Outlive

Finally, as I learned the hard way, striving for physical health and longevity is meaningless if we ignore our emotional health. Emotional suffering can decimate our health on all fronts, and it must be addressed.

One macronutrient, in particular, demands more of our attention than most people realize: not carbs, not fat, but protein becomes critically important as we age.

Exercise is by far the most potent longevity “drug.” No other intervention does nearly as much to prolong our lifespan and preserve our cognitive and physical function. But most people don’t do nearly enough—and exercising the wrong way can do as much harm as good.

Assuming that you’re not someone who engages in ultrarisky behaviors like BASE jumping, motorcycle racing, or texting and driving, the odds are overwhelming that you will die as a result of one of the chronic diseases of aging that I call the Four Horsemen: heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, or type 2 diabetes and related metabolic dysfunction. To achieve longevity—to live longer and live better for longer—we must understand and confront these causes of slow death.

Longevity has two components. The first is how long you live, your chronological lifespan, but the second and equally important part is how well you live—the quality of your years. This is called healthspan, and it is what Tithonus forgot to ask for. Healthspan is typically defined as the period of life when we are free from disability or disease, but I find this too simplistic.

I believe that our goal should be to act as early as possible, to try to prevent people from developing type 2 diabetes and all the other Horsemen. We should be proactive instead of reactive in our approach. Changing that mindset must be our first step in attacking slow death. We want to delay or prevent these conditions so that we can live longer without disease, rather than lingering with disease.

AUTHOR’S NOTE
Writing about science and medicine for the public requires striking a balance between brevity and nuance, rigor and readability. I’ve done my best to find the sweet spot on that continuum, getting the substance right while keeping this book accessible to the lay reader. You’ll be the judge of whether or not I hit the target.

Here’s to staying young, even as we grow older.

“I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future,” Ric told me. “If you want to find someone’s true age, listen to them. If they talk about the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they did, they’ve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to—they’re young.”

There’s a quote from Paulo Coelho that I think about often: “Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything,” he writes. “Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”