Jay Olshansky, PhD, would like us to lower our expectations about life expectancy. The University of Illinois Chicago epidemiologist and biostatistician argues that, as a species, we’re living, on average, about as long as we’re ever going to live: Men are typically going to max out at about 84 years; women at about 90. Centenarians will remain somewhat of a novelty.
This may deliver a bit of a buzzkill to those hopeful multitudes eagerly awaiting the next lifespan breakthrough from the legions of gerontologists, geneticists, and healthy-living gurus that fuel our growing longevity industry. Olshansky says you can forget the resveratrol, the rapamycin, intermittent fasting, gene editing, and dozens of other strategies that have slowed the aging process in yeast, nematodes, and mice. Humans can only live so long. And we should be grateful for the years we get.
“Humanity’s battle for a long life has largely been accomplished,” he writes in the latest issue of Nature Aging. “This is not a pessimistic view of [our] longevity . . . or that further mortality improvement at all ages (especially older ages) are no longer possible or that healthspan can no longer be improved through risk-factor modification or reduction in survival inequalities. Rather, it is a celebration of more than a century of public health and medicine successfully allowing humanity to gain the upper hand on the causes of death that have, thus far, limited human lifespan.”
There’s no question that life expectancy at birth increased dramatically — by about 30 years — in most developed countries during the 20th century, Olshansky notes. This improvement has led many researchers to assume that the trend would continue apace in the current century. But after reviewing mortality rates in the eight countries with the longest-lived populations from 1990 to 2019, he and his team found the rate of improvement in life expectancy had slowed considerably in every country.
Despite the claims of some life-extension researchers, including most notably the late demographer James Vaupel, who argued that most children born after the turn of the 21st century would make it to triple digits, Olshansky’s study argues that there is a clear ceiling to life expectancy now — and in the future. “There is no evidence to support the suggestion that most newborns today will live to age 100 because this would first require accelerated reductions in death rates at older ages (the exact opposite of the deceleration that has occurred in the last three decades),” he writes.
“There is no evidence to support the suggestion that most newborns today will live to age 100 because this would first require accelerated reductions in death rates at older ages (the exact opposite of the deceleration that has occurred in the last three decades).”
Indeed, he adds, “It would be optimistic if 15 percent of females and 5 percent of males in any human birth cohort could live to age 100 in most countries in this century.”
That’s not to say that fewer people will reach older age, he explains. The massive numbers of boomers around the globe will ensure that increase. But, overall, we’re still limited by the raw calculus of life expectancy. Even if you eliminated all deaths among people under the age of 50, for instance, you’d only increase average peak life expectancy by one year for women and 18 months for men, Olshansky’s team estimated.
And then there’s the brutal realities of biological aging. Eliminate all common diseases and fatal accidents, he notes, and the cellular mechanisms that sustain our bodies would still malfunction long before most of us achieve centenary status. The longevity industry is doing its best to confront those realities, but the results so far have offered little more than hyperbole.
As Brad Stulberg, MHSA, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, opined in a recent New York Times essay, we are inundated these days with youth-enhancing biohacks and protocols designed to extend our healthspan far into the future: “supplements, green powders, cold plunges, the supposed benefits of low-angle morning sunlight, continuous glucose monitors for nondiabetics, box breathing, the proposed benefits of rapamycin . . . and countless restrictive diets that range from avoiding seed oils to becoming aware of the ‘hidden dangers’ in fruits and vegetables to shunning nearly everything but meat.”
Lost amid this relentless stream of exciting options, Stulberg argues, are the rather mundane — but well-established — keys to living a long and healthy life: regular exercise, a nutritious diet, no smoking, limited alcohol intake, and meaningful relationships.
Lost amid this relentless stream of exciting options, Stulberg argues, are the rather mundane — but well-established — keys to living a long and healthy life: regular exercise, a nutritious diet, no smoking, limited alcohol intake, and meaningful relationships.
He cites a seminal 2017 study in which researchers tracked health data on more than 14,000 Americans beginning at the age of 50. Nonsmokers who limited their alcohol consumption and maintained a healthy weight lived an average of seven years longer than their counterparts who did not practice similar behaviors. “The average life expectancy for women living this trio of lifestyle behaviors was just shy of 89 years,” he writes. “For men, it was nearly 86 years.”
And a 2023 meta-analysis involving more than 2 million adults offered what Stulberg argues is a strong endorsement for the life-extending benefits of strong relationships. At any age, researchers found that loneliness correlated with a 14 percent higher risk of an early death; for those who were socially isolated, the risk of dying earlier rose to 32 percent.
Most of us recognize the importance of these lifestyle factors, yet the longevity gospel remains alluring. “A large part of its appeal,” Stulberg notes, “is the fantasy of, and desire for, control: If you just do all of these routines and regimens and take all these supplements, then you’ll live forever and never grow old or become ill.”
It’s a comforting fantasy, but in the real world accidents happen and random cellular mischief can strike at any time. So maybe we shouldn’t obsess too much about our life expectancy. Like Stulberg advises, maybe we’re better served by living in the here and now rather than struggling to control what may be: “There is a real danger in focusing so much on extending the number of years in our lives that we neglect to focus on the life in those years.”
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