Elissa: We don't want to just wait till people get disease. We know that aging is one of the main causes of later diseases except for the genetic diseases.

Rhonda: So it sounds like you're also talking a lot about differences between someone's life span, how long they live and their health span, how healthy they are.

Elissa: Okay, so I'm glad you brought that up because it is a hugely important shift for us to rather than focus on longevity and maximal longevity to focus on years of healthy living, the health span. And so what's happening with longevity is it's increasing dramatically, it's beautiful, right? So for men, life expectancy is around 78 years in the United States, for women, it's around 83 years. And that is a dramatic shift from even 100 years ago. So we are doing great in terms of longevity overall. But we're doing terrible when you look at actual healthy years of living.

Because the longer we... well, first of all, no one wants to live long with disease and suffering. It's all about healthy years anyway, that would be people who have, you know, taken care of older relatives know that you don't want to live long when you're suffering. So really, the longer we live, the more likely we are to get dementia, and disability, and need to, you know, live in institutions, etc. So that's the kind of double-edged sword of living long. So what we really want to focus in on is how can we live well with optimal slow aging for as long as we can, and then die pretty quickly before we're like suffering with dementia.

Rhonda: Right. So delaying age-related disease, delaying cardiovascular disease, delaying neurodegenerative diseases. You mentioned delaying cancer, like having all those things where you're basically improving the quality of life as opposed to just sort of, you know, increasing how long you live but just living kind of a degenerative kind of lifestyle.

Elissa: Yeah, and it's a whole formula. So it's not one thing. Like, the levers that control aging are the things that we know about but we easily forget. So we often hear, you know, about the lifestyle things. So activity, nutrition, stress. So those are really important to manage well, and they add up over time. So like a healthy lifestyle, not extreme but just healthy, is in midlife predicts longer telomeres, predicts longevity decades later.