00:00One of the most promising avenues of research that you and your colleagues have gone down
00:04is this term that I particularly like called exceptional longevity.
00:09I never thought longevity was something one could exceed at or be exceptional at.
00:14What does that term mean?
00:16And tell me a little bit about how you're approaching it
00:18and what it means for all the folks who are watching this.
00:21Welcome to The Future You, a new series by Men's Health,
00:23where we talk to the leading experts in health and longevity
00:26to help you live longer and stronger.
00:28I'm your host, Rich Dormant.
00:30In this episode, we're talking with longevity expert Dr. Nir Barzilai
00:33about caloric restriction and the secrets of exceptional agers.
00:38When we started this whole field, and I'm kind of a pioneer.
00:42There were very few people who started this field,
00:45and we had one experiment that really worked no matter which animal and which lab you did it at.
00:51You took animals, let's say mice or rats, but it works in other animals,
00:56and they were brothers, so half of them got whatever they wanted to eat,
01:01and the others got 60% of it or 70% of it.
01:05We call this paradigm dietary restriction or caloric restriction.
01:08And what happened, the caloric restricted animal lived much healthier and much longer.
01:18And not only that, they lived healthier and longer,
01:23and they kind of seemed to die in the same weeks.
01:26Like they totally avoided diseases and got to their maximal lifespan and died.
01:32And that seems to be a reasonable approach for us to understand aging,
01:37because that's what we want to do.
01:38We want us to live healthy and die one day.
01:41And as we were doing these things, I realized, and also being an MD,
01:46I realized, well, we have people like that.
01:49Let's see that we can show that people like that are,
01:54and discover what, if we do have them, what are people like that?
01:58What can they tell us about aging?
02:01So instead of looking at people who get diseases early, which was one approach,
02:07I said, hey, it was 1998, I think.
02:10And I said, you know, centenarians, those people who are 100 years old
02:14and were born at the end of the last century then,
02:17when they were born, life expectancy was 40.
02:21If they got to 40, it became 60.
02:25But basically, half of their friends died when they were 40.
02:30So they doubled their life expectancy.
02:34So this is really amazing, okay?
02:37It's more than those mice and rats that really ruined their life, right?
02:41And it's also worth noting, most of these people probably did not practice caloric restriction.
02:45In fact, we measured all those things.
02:51It's not only that they were not caloric restricted.
02:54Half of them were overweight or obese, even at 100 years old.
02:5860% of the men and 30% of the women were heavy smokers, some of them smoking there.
03:04I had a woman who smoked for 95 years, and she died at 110.
03:08Can we cut this?
03:09This is not, no, I'm kidding.
03:11If you smoke for 95 years, you'll live a long time.
03:16But you're right, that's not the lesson.
03:22You know, exercise less than half of them.
03:25So our centenarians, okay, that's not the reason they got there.
03:29That doesn't mean that that's not what all of us should do, okay?
03:32But that's not why they got there.
03:35So they got it in spite of that, really.
03:38And so we were trying to find out really what slows their aging.
03:42But the first thing we had to determine is that they, you know, do they get sick when we all get sick when they were 60 years old?
03:50Or did their lifespan and healthspan, did it go together?
03:54And, of course, we couldn't get their friends who died 50 years before, but we had their, really, we looked at the spouse of their children.
04:05Okay, that was our control group.
04:07They didn't have longevity in the family.
04:09They lived at the same period of time, but they started earlier.
04:13So people who live in our times are basically healthy until age 60.
04:20At age 60, they are starting to accumulate a disease and a treatment, and then, you know, another disease and a treatment.
04:27And it goes on, not in a really great way.
04:30At age 80, only 10% don't have any disease and treatment.
04:37Our centenarians are healthier for 20 to 30 years longer.
04:43And even at age 100, only 30% of them, 30% of them don't have a disease.
04:50And this is not the exciting thing.
04:55The exciting thing is that they die without, we have a term that's called a contraction of morbidity.
05:04The time that you're sick at the end of your life, and the time you're sick at the end of their life was weeks or months in centenarians, and it's years in other people.
05:13So you live healthy, you live longer, and you die one day.
05:20And this means that we humans have a potential to get there.
05:26By the way, the maximum lifespan of humans, that's a statistical calculation, is 115 years.
05:37Half of us die before the age of 80, more than half of us in the United States.
05:41So we have a lot that we can realize.
05:45And certainly, to live to 100, we have lots of examples, and they're really quite successful.
05:52So what slows their aging?
05:53What slows their aging enough to allow them to be so successful, and how we can adopt it was a question.
06:01I also want to say something very important.
06:04The fact that you live healthy and die in a few weeks was actually measured by the CDC.
06:12Now we all know what's the CDC.
06:14And the CDC was looking at the medical costs in the last two years of life of somebody who dies over the age of 100 compared to those who die at 70.
06:24Those who die over the age of 100 had a third the medical cost than those at 70.
06:31And when they were at 70, they didn't even go to the doctors.
06:35They didn't have any medical cost.
06:37So we started talking about longevity dividend, and that creating this model that I just described that is real, right?
06:44That it has a longevity dividend.
06:47If we can just extend healthspan, we're going to do a lot of good.
06:52And then there is a professor of economy from London School of Economy, Andrew Scott, who said,
06:59Guys, you're like, you don't know how to calculate.
07:02What's the problem?
07:03He said, You're talking about medical costs, okay?
07:07But hey, this guy is not in the hospital.
07:11That's what you're telling me.
07:12And I'm telling you just a minute.
07:13What is he doing?
07:14He's traveling.
07:15He's shopping.
07:17He has economical value that you're totally underestimating.
07:21When he estimated, the economical value is $360 trillion over the next 10 years,
07:31even if we achieve two or three years of extension of health.
07:36In other words, we cannot afford not to do it, okay?
07:40It's because medical cost is so huge.
07:42We just have to stop it, and we can stop it.
07:46Now, you came to one of our challenges of how do we get society to adopt this plan?
07:56And what society did when you read beautifully what it was about prevention, right?
08:06Harnessing food, cleaning water, sewers, all that.
08:09What happened?
08:11We got to the age of 60, and we start getting all those diseases that were not part of evolution, right?
08:17We didn't die from Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease and obesity, right?
08:21And all that.
08:22So what the government did, it's created the National Institute of Health and said, hey, there's diseases here, okay?
08:33You solve that, okay?
08:36So now we have the National Institute of Health, institutes of health, which are really National Institutes of Disease, if you think about it.
08:46There's National Cancer Institute and National Heart and Lung and Kidney and Diabetes.
08:50Okay, they're Institute of Health.
08:51And there's one institute that is the National Institute of Aging, where we're coming and saying we might not need all those institutes if we're successful.
08:59And we get only 3% of the budget when we are 65% of the subjects who are affected.
09:09And this is a political nightmare because every institute that gets much more money said, excuse me, but we have our disease, okay?
09:17So stand in line, okay?
09:19So this is a challenge for us that we're trying to tackle, and we can talk about how we're tackling them.
