The gist is that this isn't quite as cut and dry as it may seem.
We also paid to make the Nature Aging paper open access.
That’s awesome! Did you make a deal with the authors to pay for the fee during publication or is this something anyone can do by approaching the journal itself?
Edit: if you need to know I would just ask the editor if it's an option
What a world to live in.
75% American are overweight..
Just let it sink a second, they speak about how many baby born after 2000 will reach 100 years old, how we are reaching the absolute limit of human survival.
75% overweight... Everyone know fat people don't live long. I bet all the studies done in the 90's that predicted we would easily be able to reach 100 years old didn't take that into account.
i.e. the benefits of the weight loss almost certainly outweigh any side effects that are likely to manifest.
studies estimate that moderate obesity takes about 2-3 years of life expectancy (defined as having a BMI of 30-35), only people with severe obesity (BMI of 40-45+) lose on average 6-13 years, comparable to smoking.
Given that severe obesity is still uncommon even in the rich world it only has a small impact on life expectancy overall.
Hunched over old people do not have the muscle mass to help keep them upright, I guess amongst other things.
"here is the theoretical limit given adherence to modern recommendations on cardiovascular health, exercise, etc."
and
"you all didn't listen and got fat instead"
That is to say, I'm not clear that "beating aging" is what is required for "long life." Is that definitionally required and I'm just being dense?
I'm assuming this is a tiered discussion? In that nobody thinks we should freeze aging at baby stages for someone. Such that we would still want some aging, but would then try and fix a point where all aging can be stopped?
As I said down thread, this could just be a potato/potahto thing? If this is just definitionally beating getting frail, then that makes sense. But I don't know that I could pin down an age that I would want to freeze progress at. Nor do I think I expected that there would be a general age to freeze aging at. Let me keep my strength longer, but I expect I will be/look/appear older and older the older I get.
Now, granted, I'd be delighted if I have the same strength my 90 year old grandfather in law did. In his 70s, I'm pretty sure the only thing I could beat him at was a race. Lifting things or doing manual work outside, and he was far beyond what I was in my 30s.
Why not? Humans have been pursuing immortality for time immemorial. "The Epic of Gilgamesh", one of the first known stories, features such a pursuit.
So, if you limit aging to "getting frail," I am fully there. But there are other things that happen as you age.
Fair that I don't expect to be as strong in my 60s as I am now. Or when I hit 70+. If I get that far. Light weight training is plenty to get to be in good physical shape, though? Get to where you can do 10-30 pushups and run a continuous mile, and you are probably doing fine?
So, what does it mean to "beat aging in a medical sense?" If it is just definitionally to not have any of the bad effects of aging, then sure. Of course I would want that. What are the names for the good things that are generally along for the ride with aging?
Going back to my earlier quip, if you could turn off aging for babies/toddlers, how would that be a good thing?
So the heart of my question is why do we view "defeating aging" as the same as "living longer?" Or is this something where the target age that people would want to be generally coalesces on a common number?
Wrinkling skin, graying hair, loss of muscle mass and bone density, loss of mental acuity, decline of libido, late-life diseases (eg: cancer, Alzheimer's, type-2 diabetes), and so on.
It's scientifically proven that our bodies spend enormous amounts of energy up into our 20s when we reach sexual maturity and then glide through on momentum through our 30s into our 40s when we are raising our children.
Once we're in our late 40s to early 50s we're done spawning new life and our bodies throw in the towel, starting the slow but inevitable deterioration culminating in death.
It's that whole physical process that we as a species want to overcome, we want to defy being just machines for spawning more machines. Life is fucking evil.
Growing wiser from more and more life experiences is also part of aging, but it's not what we refer to when we say "defeat aging".
People are asking if we should be surprised by the headline but are missing this. As suggested in the article by the researchers, there is something dragging down the average since the 2010s. Not even hitting the general expectation of ~75 years. We don’t have solid answers yet, only theories.
So yes, generally while going up against the process of aging is going to create barriers (eg can we get to 130 years old), we are also failing to raise the baseline which is the bigger issue that people might not grasp when it comes to “life expectancy rates”.
The exact quote you gave had a pretty solid answer, certainly not just "theories".
We have research on what can affect heart health, like what things might be linked to it, such as smoking and alcohol. We also know genetics plays a huge role.
So we don't actually have solid answers, actionable answers as to the rise of heart health issues. Look at this analysis[1] regarding how dietary guidelines specifically for fats (saturated, trans) have very little substantial evidence supporting it. Yet this gets repeated by the average person, that fats are the ultimate evil you must avoid. In another study[2] we find that reducing your fat intake still resulted in the same rates of mortality as those who ate more. This is also why more in the space are shifting away from these sort of claims ("only eat x amount of saturated fat per day") and more to general food composition (eg who cares if a fish has saturated fats, eat the fish with vegetables).
It's quite challenging to figure out, everyone has their theories. All I'm saying is we don't actually have the answers yet.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9794145/ [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8092457/
Regarding other factors, American culture is fairly similar to Canadian culture. However Canadians have free healthcare, meaning more Canadians see doctors than Americans. So I wonder if they have lower levels of obesity, heart disease and diabetes, and if their lifespans have also been decreasing.
I've been hearing this complaint (that the guidelines claim fat are the worst) for way too long, when in (my) reality, all the guidelines I've seen in the last 25 years has put more emphasis on carbs than on fats (i.e. too many carbs is evil).
I know "low fat" diets were the craze a long time ago. And sure, advertisers still like to slap "low/no fat" labels. But I believe the actual recommendation has been to lower carbs since around the 90's.
This is ultimately a strawman.
The modern lifestyle is incredibly sedentary and every civilisation is built on staple foods that can feed hours of manual labour (with modern snacks thrown on top).
Calling a major food group evil is just a good scapegoat because it’s much more palatable than telling people that they don’t move enough and eat too much food.
Whether that leads to actual heart disease is iffier, but not terribly controversial among cardiologists as far as I can tell. It's only doubted on the Internet where everyone wants to be a galaxy brain with some answer the doctors don't want you to know.
But nobody ever demonized fat in general, and demonizing carbs is just as stupid. Eating enormous amounts of carbs is fine as long as you actually use them. My daily calories right now are around 3,900 with carbs at 650 grams a day, a fair amount being syrups I eat early in the morning while running. If you listened to the Internet, you'd believe I was diabetic already, yet basically every remotely serious endurance athlete eats like this and is fine. Glucose that is continuously and immediately shuttled into muscle cells to power mitochondria and provide energy for movement does no harm whatsoever. It's roughly the entire point of animal metabolism. Glucose that sits around in your blood forever because you're sitting around staring at a screen for 16 hours a day while stuffing your face is what causes problems because of all the oxidizing effects of glucose when it isn't taken apart quickly and turned into ATP.
My BMI is 21.6 for what it's worth. As far as I can tell, the whole "mystery" behind why no diets work is because no diet can magically make people eat less when they spend the overwhelming majority of their time not moving and hunger decouples from energy expenditure. If you're sufficiently active as a lifelong athlete, every diet works. I ate super sized McFlurries, entire boxes of Entenmann's donuts, and Little Debbie's treats as a teenager as staples of my diet. As an adult, I've tried paleo, zone, mediterranean. Right now, I pretty much just eat the standard American food pyramid. None of these has managed to magically poison my brain or destroy my metabolism because metabolic function can be trained just like any other bodily function and it is trained by doing regular athletic activity with a high energy demand. Just like your muscles atrophy if you never do any resistance training, your metabolism atrophies if you never do any aerobic exercise.
I can't claim to know the secret to weight loss but I know how to never get fat in the first place. On every team I was ever on from middle school to college to my time in the Army, whether that be cross country, track, volleyball, basketball, tennis, or general outdoor adventurism and long-haul hiking with a weighted pack, the overweight rate was never 0 but it sure as shit wasn't 70%. And we were all eating the same "poisons" and manufactured foods from evil Nestle that the rest of you were eating.
We're talking years of increased life expectancy.
Sadly statin is not without its downsides.
Huh? Statins are a medication type in which increases in life expectancy are extremely hard to point to all. I think they're almost a "poster child" for medications that correct a problem to an extent but whose overall benefit is quite dubious.
(and given that these medications were highly prescribed before any long term studies were finish - creating considerable incentive for people to find benefit - I'd personally wager they are overall harmful but that's me guessing - the main point is they definitely aren't boost-life-expectancy-by-years drugs but probably aren't reduce-life-expectancy-by-years drugs either, given the studies)
Link from google: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3531501/
There is no lobbying like the lobbying for massively selling classes of drugs of dubious effect.
Nestle ? McDonalds ? Burger King ?
This is all my THEORY, a speculation that I would like someone to study or to find a study about.
Theory / speculation:
Humans evolved with natural sugars, fats, proteins/meats; primitive cooking, probably some grains (more recently). That's what our bodies know how to process, to react to.
All the fake sugars, modified foods that lack the components our bodies use to regulate internal processes; highly processed foods which also lack those components we need to feel satiated and to produce the messengers to digest correctly: those are likely the causes of obesity (not feeling full, so more eating) and bodies behaving poorly.
'Food Deserts' and corporations that are geared around selling large portions of tasty but unsatisfying food, or only offering huge sizes rather than also offering adults a tasty portion that's not intended for take home leftovers also contribute.
Also: my main vice for this topic. Can I _please_ have lightly caffeinated + carbonated water that isn't outrageously expensive?
edit: you really think insulin prices don't have an effect on the lifespans of diabetics?
I find that when I point this out, people often get mad. They feel they aren't obese. But the research doesn't support them, if you are anywhere outside of the "healthy" categorization you are at the same risk (that we know of so far) as "clinically obese" people.
No. If you fall above healthy, you are "overweight". You need a higher BMI to be classified as obese.
I'm a good example of how it fails. I have long arms and legs which causes my BMI to be fairly low. However, my body fat is fairly high. I need to lose fat but were I to rely solely on BMI I'd think I'm fine.
What I'd want instead of BMI is body fat percentage. I think that gives a much better measure of health problems.
We’ve normalised being fat.
I saw more grossly obese people at that airport in the first ten minutes than I had back home in probably the previous year. It really stood out to me.
It must be your general dietary makeup and lifestyle. All that corn syrup. Also, I don't see any reason why it would have gotten better since then.
Just calling a spade a spade from an outsider's perspective..
IIRC mostly they had to do with seasonal sicknesses like the flu, the theory being that your body can burn the extra fat during periods you aren't able to eat well.
I tried adding 10kgs and it said "Overweight".
Seems ok to me.
They even warn that BMI should be used along with other indicators.
https://doi.org/10.4158/endp.19.1.50042678317gx698
The evidence that being overweight is healthier is a bit dubious, but the evidence that having a "normal" BMI is healthier than "overweight" is nonexistent.
We dance around it and call it 'obesity' but the real medical cause of obesity is an addiction to unhealthy food.
This is compounded by the fact that it is completely legal for people to make their food more addictive and therefore unhealthy and advertise it to addicted people with underhanded marketing techniques that take advantage of their addiction.
Until we recognize this as an addiction issue that is compounded by dealers being able to operate with impunity we won't make any headway -- short of technological advancements like Ozempic that allow people to side step their addiction.
Has it? We've tried a few decades of fat positively and just pretending that being fat isn't a personal failure, and just a symptom of society. People have only gotten more fat in that time. Let's try some serious shaming. If you're fat, you should have to pay more for healthcare, food, flights basically everything related to your burden on society.
Fat positivity? It's not really a popular position, and is in fact regarded as a loathesome movement.
You think every fat kid, especially those bullied, don't want to be thin?
You think shaming is going to work? That's an uphill battle, especially against the human body and the urges it generate, the causes we do not fully understand.
Normal healthy humans are supposed to be able to self regulate their weight at a healthy level. I have seen at least one friend who has an atrocious diet, poor eating habit, and yet remain rail thin.
If shaming did work, then it would have been implemented widely and obesity is solved. But it's not. We don't have anything that works as well as ozempic.
I am all for taking responsibility, but we ought to be cognizant about the current limitations of our tools and flexible at how we would solve problems, rather than sticking to dogma or trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
For example, I found a psychological trick that enables me to work long hours. Tricks for eventually getting rid of bad food addiction(sadly, I am at it again).
What kind of reasoning is this? This is only true if you believe good policies always get implemented. You'll notice other countries like Japan don't require every man and child to be drugged to stop eating food, and they have a much stronger sense of shame for being an undue burden on society.
Let's give a few decades of strict control over food suppliers a try, and if that doesn't work, maybe we could look into alternatives.
Depends. All cause mortality is notoriously lower for "overweight" people than "normal weight" people.
"Overweight" is longer-lived than "Normal," and "Grade I Obesity" isn't significantly less longer lived than "Normal." So what you're pointing out is misinformation, which is why people are annoyed by it. There is a case that "Normal" includes more sick and dying people because sick people often lose weight, but the difference still can't be as stark as reddit knowledge makes it out to be.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23280227/
Conclusions and relevance: Relative to normal weight, both obesity (all grades) and grades 2 and 3 obesity were associated with significantly higher all-cause mortality. Grade 1 obesity overall was not associated with higher mortality, and overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality. The use of predefined standard BMI groupings can facilitate between-study comparisons.
I don't know why is this even a question. Do people really think being overweight is a net positive?
Association of all-cause mortality with overweight and obesity using standard body mass index categories: a systematic review and meta-analysis
> Conclusions and Relevance: [...]overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality.
It is so pervasive though it is hard to tell until you go on a really boring and restrictive diet. It is just hard to not gain weight on average when the food tastes this good with such incredible variety.
That is even if you buy something at the store. With our "foodie" culture, restaurants are an entire other level of choice and taste on top of that.
That doesn't mean obese people are "to blame" for any medical complications they might suffer from obesity. It also doesn't mean that obesity is a death sentence; people's bodies function differently and we've all heard stories of pack a day smokers that lived into their 90s. But there is absolutely a connection between the two.
King County in Washington State, which contains the Seattle metro area, has a life expectancy of 86.3 years. This is higher than any country in the world. If you move one county south (Pierce), it is 75.7 years, slightly worse than the US average currently. Not surprisingly, there are many obvious factors that may contribute to this e.g. the obesity rate in Pierce County is 50% higher and the obesity rate in King County is roughly half the US obesity rate. The Seattle metro is a relatively walkable city and people do, Pierce County is not. As a matter of demographics, King County is significantly more Asian than Pierce County. And so on.
Both counties are geographically large and contain many municipalities. It is difficult to come up with a theory where pension fraud in King County is so high relative to Pierce County that it explains a >10 year difference in life expectancy.
Get an apartment on at least the third floor, in a building without a lift.
Get a pet dog which needs to be walked several times a day.
Eat lots of chili peppers[0]:
"The analysis included data from more than a half a million people in multiple countries. When compared with people who never or rarely ate chili pepper, those who ate it regularly had lower rates of death due to cardiovascular disease (by 26%), cancer (by 23%), or any cause (by 25%)."
[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/will-eating-more-chilis-....
A little bit of high-intensity workout each week?
I know people who are incapable of eating lunch or any meal without a large can/bottle of full-strengh coca cola or such, ever single day. Most of whom complain about not being able to lose weight.
The science is pretty clear. Breaking out of old habits is much more challenging.
EDIT: Typos: whole -> whom, mean -> meal
"Although nuts are high in fat, it’s mainly healthier unsaturated fat. They contain protein, B vitamins, vitamin E and minerals, including iron, potassium, selenium, magnesium, zinc and copper."[0]
[0] https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga....
By doing so, historical events outside of the study period don't have a major effect. In this study, they deliberately avoided the covid pandemic as it would have caused a significant drop in life expectancy that is not representative of a general trend. Of course, the future is not taken into account either. Despite what the name may suggest, life expectancy is like a snapshot of the studied period (1990-2019 here), not a prediction.
To show that we are hitting a limit on our ability to extend lifetime, we really should look at having reached 95, how many people reach 105 or something like that.
To say that the average life expectancy is dropping and therefore we have reached our limit on their ability to extend the lifetimes ignores the fact that much of the reason for a stage life expectancy drop in my country is lifelong maltreatment, often self-inflicted--death-oriented decisions on drugs, nutrition, and activity.
I think we need to distinguish between longevity and health though. Lots of people live with chronic disease and giving them more quality of life counts for more than longer life IMO.
Spending an other 100 years like say from 80 to 100... Well you are alive, but still...
It's not his lifespan I aspire to, but his healthspan.
Everyone already dies.
Our economic system is incompatible with the next 200 years irregardless of what specifically gets invented.
At 5%/year, that's a factor (not percentage) of 17292 growth; in energy terms that's not quite boiling the oceans, but it is making the poles the only barely livable zone.
In any sense besides energy, this kind of growth implies automation that makes the meaning of work radically different than today. Human or superhuman AI would be an example of that, but the successful creation of that has other complications that we can currently only guess at with less awareness than the Victorians had of climate change or biodiversity loss.
The information that something stopped or slowed down is still useful without having to think it was going to go on eternally. It allows you to adjust your plans for the future.
> did you expect her to live forever?
I understand some tech billionaire want to live forever by eating hundreds of pills a day for nutrition, anti-aging, disease control etc. Their life may be "great" for some definition of great.
But do billions of people on earth think that their life will become great in another 50 years even if it is rather miserable right now? I just live under rock to not know the desires of modern human.
Perhaps there are other shared variables besides genes? For one thing, blindness is associated with higher mortality [1]. And even within a country, life expectancy can vary dramatically by region, city, and even neighborhood. Or perhaps the people you know happen to be more likely to share certain occupations, mindsets, levels of physical activity, or diets?
Or maybe it's just coincidence.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...
When antibiotics were first invented some people thought we'd be taking them daily as a vitamin. Turns out that's not such a good idea despite them being life saving in some scenarios
The accepted view is a lot like the accepted views to mono-cultures for crops. In that they are bad. The practiced take, though, is quite the opposite? Crops are dominated by mono-cultured fields. And though antibiotics are known not to be used constantly, farms seem to use them at an amazing rate.
I'd love to see a longer exploration of this. Why is it farms seem to be full of practices that we are taught are bad?
Not exactly. We have crop rotation because over time a strict mono-culture wasn't very good.
At any rate, I'll be reading more on this some. I have real work I should be doing, after all. :D
I guess we’ll soon be able to measure the impacts on what it does to the children of parents that take it.
How have McDonalds Happy Meal sales been looking lately?
Life expectancy is a weighted average (no pun intended), and so it's unusually sensitive to outliers. People who die early drag the average down much more than people who live close to the mean life expectancy. The biggest premature killers of Americans are obesity, drugs, car accidents, and suicide. Anything that addresses one of those causes of death has an outsize effect on life expectancy. There are 100M+ obese Americans. There are about 100,000 overdose deaths per year. Obesity, while not as lethal as drugs or suicide, afflicts 1000x as many patients, and so a treatment for it can have a large effect on the numbers.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2009-03-18-moderate-obesity-takes-...
> According to the CDC, 9.4% of adults in the United States were severely obese between August 2021 and August 2023. This is higher for women (12.1%) than men (6.7%). The prevalence of severe obesity varies by age group, with the highest rates in adults aged 40–59 (12.0%)
Only 9.4% of people are severely obese. Moderately obese people have only a ~4% shorter life-span than healthy weight individuals - much of which can probably be attributed to other lifestyle issues besides simply being overweight.
This will move the needle, but I doubt as much as you think.
There's a lot more smokers than there are severely obese people.
Huh, I was going to argue this, but you're right (in the US). 19.5% of the population smokes, so there's about twice as many smokers as severely obese people.
I was sure it had dropped to 5-10%. I guess I'm in a bubble (of fresh air).
Since everyone knows smoking is bad for a long time now, we’re going to eventually need to categorize stuff like lung-cancer as a death of despair, similar to other deaths caused by alcoholism, opioids, or suicide.
A lot of people who otherwise might quit smoking are probably looking at impossible dreams of home ownership or retirement, and thinking consciously or unconsciously that there is more dignity in a death at 50-60ish than one at 80ish when you’re unemployable and the thin promises of social safety nets have fallen through.
Smoking (or other high risk activities) might be a dirty habit but it’s still more socially acceptable than suicide.
Most of them are smoking primarily because they're addicted.
A few of them actually like smoking.
If obesity is supposed to be the other main candidate for why life expectancy is down, you can do a similar analysis there. Is life really good enough to prolong or attempt to improve for people that are in at-risk categories? That’s the question people are looking at when they choose to move towards or away from self-care. For someone who makes minimum wage and already has to choose between paying for a date or paying for rent, it makes less sense for them to care much about losing weight, because it makes a bad life longer but won’t help their love life.
This is how practically all population-level analysis of health is just economics in disguise, even without directly looking at costs of medicine/services
Which, I recognize is a pretty privileged way of putting it—people struggle with weight, mental health, and drugs, and those are real struggles that shouldn’t be ignored. I just also want to see where things are developing on the upper-bound for reasonably plausible lifespans.
Sure, if all the weights are 1. Where i come from, we just call that an average.
>People who die early drag the average down much more than people who live close to the mean life expectancy.
This is true of all averages where all weights are the same.
(To reproduce exactly the scenario being discussed, you fit a constant-only model to the data using least squares: that gives the average as the best fit. Then, you measure the leverage of each point of interest.)
It has a side effect of reducing muscle gains from exercise.
As for life extension by GLP-1 active drugs, it's much more of a guess. Mechanism is relatively similar. Side effects might not be...
And there are potential bad side effects too.
If a doctor tried to push that on me I would fire that doctor.
We’re really flying in the dark there.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-benefits-of-ozempic-are-mult...
> Known as GLP-1 agonists, these drugs were originally developed to help control diabetes. But there's increasing evidence that they have other health benefits, beyond controlling weight. They seem to boost heart health, protect the kidneys, improve sleep apnea, and lower the risk of certain obesity-related cancers.
A book on sleep and how important it is to learning and health: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep "Walker spent four years writing the book, in which he asserts that sleep deprivation is linked to numerous fatal diseases, including dementia. ... The values of sleep and the consequences of sleep deprivation are also brought up in the book. One particular research conducted in the past, where people volunteered themselves to sleep for only six hours in a span of 10 nights, is brought up by Walker. This resulted in the volunteers being "cognitively impaired" along with their brains being heavily damaged, regardless of the three week eight-hour sleep schedule they received later."
"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." — Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky (1943)
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/how-the-brain-flus...
While in practice, what would happen is that we’d be doing more of the same. Bosses would be demanding more time in the office, people would be spending more time doomscrolling, nothing would change. It’s a pipe dream to think that if we had more time in the day we’d suddenly start using it more respectfully and responsibly.
seems decent to me. I hate sleeping, the problem is i get tired and cant avoid it.
This is the great future the visionary OP envisions for us.
It's not binary I guess (sleep "once a week" is less than "sleep once a day"), but even some incremental improvements seem very far off.
One also has to wonder if it's actually desirable to have less sleep and be "on" with fewer or no breaks.
The real and staggering excellence of the series is the speculation - it's not such hard SF that it explains the mechanisms by which everything happens, and there are real characters who do more than stand as cardboard observers to technology, but it's crunchier than most.
I'm all for getting rid of sleep, but given how society is structured I worry that the extra time will just end up being used for longer commutes and more zoom calls. Hardly advancement.
We really don’t know and have made it nigh impossible to study. Obviously governments are trying to hide something.
It is expensive to live a healthy lifestyle in the US.