Is It Possible For Scientists To Add 20 Years To Life Expectancy?
- How far are we away from reversing the aging process?
- Have scientists or anyone found a way to stop aging?
- How would society evolve if we found an affordable way to stop aging, becoming virtually immortal?
- I am 42 years old, will I live to see the cure for aging?
- How realistic is a cure for aging within the next 50 years?
Reverse? Stop? Cure?
Do we really think about how ridiculous the idea is? Why is it such a common question? Why do we seem to be unable to accept the realities of our existence and show such a fear of dying?
With death a natural part of living, how about accepting it as a new adventure?
Reversing aging defies physics and, last I heard, physics still seems to be pretty solid science.
I’ll hand it to the Kurzweil’s, de Gray’s, Venter’s, Diamandis’s, Sinclair’s of the world – they’ve found a way to keep the venture funds coming, the book sales cooking, and speaking engagements going as we flock to the intrigue of their claims.
Let’s dial it back a notch.
We choose to ignore it.
We sit back and hope that medical science will continue to come up with miracle solutions to extend our life expectancy when we already have solutions.
I get sideways quickly with this whole mindset that seems to want to count on science to come up with solutions to problems that we generate because of our crappy lifestyles.
We want science to develop a magic pill or shot or kryptonite substance that will allow us to live a longer life of comfort, convenience, and conformity while ignoring the fact that it is that very lifestyle that keeps our life expectancy relatively short.
We come equipped with the solution – it’s called the birthright of good health.
Consider this: we are born healthy, with the rare exceptions of those unfortunates who start life with ”blueprint errors” or birth defects. Nearly all of us have a birthright to good health. It’s a magnificent assembly of 30-40 trillion cells that are miraculously kludged together into an incredibly complex 24×7 immune system committed to protecting us from all the nefarious creatures and habits that threaten that good health.
We are magnificently talented at screwing up that birthright.
Let me count the ways:
- We eat badly – over 60% of early deaths in our western culture are due to bad diets. Our Standard American Diet (SAD) is killing us slowly, insidiously!
- We eat badly, part 2. I can’t offer up this diatribe without saying something about what I consider to be the true “elephant in the room” when it comes to our failure to maintain good health practices. The elephant is actually – wait for it – a cow! Or a cow/pig/chicken, if you will. (Excuse me as I go slightly off the rails here). In all of my extensive reading and studying about health and wellness, one consistent message stands out: An animal-product diet is bad, a plant-based diet is good. Yet the powerful cattle, dairy, poultry industries succeed each year in convincing our government that they deserve protections and subsidies to continue to provide products that play a substantial role in the declining lifespan that we are experiencing. And they seem to have been successful in convincing the ADA to, time-after-time, release dietary guidelines that are favorable to their industry and not favorable to our general health. We seem to be alarmingly unaware of the destructive nature of the meat industry – not just in terms of diet – but also in terms of the physical environment. Does deforesting 3 trillion trees to make room for cattle and using 2,200 liters of water to produce one pound of hamburger make sense even if there weren’t health ramifications. ‘Nough said!
- We go sedentary and seek comfort and convenience, falling in love with our La-Z-Boys, remotes, electric knives, and snowblowers. Only 22.9% of U.S. adults from 18 to 64 met 2008 guidelines for both aerobic and muscle-strengthening exercise.
- We stop learning and challenging our brains. Ninety-five percent of the books read in the U.S. are read by 5% of the population. The top-selling Netflix releases outsell the best-selling books year after year by large margins. We soak up, on average, 40+ hours of TV per week.
- We shrink our social interaction. Thank you Mark Zuckerberg and the financial services industry. We shrink our interaction with real live people with social media and retirement. Social isolation has become a dominant killer in our culture – as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
- We retire and stop working. Eighty-five years ago, we started accepting this silly notion that to stop working is a good thing. We created an artificial finish line called 65 and tagged it to not working, ignoring that work is a key to longevity and good health.
- We think someone is coming to save us. We naively turn to a broken, reactive “drug it or cut it out” healthcare system when things skid off the tracks. Instead of looking at our own lifestyle and undergoing the simple changes that will result in good health, we place our hope on the medical and pharmaceutical industry to save us from our wayward ways with a miracle cure for our naivete. Both industries love our stupidity and thrive on our lack of fundamental healthcare literacy. Don’t think for a minute that big pharma wants you to know how to live healthily. And your doc isn’t going to dispense preventative advice because you won’t be coming back if you follow it and that undermines the revenue stream that the entire healthcare industry is built on – along with your doc’s lifestyle.
Dr. David Katz is a physician at the Yale School of Medicine and the founder of an organization called the Academy of Lifestyle Medicine. He nailed it with this quote:
“We already know all that we need to know to reduce, by 80%, the five major killers in our country. We don’t need any more fancy drugs or equipment or more Nobel Prizes. We know all we need to know today.”
Sage advice in a world that wants miracle cures but won’t show much interest in the truth about good health.
Very interesting points you have mentioned, thankyou for posting. “The thing always happens that you really believe in and the belief in a thing makes it happen.” by Frank Lloyd Wright.
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