To Combat Aging in America, We Need a New Paradigm of What It Is

         To many, aging means deterioration.  Things Wear Out.  The skills and strength, ease and beauty of youth are replaced with slow, then quickening debilitation.  Given enough time, you fall apart, just like a toaster or a car.  In popular books look “You, A User’s Manual,” people are compared with the plumbing of a house.  Houses are best when they’re new, just like you.

         Except it’s not that way.

The Body Constantly Renews

         The truth about aging is far more complex than the rusting vision of mechanical decay so many people accept.  First, development does not stop when a fetus grows up to be a healthy young adult but continues throughout life. The blueprint changes, but can be constantly modified.  A forty five year old athlete may not be as strong as her twenty two year old version, but she may be a lot smarter.  Second, one basic secret of the body is that it never stops renewing, rebuilding, regenerating, and resculpting, until terminal illnesses begin.

         We are never the same. Almost everything in us and about us is constantly replaced.  A principle of how that works is creation through use.
        
How Long Do The Parts Last?

         Your car may last ten to fifteen years, though filters may need replacement after six months.  Your computer hard drive may blow up in four years.  Don’t count on your cellphone lasting a whole lot longer.

         The skin on your face only survives two weeks.  The lining of your gut lasts a few days.  Your red blood cells, bringing oxygen to your tissues, die in three to four months.

         If you were a machine, you’d be dead. But you’re not a machine.

         Go out and start clearing out the junk in your father’s yard and your muscles change.  Carrying heavy tree limbs and your muscles become more efficient. So will your brain, as you become more expert with a saw, cutting down errant tree limbs and long dead stumps.

         It’s not a matter of muscle cells becoming plumper and tendons developing new fibrils.  At first, they fray and even fall apart.  Then, with new use, they grow. 

         The biggest paradigm change for aging researchers involves the brain.  For well over a century every undergraduate was taught brain cells are maximized early in life. Take a couple of ounces of alcohol, and hundreds of thousands of cells die.  Brain “development” was just one long decline.

         Now we know brain cells are always repositioning, changing their communication links.  New cells grow every day in the hippocampus, an area critical to memory and learning – as long as the brain keeps on getting used.  In animal experiments, if the new cells are not used, they die.
        
Change Through Use

         The new aging paradigm is that the body is a set of different systems constantly communicating, updating and modifying depending on how it is used.  Aging is not a wearing out, but a development process.  Different systems learn different things over time. 

         Best of all, we have a lot more control of what happens than we think.  Men who walk in their fifties decrease their risk of dementia in their seventies by fifty percent.  Stroke victims once considered lost causes, recover their abilities through focused, repetitive use of damaged systems.  Sub-populations on Long Island experience an average lifespan of 95.6 years, ten years longer than what was statistically considered  “maximum life ” for human beings.

         It’s time. We need to give our mechanical vision of life and aging a place in the boneyard.  The answer to our health and our survival will not quickly come from the industrial model of health care – new superdevices, superdrugs, and super supplements that replace the parts that wear out and die.  Medical industries will continue the drumbeat of “new miracles” waiting round the corner. Someday they may be right.  But President Nixon expected the “War on Cancer” to defeat that enemy within thirty years.

         So don’ t hold your breath for new miracle cures announced on the backs of supermarket tabloids.  The miracle is here, and it’s inside you.   Your body doesn’t rust out; it rebuilds, according to a blueprint you can study, a blueprint of development that goes on all your life.  Live according to that blueprint, and you’ll do a lot more than you expect.    Your body always changes and renews.  Use it sensibly, and you will modify your aging, easing pains and increasing pleasures.  It’s about what you do, how you live.

         Or you can wait for the next miracle cure.

         The solution to this inevitable decay?  Super devices and superdrugs.   Heart failing?  We’ll give you a mechanical one.

Dr. Matthew Edlund, M.D., M.O.H., director of The Center for Circadian Medicine, is an expert on applied public health, sleep medicine and psychiatry. A former professor at Brown and University of Texas medical schools, he can be reached via email to DocME@DoctorEdlund.com. And CLICK HERE to subscribe to our new Fitcast, via the iTunes Store.