Planning to Live to 110
I'll spare you a link to one of the talking heads of the "anti-aging" marketplace discussing her plans to live to 110, and how other folk might, hypothetically, follow along at home. You can find it easily enough via Google if so inclined. It puts me in mind of the following entirely made-up short exchange:
Me: I hear you are planning to live to 110?Talking Head: Yes.
Me: So you must be donating handsomely to help fund the SENS research program, which aims to repair the causes of aging, right?
Talking Head: No.
Me: You're not planning this very well at all, then, are you?
People show up every now and again in public forums with talk of planning to live for a long time in good health using nothing more than supplements, diet, and exercise: make all the right lifestyle choices, eat a good diet, don't get fat, be calorie restricted, and so forth. There's even a billionaire who was talking a good game on the topic a couple of years back. Good health practices all raise the odds of living a healthier life, but with present day medical technology those odds don't see you making it to 90, let alone 100 or 110. Living as healthily as possible gives you slim odds - perhaps somewhere a little north of 25% - of celebrating your 90th birthday under present medical capabilities. The odds get worse if you let yourself go.
The simple, unfortunate truth of the matter is this: if eating exceedingly well really could let people live to 100 and beyond with any reliability, then this would be well known, and the world population would include thousands upon thousands upon thousands of centenarians.
So plan away, planners. It won't help all that much in achieving any goal related to the number of candles on your cake, though it may well make your life much more pleasant along the way. Good health is a very underrated thing, usually by those who still have it. The only way the planner demographic will reliably hit their high-end life span targets is by benefiting from advances in medical technology, i.e. from the results of actions and initiatives that have absolutely nothing to do with their personal health practices. For the presently older demographic, those advances would have to be of the sort envisaged in the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS): ways to actually create rejuvenation in the old by addressing the cellular and molecular damage that causes aging.
The bottom line here: if you're planning to live to 110, then you aren't planning very well if those plans don't largely revolve around helping to fund rejuvenation research of the sort pioneered by the SENS Research Foundation. Advances in medicine don't just happen: they require money, advocacy, and hard work. Which of those are you helping out with?