> If you really want to extend your "healthspan" it seems the correct solution is to do full-body work-outs a lot, eat a really clean diet, avoid drugs, and keep using your brain actively into your 80's and 90's.
All of the folks in my family who lives to their late 90s with a long “healthspan” drank or smoked excessively. The generation after them, their children, who did are either dead or on their way to an early grave.
I haven’t really been able to figure that one out.
One possibility is survivorship bias. You never met the smokers and heavy drinkers from the first generation who died young, but you did meet those who got lucky on their dice rolls. In the generation after them you knew both groups and the actual survivorship ratios become more apparent.
Other aspects of our modern environment are probably playing a role, too, of course.
Several of my friends who died in COVID heart attacks were super fit and very careful with eating. One was a pretty militant vegan. Yet they died in their 40s and 50s.
Eating vegan isn't usually very healthy. Easy to be deficient in a lot of things. Easy to lack the right macro and micronutrient balance.
It would be the same as only eating meat - human bodies are adopted to eat omnivorously, so deviating from that is more likely to lead to some ill outcome.
There's an enormous amount of dumb luck in lifespan.
We generally think in terms of life expectancy, but that's only really useful on a population level. On an individual level, it's much more useful to think about the probability of dying - you aren't running down a clock, you're constantly rolling cosmic dice to see whether you get hit by a semi truck or develop pancreatic cancer.
Before the age of 40, you've got less than a 1% chance of dying in any given year. By 60 that probability increases to about 5% and by 80 to about 25%. Some young people will just have rotten luck and roll 1 on a d100, while some people will repeatedly roll a d4 and manage to dodge the 1. Obviously those probabilities are highly modifiable by many factors, but some people will get unreasonably lucky or miserably unlucky regardless of the underlying probabilities.
I wonder if the standards for “drinking excessively” could have changed over time, or the way we drink could have changed? Or possibly, say, people in the silent generation (just for example) might have mostly just had alcohol and cigarettes, while those in the boomer and gen-x generation might have also had a higher chance to find their way to party drugs.
Just a hypothetical of course, I obviously know nothing at all about your family!
Yes, the alcoholic from their 20s to 80s (approx 1/2 a plastic bottle of vodka a day) was one of the least stressed people in the family. They were also the healthiest in their 90s compared to the smokers.
All of the folks in my family who lives to their late 90s with a long “healthspan” drank or smoked excessively. The generation after them, their children, who did are either dead or on their way to an early grave.
I haven’t really been able to figure that one out.