New research suggests human lifespans are about to push into uncharted territory - but only if we take better care of our health. Photo / 123RF
OPINION
New research suggests a leap in human lifespans, but only if we start taking better care of ourselves... something I’m all too familiar with.
I have just eaten lunch. Discerning Telegraph reader as you are, you may well think that to have been the most boring opening sentence to an article you have ever read. But bear with me.
The lunch consisted of a salad in which there were 10 ingredients. If you include my starter (raw carrot and olives) and my pudding (apple, nuts, prunes and pomegranate), we’re up to 15. My breakfast included a banana and blueberries and my day will end with a large orange and a couple of squares of 90 per cent black chocolate. At least 22 different foodstuffs, each of them (yes, including the chocolate) rated by the experts to be enormously healthy.
This is not a bizarre attempt by me to break some sort of healthy eating record. It’s what I do almost every day and have been doing for as long as I can remember. Not, I should say, because I want to live forever. I’m not quite that bonkers. Just to the age of 124.
Still bonkers? Not according to researchers from the University of Washington, who calculated that human lifespans are about to push into uncharted territory. Not only will someone alive today break the record for being the oldest living human, it’s almost a certainty that “supercentenarians” will start living into their 120s this century. They specified 124. So that’s the target.
When my grandfather was born, he could expect to live to his mid-40s. When my father was born, he could add 10 years to that. But then Alexander Fleming came along. In 1928, he discovered the world’s first antibiotic. Penicillin revolutionised the war against the bacteria that had proved so efficient at killing us in vast numbers over the ages. By the 1940s, American drug companies began to mass produce antibiotics. Many nasty bugs that had been a death sentence became not much more than a nuisance. By the 1950s, life expectancy had risen to 65 and it’s been steadily increasing ever since.
A century on from Fleming, vast teams of scientists equipped with the most powerful computers are making new discoveries by the day. Diseases that bumped us off by the million since time began have been vanquished. So of course we should be able to live to 124. Except that we’ve found ways of killing ourselves far more efficiently than waiting for a drug-resistant bug to do it. And the most effective way to do it is to get fat. Or “obese” if you’re scared of the thought police.
Obesity is one of the biggest killers in the Western world. Much the easiest way to get a heart attack. A third of 10-year-olds are obese. That’s because they eat junk food and take no exercise. Which is where my second big boast comes in.
I started smoking when I left school at 15. I started drinking two years later. Heavily. Every day without fail. By my late 20s, I was well on my way to becoming an alcoholic. Being the BBC’s North America correspondent didn’t help. The five-hour time difference meant it was six in London when I went to lunch in Washington, so it was pretty unlikely I’d have to do a live report into the Nine O’Clock News, as it was then, over the new-fangled satellite link. Not least because it cost a fortune. So ordering a second bottle of wine was a pretty safe bet. Except when it wasn’t.
The first time (a Watergate development) I delivered my two minutes with only the slightest slurring. The second time there was enough of it for my producer in Washington to warn me that the boss in London was starting to notice. So I stopped drinking (or at least I never drank at lunch and stopped getting drunk) and started running. That was nearly 50 years ago. I still run every day.
More recently my youngest son persuaded me to install a gym at home. He would lift the weights and I would watch. Then he persuaded me to do it too. I wasn’t keen until I read that building muscle when you’re older cuts the chance of getting dementia. That’s what most of us really fear when we hit a certain age, isn’t it? So I became a gym bunny too. Sort of. It’s fairly unlikely you will see my rippled muscles on the cover of Men’s Health any day soon.
But here’s the big thing. I enjoy it. All of it. Well… almost all of it. And I’m planning my 124th birthday as I write.