The important thing is not just what we eat but the way we eat. As it turns out, there is a strong correlation between fasting behavior and longevity in Blue Zones such as Ikaria, Greece, “the island where people forget to die,” where one-third of the population lives past the age of 90 and almost every older resident is a staunch disciple of the G... See more

Today, analog information is more commonly referred to as the epigenome, meaning traits that are heritable that aren’t transmitted by genetic means.

Arlan Richardson and Holly Van Remmen spent about a decade at the University of Texas at San Antonio testing if increasing free-radical damage or mutations in mice led to aging; it didn’t.16 In my lab and others, it has proven surprisingly simple to restore the function of mitochondria in old mice, indicating that a large part of aging is not due t... See more

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn noted that scientific discovery is never complete; it goes through predictable stages of evolution. When a theory succeeds at explaining previously unexplainable observations about the world, it becomes a tool that scientists can use to discover even more.

There’s also a difference between extending life and prolonging vitality. We’re capable of both, but simply keeping people alive—decades after their lives have become defined by pain, disease, frailty, and immobility—is no virtue.

Science has since demonstrated that the positive health effects attainable from an antioxidant-rich diet are more likely caused by stimulating the body’s natural defenses against aging, including boosting the production of the body’s enzymes that eliminate free radicals, not as a result of the antioxidant activity itself.

Aging is a disease. This is so clear that it seems almost insane that those four words need to be repeated again and again. But I’ll do so anyway: aging is a disease. And not only is it a disease, but it is the mother of all diseases, the one we all suffer from.

I will also tell you why I have come to see aging as a disease—the most common disease—one that not only can but should be aggressively treated. That’s part I.

These theories fit with observations and are generally accepted. Individuals don’t live forever because natural selection doesn’t select for immortality in a world where an existing body plan works perfectly well to pass along a body’s selfish genes. And because all species are resource limited, they have evolved to allocate the available energy ei... See more