Growing Young

by Marta Zaraska

  In our modern, busy times, it’s no wonder that we prefer easily quantifiable longevity quick fixes. Many of us don’t have enough hours in a day to focus on all possible things that might influence health. I certainly don’t. Between full-time work and taking care of my daughter, there is little time left to think about cardiovascular exercises, organic foods, trying a ketogenic diet, worrying about whether to stop eating gluten, and so on. That is why in this book I prioritize longevity habits and focus on the things that matter the most if you want to live long. Number one? A committed romantic relationship, which according to some studies can lower your mortality risk by a staggering 49 percent. Second, having a large social network of friends, family, and helpful neighbours can reduce the probability of early death by about 45 percent. Third is having a conscientious personality (44 percent).

  The benefits brought by the rest of the longevity interventions I describe in this book hover around 20 to 30 percent of mortality risk reduction and play a far greater role in your health than the paleo diet, your turmeric intake, or omega-3 fatty acids (volunteering—about 22 to 44 percent; omega-3s—no effects found). What’s more, all these things matter to your centenarian potential at least as much as does a veggie-loaded diet or a busy exercise schedule. Of course, it’s a tricky thing trying to compare mortality risks between studies. Studies differ in methodology, the time period when they were conducted, the populations tested (Americans, Japanese, Danish, and so on). I have based my calculations, whenever possible, on the best of studies: meta-analyses and reviews published in respected peer-reviewed journals. Still, the numbers here should be treated as rough guides, not dogma.

  To save you time, throughout this book I suggest solutions that marry classic health boosters such as nutrition and physical activity with mental and social efforts. I explain why mowing your elderly neighbour’s lawn may be better for your arteries than hitting the gym and why jogging with a friend, in synchrony, could have a higher longevity payoff than running alone (the synchrony is key here). As food goes, rather than gobbling your broccoli without much thought it’s more beneficial to eat it mindfully. And for a healthy oxytocin boost, try savouring your greens while looking deeply into your beloved’s eyes (research suggests a beloved dog might help, too).

  From the perspective of mind-based longevity, becoming a centenarian or raising one often means less work, not more. It means taking a back seat, worrying less, and buying less—fewer toys, fewer fitness gadgets, less organic food. It means letting kids play unsupervised, and letting them get dirty. It means easing up on yourself, spending more time with friends and family, and laughing more often—and the sooner you start, the better.

  As I’ll argue in this book, besides prioritizing longevity habits we should start working on our mind-based health long before retirement. In one particularly striking study, researchers evaluated aging biomarkers in almost a thousand New Zealanders and found that by the age of thirty-eight some had bodies as young as thirty, while others had a body age as old as fifty—their DNA had deteriorated more rapidly. At thirty or forty, most of us might brood over wrinkles and complain about slow metabolism, but contemplating mortality rates and healthy lifespans doesn’t truly take hold until we are deep into our sixties. A recent survey found that the top aging worry for people in their thirties, forties, and fifties was financial security. Yet bad early lifestyle choices can switch genes off and on and erode the telomeres—the caps at the ends of chromosomes that protect our genes from degradation. This, in turn, can mean more life-shortening diseases in later adulthood.

  What’s worrisome, however, is that in terms of mind-based longevity, young and middle-aged people of today may be worse off than baby boomers. While research continues to underline the power of thought patterns and relationships over our health, polls and surveys bring forward a dark picture: smartphones and social media are destroying our friendships, loneliness is rampant, and empathy levels are plunging. Former president Barack Obama noted that “we live in a culture that discourages empathy.” Some policymakers are beginning to take note of these disturbing trends. In 2018 then British prime minister Theresa May appointed a “minister for loneliness” to deal with what she dubbed “the sad reality of modern life,” and Manitoba now has a minister responsible for helping seniors stay socially engaged. In the US, Vivek H. Murthy, surgeon general in the Obama administration, went as far as to recognize that loneliness is a health epidemic. He admitted, though, that “many clinicians aren’t clear about the strong connection between loneliness and the very health problems we are trying to address, often with medications and procedures.” I’m hoping that this book will help raise awareness of these issues, leading to better patient care and health policy decisions.

  I wrote Growing Young out of a belief that in the deluge of reductionist wellness news we’ve somehow lost the big picture, ignoring the things that may matter the most for our longevity: relationships, emotions, and the psyche. I’m not a scientist, so I didn’t do any of the research personally (other than some “experiments” on myself I conducted for this book). But as a science journalist, I had the freedom to investigate diverse areas of research ranging from molecular biochemistry, epidemiology, neuroscience, zoology, anthropology, psychology, and cyberpsychology to Asian studies, marketing, and so on. I’ve read over six hundred peer-reviewed academic papers and talked to or corresponded with more than fifty scientists working on the many links between our minds and our health. Admittedly, I also had tons of fun with my research, which took me to unexpected places—catching wild mice in the woods of central England (to check how relationships affect gut microbiota), chatting about Zulu dancing with professor Robin Dunbar in his Hogwarts-like office at Oxford, sipping super-smoothies at a longevity boot camp in Portugal, and arranging flowers with octogenarians in Japan.

  After all this research, some of it slightly unpleasant (cortisol swabs), most of it eye-opening, I decided to title this book “Growing Young” to reflect the phenomenon that the very same efforts that rejuvenate our bodies and help us live long also help us grow as people: nurturing relationships, developing better mental habits, becoming kinder, more empathic, more involved in the community. It appears that growing humane grows our centenarian potential.

  I’ve divided this book into two parts. In the first part I explore how we age and how our minds and bodies are interconnected to affect health. In the second part I investigate different psychological and social interventions that affect our longevity—from marriage and friendships to volunteerism and personality changes (yes, it can be done). In each chapter I explain the biological mechanisms and offer practical tips on how to use our mindsets to improve health.

  What this book is not, however, is a guide on how to cure diseases with thoughts. The internet is chock-full of claims that you can shrink tumours or heal Lyme disease with positive self-affirmations. These have little base in science. You can’t rid yourself of cancer simply by repeating happy phrases in front of a mirror. Even though our mindsets do matter for health and can slow down progress of some illnesses, like Alzheimer’s disease for example, there are no secret miracle cures here. Mostly, it’s about prevention, just as is the case with healthy diets and exercise.

  My goal in writing this book was to help you fundamentally rethink how you approach your health—whether you might be putting too much effort into strategies that don’t work well (supplements, fitness trackers, etc.) and not enough into those that truly matter (your love life, your friendships, your life’s meaning). But I’m also hoping to entertain you as we discover the roots of Tanganyika’s 1962 laughter epidemic, the secrets of booze-loving rodents who mate for life, and why eating undercooked meat might change your personality—with health consequences. We will tour scientific labs from North America and Japan to Siberia, and visit pay-per-hour “huggers” in my birth country, Poland.

  Every time I travel to Poland these days to see my dad, he asks me if I take
good care of myself. He asks if I eat well, if I exercise, and if I always remember to wear my hat if it’s cold outside. I reply, “yes,” “yes,” and “uhmm…” (we don’t see eye to eye on the importance of woolly hats for biological well-being). My dad, meanwhile, continues to eat broccoli and swim almost every day despite his advanced age. But besides teaching me the value of phytonutrients and cardio workouts for healthy living, my father has also taught me another valuable lesson. He taught me the importance of constant self-improvement and perseverance. Now, after years of research on the psychological and social roots of longevity, I take his advice a step further: self-improvement, a commitment to growing as a person, can also help us grow younger. That’s the core of this book.

  PART ONE

  THE MIND-BODY CONNECTION AND ITS LONGEVITY CONSEQUENCES

  1

  IS DEATH OPTIONAL?

  Immortal Animals, Zombie-Killing Pills, and Super-Centenarians

  THE CELL SEEMED BLOATED—its massive, transparent shape filled up half of the microscope’s screen. My lab coat crinkled as I leaned closer for a better look: the insides of the cell were cluttered with accumulated “junk”—ripped-up DNA fragments, unwanted proteins, and as many as five nuclei. “It looks immensely old, doesn’t it?” Lynne Cox, associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Oxford, nodded toward the giant cell, which, as she told me, came from some guy’s foreskin (willingly donated). Turning around, Cox reached into a large incubator to fetch another tray of cells, then popped them under the microscope. The image that appeared was very different from the previous. There were many, many cells on the screen this time, all of them thin, like deflated balloons. “These are from the same guy, just younger cells,” she explained, then added, “Aren’t they beautiful?”

  Cox was my guide for the day to the field of aging. Here in the modern, un-Oxford-like building of the biochemistry department, I got my first look into the scary world of cell senescence and molecular decline. By the first half-hour I was ready to take any miracle longevity pill available (then, fortunately, things got more optimistic).

  It may seem obvious that humans age, that with time we get old, wrinkly and liver-spotty. Yet as recently as the eighteenth century people still believed it was possible to live infinitely, or at least well past one thousand. Methuselah made it, supposedly, to 969 years; Zahāk, a figure in Persian mythology, to a thousand; and Tiresias, a Greek prophet, to over six hundred. Even today, while modern science reveals minuscule details about the biochemistry of aging, we are not immune to outrageous longevity claims. Just recently the media picked up the story of an Ecuadorian named Jose David who insisted he was 142 years old, while Mbah Ghoto, an Indonesian, reportedly died in 2017 at the age of 146. It would be great if such feats of the human body were truly possible.

  Unfortunately, as one researcher aptly put it, “In our experience, claims to age 130 exist only where records do not.” Sometimes birth certificates have been lost or messed up. Sometimes the whole thing is nothing but a case of bad memory. And sometimes it’s an outright scam. In Japan, people have been discovered to be collecting pensions for family members who had died decades before.

  In reality, basically all supercentenarians, or people who live beyond 110, pass away around their 115th birthdays. The record for the US is currently 119, for Canada 117, for Spain 114, for Germany 112, and so on. Which raises the question: Is there some kind of natural limit to the human lifespan? If you take two longevity researchers and ask them about such a limit, chances are a fight will ensue. When in 2016 several scientists published a paper claiming that the maximum human lifespan fluctuates around 115, the back and forth of yeas and nays was astounding. Many said the analysis was accurate. Others claimed it to be flawed, full of erroneous assumptions (mostly math-related). In this study, as in several others in which scientists tried to calculate the human age limit, one problem kept popping up which, according to some researchers, skewed the results. That problem’s name was Jeanne Calment.

  Why the Universe Doesn’t Care about Old People

  The first time Jean-Marie Robine entered what he now calls “that awful nursing home,” a big concrete building straight out of the 1970s located in Arles, France, he expected to meet there a feeble-minded old lady, blind and deaf, with whom he wouldn’t be able to communicate. After all, she was already 117 years old at the time. Yet the moment he swung open the doors to her room he realized he was in for a surprise. Jeanne Calment greeted him with a strong and very conscious “Bonjour, monsieur.” She might have been old, but she wasn’t feeble.

  Robine, a gerontologist at INSERM, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, “found” Calment when he and his colleagues were gathering profiles of French centenarians back in the early 1990s. At first, they put her survey aside, worried that such an outlier would just mess up the data. “We said: what can we do with a person 115 years old? We were interested in centenarians, not people fifteen years later!” Robine tells me.

  In the meantime, Calment was also “discovered” by a Canadian movie crew that was working on a film about Vincent van Gogh. Someone in Arles, Van Gogh’s hometown, told the Canadians that there was still a woman living there who had met the painter. They found her, and she confirmed that she indeed had known Van Gogh—which Robine is not convinced was the truth (some dates just don’t add up, he says). But once Vincent and Me hit the screens, Calment became a star. Not only was Calment, at 115, officially the oldest actress in history, she was also one of the oldest people to have ever walked the earth. The press was all over her.

  Calment turned 116. Then 117. And Robine decided it was time to have a look at that file of hers. Her unusually old age intrigued him, so he set up a meeting in the nursing home. Since that day he has met her about forty times and researched her case extensively.

  Calment ended up setting a record for human longevity—she made it to 122 years and 164 days—which, in case you are wondering, has been verified and established beyond doubt. Yet whenever Robine asked her if she had any ideas for what might have caused her to live that long, she would just shrug and say that God had forgotten her. That’s unusual, since in Robine’s experience, centenarians usually like to offer plenty of explanations for their endurance. “We had about 900 centenarians in our survey, and they gave us on average more than one longevity secret. They were all over the place. One centenarian would say: ‘I started working when I was 14 and I’ve never stopped. That’s my secret.’ Then another would say: ‘I’ve never worked in my life—that’s my secret.’ So basically there was no secret,” Robine says.

  Calment liked to amaze journalists, whom she adored, with tales of her cigarette smoking and port wine drinking. But these were lies, too, Robine tells me. She only smoked for about two years (starting well after her 110th birthday), and only smoked one Gauloise per night, as a social thing to share with a smoker friend. She admitted to Robine that she would tell the media whatever they liked to hear, and a cigarette-puffing, boozing centenarian does make for a good story. Even the New York Times fell for it, reporting in her obituary that she “only quit smoking five years ago.”

  Robine believes that the lies and the love of interviews revealed something important about Calment’s personality, and possibly some part of her longevity secret. She was strong, rebellious, curious about the world, and fiercely independent. As a child and a young woman she was supposedly so out of control that her father would not allow her to go anywhere unsupervised. As a married woman, Calment loved to try new things: helicopter flights, skiing, you name it—and remember that we are talking about the late nineteenth and early twentieth century here. One of the first things she did after getting married, even before the wedding night, was to ask her husband for a cigarette so that she could finally experience smoking (her father hadn’t allowed it). She took a puff and then extinguished the cigarette right away. She had tried it; that was all she wanted. She loved savourin
g all life had to offer.

  She was happy with her husband, Ferdinand. They were married for almost half a century, and she would later claim that she only had good memories of their time together. She’d say he was the “perfect man,” Robine tells me, and she never tried to remarry after his death. Ferdinand was seven years older than Jeanne, and died in 1942 at the age of seventy-three.

  When Calment agreed to be moved to a nursing home at the age of 110 (after she had almost set her house on fire by trying to defrost the pipes with a self-made torch—long story), she made three demands: that the staff would provide a hotel-style bed turndown service for her; that every day she would be woken up fifteen minutes before everyone else so that she had time to primp herself; and that the head doctor would allow her to call him “my dear.” Yes, she was bossy. But above all, she was an optimist, something that Robine speculates was at least in part responsible for her longevity. Calment divided life’s events into two groups, he tells me. First: things you could change. These you should act on right away. Second: things you couldn’t change. These you should forget.