The Body’s Error Budget (and What Fire Steals)
Think of a cell as an information stack with three interlocking code layers: the DNA sequence (bits), the epigenome (the on/off markup), and the proteome (the compiled, folded machinery). We don’t “hit a wall” at a preset age; we drift because small errors accumulate faster than repair can erase them. Somatic mutations slip past proofreading; epigenetic marks wander (drift); proteins misfold and evade quality control; mitochondria shed electrons and leak oxidants; telomeres fray; chronic, low-grade inflammation keeps the whole system slightly off-spec. Aging, in other words, is the long arithmetic of error influx minus error correction.
Combustion spikes the influx. Light plant matter and you flood tissues with polycyclic aromatics, nitrosamines, aldehydes, and carbonyls—chemicals that glue themselves to DNA as adducts (graffiti on the code), generate reactive oxygen species that nick bases and cross-link proteins, accelerate telomere attrition, and push cells into senescence—zombie-like states that secrete inflammatory signals and corrode nearby tissue. Even the epigenome skews older: methylation clocks tick forward under sustained toxic load. Net effect: the bit-flip rate rises across all three layers while the body’s “firmware”—DNA repair, autophagy, proteostasis—gets overwhelmed. That’s why smoke-aged faces and arteries look older than the calendar says.
Separate the signal from the smoke and the math changes. Nicotine is a neuromodulator with dependence and cardiovascular effects, but it isn’t a classic DNA mutagen; the vast majority of genotoxic pressure comes from fire. When delivery removes combustion (no tar, far less carbonyl/PAH/CO burden), the error influx collapses toward what the repair systems can actually handle. In reliability language: lowering the noise floor lets the built-in error-correcting codes do their job, pushing out mean time to failure at the tissue level.
This is the information-theory read on “looking older”: your genome/epigenome is a message protected by repair codes; cigarettes jack up channel noise until even good codes leak corruption; cleaner delivery drops noise so the same codes preserve more of the message. Aging is never paused—but the slope of degradation is negotiable. Fire steepens it. Removing fire flattens it.
