Searching for the fountain of youth
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying."
Woody Allen
(This article is still a draft and I'm not an expert on the field.
WARNING: I'm not a medical doctor and I'm not recommending any change on diet or lifestyle
So use the information here only as a starting point for a personal investigation)
Let's be honest about it: aging sucks.
In the last century humans in the developed nations almost doubled their life expectancy. A man born on the US on 1900 could expect on average to live 47 years; the same US man born on 2000 has a life expectancy of 75.
Women live even longer.
This great result was obtained thanks to improvements in health care, hygiene, technology, work conditions and a period of peace in the western world that has never happened before.
Despite all this great technological process we haven't managed to enanche human lifespan. People past 80 years old are very old and frail and very few lucky guys are able to reach 100.
Still it is right now that, for the first time in human history, we are in a position to study the details of the biological process of aging and maybe delay or reverse it.
The computer revolution is helping us to make the biology revolution andgenomics is the first step.
Aubrey de Grey said he believes the first person who'll live to 1000 years is already born.
I don't share his optimism (almost all the experts on the field disagree with him), but still hope that someday scientist will be able to enhance human lifespan.
It's difficult but not impossible. It does not violate any law of physics, like for example perpetual motion.
In fact, it has been already done on other (biologically simpler) species.
This is very interesting, but what can one do, right now, to hope to live longer?
Does antioxidants, resveratrol or growth hormone work?
It is possible to preserve our body healthy enough to benefit from some kind of medical technology who will appear on the next decades?
I really don't know, what will follow is a collection of my beliefs on the matter, based mainly on readings, studies result and anecdotical evidence.
Why anecdotical and not scientific evidence?
Well, scientific results should follow a severe protocol. For example if you want to prove that caloric restriction enanche human lifespan you should have experiments on humans (with a control group) so you have basically to wait about 80 years.
I have to take decisions NOW, so I just make the most logicalhypotesis from the results we already have, well aware of the fact that they may be wrong.
Presently, there is no proven way to delay, even if slightly, the human aging process.
We also are not able to measure the biological age of a man.
The only thing that might work, and in fact is working on mice and monkey, is caloric restriction WITHOUT MALNUTRITION.
(WARNING, I'M NO MEDICAL DOCTOR AND I'M NOT RECOMMENDING ANY CHANGE ON LIFE OR DIET. CALORIC RESTRICTION IS DANGEROUS WITHOUT MEDICAL SUPPORT)
The problem with caloric restriction WITHOUT MALNUTRITION is that is dangerous, hard (people don't like being hungry all the day, every day) and has many negative effects, from the loss of bone and muscle mass to a sharp decrease on sexual libido ( the body is too busy surviving with so little food to want to reproduce).
Sounds scary.
Maybe you'll not live longer but surely your life is going to feel even too long.
Nonetheless there some people who are experimenting with caloric restriction and say that you can mitigate the problems and feel younger.
A better idea seems to try to understand why caloric restriction works and then mimic it's behaviour with a pill or something like that.
Many researcher and companies are trying to do exactly that, without any results until now.
There are some reasons to think (but I can easily be wrong) that glucose restriction and insulin sensitivity are really important. So maybe paleodiet is a good idea. On the other hand eating too much meat can also be dangerous.
Many people who follow a raw food diet seem much younger than their peers. Maybe it's because they eat less and they are on a caloric restricted diet without knowing it. Maybe because they eat very little sugar and packaged foods and prefer plants. Maybe it's because they don't eat meat. Maybe it's just a few genetically lucky people who are used as testimonials of the raw food movement.
As you can see finding the truth is never easy, and correlation does not mean causation.
So , what do you do to keep yourself young?
Well, you can't do so much.
I explain better my lifestyle on my article on nutrition and exercise.
Here I give some bullet point.
(REMEMBER I'M NO MEDICAL DOCTOR SO I DON'T GIVE MEDICAL ADVICE I ONLY DESCRIBE WHAT I'M DOING)
I don't smoke, don't use drugs.
I'm convinced one of the keys (but not the only one) of caloric restriction success is that with little glucose you have little insulin on your body and preserve the insulin sensitivity.
So I never use sugar, never drink coca cola or any of these plenty-of-sugar drinks, almost never eat sweets or packaged foods.
I also think it would be better to limit potatoes,bread and pasta and adopt an diet similar to the paleo-diet with a bit less meat and a little more fruit and vegetables (read my article about exercise and nutrition for more about this), but since I'm very young (26 at the time of writing this) and very skinny (about 64 kg, and I'm 180 cm tall) I can get along well eating bread and pasta.
I'm convinced inflammation plays an important role on health as you age, and that the best supplements one can take are fish oil and vitamin D.
I'm conviced is extremely important to reduce stress and have a positive attitude towards life.
I'm convinced you should exercise.
How people, expecially not so young ones, should exercise?
I prefer intense and brief exercise to long hours on a treadmill, and I think "chronic cardio" is unnatural (have you ever seen an animal running around at constant pace for two hours?) and can be detrimental to health (it can damage your joints with overuse, it can increase cortisol which is a stress hormone and create free radicals).
If you want to do aerobic training you can do a natural and low impact training like walking. Or you can run but not too much ( no more than 30 minutes and not too many days a week).
So weight training (always slow motion, controlled and safe), sprinting and interval training is the way to go.
The goal of exercise should be to keep and increase muscle mass (which decline with age) and to boost growth hormone and testosterone (which both decline with age).
To paraphrase Satchel Paige, the ageless baseball pitcher, biomarkers are those things that tell how old you would be “if you didn’t know how old you was.” In the book Biomarkers (Simon & Schuster, 1991), Evans and Rosenberg isolated the following signposts of vitality that can be altered for the better by changes in lifestyle:
1) Muscle Mass
2) Strength
3) Basal Metabolic Rate
4) Body Fat Percentage
5) Aerobic Capacity
6) Blood-sugar Tolerance
7) Cholesterol/HDL Ratio
8) Blood Pressure
9) Bone density
10) Ability to regulate Internal Temperature
Significantly, all 10 biomarkers can be revived or improved through strength training.
I'm sorry if this article is confusing and failed to explain many concepts, biology and medicine are not my fields and English is not my mother language.
I give you some links for a better understanding.
Interesting guys on aging research:
Aubrey de Grey (very controversial)
Cynthia Kenyon
A very good site on aging with many other links on relevant websites:
http://www.senescence.info/
A blog of a guy who is researching about aging theories and atni-agin:
Vince Giuliano anti-aging blog
A guy who is on a caloric restriction diet (I don't think it's a good idea for most people):
http://matts-cr.blogspot.com/
You can google some people who are in top shape at advanced age:
Jack Lalanne,Bob Delmonteque, Clarence Bass, Art deVany, Robby Robinson, Moe Carson (almost unbelievable).
All of them are training with weights and eat almost no sugary and packaged foods.
Woody Allen
(This article is still a draft and I'm not an expert on the field.
WARNING: I'm not a medical doctor and I'm not recommending any change on diet or lifestyle
So use the information here only as a starting point for a personal investigation)
Let's be honest about it: aging sucks.
In the last century humans in the developed nations almost doubled their life expectancy. A man born on the US on 1900 could expect on average to live 47 years; the same US man born on 2000 has a life expectancy of 75.
Women live even longer.
This great result was obtained thanks to improvements in health care, hygiene, technology, work conditions and a period of peace in the western world that has never happened before.
Despite all this great technological process we haven't managed to enanche human lifespan. People past 80 years old are very old and frail and very few lucky guys are able to reach 100.
Still it is right now that, for the first time in human history, we are in a position to study the details of the biological process of aging and maybe delay or reverse it.
The computer revolution is helping us to make the biology revolution and
Aubrey de Grey said he believes the first person who'll live to 1000 years is already born.
I don't share his optimism (almost all the experts on the field disagree with him), but still hope that someday scientist will be able to enhance human lifespan.
It's difficult but not impossible. It does not violate any law of physics, like for example perpetual motion.
In fact, it has been already done on other (biologically simpler) species.
This is very interesting, but what can one do, right now, to hope to live longer?
Does antioxidants, resveratrol or growth hormone work?
It is possible to preserve our body healthy enough to benefit from some kind of medical technology who will appear on the next decades?
I really don't know, what will follow is a collection of my beliefs on the matter, based mainly on readings, studies result and anecdotical evidence.
Why anecdotical and not scientific evidence?
Well, scientific results should follow a severe protocol. For example if you want to prove that caloric restriction enanche human lifespan you should have experiments on humans (with a control group) so you have basically to wait about 80 years.
I have to take decisions NOW, so I just make the most logical
Presently, there is no proven way to delay, even if slightly, the human aging process.
We also are not able to measure the biological age of a man.
The only thing that might work, and in fact is working on mice and monkey, is caloric restriction WITHOUT MALNUTRITION.
(WARNING, I'M NO MEDICAL DOCTOR AND I'M NOT RECOMMENDING ANY CHANGE ON LIFE OR DIET. CALORIC RESTRICTION IS DANGEROUS WITHOUT MEDICAL SUPPORT)
The problem with caloric restriction WITHOUT MALNUTRITION is that is dangerous, hard (people don't like being hungry all the day, every day) and has many negative effects, from the loss of bone and muscle mass to a sharp decrease on sexual libido ( the body is too busy surviving with so little food to want to reproduce).
Sounds scary.
Maybe you'll not live longer but surely your life is going to feel even too long.
Nonetheless there some people who are experimenting with caloric restriction and say that you can mitigate the problems and feel younger.
A better idea seems to try to understand why caloric restriction works and then mimic it's behaviour with a pill or something like that.
Many researcher and companies are trying to do exactly that, without any results until now.
There are some reasons to think (but I can easily be wrong) that glucose restriction and insulin sensitivity are really important. So maybe paleodiet is a good idea. On the other hand eating too much meat can also be dangerous.
Many people who follow a raw food diet seem much younger than their peers. Maybe it's because they eat less and they are on a caloric restricted diet without knowing it. Maybe because they eat very little sugar and packaged foods and prefer plants. Maybe it's because they don't eat meat. Maybe it's just a few genetically lucky people who are used as testimonials of the raw food movement.
As you can see finding the truth is never easy, and correlation does not mean causation.
So , what do you do to keep yourself young?
Well, you can't do so much.
I explain better my lifestyle on my article on nutrition and exercise.
Here I give some bullet point.
(REMEMBER I'M NO MEDICAL DOCTOR SO I DON'T GIVE MEDICAL ADVICE I ONLY DESCRIBE WHAT I'M DOING)
I don't smoke, don't use drugs.
I'm convinced one of the keys (but not the only one) of caloric restriction success is that with little glucose you have little insulin on your body and preserve the insulin sensitivity.
So I never use sugar, never drink coca cola or any of these plenty-of-sugar drinks, almost never eat sweets or packaged foods.
I also think it would be better to limit potatoes,bread and pasta and adopt an diet similar to the paleo-diet with a bit less meat and a little more fruit and vegetables (read my article about exercise and nutrition for more about this), but since I'm very young (26 at the time of writing this) and very skinny (about 64 kg, and I'm 180 cm tall) I can get along well eating bread and pasta.
I'm convinced inflammation plays an important role on health as you age, and that the best supplements one can take are fish oil and vitamin D.
I'm conviced is extremely important to reduce stress and have a positive attitude towards life.
I'm convinced you should exercise.
How people, expecially not so young ones, should exercise?
I prefer intense and brief exercise to long hours on a treadmill, and I think "chronic cardio" is unnatural (have you ever seen an animal running around at constant pace for two hours?) and can be detrimental to health (it can damage your joints with overuse, it can increase cortisol which is a stress hormone and create free radicals).
If you want to do aerobic training you can do a natural and low impact training like walking. Or you can run but not too much ( no more than 30 minutes and not too many days a week).
So weight training (always slow motion, controlled and safe), sprinting and interval training is the way to go.
The goal of exercise should be to keep and increase muscle mass (which decline with age) and to boost growth hormone and testosterone (which both decline with age).
To paraphrase Satchel Paige, the ageless baseball pitcher, biomarkers are those things that tell how old you would be “if you didn’t know how old you was.” In the book Biomarkers (Simon & Schuster, 1991), Evans and Rosenberg isolated the following signposts of vitality that can be altered for the better by changes in lifestyle:
1) Muscle Mass
2) Strength
3) Basal Metabolic Rate
4) Body Fat Percentage
5) Aerobic Capacity
6) Blood-sugar Tolerance
7) Cholesterol/HDL Ratio
8) Blood Pressure
9) Bone density
10) Ability to regulate Internal Temperature
Significantly, all 10 biomarkers can be revived or improved through strength training.
I'm sorry if this article is confusing and failed to explain many concepts, biology and medicine are not my fields and English is not my mother language.
I give you some links for a better understanding.
Interesting guys on aging research:
Aubrey de Grey (very controversial)
Cynthia Kenyon
A very good site on aging with many other links on relevant websites:
http://www.senescence.info/
A blog of a guy who is researching about aging theories and atni-agin:
A guy who is on a caloric restriction diet (I don't think it's a good idea for most people):
http://matts-cr.blogspot.com/
You can google some people who are in top shape at advanced age:
Jack Lalanne,Bob Delmonteque, Clarence Bass, Art deVany, Robby Robinson, Moe Carson (almost unbelievable).
All of them are training with weights and eat almost no sugary and packaged foods.
