Aging is like being enrolled in a subscription service you never signed up for and every month they remove a feature, add a new bug, and raise the price.
It begins with Spontaneous Joint Editorializing (SJE): knees and shoulders begin to offer opinions. But, of course, that’s not the end of it.
Not only does hair start falling out but it begins arriving in places you never asked for it, never wanted it, never even knew were zoned for hair. It goes gray but it’s not the “distinguished” gray you see in ads. It’s this wiry, insane villain hair that sticks out at angles, like each individual strand is furious at you.
And then there’s what used to be your memory. It’s now a sieve with a vendetta. You forget names, dates, but curiously remember every embarrassing thing you ever did. Your twenties are for making memories; your forties are for desperately trying to remember them.
No, it’s not fun. Youth is wasted on the young; middle age is wasted on Googling “is this normal?”
Luckily, there are some things we can do to make all this easier. Time to get some answers from “geroscience”, an interdisciplinary field that studies the relationship between aging and age-related diseases.
We’ll be drawing from the book “Age Later” by Dr. Nir Barzilai, founder of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Let’s get to it…
Why We Age
The main culprit here is something called “genomic instability.” This is science’s polite way of saying that as we age, our cells go on a bender. They’re mutating left and right, spiraling out of control. Your cells go from reliable employees to either early retirees or anarchists, and the repair crew is phoning it in.
Now we’ve all heard tales of the centenarian who smoked like a chimney and lived on a diet of pure mischief, while the health nut next door, who ran marathons and meditated daily, checked out early.
Guess what? That phenomenon is real.
Nir has studied “SuperAgers” extensively. And the rules do not seem to apply to them. Nearly 50% are overweight or obese, about half of them smoke and fewer than half exercise. And yet they’re doing fine at 100+.
You’re diligently making your meal-prepped quinoa salad and there’s some 102-year-old named Harold sitting across town with a bacon double cheeseburger, washing it down with a whiskey and lighting a cigarette. Harold hasn’t seen a doctor since the Johnson administration, doesn’t know what a calorie is, and thinks “sleep hygiene” is when you change the sheets once a year.
What’s their secret? Their bodies just age more slowly. Unfortunately for us, it’s genetic. Genes are typically responsible for around 20% of how we age, but for centenarians it’s roughly 80%.
(To learn how to improve your memory as you age, click here.)
So if you don’t have those magic genes, it comes down to behavior. Your choices.
So what do we need to do?
Nutrition
You’re probably not going to like this section. It’s not fun. And people have some insanely strong (emphasis on “insane”) ideas about nutrition, most of them gleaned from YouTube gurus who say “quantum” a lot. “Drink this, and you’ll feel 20 years younger!” Spoiler: you won’t, but your toilet will witness the horror.
Let’s start with the good news: when it comes to longevity, carbs are not the enemy.
In 2018, The Lancet published a study tracking over fifteen thousand adults aged forty-five to sixty-four, looking at how the ratio of proteins, fats, and carbs in their diet affected their chances of dying. The sweet spot? Fifty to fifty-five percent carbohydrates. Those people had the lowest risk of death. The folks shoveling in eighty percent carbs saw their mortality risk climb by up to ten percent. Meanwhile, the low-carb brigade saw their risk of death shoot up by sixty percent. And fiber seemed to be a critical variable in longevity. Get more.
Protein is essential but sources matter. A Loma Linda study followed ninety thousand people and found that the heaviest meat eaters had roughly double the cardiovascular mortality. Meanwhile, those getting their protein from nuts and seeds (the ones you’ve been making fun of at barbecues for the last fifteen years) had fifty percent less mortality.
Low fat isn’t as important as where the fat comes from. Researchers did a 5-year study of 7500 overweight people at risk for diabetes and heart disease. Half got a standard low fat diet, the other half did a high fat Mediterranean diet loaded with olive oil. The latter group had a third less diabetes, heart disease and stroke along with lower levels of cognitive decline. They also dropped a few pounds.
What about vitamins? When you’re young, most of these supplements do about as much for your health as eating the label. Past 50, the science says we may benefit from additional vitamin B12, calcium, and vitamin D.
And what’s all that you hear about caloric restriction? Not only does it sound miserable, whether it actually extends your life depends on your genetic background. The research isn’t clear but it’s looking like caloric restriction only works for people who are obese. For people who are already average weight or leaner? It might actually do harm. HARM. So if you’re already a normal-sized human who’s been voluntarily starving yourself because some podcast told you it would “activate your longevity pathways,” congratulations: you may have been slowly dismantling yourself for no reason.
(For more on the science of nutrition, click here.)
Now I know some people are secretly hoping for a magic longevity pill. And, actually, there kinda is one…
Metformin
This isn’t some fancy new supplement that’s going to cost you a mortgage payment. No, it’s a generic diabetes drug that’s been around longer than most of your bad habits.
Metformin is not sexy. No one’s making Instagram reels about it. It’s not whispering promises of spiritual renewal, you don’t have to chant anything when you take it, and it’s not some detox tea that makes your stomach sound like an active construction site.
Clinical trials of Metformin have shown significant reductions in the risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, dementia, and cancer. In fact, researchers took fat and muscle biopsies from older people taking it, compared them with biopsies from young people, and found that the older people’s cellular pathways looked younger.
It’s been around for over 60 years. Meaning: if it had serious negatives, we’d know about it by now. Not a single study has shown that metformin is bad for humans. In a world where practically everything is eventually revealed to be slowly killing you (including, apparently, sitting down, standing up, breathing near a road, and enjoying yourself) metformin has somehow maintained a clean record.
(To learn how to have a good retirement, click here.)
Yes, yes, we have to talk about exercise…
Exercise
You know the answer.
I know you know the answer.
But I’ll say it anyway because saying obvious things in uncomfortable ways is, frankly, a large part of what I do here: Yes, you need to exercise.
Shocking, right? (Next I’ll be revealing that the ocean is, in fact, quite damp.)
The longevity benefits from exercise are greater than those found for any particular diet.
And the good news? It doesn’t take much. One study tracked over 650,000 people for roughly a decade and found that moderate exercise, such as brisk walking, for just seventy-five minutes a week added almost two years to life expectancy. That’s it. A stroll with a purpose. (It’s also wonderful if your goal is to fit into your pants without doing that little jump-wiggle-pray combo.)
(For more on the best ways to exercise, click here.)
And there’s another part of your body that needs you to apply effort…
Cognitive Challenge
A Johns Hopkins study of 2,800 people confirmed what you probably suspect but were hoping wasn’t true: you need to make your brain do hard, thinky work.
No, that app won’t do it. No, sudoku won’t do it. You need to make your brain hate you a little bit.
You download Duolingo, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, thinking you’ll be fluent in French by the end of the year. Three weeks in, the only thing you’ve mastered is how to swear at a green owl in multiple languages.
But that effort makes all the difference.
I don’t really like thinking. It gets in the way of my sense of self-belief. But all the reading and writing I do for this blog definitely keeps me sharper. What should you do? Stop scrolling TikTok until your eyes feel like they’ve been lightly sanded. Read a book. You need to keep learning. I mean, unless you want to be that person who calls their grandkid because “the Netflix is broken.”
(For more on how to keep your brain sharp as you age, click here.)
This is starting to seem like a lot you have to do. Do you ever get to rest? Yes, in fact that is strongly encouraged…
Sleep
The research shows that sleeping six hours a night for two weeks temporarily leaves you with the cognitive capacity of someone who hasn’t slept for two entire days. And here’s the part that’s so diabolically cruel it reads like something a sadistic game designer would cook up: you can’t tell it’s happening. It’s like carbon monoxide poisoning but for your intellect.
And here’s the thing that should genuinely terrify every single person who’s ever said the words “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”, which, by the way, at the rate you’re going, will be sooner than you’d planned. Older people deprived of sleep showed a roughly 50% increase in tau protein, the biomarker for Alzheimer’s. And, over time, folks whose sleep was frequently disrupted were at 1.68 times greater risk for dementia than those who slept well.
I am not reporting from a position of authority. I have spent approximately eleven bazillion hours of my adult life awake between midnight and 4 AM doing things that, upon sober reflection, have contributed nothing of measurable value to my life, my career, or my understanding of the human condition, unless you count knowing what my ex-girlfriend’s college roommate’s husband looks like (he looks fine; he looks like he sleeps eight hours a night.)
The advice the researchers give is almost comically boring, which is how you know it’s probably correct. In my experience, good advice is always boring. Interesting advice is what gets you into trouble. The sleep researchers say: seven to nine hours per night. Consistent sleep and wake times, within one hour, even on weekends. A cool bedroom: 65 to 68 degrees. Darkness. No screens. That’s it. It has the intellectual complexity of a stop sign and it will do more for your performance, your earnings, your mood, your decision-making, and your general capacity than every biohacking protocol, productivity app, and motivational podcast combined.
(To learn more about how to improve your sleep, click here.)
Okay, we’re not getting any younger. Time to round it up and learn a simple thing that can have a profound effect on how much longer you stick around…
Sum Up
Here’s how to enjoy a long, healthy life:
- Why We Age: Mutations go up and repair goes down. And not the cool mutations like in a Marvel movie. (Unless you think ear hair is cool.)
- Nutrition: Cut out the obvious junk. Moderate carbs, more fiber, less meat, more nuts and olive oil.
- Metformin: Possibly the Clark Kent of the drug world. Unassuming, maybe a bit nerdy, but secretly packing superpowers.
- Exercise: 75 minutes of brisk walking per week. If you can’t manage that, I doubt you’ll live long enough to finish this post.
- Cognitive Challenge: If you don’t make your brain break a sweat, it’ll give up on you faster than a middle school romance.
- Sleep: The concept of sleep increasing health is a fascinating one, primarily because it suggests that the best way to become fitter is to do absolutely nothing. I’m sold.
So what’s the final thing? Have a purpose in life.
A study of nearly 7000 people age 50 to 61 showed people who had a strong reason to live lived longer. Apparently, your body hears, “Oh, you’ve got a goal? Let’s keep this going so you can actually finish something for once.”
You want to know what the most terrifying thing in the universe is? It’s not death. It’s not even that AI-generated image of Will Smith eating spaghetti that briefly made the entire internet question whether God had abandoned us. No. The most terrifying thing in the universe is living a long life with no reason to live.
So here’s my suggestion: get ridiculously invested in something. Anything. Pick a hobby, an interest, a grudge, even. Purpose is like an anchor; it keeps you from drifting off into the haze of early-onset “Who am I?”
A few tweaks here and there, and suddenly, aging isn’t just this conveyor belt toward orthopedic shoes and collecting loyalty points at the pharmacy.
We’re just talking about swapping out a few bad habits for a few slightly less bad habits and, with some luck, you’ll find yourself at 100 years old, blowing out candles on a cake the size of a coffee table.
But more importantly: you might actually enjoy those years.
