January 17, 2017
Interview with Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD author of the book The Telomere Effect
Mike Carruthers: The average teen is spending 9 hours a day with electronic devices – 9 hours!
Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD : A telomere is a special cap at the end of chromosomes. So if you think about a shoelace where a shoelace has little protective tips. And if you don’t have tips at the end the shoelace frays and the shoelace won’t work. Chromosomes carry all of our DNA are the equivalent of shoelaces.
Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD author of the book The Telomere Effect won the Nobel Prize for her work on telomeres. And she says that your telomeres wear down over the course of your life.
And that wearing down will impact on how well cells and how well they can replenish tissues throughout the body. And that in turn is really clearly now influencing the kinds of big diseases that you get like; cardiovascular disease, cancers, diabetes.
It turns out that how you live your life can improve or hurt your telomeres.
Changing small things like introducing small bouts of exercise into your life if you didn’t do it before, making the kinds of changes in your nutrition that are not hard to make but which tend towards much more healthy kinds of foods.
Cutting back on sugar, controlling stress, getting more sleep all the things you know that are important to your health effect your telomeres. Which in turn effects how long and how well you live.
It predicts in a statistical way the likelihood of mortality.
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