WE DON’T REALLY WANT to live to 107 and be demented or have all sorts of other chronic diseases. On the other hand, if we could live well into our 90s and have no chronic diseases – the big three age-related ones, neuro-degenerative, cardiovascular, and cancer – that would be the goal as Super Ager. Such person would be a perfect description of my eldest brother, Aristeo, who is almost 95 now.
Based on research, genes play a limited role in healthy aging. The emphasis that has been put on our genes for healthy aging is wrong. It’s a small component since there are many other factors, especially what is called as lifestyle-plus factors, that play the major role.
The lifestyle factors include exercise, diet and the types of nutrition. But they also extend to things like social isolation, time in nature, exposure to environmental toxins like microplastics and small particulate air pollution.
Sleep is extremely important in maintaining health. The glymphatics, not lymphatics, are the drainage system for our brain, which gets activated during deep sleep, the slow wave type of sleep.
Unfortunately, as we get older, deep sleep gets decreased in the amount of time. And we want to maximize that because that’s the best way we get our brains refreshed and get rid of the stuff that’s in our brain through the glymphatic system, an elaborate system for basically pumping out these toxins from our brain that accumulate each day. So sleep health is important to prevent these age-related diseases.
The science of aging has brought us all these new data types we never had before. So we can take a person and say, “You’re not at risk for any of these three major diseases,” or we can say, “You’re at risk for this disease,” and say when. Not just that you’re at risk. And so that gives us the ability to start to put a person under surveillance for that concern, that disease, and get all over it and prevent it.
So the point being is that if we can understand what is the uniqueness of each of us, and we can do that starting now with sensors and other ways like our gut microbiome, then perhaps we’ll get to where we can say, these foods are not good for you because they’re potentially going to increase your progression from pre-diabetes to diabetes. On the other hand, these foods might help you reduce your risk of cancer. And so each of us has propensity for either benefit or potential hazard from foods.
Looking ahead, Super Agers have future possibilities for altering the aging process. Through scientific advances, we can now predict a person’s arc of age-related diseases now unlike ever before, and it’s just going to keep getting better.
And the science of aging brings us today a lot of exciting potential. Because if we can suppress the three age-related big diseases, that’s accomplishing a huge amount, that doesn’t necessitate one of these elegant approaches to reverse aging. Instead of reversing aging, it’s preventing the age-related diseases.
It’s amazing to be a Super Ager because only a few are given such privilege. My wife and I are truly blessed – I am pushing 81 and she is 73. By Manny Palomar, PhD (EV Mail JUNE 30-JULY 6, 2025 Issue)
