something to think about . . .
For us, aging is the creeping and then catastrophic dysfunction of everything, all at once.
Our mitochondria sputter, our endocrine system sags, our DNA snaps. Our sight and
hearing and strength diminish, our arteries clog, our brains fog, and we falter, seize,
and fail. Every research breakthrough, every announcement of a master key that we
can turn to reverse all that, has been followed by setbacks and confusion.
Starving yourself, unsurprisingly, has disadvantages. If you want caloric restriction to
have a chance of working, you should take in at least thirty per cent fewer calories,
and the most useful way to do that . . .intermittent fasting . . . ia both unpleasant for
subjects to endure and impossible for researchers to patent.
The problem with most diet books, and with popular-science books about diet, is that
their impact relies on giving us simple answers, shorn of attendant complexities: it's
all about fat, or carbs, or how many meals you eat (the Warrior diet), or combinations
of food groups, or ‘intervalic fasting’ (the 5:2 diet), or nutritional ‘genomics’ (sticking
to the foods your distant ancestors may. have eaten, assuming you even know where
your folks were during the Paleolithic era). They hold out the hope that, if you just fix
one thing, your whole life will be better.
In laboratories for example, it's a different story as it sometimes seems that the more
sophisticated nutritional science becomes the less any single factor predominates,
and the less sure we are of anything.
Today's findings regularly overturn yesterday's promising hypotheses. For instance . . .
a trial in 2003, led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, compared an Atkins
diet, high in fat and low in carbohydrates, with a low-fat, high-carbohydrate, low-calorie
one. After a year, there were no significant differences in how much weight the people
in each group had lost, or in their levels of blood lipids, including their LDL cholesterol,
the primary concern for heart attack and stroke.
In a follow-up study in 2010, participants who followed either a low-carbohydrate or a
low-fat diet ended up losing about the same amount of weight (seven kilograms) after
two years. It was impossible to predict which diet would lead to significant weight loss
in any given individual, and, as most dieters well know, sustaining weight loss often fails
after initial success.
Other research seems to undermine the whole idea of dieting: extreme regimens pose
dangers, such as the risk of damaged kidneys from a buildup of excess uric acid during
high-protein diets; and population studies have shown that being a tad overweight may
actually be fine. Even studying these issues in the first place can be problematic. Although
the study of the Mediterranean diet, for example, reflects randomized controlled experiments,
most nutritional studies are observational; they rely on so-called food diaries, in which
subjects record what they remember about their daily intake. Such diaries are notoriously
inexact. No one likes admitting to having indulged in foods that they know . . . or think they
know . . . are bad for them.
Scientists tend to focus on the time line . . . since 1900, the human life span has increased
by about thirty years and so, as a consequence, have cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes,
and dementia. Aging is the leading precondition for so many diseases that "aging" and
"disease" are essentially figures of speech.
Accidents and violence are the leading causes of death up to age of forty-four, then
cancer rises to the top, and then, at sixty-five, heart disease. Doctors . . . heck, most
everybody, want to understand the etiologies of cancer and heart disease and then block
them. Why do we almost never get those diseases at age two? How can we extend that
protection to a hundred and two?
But if we cured cancer we would add only 3.3 years to an average life; solving heart
disease gets us an extra four. If we eliminated all disease, the average life span might
extend into the nineties.
To live longer, we'd have to slow aging itself.
The New Yorker, April 3 2017, SILICON VALLEY’S QUEST TO LIVE FOREVER
Can billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech research succeed in making death optional?
By Tad Friend
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