Live Long and Prosper

Several weeks ago the French CBC popular science program Découverte broadcast an episode on aging. They examined the subject from several points of view including biological, medical, quality of life, etc., and looked at the many ways that we are inventing to prevent or avoid or at least delay aging.

To not keep you in suspense, their summary of the current state of the art in living a longer life is to eat balanced meals, exercise daily, and remain mentally alert by challenging yourself in new activities regardless of your age. In short, the things we should do to live longer are all the usual things not promoted by our culture, which values sloth, television watching, mental inactivity, and encourages us from an early age to be helpless and dependent on others. I believe that widespread societal behaviours do not happen entirely by accident, so it must suit someone’s purposes to encourage us to behave this way.

While on vacation once in western Canada many years ago, we were having a mid-afternoon snack in one of the restaurants in the Chateau Lake Louise. Seated behind me were a retired, but not elderly, American couple on a tour through the Rockies. We couldn’t help overhearing them talk about their trip, and what seemed to be most important to them was the shopping in Banff and the fact that they never had to lift their own luggage at the up-market hotels that they were using. In short, they never had to do anything, and not only did that suit them, it was a much valued and sought-after goal. I wonder if they took the trouble to look at the mountains and rivers all around. Maybe they paid someone to do that for them. You have to be pretty limited in your imagination to go to Banff to shop, something you can do in any mall and at the very same chain stores.

The trouble with trying to combat aging is that in some ways, it’s like fighting evolution. The main reason our cells decide to stop regenerating so that we grow old and die is because our genes have been selected that way by Mother Nature. Once we have raised children, we have fulfilled our species’ requirement for self-perpetuation, and from that point on we are a burden. We need to die because we no longer serve any useful purpose and are dragging down the herd. It’s an uphill battle turning back forces of nature that have been in place for millions of years. But some people feel the need to try.

One segment of the program documented the move afoot by drug companies to develop and peddle anti-aging drugs. They have done some drug experiments on rats or mice (not long-term experiments since they are so inconvenient), and that seems to be enough to have spawned the usual snake oil salesmen who claim that taking some pill for life will not only lengthen your stay on the earth but will also make you more vital and energetic at the same time. At that point in the program, they were interviewing a holier-than-thou believer in his own superiority and I remember thinking how better off the gene pool would be if he met a bus head-on before procreating. Imagine how stupid you have to be to take drugs when you’re healthy, drugs that have not been tested for long-term effects, and to do this because some mice lived a few extra weeks in a lab somewhere. For all we know, those mice lived longer because good-looking lab assistants were hugging them while injecting the needle into their rumps. Maybe if some young babe dropped by your house every day and gave your butt a squeeze, you might live longer too.

The most bizarre interviewee on the program was a member of a starve-to-live-longer movement. I had never heard of that. Apparently, someone in a lab somewhere did some tests (on mice or rats again) and discovered that if you kept the poor animals on a subsistence diet, about 1/3 of the normal daily intake, they would live significantly longer. So this fellow (and others like him) cut his dietary intake to 1/3 the daily norm for a man his age and plans to continue to live his life this way. Not surprisingly, he has an emaciated face, dull eyes (but maybe he always did), a weak voice, and reports that he is in constant hunger day and night, and has to wear sweaters and heavy linens all the time because he is perpetually cold. He has calculated, based on the rat data, that he will live from five to ten years longer this way. I can’t remember his age, but he looked to be in his mid-forties so he was looking at 30 to 40 more years of constant hunger and cold, all so that he could eek out an additional 5 to 10 years of that depressing existence. Why would this appeal to someone? I remember thinking to myself at the time that if he were a dog, some vets would recommend putting him out of his misery.