Rethinking Lifespan, Dr. Lachs | The Future You | Men's Health - video Dailymotion

Rethinking Lifespan, Dr. Lachs | The Future You | Men's Health

Transcript

00:00So in your field, we hear a lot about two different but related terms. We hear about

00:04lifespan and we hear about healthspan. Can you just describe to me the difference between those

00:09two as it relates to the work that you do every day with patients? Welcome to The Future You,

00:13a new series by Men's Health, where we talk to the leading experts in health and longevity to

00:17help you live longer and stronger. I'm your host, Rich Dormant. In this episode, we're talking with

00:22longevity expert Dr. Mark Lacks about lifespan versus healthspan. So lifespan, very simply put,

00:29is the number. The number of years you get, the number of birthday candles you get on your

00:33That's exactly right. And healthspan is the length of time that you can live independently with full

00:40function. And in a perfect world, healthspan should equal lifespan, right? I mean, I have no interest

00:46in having someone live to a hundred if they're bedbound or chair fast. I mean, that's as pyrrhic

00:52a victory as a 40-year-old woman dying of breast cancer. I want people doing the things they want

00:58to do to the very last minute. Bridge, tennis, pickleball, sex, you know, whatever it is that

01:06is what my 90-year-old says, turns your gears. So the goal is really not just to increase both

01:14healthspan and lifespan, but to bring them closer together. That's exactly right. To live as long

01:19as you can doing what you want to do without disability. So when you were starting out,

01:24what were some of the most common, say, complaints? Was it frailty? What were some of the things that

01:29the quote-unquote aging population was really dealing with that you'd heard about all the time

01:34from your patients? Disability from diseases that were not treatable. So for example, heart attacks,

01:40the rates of heart disease, particularly in men, have dropped dramatically. And in those days,

01:45if you had a heart attack in your 50s or 60s, you might be breathless. You might not be able to

01:50walk without chest pain, angina. Now we put a piece of rigatoni in one of your arteries and you

01:56can live another 20, 30 years going to the gym, right? And that did not exist. Or at least not

02:01exist commonly. Stents were started in the late 70s, right? People were felled by cancers, colon cancer.

02:07We hear all about that and the younger propensity to colon cancer. Now we do a screening procedure and

02:13those get taken out so you can go on to live another 20, 30 years and meet me. So it was not

02:20just the diagnosis, but it was the prevention piece, the diagnosis piece, and the treatment piece

02:25were just a lot different than they are. And then the public health issues, you know, smoking,

02:30which, you know, everybody smoked when I was a kid. I mean, I smoked a few cigarettes in college and

02:35rates of that have dropped dramatically. People were learning about ideal body weight. Exercise. I mean,

02:42I would say that one of the biggest breakthroughs in aging has been what we call the quantified

02:49self. And that's the Fitbit, the ring. I mean, did you have any idea 10 or 15 years ago how many

02:56steps you took in a day? No, no. And now you know that. And now you aspire to that goal. You see when

03:05you're falling off. You see on an iPhone when your gait is becoming unstable. You're learning about how you

03:11sleep, the quality of your sleep. I mean, the one thing we've been unable to do is to see how much

03:16food you put in your mouth. Everybody underestimates the amount of Haagen-Dazs, right, that they're

03:21eating. Just a spoonful. Just a spoonful. Yeah. I mean, it's really one serving, that little

03:27container. So small. But I think that day's going to come. I think there'll be an app or device that

03:32will, you won't be able to sort of delude yourself into the fact that that that that big hamburger was

03:39only 150 calories. Right.