HEALTHY AT 100 (2 page)

As our older people are getting less and less well, their numbers are growing, and this process is about to shift into hyperdrive. As author Ken Dychtwald has described in his seminal book
Age Power
, there are at this very moment approximately eighty million baby boomers in the United States barreling toward old age.
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(The term “baby boomer” generally refers to people born between 1945 and 1960.)

In 1900, there were only 3 million people in the United States who were sixty-five or older. By 2000, the number had leaped to 33 million.

A century ago in the United States, the odds of living to the age of 100 were less than one in five hundred. Now the Census Bureau expects that one in twenty-six baby boomers will reach that age. Today, the likelihood that a twenty-year-old American will have a living grandmother (91 percent) is higher than the likelihood that a twenty-year-old in 1900 had a living mother (83 percent).
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This advancing age wave is the most significant demographic event of our lifetime, and it is taking place in every industrialized nation in the world.
About half of all people who have ever lived past the age of sixty-five are alive today.

In Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Venezuela, the percentage of elderly persons in the population is projected to double between 2000 and 2025.
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China is expected to be home to 332 million oldsters by midcentury. That’s more elderly people in a single country than inhabited the entire planet as recently as 1990.
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According to the United Nation’s Population Division, roughly 10 percent of the world’s 6.4 billion people are today over sixty. By 2050, 20 percent of the planet’s 10 billion human beings will be over sixty. By then there will be nearly 2 billion people in the world sixty
years of age and older. This is a number roughly equal to one-third of the entire current global human population.

This increased longevity would be a blessing if it were accompanied by increased health and wisdom, but sadly it often is not. Close to half of all Americans over the age of eighty-five have Alzheimer’s disease. The toll taken by Alzheimer’s and other chronic diseases on the old is increasing so much today that
the average twenty-first-century American will likely spend more years caring for parents than for children.

By 2040, it is estimated that 5.5 million Americans—more than the entire current population of Denmark—will live in nursing homes. Another 12 million—equal to the combined populations of Israel, Singapore, and New Zealand—will require ongoing homecare services. Many will spend their final decades struggling with loneliness and depression.

Although modern medicine is eminently equipped to prolong life, it seems to be far less able to promote healthy aging. What good will it do us, asked a comedian in 2004, if at some point in the future, the human life span is extended to two hundred years, but the last hundred and fifty years are spent in unremitting pain and sadness?

An ancient Greek fable tells of Aurora, the beautiful goddess of the dawn, falling deeply in love with a human being—the warrior Tithonus. Distraught over his mortality, Aurora requests a special favor from Zeus, the supreme ruler of Mount Olympus and of the pantheon of gods who reside there. She begs Zeus to grant her lover eternal life.

Zeus, foreseeing trouble, asks her if she is certain that this is what she wants. “Yes,” she responds.

At first, Aurora is delighted that Zeus has granted her request. But then she realizes that she neglected to ask that Tithonus also remain eternally young and healthy. With each passing year, she looks on with horror as her lover grows older and sicker. His skin withers, his organs rot, his brain grows feeble. As the decades pass, Tithonus’s aging body becomes increasingly decrepit, yet he cannot die. Ultimately the once proud warrior is reduced to a wretched collection of painful, foul, and broken bones—but he continues to live forever.

Like Tithonus, ever more of us are living longer, but our added years are too often years of suffering and disability.

It has been said that we can destroy ourselves with negativity just as effectively as with bombs. If we see only the worst in ourselves, it erodes our capacity to act. If, on the other hand, we are drawn forward by a positive vision of how we might live, we can shrug off the cynicism that has become fashionable today and build truly healthy lives.

It is extraordinarily important for us today to replace the prevailing image and reality of aging with a new vision—one in which we grasp the possibility of living all our days with exuberance and passion. There are few things of greater consequence today than for us to bring our lives into alignment with our true potential for health and our dreams for a better tomorrow.

It is a sad loss that our medical model has been so focused on illness rather than wellness. Until recently, there has been so much preoccupation with disease that little attention has been paid to the characteristics that enable people to lead long and healthy lives and to be energetic and independent in their elder years. As a result, few of us in the modern world are aware that there have been, and still are, entire cultures in which the majority of people live passionately and vibrantly to the end. Few of us realize that there are in fact societies of people who look forward to growing old, knowing they will be healthy, vital, and respected.

There are many people today who want to live in harmony with their bodies and the natural forces of life. You may be one of them. If so, it’s helpful to understand that you are not alone, and that you have elders from whom you can learn how to accomplish your goals. There are cultures whose ways have stood the test of time that can stand as teachers on the path of wellness and joy. There are whole populations of highly spirited, vigorous people who are healthy in their seventies, eighties, nineties, even healthy at a hundred. What’s more, they have a great deal in common, and their secrets have been corroborated and to a large extent explained by many of the latest
findings in medical science. New research is showing that we have all the tools to live longer lives and to remain active, productive, and resourceful until the very end.

This is good and hopeful news. It offers us a much-needed paradigm of aging as a period of wisdom and vitality. Through these healthy cultures, we can find a compelling vision of how to mature with pleasure, dignity, purpose, and love. We are being shown that something precious is possible—a far brighter future in which aging is enjoyable and desirable. And we are being shown the practical steps we can take to achieve it.

Aging, of course, is not something that begins on your sixty-fifth birthday. Who you will become in your later years is shaped by all the choices you make, all the ways you care for yourself, how you manage your life, even how you think, from your earliest years, about your future. I have written
Healthy at 100
because I have seen too many people grow old in agony and bitterness while others grow old with vitality and beauty, and I know it is possible to age with far more vigor, happiness, and inner peace than is the norm in the Western world today.

No one familiar with my earlier work will be surprised that I am interested in how our diets and exercise can help us to live long and healthy lives. But they may be surprised by some of my findings, including the great emphasis I am now placing on strong social connections. I have learned that the quality of the relationships we have with other people makes a tremendous difference to our physical as well as emotional health. Loneliness, I discovered in my research, can kill you faster than cigarettes. And by the same token, intimate relationships that are authentic and life-affirming can have enormous and even miraculous healing powers. In this book you will find why this is so, and gain clarity about the various essential steps you can take to extend both your life span and your health span dramatically. Reading this book will not only help you add many years to your life, but also help make those added years—and indeed all your remaining years—ones in which you experience the blossoming of your finest and wisest self.

Even if you’ve eaten poorly and have not taken very good care of yourself, even if you’ve had more than your share of hardships and
pain, this book will show you how the choices you make today and tomorrow can greatly improve your prospects for the future. It will give you a chance to right any wrongs you’ve committed against your body. You’ll see how to regain the strength and passion for life that you may have thought were gone forever.

Whether you are in your twenties or your eighties or somewhere in between, whether you consider yourself superbly fit or hopelessly out of shape, I believe you’ll find in these pages what you need in order to regenerate rather than degenerate as the years unfold. This book will show you how to regain, and to retain, more mental clarity, physical strength, stamina, and joy.

I have written
Healthy at 100
to offer you ways to enhance and improve both the quality and quantity of your remaining years. In this book are steps you can take to shatter stereotypes and misconceptions about aging and to rejuvenate your mind and body. Here are practices you can start today in order to live with greater health and joy no matter what your age.

In our youth-oriented culture, aging is often a source of great suffering. Older people frequently start to see themselves as collections of symptoms rather than whole human beings. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It is within your grasp to realize the opportunities for beauty, love, and fulfillment that occur at every stage of your life. It is possible to live your whole life with a commitment to your highest good. I have written
Healthy at 100
so that you can learn how to make each and every one of the years of your life more full of vitality and joy, and more worth living, than you may ever have imagined.

I
n the early 1970s,
National Geographic
magazine approached the world-renowned physician Alexander Leaf, asking him to visit, study, and write an article about the world’s healthiest and most long-living people. Dr. Leaf, a professor of clinical medicine at Harvard University and Chief of Medical Services at Massachusetts General Hospital, had long been a student of the subject and had already visited and studied some of the cultures known for the healthy lives of their elderly people. Now,
National Geographic
commissioned him to continue these travels and investigations and to share with the world his observations and comparisons of those areas of the planet which were famous for the longevity and health of their inhabitants. It was a time, unlike today, when these regions and their cultures were still somewhat pristine.

As a scientist, Dr. Leaf did not believe in a mythical fountain of youth in which anyone can bathe and be miraculously restored to eternal youth; nor did he believe in magic potions that can instantly heal all afflictions. But he did believe it was possible that there existed certain places on earth where people actually lived longer and healthier lives than is considered normal in the modern West. His goal was
not to identify the oldest living individual, but rather to locate and study those societies—if they did in fact exist—where a large percentage of elder citizens retained their faculties, were vigorous, and enjoyed their lives. Rather than being interested in mythology or panaceas, his goal was to understand the key factors that influence human prospects for long and healthy life.

Dr. Leaf undertook a series of journeys that he subsequently described in an influential series of articles that appeared in
National Geographic
magazine beginning in 1973.
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His writings were among the first authoritative efforts to bring practical medical knowledge and research to our desire to know what we can do to impact the future of our lives.

When Dr. Leaf began his study and his travels, three regions of the world were famous for the longevity of their inhabitants: the valley of Vilcabamba in Ecuador, the Hunza region of Pakistan, and certain portions of the Caucasus mountains in what was then the Soviet Union. These three locales had long been the subject of claims that they were home to the longest living and healthiest people on earth. According to the stories swirling around these high mountainous regions, people in these communities often lived spectacularly long lives in vibrant health.

Dr. Leaf and prizewinning
National Geographic
photographer John Launois traveled to these remote areas to meet, photograph, examine, and appraise for themselves the longevity and health of those who were reputed to be the world’s oldest and healthiest people. Dr. Leaf listened to their hearts, took their blood pressure, and studied their diets and lifestyles. He watched them dance and saw them bathe in ice-cold mountain streams. He spoke with them about their daily lives, their hopes, their fears, their life histories. His goal was to separate fact from fallacy and determine the truth about longevity.