Quotes from S. Jay Olshansky

Reducing caloric intake is the only proven method of extending life. If caloric intake is reduced to 20 percent below maintenance, you can extend your lifespan considerably.

In centenarians and supercentenarians - people over 110 - you see a higher level of fecundity much later in life.

As soon as a handful of scientists come up with an intervention shown to influence aging in other species, they begin selling it as an intervention for humans, even though there may not be evidence it works.

The reason we have cancer and heart disease is the same reason you can't get rid of the wear and tear on your tires on your car: as soon as you use them, you are wearing them away. You can't make eternal tires, and it's the same with the human body.

Humans will die like all living things do, but we have the added burden of knowing that we will.

The bodies we have are not made for extended use. We must cope with accumulated DNA damage, cell damage, muscle atrophy, bone loss, decreased muscle mass, and joints worn out from overuse during a lifetime of bipedal locomotion. It might have worked great for prehistoric humans, but it wreaks havoc on our knees and hips.

There is a possibility that there is somebody out there alive today over 122, but we'll probably never know it, because in all likelihood they come from either China or India, and they don't have reliable birth records.

As long as humans have existed, we have always desired to live longer. Every society, every religion, every culture. Of course, they all failed at dramatic life extension.

Once DNA acquires the ability to persist forever, the carriers become disposable. Essentially, our bodies are designed to last long enough to reproduce.

The field of ageing research is full of characters. We have hucksters claiming that cures for ageing can be bought and sold; prophetic seers, their hands extended for money, warning that immortality is nigh; and would-be Nobelists working methodically in laboratories in search of a pill to slow ageing.

The Faustian trade of the 20th century was, we got 30 years of additional life, but in return we got heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer's and sensory impairments. The question is: What Faustian trade are we making now, as we go after heart disease, cancer, stroke and Alzheimer's?

If you can slow the biological process of aging, even a minor slowdown in the rate at which we age yields improvements in virtually every condition of frailty and disability and mortality that we see at later ages.

We know in the field of aging that some people tend to senesce, or grow older, more rapidly than others, and some more slowly.

Exercise is roughly the only equivalent of a fountain of youth that exists today, and it's free to everyone.

Ageing is very rare. We only see it in humans and laboratory animals and in zoo animals and in our pets. Basically, organisms that are protected from the external world. Once you create that protection, you live long enough to see ageing.

The modern rise of Alzheimer's Disease in the twentieth century is not a sign of failure. It's a sign of success. Success in living long enough to see that disease expressed.

Physical immortality is seductive. The ancient Hindus sought it; the Greek physician Galen from the 2nd Century A.D. and the Arabic philosopher/physician Avicenna from the 11th Century A.D. believed in it.

The fact is that nothing in gerontology even comes close to fulfilling the promise of dramatically extended lifespan, in spite of bold claims to the contrary that by now should sound familiar.

A lifetime of low calories has come naturally to the longest-lived people in the world... in the Japanese archipelago of Okinawa.

The last thing you ever want to do is extend the period of frailty and disability and make people unhealthy for a longer time period. So lifespan extension in and of itself should not be the goal of medicine, nor should it be the goal of public health, nor should it be the goal of aging science.

When you hit your 40s, you begin to take notice of the effects of aging because people that you know begin to die of heart attacks and tumors, so we take notice of the effects of aging.

Growing new limbs, copying internal organs like a Xerox machine, exponential increases in computing power, better eyes and ears - I could read stories like this endlessly.

A lot of people are living in a dream world - they want to deny that aging occurs or believe it doesn't have to occur. They'll hold on to this belief until the moment they die. The reality will eventually hit them.

Exercise is roughly equivalent to an oil lube and a filter for a car. You don't have to do it, but when you do, it makes the car run a lot better.