Your body is constantly being attacked by bacteria and other viruses.
But, you have a built-in way to fight back – your T cells.
T cells are a form of white blood cells that fight off infection and disease.
T cells do their best to destroy sickness, disease, and other invaders your body doesn’t recognize. And if they need help, they copy themselves for more fighting power.
But your T cells can only reproduce so many times before they have to stop. This causes your immune system to weaken and can result in severe infections, lower response rates to vaccines, and a higher risk of cancer.1
Why do your T cells stop reproducing? The answer lies in your telomeres.
Telomeres are caps at the end of every cell’s pair of DNA, like the plastic caps on your shoelaces. They protect your DNA by keeping the chromosomes from unraveling when they reproduce.
Each time a cell duplicates, the telomeres get a tiny bit shorter. And when the telomeres get too short, they won’t be able to protect the DNA from unraveling. So instead of duplicating, the cell just goes to sleep.
As you age, this happens to your T cells. And your immune system won’t work as well as it did when you were younger. That’s why it’s easier to become sick as you age.
But here’s some good news.
There is a naturally occurring enzyme in your body that can lengthen your telomeres called telomerase. Telomerase is in all your cells, but it’s shut off. When telomerase is activated, it allows cells to reproduce more frequently without any damage.
What’s more, telomerase activation can help produce a younger immune system. In one biomarker for aging, the percentage of immune cells with short telomeres was reduced by 10-50% in most of the people tested. And the amount of “sleeping” immune cells decreased by 10-20%. Activating it represented an “apparent age reversal of 5-20 years”!2
I consider this to be one of the biggest discoveries of our time. And I’ll be telling you more about it tomorrow.
To Your Good Health,
Al Sears, MD
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