Aging Telomeres healed by exercise,decreased stress and proper diet.

A study involving hundreds of older women found that stressful events are linked to increased shortening of telomeres, the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that affect how quickly cells age. “We found that over a one-year period, the more stressors a woman had, the more their telomeres were likely to shorten,” said lead author Eli Puterman, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. But women who maintained active lifestyles, ate right and slept well appeared to shrug off the effects of stress, with their telomeres showing no significant additional shortening, the researchers said. Further details appear below.
Dr. Michael Speicher, professor and chairman of the Institute of Human Genetics at the Medical University of Graz in Austria, said the study “addresses a really important biological question: why a healthy lifestyle is really helpful, especially if you are exposed to stressors. The hopeful message is if you engage in these healthy behaviors, you can decrease some effects that stress can have on your body,” he said.
Composed of DNA and protein, telomeres protect the ends of chromosomes and keep them from unraveling. As telomeres become shorter and their structural integrity weakens, cells age and die faster. This sort of cellular aging has been associated with age-related illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. One theory holds older people are more prone to develop cancer because their shortened telomeres have made their chromosomes unstable and likely to malfunction, said Speicher, who wasn’t involved in the new study.
Telomeres naturally grow shorter with age, but unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, poor diet and too little sleep can cause them to shorten sooner. Chronic emotional stress also has been linked to shorter telomeres. To see whether a healthy lifestyle can combat the effects of stress, researchers followed 239 post-menopausal, nonsmoking women for one year. Stress and lifestyles were assessed as were their chromosomes at the beginning and the end of the study. The researchers found that these major stress events caused a significantly greater decline in telomere lengths for women who halfheartedly engaged in healthy behaviors. But the same levels of stress caused no greater shortening in the telomeres of women who stayed active, ate healthily and slept well.
“If we are in stressful situations, physical activity, sleep and nutrition are of really great importance to keep our bodies in shape and stay healthy,” Speicher said. “With this study we see it on the genetic level now.”
The study doesn’t actually prove a cause-and-effect relationship between healthy habits and longer telomeres, however. The next step will be randomized trials to see whether exercise can be used to slow cellular aging for people facing ongoing life stress, such as those serving as caregivers to Alzheimer’s patients.

Body of this article written by Glenn Rothman MD FACS

The title of this article, and picture are added by James Geiger MD. Plus the following comment regarding essential oils and aging. The FDA classifies essential oils as food supplements, think diet and prevention of premature aging. The essential oils have remarkable ability to scavenge free radical electrons that are known to accelerate the aging process due to the oils manifesting extremely high oxygen radical absorbance capacity, O.R.A.C. values.

The essential oils that I would suggest you purchase for your own personal prevention of aging food supplements are……
sandalwood,clove,thyme,frankincense,lavender,ginger and cinnamon along with a carrier or messenger oils like fractionated coconut oil to dilute these potent essential oils into 10% solution so that they can be applied topically, with a massage.
Get your supply here.
http://www.mydoterra.com/oilmd/