I'm Alan Alda, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

We got together these 1,400 people who we called the welderly because they were over age 85 and they'd never been sick with any chronic condition.

So we wanted to see what was in their genes and what was really interesting, Alan, we didn't find much in the genome sequence.

But on the other side, the elderly, which is the people with multiple chronic diseases, that's

where most people are today.

So we can do a far better job of eliminating, preventing, delaying these major age-related

diseases.

The big difference now is being able to predict accurately medical forecasting, what and when and who.

And so when you do all that, we have a reset of medicine that we never had before.

That's Dr. Eric Topal.

His new book is called Super Agers, an evidence-based approach to longevity.

It's a detailed and encouraging exploration of what new research is revealing about what it takes to become one of the welderly, a healthy

older person, as opposed to being elderly beset in old age with chronic and life-shortening

diseases.

You know, decades ago when I was interviewing scientists about longevity, many of them said we would live to 250 and beyond, eventually. But you've got a completely different take on it.

It's not how long we're going to live, but how healthy we're going to be as long as we live.

Isn't that right?

That's right, Alan.

If you're trying to just show that you can get humans to live longer, it takes a really long time to prove that.

Because you've got to wait decades.

Whereas if you're just trying to show that you can prevent diseases like

cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, cardiovascular, the big three of our age-related disease,

...