Episode Details

When it comes to living a long life, demographers, epidemiologists, gerontologists and other researchers on aging have long puzzled over the theoretical question of the maximum potential for human lifespan, along with the host of proposed practices we can implement that help us achieve that potential.

There is, after all, in the past decade alone a veritable laundry list of tactics we can use to make ourselves more age resistant, from nutrients, vitamins and pills such as Vitamin D, aspirin, metformin, magnesium, pterostilbene, resveratrol, blueberry extract, nicotinamide ribosideand rhodiola to lifestyle practices such as shivering our asses off, self-imposed starvation, fecal transplants, strict veganism, injecting into ourselves growth hormone, testosterone, stem cells, exosomes, the blood of younger healthy humans and speaking of younger humans, simply “having more children”.

Fact is, compared to the Biblical Methuselah, who purportedly lived to the ripe old age of 969, we don’t seem to be moving the anti-aging dial much. In fact, researchers estimate that in the U.S. today, the average adult life expectancy is still only about 77 years and, disturbingly, now plummeting due to high rates of chronic diseases (many of which are preventable with simple lifestyle changes you’ll learn about in this podcast). Currently – despite the Chinese lore of the recently perished “256-year-old” Li Ching Yuen, the longest-lived modern person in the world on actual record is Jeanne Calment of France, who died in 1997 at the exact age of 122 years and 164 days.

Yet, when we observe nature, some amount of immortality, or at least a significant amount of enhanced life extension, appears to be achievable. Take the naked mole rate, for example. The naked mole rat’s cells themselves seem to make proteins – the molecular machines that make bodies work – more accurately than us humans, preventing it from developing age-related illnesses like Alzheimer’s. Unlike humans, the way these ugly little creatures handle glucose doesn’t seem to change with age either, reducing their susceptibility to diseases like diabetes.

The naked mole rat isn’t the only animal scientists are now probing to pick the lock of long life. With a rampant metabolism and a heart rate of 1,000 beats a minute, the common hummingbird should, on paper, be riddled with rogue free radicals (the oxygen-based chemicals that make mammals old by gradually destroying DNA, proteins and fat molecules), but the tiny birds seem relatively bulletproofed against heart disease.

Then there are lobsters, which seem to have evolved a protein which repairs the telomere tips of their DNA, allowing for a decreased rate of telomere shortening that most animals are incapable of. Finally, as if rats, hummingbirds and lobsters weren’t enough to make us longevity seeking humans a bit jealous, we mustn’t forget one