Doable way to partly reverse and stop aging....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 6-12-2014

1.  How many of your telomeres are short determines how fast you age.

As many of you know, telomeres are the caps at the end of the strands of DNA that enable you and your cells to make perfect copies to repair or replace as needed.

Short telomeres cause that DNA to copy with some flaws when they get short enough.

When your telomeres get short enough, it causes aging or imperfect copies.  And, separate research has found that short telomeres also tend to cause heart disease and cancers and other diseases that become more common in much older people.

In an article recently, Dr Al Sears explains that it’s not the average telomere length that counts but how many of your telomeres are short.

This part of this post has a summary of what he said in his article and what to do about it.  But to make some parts of it clearer, I’ve added most of his article right after that.

The good news is that even shorter telomeres tend to be salvageable with more length than I’d thought they had.  There are ways to make them longer which solves the problems.

So, if you know how many of your telomeres are short, you know if you have a problem or not.

AND, if you know doable ways to lengthen your telomeres that are short you can dramatically slow aging and prevent disease if you use these methods.

The great news is that there is a relatively doable and inexpensive way anyone can make their short telomeres longer! 

People once paid up to $4,000 a month for a drug like compound that caused your body to make or release telomerase which did seem to work. 

This new method can come close to zero added cost – perhaps $50 to $100 a month at the very most and likely less than that.

2.  You can get an exact measure of how many of your telomeres are short at http://www.lifelength.com/index-eng2.html . 

But you don’t need to know that to use the method that will make your shorter telomeres longer. You can simply start using it right away.

3.  Short is relative and you can rebuild all but the very shortest telomeres!

Telomeres are long enough that even the shorter ones have enough left to rebuild from that you CAN make them enough longer to no longer be short.

4.  The most powerful and affordable way to do that is with a very high intake of real folate.

That's highest in liver.  But it's also high in a robust intake of dark green vegetables, cruciferous vegetables, other nonstarchy vegetables, and in beans and lentils.

(The Wahls' Protocol which stresses all those foods except the beans and lentils is very high in these foods including liver.

Her observation that eating a good bit of these foods every day seems to "youthen" her patients who follow it apparently IS accurate for this reason!)

5.  You used to have to pay several hundred dollars to thousands a month to buy a telomerase activator that has some theoretical risk of increasing cancer to achieve this.

Getting extra folate from your food almost every day solves BOTH these problems!

For what fast food lunches cost -- or even less, you can come close to buying that much of the key produce -- even organic -- at Whole Foods. 

And, you can make it doable to take it all in for several hundred dollars to buy the new and quieter VitaMix ONE time!

 -- NOT every month for the rest of your life.  VitaMixes are very well made and tend to last for many years even decades.

AND, these vegetables that are high in folate almost all of them PREVENT cancers!!  Kale, Collard greens, Broccoli, Cabbage, and many others are cruciferous vegetables are very high in folate AND each have several kinds of compounds that prevent cancers

Here’s Dr Sears’ article.  [My comments in it are marked off by this kind of bracket.]

-----Original Message-----

From: Al Sears, MD

To: David

Sent: Mon, Jun 9, 2014 9:11 am

Subject: Get a new telomere life

Never miss an issue, add AlSearsMD@email.AlSearsMD.com to your address book!

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Doctor's House Call    Al Sears

Al Sears, MD

11905 Southern Blvd.

Royal Palm Beach, FL 33411

June 9, 2014

“Dear David,

I have great news for you … we figured out how to give your telomeres new life.

Let me tell you why that’s important…

You know by now that telomeres are the little countdown clocks at the end of your DNA. Longer telomeres signify better health. Shorter ones signal faster aging.

In fact, your telomeres shorten relentlessly, especially with the environmental assaults on our cells we experience every day, until they get critically short.

When you get enough critically short telomeres, it’s game over. It causes permanent cell damage.

Your telomeres control your healthspan and your lifespan by shortening. When too many get short, the cell self-destructs.

This doesn’t mean you have a disease. But having critically short telomeres does put you at greater risk for many chronic diseases and sends your health on a downward spiral.

LifeLength   Steve Matlin is the CEO of Life Length.

For example, people with telomeres only a little shorter than average have a 320% greater risk of heart attack.1 The risk increases even more when the telomeres are critically short.

Unless you can reverse the loss.

Fortunately, we’ve figured out how to do this, and give you a new telomere life.

You get to start over…

Because as it turns out, those critically short telomeres are the ones most positively affected when you do something about rebuilding them.

Right now, the only way to measure critically short telomeres is with a test from my colleagues at Life Length. The CEO, Steve Matlin, and his team recently came to visit me in South Florida. He also invited me to speak at a dinner they had.

Life Length’s test is unique. Most labs can only measure “average telomere length.” Only Life Length tells you how many critically short telomeres you have.

The “average” telomere length measured by other tests isn’t as accurate. Every telomere in a cell won’t have the same length. Some may have a really healthy length.

Others may be in trouble. And you need to know how many are in trouble.

How short is critically short? Look at it this way. Telomeres are so tiny they’re measured in units of nucleic acids. We call them “base pairs.”

Each telomere starts out with about 10 to 15 thousand base pairs. Critically short means they’re down to fewer than 3,000 base pairs.

The good news is, even if yours are critically short, you can still reverse the loss.

We have found that when you use a telomerase activator, it miraculously goes to the critically short telomeres first. And we now have telomerase activators that aren’t just experimental. You don’t need a protocol, and they aren’t so expensive anymore … so that average people can afford them.

The rest of your telomeres may be fine, and you’ve still got time. But now you can identify and do something about the short telomeres that are causing the end of a cell’s life.

Now, you can give those cells a new telomere life. You can measure your telomere health by visiting Life Length here. [ http://www.lifelength.com/index-eng2.html . ]

So first things first. Today I want to tell you something you can do right now to decrease the number of cells that are going to get to the point of having critically short telomeres.

Boost your folate intake.

Folate or folic acid is one of the B vitamins. You might know it as vitamin B9. It plays a crucial role in protecting telomeres.

Studies show those with the highest folic acid levels have longer telomeres.2 And people with low folate have shorter ones.3

Folate works because it can counteract an amino acid we all produce that shortens telomeres. It’s called homocysteine.

High levels of homocysteine in your blood can triple the speed at which your telomeres shorten.4 One of the reasons homocysteine has such a terrible effect on telomeres is that it cuts off telomerase, the enzyme your body uses to rebuild the telomere.

Folate restores the action of telomerase, allowing your cells to give your telomeres a new life.5

How do you get folate?” “….Calf’s liver is one of the richest sources with 215 mcg in just 3 ounces. Dairy, poultry, meat, eggs, and seafood are other good choices.

Among vegetables, dark leafy greens are a good source. Especially try spinach, broccoli, asparagus and Brussels sprouts. Lentils and beans will also give you a good amount.

You can also take a folic acid supplement. I recommend getting 800 micrograms per day for your telomeres.

[This is extremely inexpensive and costs less than $5 a month to do.  But folic acid is not quite as effective as the folate actually in foods.  In addition, the foods have many similar compounds and other compounds that help make the folate more effective.

I take that much folic acid AND am working to get my intake of liver and vegetables up high enough to have this effect.]

[I’ve posted recently that eating 6 servings of vegetables a day has been found to cut your death rate from all causes by 42%. 

Clearly this works in part by helping people who do it to eat LESS of the junky foods that are the causes of diseases that kill otherwise.

But given the research on the effects of short telomeres also causing those diseases, this telomere lengthening effect of eating that many vegetables is likely a cause also!]