If we really use data, what will we learn about living longer?

Ever since the Fountain of Youth, longevity has been a great quest for humanity. We want to get there, but historically we just don’t quite know how.

Dr. Enter John Day, a cardiologist and marathon runner, who wanted to know the secrets of how to stay healthy long-term – and live longer. (He has also written a book about longevity here.)

In a recent TED talk I produced, he started by explaining what’s going on with Americans.

“The average life expectancy (of an American) is 79 years, but the average American is disabled at age 69,” he said. “That means that they spend the last ten years of their lives going from doctor to doctor and being prescribed medication. The sad thing is that research shows that most of us can live to be 90 years old in good health. Just don’t mess things up. And so we’re essentially leaving 21 good years of life on the table.”

Now, as Day notes, he speaks Chinese and takes a trip to China to talk about issues like atrial fibrillation.

So on one such trip, he said, he visited a place called the “longevity village,” about 50 miles from the Vietnam border.

“(It is) a place in China with the highest percentage of veterinarians in the world, an area that until recently was cut off from the rest of China and the rest of the world,” he explained, “a place where they live remarkably well . a long and healthy life.”

The village, revealed

What did he find?

You can watch Day describe the centenarian’s morning commute:

“They walk from their house to the piece of land they want to farm,” he says. “These were manual farmers. They were poor. They had no machines or animals to help them farm. And here you see this woman. She may not weigh more than perhaps 50 pounds, yet she carries a basket weighing almost 70 pounds that she will carry up and down the mountainside, and several miles to and from her place where she lives.

The 98-year-old woman who was filmed, he said, would later become one of the centenarians in an investigation into the village. During the research project, he added, the teams found no cases of heart, disease, cancer or dementia complaints.

Part of the difference in results, Day explained, has to do with the local diet: People eat only what they grow. They also use squat toilets, which require some dexterity, and that keeps them limber.

He also noted that the subjects had good social connections that allowed them to avoid the depression, loneliness and anxiety that come with feeling like a burden or cut off from your loved ones.

And again, there was the menu.

“They ate a natural diet,” he said. “They ate what they dug out of the ground.”

The key, he said, is that the genes of centenarians are not that different from anyone else’s. It’s just that their different lifestyles don’t allow the disease markers to express themselves in the same way.

He talked about how American subjects who embraced some of these changes were able to achieve positive results.

The takeaway

The problem with this kind of research now is: if AI and big data tell us we can do these seven things, for example to achieve a longer lifespan, will people decide it’s worth it? We probably won’t walk 10 kilometers to work every morning, carrying heavy baskets on our backs. We will probably not limit ourselves to a vegetarian diet that is also local and organic and ultimately consists only of rice and vegetables that we grow ourselves.

So it’s kind of a sliding scale – maybe we can select that specific spot on the spectrum where comfort and convenience are balanced with longevity…??

And we can get some of the quality results without sacrificing the quality of our lifestyle.

But in a fundamental sense, it seems to be a trade-off, at least that’s what the research tells us.

Others are waiting for AI and technology to replace our human “meatbags” with an infrastructure less vulnerable to decay. That’s a whole other story in itself, and you can read Ray Kurzweil’s ‘The Singularity’ or another important book for more information.

But what we see with longevity is that you can do some sensible things to extend your life, and AI can help with this. It will make the recommendations, track your progress and give you the likely results. The question is: will you follow these recommendations?