The fountain of aging well
Looking for the latest fashions in health theory? Still hot after over a decade of popularity, lifestyle theory insists that factors like diet and exercise are what protect us from disease. Also trendy is genetic theory. It says health is the result of a sort of DNA roulette. Win or lose, we’re born that way, preprogrammed for greater or lesser degrees of susceptibility to various health destinies.
As with most fashionable scientific theories, these will rule until they are replaced by the next fashion, and like most fashions, they color our perceptions so we can hardly remember how things might look without them. In fact, they color perception so thoroughly that scientists can’t see past them. Evidence supporting the central role mind-body factors play in health is shoved offstage, while genetics theory (so modern, so sexy) and lifestyle theory (so comfortingly Puritanical with all those rules about what's bad and what's good) bask in the spotlight.
In 2001, a front-page story trumpets a breakthrough in researching the genetic basis of longevity. Research findings reported in the August 28th 2001 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences point to the existence of a gene (or genes) that seems to "exert a substantial influence on the ability to achieve exceptional old age." Long-lived siblings were studied to uncover genetic similarities, which some, but not all, were found to have. "The study represents only the beginning of pinpointing the gene or genes that influence longevity," said an excited news release.
As usual, science is jazzed about this discovery because it is assumed it will eventually lead to the ability to manipulate our bodies with medical therapies so we can live longer. "We’re not trying to find the fountain of youth," said Dr. Thomas Perls, co-author of the study, who teaches at Harvard Medical School and heads the New England Centenarian Study. "We’re trying to find the fountain of aging well."
Perls has already discovered the fountain of aging well, although it seems to have slipped his mind (maybe he’s getting old). He’s been studying centenarians long enough to notice that neither genetics, diet, nor exercise have a definitive influence on living to a healthy old age, although that didn’t keep him from using these items in his list of factors that contribute to successful aging.
In Perls’s book Living to 100: Lessons in Living to Your Maximum Potential at Any Age, the list is planned to create the acronym AGING. I’ve included my comments after each item.
Attitude: This mind-body factor is strongly correlated with good health and long life. Centenarians manage stress well, rather than internalizing it. They tend to be assertive and independent. Many of the women have never married. Centenarians tend to have good senses of humor.
Genetics: This makes the list, even though studies show that mind-body factors override genetic influences when it comes to health.
Exercise: Living to a healthy old age is never correlated with exercise, but scientists believe in lifestyle factors so blindly that they ignore evidence that contradicts their convictions.
Interests: This mind-body factor is strongly correlated with enhanced health and long life. Many centenarians have a cause they are passionate about or strong connections to community.
Nutrition: Diet seems to have nothing to do with living to 100, but it is too much a part of our health brainwashing to abandon just because evidence doesn’t support it.
Get Rid of Smoking: There are centenarians who smoke. Not everyone who smokes dies early. And it is a fact that possessing an abundance of beneficial mind-body factors like an optimistic attitude and strong social ties has been shown to mitigate all detrimental lifestyle factors.
Studies that consider the affect of mind-body factors on health always find that they have more influence than genes, diet, or exercise. This is revealed despite the fact that science hardly knows how to study mind-body factors. In the first place, it’s not fashionable to study them, so there’s little money offered to encourage such exploration. Then there’s the "not quantifiable" problem: how do you count something that seems so unscientifically vague when compared to counting servings of fruits and vegetables or sequencing DNA? And the worst part for someone trying to write a research proposal: what exactly are you trying to count, anyway? Since science doesn’t understand the mind-body connection, they can’t figure out what the active ingredient is that they are stalking. If you can’t come up with a hypothesis to investigate, how can you do a study?
Genetic theory has everything mind-body theories lack. It’s sexy because it’s so cutting edge and technical. That and the fashionable factor add up to easy grant money for studies. It’s definitely quantifiable—just let the computer compare DNA until it finds uncommon matches. And even though researchers don’t have a clue what they’re looking for or seeing, genetic theory says that whatever they find in the way of unusual matching sequences is what they were looking for.
Research that concludes genes are the key to health and long life springs from and feeds the cultural assumption that health, like winning the lottery, is a matter of chance: you either inherited the good stuff or you didn’t. According to this view of life, health is not in your hands, it is in the hands of fate. This dovetails perfectly with the scientific worldview that we live in a meaningless universe ruled by chance. That belief, by the way, is not health promoting.
The most intriguing aspect of the news story about a possible genetic link to longevity can be found in this comment: "The differing lifestyles and unpredictable fates of older people have created a mystery for those seeking to understand what makes for a long life. Some seniors have kept meticulously healthy lives and then died in their 70s of natural causes. Others eat without caution, drink, smoke, never exercise, but live to 100."
To the student of mind-body health, this is not a mystery; it is part of the answer. The source of the fountain of aging well is not to be found by adding up the details of a life or by decoding our DNA. Longevity is not the result of a genetic crapshoot, nor is it the product of a lifetime dedicated to following health rules. The mind-body perspective on longevity only keeps two letters of the AGING acronym: Attitude and Interests. With that information, there’s no need to wait for science to cook up some fancy anti-aging therapy. You’ve already got the recipe.