IS IT POSSIBLE TO LIVE 100 YEARS? MANY WOULD ANSWER THAT IT'S GOOD ENOUGH TO REACH AT LEAST THE AGE OF 80, BUT TO LIVE A CENTURY IS RATHER AN EXCEPTION TO THE RULE AND A CHANCE THAT ONLY LUCKY ONES GET.
But what if it is far from that? There is a more optimistic scenario, which extrapolates: living to 100 or more and staying healthy and active is a real possibility for everyone.
It is almost everyone's biggest dream to live a long life. But various age-related problems, manifested in the form of physical weakness, mental decline, developing diseases, and other pathological changes, can block the path to this dream. Usually, all the average person can do to avoid it is to start exercising, quit using harmful substances, change their diet to include more healthy products, and try to avoid contact with infections. This is certainly important. But is it enough?
There is a lot of information nowadays about different ways to delay aging and prolong life. Theories, reviews, perspectives, and research findings we receive from paper and digital sources are varied, not all of them congruent, but often contradictory. There are lots of opinions on whether fasting is good for the body, what diet is the most effective, how much exercise we need, whether we should take vitamin supplements, how much time we should spare to get a daytime sleep, etc. Search engines "answer" these and other questions with millions of links.
But what if it comes to the prolongation of life and youth? Some specialists would say that if you want to live a long life, you need to strictly follow the laws of a healthy lifestyle; others would say that it is necessary to take as many geroprotectors[1] as possible; still, others would insist on continuous monitoring of health outcomes: measure physiological data and take regular tests. When it comes to our health, how not to get lost in the informational flow and ignore the unnecessary? What should we rely on?
Existing approaches to the problem of aging and prolongation of life are often flawed and rather one-sided. We should keep in mind that the problem is larger than it appears, so we need to consider it more broadly and consider many views. There are many ways to live a long life, and we will find out which of them are the most effective.
This book is a kind of "encyclopedia of aging" – it contains all the most important things you need to know about this process, as well as ways to prolong life and youth. Here you will find all the information about aging mechanisms, how to slow it down, how to prevent age-related diseases, and the lifestyle and mindset of long-livers.
After reading this book, you will gain the knowledge to acquire extra years of life, and you will learn how to apply them in practice, i.e., turn them into skills to control and even manage all physiological changes to achieve better health and longevity.
The knowledge gathered here comes from years of work on the VSH25[2] project. Its goal is not just to prolong life, but to preserve youth and stop aging with an experimental biological program.
There are a lot of long-living animals and plants in the world, from turtles and sharks that live hundreds of years to baobabs and sequoias that live thousands of years. Some do not age at all. The attention of biologists and gerontologists has been drawn to naked mole rats for decades: these small rodents live an unusually long time compared to their relatives, and at the same time practically do not age or get sick. Another phenomenon is the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii: it can live forever. At maturity or under adverse conditions, this animal can "go back to childhood" – to the very first stage of the life cycle, which makes the jellyfish immortal.
Humans do not live that long compared to the record-breakers of wildlife. Before the twentieth century, the average life expectancy was about 40 years. However, this figure was almost doubled, and now, according to official data, it is about 73 years old. This happened not only due to medical advances, but also because the consciousness of mankind is gradually shifting, and the idea of life prolongation is more and more actively embodied in life. In the XXI century, new futuristic projections suggest a life expectancy of 150 and even 200 years.
