Million little things1/1/2024 ![]() That became the first section of the book. They identified a list of “essential pathways ” for example, drugs that can block the hormone IGF-1, or drugs to block the pro-aging enzyme TOR.īut I realized as I looked at this: Wait, every single one of these pathways could be regulated through diet. They were brought together to identify the most promising strategies to combat aging. My inspiration for writing the book was a consensus document “Interventions to Slow Aging in Humans” compiled by the top researchers in the anti-aging field (the likes of Drs. My aim was to cover every possible angle for developing the optimal diet and lifestyle, for the longest healthiest lifespan-based on the best available balance of evidence. So, you can download the studies and read them all yourself. How Not to Age ended up with 13,000 citations, all of which I have hyperlinked for you online to access all the original sources. ![]() How Not to Die had about 2,000 citations. That’s why I cite everything to the teeth. When it comes to something as life-and-death important as to what to feed ourselves and our families, we should rely not on anecdote, but on evidence. The problem is that the anti-aging field is said to be a “fertile ground for cons, scams, and get-rich-quick schemes.” As a former president of the Gerontological Society wrote, there have been “few subjects which have been more misleading to the uncritical and more profitable for the unscrupulous.” Not only does the popular literature on the subject harbor a “huge amount of misinformation,” but most age-researching scientists widely known to the public are said to be “unscrupulous purveyors of useless nostrums,” according to the editor in chief of a leading gerontology journal. Because risks tend to double every seven years-like if the average 65-year-old had the health of a 58-year-old? Slowing aging by even just seven years could cut everyone’s risk of death, frailty, and disability in half. Imagine if there were an intervention that didn’t just reduce your risk of the leading killers, but also arthritis, osteoporosis, sensory impairments. So, rather than playing “whack-a-mole” by tackling each disease separately, slowing the rate of aging could potentially address all these issues simultaneously. If one age-related ailment doesn’t get us, another will. Why? Because dodging cancer would just mean delaying death from a heart attack or stroke. But even if all forms of cancer were eliminated, the average life expectancy in the U.S. Instead of our current piecemeal approach of focusing on individual diseases, what about slowing down the aging process itself? When I was a nerdy little kid, I wanted to cure cancer when I grew up. But what if the rate of aging was modifiable too? Now the reason we focus on things like cholesterol is because it’s a modifiable risk factor. So yes, within the same age bracket, having a high cholesterol can increase your risk of heart disease up to 20-fold, but an 80-year-old may have five hundred times the risk of having a heart attack compared to a twenty-year-old. The rate of death increases exponentially for age-related diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, dementia. But is it really?īecause the single greatest risk factor for most of our killer diseases is how old you are, one could argue that the leading cause of death is actually aging. If aging kills via diseases, why wasn’t my book How Not to Die all the longevity book anyone needs? In it, I ran through preventing, arresting, or reversing each of our top 15 killers-starting with heart disease, not only the #1 killer of centenarians, but of men and women across the board, and projected to remain that way in the decades to come. ![]() Though most were perceived-even by their physicians-to have been healthy just prior to death, not one “died, of old age.” They died from disease––most commonly, heart disease. From a study of more than 42,000 consecutive autopsies, centenarians-those who live to be a hundred-were found to have succumbed to disease in 100% of the cases. There may be no such thing as dying from old age.
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