I’ve listened to a 3 hour plus podcast on health and longevity so you don’t have to.
It was on my meditation app which seems a bit of a stretch but I suppose there’s some wellbeing in there somewhere. The host of the podcast was interviewing a very intense fellow who seems to be something of a polymath (=smartypants). He started out as an engineer, changed to medicine and became a surgeon for a while, got disenchanted and switched to commodities trading (or some such financial wizardry), before moving into science where he’s been researching exercise and aging. Phew.
The discussion was about serious aspects of longevity and health span so there was literally not a sausage about grey hair, wrinkles, cosmetic surgery or Botox. Believe me, it was miserable enough without that.
Guidance on exactly what foods to eat were slim. There are no wonder foods to slow down aging, although you have to keep up your protein intake to help prevent sarcopenia, or muscle wasting. Obesity is bad in a large part due to associated inflammation, and he suggested there’s nothing more magical to weight gain or loss than calories in/calories out, which seems refreshingly old school.
I can’t remember much of what he said about dementia, although anything you can do to promote cardiovascular health is good for your brain. Sadly, doing crosswords only teaches you how to be better at crosswords. Similarly, he may have discussed the role of insomnia but I was probably asleep at the time.
Cardiovascular disease is the biggest killer in the Western world but gets much less press than cancer, maybe because it’s an old people problem. The interviewee said that modern medicine has come a long way in treating it, though. He suggests that high blood pressure ought to be very tightly controlled, anything above 130/85 should be medicated. Similarly with lipids. It seems that rather than being pleased that I bullied my GP into prescribing me statins five years ago, I should have been started on them as soon as I left high school. A missed opportunity there.
On the cancer front, apart from avoiding smoking, alcohol, and obesity, a lot of it is just bad luck. He’s very impressed with some of the modern cancer drugs, but it’s still important for most cancers to be found early if you really want to improve survival rates. He talked about a woman in her seventies who was contemplating stopping having mammograms, because she thought the combination of breast ultrasounds and full body screening MRIs would probably be enough, and he was trying to talk her out of it. Oh what a fabulous medical system they have in the US if you can afford it!
It was clear that this chaps real hobby horse, though, was exercise. In order to avoid having significant sarcopenia in your eighties, you need to be positively muscle bound in your fifties. He laughed in the face of a couple of hours of gentle exercise a week. An hour of strength work a day is needed – here we’re talking about weights at the gym – plus at least an hour of level two cardiovascular exercise daily. This is exertion defined by “You can talk if you have to, but you don’t feel like it”, which sounds unpleasantly sinister and vaguely threatening to me.
I don’t know about you but this regime sounds absolutely exhausting. I might be grateful to drop dead just to get a bit of a rest.
