Taxing your Telomeres

Taxing Your Telomeres

Turning on telomerase is required to extend lifespan.

I had the good fortune to speak with Maria Blasco about a paper she released involving mice, telomerase activation, and calorie restriction. I cover the details elsewhere, but I want to talk to you directly about what it means.

While I admire the roughly 10,000 people out there actively calorie-restricting themselves in hopes of better health and a longer life, the results of Maria’s paper suggest that CR is not a longevity strategy and does not alter absolute lifespan. This is not new if you have been reading my work. I have been accused of beating up on the CR crowd and worse.

Here is the deal. I am not brilliant. I hang out with brilliant people for the sole purpose of giving you what I think is the truth, so you do not waste your time and effort, and so you can focus on what we know really works.

In a few weeks I will review data from different tissues and animals, including people. The one-sentence version of my talk: turning on telomerase improves healthspan and longevity without increasing the incidence of cancer.

Naturally I will review the data on TA-65, the only telomerase activator with published human studies. What I will show is that no matter how you turn telomerase on, it improves the parameters we associate with anti-aging markers. Things like bone density, immune function, skin appearance, inflammatory markers, sugar metabolism, all of these tend to move in the right direction with TA-65, as they do with genetic and viral manipulations of telomerase.

The other thing to keep in mind is that telomere health is two-fold.

You want to reduce inflammation and free-radical damage to slow the environmental contribution to telomere loss. This will likely improve your health, but it may not extend longevity by itself. Cellular replication is a necessary part of being alive. It will always tax your telomeres. To slow or stop this process, you need to add length and reduce the percentage of short telomeres. Short telomere testing can only be done by the Life Length assay.

The only known way to add length is telomerase activation, and the only telomerase activator that has been shown to do this in people is TA-65.

We live in interesting times. There is so much we can do to support healthier, longer lives. Do not sit on the sidelines while your body ages.

Doc