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Tag: longevity

  • Antonei Csoka: Aging Is Not Something We Have to Accept as Inevitable

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    SHARYL ATTKISSON: Leading the charge are visionary scientists whose work is transforming theory into tangible advances.

    Visionary scientist David Sinclair has popularized supplements that boost levels of a crucial coenzyme, potentially delaying age-related decline.

    At the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, researcher Eric Verdin explores how metabolic shifts can extend healthy years.

    Maria Blasco of Spain’s National Cancer Research Center focuses on telomeres, a piece of DNA at the end of animal chromosomes protecting them from degradation.

    Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is leading a study testing the diabetes drug metformin as an anti-aging agent.

    And Vadim Gladyshev at Harvard is investigating rejuvenation by reprogramming or “resetting” cells without turning them cancerous.

    As researchers work to crack the code on aging and how to slow or stop it, there’s a philosophical and scientific divide: Is aging a natural, programmed part of life, or a treatable condition akin to a disease that can be “cured”?

    ANTONEI CSOKA: I see aging as a kind of great challenge to humanity. It’s not something that we have to accept as inevitable.

    SHARYL ATTKISSON: Antonei Csoka is an associate professor at Howard University who studies the cell and molecular biology of aging.

    Do you see it as an illness, a disease, a common process that could be reversed?

    ANTONEI CSOKA: Great question. So I actually call it a meta-disease, in the sense that it is the cause behind almost every other disease. So it’s like the molecular damage, the DNA mutations, the telomere loss, even the epigenetic changes accumulate over lifespan and lead to these diverse diseases. But they’re all really being caused by aging. So it’s like the generative mechanism behind all of them. It’s the cause and the diseases are the effect.

    SHARYL ATTKISSON: Whatever the theory, advances are arriving at breakneck speed. And there’s been an explosion in the practice of medicine surrounding aging and longevity.

    Csoka says he hopes we’re on the cusp of virtual immortality.

    Do you think in your lifetime we’ll be seeing people live to what age, you know, more people living to 120?

    ANTONEI CSOKA: I think it’s quite possible. Yeah. I think we’re actually in an incredibly unique time. Like maybe a time that only happens once in human history. And that time is where the people alive today could determine whether they live a very long time, you know, potentially like, you know, extreme long old age, you know, a thousand years, for example.

    SHARYL ATTKISSON: You think that’s possible that people can live a thousand years?

    ANTONEI CSOKA: Yeah, I do. Yeah. I don’t think there’s any like, biological law that, that denies that possibility. But in the past, you know, people dreamed of, of immortality and the fountain of youth and so on, but it was basically impossible. Like the, the science didn’t exist. And in the future, I think it will be solved. Like it will be, you know, say a hundred years from now, the aging will be fully understood and potentially fully reversible. So we’re kind of in a very unique, very unique sliver of time.

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    Antonei Csoka, Full Measure

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  • The Hidden Effects Of Long COVID On Your Gut, Brain & Energy

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    A few months ago, I got my routine lab work back, and one number stopped me in my tracks. My neuroinflammation marker was off the charts. Which made no sense. I felt great. I was training regularly, sleeping well, and eating clean. But my doctor, Frank Lipman, M.D., told me it could be a lingering sign of Long COVID, even though I hadn’t had symptoms in months.

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  • Ultra-Processed Foods May Harm Every Major Organ, Says 100+ Studies

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    But this research also highlights something hopeful. Even in a landscape dominated by UPFs, shifting back toward whole and minimally processed foods—slowly, consistently, and in ways that feel doable—can meaningfully support your health. These foods deliver the fiber, antioxidants, and nutrients your body relies on to regulate appetite, stabilize blood sugar, calm inflammation, and fuel long-term well-being.

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  • Study Finds Link Between ADHD & Alzheimer’s Disease

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    Scientists have previously hypothesized that attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may be a risk factor for cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, the lack of studies investigating age-related cognitive decline in individuals with ADHD later in life has prevented a distinct association between ADHD and cognitive decline—until now.

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  • 23 Longevity Gifts That Prove Biohacking Isn't Just For The Boys

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    Biohacking isn’t just for the boys.

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  • Plant-Based Hospital Menus | NutritionFacts.org

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    The American Medical Association passed a resolution encouraging hospitals to offer healthy plant-based food options.

    “Globally, 11 million deaths annually are attributable to dietary factors, placing poor diet ahead of any other risk factor for death in the world.” Given that diet is our leading killer, you’d think that nutrition education would be emphasized during medical school and training, but there is a deficiency. A systematic review found that, “despite the centrality of nutrition to a healthy lifestyle, graduating medical students are not supported through their education to provide high-quality, effective nutrition care to patients…”

    It could start in undergrad. What’s more important? Learning about humanity’s leading killer or organic chemistry?

    In medical school, students may average only 19 hours of nutrition out of thousands of hours of instruction, and they aren’t even being taught what’s most useful. How many cases of scurvy and beriberi, diseases of dietary deficiency, will they encounter in clinical practice? In contrast, how many of their future patients will be suffering from dietary excesses—obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease? Those are probably a little more common than scurvy or beriberi. “Nevertheless, fully 95% of cardiologists [surveyed] believe that their role includes personally providing patients with at least basic nutrition information,” yet not even one in ten feels they have an “expert” grasp on the subject.

    If you look at the clinical guidelines for what we should do for our patients with regard to our number one killer, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, all treatment begins with a healthy lifestyle, as shown below and at 1:50 in my video Hospitals with 100-Percent Plant-Based Menus.

    “Yet, how can clinicians put these guidelines into practice without adequate training in nutrition?”

    Less than half of medical schools report teaching any nutrition in clinical practice. In fact, they may be effectively teaching anti-nutrition, as “students typically begin medical school with a greater appreciation for the role of nutrition in health than when they leave.” Below and at 2:36 in my video is a figure entitled “Percentage of Medical Students Indicating that Nutrition is Important to Their Careers.” Upon entry to different medical schools, about three-quarters on average felt that nutrition is important to their careers. Smart bunch. Then, after two years of instruction, they were asked the same question, and the numbers plummeted. In fact, at most schools, it fell to 0%. Instead of being educated, they got de-educated. They had the notion that nutrition is important washed right out of their brains. “Thus, preclinical teaching”— the first two years of medical school—“engenders a loss of a sense of the relevance of the applied discipline of nutrition.”

    Following medical school, during residency, nutrition education is “minimal or, more typically, absent.” “Major updates” were released in 2018 for residency and fellowship training requirements, and there were zero requirements for nutrition. “So you could have an internal medicine graduate who comes out of a terrific program and has learned nothing—literally nothing—about nutrition.”

    “Why is diet not routinely addressed in both medical education and practice already, and what should be done about that?” One of the “reasons for the medical silence in nutrition” is that, “sadly…nutrition takes a back seat…because there are few financial incentives to support it.” What can we do about that? The Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School identified a dozen different policy levers at all stages of medical education and the kinds of policy recommendations there could be for the decision-makers, as you can see here and at 3:48 in my video.

    For instance, the government could require doctors working for Veterans Affairs (VA) to get at least some courses in nutrition, or we could put questions about nutrition on the board exams so schools would be pressured to teach it. As we are now, even patients who have just had a heart attack aren’t changing their diet. Doctors may not be telling them to do so, and hospitals may be actively undermining their future with the food they serve.

    The good news is that the American Medical Association (AMA) has passed a resolution encouraging hospitals to offer healthy food options. What a concept! “Our AMA hereby calls on [U.S.] Health Care Facilities to improve the health of patients, staff, and visitors by: (a) providing a variety of healthy food, including plant-based meals, and meals that are low in saturated and trans fat, sodium, and added sugars; (b) eliminating processed meats from menus; and (c) providing and promoting healthy beverages.” Nice!

    “Similarly, in 2018, the State of California mandated the availability of plant-based meals for hospital patients,” and there are hospitals in Gainesville (FL), the Bronx, Manhattan, Denver, and Tampa (FL) that “all provide 100% plant-based meals to their patients on a separate menu and provide educational materials to inpatients to improve education on the role of diet, especially plant-based diets, in chronic illness.”

    Let’s check out some of their menu offerings: How about some lentil Bolognese? Or a cauliflower scramble with baked hash browns for breakfast, mushroom ragu for lunch, and, for supper, white bean stew, salad, and fruit for dessert. (This is the first time a hospital menu has ever made me hungry!)

    The key to these transformations was “having a physician advocate and increasing education of staff and patients on the benefits of eating more plant-based foods.” A single clinician can spark change in a whole system, because science is on their side. “Doctors have a unique position in society” to influence policy at all levels; it’s about time we used it.

    For more on the ingrained ignorance of basic clinical nutrition in medicine, see the related posts below.

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    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Inside Peter Attia, M.D.’s Exercise & Bloodwork Routine

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    When it comes to living longer and better, few voices carry as much weight as Peter Attia, M.D. The longevity medicine expert and author of Outlive: The Science of Art & Longevity has spent years translating complex research into actionable strategies for extending both lifespan and healthspan. 

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  • The #1 Food Category Linked To Colon Cancer In Women Under 50

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    Cancer cases in young adults have surged nearly 80% worldwide over the past three decades. And while population growth accounts for some of that increase, the trend is undeniable: more people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s are developing diseases we once thought of as problems for our parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

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  • The Best Years of Your Life Are Probably Still Ahead

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    Laura Carstensen’s favorite lecture of the year is the one when she tells undergrads at Stanford University that—contrary to what they’ve probably been told and believe—these are not the best years of their lives. Those come much, much later.

    “I look out at a sea of 100 students sitting in a classroom, and I love the look on their faces. It’s just such relief,” says Carstensen, a professor of psychology and founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. “I can visibly see it, because not only are the late teens and 20s the worst time in our lives—with the highest rates of loneliness, anxiety, and depression—but people are constantly telling [young people] that they’re the best years.”

    Carstensen’s research consistently suggests that starting in people’s mid-20s, they begin experiencing fewer negative emotions. That doesn’t mean they have more frequent or intense positive emotions; rather, their emotional balance improves as they age.

    As part of TIME’s series interviewing leaders in the longevity field, we caught up with Carstensen to talk about what drives these changes—and the surprising type of friendship she wishes more people would prioritize. 

    This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

    Your research seems to suggest that older age is something to look forward to, not dread. Is that how you see it?

    Yes, and in many ways, it’s the best time in life. Emotionally speaking, it’s the best time in life. Now let me be clear: There’s a lot not to like about aging; physically, it sucks. It’s not a good story, but the emotional one is. There’s not a perfect stage in life—there’s always trade-offs. When you’re young and miserable, you’re also at your physical peak, and that’s wonderful. Having a limitless future is exciting, too.

    Older people don’t have that, but they do have a sense of focus and what matters in their life. There’s this juxtaposition of physical vitality and emotional richness, and they’re occurring in different stages in different ways.

    So what happens to emotional well-being as we get older?

    People have a better emotional experience. They’re more satisfied with their relationships and more at peace with themselves, and as we get older, we stop caring so much about these trivial matters that can drive us crazy at earlier stages of life. Plus, in terms of cognitive processing, we tend to literally see, hear, and remember positive information more than negative information.

    Read More: 4 Ways to Get Happier As You Age

    Older people aren’t happier—we don’t see changes so much in happiness across the life course. But we do see a significant reduction in anger and sadness and fear and anxiety. That’s why we say emotional balance improves with age. It’s different than saying, ‘I’m happier.’ Your emotional life becomes richer, and you’re more likely to see an old friend and smile and get a tear in your eye at the same time. I think that’s because we know life doesn’t go on forever. It’s not happy-go-lucky, but there’s something sweetly poignant about it.

    As time becomes more valuable, we use it in better ways. 

    When do these changes happen?

    We’ve done a major longitudinal study looking at this, and it looks like the 20s are the worst. Then you begin to see some reduction in negative emotion, and it’s really going down by your 40s and 50s. The 60s and 70s are the peak of life, emotionally speaking. It doesn’t get worse significantly as you get older than that, but that’s where it kind of levels off—so the major bang-for-the-buck change is between 40 and 60.

    What are some of your other interesting takeaways about older age?

    Another reliable finding has to do with what we call prosocial behavior: basically giving to and doing things for other people. Older people are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior and also feel better when they do, so they’re giving more and they’re getting a bigger bang for their buck. It’s a very rewarding experience. Because of these findings, occasionally I’ll be having a really bad day and I’ll think, ‘Boy, I’ve got to go help somebody.’

    Are there other surprising insights about aging that you wish more people knew about?

    One is how much older people like younger people. There are lots of myths about generational conflict, but older people think young people are the bee’s knees. For the first time in human history, because we’re living longer, we now have this kind of even distribution of age in the population, and I think that’s exciting—the idea that we can come together and address big and little challenges with groups of people where we’re combining the skill and the strength and the ambition of youth with the prosociality and experience and emotional balance of older people. That inspires me—thinking about what we can do together.

    What is the Stanford Center for Longevity’s ‘New Map of Life’ initiative?

    There’s a lot of concern about aging societies: that older people are going to reduce productivity, they’ll be a burden, and on and on. There’s very little evidence for this, first of all; a lot of it’s just mythology. But there is a truth to the idea that there’s a mismatch between the way we live our lives, the social policies and structures that guide us through life, and the length of our lives.

    The premise of The New Map of Life—and, really, of our Center on Longevity—is that current generations are born into worlds that were literally built by and for young people, from the knowledge that’s housed in the medical-school libraries to the depth of the stairs that we climb every day. The presumed user is a young person, and we really think that’s why there’s so many problems related to aging.

    Read More: 4 Science-Backed Habits That Could Help You Live Longer

    What we’re trying to do is start a global conversation about new ways of living, and to think seriously about the policies and institutions. What should education look like when we live to be 100 and work until we’re 80? How should families think about the definition of family, which has long been thought of as the nuclear family? Now most families have at least three or even four generations alive at the same time. Who’s responsible to whom, and when do we give financially to our children? Should it be waiting until you die? Well, if you’re going to die at 100, your kids have to wait until they’re 80 to get the family farm.

    That’s a lot to figure out. Are you seeing this conversation start to spread?

    I think we are right on the cusp of really rewriting the life script, yes. I do believe that people have recognized—really, for the first time—that century-long lives are becoming increasingly common, and 90-year lives are very common. What are the implications of that for financial security, for education, for the nature of family, and for politics? 

    Every aspect of our life will change as a function of longevity. And we need to think of ways we can make those changes good for people. How can we use longer lives to improve quality of life at all ages?

    Are there already specific ideas on how to accomplish all this?

    There are. The financial security industry, for example, is thinking of new products that can help people prepare for longer lives. A real struggle people are having today is, how do you save enough to retire? And then let’s say you did all the right things and you’ve saved millions of dollars and you’re 65 or 70 and you’re retiring. There’s very little guidance on how to decumulate that, how to spend down that money. There are new products being developed that are helping people do that, so that’s exciting.

    We also work and talk with people in the transportation world—automating cars is going to make travel much, much better for people of all ages. A lot is percolating, and one of the things we hope to do more of at the center is to pull that together and be a repository for information about best practices, new ideas, and new ways of being.

    I want to ask you about one other area you’re passionate about: intergenerational friendships.

    This intergenerational opportunity is one that we don’t think about enough, and it’s really exciting. We know that we’re really age-segregated in our world, so young people don’t have old people who are their friends. We have relatives, so we interact across generations within families, but not very much outside of our family. If you look at somebody who’s over 65 and ask them, out of all the people in their social network, they have fewer than one friend who’s under 25.

    Read More: Unlocking the Secrets to Living to 100

    What’s interesting to me is those friendships—the opportunities and the mutual benefits. Being friends with people of different generations is really quite extraordinary, and we’re not taking advantage of it.

    How could we do a better job of that?

    We’re just starting to study this in our laboratory. We think one way to forge these connections is by having people at different ages work together on something to solve—let’s say there’s a community challenge of some sort, whether it’s having enough food distributed, building a community center, or something where people come together to work on a project together. That’s why we form strong bonds. 

    In the past, a lot of intergenerational efforts have been friendly visiting programs, and those have never been successful. They’re usually patronizing to old people. I think it’s key to approach it differently and say, ‘I’m so lucky because I live in an intergenerational world.’

    This article is part of TIME Longevity, an editorial platform dedicated to exploring how and why people are living longer and what this means for individuals, institutions, and the future of society. For other articles on this topic, click here.

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    Angela Haupt

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  • This Vitamin Slashes The Risk Of A Second Heart Attack By 50%

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    In the United States, someone has a heart attack nearly every 40 seconds1. That’s over 800,000 individuals a year, 200,000 of which are a person’s second heart attack. That’s right, the risk of having a second heart attack after a first one is significant. And researchers are particularly interested in ways to mitigate a recurrent event. 

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  • Struggling To Sleep? Science Says This Is Better Than Any Sleep Aid

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    Time to hit the hay.

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  • The #1 Science-Backed Habit To Slow Brain Aging, Study Finds

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    Take control over how fast your brain ages.

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  • 8 Ways to Stay Healthy As You Age

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    Most people might not have heard of the Framingham Heart Study. But the massive public-health research effort, now in its 77th year of conducting in-depth analysis of more than 15,000 people, is the source of many insights we now have into healthier aging. It inspired the first checklist for assessing heart disease risk, and our current understanding of how to reduce cardiovascular disease can be traced directly to its findings.

    While the Framingham Heart Study started off solely focused on heart health, following a large subset of the inhabitants of a former mill town on the outskirts of Boston throughout their lives, it is now providing information about the brain, liver, and many other organs.

    As part of TIME’s series interviewing leaders in the longevity field, we spoke to epidemiologist Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, the current head of the study and a professor at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, about the study and what it tells us about aging well. 

    This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

    What is the Framingham Heart Study?

    It’s the longest-running community-based study in the world. Its origins lie in finding the root causes of cardiovascular diseases, especially heart attacks and strokes. In 1948, the people who designed the study enrolled about a third of the population of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, which is about 20 miles west of Boston. They really wanted to understand what was causing the emerging epidemic of heart disease after World War II.

    It was already the leading cause of death, but it was quite clear that it was on the rise, and it wasn’t well-understood why that was happening. There were some very good hypotheses implying that diet and cigarette smoking might be linked, but it had never really been shown systematically or consistently.

    They started to understand that it would be valuable to have families involved in this study—that heart disease is not just a man’s disease, and that there might be some familial component. They hadn’t even discovered DNA yet. This is decades before thinking about genetics.

    Read More: How Tracking Your Health Metrics Can Help You Live Longer

    They saw all of the participants every two years and did a full physical examination, collected blood, measured height and weight, things like that. They asked, What were they doing? What were their health habits? Really deep data collection for what was available at the time.

    By the early 1960s, they had a strong signal that, in fact, blood cholesterol levels were tightly linked to risk for cardiovascular disease. Blood pressure was especially tightly linked to risks for cardiovascular disease and smoking. Pretty quickly thereafter, they could see that body weight was related, that sedentary lifestyle was related, certain aspects of diet were related.

    So Framingham is really the study that put what we now consider the traditional risk factors for cardiovascular disease on the map. 

    What happened next?

    They enrolled another 5,000-plus individuals who were the offspring of the original participants and the spouses of those offspring. So we’re starting to get the genetic linkages, but also the environmental linkages—the shared environment between spouses. It was decades before we understood these things were important, but there were inklings, and they were smart enough to listen to those signals. So the offspring cohorts get examined about every four years, in addition to the first cohort being examined still every two years. That goes on through the 1970s and 80s and 90s.

    We start to understand more about not just total cholesterol, but the subcomponents of cholesterol. We start to understand more that it’s actually your systolic blood pressure that’s more dangerous for you than your diastolic blood pressure. Certain types of dietary factors, certain types of physical activity were better.

    Fast forward another few decades: in 2002, Framingham enrolled the third generation of related individuals. Along the way, the town of Framingham was actually changing pretty dramatically. Originally, back in 1948, Framingham was a town largely made up of people from European ancestry. It was a mill town, so there was a broad stratification socioeconomically, but it was pretty homogeneous in terms of race and ethnicity—almost exclusively white. But by the 90s and 2000s, there were lots of people of Asian heritage; a lot of Brazilian people settled in Framingham, so it became a much more diverse community.

    Read More: Unlocking the Secrets to Living to 100

    In total, we’re following six different groups of people, all of whom are related to Framingham in some way. And now there’s the technology to fully sequence someone’s DNA, and understand modifications to that DNA, called epigenetics. We can collect data on what their cells are actually transcribing. We can collect data on proteomics, metabolomics, microbiomics, and there are new technologies to help us look inside the body non-invasively, so we can see disease developing in the cardiovascular system, in the brain and the kidneys.

    There has been a huge explosion in the ways we can characterize people. And Framingham has really been a leader all along in understanding the process of aging in every organ system in the body. Yes, we are still the Framingham Heart Study, but we have just as much activity going on in brain health across the life course, and lots of activity looking at bone health, kidney health, lung health, liver health—you name it—because these people are so well studied across their entire life course. 

    What kinds of things can people do to reduce the risk of diseases of aging?

    The American Heart Association has kind of a nice way to package this all together, called Life’s Essential Eight. It’s a platform in which people can measure their cardiovascular health status today. It’s also linked to really positive health outcomes over time, and it’s influenced by evidence from the Framingham Heart Study. 

    The eight components are not going to surprise you, but they’re all actionable. They’re all modifiable, and they’re all things that people can do today to improve their cardiovascular health, which has been shown to reduce their risk for Alzheimer’s disease, all forms of cardiovascular disease, even cancer, arthritis—all the things that we worry about as chronic diseases of aging. If you focus on your cardiovascular health, you’ll have benefits for all these things simultaneously.

    Read More: Want to Live Longer? First Find Out How Old You Really Are

    So what are the eight components? They are a healthy diet, participating in physical activity, avoiding all forms of nicotine exposure (combustible cigarettes, but also other forms of nicotine exposure, because they’re toxic, too), healthy sleep, healthy weight, healthy blood pressure, healthy blood sugar, and healthy blood lipids.

    No surprises, but here is what this is about: How can we optimize your health today, so that we extend not only your lifespan, but your healthspan—meaning not just the years in your life, but the life in your years? 

    Can we make the date that you get sick much later—much closer to the time you’re going to die—so that you have more healthy years, not just more years, period? 

    We don’t seem to necessarily be doing what the science suggests, as a society. Why is that? 

    The truth is, although we’ve known that for 60 years, we’re still terrible at implementing it in public-health policies and in clinical practice. It’s a pretty simple message, but we don’t design our society, our environment, our neighborhoods, or our food supply to optimize those things.

    It is possible to take this information and make a change. Great story: In the early 70s, Finland had the highest coronary heart disease death rates in the world, by a fair amount. They took information from Framingham and they said, You know what, let’s design a study where we take a county with particularly high coronary disease death rates and we just make some public-health changes. We’re going to implement smoking policy changes. We’re going to help people quit. We’re going to stop subsidizing meat, and we’re going to start subsidizing fruits and vegetables in our food supply.

    Read More: Scientists Say These Daily Routines Can Slow Cognitive Decline

    Immediately, the rates of coronary heart disease started to fall, and the strategies were soon applied across the country. By 30 years later, there was an 84% decline in coronary disease death rates, and suddenly Finland has the lowest coronary disease death rates in the world—so going from last to first.

    In the U.S., we saw about a 70% decline in death rates from heart disease between 1968 and 2010, because we’ve gotten better clinically, and we’ve done some things with public health. 

    Unfortunately, I think while we were making really, really great progress, the obesity epidemic has started to really kick in on the burden of cardiovascular diseases. Because obesity will drive higher blood pressure, higher blood sugar, more adverse cholesterol levels—all sorts of things—that sort of becomes a perfect storm. Since 2011, we’ve now seen leveling off of those improvements in death rates and maybe even some reversal, which is unfortunate. We understand everything we need to know about preventing cardiovascular disease. As we actually implement that, we’ll expand healthy aging. 

    What does the future hold for the Framingham Heart Study?

    Well, you may have heard that funding for science is a little difficult these days. But my hope would be that we would continue to represent the town of Framingham. I think there could be real value also for enrolling our fourth and our fifth generation.

    The more we’ve studied the life course of all these chronic diseases, the more we’ve understood that every time we get a diagnosis, the horse is already partly out of the barn, if not all the way. So we need to get much, much earlier in the life course with prevention.

    Read More: Your Brain Reveals a Lot About Your Age

    I’ll leave you something hopeful. In another community-based study—a kind of descendant of the Framingham Heart Study—when they looked at how long people lived without cardiovascular disease, they found that lifestyle wins. Even people with high-risk genes, if they have a good lifestyle, they on average live 12 years longer than people with good genes but poor lifestyle habits. What’s more, they live 19 years longer on average without cardiovascular disease.

    They not only extended their lifespan; they extended their healthspan substantially.

    Genetics are not destiny. We can actually bend that curve, and people can do better if they can pursue these healthy lifestyle options. So much of this is actually in our control. But we need help: We need help from our food supply. We need help from good public-health policies so we are not exposed to indoor air that is contaminated by cigarette smoke. We need safe streets to go out and do physical activity. We need to actually be able to afford to buy fruits and vegetables.

    A lot of this is policy that sets the stage. But there’s a lot in our control as well.

    This article is part of TIME Longevity, an editorial platform dedicated to exploring how and why people are living longer and what this means for individuals, institutions, and the future of society. For other articles on this topic, click here.

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    Veronique Greenwood

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  • Treat the Cause | NutritionFacts.org

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    Treat the underlying cause of chronic lifestyle diseases.

    It’s been said that more than 2,000 years ago, Hippocrates declared, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” In actuality, it appears that he never actually said those words, but there’s “no doubt about the relevance of food…and its role in health and disease states” in his writings. Regardless, 2,000 years ago, disease was thought to arise from a bad sense of “humors,” as you can see here and at 0:32 in my video Lifestyle and Disease Prevention: Your DNA Is Not Your Destiny.

    Now, we have science, and there is “an overwhelming body of clinical and epidemiological evidence illustrating the dramatic impact of a healthy lifestyle on reducing all-cause mortality”—meaning death from all causes put together—“and preventing chronic diseases such as coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer.” But don’t those diseases just run in our family? What if we just have bad genes?

    According to the esteemed former chair of nutrition at Harvard, for most of the diseases that have contributed “importantly” to mortality in Western peoples, we’ve long known that non-genetic factors often account for at least 80% to 90% of risk. We know this because rates of the leading killers, like major cancers and cardiovascular diseases, vary up to 100-fold around the world, and, “when groups migrate from low- to high-risk countries, their disease rates almost always change to those of the new environment.” Modifiable behavioral factors have been identified, “including specific aspects of diet, overweight, inactivity, and smoking that account for over 70% of stroke and colon cancer, over 80% of coronary heart disease, and over 90% of adult-onset [type 2] diabetes”—diseases that can largely be prevented by our own actions.

    If most of the power is in our own hands, why do we allocate massively more resources to treatment than prevention? And speaking of prevention, “even preventive strategies are heavily biased towards pharmacology rather than supporting improvements in diet and lifestyle that could be more cost-effective. For example, treatment of [high] serum cholesterol with statins alone could cost approximately 30 billion dollars per year in the United States and would have only a modest impact on coronary heart disease incidence. The inherent problem is that most pharmacologic strategies don’t address the underlying causes of ill health in Western countries, which are not drug deficiencies.”

    Ironically, the chronic diseases that are most amenable to lifestyle treatment are the same ones most profitably treated by drugs. Why? If you don’t change your diet, you have to pop the pills every day for the rest of your life. So, the cash-cow drugs are the very drugs we need the least. “Even though the most widely accepted, well-established chronic disease practice guidelines uniformly call for lifestyle change as the first line of therapy, physicians often do not follow these recommendations.” “By ignoring the root causes of disease and neglecting to prioritize lifestyle measures for prevention, the medical community is placing people at harm.”

    “Traditional medical care relies primarily on the application of pharmacologic and surgical interventions after the development of illness,” whereas lifestyle medicine relies primarily on “the use of optimal nutrition (a whole foods, plant-based diet) and exercise in the prevention, arrest, and reversal of chronic conditions leading to premature disability and death. It looks in a holistic way at the underlying causes of illness.”

    Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, director of PharmedOut, a wonderful organization I’m proud to support, wrote a great editorial entitled “Doctors Must Not Be Lapdogs to Drug Firms.” “The illusion that the relationship between medicine and the drug industry is collegial, professional, and personal is carefully maintained by the drug industry, which actually views all transactions with physicians in finely calculated financial terms…The drug industry is happy to play the generous and genial uncle until physicians want to discuss subjects that are off limits, such as the benefits of diet or exercise, or the relationship between medicine and pharmaceutical companies…Let us not be a lapdog to Big Pharma. Rather than sitting contentedly in our master’s lap, let us turn around and bite something tender.”

    Doctor’s Note

    The organization I mentioned, PharmedOut, is a project of Georgetown University Medical Center.

    For more on Lifestyle Medicine, see related videos below.

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    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • 9 Early Signs Of Dementia That Are Often Overlooked By Loved Ones

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    No. 5 may surprise you.

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  • What IBS, Vitamin D Deficiency & Diabetes Reveal About Brain Health

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    Many of us think of brain health as something we worry about later, when we start forgetting names or misplacing keys. But new research suggests that the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s may show up years before any memory lapses do—and in places you might not expect.

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  • How to Die Young at a Very Old Age

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    Everyone will die, but we can live healthier, longer lives until that day comes. That’s the guiding principle that motivates the work and advocacy of Nir Barzilai, a longevity researcher and president of the Academy for Health & Lifespan Research.

    “As a field, we are leading a revolution to target aging and prevent diseases,” says Barzilai, who directs the Institute for Aging Research at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine. 

    Aging drives many diseases, including heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. Many scientists including Barzilai think that the aging process can be modified and that, by doing so, diseases can be forestalled and people can stay healthier for longer. Researchers are exploring ways to alter aging, including through exercise, diet, and drugs.

    As part of TIME’s series interviewing leaders in the longevity field, we spoke to Barzilai about what drew him to longevity science and some areas of anti-aging research that particularly intrigue him.

    This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

    What prompted your interest in longevity research? 

    It started when I was a kid, when I was about 13. I remember walking with my grandfather, who was 67 at the time, and he was telling me about all these things he had done when he was young. I remember looking at him and thinking he looked old. He was balding and was walking slowly. It just sunk in that, oh, one day I’m going to age too, and I want to be able to age in a way that I’ll still be able to do things. I became very interested in understanding the biology of aging.

    Learning later that there is a difference between chronological age and biological age gave me hope that we have such flexibility [to age better]. 

    Aging was considered inevitable. The thing that is inevitable in my mind is death, but aging can be totally modified. That was the hope, but now it’s a promise. What we’re doing now as a field is realizing that promise…how to die young at a very old age.  

    Are you interested in living forever?

    No, no, I don’t have a fear of death, and I’m not an immortalist. I know people who are, but that’s a belief, that’s a religion. For me, I am interested in interfering with aging so that we can prevent disease. I want us to be healthy and then die one day.

    Read More: How Tracking Your Health Metrics Can Help You Live Longer

    Until 150 years ago, life expectancy was between 20 and 30. Today, lifespans have increased threefold. That’s a huge achievement. We harnessed agriculture so people could eat well, we cleaned water, built sewers, developed vaccination. Improving public health is what really got us through. Over those 150 years, every year we have lived a little bit longer than the year before…until we got to the age of about 60. Then all of a sudden we have diseases that never used to kill us. Over the course of human evolution, there were pandemics, there were wars, but people didn’t die from Alzheimer’s disease or diabetes or heart disease. Those are new diseases, right? Aging is what drives many diseases, so we need to interfere with aging before it causes diseases.

    So, you’re confident that the aging process can be altered?

    Yes, this is possible. I’ve collected data from about 850 100-year-olds and their families. We found that the centenarians got diseases 30 years later than most people. They also had what we call a “contraction of morbidity,” so they were sick only for a very short amount of time at the end of their lives.

    So there is an example of people who can live healthier and longer. It’s in our capacity. 

    It’s true that for centenarians, it’s mainly genetics [that is driving longevity]. So people might say, oh, I’m not born with these genes, too bad. But no—when you find these genes, you can usually design a drug that will do what this gene is doing.

    Read More: Unlocking the Secrets to Living to 100

    I’ll give you one example. In nature, small dogs live longer than large dogs, and ponies live longer than horses. In the lab, when we knock out the growth hormone, [animals] live much longer than if we induce it. So it seems that growth hormone is playing a role [in lifespan]. About 60% of our centenarians have something on their genome that interferes with the action of growth hormone.

    What we think is happening is that growth hormone is good for you when you are young. It protects you against many things. But when you are old, you’re starting to break down, and you don’t want to spend your energy on growth. You have to spend your energy on repairing, basically. That could explain why so many of our centenarians are protected: because they don’t spend that much energy on growth.

    Read More: Scientists Say These Daily Routines Can Slow Cognitive Decline

    We have taken an antibody against growth hormone, and we’ve given it to animals, and they live longer.

    So we’re looking at these mechanisms, at these centenarian genes—it’s not one gene, it’s several—and we are designing therapies and giving it to animals who age like people. We’re trying to see if these therapies increase lifespans of the animals. If they do, we can move on to testing in clinical trials and develop a drug.

    The American Federation of Aging Research currently has a “super-ager” study where we are recruiting 10,000 centenarians in order to validate our research and to find more longevity genes. We’re looking for people to register. It’s a cool project.

    Are there already treatments or other interventions that have been proven to slow aging? 

    Optimizing sleep, exercise, diet, and social connectivity all have biological underpinnings, and these interventions are good for every age.

    The enemy to our field right now is the noise that we hear about all the time: all the things out there that are being marketed as the fountain of youth. 

    Supplements are a huge, huge problem. First of all, the bottles you buy might not contain what they claim to. Also, some people are saying you should take a lot of these supplements, but there can be interactions that we don’t always know or understand. We know from a recent paper that people who took multivitamins didn’t have a lower risk of mortality. 

    On the other hand, there are drugs that have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that appear to also target the biology of aging. They include [the diabetes drug] metformin, GLP-1 drugs, and bisphosphonates which are used for osteoporosis. We’re trying to determine [their safety and efficacy]. It’s a work in progress.

    Read More: Want to Live Longer? First Find Out How Old You Really Are

    Personally, I do intermittent fasting for my health. When I started studying the biology of aging, I noticed that the lab animals that had their calories restricted lived longer than their siblings and were healthier. People have taken that to mean that if you have less food, you live longer, but actually it’s the fasting that’s really important. 

    It’s not for everyone, but people who do it really enjoy it. I fast for about 16 hours every day; I start counting after I’m done with dinner. It has had a major impact on my health. I lost some weight, but I also gained muscle. I lost the fogginess that I had sometimes during the day. 

    Looking at the longevity field as a whole, what’s most exciting to you right now? 

    As president of the Academy for Health & Lifespan Research, I try not to take sides, right? But I’ll just mention three things. First of all, there’s something that I would call a left-fielder: hyperbaric oxygen. It sounds crazy…a chamber with very high oxygen for hours. But it’s actually not as crazy as it sounds. I’ve brought those chambers to my lab to understand in animals how it targets the biology of aging.

    The second thing is mitochondria, the powerhouse of our cells. As people age, the number and function of mitochondria decreases. But it seems that you can replenish it by infusing the blood with mitochondria. There are companies that are now doing that.

    Finally, the future of the field for me is being able to take a young person, 20 years old, and giving them a treatment and repeating it every few months or years to reverse their aging. We already know a way to partially reprogram our cells to think that they’re young again, and this is already in the works in preclinical studies and even going into humans. 

    Do you remember that video that went viral where the leaders of China and Russia were talking about longevity and how we can get organ transplants and live to 150 years? Well, that’s not going to happen…but there is a company that is taking organs and using partial reprogramming to rejuvenate them. The big problem with organ transplants is we don’t have enough organs, and many donated organs are discarded because they are too old and have other problems. This technology could make organ transplants much more available.

    This article is part of TIME Longevity, an editorial platform dedicated to exploring how and why people are living longer and what this means for individuals, institutions, and the future of society. For other articles on this topic, click here.

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    Dominique Mosbergen

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  • You Have More Control Over Aging Than You Realize — Here’s What to Focus On

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    We often think of aging as something written in our DNA, a process already mapped out long before we can influence it. But emerging research suggests that the way we live, move, eat, and recover may shape longevity far more than our genes ever could.

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  • Do You Need Three Beverages At All Times? It's Actually A Longevity Hack

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    The hydration combo science says could help you live longer

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  • Protein vs. Amino Acid Supplements: Here’s The Difference

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    For the last two years, we’ve seen multiple supplements that were once only found in bodybuilders’ shaker cups make their way into mainstream use. First, it was protein powders, as everyone realized they would benefit from a protein boost. Next was creatine, as people realized this highly researched supplement delivers fitness, recovery, and cognitive benefits to all.* Now, it’s all about amino acids. 

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