Here at my Wellness Center, I help my patients slow down the aging process every day. It doesn’t require drugs. And it couldn’t be simpler.
In fact, you can do the same thing at home, starting right now.
All you have to do is take control of the aging mechanisms in your cells. And that means taking care of your telomeres – the protective caps at the end of your DNA strands.
The shorter your telomeres get, the faster you age. Short telomeres are linked to the chronic diseases of aging like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
They also make you look older. Your skin loses its moisture, glow and tone. Wrinkles and sags set in.
But here’s the good news. Cutting-edge science now proves we can control aging by controlling our telomeres. One way to do it is through diet. What you eat and drink affects how fast your telomeres shorten.
Some nutrients can even lengthen your telomeres.
I call this new body of science “telo-nutrition.” It gives you the power to bio-engineer your own cells to act younger.
It’s an entirely new way of thinking about what you put in your body. Because every time you choose a food, you make a decision about how much you want to age.
Let me give you a simple example.
Nobel Prize-winner Elizabeth Blackburn and her team wanted to know what effect drinking sugary sodas has on telomere length.
They measured telomeres in a group of 5,309 Americans, aged between 20 and 65. And then they looked at how much soda the group drank.
It turns out that drinking just eight ounces of soda a day shortens telomeres. And people who drank a standard 20-ounce bottle of soda a day had cells that aged 4.6 years faster than non-soda-drinkers.2
That’s about the same amount of aging you’d get from being a smoker.2
I suggest to all my patients that they stop drinking sodas. It literally adds years to your cellular life.
Many of them want to substitute diet soda. But that’s a bad idea, too. You see, as strange as it sounds, diet sodas lead to weight gain and obesity.
The problem is that artificial sweeteners are hundreds of times sweeter than sugar. They trick your metabolism into thinking a ton of calories are on the way. That causes your body to pump out insulin, your fat-storage hormone. Your body then starts storing away calories as belly fat.
In animal studies, when rats got artificial sweeteners, they ate more, their metabolism slowed, and they put on 14% more body fat in just two weeks – even though they ate fewer calories.
Human studies show the same thing. Researchers from Johns Hopkins examined diet soda habits of almost 24,000 adults.
They found that when overweight or obese people drank diet sodas, they ate about 88 to 194 more calories in solid food than people who drank regular sodas.3
So I recommend avoiding any kind of soda. That includes all those fruit-flavored drinks, sports drinks, and energy drinks. Here’s what to do instead:
- Design your own water. Purified water is your best choice for quenching thirst. For more flavor, add a splash of natural fruit juice, or fresh orange or lemon slices…even raspberries.
I also like to add slices of cucumber and some mint leaves to ice water. Make a big jug and let it sit for a couple of hours before drinking.
- Brew iced hibiscus tea. A recent study showed hibiscus tea has the highest antioxidant levels of any beverage.4 Antioxidants slow down telomere shortening and delay cell aging.5
Just place four hibiscus tea bags in eight cups of water and let it steep overnight in the refrigerator. Remove the bags in the morning and add the juice of one lemon. If you want a bit of sweetness, add a little honey.
- Sip some kombucha. Health food stores are now carrying bottled kombucha, a brew made from green, black or white tea. Kombucha is a probiotic drink with helpful bacteria that support digestion and the immune system. Because it’s fermented, kombucha is much more powerful than plain tea. It also protects telomeres, because its antioxidant activity is 100 times higher than vitamin C and 25 times higher than vitamin E.6
To Your Good Health,
Al Sears, MD
1. Leung C, Laraia B, Needham B, Rehkopf D, Adler N, Lin J, Blackburn E, Epel E. “Soda and Cell Aging: Associations Between Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption and Leukocyte Telomere Length in Healthy Adults From the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys.” 2014; 104(12): 2425–2431.
2. Valdes AM, Andrew T, Gardner JP, Kimura M, Oelsner E, Cherkas LF, et al. “Obesity, cigarette smoking, and telomere length in women.” Lancet. 2005;366(9486):662–4.
3. Bleich SN, Wolfson JA, Vine S, Wang YC. “Diet-Beverage Consumption and Caloric Intake Among US Adults, Overall and by Body Weight.” American Journal of Public Health. 2014; 104(3): e72-e78
4. Carlsen MH et al, “The total antioxidant content of more than 3100 foods, beverages, spices, herbs and supplements used worldwide.” Nutr J. 2010 Jan 22;9:3.
5. Furumoto K et al, “Age-dependent telomere shortening is slowed down by enrichment of intracellular vitamin C via suppression of oxidative stress.” Life Sci 1998;63:935–48.
6. Adriani L, Mayasari N, Kartasudjana RA: “The effect of feeding fermented kombucha tea on HLD, LDL and total cholesterol levels in the duck bloods.” Biotechnol Anim Husb 2011;27:1749–1755.