As the national conversation around longevity amplifies, Oprah Winfrey speaks openly about the realities of aging—and which lifestyle factors make a difference in elevating both life span and health span.
On Wednesday afternoon, Winfrey held a live talk on Oprah Daily titled “The Life You Want” with Dr. Peter Attia, author of The New York Times best-selling book Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity.
In the book, Attia cites research stating that around 80% of Americans feel they are younger than their age—and Oprah’s audience seemed to identify with that sentiment, raising their hands signifying that they agreed.
“There are 70-year-olds that are more physically robust than 50-year-olds, so who's younger?” Attia asked Oprah. “The number doesn’t mean as much as people think.”
So what’s the key to living longer and feeling younger? Unfortunately, Attia said there is no “silver bullet." Surprisingly, centenarians—those who live to 100 and beyond—don’t necessarily adhere to a rigorous eating and nutrition schedule.
“They just hit the genetic lottery,” he said. “Their secret sauce is they somehow delay the onset of chronic disease by 20 years. ... We must find a way to live longer without disease.”
The 3 pillars of health span
Cue health span, or the number of years one is able to live disease-free. We have more control over our health span than we may think, and “much of it doesn’t actually require a doctor,” Attia said.
The three pillars of health span are cognitive function, which includes memory and executive function; physical ability; and emotional health, which includes the strength of people’s relationships. While the mechanisms behind cognitive and physical decline may be out of our control, emotional health “doesn’t have to decline with age,” Attia said. Ways to boost it include reducing stress, feeling gratitude, and maintaining strong relationships throughout middle age and into the senior years. Loneliness is a strong marker of poor physical and mental health, and early mortality.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to outliving the prior generation, it’s exercise, sleep, nutrition, and managing emotional health that remain the cornerstones of increasing health span, Attia said. Still, there’s a lot of “science fiction”-style advice regarding how to live longer—exacerbated by a “Silicon Valley ethos of 'we are going to engineer our way to immortality.'”
"I constantly am bombarded with patients saying, 'What do you think about this supplement? What if I rub electromagnetic things all over my ears?” he said. “This is such nonsense. ... Even if there is some remarkable technology that in 20 years is going to render aging irrelevant, wouldn’t you want to have a hedge for that?”
For someone who once attempted to live longer solely to avoid dying, Attia has turned his own mindset around. He now attempts to live longer simply because he enjoys living.
“The last decade of your life ... could be the time in which you have the most influence over your great-grandkids or your grandkids. It could be the time in which you're doing the most to help others,” he told Oprah.
Added Attia: “If you can do that with the greatest amount of health, meaning mental and physical health, not be in pain, not be detached because you're removed … I think it makes us more comfortable with our mortality.”
