Quotes from Michael F. Roizen

Make your heart as good as new? Your brain? Your back? Every other part of your body that ages? That's the promise of what lies ahead with one of the major players in the longevity race: senolytics. "Senescence" means the "process of growing old," while "lytics" means "anti." Senolytics is anti–growing old.

use every opportunity to communicate with my friends and family. Anytime I am sitting in the back of a cab, airports, or trains I use the time to send a note to my closest friends and family. I speak with my children and my mother every day. With my sister several times a week. Frequency of communication is important, much more so than duration. These techniques have helped me to stay in touch with my family and friends in Croatia even though I left it 30 years ago."—Tom, 56

scientists from the University of California, San Francisco, continuously infused the blood of young mice into old mice—and found that the old mice functioned as young ones.

This is why senolytics is so promising: It works by getting rid of these hooligan cells that turn healthy cells to the dark side.

But the quest to preserve your brain is not just about avoiding something that's scary. It's also about preserving and extending youth, and youthful curiosity, learning, playfulness, and relationship building.

In the brain, there's a similar system called the glia-lymphatic system (really glymphatic but let's use glia-lymphatic as we think it describes the system better).2 But often we don't have optimal ability to clear waste from that area. Not surprisingly, this circumstance is largely related to the food we eat, how much exercise we get, and other lifestyle choices we make, especially regarding sleep.

Use extralight virgin olive oil, which has less flavor and may help control taste cravings.

The most important thing you can do is to make sure you build a loving, informed, and loyal team around you. That includes family. That includes friends. And that surely includes a community of trusted experts—everyone from doctors to financial advisers. Why? Because the best decision-making is not just about what you feel in your gut or even read in this book. It's about triangulating several opinions and insights from people who love you—and who may know more than you do.

YOU-reka! When you keep your hands and brain occupied—whether with video games, gardening, or removing a spleen—it means you're putting your brain into the state you want: not thinking about eating and not automatically reaching for something to put in your mouth.

We estimate that by 2050, more than 10 percent of the U.S. population will be 90 years or older—chronologically—and 18 percent will be over age 80.

The point to stress is that we believe people will work 15 to 20 more highly productive years as the Great Age Reboot kicks in.

autophagy is sort of a recycling of your body.11 It helps your body clean up and repair itself by churning up damaged cells and getting rid of (eating) the unwanted cell parts while keeping the cells intact (the word "autophagy" means "self-eating").

our bodies are not constantly in a state of autophagy. It turns on and off. Recent research shows that we can have some control over it, inducing the process by periodically fasting.12 There also is quite a bit of evidence that autophagy helps us slow aging by quieting inflammation and helping build our immune system. Clean out the cellular trash, reap the longevity benefits.

Measure your waist. Ideal is 32½ inches or less for women, and 35 inches or less for men.

These numbers demonstrate that we can absolutely afford an aging society. In fact, enhanced longevity is essential for our society. That's because if longevity increases without better health, it will mean higher costs of medicine and health care as people live longer. And that financial burden can overwhelm a country's ability to handle an aging and unhealthy demographic.

So you may not want to institute a fasting process during chemotherapy as that fasting could induce autophagy and allow your cancer to hibernate and then return stronger. However, after cancer, you do want to try intermittent fasting or time-restricted feeding, as early data imply that these simple, side-effect-free, no-medication-involved practices can help you regain impaired functions and experience better quality of life as a cancer survivor.

One of the big challenges in studying aging is this: Aging isn't a disease that has an end point. Ultimately, death is the end point, but aging is really a cluster of diseases, processes, conditions, and system errors that result in loss of years and loss of quality of life.

Enhanced longevity is essential for civilization. In every society in the past, the greatest association with societal and personal GDP increases is longevity—even much greater than schooling.

Rejuvenation: These advances slow the aging process by helping bodily systems "act" younger. You can go through a process that has an effect on the infrastructure, just like a massage may loosen up sore muscles or an oil change peps up an engine.

Every little decision adds up, and even more as you live longer. That is what good genetic engineers do! Your lifestyle choices change the functioning of your DNA switches as surely (and in a much cheaper and easier way) than CRISPR.

Even finding that calorie restriction alone extended life was an accidental discovery. In 1933, during the Great Depression, scientist Clive McCay at Cornell University wanted to keep his lab going but didn't have enough money for food for all the animals. So he made half of them go on a 35 percent calorie restriction diet. The mice that were forced on calorie restriction lived 30 percent longer than the fully fed group.

science tells us that when you are under the age of six, your genes determine what happens, but by the time you are 55, 80 percent of your health outcomes are determined by your choices, which dictate which of your genes are on and which are off.2 So while your genetic component at birth certainly has some influence on your ultimate health and longevity, life outcomes are much more about engineering via your behaviors, choices, and decisions than they are about genes.

Do not get hung up on the past. Your life is made up of the present and future, and your past helps you navigate.

There is, of course, a cloudier side of increased longevity. While the benefits of wise decisions grow, the costs of unwise decisions also grow. This dichotomy will create greater disparities in health, income, and wealth if we do not address it over time. The longer we live, the more the decisions we have made regarding our work, savings, and health compound the advantages and disadvantages we experience in our later years.