AGING
An analysis of what the experts say and a potentially helpful idea
An article in “The Guardian”
An article on super centenarians, by Miriam Frankel, posted in “The Guardian” on Sunday13 Oct 2024, struck a chord: here is the report, paraphrased for easy reading, with emphasis on statements by leading authorities on the subject of aging, followed by my suggestions for improving our quality of life and thereby (perhaps ) increasing our lifespan.
The article features Bryan Johnson, who is trying to defeat “aging” and is literally, dedicating his life to the effort.
It begins as follows: “While healthy eating and regular workouts are certainly good for us, many scientists now believe that genes, rather than lifestyle, are the determining factor in how long we live. Bryan Johnson, with whose ideas we are all now familiar, sees himself as “a modern-day explorer, pushing the bounds of what is humanly attainable, to delay death”.
Johnson takes 111 pills a day, eats his last (vegan) meal at 11AM, is teetotal and smoke-free, exercises for hours daily and goes to bed at 8.30PM.
THE EXPERTS
Nicklas Brendborg, the Danish molecular biologist, estimates in “Jellyfish Age Backwards”, that it’s as hard to survive from 93 to 100 as it is to make it to 93.
Richard Faragher, a Prof. at Brighton University, says ”Your chance of being sick or dying increases exponentially with time: a healthy lifestyle can add up to 14 years to our lives, but the rise in life expectancy is slowing down”.
Miriam Frankel, in the article we are discussing, asks “If we adopt extremely healthy lifestyles, might we live extremely long?” …….. she answers, “Not really”.
Lynne Cox, an Oxford University professor, posits that “Extreme longevity seems to be genetically driven: diet and exercise may only have a limited impact. Super-fit athletes don’t seem to live any longer. I don’t think there’s a panacea that’s going to add 20 or 30 years to human life at the moment”.
She reports a study of 55–79-year-old amateur cyclists, by Niharika Arora Duggal, concluding that “they were biologically young for their age; but that doesn’t mean we should over–exercise”. She also reports on a study on Finnish twins, which found that moderate exercisers were biologically younger than both non-exercisers and super-exercisers.
“You really want to be in the sweet spot with exercise,” says Cox, but the lady in the photo below, in response to the inevitable query as to how she got to 100, said “all you gotta do is keep on thinking” - good advice, don’t you think?
Calorie Restriction
As to calorie restriction, skinny people don’t seem to live the longest: overweight people live longer than their underweight, normal and obese peers. It has been proven that cutting calories doubles the lifespan of nematode worms, gives mice an extra 30-40% lifetime and makes rhesus monkeys appear healthier, etc. However the animal studies are based on a 30 – 40% calorie reduction and anyway, as Miriam Frankel says, we are not mice and we are not worms.
DRUGS
Ozempic and other popular “magics” cut the risk of many age-related diseases, including cardiovascular diseases and cancer, leaving researchers optimistic that they could extend life. But it will be decades, before the final tallies are in.
Also, on the one hand, potentially life-threatening side-effects are worrisome ….. and on the other, it seems to me that designer drugs, produced (as usual) to modify the outcome of a process post-facto, has to be the wrong way to go. A better idea would be to figure out the cause - the mechanism - of aging and based on that knowledge, to figure out how to prevent the change: how to nullify, or modify, the underlying problem, rather than treating its effects.
IMPASSE
So here we are, after several centuries of searching for the Grail of “eternal life” and more than 100 years of modern scientific investigation, no closer to an acceptable explanation of aging and still, with no provable theory as to how to evade it.
HORMONES
Here, a philosophical argument is easily made: as we age, we progressively and inexorably lose the ability to manufacture our hormones and as the level of each hormone falls, we inevitably develop the symptoms of its deficiency. Logical questions thus present themselves: is aging due to metabolic deterioration from reduced availability of our controlling hormones? ….. And if it is, what would be the effect if we could correct our hormone deficiency problems?
