Super Human - Dave Asprey

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up outside of your cells, but the good news is that nearly all the cells in your body have their own built-in waste disposal system called a lysosome. Your lysosomes incinerate unwanted materials of all kinds, keeping your cells free of junk and able to function optimally.

      You knew there was a but coming, right? When the lysosome can’t break down certain materials to incinerate them, the waste products end up just sitting there, clogging up the cell until it can no longer function. The name for this is intracellular aggregation. If this happens to too many of your cells, you end up with Pillar 1—loss of cells and tissue atrophy.

      There are two reasons this might happen. The first is if the lysosome itself is damaged and can’t function properly. Lysosomes rely on over sixty types of enzymes to break down waste products, and mutations in the genes for these enzymes can prevent the lysosome from doing its job. These organelles can also be damaged by an excess of reactive oxygen species—free radicals—which happens when your mitochondria aren’t working efficiently.

      But the more likely reason your cells fill up with junk is that you eat too many foods that your lysosomes are incapable of incinerating even if they are functioning perfectly. These are advanced glycation end products (AGEs) that you eat rather than the ones that are made by sugar inside your body. Remember when I said that when sugar and proteins link up inside your body, it is the same as caramelizing onions? Yeah, it also happens when you eat caramelized protein: aka charred meat (from grilling over an open flame, broiling, or cooking protein with sugars). The AGEs you consume get stuck inside your cells, and your lysosomes can’t clear them out.

      Over time, these materials build up, making more and more of your cells dysfunctional, and this affects your ability to control blood sugar levels26 and increases your risk of cancer27 and heart disease.28 When it happens to neurons, it can contribute to Alzheimer’s.29

      Fried, blackened, and charred meat all contain tons of AGEs that can overload your cellular waste system and leave your cells literally full of garbage. And this dramatically raises your risk of developing one or more of the Four Killers. A 2019 study published in BMJ looked at the dietary habits of over one hundred thousand women between the ages of fifty to seventy-nine over the course of several years. After taking into account potentially influential factors such as lifestyle, overall diet quality, education level, and income, the researchers found that regularly eating fried foods (which also contain AGEs, since frying produces a similar chemical process as charring meat) was associated with a heightened risk of death from any cause and, specifically, heart-related death. Those who ate just one or more servings of fried food a day had an 8 percent higher risk of death from heart disease than those who did not eat fried food. One or more servings of fried chicken a day specifically was linked to a 13 percent higher risk of death from any cause and a 12 percent higher risk of heart-related death than someone who ate no fried food.30

      This one hurts, I understand. When I was in my twenties, I was the master of the grill. I loved charring meat over an open flame, but now I love my clean, highly efficient cells even more. It’s worth ordering grass-fed steak with no char.

      PILLAR 7—TELOMERE SHORTENING

      Take a moment to picture the plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces that protect them from fraying. Your telomeres serve a very similar function—they are the endcaps of your DNA that protect your chromosomes from fraying with wear and tear (aka age). An enzyme called telomerase is responsible for maintaining telomeres, but these caps naturally deteriorate over time because each time a cell copies itself, the telomeres shorten. As you age, they get shorter and shorter until they can no longer protect the cell. The cell then either stops growing or submits to apoptosis. In fact, there is a term for the number of times a cell can divide before it is no longer protected by telomeres and dies—it’s called the Hayflick limit.31

      Shortened telomeres are linked to a weakened immune system and chronic and degenerative diseases like heart disease and heart failure,32 cancer,33 diabetes,34 and osteoporosis.35 The rate at which your telomeres shorten plays a huge role in determining the rate at which you age. Scientists view telomere length as a reliable marker of your biological age (as opposed to your chronological age). People with shorter than average telomere length for their age have a higher risk for serious disease and early death36 than their peers with longer telomeres. In one study, people over the age of sixty with shorter than average telomeres had three times the risk of dying from heart disease and eight times the risk of dying from an infectious disease37 as someone with average-sized telomeres for their age.

      It’s clearly critical to keep your telomeres long. There are some studies showing ways to lengthen telomeres, but not enough evidence yet to say that we know for sure how to do it in every case. But we do know some things about what make telomeres shorter and how to protect them from shortening. Interestingly, there seems to be a direct connection between telomere shortening and stress. In one study, women with the highest levels of perceived stress had telomeres that were shorter by the equivalent of one full decade than women who said they experienced less stress.38 This is an important finding because it offers evidence that how you experience psychological stress has as much of a physiological impact as environmental stress. And this makes sense, since both psychological and physiological stresses are associated with increased oxidative stress in the body.

      Exercise is another important way of preventing early telomere shortening. Researchers in Germany looked at telomere length in four groups of people: those who were young and sedentary, those who were young and active, those who were middle-aged and sedentary, and those who were middle-aged and active. There wasn’t much of a difference between the two groups of young people, but when the participants were middle-aged, the change in telomere lengths was striking. The sedentary middle-aged folks had telomeres that were 40 percent shorter than the young people, while the active middle-aged folks had telomeres that were only 10 percent shorter than the young people. In other words, the active group reduced their telomere shortening by 75 percent.39 Exercise significantly reduces perceived stress levels and inflammation,40 which may help to explain these results.

      There are two promising lines of research about lengthening telomeres. One is a synthetic peptide called Epitalon that is modeled after a peptide your pineal gland produces (epithalamin). The research on Epitalon goes back to 2003, but no one has commercialized it. When researchers injected Epitalon into mice, it was shown to increase their life-span by up to 13.3 percent by activating telomerase41 while turning on apoptosis and slowing down tumor growth.42

      Someone with identical biology to me (ahem) has been injecting Epitalon for ten days every few months for the past several years despite the fact that it is not yet approved for human use and may never be, even though it seems to work. In fact, anti-aging substances like Epitalon often exist in a strange limbo. The pharmaceutical companies don’t develop them because they’re not patentable, which means they won’t pay for the huge studies the FDA requires before approving them. The result is that you can find Epitalon affordably online, but it’s hard to know that you’re getting it from a reputable source. To me, the risk-reward ratio is worth it, but this may not be the case for you.

      Another supplement called TA-65, the name brand of cycloastragenol, also activates telomerase.43 It is incredibly concentrated extract of an Ayurvedic herb called astragalus. By law, the makers of TA-65 can’t call it an “anti-aging” drug because it hasn’t been proved to extend life-span. But studies on this molecule show that in humans, it improves biological markers associated with health span through the lengthening of telomeres and rescuing of old cells. The downside here is that it is quite expensive. If you’ve experienced a lot of stress and/or feel that you are aging more quickly than you’d like and it’s in your budget, this might be worth considering. There are generic versions available, too.

      Until we know more about how to maintain telomere length, avoiding excessive environmental stress and taking measures to reduce your psychological stress is a good start, along with getting good quality sleep to recover from stress that is truly unavoidable.

      You’ve probably noticed that these simple interventions—good food, the right environment,

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