Quotes from S. Jay Olshansky

Find a way to get a full-body massage every day.

There is no empirical evidence to suggest that ageing in humans has been modified by any means, nor is there evidence that it is even possible to measure biological age. And nothing has been demonstrated to be true when it comes to anti-ageing medicines.

Once you avoid the things that accelerate aging like smoking, obesity, excessive alcohol consumption, and excessive sun exposure, you've done about as much as you can to influence your aging process.

What we know for sure from our work and from others' is that mice have a life span of 1,000 days, dogs have 5,000 days, and we humans have 29,000 days. Recognizing that the duration is limited, and aging is inevitable, focus the attention on enhancing the quality of the days you have.

In Hollywood they're getting younger, but believe me, it's not the food. It's the plastic surgery.

Our concepts of aging really should be blurring because there are plenty of people who make it to older ages who aren't really any different in many ways than people who are decades younger.

Do we really want to continue to push out the envelope of survival only to see other things crop up that we may not like?

Fixing obesity is going to require a change in our modern relationship with food. I'm hopeful that we begin to see a turnaround in this childhood obesity epidemic.

While eliminating smallpox and curtailing cholera added decades of life to vast populations, cures for the chronic diseases of old age cannot have the same effect on life expectancy. A cure for cancer would be miraculous and welcome, but it would lead to only a three-year increase in life expectancy at birth.

In the developed world, we live 30 years longer, on average, than our ancestors born a century ago, but the price we pay for those added years is the rise of chronic diseases.

If we do everything right, the best we can do is live out our potential with as little age-related disease and disability as possible.

The way that we are going after ageing, I think, is a problem. The modern medical model is basically designed to attack one disease at a time. Independent of all other diseases and independent of the basic process of ageing itself.

We're not trying to make us live forever; we're not trying to even make us live significantly longer. What we're trying to do is extend the period of healthy life.

I have little doubt that gerontologists will eventually find a way to avoid, or more likely, delay, the unpleasantries of extended life.

Lifespan extension has never really been a goal of aging science, nor should it.

People pushing the idea that everyone can live to be 100 are perpetuating a myth that goes all the way back to the Bible.

Researchers have been looking for biomarkers of age for a long time and have failed. People sell tests out there to measure your biological age, and none of them work. There's no evidence that you can measure biological age with any reliability.

In Genesis 6:3, it says man can live to be 120, but there is no scientific basis for it.

The evolutionary theory of senescence can be stated as follows: while bodies are not designed to fail, neither are they designed for extended operation.

The real problem is that there's a tendency to associate ageing with loss and decline and things that aren't desirable. But experiencing all that there is to experience in life - whether that's at the age of ten or thirty or fifty or eighty - is what life is all about.

I'm not sure the least educated members of the population are missing out on the advances in medical technology as much as they are adopting harmful behavioral habits that shorten their life.

Just because someone looks old doesn't mean he or she is. The skin of some people who spend a lot of time outdoors seems to age very rapidly. Someone can look 80 or 90 and only be 40 to 50.

Older people may have always existed throughout history, but they were rare.

We have grown accustomed to the wonders of clean water, indoor plumbing, laser surgery, genetic engineering, artificial joints, replacement body parts, and the much longer lives that accompany them. Yet we should remember that the vast majority of humans ever born died before the age of 10 from an infectious disease.