“This passport won’t get you into Malaysia.” “
What does that mean? My passport’s not expired… is it?”
The ticketing agent wasn’t letting me on my flight, so I was hoping there was just a misunderstanding.
“No, it doesn’t expire until next month. But you can’t enter Malaysia unless your passport is good for three months after you arrive.”
I have to admit, I didn’t know that. I turned to my assistant S.D. “How come no one said anything about this to us?”
“Well, I asked the organizers of the Anti-Aging conference. They connected me to an official who told me, ‘As long as your passport is good at the time, you’re OK. The worst that could happen is they’d send you home. There shouldn’t be any problem.’”
Turns out, the official S.D. spoke with was wrong. S.D. got on her phone right away. “Hi, is this _____ Expediting? It looks like Dr. Sears needs an extension for his passport. Can you do that for us?”
The expediting service tried to get it done that day so I could make it to Malaysia on time. But you know how the U.S. government works sometimes. After waiting in the terminal for almost three hours, Sandy got one last call. “They can get the extension, but they can’t get it processed and delivered to you until tomorrow.”
So I spent the whole day at the Fort Lauderdale airport only to be sent home. I missed my flight, and my speaking engagement in Kuala Lumpur. I had been invited to be the keynote speaker at the annual Society for Anti-Aging, Aesthetic Regenerative Medicine Malaysia conference.
“They were not happy when I told them you had been kept off your flight,” S.D. told me. “The organizer said to me, ‘Many doctors were looking forward
to hearing from you and we were much disappointed at your absence.’ And that was the nicest thing they said!”
Fortunately, S.D. smoothed things over, and they sent me a letter two weeks later inviting me back next year. SAAARMM is such a big conference because the science of anti-aging medicine is a hot topic in Asia right now. The Japanese were the first to study the anti-aging effects of CoQ10. And now, the big story coming from the U.S. is telomere biology.
 |
Telomeres are the tiny bindings at the end of each of your strands of DNA. Telomeres not only protect your DNA, but have inside them all the information your DNA needs to make accurate copies when cells reproduce. What we now know is that your telomeres are like a ticking biological clock. Each time your cells divide, a tiny bit of each telomere gets used up. Over time, these telomeres get shorter and shorter until your DNA can no longer make correct copies, and that cell stops working. This process happens slowly, and it makes your cells act older and weaker. In fact, many of today’s most widespread conditions and illnesses are associated with shorter telomeres.
Here’s some of the newest research I was going to present at the SAAARMM conference. It shows that with longer telomeres, you have a better chance of avoiding:
- Cognitive decline – The famous Nurses’ Health Study looked at the telomeres of 2000 women, and found that those with longer telomeres had less cognitive decline. Each unit increase in telomere length is like your brain acting a year younger.1
- Depression – Depression is now associated with cell aging. The longer your telomeres, the less likely you are to be depressed no matter your age.2
- Cardiovascular aging – The younger your cells act, the less likely you are to suffer from cardiovascular disease.3
- Obesity – A study done just a few months ago found that children who are obese have telomeres that are 24% shorter than non-obese children.4
- Cataracts – Longer telomeres mean a nearly 50% reduced risk for the eye disease. And people with cataracts who had longer telomeres had less severe cases than those with shorter telomeres.5
- Diabetes – People with diabetes have significantly shorter telomeres than people without. The longer your telomeres, the better chance you have of avoiding diabetes. Also, among those with diabetes, longer telomeres mean less a severe case with fewer complications.6
- Periodontitis – Most people don’t think of disease originating in the mouth, but your gums are a direct path to the rest of your body. Gum disease is an indicator of inflammation in your body. People with gum disease had 23% shorter telomeres. Those with longer telomeres had no gum disease, and lower markers of inflammation.7
- Sleep Apnea – In China, they looked at the immune systems of people with sleep apnea compared to people who slept normally. The ratio of white blood cells with longer telomeres was significantly higher in healthy people than for people with sleep apnea.8
- Arthritis – Telomeres appear to shorten faster for people with rheumatoid arthritis. Longer telomeres are associated with lower risk for the immune disease.9
Fortunately for you, we now have the ability to influence the length of these tiny genetic clocks. You can have younger-acting cells and help avoid age-related problems by maintaining your telomere length. The most powerful way to do this is to activate telomerase (teh-lah-mer-race), the enzyme your body already uses to maintain and rebuild your telomeres.
Telomerase had such an impact on me, I still remember it. I was sitting at my desk almost 20 years ago. I like to stay abreast of non-medical scientific literature. So I picked up my issue of Scientific American and something jumped off the page at me. When I read that she’d found a solution to aging already in our genes, I took out a piece of paper and wrote down something that I still have today. It says, “This will change the world as we know it.”
Now, finally, it seems other people think so, too. Elizabeth Blackburn won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work on telomerase.
Why all the fuss?
Let me explain why this discovery is so powerful… After years of searching, a group of researchers isolated a molecule from a rare form of the Astragalus plant that only grows in the temperate northern climate of China. Through a unique process, they’ve been able to separate this single molecule from among the plant’s 2,000 other compounds. Then they extract it and purify it. The result is a nutritional supplement that is clinically proven to activate telomerase, keeping your telomeres long and your body younger.
They tested it during a recent study that lasted for more than a year. For most of the people, telomerase activation therapy reduced the percentage of immune cells with short telomeres by 10-50 percent. And the amount of immune cells that acted older decreased by 10-20 percent. That means their immune systems were acting like a much younger person’s.
The authors were astounded, and wrote that it represented an “apparent age reversal of 5-20 years!”10 I’m delighted and honored to have been chosen as the first doctor in the U.S. licensed to provide this natural telomerase activator to patients. But even though the cost of this supplement has come way down, it’s still expensive.
The good news is, the science of telomere biology is always moving forward, and there are other steps you can take to help maintain the length of your telomeres.
Four New Ways To Slow Down Aging
Step 1) Stick With Fresh Grass-Fed Meats: Do you grab a deli sandwich for a quick meal? Do you often eat other pre-cooked and pre-packaged meats like hot dogs, bacon and breakfast sausage, pepperoni and lox, and especially soy proteins? If you do, you’re shortening your telomeres. That’s because when your body breaks down these cured proteins, a byproduct can combine with the nitrites used in meat processing to make nitrosamines.
Nitrosamines can also enter your body through toxins in the environment like cigarette smoke. A new study finds that the more nitrosamines you expose yourself to, the shorter your telomeres become.11 To avoid nitrosamines and their telomere-shortening effect, try to eat meat from grass-fed animals like beef, buffalo and elk. Also, eat wild-caught fish, free-range chicken and turkey, and cage-free whole eggs. These are the purest forms of meat and protein you can get, and have the most nutritional value.
- I get my grass-fed beef from U.S. Wellness Meats (www.grasslandbeef.com), a group of family-owned organic farms that sell high-quality meat from animals raised in their natural environment.
- Another good source is the Ted Slanker Ranch (http://www.texasgrassfedbeef.com).
- For an alphabetical listing of pasture farms near you, visit Eat Wild (http://www.eatwild.com) and click on “shop for local” on the left hand side.
Step 2) Lower Your Homocysteine: This amino acid can build up inside you and threaten your heart health, but it also shortens your telomeres three times faster.12 Here’s what I use with my patients (amounts are daily) to lower homocysteine:
- Vitamin B12 – 500 mcg
- Folic acid – 800 mcg
- Vitamin B6 – 25 mg
- Riboflavin (B2) – 25 mg
- TMG (Trimethylglycine) – 500 mg
You can find these at your local health food store. If you don’t want to take them all separately, you can use the formula I give my patients.
Step 3) Take Vitamin C: Recent studies now show this antioxidant can slow telomere shortening by over 50%.13 I recommend 3000 mg per day split into two doses.
Step 4) Raise Your High-Density Lipoproteins (HDL): A brand new study took a group of people and measured their telomere length. They weren’t surprised to find that those with shorter telomeres were likely to have a family history of cardiovascular disease. But when they looked a little deeper, they found that separate from any other measurement, those with the highest HDL had the longest telomeres.14
I’ve been telling my patients and anyone who will listen about the importance of high HDL for 15 years now. It doesn’t surprise me that high HDL would be associated with longer telomeres and a longer, healthier life. In fact, the higher your cholesterol, the lower your chances are of dying from any cause.15 I was able to raise my HDL to 105 by doing three things.
- First, I ate a lot of garlic. A decade worth of studies prove garlic raises HDL. With so much evidence, you’d think modern medicine would stop ignoring garlic’s benefits and start recommending at least two cloves a day.
- Second, I took niacin (vitamin B3) as a supplement. I’ve been prescribing niacin for years. I have tested its effectiveness in thousands of patients in my 20 years practicing medicine. And in study after study, niacin has proven itself to be an HDL-raising warrior. In one study, researchers showed how niacin raised HDL by a remarkable 24 percent.16 Start taking it every other day and slowly work up. In my clinic, I often gradually increase to up to 2 grams per day.
- The third thing to do is to work out with a focus on capacity, not endurance. Endurance exercises like “aerobics” mimic stress. Intense, short periods of exertion like I describe in my P.A.C.E. program will strengthen your heart and reliably boost HDL. For example, one study looked at Navy personnel going through intense training. After only 5 days, their HDL had increased 31%.17
1 Devore EE, Prescott J, De Vivo I, Grodstein F. “Relative telomere length and cognitive decline in the Nurses’ Health Study.” Neurosci Lett. 2011 Mar 29;492(1):15-8 2 Wolkowitz OM, et. al. “Leukocyte telomere length in major depression:” PLoS One. 2011 Mar 23;6(3):e17837 3 De Meyer T, Rietzschel ER, De Buyzere ML, Van Criekinge W, Bekaert S. “Telomere length and cardiovascular aging: the means to the ends?” Ageing Res Rev. 2011 Apr;10(2):297-303 4 Buxton JL, Walters RG, Visvikis-Siest S, Meyre D, Froguel P, Blakemore AI. “Childhood obesity is associated with shorter leukocyte telomere length.” J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2011 May;96(5):1500-5 5 Sanders JL., et. al. “The association of cataract with leukocyte telomere length in older adults:” J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2011 Jun;66(6):639-45 6 Testa R. “Leukocyte telomere length is associated with complications of Type-2 diabetes mellitus.” Diabet Med. 2011 Jun 21 7 Masi S, et. al. “Oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, and telomere length in patients with periodontitis.” Free Radic Biol Med. 2011 Mar 15;50(6):730-5 8 LIN L, LI TP. “Alteration of telomere length of the peripheral white blood cells in patients with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome.” Nan Fang Yi Ke Da Xue Xue Bao. 2011 Mar;31(3):457-60 9 Costenbader KH, Prescott J, Zee RY, De Vivo I. “Immunosenescence and rheumatoid arthritis: does telomere shortening predict impending disease?” Autoimmun Rev. 2011 Jul;10(9):569-73 10 Harley, C., Weimin, L., et al, “A Natural Product Telomerase Activator as Part of a Health Maintenance Program,” Rejuvenation Research 2010 11 Li H, Jönsson BA, Lindh CH, Albin M, Broberg K. “N-nitrosamines are associated with shorter telomere length.” Scand J Work Environ Health. 2011 Jul;37(4):316-24 12 Richards JB, et al. Homocysteine levels and leukocyte telomere length. Atherosclerosis. 2008 Feb 14 13 Furumoto K, et al. Age-dependent telomere shortening is slowed down by enrichment of intracellular vitamin C via suppression of oxidative stress., Life Sciences 63(11):935-48, 1998 14 Dei Cas A. et. al. “…cardiovascular disease and reduced HDL-cholesterol levels are associated with shorter leukocyte telomere length…” Nutr Metab Cardiovasc Dis. Aug 2011 15 Weverling-Rijnsburger AW, Blauw GJ, Lagaay AM, Knook DL, Meinders AE, Westendorp RG. “Total cholesterol and risk of mortality in the oldest old.” Lancet. 1997 Oct 18;350(9085):1119-23 16 Linke, et al, “Effects of extended-release niacin on lipid profile and adipocyte biology in patients with impaired glucose tolerance,” Atherosclerosis 2008 17 Smoak, B.L., Norton, J.P., Ferguson, E.W., et al, “Changes in lipoprotein profiles during intense military training,” J. Am. Coll. Nutr. Dec. 1990;9(6):567-72 18 Marcon F, Siniscalchi E, Crebelli R, Saieva C, Sera F, Fortini P, Simonelli V, Palli D. “Diet-related telomere shortening and chromosome stability.” Mutagenesis. 2011 Aug 19