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You can help to make therapies for aging and life extension medicine a reality. Click here to participate in improving your future health and longevity!
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What is healthy life extension? Put simply, it is utilizing science to increase healthy life span and reduce the risk of suffering age-related conditions in later life. It is the use of the best present day methods, while supporting research to develop more effective methods for tomorrow.
Practitioners of healthy life extension use good diet, lifestyle choices, technology, and proven medical advances to live healthy, longer lives. There is much more to healthy life extension than simply looking after your health here and now, however. The medicine of today can do little in comparison to what scientists know is possible, and thus we must ensure that the public is educated, research is funded, and the medicine of the future is developed.
A longer life gives more time in which to lead a better life. The option of another tomorrow and the capacity to enjoy it should be open to all of us, each and every day.
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Aging is an enemy. It saps our strength and ability to enjoy life, cripples us, and eventually kills us. Tens of millions die from age-related conditions each and every year. Comparatively few people know that degenerative aging can be modestly slowed with diet and lifestyle choices, as is the case for many medical conditions. Comparatively few people are aware of serious scientific efforts, presently underway, aimed at understanding and intervening in the aging process - in order to one day reverse its effects.
One day, scientists will find a way to defeat aging. We would like this breakthough to happen while we are still alive and in good health to benefit from it. How will we achieve this goal? Read on to find out.
Step 1: Stop Damaging Your Health
Step 2: Adopt a Better Diet and Lifestyle
Step 3: Support Medical Research
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Despite amazing advances in understanding and treating age-related conditions (such as cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes, Parkinson's, and many others), and despite the cries of the anti-aging marketplace, the only presently available method likely to even modestly extend the healthy human life span is calorie restriction. Sadly, no medical technology yet exists that can improve upon this diet and lifestyle choice: researchers are making progress, but this field of medicine is woefully underfunded and poorly understood by the public. Promising developments and lines of research are subject to unreasonable, irrational opposition from influential politicians and bioethicists. Vital medical research and funding has been greatly hampered or even stopped dead in its tracks in the US and parts of Europe.
It is up to you to join us in speaking up! Only by making our voices heard - by creating an atmosphere of widespread support and understanding - can we ensure that the healthy life extension medicine of the future is researched, developed, and made widely available. If we remain silent, our future health and longevity remain at risk.
The following three steps will you get started on the path of healthy life extension. Remember to read our disclaimer before going too much further!
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Are you damaging yourself, perhaps more than you realize? Do you smoke? Do recreational drugs occupy a central position in your life? Do you eat nothing but junk food or are overweight? Do you exercise little or not at all? Do you have a poor relationship with your physician, or haven't seen a doctor in years? If so, you have a clear starting point. Any of these things can hurt you far more than currently available healthy life extension techniques can compensate for. There is little point in insulating the windows if the door is jammed open.
Find a physician you can trust and talk to about improving your health. You might be surprised at how easy, low-cost, and downright pleasant it is to lead a healthier - and thereby longer - life.
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The body is a complex, resilient machine. Unlike our cars, however, we can't replace it when it breaks down. Given that, it's scandalous that most people know more about the long-term care of a car than they do about the long-term care of the human body. Fortunately, it's neither difficult nor expensive to use diet and lifestyle to live a longer life.
- Adopt a calorie restriction diet. Calorie restriction is currently the only scientifically proven way of extending healthy life in mammals. It has a number of other beneficial effects on health, and is highly praised by practitioners. You can find out more about calorie restriction at the CR Society website. Here at the Longevity Meme, we have an introduction to calorie restriction that provides some helpful guidelines for getting started.
- Take a modest amount of supplements appropriate to your age and health. There is a wealth of supplement information available, but much of it is worthless, propagated by irresponsible sellers. This is perhaps the hardest topic to research, and in the end you will have to make a number of decisions yourself. A good starting point is to become a member of the Life Extension Foundation. Membership benefits include a wealth of very useful and fairly independent information on supplements, physicians, and healthy life extension delivered to your door. The Kurzweil and Grossman book Fantastic Voyage also provides a good starting point for understanding the hows and whys of supplements.
- Exercise as recommended by your physician. The benefits of a modest level of exercise for most people have been well known for long, long time.
The articles, hot topic commentaries, and links to resources here at the Longevity Meme are there for your benefit. We hope that they will help you to get up to speed on healthy life extension, find like-minded people, and have a much easier time obtaining the information that you need!
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Speaking out in favor of medical research is just as important as practicing present day healthy life extension, as even the best present day practices can only make a small difference to your life span. Most age-related conditions are still incurable. The aging process is imperfectly understood. It causes great suffering for hundreds of millions worldwide, but will one day be defeated. We must ensure that this day comes rapidly so that we are still alive, healthy and active to see it!
The medicine of the near future holds great promise - see, for example, biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence - but this promise can only be realized if research and development is fully funded and widely supported. The fields of aging and serious anti-aging research are poorly funded, and the public at large neither understands nor appreciates the possibilities offered by this research. Politicians and bioethicists demonstrate considerable opposition to the most promising branchs of medicine.
If we do not speak out in favor of better medicine - the key to our future health and extended longevity - then medical research and investment will decline. By failing to prevent legislation that slows or criminalizes vital medical research, we hurt ourselves.
Do you want to live a much longer, much healthier life? Then you have to stand up and say so! The Longevity Meme offers easy ways for you to make your voice heard on important medical, health, and life extension issues. Keep track of day to day issues with our news and the Fight Aging! weblog. Our newsletter is a simple way to keep up to date on what is going on here and elsewhere in the healthy life extension community. Subscribe and take action today!
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There you go. In three quick steps, you now have a solid start on healthy life extension. It once took people years of thought, reading, experimentation and research to reach these conclusions. You can thank us by being responsible, taking care of your health, making your voice heard, and telling your friends about the Longevity Meme.
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| Last updated January 27, 2006 |
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