Elissa Epel on Telomeres and How our Choices Affect Them and our Health

and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Yeah, thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr Alyssa Epple, a health psychologist focusing on stress pathways. For the past fifteen years.

She has studied stress in the lab and in the field using naturalistic stressors and associations with an early aging syndrome. Dr Apple studied psychology and psychobiology at Stanford University and clinical and health psychology at Yale University. She also completed an n i M A funded postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF, where she has stayed on as faculty in the Department of Psychiatry. Her new book is The Telomere Effect, A

Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer. Our sponsor on this episode is health i Q. To see if you qualify and get your free health quote, go to health i q dot com. Slish wolf Or mentioned the promo code wolf when you talk to a health i Q agent. And here's the interview with Dr Elissa Apple hi alas So, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Eric. Your book is called The Telomere Effect, A Revolutionary Approach to

Live in Younger, Healthier, and Longer. And it's a fascinating book to me because really a lot of it talks about how the choices we make emotionally about our thought patterns in our lifestyle directly affects our biology in a very clear and measurable way. So we'll jump into that in just a moment, but let's start like we normally do with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two

wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second, and she looks up at our grandmother and she says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start us off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and

in the work that you do. I think it's profound. I love it that your show is titled after it. It just reminds us of how much of our life experience is constructed by us, how much control we have over choosing what we experience. So you know, whether it's internal things, negative or positive thoughts and feelings and experiences or things that happen to us, we all have bad

and good all the time. And this question of what are we going to choose to focus our attention on is just so critical can't be understated, because where we decide to put our attention is what we experience, what determines how much we're going to remember positive or negative experiences and of course build on them and capitalize on them. So it just says so much about really our our psychological power to choose our story in a way, yep.

And your book is really fascinating because it talks about the implications of choosing that story and what that looks like. There's a great quote that you say early in the book from a researcher by the name of George Bray, and this really gets to kind of what you said in the intro about things aren't necessarily fixed. We have a tendency to think of genetic traits as being like, well, I have this genetic trait. And his phrase was, jeans

load the gun and environment pulls the trigger. And that environment is not just our physical environment, but but our mental environment as well. Absolutely exactly. It's just so easy for us to feel that our health is to termined for us, you know, by our family history and buy our genes. And what we know is that at least of the variance and whether we die early, whether we get sick early from this or that, is our behavior.

And of course what shapes our behavior. Much of that is our psychological experience, our volition and taking a step back from that, it's our social environment, our neighborhoods, our relationships. So there's all these factors that we can try to shape to be, you know, a better life for us and for those around us that we have control over. So we control our aging much more than we ever

thought we could. We we can see how people's different experiences on a daily basis are associated with some of the biological aging that they undergo. Well, let's jump into the book in a little bit more detail. What is a telomere? So people liked to think of telomeres as

the tips at the ends of their shoelaces. So if you think of those plastic agglets at the ends of shoelaces, and you think of your shoelaces as the genes the DNA that makes us who we are, and then at the very tips are these protective caps still made of DNA, but not not genes. And it's very these caps are very important to protect our genetic code from any damage from fusions. And as ourselves divide, these protective caps get shorter and shorter. So there's something that happens to all

of us with age, which is tilma shortening. And when they get to a critical shortness, the cells become old and they cannot divide any longer, and they tend to become pro inflammatory, So they not only can't do whatever job they were supposed to do, like fighting infections for talking about immune cells, but then they start wreaking habit on our health by secreting inflammation into our blood. So we really want to keep tilomere's long and sturdy and

stable throughout our lifespan. And the good news is that while that genetics determine some of how long our tilomeres are, it looks like our lifestyle and social factors and nutrition, all of these factors are also shaping our telomere length. Telomere is the correct pronunciation is that it yes, So it sounds like the longer telomere is a better one

for us. And that that there's lots of studies from reading the book about different things that cause us to have a longer or shorter telomere, and we can talk through what some of those are. But one of the things I thought was really interesting in the book was it says that it's been suggested that telomere length maybe the holy grail for cumulative welfare can you talk a

little bit about that. Yes, that was an animal researcher Dr Bateson titled that, as you know, part of his paper, and it was just such a provoc kind of thought. And then it turns out there's some data to support that. So what telemeres are associated with so many different factors

in human lives. All the exposures that we're exposed to from our environment from chemicals, are social environment, our psychological state, our health behaviors, and they all kind of add up to shape the rate of how quickly our tilemere shortened. And when we think about, you know, can we take a person or an animal and measure their talmars and

what does that tell us about their life history? And you know, it's hard because telemers are affected by so many things, including genetics, we can't make really accurate direct predictions. But in general we can look at the tilmar length of a person and find that it's associated with their history. They're kind of cumulative history of adversity, all of the really difficult things that happened to them. And you know,

there's a few studies on this. Now even a stronger effect is what happens to us in childhood turns out to be really important in shaping our telomere length as adults. So you know, it's a critical period of growth and vulnerability. So we really want to protect children from toxic stressors like poverty and violence and neglect, because those are the

factors that really imprint on telomeres. Now, Dr Bateson was asking about animals and animal welfare and suggesting, why don't we apply this to animals and really look at the quality of their life, you know, especially those who are We control their environments that they grow up in, and they could be in factory farms, it could be in more humane conditions, and their telomeres might tell us a clue of their welfare. So this is not science that's kind of out on the edge. This is pretty well

known robust science. You wrote the book with Elizabeth Blackburn, who is a noble laureate. So this idea of telomeres and their length and how that affects our overall health and the things that can improve those this is pretty

robust science, right, It is robust. I can tell you where there's questions and controversy to what's robust is that there are so many studies showing that the length is predicted the length matters, so in midlife, for example, shorter telomeres statistically predict getting diseases of aging, kind of across the diseases, earlier cancers and exception. So it turns out for some cancers, longer tilomeres put us up more risk

of these cancers. There is a question of what is this just kind of a factor that you know, changes with age like so many things in our body, or is it causing aging? Is it really a mechanism? And so that's been a question for a long time, and now we know that it is definitely at least a small causal part of our aging. And we know that from these genetic studies we call them and deali in

randomization studies. So people who have the genes for longer tilomeres are less likely to get early heart disease or Alzheimer's dementia. Got it. I'm stepping way out of my knowledge zone here, But do telomeres have anything to do with whether or not genetic mutation occurs? So it's a good question, and most of us have common genes for telomeres. They might be you know, code for short or long timers,

but there they don't make a big difference. And then there are some people who have these rare genetic mutations that cause them to have very short telomeres, so, you know, maybe half the amount of telomerase, the enzyme that protects

telomeres as normal people. And so we have learned from those very sad genetic conditions that people do tend to develop some you know, pretty severe health problems like bone marrow failure, and they tend to die much earlier in life, and they tend to transmit very short telomeres to their offspring. And one thing that's so interesting is that while they might transmit the genes, the mutated genes to some offspring, other children don't get the mutation, but they still inherit

the short telomeres. And what that means is that we don't have just genetic transmission, which always occurs, but we have an epigenetic or direct transmission of tilmarlink. If mom and dad are very short tilmeres, it appears that's passed on through the sperm and egg to what the child ends up with. This episode is sponsored by health i Q. Health i Q is an insurance company that uses science and data to help you get lower rates on life insurance.

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And here's the rest of the interview with Alissa Apple. Let's talk briefly. You mentioned it earlier, talk about the role of inflammation both in our overall health and then how that ties to telomeres. So inflammation is really important. We think that it's one of the major kind of highways of aging of how our body's age. So when we're cut, we want to have a big inflammatory response to help us heal. But what we don't want is a slow drip of in flammation in our blood as

we age, and we call that inflamm aging. And that's what happens. When our tissues get old and we call them senescent. They start secreting these inflammatory factors and that builds up. It comes from fat and uh, from immune cells, from bone. There are many tissues and cells that start secreting prone flumtoris side of kinds. So when this builds up, it's feeding all of our body and organs and tissues and it's creating a fertile ground for diseases such as cancer.

So we want to be doing things to reduce inflammation, like having an anti inflammatory diet. Now that sounds fancy, and if you look at what's anti inflammatory, it's simply this. It's a whole food, high fiber diet. It's like the Mediterranean diet versus eating a lot of things like red meat, processed meat, soda, a lot of refined carbs. Those are going to be promoting inflammation in our body. It's always

interesting to me. There's so much noise about diet and so many different approaches and all that, but it seems like there are a couple of key principles that everyone agrees on, like eat less processed foods and eat foods that are closer to being whole foods. And then there's some variations beyond that. But at least that seems to

be consistent. I could not agree more. I think that everyone is confused, and you know, we've got some real issues and nutrition research, and one is conflicts of interest. If you look at the different sides battling, you often have food industry funding the side that says sugar doesn't cause disease, et cetera. Yeah, I agree, it is. It

is confusing. I just I always like when I can find a point of common ground among a bunch of different positions, because then I can go okay, well that I can at least probably you know, count on to some degree. And I think, you know, these nutritional basics that you just summarize so well, they add up across

what ever we're looking at. We know it's this, you know, it's this high antioxidant, high inflammatory diet, let's say Mediterranean diet that causes less of a glucose and insulin spike, so when it's less processed, we have a better, more stable metabolic response. This is the response that's better for the heart, it's better for the brain, and it's better for the telomeres. So it lines up very nicely to be a strong consistent story about biomarkers and early aging

as well as diseases of aging. These are all fed by the high glycemic, high carb high meat diet, and the opposite can help prevent them. So it is not new. People want the new exciting trend, but really, you know, eating well means going to the store, buying the fresh produce and trying to have less of the tempting you know what we call comfort food, not abstinence, but just less of it. You know, we do these studies trying to help people with our very understandable food drives. Right,

we get hooked on the highly palatable food. So we use mindfulness skills and we try to help people deal with those creating so that they can make the choices they want to be making excellent. Let's talk about depression. Depression comes up in several places in the book, and you sort of summarize it up by saying the arrow likely points in both directions. With depression, short telomeres may proceed depression, and depression may speed up telomere shortening. So

what do we know about depression and telomeres? Yes, this is a great question and it just shows the complexity of the mind body connection, how how factors moved together. So what we know is that when people have longer depression and untreated depression without antidepressants or therapy, their tiomeres tend to be shorter in a dose response fashion. So it looks like depression is causing faster wear and tear

on our seal aging. But then we also know that there are you know several studies that show that that people at risk of depression before they're ever depressed, tend to have shorter telomeres. So a colleague, Ian Gottlieb, showed

this with young girls. They were at risk of depression, their mothers were depressed, they've never been depressed, and when he looked at their stress response, they were they had exaggerated emotional and cortisol responses to stress, and they had shorter telomeres already no depression, and the bigger their cortisol response, the shorter their telomeres. So we know that stress can

kind of promote shorter telomeres as well as vulnerability to depression. Um, so it may be that the telomeres came before the depression. It may be that the animal studies suggests that shorter telomeres in the brain and the campus put the rats at risk of depression. And when they can boost up the hippocampus with telomeras, they're more resistant to depression. So there's all sorts of bidirectional pathways and just to to

add an even another wild card. In one recent study when researchers compared people with depression to people without depression, so cases and controls. They found that the people with depression were more likely to have this gene that causes short telomeres. So, all of a sudden, now we're looking at, you know, possible genetic predisposition to have short telomeres and to have depression. Interesting, it's a complicated web, and I think, um, you know, these are hard to pass out in humans.

We need to study people, you know, in a in a sense kind of across the lifespan and the next generation and look at the genetics at the same time as we look at their actual telomeres. Yeah, and we're going to transition now into talking about what things people can do that can help increase telomere length. And interestingly, they're the very same things that people would do to

deal with depression, to deal with and anxiety. So it may be a little chicken and egg, but the good news is we don't have to have the answer in order to do the things that are beneficial. And so the thing that I think is so fascinating about this a lot of the concepts that we're going to talk about in a minute here are are going to be things that we cover on the show fairly regularly and reminders are always great for these things. What I loved about your book though, and I think this this one

line really sums it up. It says we can change the way that we age at the most elemental, cellular level. So everything that we're about to talk about are really good strategies that we've also seen in studies that are truly working at a cellular level. And I think that's such an interesting thing to take these these ideas that we think, well, that works, makes my mind better, makes my mood a little bit better, and recognize that we're really able to measure these things the effect of them

at a true biological level. So let's start is something called the challenge response. Can you tell me a little bit about what the challenge responses and how that helps share?

So one of the areas of research that we've been doing that but looks at the acute stress response is trying to look at how people approach a stressful situation in different ways, and a natural, evolutionary based way is when we feel our survival is threatened, physical survivor vival, our physical survival is threatened, or our social survival if our ego is threatened, and we feel like we're going

to be embarrassed, humiliated, or fail. This triggers a threat response in the body, characterized by high cortisol and uh kind of the autonomic nervous system VASO constricts those patterns of reactivity. If we have them over and over over time, they are causing more wear and tear on our body. They're making us more vulnerable to stress induced diseases of aging.

So what the kind of antidote to that is. Of course, we're all going to experience stressful events, little ones and big ones, and what we can do is try to respond with a good strong stress response and recover quickly. And that profile is going to be related to slower aging. Now, how do we cause our stress response to recover quickly? Will think about you know, number one, when you approach a stressful event, you want to remind yourself that the

stress response is your friend. It helps you cope, and it energizes you, and it helps you problem solve better. So just those thoughts of rethinking the stress response in a positive weight can help our body have a more helpful stress response. We call it the challenge response. Stronger crediac output and more adrenaline than cortisol, So we want to have positive challenge response, and then once the stressor is over, it's very easy to ruminate about it. We

call this perseverative thinking. We continue to think about it long after its past. That keeps up a stress response. But we can actually try to notice that we're ruminating and let the situation go and have a quicker psychological recovery, which leads to a quicker physiological recovery. So just you know, close up looking at your stress response, you know, how

are you feeling? You can cope with the situation, and once it's over, can you help it end with a crisp ending, you know, take a walk at social support, um do something to cut down on rumination. Now, there's other things we can do to boost our stress resilience, like exercise, like getting enough sleep. These things are actually related to less rumination. So ruminative thinking is natural habit that many of us have that we can kind of can't notice and try to nip in the bud more

than we do ruminations an old friend. Around these parts, there are a couple of these that fall under the category in my mind of perspective of getting a different perspective on things. Which I always think is so helpful. And one of them is called linguistic self distancing. Can we talk about that. Yeah, that's researched by colleagues of

mine Um aus Aitic and Ethan Cross. And so what they've shown is that when they bring people into the lab to kind of relive a stressful situation, if they help them take perspective on the situation the person, the person actually looks much more stress resilient. So they can do visual distancing, they can watch the situation on a

movie screen. They can do linguistic distancing. They describe and replay it, talking about their responses in a third person a very analytical way that actually reduces their emotional response, gives them perspective. Um, they can do time distancing, and they can ask themselves is this situation really going to

affect me in five years? Usually the answers no. So while it seems like a crisis at the moment and our bodies responding as as as if our survival depends on it, when we remind ourselves that we are this really in the big picture, doesn't make a difference, right, and we shouldn't sweat the small things. This helps people rapidly recover from the stressful situation. So it's helpful just to kind of take a step back and you know,

realize it's not about avoiding stress. Stress is inevitable. We all are going to face challenges that are unpredictable that come up at different times in life, and it's really about coping with it in a way that doesn't amplify the stress in our mind and continue it the whole day even while we're you know, sleeping, we can be more kind of vigilant and arouse, and really there's always the next moment when we're not coping, when when an immediate crisis is over, when we can find peace in

that moment and we can be finding you know, joy even though we might be dealing with a terrible chronic situation. So there's always momentary relief and momentary absorption into the moment that is so important for our bodies and respite from chronic stress. Yeah, I love the time distancing. You

don't even have to go out to five years. I think a lot of times I'm like, well, this matter in five hours, five days, five weeks, and in a lot of cases, I'm getting upset about something that in five hours, I probably won't remember, like being stuck in traffic or other things. So time distancing is a great one.

And what you were saying there about the stress response reminds me of some studies I read where it's not so much the stress that's the problem, but what we think the stress is going to do to us also, so our belief in what stress does has some of that,

and that gets to the challenge response. Instead of thinking this is awful, I'm stressed and boy, it's gonna have so many bad effects on me to look at it as okay, this is, as you mentioned, priming my body or or getting me focused, and and even that thinking of it differently just lessens the impact that it has. Yeah, exactly, it's beautiful. Is there anything that you think we should

talk about before we wrap up. We've got just a few minutes left, and I want to make sure there's anything that you want to cover that I get that in there, Eric, I would love to hear from you any reflections on the parable and what that's like to hear different interpretations and sound bites of it every day over time, and how you think it relates to this book. Well, you turn the tables on me here, you're not supposed to answer a question with a question. I think is

the phrase, um. It's interesting. The way I think it relates to the book is kind of as I mentioned a little bit earlier, that you know, the parable is about making choices. To me, it's it's heart. And I think the reason it's a parable is because it you hear it and you almost immediately understand it on one

level what it means. You're like, Oh, it means that I have to make choices and decisions what I do with my you know, my thoughts, my behavior, and my emotions to the extent that I can work with those things, I should. And I think that the part of the book that I loved was that you're covering a lot of the same ground as far as the things that you do to work with your thoughts, your stress, your emotions. But I really love when it's that concrete ties it

back to biology. And I also love that a lot of what you're showing is that these telomere lengths can be modified, so it we're not just if I just if I have shorter telomeres doesn't mean that I'm doomed, right, I'm not doomed. I can actually do things in my day to day life. I can I can choose to feed the good wolf, and that will improve those telomere lengths. And so that we have a choice in what we do, and not only do we have a choice, that choice

actually makes a difference. Beautiful, you said it so well. That is a huge theme of the Tilmer story. And you know, and how our aging is so malleable. Lots of people like to know what their tilmar length is and and there's nothing wrong with that. I don't know how you know, the tests aren't necessarily that accurate yet, um. And I'm the I'm the type of person who I don't really want to know mind, because I know where

I've been and they're probably short. And I really like to focus on what we can do now today, and that's all we can control. And so really, even if someone has very short telomeres because they've had a lot of childhood hardship, that's not worth measuring them to see that, because what matters is that what they do today can be changing up that system, can be increasing the telomeries, can be reducing the ox save stress and the inflammation.

These are things we can control. Yeah, that's a great point. I was going to ask can people measure their own? But I agree with you in general, I don't think that's a particularly useful approach. It's much more about what

can I do now to improve that situation. Although it would be great to see a lengthening over time so that you knew that what you were doing was having an impact, right right, And I think eventually we might get there with more you know, accurate and frequent measurements, and that would be you know, if someone is starting at you know, a pretty intensive program for health improvement, in some way, it would be an interesting experiment to look at PrePost yep, yep exactly. So one final question,

you've talked about telomeraise. Did I say that when right close tolomerase alome raise all right as a chemical that helps? And is there treatments that we think are forthcoming? It's a good question. I don't have a good answer. We just don't know enough yet. We do know that at least from observational studies, we know the talomerase tends to be higher well, for example, smoking decreases it and being

physically active increases it. And we know from a few intervention studies that it looks like we can boost the telomerase with mind body activities like meditation and che gong, and so that's super safe and no no side effects there. And then there are supplements on the market and they just simply haven't been well tested by unbiased parties for any long term periods. So it's just a little bit of a question mark about what the risk benefit ratio is of those kind of over the counter products to

increase telomeries. And and the risk is nothing to take lightly because if you have too much tilomeris, if you're prone to cancer, and if a tilomeris supplement could kind of push you over that threshold, then you are more at risk of cancer. So it's it's a possibility, is all I'm saying. Yeah, Well, thank you Alyssa so much for taking the time to come on. I've I loved the book and I'm glad we got a chance to

sit down and talk about it. Thanks so much, Eric, wonderful questions and hopefully something I've said is helpful to some of your listeners. All right, take care, take care, Thank you so much. Okay, byeye, if what you just heard was helpful to you please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the