How Long Have We Really Got?

 

Since we are here to talk about aging well - happy, healthy and long - I thought it would be interesting to look a little deeper into just how long a human being could possibly live. Is there a biological "design limit" on the human body? A time after which we just simply wear out and stop working?

Worldwide, less than 1% of the population lives to be 100 years old. The oldest documented lifetime is that of a French woman, Jeanne Calment, who lived to be 122 years and 164 days old. Most aging researchers agree that the maximum lifespan for a human being, the biological design limit, is about 120 years. But the truth is that no one really knows.

People today are living longer than ever on average. Most of this is due to societal advances such as vaccines, antibiotics, public health infrastructure, sanitation, hygiene, earlier diagnoses, and increased public awareness about health and longevity. But while people are living longer lives on average, the the age at which the very oldest people die does not appear to have changed much in all of recorded history.

“Everything has to have a limit. There’s no creature on planet Earth that we know of that doesn’t die at some point,” says Briana Mezuk, the co-director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health. . “But there’s obviously substantial variation in life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, which is in some ways more important than the first question. How long can we live and be able to have the type of psychological, functional, and social life that makes life worth living? What is that life expectancy?”

And maybe that is the real point. Not how many years it is before we die but how many years we are living the active, healthy, mentally fit lives we want to live. Not the years in your life but the life in your years.

The problem of aging has been shifted down the road. People living into their 70s, 80s and 90s is more common every year. Alzheimer’s disease and other age-related chronic conditions have increased due to people living longer. “Now, many of us are living to our seventies; we’re experiencing this built-in obsolescence of humans that manifests itself in age-related chronic conditions,” said William Mair, the director of the Harvard Chan School Aging Initiative.

While contemplating how old we might theoretically live is interesting, perhaps a better approach would be to do what we can to ensure that whatever time we do have is a life and not simply an existence. And the best balms against aging poorly are the things our mothers and grandmothers told us to do: exercise regularly, avoid smoking, avoid drinking too much alcohol, and stay away from highly processed foods to focus on a balanced diet of healthy whole foods.