May You Be Forever Young

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Chew on This gives us a review of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. He’s the guy who wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals:

The moral of this story - that humans do better on food that’s as close to its original state as possible - is the subject of In Defence of Food the latest book from US writer Michael Pollan. author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma . In Defence of Food is partly about how progress in food processing created the western diet which in turn helped fuel new epidemics - like diabetes - which modern medicine is now trying to fix.

The book is also about what he calls the rise in nutritionism - our habit of focussing on what single nutrients or components in food - like fibre - can do for us rather than on the benefits of eating the whole food itself. ‘Nutritionism’ makes us think that you can make a processed food healthy simply by tossing in some extra nutrients - think refined breakfast cereals with some added fibre and vitamins.

I still like Pollan’s advice for escaping the processed diet:

- Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food

- Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number.

- Avoid food products that make health claims (food products making health claims are in packets and more likely to be processed, he points out)

- Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle - processed foods dominate the center aisles, while fresher food is around the walls.

- Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. Pollan’s advice here is to try and shop at farmer’s markets whenever you can.

If SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) is your thing, you’re going to want the up-coming book from Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae called Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Biotechnologies That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (Amazon). Here’s how Reason described it:

Aimed squarely at folk who want to know more about the science of repairing the molecular damage that causes aging, but find navigating the wild waterways of scientific publications too intimidating or time-consuming, this is a step by step, detailed explanation of how we could achieve radical life extension within our lifetimes, as best we understand from our present knowledge of our biochemistry.

If you’re used to the “eat this, take supplements and exercise” longevity bookshelf, Ending Aging is a big step up - very much more “research this science to develop this specific therapy based upon that sound basis established over the past two decades.” You’ll be seeing more of that in the years ahead, and this exactly where your attention should be focused if you care about your own longevity.

I put in my order.

Salon interviews Nora Ephron, who’s just written I Feel Bad About My Neck.

“Every so often I read a book about age, and whoever’s writing it says it’s great to be old,” Ephron writes. “It’s great to be wise and sage and mellow; it’s great to be at the point where you understand just what matters in life. I can’t stand people who say things like this. What can they be thinking? Don’t they have necks?” While she understands that aging beats the alternative, Nora Ephron does not think it’s great to be old. She thinks it sucks.

Courtesy of ABC News, there’s an excerpt of The Longevity Bible : 8 Essential Strategies for Keeping Your Mind Sharp and Your Body Young by Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan.

The excerpt gives us a peak at most of their Essentials:

1. Keeping a positive outlook
2. Keeping one’s mind sharp
3. Relationships
4. Stress (less of it, not more, although in a previous post, we pointed to an article that said said stressors can help)
5. Handling environmental influences
6. (Not mentioned.)
7. Diet
8. Medicines and treatments

Nothing there that’s too out there.

Small is apparently trying to hone in on the bible market, as he also wrote The Memory Bible, which built on the memory thing, as he and Vorgan also wrote The Memory Prescription.

Fight Aging! points us to the Handbook of Models for Human Aging, and comments:

if you can reasonably claim to cover the diversity of scientific approaches to aging … in one fairly hefty book, that seems to be to indicate that nowhere near enough resources are presently focused on this very complex topic. I don’t believe one could adequately tour models for cancer research in 1075 pages, for example.

Indeed.