Can sleep and laces teach us how to slow the signs of ageing?

The Telomere Effect Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel Orion €21

There are so many books promising ‘a revolutionary approach to living younger, healthier, longer’ – as this one does – that it can almost make you feel prematurely aged just contemplating them, and the tedious regimes they advocate. The Telomere Effect, however, is worth more serious attention.

It is co-authored by Elizabeth Blackburn, a Nobel Prize winner for her research into telomeres, the part of our chromosomes that determine how quickly our cells age and die. This is her attempt, along with the health psychologist Elissa Epel’s, to translate the scientific lessons thus learned into ‘language for the general reader’. She has done a compelling job. The book’s central message is that telomeres shorten as we age, and this underlying mechanism contributes to most diseases of ageing. The good news is that your lifestyle choices can do a lot to counteract it.

A telomere’s relationship to a chromosome inside a cell, the authors explain, is like the protective ‘aglet’ or cap at the end of a shoelace: as it disintegrates, the shoelace unravels and finally becomes unusable.

To drive home the metaphor, the picture of a shoelace with long aglets is reprinted throughout the book. When you see it, you are supposed to ‘refocus your mind on the present, take a deep breath, and think of your telomeres being restored with the vitality of your breath’. Those of us more inclined to imagine the lace-end shrinking might wish to remember that telomere shortening can be arrested and in some cases reversed. The behaviours that protect them are both physical and mental: regular exercise, sleeping more than seven hours a night, a healthy non-processed diet, and cultivating an optimistic outlook and a good social network.

Along the way, Blackburn tells how in the 1970s she was studying something called tetrahymena, a single-celled organism. In its nucleus it had ‘20,000 tiny chromosomes, all identical, linear and very short’. As Blackburn examined its X-ray films, she saw at the end of chromosomes ‘a simple, repeated DNA sequence… I had discovered the structure of telomere DNA’.

Later, she discovered something equally important: the telomeres were not of identical lengths, and the differences had serious implications. No matter how resistant one is to health and diet books, the burden of the argument here is refreshingly sensible and convincing. I predict the T-word will soon be on everyone’s lips.