Editor's Blog
I’m writing the Forever young columns for transhumanists who want to live longer than the longest-lived human to date. Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment was born in 1875 and died in 1997 at the “old age” of 122 years and 164 days.
Despite the apparent odds against outliving the oldest documented person, most transhumanists I now expect to live to 150. Just last night, Eric Gradman, a computer scientist who does circus acts and fire-twirling, told me, “I will live to 100, worst case, but intend to live until 250.” Prof. Gregory Benford, chairman and co-founder of longevity supplement company Genescient (featured in my Forever Young column in h+ issue #3), stands firm on his claim that he can tell me, at age 47, how to live until 150. I’ve known Greg for over 10 years, and he’s never been wrong, so I choose to believe him.
However, if 150, instead of 75, is the new span of life, then we need to get through the toughest rite of passage. The Massai boys of Kenya had to face a lion to become men, and the Spartan boys had to face a wolf. We who would double our life-spans have to survive a similar trial — facing down our own cells, preventing them from becoming excessively feral and fertile through what I will call “new adolescence.” We face this passage during that period from the mid-40s to the mid-60s when we are most likely to get cancer. There’s bad news and good news. The bad news is that cancer accounts for 23-25% of all deaths in the US (vs. about 26% for heart disease, the #1 cause) and will kill 292,540 men and 269,800 women in 2009, according to the American Cancer Society. The good news is that if you can survive “new adolescence” without dying of cancer, you are less likely to die of cancer with each year that you add. A study of centenarians revealed that fewer than 4% died of cancer.
The other good news is that if you are reading this magazine, which probably requires a higher education and IQ level than just about any other magazine in Barnes & Noble, you have the ultimate cancer fighters: curiosity and ability to process complex and weird information. Cancer is basically what happens when your cells are copied with errors before they can get repaired — and then they grow out of control. As a smart person, you can employ useful information to reprogram yourself. I’m not a doctor, and I’m not giving health advice, so follow these eight New Rules at your own risk. On the other hand, most people are aware that they need to look out for themselves.
To help spark new conversations, I offer these eight new rules for Cancer:
1. Cancer is a result of many things, the most easily treatable of which is information deficiency.
It’s important to read widely about cancer. Cure magazine (see resources) focuses on cancer treatment. As I write this the Cure website has a feature article about sex toys, so it’s not as grim as you might think. The cancer related sections in Aubrey de Grey’s Ending Aging (pgs. 274-308) and Ray Kurzweil’s Transcend are the minimum an h+ reader should read and grok.
2. Your success in staying cancer-free could be worth a fortune.
According to the Milken Institute, curing cancer is worth $50 trillion. If you come up with a program that works, you will be part of the solution and might even be able to save lives of friends as well as strangers… and make money from both. Plus, 60% of US bankruptcies are from health care bills, so stay healthy.
Insulin turns out to be the perfect nutrient… for cancer farming!
3. Get thin, as if your life depends on it, because it does!
Essential body fat is 3-5% for men and 9-11% for women. The average American man has 17-19% body fat and the average American woman has 22-25% body fat. Greater fat correlates with greater insulin resistance (morbid obesity = much greater likelihood of getting diabetes). The more insulin resistance you have, the more insulin your body has to produce, and the longer the insulin floats around in your blood stream. Insulin turns out to be the perfect nutrient… for cancer farming! This could be part of the reason that the more obese someone is, the more likelihood he or she will get cancer, particularly cancers of internal organs. It’s my own unscientific hunch that if humans got closer to essential body fat numbers, we would see a drop in internal cancers, though it’s important to keep in mind that that vitamins A, D, E, and K are lipid (fat) soluble, so you need sufficient fat to absorb these vitamins.
4. The sun on your body is your friend for up to 10 minutes a day. After that, it’s trying to kill you.
Get direct sunshine because it’s the most natural source of vitamin D. However, direct sunlight can cause up to 50,000 DNA strand breaks per minute, and if the cells divide before the damage is repaired, you could be setting skin cancer in motion, so 10 minutes is all you want. Approximately 68,000 cases of melanoma are diagnosed each year, and 7,000 prove to be fatal.
5. If you want a friend, get a dog… a cancer-sniffing dog.
Part of the reason skin cancers can prove fatal is that only 80% are diagnosed at the “local” stage. There are dogs that, if they see or smell cancer, will snarl, bark, and try to bite off the cancerous skin. Strange as it sounds, you actually want to get one of these dogs, and you want your friends to get one too. You want to let the dog sniff you and see you slowly twirl around in all your naked glory at least once a week. Even more importantly, you want a dog that can sniff your urine and bark if you have cancer. I’m serious as cancer about this. And every time you buy a cancer-sniffing dog, you increase the likelihood that this trait will be bred for and trained for.
6. It takes a village (without an idiot) to keep you cancer free.
Friends, even Facebook friends, can potentially give you information about diet, exercise, supplements, natural cures, good doctors, bad hospitals, and so forth that may end up saving your life. Become friends with the smartest people who are also interested (in fact, obsessed is good) in longevity — and in getting you through the twenty years of increased cancer risk.
7. Don’t like taxes? Well, cancer is a tax.
Cancer is a tax on fat people, lazy people, smokers, and people who consume processed meats and coat their bodies with lots of chemicals. You don’t have to pay this tax, but it does mean changing or eliminating what you eat, drink, smoke, or rub on your skin.
8. You’ve got to keep moving.
Cardiovascular exercise does over 100 helpful things to the human body. If you tried to duplicate all these good chemical interactions in your body with prescription drugs, it would cost a fortune, and you’d probably get sick from the drug interactions. Yet only a minority of doctors prescribes exercise. Well, consider this your prescription: you need to exercise for at least an hour, at least three times a week. I know normal people who exercise 20 to 30 hours a week and have fun doing it. None of them have cancer. It may not be the reason they don’t have cancer, but to the best of my knowledge this hasn’t been tested, so it’s entirely possible. Good luck with your adventures in longevity. May you and yours stay healthy until 150.
Alex Lightman is the Executive Director of Humanity+ (the organization) and CTO of FutureMax, a merchant bank. He is the author of Brave New Unwired World, the first book on 4G wireless.
12 Comments
It is vague and partly erroneous to claim it is unhealthy to “coat our bodies with chemicals”. A more accurate claim is that it is unhealthy to coat our bodies with the *wrong* chemicals, and we’ll omit the fact we’re walking chemical warehouses to begin with. Supplementing our lives with beneficial molecules and nootropics will help us live longer, not shorter lives.
Befriend the chemical bro-man, don’t be afraid of it.
It is almost common sense, but it needs to be drilled into people’s heads, so thanks for this article. Here’s some hard data that is pretty telling to me: 4 years ago I dropped 50lbs, upped my running to 4 miles a day, started slowly cutting out all types of saturated fats, became religious about taking fish oil and a multivitamin, and added fruits, grains, and vegetables to my diet – a lot of them. I did this because I was stressed and depressed, and because cancer, obesity, and Type-2 diabetes are all through my family. I looked at the healthier members of my family, though, and none of them had these issues. My grandparents lived into their 90s, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to get cancer or diabetes when I’m 55. Or, at the very least, I’m not going to INVITE it!
So what did this do? My LDL is down to 70. My Triglycerides have been more than halved and are in the 30-range. My resting heart rate is 52. My blood pressure is a steady 110/60. My stress level is down. My mind is sharper. Losing the weight actually helped me drink less, too (can’t put down as many beers, which is a good thing!).
And it WAS NOT HARD TO DO THIS. I didn’t just wake up and make these changes, I did them gradually. For example, I switched from mayo to honey mustard. I switched from lettuce to spinach. I quit eating processed deli meat and go for the turkey on whole wheat. I have not had a carbonated beverage in 3 years – just water, water, water. Instead of a bowl of ice cream, I have a bowl of grape nuts with raisins.
It comes down to this if nothing else: If I do get cancer or some illness, my odds of surviving it are so much higher if I’m healthy.
thanks for a great article Alex — I have one question — you didn’t mention any supplements, any anti-oxidants – what is your opinion on cancer-preventative pills? any recommended? thanks
With the active use of antioxidants we are entering the strange world of a not wholly explored range of effects.
So first off: Antioxidants are good a puffering off excess free radicals, which can cause DNA damage. I’d simply recommend green tea, it has high levels of those, is easily bought over the counter, won’t burn a hole into your wallet and has that wonderful smart drug caffeine in it to boot (does its part against alzheimer’s if i remember correctly). Oh, and a glass of red wine every day, also has antioxidant properties and has that other smart drug, alcohol, in it (also healthy in small doses).
But I wanted to talk about strange things. That starts with insulin sensitivity, which was mentioned in the article. Now one of the many benefits of aerobic exercise is an increased insulin sensitivity, even without reduction in body fat (which is recommended anyway). Caveat: this increased insulin sensitivity is mediated over free radicals. Which are produced at an increased rate through exercise.
Now let that sink in: Through exercise you have increased production of free radicals that give you cancer, but increased insulin sensitivity, which might help prevent cancer. If you want to counter the radicals through antioxidants, you at the same time take away the increased insulin sensitivity. It’s a question of quantitative effects. And we only have a bad idea about those.
To sum it up: In order to systematically fight the perfect preventive battle against cancer, we don’t have the information. So I’d be a little sceptical about supplements and such.
I’m twenty years old and morbidly obese. I have been exercising and eating healthy since the first of January now.
My starting weight was around 300 pounds and I lost 70 pounds since i started and after all the positive comments I’m more determined then ever to lose the weight and live healthy.
This article made me even more determined cause there is no way I am gonna get diabetes or cancer cause of bad habits. Of course I could get unlucky and do get it, but it’s better that I’m gonna be healthy when I get it then unhealthy.
I’m happy that i realized that i need to change while I’m still young…
Excuse me for any bad English cause It’s not my first language.
Where is the talk of telomeres and telomerase? I hear a lot of talk about cancer and longevity on a lot of transhumanist website and still have not heard these mentioned at all, which is weird considering that these are the driving forces behind longevity AND cancer. A little ‘investigative journalism’ would be greatly appreciated!
What a load of old elitist bollucs
Telomerase is not the whole story. From what I understand, other issues will get you before your telomeres get so short as to be a problem. Eventually I suspect they’ll come into play, but there is other cellular “junk” that ages you faster – mitochondrial DNA mutations, for one thing, and amyloid accumulation in the intra-cellular spaces (Alzheimers, for example).
Would welcome the thoughts of folks more educated than I am about cellular biology, though.
Arnie – right, I was making reference to telomerase in cancer specifically. The Geron Corporation has been doing research on switching off telomerase to stop cancer cells from rapidly growing. There is more to it than that, such as cancer cells metabolizing sugar, but vaccine’s utilizing telomerase control are currently in the testing phase. I thought it might be worth the mention seeing how this thread is about preventing cancer as a means towards longevity. I guess what I’m trying to say is “I don’t know enough about this, an article about it would be awesome!” Thanks for the extra info! I’ll be sure and add it to my research list since I guess I’m a ‘fledgling biologist’ at best. Any information helps!
Hi Likeadog,
The more I read on vaccines the more amazed I am. It really does look like we’re on the verge of some major advances – there are vaccines that have been shown to actually eliminate beta-amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s patients – basically curing Alzheimers – but there are serious side-effects that make them untenable right now. The good news that I see is that in almost every case of a setback, scientists seem to understand the basic reason why it failed. It would not surprised me if vaccine approaches to amyloid buildup did not mature in the next 5-10 years. The biggest obstacle to this is the long research pipeline.
And based on how a vaccine would work, there is no reason it couldn’t also be used to approach telomeres. I was just saying that telomere shortening and mutations are not the only things that cause cancer – basically any free-radical mutation can.
I have no formal biological education and all that I do know I’ve gleaned from reading, but there is a bio-tech revolution happening right now and we’re in the middle of it. I’m notoriously skeptical and a bit cynical, but I really do believe that we’re going to hit longevity escape velocity sooner than people realize. The key is trying to stay healthy and alive long enough to see it.
Considering exercise; Read the book “Body By Science” by Doug McGuff.
You can find short videos on youtube that sum up the chapters of this book, and when you have watched these, I’ll be very surprised if you don’t buy the book, read it, and change your opinion about cardiovascular exercise.
The main issue being that too much steady-state exercise seems to do more harm than good, especially if you compare it to High Intensity Resistance training, which also seems to trigger all the same benefits as steady state, but with far less wear and tear on the body.
Arnie, vaccines that clear amyloid plaques actually make Alzheimer’s worse. It turns out that the plaques are neutral warehouses, the damage is done by soluble amyloid way before it precipitates into plaques. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and you won’t cure anyone of anything by surfing the Internet.