Until she turned 100 she lived alone in
a cabin without running water; now she is the star resident of a Houston
nursing home. No mention is made of her health, but it is probably frail—
life flickers like a guttering candle when one reaches the limits of human
longevity . At 109, Belle has moved far beyond biological probability and into a
mysterious and uncertain surviv al. There is a riddle attached to longevity ,
because science still cannot predict who will live to extrem e old age. Genetics does not hold the entire answer—no centenarian has ever been
recorded who had a centenarian father or mother . Lifestyle is also
problematic—someone like Belle, raised on a marginal diet and grinding
physical labor , had a horrendous lifestyle by modern standards, yet she has
outlived 99.999 percent of her generation, including those who lived in far
better circumstances. Of ficially , the oldest survivor in American history wasDelina Filkins, a country woman from Herkimer County , New York, who
died in 1928 at 113. (Unof ficial claims to much higher ages are frequently
made, and there is little doubt that some unsung individual has survived 115
years or more.) Belle isn’t challenging the record yet, but even to be a
contender puts her in the longevity elite. “Are you lonely?” a reporter asks her . “Yes’m, sometimes I am,” Belle replies. The very old are inevitably
alone, having outdistanced the family and friends with whom they started
out on life’s journey. Belle is typical in this regard. She has buried three
husbands, one brother , and six sisters. (Unlike most women of her
generation, Belle had no children.) Even her nieces are far too old to take
care of her now . It’s said that in a typical climbi ng season on Mt. Everest, an average of
sixty-four climb ers arrive at base camp; of this number , which is a tiny
fraction of the world’ s skilled mountaineers, one-third attempt the final
assault on the peak. Two climbe rs will perish in the attempt, and only four
will succeed. Belle Odom is like one of those four climbers standing ten
yards from the summit of human longevity , exhausted, hardly able to take
another step, but there. In the next few decades, the mountaintop is going to become much more
crowded. Barring a premature heart attack or a fatal disease or accident, you
and I are likely  to make it at least to base camp. Ages of 85 and 90 are
going to become as common in the future as they were rare in the past. Newspapers will carry notices of people reaching their hundredth birthdays
as routinely as they now print announcements about the birth of twins. Only
when someone reaches 1 10 will it be considered an event. Can you imagin e what you will be like the day you turn 100? It’s a big
conceptual leap, comparable to asking a 2-year -old to imagine being
middle-aged. But think of yours elf at 50 (perhaps you are already there) and
then try to grasp  this staggering fact: The day you turn 50 is going to be
your second birth. In all likelihood a complete lifetime lies ahead of you,
lasting at least thirty or more likely forty , fifty, or even sixty years. For
every previous generation, 50 was a time for winding down. Children were
grown up, off to college, possibly even married with their own children. Career was a settled matter , and a person pretty well knew whether he was asuccess or failure. The idealism  of youth had long faded; the midlife crisis
had been  weathered either as a full-blown tempest or, if one was lucky , as
only brooding squalls on the horizon. But to be born at 50! Little in life has prepared us for this. Yet according
to a California health department study , if medical science could wipe out
just one major health risk, arteriosclerosis, the average life expectancy for
women in California would rise to 100—the average. Compared to your first birth, the one you will experience at 50 has both
pluses and minuses. In both instances, a completely new and unknown
existence opens up, but the great advantage of your second birth is that you
can plan ahead. Your first birth was thrown at you, complet e with total
strangers who turned out to be your parents, an awkward, unformed body
that had to be trained to perform the simplest tasks, and a bewildering world
of chaot ic sight s and sounds your brain had to mold into something that
made sense. By age 50, all that work has been done, and as fearful images
of the “old old age” rapidly dissipate, the obvious disadvan tage of the
second birth—not having a new body—will not be so crippling. Disease
and infirmity will be long delayed, if not conquered. Fired by the possibilities of planning a whole new lifetime, I decided to
take the opportu nity seriously . I set aside all the stereotypes of old age that
clutter the mind  and approached my second birth (which is only four years
away) with a wish list. What  would I want should I live to be 100? Immediately the following desires came to mind:
I want to survive even longer , if possible. I want to remain healthy . I want a clear , alert mind. I want to be active. I want to have achieved wisdom. As soon as I wrote down these desires, a surprising thing happ ened—they
all seem ed withi n my reach. Why shouldn’ t I have as much life as possible? As long as life is good, it’s only natural to want more of it. Why shouldn’ t I
be healthy? I know what to do to be healthy today , and I can live tomorrow
the same way. My mind is clear and alert now; there is no reason why itmust dim with time, assuming that I keep using it. I’ve always been active,
so why fear that I’ll sink into a chair one day, never to get up again? And if
wisdom isn’t mine yet, that’s all the better; wisdom is a gift that arrives in
its own time. My other desires would be meaningless if I didn’ t expect this
final golden fruit to be bestowed when I am ready . With this simple  list I had turned survival from a threat into a desirable
goal, because on my list were things I truly wanted. Accordin g to public-
opinion polls, 80 percent of Americans say yes to the question “Are you
satisfied with your life today?” A majority , however , say they don’t want to
live to be 100, so they must share an expectation that the road between
today and 100 brings loss. This self-fulfilling prophecy can be changed only
by choosing to impr ove with age. Old age is a grace if you reach it with joy,
creativity , and curiosity . These qualities require living fully in the present
moment, since today is the youth of your longevity . The unquestioned assumption of the old paradigm was that as the body
wore out over time, life became increasingly unfulfilling. The storehouse of
possibilities ran out after a certain age, which was arbitrarily  defined by
each society and each individual. The new paradigm tells us that life is a
process of constant transforma tion, not decline, and therefore is full of
potential for unlimited growth. To keep unfolding new possibilities decade
after decade, one has to know what these possibilities are. Wha t should we
expect physically , mentally , and emotionally in the second fifty years of
life? A new science of longevity has emer ged to answer these questions. Even staunch adherents to the old paradigm now agree that automatic
decline is not programmed into our bodies. Longevity comes to those who
have discovered  this on their own—science is merely validating the
numerous improvements in bodily function that older people are already
experiencing. In this section I want to exam ine these new findings in the hope of
discovering the most essential ones, the keys to longevity that hold true for
most if not all people. Human life is incredibly resilient. It would seem
unlikely that someone like Belle Odom could survive as long as she has. Many disadvantages were stack ed against her: being poor and black, being
deprived of adequate medical care, spending most of her life on a diet that
was likely to have been high in fat and low in essential vitamins. Thescience of longevity must account for these anomalies, and I believe that the
only way it can is to probe into issues of mind and heart that transcend
physical factors. Belle is much more than her lifestyle—and so are all of us. Biologists and gerontologists have amassed fascinating inform ation about
how to survive to great old age, but new data is not enough. We need
practical examples of holistic living. As an inspiring experiment in this
direction, Gay Luce and her colleagues in Berkeley , California, ran Project
SAGE (Senior Actualization and Growth Explorations). Founded in 1974,
SAGE attempted to revitalize people between the ages of 65 and 85 with
startling success. Many transformed their lives. One woman, who
mournfully said her life was over when she was 74, wrote a book at age 91
and began traveling as a speake r campaigning for a decent environment for
the dying. People discovered that by breath work and attention they could
undo long-term symptoms—migraines, headaches, and arthritis pain. A
retired woman who thought herself virtually color blind discovered through
an art process that she could do interior decoration, and redid her home. There is a secret  core of meanin g waiting to be discovered in every life, and
those who have found it are the teachers I look to for my own future
survival. They have lived the years after the second birth. They are the true
scientists of longevity and therefore its real geniuses. OceanofPDF .com100 YEARS YOUNG:
What the Oldest Can Teach Us
Most of us have never met anyone who is 100 years old. Histori cally , living
to 100 was a feat so rare that it was almost freakish. Victorian-era research
into the lineage of British aristocrats, who were presumably the best fed and
cared for members of their society , could not unearth a single peer in the
preceding ten centuries who had lived to be 100. The first was Lord
Penrhyn, who died in 1967 at 101. Today in most industrialized countries,
one person in 10,000 passes the century mark, and the ratio is rising faster
than any other growth statistic in the population. The oldest peop le alive today do not tend to be merely random survivors,
but individuals who embody enviable attitudes and values. Sociologists
who study centenarians are inevitably struck by their strong attachment to
freedom and independence. Throughout their lives, centenarians tend to
avoid being held back by const raints. Traditionally , most have worked on
their own, very few in the confines of modern corporations. They prize their
autonomy very highly . As I said earlier, the word researchers apply most frequently to
centenarians is adaptable. At some point in their lives, all have suffered
losses and setba cks. But even the most intense loss, such as that of a spouse
after fifty or sixty years of marriage, was mourned, and then the person
moved on. Studied as a group, centenarians have other significant
similarities. In his compelling book on longevity , Prolongevity II, Albert
Rosenfeld reports from interviews conducted with twelve hundred people
on Social Security who gave their ages as 100 or more. “It was clear that,
though these individuals worked hard and enjoyed their work, there was a
marked lack of high ambition . They had tended to live relatively quiet andindependent lives, were general ly happy with their jobs, their families, and
their religion, and had few regrets. Nearly all expressed a strong will to live,
and a high appreciation for the simple experiences and pleasures of life.”
If aging were simply a matter of wearing out, we would expect all
centenarians to be in poor health, trapped in bodies with many deteriorated
working parts. Actually , standards of health are high among our
centenarians; fewer than one in five report that they are disabled or in such
poor health that they require assistance to eat, walk, bathe, and so forth. Most still get around on their own (almost always without crutches or
walkers), and many continue to work, at least by keeping house and caring
for themselves. Trying to articu late a specific “longevity personality” is too constricting
for centenarians—the benign, quiet, wise grandfather or grandmother is
only one type among many . Living to be 100 also happens to selfish,
sarcastic, and unsociable peopl e. The common thread is a sense of self-
sufficiency that runs much deep er than personality . To support this point, a
1973 study in New York of seventy-nine healthy people 87 years of age and
older found that they almost never went to doctors, were never found in
nursing homes, and were rarely in homes for the aged. Dr. Stephen P.
Jewett, the senior psychiatrist who conducted the New York study , made
clear that his subjects were more than chance survivors or lucky
beneficiaries of good genes. Granted, the seventy-nine people he studied had escaped catastrophic
illness, such as heart attack and cancer , in the critical midlife period from 45
to 65 (this is when bad genes, hypertension, elevated cholesterol, smoking,
alcoholism, and other negative factors tend to take their highest toll). But
Jewett’ s subjects managed to be healthy into their late eighties and nineties,
implying that some powerful positive factors were working in their favor . Jewett’ s study saw longevity in broad terms, and the majority of the
factors he came up with were subjective, having to do with how these
people felt about themselves. In comparison, the purely objective factors
linked to long life were few and very general. PHYSICAL  CHARACTERISTICSNot seriously overweight or underweight
Little weight fluctuation over their lifetime
Good general muscle tone
Good grip
Young appearance to skin
Still drives a car and engages in physical activity
PSYCHOLOGICAL  CHARACTERISTICS  
(INCLUDING LIFESTYLE AND BEHA VIOR)
Superior native intelligence, keen interest in current events, good
memory . Freedom from anxiety , few illnesses, not prone to worry . Independence of choice in their vocations. They tended to be their
own bosses. They worked at farming and in the nursery business,
and in the profe ssions of law, medicine, and architecture; others
headed small businesses of their own, and in a few cases large
businesses. The majority did not retire early . Most had been hard hit by the Depression, which came along in their
fifties and sixties, but they recovered and built new futures. They enjoyed life. All had a degree of optimism and a marked sense
of humor . They responded to simple pleasures. Life seems to have
been a great adventure. They could see beauty where others saw
only ugliness. Great adaptability . While many cherished childhood memories, all
preferred living in the present with its many changes. They were not preoccupied with death. They continued living with satisfaction from day to day . All may be described as religious in the broad sense, but none
exhibited extreme orthodoxy . They were moderate eaters but willing to experiment. No special
diets. Diet inclu ded a high varie ty of foods high in protein, low in
fat. All were early risers. A verage sleep was between six and seven hours,
although they rested in bed for eight hours. (Shortened orinterrupted sleep is typical in old age.) No uniformity in drinking habits. Some drank moderately , some
drank too much at times, some abstained. Smoking—some abstained, a few had smoked very moderately but
had long since given it up, a few were inveterate pipe smokers. Medications—used less medication in their lifetimes than many old
people use in a week. Most drank cof fee. I have covered some of these factors previously , and I’d like to touch on
a few more first, the physical characteristics on the list, though few , are very
telling. Longevity and Weight
Maintaining a fairly steady weight throughout life seems to be more
important than whether one is over- or underweight. As with so many
findings about longevity , this one sounds rather insignificant but may turn
out to have deep implications. A study of 11,700 Harvard graduates from
the classes of 1916 to 1950 paid particular attention to how they fared from
middle age onward. Data colle cted between 1962 and 1988 revealed that
gaining or losing even a moderate amount of weight over a long period of
time raised one’ s risk of mortality . Compared to men who kept their weight constant, those who lost eleven
pounds or more over a ten-year period had 57 percent higher mortality ,
including 75 percent higher risk of dying from a heart attack. Those who
gained eleven pounds or more over a ten-year period were only somewhat
better off, with 36 percent higher mortality than the men who maintained a
steady weight; their risk of dying from a heart attack jumped dramatically
to 200 percent. This finding overturns the common misconception that
being too fat is the main risk associated with weight; actually , as long as
clinical obesity isn’t present (defined as being 15 percent or more over
normal body weight), carrying around some extra poundage is not
correlated with shorter life span—just the reverse.Extensive actuar ial studies conducted by Dr. Reuben Andres have shown
the lowest mortality among those who are 10 percent overwei ght and the
highest mortality among the chronically underweight. Andres’ s work, based
on studies of millions of people in all income and social brackets, plays
havoc with societal values that equate slimness with all things good and
healthy; as a result, many docto rs have chosen to overlook facts that do not
fit in with prevailing beliefs. The Harvard study further undermines the
stereotype through its emphasi s on maintaining a steady weight. It also
supports the long-held notion that going on crash diets is unhealthy , but
calling this a purely physical finding seems misleading to me. Weight is
inevitably boun d up with self-image. At a young age many people, both
men and women, learn to use dieting as a quick fix for a poor self-image. The thinner they are, the better  they feel about themselves and the more
prone they are to believe that their problems in general have been cured. The improveme nt brought about by losing five or ten pounds is
superficial, however, since deeper emotional issues remain untouched. Typically , the chronic dieter falls into the “yo-yo syndrome,” dropping a
few pounds when self-esteem is relatively high, only to gain them back
quickly (and with more to spare) when self-esteem sinks again. The fact
that either  gaining  or losing weight shortens one’s life span makes me
speculate that poor self-esteem  is the real culprit. The subjects who
maintained a steady weight are likely to be psychologically steady as well
—this is their saving virtue, not their weight per se. Clinical obesity
remains a proven risk in heart disease and type II diabetes, but being
physically active  may compensate for being overweight due to the fact that
carrying the extra pounds provides considerable aerobic exercise to the
heart. Longevity and Exercise
The strong grip and good muscle tone of Jewett’ s subjects indicate that they
were active people. However , there is a marked absence of pursuing
organized exerc ise, despite the fact that exercise is known to retard aging.To understand this seeming anomaly , we have to look deeper into how
much activity is actually needed to make a significant contribution to
longevity . Dr. Steven Blair and his colleag ues at the Institute for Aerobics Research
performed tread mill tests on more than ten thousand men and three
thousand women , then followed the group for eight years to determine how
much protection was provided by various levels of fitness. It was no surprise that the least active people had the highest death rates
—mortality for the most sedentary men was more than three times higher
than for the fittest men, while the most inactive women had a mortality rate
more than five times higher than the fittest women. What was surprising is
that the most striking improvement came with fairly modest levels of
activity . Someone who walked  thirty minutes a day, six days a week,
enjoyed a mortality rate almost  as low as someone who ran thirty to forty
miles per week. Blair drew the conclusion that exercising for fitness was
not the same as exercising for health. As long as you perfo rm regular ,
minimal activity —the equivalent of walking half an hour a day—you are
gaining most of the longevity benefits conferred by exercise. Another way to state this is that doing anything physical is much better
than remaining inactive. In Blair ’s study , the mortality rate of sedentary
people of both sexes was twice as high as for people who walked every day. Walking uses up between 290 and 430 calories per hour, depending on how
fast you walk. This breaks down  to an average of 180 calories for the thirty
minutes that is needed to keep someone healthy . You can burn
approximately the same amount of calories by:
30 minutes of dancing
20 minutes of tennis
17 minutes of uphill hiking
15 minutes of swimming
If you wanted to expend these calories in domestic chores, the times work
out to:
40 minutes of housecleaning
30 minutes of weeding the garden25 minutes of mowing the lawn
15 minutes of shoveling snow
I’m not suggesting that you count calories when you exercise; these figures
are presented to indicate how easily you can maintain your health without
feeling guilty that you don’t jog five miles every morning or swim laps at
the gym. Every time you climb the stairs instead of taking the elevator , your
body uses only 4.5 calories for every flight, but this low number is
deceptive. Stair climbing is excellent aerobic exercise, increasing the heart
rate by ten beats for every flight climbed. A study  in Finland found that people who climbed at least twenty-five
flights of stairs a day achieved a significant level of fitness. That would be
too much to climb at once—the  load on your heart could tax it dangerously
—but anyone who lives in a two-story house can easily climb the stairs a
dozen times a day; add in the opportunity to climb stairs at work or
shopping (every  time you see an escalator or elevator , you’ll find stairs
nearby), and the total of twenty-five flights a day is surprisingly easy to
reach. It’ s just a matter of being on the lookout for opportunities. Exercising a little every day is much better than waiting for the weekend. Start-and-stop activity is stressful on the body , which prefers short daily
sessions of activity . Whether you call your activity “exercise” is up to you
—some people are just not interested in Sports or worko uts, but you can be
active by making the bed, climbing stairs, walking to lunch instead of
taking a taxi, carrying a bag of groceries home on foot, etc. It takes longer ,
more sustained exercise to develop overall fitness, build muscles, and
increase endura nce; the activities listed here basically tone up the
cardiovascular system by pump ing the blood a little faster and giving the
lungs a bit of a workout. Performing regular aerobic exercise will make you healthier , but it will
not necessarily pay rich dividends in terms of added years. In fact, detailed
studies involving Harvard graduates over a period of three decades show
that intensive exercise (expend ing two thousand calories a week, or the
equivalent of running eighteen miles) lengthened life by between one and
two years. Cardiologist Dean Ornish has calculated that it takes thirty
minutes of running, six days a week, to burn up two thousand calories; tothis time you have to add half an hour to suit up and go to the track plus
another half-hour to go home, shower , and change clothes again. If a person
began running at age 30, the hours spent in exercising until age 75 would
add up to betwe en one and two years. Since this is equal to the extra life
you can expect to gain, the net dividend is zero. Heavy exercise gives only
an illusion of adding to life span. The point is not that you shouldn’ t
exercise strenuo usly, but that if you do, you should know that what you are
getting is better quality of life— surely a very great advantage—not more
time. Longevity and Diet
Glaringly absent from Jewett’ s study is the role of diet. No mention is made
of rigorous attempts to control cholesterol. There is no insistenc e on the use
of vitamins and minerals, no recommendations on health food regimens,
fiber supplements, or vegetaria nism. Centenarians eat a wide variety of
diets—this has been confirmed  in all the studies—but the fact that they
maintain a constant weight implies that they tend to eat moderately . Beyond
that, it appears that many of our present dietary beliefs may need to be less
rigid. This point was forcibly brought home by a recent and revealing study . In Finland, a country that has traditionally suffered the highest heart-attack
rate in the world, cardiac researchers selected twelve hundred business
executives who were thought to be at high risk for heart attack because they
displayed one or more of the classic risk factors: obesity , high blood
pressure, elevated cholesterol, and heavy smoking (each smoke d more than
ten cigarettes per day). Half of the men were placed on an intensive five-
year program of controlled diet, regular checkups, and detailed information
about their poten tial risks. The other group was left free to live as they liked
but with regular checkups. At the end of the five years, researchers were extremely surpris ed to find
that death rates were much higher for the group told to cut down on
cholesterol, calories, sugar , and alcohol— including twice as many deaths
from heart attacks. This despite the fact that the heavily monitored grouphad been advised to eat more polyunsaturated fat (mainly margarine),
replace red meat with fish, chicken, and vegetables, quit smoking, and
reduce alcohol consumption. After fifteen years, the statistics were still
skewed: The closely monitored group had suffered thirty-four cardiac
deaths, the control group only fourteen. By any measure, the group left to continue their smoking, drinking, and
overeating should have been at much higher risk. What happened? The
perverse results may or may not imply that controlling the cholesterol you
eat is significant to your health. But they are certainly an indictment of the
stressful nature of present-day prevention techniques. A leading cardiologist in Britain makes the point briskly: “These results
don’t mean that you can stuff yourself silly with impunity . But my own
feeling is that if a patient exhausted by effort and distress has his life
invaded by doctors and other do-gooders wanting to constrain his eating
and other behaviors, the hassle factor and loss of autonomy could prove the
last straw .”
The significant phrase here is loss of autonomy . As we have seen, a
strong sense of personal freed om, coupled with personal happiness, is
critical to surviving in good health to a ripe old age. Fear is not a good
motivator because it creates its own stress. Yet millions of people have been
indoctrinated about cholesterol, on the assumption that the price of fear is
small compared to the price of high cholesterol. This is an extremely short-
sighted strategy . Cholesterol has been promoted as an enemy of the body
for forty years, despite the fact that every cell needs cholesterol to survive
(it forms a critical part of cell membranes, among other functions), and two-
thirds of the cholesterol inside us is manufactured by the liver, not absorbed
through food. The very premise that low cholesterol is beneficial has come under
increasing suspi cion. In a massive review of eighteen studies from around
the world, covering 650,000 people in the United States, Japan, Europe, and
Israel, the benefits of having low serum cholesterol were refuted. The
125,000 women studied had the same life expectancy whether they had
high, low, or average cholesterol readings. Furthermore, no specific cause
of death , such as heart attack or cancer , was related to choles terol levels,either high or low (these findings are doubly important given that almost all
the classic studies warning against cholesterol were based on males). Among the 520,000 men studied, findings were somewhat more
complex. Men with average to borderline cholesterol readings (200 to 240)
had the same survival rates as men with low readings (160 to 200), while
those with either  very high or very low readings were worse off. Men with
a cholesterol level below 160 were 17 percent more likely to die of all
causes, as were men with very high readings (over 240). This research, published in the September 1992 issue of the prestigious
journal Circulation,  represe nts by far the largest pool of data ever
assembled. It strikes deep at our conventional notion that fat and cholesterol
are “bad ,” but the result is still not clear . The evidence against high-fat diets
remains strong, especially when one considers the additional risks posed by
obesity , a common condition in countries with rich diets. Keeping fat at
around 30 percent of total calories continues to be a prudent guideline. What all this means is that a healthy diet must have two components: (1)
It has to be psychologically satisfying; (2) It has to provide a balanced
supply of nutrients several times a day. These are very basic requirements,
but in a society that is fixated on “good” and “bad” foods, that eats half of
its meals at fast-food stands and runs record-high rates of obesity ,
alcoholism, eating disorders, and crash dieting, it is hard to meet them. Evolutionarily , our bodies were designed to eat a wide variety of foods, but
we have compromised this great range of adaptability by nutritional
overload. In The Paleolithic Prescription,  S. Boyd Eaton and his coauthors point
out that so-called primitive diets were much more concentrated in all
vitamins and minerals than are modern diets while being much less
concentrated in fats, proteins, salt, sugar , and calories. Stone Age man, like
most tribal peoples today , ate a low-fat diet consisting largely of plant-
derived foods, with only an occasional bit of meat or fish. Because all foods
were fresh and had low fat content, our ancestors avoided one of the chief
hazards of modern diets—high concentrations of useless calories. The
human body was designed to eat all kinds of foods, but Nature provides few
foods with concentrated calories.Nuts, seeds, and meats are the most concentrated foods in the wild, and
they form a comparatively minor part of the average diet of most tribal
societies. Almos t all native peoples must consume large amounts of fruits,
grains, and vegetables—up to five or six pounds a day—in order to get the
same calories that we get from one-third as much intake. (This also
accounts for the faster speed of digestion on native diets and the increased
bulk of elimination—up to four pounds of feces a day .) Fruits, vegetabl es, and grains contain large amounts of water and
indigestible fiber; therefore, one has to eat a lot of them to extract any
calories to fuel the body . Besides ensuring that the intestines receive enough
fiber, a native diet has the bene fit of concentrated vitamins: A handful of
wild greens can contain a day’s requirement of vitamin C (50 to 60 mg.)
with fewer than 10 calories, while a slice of toast, a doughnut , a bowl of
oatmeal, coffee, and a glass of milk satisfies only 4 percent of the day’s
requirement of vitamin C with 500 calories. As a source of vitamin C, wild
greens are 1,250 times more effective per calorie. By contrast, most
processed foods  contain large doses of salt and sugar , along  with their
extremely high ratios of fat. Although diet was not a distinguishing feature of centenarians, improper
diet is clearly linked with disease and premature aging. The most recent
statistics indicate that the typical American diet contains about 40 percent
fat, 130 pounds  of white sugar per year, and three to five times more salt
than the body actually needs. It cannot be coincidental that 86 percent of
Americans over age 65 are afflicted with one or more degenerative
disorders, such as heart disease, cancer , arthritis, diabetes, and osteoporosis. Although these have been long considered diseases of old age, we now
view these conditions more accurately as lifestyle diseases ; there are
alarming signs of these same disorders in people under 50 and even in
young children. If primitive and tribal peoples survive childhood illnesses and escape
accidents (the two leading causes of early death in the wild), they exhibit
strong, healthy constitutions throughout life. By contrast, our modern
lifestyle creates the basis for cancer and heart disease in all age groups. A
hundred years ago, when Ameri cans ate much less fat and processed food,
much more fiber, and only a fraction of our intake of white  sugar , theincidence of chronic disease was also proportionally lower . Returning to a
more natural diet is worthwhile, given all the evidence. Associated with diet is the question of alcohol, which has its own
ambiguities. For several decades population studies in Europe have
indicated that people who drink a moderate amount of wine (one or two
glasses a day) enjoy lower heart-attack rates than either heavy drinkers or
teetotalers. The precise mechan ism is debatable, but alcohol is known to
raise levels of HDLs (high-dens ity lipoproteins, the “good” cholesterol) and
dilate blood vessels, which reduces blood pressure. It also removes
emotional inhibition, which may counter the tendency to bottle up
emotional stress. Weighed against this are some very negative effects, however:
Alcoholism is an enormous social problem, and, as a chemical, alcohol is
toxic to brain cells; it dehydrates the intestines and can reverse the
assimilation of vital nutrients, particularly in the elderly . Various cancers
and birth defects have been associated with even moderate drinking, not to
mention the wide variety of disorders that afflict alcoholics. If we refer to
Jewett’ s study of people who age successfully into their eighties and
nineties, the fact that drinking habits varied widely suggests that alcohol
alone is not a definitive factor . The only clear implication is that there are
few if any 100-year -old alcoho lics; they died off at a much younger age. Despite the lower incidence of heart disease that is alcohol’ s greatest claim
to health, there is no proof that drinking significantly increases life span. Setting Longevity as a Goal
If we summarize the physical findings from Jewett’ s study , we find that his
subjects maintai ned a steady weight, ate moderately , and remained active
throughout their lives. These factors are obviously not sufficient to explain
longevity . Millions of people who have the same habits do not live to great
old age. The psychological factors in Jewett’ s profile more clearly set his
subjects apart. Their optimism, lack of worry , emotional resilience, capacity
for enjoyment, and love of autonomy all indicate a high degree ofpsychological health. The fact that they are above average in intelligence
also correlates well with similar studies; above-average intelligence makes
it easier for a person to remain in good health, to earn a stable income, and
to learn to resolve personal problems. At the other extreme, people with low
intelligence often cannot take advantage of books and articles about health
and nutrition; they more easily  fall into low-income groups that cannot
afford good housing, food, and health care. Poor, uneducated people also
have the highest rates of cigarette smoking, which is a potent shortener of
life. The question arises whether longevity belongs only to those who are
fortunate enough to be born with certain advantages. Psychologically
healthy people tend to come from psychologically healthy families; parents
with superior education and income tend to have well-educated children
who go on to earn high salaries. There is no doubt that such advantages are
very helpful. In a small but highly suggestive study in 1970, psychiatrist
Eric Pfeiffer took thirty-four men and women, all in their late sixties, who
were considered  the most successful agers in the ongoing Duke  University
Longevity Study , one of the major projects of its kind. When he compared
his successful agers with thirty- four men and women who were  considered
the worst agers , Pfeif fer discovered a significant difference in longevity . The men who aged best survived on average 14.8 years longer than did
those who aged worst; a slightly smaller gap, 13.8 years, separated the
women. This difference was not due to any single factor “but rather a
constellation of biological, psychological, and social factors, amounting to
what may be described as elite status, ” Pfeif fer wrote. The marks of this elite status were as follows:
MEN
  1. Financial status—70 percent of the long-lived men described
their circumstances as comfortable, 80 percent of the short-lived
men rated themselves as poor . 2. Self-percep tion of health as they aged—75 percent of the long-
lived men said that their health was the same as or better than itwas at 55, 80 percent of the short-lived said their health was
worse. 3. Physical function (self-rate d)—63 percent of the long-lived men
described themselves as having  no disorders or at worst mild
disability , 60 percent of the short-lived fell into a range from 20
percent disability to total disability . 4. Improvement in financial status—70 percent of the long-lived
men said that their income was the same as or better than when
they were 55, 60 percent of the short-lived said they were worse
off. 5. Marital status—95 percent of the long-lived men were married,
compared to 75 percent of the short-lived. WOMEN
  1. I.Q.—the long-lived wome n scored about 50 percent higher on
intelligence tests than did the short-lived. 2. Self-percep tion of health as they aged—47 percent of the long-
lived women rated their health better than when they were 55,
while 53 percent of the short-lived saw their health as worse. 3. Marital status—71 percent of the long-lived women were
married, 71 percent of the short-lived were not. 4. Physical functioning rating—many more of the long-lived
women described themselves as healthy or only mildly disabled;
many more of the short-lived described themselves as partly or
completely disabled. 5. Change in financial status— many more of the long-lived women
were financially  better off than they were at age 55; many more
of the short-lived had grown poorer . The notion of an aging elite supports the idea that biology can be
influenced by outside factors. Coming from a disadvantaged background
doesn’ t automatically disqualify someone from bettering him- or herself,
and insofar as a person achieves a stable income, good health, and a
satisfying marriage, he is adding to his chances of longer life. But canlongevity , in and of itself, be set as a conscious goal? Although most of us
try to attain the best life we can, we do not always equate that goal with
long life. Longe vity has been a conscious primary goal for only a small
number of people throughout history . However , the insights of those few are
important to consider . In the nineteenth century , when  only one in ten people lived to be 65,
anyone who survived to 90 or 100 qualified as a source of wisdom about
longevity . At the turn of the century, an Englishman, Dr. G. M. Humphrey ,
professor of surgery at Cambridge, examined nine hundred patients who
were over 90. He sorted out fifty-two who were thought to be centenarians
and made a list of their habits. The majority , he found, were moderate or
light eaters, consumed little meat and some alcohol, rose early , and liked to
do outdoor work. A large majority , over 80 percent, reported that they were
excellent sleeper s—most averaged over eight hours a night for most of their
lives. (As usual, the women centenarians vastly outnumbere d the men,
thirty-six to sixteen. Almost all had been married; most had raised large
families.) These character istics fall into the same patterns as those we see in
modern studies;  they also gave  rise to what we could call the longevity
movement, as consciously trying to live a long life became more feasible. The late Victorians were riding  a crest of increasing life expectancy . The
work of Pasteur and Koch had raised huge optimism about wiping out
epidemic disease; social reform was improving housing, sanitation, and
working condit ions. Instead of assuming that long life was a gift of
providence, people began to take responsibility for their existence; they
began to believe that their own efforts made a difference. Thus the first
seeds of conscious life extension were planted. Several long-lived doctors in their nineties in the Victorian era wrote
books on longevity . All were fierce advocates of a simple diet and abundant
exercise. Alexandre Gueniot, a Parisian physician who lived to be 103,
disclosed that every morning when he arose to work on his book at age 99,
he reach ed his study by climbing three flights of stairs. His English
counterpart, Sir Hermann Weber, a doctor who lived to be 95, was adamant
about the role of constant exercise: In his nineties he recommended one tothree hours of walking every day and taking vacations that included
mountain climbing and hiking. Other long-lived  authorities of the day believed in the virtues of country
living, of keeping active in old age, and of maintaining close social ties with
family and community . It is also interesting that many of the nonagenarian
doctors advised vegetarian diets  with small amounts of dairy products; most
believed that calorie consumption should be low, around 2,500 a day, which
is frugal for an adult who exercises several hours daily . Certain incidental
advice crops up that cannot be proven scientifically but still seems valid:
Weber and Gueniot both thought highly of massages and deep breathing
exercises (we would call them aerobics) to “stimulate the vital or gans.”
None of this advice has ever been contradicted, and much of it has been
reinforced by modern prevention techniques. In the 1930s, writer Maurice
Ernest in his book The Longer Life examined the biographies of
centenarians across many European cultures and back to ancient times. Ernest concluded that understanding just a few physical processes would
extend our lives to 100 or 120 years; he gave the following prescriptions:
•  Eat frugally
•  Exercise and get plenty of fresh air
•  Choose a congenial occupation
•  Develop a placid or easygoing personality
•  Maintain a high level of personal hygiene
•  Drink wholesome liquids
•  Abstain from stimulants and sedatives
•  Get plenty of rest
•  Have a bowel movement once a day
•  Live in a temperate climate
•  Enjoy a reasonable sex life
•  Get proper medical attention in case of illness
Of all these factors, frugal eating is the one that has caught the
imagination of almost every person who consciously tried to live a long life. For centuries the literature of longevity has been filled with testimony about
the virtue of strict dietary abstinence. A fifteenth-century Venetian
nobleman name d Luigi Cornaro is famed in gerontology because heresolved, after a roaringly dissolute youth, that he would mend his ways,
pursue a healthy course of life, and try to survive to at least 100. He
succeeded spectacularly . In an age where the average person was fortunate
to live to 35, Cornaro lived to 103 and remained active and clear-headed to
the end. His method for achieving this feat was to abstain from drinking and
to eat very spari ngly: In essence, he fasted from age 37 onward , following
ancient Greek and Roman notions of frugal diet as the secret of longevity . Cornaro’ s prescription gained scientific credence centuries later, at least
in anima l experi ments. In the 1930s Dr. Clive McKay of Cornell University
took newly weaned rats and fed them only 60 percent of the calorie intake
of a rat with food available all the time. This restricted diet was
supplemented with adequate vitamins and minerals. The diet-restricted rats
grew very slowly compared to normal rats, but they appeared  extremely
healthy througho ut their long lives; they could be held in a growth-retarded
cycle for a thousand days, by which time all the rats on unres tricted diets
had died. When the restricted rats were allowed to return to a full diet, they
started growing normally , and they showed interest in sexual activity , which
had been missing before. To date, McKay’ s method of “undernutrition”—supplying complete
nutrients on a very-low-calorie diet—is the only proven way to extend the
maximum life span of animals. Follow-up research indicated that the
average maximum life span of approximately a thousand days for fully fed
rats could be extended to sixtee n hundred days for undernourished rats, an
increase of 60 percent. Would the technique work for humans? Perhaps. But
the test cannot be done on newl y weaned babies, given the risk of stunting
their growth and the obvious ethical objections. A human diet restricted to
60 percent of normal calories—roughly fourteen hundred calories per day
for an average adult—is on the borderline of fasting. It would be intolerable
to impose this on children, and since young adults can’t see signs of the
aging process yet, they don’t have much incentive to prevent  it. Cornaro
took up his fast in middle age, which may be early enough. Dr. Roy Walford, a noted gerontologist at UCLA and an outspoken
advocate of undernutrition, is one of the few scientists actually to take up
the method himself. Walford believes that cutting back on calories is safe
and effective long after infancy . To support this view , he started mice on arestricted diet at the equivalent age of 30 to 33 in humans and found that
they lived 20 percent longer . Unlike the animals who followed a restricted
diet from  birth, these did not outstrip the maximum age of mice. On the
other hand, a 20 percent increase in life span represents about fifteen years
for humans. The animals displa yed excellent health all their lives and aged
with a fraction of the heart disease and tumors of fully fed mice. Walford did not subject the animals to total fasting every day. Earlier
research had shown that eating  a restricted diet only every other day was
highly effective in increasing life span. In addition, the mice were tapered
into their new diet gradually , allowing their bodies to shift their metabolic
set point to accommodate dietary restrictions without abrupt changes. Your metabolic set point is a brain mechanism that regulates how fast
your body burns fuel. It also indicates when you feel hungry or satisfied. If
you try to impo se a diet on yourself that disagrees with your metabolic set
point, the brain will create cravings for food until more is supplied. By
changing the metabolic set point gradually , Walford coaxed it into line with
the meager calories called for in undernutrition. He advises the same
tapering process  for people who adopt his method, taking several months or
years to adjust to a 40 percent reduction in caloric intake. This graduated plan forms the basis of Walford’ s diet, which he believes
will allow anyone to surpass Cornaro and live to age 120 or older . “The idea
is to lose weight gradually over the next four to six years,” he says, “until
you’re 10 to 25 percent below your set point. That’ s the weight you’ll drift
toward if you neither overeat nor undereat. Usually it’s what you weighed
between ages 25 and 30.” The gradual restriction of calories has to include
careful food selection to make sure that all vitamins and minerals are
included—undernutrition is not the same as malnutrition. From a
physician’ s viewpoint, Walford’ s diet would lead to almost certain
improvements in health, particularly in the areas of cancer and
cardiovascular disease. Instead of eating anything like the 37 percent fat that the average
American consu mes daily , or even the 30 percent advised by prevention
experts, Walford ’s regime cuts fat to a marginal 11 percent—ap proximately
the fat in one tablespoon of vegetable oil, plus traces in grains, vegetables,
and fruits. Altho ugh this intake is so minimal that only the most intenselymotivated person could realistically expect to live on it, 11 percent fat is
normally not dangerous over the short term. The widely publicized program
for reversing heart disease devised by cardiologist Dean Ornish contains
only this much fat, as does the Pritikin Plan and the Duke Univ ersity “rice
diet” that preceded it. Another advantage of dietary restriction is its elimination of useless
calories and processed foods. On a regimen of twelve hundre d to fifteen
hundred calorie s a day, there is no room for cakes, cookies, ice cream,
hambur gers, and french fries. Sugar and fat have to be excised to make
room for an abundance of whole foods. This is desirable even if longevity
doesn’ t result from Walford’ s plan. Some gerontologists point out that the
animals who are of real interest are not the diet-restricted ones but those
that were allowed to eat all they wanted. Dr. Leonard Hayflick, one of the
country’ s leadin g research gerontologists, says that the argument should be
reversed: “The restricted mice are merely being allowed to reach the limit
of their life span. It’ s overfeeding that kills the control group.”
This contention makes a good deal of sense when applied to humans; the
rampant degene rative disease that afflicts our society in old age indicates
that we are being held back from the long, healthy life spans that a few
achieve—approximately 15 percent of people over 65 have no major
degenerative disorder such as heart disease, cancer , diabetes, arthritis, or
osteoporosis. No one has yet discovered why calorie restriction extends life span in
animals. Walfor d speculates that it postpones a breakdown in the immune
system. Presently a huge government facility in Arkansas has been turned
over to undernourishing thirty thousand rats, with similar extensive trials
being run on monkeys. In the near future, announcements of the results,
which have been favorable so far , will no doubt be widely aired. It seems unlikely that many people will ever undertake severe calorie
restriction as a longevity program, given its rigors, but my cultural
background predisposes me to favor the principle of occasional fasting. In
India there is a tradition, centuri es old, that longevity can result from taking
little or no food one day a week (in the form of fruit juice, warm water with
honey , or low-fat milk). The principle at work is simple: The digestive
system is allowed to take a rest, to recover its balance and flush outaccumulated impurities. Modern physiology has not accepted these
principles, yet every spiritual tradition boasts long-lived people who
adhered to them. The success of frugal eating, I believe, is that it must be
blended with a lifestyle in which fasting is neither a punishment nor a
discipline but a respite from daily activity . The time one would ordinarily
devote to eating  would be spent quietly , alone. Fasting would then allow the
body to participate in a feeling of peaceful non-doing. It seems to me that centenarians tend to be far ahead of geronto logists in
what they know about living. There’ s something woefully lacking in any
fragmentary approach to life, however intriguing any single fragment
happens to be. Dietary restricti on doesn’ t address the rich psychology of
humans, and what we know about longevity so far indicates that this factor
is extremely important. I recently read an interview with an inspiring 100-
year-old woman named Edna Olson. She is very devout; all her life she has
sung and prayed  and written poetry expressing her faith. When asked about
her life, she said, “I was only about 2 years old when God spoke to me. He
told me he was God and He wanted me to believe in Him, and He said, ‘I
will take care of you.’
“And He has. He said, ‘Don’ t tell your mother yet. She’ll just say you’re
a silly child and you don’t know  what you’re talking about. I will send you
dreams.’ And God did send me dreams in the morning—before  I woke up
—and they would always be true dreams. They would tell me what I should
do. That’ s how I’ve lived my whole life.”
A woman nourished by visions, or thirty thousand rats on short rations—
I know the juxtaposition seems  strange, but I cannot conceive of survival
without vision. Even if I don’t wake up to dreams from God, every new day
has to mean something to me, and if it does, I believe the battle is won. However , this emphasis on personal qualities of heart and mind is at odds
with current gerontology . The cutting edge of the field lies in
biotechnology , and the most exciting breakthroughs, reported with
extravagant hopefulness by the media, have to do with youth hormones and
genetic engineering. Are these  the true hope? There is an appealing
simplicity to the idea that youth is only a matter of injecting the right
chemical or manipulating a wayward gene. In many people’ s minds
(including those  of many geront ologists) the science of longevity ultimatelyboils down to finding a magic bullet, a substance that will chem ically alter
our cells’ propensity to age. We therefore need to evaluate this perspective
and ask why the kind of longevity that seems to be achievable in test tubes
is so far removed from the kind achieved by real-life centenarians. OceanofPDF .comLONGEVITY UNLIMITED? The Future of an Unlikely Survivor
It makes  sense that the strongest  creatures should live the longes t, but if that
were the case, the naked ape would be a poor candidate for longevity . As
infants, we emer ge from the womb in a state of utter helplessness, unlike
Arctic caribou, for example, whose offspring drop onto the tundra straight
from the womb, immediately gain their wobbly bearings, and within a few
hours are contentedly walking along with the herd. As we know, human
newborns cannot even sit up or roll over . The things we can do straight from the womb—suck, swallow , salivate,
hiccup, blink, yawn, sneeze, cough, stretch, cry, and sleep—aren’ t very
useful for survival, except for the first two, sucking and swallowing, which
enable us to eat. (A baby also exhibits certain reflexes that must have
helped our remote ancestors to survive: A newborn human has a grip so
strong that it can support its own weight if lifted, perhaps an echo of infant
monkeys clinging to their mother ’s fur; this ghost from the genetic past
fades away after about two months, however .) Most creatures have evolved some way to protect their DNA from the
elements, either with a shell, feathers, fur, or scales. But human skin is bare
and so thin that it is easily punctured. Our DNA is vulnerable to wind, rain,
cold, and heat; even remaining in the sun for a few hours makes us
susceptible to cancer . After years of maturing—far longer than any other
mammal require s—humans still cannot run fast enough to escape lions and
tigers, and if we choose to stand and fight, our teeth, fingernails, and fists
provide hopelessly inadequate defenses. So it makes little sense that man lives longer than any other warm-
blooded creature, upward of 115 to 120 years. At least one man in currenttimes, a Japanese offshore islander named Shigechiyo Isumi, reached the
limit of this range. Born two months after Lincoln was assassinated in 1865,
Isumi died 120 years, 237 days later, in 1986. Isumi-san was reported by his
doctor to be healthy and alert until just a few months before his death. In his
eleventh decade he still took a daily walk and drank the local rice beer. In
The Guinness Book of World Records there is a beguiling picture of Isumi,
looking like an Oriental sprite with his long, snowy beard, surrounded by a
dozen children born in his village since his 1 10th birthday . Other people without reliable birth certificates may have lived as long as
or longer than Isumi. Arthur Reed, an American, was thought to be 124
when he died in 1984, which means that he was born the year Lincoln was
first elected. Presently the oldest person alive is said to be a Frenchwoman,
Jeanne Louise Calment, age 117. Since governments and health authorities
are haph azard at best about keeping up with long-lived individuals, the
most notable are generally reported for publicity value to The Guinness
Book of World Recor ds, which recently listed three wom en, a 112-year -old
from Wales and two 115-year -olds from the United States, as the oldest in
the world. (The fact that all these potential record holders are women is in
keeping with an advantage women hold over men throughout life; among
centenarians, women outnumber men two to one.) Most longevity charts list the giant tortoise, which is cold-blood ed, as the
longest-lived creature, with a life span of at least 150 years. A specimen
that old was recorded living in an old fort on the island of Mauritius in the
Indian Ocean. This particular tortoise was an adult when captured, and it
did not die of old age but by accident when it fell through a rotted cannon
emplacement. Technically speaking, a coral colony can be considered a
single, extremely long-lived organism; even though individual polyps do
not survive for long, the entire colony goes on for thousands and perhaps
tens of thousands of years. Among mamma ls, our closest competitors for longevity are the great
whales, who may live to be 100 or more—one blue whale was observed to
return to its seasonal feeding grounds off Australia for nearly a century . Elephants can survive under the best conditions to about 70, but among
small mammals, life spans shrink drastically , so that mice, shrews, and ratsreach only 1 to 3 years of age under optimum conditions. Domestic dogs
and cats can survive to 20 and 30 years respectively . Biologists use two measures for how long any animal can live. There is
maximum  life span (the outer limit of longevity for a species) and average
life expe ctancy (how long the members of a species normally  live in the
wild). There is often a huge diver gence between these two numbers. Nature
is extravagant with birth and equally extravagant with death, allowing many
more creatures to be born than ever survive to breeding age. At least half of
the small animal and bird popul ation, regardless of species, dies every year. Creatures as diverse as the praying mantis and the brilliant tropical fish in
the Great Barrier Reef will spawn hundreds or thousands of young for every
one that survives. A humpback whale may theoretically have a maximum
life span of over seventy years, but in today’ s polluted seas, newborn
humpbacks seem  to have an average life expectancy of only two or three
years. This shocking shortening of life is tragic, because if not enough baby
whales mature to breeding age, the species will dwindle into extinction. Even without man’ s destructive interference, living to old age is one of
Nature’ s great improbabilities. The only feasible way to measure an
animal’ s maxim um life span (and this is only approximate) is to observe it
in a zoo, which serves as a sort of longevity museum. Animals in zoos are
kept well fed and free from predation until they die of old age. Thus we
have learned how peculiar longevity can be. Generally , the smaller an
animal is, the shorter it lives, which is why elephants live thirty-five times
longer than do shrews. Having stated this fact, we immediate ly run into
complications. Some small animals, particularly if they are cold-blooded,
survive a very long time: Fresh-water mussels and sea anemone s can live a
century . Despite their high heart rate and fast metabolism, birds do not wear
themselves out quickly: Eagles, condors, owls, and parrots can live past age
fifty and up to seventy . Something about the flying life gives them
durability , for even bats live three to four times longer than do mice of their
size. Man himself is much smaller than an elephant but lives longer . All
these anomalies indicate that there are few fixed rules about how Nature
determines life span.Humans have the capacity to think about being immortal, but the closest
DNA has come is in primitive organisms—algae, plankton, amoebas, and
microbes, to name but a few—whose existence is too simple to allow for
aging. Any amoeba floating in a roadside ditch today sprang from the first
amoeba that ever appeared; rather than aging and dying, the ancestral
amoeba prolonged its existence indefinitely by dividing into carbon copies
of itself , time after time. Immo rtality was the first survival strategy DNA
learned, hundreds of millions of years before complex plants and animals
appeared—bringing the complex syndromes of aging with them. A coral
reef never gets cancer; streptococci are immune to Alzheimer ’s. Fifty years ago, it still seemed possible that human cells were potentially
immortal, that they could divid e indefinitely if given a chance . The most
convincing support came from a famous experiment begun at the
Rockefeller Institute in 1912. Dr. Alexis Carrel, an eminent French surgeon
and Nobel laure ate, took a samp le of fibroblasts (cells found in connective
tissue such as cartilage) from chicken embryo hearts and began to raise
them in a nutri ent solution. The cells thrived, divided, and then divided
again. The fibroblasts divided so enthusiastically that they eventually filled
the flasks to overflowing, at which point Carrel poured off the excess and
topped the nutrient solution with fresh broth. Under this regime n, the cells
multiplied unch ecked for thirty-four years, finally coming to a halt only
when the project  was abandoned two years after Carrel’ s death. Carrel had a
flair for theatricality , and as the fame of these chicken cells spread, he
invested them with supernatura l qualities. “The tending of the cells was
very like a religious rite,” Albert Rosenfeld recounts. “In fact, everything
that went on in Carrel’ s lab took on a ceremonial air as his celebrity grew . He even made his technicians carry out their solemn high duties in flowing
black robes with hoods.”
Carrel died believing that he had solved a crucial part of the aging
puzzle: Cells could live forever provided they were given the right
environment. Unfortunately , Carrel was discovered to have made a serious
mistake in technique. When he added new batches of nutrient medium,
which was also derived from chickens, he was accidentally introducing new
embryo cells at the same time. It was these cells that kept on dividing after
the previous generation of fibroblasts died.The final hope that human cells were immortal was dashed by acccident
in the late 1950s  when Leonard Hayflick, a young Philadelphia researcher ,
could not get a batch of human embryonic cells to multiply past a certain
limit. No matter  how carefully he cultured them, the cells died after about
fifty divisions. However , Hayflick’ s failed experiment turned into a
breakthrough, as he realized that he had discovered the outer limit of cell
longevity . What came to be known as “the Hayflick limit” was born. Besides overtur ning Carrel’ s results, Hayflick also observed that as they
approach their fiftieth division, cells divide more slowly and begin to look
older , accumulating yellowish waste products. Other experimen ts revealed that the Hayflick limit was apparently part of
DNA ’s program med memory , for cells raised in vitro (i.e., in test tubes
under laboratory conditions) seem to remember how close to their limit they
are. If cell cultu res are frozen after making twenty divisions, for example,
they will reprod uce thirty more times after being thawed out, and then they
will die. This implies that a fixed timetable is being followed. The Hayflick
limit therefore strongly endorses the idea that aging is controlled by a
biological clock. Now a senior spokesman for aging-clock theories,
Hayflick believes that humans have a fixed maximum life span, using the
simple logic that if our cells have a fixed limit on their life, we cannot
exceed it. In support of this theory , when cells extracted from old people are raised
in the laboratory , they die after many fewer divisions than do younger cells,
implying that they were already close to the Hayflick limit; giving them a
new environment with perfectly  controlled nutrients does not extend their
life. Likewise, skin from old mice, when grafted onto younger mice,
continues to age and die according to the donor ’s life cycle. The Hayflick limit is apparently not the same for all cells, however . Roy
Walford of UCLA conducted later experiments showing that white blood
cells may reach a limit of only fifteen to twenty divisions, and lower limits
have been seen in cells from short-lived animals such as mice and rats. In
order to overcome the Hayflick limit, researchers have had to resort to
artificial conditi ons unknown in Nature. Bone marrow can be taken from
old mice and implanted inside young ones, then as they age, the marrow can
be extracted and transplanted again. In this way , marrow cells have survivedfour or five generations of host mice, far beyond the Hayflick limit. Challengers have pointed out that raising cells under glass is still not a
perfected art; they surmise that when better conditions are developed for
tissue culture, cells might divide more than fifty times. DNA and Destiny
How does the Hayflick limit af fect our chances for living past a certain age?
_OceanofPDF.com_Ageless_Body_Timeless_Mind_-_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        Until she turned 100 she lived alone in
a cabin without running water; now she is the star resident of a Houston
nursing home. No mention is made of her health, but it is probably frail—
life flickers like a guttering candle when one reaches the limits of human
longevity. At 109, Belle has moved far beyond biological probability and into a
mysterious and uncertain surviv al. There is a riddle attached to longevity,
because science still cannot predict who will live to extrem e old age. Genetics does not hold the entire answer—no centenarian has ever been
recorded who had a centenarian father or mother. Lifestyle is also
problematic—someone like Belle, raised on a marginal diet and grinding
physical labor, had a horrendous lifestyle by modern standards, yet she has
outlived 99. 999 percent of her generation, including those who lived in far
better circumstances. Of ficially, the oldest survivor in American history wasDelina Filkins, a country woman from Herkimer County, New York, who
died in 1928 at 113. (Unof ficial claims to much higher ages are frequently
made, and there is little doubt that some unsung individual has survived 115
years or more. ) Belle isn’t challenging the record yet, but even to be a
contender puts her in the longevity elite. “Are you lonely. ” a reporter asks her. “Yes’m, sometimes I am,” Belle replies. The very old are inevitably
alone, having outdistanced the family and friends with whom they started
out on life’s journey. Belle is typical in this regard. She has buried three
husbands, one brother, and six sisters. (Unlike most women of her
generation, Belle had no children. ) Even her nieces are far too old to take
care of her now. It’s said that in a typical climbi ng season on Mt. Everest, an average of
sixty-four climb ers arrive at base camp; of this number, which is a tiny
fraction of the world’ s skilled mountaineers, one-third attempt the final
assault on the peak. Two climbe rs will perish in the attempt, and only four
will succeed. Belle Odom is like one of those four climbers standing ten
yards from the summit of human longevity, exhausted, hardly able to take
another step, but there. In the next few decades, the mountaintop is going to become much more
crowded. Barring a premature heart attack or a fatal disease or accident, you
and I are likely  to make it at least to base camp. Ages of 85 and 90 are
going to become as common in the future as they were rare in the past. Newspapers will carry notices of people reaching their hundredth birthdays
as routinely as they now print announcements about the birth of twins. Only
when someone reaches 1 10 will it be considered an event. Can you imagin e what you will be like the day you turn 100. It’s a big
conceptual leap, comparable to asking a 2-year -old to imagine being
middle-aged. But think of yours elf at 50 (perhaps you are already there) and
then try to grasp  this staggering fact: The day you turn 50 is going to be
your second birth. In all likelihood a complete lifetime lies ahead of you,
lasting at least thirty or more likely forty, fifty, or even sixty years. For
every previous generation, 50 was a time for winding down. Children were
grown up, off to college, possibly even married with their own children. Career was a settled matter, and a person pretty well knew whether he was asuccess or failure. The idealism  of youth had long faded; the midlife crisis
had been  weathered either as a full-blown tempest or, if one was lucky, as
only brooding squalls on the horizon. But to be born at 50. Little in life has prepared us for this. Yet according
to a California health department study, if medical science could wipe out
just one major health risk, arteriosclerosis, the average life expectancy for
women in California would rise to 100—the average. Compared to your first birth, the one you will experience at 50 has both
pluses and minuses. In both instances, a completely new and unknown
existence opens up, but the great advantage of your second birth is that you
can plan ahead. Your first birth was thrown at you, complet e with total
strangers who turned out to be your parents, an awkward, unformed body
that had to be trained to perform the simplest tasks, and a bewildering world
of chaot ic sight s and sounds your brain had to mold into something that
made sense. By age 50, all that work has been done, and as fearful images
of the “old old age” rapidly dissipate, the obvious disadvan tage of the
second birth—not having a new body—will not be so crippling. Disease
and infirmity will be long delayed, if not conquered. Fired by the possibilities of planning a whole new lifetime, I decided to
take the opportu nity seriously. I set aside all the stereotypes of old age that
clutter the mind  and approached my second birth (which is only four years
away) with a wish list. What  would I want should I live to be 100. Immediately the following desires came to mind:
I want to survive even longer, if possible. I want to remain healthy. I want a clear, alert mind. I want to be active. I want to have achieved wisdom. As soon as I wrote down these desires, a surprising thing happ ened—they
all seem ed withi n my reach. Why shouldn’ t I have as much life as possible. As long as life is good, it’s only natural to want more of it. Why shouldn’ t I
be healthy. I know what to do to be healthy today, and I can live tomorrow
the same way. My mind is clear and alert now; there is no reason why itmust dim with time, assuming that I keep using it. I’ve always been active,
so why fear that I’ll sink into a chair one day, never to get up again. And if
wisdom isn’t mine yet, that’s all the better; wisdom is a gift that arrives in
its own time. My other desires would be meaningless if I didn’ t expect this
final golden fruit to be bestowed when I am ready. With this simple  list I had turned survival from a threat into a desirable
goal, because on my list were things I truly wanted. Accordin g to public-
opinion polls, 80 percent of Americans say yes to the question “Are you
satisfied with your life today. ” A majority, however, say they don’t want to
live to be 100, so they must share an expectation that the road between
today and 100 brings loss. This self-fulfilling prophecy can be changed only
by choosing to impr ove with age. Old age is a grace if you reach it with joy,
creativity, and curiosity. These qualities require living fully in the present
moment, since today is the youth of your longevity. The unquestioned assumption of the old paradigm was that as the body
wore out over time, life became increasingly unfulfilling. The storehouse of
possibilities ran out after a certain age, which was arbitrarily  defined by
each society and each individual. The new paradigm tells us that life is a
process of constant transforma tion, not decline, and therefore is full of
potential for unlimited growth. To keep unfolding new possibilities decade
after decade, one has to know what these possibilities are. Wha t should we
expect physically, mentally, and emotionally in the second fifty years of
life. A new science of longevity has emer ged to answer these questions. Even staunch adherents to the old paradigm now agree that automatic
decline is not programmed into our bodies. Longevity comes to those who
have discovered  this on their own—science is merely validating the
numerous improvements in bodily function that older people are already
experiencing. In this section I want to exam ine these new findings in the hope of
discovering the most essential ones, the keys to longevity that hold true for
most if not all people. Human life is incredibly resilient. It would seem
unlikely that someone like Belle Odom could survive as long as she has. Many disadvantages were stack ed against her: being poor and black, being
deprived of adequate medical care, spending most of her life on a diet that
was likely to have been high in fat and low in essential vitamins. Thescience of longevity must account for these anomalies, and I believe that the
only way it can is to probe into issues of mind and heart that transcend
physical factors. Belle is much more than her lifestyle—and so are all of us. Biologists and gerontologists have amassed fascinating inform ation about
how to survive to great old age, but new data is not enough. We need
practical examples of holistic living. As an inspiring experiment in this
direction, Gay Luce and her colleagues in Berkeley, California, ran Project
SAGE (Senior Actualization and Growth Explorations). Founded in 1974,
SAGE attempted to revitalize people between the ages of 65 and 85 with
startling success. Many transformed their lives. One woman, who
mournfully said her life was over when she was 74, wrote a book at age 91
and began traveling as a speake r campaigning for a decent environment for
the dying. People discovered that by breath work and attention they could
undo long-term symptoms—migraines, headaches, and arthritis pain. A
retired woman who thought herself virtually color blind discovered through
an art process that she could do interior decoration, and redid her home. There is a secret  core of meanin g waiting to be discovered in every life, and
those who have found it are the teachers I look to for my own future
survival. They have lived the years after the second birth. They are the true
scientists of longevity and therefore its real geniuses. OceanofPDF. com100 YEARS YOUNG:
What the Oldest Can Teach Us
Most of us have never met anyone who is 100 years old. Histori cally, living
to 100 was a feat so rare that it was almost freakish. Victorian-era research
into the lineage of British aristocrats, who were presumably the best fed and
cared for members of their society, could not unearth a single peer in the
preceding ten centuries who had lived to be 100. The first was Lord
Penrhyn, who died in 1967 at 101. Today in most industrialized countries,
one person in 10,000 passes the century mark, and the ratio is rising faster
than any other growth statistic in the population. The oldest peop le alive today do not tend to be merely random survivors,
but individuals who embody enviable attitudes and values. Sociologists
who study centenarians are inevitably struck by their strong attachment to
freedom and independence. Throughout their lives, centenarians tend to
avoid being held back by const raints. Traditionally, most have worked on
their own, very few in the confines of modern corporations. They prize their
autonomy very highly. As I said earlier, the word researchers apply most frequently to
centenarians is adaptable. At some point in their lives, all have suffered
losses and setba cks. But even the most intense loss, such as that of a spouse
after fifty or sixty years of marriage, was mourned, and then the person
moved on. Studied as a group, centenarians have other significant
similarities. In his compelling book on longevity, Prolongevity II, Albert
Rosenfeld reports from interviews conducted with twelve hundred people
on Social Security who gave their ages as 100 or more. “It was clear that,
though these individuals worked hard and enjoyed their work, there was a
marked lack of high ambition. They had tended to live relatively quiet andindependent lives, were general ly happy with their jobs, their families, and
their religion, and had few regrets. Nearly all expressed a strong will to live,
and a high appreciation for the simple experiences and pleasures of life. ”
If aging were simply a matter of wearing out, we would expect all
centenarians to be in poor health, trapped in bodies with many deteriorated
working parts. Actually, standards of health are high among our
centenarians; fewer than one in five report that they are disabled or in such
poor health that they require assistance to eat, walk, bathe, and so forth. Most still get around on their own (almost always without crutches or
walkers), and many continue to work, at least by keeping house and caring
for themselves. Trying to articu late a specific “longevity personality” is too constricting
for centenarians—the benign, quiet, wise grandfather or grandmother is
only one type among many. Living to be 100 also happens to selfish,
sarcastic, and unsociable peopl e. The common thread is a sense of self-
sufficiency that runs much deep er than personality. To support this point, a
1973 study in New York of seventy-nine healthy people 87 years of age and
older found that they almost never went to doctors, were never found in
nursing homes, and were rarely in homes for the aged. Dr. Stephen P. Jewett, the senior psychiatrist who conducted the New York study, made
clear that his subjects were more than chance survivors or lucky
beneficiaries of good genes. Granted, the seventy-nine people he studied had escaped catastrophic
illness, such as heart attack and cancer, in the critical midlife period from 45
to 65 (this is when bad genes, hypertension, elevated cholesterol, smoking,
alcoholism, and other negative factors tend to take their highest toll). But
Jewett’ s subjects managed to be healthy into their late eighties and nineties,
implying that some powerful positive factors were working in their favor. Jewett’ s study saw longevity in broad terms, and the majority of the
factors he came up with were subjective, having to do with how these
people felt about themselves. In comparison, the purely objective factors
linked to long life were few and very general. PHYSICAL  CHARACTERISTICSNot seriously overweight or underweight
Little weight fluctuation over their lifetime
Good general muscle tone
Good grip
Young appearance to skin
Still drives a car and engages in physical activity
PSYCHOLOGICAL  CHARACTERISTICS  
(INCLUDING LIFESTYLE AND BEHA VIOR)
Superior native intelligence, keen interest in current events, good
memory. Freedom from anxiety, few illnesses, not prone to worry. Independence of choice in their vocations. They tended to be their
own bosses. They worked at farming and in the nursery business,
and in the profe ssions of law, medicine, and architecture; others
headed small businesses of their own, and in a few cases large
businesses. The majority did not retire early. Most had been hard hit by the Depression, which came along in their
fifties and sixties, but they recovered and built new futures. They enjoyed life. All had a degree of optimism and a marked sense
of humor. They responded to simple pleasures. Life seems to have
been a great adventure. They could see beauty where others saw
only ugliness. Great adaptability. While many cherished childhood memories, all
preferred living in the present with its many changes. They were not preoccupied with death. They continued living with satisfaction from day to day. All may be described as religious in the broad sense, but none
exhibited extreme orthodoxy. They were moderate eaters but willing to experiment. No special
diets. Diet inclu ded a high varie ty of foods high in protein, low in
fat. All were early risers. A verage sleep was between six and seven hours,
although they rested in bed for eight hours. (Shortened orinterrupted sleep is typical in old age. ) No uniformity in drinking habits. Some drank moderately, some
drank too much at times, some abstained. Smoking—some abstained, a few had smoked very moderately but
had long since given it up, a few were inveterate pipe smokers. Medications—used less medication in their lifetimes than many old
people use in a week. Most drank cof fee. I have covered some of these factors previously, and I’d like to touch on
a few more first, the physical characteristics on the list, though few, are very
telling. Longevity and Weight
Maintaining a fairly steady weight throughout life seems to be more
important than whether one is over- or underweight. As with so many
findings about longevity, this one sounds rather insignificant but may turn
out to have deep implications. A study of 11,700 Harvard graduates from
the classes of 1916 to 1950 paid particular attention to how they fared from
middle age onward. Data colle cted between 1962 and 1988 revealed that
gaining or losing even a moderate amount of weight over a long period of
time raised one’ s risk of mortality. Compared to men who kept their weight constant, those who lost eleven
pounds or more over a ten-year period had 57 percent higher mortality,
including 75 percent higher risk of dying from a heart attack. Those who
gained eleven pounds or more over a ten-year period were only somewhat
better off, with 36 percent higher mortality than the men who maintained a
steady weight; their risk of dying from a heart attack jumped dramatically
to 200 percent. This finding overturns the common misconception that
being too fat is the main risk associated with weight; actually, as long as
clinical obesity isn’t present (defined as being 15 percent or more over
normal body weight), carrying around some extra poundage is not
correlated with shorter life span—just the reverse. Extensive actuar ial studies conducted by Dr. Reuben Andres have shown
the lowest mortality among those who are 10 percent overwei ght and the
highest mortality among the chronically underweight. Andres’ s work, based
on studies of millions of people in all income and social brackets, plays
havoc with societal values that equate slimness with all things good and
healthy; as a result, many docto rs have chosen to overlook facts that do not
fit in with prevailing beliefs. The Harvard study further undermines the
stereotype through its emphasi s on maintaining a steady weight. It also
supports the long-held notion that going on crash diets is unhealthy, but
calling this a purely physical finding seems misleading to me. Weight is
inevitably boun d up with self-image. At a young age many people, both
men and women, learn to use dieting as a quick fix for a poor self-image. The thinner they are, the better  they feel about themselves and the more
prone they are to believe that their problems in general have been cured. The improveme nt brought about by losing five or ten pounds is
superficial, however, since deeper emotional issues remain untouched. Typically, the chronic dieter falls into the “yo-yo syndrome,” dropping a
few pounds when self-esteem is relatively high, only to gain them back
quickly (and with more to spare) when self-esteem sinks again. The fact
that either  gaining  or losing weight shortens one’s life span makes me
speculate that poor self-esteem  is the real culprit. The subjects who
maintained a steady weight are likely to be psychologically steady as well
—this is their saving virtue, not their weight per se. Clinical obesity
remains a proven risk in heart disease and type II diabetes, but being
physically active  may compensate for being overweight due to the fact that
carrying the extra pounds provides considerable aerobic exercise to the
heart. Longevity and Exercise
The strong grip and good muscle tone of Jewett’ s subjects indicate that they
were active people. However, there is a marked absence of pursuing
organized exerc ise, despite the fact that exercise is known to retard aging. To understand this seeming anomaly, we have to look deeper into how
much activity is actually needed to make a significant contribution to
longevity.
113 (Delina Filkins)
What is the age of the oldest person mentioned in the text?
Belle Odom's longevity is used as an example to illustrate the fact that lifestyle does not entirely determine one's life span, as she had a poor diet and physical labor, but still lived beyond 99.99% of her generation.
What is the significance of Belle Odom's longevity in the context of the article?
The study concludes that the factors that contribute to longevity are not just physical, but also psychological, as the subjects who maintained a steady weight, ate moderately, and remained active throughout their lives.
What is the conclusion drawn from the study on Harvard graduates?
The study suggests that it is possible to extend the maximum life span of cells by using a gradual reduction in caloric intake, as the mice lived 20% longer than usual.
What is the key takeaway from the study on mice by Dr. Roy Walford?
The issue is that even with advanced technology, it is difficult to create a controlled environment for tissue culture, and it is uncertain whether cells can divide more than 50 times.
What is the main issue with the idea of using Hayflick's work to overcome the Hayflick limit?