Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Cristina Bufi-Pöcksteiner
I actually would like to ask you to help me
with a super-unscientific research study.
So if you would, in your mind's eye,
bring to mind some 79-year-old woman,
think about her.
Think about what she's wearing.
It could be somebody you know or somebody that you don't know.
Think about what she looks like,
what her hair is like, what her skin is like.
And with that image in mind,
please raise your hand if you are looking forward to aging.
(Laughter)
Ooh, there's one weird guy in the back.
(Laughter)
You're in good company, right?
If you look around, most of us are not looking forward to aging, at all.
In fact, we as a culture tend to view aging very, very negatively,
so much so that we assume that it means inevitable decline
that we can't do anything about.
But is this really true?
Is this really what the research says, or does it say something else?
I've spent the better part of my career focused on helping people age better.
And more recently, I began to ask myself the question
"Well, does aging have to mean this inevitable decline?"
What does the research say?
And so I began to look at it a little deeper,
and I discovered there are a lot of things that we can do to help us age better
and, in some cases, reverse aging.
I know now you're intrigued.
And one of those things -
we're going to talk about three of them, but the first one is what we eat, right?
So, well-known author Michael Pollan is known for saying:
"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."
I want to focus on this "mostly plants" part.
Because if you travel around the world,
and you look at the healthiest, longest-lived people in the world,
they have a few things in common.
And one of the things that they have in common
is that they eat a diet that's mostly plants.
This is exactly what National Geographic explorer Dan Buettner did;
he traveled around the world
looking for the longest-lived, healthiest people,
and he began to see what patterns do these people have in common.
And one of them is that they eat a diet that is rich in plants.
So fruits, vegetables, beans, yams, nuts -
all that yummy, delicious food.
Two of these populations are the Okinawans -
they live on a island off the coast of Japan called Okinawa -
and the Sardinians who live on an island off the coast of Italy called Sardinia.
And no, you don't need to move to an island.
But the Sardinians reach the age of 100,
and they do so in a really healthy manner,
and they do so in equal numbers for men and women.
The Okinawans also reach the age of 100, in large numbers,
and they have one-fifth the rate of the chronic diseases
that impact Americans over the age of 65.
Not really novel, right?
Mom and Grandma have always told us for years to eat our vegetables,
so we know this.
Where it gets interesting, though, is at the genetic level.
And in order to explain that,
I need you to imagine that I am an X chromosome.
I am a fancy X chromosome
because I wear really long gloves and really long socks.
And we're going to call those long gloves and socks "telomeres."
And telomeres are the protective end caps
on the ends of chromosomes that hold our genetic information.
Why am I talking about telomeres?
Well, when we're young and healthy, these telomeres are nice and long,
and as we age and our bodies go through normal wear and tear
and our cells divide,
the telomeres shorten.
Those shortened telomeres are the guilty accomplices
in nearly every disease that we know of and are afraid of;
everything from obesity, dementia, cancer, heart disease
are all implicated by shortened telomeres.
Luckily, in the world there are people that like to study these things,
and one of those people is Dr. Dean Ornish.
He is a cardiologist out of the University of California in San Francisco,
and he wanted to study the impact of lifestyle on telomeres -
I'm glad there are people out there in the world.
So he had his participants engage in a comprehensive lifestyle-change program.
And one the things, as you may have already guessed, that they did
was they changed their diets and they ate a diet of mostly plants.
Then he looked at their telomeres, and what did their telomeres show?
Well, their telomeres didn't shorten quite as fast as everybody else's,
but not only that, the longer they stayed on this lifestyle change,
in some cases their telomeres actually lengthened.
So not only did they slow the rate of aging
but they actually reversed it in some ways.
I bet you can guess what else they did.
They exercised.
They didn't become marathon runners, and they didn't become bodybuilders;
they walked for thirty minutes a day.
This is the same recommendation
that the CDC - the Centers for Disease Control - recommends for all of us,
that we do moderate exercise for 30 minutes a day.
Well, there's a reason for this,
and the reason is that if you exercise, you lower your risk of a lot of diseases.
So, for example, colon cancer:
if you exercise, you have less risk of getting colon cancer.
Breast cancer: if you exercise,
as a woman you have less risk of getting breast cancer.
Again, not anything we didn't know, right?
Mom and Grandma told us to eat our vegetables
and then go outside and play.
Once more, where it gets interesting is at the genetic level.
So, I used to believe that whatever hand we were dealt
from a genetic perspective
was inevitable and was going to become our destiny.
So if you came from a family that had a high prevalence of heart disease,
it was only a matter of time before you yourself were going to get heart disease.
That is until I came upon an area of study called "epigenetics."
And epigenetics is the study
of how the environment impacts your health and your cells' health.
And, as an example,
let's say you are genetically predisposed to be a world-class javelin thrower.
But you sit at home on the couch
and you eat all kinds of things like cake and ice cream and chips,
you never pick up a javelin to throw it and you don't work with a trainer.
The chances of you becoming a world-class javelin thrower are pretty minimal.
Versus, if you pick up the javelin every day, multiple times a day,
and practice throwing it,
and you eat really nutritious foods,
and you work with a coach
and you develop this talent that you have,
the chances of you becoming a world-class javelin thrower are much greater.
In both those scenarios, the only thing that changed is the environment;
the genes didn't change - you were born with the same genes in both cases.
In one case, you became a world-class javelin thrower
and in the other case, you didn't.
One of the ways this happens is a process called methylation,
and I need to give props to my fourth-grade teacher
because to explain methylation,
I have to help draw a mental image of a cell,
and Mrs. Caras, in fourth grade, taught me how to draw a cell;
we drew the cell membrane,
we drew the nucleus, the nucleolus,
the mitochondria, the cytoplasm -
you remember, right?
Imagine on the outside of that cell membrane,
you've got atoms clustering in different patterns.
The way that those atoms cluster
is dependent upon the environment in which that cell lives.
That is called methylation.
Now, those different clusters turn off or on certain genes.
Okay?
Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden
decided they wanted to study methylation,
and they wanted to study methylation with respect to exercise:
how does exercise impact methylation patterns?
So what they did was they took participants in their study,
and they put them on an exercise bike.
But they had them only exercise one leg.
And then they found that the exercise leg became more fit.
Awesome, right?
But they also found that on more than 5,000 cell-receptor sites
of the genome of the muscle cell,
there were different methylation patterns than in the non-exercise leg.
And those methylation patterns showed improvements
in areas like metabolism, insulin and inflammation.
Similarly, researchers out of McMaster University in Ontario
wanted to study what happens to us when we exercise:
how does it impact our health?
And they did this in people, and they did this in mice.
And they found that when people exercised three hours a week,
and these people were over the age of 40,
that their overall health improved.
But not only that, in addition to their overall health improving,
their skin got visibly younger looking,
similar to that of people in their 20s and 30s,
even if they were over the age of 65.
So then they did similar experiments with mice,
and they had some mice go on an exercise wheel
and some mice not exercise.
Same thing: the mice who exercised
showed overall improvements in their internal organs,
so things like their reproductive organs got healthier, their hearts got healthier,
their brains got healthier.
But the more interesting part, I found,
was that the mice who exercised, their fur never turned gray.
So, I'm not going to lie;
I was pretty much sold
on the visibly younger-looking skin and the no gray hair.
But in all seriousness,
I want to tell you about one more thing that we can all do as of today,
and it's probably the most powerful of the three, in my opinion.
If you take only one thing away from this talk today,
let it be this one: have friends.
It's that powerful.
And this is true for all humans,
as young as newborns and as old as the day that you die.
And research on this goes way back.
As early as World War II, researchers studied orphans,
and they studied orphans who had all their physical needs met -
so food, clothing, shelter -
but they didn't have human bonding.
And those orphans did not thrive.
Not only did they not thrive
but their chances of survival significantly decreased.
Now, why does this happen?
Close your eyes for a minute and don't fall asleep.
But imagine somebody that you just like to be around,
that person that is just, you know, somebody who gets you,
you laugh when you are together, you have all these inside jokes
and you have such a good time together.
You can open your eyes now.
Those feeling that you feel inside when you think of that person,
those are all, among other things,
a cascade of biochemical responses that are happening inside of you.
So things like cortisol, your stress hormone, decreasing.
Serotonin, your feel-good hormone, increasing.
Oxytocin, your bonding hormone, increasing.
And what that does is that helps your body's health,
and it also helps your immune function.
So much so that - did you know that if you have friends,
you actually lessen the chances of your getting a cold every year?
I promise it's true.
Sheldon Cohen, out of Carnegie Mellon University,
studied people with friends and without friends,
and the people with friends had fewer colds in a given year
than people who didn't have friends.
In her book "Goddesses Never Age," Christiane Northrop says,
"Community equals immunity."
And this is really a nice summary of saying that if you have friends,
you are going to have overall better immune function
and you're going to be overall healthier.
Probably the biggest research on this topic
comes out of Brigham Young University,
and there, scientists did a meta-analysis
of 148 longitudinal studies
that encompassed more than 300,000 men and women.
And they found that people who had friends
were indeed healthier, but not only that.
They had a 50% greater survival rate overall than people without friends.
So just to put it in perspective,
this would be the same as saying that if you don't have friends,
your risk factors would increase
as though you were an obese alcoholic
who didn't exercise and smoked 15 cigarettes a day.
Have friends.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
One last point on friends.
Friends even impact whether you become addicted to drugs or not.
Not because they're a bad influence,
but if you - take mice, for example.
Dr. Bruce Alexander, out of the University of Vancouver,
did this with mice.
He had mice who were isolated and mice who had mice friends.
And he gave them all access, unlimited access, to illicit drugs.
The mice who were isolated
were 100 times more likely
to become addicted to the illicit drugs
than the ones who had friends,
even though everybody had the same access to the drugs.
So, again, it really does go back to what our moms and grandmas told us.
They said, "Eat your vegetables and go outside and play with your friends."
There's a reason it's withstood the test of time,
and there's a reason that it stands up to the science too.
And in his book "Blue Zones,"
Dan Buettner estimates that by doing all of these types of things
that you can extend your life by eight healthy years.
Think about your life personally
and what you can accomplish in those eight healthy years.
Now, I want to go back to my original question,
the 79-year-old woman.
And I want you to think of her again
because I want to share with you
the image of the 79-year-old woman that I thought of,
and I want to do this in the spirit of asking each one of you
to challenge this notion that aging has to mean decline
and that we're helpless against it and there's nothing that we can do.
This woman is 79 years old.
Thank you.
(Applause)