Ever wondered why we age and eventually die?
My guess is that you most likely haven’t, that rather, simply accepted that ‘things wear out, in fact, everything just wears out eventually…’
That may well be the case, especially if you are contemplating things like the End of the Universe, and the second law of thermodynamics.
But one of the weird things is that your body doesn’t just wear out. Your body regenerates itself millions and millions of times over. The actual atoms that are you now, are completely different atoms from when you were 20 years old. You carry inside every single cell of your body a genetic blueprint that can be cloned and made into an identical brand-new you.
If you think the above is weird, you are in for a further shock… A Chinese scientist has already cloned (or at least has claimed to have cloned) a human. He claims a fully independent, growing embryo was cloned in a lab from an adult human cell, and then terminated. (The scientist was consequently shunned from the scientific community for being unethical). So, we know that aging is not necessarily written into our DNA. The cloned embryo was not forty years old.
What is currently a mystery to science is why we start to age at all. Some species have cells that only acquire ‘negligent senescence’ which effectively means they don’t age.
There is a Bristlecone pine that is 4,850 years old – this same tree was already staggeringly old when Jesus was a baby! The Greenland Shark is thought to live for 500 years, so, some of them have been cruising around in our oceans since before the industrial revolution!
If you don’t just accept that aging is inevitable, it opens your mind to the fact that aging might be a process, and if it is a process, perhaps it can be slowed. If the process can be slowed, can it be stopped? And if it can be stopped, can it be REVERSED?
Strangely, most of us have no problem accepting that the aging process can be sped up. Sceptical? Try eating 6 oversized meals of junk food every day, don’t leave the couch, smoke cigarettes, and stress out as much as possible. The also limit your sleep to 3 hours a night. You might be thinking, of course, a poor lifestyle will kill you.
But this is highly contentious. You could find evidence that by doing those things, you had actually advanced or driven the 9 hallmarks of aging (through cellular damage and a whole heap of other means). But are these 9 hallmarks the cause of aging? Or are they just the symptoms of aging? At present, there is no emphatic answer.
So, if we so readily accept that aging can be sped up, why do we struggle so much with the idea that it can be slowed down? You have probably twigged to my point above by now. If you do the reverse of the things listed above, you can slow down the aging process and extend your lifespan.
This is not some conceptual idea or a cherry-picked bit of science.
This has been empirically shown and published in peer-reviewed articles that one of these factors – regular exercise – extends the telomeres, which are the caps on the end of your chromosomes. (Telomere shortening is one of the 9 hallmarks of aging).
Scientists got people who were middle-aged and had the expected telomere shortening (that comes with reproductive replication of our DNA) for their current age. They divided the group into 2 and made 1 group exercise a few times a week for around 30 minutes at a time (the other group was a control).
What became evident was that the exercise group, at the end of the experiment, had telomeres that were a similar length to people half their age, whereas the control group, as expected, had no changes to the length of their telomeres at all.
So, if you want to live longer, do something about it. It’s not rocket science, and most of the things that you think are bad for you, probably are, and vice versa.
One of the best things about all this exercise, fasting, nutrition etc, is not that you might eke out an extra five years of life, but as the science has shown, you are going to have MUCH BETTER HEALTH up until the point that you do actually die.
You will be fitter, stronger, healthier have more energy and basically enjoy life more.
You might be tempted to say at this point – “Hold on Doc, maybe you can slow the aging process, by a tiny bit. But that is no big shakes, of course, if you live healthily, you will live a bit longer, but that is hardly reversing the aging process”.
Well, my friend, I would suggest to you, that science is already demonstrating that the aging process can actually be reversed, at least in principle, but I will write much more on that later.
List to our How Old is Old? Podcast to find out more: