Have you ever wondered if there's a natural way to lower your high blood pressure,

guard against Alzheimer's, lose weight, feel better?

Well, it turns out there is.

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

You can't buy an epigenetic clock, but you can use one to measure the age of your tissues

and cells and to protect health outcomes and life expectancy.

In our first story, we look at how epigenetics have surpassed telomere length as the

best age predictor.

Epigenetics, the differential expression of genes both establishes the character and function

of a cell and maintains that identity over time through round after round of cell division.

So our heart cell stays a heart cell and divides to make more heart cells instead of

skin cells or kidney cells, even though all of our main cells have the same entire complement of DNA to potentially

be anything.

This is accomplished by methylation chemical markers that silence inappropriate genes

in a particular cell.

The fidelity of that maintenance of methylation is good, 97 percent to 99.9 percent

every division, but not perfect.

Over time, those tiny errors may add up and may help explain why the methylation

patterns of identical twins drift apart as they age.

The epigenetic markers of young identical twins are essentially indistinguishable, but then diverge

over time. Identical twins have the same DNA, the same genes, but the difference in gene

...