Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying) by Bill Gifford

I can’t say precisely when I began to shift my reading preferences strongly towards non-fiction, but I suspect it was in graduate school.  It was during that period in my life that, perhaps unwittingly, became more productivity-focused and began a habit of reading to learn. reading several hours a day wasn’t entirely new based on my undergraduate experiences, but the regularity of that pace in graduate school was new. Reading A LOT became a part of daily life, a part that I can still happily re-enact into if the pieces of my current life fall, or rather be forcibly pressed, into place. My reading as graduate student was nearly entirely a part of my overall studies, and the goal of my studies was to learn new ideas and information. I guess I’ve shaken the habit of purposeful reading. I’m guilty of skipping over the short story in nearly every issue of the New Yorker magazine for the past ten years, yet I have surely read hundreds of articles on many topics essentially irrelevant to my life. A first hand account of the Arab Spring? Interesting! A new short story by Zadie Smith? Mmmm….only if I run out of reading material on this cross-country flight.

But Bill Gifford’s new book Spring Chicken falls squarely in the middle of that beautiful Venn diagram of book preferences in my head: non-fiction? Check! Science-related? Check! Science I am personally very interested in? Check!

True story: Even as a boy, I made it a goal to live to 100 years. During sporting events in high school and college, I would crack the joke that I was training for the Senior Olympics; that is, 50 years in advance,  which I guess doesn’t sound so funny now that I’m rapidly approaching middle age and the youngest age bracket is 50 (!) years or older. My father’s side of the family has a great track record for longevity: three of the last four deaths were in the early to mid 90’s. My mother’s side is not so stellar, with early deaths due to heart disease (OK, that’s something I can prevent) and acute myeloid leukemia (ugh, that’s NOT something I can do much about).  But by and large, I have always believed that my good genes plus an active, healthy style (what other generation started exercising and eating right as early as I did?) would certainly get me to the land of centenarians.

My takeaways from the book:

1. Environment/lifestyle can get you to 80 years old, but genetics gets you to 100 years – This insight, based on research on centenarians, was a major bummer to me. As I described above, I’ve wanted to life to 100 since I was a kid, and I thought/think I’ve done all the right things. I have harbored this feeling that no generation in history had the information I did about human physiology or would have avoided vices, ate as well or exercised as regularly as early on as I have. But if data like GWAS data bears out, and barring any future intervention (such as gene therapy or epigenetic modification), it might mean nothing, and I’ll circle the drain in my 9th decade like so many of my predecessors.
2. The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging – I’d love to be a part of this! Gifford offers some very funny commentary on his interactions with other participants of “BLAST”, as he refers to it. I’m definitely inclined to the Quantified Self end of the spectrum, so I’m sure I’d find it fascinating to learn about my own cognition and physiology in great detail. That said, one downside of QS sleuthing is the repeated blows leveled against one’s inner sense of exceptionalism; that is, we all feel special on the inside, that we matter so much, that we must be unique in some way. Sadly, I have learned my lesson over and over again that I have the same foibles and deficiencies that all people do. I’m part of the same normal distribution and not a outlier (at least on any measure that I’ve discovered). Nonetheless, QS thinking to me is an aspect of self-actualization, allowing me to understand who I am, how I’m built, and what makes me tick. Traveling to NIH from California every three years seems like an incredible opportunity to enhance that process
3. Better lipid profiling – In Chapter 6, Gifford discusses cholesterol and lipid profiling. Like most men of a certain age, I’ve done the standard lipid panel performed. But Gifford went one step further, and had a lipidologist perform a “Boston Heart panel” on him, which provided much more granularity on his lipid profile, especially with regards to HDL and LDL particle size. I looked this up, and found that Boston Heart is a company and they offer multiple tests. I assume Gifford was referring to the Boston Heart HDL Map test. I’ve reached out to my physician and I hope to take this test myself. As Gifford describes, LDL particle size is influenced by variations in the gene for cholesteryl ester transfer protein, or CTEP. Though Gifford didn’t explicitly state it, I assume that the genetic variant he sought is one that results in lower CTEP activity/affinity, which results in the larger LDL particle size, which appear to be advantageous for cardiovascular health and aging. I assume this because I know that several pharmaceutical companies have tried to develop or are development CTEP inhibitors for high cholesterol and metabolic disease. Now that I think about it, it wouldn’t take me long to see if there is a SNP for CTEP variants and check my raw data from 23andMe  to see where I stand.
4. We should be thinking about fat and muscle as “endocrine organs”  and not as inert, structural parts of our anatomy. This area of research is fascinating and, at least with regards to the paradoxical IL-6 discovery that Gifford describes, is bound to keep biologists busy for many years and hold many surprises.
5. The important role that attitude plays in health span. Perhaps not surprisingly, an optimistic, can-do attitude appears to have a multiplicative effect on several important aspects of aging, such as levels of physical activity, approach to social life, and staying intellectually curious. Even if it doesn’t lengthen life span per se, maintaining a positive attitude I would argue simply makes life better. The key question for me is: What strategies can we employ to supplement our baseline temperament to buffer us from the inevitable setbacks and losses in life? Happy marriage? Meditation? Practicing gratitude?
6. The Biosphere experiment of the early 1990’s – I vaguely remember this from when I was young, so it was very fun to read Gifford’s account of it. One of his key points, which was new to me, was that it turned out to be a long-term, involuntary experiment of caloric restriction in humans. However, while the health outcomes were quite poor, seemingly contradicting the many animal studies showing health benefits, the experiment was ultimately confounded by the exposure of the Biosphere inhabitants to abnormally high carbon monoxide levels. Yikes! At any rate, Gifford’s account of the episode compelled me to put Jane Poynter’s book The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2 on my reading list.
7. The inherent challenges of simple hormonal replacement therapy, especially testosterone in men – Gifford did a great job recounting the long history of attempts to recapture youth by replacing reintroducing something young into someone old. I’ve long assumed, intuitively, that simple long-term administration of supplemental testosterone isn’t a good idea. First, there are hormonally-driven, androgen-dependent cancers, notably reproductive cancers like prostate cancer. Second, Mother Nature always engineers in feedback mechanisms to maintain homeostasis. Jacking up testosterone levels seems like it would lead to both a decrease in androgen synthesis and decrease in androgen receptors, both of which would lead you worse off (if “low T” is really you’re problem). Knowing what I know, which isn’t very much, I do wonder if short term use or late life use of androgen precursors, to boost production (think L-dopa for dopamine), would have a better risk/benefit profile. If I’m, say, 80 or 85 years old, the risk of dying from prostate cancer is low (it’s a rather indolent disease, until it becomes “castration-resistant” and metastasizes to bone) and the benefit in increased muscle mass and vitality would be high. Then again, the first drugs targeting the myostatin pathway will soon be approved, so there will certainly be other means of opposing atrophy of muscles at least.   Also
   • Also in this vein is Gifford’s discussion of the miraculous parabiosis studies recently reported by groups at Harvard and Stanford. These are incredibly exciting,  yet I must mention that experiments that identified the purported age-reversing plasma factor, GDF11, have been called into question since Gifford’s book was published.
8. Days of Life App – This app calculates (crudely) the number of days you have left to live and will send you a notification each day of the number of days you have left. Gifford hated it. I love it. To him it was morbid. To me, it’s a reminder of carpe diem or, if you prefer, momento mori. The inimitable Kevin Kelly has written about a similar  life countdown clock. I considered having a similar one built as a gift to myself for my 40th birthday, my official crossing into middle age. The app is a simpler alternative, though as I mentioned above, the days remaining calculation is very simplistic. It’s based solely on your sex, the year you were born, and where you live.

There were a few topics that Gifford didn’t touch on. For example, in a recent podcast, Peter Diamandis, founder of Human Longevity, Inc., stated that VO2Max and flossing are correlated with lifespan. The flossing, as a proxy for oral hygiene, doesn’t surprise me at all. But VO2Max? I hadn’t heard that before, and yet I know that altering VO2Max is very difficult. Gifford didn’t mention the correlation, though say that the BLAST study had determined the VO2Max and maximum heart rate during exercise decrease steadily with age. Perhaps the atrophy and hardening, the loss of “elasticity” that Gifford describes, is related to Diamandis’s assertion. This sound like a job for PubMed…..