We also need to address the ethical concerns that treating (or even curing) aging could raise. Even once people understand that it’s scientifically possible, many are uncertain or dismissive of research into anti-aging medicine because of worries about its moral and social consequences. These range from exacerbating environmental problems or

One piece of news that very slightly offsets the raw deal for men is that, curiously, though women live longer, they tend to do so with worse health on average. There is still some debate about the size and even the existence of this phenomenon, but perhaps the most compelling data come from centenarians: one study found that women over the age of

It’s also speculated that mitochondria may play a role in the longevity gap, thanks to the peculiar way we inherit them: exclusively from our mothers. Every one of your mitochondria is a descendant of the several hundred thousand in the egg which went on to become you, which means that a tiny fraction of your DNA (that in the mitochondria) comes

Missing genetic backups have far more subtle effects when it comes to the rate of aging, but it’s observed throughout the animal kingdom that whichever sex has non-matching sex chromosomes tends to have a shorter life expectancy. In birds, for example, males have ZZ chromosomes and females ZW, and males tend to be the longer-lived sex.

Another example is Helicobacter pylori, the bacterium which causes stomach ulcers and a substantial fraction of stomach cancers. There are also suggestive reports of bacteria and viruses being found in the plaques which clog our arteries in old age, and the brains of patients with dementia.

Large systematic reviews find that getting less than this is associated with an increased chance of death and—less widely publicized—that getting more than eight hours of sleep is associated with a larger increased risk of death than getting too little.

Eating more fruit and vegetables has been shown to improve the diversity of your microbiome. Obtaining your protein from plant rather than animal sources may also cause a kind of dietary restriction. Plant proteins have a different ratio of amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—which is less optimal for human needs than animal protein, but,

Smokers can’t even claim to live fast and die young: they experience about the same number of years in ill health at the end of life as non-smokers, meaning a greater fraction of their shorter lives overall.

However and whenever we do manage to cure aging, this is how it will happen: the cure for aging will be a jigsaw of treatments which evolves with time, a succession of technologies which gradually improve life expectancy to the point that people will notice that they’ve stopped aging—not a miraculous magic bullet discovered in a flash of insight by