Why do we care about mTOR? Because this mechanism turns out to be one of the most important mediators of longevity at the cellular level. Not only that, but it is highly “conserved,”2 meaning it is found in virtually all forms of life, ranging from yeast to flies to worms and right on up to us humans. In biology, “conserved” means that something

why so many people just stop moving is something else: injury. That is, older people tend to exercise less, or not at all, because they simply can’t. They have hurt themselves in some way, at some point in their lives, and they just never got back on the horse. So they continued to decline.

AMPK is like the low-fuel light on the dashboard of your car: when it senses low levels of nutrients14 (fuel), it activates, triggering a cascade of actions. While this typically happens as a response to lack of nutrients, AMPK is also activated when we exercise, responding to the transient drop in nutrient levels. Just as you would change your

That’s what stability is about: safe and powerful transmission of force through muscles and bones, and not joints or spinal hinge points.

changing the behavior can change the mood. You do not need to wait for your mood to improve to make a behavior change.

A handful of genes emerged as drivers, including TP53 (also known as p53, found in half of all cancers), KRAS (common in pancreatic cancer), PIC3A (common in breast cancer), and BRAF (common in melanoma), but very few if any of these well-known mutations were shared across all tumors. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any individual genes that

At a certain point in this process, the plaque may start to become calcified. This is what (finally) shows up on a regular calcium scan. Calcification is merely another way in which the body is trying to repair the damage, by stabilizing the plaque to protect the all-important arteries. But it’s like pouring concrete on the Chernobyl reactor:

“I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future,” Ric told me. “If you want to find someone’s true age, listen to them. If they talk about the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they did, they’ve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to—they’re

The payoff is that increasing your VO2 max12 makes you functionally younger. One study found that13 boosting elderly subjects’ VO2 max by 6 ml/kg/min, or about 25 percent, was equivalent to subtracting twelve years from their age.