S. Jay Olshansky Quotes
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The Faustian trade of the 20th century was, we got 30 years of additional life, but in return we got heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer's and sensory impairments. The question is: What Faustian trade are we making now, as we go after heart disease, cancer, stroke and Alzheimer's?
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Exercise is roughly equivalent to an oil lube and a filter for a car. You don't have to do it, but when you do, it makes the car run a lot better.
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Fixing obesity is going to require a change in our modern relationship with food. I'm hopeful that we begin to see a turnaround in this childhood obesity epidemic.
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What we know for sure from our work and from others' is that mice have a life span of 1,000 days, dogs have 5,000 days, and we humans have 29,000 days. Recognizing that the duration is limited, and aging is inevitable, focus the attention on enhancing the quality of the days you have.
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How long you live is less important than how healthy you are along the way.
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Reducing caloric intake is the only proven method of extending life. If caloric intake is reduced to 20 percent below maintenance, you can extend your lifespan considerably.
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Physical immortality is seductive. The ancient Hindus sought it; the Greek physician Galen from the 2nd Century A.D. and the Arabic philosopher/physician Avicenna from the 11th Century A.D. believed in it.
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A lot of people are living in a dream world - they want to deny that aging occurs or believe it doesn't have to occur. They'll hold on to this belief until the moment they die. The reality will eventually hit them.
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The way that we are going after ageing, I think, is a problem. The modern medical model is basically designed to attack one disease at a time. Independent of all other diseases and independent of the basic process of ageing itself.
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In the developed world, we live 30 years longer, on average, than our ancestors born a century ago, but the price we pay for those added years is the rise of chronic diseases.
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A lifetime of low calories has come naturally to the longest-lived people in the world... in the Japanese archipelago of Okinawa.
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When you hit your 40s, you begin to take notice of the effects of aging because people that you know begin to die of heart attacks and tumors, so we take notice of the effects of aging.
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While eliminating smallpox and curtailing cholera added decades of life to vast populations, cures for the chronic diseases of old age cannot have the same effect on life expectancy. A cure for cancer would be miraculous and welcome, but it would lead to only a three-year increase in life expectancy at birth.
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Do we really want to continue to push out the envelope of survival only to see other things crop up that we may not like?
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Our concepts of aging really should be blurring because there are plenty of people who make it to older ages who aren't really any different in many ways than people who are decades younger.
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The fact is that nothing in gerontology even comes close to fulfilling the promise of dramatically extended lifespan, in spite of bold claims to the contrary that by now should sound familiar.
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Death is a zero sum game for which there is no cure.
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In Hollywood they're getting younger, but believe me, it's not the food. It's the plastic surgery.
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Lifespan extension has never really been a goal of aging science, nor should it.
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As long as humans have existed, we have always desired to live longer. Every society, every religion, every culture. Of course, they all failed at dramatic life extension.
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People pushing the idea that everyone can live to be 100 are perpetuating a myth that goes all the way back to the Bible.
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I have little doubt that gerontologists will eventually find a way to avoid, or more likely, delay, the unpleasantries of extended life.
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The last thing you ever want to do is extend the period of frailty and disability and make people unhealthy for a longer time period. So lifespan extension in and of itself should not be the goal of medicine, nor should it be the goal of public health, nor should it be the goal of aging science.
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We have grown accustomed to the wonders of clean water, indoor plumbing, laser surgery, genetic engineering, artificial joints, replacement body parts, and the much longer lives that accompany them. Yet we should remember that the vast majority of humans ever born died before the age of 10 from an infectious disease.