Many of the pharmaceutical studies we rely on do not take sex into consideration. Since hormones fluctuate over the course of a month, tests that use females can be a lot more complicated to analyze than tests that use males. Without taking hormonal shifts into account, it is impossible to determine how treatments might affect a woman over the course of a month." (pp. 55 - 56)

The author even recommends "eat what your ancestors ate" and I'm pretty sure the diet of the old people in Okinawa looked nothing like the mediterranean diet, so how would an Asian person approach this book? I guess, if you are Italian, the this book is for you, otherwise it will leave you with few questions. How much was his pitch about longevity? Was he primarily telling people that the goat testicles would make them more sexually potent, or was the promise of a longer life just as important? This book is written by a genetics professor at Harvard who works in this area. It’s remarkable that a scientist has written such a personal book. It’s really about him and his research. What motivated him to get into the field was his grandmother who lived to 92, with the last decade of her life not being a good one.The longitudinal Framingham Heart Study taught us that the common denominators of heart disease included high blood pressure, smoking and high cholesterol levels. (p. 30) Embryonic stem cells have the ability to divide and become other types of cells. They have the potential to become any type of cell in the body. The hard reality is that 99% of these longevity books are premised on shaky science at best, and are outright promoting mistruths to sell dangerous health advice to vulnerable readers at worst. This is a really intriguing book by a scientist who’s a neurologist. She didn’t start off being interested in longevity or aging at all. What she was really interested in was trying to understand why humans are cleverer than elephants. Elephants’ brains are three times bigger than ours, so why aren’t they three times as smart? What we have is a particularly big brain for our body size. If you took another animal that’s of comparable size, like a small zebra, it has a brain that’s a fifth the size of ours. So we’re really an outlier. I give some examples of how we might go about this. For instance, the longest-lived mammal is a bowhead whale, which probably lives 250 years. It’s hard to have a laboratory colony of bowhead whales, but there’s a lot we can learn from looking into the cells of a bowhead whale. If you have that many cells, 100,000 times as many cells as humans do, and you don’t get cancer in a year—each cell potentially could turn into a cancer—you must have some very, very good mechanisms for preventing cancer. The same goes for other aspects of longevity.

That you may already suffer from an extremely common yet underdiagnosed liver condition that could be a precursor to the chronic diseases of aging. Comments deemed to be spam or solely promotional in nature will be deleted. Including a link to relevant content is permitted, but comments should be relevant to the post topic. I don't want you to live in fear of ageing, or beat yourself up about the fact that your body is doing something totally natural. I want to reframe the way that we, as women, talk about ageing. I want to offer a perspective that is healthier and more scientifically accurate than the fear and shame-based conversations that permeates our culture." (p. 5, Introduction) I really liked the fact that this book wasn't about "anti-aging". Society as a whole can sometimes focus on youth and superficial beauty and look down at the aging process when in reality, aging is gift. You have been given the gift to live more. Some do not have that gift so it seems silly to me that we can become so obsessed on superficial beauty and get upset about wrinkles or the visual changes to show your age. This was a good book to read to encourage others to accept and embrace their age and look at the beauty in the experiences that they have had. I've been reading various sources that hiWhat we eat is the biggest determinant of ageing, so to prevent ageing, eat the right things. Specifically, “sugars and proteins affect key genes and pathways that are central promoters of ageing and age-related diseases.” To minimize ageing, follow an eight-point longevity diet, summarized as being a low-protein vegan (with occasional fish). Fortunately, hidden in one of the chapters, there is a chart showing the calorie/macronutrient breakdown of the FMD. It is slightly different from his journal article versions, other versions he's published, and other FMD details in this actual book in other chapters. But close enough.