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March 31, 2005
And What Would You Suggest?
[Disclaimer: I have no idea what Jay Olshansky ate yesterday.]
My friend Lisa, who was the best organizer I ever worked with, had a great way of handling criticism. When someone would tell her that they didn't like what she was doing, she would say, "And what would you suggest?" This was effective, because nine times out of ten, the person would have no alternate plan to recommend, and it would be clear that he or she was blowing off steam more than constructively criticizing. On the occasion when someone did have something to suggest, they would then put it forward and all rational options could be discussed.
I remembered Lisa's criticism trick yesterday when I watched a debate between Aubrey de Grey and Jay Olshansky at BIOMEDEX, a conference of biotech and related companies in Montreal. The debate was, as always, on the foreseeability of radical anti-aging biomedicine. Aubrey started off with a presentation of his SENS approach (http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens if you've been hiding under a rock and don't know what I'm talking about), and also pointed out numerous occasions on which Dr. Olshansky has agreed that some kind of extension of lifespan through bio-medicine is likely at some point in the near future. Aubrey laid out the seven deadly things that kill you, along with the reasons to believe we can fix them, in enough detail that the audience was clearly getting it. I wondered how Olshansky was going to respond, as he's a demographer, not a biologist, and therefore I thought unlikely to take Aubrey on about the specifics of the SENS approach.
I was right that Dr. Olshansky avoided the specifics. There were many points to his talk, and I won't attempt to summarize them all. I thought that his presentation was very well done, and to be honest, I said a loud "Amen, brother" to many of his points. You're surprised by that, aren't you? Well, let me tell you why I was really warming up to Olshansky by the end of his talk, but why this story ends with me getting into bed with MR last night (after 38 hours without sleep) and announcing, "I got into a fight with Jay Olshansky!"
As I said, Olshansky didn't take de Grey on when it comes to biology. Instead he tried to convince the audience that radically extended lifespans should not be our goal. Rather, he suggested that we should focus on three things: a) Improving public health b) postponing the period of time when people are in age-related decline c) improving people's functioning right now.
Well, well, well. You're singing one of my favorite songs there, brother. As anyone who has known me for a long time, or anyone who has read the unpublished blog entry "The Two Are Inextricably Intertwined Over the Medium Term" knows, up until the very instant that I was converted into an Mprize volunteer, I was passionate about food and health as a public health issue. While I recognized the difficult of converting others to CR, I believed (and continue to believe) that encouraging people to do even a moderate version of CR would be a worthwhile endeavor. In fact, that's one of the main reasons why I started this blog that you've come to know and (I hope) love. So as Dr. Olshansky is showing graph after horrifying graph of the rise in obsity, especially in children, and urging that we should do something about it, I'm about to jump up and start clapping, all the while thinking, "Hey, I'm supposed to be rooting for the other guy, the one with the beard!"
Now here's where I disagree with Dr. Olshansky: While I think that we should be putting energy and public health into ending obesity, I don't think that we should do that to the exclusion of focusing medical research dollars on a real cure for aging. And I don't think that taking about the foreseeability of radical anti-aging medicine is going to discourage people from taking on the obesity crisis. The number of Mprize volunteers who are also CR practitioners makes the opposite argument: people who take seriously the possibility of radical anti-aging medicine are just as likely to take better care of themselves than worse. In any case, I doubt that there is anyone out there finishing off his second pint of Ben and Jerry's and thinking, "It'll all be okay because Aubrey de Grey says we can cure aging. Pass the mashed potatoes!"
I am also in general very discouraged about the idea that most people will *voluntarily* do much of anything to improve their own health. One of the reasons why I find working with the Mprize very personally satisfying is that my efforts will help people, whether they have the self-discipline to help themselves or not. I know that most people won't do CR. Most people won't even adopt the pathetically weak recommendations of public health "authorities" -- even the authorities themselves aren't models of what they preach! I mean, hello! People who live and work with the evidence that the standard American diet is deadly keep eating crap, so I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that anything short of coercion is going to get the masses to eat less. But if we are successful in our efforts at the Mprize, we can help bring about rejuvenation therapies that won't be so darned difficult for people.
But here's Dr. Olshansky talking about how we should put our energy into public health, increasing the time in which people are youthful and healthy, and improving people's functioning right now. All three things that my mission to convert more people to CR is supposed to accomplish.
So I was expecting to walk up to Jay Olshansky after the debate and start a happy chat about how much better everything would be if lots and lots of people would do at least moderate CR. I pointed out that CR will get us most of the benefits he outlines in his three goals, and that Luigi Fontana is studying CR'd humans and finding excellent health results.
Olshansky said that he doesn't advocate human CR because it's not been proven that it works. Well, hmmm... when I pointed out that so far in the humans who are practicing it, it seems to be contributing to both immediate feelings of well-being, fewer illnesses, etc., as well as to be lowering risk factors for killers like heart disease and diabetes, he said that it also has risks, like it might mess with fertility. I pointed out (sorry if this is too much sharing) that I practice CR pretty intensely, and I'm not in amenorrhea (I was for a short time, but once my body adjusted to my current calorie level things started functioning normally) so I'm fairly confident I could get pregnant if for some completely unfathomable reason I wanted to inflict the terror of children on myself. Besides, for people who have already had their children or don't want any children, this is simply not an issue. Dr. Olshansky then said, "But what you're on is an experimental diet."
"So is whatever you ate today," I answered.
And here's where I get to the point of what was frustrating about this encounter. If what Jay Olshansky ate yesterday was even remotely similar to the standard American diet, then it's actually not experimental: his own evidence proves that it's killing people! Left and right, killing people! People are dying young, feeling terrible, and looking like crap. Caution should be applied to that diet: public health authorities should be warning people to avoid anything that looks remotely like SAD as though it were the plague! Instead, they're urging that people eat unhealthful gak "in moderation," exercise "moderately" (when everyone knows that even very athletic people die of heart attacks if their diets stink) and "reduce stress." Huh? My "experimental" diet is the only thing that makes any sense: you know that eating too many calories kills you, and that in every animal in which it's ever been tested, CR extends the period of youthful functioning. Why are we handwringing about whether or not CR might mess with fertility when a) lots of CR'd women have successfully had children b) everyone else in the room is overweight and looks like crap! Well, I take that back, we were in Montreal, where people speak French, and therefore look better and are thinner. They also dress much better and have better hair. I love French women and long to be one, though I fear that many of them smoke and of course I would never do that. Can't very well be a life-extensionist and go setting your lungs on fire all the time, now can you? But I digress.
Olshansky opposes Aubrey's contention that we should do whatever we can to find the cure for aging so that we can dramatically extend the time when we are youthful and healthy. Rather, he says, we should put our energy and funding into ending the obesity epidemic, which threatens to not just stop life expectancy from growing, but to actually *shorten* average life expectancy. But when asked about humans doing CR, which we have every reason to believe accomplishes all three of the goals he outlined as being more worthy than the goal of dramatically extending human lifespan, he says he doesn't advocate CR because it's an "experimental diet." An "experimental" diet that's working for people, right now, including the size 0 girl in front of him who has been awake for almost 36 hours and is still energetic, healthy, and looking smashing if I do say so myself? An "experimental" diet that combines all that is known about the dangers of excess calories with all that is known about the importance of getting the right nutrients? An "experimental diet" that makes people look and feel much, much younger than they are (has he seen a picture of MR? MR looks 22!) How can public health authorities, who live with the evidence, fail to advocate for CR? What, precisely, would he suggest?
Posted by april at March 31, 2005 09:26 AM
Comments
Hey April,
That's some kickass blogging right there. I espcially like:
"If what Jay Olshansky ate yesterday was even remotely similar to the standard American diet, then it's actually not experimental: his own evidence proves that it's killing people!"
I do have to take issue with one thing, though. You can't confuse the CR part with the ON part.
Calorie restriction, especially when severe, can leave a person with minimal reserves and change the chemistry of the body enough that doctors no longer understand what they're looking at. Also, if it doesn't have an impact on fertility, it certainly has an effect on the *desire* of some to exercise whatever capability they still maintain. There are also other effects, some psychological, whose consequences are not yet fully understood.
Optimal nutrition, on the other hand, is far less experimental. While we don't know exactly what "optimal" entails, simply getting the RDI of all your nutrients, consuming plenty of quality protein, avoiding excessive saturated and trans fats, and keeping your glycemic load in check are pretty well backed steps in the right direction, and they're almost guaranteed to yield better results than SAD.
So, my feeling is that, while it's pretty non-controversial to argue that getting people to eat a much more nutritious diet would have a major positive impact on the national health crisis, your footing is definitely not as firm when you suggest that anything beyond mild CR would do the same.
Take it easy,
-Dan
P.S. The comment box apparently jettisons all html tags before posting the material, making it look like I'm being stingy with the carriage returns. Maybe this means I wasn't supposed to wrote so much :).
Posted by: Dan at March 31, 2005 05:38 PM
Oops...or maybe it's just the Preview feature that hides all the paragraphs separators...when you actually hit Post, it works fine.
Posted by: Dan at March 31, 2005 05:40 PM
Wow, April - this is really the gist of it all isn't it? It just shows how truly irrational people are about food and health. Your arguments are irrefutable - and very well stated, I may add. We need to practice them for the press, since they also say this same crap over and over again.
Posted by: Mary at March 31, 2005 08:23 PM
Clap, clap, clap...
Wow, you always find the words I would want to speak and the ones seem not to be able of going out of my mouth!
Just what I believe: SAD is really a big experiment, a huge poblational study, that is clearly giving us its results, where we can see the irrefutable conclusions. And as far as you say, CR(ON) beats the three phantoms of Obesity, Disease-years near the end, and Short-living. What better aproach do anybody suggest you could do here and now?
Posted by: Willie at April 1, 2005 12:44 AM
April, based on just reading your blog, not hearing the debate in Montreal, my reaction is that you're right, de Grey is right, and that Olshansky is right. We ought to be doing all of the things that de Grey and Olshansky advocate -- they're all important in the quest for greater wellness and longevity. Olshansky sounds overly conservative in his stance on CR. Maybe it hasn't been proven to increase longevity in humans, but there won't be enough data to prove it or disprove it for many years. In the meantime, we can look at its effect on the markers of disease and aging, and conclude that CR makes us less likely to die of certain diseases. Hope that Olshansky understands that the emphasis should be on CRON, not just CR.
So what is this about "we were in Montreal, where people speak French, and therefore look better and are thinner." What is it about speaking French that makes people look better and be thinner? Is it because it's harder to pronounce words correctly, so it takes more effort and burns more calories? You had another comment earlier about people being better in Canada. Will those of us in the States get better just by crossing the border or do we have to born there or live there for a certain number of years? This is important for people planning retirement, i.e., is it too late to get better by moving to Canada?
Posted by: Howard at April 1, 2005 06:53 AM
I agree with you about the way you view the issue. I remember, long time ago, Jack London said something like "Everything positive has a negative side; everything negative has a positive side." I also find it interesting to see different points of views and learn useful things in the discussion.
Posted by: Richard Hill at May 23, 2005 08:59 AM
Posted by: size pro at May 23, 2005 01:49 PM