You Might Also Like: It Turns Out

**Cara Miller** (0:00)
Today, a look inside the labs trying to extend our lives.

**Coleen Murphy** (0:05)
The question really is, if you are systemically destined to not live long, can we overcome that? That's the thing we'd really want to be able to do.

**Cara Miller** (0:14)
Coleen Murphy is a professor of molecular biology at Princeton, focused on longevity. And she explains what the research tells us about who lives a long time.

**Coleen Murphy** (0:25)
And the centenarians were more likely, almost like four and a half times more likely to have had a kid after the age of 40

**Cara Miller** (0:31)
And how we might be able to move the needle.

**Coleen Murphy** (0:34)
And in fact, actually the group that didn't do the intermittent fasting, but also kept track of what they ate, actually seemed healthier in the end because they didn't lose muscle.

**Cara Miller** (0:43)
What we know, what you can take action on now, and why America may not come up with the next breakthrough in longevity.

**Coleen Murphy** (0:51)
China is not spending less money. They're spending more money in science. And they're very happy to take back the scientists that we trained graduate students and post-docs in our labs to go run things in their lab.

**Cara Miller** (1:03)
That's coming right up.
Welcome to It Turns Out. I'm Cara Miller. A few weeks ago, we looked at the question of whether fewer people live to a hundred than we might imagine. Maybe because records aren't that good, maybe because pension fraud is rampant in lots of places. But today, we're going to tackle a different question about longevity. What has science actually found that extends life? Coleen Murphy is a professor of molecular biology at Princeton who focuses on longevity. She's also the author of How We Age from Princeton University Press. She says, much of what has been discovered so far that can help extend lifespan, or health span, which is the number of years that you're in good health, they are things you can do yourself. We'll get to them.
But she also expects new pharmaceuticals to come on the scene soon.

**Coleen Murphy** (2:11)
Most things that are super interesting to me, at least, that I think are going to come online within the next decade are not the things you can buy right now.

**Cara Miller** (2:19)
But there's a recent prescription drug that may have an unexpectedly large impact on how long Americans live.

**Coleen Murphy** (2:29)
I don't think anyone intended for GLP-1s to be the first impactful longevity drug, but it does seem that it's checking a lot of the boxes for what people were looking for in something that would extend healthspan and lifespan.

**Cara Miller** (2:43)
More than 20 years ago, in the early 2000s, the FDA approved the first GLP-1.
At the time, it was really geared towards diabetics. Then its appeal broadened.

**Coleen Murphy** (2:56)
I do think there's a lot to be said for the kind of shorter lifespan we see for people who have problems with obesity, metabolism problems, and so this sort of overlap, and those areas getting treated very well, cardiovascular disease, all those things.

**Cara Miller** (3:11)
In the lab, scientists have long known that one thing that seems to help animals live longer is calorie restriction. Now, there are folks out there who do calorie restriction voluntarily, not Murphy.

**Coleen Murphy** (3:24)
I'm not a big advocate of dietary restriction. I'm probably one of the few people in the field who doesn't love it, because I've noticed in our studies, there are much more powerful ways of extending lifespan through other genetic manipulations. But there's no denying the fact that there is plenty of scientific evidence in every model system that's been tested that caloric restriction does extend lifespan and to some degree help with health span.

**Cara Miller** (3:48)
Murphy believes that GLP-1s could, on average, help Americans live longer.
Which brings up an obvious question. If caloric restriction is beneficial, should people who aren't overweight also consider restricting calories? Could GLP-1s be good for them if they want to live longer?

**Coleen Murphy** (4:06)
And in fact, I probably wouldn't advocate for somebody who's already of normal weight to take them, and that would start to veer into unhealthy areas.
I'm mostly thinking about the people who have had trouble losing weight and keeping weight off, who are, as a result, then going to have cardiovascular and other metabolic problems. And keeping them healthy is really going to raise the average life expectancy in the US especially. So I think there are two different things, but they're kind of solving maybe the biggest problem we have in the United States for obesity-related issues in healthsmen.