Gerontologists find that mean life spans have greatly increased in the past century. However, without significant biomedical advances, maximum life spans (122 years) have not. Even the elimination of cancer and other major diseases are a start, but even they would do little to raise our maximum life spans. Handfuls of supplements, regular checkups, and exercising like mad do little to lengthen our lives (and much to shorten them). In order to live past the centenarian mark in style, we need headline-making discoveries.
Even so, doctors of the future may find novel ways to treat age-related diseases. They may learn how to encourage the body to salvage broken down proteins, and produce more cell-defending chemicals. In the meantime, we can be assured that those who claim to know the keys to life-extension are nearly always scammers.
The length of human life, when seen from the perspective of geologic or historical time, is certainly brief. The few decades that we get are precious, and we must resolve to live them to the fullest. But people, who resist the fleeting nature of life, and turn to the life-extension scammer, in a bid to turn back the clock, are merely swindled.
"The job of Dr. Tim Staten is to fight the relentless influence of aging. He knows that nearly all forms of weakness induced by aging are easy to reverse."
Aided by expensive politicians, who allow such scams to flourish, the life-extension scammer offers a large assortment of high-priced nutritional products, replete with bogus and irrelevant studies. Such scammers claim that a lack of whatever they are selling is the cause our problems. If we would only use their products, better memory, fantastic sex drive, and forests of hair will be ours. Gray hair will return to its original color and age spots will vanish--courtesy of fake before and after photos. Nonetheless, their bank account will attain longevity.
The life-extension scammer would have us believe that longevity is the be-all and end-all of life. In reality, a short life well lived, full of sensuous joy, is superior to the struggle to lengthen a dreary existence. Besides, most people who spend their dwindling years preoccupied with how to live longer are often self-important, tiresome to be around, and far from living the good life. In any case, no one knows if we may be lucky enough to live to a ripe old age, or do it with all of our faculties intact.
We must do our best, as long as we have air moving through our lungs, to live the good life, in spite of the genetic and socioeconomic lots we have drawn. The other choices are to resort to useless tirades, wishful thinking, worthless prayer, inspirational lies, or false pity, all of which make matters worse.
Still, we may wonder:
"What defines optimal health and happiness; is it intense aliveness, or is it merely freedom from disease?
The pursuit of optimal fitness, optimal happiness or optimal energy is vague, and usually pays an equally vague dividend. Most of us would find it difficult to stick to a diet and exercise program for long. Even if we could, we would add little to our life spans at best. The good news is that there are other, more pleasant ways, to improve our health:
- Enjoying friendships and social activity.
- Going to concerts, movies and plays.
- Alternating activity and relaxation.
- Listening to, watching or playing music.
- Eating less (while eating ample vegetables and fruits).
Then again, the holistic cleric has a different set of values:
"The purpose of life is to prolong our existence through the tenets of holistic health."
In their personal life, the holistic cleric manages, in soy-based sermons, to turn simple, commonplace illnesses into full-scale spectacles. Next comes the unwanted health advice, or worse, the subtle feeling that being sick is a punishable offense.
Regardless of the lifestyle improvements we make, how many vitamins we take, or hormones we inject, the chances of our average life expectancy rising to beyond 100 or so are slim indeed.
If we look at the average life span of today, we see that we're living longer and longer every year. If we were to track those trends, and they kept up—which they're not going to—males and females combined would not reach an average, in France and Japan, of 100 years, until the 22nd century.
Despite this, our rise in life expectancy is actually slowing down. This isn't a surprise, because life expectancy is difficult to increase once we approach 80. Why? Because adding decades to the lives of people who have already lived 70 years or longer is more difficult than adding decades to the lives of children who are dying of infectious disease.
The numbers are shocking: the average lifespan would not increase very much if all cancer were eliminated!
"If everyone ate a 30% fat diet, women would gain 4 months, and men would gain an average of 3 months to their average life spans. So, all that trouble, and that's all we get? Some people will live longer and some shorter, but that average is an increase of 3-4 months. Most of us would have trouble sticking to that kind of diet. We would feel deprived every day of our lives, and deny ourselves the food we love And yet all we would get is a lousy few months in our diapers at a nursing home.
Gee, we don't want to miss that, do we?"
Dr. Dean Edell
A person who lives to be 115 or 120 is extremely rare indeed. Even if we were to live that long, what would our quality of life be like?
We need to grow up and face the fact that life is finite. Even so, lots of us walk around thinking we're going to beat the system.
One of the favorite lines of Dr. Edell is a Red Foxx quote that goes something like this:
"All these people out there exercising and eating special diets. What are they going to think someday when they're lying in a hospital dying of nothing?"
In other words, we've got to die of something.
Aging is complex. We really have to work, despite genetic breakthroughs, to improve our life expectancy. Whatever will turn it around won't be a serum or health food supplement . Eliminating diseases will be a start, but even that's not going to be huge.
The best advice is to enjoy the life we have. That's something that'll help us to live longer. The mind/body effect can be very powerful. We'll live longer if we enjoy our life, and maintain social connections.
Our outlook has quite an effect on our body, and can even slow the aging process. We encourage ourselves to be elderly by constantly bringing to mind our advanced age, and that we have had it.
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When seventy-year olds are secluded in a place decorated in a style reminiscent of times 20 years ago, while eliminating all evidence of the last two decades, the results are surprising. Subjects act as if they'd really gone back in time. After a week, they were faster and stronger than before. Certainly stronger than control groups that don't get this smattering of time-travel.
Instead, the control groups are left to think about how gd. old they are.
