#374 Longevity Secrets of Centenarians - Dr Nir Barzilai

Nir Barzilai (0:00)

One of the things we discovered in centenarians is that the genes of their longevity are exactly similar to what we learn from animals.

Siim Land (0:09)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host, Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. Nir Barzilai. Nir is a professor of medicine and genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Nir has written the book Age Later, Secrets of the Healthiest, Sharpest Centenarians. The only way to truly know your health status and mortality risk is to measure your blood work. That's why I'm excited to have Insight Tracker as today's sponsor. Insight Tracker is an at-home biomarker service that you can use to test up the 43 different biomarkers, like lipids, liver enzymes, inflammation, sex hormones, and much more. The process is simple. You order the test kit to your home, use the little finger prick device to give your blood, send it back, and you get your results to your online dashboard or app.

You can get a 20% discount off all their tests if you head over to insidetracker.com forward slash siimland. That's insidetracker.com forward slash siimland, and the code is siimland. Nir, welcome to the show.

Nir Barzilai (1:08)

Nice being with you. Good morning.

Siim Land (1:10)

Yes, I'm also very glad to talk with you, and you have a very interesting field of research because longevity sometimes, a lot of the studies are done on different animals, like mice and fruit flies. And there's, of course, you can learn a lot of things from those studies, but it's always better to research people who are actually living the longest, the centenarians and the humans itself. Like we are humans, we're not mice, we're not fruit flies.

Although there are some similarities, different pathways that are similar, it's always better to focus on the actual human outcomes. And that's what you have done with your book of looking at centenarians and what is like, what are the reasons, their environmental reasons, as well as genetic reasons of why they live so long. So yeah, I'm happy to talk with you.

Nir Barzilai (2:03)

Two things in your opening that I want to just make a point of.

You're using the term longevity. You know, when I started my research, I said, I'm interested in aging.

You know, meeting friends at the elevator, right? An elevator pitch. And they're like, yeah, we're not interested in that. And then I said, oh, by the way, I'm looking at centenarians. I'm actually, I'm interested in longevity. And it still didn't get an attention because people, most people, if you'll tell them, you know, what about living longer? They will assume that they're going to be sick for longer, not healthy for longer. And that's where we cloned the phrase healthspan. Okay, because I think that's what people wants. Lucky for us, it's the same mechanisms, right? If we're targeting the biology of aging, we're delaying age-related disease and deaths. And so it's kind of the same mechanism, but I think we have to be sensitive because sometimes buzzwords mean different things to different people. So that's about using the term longevity, which I like, as long as we understand what it is. The second thing about animals, and I started with animals.

So let me put it this way. One of the things we discovered in centenarians is that the genes of their longevity are exactly similar to what we learn from animals.

In our hypothesis with animals, that unlike for diseases, which the animals didn't help us much for diseases, but when it came to aging, all animals kind of age the same way. The skin, the hair, the skeletal, they get diseases when they get all different diseases, but the biology behind it happened to be really the same. So as long as we're looking at any disease of aging in the right template, which is in old animals, we can be more successful than what happened was studying cardiovascular disease on two months animal. It's not the same biology. So that was it. I'm sorry, that was my comments on your introduction, but I think also covered the fact that animals and humans are the same and that we want not only longevity but healthspan.

Siim Land (4:40)

Right. Yeah, that's a good clarification. So the biology is kind of the same.

And there are maybe some differences, or at least a lot of the fasting literature or calorie restriction literature is like, yes, calorie restriction does extend lifespan in these animals, but maybe the degree or with fasting, like the mice go into autophagy, for example, which is this process that increases during fasting relatively faster compared to humans. And the time span might or like the implications of whether or not you shoot fast for longevity are kind of different between kind of humans and mice, at least.