1. Ageing Is Really About Trade-offs
Despite what you think, ageing – in the traditional way that we think of it, with everything slowly and painfully shutting down – isn’t “meant to be”. It’s not an effect of life. It’s actually more of a side effect of a grander plan for humans.
A lot of people think that creaky joints, craggy nails and cranky bowels are simply part of the deal. You get to live to eighty-something; then, in exchange, you’re going to have your fair share of misery along the rest of the way. Horrible being old, eh? Hold on. Yes, there is a trade-off, but it’s not that one. If you take a look at every biological process that happens in your body, there’s an evolutionary reason why it works that way, and that reason, without fail, is to ensure the survival of the species. That is, evolution has deemed the perpetuation of your genes to be much more important than the perpetuation of your individual life. Your biological processes are designed to protect you only long enough to reproduce and to raise your young. In fact, it wasn’t until the mid–twentieth century – at least in developed countries – that human beings could expect to live much beyond their reproductive years.
Those processes that make perfect sense for reproduction may not work in your favour as you get older. That’s ageing. The systems designed to protect you until you finish reproducing (whether you’re actually reproducing is unimportant) can be maladaptive as you age. When you look at ageing through the lens of the gene, rather than the lens of the individual, it all makes much more sense. These trade-offs are what we’ll occasionally refer to as the YOU-nified theory of ageing – the fact that ageing isn’t some master plan for life but, rather, an offshoot.
2. Ageing Isn’t About Breaking Down as Much as It Is About Repair
Stuff breaks. Cars, computers and relationships all have their own breaking points. And to suggest that stuff will not break either through acute injury (a fire in a building or a torn knee ligament) or from wear and tear over time (a fifty-year-old road or an overused back) would be misleading. While it’s obviously important to keep your biological systems from breaking down, the real secret to longevity isn’t whether or not you break; it’s how well you recover and repair when you do. Our bodies, in fact, weren’t designed not to break down (legs as thick as trees may not break, but they wouldn’t be very nimble). They were designed with a great efficiency and ability to repair themselves.
As with a car, you’ll get a lot more mileage out of your body if you perform routine maintenance. Ageing is essentially a process in which your cells lose their resilience; they lose their ability to repair damage because the things you might never have heard of (until now), like mitochondria and telomeres, aren’t working the way they should. But it’s within your power to boost that resilience and keep your vehicle going an extra couple of hundred thousand miles.
3. Ageing Happens from Both the Inside Out and the Outside In
Many of us like to think that ageing is a magical process that happens deep within our bodies; that some so-called gremlins of gerontology ratchet down our cells and our systems so we grow old. You’ll learn in this book that ageing is not only about those cellular processes, but, more important, it’s how you respond, adapt to and deal with the stressors that affect you from the outside – things like sun and stress and slippery pavements. What does that mean? It means that ageing is really about the rate of ageing – specifically, how the outside and inside factors accelerate or decelerate your ageing. Here’s the big secret about ageing: your rate of ageing doubles every eight years. So, if we were able to maintain a forty-year-old’s rate of ageing for the rest of our lives, we would live past the age of one hundred and twenty and “die of old age”. While inside out and outside in both play a role – and both influence each other – your job is to try to manage both forms, so that you slow the real culprit in growing old: the rate of ageing.
4. Ageing Is Not About Individual Problems but Compounded Ones
Spend any time at a deli counter, and you know that Swiss cheese has two different looks. Big holes or small holes, all in random order and patterns. A good way to think about ageing is to imagine yourself looking through a dozen slices of stacked-up Swiss cheese (see Figure Intro 2). If the holes are small and the slices are thick, you can’t see through the stack. Now pretend that each of these Swiss cheese slices represents a layer of protection that your body provides to prevent ageing. People who are vibrant and strong may have small holes in their system – stuff that lets through a few problems, but nothing too major. Maybe they’ve got a little hole in their slice of heart health, and a few little holes in their slice of brain health, and a medium-sized hole in their slice of chromosome health. Nothing major lets you see through the stack.
FACTOID
Currently, there are more than six thousand centenarians in the UK. This number is expected to increase to forty thousand in 30 years’ time. (The Guardian, 18 January 2006)
As ageing takes effect, however, those holes can get a little bigger, or the cheese can get a little thinner. When big holes from one slice perfectly align with big holes from another slice, then, in effect, you’ve got big problems. That’s a little bit what ageing is like: the small problems may not have a big effect here and there, but when they grow, and when they interact with other problems, then you’ve created what we like to call a (cue scary orchestra music) web of causality. That’s when seemingly small health problems spiral into bigger ones – all possibly triggered by several different causes.
Figure Intro 2 Cheese Doodle Each layer of resilience we have against ageing is like a slice of cheese. The differences in hole size, number of holes and thickness of slices describe how we protect ourselves against ageing.
5. Ageing Is Reversible – All You Need Is a Nudge
Most people think ageing is a landslide of a process, that we’re destined to use walkers and hearing aids and thick glasses no matter what. And while we’re not saying that you will absolutely avoid all the bumps (big and small) along the way, we are saying that ageing isn’t as inevitable as a morning trip to the toilet.
What you will learn in this book is how to nudge your systems so that they work in your favour to create leverage points in life. And the great thing is that it’s never too early or too late to start making these changes. You don’t need a complete overhaul, because, frankly, your body is a pretty fine piece of machinery. What you’ll ultimately do is find and fix your own personal weak links – the things that make you most vulnerable to the effects of ageing. The cumulative effect of those nudges, though not major from a behavioural or even a biological perspective, can be huge when it comes to increasing the length and quality of your life.
The truth about ageing is that you – right now – have the ability to live 35 percent longer than expected (today’s life expectancy is seventy-five for men and eighty for women) with a greater quality of life and without frailty. That means it’s reasonable to say that you can get to one hundred or beyond and enjoy a good quality of life along the way. While relying on the talents, skills and knowledge of others may get you out of a medical jam, what you really want is to avoid it in the first place. Restricting calories, increasing your strength and getting quality sleep are three of nature’s best anti-ageing medicines. Together, these activities – as well as the other actions we recommend – control 70 percent of