How Likely Are You To Live To 100?
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How much hope can we reasonably have of reaching 100?
Yesterday, we asked you: assuming a good Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL), how much longer do you hope to live?
We got the above-depicted, below-described, set of responses:
- A little over 38% of respondents hope to live another 11–20 years
- A little over 31% hope to live another 31–40 years
- A little over 7% will be content to make it to the next decade
- One (1) respondent hopes to live longer than an additional 100 years
This is interesting when we put it against our graph of how old our subscribers are:
…because it corresponds inversely, right down to the gap/dent in the 40s. And—we may hypothesize—that one person under 18 who hopes to live to 120, perhaps.
This suggests that optimism remains more or less constant, with just a few wobbles that would probably be un-wobbled with a larger sample size.
In other words: most of our education-minded, health-conscious subscriber-base hope to make it to the age of 90-something, while for the most part feeling that 100+ is overly optimistic.
Writer’s anecdote: once upon a time, I was at a longevity conference in Brussels, and a speaker did a similar survey, but by show of hands. He started low by asking “put your hands up if you want to live at least a few more minutes”. I did so, with an urgency that made him laugh, and say “Don’t worry; I don’t have a gun hidden up here!”
Conjecture aside… What does the science say about our optimism?
First of all, a quick recap…
To not give you the same information twice, let’s note we did an “aging mythbusting” piece already covering:
- Aging is inevitable: True or False?
- Aging is, and always will be, unstoppable: True or False?
- We can slow aging: True or False?
- It’s too early to worry about… / It’s too late to do anything about… True or False?
- We can halt aging: True or False?
- We can reverse aging: True or False?
- But those aren’t really being younger, we’ll still die when our time is up: True or False?
You can read the answers to all of those here:
Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?
Now, onwards…
It is unreasonable to expect to live past 100: True or False?
True or False, depending on your own circumstances.
First, external circumstances: the modal average person in Hong Kong is currently in their 50s and can expect to live into their late 80s, while the modal average person in Gaza is 14 and may not expect to make it to 15 right now.
To avoid extremes, let’s look at the US, where the modal average person is currently in their 30s and can expect to live into their 70s:
United States Mortality Database
Now, before that unduly worries our many readers already in their 70s…
Next, personal circumstances: not just your health, but your socioeconomic standing. And in the US, one of the biggest factors is the kind of health insurance one has:
SOA Research Institute | Life Expectancy Calculator 2021
You may note that the above source puts all groups into a life expectancy in the 80s—whereas the previous source gave 70s.
Why is this? It’s because the SOA, whose primary job is calculating life insurance risks, is working from a sample of people who have, or are applying for, life insurance. So it misses out many people who die younger without such.
New advances in medical technology are helping people to live longer: True or False?
True, assuming access to those. Our subscribers are mostly in North America, and have an economic position that affords good access to healthcare. But beware…
On the one hand:
The number of people who live past the age of 100 has been on the rise for decades
On the other hand:
The average life expectancy in the U.S. has been on the decline for three consecutive years
COVID is, of course, largely to blame for that, though:
❝The decline of 1.8 years in life expectancy was primarily due to increases in mortality from COVID-19 (61.2% of the negative contribution).
The decline in life expectancy would have been even greater if not for the offsetting effects of decreases in mortality due to cancer (43.1%)❞
Source: National Vital Statistics Reports
The US stats are applicable to Canada, the UK, and Australia: True or False?
False: it’s not quite so universal. Differences in healthcare systems will account for a lot, but there are other factors too:
- Life expectancy in Canada fell for the 3rd year in a row. What’s happening?
- UK life expectancy lagging behind rest of G7 except the US
- Australians are living longer but what does it take to reach 100 years old?
Here’s an interesting (UK-based) tool that calculates not just your life expectancy, but also gives the odds of living to various ages (e.g. this writer was given odds of living to 87, 96, 100).
Check yours here:
Office of National Statistics | Life Expectancy Calculator
To finish on a cheery note…
Data from Italian centenarians suggests a “mortality plateau”:
❝The risk of dying leveled off in people 105 and older, the team reports online today in Science.
That means a 106-year-old has the same probability of living to 107 as a 111-year-old does of living to 112.
Furthermore, when the researchers broke down the data by the subjects’ year of birth, they noticed that over time, more people appear to be reaching age 105.❞
Pop-sci source: Once you hit this age, aging appears to stop
Actual paper: The plateau of human mortality: demography of longevity pioneers
Take care!
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Hold Me Tight – by Dr. Sue Johnson
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A lot of relationship books are quite wishy-washy. This one isn’t.
This one is evidenced-based (and heavily referenced!), and yet at the same time as being deeply rooted in science, it doesn’t lose the human touch.
Dr. Johnson has spent her career as a clinical psychologist and researcher; she’s the primary developer of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), which has demonstrated its effectiveness in over 35 years of peer-reviewed clinical research. In other words, it works.
EFT—and thus also this book—finds roots in Attachment Theory. As such, topics this book covers include:
- Recognizing and recovering from attachment injury
- How fights in a relationship come up, and how they can be avoided
- How lot of times relationships end, it’s not because of fights, but a loss of emotional connection
- Building a lifetime of love instead, falling in love again each day
This book lays the groundwork for ensuring a strong, secure, ongoing emotional bond, of the kind that makes/keeps a relationship joyful and fulfilling.
Dr. Johnson has been recognized in her field with a Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Order of Canada.
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It’s Not Fantastic To Be Plastic
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We Are Such Stuff As Bottles Are Made Of
We’ve written before about PFAS, often found in non-stick coatings and the like:
PFAS Exposure & Cancer: The Numbers Are High
Today we’re going to be talking about microplastics & nanoplastics!
What are microplastics and nanoplastics?
Firstly, they’renot just the now-banned plastic microbeads that have seen some use is toiletries (although those are classified as microplastics too).
Many are much smaller than that, and if they get smaller than a thousandth of a millimeter, then they get the additional classification of “nanoplastic”.
In other words: not something that can be filtered even if you were to use a single-micron filter. The microplastics would still get through, for example:
Scientists find about a quarter million invisible nanoplastic particles in a liter of bottled water
And unfortunately, that’s bad:
❝What’s disturbing is that small particles can appear in different organs and may cross membranes that they aren’t meant to cross, such as the blood-brain barrier❞
Note: they’re crossing the same blood-brain barrier that many of our nutrients and neurochemicals are too big to cross.
These microplastics are also being found in arterial plaque
What makes arterial plaque bad for the health is precisely its plasticity (the arterial walls themselves are elastic), so you most certainly do not want actual plastic being used as part of the cement that shouldn’t even be lining your arteries in the first place:
Microplastics found in artery plaque linked with higher risk of heart attack, stroke and death
❝In this study, patients with carotid artery plaque in which MNPs were detected had a higher risk of a composite of myocardial infarction, stroke, or death from any cause at 34 months of follow-up than those in whom MNPs were not detected❞
~ Dr. Raffaele Marfella et al.
(MNP = Micro/Nanoplastics)
Source: Microplastics and Nanoplastics in Atheromas and Cardiovascular Events
We don’t know how bad this is yet
There are various ways this might not be as bad as it looks (the results may not be repeated, the samples could have been compromised, etc), but also, perhaps cynically but nevertheless honestly, it could also be worse than we know yet—only more experiments being done will tell us which.
In the meantime, here’s a rundown of what we do and don’t know:
Study links microplastics with human health problems—but there’s still a lot we don’t know
Take care!
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Feta or Parmesan – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing feta to parmesan, we picked the parmesan.
Why?
It’s close! Looking at the macros, parmesan has more protein and slightly less fat. Of the fat content, parmesan also has slightly less saturated fat, but neither of them are doing great in this category. Still, a relative win for parmesan.
In the category of vitamins, feta is a veritable vitamin-B-fest with more of vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, and B9. On the other hand, parmesan has more of vitamins A, B12, and choline. By strength of numbers, this is a win for feta.
Minerals tell a different story; parmesan has a lot more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc. Meanwhile, feta is not higher in any minerals. A clear win for parmesan.
Both cheeses offer gut-healthy benefits (if consumed regularly in small portions), while neither are great for the heart.
On balance, we say parmesan wins the day.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Feta Cheese vs Mozzarella – Which is Healthier?
Take care!
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Ageless Aging – by Maddy Dychtwald
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Maddy Dychtwald, herself 73, has spent her career working in the field of aging. She’s not a gerontologist or even a doctor, but she’s nevertheless been up-to-the-ears in the industry for decades, mostly as an organizer, strategist, facilitator, and so forth. As such, she’s had her finger on the pulse of the healthy longevity movement for a long time.
This book was written to address a problem, and the problem is: lifespan is increasing (especially for women), but healthspan has not been keeping up the pace.
In other words: people (especially women) are living longer, but often with more health problems along the way than before.
And mostly, it’s for lack of information (or sometimes: too much competing incorrect information).
Fortunately, information is something that a woman in Dychtwald’s position has an abundance of, because she has researchers and academics in many fields on speed-dial and happy to answer her questions (we get a lot of input from such experts throughout the book—which is why this book is so science-based, despite the author not being a scientist).
The book answers a lot of important questions beyond the obvious “what diet/exercise/sleep/supplements/etc are best for healthy aging” (spoiler: it’s quite consistent with the things we recommend here, because guess what, science is science), questions like how best to prepare for this that or the other, how to get a head start on preventative healthcare for some things, how to avoid being a burden to our families (one can argue that families are supposed to look after each other, but still, it’s a legitimate worry for many, and understandably so), and even how to balance the sometimes conflicting worlds of health and finances.
Unlike many authors, she also talks about the different kinds of aging, and tackles each of them separately and together. We love to see it!
Bottom line: this book is a very good one-stop-shop for all things healthy aging. It’s aimed squarely at women, but most advice goes for men the same too, aside from the section on hormones and such.
Click here to check out Ageless Aging, and plan your future!
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Strawberries vs Raspberries – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing strawberries to raspberries, we picked the raspberries.
Why?
They’re both very respectable fruits, of course! But it’s not even close, and there is a clear winner here…
In terms of macros, the biggest difference is that raspberries have more than 3x the fiber. Technically they also have twice the protein, but that’s a case of “two times almost nothing is also almost nothing”.
But still, for the fiber, we’ll call this a clear win for raspberries on macros.
When it comes to vitamins, raspberries sweep this category. They’re higher in vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, E, K, and also choline, which is sometimes considered a vitamin. Strawberries, meanwhile, boast only a higher vitamin C content.
All in all, another easy win for raspberries.
In the category of minerals, guess what, raspberries win this hands-down, too. They’re higher in calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and zinc. Strawberries have nothing to boast in this regard.
Adding up all the individual wins (all for raspberries), it’s not hard to say that raspberries win the day.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Strawberries vs Cherries – Which is Healthier?
Take care!
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Felt Time – by Dr. Marc Wittmann
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This book goes far beyond the obvious “time flies when you’re having fun / passes slowly when bored”, or “time seems quicker as we get older”. It does address those topics too, but even in doing so, unravels deeper intricacies within.
The author, a research psychologist, includes plenty of reference to actual hard science here, and even beyond subjective self-reports. For example, you know how time seems to slow down upon immediate apparent threat of violent death (e.g. while crashing, while falling, or other more “violent human” options)? We learn of an experiment conducted in an amusement park, where during a fear-inducing (but actually safe) plummet, subjective time slows down yes, but measures of objective perception and cognition remained the same. So much for adrenal superpowers when it comes to the brain!
We also learn about what we can change, to change our perception of time—in either direction, which is a neat collection of tricks to know.
The style is on the dryer end of pop-sci; we suspect that being translated from German didn’t help its levity. That said, it’s not scientifically dense either (i.e. not a lot of jargon), though it does have many references (which we like to see).
Bottom line: if you’ve ever wished time could go more quickly or more slowly, this book can help with that.
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