Sugar Blossom

Can You Alter Your Life Expectancy?

There is no doubt that life expectancies have risen dramatically in many areas of the world during the past century. The average life span of anyone in an industrialized nation has increased by over thirty years due to improvements in public health, vaccinations, and disease prevention since the turn of the last century. Fewer people have been negatively impacted by uncontained outbreaks of infectious diseases such as smallpox that can be vaccinated against or from easily treatable conditions like pneumonia.

Rising longevity along with falling fertility rates are the pri­mary reasons for the recent aging of the world’s population in more af?uent areas such as the United States and Europe, recently causing their citizens to start “graying” rapidly. Only countries like France that have tax credits for child care and other govern­ment-based programs to support the expansion of younger popu­lations are starting to balance out the young and older populations more effectively.

Will Life Expectancies Continue to Increase?

It’s highly unlikely that life expectancies will continue to rise equivalently in the coming decades. The approximate ten million cells in your body have a limited life span, meaning they can only divide a certain number of times (their method of reproducing) before they begin to age and stop reproducing, a phenomenon known as the Hay?ick limit after its discoverer, Dr. Leonard Hay-?ick. The human life-span limit is believed to be close to 125 years, although very few of us reach that ripe old age.

Why don’t more of us make it to even a hundred years? The reasons are varied, but nearly all of us experience life-shortening disease states while our cells still have the capacity to keep dividing and re-creating themselves, ones such as heart disease and can­cer. Thus, while it may not be possible to change your cells’ pre­programming, prevention or better treatment of these diseases, if they occur, will allow you to come closer to your unique Hay?ick limit.

In the United States, the average person lives into his or her seventies, at least four decades short of the potential maximum age. Once you reach the age of seventy, your life expectancy is greater than average (see Table I.1), particularly if you are healthy. If you live to be eighty, you can revel in the fact that you have outlived most of your physicians.