Holding Back The Clock on Aging
This is Dr. Eric Verdin, President and CEO of the Buck Institute of Research on Aging. He’s also held faculty positions at the University of Brussels, the NIH, and the Picower Institute for Medical Research. Dr. Verdin is also a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. Verdin’s laboratory focuses on the role of epigenetic regulators (especially the behaviors of certain enzymes) in the aging process. He studies how metabolism, diet, and chemical factors regulate the aging process and its associated diseases, including Alzheimer’s.
He has published more than 210 scientific papers and holds more than 15 patents. He is a highly cited scientist and has been recognized for his research with a Glenn Award for Research in Biological Mechanisms of Aging.
And that’s just what we could fit here! Basically, he knows his stuff.
What we can do
Dr. Verdin’s position is bold, but rooted in evidence:
❝Lifestyle is responsible for about 93% of our longevity—only about 7% is genetics. Based on the data, if implementing health lifestyle choices, most people could live to 95 in good health. So there’s 15 to 17 extra years of healthy life that is up for grabs❞
~ Dr. Eric Verdin
See for example:
- From discoveries in aging research to therapeutics for healthy aging
- Optimism, lifestyle, and longevity in a racially diverse cohort of women
- Well-being, food habits, and lifestyle for longevity—evidence from supercentenarians
How we can do it
Well, we all know “the big five”:
- Good diet (Mediterranean Diet as usual is recommended)
- Good exercise (more on this in a moment)
- Good sleep (more on this in a moment)
- Avoid alcohol (not controversial)
- Don’t smoke (need we say more)
When it comes to exercise, generally recognized as good is at least 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity exercise (for example, a brisk walk, or doing the gardening), and at least three small sessions a week of high intensity exercise, unless contraindicated by some medical condition.
As for Dr. Verdin’s take on this…
What Dr. Verdin recommends is:
- make it personalized
- make it pre-emptive
- make it better
The perfect exercise plan is only perfect if you actually do it. And if you actually can do it, for that matter.
Prevention is so much better (and easier) than cure for a whole array of maladies. So while there may be merit in thinking “what needs fixing”, Dr. Verdin encourages us to take extra care to not neglect factors of our health that seem “good enough”. Because, give them time and neglect, and they won’t be!
Wherever we’re at in life and health, there’s always at least some little way we could make it a bit better. Dr. Verdin advises us to seek out those little improvements, even if it’s just a nudge better here, a nudge better there, all those nudges add up!
About sleep…
It’s perhaps the easiest one to neglect (writer’s note: as a writer, I certainly feel that way!), but his biggest take-away tip for this is:
Worry less about what time you set an alarm for in the morning. Instead, set an alarm for the evening—to remind you when to go to bed.
Want to hear directly from the man himself?
Here he is speaking on progress we can expect for the next decade in the field of aging research, as part of the 100 Minutes of Longevity session at The Longevity Forum, a few months ago:
