Is there anything that we can do about aging?
Is there any strategy, or intervention or therapy that can halt or reverse the ravages of aging?
This is a question that humanity has been asking itself ever since we first became aware of our own mortality.
We now know that the answer to the question is a resounding, “You bet you can!"
If you're brand new to the concept of longevity and life extension, then this series is for you.
So stay tuned.
We’re back. And we’re answering the question “Can anything be done about aging?”
The short answer? Absolutely! You bet something can be done about it.
That’s been proven in the research that has been done in just the last decade.
It used to be that the whole concept of longevity, of a “fountain of youth”, was relegated to the realm of science fiction.
The idea of a 150 year old individual who was living the life of a healthy 40 or 50 year old was definitely something for the distant future.
But not anymore.
In the past decade, some really big changes have happened in the field of longevity.
For one thing, research into longevity has passed from being considered a crackpot theory
to becoming a respected endeavor.
Aging as a disease is now considered or being considered to be an authentic concept by many of the regulatory agencies in the world.
And that has freed up funding and laid the groundwork for a growing list of scientific studies
being performed and written up in peer-reviewed journals.
I’m talking about research that is getting respect.
But that’s just changes in the research environment.
What’s really exciting is the discoveries that are being made as a result of that new environment.
As a result of these discoveries, scientists now have a pretty clear picture of where the research should go,
of what type of research is most likely to provide therapies and interventions that will turn back the clock,
that will reset our calendars and that will allow us to reach ages that were previously unheard of
…and do it in radiant good health.
I believe that extending the active lifestyle of a healthy 40 year-old out to maybe 150 years is achievable in my lifetime.
Let’s take a look at what might be doable in the not-so-distant future.
In the previous videos in this series, we talked about what caused aging, and we arrived at a couple of things.
One is the damage that accumulates from repair processes that are in decline as we age.
The second is the loss of information that causes those repair processes to fall into decline in the first place.
Let’s look at the damage first.
There has been so much progress made in the last decade in repairing that damage, that I can’t possibly go into it all here.
But let’s look at a few.
As you may have heard, technology has advanced to the point where we’re now 3D printing new organs.
It’s not ready for humans yet, but we’re moving towards that point.
A failing organ is kind of the ultimate form of damage,
and we’ll soon be able to print and transplant new organs built from someone’s own tissue
so that it won’t get rejected like current transplants. That’s repairing damage on the macro level.
But we’ll also be able to repair damage at the micro level.
Gene therapies and exosome and peptide treatments offer another path to repairing that damage.
Some of these types of therapies are being offered by new biotech start-ups right now, today.
And while the benefits of these interventions are somewhat limited right now,
these limitation will become fewer and fewer as the technology progresses.
These fields hold great promise.
There’s another possibility that is further out into the future.
It’s likely that nanotechnology will be developed that can repair most, if not all, of that damage.
Nanobots will be able to patrol through our bodies, recognizing damage done to the molecular level and either remove or repair it.
These bots will have a clear picture, based on our own individual genome,
of how something is supposed to be built, without any damage.
And if it constructed improperly, or has damage, they’ll have access to the blueprint to make repairs
so that it will conform perfectly to that blueprint.
These bots won’t need to know what caused the damage, they’ll simply recognize that it is damage and make it right.
But there’s another path to repairing this damage.
If we can restore the lost information, then the corrupted repair processes that are operating on flawed data will be restored.
They’ll now be conducting repairs correctly. And so damaged tissue will be rejuvenated naturally.
The processes of repairing damaged tissue and restoring that tissue to youthful levels
will be an internal, organic operation that will happen naturally,
as opposed to to external interventions like gene therapy or organ transplants.
Right now, restoring the lost information seems to be the most promising of all the research going on.
The loss of information is looking like a good candidate for a single, underlying cause of aging.
And we know that most of this loss occurs as the information is being interpreted by the epigenome.
Because the information in the genome isn’t really lost.
It’s written in a digital format that’s easy to preserve.
One proof of that lies in cloning. Cloning is something that technology achieved a while ago.
Cloning technology is with us today. Barbara Streisand cloned her pet dog.
In a nutshell, cloning is taking the nuclear DNA and inserting it into an ovum.
The ovum then grows into a genetically identical twin of the original.
They’ve produced clones using the nuclear DNA from old, aged individuals that resulted in new individuals that are normal in every way
…and that have lived normal lifespans.
Lifespans that included infantile, adolescent, adult, and senior stages.
From the nuclear DNA of old donors.
That means that old DNA is every bit as good as the young DNA, that DNA is immortal, even if we’re not.
It’s the corrupted information that passes through the epigenome that causes us to grow old.
Not the information in our DNA.
And investigations into restoring the epigenome to a youthful stage is an area of research that’s getting a lot of attention.
And a lot of promising results.
But’s that’s all for the future. Is there anything that can be done about aging…today?
Is there anything that we can do right now, without waiting for the future to get here, and can slow down that aging process?
And you know what? That question gets the same answer as the previous question.
Absolutely! You bet.
Believe it or not, there’s a lot that can be done right now, today, to actually extend our own lifespan,
from the average lifespan, which is around 80, to around the maximum lifespan, which is 122.
That an extra 40 years.
And in my opinion, the best strategy to accomplish that is to do everything we can to extend our own health span.
Our health span is the part of our lives that is lived in good health.
In charting the path of a normal life, there’s a section at the very end that is called morbidity.
Morbidity is that section of our lives in which everything is in rapid decline. We get weak and frail.
We’re beset by chronic disease. We lose mobility and we look like shit. And it ends in death.
During a normal life, the morbidity section can be 30 years long, ending around the age of 80 or 85.
Meaning that the onset of morbidity can occur around 55.
So the health span of that individual would be about 55 years.
Our goal would be to move the onset of morbidity back as far as we could.
This is called compressing morbidity.
In the above individual, if morbidity could be compressed to 10 years, and it certainly can be,
then the health span would be 75 years. But we can push the healthspan further back than that.
It’s believed that it’s possible to push the health span back to around 100 or beyond, right now, today.
As I said, the maximum human lifespan is 122 years.
When you add a period of morbidity to the health spans that are now achievable,
I think that people reaching an age of 120 will become less rare.
So, how do we do that? What do we need to do today to extend our health span?
Well, there’s a lot you can do.
But it’s all built on a foundation of good nutrition, exercise and supplements.
Now, there’s a lot more than just that foundation. But that foundation will take you 80 to 90% of the way.
That’s how important it is.
If you do all the other stuff, but you don’t do it on top of that great foundation, you’ll move the needle, but not by much.
I’ll demonstrate what I mean.
Let’s take that average person, who lives to around 80 and enters morbidity around 50 or 55.
Now if a person builds a proper foundation on which to do all the other interventions,
let's say that person might be able to potentially extend their lifespan to around 120.
That's a 50% increase in their lifespan.
By compressing morbidity, they might be able to extend their healthspan to around 100.
That represents 100% gain in their healthspan, hypothetically.
Now, let’s say they do all the other interventions, but they don’t build a solid foundation of health and fitness first.
How much of a gain in lifespan do you think they'll achieve?
I'm thinking maybe 10% instead of 50%.
Now that's just a guess, but it's based on everything that I've read and learned about longevity.
It's also based on the impact that a healthy lifestyle can have on aging.
One thing is indisputable.
All the interventions work much, much better if you are slim, fit and healthy and you have great nutrition
than if you're overweight, out of shape, unhealthy and live off of junk food.
Alright. Back to my calculations.
Let's add that 10% to both the lifespan and the healthspan.
10% of 80, the normal lifespan, is 8.
So if a person does all the interventions, but doesn't do it on a good foundation, they might live to 88.
10% of 50, the normal health span, is 5. So their health span might amount to about 55 years.
Without a great foundation, I don't think they'll see much morbidity compression at all.
Now, that doesn't seem like that much of a bump to me.
Not compared to someone who does all the things, who builds on a great foundation,
and potentially stays healthy until they're 100 or 110, and might live to 120 or even 130.
Which I think will be totally doable in my lifetime, and I'm now 71 .
And here's the thing, while longevity science might be in it's infancy today,
if I can extend my lifespan to 120 or 130, where do you think it will be then?
I think in 50 or 60 years longevity science will be a mature field.
And who knows where we might go from there?
If you enjoyed this video, and you’d like to see the rest of the videos in this series,
click on this playlist to continue your education.
That’s it for me. I'm outta here.