---

Скачать книгу

---

course not. When we stay healthy and vibrant, as long as we feel young physically and mentally, our age doesn’t matter. That’s true whether you are 32, 52, or 92. Most middle-aged and older adults in the United States report feeling ten to twenty years younger than their age, because they still feel healthy. And feeling younger than your age predicts lower mortality and better cognitive abilities later in life.108 It’s a virtuous cycle, as long as you keep pedaling.

      But no matter how you feel at this moment in your life, even with a positive outlook and a healthy lifestyle, you have a disease. And it’s going to catch up to you, sooner rather than later, unless something is done.

      I acknowledge that calling aging a disease is a radical departure from the mainstream view of health and well-being, which has established an array of medical interventions addressing the various causes of death. That framework evolved, however, largely because we didn’t understand why aging occurs. Up until very recently, the best thing we had was a list of aging hallmarks. The Information Theory of Aging could change that.

      There is nothing wrong with using the hallmarks to guide interventions. We can probably have a positive impact on people’s lives by addressing each of them. It’s possible that interventions aimed at slowing telomere deterioration will improve people’s long-term well-being. Maintaining proteostasis, preventing deregulation of nutrient sensing, thwarting mitochondrial dysfunction, stopping senescence, rejuvenating stem cells, and decreasing inflammation might all be ways to delay the inevitable. Indeed, I work with students, postdocs, and companies around the globe that are developing solutions to each one of these hallmarks and hope to continue.109 Anything we can do to alleviate suffering we should do.

      But we’re still building nine dams on nine tributaries.

      In coming together to tackle the “new science of aging,” as the attendees of the Royal Society meeting termed this fight in their 2010 meeting, increasing numbers of scientists are starting to acknowledge the possibility and potential inherent in heading upstream.

      Together we can build a single dam—at the source. Not just intervene when things go wrong. Not just slow things down. We can eliminate the symptoms of aging altogether.

      This disease is treatable.

PART II

      WHAT WE’RE LEARNING

      (THE PRESENT)

FOUR

      LONGEVITY NOW

      EVERY DAY I WAKE UP TO AN INBOX FULL OF MESSAGES FROM PEOPLE FROM ALL over the world. The tide ebbs and flows but always takes the form of a flash flood in the wake of newly announced research from my team or others.

      “What should I be taking?” they ask.

      “Can you tell me what I need to do to get admitted into one of the human trials?” they implore.

      “Can you extend the lifespan of my daughter’s hamster?” I kid you not.

      Some of the letters are much sadder than others. One man recently wrote to offer to contribute a donation to my lab in honor of his mother, who had passed away after suffering terribly through many years of age-related illness. “I feel compelled to help, even in some small way, to prevent this from happening to someone else,” he wrote. The next day, a woman whose father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s wrote to ask if there were any way to get him admitted into a study. “I would do anything, take him anywhere, spend every last cent I have,” she pleaded. “He is the only family I have and I cannot bear the thought of what is about to happen to him.”

      There is great reason for hope on the not-so-distant horizon, but those battling against the ravages of aging right now must do so in a world in which most doctors have never even thought about why we age, let alone how to treat aging.

      Some of the medical therapies and life-extending technologies discussed in this book are already here. Others are a few years away. And there are more to discuss that are a decade or so down the road; we’ll get to those as well.

      But even without access to this developing technology, no matter who you are, where you live, how old you are, and how much you earn, you can engage your longevity genes, starting right now.

      That’s what people have been doing for centuries—without even knowing it—in centenarian-heavy places such as Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Sardinia, Italy. These are, you might recognize, some of the places the writer Dan Buettner introduced to the world as so-called Blue Zones starting in the mid-2000s. Since that time, the primary focus for those seeking to apply lessons from these and other longevity hot spots has been on what Blue Zone residents eat. Ultimately this resulted in the distillation of “longevity diets” that are based on the commonalities in the foods eaten in places where there are lots of centenarians. And overwhelmingly that advice comes down to eating more vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, while consuming less meat, dairy products, and sugar.

      And that’s not a bad place to start—in fact, it’s a great place to start. There is widespread disagreement, even among the best nutritionists in the world, as to what constitutes the “best” diet for H. sapiens. That’s likely because there is no best diet; we’re all different enough that our diets need to be subtly and sometimes substantially different, too. But we’re also all similar enough that there are some very broad commonalities: more veggies and less meat; fresh food versus processed food. We all know this stuff, though applying it can be a challenge.

      A big part of the reason so many people aren’t willing to face up to that challenge is because we’ve always thought of aging as an inevitable part of life. It might come a little earlier for some and a little later for others, but we’ve always been told that it’s coming for us all.

      That’s what we used to say about pneumonia, influenza, tuberculosis, and gastrointestinal conditions, too. In 1900, those four illnesses accounted for about half of the deaths in the United States and—if you managed to live long enough—you could be virtually assured that one of them would get you eventually.

      Today, deaths among people suffering from tuberculosis and gastrointestinal conditions are exceedingly rare. And pneumonia and influenza claim less than 10 percent of the lives taken by those conditions a little more than a century ago—with most of those deaths now among individuals weakened by aging.

      What changed? In no small part it was framing. Advances in medicine, innovations in technology, and better information to guide our lifestyle decisions resulted in a world in which we didn’t have to accept the idea that these diseases were “just the way it goes.”

      We don’t have to accept aging like that, either.

      But even among those who will have the most immediate access to pharmaceuticals and technologies that will be emerging to offer longer and healthier lives in the next few decades, reaching an optimal lifespan and healthspan won’t be as easy as flipping a switch.

      There will always be good and bad choices. And that starts with what we put into our bodies.

      And what we don’t.

      GO, FAST

      After twenty-five years of researching aging and having read thousands of scientific papers, if there is one piece of advice I can offer, one surefire way to stay healthy longer, one thing you can do to maximize your lifespan right now, it’s this: eat less often.

      This is nothing revolutionary, of course. As far back as Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician, doctors have been espousing the benefits of limiting what we eat, not just by rejecting the deadly sin of gluttony, as the Christian monk Evagrius Ponticus counseled in the fourth century, but through “intentional asceticism.”

      Not malnutrition. Not starvation. These are not pathways to more years, let alone better years. But fasting—allowing our bodies to exist in a state of want, more often than most of us allow in our privileged world of plenty—is unquestionably good for our health and longevity.

      Hippocrates knew

---

Скачать книгу