The Longevity Code: Secrets to Living Well for Longer from the Front Lines of Science

314 Pages·2018·5.6 MB·English

by  Kris Verburgh

The Longevity Code: Secrets to Living Well for Longer from the Front
Lines of Science
Copyright © 2015, 2018 by Kris Verburgh
Illustrations copyright © 2015 by CMRB, unless otherwise indicated
Translation copyright © 2018 by The Experiment, LLC
Originally published in the Netherlands as Veroudering Vertragen by
Prometheus/Bert Bakker in 2015. First published in English in North
America by The Experiment, LLC, in 2018.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Verburgh, Kris, 1986-
Title: The longevity code : secrets to living well for longer from the front
lines of science
/ Kris Verburgh.
Other titles: Veroudering Vertragen. English
Description: New York : The Experiment, [2018] | Originally published in
Dutch as: Veroudering Vertragen (Amsterdam : Prometheus/Bert
Bakker,
2015). | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017025679 (print) | LCCN 2017029381 (ebook) |
ISBN
9781615194254 (ebook) | ISBN 9781615194131 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Longevity. | Aging--Prevention. | Life spans (Biology)
Classification: LCC RA776.75 .V4613 2018 (ebook) | LCC RA776.75
(print) | DDC
613.2--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025679
ISBN 978-1-61519413-1
Ebook ISBN 978-1-61519425-4
Translation by Tina Vonhof
Cover and text design by Sarah Smith
Author photograph by Michel Porro/Contour/Getty Images
Manufactured in the United States of America
Distributed by Workman Publishing Company, Inc.
Distributed simultaneously in Canada by the University of Toronto Press
First printing January 2018
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
1. Preface
2. Introduction
3. 1. Why Do We Age?
4. 2. What Causes Aging?
5. 3. The Longevity Staircase
6. 4. Some Thoughts About Aging, Longevity, and Immortality
7. 5. Recipes
8. Afterword
9. Afterword to This Edition
10. Additional Reading
11. Glossary
12. References
13. Index
14. About the Author
PREFACE
We live in a strange world. A world in which people are mortal. A world in which
most life-forms age and die. There are a few exceptions: organisms that do not
age, that are immortal, or that can even become younger. But for the large
majority of everything that walks, crawls, swims, or flies on this earth, mortality
is an integral part of existence. That is strange, because from a biological
viewpoint there is no reason why aging and mortality should exist. For centuries
biologists have addressed the question of why something as strange as aging
exists. As we shall see, aging is not simply the result of what is generally
thought to be “inevitable wear and tear,” nor is aging meant to combat
“overpopulation,” whereby “older animals must make room for younger
animals.”
In this book we will discuss why some organisms age very rapidly and other
organisms can grow hundreds or thousands of years old or not age at all. In the
second part of the book we will talk about what happens in our body that makes
us age. Once we have a better understanding of why we age, we will also be
better able to figure out how we can slow down the aging process. That is what
the third part of this book is about. We will see that certain foods, interventions,
and substances can slow down the rate at which we age. The problem in the
West is that we are consuming too many foods that accelerate aging and cause
obesity as well. It is not a coincidence that overweight people are at risk of all
kinds of aging-related diseases, such as heart attack, dementia, and diabetes. We
will also see that the epidemic of obesity is not simply a matter of “too many
calories” and “too little exercise,” as is often claimed.
Then we will focus on therapies that are currently being developed to slow
down aging or that are already in use to treat certain rare diseases that bear
similarities with aging. Not only can these therapies drastically slow down the
aging process but they could even reverse it. Reversing aging means making
people younger, such as by erasing wrinkles, making blood vessels elastic again,
and curing aging-related diseases, such as heart failure and Alzheimer’s disease.
We will see that this is not impossible. To the contrary, many scientists are
amazed by how easy it is to reprogram a body into a more youthful state. In the
final part of this book we will discuss the great social revolutions that are rapidly
approaching due to the fact that we will be living longer and longer. Current life
expectancy increases by six hours every day, and in a relatively near future,
when technologies become available to drastically slow down the aging process
and even reverse it, we must consider a scenario in which people can stay
healthy and young for a very long time. Even without these new technologies we
know that the first person who will reach the age of 135 has already been born.
Some scientists even suggest that the first person to reach the age of 1,000 has
also already been born.
Regardless of whether the latter will turn out to be true, one thing is certain:
Our increasing knowledge will enable us to transform disease, life, and death.
This future is closer than we think, and therefore we need a plan—a plan that
will enable us to benefit from this future revolution as much as possible, so that
we have a greater chance of enjoying the fruits of these new developments. This
book is intended to serve as a guideline for that plan. First, however, we need to
understand why something as strange as aging exists to begin with.
A brief note: This book contains references to scientific studies. The references
are added to serve as an introduction for those readers who want to delve deeper
into the matter. Every claim I make in this book is based not only on the
references mentioned in this book but on my training as a medical doctor, my
research, thousands of other scientific studies, books, articles, lectures, and
conversations with experts in their fields.
INTRODUCTION
Why do we have to die? This is one of the most important questions one can ask. It
is, after all, the question why our existence is finite. Although the answer is very
interesting, misunderstandings surrounding it abound. One reason for this is
because the question can be answered in two ways: why we age, and what causes
aging. The why examines why aging exists in the first place; why does it occur in
nature? The what looks at exactly what takes place in the body that causes it to
age.
Let’s look first at why aging exists. At first glance, aging is a very strange
thing. First nature allows you to exist: You are born from a fertilized egg cell
that divides many times until there are 40,000 billion cells, which together form
your body. The complexity of that body is amazing; it consists of more than 250
different kinds of cells (liver cells, muscle cells, eye cells, stomach cells, etc.)
that work closely together to form a body, which contains as many cells as there
are stars in 400 galaxies (a galaxy on average contains 100 billion stars).
That is not all, however. After it is born, that body will then amass dozens of
years of experiences and memories. It will learn to walk, to bring a spoonful of
porridge to its mouth without spilling, to talk, play soccer, solve math problems,
dance, drive a car, and play bingo. That body will store a treasure trove of
memories and knowledge, enough to fill an entire library with sounds, images,
and smells. Then nature abandons that same body, which has finally built up all
these cells, knowledge, experiences, and memories, and leaves it to wither and
die.
Of the 150,000 people who die every day, 100,000 die of old age. Each
human being who dies is a microcosm of billions of cells, experiences, and
memories that implodes and is lost forever. Why? Would it not be much more
efficient for nature not to allow people to age, but to continually repair and
maintain them, so they would stay young and fit forever? That is very well
possible. As we shall see, not a single law of nature forbids immortality. But
Mother Nature does exactly the opposite: She allows bodies to age and die, only
to replace them with newborn bodies. That is much less efficient and it costs a
lot more time and energy. After all, she has to start from scratch every time: A
baby has to grow and learn for many years, only to age and die. It would take
much less time and energy to keep a body young and fit for centuries than to
replace it each time with a newborn child. Mother Nature is the greatest
squanderer that exists: After building a very complex body, she abandons that
body and lets it age and die. It is ultimately thrown away. Nature has thrown out
quite a few bodies—roughly more than 150 billion of them: all the people who
ever lived and are now dead.
In other words, on the face of it aging and mortality are not logical at all. It is
strange that aging exists. For centuries biologists have wondered about this. Not
until the twentieth century did they finally find an answer. That answer is not
self-evident. It is not true that we grow old because we wear out. Furthermore,
the answer nicely explains why some animal species age hardly at all, whereas
others age and die very rapidly.
In short, the why of aging inquires why aging occurs everywhere, or almost
everywhere, in nature. The what of aging, on the other hand, tries to explain
what causes us to age: what mechanisms are at work in our body that slowly but
definitely cause that body to age, so that in the end we succumb to these aging
processes, most often in the form of a heart attack, stroke, cancer, pneumonia, or
dementia. If we can understand what causes us to age, we will be better able to
understand what we can do about that aging process.
Let’s start with the why of aging. It is an extremely interesting story about
elephants, bats, cancer, strange brain diseases, and sex. A lot of sex actually,
because reproduction and life span are intricately intertwined.
SUMMARY
The why of aging explains why aging occurs in nature.
The what of aging explains the processes that take place in the body that cause it to age.
1
Why Do We Age?
Many people believe that we age because we wear out. After all, our body must
work continuously, day in day out, for dozens of years, and that causes it wear
and tear. When we leaf through a standard medical handbook, we indeed
encounter numerous diseases that appear to be the result of wear. Take, for
example, osteoarthritis, also called joint wear. Dozens of years of walking and
lifting are thought to be responsible for the inevitable erosion of our joints.
Another disease that appears to be due to wear is narrowing of the blood vessels
(atherosclerosis) due to the passage of all kinds of sticky debris (certainly after a
visit to a fast-food restaurant). Although you can slow down this buildup with
healthy eating, it is deemed as an inevitable result of the passage of time. Or take
dementia. Our brain consists of 86 billion brain cells that fire frantically at all
times and will eventually suffer damage. In short, the constant working of our
body causes it to wear, and aging is assumed to be the unavoidable result.
The interesting thing is that this is not really true. Aging is not simply a
result of inevitable wear and tear. Take, for example, mice and bats. Both animal
species have a very fast metabolism. Metabolism is a collective term for all the
processes in the body that allow the body to function: the beating of the heart,
the contracting of muscles, the breathing, and the firing of nerve signals. Since
mice and bats have a comparable metabolism, one would expect that they also
wear and age at the same rate. However, the average life span of a mouse is two
years, whereas a bat can live to be 30 years old or more. Some bats have been
found that were at least 40 years old. In short, although mice and bats both have
a very fast metabolism, these two species do not wear at the same rate. That
means that the joints, heart, and brain of the bat wear fifteen times more slowly
than do those of a mouse. Obviously, nature has found a way to drastically slow
down joint wear in bats, as well as the clogging of bats’ blood vessels and aging
of the bat brain. It appears, therefore, that wear and tear is not simply inevitable
but something that to a large extent can be controlled by nature.