Longevity studies: Your cheat sheet to a longer, healthier life

Who wants to live forever? Well, we do. Humans have been fascinated by ways to extend our lifespans since time immemorial. And the interesting thing is, we’ve been getting better at it. According to Worldometer.com, the average life expectancy (of both men and women) is currently 73.3 years; it was 64 years in 1990.

However, while we fight tooth and nail to survive just a bit longer — is it enough to just exist? The answer, obviously, is no. We want to maintain a good quality of life even as we hunker down and struggle against the tide of ageing. Enter longevity studies, a branch of research dedicated to figuring out how to live longer and be healthier.

More than physical intervention

Dr Adeel Khan, world renowned stem cell specialist who has a number of celebrity clients including Tony Robbins and Chris Hemsworth, explains that this health refers not only to the physicality of a person. “You could have a six pack and have the best physique in the world, but if you’re depressed, you’re not really living the longevity lifestyle, because you’re not really optimised from a mental perspective. I think it’s a combination of mind, body, spirit when it comes to longevity… if you have a lack of purpose, you don’t have something that drives you and something that brings you happiness outside of materialistic stuff then you’re not really going to be living the optimal longevity lifestyle.”

He goes on to add that to live a healthy life, people need to focus on the fundamentals. “The basics are the basics, and they haven’t changed,” he shrugs. “With the science getting really molecular, we can now say more confidently that exercising, resistance training, doing cardiovascular training, increasing heart rate variability, good sleep, stress management, nutrition, minimally processed foods are all things that make a difference.”

He insists that people should first target these areas before they venture into any supplements, peptides, or regenerative medicine.

And the way to do that is by practising self-awareness. “At the very foundation is mindset. What type of relationship do you have with your body? What type of relationship do you have with food? A lot of people do stress eating or emotional eating. A lot of people have a history of trauma, and then they use food to cope with it, and that’s where food addiction comes from. And so I think you have to first understand, why do you want to be healthy in the first place? If you have to continuously push yourself, you’re going to eventually run out of motivation,” he adds.

Step two is discovering what works for you and then comes the whole adding of supplements, etc. to your routine.

Khan is quick to point out that working towards longevity can be (but doesn’t have to be) an expensive endeavour. “It can be very inexpensive and easy and accessible to everyone, because it’s just about education, which means knowing what the right things to do are, and then having a systematic approach to it. Having blood work and having more data will be a way to make it more personalised… it takes a bit of the guesswork out of the process. But having said that, most people don’t necessarily need the fancy blood tests and stuff. Most people just need to exercise more and eat less processed food and sleep more, to do the foundational stuff,” he explains.

The thing we need to fight is, he explains, conditioning. “It’s called condition wanting — our bodies want certain foods or certain things that are not good for health, because we’ve been doing it since we were children, and we’re just used to it; it’s an unconscious psychological loop that we go into,” he says, adding that that’s partly why it’s so important for healthy habits to be inculcated in children.

Nature or nurture?

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