Ever since the fountain of youth, longevity has been a big quest for humanity. We want to get there, but historically, we just don’t quite know how.
Enter Dr. John Day, who is a cardiologist and marathon runner, who wanted to know the secrets of staying healthy long-term – and living longer. (He’s also penned a book on longevity here.)
In a recent TED talk that I produced, he started by explaining what’s going on with Americans.
“The average life expectancy (of an American) is 79, yet the average American is disabled by 69,” he said. “That means they’re spending the last ten years of their life going from doctor to doctor, being prescribed medication. The sad thing is, studies suggest that most of us can live to age 90 in good health. Just don’t screw things up. And so in essence, we leave 21 good years of life on the table.”
Now, as Day notes, he is a Chinese speaker and goes on trips to China to talk about things like atrial fibrillation.
So on one such trip, he said, he visited a place called the ‘longevity village’ about 50 miles from the Vietnam border.
“(It’s) a place in China with the highest percentage of centenarians in the world, an area that’s cut off from the rest of China and the rest of the world, until just recently,” he explained, “a place where they live remarkably long, healthy lives.”
The Village, Unveiled
What did he find?
You can see Day describing the centenarian’s morning commute:
“They’re walking from their home to the area of land that they would farm,” he says. “These were hand farmers. They were poor. They did not have the use of machinery or animals to help them farm. And here you’ll see this woman. She can’t be more than maybe 100 pounds, yet she is carrying nearly a 70-pound (basket) that she will carry up and down the mountainside, and several miles to and from her place where she lives.”
The 98-year-old woman filmed, he said, would later go on to be one of the centenarians in a study of the village. During the research project, he added, teams found no cases of heart disease, cancer or dementia.
Part of the difference in results, Day explained, has to do with the local diet: the people are eating only what they farm. They also use squat toilets, which requires an amount of dexterity, and that tends to keep them limber.
Also, he noted, the research subjects had good societal connections that allowed them to avoid the depression, loneliness and anxiety connected to feeling like a burden or being cut off from your loved ones.
And again, there was the menu.
“They ate a natural diet,” he said. “They ate what they pulled out of the ground.”
The key, he said, is that the centenarians’ genes are not that different from anyone else’s. It’s just that their different lifestyles don’t allow the disease markers to express themselves the same way.
He mentioned how American trial subjects who embraced some of these changes were able to get positive outcomes.
The Takeaway
Now, here’s the rub with this kind of research – if AI and big data tell us that we can do these seven things, say, to get better longevity, will people decide that it’s worth it? We probably won’t be walking 6 miles to work every morning, with heavy baskets on our backs. We probably won’t be restricting ourselves to a vegetarian diet that’s also local and organic, and in the end, consists solely of rice and vegetables that we farm ourselves.
So it’s sort of a sliding scale – maybe we can select that particular place on the spectrum where comfort and convenience balance out against longevity … And we can get some of the quality results, without sacrificing the quality of our lifestyles.
But in a fundamental way, it seems to be a trade-off, or at least that’s what the research is telling us.
Others are waiting for AI and technology to replace our human ‘meat bags’ with an infrastructure that’s less vulnerable to decay. That’s a whole other story, and you can pick up Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity” or some other weighty tome to learn more.
But what we’re seeing with longevity is that you can do some common-sense things to extend your life, and AI can help. It will make the recommendations, track your progress, and give you the likely results. The question is: will you follow those recommendations?
