The Benefits of Meditation

Making Healthy Choices: The Benefits of Meditation with Deepak Chopra, Founder, The Chopra Center and Co-author, Super Genes

I’ve been working with scientists, including Rudy Tanzi at Harvard University and Mass General Hospital, but other scientists from many institutions, and we found that the regular practice of meditation increases the levels of telomeres, which is an enzyme that influences genetic age. So as we grow older our telomeres, which are like little extensions of our chromosomes which house our genes, the telomeres get short and when they get to a certain shortened length then the chromosome falls apart. That’s the mechanism of biological death at a genetic level. So meditation actually reverses that at a genetic level. We’ve also found that meditation increases the activity of the genes that are responsible for self-regulation, the upgrading of the genes for health and healing. It decreases the activity of those genes that are responsible for inflammation and somehow linked to Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes and many types of cancer.

This data is now coming out very extensively, not only through our work but of several institutions that meditation influences gene activity in the brain, it influences gene activity in the gut. There’s something that stressed people have called leaky gut, which means that when they’re stressed their microbiome gets inflamed, the enzymes leak out of the gut into the circulation and then they start to digest normal tissues like even the islets cells of the pancreas leading to diabetes degenerative disorders. When a person meditates the inflammatory markers went down, the leaky gut syndrome improved and gene activity responded. So meditation is very profound in influencing gene activity at a very fundamental level decreasing your risk for disease but also delaying and even reversing the biological markers of aging at a level that we would say is the most basic level, which is the brain inside every cell, which we call DNA.