The Secret of Long Life

We have breathed the breath of virgins and drunk the blood of gladiators.

We have eaten gold and yogurt, and injected ourselves with Novocain and the crushed testicles of dogs.

We have taken laxatives, given ourselves enemas and searched for magic plants and waters in far mountain fastnesses and remote jungle islands.

Ever since we could foresee our death, we have sought the means to forestall it.

Our mistake has been in thinking that the key to longevity must be exotic: rare herb or alchemical formula.

In truth, it is as plain as the food on our plates. It is in what we eat, how we think, what we do with our bodies and how we relate to our fellow humans.

Most of us could live to be 100. Many might even make 120. Certainly, all of us could live a lot longer--and healthier--if we heeded what researchers already know.

“Present medical knowledge indicates that the body is programmed to endure, if it is not abused, for more than a century,” says Dan Georgakas, author of “The Methuselah Factors” (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1995).

Georgakas’ conclusion is backed not only by many gerontologists, but by current demographics. Although our average life expectancy these days is seventysomething, a growing number of Americans are hitting three-digit ages.

According to a report last year by the Population Reference Bureau Inc., a private research group, about 52,000 Americans are 100 years old or older, and “the number of American centenarians . . . may reach 1 million by the middle of the 21st century.”

At the same time, “there seems to be right now a revival of interest in this topic,” Georgakas says. “I think the baby boomers have just crossed the cusp to where they see mortality looming on the far horizon.”

Indeed. This year the first of the baby boomers are looking at life from the other side of 50.

Many of those boomers could live another 50 years, or more, thanks to a discovery made by Clive McCay, a scientist at Cornell University, in the 1930s.

McCay discovered he could extend the lives of rats by about 50% by cutting their consumption of calories to near starvation levels.

But the significance of this discovery was not appreciated until much more recently.

In the early 1970s, Dr. Roy L. Walford, a professor of pathology at UCLA Medical School, began studying the how and why of McCay’s discovery.

Working with other researchers, Walford has shown that animals placed on a low-calorie, nutrient-dense diet not only will outlive their peers, who eat without restriction, but will remain youthful into a very old age.

Walford has shown that such a diet increases the immune-response capacity and the DNA-repair rate of the animals, lowers blood pressure and cholesterol, reverses arteriosclerosis and drastically reduces the occurrence of cancer.

Because these results have been replicated many times in a variety of animals, Walford believes they would hold for any species, including humans.

And so, for the past several years, Walford, 71, has placed himself on a restricted diet with the professed goal of living to 120. He has also written several books outlining how the diet works and what humans wishing to extend their life-spans should do to follow it.

The newest of these, “The Anti-Aging Plan” (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995), includes more than 100 recipes developed by his daughter, Lisa Walford. The diet is primarily but not strictly vegetarian, heavy on fruits, vegetables and grains.

Walford explains how each person must find his own “genetically determined set point, where your set point is what you weigh if you just eat normally.” Determine how many calories you eat each day to maintain that weight and gradually reduce them until you start losing weight.

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By how much?

“Caloric limitation should lead to a weight loss no greater than about 10% for women and 18% for men in the first six-month period,” Walford advises.

How will this affect you?

Little has been done with humans so far, but Walford did have a chance to study eight human subjects, including himself, on an extremely low-calorie diet for the two years he and seven other researchers spent living inside Biosphere 2.

In the December 1992 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Walford reported that the diet resulted in “drastic reductions in cholesterol and blood pressure in humans similar to those in other animal species.”

And everybody lost a lot of weight. The men lost an average of 33 pounds; the women, 17. In other words, people seem to respond to this diet much like mice.

But can the average person live happily on this sort of diet?

Walford says it is no more difficult, really, than being a vegetarian.