Being kind helps how?

Here is a link to a article I read recently.

https://www.mindful.org/loving-kindness-meditation-may-protect-your-genes-and-slow-aging/

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/01/telomere-extension-turns-back-aging-clock-in-cultured-cells.html

Not our site or views and all rights are theirs and such. May expire any time.

This is taken from the article


" Previous studies suggest that a combination of mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation may slow down the breakdown of telomerase that naturally occurs with stress and aging. More research will be needed to tease out why and how this occurs."

Thoughts ?

I'd look into their 'citations'.

What they're claiming isn't what the studies found.

Would you like to elaborate?

“Now we have found a way to lengthen human telomeres by as much as 1,000 nucleotides, turning back the internal clock in these cells by the equivalent of many years of human life,” said Helen Blau, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford and director of the university’s Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology. "

What do you think?

Here are the articles referenced in the first link

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/acm.2008.0495

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306453019300010?via%3Dihub

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306453013004538

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3401586/

https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/cncr.29063

It'll take me a little while to review them

Folk into anti-aging do assert strongly that stress does speed up aging, so it stands up to the pub test.
These are complicated systems of complicated systems so digging through the science tends to raise more questions than answers. It is an interesting topic though, anti-aging, which isn't so much about avoiding aging and death, but rather extending healthy lifespan as much as we might be possibly able to. Whether that is 'natural' or not would depend on the methods used I suppose.

Carlos.Martinez3 wrote: Would you like to elaborate?

“Now we have found a way to lengthen human telomeres by as much as 1,000 nucleotides, turning back the internal clock in these cells by the equivalent of many years of human life,” said Helen Blau, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford and director of the university’s Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology. "

What do you think?

Not to imply that this means the content itself is inaccurate, but these "direct quotes" we find in pretty much every press release about scientific studies are a matter of form, really. There is a pattern to how one writes such articles, and including a direct quote at one of a selection of places is just commonly part of that writing style. There is a very good chance the actual paper's authors were never actually interviewed by the press release article's. With any luck they might have seen an early rough draft of the press release and had an opportunity to send back an advisory comment before publication, but the chances that the words ascribed to the researcher were ever actually or approximately uttered or written by them is, in my opinion, rather slim. When I co-authored research papers there was not even so much as an expectation of a press visit, and the supervisor would suggest that the article literally put words along some vague line in his or the corresponding author's mouth. This is why even when the source may be a tougher read, it is the only dependable repository of the study's actual contents. Between getting things wrong due to a lack of expertise and outright lying to further a select worldview, it is almost never safe to trust the press release (let alone articles on themed blog sites) even as a "simplified summary", because that's just not what they are.

Gisteron wrote:

Carlos.Martinez3 wrote: Would you like to elaborate?

“Now we have found a way to lengthen human telomeres by as much as 1,000 nucleotides, turning back the internal clock in these cells by the equivalent of many years of human life,” said Helen Blau, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford and director of the university’s Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology. "

What do you think?

Not to imply that this means the content itself is inaccurate, but these "direct quotes" we find in pretty much every press release about scientific studies are a matter of form, really. There is a pattern to how one writes such articles, and including a direct quote at one of a selection of places is just commonly part of that writing style. There is a very good chance the actual paper's authors were never actually interviewed by the press release article's. With any luck they might have seen an early rough draft of the press release and had an opportunity to send back an advisory comment before publication, but the chances that the words ascribed to the researcher were ever actually or approximately uttered or written by them is, in my opinion, rather slim. When I co-authored research papers there was not even so much as an expectation of a press visit, and the supervisor would suggest that the article literally put words along some vague line in his or the corresponding author's mouth. This is why even when the source may be a tougher read, it is the only dependable repository of the study's actual contents. Between getting things wrong due to a lack of expertise and outright lying to further a select worldview, it is almost never safe to trust the press release (let alone articles on themed blog sites) even as a "simplified summary", because that's just not what they are.

Gisteron, Do you think that kindness keeps people younger or in better health? Do you think loving kindness and meditation work like that? CAN IT? Ever reflect or see it work like that for you or any one else? Know any one who LOOKS immortal from their glow? Ever felt that?

Well, that depends. Are we talking about matters of actual medical research, or fuzzy feelings here? I was responding to your query about thoughts on a passage from (at best) a pop-sci blog post with an alleged quote from a research scientist; a query you posted wondering what exactly was meant by the study in question not actually confirming with that blog post's message. My response was a comment about how such quotes come to be and how little they mean, because they are more likely to be made up by the post's author than by the paper's. I even explicitly stated as the very first thing in my response, that this was not a comment on the "quote's" content.

If you ask whether I believe there is a link between warmth of behaviour and longevity, I say I don't know. It would surprise me to find that there was no correlation at all (positive or negative), because frankly I don't think casting a fair sampling of such things is not something we are likely to find with the methods at our avail, and just by statistical noise alone some residual correlation one way or the other is expected. But then I'm not a behavioural psychologist nor a medical researcher and I'm entirely comfortable leaving it to experts of that field to decide what does or does not count for good statistics in it, appreciating that standards I would intuitively apply to questions they tackle are not only different but likely also just plain not appropriate.

If you ask whether I have noticed a link between kindness and longevity in my own experience, I'll say most firmly no. I have yet to personally know nasty people who have passed away, so my personal-experience-based sample is grossly biased. And among kind people of various levels of kindness I have seen no indication that the kinder ones grew any older before their departure than did their less kind peers. Again, this is not to say there is no link there, but if you'll ask about my personal experience, the handful of people in my life who I can point to as ones whose lifespan has had a definitive value in the first place do not make a sufficient sample size to draw conclusions from. And that's even ignoring what methods one would begin to use to evaluate their kindness levels by, too.

And no, I have never felt that anyone "LOOKS immortal". People are mortal. The set of mortal people is indistinguishable from the set of people. Looking like a mortal person is thus equivalent to looking like a person. Consequently, looking like a non-mortal person is equivalent to looking like a non-person-like person, or looking like a thing that both is and is not a person. I do not understand what that means enough to be able to identify it as a feeling should I ever experience it.

Happy Birthday Jonathan, over 190 years in the slow lane

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2022/1/190-year-old-jonathan-becomes-worlds-oldest-tortoise-ever-688683