The Straight Dope: Do your lifestyle choices matter once you’re really old?

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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Daniel T. is still just a kid at age 40. He’s got to stick to clean living until age 60 at least.

I’m age 83, still working on multiple projects abroad for multinational development banks who never check the date of birth I put in my resume and have no idea how old I am.

Just this year I abandoned the sort of Mediterranean diet I have more or less followed since age 32 or so. I still have no organic disease: no problems with sugar or cholesterol or anything like that. Not even an enlarged prostate. Hearing is going and I need three sets of glasses to see various distances: bifocals for reading and working, single focus lens for watching movies on my big 3D monitor, and street glasses. Not as steady on my feet as before but still stride when I walk. Had to give up lifting weights in 2011. Not to worry, it helps to be able to remember what you read and the memory is still OK.

So I thought FRACKIT. Now it’s four eggs a day,lots of ice-cream and Brie / Camembert cheese and a couple of glasses of wine per day. Apples and papaya still but not in the fanatic way I did up to last year. I draw the line at tobacco because I once became addicted to it.

The main thing is to do what gives you joy and for me it’s a lot of things that would have kept Leonardo happy in his old age": physical science, economics, governance and law.

Read Richard Feynman and take seriously what he says about doing what you enjoy doing. Learn quantum physics. Do something really bizarre like leaning a language you know nothing about. Seems only a few years ago I was 5 years old wearing clothes from the welfare agency and learning the ABC’s.

Life is too short to allow yourself to get trapped into doing soul-destroying things. Do an MA or MS or a PhD or finish high school if you missed out, but tool up for the modern world. What the hell else is there left to do when you reach 80?

I have never been to Australia but I have sat on an Australian geological plate drinking white wine.

Last night I sat for a half-hour watching the waves roll onto the beach on the north coast of Timor Leste, enjoying the experience of being 300 yards /meters from the edge of an Australian geological plate that drops down 4,000 meters / 13,000 feet to the ocean floor. I know about this stuff because I finished an MS degree in Earth science at age 74.

Don’t just sit and watch TV. Do something challenging.

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Link to column

After spending half my life worrying every single day about what I was going to eat or not eat, I spent a year learning to eat when I was hungry and stop when I wasn’t hungry. I now eat whatever I want, and do not stress about it. I tell people “Stress will kill you a lot quicker than a bad diet.”

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I read somewhere that three cardiologists were talking about this very thing at a convention. They were in their early sixties at the time. All of them ate healthily, exercised regularly, drove carefully, and in general lived a healthy lifestyle. They suddenly realized that they had eliminated virtually every cause of death except cancer. In other words, all they had accomplished was that they had guaranteed for themselves long, lingering deaths. When they went down to dinner, they all ordered red meat. Rare.

That said, there is more to life than just longevity. Once you are over sixty your lifestyle may not make much difference in how long you live. But it can make a whale of a difference in whether you spend your golden years fighting joint pain, trapped in a wheelchair or a scooter, are able to drive, participate in sports, or just visit the grandchildren.

Obesity is the number one cause of senior citizens becoming shut-ins, cut off from the outside world by simple lack of mobility. It is also the major source of pain in your old age. Excess weight puts extra stress on your joints. It makes it harder to get through doors, drive, get on and off airplanes and cruise ships, and buy clothes. It destroys your sex life, ruins your enjoyment of food, and exacerbates back problems. It causes incontinence and can mean the difference between spending old age as a diabetic or not.

Lack of flexibility is another big problem. Spending your final years unable to tie your own shoes or even dress or bathe yourself is no fun.

Neither is it fun to go to the doctor every six months for a skin map and to have suspicious moles removed because you spent too much time in the sun when you were younger.

There is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be able to fly an airplane, play golf and tennis, or dance the night away when you are in your nineties. Or all of the above. I have known people who, on their ninetieth birthday, played two sets of tennis and then went out and shot their age on the golf course.

There are only two things that you really don’t have much control over: stroke and Alzheimer’s. Those will ruin your life, for sure. But, barring those, you should be able to enjoy old age right up to the end.

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And if you do have a stroke and your wife finds you lying on the floor of the garage, tell her to wait an hour and a half before calling 9-1-1. There are indeed fates worse than death.

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I’m a noob and this is the first article of yours I’ve ever read. I loved it. You seem to have the ability to look at all sides while being humorous. Thank you for this article. I am 50 and was wondering the same thing.

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My doctor once suggested starting smoking at 60, Heroin at 75, and crack cocaine at 80.

Sadly, I think he was joking.

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I coded during a minor lung biopsy, bastard surgeon resuscitated me even though I had a DNR in my chart. I agree, it seems to be rarely discussed but there are fates worse than death.

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My mom was in her 50s when she finally got her PhD. She was still working full time through it all.

Damn - one less excuse. :smack:

And I have to comment on this:

Are you sure you’re not trying to make it look like your wife offed you? :smiley:

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Well stated and a major part missing in the column. Modern health care can keep us living with our disabilities longer. What we want though is less to stave off death than to stave off decrepitude. Fitness in the bank and maintained, both aerobic and strength, and decent enough nutrition (enough protein is a big deal for the elderly) impacts that more than it impacts longevity.

Also an important caveat to the drinking item. What is unclear is if moderate alcohol consumption is protective (which it may be) or if it is a marker - for social connections for example. People who socialize and drink moderately as they go out and about are very different than people who are alone, drinking or not.

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I reminds me of my wife’s great-grandmother. She lived to be 108, but when she was around 100 she came to the conclusion that she could eat pretty much whatever she wanted. So I think she ate a remarkable amount of chocolate after that.

Who is going to tell her she can’t?

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My grandmother is 94 and has very little interest in food unless it’s ice cream. And the doctors still want her to gain more weight.
Powers &8^]

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I asked a similar question in this thread, with good discussion and info as a result.

Nutshell: being healthy may not add years to your life, but will likely add life to your years.

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“Lifestyle choices” is pretty broad, but in general the risks for cardiovascular disease (think strokes and a crappy heart) and cancer (adenocarcinomas in particular) take decades to develop.

If you get to 65 healthy, thin, hypertension-free and vascular-disease free, and you have no history of tobacco exposure, I would say it’s fine to eat what you want. You should not eat as much as you want, because there is pretty good evidence that thinness is associated with longevity and health.

It’s probably OK to start smoking, although I suggest waiting until 70 (just arbitrarily) as long as you only care about not getting cancer. There won’t be time to get adenocarcinomas from smoking in only 20 years. Smoking is going to reduce lung capacity as well, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

Keep getting your ass off the couch for moderate activity. Avoid over-exercising. Bad for your joints at any age.

Stay mentally active.

Buy some good genes if they become available on the open market.

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Not many doctors. Research has showed that chocolate is actually good for you, but it depends on how it is made.

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Not so much so particularly in the elderly.

A more mass mediatreatment:

Possible explanations include that lower weight is a harbinger of medical problems, a marker, or that a little extra provides a buffer when illness or disability hits.

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There’s this notion in the medical literature of compression of morbidity, which basically states that “the burden of lifetime illness may be compressed into a shorter period before the time of death, if the age of onset of the first chronic infirmity can be postponed.” I don’t know how widely accepted it is, but it’s not a wildly crazy idea.

A friend of mine did an analysis using maximum BMI rather than BMI at time of survey and found that the apparent protective effect of extra weight disappeared.

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My father-in-law is almost 99, and sometimes catches doctors worrying about the long term effects of treatments they give him.
At a certain point if you monitor various vital signs you can stop worrying about statistical norms and only worry about yourself. I’m bad about eating eggs and meat and things, yet my cholesterol (I’m 63) is absurdly low - about the lowest my doctor has ever seen for someone not on medicine. Some people are lucky, those who live to very old ages are lucky by definition.