The Most Common Causes of Cellular Damage

Scott: Can you talk about the telomere length? Is there a way to test that, and is it worth it or good to know what those results might be?

Dr. Ed Park: Yeah. I would say there are different forms of testing. I did a video on this on my website, which discusses why some of them are more valid than others. You can do it, but you're only measuring the white blood cells, usually. The Nobel Prize winner Blackburn is coming out with one that's based on a swab of your saliva, which is good. People measure the blood, because it's easier to draw a tube of blood. That would be like checking your tire pressure because it's there. It doesn't tell you how much brake pad you have or how worn you cylinders are. Everything will age differently. If you're a drinker, your espophagus, your liver will age rapidly. If you have intestinal problems, like Crohns disease, those will age more rapidly. It's kind of a fallacy, like a dirty little secret of the field, that just because everywhere there's 15,000 papers measuring white blood cells, that's going to be correlating with all other things. Not so.

Scott: Telomere length, if that's important in our aging, what can prematurely shorten those?

Dr. Ed Park: The number one thing is replicative senescence, so overcopying. I should say it's not just overcopying; it's inadequate repair. You have a lot of stress on the system and you go to sleep with anxiety, you're note repairing. You have an imbalance there. If you're a happy-go-lucky person with a great attitude, you exercise and everything, guess what? You have a crappy day? You go home and sleep, you get caught up. But if you start to let everything accumulate and you don't sleep well...it's all about the sleep. Gradually, the system starts to grind down, which is why the supplement that we take accelerates your repair up to 300%. You get caught up and then some.