When S. Jay Olshansky accepted a recent invitation to speak before a group of seniors, he immediately started having second thoughts. After all, he is a researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies the human life span. His primary message is straightforward and would seem a bit sobering.
“People pushing the idea that everyone can live to be 100 are perpetuating a myth that goes all the way back to the Bible,” Olshansky said. “In Genesis 6:3, it says man can live to be 120, but there is no scientific basis for it.”
Olshansky is what’s called a biostatistician. He and colleagues such as Bruce A. Carnes at the University of Chicago factor biology into the equation of longevity. Olshansky agreed the Social Security Administration is headed for “demographic doom” and cash shortages by 2011. He quickly added that life expectancy-statistics forecasts–87.5 for women, 83.1 for men–at midcentury are 3.7 years too high.
“We will indeed have a huge number of people who are 85 and older, and the number of centenarians will rise rapidly,” Olshansky said. “It’s just that the overall measure of life expectancy won’t rise that rapidly.”
Olshansky and Carnes co-authored a research paper that will be published in the journal Science this week. The results will be announced Sunday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Francisco. The paper has been 10 years in the making. A decade ago, Olshansky and Carnes published a first paper that estimated the “practical limit” of life span to be 85, or 88 for women and 82 for men.
During the subsequent few years, a number of researchers challenged the limit and championed the hypothesis that humans could fully expect to live to 100. Expect by Sunday night that Olshansky and Carnes will douse some reality on the 100 hype with numbers culled from the United States, Japan and France. Olshansky wouldn’t budge much from a news embargo during an interview but did allow that only about 3 to 10 percent of us are even genetically equipped to live to 100 and that the new paper’s conclusions will “fly in the face” of more optimistic predictions. They have authored a book on the subject, “The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Aging” (W.W. Norton, $29.95).
“The bodies we have are not made for extended use. We must cope with accumulated DNA damage, cell damage, muscle atrophy, bone loss, decreased muscle mass and joints worn out from overuse during a lifetime of bipedal locomotion. It might have worked great for prehistoric humans, but it wreaks havoc on our knees and hips.”
In the current issue of Scientific American, Olshansky and Carnes review the body part by part to show our weak spots.
“My favorite example is the prostate,” Olshansky explained. “It is plumbed the wrong way. Any plumber looking at how it is constructed would merely scoff. You would never run a tube or pipe carrying liquid into a closed container. But that’s how the male body is constructed.”
Nonetheless, Olshansky was feeling uneasy about the 50 seniors he was going to address in Arlington Heights. Most of them were 70 and older.
“I’m thinking these people are fearful about aging, that they will think I am being negative,” Olshansky said. “As it turned out, the speech was incredibly liberating for the audience. People stopped me afterward to say they could now stop obsessing about all of the anti-aging potions and products.”
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It’s not that Olshansky is giving people carte blanche to live an unhealthy life. He advises people to reduce “age accelerators” in their lives, including tobacco use, obesity, excessive alcohol consumption, high exposure to sun and use of drugs and medications. He said advances in biotechnology, such as gene manipulation, organ transplants and stem cell research, will likely add two or three years to the life span. But his research indicates that hormones, antioxidant cocktails and other elixirs aren’t making much difference in longevity. Regular exercise and sensible eating can achieve the same effects at lower cost, he said.
“The point is we should enjoy each day, especially when we reach the 70s and 80s,” said Olshansky, who is 46. “Those people are a select, robust group. They shouldn’t be obsessing about age or pain.”
For his part, Olshansky strives to exercise four times per week, splitting his workouts between cardiovascular activities (“I use the elliptical machines to go easy on the joints”) and weight lifting.
There is one other thing Olshansky would do every day “if I could afford it.”
“Find a way to get a full-body massage every day,” said Olshansky, who recently experienced just that during a week stay at the Heartland Spa in Gilman, Ill. “For one thing, it moves along the lactic acid [waste products from muscles]. But it is also a great stress reducer. You will feel incredibly relaxed in a matter of days.”