They say there are only two things certain in life: death and taxes. But if you’re rich, you can get around both – or so the world’s richest have always hoped.
In the past, the search for eternal youth led Cleopatras and Caesars to bathes full of donkey’s milk and use face masks made from crocodile excrement. Today – well, things aren’t much better.
One example: US tech billionaire Bryan Johnson, who spends an average of $2 million a year on purported anti-aging technologies, claims that his body now “accumulates less age-related damage than the average one-year-old.” Which, if true, might be comforting, since her regimen includes weekly acid peels, 23-hour-a-day fasting, and using her own son as a portable blood bank.
Photo: instagram.com/bryanjohnson_
But plasma or blood infusions have “no proven clinical benefit” for geriatric conditions, writes Rachael Jefferson-Buchanan, professor of Human Movement Studies (Health and Physical Education) and Creative Arts at Charles Sturt University. “Many of Johnson’s rejuvenation methods are questionable, based on dubious science, and have known side effects.”
So what can we do to get a few extra years on Earth? The answer is simple and – we hate to say it – disappointing.
Among the population, paying attention to body weight, not smoking, drinking alcohol in moderation and eating at least five servings of fruit and vegetables a day can increase life expectancy by up to 14 years compared to those who do none of these
– writes Richard Faragher, professor of biogerontology at the University of Brighton, in an article written jointly with Nir Barzilai, professor of medical genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
In the end, though, super longevity might just come down to sheer luck. “In one study, up to 60 percent of Ashkenazi Jewish centenarians smoked heavily for most of their lives,” Faragher and Barzilai note. “During the same period, half were obese, less than half did even moderate exercise, and less than three percent were vegetarians.”
Who wants to live forever?
So that’s it: eat right, don’t smoke, and try not to let your cells overdo protein building. But if the formula is so simple, is it possible to say what the upper limit of life is?
Well, that’s a difficult question to answer – amply evidenced by the fact that so many hypothetical “maximum human life spans” have been published in recent decades.
“In 1921, it was ‘proved’ that an age over 105 was impossible,” writes Faragher. “Estimating the limits of longevity has been criticized ever since, because all previously assumed ‘maximum limits’ of life span have been exceeded.”
Yet, despite all this successful aging and the ever-growing population, there is one figure that has remained unchanged for more than a quarter of a century: the age of the oldest person who ever lived, Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days.
This number is strikingly close to one of the generally suggested limits of human lifespan: about 120 years. And Madame Calment’s unbreakable record is not the only reason for this number’s popularity. “If you look at how our organs decline with age and compare that rate of decline to the age at which they no longer function,” Faragher explains, “most estimates suggest that organs only last as long as the average person, around 120 years old. there is”.
Mathematical models predict a similar limit. A 2016 study, for example, used demographic data to conclude that humans have a maximum lifespan of about 125 years — and the chance of someone reaching that age is less than one in ten thousand. Other studies have obtained remarkably similar figures.
However, some scientists are not so pessimistic. Breakthroughs in the understanding of the aging process suggest that the maximum life span may be as long as 150 years; others say the limit is the starry sky. But is it good?
“Do we really want to live longer and longer?” – asked Joris Deelen, a molecular epidemiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Aging, in an interview with the magazine Erstrebenswert.
“As a scientist, my goal is not for people to live 130 or 140 years,” he said. “It’s much more important that they stay healthy for longer and that we can delay the onset of age-related diseases or, ideally, prevent them altogether.”
