50 really is the new 30

You can live younger, longer but if you are looking for a magic bullet, forget it. It all comes down to our brain-body connection. – Norman Swan

We must be doing something right when it comes to living younger longer. The statistics are dramatic when you compare today’s chances of dying to 50 years ago. If you’re 50 years old today, your chances of dying at that age are the equivalent of someone in their late thirties 50 years ago. If you’re 80 today, your chances of dying at that age are the equivalent of someone in their late sixties 50 years ago. If you’re 90 years of age today, your chances of dying at that age are the equivalent of someone in their early eighties 50 years ago. Put another way, in 1950, the risk of death in the following 12 months for an 85year-old woman in Sweden was 17 per cent. Today it’s 7 per cent. The size of reductions have been similar for men and even people aged over 90. In the US, at age 95, the risk of dying has fallen from 31 per cent to 22 per cent. So why has this happened? There are many reasons, including stopping smoking, but it’s far more than that.

There are a few concepts about living younger longer that are important to get straight up front. The first is to be clear that the aim is to have a body (including your brain) that has fewer kilometres on the clock than your number of birthdays would suggest. In other words, your biological age is less than your years. There are many markers of being biologically older than your calendar age. High blood pressure, high blood sugars and fats, too big a waist circumference, resting pulse rate, exercise tolerance, muscle strength, cognitive impairment and levels of chronic stress and psychological distress are all markers of increased biological age. There are also markers than can be measured in our genes and chromosomes.

There’s also evidence that if you look younger than you are on the outside then you are likely to be younger on the inside as well.

The second is that it’s critical to understand that living younger longer starts above your neck – in

your brain. We tend to behave as though our brain and mind are separate from the rest of our body when in fact they are in it together and our brains run the show. This has huge implications for living younger longer.

We humans are exquisitely designed for living as long as possible and the organ that allows that to happen is our brain. It has evolved to monitor the environment around us including temperature, night and day, food and relationships. The brain takes in all that via our eyes, ears, skin, lungs and gut and then tells the rest of the body how to respond. If we perceive threats around us or are battered by stress then we shouldn’t be surprised that our immune systems get fired up for much longer periods than they were designed for just in case we need to be defended. The side effect though of a fired up immune system is that it causes inflammation which ages us prematurely.

The third concept is that what goes on in the rest of our body can speed up or slow down how our brains age. A Mediterranean diet gives us healthy arteries and an anti-ageing microbiome. Moderately intense exercise has very significant effects on the brain and ageing.

And the final concept explains why taking anti-ageing supplements don’t appear to work, at least not yet. The word here is balance. What’s good for you can be bad for you and what seems to be bad for you can sometimes be good for you. Our bodies work best when there’s a balance and the challenge of staying young as long as possible is restoring the balance to a youthful profile. Supplements turn out not to be good at restoring that balance. The reason is that single supplements might give the ageing process a nudge but the body is stubborn and finds ways to tilt back towards ageing. That’s probably why diet and exercise are more effective because they come at the body from lots of different angles keeping it off balance, so to speak.

Going back to the brain, let’s take sleep, which is much misunderstood when it comes to ageing prematurely. Sleep is thought to be restorative and a chance for our brains to put out the day’s garbage. Sleeping for fewer than six hours a night has been said to speed up ageing but in fact recent research suggests it’s not so much how long you sleep but how well. Poor sleep quality turns out to be the thing to focus on which is good news since even the best sleep therapy doesn’t get you sleeping much longer. It improves your sleep quality and that is associated with living younger longer.

Another related factor is your body clock – your circadian rhythm.

There are clocks pretty much everywhere in the body and there’s a growing body of research suggesting they play a key role in how quickly or slowly you age. Body clocks put your temperature up and down during the day and among many other things, vary your iron levels, how sticky your blood is, how active and ‘inflamed’ your immune system is and maybe even the function of cells in your joints, increasing or decreasing your risk of arthritis. Clocks increase or decrease the speed at which cells age. The master clock is in the brain and responds to light in our environment. Remembering that the mind and body are ‘one’ – you won’t be surprised to hear that the master clock (called the suprachiasmatic nucleus – SCN) then sends messages to the rest of the body through hormones in the blood as well as directly and at high speed via our nerves – our electrical cabling. Getting your clock – your circadian rhythm – in order may be an important part of staying young. It would be sobering if middle-of-thenight screen time, our never dark environment or street lamps streaming into your bedroom through inadequate window blinds were to age you prematurely. It’s more than getting a good night’s sleep. It’s also about what and when we eat and how and when we exercise and the interaction of the body clock with our psychological wellbeing, including whether we’re chronically stressed.

The message is that no one thing is going to get you living younger longer – even fasting every couple of days. It’s a package. You’re probably expecting me to dump the proverbial on a whole heap of stuff from colonic irrigation to detoxifying yourself, to shutting yourself in a tepee while someone rings gongs, to ayahuasca-fuelled weekends spent hallucinating and vomiting.

Well, you don’t need me to. Just stay sensible and sceptical and holistic, and remember that your brain runs the show.

“It’s critical to understand that living younger longer starts above your neck – in your brain.”

So You Want To Live Younger Longer? by Dr Norman Swan, Hachette, is on sale from July 27.