Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

by David A. Sinclair

She died at the age of 92. And, in the way we’ve been taught to think about these things, she’d had a good, long life. But the more I have thought about it, the more I have come to believe that the person she truly was had been dead many years at that point.

There’s also a difference between extending life and prolonging vitality. We’re capable of both, but simply keeping people alive—decades after their lives have become defined by pain, disease, frailty, and immobility—is no virtue.

Thanks to a combination of a BRAF inhibitor and immunotherapy, survival of melanoma brain metastases, one of the deadliest types of cancer, has increased by 91 percent since 2011.

So... Not that much. Percentage increase at small numbers is misleading

Having capitalized on its relatively large brain and a thriving civilization to overcome the unfortunate hand that evolution dealt it—weak limbs, sensitivity to cold, poor sense of smell, and eyes that see well only in daylight and in the visible spectrum—this highly unusual species continues to innovate.

The way doctors treat illness today “is simple,” wrote S. Jay Olshansky, a demographer at the University of Illinois. “As soon as a disease appears, attack that disease as if nothing else is present; beat the disease down, and once you succeed, push the patient out the door until he or she faces the next challenge; then beat that one down. Repeat until failure.”

But consider this: though smoking increases the risk of getting cancer fivefold, being 50 years old increases your cancer risk a hundredfold. By the age of 70, it is a thousandfold.21 Such exponentially increasing odds also apply to heart disease. And diabetes. And dementia. The list goes on and on. Yet there is not a country in the world that has committed any significant resources to help its citizens combat aging. In a world in which we seem to agree on very little, the feeling that “it’s just the way it goes” is almost universal.

Why would we choose to focus on problems that impact small groups of people if we could address the problem that impacts everyone—especially if, in doing so, we could significantly impact all those other, smaller problems?

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.

Barzilai once asked one of his centenarian study subjects why she hadn’t listened to her doctors over the years when they had strongly advised her to end her lifelong smoking habit. “I’ve had four doctors tell me smoking would kill me,” she said with a wry smile, “and well, all four are dead now, aren’t they?”

There isn’t much debate on the downsides of consumption of animal protein. Study after study has demonstrated that heavily animal-based diets are associated with high cardiovascular mortality and cancer risk. Processed red meats are especially bad.

When we substitute animal protein with more plant protein, studies have shown, all-cause mortality falls significantly.

All of these findings may explain why vegetarians suffer significantly lower rates of cardiovascular disease and cancer than meat eaters.30 The reduction of amino acids—and thus the inhibition of mTOR—isn’t the only thing at play in that equation. The lower calorie content, increased polyphenols, and feeling of superiority over your fellow human beings are also helpful.

The big shock was that the health benefits were remarkably similar no matter how much running the people had done. Even about ten minutes of moderate exercise a day added years to their lives.

The most delectable strawberries are those that have been stressed by periods of limited water supply.

This is where “antagonistic pleiotropy” comes into play: the idea that a survival mechanism that is good for us when we are young is kept through evolution because this far outweighs any problems it might cause when we get older.

Those with a double dose of the X lived longer, even if they had testes and especially if they didn’t, thus proving once and for all that female is the stronger sex.

This is the future. Eventually, every drug will be included in a huge and ever-expanding database of pharmacogenetic effects. It won’t be long before prescribing a drug without first knowing a patient’s genome will seem medieval.

They recruited older male and female cyclists between 55 and 79 for their study and contrasted them to older and younger sedentary people. “The cyclists proved to have reflexes, memories, balance and metabolic profiles that more closely resembled those of 30-year-olds than of the sedentary older group.”