Category — Why and how we age

I had a fun – and instructive – time last Friday participating in a real-time, online Q&A session about anti-aging strategies hosted by The Guardian newspaper and orchestrated by the unflappable Emma Keller.  It was a fast-paced, intense hour of back-and-forth with queries flying as fast as I could type reasonably informed answers (and correct almost but not quite all of my typos).  You can read the transcript here.

Actually, the questions came faster than I could reply, but Emma was a great curator, combiner and traffic cop.  She kept me apprised of what she was doing or going to do, what questions were coming next, when I should just click “post” and move on, all through ceaseless back channel communication (side chats on the site, an open phone line between us).  So much was happening at such a fast pace that I actually, literally, worked up a sweat.

What was most interesting about the entire experience (other than how strenuous it was) was how many of the questions focused on the aging face.  Before we even went live, Emma texted me that she was being deluged with questions about how to erase wrinkles and what the best face cream was and what to do about a sagging jawline and if estrogen cream improves skin texture and whether facial exercises were a good idea and what supplements to take to have younger skin and whether vegetarians might have special skin needs.

I wanted to write:  Hey, out there.  Staying youthful is about what is happening INSIDE.  The best anti-aging strategies are about how to keep your heart and lungs and arteries and muscles and brain in tip-top shape not how to smooth out your skin.  Ask me those kind of questions! But I didn’t – or at least not until later in the session. I began by dutifully answering the skin questions. That’s because I know that a significant percentage of the almost $100 billion American anti-aging industry is devoted to the face, from surgeries and muscle paralyzers to fillers and plumpers, from lasers and peels to supplements and salves, to $900 a pot face creams with scientific pedigrees and impossibly exotic ingredients.

The Daily Mail (perhaps not the most trustworthy source) reported recently that Jennifer Anniston spent about $2000 a month on her face, including a $450 ointment that (here’s where the “perhaps not the most trustworthy source” comes in) was made with crystals from Mars.  I so wish that were true.  It would be an awesome reason to increase NASA funding.  Leaf through any magazine devoted to women (and some that are devoted to men) and the first ten pages – more like 20 in some magazines – are face creams that promise incredible anti-aging results which you can plainly see on the studio-lit, airbrushed, poreless faces of the 25-year-old models staring out at you, doe-eyed.

So…my answer to those questions circling around “Does anything work?”  Yes. Staying out of the sun works.  Not smoking works.  Staying hydrated works.  Eating clean works.  Exercising works.  Can you erase wrinkles with surgery, fillers, plumpers?  Yes.  But you are NOT erasing age.  You are not turning back your biological clock.  That ticks from the inside.

A bunch of drop-dead gorgeous actresses (think Halle Berry) are now in their forties, so all of a sudden, forty is fabulous, forty is hot, forty is sexy.  When Halle Berry is eighty, eighty will be sexy.  Good for her.  But how about the rest of us?  What perks do the advancing years bestow on us?  I mean, besides the promise of reduced admission to the movie theatre.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately.  Although I intend to stay vibrant and vital, energetic, resilient and generally kick-ass for as long as possible, I don’t deny that the seasons do change and the calendar pages flip over and my children are getting older.  Which means I must be too.  I mean chronologically, of course.  Biologically I am fighting the good fight and, so far, holding my own.

Still, I feel I need to come up with at least a few solid benefits to this aging business. “Aging has nothing to recommend it,” a mid-70ish Woody Allen told an interviewer a few years ago.   I refuse to believe that.  But I am also skeptical of those who say, “I have never felt so comfortable with myself as I do now that I am (fill in the age).”  At least half wishful thinking, right? And that claptrap about older meaning wiser?  Please.

So what do I see as the benefits of getting older?

1.  I (occasionally) know what I’m talking about.  That’s because I’ve lived through some stuff, and on those occasions when I did so with eyes (and heart) open, I may actually have learned something.  I’m not talking wise here.  Just less stupid.

2.  I am deeply knowledgeable about and completely up to speed on the New Trend in Health and Fitness.  That’s because the new trend for 2013 is exercising the way we all used to in gym class back in the day:  jumping jacks and squats, push-ups, rope climbs, bear crawls – all that P.E. misery is now de rigueur.

3.  I am old enough to understand the idiocy of “no pain, no gain.”

4.  I can look forward to being even happier than I am!  That’s because, according to research I’ve been reading, the “mature” neurons in older brains react less intensely to negative experiences while still responding strongly to positive stimuli.

Sitting next to me at the anti-aging convention in Las Vegas was a smooth-faced honey blonde with taut cheeks and forehead, a firm chin and knife-sharp jawline, no nasal-labial lines, no lines anywhere and Angelina Jolie lips.  The convention is a huge event featuring three days of paper presentations and panels, and showcasing hundreds and hundreds of anti-aging products and services.  I was there to do “traditional” research for my book, Counterclockwise – taking notes at presentations, buttonholing experts, getting copies of papers.  But I was also there as a kind of cultural anthropologist observing this well developed, carefully crafted new culture of anti-aging enthusiasts.

This woman sitting next to me in the cavernous conference hall could have been in her late twenties.  I watched her out of the corner of my eye.  She reached into her purse.  That’s weird, I thought.  Her hands were veiny and freckled with age spots.  This young woman somehow had the hands of a 60 year old.  It took me a moment to realize my error.  It’s the other way around: This 60-plus-year-old woman is wearing the face of a 25 year old.

From her purse she pulled a pair of reading glasses, perched them on her perfect nose and squinted as she rummaged around in her purse until she found two small prescription pill bottles.  She set them on the table in front of her, and when she turned away to grab a water bottle, I sneaked a peek:  Lipitor. Atenolol.  Lipitor is the top cholesterol-lowering drug.    Atenolol is a beta blocker often prescribed to prevent second heart attacks.

Living beneath this impressively wrinkle-free, youthful mask was a not-very-healthy older middle-aged woman with high cholesterol and heart disease.  She believed she’d turned back the clock because the mirror showed her a young face.  But actually, biologically turning back the clock is about becoming younger on the inside not the outside.  Slowing or reversing aging is not about surgery, or injectibles or fillers.  It’s about all the things we can do to sustain and regain the vitality and youthfulness of our hearts, lungs, arteries, brains, muscles.  It’s about recapturing, regaining and sustaining intellectual verve, creative vitality, a sense of adventure, a love of challenges and new things, curiosity, wonder, optimism.

That’s what “anti-aging” is about.

I hate the word “anti-aging.”  Yes, I’ve written a book with “anti-aging” in the subtitle.  And yes, I’ve attended the World Anti-Aging Convention.  And yes, I have a Google Alert for “anti-aging.”  But I hate the word.

“Anti-aging” defines, I think, a commercialized, product-infused, huckster-driven world.  It’s associated with $200 an ounce wrinkle crèmes and surgeries that transform faces into masks and kooks who arrange to freeze their bodies in cryogenically controlled coffins.  It’s the latest and greatest miracle approach, the one supplement, the one hormone, the one superfood, the newest sensation, the big secret known to only Hollywood celebs and nonagenarians in the Caucasus.

There’s a desperation about the term “anti-aging,” a failure to ground oneself in what it means to be alive.  You can’t be anti aging – against aging – the way you can be anti capital punishment or anti animal testing.  If you stand against aging, if you say “No!” to aging, what exactly are you in favor of?  What are your options?  Death or the deep freeze?  Or maybe the anti-agers just want to live forever – or at least longer than our currently expected lifespan.

Or not.

I just read a sobering study in the Journal of Gerontology that found that, while life expectancy did in fact increase 1 year during the past decade, people faced an additional 1.2 years of serious illness and an extra 2 years of disability.

I stand with those in the scientific and medical communities who frame the whole thing differently.  They are not against aging; they are in favor of increased and prolonged health and vitality. Most of those interested in untangling the mysteries of aging think about how to extend that healthy middle of life that so many of us enjoy.  Someone cleverly coined the word “middlescense” (like adolescence only much older…and with no acne) to capture those generally vital years between, say, 40 and 65.  Prolonging middlescense is about preserving the (relatively) youthful function, attitude and even appearance of midlife into the years – and hopefully the decades – beyond.  Others talk about “extending the health span,” which is basically the same idea.  It’s not about extending the total number of years lived (lifespan); it’s about extending the total number of years lived with energy, vitality and health.  Or, as a very long bumpersticker might put it:  It’s not about adding years to life.  It’s about adding life to years.

That’s my version of “anti-aging.”

How old are you? If you answered based on the year you were born, you’re probably wrong.  Why?

Because chronological age is meaningless.

It’s the age of the body that’s important.

That’s what just about everyone who studies human aging now believes.  The Baltimore Longitudinal Study, a massive effort that tracked 3000 people from their twenties to their nineties, concluded that people age at such vastly different rates that by the time they reach 80 or 90 the differences are so marked as to make birthdates entirely irrelevant.  But you don’t have to wait to age 80 to see this. There’s widespread agreement that after age 35 or 40, the date on your birth certificate is one of the least accurate indications of how old you are.

Yes:  Every day we get older.  But the pace at which we grow older varies enormously.  We don’t have control of the former.  We do have far more control than we think of the latter.

The old way of looking at aging is that the body just progressively falls apart, and the best way to stay healthy and live a long life is to…remember this great piece of advice?… choose your parents wisely.  Gee, thanks a lot.  Now several decades of re-focused research on aging is telling us something different.  And more helpful!

It seems that we age – that is, our bodies age – in a way and at a rate that is greatly affected by the everyday choices we make.  The way we live our lives.

That means physical activity (or lack thereof), healthy eating (or not), stress-reducing behavior (or freak-outs), satisfying (or stultifying) work, agreeable (or disagreeable) relationships.  Do we challenge ourselves or go on auto-pilot?  Make an effort to rebound from life’s vicissitudes or wallow?  Experts now believe that the accumulation of choices we make in how we live account for – hold onto your hat — close to 70 percent of how and how quickly (or slowly) we age.