When it comes to something as life and death important as to what to feed ourselves and our families,

we should rely not on anecdotes, but on facts. Welcome to the Nutrition Facts podcast. I'm your

host, Dr. Michael Greger. There's a lot of research being done right now and the best way to

understand the processes by which we age.

Here's our first story.

There are numerous ways to try to unlock the mysteries of aging.

You could study long-lived individuals like centenarians and super-sentenarians,

particularly long-lived smokers, perhaps, to uncover the secrets to their resilience.

Or you could go in the opposite direction and study short-lived smokers, perhaps, to uncover the secrets to their resilience. Or you could go in the opposite direction and study short-lived people tragic, accelerated aging syndromes like

progeria, or children age at 8 to 10 times at normal rate, wrinkling, balding, and then typically

dying around age 13 of a heart attack or stroke.

Or you could study long-lived animals.

There are mammals such as the bowhead whale.

They can live hundreds of years.

There are oysters and clams whose hearts can be over a billion times

over its five-century lifespan.

What accounts for the 10,000-fold range of lifespan in the animal kingdom?

Most of the aging pathways identified as the hallmarks of aging were established using

so-called model organisms such as yeast, worms, flies, and mice, simpler species that may

nonetheless offer insights due to the remarkable conservation of common

aging mechanisms to the aeons of evolutionary time.

Aging used to be considered simply too complex to study.

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