Telomere Testing: Everything You Need To Know About A Cutting-Edge New Longevity Test That Tells You Your Cellular Age.

Hey, what's up? It's Ben Greenfield. If you want to live longer, today's the show for you. It's about telomere testing, like this cutting edge new longevity test that actually tells you your cellular age. I was kind of surprised at mine. You're gonna find out what it was and then tells you what to do about it. If your cellular age isn't everything you thought it would be cracked up to be in this episode of the Ben.

Greenfield Fitness show, trying to make a mental shift, you know, from sick care to preventative personal care that really tries to prevent disease. I think, well, that resonates with a lot of people right now. And, you know, hopefully telo years can be one of the tools in the arsenal that helps people do that. Telomere length is a surrogate marker, and what that means is it's a biomarker that actually helps you know something that it predicts some kind of risk that comes down the pike in the future.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And recently I took this test. It's basically like a, like a longevity slash anti aging test that allows you to measure not your chronological age, which would be basically like when your birthday is, but your biological age, specifically your telomeres and your telomere length. You've probably heard of telomeres before. If you've read any books on health or looked into the biohacking or the anti aging or the longevity sector at all, you're probably aware of the existence of telomeres. But until recently, I didn't know of a good way to actually measure them without going off and spending thousands and thousands of dollars at some fancy longevity institute. But I actually, I found a company that can actually test your telomeres using a very simple, like, at home blood spot test. And I had it done myself. I have the results sitting right here in front of me, and I not only want to delve into these results with you on today's show, but I also want to kind of take a little bit deeper, dive into Telomere testing and what it is and what it can tell us and how it works and what happens to your telomeres as you age and perhaps most importantly, how you can keep your telomeres from getting too short as you age, which is associated with accelerated aging. And so on today's call, I have a guy named Jason Shelton. And Jason works with a company called Telomere Diagnostics. That's where I got my own testing done. And he's got a couple decades of experience in the medical, device, healthcare and startup sectors. So he used to be CEO of a company called Earlens and before that he worked for a company called Sinitus Medical and he's also worked with companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Bioform Medical and Align Technology. He has a degree in biochemistry as an mba, so he's pretty savvy when it comes to anti aging. And frankly, one of the things you should know before we jump into today's show is that my chronological age is 34, but my biological age and I was pretty shocked by this. It's actually quite different. And so I wanted to talk to Jason a little bit about that too and what I can personally do and hopefully you learn a little bit from that as well. So Jason, welcome to today's show, man.

Thank you, Ben, thank you for having me.

Yeah, no problem. Oh, and by the way, if you're listening in right now, I'll link to everything that Jason and I talk about, including this test that you can get if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com telomere test. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Telomere Test by the way, Jason, I assume you have, but have you actually had your own telomeres tested?

I have. I've done it more than once since I've joined the company over the past year or so since we launched the test. And I'd be happy to share with you some of the results if you'd like to hear about them.

Well, I guess the million dollar question is, is your biological age greater than your chronological age or less?

Well, it's less. And my chronological age, my actual age is 44 years old. And the first time I was tested was about a year ago and I got some results back that said that I was effectively about 34 years old in telo years.

Oh, wow.

So at that time though, and what's I think interesting for me and for other people and I guess I'm an example of someone who engaged in some lifestyle management That I think proactively made a difference in my cellular age. So I was, I actually had a muscle injury in my leg owed to a Frisbee accident somewhere on the east coast with my brother in law. But I started engaging in a personal training rehab regimen for about eight or nine months where I was for about three times a week getting fairly rigorous exercise. And you know, I thought, well, that'd be a pretty good baseline to try to figure out what it means for my age and telo years. And so I retested about eight months after I started this regimen and my age and telo years dropped to 27. So I personally have seen lifestyle management changes that have actually decreased my cellular age. And you know, there's lots of peer reviewed literature that suggest a variety of things that one can do because telomeres, these things that are these protective end caps on the ends of your DNA, they are one of the unique parts of the human genome in that they can actually change, they are dynamic and they can increase or decrease in response to good or bad changes in lifestyle, stress management, diet, other kinds of fitness regimens, even various aspects of meditation and a whole host of other things that have been published in the peer reviewed literature. And perhaps talk about some of those today.

Yeah, I want to delve into those too. But you were saying so when you first tested, you were 34 and then you started on this exercise regimen, actually dropped you down to 27.

That's right. Wow.

I'm assuming that your exercise regimen must not have been like Ironman triathlon and marathon training.

No, it was probably about 60 minutes, two to three times a week of a combination of fitness types of jumping, squats, training, some light weight work, then some jogging, treadmill, elliptical, a variety of things that I learned from a personal trainer. And I myself am not the world's fittest person. I'm not one of those people that are aggressively committed to fitness and health. But I have found inspiration actually in my results, which I think a lot of our customers have found because I think what telo years provides, it's really two things. I mean, one, it's knowledge of yourself at the level of your own DNA. But two, it's inspiration. I think a lot of people today recognize that we're living in this new genetic information age since human genome experiment where people realize there's a tremendous burgeoning interest in not just how to quantify your health and fitness, but how to do that at the level of your DNA. And so it's kind of intersecting those two fields. And I think Telo Years finds itself right at that intersection. And I've found that a lot of people, they get these results and find inspiration in them to actually engage in positive lifestyle management. And it's been, I think, quite good so far.

Yeah, I mean, my own results actually inspired me a little bit. And I asked you that question about Ironman and marathon and triathlon training, and then you responded by saying you're not like uber fit or anything like that. I think the ironic thing is that many uber fit folks think that they are by doing, say like a daily CrossFit wad or training for an Ironman triathlon or, or pounding the pavement on a three hour weekend run for a marathon, actually somehow adding years to their life or increasing their resilience or their ability to be able to defy a lot of the things that would cause aging, like inflammation or tumor growth or something like that. But in fact, and this is what I saw in my own results, a lot of those things can shorten telomeres or take years off of your life. I mean, if you look at, if you look at some of the research that I'm aware of, once you exceed about 90 minutes of just pure aerobic exercise or 60 minutes of anything that intense each day, you actually start to see increased mortality and a law of diminishing returns when it comes to your exercise efforts versus the whole. I've had this guy on my show before named Mark Sisson, and he's got this philosophy of lift, move, sprint, you lift heavy things every once in a while. You know, you engage in low level physical movement during the day and then occasionally, just like you occasionally lift heavy stuff, you occasionally sprint. And that's kind of like a more ancestral approach to fitness. And just to let the cat out of the bag, I'm 34 years old, but my telomere length. You said that you were 44. You tested at 34, Jason. And then after your exercise protocol, which sounded pretty reasonable and not too excessive, you're at 27. I am at 36 for my age in tele years, you know, looking over my telomere testing results. And for those of you listening in, I'll link to my own results in the show notes. But I'm actually older, you know, despite, you know, everything that I do. I spent a decade just destroying my body, you know, racing an Ironman triathlon and doing bodybuilding, which, you know, in the process of sucking down protein shakes and avoiding any fat whatsoever, you know, is also one of the more unhealthy, inflammatory sports on the face of the planet. You know, I'm. After getting out of that and adopting more healthy lifestyle practices, I'm very interested in testing my telomere length again in about a year and kind of ensuring that it's continuing to come down. I wouldn't have been surprised if I was even older, you know, last year or the year before on this test. But. But, yeah, I mean, I was shocked at my own results that show that or that, I guess, back up the fact that this whole, like, you know, masochistic approach to fitness can actually take years off of your life in terms of your telomere length, rather than, you know, doing you a favor in the aging department. But, but I want to ask, you know, let's. We may have gotten ahead of ourselves a little bit here. For people listening in, can you just give us kind of like the. The brief overview of what telomeres are and why they're so important?

Sure. So telomeres are parts of your DNA. So I'm sure your audience knows that inside of every one of your cells, there is a cell nucleus. And inside that nucleus, there is a bunch of DNA strands in your chromosomes. At the very ends of your chromosomes are these protective and dynamic end caps that are called telomeres. So specifically, what telomeres are, are these nucleotide base pair repeats of the sequence ttaggg. And those repeats at the end of your chromosomes go on many thousands of times. And these, you know, if you think of your DNA like a long ladder, to be a little less technical, your genes are kind of series of rungs in the middle of the ladder. And what telomeres are, are the rungs toward the ends of the ladders. And what those rungs do, what the telomeres do is they are instrumental in the process of cell replication. So as you get older, as you age, as you. Your body needs to reproduce and divide the cells so that you can heal and function normally. As you get older or to respond to injury, your cells duplicate and make more of themselves. And in that process, what the telomeres do are help the cells divide, and they regulate the amount of cell division or replication that your body can undergo. Every single time your cells replicate, a little bit of that telomere region breaks off and wears down. So generally, as you get older, your telomere length, the amount of end cap cell you have to protect, your genetic material, gets a little bit shorter. And eventually, as your cells repeat more and more, the telomeres become critically short and your Cells become what's called senescent. What senescent cells are, are cells that can no longer divide normally. The effect that senescent cells have on your body is that they tend to release what are called inflammatory cytokines, which can actually be some of the causal nexus of what starts the aging process and various bodily features. So the telomeres are a very, very important part of your DNA. And as I began to reference before, what's really fascinating about telomeres is unlike most other parts of your genome, the telomeric region is one part of your DNA that actually changes over the course of your life. And it's dynamic environment, stress, lifestyle and other kinds of factors. And in effect, what your telomere length is, is it's the amount of cellular reserve capacity that your body has. It's kind of like how much fuel is left in the fuel tank for your cells to multiply and divide and for your respond as you get older and as you heal. And so that's what telomeres are. It is a burgeoning field of science. In fact, I just looked this morning on PubMed and if you're not familiar with PubMed, it's saying it's the United States scientific and medical repository of free scientific literature. And if you go on there and you enter the term telomere or telomeres, you get approximately 20,000 peer reviewed scientific articles that have been published over the past 25 years or so on telomeres and the link that telomeres have between aging and various age related diseases. So although it's a fairly new field, it has been really extensively studied and published. And telomeres specifically as a biomarker are used routinely by some of America's most credible and trusted institutions, including the National Institutes of Health, including NASA. There's some interesting experiments that just happened with twins that went to space about their telomeres.

Yeah, I saw that.

And Harvard, major institutions, I mean, many of which we put on our website@tilowyears.com.

Tell me about that twin study, the astronaut twin study.

So the twin study. And if people aren't familiar with Mark and Scott Kelly. Mark and Scott are both gentlemen who have been astronauts in the NASA program for a long time and they are twins. Mark, you might know him because his wife is Gabby Gifford. She was subject to the assassination attempt that happened in the government out of Washington D.C. you may have heard about that a while ago. Scott, his twin brother was sent to space by NASA for a period of one year. And what NASA is gearing up to do is try to understand what the effects of space travel have on human beings over the longer term as they prepare potentially for a mission down the road to Mars, you know, a trip that would take probably at least six months in one direction to get to Mars. So what happened was they benchmarked Scott and Mark, Scott, the space bound twin, and Mark the earthbound twin, on a variety of measures and then sent Scott to space and brought him back. You know, I heard Scott when he came back talking on NPR on the radio, and you know, the, the interviewer said to him, you know, when you go to space for a year, you know, like, what does NASA measure? What do they look at? He's like, well, for one, I was about 2 inches taller when I came back. But the first thing he mentioned in that interview was NASA measured this part of my DNA called telomeres to try to understand how I had undergone certain tolls in space travel in comparison to my brother. And so it's interesting to me that the first thing that he mentioned when asked coming back, what do they actually measure was telomer length. And so I think what that's a testament to is the worthwhile nature of telomere length as a biomarker that's being used as it's already being used by some of the nation's most credible and trusted institutions because of its well known and well established link to various age related phenomena.

So with him, his telomeres were shorter coming back from space travel.

You know, what was funny was when he was in space, and this was one of the discoveries which NASA thought was really interesting, his telomere length got a little bit longer while he was in space, really published, and they think that it could potentially be because when he's in space, he was undergoing extensive exercise regimens. Because if you think about it, when you're in space, you're in a more or less weightless environment and your heart, all of your heart, think about all your muscles, like your heart is pumping. It's a muscle that is constantly working on Earth under the force of gravity. And you take away that gravity, your muscles now are not lifting their own weight. And so, you know, they put him on a very aggressive, trying to stay fit and workout regimen. And then when he came back to Earth, resumed normal activities, his telomere length reportedly kind of came back down.

Maybe I need to go be an astronaut. What happened to his brother?

Well, they used his brother as a control, so I don't know for a fact whether his went up or down. But they used him as a control for a point of comparison. But that's all I know what I've.

Read about, but people are different. When you look at telomeres and the rate of cellular aging, it's not the same from person to person, right?

No, it is not the same from person to person. And that said, different people of different ages have different telomere lengths. What's useful about telomere length, in fact, is the fact that it does vary by individual. And the example that I. By individuals of certain age and populations. I mean, for example, I sometimes say, imagine if you were measuring cholesterol and you found out that all men age 51 had the same cholesterol level. It would be a useless measure. It's the fact of its variance that makes it a useful measure so that you can compare it. And so what we try to do is we provide with telo years your age in telo years. Because first and foremost, telomere length varies with age. It tends to decline with age. And that scientific body of literature, by and large, has established that telomere length tends to decline over time. And it's also an insightful way to provide people a point of reference to really understand this somewhat novel and comprehensive overall indicator of cellular wellness through the lens of something that people get. Which is. Which is how old they are.

Right, right. I actually interviewed. Do you know Aubrey de Grey? He's like kind of an anti aging spokesperson enthusiast, kind of like guy in the anti aging space with a very big beard. Yeah, yeah. When I interviewed him, he talked about cellular senescence and how that's like the cellular equivalent of aging. And it's this process where the cell kind of goes into a state of growth arrest. And from what I understand, measuring your telomeres can actually indicate your rate of cellular senescence. Like your actual rate at which your cells are no longer able to grow.

Yeah. When your telomeres get to a critically short length, your cells can no longer reproduce and divide. And that is what cellular senescence is defined as. Senescent cells are cells that can no longer divide.

And so we're trying to keep our telomeres in a state where the cell is actually able to divide.

Yes. You're generally trying to, in most cases, slow the rate of shortening that your telomeres are undergoing is generally what you're trying to do.

Okay, got it. Now what about cells themselves? Does each individual cell have a different length of the telomere in that cell? Or is the telomere length consistent from cell to cell in any given person.

Now, it does vary by various cell types within the body. So, you know, some scientists, I've seen present papers where they say you can measure the telomere length of your liver tissue, your lung tissue, or in certain cancers, the tumor tissue. Now, what we do with telo years is we measure the telomere length as an average in your leukocytes, which are your white blood cells.

Okay.

The reason that we use white blood cells, beside the fact that they're readily available, your white blood cells are short lived, circulating cells that float around in your body, and they are created by the bone marrow. And that's the source. That's where your stem cells are. And so your leukocyte telomere length is a good proxy for your stem cell telomere length. And because they're short circulating cells, that's what makes them kind of interesting and relevant. And that's why, if you look at that body of scientific evidence that I'm talking about, average telomere length measured in leukocytes or white blood cells is the measure that is most typically used in the scientific literature that talks about telomere length and aging.

So when you sent this kit to my house, it came in this little box, and I did one drop of blood. When I send that back to you, then what you're looking at is the actual telomere length in the leukocytes or the white blood cells found in that single drop of blood that I send back to you.

That's right. That's right. So we get the drop of blood back, and from that drop of blood, we extract the DNA, and there are thousands and thousands of cells. And what we do is we measure the average telomere length that is present in the leukocytes from the DNA of that blood sample in our lab here in California.

Okay. And so you're looking at the average telomere length. So in my results, where it says, like, atl, that's average telomere length of all those different white blood cells tested in that single drop of blood of mine that I sent in.

That's right. The ATL stands for average telomere length. And if you think about it, if you have 23 chromosomes, right. You know, in chromosomes, they kind of look like an X. And so every x has basically four ends. So if you think of your 23 chromosomes, you have times four, 92 telomeres on each of those chromosomes. And so what we're doing effectively is measuring the average length of telomeres across all of your chromosome ends in that in your white blood cells in your body, and there's many, many of those cells in the sample that we receive.

Okay, got it. And then using that data, when I'm looking at my results here, and again, if you guys want to see what, like, sample results look like, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com telomere test and I'll just put my PDF up there in full embarrassing detail for anybody to be able to look at. But when I'm looking at these results and it's giving me my age, right? Like it's saying my age and you guys call it tilo years. So my age in telomere years, how is that then calculated based on the telomere length? Is there some kind of like, algorithm or something that you feed that into?

Yeah, so I'll give you the general answer then. I'll give you a specific answer. The general answer is your age in telomere, in telo years is the actual age of the typical man or woman, your same gender of your age, whose telomere length is similar to yours. That's the specific answer. The way that we arrive at that is we measured telomere length in a representative population of the US Sample that we selected, and then we took those results and gave them to our biostatisticians. These are PhDs who work in the field of mathematical modeling, and they developed these complex mathematical models to be able to compare your individual telomere length through algorithmic formulas to this representative sample population across the US and then what we do is we report to you using those mathematical models, are your age in telomeres, which is, like I said, the actual age of the typical man or woman of your age whose telomere length is similar to yours.

And you can't do this from like, saliva or urine or stool. You need to do it from blood.

You can do it from other tissues. You can do it from saliva. One of the disadvantages of saliva, the reason that we don't use saliva, is because it tends to create a lot more degradation of the DNA when you get it, the saliva sample, if you think about it, it is often contaminated with other substances such as mucus or food or tobacco or various other bacteria, which, when you get it, it tends to give you a more degraded DNA sample. And at least for me personally, just subjectively, when I've given saliva samples in the past, I don't know if you've ever tried it, but it's kind of gross, I mean.

Oh, yeah, I'VE done. I'm really good at it. I sniff peanut butter, and that makes me salivate.

It's not like you do it once. You have to sit there for like five minutes and salivate and let it drip into this cup.

Right.

For my aesthetic judgment, I mean, I kind of feel like. Kind of like you do home glucose monitoring. A quick poke of the finger and a drop of blood on a piece of paper, not only to me, is a little bit easier, and it's. It's also tends to give you a result that is more stable and robust from getting DNA from the actual blood.

And I've got thousands of white blood cells in just one drop of blood. So you're able to. To take that and then analyze each of those and get an average telomere length based on that.

Yeah, And I won't quote an exact number. I should get my scientists, but it's tens of thousands. I mean, it's a. It's a very large number.

I wish I had my own scientists to follow me around, give me information like that, pull them out of the back pocket. My pet scientist. Okay, so when I get this test done, I've got my results back here. And obviously, like I alluded to earlier, I am older than what I biologically than I actually am chronologically, based on my average telomere length. Now, my first question for you before we delve into some of the things that you guys have found, because on this PDF and the document that you sent over to me, I've got some recommendations from you. But before we delve into that, how long does it take to actually see these things change? I mean, I think you mentioned that you did how many months of exercise to drop from like 34 down to 27?

About eight months.

Okay, so you saw some pretty quick results in eight months. Is that generally about how often tests like every half year, or is it every year? Or like, what's. What's kind of a decent time to wait before repeating a test. If I start to implement some of the things that can defy aging.

Yeah, that again, I have my scientist who follows me around and I've asked them those questions. We give a suggestion for that, and we say that you should wait three to six months before retesting. The reason that we give that is because there are some data that have shown that lifestyle interventions in as little as three months can actually make you have changes in telomere length. So that's why we give that a number. I've spoken to some of our scientists who Say that, you know, you can see some fluctuations, you know, in the shorter term, but I think, you know, most of the scientific data suggests perhaps wait a little longer. And I think that's, that's a better time frame. So that's what we suggest.

Okay, gotcha. All right, let's get into the good stuff here. Let's say that you were in my shoes. I know you're not a, you're not a physician. This isn't necessarily medical advice that you're dispensing, but in your guys experience over at tele years, what have you found to give people the most bang for their buck when it comes to decreasing the rate at which telomeres shorten? I know it's a loaded question and that'll probably rabbit hole a little bit, but I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on this.

Yeah. So we provide with our telo years results a thing that we call the telo years blueprint for Aging well. And it's a document that we painstakingly poured over the decades of literature and carefully scientifically annotated a variety of things that we broke out into about four or five categories that we think are useful. And those categories generally are things related to diet. Exercise, stress and sleep are the first big four. So maybe I'll address them sort of in that order. There's very good literature that suggests that eating a Mediterranean diet that is plant rich, low in sugar, lots of healthy oils, nuts, et cetera, has been shown in research to be good for telomere length. And there's science on that, studies that you can find to look that up.

Now I've seen the same thing. But Jason, to play devil's advocate, you see people following the Mediterranean diet in the States and they're face stuffing with avocados and drenching everything in olive oil. And I do the same. I think that that type of practice is great. But you also see in a traditional Mediterranean diet, if you were to be in the Mediterranean, two other things. You see a lot of fasting. My dad follows a traditional Mediterranean diet and he'll come over sometimes, he'll just be like, yeah, I haven't eaten in a week, or that, or he hasn't eaten meat in a week. He's on some kind of a protein sparing diet. So it's almost like they have these periods of fasting and feasting now here in the US it seems like a lot of people will follow the Mediterranean diet. But leave out that part about fasting. Do you think that's an important component or do you think that just doing the olive oil and the avocados and the fresh tomatoes, et cetera is enough?

Well, I think if I got more specific about diet, I mean, I think that there is some data I would have to search, but I think that there is some data that published. And if again you go to pubmed and you type in telomere length fasting, you will find some publications. I just did that real quick now in the background to take a look. But the thing that I try to educate people on around diet is what I call oxidative stress. Let me define that. What oxidative stress is. It is the imbalance of free radicals floating around in your bloodstream with antioxidants which remove those free radicals. There are certain foods that tend to be the types of foods that are antioxidant based that help keep your oxidative stress imbalance. And there's a decent amount of literature, I think that exists in that field. And so without commenting specifically on the Mediterranean diet. Exactly. Whether you should just eat avocados or eat oils or whether you should fast, that's kind of where I'd start. Try to understand mechanistically what's happening and then think about how to build your diet from there, if that makes sense.

Okay, got it. But what about intermittent fasting? Do you, have you guys seen or have you looked at at all like the effects of fasting versus not fasting or people who engage in any amount of calorie restriction versus those who don't when it comes specifically to telomere length?

No, we have not. We have not produced or looked at any particular studies that we've sponsored. We've said what is the effect of fasting on telomere length? But I would encourage people to go to pubmed.com research and take a look at telomere length and fasting and look at some of the papers that are out there.

Okay, got it. Another question regarding diet would be this concept of growth hormone and insulin like growth factor. You'll see this a lot in the anti aging community too, that if you have there's a sweet spot with growth hormone and insulin like growth factor, where if you're doing too much dairy, too much food, too many anabolic things, not enough caloric restriction, et cetera, you would get to a point where excessive growth hormone or excessive insulin like growth factor might actually have an accelerated aging effect. Do you take that into consideration at all things like growth hormone, insulin like growth factor, you know, excessive consumption of dairy things along those lines?

Well, there is evidence in the literature that hormones might regulate the enzyme telomerase and its activity. And so there have been studies that I have seen where they have looked at that. I'm not saying that's a good thing to necessarily engage in, but there is a relationship in the literature between those things.

Yeah, I've always thought it was interesting, kind of confusing because you see in many of these anti aging clinics, they'll give growth hormone therapy, right? Like you'll do like growth hormone injections with an insulin syringe before you go to bed at night. And it's regularly injected with, you know, these supposed rejuvenating properties. But that's exactly the opposite of what you'll see. You know, I know there was. There was, I think it was the American Anti Aging association and there was this guy who, who was the recipient of what they call the Methuselah Prize, which I guess is like an award given to people who are in aging research. And this gentleman with the American Aging Association, I think that what he was doing was he was suppressing the growth hormone receptors in mice and finding that mice were living twice as long as usual. When you reduce growth hormone and you reduce specifically insulin, like growth factor, and then you see the exact opposite done in some people who will get growth hormone injections for their repairing and recovering process properties. I mean, my take on this is that you have to find the sweet spot between anabolism and catabolism, between fasting and feasting. But I think it's interesting that it seems like both seem to have some type of beneficial effect to some extent.

Yeah, I mean, I guess our take on it is that we are providing with telo years, a yardstick for measuring the impact of various lifestyle interventions on your body. The things that we provide are, that we suggest are mostly lifestyle modification types of things and what the science says about them. When you get into something like whether or not to take growth hormones or other kinds of drugs, that's really something you should talk to your doctor about. And something that's really beyond the depth is something that I'm able to talk about in general.

Yeah, talk to your doctor or your pocket scientist about that. So you're measuring white blood cells, by the way, and this got me thinking, and we'll get back on the nutrition bandwagon in just a second. But it got me thinking about white blood cells in general and how they seem to be very responsive to immune system reactions and also inflammation. And when you're measuring just white blood cells. Do you think that in an athlete who's experiencing a lot more inflammation, who is eating a higher number of calories and potentially getting, getting some of the potential for autoimmune issues or immune system issues related to a lot of calorie consumption combined with inflammation, that white blood cell telomere length, or measuring the average white blood cell telomere length might not give you as big a picture when it comes to their actual age compared to measuring all the other telomeres in all the other tissues. Or have you looked into specifically an athletic or a very active population with respect to part of the telomeres you measure?

Well, I think it does matter the benchmark of who you compare people to. I mean, what we use, our benchmark is the typical average, not unhealthy US Population as our control. I think it could matter when you get into, you know, especially high performance athletes, professional athletes. I mean, there might be a different way of framing how you think about it. So I think it's worth considering and testing. But no, we haven't really looked at high performance athletes and how their telomere length does or doesn't change. I mean, we are. Maybe I'll just make a comment about a biomarker like telomere length in general is. You want to say, hey, for a specific population, what's that mean? Telomere length is a surrogate marker. And what that means is it's a biomarker that actually helps you know something that you know, it predicts some kind of risk that comes down the pike in the future. And any kind of health marker that is looking at future risk, it does not do so perfectly okay? I mean, none of them do. Your cholesterol level doesn't do that. Your body mass index, obesity, your blood pressure, none of those are perfect predictors of the future. But what they are is they do it powerfully. Right? And there is data that exists that suggests that telomere length is an independent predictor of, for example, cardiovascular disease risk. And there are meta analyses published about a year or so ago in the British Medical Journal that looked at a meta analysis of something like 43,000 subjects that concluded that telomere length independently associated with negatively with cardiovascular risk outcomes, independent of conventional vascular risk factors. Now, does that mean if you have short telomeres you're definitively going to have a heart attack whether you're a high performance athlete or not? No. But what it does, like other biomarkers, is it suggests that you are at increased risk. So an analogy would be Smoking, you know, if you smoke, you are at increased risk of lung cancer. Now, there are some people who will smoke and say, hey, my dad lived at 73 and he didn't get lung cancer after smoking. And I'd say, well, some people have that. But you cannot deny the fact that these biomarkers are predictive of future risk. The way that I try to ratchet that up to a, you know, populational healthcare kind of discussion is in the United States, at least, the way that the healthcare system is set up today, by and large is a curative care system. It waits until something is broken or until you have a disease to go into the hospital and to fix the problem. And I think most reasonable people can agree that it would be better to try to prevent some of these problems than to wait until they occur and then address them. Right. And that I think this evolving shift in mindset that's happening from curative sick care to preventive and personalized healthcare and doing that takes a bit of a courageous leap to start to deal in future probabilities of risks. But what I think tests like ours do, regardless of the subset of the population, is it puts you in control of those lifestyle risks. It gives you knowledge that you can then act on before it's too late to make some modifications to your lifestyle to help address and manage those risks. Because if you don't measure it, you can't manage it and you can't control it. And that's what we're trying to do with teliors.

Yeah, I think the interesting thing too is I monitor pretty frequently my blood glucose and also my hemoglobin A1C. I'm not one of those guys who wears, they have like these Dexcom G5 blood glucose monitors that will monitor your glucose all the time. I don't do that, frankly, because when I'm out doing a Spartan race and churning through the mud, those under the skin glucose monitors don't hold up too well, unfortunately. But just doing like, like blood measurements, postprandial fasting, when I wake up in the morning for blood glucose and then when I get lab tests, I pay attention to this value called hemoglobin A1C, which is like a three month snapshot of your sugar levels. I do that not only because I've done like 23andMe genetic testing and that's revealed that I have a higher than normal risk for type 2 diabetes, but I also pay attention to guys like, like Peter Attia, for example. You familiar with Peter at all?

No, I'm not okay.

He's, he's a great blogger. He's got a website called war oninsulin.com and he's very involved in kind of like the anti aging sector. And the two variables that, that he recommends paying the most attention to when it comes to accelerated aging or risk of disease or death is your actual blood glucose value, your facet blood glucose value, and whether or not your blood glucose is kind of staying stable throughout the day. Meaning that A, your fasted glucose should be low, but B, you should also not be getting frequent spikes from that number throughout the day, like after you eat a meal. If your postprandial blood glucose is hanging out at over 122 hours later, that's a good sign that you're probably accelerating aging. I think the interesting thing is that this white blood cell test that you guys are doing, I do know white blood cells are very sensitive to the inflammation that can be caused by excessive fluctuations in blood glucose. So this is almost like a little bit of a corollary, getting your telomeres tested and your white blood cells tested specifically to your blood glucose levels. You know, kind of a long train of thought there. But ultimately, you know, what I would expect to see. If I'm able to control my blood glucose fluctuations and control my postprandial blood glucose and control my inflammation, my white blood cell telomere length should, should change accordingly. I would imagine we'll, we'll find out when I retest. So anyways though, we kind of, we kind of took a little bit of a rabbit hole there. But you talked about the Mediterranean diet. You also said that there were three other factors I think in addition to diet that you mentioned.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the second one was exercise, and we touched on that a little bit earlier. But the data suggests that about three times a week of moderate, not overly severe exercise, which means getting your heart rate up for at least 45 or so, 30 to 45 minutes, at least two or three times a week has been shown to associate with getting people fit. Now these are standard recommendations to people here. And you kind of made the point before of excessive exercise can actually start to take a toll on the body and on your cellular reserve. The ones that get more interesting I think maybe is in the area of sleep. And you know, a lot of people say, well, geez, what's to say about sleep? You know, try to get eight hours a day. But you know, we try to put out in our blueprint for aging. Well, not just what you should do in terms of how many Hours of sleep. But there's a certain type of sleep hygiene that I think is actually something that people can learn about and observe. I mean, in the days of having TVs and laptops and computers in your room, you wind up doing things that affect your sleep and your sleep cycles that I think could potentially not be as good. And so it's a way to show not just a respect for. Respect for your sleep and not just the hours, but sort of the environment of how you get sleep. And then, you know, I think that's an interesting area. And then I think, you know, the last thing that people sometimes ask about is how about genetics, you know, and what does it mean? And there is a genetic component of telomere length and there is an environmental component of telomere length. And so pollution, various other types of environmental exposures can impact telomere length. And, you know, I have anecdotally seen some people who get, you know, fairly surprising negative results and they come to learn that they have been ingesting excessive mercury or they've been doing something that didn't know that the test has really provided a benefit for them.

That's really interesting. I just finished an excellent book, one of the better books I've read recently on cancer. My voice is going to fade as I strain my neck here to look at my bookshelf to tell you the title. But this book, one moment. It is called the Metabolic Approach to Cancer. And interestingly, three of the biggest variables that seem to affect specifically the potential for cancer cell growth are a few of the things that you mentioned. Lack of sleep, pollution and metals. They talk about all three of those in this book and it's interesting that these seem to be things that affect telomeres as well. Now, are there actual studies. I want to get into exercise here in a second, but to touch on the sleep and the pollution component, are there actual studies that show air pollution exposure can affect telomere length?

I'm sure that there are. I mean, there is such an extensive body of literature that I'm sure that if you searched it that you would find it.

Okay, got it. And is there any proposal as to the mechanism of action for that? Would it just be inflammation and oxidative stress or. Or something else that would affect the cells from something like that?

Yeah, to be honest, I don't know. I mean, I'm not familiar enough with like that actual body of research. I mean, I'm sure it stems back to the mechanisms, action perhaps of oxidative stress or something that impacts how cells are in some way unable to reproduce normally.

Well, here there's One study on PubMed that shows it's entitled Long Term Ambient Particle Exposures and Blood DNA Methylation. And that looks like actual exposure to some of the particulates from pollution affects actual methylation or an inability to methylate DNA, which of course would cause excessive DNA damage or a limit of DNA to be able to repair. When you limit DNA's ability to repair, Jason, does that increase the rate at which telomeres shorten?

Well, I think it can, certainly. I mean, I think as I'm looking at pubmed now and I see studies right away that say long term exposure to air pollution is associated with biological aging. I mean, it's not difficult to find studies that do and report exactly on that.

Gotcha. And when you see that term biological aging, like if we see that in press releases and stuff, are they referring to telomeres?

I'm sure not always, but generally that is what it's referring to. And you can kind of, you know, what I generally do is I find a study, I look at the abstract, I scan down to the results section and I look for the conclusions that the study draws. And you can then go back and analyze whether it's a good study or a bad study, who funded it. But I mean, there are so many NIH funded studies that are actively looking at these types of questions that even I'm not putting myself out as the head scientist who is perfectly knowledgeable of this field of knowledge. What I know is that there is a large and extensive studied and published body scientific literature that supports links between telomere length and a variety of these things. And that's why we think it's useful as a biomarker. And frankly, that's why I think some of the most credible institutions in the United States are already using telomere length as something that is worthwhile measuring in their populations.

Yeah, I actually read the journal Sleep quite a bit and what you said about sleep. I know you mentioned pollution and the cleanliness of your environment and you mentioned exercise and, and also the diet. But in the journal Sleep, there's quite a bit of talk in there about body repair and I've seen several studies in there about the relationship between sleep and telomere length. And one of the most interesting things that I've taken away from that the past several years has been that even sleep temperature seems to have an effect on that. Meaning that the lower your body temperature can drop as you sleep, the more efficient the DNA repair Mechanisms become as you sleep. And so I go as far as to monitor my heart rate. I wear this little ring called an aura. It monitors my heart rate while I'm asleep. And if my heart rate is normally at like, let's say, 38, when I sleep at my normal room temperature, which is like 60 to 65 degrees. And I even have one of these things now called a chili pad that makes the. The mattress cooler while I sleep. And I can control it with my little remote. My wife can control her side with her remote in case she doesn't want to sleep at the frigid temperatures that I sleep at. But what I found is that everything from my deep sleep levels and my REM sleep and my sleep latency and all these important sleep variables, they are far better when I'm colder, when I sleep, and when my heart rate during any given night is lower. And then the other thing I look at is you can look at what point during the night your heart rate achieves its lowest point. And if it occurs late in the night or like 4am or 5am, that's a sign that you're sleeping hot versus if it occurs at like 1am or 2am so heart rate during the night. And then like, the cooling effect of sleep seems to be pretty heavily correlated to this DNA repair and to this decreased rate of which telomere shorten that sleep can offer you, which I think is really interesting.

Yeah, I think that's really interesting too. I think that there is. I mean, the things that you're pointing out are just an example of this burgeoning health trend that people have an active desire to actively monitor their fitness and health regimens. And there's more tools out there now than ever before. I mean, and, you know, telomere length measurement with telo years, I think is a great way of seeing this cumulative overall effect that a variety of these things have on you at the level of your DNA in a way that it can be then actionable to take some alternate steps and see how it. How it changes.

Yeah, and coming full circle to what you described, which. Which was actually shocking to me, I didn't know this one before we got on the call that you dropped from 44 and it showed you at 34, and then you did this eight months of physical training, and you dropped down to 27. When you guys sent me the recommendations in the PDF, one of the things that I respected about that was it actually said, hey, excessive physical exercise, chronic endurance exercise, et cetera, that can actually increase the rate at which these telomeres shorten. And there was an article that I actually wrote on my website called Anti Aging Secrets of some of the Fittest Old People. And when you look at the practices of some of these old guys, like Don Wildman and I guess Laird Hamilton isn't old, but I've got him in there and you know, Mark Sisson and some of these other folks, what I highlight in there is not only the frequency and the attentiveness that most of these folks give to long term weight training, but also some of the studies out there that show the positive effects of strength training on telomere length in human skeletal muscles. So not mice or rats or anything like that. But in humans it's been shown that one of the most powerful things that you can do is strength training. And on the flip side, one of the most deleterious things that you can do is like long term chronic cardio endurance type of training versus heavy lifting and sprinting. So I'm curious too about your own protocol here where you train for eight months and you drop from 34 down to 26. What were you doing as far as like sets and reps? Were you going super heavy? Were you kind of like in a, in a 12 to 20 rep range or like, what, what'd your protocol look like?

I mean, you know, my personal protocol. And like I said, I'm not, I'm not the world's fittest guy, right? So. But I started with, I would generally go into the gym. I would start with some kind of warm up on the, on a bike, maybe 10, 15 minutes. I would then go to maybe an elliptical for 10, 15 minutes. I would then go through a series of various sort of isometric kind of exercises. Stretching, getting loose, the kind of stuff that, you know, when I go to the baseball game, I see baseball players doing before the game, you know, that kind of stuff. I would do some stuff with light weights, then like maybe three reps of 12, doing some dumbbell squats, various other things like that. And then you know, generally at the end I would try to save about, if I had any gas left in the tank, maybe like 12 minutes running on a treadmill. I mean it nothing more complicated than that. But like I said, I'm not, I did not come into it with really much of a basis for great physical fitness. And I was just trying to kind of get my heart rate up and kind of get back on track, you know, to, you know, not be a peak performance athlete by any means, but just to get myself moving. Yeah, the thing that you, when you point out about athletes who really, and I know some of these guys who do these hundred mile marathons around where.

I live, you're talking to one of them.

What I wonder is what impact those activities have on the category that I kind of saved for last, which is stress. What is it doing in terms of giving you heavy loads of chronic stress in the short term somehow on your body? I don't know what that is, but. But there is a lot of data that increasingly links stress and the perception of stress and how one handles stress with impact on telomere length. And if you looked at our website and clicked on the blog, one of our scientists, Dr. Zhu Lin, wrote a blog post about stress in telomere length and she has published extensively on this. The other thing that I'd say is there's a new book that came out in January by two of our co founders, one of whom had won the Nobel Prize in medicine in the field of telomere biology. And the book is titled the Telomere Effect, and it talks a lot about stress and impact on your telomere length. And so again, not trying myself to be the expert, just the conduit to direct people to expertise if I can. I think it's a fascinating field. And, you know, what we're dedicated to at telors is we want to help develop the field. We want to promulgate this relatively new knowledge to people. Because I think when people take a look and start to find out about the growing and dynamic field of telomere science, they can't help but start to say, wow. I mean, this is a biomarker that is worth measuring. It is something that's already being used. And I for one believe that, you know, if this had been 30 years ago and the reimbursement environment was different in the United States, telomere length would probably already be a routinely reimbursed measure that doctors would order as part of the typical cardiovascular workup. And I think in the future, every time a doctor orders HDL and LDL on somebody, they're probably at some point going to order atl. This average telomere length thing that I.

Do, well, they don't even need to order it. If you can just order it to your own house and have it done yourself. Right?

Yeah, but I think, I guess if.

You want it covered by insurance. Huh?

If you want it covered by insurance, that's exactly right. And I think that ties to my point about, you know, trying to make a mental shift, you know, from Sick care to preventative personalized wellness care that really tries to prevent disease. I think that a lot of people that resonates with a lot of people right now. And you know, hopefully telo years can be one of the tools in the arsenal that helps people do that. And then the innovation, all these innovation, all these interventions we're talking about, I mean, by and large with telo years we try to remain, you know, we make suggestions, but we try to remain neutral. I mean, what we are doing is we are selling the yardstick and the interventions are really up to the individual. And we're committed to providing an accurate, robust, scientific and understandable way of knowing what your telomere length is, how it compares and, you know, how it can change over time.

Yeah, yeah. And by the way, to backpedal for just a second on the exercise component, that study I was alluding to about the effect of strength training on telomere length, what they specifically looked at, because I was able to find that, and I'll link to this in the shownotes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Telomere test for those of you who want to look at this one. They found that telomere length was inversely correlated to specifically when they compared power lifters to the general population, your squat strength and your deadlift strength. And so if there's any takeaway from there, if you were going to focus on a couple of exercises and you're going to do heavy low rep exercises to help you to age a little bit more gracefully, it would be heavy loads placed in the body with a squat and a deadlift. And I'm right now working on an article with another guy about all these different barbell complexes that you can do with just a single barbell that allow you to kind of use some of these same type of protocols. So I'll publish that soon for those of you listening in over on the website. But in the meantime, do more strength training and pound the pavement less with the caveat that if you, you know, and I guess you guys probably run into this sometimes, Jason, it's like who wants to live a long time if you're constantly cold and skinny and fasted? Right. It's like if it makes you happy to cross the finish line of an Ironman triathlon or you find great joy in running for three hours down a fly forested trail, I think that there's some benefit to be found in just like the balance of happiness versus accelerated aging. Right. As long as you're not living too hedonistic A lifestyle.

Yeah, I mean, there's absolutely a balance. And sometimes people say to me, well, look, I mean, what problem are you trying to solve with telo years? And I feel like we're engaging with one of humankind's frankly oldest and biggest problems. I mean, we are trying to help people who want to put more years in their life and more life in their years. Right. It's not just one or the other, you know, so, so I think that balance is absolutely key. And living longer, healthier and feeling younger longer, I think is important to a lot of people.

Yeah. And, and the test, the test itself is not. I don't remember how much is it?

The test is 89.

Yeah. So that's like cheaper than 20. It's a lot cheaper than like 23 in me. Genetic testing. It's like, yeah, that's a pretty good deal if you ask me.

We have tried to offer the test at an affordable price. We recognize that 89 can for many still not be an affordable price. But we think it's a fair price for what we offer because we want to make broad based telomere length testing available and broadly available. So we've, you know, some people say, hey, how do I get a discount on this and that? We tend to not offer discounts. We tend to say we have tried the best we can to put an honest fair price forward to make this broadly accessible to people. And that's been our pricing philosophy.

Yeah, I think it's fair. I mean, I got a lot out of the test, even like the blueprint that you guys sent over. I like to think that I know a little bit about aging and keep my nose in the literature somewhat, but I learned some things from that. And I'll put my results in the show notes for those of you listening and if you want to see what sample results look like. And I'll also put links to the other stuff that Jason and I talked about, like some of the books that we mentioned, like the Telomere effect and the Metabolic Approach to Cancer and a few of the other articles and studies that we went over in today's show. But in the meantime, you can access all those over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com telomere test. If you don't know how to spell telomere, what's wrong with you? We've said it like a billion times already, but it's T E L O M E R e telomere test. BenGreenfulFitness.com telomere test and then Jason, I'm not sure if you're going to be like Benjamin Button the next time I talk to you and like a small child unable to form words. If that is the case, you'll probably never be on the podcast again. But in the meantime, it seems like you're doing things pretty right. You should probably just stop by the time you get to a biological age of 15, just so you don't have to go through reverse puberty again.

I don't expect it to go down any further. In fact, I kind of fell off the wagon a little bit like a lot of people do.

And I'm personally kind of obsessed with my dad and now I want to go back and retest after I try out a whole bunch of the things that you guys recommended to me.

Yeah, I think that the type of person who is intrigued and interested in this field I think appreciates what we put forth out there. And you know, we're dedicated to putting up, like you said in the result, what we put in the blueprint that comes with it. We want to talk about the best uses and the limitations of the test and we try to put that out there and we hope to continue to invest in it over time.

Awesome. Got it. Well, we will link to all this stuff and you can check out the show notes@bengrinthelfitness.com Telomere Test Jason, thanks for coming on the show and sharing this stuff with us. My geeked out mind thinks it's pretty cool. So thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks for having me on, Ben. I enjoyed it.

All right folks, well, until next time. I'm Ben Greenfield along with Jason Shelton from TLO Years signing out. Have a healthy and an extremely long lived week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.