Professor Caitriona Ryan

I absolutely do.

And, you know, it's such a great point.

You know, we've done so much with traditional medicine now to live longer, you know, to increase life expectancy over time.

And, you know, hugely so actually in the last decade or two, you know, through all of our new advances and everything.

But, you know, living longer isn't necessarily a great thing.

I would prefer to live to 80 extremely healthily

than to live to 100 and be decrepit and have severe dementia for 20 years and live to 100.

And I think that's where we're often focusing the wrong way.

Now, the last decade or two of people's lives often is with quite profound chronic disease, cognitive decline.

So I think, you know, us talking about health span is a far more healthy thing to talk about because what we really want to do is live better for every decade that we're alive.

And I think the real focus of preventative health and, you know, wellness has really moved this way and it's a great thing.

And the good news really is that an awful lot of this is determined by what we do ourselves, not by medications, not by any fancy interventions.

You know, it's actually 80% of

of how we age healthily is governed by our lifestyle.

80%.

Yeah.

So only 20% is actually governed by your genetics.

So that's great news, I think.

And when you look at it, the real pillars of living a healthy life are exercise, sleep, healthy nutrition, reducing our stress,

Social connections is huge as well.