There Is No Exotic Secret To Longevity

We have breathed the breath of virgins and drunk the blood of gladiators.

We have eaten gold and yogurt, and injected ourselves with Novocain and the crushed testicles of dogs.

We have taken laxatives, given ourselves enemas and searched for magic plants and waters in far mountain fastnesses and remote jungle islands.

Ever since we could foresee our death, we have sought the means to forestall it.

Our mistake has been in thinking that the key to longevity must be exotic: rare herb or alchemical formula.

In truth, it is as plain as the food on our plates. It is in what we eat, how we think, what we do with our bodies and how we relate to our fellow humans.

Most of us could live to be 100. Many might even make 120. Certainly, all of us could live a lot longer - and healthier - if we heeded what researchers already know.

“Present medical knowledge indicates that the body is programmed to endure, if it is not abused, for more than a century,” says Dan Georgakas, author of “The Methuselah Factors” (Academy Chicago Publishers, $18.95).

Georgakas’ conclusion is backed not only by many gerontologists, but by current demographics. Although our average life expectancy these days is 70-something, a growing number of Americans are hitting three-digit ages.

According to a recent report by the Population Reference Bureau Inc., a private research group, about 52,000 Americans are 100 years old or older, and “the number of American centenarians … may reach 1 million by the middle of the 21st century.” At the same time, “there seems to be right now a revival of interest in this topic,” Georgakas says. “I think the baby boomers have just crossed the cusp to where they see mortality looming on the far horizon.”

Indeed. Next year the first of the baby boomers will be looking at life from the other side of 50.

Many of those boomers could live another 50 years, or more, thanks to a discovery made by Clive McCay, a scientist at Cornell University, in the 1930s.

McCay discovered he could extend the lives of rats by about 50 percent by cutting their consumption of calories to near starvation levels.

But the significance of this discovery was not appreciated until much more recently.

In the early 1970s, Roy L. Walford, a professor of pathology at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical School, began studying the how and why of McCay’s discovery.

Working with other researchers, Walford has shown that animals placed on a low-calorie, nutrient-dense diet not only will outlive their peers, who eat without restriction, but will remain youthful into a very old age.

Walford has shown that such a diet increases the immune-response capacity and the DNA-repair rate of the animals, lowers blood pressure and cholesterol, reverses arteriosclerosis and drastically reduces the occurrence of cancer.

Because these results have been replicated many times in a variety of animals, Walford believes they would hold for any species, including humans.

And so, for the past several years, Walford, 71, has placed himself on a restricted diet with the professed goal of living to 120. He has also written several books outlining how the diet works and what humans wishing to extend their life spans should do to follow it.

The newest of these, “The Anti-Aging Plan,” (Four Walls Eight Windows, $19.95), includes more than 100 recipes developed by his daughter, Lisa Walford. The diet is primarily but not strictly vegetarian, heavy on fruits, vegetables and grains.

Walford explains how each person must find his own “genetically determined set point, where your set point is what you weigh if you just eat normally.” Determine how many calories you eat each day to maintain that weight and gradually reduce them until you start losing weight.

By how much?

“Caloric limitation should lead to a weight loss no greater than about 10 percent for women and 18 percent for men in the first six-month period,” Walford advises.

How will this affect you?

Little has been done with humans so far, but Walford did have a chance to study eight human subjects, including himself, on an extremely low-calorie diet for the two years he and seven other researchers spent living inside Biosphere 2.

In the December 1992 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Walford reported that the diet resulted in “drastic reductions in cholesterol and blood pressure … in humans similar to those in other animal species.”

And everybody lost a lot of weight. The men lost an average of 33 pounds; the women, 17. In other words, people seem to respond to this diet much like mice.

But can the average person live happily on this sort of diet?

Walford says it is no more difficult, really, than being a vegetarian.

But some members of the Biosphere team did confess to obsessing about food during their confinement. The treats they weren’t eating became such an object of longing that one Biospherian even wrote a cookbook.

So what do you do if you want to live a long and vital life, but find Walford’s prescription a bit too stringent?

Georgakas, who studied the habits of centenarians as well as the findings of gerontologists, suggests that it’s easier than you might think.

“What I think is really the most important for most people,” Georgakas says, “is if you can make 60 to 80 as vigorous as 40 to 60, then you’ve really added an enormous amount of real life to your life span, and I’m absolutely convinced that everybody can do that.”

You can do that by following what Georgakas calls “The Longevity Agenda,” which comes down to four fundamental points:

Get thin.”Light body weight provides one of the most reliable predictors of longevity at any given age,” Georgakas says.

You can achieve this if you …

Eat less. Eat a low-calorie diet not unlike that prescribed by Walford, low in fats and high in carbohydrates. The average American eats twice as many calories as he or she needs every day, Georgakas says, while “the major characteristic of the diet of longevous people is low caloric intake throughout life.”

Move around. Engage in some form of moderate exercise every day. It is best that the exercise be vigorous but not strenuous - jogging is good; running is bad, for example. Georgakas recommends an hour of walking every day.

Adjust your mind-set. People who live a long time tend to be people who never gave much thought to living long. This is because they are deeply involved in living their lives. They are engaged intellectually and with other people, and, Georgakas says, they view time as an accomplice rather than an enemy.

“My favorite nonagenarian gets up in the morning and takes his walk, two or three miles. And then he plans his schedule. He has a group on Tuesday that does foreign affairs, so he plans a lecture. My goodness, this guy’s in his 90s, and he worries about the future, the next presidential election, and is the country going in the right direction?

“And I say, ‘Hey, good for you, no wonder you lived to be 90.’ He also has had a lot of operations. He had cancer and overcame it. And I say, ‘George, how do you feel about each day?’ ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘It’s blessed to be alive. I’m going to enjoy this one.’ He really means it. He’s going to enjoy that day.”