HEALTH

Amidst the societal clamour for everlasting youth, the authoritative voice of best-selling author Bill Gifford surfaces, heralding a transformative call to action. Renowned for his insightful works, including Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (Or Die Trying) and the collaborative gem Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity, co-authored with Dr. Peter Attia, Gifford challenges the anti-ageing ethos, urging us to embrace ageing while seeking vitality. In this exclusive interview, Gifford offers insights into navigating longer lifespans, reimagining societal support, and prioritising preventative healthcare. With promising advancements in ageing science, Gifford envisions a future of enduring vitality and vibrancy.

Along with Dr. Peter Attia, Bill is the co-author of The New York Times best seller book Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity

Bill is the author of The New York Times best seller book
Spring Chicken Stay Young Forever (Or Die Trying) 

In your work, you advocate for reframing the conversation around ageing from ‘anti-ageing’ to embracing the process and seeking tools for healthy longevity. Can you elaborate on this philosophy and why you believe it's important for individuals to shift their mindset in this way?

Back in the 1950s, a famous British scientist named Peter Medawar called ageing the last unsolved problem in biology. It’s still unsolved — ageing and death evolved for a reason, and nature has about a 400-million-year head start on us. Organisms need to age and die to make way for new generations. But now that more humans are living for longer, we need to figure out how to navigate the ageing process better. This is new territory for us as a species. And some of the very things that have helped us live longer (comfortable environment, increased food security), work counter to healthy ageing, mainly by allowing us to be inactive and obese. etc. 

We’re not going to solve ageing in our lifetimes. But, we can get better at navigating it.

How did your active research for your books Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying), 2015 and Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity (co-authored with Dr. Peter Attia, 2023) change your views on ageing, and how do you apply what you learned to your own life?

I had a few epiphanies while working on these books over a period of more than ten years. The first is that sleep is the most essential piece of staying healthy and performing well; while writing Spring Chicken, I eventually quit setting my alarm and just let myself sleep as long as I needed (typically to about 8:30 am). Now I’m working on strength training, which I don’t naturally love, but I’m quite aware of how important it is to maintain muscle quality as we age. I want to be able to cook my own dinner, shop for groceries, and tie my own shoes when I’m 90.

What role do you think community and societal support systems play in promoting healthy ageing? How can we create environments that enable older adults to thrive and contribute meaningfully to society?

Creating healthy environments for the ageing population is a huge problem in our society. In the US and Europe in particular, the older people get, the more likely they are to live alone. This is the exact opposite of what should be happening. I think this stems from the fact that our goal in life is to retire, stop working and then do nothing but play golf, or whatever, until we die. On one specific day, when we turn 65 or 63 or even as early as in our late 50s, we simultaneously give up one of our primary purposes in life — our work; and in so doing we also give up a key focus of social connection. That’s devastating. And for men especially, the year that one retires can be really difficult. You wonder why you worked so hard, and why you’re so lonely all of a sudden.

There’s a really interesting body of research developing around what’s called “social prescribing”— the idea that instead of taking a pill or even an exercise intervention, healthcare providers can steer patients (of all ages) toward groups of like-minded people who are taking part in some enjoyable shared activity, like open-water swimming or gardening or cycling. In this way, people make connections with others and find new purpose and joy in their daily lives, and that, in turn, can be healing.

In Outlive you mention the financial incentives in the healthcare system that often prioritise treatment over prevention. How can these incentives be realigned to promote preventive measures for chronic diseases, and what role do individuals, healthcare providers and policymakers play in driving this change?

It’s baked right into our insurance plans, at least it is here in the US: we have these huge ‘deductibles’ that mean the first few thousand dollars of our annual healthcare costs are ‘ON US’. That’s a huge and obvious deterrent to prevention — we won’t go to the doctor for prevention, or to keep a minor problem from becoming major, because it will cost us a bundle. Insurance companies make it worse, by refusing to cover certain preventive screenings (I had a calcium scan recently that I had to pay for).

Simply put, our entire medical system pulls in more revenue when people are sick than it ever could earn by trying to keep people healthy in the first place. It’s completely backwards.

Looking to the future, what do you envision for the field of longevity and healthy ageing? Are there any emerging trends or areas of research that you find particularly exciting or promising?

There’s a lot of stuff happening that really gets me excited — early cancer detection has huge promise, and AI could be a really powerful tool to help us make sense of really complex phenomena like the microbiome and the workings of our genome.
I’m still hopeful that, someday fairly soon, most people will have access to a medicine or set of medicines that will help us stay healthier as we grow old. We won’t be living forever or anywhere close to that, but we need to reduce the suffering that our parents and grandparents — and eventually we ourselves — too often endure.

Bill Gifford is an author, journalist and speaker in health, medicine, longevity and cutting-edge biology. He is (co)author of the worldwide bestseller Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity, with Dr. Peter Attia and author of NYT bestseller Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (Or Die Trying), a personal investigation into the science of ageing.