The Key to Living a Longer Life | Breakthrough

NIR Barzilai has been studying a group of exceptionally healthy hundred year olds, or centenarians.

"Hi Milton, so nice meeting you!"

He believes they're a model for how we can all age.

"Come on in fellas!"

One of the interesting things with those centenarians is to see how they interact with their environment.

And we thought, "Hey, maybe they do all the right things."

"Do you eat something special?"

"Do you know? I try to keep a healthy diet."

"What about exercise?"

"Exercise? I walked about a quarter of a mile, but breakfast? I swam every day. So my body has always been activated."

When you look at the population, you find almost the opposite.

"I go just about every year afternoon to the Dunkin' Donuts, and I have coffee there and a Boston cream, that sort of thing."

"Your eating habits are not necessarily healthy."

"That's true. I smoked for minus 40."

"Fifty percent of them or beasts, fifty percent of them do not exercise. Sixty percent of the men and thirty percent of the women are smoking."

So it's in spite of all that that they have some protection that allows them easily to get to age 100.

What we do find that they have is genes that are protecting them against anything that's thrown their way.

Those are individual cells that have mutations we think are associated with longevity, and we follow what those mutations are doing to the cell.

What happens when you put the cells into a hostile environment?

The reason we're looking for those mutations is that we think that those mutations will slow the rate of aging.

Barzilai believes from a biological perspective his centenarians are aging slower than the rest of us.

His plan is to prove that medications can make us all age more like them.

"When you do genetic studies, the public thinks that we need genetic treatment for those diseases, but we cannot change your genes so that you become 100 years old."

But we can design medications based on our knowledge that will interfere with this pathway and intervene and delay the effects of aging.