AGF         Do you want to live to be 100?      20 Nov 2006

There is no warranty given regarding the information below.  But if you read and absorb the data, you might live just a little longer that you otherwise would have done.

New Scientist of 3 June 2006 (Issue 2554) has a series of reports on the aging process, and a few quips from celebrities about when they were likely to die. 

A 104 year-old woman Wook Kundro has just got married for the 21st time to a man of 33.  The points that one article made was that on average, married people live longer than single ones.  And they didn't say that it just seems longer!  It really is true.

Women in Holy Orders are also long-lived souls.  Everywhere one looks, it seems that tranquillity of mind is one most important ingredients of long life.

But there are other far-less obvious factors that prolong life.  It's known that over-eating reduces life-span, but under-eating too adds to the years one has in this world.  Both animal and human examples of a starvation diet show that a food intake that is normally considered to be too low, actually increase the lifespan.  The only-suggested explanation is that the the body is forced into greater efficiency and does not produce so many free radicals.

Another counter-intuitive fact that emerges from epidemiological studies.  Mild abuse of the body seems to give added protection.  And examples were given to demonstrate this fact.  Children reared in unusually hygienic environments have more eczema and asthma than the average.  It seems that as an animal we need constant assaults on our health to be at our fittest.  Workers like nuclear dockyard staff and radiologists who are constantly being assaulted with low-level radiation, have less cancers that the rest of the population.

I suppose there are some obvious example of the low-level assault being beneficial to the body.  A building trade labourer develops tougher skin on his hands, than say, a schoolteacher.  A person who regularly works out of doors develops a greater skin protection against sunburn.

On the subject of foodstuff, free radicals seem to play an important role.  Small animals live much shorter lives than larger ones.  Small animals have a much higher metabolic rate than their larger cousins and they produce more free radicals.  And these chemicals seem to play a major part in the aging process.  It seems that this may be a factor in why animals on a starvation diet live longer.  With barely enough food to survive, the body has to become more efficient and it will produce less free radicals.  But, the article reports, there area  large number of exceptions.  Humans live about four times as long as we should for our body size.  Birds, bats and porcupines live longer than they should for their body size too.

Another fly in the ointment is that anti-oxidant supplements that mop up free radicals do not appear to give a longer life.  There are still a very large number of questions to which we have no answer.  One group of questions that needs a lot more research is; if moderate bodily assaults are beneficial, at what level of assault does the changeover occur between being beneficial and being harmful?

A novel theory has emerged recently.  Animals evolve different aspects of their survival at different times in their evolutionary history.  One of the most important evolutionary changes is to find a way to avoid predators.  Other evolutionary changes then take place later.  Birds, for example, have found a superb evolutionary method of avoiding being eaten: their ability to fly is probably the best way to get out of harms way and survive to procreate and continue the species.  Look at the poor old dodo; it never learned to fly and became a good dinner for many early sailors.  This evolutionary benefit then allowed the little darlings to evolve other useful attributes like living longer.  Ostriches, for example do not need to fly, they have other forms of defence against theor enemies.

There is, however, one almost certain way of living to be a 100, and that is to choose your parents very carefully.  Longevity definitely goes in families.  And a last little snippet, dark chocolate has a beneficial effect on the body, but, as always, not too much!