4 ms·
No present day biotech can do better for a healthy person that calorie restriction and exercise. This is true, and backed up by a great weight of science. Also
by reasonattlm 16y ago
No present day biotech can do better for a healthy person that calorie restriction and exercise. This is true, and backed up by a great weight of science.
Also true: nothing mentioned in your article can do as well as calorie restriction and exercise.
But calorie restriction and exercise cannot enable a person to live much longer. It helps you reach what will be your maximum optimal natural life span under today's medical technology, which might be a century if you are exceptionally fortunate.
The thing that will determine your life span is none of the above, however. It is future medical technology. Therefore the thing happening today that most greatly determines your future longevity is the level of investment and progress in the right sorts of technological development.
This is a stark change from the 50s or the 70s. There, no amount of foreseeable technological progress was going to impact the future life course of a 40 year old to the same degree as exercise and calorie restriction. Today, however, whether you die at 80 or whether you life for hundreds of years is absolutely a function of the degree to which rejuvenation biotechnology is realized over the next two to three decades.
This degree of realization can be swayed, now, today, by sufficiently motivated individuals. Such as the people who founded the SENS Foundation, or the Methuselah Foundation, or who persuade million-dollar donations into fundamental research into the repair of biochemical damage that drives aging.
This is an important era, and to focus on health in the sense that your parents did is to bury your head in the sand.
- jaltucher 16y agoNo smoking, no drinking, crap on a regular basis, and sleep 8 hours a day (and enjoy sex) will be much better for your quality of life (and quantity!) than calorie restriction. Look at the stats. Imagine if simply people avoid smoking: average age would go up 10 years immediately across the country.
- rubashov 16y agoThe centrality of smoking to these models seems a little suspicious considering all the ancient people in Japan who have smoked all their lives. Also, cancer rates in the west, including lung cancer, have continued to rise despite major declines in smoking. Not that I'd suggest smoking; I'm just suspicious of the models.
- pjscott 16y agoThe existence of really old people who've been smoking their entire lives is something you should expect to see if smoking is a strong statistical danger but not a guaranteed killer. It does not count as evidence against that theory. By the way, I looked up lung cancer rates in the US and the UK, and they've both been going down quite significantly among men, who were at a higher risk to begin with, and rising slowly among women -- a trend which has tapered off more recently. http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/statistics/trends.htm http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/statistics/trends.htm http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/lung/incidence/ http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/lung/inci... Looking at correlations between smoking rates and lung cancer rates in various countries, there's strong evidence that most of the mortality gap between men and women can be explained by the greater prevalence of smoking among men: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/555221_2 http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/555221_2