CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Places and Faces That Support Our Telomeres
Like the thoughts we think and the food we eat, the factors beyond our skin—our relationships and the neighborhoods we live in—affect telomeres. Communities where people do not trust one another, and where they fear violence, are damaging to telomere health. But neighborhoods that feel safe and look beautiful—with leafy trees and green parks—are related to longer telomeres, no matter what the income and education level of their residents.
When I (Elissa) was a graduate student at Yale, I routinely worked late into the evening. By the time I walked back home from the psychology building, it was dark. I had to pass a church where someone had been murdered a few years earlier, and even though the area was usually quiet when I walked by at around 11:00 p.m., my heart would beat faster. Next, I turned down my street, where the rent was quite affordable on a student stipend. It was a long street, known for occasional muggings. As I walked, I listened carefully for steps behind me. I could feel my heart thump more powerfully. It is a good bet that my blood pressure went up and that glucose was recruited from its stores in my liver, giving me energy to run if needed. Every night, my body and mind mobilized themselves for danger. That experience lasted for just ten minutes each evening. Imagine how stressful it would feel if the risk was much worse, the duration was longer, and you couldn’t afford to move away.
Where we live affects our health. Neighborhoods shape our sense of safety and vigilance, which in turn affects levels of physiological stress, emotional state, and telomere length. Besides violence and lack of safety, there is another critical aspect that makes neighborhoods potent influences on health, and that is the level of “social cohesion”—the glue, the bond, among people who live in the same area. Are your neighbors mutually helpful? Do they trust one another? Do they get along and share values? If you were in need, could you rely on a neighbor?
Social cohesion is not necessarily a product of income or social class. We have friends in a beautiful gated neighborhood, where the houses sit on acres of rolling hills. There are positive signs of social cohesion, including Fourth of July picnics and holiday dances. But there’s also mistrust and infighting, and it’s not free of crime. It’s a neighborhood full of doctors and lawyers, but if you live there you might wake up in the morning to the sound of a police helicopter hovering over your house, searching for an armed robbery suspect who has jumped over the gate. When you take out the trash, a neighbor who is unhappy about your plans for remodeling might accost you. Check your messages, and you could find that your neighbors are in a heated e-mail fight about whether to hire a security patrol and who will pay for it. You may not even know the person who lives next door. There are also neighborhoods that are poor but have people who know each other and have a strong sense of community and trust. While income plays a role, a neighborhood’s health goes way beyond income.
People in neighborhoods with low social cohesion and who live in fear of crime have greater cellular aging in comparison to residents of communities that are the most trusting and safe.1 And in a study in Detroit, Michigan, feeling stuck in your neighborhood—wanting to move but not having the money or opportunity to do so—is also linked to shorter telomeres.2 In a study based in the Netherlands (known as the NESDA study), 93 percent of the sample rated their neighborhood as generally good (or higher). Despite that these neighborhoods were good environments, the more specific ratings of quality—including levels of vandalism and perception of safety—were associated with telomere length.
Figure 25: Telomeres and Neighborhood Quality. Here in the NESDA study, residents of neighborhoods with higher quality had significantly longer telomeres than those with moderate or poor quality.3 This is even after adjusting for age, gender, demographic, community, clinical, and lifestyle characteristics.
Maybe the people living in lower quality neighborhoods have more depression. Was that a possibility that occurred to you? It makes sense that people who live in neighborhoods with low social cohesion would feel worse psychologically. And we know that depressed people have shorter telomeres. The NESDA researchers tested this—and found that the emotional stress of living in an unsafe neighborhood has an effect independent of how depressed or anxious its residents are.4
Exactly how does low social cohesion penetrate to your cells and telomeres? One answer has to do with vigilance, that sense of needing to be on high alert to maintain your safety. A group of German scientists performed a fascinating study of vigilance that pitted country folks against city dwellers. People from both groups were invited to take one of those nerve-wracking math tests that are designed to elicit a stress response, the kind where volunteers perform complex mental math while researchers give instant feedback. In this case, the participants were hooked up to a functional MRI, which allowed the researchers to watch their brain activity, and so the researchers gave their feedback over headphones, saying things like “Can you go faster?” or “Error! Please start from the beginning.” When the city dwellers took the math test, they had a bigger threat response in their amygdala, a tiny brain structure that is the seat of our fear reactions, than the people who lived in the country.5 Why the difference between the two groups? Urban living tends to be less stable, more dangerous. People in cities learn to be more vigilant; their bodies and brains are always prepared to mount a big, juicy stress response. This ultrapreparedness is adaptive but is not healthy, and it may be part of the reason that people in threatening social environments have shorter telomeres. (It’s interesting, and a source of relief to us city dwellers, that the noise and crowds of urban living are not associated with shorter telomeres.)6
Some neighborhoods may shorten telomeres because they are places where it’s harder to maintain good health habits. For example, people tend to get less sleep when they live in neighborhoods that are disorderly and unsafe, with low social cohesion.7 Without adequate sleep, your telomeres suffer.
I (Liz), who also lived in New Haven for a time, experienced firsthand another way that a neighborhood can inhibit health habits. Prior to moving to New Haven, I had studied in Cambridge, England. With its flat terrain, Cambridge is a bicycling haven, and I rode my bike everywhere. When I arrived in New Haven to start postdoctoral research at Yale, I noticed that its geography was ideal for cycling. One of the first questions I asked my new lab mates was, “Where can I get a bike to ride to and from work?”
A short silence followed. Someone said, “Well, maybe biking home in the evening is not such a good idea. Bikes tend to be stolen.”
Airily I replied that when that had happened in Cambridge, I simply bought a cheap, secondhand bike to replace it. Another silence, and then someone kindly explained that when their colleague said “stolen,” he had meant “stolen while the person was still riding the bike.” So I didn’t bike in New Haven.
Other residents of low-trust, high-crime neighborhoods may draw similar conclusions. It’s hard enough for many of us to fit exercise into our schedules, or to resist the call of the easy chair—and for people in unsafe neighborhoods, certain kinds of exercise may be too dangerous to even contemplate. Safety is only one barrier. Another is a lack of parks and other places to exercise. The social and “built environment” of poor neighborhoods stacks the deck against exercise. Without exercise, telomeres are shorter.
LITTERED OR LEAFY?
San Francisco is one of the world’s great cities. Its citizens live within walking distance of museums, restaurants, and theaters; they can hike to spectacular views of the hillsides and bay. But as with many cities, parts of San Francisco are also quite dirty. They have a litter problem. This is not good for the residents, especially the young ones. Children who live in a neighborhood that is physically disorderly, with vacant buildings and trash in the streets, have shorter telomeres. The presence of litter or broken glass right outside the house is an especially strong predictor of telomere trouble.8
Have you ever been to Hong Kong? There is a stark contrast between the densely populated bustle, bright neon lights, and chaos of Kowloon, the city’s downtown, and the sprawling green hills of the New Territories, which are located just outside the city. There, the citizens enjoy trees, parks, and rivers. A 2009 study looked at nine hundred elderly men; some lived in Kowloon and others lived in the lush New Territories. Guess who had shorter telomeres? The men who lived in the city. (The study controlled for social class and health behaviors.) While other factors could be responsible for the association, this study suggests that there’s a role for green space in telomere health.9
When you’re in the thick of a forest, breathing the crisp, clean air, it’s not hard to believe that telomeres could benefit from exposure to nature. We’re intrigued by this possibility because it’s supported by what we already know about nature and a phenomenon called psychological restoration. Being in nature provides a dramatic change in context. It can inspire us with beauty and stillness. It takes us out of small thinking about small problems. It can also relieve us of the moving, blinking, wailing, shuddering, shaking, noisy urban stimuli that keep our arousal systems jacked up. Our brains get a break from registering dozens of simultaneous sensations, any of which could mean danger. Exposure to green spaces is associated with lower stress and healthier regulation of daily cortisol secretions.10 People in England who are economically deprived have almost double (93 percent) the early mortality of the wealthiest in their country—except when they live in neighborhoods surrounded by greenery. Then their relative mortality dips, so that they are only 43 percent more likely to die early from any cause.11 Nature halves their comparative risk. It’s still a sad statistic about poverty, but it leads us to believe that the greenery-telomere connection deserves more exploration.
CAN MONEY BUY LONGER TELOMERES?
You don’t need to be rich to have long telomeres, but having enough money for basic needs does help. One study of around two hundred African American children in New Orleans, Louisiana, found that poverty was associated with shorter telomeres.12 Once you have basic needs met, having more money doesn’t seem to help further—there are no consistent relationships between gradients of how much money you make and your telomere length. But with education, there does appear to be a dose-response gradient—the more education, the longer the telomeres.13 Educational level is one of the most consistent predictors of early disease, so these results aren’t too surprising.14
In a UK study, occupation mattered more than other indicators of social status: White-collar jobs (versus manual labor) were associated with longer telomere length. This was true even among twins who were raised together but as adults had different occupational status.15
CHEMICALS THAT ARE TOXIC TO YOUR TELOMERES
Carbon monoxide: It’s odorless, flavorless, and colorless. Deep underground, in coal mines, it can build up without detection, especially after an explosion or fire. At high enough levels, it can cause a miner to asphyxiate. So in the early 1900s, miners began carrying caged canaries down into the mines with them. The miners considered them friends and would sing to the birds as they worked. If there was carbon monoxide in the mine, the canaries would show distress by swaying, reeling, or falling off their perches. The miners would know that the mine was contaminated, and they would either exit or use their breathing apparatuses.16
Telomeres are the canaries in our cells. Like those caged birds, telomeres are captive inside our bodies. They are vulnerable to their chemical environment, and their length is an indicator of our lifelong exposure to toxins. Chemicals are like litter in our neighborhoods—they are a part of our physical surroundings. And some are silent poisons.
Let’s start with pesticides. So far, seven pesticides have been linked to significantly shorter telomeres in agricultural workers who apply them to crops: alachlor; metolachlor; trifluralin; 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (also known as 2,4-D); permethrin; toxaphene; and DDT.17 In one study, the greater the cumulative exposure to the pesticides, the shorter the telomeres. It wasn’t possible to determine whether one type of pesticide alone was worse or better for telomeres than any others; the study looked at an aggregate of all seven. Pesticides cause oxidative stress—and oxidative stress, when it accumulates, shortens telomeres. This study is supported by another finding, in which agricultural workers who are exposed to a mixture of pesticides while working in tobacco fields have been found to have shorter telomeres.18
Fortunately some of these chemicals have been banned in parts of the world. For example, there is a worldwide ban on the agricultural use of DDT (although it is still used in India). Once released, however, these chemicals don’t just disappear. They live on and on in the food chain (“bioaccumulation”), so any hope to live completely free of chemicals is impossible. There are probably many toxic chemicals in small amounts in each of our cells. They end up in breast milk as well, although the benefits of breast-feeding are thought to far outweigh the exposure to chemicals. Unfortunately, many compounds on the toxic list (alachlor; metolachlor; 2,4-D; permethrin) are still used in farming and gardening and are still being produced at high levels.
Another chemical, cadmium, is a heavy metal with weighty effects on our health. Cadmium is found mostly in cigarette smoke, though we all carry low but potentially toxic levels around in our bodies because of our contact with environmental contributors such as house dust, dirt, the burning of fossil fuels such as coal or oil, and the incineration of municipal waste. Cigarette smoking has been linked to shorter telomeres—no surprise there, given the other dangerous effects of smoking.19 Some of that relationship is due to cadmium.20 Smokers have twice the levels of cadmium in their blood compared to nonsmokers.21 In some countries and industries, people are exposed to cadmium through factory work. In an electronic waste-recycling town in China with known high cadmium pollution, higher cadmium levels in blood were linked to shorter telomeres in placentas.22 In a large study of U.S. adults, those with the worst cadmium exposure have up to eleven additional years of cellular aging.23
Lead is another heavy metal to watch out for. Lead is found in some factories, some older homes, and developing nations that do not yet regulate lead paint and still use leaded gasoline, and it is another potential culprit in telomere shortening. Although the study of the electronic waste-recycling plant found no association between lead levels and telomere length, another study of Chinese battery factory workers who were exposed to lead as part of their work environment found some striking relationships.24 In this study of 144 workers, almost 60 percent had lead levels high enough to meet the definition of chronic lead poisoning, and they had significantly shorter immune cell telomere length than those with normal or lower lead levels. The only difference between groups was that the group with poisoning had worked at the factory longer. Fortunately, once the lead poisoning was discovered, victims were hospitalized and given treatment (lead chelation therapy). During treatment, urine was assessed for how much lead was excreted, a measure called the “total body burden” of lead. Body burden indicates long-term lead exposure. The greater the body burden of lead, the shorter the telomeres. The correlation was .70, which is very high (the highest a correlation can be is 1). This relationship was so strong that the usual relationships of telomere length with age, sex, smoking, and obesity were not detectable in those exposed to lead. Lead exposure overrode all these factors.25
While severe occupational hazards have the strongest effects, it is alarming that households can also carry genotoxic hazards. Older homes may still have lead paint, which can be a danger if the paint is peeling. Many cities still use lead pipes, and the lead can travel into our homes and drinking water. Consider the tragic and shameful crisis in Flint, Michigan, in which the water supply is so corrosive that lead was leached from the pipes. The water became highly contaminated—and so did the residents’ blood. While this disturbing drama has unfolded publicly on our screens, the same problem is silently taking place in many other cities that use old pipes. Particularly troublesome is that children are more sensitive to lead than adults. In one study, eight-year-old children with lead exposure had telomeres that were shorter than those of children without lead exposure.26
One category of chemicals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), is airborne, which makes it especially hard to avoid. PAHs are by-products of combustion and can be breathed in from fumes from cigarette and tobacco smoke, coal and coal tar, gas stoves, wildfires, hazardous waste, asphalt, and traffic pollution. You can also be exposed to PAHs if you eat foods grown in affected soil or that have been cooked on a grill. Beware. Higher exposure to PAHs has been shown to be associated with shorter telomere length in several studies.27 An investigation of PAHs offered a caution for pregnant women: the closer a pregnant mother lived to a major roadway, and the fewer trees and plants in her neighborhood (which can reduce air pollution levels), the shorter were the telomeres of her placenta, on average.28
CHEMICALS, CANCER, AND LONGER TELOMERES
Some chemicals are associated with longer telomeres. This may sound good, but remember that very long telomeres in some cases are associated with uncontrolled cell growth—in other words, cancer. So when genotoxic chemicals get into our bodies, we are more likely to get mutations and cancerous cells, and if the telomeres of those cells are long, they are more likely to divide and divide and divide into cancerous tumors. This is one reason we are so concerned about the widespread use and marketing of supplements and other products that claim to lengthen your telomeres.
We are concerned that chemical exposures and telomerase activating supplements may damage cells, or that they may increase telomerase and change telomeres in radical or inappropriate ways that our bodies have not learned to cope with. But when you practice naturally healthy habits such as stress management, exercise, good nutrition, and good sleep, your telomerase efficiency increases slowly, steadily, and over time. This natural process protects and maintains your telomeres. In some cases, lifestyle changes may even help your telomeres grow a bit longer, but in a way that won’t trigger uncontrolled cell growth. Healthy lifestyle factors that have been correlated with longer telomeres have never been shown to increase cancer risk. Lifestyle changes influence telomeres through mechanisms that are different from and safer than chemical exposures or supplements.
Which chemicals might unnaturally lengthen telomeres too much? Exposure to dioxins and furans (toxic by-products that are released through various industrial processes and that are commonly found in animal products), arsenic (common in drinking water and some foods), airborne particulate matter, benzene (exposure occurs via tobacco smoke as well as gasoline and other petroleum products), and polychlorinated biphenyls (or PCBs, a class of banned compounds that is still found in some high-fat animal products) is associated with longer telomere length.29 What is so interesting is that some of these chemicals have also been linked to cancer risks. Some have been linked to higher rates of cancer in animals; others have been studied in labs, where heavy doses are put into cells and create cancer-promoting molecular changes. It is possible that chemicals can both create fertile ground for mutations and cancerous cells, and create high telomerase or longer telomere length, promoting greater likelihood the cancerous cells might be replicated. We speculate that telomeres thus may be one link in the chemical-cancer relationship.
To put this into perspective, the American Association for Cancer Research Cancer Progress Report of 2014 informs us that 33 percent of the relative contribution to overall risks of developing cancer is from tobacco use alone, and about 10 percent is attributable to occupational and environmental exposures to pollutants.30 But that low percentage is for the United States; it is not known how much higher it is in countries and regions of the world where environmental pollution and exposures at work are much less well controlled. Furthermore, a 10 percent increase in risk may seem small, but since there are over 1.6 million new cases of cancers every year in the United States alone, that 10 percent translates into 160,000 new cancer cases per year. Think about it. Every year, 160,000 additional people and their families have their lives irrevocably changed by a diagnosis of cancer. And that’s just in the United States; the World Health Organization estimates that there are 14.2 million new cases of cancer around the globe each year, so we could estimate that 1.4 million new cases of cancer each year come from environmental pollution.31
Telomere Toxins
Chemicals Linked to Shorter Telomeres: Heavy metals, such as cadmium and lead
Chemicals Linked to Longer Telomeres
(Long telomeres in these conditions indicate a possible risk of uncontrolled cell growth and some forms of cancer.):
Dioxins and furans
Arsenic
Particulate matter
Benzene
PCBs
Chemicals Linked to Shorter Telomeres: Agricultural pesticides and lawn products:
alachlor
metolachlor
trifluralin
2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (also known as 2,4-D)
permethrin
Mostly no longer produced but still present in the environment:
toxaphene
DDT
Chemicals Linked to Shorter Telomeres: Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)
PROTECT YOURSELF
What can you do? More research is needed to fully understand the connection between these chemicals and cell damage, but in the meantime it is reasonable to take all the precautions you can. I have always had a preference to use natural products—but only when it was convenient for me to buy them. After realizing that so many of our household cleaners and cosmetics contained genotoxic and telomere-damaging chemicals, I now actively seek out natural products.
You may also want to change the way you eat and drink. Arsenic is naturally found in wells and groundwater, so you can either have your water tested or use a filter. Avoid plastic drinking bottles and cookware. Even BPA (Bisphenol A)–free plastic bottles may not be free of other harmful chemicals. BPA substitutes may be as unsafe; they just haven’t been studied to the same extent (plus, we may soon have more plastic in the ocean than fish if we don’t reduce our reliance on plastic bottles). Try not to microwave plastics, even the ones that say they are microwavable. It’s true that microwaveable plastics won’t warp when you heat them, but there are no promises that you won’t get a dose of plastics in your food.
How can you reduce your exposure to smoke, air, and traffic pollution? Avoid living near major roadways if possible. Don’t smoke (yet another good reason to quit), and avoid passive smoke. Greenery—trees, green space, and even house plants—can help reduce the levels of air pollutants inside your home and in a city, including volatile organic compounds. There is no direct evidence that living with more plants leads to longer telomeres, but there are correlations to suggest that increasing your exposure to greenery can be protective. Try to walk in parks, plant trees, and support urban forestry.
For more ways to protect yourself, see the Renewal Lab here.
FRIENDS AND LOVERS
Long ago, when most of humanity lived in tribes, each group would delegate a few of its members to keep watch at night. The folks on watch would remain alert for fires, enemies, and predatory animals, and everyone else could sleep soundly, knowing that they were protected. In those perilous days, belonging to a group was a way to ensure your safety. If you couldn’t trust your night watchmen, you weren’t going to get your much-needed sleep. Our ancestors’ version of poor social capital and lack of trust!
Flash-forward to contemporary life. When you lie down in your bed at night, you probably don’t worry very much about panthers dropping on you from above, or enemy warriors skulking behind the drapes. Nevertheless, the human brain hasn’t changed much since tribal days. We’re still wired to need someone around who “has our backs.” Feeling connected to others is one of the most basic human needs. Social connection is still one of the most effective ways to soften the danger signal; its absence will amplify it. That’s why it feels so good to belong to a cohesive group. It feels good to be in connection with others—to give or receive advice, borrow or lend something, work together, or share tears and feel understood. People with relationships that allow for this kind of mutual support tend to have better health, whereas people who are socially isolated are more stress reactive and depressed, and are more likely to die earlier.32
In animal research, even rats, who are social animals, suffer when they are caged solo. Little did we know how stressful isolation is for this social animal. Now we know that when rats are caged alone, they don’t receive the safety signals from being in close proximity to others and feel more stressed out. They get three times more mammary tumors than the rats who live in a group.33 The rats’ telomeres weren’t measured. But a similar experiment found that parrots caged alone have faster telomere shortening than when they are with a mate.34
Aside from my bicycling disappointment, I (Liz) was generally happy as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale. But as it became time to think about finding a job, I began to worry. I’d wake up in the night in a cold sweat of anxiety, wondering how on earth I would ever become employed. One of the hurdles I had to overcome was preparing a job seminar, a lecture that I’d deliver when interviewing for academic positions. Feeling insecure, I overdid it. Desperate to convince a skeptical world about the validity of my scientific conclusions, I poured every bit of my data into the text. When I practiced the talk in front of my colleagues, the reaction was… muted, to say the least. The lecture was so dense that it was unintelligible. I went back to my shared office and succumbed to despairing tears. The head of the lab, Joe Gall, came by and offered kind, encouraging words. That helped. Then Diane Juricek (later Lavett), dropped in. Diane was a visiting junior professor working in a neighboring lab, and she and I shared group meetings and lunch tables. Diane volunteered to help me work my talk into shape, taking out the excessive quantities of data description and forming it into a more coherent whole. Then she helped me rehearse the lecture in the big, old-fashioned hall near the building where we worked. This enormous generosity to a younger, less experienced colleague—Diane didn’t even know me well—made a huge impression on me. I realized what an academic scientific community could be about.
At the time, I was simply grateful for Diane’s help. I didn’t know then that my cells were likely responding to the support. Good friends are like the trusted night watchmen; when they’re around, your telomeres are more protected.35 Your cells beam out fewer C-reactive proteins (CRPs), proinflammatory signals that are considered a risk factor for heart disease when they appear in high levels. 36
Do you have someone in your life who is close to you but also causes unease? About half of all relationships have positive qualities with less helpful interactions, what researcher Bert Uchino calls “mixed relationships.” Unfortunately, having more of these mixed-quality relationships is related to shorter telomeres.37 (Women with mixed friendships have telomeres that are shorter; both women and men have shorter telomeres when the mixed relationship is with a parent.) That makes sense. These mixed relationships are characterized by friends who don’t always know how to offer support. It’s stressful when a friend misunderstands your problems or doesn’t give you the kind of support you really want. (For example, a friend may decide you need a long pep talk when what you really need is a shoulder to cry on.)
Marriages come in all flavors, and the better the quality of the marriage the better the health benefits, although these are what we consider statistically small effects.38 Put someone from a satisfying marriage into a difficult situation, and they’ll likely have more resilient patterns of stress reactivity.39 Happily married people also have a lower risk of early mortality. Marriage quality has not been examined with telomere length yet, but we do know that married people, or people living with a partner, have longer telomeres.40 (This was a surprise finding from a genetic study of 20,000 people, and the relationship was stronger in the older couples.)41
Sexual intimacy in marriage may matter for telomeres, too. In one of our recent studies, we asked married couples if they had been physically intimate during the previous week. Those who answered yes tended to have longer telomeres. This finding applied to both women and men. This effect could not be explained away by the quality of the relationship or other factors relating to health. Sexual activity declines less in older couples than stereotypes would have us believe. Around half of married thirty-to forty-year-olds, and 35 percent of sixty-to seventy-year-olds, engage in sexual activity anywhere between weekly and a few times a month. Many couples remain sexually active well into their eighties.42
Couples in unhappy relationships, on the other hand, suffer from a high level of “permeability”—they pick up on each other’s stress and negative moods. If one spouse’s cortisol rises during a fight, so does the cortisol of the other spouse.43 If one spouse wakes up in the morning with a big stress response, the other is more likely to as well.44 Both are operating at a high level of distress, leaving no one in the relationship who can put the brakes on the tension, no one who can say, “Whoa, wait. I see you’re upset. Let’s take a breath here and talk about it, before things get out of control.” It’s easy to imagine that these relationships are wearying and depleting. Our physiological responses moment to moment are more synced with our partner’s than we may realize. For example, in one study examining couples having both positive and stressful discussions in the lab, heart rate variability followed the pattern of the other partner with a slight lag.45 We suspect the next generation of research on relationships is going to reveal many more ways that we are connected physiologically to people we are close to.
RACIAL DISCRIMINATION AND TELOMERES
One Sunday morning, thirteen-year-old Richard decided to attend a friend’s church in a town a few miles outside his Midwestern city. “I guess there weren’t too many black people at the church to begin with,” says Richard, who is black, “and I guess the two of us were dressed differently.” Richard sat quietly with his friend in the reception area, waiting for the service to begin. As a minister’s son, Richard had grown up in churches; he had always known them to be places where he felt welcomed, accepted, and safe. Then a woman who ran one of the church programs walked up to them.
“What are you guys doing here?” she asked in a pointed tone. They explained that they were planning to attend the Sunday service.
“I don’t think you’re in the right place,” she said, and told them to leave.
“I felt so uncomfortable,” Richard recalls now of the incident. “She kind of convinced me that I actually didn’t belong there. We ended up leaving the church and not going to the service. I almost couldn’t believe it had happened, but then my dad e-mailed the minister, and he confirmed that the details were correct. The woman really had said all those things. It seems inhuman that people would go to such lengths to get me out of a church.”
Discrimination is a serious form of social stress. Discriminatory acts of any kind, whether they target sexual orientation, gender, ethnicity, race, or age, are toxic. Here we’re zeroing in on race, because that is where telomere research has been focused. In the United States, being black, and especially being a black man, means you are more vulnerable to encounters like the one Richard had. He says, “When I talk about racism, people think I mean something extreme. But it can be small, like when a white mother grabs her child’s hand when an African American teenager walks by. It hurts.”
Unfortunately, racism in its extreme form is also common. African American men are more likely to be accused of a crime and attacked by the police. Now, given dashboard cameras and iPhones, we see these painful scenes on our TVs often. Police officers are like every other human: they make automatic judgments about people from a visibly different social group. Meet someone new, and within milliseconds your brain is assessing whether the person is “same” or “other.” Does the person look like me? Is he or she familiar in some way? When the answers are yes, we instinctively judge the person as being warmer, more friendly, and more trustworthy. When the person seems different from us, our brains judge them to be potentially hostile and dangerous.46
As we said, this is an instant, unconscious reaction. It is a reason that skin color can set off automatic judgments—but it’s not an excuse for acting on those judgments. All of us have to consciously work to counter this internal bias. Tim Parrish, who was raised in a close-knit but racist community in Louisiana during the 1960s and ’70s, is now an adult in his fifties. Tim, who is white, admits that sometimes racist assumptions pop into his head, even though he doesn’t want them there and no longer believes them to be true. But, as Parrish explained in a opinion piece for the New York Daily News, “What gets injected into us as beliefs is not fully our choice. What is our choice is to be constantly vigilant, to deconstruct the assumptions we make, to combat impulses we may have that lead us in the direction of thinking we are somehow the generalized victim and the more civilized color.”47 In a relatively low-stress situation, this mental work against bias may be easier to accomplish than in fast-moving, tense situations. It is a reason that “driving while black” means you are more likely to be pulled over. If you’re a black man in America and your behavior seems dangerous, or is hard to interpret, you are more likely to be shot. My (Elissa’s) husband, Jack Glaser, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, works on training police officers to reduce racial bias. He is helping to adapt police procedures so that they are not so heavily influenced by automatic judgments that can lead to racial discrimination. Although he and his academic colleagues categorize this as policy work, I think of it as stress reduction at a societal level, and possibly telomere relevant!
The amount of suffering people experience when they are targets of discrimination runs very deep. African Americans tend to develop more chronic diseases of aging. For example, they have higher rates of stroke than other racial and ethnic populations in the United States. Poor health behaviors, poverty, and lack of access to good medical care may explain some of these statistics, but so does a lifetime of greater stress exposure. In a study of older adults, African Americans who experience more daily discrimination had shorter telomeres, and this relationship did not hold up for whites (who experience less discrimination in the first place).48 But this is probably not a simple, straightforward relationship; it may depend on attitudes we are not even aware of within ourselves.
David Chae at the University of Maryland performed a fascinating study that looked at low-income, young black men living in San Francisco. He wanted to know what happens to telomeres when people internalize the common societal bias, meaning that they come to believe society’s negative opinions of them at an unconscious level. Discrimination alone had a weak effect. The men who had been discriminated against and internalized the disparaging cultural attitudes toward blacks had shorter telomeres.49 Internalized bias toward blacks is tested by a computer task using reaction times to see how quickly people pair the word black with negative words. You can test your own bias at this website: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/user/agg/blindspot/indexrk.htm. Just don’t berate yourself for having automatic biases; most of us do. We suspect we will see more data on discrimination and telomeres in the coming years.
Knowing how places and faces affect your telomere health can be reassuring, or it can be unsettling. It all depends on your situation—where you live, the quality of your relationships, and how much you’ve internalized discrimination (discrimination toward any aspect of yourself—race, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability). But all of us can take steps to reduce toxic exposures, improve the health of our neighborhoods, become more aware of our biases toward other groups, and create positive social connections. The Renewal Lab at the end of this chapter offers some ways to get started.
TELOMERE TIPS
We are interconnected in ways we cannot see, and telomeres reveal these relationships.
We are affected by the toxic stress of discrimination.
We are affected by toxic chemicals.
We are affected in more subtle ways, by how we feel in our neighborhood, by the abundance of green plants and trees nearby, and by the emotional and physiological states of those around us.
When we know how we are affected by our surroundings, we can begin to create healthful, supportive environments in our homes and our neighborhoods.