David A. SinclairCritiques

Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
Print: COPYRIGHT: 9/10/2019; ISBN 978-1501191978; PUBLISHER: Atria Books; Illustrated edition; PAGES 432; Unabridged

Digital: PUBLISHER: Atria Books. Kindle Edition

*(This version) Audio: COPYRIGHT: 9/10/2019; ISBN: 9781508296058; PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster Audio; DURATION: 11:56:56; PARTS: 10; File Size: 343687 KB; Unabridged (Overdrive LAPL)

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
How I picked it: I saw a print copy at the Newport Beach Friends of the Library bookshop that looked intriguing.
The promising progress in the research that’s been done on aging, and thoughts about what effect longer lives would have on our planet and living conditions.
What did I think? I felt that I learned quite a bit, and found it all interesting. A lot of research seems to be about wishful thinking, until there’s a breakthrough and suddenly the improbable becomes reality. Steps may be incremental, but it still sounds like progress.

AUTHOR:
David A. Sinclair:
From Wikipedia:
“David Andrew Sinclair AO (born June 26, 1969)[2] is an Australian biologist and academic known for his research on aging and epigenetics. Sinclair is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and is the co-director of its Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research.[3] He is an officer of the Order of Australia (AO).
Sinclair has appeared in Time magazine, The New York Times, The Charlie Rose Show, 60 Minutes, Boston magazine, The Washington Post, The Economist, TED and The Joe Rogan Experience.”

NARRATOR:
Mathew D. LaPlante
From Utah State University:
“Matthew LaPlante is an author, journalist, radio program host, advocate for educational equity, climate scientist, and associate professor of journalistic writing at Utah State University”

David A. Sinclair
See under Author

*Great narrations. David narrates the chapters and then between chapters Matthew serves as interviewer.

GENRE:
Nonfiction; Health & Fitness; Science

SUBJECTS:
Aging; Research; Epigenetics; Academia

DEDICATION
“To my grandmother Vera, who taught me to see the world the way it could be. To my mother, Diana, who cared more about her children than herself. To my wife, Sandra, my bedrock. And to my great-great-grandchildren; I am looking forward to meeting you.”

EXCERPT from Chapter 1:
“I GREW UP ON THE edge of the bush. In figurative terms, my backyard was a hundred-acre wood. In literal terms, it was much bigger than that. It went on as far as my young eyes could see, and I never grew tired of exploring it. I would hike and hike, stopping to study the birds, the insects, the reptiles. I pulled things apart. I rubbed the dirt between my fingers. I listened to the sounds of the wild and tried to connect them to their sources. It went on as far as my young eyes could see, and I never grew tired of exploring it. I would hike and hike, stopping to study the birds, the insects, the reptiles. I pulled things apart. I rubbed the dirt between my fingers. I listened to the sounds of the wild and tried to connect them to their sources.
And I played. I made swords from sticks and forts from rocks. I climbed trees and swung on branches and dangled my legs over steep precipices and jumped off of things that I probably shouldn’t have jumped off. I imagined myself as an astronaut on a distant planet. I pretended to be a hunter on safari. I lifted my voice for the animals as though they were an audience at the opera house.
“Coooeey!” I would holler, which means “Come here” in the language of the Garigal people, the original inhabitants.
I wasn’t unique in any of this, of course. There were lots of kids in the northern suburbs of Sydney who shared my love of adventure and exploration and imagination. We expect this of children. We want them to play this way.
Until, of course, they’re “too old” for that sort of thing. Then we want them to go to school. Then we want them to go to work. To find a partner. To save up. To buy a house.
Because, you know, the clock is ticking.
My grandmother was the first person to tell me that it didn’t have to be that way. Or, I guess, she didn’t tell me so much as show me.
She had grown up in Hungary, where she spent Bohemian summers swimming in the cool waters of Lake Balaton and hiking in the mountains of its northern shore at a holiday resort that catered to actors, painters, and poets. In the winter months, she helped run a hotel in the Buda Hills before the Nazis took it over and converted it to the central command of the Schutzstaffel, or “SS.”
A decade after the war, in the early days of the Soviet occupation, the Communists began to shut down the borders. When her mother tried to cross illegally into Austria, she was caught, arrested, and sentenced to two years in jail and died shortly after. During the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, my grandmother wrote and distributed anti-Communist newsletters in the streets of Budapest. After the revolution was crushed, the Soviets began arresting tens of thousands of dissidents, and she fled to Australia with her son, my father, reasoning that it was the furthest they could get from Europe.
She never set foot in Europe again, but she brought every bit of Bohemia with her. She was, I have been told, one of the first women to sport a bikini in Australia and got chased off Bondi Beach because of it. She spent years living in New Guinea—which even today is one of the most intensely rugged places on our planet—all by herself.
Though her bloodline was Ashkenazi Jew and she had been raised a Lutheran, my grandmother was a very secular person. Our equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer was the English author Alan Alexander Milne’s poem “Now We Are Six,” which ends:
But now I am six, I’m as clever as clever. So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.
She read that poem to my brother and me again and again. Six, she told us, was the very best age, and she did her damnedest to live life with the spirit and awe of a child of that age.”

RATING:
4

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
2-25-2023 to 3/9/2023

Thought provoking. Between chapters the reader and author had conversations making the listening experience more personal.
The authors basic point is that aging is a disease. It is a disease of losing information from the genetic code and its interaction with the ’epigenome’. He is very enthusiastic about what he has learned.
He isn’t suggesting we might never die but that we would feel healthy and remain active until death.
There may be problems with a population that lives twice as long- his expectation. But he feels human ingenuity is up to the task.
At 77 I am probably too old to be a major beneficiary from the things his lab is learning. Still it is a very upbeat and hopeful message.

This is NOT my REVIEW, it's an extract from the book I like to share. Thanks to Delanceyplace

Today's selection -- from Lifespan: Why We Age -- and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, PhD. For decades, scientists have known that restricting calorie intake is a reliable path for longer life:

"As far back as the 1970s … there have been observational stud­ies that strongly suggested long-term calorie restriction could help hu­mans live longer and healthier lives, too.

"In 1978 on the island of Okinawa, famed for its large number of cen­tenarians, bioenergetics researcher Yasuo Kagawa learned that the total number of calories consumed by schoolchildren was less than two-thirds of what children were getting in mainland Japan. Adult Okinawans were also leaner, taking in about 20 percent fewer calories than their main­land counterparts. Kagawa noted that not only were the lifespans of Oki­nawans longer, but their healthspans were, too -- with significantly less cerebral vascular disease, malignancy, and heart disease.

"In the early 1990s, the Biosphere 2 research experiment provided an­other piece of evidence. For two years, from 1991 to 1993, eight people lived inside a three-acre, closed ecological dome in southern Arizona, where they were expected to be reliant on the food they were growing inside. Green thumbs they weren't, though, and the food they farmed turned out to be insufficient to keep the participants on a typical diet. The lack of food wasn't bad enough to result in malnutrition, but it did mean that the team members were frequently hungry.

"One of the prisoners (and by 'prisoners' I mean 'experimental sub­jects') happened to be Roy Walford, a researcher from California whose studies on extending life in mice are still required reading for scientists en­tering the aging field. I have no reason to suspect that Walford sabotaged the crops, but the coincidence was rather fortuitous for his research; it gave him an opportunity to test his mouse-based findings on human sub­jects. Because they were thoroughly medically monitored before, during, and after their two-year stint inside the dome, the participants gave Wal­ford and other researchers a unique opportunity to observe the numerous biological effects of calorie restriction. Tellingly, the biochemical changes they saw in their bodies closely mirrored those Walford had seen in his long-lived calorie-restricted mice, such as decreased body mass (15 to 20 percent), blood pressure (25 percent), blood sugar level (21 percent), and cholesterol levels (30 percent), among others.

"In recent years, formal human studies have begun, but it has turned out to be quite difficult to get volunteer human subjects to reduce their food intake and maintain that level of consumption over long periods. As my colleagues Leonie Heilbronn and Eric Ravussin wrote in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2003, 'the absence of adequate information on the effects of good-quality, calorie-restricted diets in non­obese humans reflects the difficulties involved in conducting long-term studies in an environment so conducive to overfeeding. Such studies in free-living persons also raise ethical and methodologic issues.'

"In a re­port published in The Journals of Gerontology in 2017, a Duke University research team described how it sought to limit 145 adults to a diet of 25 percent fewer calories than is typically recommended for a healthy lifestyle. People being people, the actual calorie restriction achieved was, on average, about 12 percent over two years. Even that was enough, how­ever, for the scientists to see a significant improvement in health and a slowdown in biological aging based on changes in blood biomarkers.

"These days, there are many people who have embraced a lifestyle that permits significantly reduced caloric intake; about a decade ago, before fasting's most recent revival, some of them visited my lab at Harvard.

"'Isn't it hard to do what you do?' I asked Meredith Averill and her husband, Paul McGlothin, at the time members of CR Society Inter­national and still very much advocates for calorie restriction, who limit themselves to about 75 percent of the calories typically recommended by doctors and sometimes quite a bit less than that. 'Don't you just feel hungry all the time?'

"'Sure, at first,' McGlothin told me. 'But you get used to it. We feel great!'

"At lunch that day, McGlorhin expounded upon the merits of eat­ing organic baby food and slurped down something that looked to me like orange mush. I also noticed rhat both he and Averill were wearing turtlenecks. It wasn't winter. And most folks in my lab are perfectly com­fortable in T-shirts. But with so little fat on their bodies, they needed the extra warmth. Then in his late 60s, McGlothin showed no signs that his diet might slow him down. He was the CEO of a successful marketing company and a former New York State chess champion. He didn't look much younger than his age, though; in large part, I suspect this was because a lack of fat exposes wrinkles, but his blood biochemistry sug­gested otherwise. On his 70th birthday, his health indicators, from blood pressure and LDL cholesterol to resting heart rate and visual acuity, were typical of those of a much younger person. Indeed, they resembled those seen in the long-lived rats on calorie restriction.

"It's true that what we know about the impact of lifelong calorie re­striction in humans comes down to short-term studies and anecdotal experiences. But one of our close relatives has offered us insights into the longitudinal benefits of this lifestyle.

"Since the 1980s, a long-term study of calorie restriction in rhesus monkeys -- our close genetic cousins -- has produced stunningly com­pelling results. Before the study, the maximum known lifespan for any rhesus monkey was 40 years. But of twenty monkeys in the study that lived on calorie-restricted diets, six reached that age, which is roughly equivalent to their reaching 120 in human terms.

"To hit that mark, the monkeys didn't need to live on a calorie-restricted diet for their entire lives. Some of the test subjects were started on a 30 percent reduction regimen when they were middle-aged monkeys.

"CR works to extend the lifespan of mice, even when initiated at 19 months of age, the equivalent of a 60- to 65-year-old human, but the earlier the mice start on CR, the greater the lifespan extension. What longevity benefits of calorie restriction, but it's probably better to start earlier than later, perhaps after age 40, when things really start to go downhill, molecularly speaking.

That doesn't make a CR diet a good plan for everyone. Indeed, even Rozalyn Anderson, a former trainee of mine who's now a famous pro­fessor at the University of Wisconsin and a lead researcher in the rhe­sus study, says a 30 percent calorie-reduced diet for humans, long term, amounted in her mind to a 'bonkers diet.'

"It's certainly not bonkers for everyone, though, especially consider­ing that calorie restriction hasn't been demonstrated only to lengthen life but also to forestall cardiac disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer. It's not just a longevity plan; it's a vitality plan.

"It's nonetheless a hard sell for many people. It takes strong willpower to avoid the fridge at home or snacks at work. There's an adage in my field: if calorie restriction doesn't make you live longer, it will certainly make you feel that way.

"But it turns out that's okay, because research is increasingly demonstrating that many of the benefits of a life of strict and uncompromising calorie restriction can be obtained in another way. In fact, that way might be even better.

"To ensure a genetic response to a lack of food, hunger doesn't need to be the status quo. Once we've grown accustomed to stress, after all, it's no longer as stressful. Intermittent fasting, or IF-eating normal portions of food but with periodic episodes without meals -- is often portrayed as a new innovation in health. But long before my friend Valter Longo at the University of California, Los Angeles, began touting the benefits of IF, scientists had been studying the effects of periodic calorie restriction for the better part of a century."

I've been reading sf stories about life extension for a class I will teach, but I've also been reading books recommended by one of my co-teachers about the actuality of it. This one is by a Harvard Medical School researcher into aging. Compared to some others that I have read, it has more of a real science feel. It's somewhat written in that breathless style of popular science journalism, but not as often. There's some real science in here, or at least so it seems from the perspective of this nonscientist.

I also appreciated that Sinclair thinks through some of the social consequences of longer lifespan, and he has good answers where he can. Some areas, he freely admits, don't have good answers: the rich will gain access first, and longer lifespan will allow the rich to acquire even more, creating a feedback loop. (This is something I've seen in a number of the sf stories I've read.) On the other hand, I wasn't convinced by all his answers: he says we'll save money from not having to treat diseases that are symptoms of aging... but since he's not promising immortality, wouldn't those diseases catch up with us again at some point?

The book is clearly trying to be accessible but also not be fluff. I think it fails in threading the needle when it comes to explaining epigenetics, which is the key to Sinclair's theory of aging, but which I totally failed to understand the explanation of; it's a mixture of too-much technical detail and too-dumbed down analogies.

But on the whole, I found this to be one of the more convincing advocacies of anti-aging I've read. Should I start taking the supplements he recommends to extend my own lifespan...?

There is one reason I suggest people read this book - this is what the future looks like. This is where much research is headed. However, there are simple rules you can follow - proper diet, exercise, and proper sleep. This is what David Sinclair mentioned in his book. I don't believe you need to be part of some strange DNA sequencing exercise.
The God Machine mentality in the book disturbs me.
It is not an easy book to read. Even though he has tried to make it accessible to many readers, much of the technical stuff went above my head.
He didn't answer the question posed by the rock group Queen. "Who wants to live forever?"
His last two chapters addressed issues like climate change, inequality, and conflict. But he drowned them in his relentless optimism. This is techno-geek at its worst.

At my age, late 60s, I found sections of this book to be very useful. For example, my general physician had recommended that I take metformin but she did not do a very good job of explaining the benefits of the drug. Sinclair explained the benefits of metformin above and beyond treating diabetes.

I skimmed through much of the book. I sought out sections that I found practical for my situation. I bypassed the more "scientific related" sections that I did not really understand or had little interest in.

This book has or at least will change some habits in my life particularly when it comes to my diet and exercise habits.

Some of my notes (excerpts) from the book:

I believe that aging is a disease. I believe it is treatable. I believe we can treat it within our lifetimes. And in doing so, I believe, everything we know about human health will be fundamentally changed.

There are some simple tests to determine how biologically old you probably are. The number of push-ups you can do is a good indicator. If you are over 45 and can do more than 20, you are doing well. The other test of age is the sitting rising test. Sit on the floor, barefooted, with the legs crossed. Lean forward quickly and see if you can get up in one move. A young person can. A middle-age person typically needs to push off with one of their hands. An elderly person often needs to get onto one knee.

When we stay healthy and vibrant, as long as we feel young physically and mentally, our age doesn't matter. That's true whether you are 32, 52, or 92. Most middle-aged and older adults in the United States report feeling 10 to 20 years younger than their age, because they feel healthy. And feeling younger than your age predicts lower mortality and better cognitive abilities later in life.

After 25 years of researching aging and having read thousands of scientific papers, if there is one piece of advice I can offer, one sure fire way to stay healthy longer, one thing you can do to maximize your lifespan right now, it's this: eat less often.

Provocative theories around aging - it's a preventable disease state

Skip to the end and read what the author do. You would save some time...

Definitely worth a read, even if you're worried about the science behind it.

Interesting and passionate discourse on a topic that is not commonly discussed - how to prevent aging. Unfortunately, too many acronyms and technical terms littered within the narrative made it difficult to gain an in-depth understanding of and appreciation for the field. Still, it served as a good introduction and made me interested enough to look for more literature and research about aging.

I have a feeling this will be a long review, so if you're just looking for some cliff-notes then mine are: "This book has the potential to change the way you live your life. You might not enjoy reading it (*1), but the topic it addresses will definitely affect you personally. Whether it's right after reading it (*2), or at a societal level in the years to come, that's up to you."

Now for the long version...

My previous knowledge of David Sinclair was from his visits to JRE podcast, where I found him to be an insightful and smart fella' (*3). This also comes across throughout the book, which was nice to see. I'm not denying that I went into this with a bias towards liking it, but like everything I read, I try to correct for it.

The way I see it, books can serve many purposes. Whether it's as simple as keeping you from having your own thoughts for a few dead minutes (*4), entertaining you with a well-written prose, engaging you in an action-twisted plot or changing your entire world-view by completely removing a deep-rooted assumption you've previously held since you were 4 years old, I'll have to say this book very much does the latter.

I'm not a slob to begin with. Ever since high-school my views were that your body should not be mistreated. That is if you plan on it being there for you in the long run. You either routinely take care of it as a force of habit, or you eventually try to patch it up in a very painful, costly and potentially mentally debilitating way at some point in the future (which personally, I see the loss of mental faculties as the highest price you can pay for neglect). This lead me to always try my best at being up to date on the latest medical discoveries and trying to fine tune my mental model of how my body works in hopes of better maintaining it.

That being said, I always started off by assuming that I have somewhere around 40-ish healthy adult years ahead of me (if I'm lucky), and that I should try and work around that when it came to setting goals and thinking what long-term choices are best for me to take. This book challenges that assumption to it's core.

What if my previous goal of having a decently healthy standard lifespan are me setting a low bar? Of course, I'll be lucky to have that in any case, but what if I could set the bar at actually increasing the limit of those 40 years instead? My previous goal of keeping a good health is already on the table and is pretty much included in the new goal, so what would it cost me to raise my health-span (*5)?

This book did a decent job at answering that question for me and I found the answer shocking. I think the reason I found it shocking is because of a life-long aversion to anything that advertises *rejuvenation* or *making you young again* gained from the bombardment of marketing buzzwords and a tradition of snake-oil salesmen humanity has had for millennia. It might be a case of boy-cry-wolf at a grand scale. We've been burned by bad/fake science & marketing for many years, so now when actual hard science tells us that "hey... you know this crazy idea we've had about stopping aging, well it seems it might actually be doable."(*6), our knee-jerk reaction is to ignore it.

David is not promising that, but what he does is show you just how close we might be to achieving it soon. That to me is mind-blowing out of the box. The book details how different discoveries clicked together in recent years to get us from seeing it as a crazy idea to a technology problem?! And as far as it goes, we're pretty good at solving technology issues when they get enough time and funding.

There's a great deal of things you can do now that are natural and proven to at least postpone some aspects of aging, but the review is long already and I want you to do the work of reading it to actually find out.

*1 - you might not enjoy the style, length, analogies, etc.
*2 - by curving your calorie intake, taking better care of yourself etc.
*3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOTS0HS7aq4
*4 - that's not something we allow anymore as a society.
*5 - health-span = % of lifespan lived in good health
*6 - scientific shrug ¯_(ツ)_/¯

In Lifespan, the Harvard ageing scientist describes the current state of play of the science of why we age, and what can be done to slow or even reverse this process.

Ageing relates to a complex set of processes, including the shortening of the telomeres, the protective chromosome endcaps, and mitochondrial dysfunction. However, there may be an underlying cause to all these factors, which is that the cell loses information about how to function. They do this because the DNA gets damaged and then stops telling the cell how to work properly – the correct information for the cell to carry out its myriad tasks is increasingly degraded.

What can we do to stop this deleterious process? Sinclair recommends a set of actions: exercise, intermittent fasting, exposing ourselves to hot (saunas) and cold (t-shirts in the winter) environments, a vegan diet. It’s also possible that certain chemical supplements may help, most notably Metformin (a common type II diabetes drug), resveratrol, and NMN. All these together may activate DNA repair mechanisms in our bodies, as well as reduce inflammation, and help keep us young.

The scientific content in this book is very detailed and clear, and the ethical and societal implications of this work are put forward with an obvious agenda, but the arguments are well reasoned. This, to me, was one of the most important science books I’ve read.

However, I should add the small caveat that Sinclair has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies, and some of those pies are commercial ventures. At times, the NMN and other suggestions appeared a little like adverts. The science isn’t so clear as yet on the benefits of NMN, for instance. It could be that while NMN boosts cellular activity in ways that might “rejuvenate” cells, it might also boost the activity of cancer cells. This research is ongoing, and there are as yet no published studies to demonstrate the long-term benefit of NMN in humans. I would have preferred Sinclair to express more caution about some of his claims.

Nevertheless, this is an extremely important, very engaging and well written book and, as long as you aren’t totally taken in by the promises of impending immortality, it is a book that everyone should read.