Thank you, RapAdmin for posting this article. This is such an important finding. A lot of health and longevity research is confounded by genetic variants and environmental factors. Exercise is a great example. You may have greater exercise capacity genetically, and also need that exercise more, because that greater exercise capacity is also genetically linked with more disease vulnerability. You then get a bunch of folks who exercise and they are healthy because it fixes their disease vulnerability, while folks who don’t exercise and have that disease vulnerability fall sick. You then conclude that exercising is healthy. It is, but it works best exactly in the folks who need it most. If I own a car (disease vulnerability), I will benefit from buying insurance (exercising) compared to someone with a car (disease vulnerability), but no car insurance (not exrecising). But if I don’t own a car, I won’t benefit from buying car insurance. That’s how you get all those centenarians and supercentenarians who don’t do focused exercise, or even have contempt for exercise (like the recent news about a healthy 110 year old man 1*) yet who live long and often healthy lives.
The bottom line is that true longevity interventions must move in the direction of personalized medicine. Everyone is an individual, everyone has their own response to drugs, supplements, diet, exercise, lifestyle. Yes, there may be majorities or trends this way or that, with any response to interventions, but we remain unique individuals at the end of the day. An intervention X may work in 80%, 90%, 99% of the people, but someone must make up that remaining 20%, 10%, 1% and that may very well be you.
1* 110-year-old NJ man who lives on his own and drives daily offers tips on longevity
Some qoutes:
"He lives alone with no home aide or extra help, cooks simple food for himself, walks up and down his three-level house and drives “pretty good” daily with no issues.
He’s never had cancer, dementia or other major diseases and has no headaches or backaches.
But Dransfield, who was born in 1914, isn’t a health fanatic.
He smoked cigarettes for 20 years and worked his whole life from age 15 to his late 70s. He eats whatever he likes — including hamburgers, milk chocolate and Italian food, has an occasional beer, drinks coffee every day and is amused by people who run."
As, always, kids, it is better to be lucky than good.
That “not a health fanatic” guy has lived a longer life with smoking, beers, hamburgers, indifferent diet, no “exercise”, than likely (statistically) anyone reading this website will, who is a health fanatic and invests oodles of time, money and effort into diet, exercise, supplements, exotic drugs and exotic treatments.
So, should we keep doing what we’re doing? Yep, that’s what the statistics tell us, so we go with those 80% or whatever. Most of us can’t count on being the 1% or the 0.000000001%. At the same time, we must stay humble and acknowledge that it all comes down to your individual self, what is best for you, and the cards you were dealt.
