HEALTH
5 Science-Backed Methods You Can Do Every Day to Live longer
Most of us know the concept of aging very well. We watch our parents grow older over time. For the younger ones, it might seem that ageing never gets a hold of us until maybe you notice a couple more strands of white hair.
Whilst we can’t yet totally escape it, we can actually delay this inevitable fate.
This is what lifespan by Dr David Sinclair taught me about ageing. It gave me a fighting chance on something that seemed so inevitable. It has completely evolved the way I now view ageing.
He encourages us to view ageing as a disease rather than accept its fate. Like all other diseases, we have to fight it. However, unlike other diseases, ageing is something that is with us for the rest of our lives. So we must constantly put in the effort to fight it.
To simplify ageing and I am probably oversimplifying what is the most complicated phenomenon in all of Earth. Ageing is the loss of irrecoverable information and not allowing our body to fully recover.
Every day, we live our lives and cause damage to our bodies. Our bodies repair this damage with information from our DNA and other sources. However, slowly as our bodies use the information, we also lose small bits of that information every day.
It isn’t a big deal at the start but over time as the information loss gets more and more severe, our bodies lose the information it needs to repair ourselves.
Therefore, the variety of methods that were shown in the book which are the methods I am about to show too all have one common theme.
They science-backed methods to get your body to preserve more information each day. The only way to do this is to induce some kind of stress, to let your body know something is wrong and that it should be doing more work to preserve that information.
Intermittent Fasting
Fasting is a way of placing chemical stress in our bodies. This stress signals our body that we may not always have food available and tells our body to dedicate more resources to preservation.
In lifespan, fasting was presented as a method to trigger longevity genes in our bodies. The one way I am applying this to my life is to fast on weekdays. With work being so busy, I find it relatively easy to skip meals. The only hard part becomes resisting the urge to snack.
It was hard at first but I now, go about 20–21 hours without eating about 4x a week. Might sound a bit extreme but I started out slowly with 12-hour fasts and then slowly extending that.
I believe there are a lot of benefits to fasting aside from it’s longevity benefit that people should definitely include in their day to day lives.
Avoid Thermo Neutrality
In this article, I wrote about the benefits of staying a little colder than normal. To summarize that article, staying a little colder than normal promotes the production of brown fat, which in turn promotes mitochondrial activity which is linked to living longer.
What I didn’t mention was that there is some benefit to staying hotter than normal too. But as David mentions in lifespan, it is much harder for us to raise our core temperatures because we are naturally hot-blooded creatures.
Nonetheless, it seems like being either colder or hotter than normal can be really beneficial to us. It comes back down to inducing some form of stress on our bodies. Which in turn tell it to work harder and preserve more information.
For me, this just means skipping wearing a jacket in the winter and a visit to the sauna regularly. Being cold sucks but growing old fast sucks more.
What We Eat Matters
Unfortunately, the age-old saying of “eating fresher food and less processed foods” holds some wisdom. As obvious as it is, it is true. Our bodies respond a lot better to fresher foods than processed ones. What is less obvious is the role of meat and how it affects our lifespans.
No matter where you stand on eating meat, meat can fully satiate and fulfil our body’s nutritional and caloric needs. However, this again makes our bodies complacent.
Because meat can provide almost everything we need from an energy point of view, our bodies think it doesn’t have to do more work, which isn’t so great for our longevity. It makes our bodies think that we can always get all the nutrition we need from external sources.
So, intentionally depriving ourselves of meat every now and then can trigger our longevity genes. It lets our bodies know that even though we are eating, it can’t get all the energy it needs from external sources, so it should be preserving more information.
Personally, I love meat and I don’t think I am able to give it up. So for a compromise, I drink plant-based protein shakes instead of whey and also try to go vegetarian for a whole day 1–2x a week. Since I fast most of the day during the weekdays, I don’t eat that much meat throughout the week.
Sleep
The one fact that is missing from lifespan is the role of sleep. This fact was made clear to me by Matthew Walker in his book why we sleep. Where he shows scientific evidence that a lack of sleep can drastically shorten our lifespan.
Being sleep deprived can actually shorten our telomeres which are the end caps of our DNA. This means our bodies readily loses information it needs to repair itself just because we lack sleep.
The more obvious role of sleep is that we are less alert and have a much higher chance of getting into an accident. As obvious as that is, it severely increases our mortality rate due to external factors. Especially, if we want to drive when we haven’t gotten enough sleep. Matthew ranks a sleep-deprived person equal to that of a drunk person. If we don’t drink and drive, we shouldn’t be sleep deprived and drive either.
A seemingly not so obvious reason is the lack of sleep also puts our cravings and impulses on overdrive. We are more likely to give in to our guilty desires when we lack sleep. This could mean binging on high-calorie foods at night or drinking more alcohol because we lack self-control.
Sleep, therefore, plays a pivotal role in the war against ageing. It affects not only our mental well being but also our lifespan.
Exercise
Aside from getting more sleep, all the methods above induce some form of chemical stress. Exercising is a method to induce physical stress on our bodies.
Exercising for a decent amount of time with a decent intensity can help us live longer. Not only does it combat obesity and other cardiovascular diseases but it also triggers our longevity genes in our body.
Following the theme of all the other methods, that stress is what makes our bodies work harder and preserver more information.
It stands to reason then that we can reap the maximum amount of benefits by inducing both physical and chemical stress onto our bodies at once. David suggests that it is the most effective way that anybody can combat ageing.
So if you already fast and do some form of exercise, you are doing more than others in your own fight against ageing.
Final Thoughts
Performing all the methods consistently places you in a very good position to significantly delay ageing. But all the methods also require a decent amount of conviction and effort to implement consistently. But even doing one out of the five methods listed means you are already taking steps to fight aging.
The most eye-opening fact for me in this book was the very fact that we can actually fight aging. That it is possible with consistency and a small lifestyle change, that we can actually delay this inevitable fate.
I hope by reading this article, more people are inspired that there are possible daily actions that we can take to fight it.
Thanks for reading.
