
Could the DNA of these ‘super seniors’ hold the secret to healthy aging? - fmihaila
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/article-could-the-dna-of-these-super-seniors-hold-the-secret-to-healthy/
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reasonattlm
"Healthy aging" is a oxymoron and people should stop using it. Aging is by
definition a rise in mortality risk occurring due to the progressive failure
of bodily systems. It is the opposite of health.

You cannot age healthily. It is an impossibility. If you are aging, your
health is deteriorating.

To say you want to do something about aging by saying that you want to allow
it to continue - but "healthily" \- is to immediately engineer the defeat of
whatever it is you then plan to do, because it won't be anything meaningful.
The only way to address aging is to find a piece of it, a cause, and reverse
or repair that cause. To attack aging. To oppose it. To try to end it.

Running around trying to figure out why some people have a 1.1% chance of
living to 100 rather than a 1% chance of living to 100 isn't helpful. Yes, it
will probably tell you something about how our biology works when it is
horribly damaged, but why would we care about that, rather than caring about
what the damage is and how to repair it?

So very much of aging research is completely irrelevant to progress in human
health because it is misdirected in this way.

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maturz
Yes, anti aging research is more interesting
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SENS_Research_Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SENS_Research_Foundation)

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koverda
_Goes to gym, plays sports, active social life._

I'm sure those contribute to healthy aging.

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sametmax
> At 88, he hits the gym twice a week, plays on a curling team in winter and
> drives from Tsawwassen to Vancouver for Sunday dinners with his daughter.

Yeah, that seems more a cause than an effect.

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TheSpiceIsLife
The main thrust of the article is that being active and sociable might not be
enough, that people who live longer may have genetics that protect against
disease.

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stochastic_monk
There’s also the Scripps Wellderly project where vcf data is available for all
of their subjects.

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ada1981
I’d like to start a collection of articles in which the title poses a question
and the answer is actually yes.

My rule of thumb is that, whenever an article says “Is X the secret to Y?”
that the answer is almost always “NO”.

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noahlt
Unfortunately, you've been beaten to the punch by Ian Betteridge:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

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ada1981
Ha! Thank you!

