Want to live forever? Then trim your toenails, drink beetroot juice and keep dancing!
Dancing, toenail clipping and kissing. These may not top your new year’s resolutions, but if you want to keep healthy and avoid getting old, says Professor John S. Tregoning, they should.
Greek heroes begged the gods to give them the gift of eternal youth. Today we’re offered expensive tests, fad diets or wonder drugs that promise the same.
Tregoning, a professor of immunology at Imperial College, London, sets out to examine which anti-ageing processes and tips actually work – and which you shouldn’t waste your time and money on.
Perhaps it was dancing that got Fred Astaire to the grand old age of 88
Live Forever? is an irresistible title but he admits in the introduction that, of course, no one can. But what he sets out to do is examine what you can do to delay death – or at least make the process less unpleasant.
As such, he becomes a one-man experiment – exploring gene sequencing, microbiome testing, fasting, living in isolation and cold-water swimming to see what might make a difference.
What we die from has changed dramatically over the last century. The great leaps forward made by science in the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases means in the affluent West, death is more likely to come for us because one or several of our organs has failed, and our cells have aged beyond repair.
Scientists argue over whether this cell ageing happens because it’s programmed to do so (once you can’t reproduce, evolution is done with you) or because it’s damage related. But the likelihood is that both contribute, in the way an old banger of a car will eventually fall apart as the rust takes over. The widely held belief is that the cap on human lifespan is 125 years.
To try to work out how best to reach this age, Tregoning (currently in his 40s) undergoes genetic testing, and then goes on to have a full body MoT with blood and urine testing and blood pressure thrown in for good measure. The results come back pretty positively for him, only showing a slightly elevated risk for strokes and heart disease.
But Tregoning is dismissive of paying £200 for such deluxe testing – ‘Discovering I was a bit fat with a slightly elevated risk of a heart attack…felt a pretty poor return on investment,’ he writes.
He also gets mixed results from trying to alter his gut microbiome. He tests his stools after eating normally, then consuming curry and beer, and a week of a high-fibre diet supplemented with fermented foods. The first two showed no difference, while after the third there was actually a reduction in diverse bacteria. His conclusion: don’t take this as an invitation to shovel down the vindaloos, but to shift the gut microbiome you need to do something over a sustained period (and again don’t waste your money getting your poo sequenced).
The science does suggest some unusual health strategies. Researchers found that regular ejaculation reduces the risk of prostate cancer in men. Men who ejaculate 21 times a month reduce their risk by two thirds, compared with those who ejaculate only seven times a month.
Keeping your toenails trimmed is essential. Not only can it be a useful guide to how flexible you are, it also helps avoid falls, as people often experience foot pain when toenails are left unruly.
The hormone oxytocin, also known as the love hormone, can also aid muscle repair (which suggests kissing it better actually works). There’s a lot of serious medical information in here, but Tregoning leavens this by writing in an engaging manner with witty asides (he cannot resist a section in his chapter about blood being titled ‘The Clot Thickens’).
I was surprised that the big phenomenon of the weight loss drug semaglutide, better known as Ozempic or Wegovy, gets scarcely half a page – his main point is that if it is bought by celebrities for aesthetic reasons then it may deny it to poorer people who need it medically. Though Tregoning points out that in 2023, Novo Nordisk, a company that makes semaglutide, was worth more than the rest of the Danish economy put together, selling so much of the drug that it actually prevented a Danish recession.
So, what are Tregoning’s overall conclusions? First the obvious parts – you don’t need to spend a fortune on any fads. Instead, don’t smoke or drink, eat no more than you need, and exercise regularly (although he personally finds cold water swimming a bit much). When you read the stark sections on smoking or drinking, you’ll be left in no doubt as to quite how self-destructive those behaviours are – smoking kills as many people as the entire population of Wales each year. And there is no safe limit for drinking – you just dramatically increase the harm the more you drink. Tregoning did find calorie-restricted diets successful, though he put the weight back on. And he has decided to limit red meat because of the links to bowel cancer.
To keep your blood pressure healthy, he recommends reducing your salt intake and eating bananas, rich in potassium, which dislodges sodium from the blood. And drinking beetroot juice, which contains nitrates to reduce blood pressure.
It’s never too late to make friends and have fun
But what he stresses above all is that happiness and social connectivity trump everything, as one of the longest running studies of ageing, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, has proved. Loneliness has been estimated as more dangerous than six alcoholic drinks a day, influenza, obesity or pollution; social connectivity increases your survival by 50 per cent.
For those particularly concerned about dementia, one of the best things you can do to keep your brain in good shape is dancing, as shown by Hugh Grant in Love Actually. It has the combination of promoting exercise, cognition and making you socialise.
Tregoning concludes by saying we should take a ‘health pension’ as seriously as we take our financial security. Given that our organs start to decay from their peak in our mid-20s, you should be doing as much exercise as you can, focus on educational attainment to protect against dementia, and build social connections. And just as with a cash pension, the earlier you pay in, the more you benefit – but it’s never too late to top it up.