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Chapter 1: What is the focus of the discussion on health and longevity?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance.
Everyone seems to be talking about longevity. But while there's huge interest in living longer, experts are increasingly asking different questions. How do we stay healthier for longer? The reality is that many of the biggest factors influencing our future health aren't expensive treatments or cutting-edge technology. They're the habits that we practice. every day.
And Professor Katrina Ryan is a consultant dermatologist and she joins me on the line now. Lovely to speak to you, Katrina. Longevity, it became a bit of a buzzword, but when you hear people talking about it, do you think we're actually focusing on the wrong thing? We should be talking about healthspan rather than lifespan.
I absolutely do.
Chapter 2: Why is healthspan more important than lifespan?
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. Reducing our inflammation in our bodies. A lot of people are taking supplementation and things like that. And then reducing things like smoking and alcohol.
So these are all things I think we all know, but people are focusing on fancy interventions and not on the obvious things. Like exercise is the best thing we can do. It's more powerful than any drug that we've ever had. You know, your VO2 max and your muscle mass are the strongest predictors of healthy aging that we've ever measured.
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Chapter 3: What everyday habits can significantly impact our health?
And exercise is for free. And, you know, it's not just your physical performance when it comes to exercise. It's things like your insulin sensitivity, your cognitive decline can be really helped with frequent exercising, your bone density, but also your functional dependence. I want to be that woman who's 90 years of age and still able to put my own case up in the airplane.
That's what, you know, putting in the time now, you know, in my late 40s is going to dictate how I'm living in my 70s, 80s, 90s. Sleep is another obvious one. You know, it's again for free, but it's highly underrated. But if you get good sleep, and I don't just mean long sleep, deeper sleep, then it improves everything. It's the key time that our body repairs, regenerates.
It actually has a big impact on our metabolism, our cognitive functioning. And if you don't sleep well, so people who are sleeping less than six hours a night have a much higher mortality risk, 79% increase in mortality risk. compared to people who don't. So again, it's such a key factor and it's really underappreciated.
So if you could look at a person's average daily routine then, Katrina, what are the biggest health mistakes that you'd expect to find for your average person?
I think it's our sedentary lifestyle. There's lots of things we can do to try and be more active, whether it's walking to work, getting in your steps is an easy one as well. You know, compromising our sleep, really important as well. I think our social connections is a huge one. You know, it sounds like a very soft variable, but loneliness is a big predictor of loneliness.
poor life expectancy too. It can be equivalent to smoking, you know, when you look at it in some studies. So I think it's our daily lifestyle. Like if you look at the people who live for, you know, the longest, and I don't just mean living longer, but you know, living into their hundreds in good health, with good cognitive function and good overall daily functioning.
The blue zones, they're called. None of them are genetically interconnected, but they are places where people have shared patterns. So natural movement. None of these people go to the gym or take supplements, by the way. They have natural movement. They're very active people. They have strong social ties. Their diet is a Mediterranean-based diet, plant-forward.
Now, they still eat meat, but they don't overfill themselves. And then having times of rest during the day, whether that be, you know, I don't mean sleeping all the time, But meditation, prayer, slower meals, all of these things make a huge difference in the way we age and how happy we are as well.
What's interesting is one of the biggest things that these places have in common is people having a sense of purpose, a reason to wake up, a sense of value in their lives too. So it's all of these things that actually cost us nothing.
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