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Product Description
Centenarians, once a rarity, have been a world’s fastest flourishing age group: there have been now about 50,000 people over 100 in a United States alone, roughly 3 times as most as there were in 1980. Centenarians have been environment a bullion customary for full of illness aging. What can you sense from these pioneers? How can people decades younger request a centenarians’ longevity lessons to their own lives? These have been a questions Harvard scientists Thomas Perls as good as Margery Hutter Silver set out to answer when they launched a New England Centenarian Study.As they probed over mildew to brand a parameters of an enterprising after life, Perls as good as Silver satisfied which a pass to preserving illness as good as physical nature lies not in guidance how people stay young, though in bargain how they age well. By identifying lifestyle patterns, vitamins, as good as medications which minister to aging well—and might even assistance delayed down a aging process—they uncover how all of us can show off a full of illness apportionment of a life-span.Filled with personal profiles, informational sidebars, as good as quizzes, Living to 100 offers impulse as good as plain systematic report to a some-more than seventy-five million people alive currently who can demeanour brazen to their ninth as good as tenth decades.
- ISBN13: 9780465041435
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to perspective the Condition Guide as good as Shipping Prices
Average Ratings : 4.0
Price : $2.32
Aaron D. Brinson
Posted on March 9th, 2010 at 8:19 amA good book. Not particularly an interesting read, but it does have some good information in it. I was introduced to it by a show, but it was over rated.
Rating: 2 / 5
taylor@twinkie.gsfc.nasa.gov
Posted on March 9th, 2010 at 9:49 amBook review of “Living to 100: Lessons in Living to Your Maximum Potential Age”
When, less than an hour ago, this book arrived, I was excited because it’s authors interviewed over 100 centenarians to find out what they did to make it that far. So I had hoped there would be something truly useful: information about what foods they ate. You see, if you take a large enough sample of objects in which each object’s properties is a smooth function of several random variables, the variables upon which each object’s properties primarily depend can be easily picked out just by looking at just the similarities between the extreme objects. In English: each extremely long lived person must have been on a longevity diet, of had longevity genes, _and_ of lived a longevity lifestyle. I can’t change my genes, don’t want to change my personality/driving habits, and already think I know nearly everything about exercise, so the one thing I wanted to learn from this book was what type of diets the centenarians ate. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in this book. Instead, there are lots of pictures of old people doing things like playing golf. I learned nothing new.
The only thing I could find was on page 59:
“One of our centenarians had been eating bacon and three eggs every day for breakfast for 15 years. Had he survived so long in spite of or because of this diet? Other centenarians swore by dietary concoctions they had invented, such as James Hanlon’s breakfast combination of oatmeal, olive oil, raisins, apples, and other fruits. There was no rhyme or reason to the results we saw.”
But the real truth is that these authors simply were too narrow-minded and lazy to ask questions about what the centenarians used to eat. They didn’t obtain the relevant data but formed a conclusion anyways. A classic example of bad science that looks good on paper.
What is most pathetic is that they actually did perform a limited survey using an inappropriate questionnaire which only asked what the centenarians are eating right now. About the questionnaire, they write (on page 58),
“After looking at responses from only 20 centenarians, it was clear that studying self-reported diet would not prove fruitful for several reasons. In the first place, we were interested in the conditions that allowed people to live to 100—what they were doing once they arrived at that age was often a different story. Many of our subjects had lost their robust appetites, and were no longer consuming full diets. We found a number of centenarians with deficiencies in important nutrients. They had to some extent migrated away from their lifelong dietary habits, and those potentially health-sustaining practices were the ones that interested us.”
I agree with them that the questionnaire they used was stupid. But to then say that lifespan is independent of diet is in blatant contradiction with the scientific method. (In fact the above supports the theory of calorie restriction.) It’s like saying that because it is relatively difficult in studies about heart disease to measure the saturated fat to poly-unsaturated fat ratio in diets that heart disease is not a function of it.
Their attitude is summed up on page 118 in this blatantly ridiculous paragraph:
“Newspapers and magazines are full of fountain of youth prescriptions: hormones, extracts of ginkgo and garlic, yogurt. Fruit flies don’t take any of these nostrums. Their variation in longevity did not appear to be linked to differences in diet or environment.”
Regardless of his opinions on calorie restriction, I think Doug Skrecky (along with 100’s of others) has shown that the opposite is true. If you are 60 and want to feel inspired about being active while old, read this book. You can have my copy. If, on the other hand, you hate fluff, don’t waste your time with this book.
Jason A. Taylor, Ph.D.
Rating: 1 / 5
Soccer Mom
Posted on March 9th, 2010 at 12:11 pmThis was a rather rambling read, mostly filled with anecdotes rather than any kind of serious research. The authors seemed to focus mainly on genetics and personality types as reasons for longevity.
The book is obviously written by people with little background or interest in nutrition. The book mentions that one of the main commonalities among those over 100 is that they have never had cancer, yet downplays the role of any common diet traits in the people they study. The book does have a copyright of ten years ago as I write this review, so maybe the major diet – cancer link that we all know exists today wasn’t as well researched back then. However, the book authors did little to push it along back then based on their studies of the elderly.
One of their recommendations in the book is to avoid sun exposure, calling it “one of the most frequently encountered and avoidable causes of human cancer.” While sun too much sun exposure may indeed be bad for human skin, it has never been true that zero sun exposure is optimal, either. Current research shows that vitamin D deficiency is actually linked to cancer, especially breast cancer, and other disorders of aging such as osteoporosis. If you are looking for information on aging well, I would suggest looking for a book written more recently with more up to date research.
Rating: 1 / 5
Anonymous
Posted on March 9th, 2010 at 1:37 pmTheir appearance on the Today Show sparked my interest so I previewed it as a potential gift for my dad. I can’t praise this book enough. It is well written, very interesting and most importantly it provides just the morale boost my dad needs. I bought 2 more copies… one for my wife’s folks and one for me.
Rating: 5 / 5
Anonymous
Posted on March 9th, 2010 at 3:21 pmThere’s something oddly fascinating about centenarians … or at least about the idea of living to a hundred. Part of it is our obvious fascination with round numbers (don’t get me started on when the millenium hits) but more than that, these are people who have lived a century. When they were born, cars were a novelty, electricity a rumour and the computer undreamt-of. Unfortunately, even as the idea of living fascinates, it repels, because we see the journey as inevitably leading to physical and mental decay. Heck, the word “senility”, which comes from the word meaning “old” is virtually a synonym for dementia. Just five years ago, a Canadian report suggested mental decline was the inevitable result of living so long. We just aren’t cut out to live that long … and if we do, we’ll suffer for it. But do we need to? Not according to this book, which provides a wealth of information about people who have lived to be 100, and who are still fit and functioning.
Rating: 4 / 5