and rats live only three to five years. Why the disparity? By comparing similar mammals with very different life spans, scientists may be able to identify the specific genes that make some live longer than others.
If one direction of learning shows promise when it comes to increasing the length of life – and the length of a healthy life – scientists will apply and reapply methodologies that are more and more complex, ultimately testing medications or treatments on humans to determine their safety. At each step, they must evaluate the efficacy of their methods. Just because manipulating a certain gene or pathway or hormone makes a fly live longer doesn’t mean it will do the same for a mouse, let alone a human.
And just because it works for a man doesn’t mean it will work for a woman, as we will soon discuss.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO GROW OLD WITH HEALTH?
Life expectancy doesn’t tell us how long a being might live under the best of conditions. It tells us how long a being might live while taking into account the reality of its environment. We can give science a lot of credit for doubling our life span, but we can’t give doctors all the responsibility for keeping us healthy.
Your genes create the basis for your health. The environment you live in and the lifestyle choices you make every day have a massive impact on how you age, what makes you sick, and how your body heals. As we grow older, weakening is inevitable and becoming strong is a choice. Diseases of old age are not necessarily a given for any one of us. I think it’s always more challenging to make new choices or try out new behaviours if you don’t understand the “why” behind them. Advice like “eat healthfully” or “exercise every day” doesn’t really mean anything to me in a vacuum. That’s why the information in this book is so important to me. Without context, how can any of us be expected to understand why we should eat more vegetables or why strength training is a big deal for women? We know from being avid consumers of media that certain things are “good for us”, but we may not fully understand why.
So let’s do our best to learn these things. Let’s try to better understand how our choices influence our health at the cellular level, and how the changes in our cells are what affect our health as a whole and, in particular, our health as we age. We can become better advocates for our own health. It all starts with learning the facts.
FACT: WOMEN LIVE LONGER than men. A baby girl born in the United States in 2010 had a life expectancy of eighty-one; for the baby boy next door, that number was seventy-six. That’s a five-year gap, enough to make a person really curious about why this might be the case, especially when you consider that this is true around the world, too. Country by country, life expectancies vary (due in part to variables like availability of clean water, access to healthcare, and stability of the region), but the world over, the women’s life expectancies are always greater than men’s.
In the United States, over the course of all that longevity, women use more healthcare services and take more prescription drugs than men do. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic made headlines a few years back when they announced that nearly 70 per cent of Americans take at least one prescription drug daily. They also reported that, as a whole, women and older adults receive the most drug prescriptions. As people get older, they are prescribed more pills to take, not fewer, and the quality and accuracy of those medications has a direct impact on health. The more medicines lined up in your bathroom cabinet, the more important it becomes that you are taking the right medications, in the right doses, at the right times.
Health and healthcare are inextricably bound together. Every time you go to the GP surgery, every time you pop a pill, you are relying not only on your doctor and your pharmacist, but also on medical schools, on drug companies, on research labs, on individual scientists – and their assumptions about women, and their awareness of the latest research about women’s health and women’s bodies.
A lot of people hate going to the doctor, and I get it. Hanging out in a waiting room on your lunch hour or having blood drawn when you’re running late for another appointment is not exactly fun. But I take going to the doctor very seriously. When I’m sick, I make an appointment. And when I’m healthy, I make appointments, so that I can avoid getting sick for as long as possible. I want to understand where my health is now so that I have a framework for comparison for later. I want to use medicine as a preventative tool for my health as I age.
And researchers are discovering that this habit of mine might actually be tied to female longevity. Women are more likely to visit the GP than men and this may help us to live longer. So do the other healthy choices that, as a group, women make more than men do, like not smoking. Fewer women than men smoke, which cuts our risk profile for numerous diseases. Men also drink more than women do. Women are more careful about their nutrition, and taking care of food needs helps bolster strength and longevity. And women are less likely to take risks. Fewer risks equals fewer injuries, which equals greater health: unintentional injury is number three on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mortality charts for men, and number six for women. Women also value friendship, love, and connection. We are social beings who invest in our families and in our communities and in our relationships. All these choices contribute to a longer life.
But female longevity isn’t just about our choices. Among primates like chimpanzees, females live longer too, and monkeys don’t make doctor’s appointments. So why do females enjoy a longer life span? Some scientists are looking for answers that are rooted deep within the genetic coding of our cells. The cells of men and the cells of women are not the same, and what makes your cells unique affects everything about you – including how long you live.
THE OLDEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD
Today, life expectancy is twice what it used to be, but it may still be forty years shy of the maximum human life span, which most scientists believe to be about 120 years old.
They base that opinion on people like Jeanne Calment, the oldest woman who ever lived. Jeanne was born in France in 1875 and passed away in 1997. When she was a year old, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. When she was thirteen, she met Vincent van Gogh. When she was eighteen, the Wright brothers flew for the first time. She lived through two world wars, saw infections thwarted by medicine, and witnessed the development of the Internet and contemporary medical technologies.
When she was ninety, a lawyer who was not yet fifty offered to pay her every year if he could take over her home when she died. She agreed. He died at seventy-seven, and Jeanne kept on going. She lived by herself until she passed away at the age of 122.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE BIOLOGICALLY FEMALE?
You are a lady with millions of microscopic lady cells. Your female cells are special – the genetic information contained in each and every one of them is what makes your body biologically distinct from that of a man. Your female cells have unique characteristics, and so do the organs they make up, because female organs are sized and shaped differently than male organs.
For
