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Originally Posted by senior citizen
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Why stop at 123? Why not 125?
I like the challenge to see if I could do it while maintaining good health. Anyway, what's the alternative? Is being dead more appealing? I'm in good drug-free health at 73 so I would only have to keep it going for another 50 years to make it to 123.
There are challenges at every stage of life, so this is just another. At the current rapid-pace of scientific discovery, there will be new lifestyle suggestions to enhance our lives.
One such discovery was made about 4 or 5 years ago. I saw a brief mention of it in Reader's Digest. This month I read about it again in the AARP Bulletin. A study was Published in the journal Lancet Oncology. It was a study that was conducted by Dr. Dean Ornish and coauthored with Elizabeth Blackburn, a Nobel Prize winner.
The study found that you could increase the length of your telomers (DNA on chromosomes that regulate cell aging) if you were to follow Ornish's program.
This is big news! Not long ago a man who was in good health died at 109. His doctor has a radio program and I heard him say that his 109 year old patient didn't have a thing wrong with him. He just nodded off while watching TV and never woke up.
The way I understand it, as the average person ages their telomers get shorter and shorter everytime a cell divides. So, it was thought that you only get so many cell divisions and that's it. If worn out cells can no longer replace themselves, you die. This new discovery changes all of that.
So it's up to the individual, as usual. If you enjoy life and don't mind following a healthy lifestyle, you can live much longer than was ever thought possible.
Dr Ornish made the following statement:
This was the first study showing that [an] intervention can actually make your telomeres longer-in a sense, reversing aging at a cellular level."