Aerobic exercise lengthens telomeres and buffers against losses caused by stress | Elissa Epel
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A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that there's a correlation between nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress management and having longer telomeres. Identifying the mechanisms that drive these correlations has proven challenging, but a few candidates stand out, including improvements in immune function and metabolic health. In this clip, Dr. Elissa Epel describes some of the studies that demonstrate the links between healthy lifestyle behaviors like exercise and discusses potential mechanisms.
Rhonda: I actually find that a good workout, a very good like, you know, if I do a really hard intense run, or a sprint, or a high intensity bicycling spin class or something that if I'm anxious, or I have a, you know, like a sort of a pessimistic view of something, absolutely it helps alleviate that.
Elissa: Yes, absolutely. Your N of 1 is also been shown up in, you know, studies of exercise and studies by Eli Puterman showing that exercise actually does reduce ruminative processes.
Rhonda: What about exercise and meditation, so telomerase activation…
Elissa: So these lifestyle things...and Liz I wrote a book summarizing all of the different things we know about telomeres from their biology and genetics to the lifestyle factors. And it's interesting, I would say that there's a pretty big literature on nutrition, exercise, sleep, showing healthier levels, longer telomeres. But of course, these are correlational. So what we really want are these intervention studies in humans. How much can we really move these things around? Is it just that they're all correlated at birth? You're born with disadvantage, you have shorter telomeres, you're less likely to do all these healthy behaviors. So we really need to experiment and move these things.
So one study that I believe you just read maybe just came out was a study by Eli Puterman, who took sedentary high-stress caregivers. So men and women caring for a partner with dementia and he had them exercise for six months. At the end of six months, their stress was lower, their telomeres were longer compared to the control group. And so that's a hint, you know, it's just one study but it's a hint that we can improve our circulating immune cell telomere length. Exactly how that happened, we don't know. Is it per cell? Is it a refreshing of naive cells in the immune system?
It's very crude when we do this in humans and we look at blood. We don't know exact mechanisms but we see telomere lengthening and that's probably a good thing. So another study, Ashley Mason just published this, we did a weight loss trial. And we found that, first of all, no one really keeps off a lot of weight a year or two later, right? The handful of people who kept off 10% of their weight a year later had telomere lengthening. So that was pretty exciting. And then we had the same thing for the people who kept at least 5% off, it was just less dramatic.
So a proof of concept study, if you change your set point of weight, that's probably very good for a lot of your metabolic health but including your telomere length. So that was pretty exciting because there's many meta-analyses showing higher BMI, shorter telomere length. So what? Can we change that? Can we move that? What is it? Is it insulin sensitivity? Is it really adiposity? I personally think forget about weight, don't get on the scale. Just look at your metabolic health, your levels of glucose and insulin.
A measurement that serves as a proxy for body fatness. BMI is calculated by dividing an individual’s body weight in kilograms (kg) by their height in meters, squared (m2). It is often considered a flawed measurement, however, because it does not measure overall fat or lean tissue content. BMI is interpreted as follows:
• ≤ 18.49: Underweight
• 18.5 - 24.99: Normal weight
• 25 - 29.99: Overweight
• ≥ 30: Obese
A general term referring to cognitive decline that interferes with normal daily living. Dementia commonly occurs in older age and is characterized by progressive loss of memory, executive function, and reasoning. Approximately 70 percent of all dementia cases are due to Alzheimer’s disease.
Important for the endocrine enhancing properties of exercise. Exerkines are exercise-induced hormonal-like factors which mediate the systemic benefits of exercise through autocrine, paracrine, and/or endocrine properties.[1]
- ^ Helge, Jørn Wulff; Moritz, Thomas; Morville, Thomas; Clemmensen, Christoffer; Dela, Flemming (2020). Plasma Metabolome Profiling Of Resistance Exercise And Endurance Exercise In Humans Cell Reports 33, 13.
A peptide hormone secreted by the beta cells of the pancreatic islets cells. Insulin maintains normal blood glucose levels by facilitating the uptake of glucose into cells; regulating carbohydrate, lipid, and protein metabolism; and promoting cell division and growth. Insulin resistance, a characteristic of type 2 diabetes, is a condition in which normal insulin levels do not produce a biological response, which can lead to high blood glucose levels.
The practice of dwelling on external stressors to excess. Rumination can set in motion a cascade of hormonal and physiological responses that harm mental and physical health. A key player in the body’s response to rumination is a biological pathway that starts in the brain’s hypothalamus with the release of corticotrophin-releasing hormone and has a direct effect on many parts of the body including the brain, gut, and DNA. Meditation has been shown to reduce rumination and its negative effects.
An enzyme that extends the telomeres of chromosomes. Telomerase adds specific nucleotide sequences to the ends of existing chromosomes. Telomerase activity is highly regulated during development, and its activity is at an almost undetectable level of activity in fully developed cells. This lack of activity causes the cell to age. If telomerase is activated in a cell, the cell will continue to grow and divide, or become "immortal," which is important to both aging and cancer. Telomerase enzyme activity has been detected in more than 90 percent of human cancers.
Distinctive structures comprised of short, repetitive sequences of DNA located on the ends of chromosomes. Telomeres form a protective “cap” – a sort of disposable buffer that gradually shortens with age – that prevents chromosomes from losing genes or sticking to other chromosomes during cell division. When the telomeres on a cell’s chromosomes get too short, the chromosome reaches a “critical length,” and the cell stops dividing (senescence) or dies (apoptosis). Telomeres are replenished by the enzyme telomerase, a reverse transcriptase.
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Telomeres News
- Aerobic exercise (120 minutes per week) significantly lengthened telomeres, a biomarker for healthy aging, in white blood cells after 24 weeks.
- Coal plant emissions may be damaging infant DNA. Babies born during a coal plant’s operation in China had shorter telomeres.
- High physical activity levels were associated with delayed biological aging by 9 years as measured by telomere length.
- Air pollution linked to shorter telomeres, a marker for health & aging, in adolescents in a dose-dependent manner.
- High levels of exercise, equal to 30-40 minutes of jogging per day 5 days per week, linked to nine years of less aging at the cellular level.
