Anti-Aging Pt 2 - Telomeres - User Manual For Humans S1 E18 - Dr Ekberg

Good afternoon we're happy to see so many of you here once more for our next

installment anti-aging number two and we will continue our talk on telomeres and

we'll get a lot more detail in the overview we just sort of mention them

now we're going to talk more about what they are how they influence aging we're

going to introduce something called telomerase and we'll talk about how

stress is probably the number one factor in all of this so first of all the whole

idea of why telomeres matter is that cells divide and on this first slide

here we have a picture of mitosis and that simply means that that's when a

cell makes a complete copy of itself so the first part of that is to replicate

the DNA inside and then the DNA when you have two copies each copy finds the

separate half of the cell and then the cell splits and you have two separate

cells with a complete copy of the original called diploid cells meaning

they have a complete set up of that DNA there's a different kind of copying

called where you end up with haploid cells and that's where you don't make a

complete DNA replication you just split it down the middle and then you you

separate the cells with half and that's what makes up an egg cell or a sperm

cell and we'll talk a little bit more about those they become interesting

because these these haploid with half the genetic they behave differently than

a dip and so when we have this cell division

take place there is a peculiarity that we mentioned that the DNA cannot copy a

hundred percent of all of the different base pairs it is not possible due to the

mechanism and they knew this very early on the Watson and Crick who discovered

the structure of DNA they also figured out how DNA replicates

and they said this doesn't make sense because with this mechanism it's not to

be possible for the DNA to copy 100 percent it's going to lose a few base

pairs at the end and if that was the case then how can you copy all the

information over to the next cell if you lose a little bit of the of the

chromosome and telomeres is the solution it's nature's solution to this because

telomeres is the last portion the last part of the chromosome is called a

telomere and the telomere is DNA material that doesn't code for anything

it's a repeating repeating nonsense sequence so you can lop off a few base

pairs each time and you're not losing anything that would code for anything

you're not losing anything that would code for proteins and one of the best

metaphors or pictures for this is a shoelace and there is an actual term for

that little protective cap it's called an aglet so now you learn something

useful today and it's very much the same thing that the aglet keeps the shoelace

from fraying and getting damaged and that's exactly what the telomere does it

keeps the end of the chromosome from and getting damaged so these telomeres

are kind of funny in there this is a very very young very new science and

there's a lot of theories and they're finding things every day and they still

have a very incomplete picture of how this works but it's it's getting more

and more interesting so Elizabeth Blackburn was she did some

research on this in the 1970s 1980s and she got the Nobel Prize in 2009 when

they realized how profound this research was when it in relevance to aging and on

their on the rough model what they found is the sperm cell and the egg have about

15,000 base pairs of telomeres the the length of the protective portion is

15,000 base pairs and then their cells divide to make a fetus and by the time

you're born you have about 10,000 base pairs left and you can't get down to 0

base pairs because there needs to be a certain length and we'll talk about some

of those reasons but you have to have a certain length of that telomere for the

chromosome and the cell to work for the cell and the chromosome to know what's

the what's the end what's up and down on on the chromosome so by the time we get

to about 5,000 base pairs then the cells stop being functional they don't know

how to replicate the DNA anymore and they just stop they call that state

senescence which basically means that the the cells won't divide anymore they

won't do much of anything and when a large portion of of a person cells

reaches senescence then we're gonna die very shortly

thereafter and some of the things that happen is that chromosomes can break you

can for various different reasons they can get damaged and they can break and

the cell has the capacity to glue them back together and this is really really

important and this is illustrated on on the next page with a little blue and red

there that if it breaks the telomere will tell the cell what is the end of

the chromosome so you're not going to try to glue it back together at that end

but anything that doesn't have a telomere is fair game for blue ink so if

if the telomere gets too short then it might get glued back together in the

wrong place and that would be the picture on the right and now you have a

completely dysfunctional chromosome that one is not capable of replicating even

once if if the body tries to to duplicate that one it's just going to

rip apart and shatter and it won't be anything but like chaos leftover so

there are many factors involved in the function of these telomeres and that's

one important aspect and so what the what Elizabeth Blackburn she calls the

chromosome gets sticky if they don't have the proper length of the telomere

and this creates instability in the chromosome the the length of the

telomere provides stability and instability is one of the hallmarks of

cancer they have a lot of research a lot of evidence now that when the telomeres

get too short and the gets unstable that's actually one of the

things that lead the Canada the cell to mutate and become cancerous what they're

finding that's really interesting is that aging seems to be programmed it

seems to follow a pattern and we can tell that because most of us age at

approximately the same rate but when some mechanism in the body fails then

aging can occur much much much much faster and in progeria in a normal cell

there's a gene called lmna which codes for a protein and don't have to worry

about the details laminate which maintains the structure of the cell

nucleus and as the telomeres shorten the cell starts making a toxic version of

this protein called progeria which accelerates aging so it's not just

whether we have a telomere or not but how long it is depend determine sort of

how well the cell works how wellness that the structure of that the cell

nucleus is and the shorter the telomere the more progeria in the cell makes well

in this disease they have a mutation that they're not making any of the

laminate so all of their all of their proteins look like the progeria like the

aging protein so these kids aged about five to seven times faster and that's

why they start balding at five years old they start getting arthritis and heart

disease and it's not just a look but every organ of the body every tissue

that they can every disease that people get in their

70s these kids get in their early teens and they they die as teens from old age

and everything that they studied about chromosomes fit exactly with with that

aging process because they have short telomeres to start with and their

telomeres wear shorter at a very very fast rate and they don't have the

enzymes to protect the telomeres and so it seems like the the telomeres are sort

of flexible and this brings us to something very interesting that after

Elizabeth Blackburn had found out about the telomeres and the structure of the

telomeres they found that it didn't seem completely consistent it seemed that in

some cases it appeared that the telomere could regrow and then they figured there

has to be a mechanism there has to be a gene there has to be an enzyme there

must be something to make it to regrow and she started looking for this and yet

I think she had to look for about eight years and that's part of why she got the

Nobel price but eventually she found a gene that codes for an enzyme called

telomerase and this is an enzyme that will actually lengthen the telomere and

make the cell more youthful and that was quite astounding because all of a sudden

aging was not something that just moved in one direction it really was possible

to make it reverse and go the other way and one way that

they they figured this out was by studying like I said the the sperm cell

egg cells and sperm cells these are these have cell division but they make a

haploid cell and when the DNA is in his half configuration called haploid like

in a sperm cell now they tell them that too long a race

gene is active and it protects that telomere indefinitely that sperm cell is

100% immortal it can divide any number of times and not lose an iota of that of

that genetic material so the mechanist becomes really interesting because now

aging isn't inevitable the mechanism to regrow telomeres and keep cells youthful

forever is there but as soon as the cells combine as the sperm and egg

combine to make a whole cell then now this telomerase gene becomes partially

inactive not completely inactive because it seems to be able to to increase or

decrease activity so you can speed up or slow down aging but there is an enzyme

that that does this so some of the research that they have done is they

have taken individual human cells like skin cells that have that are old skin

cells and they have injected them with telomerase and they have reversed the

age of the skin cells not just made them a little bit younger but if they keep

adding telomerase they can revert that aging skin cell all the way back to a

stem cell before it even different to his origin cell like a feeble stage

cell and another thing that they did with mice is they they engineered some

ice they fixed their their DNA so that that too long a race gene was completely

blocked and now these mice started aging very very fast within a couple of months

they let them reach adulthood without this enzyme and they were aging very

very quickly and then they figured out because they have done this this

mutation on purpose they they had fixed this so that they could give the mice a

chemical and reverse that will change the damage and so they had these mice

they were born they were allowed to reach adulthood and at that point these

were very very old decrepit mice they were they were way past the point of

fertility they started getting age-related brain shrinking that brains

were down to 75% of of an adult mice Mouse they had arthritis and organ

failures and their their neural development started shutting down then

they gave them this chemical to activate the telomerase again and these mice

became younger and their brains regroup they started developing new brain cells

they reversed organ damage and they became fertile again okay

so the mechanisms that we're talking about are

that you you really you're not just talking about sort of cosmetically or

partially fixed in different aspects you're talking about turning back the

entire clock so it's pretty exciting stuff and even if we're not at the point

where we can turn back the entire clock we have figured out that this telomerase

is not a black or white it's not entirely on or off all the time and

there are certain lifestyle things that we can use to affect it

so they took they took a group of people and the research I didn't read the

actual article I just started referenced by dr. Blackburn and they took a group

of people who are caregivers and they had them rate how stressed they were in

their role of caregiving and then they divided them in two groups the top

stressed and that the most stressed half and the least stressed half and they

measured their telomerase activity and the resulting telomere length and they

found a very statistical mean clear as day and night that the people that felt

more stressed had less telomerase activity and shorter telomeres and the

difference was when when when compensated for actual age the

difference was as much as ten years of biological age just from house their

their self-reported level of stress and it became even more significant when

they included how long for what period time they have been under this dress

then they took on the same group of people they measured cortisone and

adrenaline and noradrenaline and these are basically all you have to know is

these are stress hormones they are the hormones that the body makes in response

to stress and they shorten the telomeres and again when they took the top half of

people and the the most stress people and the least stress people the top half

had much much the more stress people had much much higher levels of cortisol and

adrenaline and noradrenaline and then of course the resulting shorter shorter

telomeres this testing that she quoted is very close to the testing that we do

in here so the stress test that we do in the stress test that they then were

quite similar and it shows a dramatic difference in the telomerase activity so

what they had people do in this and there's a slide for this one they had

them they measured a resting heart rate level a resting heart rate variability

level which is something we measure as well and they measured a pulse pressure

level so and then they compared between the the highest 25% and the lowest 25%

and this was where they had measured that tell them to long erase activity in

the people so the people with the 25% with a highest telomerase and the 25%

with the lowest telomerase they compared the two groups and then they had them in

a resting baseline reading and then they told them you're gonna have to make a

five minutes each into a video camera and then they

left them alone for five minutes and this was the anticipation stage and they

should saw how stressed were people just thinking about this event and then they

had had them give the speech and then they have them recover and then they had

them do a math test ahead counting math test which is very similar to the type

of stress test that we do it's not exact but it's the same idea so if you look at

the green and the red lines here the people with the higher telomerase

activity the higher DNA repairing activity their resting heart rate

started at 70 and the people with a low telomerase activity the people with poor

repair started at 82 and then when they told them they were going to make a

speech both of them jumped about one jumped 12 points and and the other

jumped about 10 points and then they gave the speech and they jumped a little

bit more and then they had them rest and the math wasn't quite as bad as giving

the speech but overall you can see that the average heart rate was about 20

beats higher almost 15 to 20 beats higher in the people that had better

weather the heart rate was higher in the people that had worse DNA repair so the

things that we measure in this test the heart rate and the heart rate

variability it's not just it's like you have higher heart rate it has a direct

effect on how well your body repairs at the cellular level and how how long

you're going to live as a result and then they did the same the same thing

and they measured the heart rate variability and here it was the higher

heart rate period is good because that means your nervous

system is more flexible its responding better to the challenge and then at the

end the last one they mentioned was pulse pressure and the people with the

low telomerase they had a huge spike in pulse pressure means there are 20 in

anticipation of giving this speech so I think this is absolutely fascinating and

it shows how huge how significant how direct an impact it that stress is on

Aging and on DNA repair and and telomerase so what can we do this is the

same as we had last night but it's just one around off and and repeat this what

can we do as individuals what we want to be willing to learn if we don't know why

we're never gonna stick with it there's so many things out there we know we

should do and we don't do any of them because we should as soon as we we

should do something then we just put up our defenses and rarely do we do it but

if we know why and we know that we want to do it now we'll have the the

excitement and and the incentive to do something that's that's the only thing

that people will ever stick with and why do we want to get adjusted because

chiropractic is one of the most powerful ways of interrupting the stress response

that has ever been found and all the things that we talk about in this talk

all that stress is can be reduced by the adjustment it's not the only thing you

want to do though because we are we are whole ecosystems and everything that the

ecosystem knees you have to provide in order for

that ecosystem to thrive so there is no quick fix

then the chiropractic adjustment is not a quick fix no more than than a pill is

but it's a very very important component

lifestyle learn how to eat better move better feel better and on other talks I

talked about what requirements for a plant are so we'll run that one again

have you heard it yeah what does a plant need you have a plant and if it's not

looking too happy what do you give it water and then you give it some water

and it's still wilting it's still not so happy what do you give it next try some

light exactly take it out of the closet and then you give it those two and it's

still not thriving what do you what do you think it is nutrients quality of the

soil so a plant has to have water sunlight and nutrients in the soil so if

you have a thousand plants and you do an experiment on all those thousands of

plants you divide them into different groups and you give every conceivable

combination you give two out of three some of them you give them water and

sunlight no nutrients some of them you give them nutrients and so forth at the

end of a year how many healthy plants are you going to have zero because if

something is required you can't live without it

you can get by for a while but you can never thrive in the long term so humans

are incredibly resilient and we have nutritional and physical and emotional

requirements and we can focus on nutrition and skip the others we can

focus on exercise skip nutrition we can eat well and workout and feel horrible

we will never thrive with two out of three so that's why we want to talk

about the whole ecosystem of what the ecosystem requires and that's what we

talked about eat better move better feel better and feeling well is not something

that happens by accident it's a skill that you practice and learn it's learn

about it's a practice then you want to reduce your toxic burden and you want to

do a cleanse a few times a year supplements are providing improving

increasingly important because in this world we're not really getting all the

nutrients that we need and the more stress we have and the more toxins we

have in the environment the more nutrients we need to compensate for it

the liver needs fuel to help detoxify it means the the energy and the substance

substrates to to help clean us up and exercise is not optional we can never

ever function optimally we can get by for decades but we cannot function

optimally without all the components that we need an exercise is very very

important we're going to have the talk where we talk about exercising us two

things it stimulates your body and makes it and then stimulates growth hormone

which is fantastic and on the other hand exercise is stressful

and break two down so the correct exercise is

about finding the balance that gives you the best boost of growth hormone with

the least amount of stress so that's the the trick to exercise so that will be

all for today and I thank you all so much for coming

and any questions you might have one try to entertain those thank you