The Age Code: The New Science of Food and How It Can Save Us
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The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk.
From rising cancer rates in younger people to increasing infertility, scientists are warning that many of us may be aging faster than we should, and our diet could be a major factor. In his new book, The Age Code, Dr. David Cox explores the emerging science of showing how what we eat can influence the aging process at a cellular level and even determine the age of our organs. And Dr. David Cox joins me on the line now. David, good morning and welcome.
Thank you.
What alarming trends are we seeing in aging and health?
Thanks so much for having me.
Now, I suppose that we should start with the concerning evidence that our bodies are ageing faster, perhaps, than they used to, even if we do live longer.
Yes, I mean, I think there's been some very lots of disturbing trends, I would say, in the last 30 years. You know, we've seen this rise in cancers in the under 50s. And there's also more and more people getting inflammatory diseases at like a young age, which they normally would have got like in their 60s or 70s. People are getting these diseases in their 20s and 30s now. And also we've got rising rates of infertility. And all of this kind of points towards the fact that people are aging faster than they should.
So the question of not how long you live, but how well you live the years you have is the critical one, really.
Exactly. Because I think what's often kind of quite key in aging is that, you know, a lot of people are sort of getting lots of these horrible chronic diseases now, lots of kind of by their 40s, 50s and 60s. And, you know, the big the big challenge for public health is to allow people to sort of live longer and disease free, you know, so they can get into their like 70s, 80s and 90s before they have like one of these diseases.
Now, in your book, The Age Code, you point to our nutrition as one of the drivers of this new trend of, for example, under 50 cancers.
Exactly. I mean, I think nutrition is a very interesting one with aging because it's something which is perhaps the most within our control. You know, we all like to eat three meals a day, you know, and so it's the thing which we can perhaps influence most when it comes to how well we age. And particularly like, for example, like sort of the rising numbers of cancers in the under 50s, we now have quite clear evidence that a lot of the reason for that is because a lot of us simply aren't getting enough fiber in our diet.
And that would be fairly easy to rectify. You talk about the different forms of nutritional stress and how they interlink. What do you mean by nutritional stress?
Yeah. So basically across the book, I describe kind of 10 forms of nutritional stress. So different things like which we're even not doing or things we're eating, which are not good for us in our diet, which are basically stressing our bodies, which is accelerating aging in different ways. So, for example, to give you a couple of examples, you know, many of us are eating essentially too much. You know, we're basically from the moment we wake to the moment we sleep, we're eating in some way, whether that's meals or kind of snacking. And it basically puts what I call metabolic stress on our bodies because our bodies are not getting a chance to kind of recover. So essentially, basically when you're eating, your body's growing.
But when lots of you are not eating, that's when your body has a chance to repair. And for too many of us, we're placing this stress on our bodies because our bodies are not getting enough of a chance to repair.
Now, we all know about chronological age. We celebrate birthdays every year. But the difference between chronological age and biological age, can we measure biological age in the way that we measure chronological age?
This has been a real advance in aging and health over the last 10 years and I do truly think it's going to transform medicine in the coming years and decades. We're now starting to get lots and lots of different tests which basically estimate how old we really are based on our biology. They will measure the amount of aging which has taken place in your DNA or the amount of aging which has taken place in your immune system.
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