It’s been decades since my parents, Chef Ira and The Gardener, first coined a name for the way they eat, the “wrinkle-free” diet. While it started as a joke, an answer to the fact that they didn’t seem to be aging as quickly as their friends, it’s not a joke any more. The wrinkle-free diet’s magic, it turns out, happens not on the surface, but deep inside, through changes to a special part of our chromosomes that scientists call the telomere.

Telomeres are tiny little caps that protect the ends of our chromosomes from damage, and longer is better. Tobacco, sugar, white flour, trans fat, chronic stress, loneliness and depression shorten telomeres. Short telomeres are associated with aging, cancer, dementia, and, yes, premature death.

But long telomeres do the opposite. Walking the walk, eating nutritious food, and catching enough zzzzz’s actually increase the length of your telomeres. Eating real food, making opportunities to move, getting sufficient rest and relaxation, and surrounding yourself with loving friends and family (if you’re very lucky) definitely makes you healthier, but it may even reverse aging.

My colleague, Professor of Lifestyle Medicine Extraordinaire Dr. Dean Ornish, was the first to show that telomeres can actually grow longer. Here are the particulars of his recent study: Thirty-five men [with low-risk prostate cancer, under active surveillance] had their telomeres measured and were then divided into two groups. The first group consisted of 10 guys who were taught to eat a plant-based diet, get some exercise, spend time with friends, and do some mindfulness training with yoga, meditation, or other stress-management strategy. The other guys got a pat on the back. See ya later.

After five years, researchers again checked the telomeres on all the original study participants. They discovered that the “clean living” group’s telomeres had increased by an average 10 percent but that the other guys’ telomeres had shrunk by an average 3 percent. Bummer for them — but it’s not too late! Interestingly, the amount of telomeres lengthening correlated with the amount of “clean living.” The more healthy lifestyle changes, the longer the telomeres were. After this, Dr. Ornish said that “our genes are predisposition, but not our fate.”

It looks to me as if we can become more like what we dream of being, and we can all have fewer wrinkles.