Practices, Laws, or Principles of living longer

[Cantor080]

I am starting to search data on what actions are to be made for living longer. I might have to know the working of human body, but it might take lot of time. Within the time I know the working of human body, and have custom actions for me to live longer, to eliminate me not do any of the random actions, I have now thought on knowing the actions or conformations which are known to have greater probability of allowing humans live longer.

Can you all suggest actions or conformations allowing humans to live longer or else, suggest sources for them?

 

[SchroedingersLion]

Is this for a research project or do you simply intend to live longer through better habits?

If it's the latter:
-get enough sleep
-eat clean (especially LOTS of veggies and water)
-get enough movement/exercise
-don't overexert yourself physically or mentally (e.g. don't work 70h every week without taking proper breaks/holidays, don't work in places that destroy your body over the years)
-keep it short on drugs (smoking, alcohol and others)
-be careful and responsible, e.g. at driving

It's all about developing good living habits that become completely natural. Sadly, this can only increase the probability to live longer. Nothing is certain. It's still worth the try as you will generally feel better, if you start living like this.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

In 2008, a large UK study worked out how a combination of four healthy behaviours would affect your health. These were: not smoking; keeping active; moderating how much alcohol you drink; and eating five daily portions of fruit and vegetables.

People who did all four healthy behaviours gained an average of 14 years of life compared to people who didn’t do any of them.

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-cancer/can-cancer-be-prevented
https://scienceblog.cancerresearchu...7.1963601292.1537708434-1318229269.1537708434

 

[Tom.G]

Heart disease and Cancer are the two big ones, combined they are responsible for 45% of deaths.
For more statistics see: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

 

[Mark44]

If it's the latter:
-get enough sleep
-eat clean (especially LOTS of veggies and water)
-get enough movement/exercise
-don't overexert yourself physically or mentally (e.g. don't work 70h every week without taking proper breaks/holidays, don't work in places that destroy your body over the years)
-keep it short on drugs (smoking, alcohol and others)
-be careful and responsible, e.g. at driving

And choose your parents carefully...

 

[SchroedingersLion]

And choose your parents carefully...

Very true. I just have to think about pregnant mothers drinking and smoking. This sh't should be heavily punished by law.

 

[irk]

Read 'Longevity Diet' by Valter Longo or his original publications.

 

[BWV]

Is this for a research project or do you simply intend to live longer through better habits?

-eat clean (especially LOTS of veggies and water)

'clean' eating is a marketing gimmick and mostly pseudoscience. Vegetables are good, regardless of whether they are organic or GMOs

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/11/why-we-fell-for-clean-eating

 

[SchroedingersLion]

'clean' eating is a marketing gimmick and mostly pseudoscience. Vegetables are good, regardless of whether they are organic or GMOs

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/11/why-we-fell-for-clean-eating

With clean I simply meant "healthy". The stuff that woman was doing in the article is obviously bs.

 

[eachus]

I've been watching these statistics (as a statistician) for a long time. I keep hoping to figure out better statistics for tracking life expectancy. The answer is that the calculated numbers will always understate the actual life expectancy, but the amount may be as low as a few percent, or get into a territory where NBU (new better than used) test fail on the data.

Let's talk about bathtubs for a few minutes. If you plot the probability of dying of any cause, or the probability of dying of heart attacks or cancer against age on a logarithmic page, you will come up with a graph that looks like a bathtub. The left side (birth to age 5) has been dropping rapidly--from over 40% in some areas to well under 1% today: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality The right side of the bathtub slopes at around 45 degrees (depending on how many factors of ten your graph has). This side of the bathtub has moved just a few years even going back centuries. On the other hand, the most recent increase in life expectancies is due to moving that right wall--there is almost no infant mortality left to reduce in developed countries.

That's the grim part. More important is that the mortality tables have gone from the big ten causes to the big two: heart disease and cancer. Three of the big ten: chronic lower respiratory diseases, influenza and diabetes are still in the top ten causes (in the US) but are dropping fairly rapidly, stroke is dropping slowly, and Alzheimer’s (a recent addition) is rising. Alzheimer’s may be a part of the wall, but there is a genetic component, and a treatment, if not a cure should arrive within a decade. If either heart disease or cancer drops out of the top two, remaining life expectancy at 60 (or 80) will shoot up. Getting all the cars on the road automated can knock a big hole in the accidental deaths. If both of the top two drop out, your calculated life expectancy will rise much faster than your age. Yes, your chance of dying in the year you die won't change. But predicting that year will be almost impossible. There is obviously no data on mortality for those born in the last 100 years once they reach the century mark, or two centuries, or three...

 

[jim mcnamara]

@eachus As a statisitican you probably are aware of this, but others may not be:

What you show is described by a survivorship curve - Type I with high infant mortality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_curve
The whole topic of describing risk of mortality is the substance of actuarial science
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_analysis - based on the survivorship curve function you assume at the start.

 

[eachus]

Yep. Assuming no change with time, actuaries have come up with a lot of ways to predict deaths in an age cohort. But there is a problem in that medicine and economic growth have been improving human survival rates. To a large extent, in the past few hundred years, this has taken two forms, reducing infant mortality, and reducing overall mortality regardless of age. In the bathtub plot, this causes the left side and bottom to drop, but when you get above 70, age related mortality kicks in, and most members of a cohort die at about the same age. Decades ago almost everyone reached 60, very few reached eighty.

Now medical research is beginning to make a dent in elderly death, and there are a few problems when you try to describe 1) what the real mortality assumptions should be for young people today. They did not have a lot of diseases which were common when I was a child: measles, chicken pox, rubella, mumps, etc. How did these effect our health in old age? Shingles in old age requires that you had chicken pox. 2) what happens when you have a step function in mortality? (The death rate spikes or drops suddenly.) A lot of mortality models give nonsense results. We have had some (small) effects like that--the influenza pandemic of 1918 (one hundred years ago) dropped calculated life expectancy in the US by 12 years, but the reality was closer to 3 years before the pandemic, and an increase in life expectancy if you survived the epidemic. 3) When the decrease in death rates is huge the calculations break down entirely.

Let's say that next year someone develops a technique to cut deaths from heart disease by half, and someone else finds a cure for most cancers. Did you suddenly become immortal? No. But if a few people in your cohort live for a couple thousand years, there will be an unrealistically high life expectancy because the average (mean) age at death goes to infinity due to those few outliers, while the median may only increase by a few years. (And Alzheimer's becomes the number one cause of death.)

That's why, even though actuarial tables have been around for a century or so, there is still a problem of coming up with a useful number telling you about how much longer you will live. (Assuming you will live as long as your parents or grandparents is a reasonable place to start. Genetics does count. You may need to correct by dropping out those who didn't die of old age.)