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Dhruv Khullar
A contributing writer covering medicine and health care
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It is a testament to the allure of anti-aging advice that the market for longevity content is seemingly boundless, even as the basics can be covered in a few words: exercise, eat well, sleep enough, maintain relationships, don’t drink in excess, and don’t smoke at all. But the potency of our desire for something more—that special diet, device, habit, elixir, anything—makes us all too eager to accept the claims of those who say they’ve found it (and are very happy to sell it to us). In recent years, longevity influencers have honed a playbook. The key is to overstate what’s known by blurring the lines between the proven and the speculative. A common tactic is to extrapolate: from theory to practice, from animal studies to human benefit, from narrow indications to general-purpose applications. It helps to mix in an aura of exclusivity and a dash of conspiracy. For consumers, there’s a thrill in being first to the next big thing, and in gaining access to insider knowledge that, for one reason or another, the powers that be don’t want you to have.
In this week’s issue, I review two new books that aim to puncture the longevity-industrial complex. In “Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science,” the Oxford researcher Saul Justin Newman argues that much of what we think we know about centenarians might be wrong, because many of the people we think of as centenarians aren’t really centenarians at all. In Newman’s telling, the places that appear to produce a disproportionate share of extremely long-lived individuals actually just have disproportionately bad recordkeeping: unreliable birth certificates, out-of-date civil registries, widespread pension fraud.
If the secrets to longer living aren’t hiding in some Greek fishing village or Japanese mountain town, there may be some simple lessons to be discovered in plain sight. In “Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life,” Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a physician and bioethicist, offers a commonsense guide to healthy living that almost seems designed to troll modern longevity gurus. (And I mean really commonsense: brush your teeth, go for walks, don’t drink and drive.) Emanuel’s real target, though, is a culture obsessed with promoting long lives instead of meaningful ones. “Wellness and living long are only means,” he reminds us. “They are not, themselves, the essence of a good life.”
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