Our organization (the American Federation for Aging Research) is hosting a webinar with Jay Olshansky (author of the paper) and Andrew Scott, a leading economist in longevity to discuss Jay's results on 10/22.
The gist is that this isn't quite as cut and dry as it may seem.
We also paid to make the Nature Aging paper open access.
> We also paid to make the Nature Aging paper open access.
That’s awesome! Did you make a deal with the authors to pay for the fee during publication or is this something anyone can do by approaching the journal itself?
Thanks! I wasn't directly involved in that discussion, but I imagine anyone can do it. It is a requirement for some grants and for some research funders.
Edit: if you need to know I would just ask the editor if it's an option
Just let it sink a second, they speak about how many baby born after 2000 will reach 100 years old, how we are reaching the absolute limit of human survival.
75% overweight... Everyone know fat people don't live long. I bet all the studies done in the 90's that predicted we would easily be able to reach 100 years old didn't take that into account.
I'm thinking that ozempic and zepbound will have something to say about this. When ozempic becomes available as a generic (2032) it's going to be available for $10 a dose and a huge amount of people will be taking it.
studies estimate that moderate obesity takes about 2-3 years of life expectancy (defined as having a BMI of 30-35), only people with severe obesity (BMI of 40-45+) lose on average 6-13 years, comparable to smoking.
Given that severe obesity is still uncommon even in the rich world it only has a small impact on life expectancy overall.
I'm actually a little surprised at the framing here. I didn't realize anyone thought we could overcome aging. I thought the goal was to live longer, but not to completely overcome aging. That sounds somewhat foreign to me. Is that a commonly reasonable goal for folks?
That is to say, I'm not clear that "beating aging" is what is required for "long life." Is that definitionally required and I'm just being dense?
I'm assuming this is a tiered discussion? In that nobody thinks we should freeze aging at baby stages for someone. Such that we would still want some aging, but would then try and fix a point where all aging can be stopped?
It's the bit of life where you can dress yourself and control your bowels that most people would like to extend. I think nobody gets into longevity research hoping they'll be able to dodder around a nursing home with a walker for 25 years instead of 15.
But you could do that by extending the bit of your life where you can do those things. Not necessarily turning off aging?
As I said down thread, this could just be a potato/potahto thing? If this is just definitionally beating getting frail, then that makes sense. But I don't know that I could pin down an age that I would want to freeze progress at. Nor do I think I expected that there would be a general age to freeze aging at. Let me keep my strength longer, but I expect I will be/look/appear older and older the older I get.
Now, granted, I'd be delighted if I have the same strength my 90 year old grandfather in law did. In his 70s, I'm pretty sure the only thing I could beat him at was a race. Lifting things or doing manual work outside, and he was far beyond what I was in my 30s.
I think it is just a difference in how you view it? I'd expect ancient person to be noticeably ancient. Not necessarily frail, but just as an old tree has signs of aging that younger trees don't necessarily have. Not that they stopped aging entirely.
So, if you limit aging to "getting frail," I am fully there. But there are other things that happen as you age.
I honestly thought the whole point was beating aging. Whether that's longer life or cancer or whatever. The point is to stay 20-40 forever, from what I can tell.
But, by the time you hit 20-40, you have already done a ton of aging?
Fair that I don't expect to be as strong in my 60s as I am now. Or when I hit 70+. If I get that far. Light weight training is plenty to get to be in good physical shape, though? Get to where you can do 10-30 pushups and run a continuous mile, and you are probably doing fine?
> The decline in the United States is driven by increasing numbers of deaths because of conditions such as diabetes and heart disease in people aged roughly 40 to 60.
People are asking if we should be surprised by the headline but are missing this. As suggested in the article by the researchers, there is something dragging down the average since the 2010s. Not even hitting the general expectation of ~75 years. We don’t have solid answers yet, only theories.
So yes, generally while going up against the process of aging is going to create barriers (eg can we get to 130 years old), we are also failing to raise the baseline which is the bigger issue that people might not grasp when it comes to “life expectancy rates”.
That's not what I meant. A solid answer as to why those conditions are happening, not the fact that they are happening at all.
We have research on what can affect heart health, like what things might be linked to it, such as smoking and alcohol. We also know genetics plays a huge role.
So we don't actually have solid answers, actionable answers as to the rise of heart health issues. Look at this analysis[1] regarding how dietary guidelines specifically for fats (saturated, trans) have very little substantial evidence supporting it. Yet this gets repeated by the average person, that fats are the ultimate evil you must avoid. In another study[2] we find that reducing your fat intake still resulted in the same rates of mortality as those who ate more. This is also why more in the space are shifting away from these sort of claims ("only eat x amount of saturated fat per day") and more to general food composition (eg who cares if a fish has saturated fats, eat the fish with vegetables).
It's quite challenging to figure out, everyone has their theories. All I'm saying is we don't actually have the answers yet.
I think the distinction there is between immediate cause and root cause. Heart disease and diabetes (or complications thereof) is the immediate cause of death, but what is causing an increase in those diseases is theory at this point.
Cutting out sugar and useless carbs, and trying to replace those things with nuts and quality proteins - more nourishing and filling substitutes, can help a bit, I think. Mostly, try to stay away from refined sugar and products containing sugar or corn syrup. And for the love of God, lots more vegetables. Less dairy perhaps?
Get an apartment on at least the third floor, in a building without a lift.
Get a pet dog which needs to be walked several times a day.
Eat lots of chili peppers[0]:
"The analysis included data from more than a half a million people in multiple countries. When compared with people who never or rarely ate chili pepper, those who ate it regularly had lower rates of death due to cardiovascular disease (by 26%), cancer (by 23%), or any cause (by 25%)."
I know people who are incapable of eating lunch or any meal without a large can/bottle of full-strengh coca cola or such, ever single day. Most of whom complain about not being able to lose weight.
The science is pretty clear. Breaking out of old habits is much more challenging.
I think my main point was about reducing all sugar, and reducing the intake of garbage carbs.
"Although nuts are high in fat, it’s mainly healthier unsaturated fat. They contain protein, B vitamins, vitamin E and minerals, including iron, potassium, selenium, magnesium, zinc and copper."[0]
I wonder how much impact there will be on average life expectancy uncovering that a lot of the super-long-lived population examples have been pension fraud.
Probably not much because you can find long-lived populations that don't follow the administrative boundaries of pensions.
King County in Washington State, which contains the Seattle metro area, has a life expectancy of 86.3 years. This is higher than any country in the world. If you move one county south (Pierce), it is 75.7 years, slightly worse than the US average currently. Not surprisingly, there are many obvious factors that may contribute to this e.g. the obesity rate in Pierce County is 50% higher and the obesity rate in King County is roughly half the US obesity rate. The Seattle metro is a relatively walkable city and people do, Pierce County is not. As a matter of demographics, King County is significantly more Asian than Pierce County. And so on.
Both counties are geographically large and contain many municipalities. It is difficult to come up with a theory where pension fraud in King County is so high relative to Pierce County that it explains a >10 year difference in life expectancy.
For every pension fraud that went on that long and took such an obvious risk with continuing to a notable age, I imagine there were hundreds or thousands of shorter frauds.
Isn´t this also an issue with World War's 1 and 2? They both dented life expectancy fairly significantly, and that cohort is now aging out of the figures. If the rate of increase is being measured, then that would presumably play a small part?
The way life expectancy is usually calculated, it shouldn't have an effect. It is calculated is by looking at the mortality rate for each age group, which gives a probability of death for each age, and by simulating people growing up in such conditions, and then taking the average age of death.
By doing so, historical events outside of the study period don't have a major effect. In this study, they deliberately avoided the covid pandemic as it would have caused a significant drop in life expectancy that is not representative of a general trend. Of course, the future is not taken into account either. Despite what the name may suggest, life expectancy is like a snapshot of the studied period (1990-2019 here), not a prediction.
Talking about the number of people who live over 100 along with the average life expectancy seems to be mixing two unrelated things.
To show that we are hitting a limit on our ability to extend lifetime, we really should look at having reached 95, how many people reach 105 or something like that.
To say that the average life expectancy is dropping and therefore we have reached our limit on their ability to extend the lifetimes ignores the fact that much of the reason for a stage life expectancy drop in my country is lifelong maltreatment, often self-inflicted--death-oriented decisions on drugs, nutrition, and activity.
It seems reasonable to expect it to grow even at a diminished rate until everyone enjoys equivalent access to health care, nutrition, occupational safety etc but that is subject to the political environment, priorities of the electorate and the capacity of the economy. Without pandemic, famine, war or natural disaster a decline in life expectancy is generally the result of public policy for a rich democracy and not an inevitability.
I think we need to distinguish between longevity and health though. Lots of people live with chronic disease and giving them more quality of life counts for more than longer life IMO.
The actual story here is that it's slowing down because the lower tail is growing, not because the upper tail is compressing as we hit some kind of upper limit of human longevity. That is: more people are actually dying younger, which has been gradually offsetting other people living longer.
I wonder if "life expectancy" is really such a useful metric, since it aggregates so many different things together. It's kind of like measuring "aggregate years of human life lived".
If not forever, but if 200-ish becomes a norm, it would be super awesome. Now, it is like, “Awesome, I know this, I know that. I need to learn that.” “Hold on, time to die.”
I assure you many aspects of a society where 200 years old becomes a normal life expectancy would be a hellscape and not "awesome." We already currently have a massive societal and economic problem with aging populations as things currently are.
The macroeconomic implications of that large a fraction of the population being above working age or such a large fraction of one's life not being working years are not exactly great.
If someone said “my son has stopped wetting the bed”, would you reply “did you expect them to wet the bed forever”? What if someone said “my leg no longer hurts”, would you reply “did you expect it to hurt forever”? How about “my bag of candy is almost empty”, would you reply “did you expect it to be full forever”?
The information that something stopped or slowed down is still useful without having to think it was going to go on eternally. It allows you to adjust your plans for the future.
I understand some tech billionaire want to live forever by eating hundreds of pills a day for nutrition, anti-aging, disease control etc. Their life may be "great" for some definition of great.
But do billions of people on earth think that their life will become great in another 50 years even if it is rather miserable right now? I just live under rock to not know the desires of modern human.
I always wondered why I personally know almost nobody who has managed to exceed average age. With the only exception of my previous landlady, she became 95. In my family, the average age is roughly 60, with three siblings on my fathers side dying before 50. Both my grandpas died around 50. My best friend died with 18. Many of the fellow blind people I know died below 50. And I am from a relatively rich country, with classical western standards. It is almost as if I was thrown into a local minimum while the simulation was set up. I would understand if the phenomenon was largely limited to my family, call it genes then. But it doesn't end there. I guess the personal statistics becomes only meaningful after your own death and beyond. But really, looking at how many people had to pass away early, I am beginning to get spooked.
> I would understand if the phenomenon was largely limited to my family, call it genes then
Perhaps there are other shared variables besides genes? For one thing, blindness is associated with higher mortality [1]. And even within a country, life expectancy can vary dramatically by region, city, and even neighborhood. Or perhaps the people you know happen to be more likely to share certain occupations, mindsets, levels of physical activity, or diets?
I wonder how Ozempic will change this? I really do expect we will all be on this soon and maybe we can resume the increase in lifespan that has been stalled by obesity, lack of exercise, and processed food.
When antibiotics were first invented some people thought we'd be taking them daily as a vitamin. Turns out that's not such a good idea despite them being life saving in some scenarios
The accepted view is a lot like the accepted views to mono-cultures for crops. In that they are bad. The practiced take, though, is quite the opposite? Crops are dominated by mono-cultured fields. And though antibiotics are known not to be used constantly, farms seem to use them at an amazing rate.
I'd love to see a longer exploration of this. Why is it farms seem to be full of practices that we are taught are bad?
Assuming you're not on drugs or thinking of killing yourself, you're probably not in the cohort that's dragging the life expectancy stats down.
Life expectancy is a weighted average (no pun intended), and so it's unusually sensitive to outliers. People who die early drag the average down much more than people who live close to the mean life expectancy. The biggest premature killers of Americans are obesity, drugs, car accidents, and suicide. Anything that addresses one of those causes of death has an outsize effect on life expectancy. There are 100M+ obese Americans. There are about 100,000 overdose deaths per year. Obesity, while not as lethal as drugs or suicide, afflicts 1000x as many patients, and so a treatment for it can have a large effect on the numbers.
Yeah, I'm still kind of confused by this sentiment. There's a cohort that claims metformin somehow extends life as well. I'm pretty sure if a doctor prescribed me Ozempic that'd be grounds for malpractice.
Ozempic seems to have a large number of positive effects for virtually everyone. It's a little premature to think everyone will be on it "soon" and there are plenty of people who won't take something even if it's universally beneficial.
> Known as GLP-1 agonists, these drugs were originally developed to help control diabetes. But there's increasing evidence that they have other health benefits, beyond controlling weight. They seem to boost heart health, protect the kidneys, improve sleep apnea, and lower the risk of certain obesity-related cancers.
In our relentless quest for longevity and a richer life experience, one profound consideration emerges: the role of sleep in our daily lives. Sleep, which consumes approximately one-third of our existence, represents a significant barrier to maximizing our time and productivity. If we could find a safe way to eliminate the need for sleep, we would theoretically unlock vast reservoirs of hours previously devoted to rest, transforming them into opportunities for personal and societal advancement.
Not suggesting anyone try this but some people claim to sleep only two hours a day with this approach:
https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/polyphasic-s...
"Uberman Sleep Schedule: Six 20-minute naps are spaced evenly throughout the day, totaling two hours of sleep per 24-hour period."
A book on sleep and how important it is to learning and health:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep
"Walker spent four years writing the book, in which he asserts that sleep deprivation is linked to numerous fatal diseases, including dementia. ... The values of sleep and the consequences of sleep deprivation are also brought up in the book. One particular research conducted in the past, where people volunteered themselves to sleep for only six hours in a span of 10 nights, is brought up by Walker. This resulted in the volunteers being "cognitively impaired" along with their brains being heavily damaged, regardless of the three week eight-hour sleep schedule they received later."
The current thinking is that Alzheimers and dementia are caused by the brain’s waste disposal system malfunctioning and results in an accumulation of proteins in the brain that damages a lot of important functions. This waste disposal only happens during sleep.
> If we could find a safe way to eliminate the need for sleep, we would theoretically unlock vast reservoirs of hours previously devoted to rest, transforming them into opportunities for personal and societal advancement.
While in practice, what would happen is that we’d be doing more of the same. Bosses would be demanding more time in the office, people would be spending more time doomscrolling, nothing would change. It’s a pipe dream to think that if we had more time in the day we’d suddenly start using it more respectfully and responsibly.
we currently spend about half our waking hours during the day at work during the week. if we got those 8 hours of sleep back then presumably we would get 4 more hours of non-working awake time.
seems decent to me. I hate sleeping, the problem is i get tired and cant avoid it.
On the plus side, this would solve the housing problem too. Without the nuisance of sleep requirements we would move to the offices and live, ahem, produce there 24/7. Much like cattle.
This is the great future the visionary OP envisions for us.
I have a hard time imagining this will ever become a reality; the need for sleep is fairly deeply hard-coded in how our brains operate, and I believe it's also needed for some more basic cellular functions.
It's not binary I guess (sleep "once a week" is less than "sleep once a day"), but even some incremental improvements seem very far off.
One also has to wonder if it's actually desirable to have less sleep and be "on" with fewer or no breaks.
I'm all for getting rid of sleep, but given how society is structured I worry that the extra time will just end up being used for longer commutes and more zoom calls. Hardly advancement.
For some reason I would feel disappointed if sleep was a solved issue. I feel as though perhaps I need that daily break from being conscious for my own mental health.
>”It tells you that something pretty negative is happening among some subgroups of the population to drag the average down, because the wealthier, more highly educated subgroups are actually doing better,” Olshansky says.”
It is expensive to live a healthy lifestyle in the US.
Our organization (the American Federation for Aging Research) is hosting a webinar with Jay Olshansky (author of the paper) and Andrew Scott, a leading economist in longevity to discuss Jay's results on 10/22.
The gist is that this isn't quite as cut and dry as it may seem.
We also paid to make the Nature Aging paper open access.
Event: https://www.afar.org/events/webinar-lifeexpectancy-1
> We also paid to make the Nature Aging paper open access.
That’s awesome! Did you make a deal with the authors to pay for the fee during publication or is this something anyone can do by approaching the journal itself?
Thanks! I wasn't directly involved in that discussion, but I imagine anyone can do it. It is a requirement for some grants and for some research funders.
Edit: if you need to know I would just ask the editor if it's an option
>We also paid to make the Nature Aging paper open access.
What a world to live in.
> Can we overcome ageing?
75% American are overweight..
Just let it sink a second, they speak about how many baby born after 2000 will reach 100 years old, how we are reaching the absolute limit of human survival.
75% overweight... Everyone know fat people don't live long. I bet all the studies done in the 90's that predicted we would easily be able to reach 100 years old didn't take that into account.
I'm thinking that ozempic and zepbound will have something to say about this. When ozempic becomes available as a generic (2032) it's going to be available for $10 a dose and a huge amount of people will be taking it.
How do you know they don’t have side effects that would reduce max life expectancy?
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Wait, doing amphetamines for weight loss is cool again and has no drawbacks of it's own?
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> Everyone know fat people don't live long.
studies estimate that moderate obesity takes about 2-3 years of life expectancy (defined as having a BMI of 30-35), only people with severe obesity (BMI of 40-45+) lose on average 6-13 years, comparable to smoking.
Given that severe obesity is still uncommon even in the rich world it only has a small impact on life expectancy overall.
Combined with getting in your car and driving absolutely everywhere (most Americans)?
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There is probably a distinction to be made between
"here is the theoretical limit given adherence to modern recommendations on cardiovascular health, exercise, etc."
and
"you all didn't listen and got fat instead"
I'm actually a little surprised at the framing here. I didn't realize anyone thought we could overcome aging. I thought the goal was to live longer, but not to completely overcome aging. That sounds somewhat foreign to me. Is that a commonly reasonable goal for folks?
That is to say, I'm not clear that "beating aging" is what is required for "long life." Is that definitionally required and I'm just being dense?
I'm assuming this is a tiered discussion? In that nobody thinks we should freeze aging at baby stages for someone. Such that we would still want some aging, but would then try and fix a point where all aging can be stopped?
It's the bit of life where you can dress yourself and control your bowels that most people would like to extend. I think nobody gets into longevity research hoping they'll be able to dodder around a nursing home with a walker for 25 years instead of 15.
But you could do that by extending the bit of your life where you can do those things. Not necessarily turning off aging?
As I said down thread, this could just be a potato/potahto thing? If this is just definitionally beating getting frail, then that makes sense. But I don't know that I could pin down an age that I would want to freeze progress at. Nor do I think I expected that there would be a general age to freeze aging at. Let me keep my strength longer, but I expect I will be/look/appear older and older the older I get.
Now, granted, I'd be delighted if I have the same strength my 90 year old grandfather in law did. In his 70s, I'm pretty sure the only thing I could beat him at was a race. Lifting things or doing manual work outside, and he was far beyond what I was in my 30s.
> Is that a commonly reasonable goal for folks?
Why not? Humans have been pursuing immortality for time immemorial. "The Epic of Gilgamesh", one of the first known stories, features such a pursuit.
I think it is just a difference in how you view it? I'd expect ancient person to be noticeably ancient. Not necessarily frail, but just as an old tree has signs of aging that younger trees don't necessarily have. Not that they stopped aging entirely.
So, if you limit aging to "getting frail," I am fully there. But there are other things that happen as you age.
I honestly thought the whole point was beating aging. Whether that's longer life or cancer or whatever. The point is to stay 20-40 forever, from what I can tell.
But, by the time you hit 20-40, you have already done a ton of aging?
Fair that I don't expect to be as strong in my 60s as I am now. Or when I hit 70+. If I get that far. Light weight training is plenty to get to be in good physical shape, though? Get to where you can do 10-30 pushups and run a continuous mile, and you are probably doing fine?
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> The decline in the United States is driven by increasing numbers of deaths because of conditions such as diabetes and heart disease in people aged roughly 40 to 60.
People are asking if we should be surprised by the headline but are missing this. As suggested in the article by the researchers, there is something dragging down the average since the 2010s. Not even hitting the general expectation of ~75 years. We don’t have solid answers yet, only theories.
So yes, generally while going up against the process of aging is going to create barriers (eg can we get to 130 years old), we are also failing to raise the baseline which is the bigger issue that people might not grasp when it comes to “life expectancy rates”.
> We don’t have solid answers yet, only theories.
The exact quote you gave had a pretty solid answer, certainly not just "theories".
That's not what I meant. A solid answer as to why those conditions are happening, not the fact that they are happening at all.
We have research on what can affect heart health, like what things might be linked to it, such as smoking and alcohol. We also know genetics plays a huge role.
So we don't actually have solid answers, actionable answers as to the rise of heart health issues. Look at this analysis[1] regarding how dietary guidelines specifically for fats (saturated, trans) have very little substantial evidence supporting it. Yet this gets repeated by the average person, that fats are the ultimate evil you must avoid. In another study[2] we find that reducing your fat intake still resulted in the same rates of mortality as those who ate more. This is also why more in the space are shifting away from these sort of claims ("only eat x amount of saturated fat per day") and more to general food composition (eg who cares if a fish has saturated fats, eat the fish with vegetables).
It's quite challenging to figure out, everyone has their theories. All I'm saying is we don't actually have the answers yet.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9794145/ [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8092457/
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I think the distinction there is between immediate cause and root cause. Heart disease and diabetes (or complications thereof) is the immediate cause of death, but what is causing an increase in those diseases is theory at this point.
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What has been the role in demographic shifts?
[flagged]
Epicureans. No point to live long which means being old for a long period of time. Better to be happy when you are young.
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Actual study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-024-00702-3#Sec2
They're going to need new excuses for phasing out state pensions oops sorry I mean "raising the pension age".
Cutting out sugar and useless carbs, and trying to replace those things with nuts and quality proteins - more nourishing and filling substitutes, can help a bit, I think. Mostly, try to stay away from refined sugar and products containing sugar or corn syrup. And for the love of God, lots more vegetables. Less dairy perhaps?
Get an apartment on at least the third floor, in a building without a lift.
Get a pet dog which needs to be walked several times a day.
Eat lots of chili peppers[0]:
"The analysis included data from more than a half a million people in multiple countries. When compared with people who never or rarely ate chili pepper, those who ate it regularly had lower rates of death due to cardiovascular disease (by 26%), cancer (by 23%), or any cause (by 25%)."
[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/will-eating-more-chilis-....
A little bit of high-intensity workout each week?
I know people who are incapable of eating lunch or any meal without a large can/bottle of full-strengh coca cola or such, ever single day. Most of whom complain about not being able to lose weight.
The science is pretty clear. Breaking out of old habits is much more challenging.
EDIT: Typos: whole -> whom, mean -> meal
The health effects of nuts are fairly overstated especially since many of them are high in PUFAs.
I think my main point was about reducing all sugar, and reducing the intake of garbage carbs.
"Although nuts are high in fat, it’s mainly healthier unsaturated fat. They contain protein, B vitamins, vitamin E and minerals, including iron, potassium, selenium, magnesium, zinc and copper."[0]
[0] https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga....
I wonder how much impact there will be on average life expectancy uncovering that a lot of the super-long-lived population examples have been pension fraud.
Probably not much because you can find long-lived populations that don't follow the administrative boundaries of pensions.
King County in Washington State, which contains the Seattle metro area, has a life expectancy of 86.3 years. This is higher than any country in the world. If you move one county south (Pierce), it is 75.7 years, slightly worse than the US average currently. Not surprisingly, there are many obvious factors that may contribute to this e.g. the obesity rate in Pierce County is 50% higher and the obesity rate in King County is roughly half the US obesity rate. The Seattle metro is a relatively walkable city and people do, Pierce County is not. As a matter of demographics, King County is significantly more Asian than Pierce County. And so on.
Both counties are geographically large and contain many municipalities. It is difficult to come up with a theory where pension fraud in King County is so high relative to Pierce County that it explains a >10 year difference in life expectancy.
Those people are statistically irrelevant. Not enough of them to drag the average much one way or the other.
For every pension fraud that went on that long and took such an obvious risk with continuing to a notable age, I imagine there were hundreds or thousands of shorter frauds.
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This will not age well.
We're not living longer. We're dying more slowly.
[dead]
Isn´t this also an issue with World War's 1 and 2? They both dented life expectancy fairly significantly, and that cohort is now aging out of the figures. If the rate of increase is being measured, then that would presumably play a small part?
The way life expectancy is usually calculated, it shouldn't have an effect. It is calculated is by looking at the mortality rate for each age group, which gives a probability of death for each age, and by simulating people growing up in such conditions, and then taking the average age of death.
By doing so, historical events outside of the study period don't have a major effect. In this study, they deliberately avoided the covid pandemic as it would have caused a significant drop in life expectancy that is not representative of a general trend. Of course, the future is not taken into account either. Despite what the name may suggest, life expectancy is like a snapshot of the studied period (1990-2019 here), not a prediction.
Talking about the number of people who live over 100 along with the average life expectancy seems to be mixing two unrelated things.
To show that we are hitting a limit on our ability to extend lifetime, we really should look at having reached 95, how many people reach 105 or something like that.
To say that the average life expectancy is dropping and therefore we have reached our limit on their ability to extend the lifetimes ignores the fact that much of the reason for a stage life expectancy drop in my country is lifelong maltreatment, often self-inflicted--death-oriented decisions on drugs, nutrition, and activity.
Frustrating that an article with a title like this doesn't include a single graph.
Did we expect it to grow forever?
It seems reasonable to expect it to grow even at a diminished rate until everyone enjoys equivalent access to health care, nutrition, occupational safety etc but that is subject to the political environment, priorities of the electorate and the capacity of the economy. Without pandemic, famine, war or natural disaster a decline in life expectancy is generally the result of public policy for a rich democracy and not an inevitability.
I think we need to distinguish between longevity and health though. Lots of people live with chronic disease and giving them more quality of life counts for more than longer life IMO.
The actual story here is that it's slowing down because the lower tail is growing, not because the upper tail is compressing as we hit some kind of upper limit of human longevity. That is: more people are actually dying younger, which has been gradually offsetting other people living longer.
I wonder if "life expectancy" is really such a useful metric, since it aggregates so many different things together. It's kind of like measuring "aggregate years of human life lived".
If not forever, but if 200-ish becomes a norm, it would be super awesome. Now, it is like, “Awesome, I know this, I know that. I need to learn that.” “Hold on, time to die.”
200 at what qualitative life point currently? 80? 90? 100?
Spending an other 100 years like say from 80 to 100... Well you are alive, but still...
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I assure you many aspects of a society where 200 years old becomes a normal life expectancy would be a hellscape and not "awesome." We already currently have a massive societal and economic problem with aging populations as things currently are.
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The macroeconomic implications of that large a fraction of the population being above working age or such a large fraction of one's life not being working years are not exactly great.
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If someone said “my son has stopped wetting the bed”, would you reply “did you expect them to wet the bed forever”? What if someone said “my leg no longer hurts”, would you reply “did you expect it to hurt forever”? How about “my bag of candy is almost empty”, would you reply “did you expect it to be full forever”?
The information that something stopped or slowed down is still useful without having to think it was going to go on eternally. It allows you to adjust your plans for the future.
> my mother died
> did you expect her to live forever?
And then some.
I understand some tech billionaire want to live forever by eating hundreds of pills a day for nutrition, anti-aging, disease control etc. Their life may be "great" for some definition of great.
But do billions of people on earth think that their life will become great in another 50 years even if it is rather miserable right now? I just live under rock to not know the desires of modern human.
I always wondered why I personally know almost nobody who has managed to exceed average age. With the only exception of my previous landlady, she became 95. In my family, the average age is roughly 60, with three siblings on my fathers side dying before 50. Both my grandpas died around 50. My best friend died with 18. Many of the fellow blind people I know died below 50. And I am from a relatively rich country, with classical western standards. It is almost as if I was thrown into a local minimum while the simulation was set up. I would understand if the phenomenon was largely limited to my family, call it genes then. But it doesn't end there. I guess the personal statistics becomes only meaningful after your own death and beyond. But really, looking at how many people had to pass away early, I am beginning to get spooked.
> I would understand if the phenomenon was largely limited to my family, call it genes then
Perhaps there are other shared variables besides genes? For one thing, blindness is associated with higher mortality [1]. And even within a country, life expectancy can vary dramatically by region, city, and even neighborhood. Or perhaps the people you know happen to be more likely to share certain occupations, mindsets, levels of physical activity, or diets?
Or maybe it's just coincidence.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...
I wonder how Ozempic will change this? I really do expect we will all be on this soon and maybe we can resume the increase in lifespan that has been stalled by obesity, lack of exercise, and processed food.
> I really do expect we will all be on this
When antibiotics were first invented some people thought we'd be taking them daily as a vitamin. Turns out that's not such a good idea despite them being life saving in some scenarios
This is a thing that always blows my mind.
The accepted view is a lot like the accepted views to mono-cultures for crops. In that they are bad. The practiced take, though, is quite the opposite? Crops are dominated by mono-cultured fields. And though antibiotics are known not to be used constantly, farms seem to use them at an amazing rate.
I'd love to see a longer exploration of this. Why is it farms seem to be full of practices that we are taught are bad?
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My totally off-the-cuff theory is that we’ll only need a lifetime of ozempic and its clones every 3-4 generations to reset the obesity cycle.
I guess we’ll soon be able to measure the impacts on what it does to the children of parents that take it.
How have McDonalds Happy Meal sales been looking lately?
I'm not fat or diabetic. Why would I take ozempic?
Assuming you're not on drugs or thinking of killing yourself, you're probably not in the cohort that's dragging the life expectancy stats down.
Life expectancy is a weighted average (no pun intended), and so it's unusually sensitive to outliers. People who die early drag the average down much more than people who live close to the mean life expectancy. The biggest premature killers of Americans are obesity, drugs, car accidents, and suicide. Anything that addresses one of those causes of death has an outsize effect on life expectancy. There are 100M+ obese Americans. There are about 100,000 overdose deaths per year. Obesity, while not as lethal as drugs or suicide, afflicts 1000x as many patients, and so a treatment for it can have a large effect on the numbers.
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Yeah, I'm still kind of confused by this sentiment. There's a cohort that claims metformin somehow extends life as well. I'm pretty sure if a doctor prescribed me Ozempic that'd be grounds for malpractice.
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Ozempic seems to have a large number of positive effects for virtually everyone. It's a little premature to think everyone will be on it "soon" and there are plenty of people who won't take something even if it's universally beneficial.
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https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/how-long-til-were-all-on-o...
https://www.wired.com/story/the-benefits-of-ozempic-are-mult...
> Known as GLP-1 agonists, these drugs were originally developed to help control diabetes. But there's increasing evidence that they have other health benefits, beyond controlling weight. They seem to boost heart health, protect the kidneys, improve sleep apnea, and lower the risk of certain obesity-related cancers.
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In our relentless quest for longevity and a richer life experience, one profound consideration emerges: the role of sleep in our daily lives. Sleep, which consumes approximately one-third of our existence, represents a significant barrier to maximizing our time and productivity. If we could find a safe way to eliminate the need for sleep, we would theoretically unlock vast reservoirs of hours previously devoted to rest, transforming them into opportunities for personal and societal advancement.
Not suggesting anyone try this but some people claim to sleep only two hours a day with this approach: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/polyphasic-s... "Uberman Sleep Schedule: Six 20-minute naps are spaced evenly throughout the day, totaling two hours of sleep per 24-hour period."
A book on sleep and how important it is to learning and health: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep "Walker spent four years writing the book, in which he asserts that sleep deprivation is linked to numerous fatal diseases, including dementia. ... The values of sleep and the consequences of sleep deprivation are also brought up in the book. One particular research conducted in the past, where people volunteered themselves to sleep for only six hours in a span of 10 nights, is brought up by Walker. This resulted in the volunteers being "cognitively impaired" along with their brains being heavily damaged, regardless of the three week eight-hour sleep schedule they received later."
The current thinking is that Alzheimers and dementia are caused by the brain’s waste disposal system malfunctioning and results in an accumulation of proteins in the brain that damages a lot of important functions. This waste disposal only happens during sleep.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/how-the-brain-flus...
> Sleep, which consumes approximately one-third of our existence, represents a significant barrier to maximizing our time and productivity.
"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." — Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky (1943)
That question was solved by social media.
> If we could find a safe way to eliminate the need for sleep, we would theoretically unlock vast reservoirs of hours previously devoted to rest, transforming them into opportunities for personal and societal advancement.
While in practice, what would happen is that we’d be doing more of the same. Bosses would be demanding more time in the office, people would be spending more time doomscrolling, nothing would change. It’s a pipe dream to think that if we had more time in the day we’d suddenly start using it more respectfully and responsibly.
we currently spend about half our waking hours during the day at work during the week. if we got those 8 hours of sleep back then presumably we would get 4 more hours of non-working awake time.
seems decent to me. I hate sleeping, the problem is i get tired and cant avoid it.
On the plus side, this would solve the housing problem too. Without the nuisance of sleep requirements we would move to the offices and live, ahem, produce there 24/7. Much like cattle.
This is the great future the visionary OP envisions for us.
I have a hard time imagining this will ever become a reality; the need for sleep is fairly deeply hard-coded in how our brains operate, and I believe it's also needed for some more basic cellular functions.
It's not binary I guess (sleep "once a week" is less than "sleep once a day"), but even some incremental improvements seem very far off.
One also has to wonder if it's actually desirable to have less sleep and be "on" with fewer or no breaks.
One of my favorite science fiction novels deals with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_in_Spain
Read the novella and skip the novel.
What a fascinating book series that I've never heard of. It looks like it sort of takes a middle ground between Le Guin and Rand?
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Hopefully it doesn't go like the X files episode: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleepless_(The_X-Files)
I'm all for getting rid of sleep, but given how society is structured I worry that the extra time will just end up being used for longer commutes and more zoom calls. Hardly advancement.
Have you ever considered that sleep can actually make your life richer in interesting experiences?
For some reason I would feel disappointed if sleep was a solved issue. I feel as though perhaps I need that daily break from being conscious for my own mental health.
Enter cocaine
Micro dosing cocaine might have positive impacts over long time periods.
We really don’t know and have made it nigh impossible to study. Obviously governments are trying to hide something.
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Well said. "Youth is wasted on the young"
>”It tells you that something pretty negative is happening among some subgroups of the population to drag the average down, because the wealthier, more highly educated subgroups are actually doing better,” Olshansky says.”
It is expensive to live a healthy lifestyle in the US.