Eric Topol

Dr. Eric Topol says health influencers make big claims about longevity, but he's offering us a reality check.

Straight talk about how to grow old and stay healthy.

That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast.

Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

It drives me nuts that things that we have validation with all kinds of great studies and the highest level peer review literature could take years before it gets to implementation.

I am a cardiologist, author of Super Agers, and I'm a professor and executive vice president at Scripps Research.

A lot of this longevity fixation is related to lifespan rather than health span.

healthy aging, the average American health span is 64.

That's when major diseases creep in and lifespan is 79 on average.

So you've got a big gap of about 15 years where your health span is ended and your lifespan continues.

I grew up with so many of my family members dying at very young ages, my grandparents and aunts and uncles.

I spent a lot of time as a kid going to funerals.

And my parents also died at a young age.

So I feel like, well, I'm condemned.

I'm going to be signing out any time here.

So part of it was just understanding our fate, if you will.

Part of it is also to shed some light on a field that's had lots of confusion and this equivalence of health span.

with lifespan, which is so different that, you know, we need to really compartmentalize these and understand that what drives them are altogether different.

I always was fascinated by genetics, and I basically set up a major in genetics and wrote a thesis in 1975 called Prospects for Gene Therapy in Man, long before we could sequence genes, of course.

That was about 40 years early, I think.