Can I improve my healthspan?

  What can I learn from centenarians? From a personal and family point of view, I can look to grandparents and aunts from my mother’s side. My grandmother, Ba-chan, lived to be 96 y.o. while two aunts are now 98 and 96 y.o. I can’t really take anything from my parents because they succumbed to automobile crashes either immediately or delayed by a few years. Ba-chan lived a busy but relaxed life, and always had her family nearby. Besides puttering around her home, she liked to talk with family and friends; her only hobby that I remember well was playing a card game that involved lots of loud talk, laughter and slamming her cards on the table while cursing in Japanese. From her tone of voice, I took it to be cursing but I can’t be sure because I know only a few words of Japanese. She immigrated to BC from Japan as young woman and as you would expect her diet was a mixture of Canadian and Japanese style food. Her supper might have had salmon, white rice and a variety of...

  Is my diet appropriate/optimal for living well for the next 25 years? I think a good place to start would be with this cartoon of human development. Early on in human history, we were hunters and gatherers, eating whatever we could kill or gather in our environment. Since then our physiology has evolved slowly while our sources of food have evolved very rapidly. In the last century our physiology cannot have changed very much because only a few generations occur in 100 years, but our food sources have changed dramatically. Does this mean that my current diet is matched worse or better with my body’s requirements? Paleontologists tell us that humans began farming about 20,000 years ago and this changed how we lived in many ways. For one, we started to raise our food rather than hunt it or gather it. This also meant settling in one location instead of being on the move continuously. We have also been told that cultivated plants became a major source of calories, and...