A Fountain of Youth
at the Cellular Level
S
WRITTEN BY Nancy Palermo Lietz, MD,
Thrive Personalized Healthcare and Wellness
Since Ponce de Leon’s unsuccessful search for the fountain of youth in 1513, the
fascination with maintaining youth indefinitely has continued. While aging is a
natural inevitability, we compound the process with lifestyles filled with processed
foods, refined sugars, poor antioxidant intake, inadequate sleep, environmental
toxins, technology overload and unrelenting stress. Science has proven this to be
true. The study of telomeres—the tips on the end of our chromosomes—shows
how lifestyle and diet impact the aging process. Telomeres have been compared to
the protective cap at the end of shoelaces. While the length of your telomere is in
part genetically determined, no matter your starting length, all telomeres shorten
over time. When this “cap” disappears, cells die and so do we.
Telomeres can serve as an indicator of biological age, and it was believed that telo-
mere length always correlated with age. However, recent research has uncovered
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