Image: Su San Lee (potato chip enthusiast), Unsplash
Time-Machine. Defeat Aging; One Grain Of Sand At A Time:
One problem most of us have is wrestling with incremental progress.
As I talked about in the post on weight-loss and muscle gain, it turns out to be +/- imperceptible.
It’s almost a religious practice. Based on faith, done routinely, and deals with the unknown and things that seem invisible.
Many times, we don’t know if what we’re doing is working, or even helping.
But even though The Unknown can seem discouraging at times, it’s important to stay the course for when the graph does make that “hockey stick” change upward.
And an Oxford-led team just discovered the same discipline is true for how long and well you live…
The Short Answer:
- Even though it’s imperceptible, incremental progress can influence a lot over time.
- Psychology & Health have debated Environment Vs. Genetics for awhile.
- An Oxford team tried to figure out an answer using big data and fancy tests.
- They narrowed down over 160 risk-factors down to 25 that matter.
- These were all correlated to 22 serious diseases with math and “biological clocks” made of 3,000 proteins.
- About 500,000 subjects provided most of the info, with 45k giving even more.
- The results for Behavior & Environment (Nurture) vs. Genetics (Nature) show that the first counts for 17% of the results and the second only 2%.
- So Nurture/Behavior/Environment wins and genetics is not destiny!
- The reason this works is something called Epigenetics.
- That means your DNA is like computer programs, but you get to choose which get run & how long.
- Smoking, Income, Exercise, & Living Conditions were associated with the most diseases.
- Problems with Heart, Liver, & Lungs were influenced by behavior.
- But it looked like Dementia, and problems with Breast, Ovaries and Prostate were actually governed by genetics.
- The greatest life-extensions were associated with Living with a partner, Being Employed, and Being Financially Comfortable.
- The study also found that both for good and bad, lots of tiny exposures add-up to better or worse outcomes in the long-term.
- There is a lot this study didn’t cover and neither it nor its data were perfect.
- This is especially true for its gaps around nutrition, but there may be others.
Read on to find out the details…
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Take any psychology or biology class and one of the debates you’ll run-into is, “Nature vs. Nurture”.
Are we only what we get in our genetic code, or is there more to it?
For psychologists not currently named Randolph or Mortimer Duke, I think they might argue it’s 20% Nature, 80% Nurture and that early environments matter an awful lot.
Strangely enough, they might be onto something with those ratios.
Because even though we’re told over and over that genetics are a big factor when it comes to serious health stuff, we might be finding out otherwise…
To answer that question, Oxford researchers looked at about 500,000 subjects from the UK Biobank, and then narrowed them down to 45,000.
They looked through it for a short list of 25 out of 160+ environment & behavioral factors, and 22 associated diseases.
The results from that showed genetics only had a 2% influence, while lifestyle & behavior counted for 17% of all problems.
What’s even more interesting than that, especially for nerds, is that they did it using several tiny aging clocks based on 3,000 different proteins.
They even gave the difference between birth-timed age and aging-clock age a fancy-shmancy SCIENCE! name: “The proteomic age-gap”!
But wait, it gets even better.
Not only were researchers able to find at-least that behavior counts for a TON,
They also discovered 23 of the 25 lifestyle, social, financial, & environment factors are things you can change!
And here’s the list of the ones associated with the most problems:
1) Smoking – linked to 21 diseases
2) Income & Wealth – linked to 19 diseases
3) Physical Activity – 17 diseases
4) Living Conditions – 19 diseases
These are ALL things we can modify in some way!
To be fair to the genetics guys, there was a shorter list of large-effect diseases that weren’t influenced as much by behavior-changes.
They were:
1) Dementia
2) Breast cancer
3) Ovarian cancer
4) Prostate cancer
That being said, behavior changes were found to reduce the following health problems:
1) Heart disease
2) Liver disease
3) Lung disease
And the main factor-changes that are associated with extending life the most are:
1) Living with a partner
2) Being employed
3) Being financially comfortable
Previous studies have also equated wealth with positive outcomes as well.
The reason all of this works? A weird thing called, “Epigenetics“.
What that means is outside factors can influence which parts of the DNA-code that gets run in your body.
Your DNA is like all the programs on a computer, and you are the user who gets to choose which ones get run and for how long.
It also means: Genetics Is Not Destiny!
Health nerds have theorized this forever, but this Oxford work is one of the earliest examples of its kind.
Especially since it uses several different types of these “tiny clocks” we’ve referenced before.
It also points at what could be a whole new frontier of aging research & fixes for the future.
Kind of like the protein-clock-based, “vitamin deficiency test” for lifespan!
They also found, just like incremental progress we mentioned at the beginning,
All the behavior & environment issues (both for better and worse) add-up over time, and also that they start taking effect as early as the age of 10.
So it’s good to do the best you can over the long haul!
But we have to also remember that this study is not perfect.
It’s observational and based on very short-term data.
For example, it really underestimates the role of nutrition on health.
This is probably incorrect because at the minimum, sugar, seed oils, UPFs and saturated fat intake are all associated with structural-damage, and accelerated aging.
It also did not exactly explain why some things are correlated with good outcomes, just that they were.
So there you are!
-3,000 High-precision body-clocks tell you what matters, what you can influence, and what to do.
Change won’t always be easy, but the investment in incremental-progress will always be worth it.
In the Harry Potter novels, the headmaster of the school says something very interesting to him on a similar subject:
“It is not our abilities that show who we truly are. It is our choices.”
The future is in your hands.
[and also probably between the plate and the utensils]
• Source: Oxford
• More Coverage: HT-Fatigue From Decisionmaking
• Source Study: Nature.Med – Integrating the environmental and genetic architectures of aging and mortalityg
