For many years, despite ample proof against genetic determinism, the notion that our genes were malleable was considered untenable. The predominant belief was that our genetic blueprint predetermined our fate and that we were powerless to effect change. However, a series of breakthroughs in the field of Epigenetics have shown that we can profoundly influence our genes through our choices, environment, behavior, and even our thoughts and emotions.
In the book “Identically Different,” author Tim Spector expounds on how our genes interact with our environment, suggesting that “Genes are not a preordained fate, but rather, a set of instructions that interplay with our environment to shape who we are.” This implies that while we may inherit certain genes from our parents that predisposition us to certain health conditions, we are far from locked into a predetermined outcome. Instead, our choices and environment play a significant role in determining how those genes are expressed.
Lifestyle choices provide one way that we can impact our genes. Studies have demonstrated that regular exercise can activate genes associated with improved metabolism and cardiovascular health. Similarly, a diet that’s right for you, can upregulate genes responsible for preventing chronic diseases. The lifestyle choices we make can actively modify the way our genes express themselves.
Identically Different: Why You Can Change Your Genes
Our environment, both physical and social, can also affect our genes. One example is the temperature we expose the body to. Research has suggested that cold exposure, such as dipping in ice water, can impact gene expression. In a study published in the journal Cell Metabolism, researchers found that exposing participants to cold temperatures resulted in an increase in the activity of certain genes related to brown fat metabolism, a type of fat that burns energy to produce heat. This increase in gene activity has beneficial effects on metabolism and weight loss. Another environmental example is Exposure to pollutants and toxins.These stressors can trigger alterations in gene expression linked to cancer and heart disease. Conversely, beneficial social factors like supportive relationships can offer a protective effect on our genes.
Our behaviors and habits play a crucial role in gene expression. Smoking, for example, has been shown to induce changes in gene expression that increase the risk of lung cancer. Similarly, chronic stress can activate genes associated with inflammation and accelerated aging.
Photo by Alora Griffiths on Unsplash
Perhaps the most surprising means of influencing our genes is through our thoughts and emotions. This is because our thoughts and emotions produce chemicals in our body that can either bolster our health or lead to disease. For example, gratitude and love can activate genes associated with immune function and stress resilience, while fear and anger can activate genes linked to inflammation and other adverse health outcomes.
We have the power to influence how our genes are expressed through the choices we make each day. As Tim Spector notes in “Identically Different,” “We are not passive recipients of our genes but active participants in shaping our biology.” By embracing this concept and assuming responsibility for our health, we can unlock our full potential and live lives brimming with vitality and wellbeing.
What do cold showers, intermittent fasting, freediving, saunas and supplementing with curcumin, all have to do with extending your healthspan? They are all forms of hermetic stressors, a practice that involves applying stress in measured doses for a beneficial health outcome.
Surely, you are familiar with the phrase “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” While this phrase is often used by well meaning friends to encourage you during difficult life situations such as heartbreak, divorce, and loss, resilience research now shows it isn’t always the case. Often, repeat trauma or injury that doesn’t fully heal, isn’t solid ground for growth. In terms of building both mental and physical resilience, sometimes what doesn’t kill you makes you more vulnerable.
The opposite approach to “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is that stress is something to be reduced as much as possible. But, what if they are both wrong? And what if some form of stress could improve your wellbeing and extend healthspan? Such a form exists. It’s called Hormetic stress, or Hormesis, and it could be the answer to using stress in a way that enhances longevity.
So, what is hormesis? Hormesis involves the application of low doses of mild to moderate stressors for short periods. These stressors, referred to as hormetic agents, may include heat stress, cold stress, fasting, hypoxia, intellectual tasks, exercise, and exposure to poison in small doses. The idea is that your body adapts to the stressor and becomes more resilient (1). In the long term, it makes you stronger. But only if you let the body recover properly between stressors.
Hormesis via cold-shock therapy
In this article we will focus on reaping the rewards of hormesis with exercise.
“Hormesis is a biological reaction in which low doses of an agent that could be toxic or lethal at higher doses have a beneficial effect, such as improved health, stress tolerance, muscle growth, or longevity. Sure, exercise could kill you if you went to extremes, but in controlled doses, exercise can give you hormetic benefits, such as an increased ability to fight free radicals, manage heavy loads, or be more resilient to environmental stressors.” (8)
Exercise: Helpful or Harmful for Longevity?
Some 500 years ago, Swiss physician Paracelsus expressed the basic principle of toxicology: “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.” This idea is popularly condensed to: “The dose makes the poison.” It means that a substance that contains toxic properties can cause harm only if it occurs in a high enough concentration. But in the right amount it can be a potent cure.
Over-exercising or the wrong type of workout can be harmful for your healthy longevity. For example, prolonged stretches of intense physical exercise, such as Iron Man training, can induce chronic inflammation which is associated with a wide range of ailments, including premature and accelerated aging. Hence the term ‘inflammaging’, a condition which is gaining attention in longevity research. On the other hand, short bursts of intense exercise stress the body just enough to trigger an adaptive response. The exercise breaks your muscles down, but they become stronger when they recover.
The benefits of just the right form and amount of workout goes up to your head too. Wendy Suzuki, Professor of Neural Science and Psychology in the Center for Neural Science at New York University, said in her TED Talk, “Exercise is the most transformative thing you can do for your brain today.” (2)
When referring to your healthspan, the goal is to extend the years of your life in which you are in good health, instead of just lengthening your lifespan, which simply adds years to your life. To improve your healthspan, you want to promote a healthy brain and body. Through her research, Suzuki found that exercise has protective effects on the brain. This was primarily in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, the most vulnerable areas to cognitive decline as you age. Exercise is one surefire method of biohacking your healthspan by boosting your mood, energy, attention span, and long-term memory.
What Is Exercise-Induced Hormesis?
Hormesis is sometimes referred to as voluntary stress since you are intentionally putting stress on yourself. The difference between voluntary stress and everyday physical stress is that you use voluntary stress in a controlled and measured way. In the case of exercise-induced hormesis, you choose to engage in short bursts of specific types of high-intensity exercise.
How does hormesis support longevity? Over time, your mitochondria become damaged by free radicals in your environment (3). These free radicals, from environmental toxins, chemicals in your food and water, and chronic stress, can all lead to oxidative stress that reduces cell efficiency. Hormesis pushes the body to weed out weak, dysfunctional, or mutated cells, or if the cell is in good enough condition to save, hormesis can help to fortify cellular health. When short doses of stressors are applied, your mitochondria adapt by increasing productivity to maximize your chances of survival(4).
High Intensive Interval Training
What Are the Benefits of Exercise-Induced Hormesis?
The main perk about the hormetic approach to exercise? It’s short! It can take 10 to 20 minutes. No matter how busy your schedule, everyone has time for that. Plus, it’s mostly free! On top of the convenience and affordability, there are plenty of science-backed benefits to exercise-induced hormesis (6):
Improved physique
Enhanced pulmonary-cardio stamina
Possible prevention or delay of age-related metabolic diseases
Emotional balance
Hormonal regulation
Maintenance of cognitive function
Using exercise strategically for its hormetic effects is a quick and effective way to impact your healthspan positively.
How Can You Induce Hormesis Through Exercise?
To enjoy the longevity-supporting hormetic effects of exercise, you must choose a physical activity that provides brief spurts of intense training. Five qualities for physical activities that support your healthspan are: brief, intense, infrequent, safe, and purposeful. What type of exercise fulfills these qualities? High-intensity interval training!
It is recognized that high-intensity interval training, also known as HIIT, has a particularly strong hormetic effect on cell mitochondria. They become more efficient in dealing with the stress, which increases your energy production and slows down aging at the cellular level.
HIIT
Some examples of exercises ideal for HIIT are:
Tabata
Bodyweight exercises
Crossfit
Powerlifting
Resistance machines
Weight training
So, how does HIIT work? You exercise in short bursts at a high intensity with active rest periods between each set. During your active rest period, you continue moving your body at a low intensity. Here’s a sample beginner HIIT workout:
Warm-up for 2 minutes.
Sprint for 10 seconds.
Walk for 20 seconds.
Repeat the cycle two more times.
You’ll want to pick the work/rest ratio that best suits your abilities. Above, we used a 1:2 ratio, but if this pace is too challenging, reduce your ratio to 1:3 or 1:4. For example, sprint for 10 seconds, then walk for 30 or 40 seconds. The key is to put all of your efforts into your work period, whether it be sprinting, lifting weights, or jumping on a trampoline.
Summary
Yes, exercise breaks down your muscles. But it builds them back up even stronger and more resilient than before. In small doses. Pick a high-intensity workout and do it in short bursts with rest in between each set. Enjoy the healthspan boosting benefits of exercise-induced hormesis…
The Ultimate Guide to Gratitude, appreciation-bio-hacking tools, and the effects of focusing on the blessings in our lives on our health.
Repetitive negative thoughts can kill us. Slowly but surely. The mechanism by which a thought pattern can cut our healthspan short so effectively is that thoughts evoke emotions. And emotions directly effect production of hormones. When we focus more on the negative things in life, we suffer over exposure to the stress hormone Cortisol. This leads to high blood pressure, poor sleep patterns, harmful coping habits, like overeating, and a host of other issues that are all, at the end of the day, health related.
On the upside, if our thoughts can kill, they can also heal! Shifting our negative thought patterns to focus on the good things in our lives can counteract the damage. In this article, we’ll go over:
How we are biologically programmed with a negativity bias
How gratitude physically reprograms us for better health
Simple actions you can take today to extend your healthspan through gratitude
What is Negativity Bias?
Negativity bias is our natural, biological tendency to focus on negative factors around us. It is a survival mechanism that helped our ancient ancestors survive by anticipating danger before it happened. This survival mechanism required our ancestors to pay more attention to the bad things than the good things. They could afford for good things to come again later. However, if a threat caught them unaware, they might not live to try again [1].
In the modern-day, we do not have a saber tooth tiger lurking around the corner. Instead, we have a host of other uncertainties like the pandemic, novel viruses, toxic workplaces, uncertain economies, job instability, manipulative family members, divorce, heartbreak and other threats to our well-being. It often feels like we can not ‘unplug’ even for a moment or we will be caught unaware.
How Does Negativity Bias Affect Our Health?
Negativity bias creates stress and anxiety. Short, brief doses can be good for the body, as it encourages us to do something about the source of the stress. However, our modern society produces severe and chronic levels of stress.
Here are a few troubling statistics about how stress directly affects your health [2]:
In a study by Everyday Health, over 33% of the respondents reported going to the doctor for stress-related health issues.
57% of respondents to another study reported they were paralyzed by stress.
Stress caused sleep deprivation in 66% of American workers in 2018.
Work-related stress causes 120,000 deaths yearly
Both women and men cope with stress through habits bad for our healthspan like drinking extra caffeine (37%), smoking (27%), overeating and snacking (46% women, 26% men), and illicit drugs (12% men and 2% women).
Why does stress cause health problems?
Our bodies are made to use stress as a short-term boost to help us overcome a threat. Chronic stress, however, leads to a lot of wear and tear on our bodies in the form of high blood pressure, fat-building cortisol, and fatigue. We also tend to let our healthy habits falter as we seek to cope with that stress. As a result, our quality of life and eventually our healthspan suffers.
Our bodies are made to use stress as a short-term boost to help us overcome a threat. Chronic stress, however, leads to a lot of wear and tear on our bodies in the form of high blood pressure, fat-building cortisol, and fatigue. We also tend to let our healthy habits falter as we seek to cope with that stress. As a result, our quality of life and eventually our healthspan suffers.
Luckily, the biological effects of stress, anxiety, and negativity can be counteracted without drugs or expensive treatments. We can change our thought processes by focusing on the things in our life that we are grateful for.
How Does Practicing Gratitude Overcome Negativity Bias?
What is Gratitude?
Gratitude is actively expressing our appreciation for what we have. Rather than focus on the stressors and uncertainties in life, we acknowledge there are good things in the world. We also acknowledge the gifts and benefits we have received from other people, circumstances, and higher powers [3].
What Does Gratitude Look Like?
Just like stress has physical symptoms like headaches, tightness in the chest, and tension, gratitude can be consciously felt.
Jing Lee, founder of @pacificpause describes it as “…warmth in the body, a sense of grounded-ness, a slowing of the breath, spaciousness in the chest and heart, uncontrollable tears or an automatic smile. I know when I am experiencing gratitude because it’s not just a concept in my head, I can feel it in my body. [4]”
How Does Gratitude Affect Health?
Breaking the stress of negative bias has profound effects on our healthspan:
Reduces stress and improves sleep quality, which helps build resilience [5][6][7][8].
People who regularly express gratitude have more grey brain matter [5]
Gratitude acts as a natural anti-depressant, and you can build the neural pathways to make the anti-depressive benefits permanent! [5][6][8]
Stops stress on the limbic system, which controls emotions, memory, and body functions. Activating the system with gratitude is reported to shorten recovery times and contribute to better feelings of well-being [5][7][8].
Gratitude releases dopamine, which helps regulate and reduce pain [5][6][8].
Gratitude dramatically reduces the stress hormone cortisol. This stress hormone is a big contributor to belly fat, high ‘bad’ cholesterol and blood pressure, and other health factors [5].
These are just the tip of the iceberg in how a change in how we view the world affects the condition of our health.
Bio-Hacks to Practice Gratitude Today
Practicing gratitude is an easy and inexpensive way to improve your healthspan. Here are a few tips and practices to try today!
Be Patient With Yourself
Gratitude is a process. It will not work its magic all at once, and you will find yourself sliding into old negative thought patterns at first. Like any habit or a new skill, it will take time to master. Be kind to yourself when you find yourself stressing over the negative things in life. The last think you want is to add that to your list of stressors. Take a deep breath, acknowledge yourself for the awareness, and gently course correct. Gratitude is a muscle that builds overtime.
Try Out Journaling
For most people, journaling all the positive things you experience can help bring on a more positive bias thought pattern. It is more than listing out the good things though- you need to reflect on them and allow yourself to feel that appreciation and calm of having good things in your life.
Try listing out five things you are happy to have in your life in the morning. Record good memories after an event. End the day with a brief letter to yourself about something good about the day. This will help your mind keep on the lookout for good things to write down and distract yourself from some of the negative.
Write a Letter of Gratitude
Sit down and write to someone who has contributed to your day (or life) in a positive way. You do not have to send it unless you want to. Just the act of writing out the letter will be enough to evoke positive thoughts and emotions.
Gratitude Visit
Going a step further from a letter, visit someone who has had a positive effect in your life to express your gratitude face to face. Maybe treat them to their favorite tea or reminisce about a moment that they made a huge impact on you. This activity fulfills both a focus on positives in life and a social need to be around positive and supportive people.
Find a Gratitude Buddy
It could be a spouse, child, friend, or companion online. The goal is to check in daily and spend a minute or two sharing positive news and things you are grateful for.
Take a Walk
Mixing the practice of observing the beautiful and positive parts of your surroundings with the endorphins produced with light walking, cycling, or wheelchair travel can significantly improve your mood and feelings of well-being.
Meditation/Gratitude Ritual
Take a few minutes of your day to focus on the good things you are grateful for. Find a distraction-free area, put your phone on silent, close your eyes, and just focus on the good things in your life.
Volunteer
Assist at a homeless center, a soup kitchen, a children’s hospital, or another good cause. Seeing the struggles of others and helping them in a small but meaningful way helps us put our own troubles and blessings into perspective!
An Attitude of Gratitude Extends Your Healthspan
Negative bias and the stress it produces is easy and inexpensive to counter. Live a longer, healthier, and more fulfilling life by focusing on the things you are grateful for. The psychological and physical benefits will greatly improve your healthspan!
In 1944 Polish candy factory owner Yisrael Kristal lost his wife and two children after the family was transported to Auschwitz concentration camp. Kristal survived, making it though the brutal 1945 death march. After the war he went back to his home town where he met fellow Hholocaust survivor Bat Sheva. They married and began a new life together, The couple married, started a family, and opened a new candy factory in Haifa. Yisreal lived on to became the Guinness world record oldest Holocaust survivor in 2010, and lived to see his great grandchildren thrive in Israel.
Throughout the most part of his long life, Yisrael enjoyed good health. He died surrounded by his extended family in 2017, just 5 days short of his 114th birthday. Kristal was a middle aged man when he lost everything, and in the seven decades that followed the war, he got to start a new life and live it fully.
Yisrael Kristal Taken from jpost.com (photo credit: COURTESY OF FAMILY)
Living Longer But Not Healthier
Celebrating life with such healthy longevity is a rare individual achievement. Yet, as a species, we have made extraordinary improvement in the longevity stakes over the 150 years. During that time the average global lifespan has more than doubled. A two-fold increase in longevity in a blink of an eye on the evolutionary time scale, is a remarkable human achievement. However, the extended human lifespan has brought with it some major adverse effects. Consequently, for most of us, an increase in lifespan iis not equal to an increase in healthspan.
As we age, put chances of getting sick increase. In fact, the risk of suffering from such conditions as cardiovascular disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease goes up exponentially with every year we add to our lives. Arthritis, osteoporosis, type 2 diabetes, and many other chronic diseases are all associated with aging. In 2020, more than half of Americans 65 and older are being treated for multiple chronic conditions. A typical chronic combination of conditions is diabetes together with high blood pressure and a heart condition.
A 2011 study by the world economic forum projected that by the year 2030 the cost for treating chronic illness worldwide would exceed 47 trillion dollars. The rising cost of managing the ill health of old age is devastating and the impact on the quality of life of a chronically ill individual is immeasurable.
Longer lives have come with a dire unintended downside. In extending lifespan we hoped for a commensurate better quality of life. Instead, it seems we have stretched our limits beyond sustainable biological longevity. As a result, ill health in old age, and the economic healthcare burden that can bring economies to their knees, is inevitable.
Or is it?
In this article series, we explore breakthroughs in longevity science and biotechnology that suggest it is time for us to rethink the notions that extended lifespan and health are mutually exclusive. As technology advances and we learn more about biological aging, there are more reasons to be optimistic that good health over most of a long life may be possible.
Imminent even.
Why Do We Get Sick When We Get Older?
Longevity and health are an age old human desire. Every culture has its tales of longevity outliers. In the Bible, Methuselah lived to the ripe old age of 960, with many Bible patriarchs living well into the multiple centuries. Yet, for millions of years the average life span was between20 and 30 years. A few millennia ago it began to gradually climb until it reach into the early 40s in the second part of the 9th century.
The burning question driving scientists globally is, with the rare exception of centenarians, could the reason we get sick when we age be that in doubling lifespan we have broken some irrefutable law of biology?
What we do know is that risk of suffering from cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimers, arthritis, osteoporosis, type 2 diabetes, and many other chronic conditions goes up as we get older. These illness are very different in nature from the infectious diseases that contribute to mortality in the early parts of life.
Is There a Common Root Cause to the Diseases of Old Age?
The answer, growing insights from longevity science tell us, is the process of biological aging.
Gerontologists refer to it as senescence. Simply put, it is a gradual and ultimately fatal deterioration of function that results from accumulated damage in the body. This appears to be a deadly side effect of essential metabolic processes in a biological economy that from middle age on suffers from diminishing garbage disposal and repair resources.
Think of this as biological operating expenses that rise exponentially from middle age until,l eventually, running the business of staying alive becomes unsustainable. In the past we didn’t live much beyond middle age.
Age related illnesses came along as we took evolution into our own hands and deliberately ventured humanity to new frontiers of longevity.
Does that mean that ill health in old age is inevitable? Or can a biohealth hacking focus allow us to live longer AND healthier lives? In Part Two of this multi part series we search for answers.
On October 1st, 2020, some of the world’s most renowned longevity exports gathered in the beautiful ski resort of San Mortiz, Switzerland. They were there for the Longevity Investors Conference to speak before an audience of potential financial investors.
Longevity is primed to be the next massive investment opportunity, with conference co-host Marc Bernegger saying . . .
Longevity will become one of the largest investment opportunities in the coming decades. It will disrupt not only the healthcare system, but society and the economy in general. Longevity is a topic that moves investors. Besides making a nice profit, they share an interest in staying healthy and living longer.
A key speaker at the conference, Aubrey De Grey, stated that latest innovations in cell repair are capable of transforming a 70-year old into the biological equivalent of a 40 year old. The only thing impeding such progress, De Grey, who created the SENS Research Center in California, claimed, was the amount of funding.
The Longevity Investors Conference was designed to address that need. The enthusiastic reception that the speakers received from the investors portends positive outcomes. Lengthening healthspan may be imminent, but only if it is sufficiently funded in the coming years. That remains to be seen.
When it comes to runners, Anne McGowan could be considered a late bloomer. She didn’t start pounding the pavement until she was 49. Anne began running to help her cope with the loss of her husband, yet she soon fell in love with the activity.
Born in 1925, Anne has been running regularly since 1974. In 1991, in the wake of a mastectomy, she ran in the 1991 National Senior Games, in which 50+ athletes who have qualified at regional level compete for national honors. As well as competing on the track in the 100, 200 and 400 yard sprints, Anne has also gone toe to toe with the best seniors in the country in such power events as the hammer throw, discus, javelin and long jump.
Anne is now 95 years old and still going strong. In fact, she’s in better shape than most people half her age. She is still competing at the National Senior Games, being just one of eight super agers to have competed in every game since their inception in 1987. Anne is a sterling example that over 80 doesn’t have to mean over the hill!
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