Still in my biking gear, I had just finished up a 20-mile ride when I got the word — I was going to be a grandfather. The cognitive dissonance wasn’t lost on me.
I thought back to when my son Regis — the now deliriously happy father-to-be — was born. My dad, 60 at the time, looked like what I envisioned a grandpa was supposed to look and act like: a bit overweight, sedentary and, well, slow. That wasn’t me!
The juxtaposition in my mind got me thinking about how starkly different my father’s 60s were from mine now, and how I got here.
Nobody wants to get old but, as they say, it is a privilege not afforded to everyone, my father included. My dad suffered his first heart attack at age 57, followed by a heart bypass, another heart attack, bladder cancer and finally lung cancer which took him away from us too early at age 77. What my father experienced as the later years of his life are unfortunately not the exception but the rule for many of us. During the last 150 years, we have been given many extra years. In fact, our life expectancy has doubled. However, this longer life is most often accompanied by a slew of diseases, the chronic disease of aging: heart attacks, stroke, cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, osteoporosis, macular degeneration, type 2 diabetes. These diseases degrade the quality of our lives during our later years and are imposing an increasing financial burden on our already strained social security systems.
I was determined not to have this fate. I wish I could say that I have followed great habits my whole life but well, I was young once too. I did smoke in my 20s and, having grown up in Belgium, I have more than occasionally overindulged in chocolate, beer and French fries!
I’m sure we’ve all done some things we wish we hadn’t. The good news is, it is never too late to adopt a healthy lifestyle. You can influence both your lifespan (how long you live) and, more importantly, your healthspan (your healthy years of life). This distinction is critical. I give talks all over the world and I love to ask my audiences for a show of hands to the question “How many of you would like to live to be 120?” There are typically only a few hands that go up. Then I ask “How many of you would like to live to be 120 if you could retain the same mental and physical abilities that you had in your 40s and 50s?” Suddenly all the hands in the room shoot up.
There may not be a sure-fire way of hitting 120 but there are some concrete steps you can take that, carefully controlled scientific studies show, can increase your healthspan by 10 to 15 years. In fact, most of us could expect to live to 90 or 95 in good health once “optimized.” I will be outlining some critical steps to reach this goal in this column in the months to come. Since I follow them, I can tell you from experience you won’t miss any of the bad habits because you will feel so much better. Need more inspiration? You don’t have to swear off that glass of wine you enjoy with friends or the occasional rich dessert. There’s an old joke about the man who lived a life totally focused on maximizing longevity to the exclusion of everything else. It was said that he wouldn’t live forever, but it would surely seem that way. That’s not what I’m aiming for here.
I am delighted to share the incredibly exciting field of research on aging with you. For now I will leave you with two bits of good news. First, your longevity is primarily in your control. Research shows that genetics are far from destiny; in fact only 7% of our aging journey can be attributed to genetics. A full 93% of how we age is determined by lifestyle factors like diet, sleep, stress, physical activity, social engagement and mental stimulation. Second, we live in the most long-living county in the state. Marin, with its beauty, its nature and its abundance, also offers us a leg up on healthy living. The county is of course also home to the largest independent scientific research institute in the Bay Area, and the first institute in the world to focus solely on the biology of aging: the Buck Institute.
I began my scientific career focused on metabolism and diabetes at Harvard Medical School and spent many years studying mechanisms of epigenetic regulation (more about this in a future column!), first back east at the National Institutes of Health and the Picower Institute in New York and then here in the Bay Area at the Gladstone Institutes and UCSF. It was there that my work led to a fascination about aging and its mechanisms. When I was offered the opportunity to lead the Buck Institute in 2016, I jumped at the chance.
When the Buck opened its doors back in 1999, research on aging had just undergone a dramatic transition with the discovery of unique biochemical pathways that controlled the aging process. These discoveries highlighted the possibility that aging could one day be modulated using drugs and other interventions. These predictions have been largely validated, and today, research on aging is one of the most exciting fields in all of the life sciences. The Buck Institute was clearly ahead of its time then, and this pioneering tradition is continuing today. Since we opened our doors, the scientific understanding of aging has evolved dramatically, shifting from a fatalistic view where aging was seen as an inevitable slow decline to one where we see aging as a malleable process that can be altered, slowed and perhaps even reversed.
At the Buck, we firmly believe that we can enjoy life — with sound mind and sound bodies — at 95 as we do at 45. We do not believe that growing old means growing sick. Aging is the number-one risk factor for the chronic diseases of aging as described above. Up until now, we’ve treated these diseases as if they were independent occurrences, a process that I have called “whack-a-mole medicine”: successfully treat someone’s cancer, only for them to suffer a heart attack, or get someone’s diabetes under control only for them to face the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease. The “geroscience hypothesis” initially proposed by Buck scientists suggests that by targeting the biological processes of aging itself, we might be able to delay the onset of many age-related diseases simultaneously. In simpler terms, if we focus on slowing down the aging biological clock, we might prevent not just one but a multitude of aging-related issues at once. It is no wonder I look forward to coming to work every day!
By the way, my grandson Niall turned 1 this past February and is now walking. I can hardly wait to get him a bike in a few years. We’ll see if he can keep up with me!
