Ella Mills

Okay, our second headline is always a popular one because it is about how to slow aging, including some of our favorite foods like olive oil and coffee.

So we will be back after the break to delve into that.

Also, Rhi, don't you think it's also, because we always talk about this, how like whenever there's a headline about, we say like coffee or red wine, it's like everywhere because we all want to read it, right?

Like we want these things that we enjoy to be good for us, obviously.

Same with chocolate.

Whereas berries is kind of like, oh...

I mean, loads of people love berries, but you don't necessarily, you're not like, yes, berries are good for us.

And also, we probably already know that.

But I think it's quite funny because whenever there's like an iota of information to say that coffee, red wine, chocolate might be good for us, front page news.

Yeah, it's so interesting.

So this was the University of Navarra.

They followed just over 1,700 adults in Spain for nearly a decade.

So a really nice long period of time.

And they were monitoring both their diets and their biological markers of aging.

Now, what they were particularly looking at is something called a telomere.

and that is this like imagine a shoelace right and you've got that little plastic cap on the end it's like this tiny protective cap at the end of your chromosomes and essentially what it's doing is every time our cells are dividing these telomeres are just naturally shortening a teeny bit like those laces are fraying you can imagine great analogy it's such a good one i'm going to use that in lectures

Thank you.

But basically, over time, as these telomeres shorten, that's associated with cellular aging.

And that is linked with high risk of chronic diseases, things we often think of, unfortunately, are more prevalent as we get older, heart disease, cancer, even things like Alzheimer's.

And because of this, telomeres are often described as part of the body's biological clock.