New technology promises to keep cells healthy as we age, but it may be too good to be true
People are willing to invest a lot in increasing their life expectancy, although science does not yet support it.
Your cells are where everything begins; If your cells do not function properly, the entire system of your body cannot work properly, that’s why the cellular health is really critical,” Deehan says. “Anything we can do to improve our disease profile, another way of saying ‘improve our longevity’, begins and ends with our cells. “As we age, and when we eventually die, it is a failure of our cells that causes that to happen.”
The health of your cells is characterized by several different factors, including their ability to effectively produce energy (which, as you remember from high school biology, comes from the “powerful mitochondria”); your hydration, nutrition and oxygenation; the integrity of your DNA; and your ability to respond to stress.
The better these features are, the lower your “biological age” (which, unlike your chronological age, the number of years you’ve been alive, directly correlates with how your body is functioning) and the better your overall longevity. In other words, a 50-year-old with a solid diet and exercise routine could have a biological age of 45, while a 45-year-old, stressed and sedentary, could biologically be about 65 years old.
This is because the cellular health is directly related to a healthy lifestyle. Things like poor sleep and nutrition, dehydration, excessive stress y lack of exercise can cause cells to age faster than the body that houses them, as can inflammation, oxidative stress from the environment, infections and genetic mutations.
Recent research has confirmed that these broader lifestyle practices can have a ripple effect at the cellular level and, in turn, improve our chances of living longer, healthier lives. According to a new study, exercise improves muscle health renewing the mitochondria (“the power plant of the cell”), which transform the nutrients we consume into the energy we need to live. Another theory, called restorative theory, maintains that adequate sleep is necessary for our body to restore itself. While we sleep, our systems shift into “rest and repair” mode, during which cells regenerate at a faster rate to replace damaged cells. old and dead cells with new and fresh ones that are ready to go.
“The health of our cells impacts the health of our entire body,” says Leonard Guarente, founder and chief scientist of Elysium. “And it’s smart to intervene at the cellular level because if individual cells are better maintained, a person will stay more intact—and youthful as a whole—for longer.”