Aging Is Not A Disease

A few years ago I did a TedX talk focused on aging as a disease. I've completely changed my position.

In my TedX talk, I discussed aging from a disease standpoint because I idealistically believed that academia and Western systems of research could discover the root causes of aging, and age related diseases, and therefore find a cure.
I have since become convinced that this is the exact opposite of what would happen. 

While I was in college, the future of aging research looked brighter than ever, and in retrospect, much of that optimism was misdirected. I do still firmly believe we have many answers to the aging process at our fingertips, and I believe even better ones are on the horizon. But today we're going to consider why aging may not be a disease after all, and why that means it's even more under your control.

There are some scientists who argue that aging should be classified as a disease, and this would open up funding opportunities for researchers to do more studies on compounds that can slow the aging process itself. If I'm going to pay taxes, I want that money to go towards research and infrastructure, so that still aligns with my values. But research funds are distributed in such a way that they fund what will make someone else a pile of money, or will make only the most incremental step forward in a field while reinforcing all previous work.

This means that potentially groundbreaking research doesn't get funded because it's wildly different than what's come before. The other option is private investors funding startup companies, then remember what I said about somebody expecting to make a pile of money.

Further, let's say aging was classified as a disease. In all likelihood this approach could make longevity therapies less accessible, and certainly not equitably accessible, since they would depend on the healthcare system, and this is out of reach for many, for a whole lot of reasons.

Whatever researchers find would take years, if not decades, to develop, and would fall under the domain of regulatory agencies and those with the power to prescribe pharmaceuticals. No one would deny that the healthcare system is in dire need of improvements, and those looking for answers to the problem of aging may find that effective compounds are inaccessible behind a wall of bureaucracy and excessive costs.

Now think about what happens in your mind, and the reactions in your body when you believe you have  a disease that everyone else also has, and is known to be nearly 100% fatal. (I say nearly because I will bet you bitcoins that there are masters living in caves who have figured all of this out already.)

How does that make you feel? Are you suddenly afraid? Do you panic, and want to talk to your doctor, to get the latest and greatest cures? Being diagnosed with "the disease of aging" makes you look outside of yourself to a medical system, an expert, an adultier adult to give you an answer. It's disempowering, when you hold all the cards in this game. Many doctors help many people, but they generally don't have the tools to move the marker when it comes to the root causes of aging. So calling aging a disease is more like calling aging a curse.

Instead, I invite you to try this thought experiment. Consider aging a problem. A puzzle. A game, even. What tools has the game given us to figure out this puzzle?

Let's begin with where we are. We are Earth-based humans. We live on Earth, we're made of Earth. Therefore let's believe the Earth has everything we need to figure out the puzzle, to achieve our goal of...what, exactly? Not immortality. That would assume a lifespan of thousands of years or more, and that might not be what everyone wants. If you do, sweet, I completely support this goal! But if you're ready to be done living in a body, immortality also becomes a curse. And there are solid reasons to not want that. Extended lifespan? That could still be hundreds or thousands of years, and lifespan alone doesn't address health, or having meaning and deep relationships in your life. So let's say...living as long as you want to. That's my metric. Have all the experiences you're here to have, create impact, exhaust your spark of life, which burns at a different brightness for each of us, then have a swift decline without regrets and take that step into the next world.

If you want to age more slowly (and possibly even in reverse), start here:
Align yourself with the Earth's rhythms: get up with the sun and get that light into your eyes. Spend more time outside, moving your body, and breathing deeply. Drink plenty of fresh clean water, and eat foods that are close to the source, as unprocessed as possible. My stance on those things hasn't changed one bit, these are the foundations of exceptional health and longevity.

Reduce stress, meditate, and have something that drives you, whether that's some grand purpose, a project you're working on, or just feeling good about keeping your house clean.
Maintain supportive social connections, and that means seeing your friends face to face, not just online.

It's my stance that meats are food and plants are medicine, and we just don't realize how much medicine we need. Quite a lot of evidence supports this as well, and it avoids any diet dogmas that gurus want to sell you. Meats have protein building blocks and fats for fuel. Plants are healing, they're full of vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, and enzymes that help us stay healthy, and they even have delicious carbs to keep us happy.

We'll get into specific plants and their uses later, but I want to emphasize that, while supplements are useful, and isolated compounds can be powerful, the synergy between what we might call an active ingredient with the other components of a whole plant, called the entourage effect, can have an overall more positive impact on health, while maintaining balance. And you can grow a lot of the biologically useful plants in your own kitchen or yard.

To be clear, professionally I work with cutting edge supplement formulas and I DO support their use, and use many of them myself. But they are icing on your longevity cake, they are not the foundation, and they are absolutely not a replacement for food.

So now what do you do? I want you to consider, as you would a story in a book, what your life would look like if it wasn't scripted according to social constructs that keep us locked in what a certain age should feel like, should look like, or should do. Take away the stories that culture has tried to write on you, and write your own. I leave with this question: If your life was 1000 years, how would that change how you think and how you show up in the world?