The Latest Longevity Rx
It’s about health and lifespan
GENETICIST AND HARVARD Medical School professor David A. Sinclair has been on Time magazine’s list of “100 Most Influential People in the World” for his work on prevention and reversal of age-related disease. He’s confident we can live longer and healthier, and that’s the premise of his recently published book, Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To.
Tara Losinski What’s more important in your work, quantity or quality of life?
David A. Sinclair It’s 100 per cent about quality. It just turns out that if you’re not sick or you don’t have a disease of aging, you don’t die – unless you don’t cross the road safely. You have an increased, what we call, health span. And if you extend health span, you automatically get a longer lifespan.
TL You write about stressors, like exercise, that activate our survival circuit. How does that help?
DS The survival circuit serves to keep us alive for longer, healthier for longer when we’re under threat. If you run out of breath on the treadmill for example, that’s good. The circuit itself leads to aging, we believe, but keeping it on high alert is the best you can do to slow down the negative impact. We say whatever doesn’t kill you makes you live longer. But a little goes a long way.
TL You also study supplements, including resveratrol (an antioxidant in plants such as wine grapes). What’s better?
DS I think that you need both approaches, and that’s the best we can do for now. It’s not an excuse to just sit on the couch and pop a pill. With the resveratrol work that we published, we did see that a combination of it and fasting extended lifespan the best.
TL Speaking of fasting, you cite its merit and practise intermittent fasting yourself.
DS We’re taught that three square meals a day is what we should be having. That, in my field, has been thrown out the window. It doesn’t agree with the last 20 years of research on aging.
Your body should be a bellwether, and your doctor should let you know if fasting is fine. But if you are in good health, I really couldn’t recommend anything better for long-term health than being hungry a little bit during the day.
TL And if we can’t manage, as you say, exercise that leaves us out of breath?
DS It’s just – move. And move as much as you have time for, as much as you can.
So my father, at 80, has been doing a couple of days of exercise a week and doesn’t regret a minute of it. He’s now as fit as he was at 30 because he has been moving for the last 50 years. And we like to hope that the supplements he’s taking are helping as well – they don’t seem to be hurting.
If you are frail and you can’t run on the treadmill and you don’t have the energy, we think we have things for you as well, which are molecules like resveratrol that mimic exercise.
TL You also write about, one day, being able to reverse aging genetically.
DS So, similar to the experiments we did with mice where we accelerated their age by 50 per cent, if you can give something, you can also take it away.
TL You’re not worried about us kicking around for all that extra time?
DS It’s hard enough to extend the lifespan of a mouse by 20 per cent, so I’m not worried about that. But I think that my father is a role model. And that’s the future we should talk about. Because the world will be a much better place when people stay productive as they age, and their wisdom can continue to be imparted.