It's not about stopping the ageing process, it's more about learning to age well. Photo / Getty Images
It's not about stopping the ageing process, it's more about learning to age well. Photo / Getty Images
It’s the one certainty in life — we will all get older and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, no matter how much cosmetic surgery and appearance medicine you try. These 17 stories feature expert advice and inspiration on how to age well, from heart health to cancer,mindset to memory.
This story was previously published in December and has been updated with additional content.
Why do we age? Scientists are figuring it out
Researchers are investigating how our biology changes as we grow older — and whether there are ways to stop it.
According to some estimates, consumers spend US$62 billion ($104.6b) a year on “anti-ageing” treatments. But while creams, hair dyes and Botox can give the impression of youth, none of them can roll back the hands of time.
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Scientists are working to understand the biological causes of ageing in the hope of one day being able to offer tools to slow or stop its visible signs and, more importantly, age-related diseases. These underlying mechanisms are often called “the hallmarks of ageing”. Many fall into two broad categories: general wear and tear on a cellular level, and the body’s decreasing ability to remove old or dysfunctional cells and proteins.
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It's time to start future-proofing your body. Photo / 123RF
The five simple tests that tell how well you’re ageing
Does getting out of a chair make you go ‘oof’? It’s time to start future-proofing your body.
You can have the healthiest diet in the world, but if you want to age well and remain independent the key things you’ll need are balance, strength and flexibility.
As a fitness coach specialising in strength workouts at home — specifically for those of us in midlife — I can’t stress enough how important it is to future-proof our bodies. From the age of 35 onwards, we lose bone density and muscle mass; research repeatedly shows exercise and daily movement are essential to combat this. Putting in the effort now, there’s no reason we can’t be healthy in our later years.
Private US$20,000 ($35,000) health clinics offering genome sequencing and full-body scans. Gyms with US$40,000 annual fees. Blood plasma exchanges for US$10,000 or more a pop. One-on-one sleep coaching and US$300 wearables.
Pursuing “longevity” has become an expensive – not to mention time-consuming – hobby. But it doesn’t have to be: experts say many of the practices that are most likely to extend your life are also the cheapest.
Simple lifestyle choices, like eating well and getting regular exercise, are by far “the most effective and well-supported” longevity tactics – and “nothing else comes close,” said John Tower, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Southern California Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.
Ageing in adulthood is not a linear process, but perhaps one that jumps dramatically at certain points in one’s life. Illustration / Alberto Miranda, The New York Times
Do we age steadily, or in bursts?
New technologies are giving scientists a better understanding of how the process actually works.
For many people, ageing feels like it happens in stops and starts. After a period of smooth sailing, one day, seemingly out of the blue, you have achy knees.
“You wake up in the morning and you suddenly feel old,” said Dr Steve Hoffmann, a computational biology professor at the Leibniz Institute on Ageing in Jena, Germany. “That’s sort of the takeaway.”
It turns out there may be a scientific basis for this experience. By analysing age-related markers, such as proteins and DNA tags in the bloodstream, some scientists are coming to understand that ageing in adulthood is not a linear process, but perhaps one that jumps significantly at certain points in one’s life.
Tech billionaires claim we can "hack" ageing. Photo / Getty Images
Pig brains and oxygen chambers: How the super rich are biohacking their way to immortality
The longevity business is booming and for high society, the quest for eternal life has become an expensive hobby
Automatic doors open on to a cavernous lobby that could double as a spaceship. Reclining on white leather chairs are several young-looking men, glow-in-the dark intravenous drips attached to their arms.
In one corner sits a man wearing what looks like a scuba mask attached to a computer. Machines beep. Doctors in lab coats murmur.
This is Hum2n in Chelsea, one of London’s first biohacking centres, which offers cutting-edge treatments in the booming longevity business. That scuba mask is actually a ReOxy device that mimics low oxygen conditions to stimulate lung and heart performance as well as souping up your metabolism. At the helm is Dr Mohammed Enayat, a supreme biohacker himself who has a staff of 28 and plans to open more clinics in London and Saudi Arabia.
The fact women are living longer than men doesn't necessarily mean they are living better. Illustration / Bianca Bagnarelli, The New York Times
Longevity gap: Why do women live longer than men?
By understanding the reasons, scientists hope to help both sexes age better.
Women outlive men, by something of a long shot: in the United States, women have a life expectancy of about 80, compared with about 75 for men.
This holds true regardless of where women live, how much money they make and many other factors. It’s true even for most other mammals.
“It’s a very robust phenomenon all over the world, totally conserved in sickness, during famines, during epidemics, even during times of starvation,” said Dr Dena Dubal, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco.
But the reasons women live longer are complicated and less established – and the fact they are outliving men doesn’t necessarily mean they are living better.
Why your cancer risk changes with age — and what to look out for at 40, 50, 60 and beyond
A cancer diagnosis is perhaps one of the most challenging events that can occur within your lifetime, but the varying forms of the disease that might strike depend very much on your age.
Research from Cancer Research UK shows a third of all cancers are diagnosed in the over-75s, but the type of cancers that impact us in old age tend to affect different organs and have very different underlying causes compared with the ones that strike people in their youth.
“People who carry a particular genetic mutation tend to develop cancers much earlier in their life, and it’s much more aggressive, while cancers which affect people over the age of 75 are related to the ageing of our cells and the cumulative effect of lifestyle-related damage over the course of a lifetime,” says Dr Carla Perna, a clinical oncologist in Surrey.
Midlife often means weight gain and muscle loss — but upping your protein intake could change that. Photo / 123rf
The anti-ageing benefits of eating protein
Midlife often means weight gain and muscle loss — but upping your protein intake could change that.
Many people struggle with gaining weight in midlife. I hear it every day in my practice, with patients saying they are eating the same as they always have and exercising the same amount, but putting on weight.
Our muscle health declines naturally, starting in about our 30s, in a process known as sarcopenia. By the age of 50, muscle mass decreases at an annual rate of 1-2%. The lost muscle is often replaced by fat.
Why middle-aged men are sitting on a heart health time bomb
Coronary heart disease is the No 1 cause of death for both sexes in the industrialised world. However, according to Ruth Goss, a senior cardiac nurse for the British Heart Foundation: “Coronary heart disease affects twice as many men as women and is the main source of heart attacks.”
The source for this oft-quoted statistic is a Norwegian study of 34,000 people who had a heart attack between 1979 and 2012. Researchers found that throughout their lives, men were about twice as likely as women to suffer this serious outcome.
“That higher risk persisted even after they accounted for traditional risk factors for heart disease, including high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, body mass index, and physical activity,” said the study.
The heart health risks for midlife women — and how to beat them
Usually seen as a problem for overweight, middle-aged men, research reveals menopausal women are at a high risk of cardiovascular illness
When, in her late 40s, Rebecca Hutchinson started having hot flushes and dizzy spells, she thought it was because of the menopause, and her doctors believed the same.
“I started to have episodes where I felt ‘funny’,” she says. “If ever I went for a long walk, I would feel clammy, get out of breath and have to sit down. In a hot tub on my wedding anniversary, my swimming costume felt so tight I thought it was strangling me. It didn’t occur to me this would have anything to do with my heart.”
Usually seen as a problem for overweight, middle-aged men, research reveals menopausal women are at a high risk of cardiovascular illness.
How to slow ageing: Nine quick tips from America’s longevity expert
The doctor and author Michael Greger, 51, shares his rules for life.
“The vast majority of premature death and disability is preventable,” says Michael Greger bluntly, over Zoom from his treadmill desk. “We have tremendous power over our health, destiny and longevity.” The American doctor and author and his team of 19 have spent three years wading through more than 20,000 research papers, unearthing hundreds of surprising diet and lifestyle tips for a new book, How Not to Age.
Who knew, for example, that a teaspoon of ground lettuce seeds could be a sleep aid? They contain the hypnotic lactucin, a substance with sedative properties. Or that mushrooms can help stave off an unpleasant whiff that comes with ageing? “There’s this distinctive body odour of the elderly due to a chemical we start producing as early as 40,” explains Greger, 51. “Ain’t that wild?” It has a “grassy, greasy” smell resulting from the oxidation of omega-7 fats emitted from our skin. According to a Japanese study, it is worth eating plain white button mushrooms to combat this.
Those of us in early old age — late 50s to mid-60s with a cut-off date when the Gold Card drops at 65 — regard actual old age with horror. We fear the worst. We have seen the worst, in our friends and family — people who lived lives of great vigour and good sense, but then gone gaga, gone to physical hell, gone down the rabbit hole of stupid ideas.
Terrifying! Death is one thing, the dark inevitable; actual old age is another, more challenging thing, a game of chance. Many win it. They remain alert, mobile. Many others through no fault of their own, through genetics and illness and misfortune, lose it. “The horror,” Kurtz whispers in The Heart of Darkness. “The horror.”
Ageing and memory: A peek inside the brains of ‘super-agers’
New research explores why some octogenarians have exceptional memories.
When it comes to ageing, we tend to assume cognition gets worse as we get older. Our thoughts may slow down or become confused, or we may start to forget things, like the name of our high school English teacher or what we meant to buy at the grocery store.
But that’s not the case for everyone.
For a little more than a decade, scientists have been studying a subset of people they call “super-agers”. These individuals are 80 and older, but they have the memory ability of a person 20 to 30 years younger.
Middle age shouldn’t be a drag: How a ‘chrysalis’ mindset can help
Midlife desperately needs a makeover. Too few of us dream of glory and glamour in our second half. But best-selling author Chip Conley, a hospitality entrepreneur who co-founded the Modern Elder Academy, thinks differently.
In his book Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better With Age, Conley, 63, asks: “What if we could reframe our thinking about the natural transition of midlife not as a crisis, but as a chrysalis — a time when something profound awakens in us, as we shed our skin, spread our wings, and pollinate our wisdom to the world?”
Jodie Rimmer plays a woman in search of her lost punk-rock youth in the new solo show, Nicola Cheeseman is Back. Photo / Dean Purcell
Jodie Rimmer: Why it’s time for women in their 50s to start acting their age
As she prepares for her first one-woman show, Jodie Rimmer talks to Joanna Wane about why it’s time for women to start acting their age.
In the end, it was radio DJ Athena Angelou’s superior bicep power that left Jodie Rimmer undone. But by the time the (then) 45-year-old actor was bumped from Celebrity Treasure Island on day 12, after losing a challenge to the much younger Angelou, she’d made her point. Nobody puts Jodie in a corner.
“The people I hang out with know my value, but they just looked right through me,” she says, of a buff 2019 line-up that included rower Eric Murray and boxer Shane Cameron. “And I didn’t like that at all.”
The lifesaving health tests every middle-aged man should have
British men die four to six years younger than women on average, according to government figures (statistics for New Zealand men are similar). Alongside being more likely to have jobs in construction or the military, and having what scientists call the “biological destiny” — which results in more risk-taking behaviour — men simply don’t like going to the doctor.
A British Medical Journal report this year revealed men are 32% less likely to see their GPs than women are. “The main difference between men and women is that women present earlier and get better outcomes, whereas men let things fester and get worse,” says GP Dr Niaz Khan, chief clinical officer for primary care at HCA Healthcare.
It peaks in young adulthood and older age in what’s called the ‘loneliness curve’. Here’s how to deal with feeling lonely in each life stage.
Loneliness can hit you if you’re a young adult trying to navigate starting employment or education, and it can hit you when you’re older too, when your relationship status changes or you’re dealing with health issues. This U-shaped pattern, peaking in younger and older adulthood is now being referred to as the “loneliness curve” thanks to a new study by Northwestern University. The study shows loneliness consistently increased in older adults too.
“Loneliness often occurs when we’re in transition and we lose our connection to our anchor points so the U-shaped curve makes sense,” says Professor Olivia Sagan, a chartered psychologist who researches loneliness.
