A career in television in front of the camera is enough to make anyone obsess over staying young, but my history as a cancer patient makes me doubly concerned. Call me shallow, but I don’t think I’m alone. I suppose we are all focused at some level on either looking younger or feeling younger. And, since the nation’s pharma companies were able to come up with successful vaccines for a virulent virus they had never seen before in just six to seven months, well, I’m beginning to think that at some point they will devote their attention to fixing aging too.
To that end, I just finished reading a book called “Ageless,” written by a super smart science writer named Andrew Steele, a PhD in physics from the University of Oxford who decoded DNA at the Francis Crick Institute. You get the picture, he’s no slacker. The book works its way through the cutting edge of science research into the causes of aging, which Steele maintains is the scientific challenge of our time.
More than that, Steele says that aging is a disease and problems like cancer, heart disease and diabetes are simply symptoms of it. Aging, he writes, is happening at the cellular level, where aging cells can no longer successfully replicate and muck up the functioning of the still-good cells. Even DNA itself, the building block of life, gets a little woolly as it gets older and loses its potency, its ends fraying and the critical information it shares with the rest of the body distorted. Organs with cells that may not replicate often have it the worst, like the heart.
Meanwhile, scientists are staying up late trying to figure out how to lengthen the lives of these cells that malfunction (possibly a cocktail of a cancer drug and flavanol, dasatinib and quercertin, called D+Q, not to be confused with The DQ) or get new ones (maybe stem cell therapy).
Neither of those solutions are ready for primetime, not yet. In fact, most of the solutions are still being tested on mice, not humans. In other words, the science of preventing aging is still in the early stages of development. Steele estimates that the first drugs to come to market will deal with those aging cells, a specialty called senolytics, in just a few years. Stem cell solutions are decades off.
Even though most transformative solutions are years off, there’s work for regular folks like us to do now before these products hit the market. And this to me, is his biggest insight: Aging, he says, is malleable. Even if your parents died at a young age, that doesn’t mean you have to. There are many ways to slow down the process. Do what you can now, he says, to extend your life and the quality of your life so that when the new aging prevention drugs do come to market, you’ll be around to benefit. To that end, he suggests a lengthy list of things you’ve already heard of. Like exercising. No smoking. Eating well. But here, too, Steele ups the ante and gives us facts you may never have heard of about these very mundane prescriptions.
Like this: Sure, eating too much makes you fat, but did you know that dietary restriction is one of the major areas of inquiry by scientists in the field? Smoking, of course, is terrible for you, but the worst impacts can be reversed by stopping, he writes. Quitting even at the age of 60 will increase your life expectancy by three years, while quitting at 30 pretty much restores your life expectancy to normal. Exercise, even a little bit, reduces the risks of dozens of diseases, even the ones that most plague people who are getting older, like me. Ten to 15 minutes a day halves your risk of dying from any cause.
p.s. I haven’t yet figured out how to add descriptions below photos, but for the record that is me and my chocolate toy poodle, Rufus, reading “Ageless.”
Being a book publisher, I come in contact with people who have to present a public persona. Appearance is an enormous part of first impressions, and all the impressions going forward. So I'm very sympathetic to people who exist in front of a camera and crowds. I can only be more and more accepting of people who face such scrutiny and encourage others to do the same. Keep your smile. It can last a long time. :)
Great insight Gerri! Thanks. Getting older doesn’t have to suck!