Super Agers: From Their Cells to Their Psychology, They Show Us How to Live to 100 and Beyond | CLIP

a super Ager is generally defined as someone over 80 who displays the mental ability of someone decades younger an octogenarian with the memory of someone in their 60s 50s or even younger is a classic example of super aging the research shows factors like regular exercise healthy diet and having a strong friend and family ties go hand inand with super aging today though we're going to take the concept of super aging to a deeper level with expert in the biochemical me mechanisms of health and disease Dr Dane G now you know obviously eat better obviously ex exercise for you want your circulatory system and oxygenation of the body proper we need to do all those things for sure but if we want to have super aging we need to strategically add things back in that we know become deficient which specific nutrient deficiency could mean the difference between living to 70 and living to 100 what Chief characteristic going from ourselves to our behaviors fundamentally determines lifespan and which everyday activity if Done Right is equivalent to a resistance training workout for the brain it's an actual physical process of the human brain and that is maintained in super agors better than others and it's linked to increased cortical volumes and certain thicknesses of certain areas of the brain welcome to Vital Signs where we learn how to get healthier from all angles from the biochemical and nutritional to the things we do that nourish our minds and our Souls I'm brandan Fallon over several decades Dr ganau has issued patents conducted clinical trials and published literature on a range of neurological disorders including Alzheimer's disease ALS and autism links to his related research and his book breaking Alzheimer's are in the description below there are different concepts around aging some people think of it as a disease I'm interested for your insights Dr goodan now how do you see Aging in the context of the neurobi chemical research that you've done when people look at aging we've been kind of programmed into looking at it like something that it happens to us and so like a infection or a disease and then which has actually been the main reasons why we die right we get in an accident we get infected by a bad virus or we do you know something kills us early in our life and so that's been the primary cause of human death for most of our existence and so the average lifespan for individuals was typically in the 30s to 40s for most of you know so people would live longer but that would be relatively small proportion of the population and so a lot of research has been focused on how to prevent death right so and we've done a very good job of that so the average lifespan of humans is increased dramatically over the past hundred some years so now that average lifespan has gone from in the 30s to 40s to in the mid 80s and it's kind of plateaued we've done very little successful aging beyond that but was interesting when we look at how good we've been at reducing what I call premature death is that we've been very unsuccessful at increasing our maximum lifespan or or increasing the length of our health and vitality and so when you think about aging though what you're really thinking about is the progression to death and so really the question now becomes is really not what is aging but what is death and we think about life and death as a progression but it's really one thing and the other part about aging and the trying to prevent your death or try to sustain your life for the longest time possible with the largest amount of Vitality in it what we're really talking about is a loss of life and I think a lot of people forget about we think that the absence of something is something okay if we go back to just basic physics for example when people think about oh my house gets cold or my house gets hot well there's actually no such thing as cold cold is actually not a phenomenon that actually exists you either have heat or you have a lack of heat so heat either comes into your house or heat leaves your house but cold does not actually come in or out and the same concept is with life like you can't really have there's no such thing as death you don't actually acquire death you lose life and so death is the absence of life and so once we're born once that spark of life has been initiated it is basically on okay and it doesn't go off until we die and that spark of Life of function of purpose permeates our daily living but it also permeates every single cell of our body and so as we look at this loss of life or the loss of our ability to function it comes through the first and second laws of thermodynamics really the first law is nature you know molecules or atoms or matter cannot be created or destroyed we just kind of move things around right this is like energy transferring from one form to another like kinetic energy transferring to to heat energy correct something like that that's exactly it so for instance photosynthesis when the Sun Shines on a plant and it it interacts with the chloroplast and it converts carbon dioxide and water into glucose what it's doing is it's not creating glucose it is taking the carbon atoms from carbon dioxide and the oxygen molecules from atoms from water and it's Bing them into creating a molecule called glucose so everything that comes into your body must come out so ultimately speaking life is a balance sheet it's like an accounting the two sides of ledgers will always balance now we may not always like how they balance but they will always balance and so ultimately ashes the ashes dust to dust ultimately the body will Decay degenerate will evaporate Into Thin Air so those molecules just get transformed the second law of third Dynamics is the law of entropy which is all systems tend to reach a state of disorder right it's like the world hates order and I usually tell the analogy of you know making your bed in the morning like the entire world hates a made bed that everything conspires to unmake your bed you get up in the morning you make your bed it's beautiful looking then you put your clothes on it and it starts to get wrinkled or you sit on the edge of the bed and it gets wrinkled and so but you're always constantly applying energy back to your bed so you physically have to go and smooth the bed out so you're applying energy to maintain that order and at a very simple level everything in your body is that way okay in order to maintain the order of the human body we are constantly applying energy into that body to do that the uninterrupted state of things is chaos it's it's only with with intervention that things have order exactly and so we and we have to add heat we have to add energy in so our bodies burn like we take carbon we take hydrocarbons and we burn them into carbon dioxide and water and that energy that heat energy we use that energy to maintain the structural order of our bodies as you can imagine our body is much more complex than making your bed every day and so all these systems of your body over time become harder and harder to maintain so aging itself like is not a disease it's entropy and this is where as you start looking into the underlying causation of decline it really comes down to some basic concepts of function and purpose and the ability to create and maintain order in the systems that we have that's the opposite of of entropy right entropy is is like chaos like the of the body the the physiology falling into disorder correct we have to maintain order and so this is where the complexity comes in of the human body it's complex in its enormity but it's simple in terms of its individual Parts themselves right and so the heart has a function the lung has a function the cell within a heart has a function the cell within a lung has a function and so over long periods of time these the ability to actually maintain this becomes harder and harder to do like any complex system what people forget about the aging process is that this interplay between our function and our purpose so at the end of the day you need that underlying purpose and your your body will then match the function for that the whole concept of healthy aging is adaptability whole concept of life is the ability to adapt to a changing environment whether it's internal or external that's gives us our Vitality okay and so our ability to adapt to a changing environment is 100% of our aging process and you adapt to the environment around you so you become a school teacher or you become a mathematician or you have a very different skill set you adapt to the skills required of your system and this happens at even at the cellular level because every single cell of your body has the same DNA your heart cell has the same DNA as your brain cell same DNA as a fat cell but all of these cells have different purposes okay and then they have adapted to the purpose that they have to fulfill and we forget things that we think are stressful and bad for us in our life oh it was you know stressful going through school it's stressful trying to get a job it's stressful trying to find a you know a spouse and compete and raise a family but all of these things have time constraints to us right and they provide purpose they have a reason for us to get up in the morning reason for us to exercise and so on so when you take a look at these super aers right and you look at their their lives and their structure most of them will have very positive social relationships a big factor in superaging populations is that they maintain a positive social relationship mindset um people are important to them their relationships are important to them because humans are social okay we find purpose in the people around us we find purpose in helping others we find purpose in being useful to others and those things of purpose give us a reason to get up in the morning give us a reason to eat better meals give us a reason to be healthy because if I want to help someone else okay I have to be healthy myself and psychologically and subconsciously these things drive a lot of our Behavior because it does drive us to more positive behaviors versus more negative behaviors