May You Be Forever Young

Prevention.com gives us a quicky article outlining 14 Surprising Signs You’ll Live Longer Than You Think. Their list:

1. Your Mom Had You Young
2. You’re a Tea Lover
3. You’d Rather Walk
4. You Skip Soda (Even Diet)
5. You Have Strong Legs
6. You Eat Purple Food
7. You Were a Healthy-Weight Teen
8. You Don’t Like Burgers
9. You’ve Been a College Freshman
10. You Really Like Your Friends…
11. …and They’re Healthy
12. You Embrace New Challenges
13. You Don’t Have a Housekeeper
14. You’re a Flourisher

Some of these aren’t so surprising, but still a decent list.

Food Matters, an upcoming Australian documentary, looks like it’s going to be great. Here’s their blurb:

With nutritionally-depleted foods, chemical additives and our tendency to rely upon pharmaceutical drugs to treat what’s wrong with our malnourished bodies, it’s no wonder that modern society is getting sicker. Food Matters sets about uncovering the trillion dollar worldwide ‘Sickness Industry’ and gives people some scientifically verifiable solutions for curing disease naturally.

Here’s the trailer:

The web site has good info on it as well. Check it out.

About has a bit on the relationship between wealth and longevity.

Research shows that people who make more money also live longer.

Here’s an example: In a study in Germany, researchers examined a national database that contained the data from all (5 million) retired German men over the age of 65 (as of 2003). What they looked for was data on deaths grouped by lifetime income, type of work and other variables. They grouped the men into five groups based on their income level. They showed that mortality for retired German men varies by 60% with life expectancy at age 65 ranging from 14.9 to 18.5 years. Former manual workers had a 35% higher risk of death than salaried workers (and those on public insurance had a 44% greater chance than those using private insurance). In the end, a retired manual worker on public insurance in the lowest income group is 3 times more likely die than a wealthier, privately insured former salaried worker.

Look at this fatuous magazine article from Men’s Health called 50 Ways to Beat the Reaper. Someone phoned one in, apparently. The tips range from the somewhat obvious to the downright silly.

20. If You’re Attacked, Hit the Shark in Its Eyes or Gills

24. Vacuum for 30 Minutes

35. Don’t Get Blown to Bits

44. Fall on Your Butt

You get the idea. A real eye-roller if you’re serious about longevity.

Via Digg. Photo: Yuni88.

If you didn’t make it to the Singularity Summit, all is not lost - you can listen to the audios.

Speakers include Ray Kurzweil (a dialog), Peter Theil (Financial Markets and the Singularity), Eliezer Yudkowsky (Introducing the “Singularity”: Three Major Schools of Thought), Paul Saffo (Machines of Loving Grace: Anticipating Advanced AI) and many others.

Via Boing Boing.

Another example of calorie restriction in mainstream media: Eat less, live long in Australia’s rag the Daily Telegraph.

A growing number of middle-aged Australians are joining a “calorie restriction” movement in a drastic bid to live for longer.

Note the characterisation as “drastic”.

Also:

Arthur Everitt, Honorary Associate Professor at Concord Hospital and Sydney University, follows the principles of calorie restriction with a diet high in fruits and vegetables plus some protein.

The 83-year-old, who has been researching ageing and calorie restriction in rats for more than 50 years, warns baby-boomers may be leaving the diet a bit too late.

“Calorie restriction should really be started early in life as a young teenager or adult,'’ he said.

“It’s extremely difficult to do but I think almost everyone can reduce the amount of food they eat, even if it’s by five per cent.

Via Digg.

Wired’s co-founder Kevin Kelly has a death counter running on his computer. It counts down the days he estimates he has left in his life. Yuck.

I decided to take the idea of number days seriously, and to revisit my earlier experience of counting down my remaining time on this lovely mortal plane. My hope was that a reckoning of my numbered days would help me account for how I spend each precious 24 hours, and to focus my attention and energy on those few tasks and projects I deem most important to me. Indeed, it might help me decide which ones are most important, which is the harder assignment.

What I wanted was a great big flashing sign that would show up on my computer and shout out to me how many days I had remaining. Then I would try to use my blog to record what how I spent the day to keep me honest. A wasted day would reveal its loss in the empty lower count the next day. I figured that mounting an automatic personal countdown sign should be pretty easy, and something that others might want to do as well.

While I can understand the “live life like it’s almost over and make the most of it” attitude behind this, it actually really irks me. I believe the body takes instructions from the mind (what happens to your mouth when you think of the taste of lemons?), and that what you focus on expands. Surely Kelly is not-so-subtly programming his mind and body to die in a planned way.

For those with an interest in radical life extension, perhaps this is an idea to simply flip around. Create a counter the goes up instead of down, adding life instead of taking it away. And maybe get rid of the huge “until Dead”, and replace it with “More Life to Live”.

Via Boing Boing.

High-profile calorie restriction practitioner April has pointed out that CNN posted some CR recipes in anticipation of a segment that includes her by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. The recipes include a MegaBrownies.

Perhaps more interesting, in anticipation of the interest the article will generate, she’s posted an excellent FAQ, giving links to articles that cover a lot of basics as well as attitudinal questions people ask, including:

Are you trying to convince other people to practice CR? No.

Are you all just rich snotty holier than thou selfish people who want to make other people miserable by being thin and healthy and eating kale?

What’s the difference between this and an eating disorder?

Yeah, but do you have any fun?

The NY Times reviews a doco called “Living Old”.

“Living Old” is not a bad documentary, filled as it is with lively and less lively old folks and facts galore about chronic diseases, physical decline and nonagenarians and their overburdened 70-something children. It puts on display the suffering that awaits us all, which is important, in its way, but also troublesome.

Only troublesome if we don’t do something about it. One of the documentary’s subjects sums it up perfectly:

Mr. Haak’s [says] “I don’t really look forward to anything; old age is for the birds.”

Yep.

The NY Times has an article on sirtuin activators.

By suppressing the common killers of age, the drugs, sirtuin activators, could significantly prolong both health and lifespan.

But is the promise a mirage or a serious possibility?

The drugs are designed to mimic the effects of caloric restriction, a low calorie but healthful diet known to make laboratory mice live longer and more healthily but is too hard for all but the most ascetic of humans to keep to. One such drug, resveratrol, also a very minor ingredient of red wine, hit the headlines last week with a report by David Sinclair of Harvard Medical School and colleagues that it negates the bad effects of a high-fat diet in mice.

Despite the general rejoicing of fat mice everywhere, Aubrey de Grey isn’t too enthusiastic about them. In an interview in PIMM, he says:

I think effective CR mimetics may arrive within a few years. However, I am rather pessimistic about their efficacy - I think they will probably give us only a couple of extra years, even for people who use them all their lives, because I think CR itself will only give about that. I am even more pessimistic about anything else that is currently or imminently available. That’s really what drove me in the direction of SENS, which I think has a good chance of giving 30 years of extra healthy life to those who are already in middle age, within 25-30 years from now (subject to funding).

It’s a familiar theme for de Grey followers.