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Spring Chicken Page 19


  She was, in short, a ringer—yet her life story is hardly that of an elite athlete. She grew up on a farm in Iowa, and for most of her life her only real exercise consisted of keeping up with her elementary school kids in Long Beach, Southern California. She had taken up jogging at forty-five, during the running boom of the 1980s, but only got serious about training and competing when she turned sixty. “The women I started running with years ago were better athletes than I was—but they’re not running anymore,” she told me.

  As a teacher, she would take her kids to running meets. Now she does nearly all her training runs on soft grass, to preserve her knees (which, obviously, were not really designed to last seventy years); and like many athletes she pays careful attention to her diet. As she got more into running, she gave up French fries—which she loved—for six weeks, just to see if she could. At the end of six weeks, she was cured of her French-fry addiction, and she now thrives on a diet of “living foods,” by which she means raw foods, salads, and sashimi. She spends her spare time visiting nursing homes, trying to motivate the residents—some of whom are younger than she is—to stay active, and eat more healthy food.

  “Aging is beautiful,” she told me as we stood there in the infield. “Put in there that it’s beautiful. God’s design for aging is perfect.”

  It was hard to argue the point with her. But the question occurred to me: Did Jeanne Daprano perhaps have more in common with Irving Kahn, the 108-year-old investment guru, than with her old running buddies? Were Jeanne and Ron and Don and Bernie and their fellow competitors also genetically protected from aging, somehow? Maybe God’s plan for aging (or whoever’s) is more perfect for some than for others.

  Nathan LeBrasseur has the same question, and it hasn’t really been answered in the existing research. “The problem with these studies is you don’t know if the capacity to exercise well, to have a high VO2 max, or to be motivated, is part of same the genetic signature as longevity,” he says. “If you have the ability to train and protect fitness, are those the same things that protect against cardiovascular disease and stroke?”

  We all know entire families of couch potatoes—but are they couch potatoes because of heredity, or because everyone around them is also a couch potato? Recent research suggests that the very willingness to exercise may be at least partly inherited. Studies of twins, for example, have found that close genetic relatives maintain similar activity levels throughout life. That doesn’t really answer the heredity/environment question through.

  Scientists at the University of Missouri recently tried to parse the issue with an interesting experiment: They separated a bunch of lab rats into two groups, those who ran enthusiastically and those who wouldn’t go near a treadmill. They then selectively bred the runners with other runners, and the lazy rats with lazy rats. Within eight generations, they found distinct differences in the brains of the two lines of rats. The running rats had more of a particular type of neuron that is related to pleasure and addiction, which meant they were more likely to derive pleasure from exercise. The couch-potato rats had fewer of those neurons, which are located in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens. But then the researchers added a twist: When the couch-potato rats were induced to run (via electric shock), they too grew more of the “exercise neurons.” So even the genetically programmed couch-potato rats learned to like it, at least a little.

  This is an important finding, since studies indicate that up to 90 percent of Americans fail to meet the minimal guidelines for physical activity, defined by the federal government as thirty minutes of moderate exercise (think “brisk walking”), five times per week. As we engineer the activity out of life with each passing generation—en route, perhaps, to a La-Z-Boy-bound world like that depicted in the movie Wall-E—humans in the developed world tend to get lazier and lazier, less willing to be active (and rarely required to be), more like the couch-potato rats.

  But at the same time, both the willing and unwilling rats were still better off doing something than doing nothing—and the same holds for people. Researchers are finally getting funding for clinical trials of exercise as an “intervention”—that is, evaluating exercise as if it were a drug—and one of the largest, the LIFE Study, reported results in June 2014. In the experiment, a group of eight hundred sedentary older people age seventy to eighty-nine was induced to begin a mild exercise program—presumably not via electric shock, but who knows?

  They were already in trouble, scoring very low on physical performance tests, but they could at least still walk a quarter mile, considered the threshold for something called major mobility disorder. Even so, these were the sorts of folks who were unlikely to go and join the gym; they were on the brink of no longer being able to live independently. After two years, the exercise group had far lower rates of disability than a matched group that had merely been told they should exercise. A little bit of walking kept many of them out of the nursing home, at least for a bit longer. If it were a drug, it would have been a slam dunk for FDA approval.

  “It really is our most promising intervention for the ills of late life,” LeBrasseur says. And, it’s free.

  Chapter 11

  STARVING FOR IMMORTALITY

  I stumbled out of Harrisburg. Cursed city! The ride I proceeded to get was with a skinny haggard man who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health. When I told him I was starving to death as we rolled east he said, “Fine, fine, there’s nothing better for you. I myself haven’t eaten for three days. I’m going to live to be a hundred and fifty years old.” He was a bag of bones. A floppy doll. A broken stick. A maniac.

  —Jack Kerouac, On the Road

  Answering the door of his stately home north of Boston, Don Dowden greets me with the news that I’ve missed lunch. Guiding me into the kitchen, he shows me the big metal salad bowl, now empty save some traces of dressing as well as a few remnants of spinach greens, red peppers, broccoli, mushrooms, and a stray chickpea or two. “It was really good,” he says, and having just driven 150 miles without any breakfast, I have to agree. It even smells delicious.

  But even in my hypoglycemic haze, I can appreciate the irony of the situation: I’m standing there starving, while Dowden—a retired patent attorney who practices what Kerouac called “controlled starvation for the sake of health,” also known as caloric restriction—is licking his chops. Normally, he’s the guy who should be hungry. Immediately, the tall, elegant Dowden reminded me of another patrician figure who adhered to the same discipline, only this guy did it five centuries ago, before it was cool.

  The other guy’s name was Alvise Cornaro, and he was a wealthy merchant and property owner who lived in Padua, Italy, in the sixteenth century. He was a largely self-made man, and evidently, he loved to party. His friends called him Luigi. By the time he reached his late thirties, though, his fast living had taken a toll, and he was tormented by ill health: “colic and gout, an almost continual slow fever, a stomach generally out of order, and a perpetual thirst,” as he confessed.

  Phil Bruno and any other diabetic would instantly recognize these as key symptoms of diabetes, a thoroughly modern disease of aging. Although Johann Sebastian Bach is sometimes cited as the first recorded diabetic, poor Luigi Cornaro beat him to it by a couple of centuries. He was not yet forty, but he was in such discomfort that, when he was honest with himself, he had to admit that he would almost welcome death. He couldn’t let that happen. His gorgeous wife, Veronica, had just borne him a long-awaited daughter, and he had to live to see her grow up.

  His doctors instantly pinpointed the cause of his distress in his “intemperate” lifestyle—in short, too many Renaissance feasts. (We’ve all been there.) The learned physicians, citing the already-ancient advice of the Roman physician Galen, told him to cut back a little. Naturally, he ignored their advice and kept feasting with his friends. (Been there, too.) “This, indeed, like all other patients, I kept a secret from my physicians,” he admitted later.

  Eventually, thoug
h, his illness forced him to surrender. His doctors had warned him one last time that if he did not cease and desist, he would be dead within months. This time, he resolved to change his ways. He started by cutting out foods that disagreed with him: “Rough and very cold wines, as likewise melons and other fruits, salad, fish, and pork, tarts, garden-stuff, pastry, and the like, [which] were very pleasing to my palate, [but] they disagreed with me notwithstanding.” That did not leave much, except maybe ice—but he cut that out, too. Talk about a tough New Year’s resolution.

  Over the space of a few months, he settled on a healthy but meager-sounding daily ration of bread, a little meat (goat or mutton), or some poultry or fish, usually mixed into a brothy soup, with an egg yolk to make it more filling. He allowed himself exactly twelve ounces of this potage every day. “I always rose from the table with a disposition to eat and drink more,” he remarked, somewhat unsurprisingly. “I take but just enough to keep body and soul together.”

  Spare as it sounds, his new diet literally gave him a second life. He began feeling better within a week, which gave him the strength to continue. Rather than dying at forty, as his doctors feared, Cornaro went on to become one of the wealthiest and most important men in Padua, and eventually one of the oldest. Tintoretto painted his portrait, which now hangs in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. In the picture, whose year is unknown, he is bald and obviously aged, but his eyes dance with life. He was a happy man. He boasted to a friend that his way of living “has given me the vigour of thirty-five at the age of fifty-eight.”

  That was only the beginning. Even in his eighties, he was still bounding up and down the stairs of his estate, and working in his gardens. “I can mount a horse with ease,” he bragged, “and many other things.”

  Not everyone was so thrilled. His worried family urged him to eat just a little bit more. He bumped up to fourteen ounces per day, but complained that the extra food made him “melancholy.” So he went back to his twelve ounces, and they quit bugging him. He could return in peace to his main work, drafting a long-in-the-making treatise about his new lifestyle. He titled it Discorsi della vita sobria—Discourses on the Sober Life—and the first edition appeared in 1558, when Cornaro had reached the grand old age of eighty-one, double what his doctors had predicted for him. He revised it two years later, at eighty-three, and then again at age ninety. As he continued into his nineties, still in perfect health, he felt the need to rework and extend it yet a fourth time, at the ripe age of ninety-five—proof, perhaps, that the only thing that ends the editing process is death itself, to which he finally succumbed at age ninety-eight.

  In all four versions, though, the basic message was pretty simple: Don’t eat so much. A man, he wrote, should eat “no more than is absolutely necessary to support life, remembering that all excess causes disease and leads to death.”

  Cornaro’s earnest little tome went on to become the world’s first best-selling diet book. Strikingly modern in its confessional tone, it was translated and republished in nearly every language and in every century up to our own, becoming one of the most popular works on diet and longevity that has ever been written. It appeared in German, French, and English, including an edition compiled by none other than Ben Franklin, who no doubt recognized its commonsense appeal.

  Cornaro’s work enjoyed a renewed vogue around the turn of the twentieth century, when the growing temperance movement misinterpreted his use of sobriety—conveniently forgetting that he washed down his twelve ounces of soup with fourteen ounces of wine, or almost three glasses. Thomas Edison blurbed the book—now usually titled The Art of Living Long or How to Live to 100. Henry Ford handed it out to his rich friends, and new editions kept appearing all the way up into the 1980s. Through his book, Alvise Cornaro had earned the immortality he craved. But he would also make his mark on science.

  One person who discovered the Discorsi, and scribbled in its pages, was a young professor of nutrition at Cornell named Clive McCay, who had come across a 1917 edition published as The Art of Long Living. Intrigued, McCay tried putting some lab rats on the Luigi Cornaro diet. He fed one group of baby rats a reduced-calorie diet (enriched with vitamins, to avoid malnutrition), while the rest were fed normally. Though the underfed animals remained smaller and scrawnier (or in his word, “retarded”), they lived nearly twice as long as their tubby cousins—up to four years, in some cases, which is a long time for a rat.

  McCay’s resulting paper, written with his graduate student Mary Crowell and published in the Journal of Nutrition in 1935, is now considered one of the great breakthroughs in our understanding of aging—but at the time, other scientists regarded their work as a bit odd, and of course irrelevant. Nutrition, in those days, was a bit of a backwater: “People hardly rate it a science at all,” he complained. And if nutrition was a scientific backwater, then the study of aging—gerontology—was practically a desert island.

  The public, on the other hand, was fascinated. In a radio talk, McCay claimed that his rats had lived the equivalent of 120 human years, which got people’s attention. “The lifespan is probably much more flexible than we have imagined,” he declared. He was written up in Time, and he gave countless radio interviews to a public that was intrigued by the idea that you could starve your way to a longer life. The Social Security program was brand new, and Americans wanted to be able to reap its bounty for as long as they possibly could. The Rockefeller Foundation soon came calling, with a $42,500 grant to further McCay’s work on “diets that may promote longevity.” Family patriarch John D. Rockefeller was ninety-six years old at the time, too late to benefit from McCay’s work, and at any rate the various experimental diets he tried on the Rockefellers’ dime—feeding the rats coffee, vitamins, “organ meats,” and whole wheat bread—failed to inspire them to live as long as plain old hunger did.

  The public’s new enthusiasm for longevity research faded with the approach of World War II, which was shortening lifespans rather abruptly across the globe. Food and sugar rationing dampened any residual appeal of voluntary starvation, and McCay turned to other endeavors. Working with the military, he developed a dense, highly nutritious, and let’s just call it chewy new kind of loaf that was dubbed “Cornell Bread”; it caught on, and could still be found in health-food stores throughout the country up into the 1980s. Little did people know that it was based on McCay’s own special recipe for rat chow.

  McCay never gave up his fascination with longevity, however. A gentle soul who had been orphaned at a young age, he surrounded himself with animals, particularly old dogs. His Green Barn Farm outside Ithaca, New York, was a veritable kennel, full of well-loved strays as well as retired beagles who had been used in research. Their scientific careers were not entirely behind them, as McCay kept fiddling with their diets. His research helped establish the basic nutritional requirements for modern dog food. And to his utter non-surprise, he found that dogs on a limited diet seemed to live healthier lives than those who were fully fed. (Advice I took to heart as I fed my own mutts—always at the lower end of the suggested feeding range.)

  Someday, he would apply his research to humans, if he ever got the chance. “We have learned to keep most of our children from dying but we have not made much progress toward giving men and women a longer and healthier middle age,” he lamented, toward the end of his life. “We do not wish to prolong the suffering that goes with feeble old age; we want to extend the prime of life when most of us live and enjoy living.”

  After Clive McCay’s death, the gospel of starvation for the sake of health found an unlikely apostle in, of all places, Venice Beach—in, of all decades, the hedonistic 1970s. Part hipster, part artist, part Svengali, and part scientist, Roy Lee Walford had long been fascinated by aging, even as a teenager in San Diego in the early 1940s. “As a young man, he just wanted to live forever,” one of his (many) girlfriends told the documentary filmmaker Christopher Rowland in 2007. “If you extended your life, you could have multiple careers, you could have multiple marria
ges—you could accomplish all kinds of things in this world.”

  Walford wanted to do it all. He was an actor, a writer, and an adventurer, ahead of his time in many ways. Also smart: He paid off his student loans, according to one story, by going to Reno with a mathematician friend and hanging around for three days analyzing how the roulette wheels were rigged. Then they bet accordingly, and cleaned up. He took periodic breaks from science, including a year spent traveling around India in a loincloth “as a naked seeker,” as he put it, carrying a thermometer in order to study body temperature and aging in Indian yogis. Back home in Los Angeles, he palled around with a fast crowd that included Timothy Leary and members of the Living Theatre group. He stood out from the long-haired Venice hippies with his shaved head and blondish-gray Fu Manchu facial hair—again, ahead of his time. He got into punk rock before most of the rest of the world even knew what it was. He was in his fifties by then. “He was a bit of a wild man,” recalls Rick Weindruch, his graduate student and protégé. “He lived life on the fringe.”

  Walford became fascinated by Clive McCay and his starved rats. McCay and others had believed that caloric restriction was extending the animals’ lives by “retarding” their development from birth; slower growth equaled slower aging, they thought. Walford and Weindruch suspected that caloric restriction might actually be slowing the aging process itself, on a more fundamental level. They proved it by taking adult mice and gradually cutting back their food supply. It had been thought that older animals could not survive a reduction in food, but in fact they lived longer, with a much lower incidence of cancer. The restricted diet seemed to “shift them to a different metabolic and physiologic state, consistent with slower aging,” Weindruch says.