WARNING: Throw away the donuts, potato chips, triple-cheese pizzas and your cancer sticks (cigarettes): if you’re smoke or are fat you could grow older faster.
According to researchers, smoking and being fat speed up the aging process by accelerating damage to DNA. According to The Guardian, being obese can SUBTRACT 9 years to a person’s life — and smoking for 40 years SUBTRACTS 7 years. Tim Spector of St Thomas’s hospital, London tells the paper:
“We have shown someone who smokes and is obese at 30 can look and feel like someone who is 40. If you tell a girl in her teens or her 20s that if she carries on smoking she could die at 75 instead of 80, it might not have much effect. But if you tell her she is going to look much older when she is still a young woman, that could make her consider giving up cigarettes and eat healthily.”
Professor Spector and colleagues in the US reported their findings in a research letter published online by the Lancet. They analysed telomeres, sections of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes in cells and prevent damaging unions with other chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, and as people age, their telomeres get shorter.
Doctors have long warned of the dangers to longevity from smoking and obesity, but analysing the molecular consequences is a far newer science. “Obesity and cigarettes cause oxidative stress to increase and this cumulative damage over time causes the loss of the telomeres, which we believe is a marker of accelerative ageing and accounts for why these people get heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis and other age-related disease,” said Prof Spector.
Reuters adds:
The scientists found a decrease in telomere length that corresponded to the more obese the women were and the amount of cigarettes they had smoked.
There was a difference between being obese and lean which corresponded to 8.8 years of aging. Being a current or ex-smoker equated to about 4.6 years and smoking a pack a day for 40 years corresponded to 7.4 years of aging.
“Our results emphasize the potential wide-ranging effects of the two most important preventable exposures in developed countries — cigarettes and obesity,� the researchers said in the journal.
Obesity, which affects about 300 million people worldwide, increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke and other illnesses.
Researchers have shown that cigarette smokers die on average 10 years earlier than non-smokers but that kicking the habit can halve the risk. Smoking is a leading cause of lung cancer and COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis. It also increases the risk of heart disease.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it..
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.