LIVE LONG & PROSPER
Get some exercise, make sure to rest and lay off sugar
Until recently, our knowledge about aging well appeared straightforward. Low-fat foods with a good portion of carbohydrates would keep us healthy.
It seemed to work: The average age in wealthy nations has climbed gently for decades. Clearly, we have been doing something right. Until now.
In 2015, life expectancy in the United States declined and continues to drop. Something similar is happening in other rich countries. The obesity epidemic is at least partly responsible.
For decades, many people followed the “heart-healthy” diet, cutting out fats and eating cereals and whole grains.
But last year, the Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study — which examined the health of 135,000 people in 18 countries, over a decade — turned everything upside down. Researchers found that those who ate butter and eggs had fewer strokes and lived longer than those who ate cornflakes.
When I started practising medicine, 25 years ago, I truly believed that butter was bad and margarine was good. But I’ve learned that every five years, we need to unlearn half of what we thought was true. My book Younger for Longer (Little, Brown) is a culmination of that 25-year journey and shares the secrets I have learned.
It’s sugar and refined carbohydrates, not fat, that are public enemy No. 1 — strongly linked to obesity.
Second, antioxidants are not the health-hit we once hoped. Many of us have spent years consuming them, in the form of vitamins C or E. But it now seems this can harm us more than it helps.
In the 1960s, Dr. Denham Harman explained that cells are damaged by free radicals, and that antioxidants attack those free radicals. He was right, but it turns out that our cells have their own powerful antioxidant system called SOD (superoxide dismutase). Taking lots of antioxidants seems to make SOD lazy. A better solution is to exercise daily because that wakes up our powerful SOD system, which is a far stronger antioxidant than any supplement. We now know that exercise reduces stress, stimulates brain growth and cuts our risk of diabetes and heart attack.
You could argue exercise (short and intense is the latest advice) is the single most beneficial thing we could do to stay younger for longer. Unfortunately, though, none of this will stave off death ... or might it? For millenniums, we have known our allotted time is about three score years and 10. But many other animals do things differently. The “immortal” jellyfish, for instance, never dies unless eaten. The bowhead whale can live to 200. It has genes that guard against cancer. Scientists hope this knowledge can one day help humans. Academics have also started looking at the growing numbers of people who live to 100. They have found that many centenarians have longevity genes called gerontogenes. Scientists hope, in the future, to be able to transfer healthy gerontogenes from the lucky few to the rest of us.
The human body contains about 20,000 genes, most of which lie dormant. Switching on whatever longevity genes we have is merely a case of living healthily.
If we exercise today and cut out sugar and starch, we will activate them. So if we want to fire up our longevity genes, healthy living needs to be a daily way of life. My grandfather grew up in Edinburgh, survived two world wars and made it healthily into his 90s. Probably his biggest lesson was not to take anything too seriously. Stress can switch off our healthy genes and his jovial approach to life probably kept many of his switched on.