In today’s world, research and development of strategies focused on reducing aging have become more constant and, therefore, more details are known about the subject, which gives us the opportunity to age in a healthier way.
There are experts who say that people who will reach 150 years of life are very likely already existing. Says the young researcher from Boston, United States, Nina Khera, who is also the founder of Biotein, “there are people like me, who are not interested in knowing how long they will live, but rather that as long as they are here, live healthy, many of them are very disciplined, they have a routine of not going to bed late and get up very early, they are not necessarily older than 40″.
Today, groups of people around the world are betting that aging will be demolished
Steve Horvath, is a biostatistician, who considers “each animal species has to some extent an expiration date, for the mouse it is less than 5 years, for the Greenland whale it is 211, in humans 122, each species has a assigned life, the question is why?
Now, can we humans exceed biological barriers, be above nature? The experts also point out that for some time we have been on the way to lengthening our lives more and more. In ancient Rome the average life expectancy was 25 years, in the Middle Ages about 35 years, currently about 70 years, it is the advances in medicine and hygiene that have made us live a little longer.
People must lead a more balanced life and it is in Nicoya
If we talk about having a more balanced life, without so many worries and connected with nature, we move to Central America, specifically to Costa Rica. The foregoing is confirmed by Ana Gayle Glenn, who has lived in Costa Rica since 1972, deals with the so-called centenarians, has fallen in love with the country and the Nicoya Peninsula, which, in her opinion, is a place where people are especially long lived, “I can’t stop thinking about it, it’s really mysterious”.
For Anna, not even the inhabitants of Nicoya know its great benefits. “The residents of this area of Costa Rica, not only live longer, but also stay healthier.” Many of the people live until they are 90, others until 100, and have commented that the secret has been to eat healthy and be calm, without worries, consuming a lot of vitamins.
Nicoya is one of the five blue zones in the world
Specialists such as Luis Rosero-Bixby, who is a Costa Rican Demographer, call areas like Nicoya “blue zones” and it is one of the five in the whole world, to mention the others (Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Icaria Greece; Loma Linda, United States). In the blue zones it seems that the aging process is slower.
There are people who talk about the fruit diet, religious faith, genetics or the environment, which helps to have eternal youth. Not to go that far, we must not forget that in Costa Rica, there is the Pura Vida greeting.
Rosero-Bixby talked about a study he did of the people from Nicoya who went to other parts, and people from other parts who went to Nicoya, “but they don’t have the same longevity as those who were born there, grew up and stayed over there”.
Ana Gayle also says that “everything possible should be done to take care of oneself, but also of others. A few years ago, a law was passed to protect the long-lived or centenarians in the area and legally it is a blue zone.”
Disease and aging
María Blasco, a molecular biologist and biochemist, is also included in the various points of view on aging and the diseases that are emerging, including cancer, “apparently our lifestyle has a lot to do with the frequency of the division cell phone, also smoking and poor nutrition”.
People like Blasco investigate how to artificially lengthen telomeres to slow down the aging process. Telomeres are special DNA sequences that are found at the ends of chromosomes and have repetitive sequences that are recognized as the end of them, and that prevent the chromosome from breaking or being damaged. Every time the cell divides, the telomeres also divide. In this way, the scientists comment that the people of Nicoya have the longest telomeres…
Biogerontologist Greg Fahy said, “We don’t have to see our biology as set. We don’t have to accept our current biological limitations, we have to set goals beyond normal concepts of health. When it rains we don’t just sit around and get wet, we build houses”.
For Manuel Serrano, a molecular biologist from Barcelona, Spain, aging always has to do with the regeneration of tissues and organs, “we know practically nothing about this process, cells are progressively damaged, they age, but when they reach a certain threshold they undergo a change, they modify their function, they become senescent cells (they are between alive and dead), they produce an alarm signal so that the body’s cells recognize that there is damage and can repair it, the problem is that as we age these cells repair machines also age, until they end up weakening and stop working.
It is part of the process of cracking the code on the subject of aging. Hong Kong has the greatest hope in the world, also on the subject of longevity, on the subject of its wealth.
Old age, is it a disease that can be cured?
In this regard, the scientist David Sinclair, who has a doctorate from the University of New South Wales, Australia, and a postdoctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the United States, and is in charge of a laboratory at Harvard University, affirms that “old age is a disease and that can be cured”.
To the knowledge of many, aging is something natural and inevitable, but not so for the geneticist Sinclair. According to the studies it has carried out over 20 years, it ensures that it is possible to delay aging with a few simple habits so that we have a longer and healthier life.
Sinclair believes that it will soon be possible to slow down aging with drugs that are still being tested. His work focused on why we age has earned him dozens of awards from associations and scientific entities. It also made him a celebrity: he has been chosen one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine and has almost 200,000 followers on Twitter.
Why do we age?
Among the causes, there may be a lack of information: the “digital” one, the genetic code, and the other is the “analog” one, the epigenome, the cell systems that control which genes are activated and deactivated.
It is the turning on and off of a cell’s 20,000 genes that tells the cell who it is—that is, gives it its identity—and how it is supposed to function. But over time, the epigenome begins to lose information, like scratches do to DCs, and cells lose the ability to turn on the right genes at the right time. They lose their function.
Don’t we need to get old?
According to the Harvard scientist, “There is no law in biology that says we should age. We don’t know how to stop this, but we are getting better at slowing it down. And, in the lab, we were able to reverse it (the process). My point is that the epigenome is changeable”.
Consider that they are finding in animals like rats and mice and even in whales and elephants and in people who have different lifestyles, that aging can occur at a very different rate and that more than 80% of the future health of people depends on on how they live, not on DNA.
Finally, scientists have discovered by observing long-lived people that they choose to eat the right kinds of foods (a good place to start would be the Mediterranean diet), eat fewer calories, and eat less often. Physical exercise also helps and some people think that changing the body temperature with ice and cold water is helpful. Research continues, you define your lifestyle to have a healthier future. Follow the example of the people of the Nicoya Peninsula, bravo to them.
