How to be a "Super Ager" (it's not your genes)
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What does it mean to be a super-ager?
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And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, a guide to being a super-ager, living long and well. It's a strange moment for growing old. We live in an era when some seem to be suggesting that aging... I'm that crazy guy trying to not die.
...is optional. He spends $2 million a year attempting to... I think we're entering into a new era where death may no longer be inevitable.
Silicon Valley elite, celebrities, and influencers alike race against the clock to limit signs of aging.
We are essentially hacking human biology.
I've had three facelifts. Everywhere the light touches is Botoxed. People collect more data about their bodies than ever. Having a Fitbit has truly changed my life. And AI is bringing breakthroughs for conditions once thought to be untreatable. AI will help cure diseases.
AI will help cure cancer. Yes, it's already in the process of doing that.
But we're also in an age of insurance inequity and uneven distribution of these medical miracles. Not to mention billion-dollar industries built on selling you alleged cures to growing and looking older. So it's hard to know. What hot trend or medical breakthrough is worth spending your time and money on? And what is, well, bunk?
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.
This is Dr. Eric Topol.
I am a cardiologist, author of Super Agers, and I'm a professor and executive vice president at Scripps Research.
Eric is an expert on the best ways to expand not just our lifespan or how long we actually live, but our health span.
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.
In some ways, Eric's career has been driven by his own personal obsession with the idea that through science and medicine, we can change our aging destiny.
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.
Long before he made a breakthrough discovery in the science of healthy aging, we'll get to that in a minute, he was a curious college student, sure that people's genes held the answer to how long they would live.
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. But it was more like understanding what makes us tick.
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