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Oh hey, it's your old dad here, saving you some pancakes even though you sleep until eleven am when you visit Alley Ward back with another episode of Ologies. So I have been promising you for weeks, an episode about aging and marching toward our demise, molecule by molecule. Here we are, folks, we made it. So this is an interview that is like concentrated laundry detergent. It's like eating spoonfuls of instant coffee, like cereal. It's to the point.
It's tensely powerful information, minimal buffoonery. Aging. Why how let's get into it first. Let's get some business out of the way. I want to thank everyone supporting on patreon dot com. Slash Ologies for submitting their questions making the show possible. Anyone wearing ologies merch out and about. I hope you find each other and fall in love. Have me officiate your wedding. And thank you to all the folks who have rated and subscribed and left reviews. I
read them all you know that. For example, glassful Assass who said that they changed two passwords and signed into four different accounts to leave a review which was very hilarious and sweet. Also thank you for the review KATEVF who says every week I wait with baited breath for the latest episode to drop. Ally and her guests are so captivating, and one episode even brought attention to a medical condition I didn't realize I had and may have saved my life. Thanks all that, Ward, thank you for
continuing to live. Let's talk about old age. Okay, So biogerontology, etymology. So bio means life and jeron means old man. So the biology of an old guy not super inclusive in terms of its roots, but it's a subset of gerontology. It examines the processes of aging. So how does old
thing happen? Now? I came across this ology after recording Coloniology about turtle life spans back in November, and a Wikipedia page whispered biogerontology is a thing, which ushered me to an article about how one particular ologist has been studying this since the nineteen fifties. And lo and behold, his office was a few miles away from me in La What so I gingerly begged him via email to hang out, and I freaked out when I got a reply.
Then I navigated to usc with my vintage purse full of microphones and hope, and I knocked on his door twelve seconds after our appointed time. And there he stood a person who is ranked in the top half percent of the most cited scientists in the world. Five hundred papers with his name on them, decades of research, thousands of students, scores of studies. This dude in the cardigan in the khaki pants standing before me with a long white beard and an office piled with books. He is
the dude. Now for a visual, just Google image search father time, and then add a laser focused expression and a furrowed brow. He's like a human fountain of knowledge on how our youth slips away. So in the death and Dying episode. I talked to Colin Perry, who makes ballpoint pens inscribed with the motto I don't have time for bullshit, and I should have given this biogerontologist one of these pens as a parting gift, because, as you will hear, when you are an expert on mortality factors,
you don't suffer fools, you don't waste any time. This man does not have time for bullshit, and I love him. So let's get right into it. Let's talk about metabolism's modern life, life spans, risk factors for losing your memory, Thoughts on a possible cause and cure for Alzheimer's, why we age, secrets of centenarians, and what a seventy eight year old professor and globally lauded science hero does to
stay so fit and so sharp. So sit up straight, take some notes for the concentrated crash course on the Forward March of Molecules with world renowned biogerontologist doctor Caleb tuck Finch.
Mind me of where the radio program is.
It's on Apple's iTunes and anywhere on the internet. So thank you so much, sure for doing this. So let's go into your background a little bit. Can you tell me why you decided to study aging well?
As an undergraduate, I was looking to work on fields that had not been fully developed, in which there would be the chance to work out some of the basic questions. And one of my professors at Yale, who was a physicist named Carl Woes, coming into biology in nineteen fifty eight, he said, well, why don't you think about aging. Nobody knows anything about the biology of aging, even much less
than how embryos developed. And this was nineteen fifty eight, which is just five years after Watson and Crick, and we didn't know what the genetic code was, so that stuck in my mind. And then when I got to graduate school in New York at Rockefeller University, I did my PhD on aging, and sort of the first papers on the neurobiology of aging came out of my work there.
So yes, Doctor Caleb Finch attended Yale on a scholarship, working in labs to help pay his tuition, and he graduated in nineteen sixty one with a degree in biophysics, and then he went on to Rockefeller University to get his PhD in cell biology, studying cellular activities during aging in mammals, and he gave a talk on this subject, and some chipbroni afterward came up to him to say, like, don't bother. Everyone already knows what they need to know
about aging. And that tall drink of hater aide was a pathologist, Peyton Rousse, who had recently won a Nobel prize. Finch was like whatever, dude, and went on to become one of the foremost voices in the highly respected field of senescence research, which that's just a fancy word that means the condition or process of deterioration with age. So what part about the aging process fascinates you the most? Is it the effect neurologically or is it the entire body?
It's the unknowns that we are still working out basic mechanisms, and we know that it is under some genetic influence. If you have the genes of a mouse, you're only going to live two years. If you have the genes of a human you might get to seventy eighty or ninety. So it's genetic. But then with among individuals the role
of genetics seems to be much less. Roughly identical twins lifespans you can attribute twenty percent of their heritability in aging is due to genes that influence aging, So it's really a minority of the individual differences in humans and in other animals can be attributed to inherited genes.
So only twenty percent is attributed to genes, which is terrible news for those of us who to deny personal responsibility.
So I've been working on in many parts of my career on environmental aspects of how individual gene responses to the environment, to diet influence outcomes of aging. And I'm now in the last six seven years been focusing on air pollution, which shortens lifespan in proportion to the number of particles per cubic meter and also accelerates almost all of the diseases of aging, including the risk of Alzheimer's.
Was that inspired it all by living in Los Angeles?
Indirectly because I have had colleagues in the epidemiology group on the Health Science campus who were pointing out to me that the rate of arterial aging in Los Angeles scaled in proportion to the density of air particles in your residence and the arteries that they were studying with the carrots which go to the brain and so they kept saying to me, well, Finch, why don't you're interested
in the neurobiology of aging. You really got to see if there's a relationship to the arterial aging that we've been described, that we've described as driven by air pollution. So that's what I undertook to study. In last year we published definitive paper in collaboration with epidemiologist J. C. Chennett in the USC's School of Medicine. And in that same paper a mouse model showing that air pollution increases the Alzheimer processes. And we know what molecules are involved in the mouse anyway.
So let's go to the super basics. As someone who is not as well versed in this as you, what exactly is aging? How do you define aging?
Well, the basic way is at a population level that after the age of forty, your risk of mortality essentially doubles every seven or eight years, So there's an exponential increase in mortality risk, and preceding that is a parallel risk in chronic diseases, heart disease, cancer, and at later ages Alzheimer's. So the individual pathways in this are not understood, but as by age group, aging increases the risk of
chronic diseases that are causes of death. And then you can add, at a more fundamental level, what are the mechanisms behind that? And that's where the mystery is.
So our risks of disease and dyeing go exponentially up. Okay, Rather than bum you out let that fact. Encourage you to write the novel that you've been intending to, or collin sick, go to six Flags tomorrow, or wear the shoes you think you should save for fancy occasions wear today. We're all getting old. Just go for it. Champ, Speaking of how do you ask a genius expert the most basic bitch question ever? You just do it? People you live in the now watch Is it that our cells
don't regenerate as fast? Is it?
That's part of it? Our molecules don't regenerate as fast. And there's some molecules that are as old as we are, in our blood vessels and our connective tissue in our eyes that undergo molecular deterioration.
I know they say you're kind of new person every seven years.
Is that that's not at all correct?
Okay, so that's some flim flam to debunk.
Which it's not true. Yeah, that's one of those sort of inherited tales that have no scientific substance. I have no idea where that comes from.
I gotta look it up.
Yeah, there's no there's no science.
There, right. I didn't think so it always, I mean, it's always. I don't know where that came from, but it's it's an interesting myth.
And no it's not interesting. It's destructive because it's wrong.
Right. By the way, if you're like, was Ali just dying at this point, the answer is yes, man, I am dying up here, both from a molecular standpoint and psychologically. But just stick around because like life, there are twists and there are turns around every corner. Ps Where did
that destructive myth start? I did a little digging, thinking that the origin would be like an ancient tale, but it seems like it started in two thousand and five with a Swedish stem cell scientist, Jonas Freisen, who had been curious about the ages of different cells in the body and used radioactive carbon fourteen tracers conveniently deposited in humans from nuclear warhead tests in the sixties to track the age of different cells. So how old are you really? Okay,
there's a cool math trick you can do. You take your age and multiply it by sixteen, then divide it by sixteen, which is your age. You're just your age. I made you math for nothing. Here's the deal. Your body is a bunch of different ages. Like the lining of your guts, which are just constantly splitsh splashing in an acid bath. They're newborns. They turn over every five days or so, but skeletal muscles are fifteen. They're about
to get their learning permits. Some part of your brain are just as old as you are, just about other parts turnover faster. The core of your eye lens you can see ophthalmology episode from more on. That is exactly your age from pre birth that never turns over. This is fun. This is like antique road show for your meat covered bone scaffolds.
What he's ever looked at at that I'm aware of?
Well, Ted, did you notice when you showed this to me that I kind of stopped breathing a little bit. Not only that the condition of this is unbelievable.
So in his nine hundred page book Longevity, Senessence, and the Genome, Caleb Finch covers the life spans and aging processes of everything from apple trees to forty year old clams, to lobsters who molt away their exoskeleton and avoid some mechanical aging that way, to schurch and fish that can
outlive humans to relatively old teenage salamanders. So if you listen to the Colonialogy episode, you might remember my side about the etruscan shrew that has a heart rate of fifteen hundred beats per minute and lives two years versus tortoises with slow metabolisms like Old Jonathan, a giant tortoise kicking it retirement style on an island at age one
hundred and eighty seven. Naked mole rats can live up to thirty two years, perhaps due to an uncanny ability to just slow down their metabolism when they need to or repair their wonky DNA, which humans can also do. And I don't think doctor Finch would enjoy the term wonky. But here we are. Now how do different animals age? I know you mentioned a mouse might have a lifespan of two years.
Any each species has its own pattern of aging, so mice don't get Alzheimer's disease and they don't get blood vessel disease and have heart attacks, but they do get cancer, and their arteries become more rigid, and their lungs become more rigid because of molecular aging. Those same that part of aging happens in humans at a much slower rate. And in addition, and we have diseases that are special to the human species, including Alzheimer's disease.
You've said that other primates don't get Alzheimer's the way that humans do.
They have a very much milder aspect of brain aging. And there's nothing equivalent in the great apes or in the rhesus monkey to the devastation in the brain of Alzheimer's disease, where there's huge amounts of death of neurons in particular pathways. But there's major gaps that still remain
to be filled before we have a definitive conclusion. But the present time, I'm comfortable in saying there's nothing that has yet been shown to be equivalent to the level of brain cell damage that happens in Alzheimer's in any other primate.
And what is causing that. I know there's many, many factors, but primarily.
Well that's a huge set of unknown questions that the field of Alzheimer's, and I'm in that field in a significant way, is trying to understand. So there are changes in the brain that are going on from the age of thirty onwards. In my lab in the nineteen seventies, I had the first evidence that there's a progressive loss of synapses in the brains of healthy mice and healthy
humans in middle age. So there's changes that are happening in the thirties to forties that are on a pathway that in some individuals takes a more steep dip leading to degeneration of neurons. We don't know what triggers that steep dip from a more gradual, progressive change that everybody experiences.
So side note. Just about a week or so ago, a study was published that had the Internet all of uzz. It had the catchy title Perfiromanus gingervalis in Alzheimer's disease brains Evidence for disease causation and treatment with small molecule inhibitors WOW. In short, researchers found that bacteria that caused gingivitis aka inflamed gums could lead to brain inflammation, leading to Alzheimer's. This seems like huge news, but of course
I'm primed for flim flam debunkery. Also, I saw there was a study from two thousand and five by doctor Margaret Gatz about gum disease and Alzheimer's. So maybe this isn't new news. Maybe this is just internet sensatialism. So I emailed doctor Finch the other day, expecting either crickets or like a pushshaw, but I got a note right back. He said, just look this up as a mouse study. It is impressive and supports Margie gats prior conclusion that
oral infection increases Alzheimer's disease risk, but now gives a mechanism. Exciting. He was on board. This is great. Even more exciting he had cced doctor Margaret Gatz, who said thanks all back high a little fan girl moment. So yeah, okay, a tiny bacteria in your gums can make big brain trouble later on, and this news is getting us closer to keeping healthier noggins in the future. Is the brain
the thing? Is the brain the part of our body that ages the quickest, Or where do we see aging happen?
I'd say blood vessels are so there's in terms of shared anatomy across men and women, the blood vessels are already beginning to age even before puberty.
Really, yes, so we're already.
We're already accumulating at and plaques on our arteries. And if you're in a household with smokers as a child, that it's accelerated. If you're in an area of high air pollution, that's accelerated as a child. But then there are differences between men and women by reproductive status, and the ovaries of women start to lose egg cells even before birth.
Oh wow, so yeah, you start dying before you're born. Gool gool googol. Just cut banks, textra crush, We're all going to die.
So by the time of puberty, half of the egg cells a woman was born with have disappeared, and then the rest of them are lost by age fifty, which is menopause. There isn't anything equivalent to that in men. Testosterone levels do decline, fertility does decline, but it does and have a steep drop off, as is the case from women. And this is an important example of how
our embryonic development defines different patterns of aging. Because the ovary is fully formed in the embryo and those genes turn off, and no new egg cells and follicles are formed after birth, and that there's nothing like that that happens in the male gond test.
I just want to acknowledge that the terms men and women and male and female are along a gender binary that doesn't apply to everyone. And doctor Finch is talking about broad strokes in historical studies, and I just want to let the non binary folks know out there that I see you and I love you. And what about male versus female lifespans? Have we seen that change over the last few decades or pretty study?
Well? Both, No, they both increased as overall health has increased, and it is observed in the health rich populations of the world, and our upper income people in this country are health rich people. That women are living five years or longer than men.
Why is that?
We don't know.
I'm trying to think if it's stress or not, but I feel like, no, it's.
Not simple like that, because it's it's hard to define stress because a completely stress free life is impossible. And in the other hand, there are people who have apparent high levels of stress, women who have eight kids and who live to be ninety, so it's not at all clear how we define stress.
So a side note, quick shout out to my grandma Teresa Ward, who lived to be ninety nine years and nine months despite having eleven in childs writer, right, so what are we doing that is helping progress aging? Or what are we doing? What are we doing wrong? Essentially when it comes to aging.
Well, the major health concern across the country is people are eating more energy rich foods than they need and not getting enough exercise. I mean, that's simple lifestyle take home is it's boring to say, but if you are even mildly obese in midlife and you're not exercising, you're having a shorter life expectancy.
As the fit doctor Tuck Finch explained this, I wondered if he ever had a turning point in his life and started to pay more attention to his health such as I was doing sitting in his office at that moment. Has your work changed the way that you live?
I would say no. I've always been athletic and physically active, and I never smoked, and I don't eat or drink sugary or fat foods. But that's always been my preferred avoidance, so nothing interesting to say.
Well, do you play basketball, do you ski? What's your secret?
I used to be a competitive swimmer. I swam in college. I get modest amounts of exercise, not too much to wear my joints out. So I do some hiking, I do some swimming, I do some weightlifting. I mean, nothing exotic or overly strenuous.
Not any zoomba or tybo. No, no kickboxing, no good. That means I don't have to start that.
I just it's very dull, nothing on, nothing unusual.
And you mentioned something about sugar, and I know that inflammatory foods and inflammation is part of your research. How does inflammation affect the human body in terms of aging.
Well, all of the diseases of aging that we worry about, blood vessel disease, obesity, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, involve the molecules of inflammatory responses. So it's deeply built into our systems and in the processes of aging. So that's just a fundamental fact. And the term inflammation comes from ancient understanding of having when you have a cut, it swells up and it's red and it's hot and it causes pain. Well, basis for that are the inflammatory cytokines that come in
to help the body clean up the damaged tissue. But responses to damaged tissue happen inflammatory responses in arterial disease, in cancer and obesity, and an Alzheimer's disease. So there's a shared core of inflammatory proteins that are at work during aging. From the day we're born.
Flames on the side of my face, breath, heaving breath.
Is there a way that we should be keeping inflammation at bay?
Well, that's part of the idea of exercise and diet, which reduces the level of inflammation, and some people are still looking for pills that will do the equivalent of exercise and proper diet. That's the strongest starting place.
So move your bod and eat your greens. We fixed it America. And where has the average American lifespan gone? I mean, are we still increasing or have we hit a point?
No, we're decreasing. In the last ten years, the average lifespan in the United States has decreased, and we're now in the twentieth or thirtieth in the world and having in our adult lifespans. Because of all that we've been talking about the epidemic of obesity as a direct relationship to that, plus the health disadvantages of lower income people who don't see doctors and can't afford medication, and then
this terrible epidemic of drugs. Those are all pushing lifespan down after remarkable gains in the twentieth century.
And what's happening in other parts of the world and in blue zones where longevity is higher? Side note? What is a blue zone? So this came up in the hematology episode and I only know that because I searched
my Google Drive for the word legomes. So a blue zone is a place identified by author Dan Butner, who has studied some scientists data and concluded that people in five places live the longest ok Nowa Japan, Sodinia, Italy, Koya, Costa Rica, Akaria, Greece, and a small posse of Seventh Day Adventists in the La suburb of Loma Linda, California. So what Saith Dan? Are commonalities among these groups? Apparently they are prioritizing family above everything else. They smoke lass,
they eat a lot of veggies, are semi vegetarian. They have constant moderate physical activity and good social engagement. Which does not mean likes and comments on Instagram, but like hanging out with many generations in the community. Oh also lagooms. They eat a lot of lagoms. So does doctor Finch think this is just a hello beans?
I'm not an enthusiastic of something unique about the blue zones. I mean, there are peoples in all of the continents who live a little longer than the average, But most of my colleagues don't think there's anything unusual about that. But if you look globally, lifespan has been increasing as
early life mortality decreased because of reducing infectious disease. But pushing against that is the global epidemic of obesity, the global sale of tobacco, which is huge in Africa and in Asia, and the global issues of air pollution, which is getting worse in most of the world because of fossil fuel consumption and global warming.
And is global warming contributing directly? Is it temperature change contributing directly to the way our bodies work or age?
That story is emerging. This is a book that I wrote that talks about this. This came out this year.
This book is called the Role of Global Air Pollution in Aging and disease, and the title appears in stark white all caps against the veiled, smoky silhouette of a polluted Parisian skyline. I am truly confounded as to how one human can be so prolific. I did wonder. I mean, you've probably ish over five hundred papers and four books.
Actually this is my sixth, your sixth book.
How do you approach life to how do you get all of this done? How do you balance all of this personally?
I have a very happy home life. I work very hard, but I give myself personal time and avoid feeling ground down.
Oh that's very smart. That's a very good life lesson.
Well, what works for me might not work for other people.
Don't my me.
I'm just having a moment here evaluating everything I've done wrong in my life. What do you think as the as the baby boomer generation starts to age, what do you think the best thing our society can do to.
Well, our society doesn't have much meaning, they I mean, there is no such thing as our society, right, I mean, who is our society? There's hundreds of societies, so every unity has its own lifestyle. So the main point is is a healthy diet and exercise and avoid cigarettes. And that's totally boring to say, but that's really the basis for optimizing outcomes of health at later ages. You need to maintain a healthy lifestyle from childhood onwards.
So now is the time when we dive into listener questions. And also I mentioned that a portion of the podcast income goes to a charity each week. This week, doctor kleb Vinch chose curealz dot org. Curealz dot org. It's a nonprofit organization. They're dedicated to funding research with the highest probability of preventing, slowing, or reversing Alzheimer's disease. Now to date, they have raised over eighty six million to fund almost four hundred studies, and one hundred percent of
the funds go directly to research. So thank you listeners for helping a lab by SIMPI Pets getting closer to a cure for Alzheimer's. Okay, your listener questions. Now, I didn't want to take up too much of the professor's time, so I blazed through these questions without reading off a bunch of names, but I will insert them when I can.
For example, the first two questions here were asked by Liz Sunden, Athena Balisteri, Dion Dabolow, Mike Manakowski, Anonymous, Bob, Anna Thompson, Lucille Adinette which might be Audonay, I'm not sure, and Taylor Munich I have some listener questions. Almost everyone is just asking what's the secret to aging? Well, it seems like diet, exercise, rest. Yeah. Do you think that there's a maximum age that the human body can reach?
Well, the evidence is very clear. Almost nobody gets beyond one hundred, and there's one person in the last thirty years who reached over one twenty, Jean Chalmand. But there are more people getting to one hundred, but they still in the last thirty years, she's the only one to get beyond one hundred and twenty.
So sign Oue Jean Coment lived to be one hundred and twenty two, the oldest human on record, and she was fond of wearing headphones and doing chair gymnastics, prayer, fruit salad, and smoking well one Dunhill cigarette a day and a small glass of port wine until she was one hundred and seventeen, which proves that you're never too old to quit a bad habit and turn over a new leaf. So seriously, let's nope. The smokes folks love old Dad. And do you think that there's anything to
the secrets that they claim? A glass of whiskey a day, a hardboiled egg extension. I think there's every time someone reaches a remarkable age, you never.
Heard that set will say that about them, But I've never heard any of them say that. You have to distinguish between what people say about about centenarians and what the centenarians actually say. So if you talk to New York, Albert Einstein Medical College near Barselaw is a great expert on this, and what's he's shown is that his group of centenarians have the same diseases of other people, and some of them smoked, and some of them are still working.
There isn't really any genetics or lifestyle that makes it obvious as to how they got there.
So super quick. This lab at Albert Einstein Medical College is great and focuses on the metabolic decline of aging. They hypothesize that the brain leads this decline. But real quick, just let's get back to if I was hallucinating stories about eggs and whiskey. Okay, good news, my brain still works, because the Internet is just littered with stories of centenarians with Quippi secrets to longevity that are just bogglingly bad advice. So one of the oldest living World War Two vets,
Richard Overton, who passed away in December. He lived to be one hundred and twelve, and he drank four times as much coffee as me.
Get me a cup of coffee. Sometime. I'd drink a boke of the covid in the morning. This morning, I'd drink about that much.
Whiskey and four cups of whiskey a day. So okay, he's going to be the only one, right, Nope, Nope. Mariano pops Rotelli said at one hundred and seven that everyone should have a little whiskey nip a day, telling a newspaper quote, I've had a shot a whiskey in my coffee every morning for one hundred years, he said, I went to the doctor three times in one hundred years. He's dead, I'm still living. Okay, so that's two people.
Wait. Wait.
One hundred and five year old British man and Jack Reynolds credits his long life to a daily regiment of whiskey. Agnes Fenton one hundred and eleven told reporters that she drank three Miller High Lives and a glass of Johnny Walker daily. Also at one hundred and eleven, Grace Jones credited a shot of scotch every single day for the past fifty eight years, which I don't think is how you're supposed to drink scotch. But you live that long, you do what you want. Now, did I make up
the egg part? I did not. Italian Emma Moreno lived to one hundred and seventeen. She consumed eggs every day, also a glass of brandy daily, but just put down the bottle. Friends. The current oldest person alive, one hundred and sixty year old Hane Tanaka of Japan, credits family, sleep, and hope as her secrets for longevity. She also drinks a lot of water. She drinks a lot of water, she's a lot of small fish and soup, and she
keeps faith in religious spirits. So what I'm saying is it's anyone's guest, And by anyone, I mean Caleb Finch, and by gay I mean conclusions based on decades of research, and you mentioned that genetics is only about twenty percent of.
Effect, twenty five percent somewhere in that so.
It's a minority. And what's the role of telomeres in aging?
We don't know. So telomers are at the ends of chromosomes that get shortened during cell division, So some of our cells do show shorter telomers in the immune system, its actual functional consequence is not clear.
So that's clearly hasn't been the secret to.
There's no secret. There's nothing in aging that is a secret.
Does he hate me again? Twists and turns, Listen to the end. Also, I wanted to take up the least amount of his time, so apologies for not always reading the patron names. You girl here was flustered. But Kelly Meeker, Jullie Noble, Sarah Desmet, Kristin Long all had questions about Alzheimer's, which we go back into here. What's been the most exciting find for you and your work?
Well, we made a finding that in the realm of Alzheimer's disease that has been important, that the most toxic form of the amyloid peptide that people still considered to be one of the major factors in Alzheimer's is small aggregates rather than the large amyloid fibrils. And so that oligomeric A beta was discovered in my lab here and it's recognized as the most toxic component in the amyloid cascade.
So that was that was one of our discoveries. And I would say the other discovery that we published this year is that air increases the production of the amyloid peptide. Really, yeah, that's published.
And the difference in smaller plaques versus bigger plaques, does that signify that it might be more gradual of an onset.
Well, people don't think that this plaque size is the importance, because there is. The point is that in the vicinity of the amyloid plaque, which is outside of the cells in the brain substance, the neurons that are nearby are less healthy, their projections are more twisted, and they have more protein abnormality, so that it's really the total plaque load that is associated in some still mysterious ways with
the loss of synapses in the brain. And then the end of the day, all of my colleagues and I are a uniform agreement that it's the loss of synapses that causes the deterioration in Alzheimer's when neurons can no longer talk to each other across synapses.
And that might be impeded by the plaques.
Then, yeah, the plaques in some way seem to be causing loss of synapses. So the chemistry, biochemistry, and molecular biology, this is immensely complicated and there isn't a single pathway that seems to account for it.
So it's the plaques that cause the loss of synapses, and the question is how do we arrest the plaques. So they're working on it now. A few folks such as Caitlin Donald Rose, mccatherine Shannon Patterson. During Olambushan Caroline Lewis had this next question, do you find any particular strategies for keeping your brain sharp or for maintaining neuroplasticity?
Well, I've told you all I know, exercise and have an active life.
Yeah, puzzles, anything like that.
No, my science is an endless set of puzzles. I don't have to play games to challenge my brain.
Patron Christopher Yersowitch asked about diets and one Patro Martinez asked this next question specifically and what about vegetarian veganism diets any evidence for those?
Well, the main point is whatever you eat, keep your blood lipids and blood sugar low. And there are people on vegetarian diets who are live as long as people who are meat rich diets. But it's harder to keep your blood properties healthy if you're eating a lot of fatty meat and a lot of salt.
Patron Evan Mounro said, I intermittently fast, partly for weight loss and partly because of the apparent benefits to longevity. How much reliable proof is out there that fasting or strict calorie reduction leads to longer life and humans? And what about fasting in that are coloric restriction? Any evidence that it slows aging or gives the body a break?
Well, in humans, there's no evidence that fasting or starvation does more than lower's blood lipids, but there's in a long term basis, extreme coloric restriction for most people is simply not sustainable. Doctors who treat obesity have agreed that you can only go so far with somebody who has been obese to by diet and exercise, there's something else that keeps causing them to bounce back, but my calling.
Walter Longo, who's the lab right down the hall, former student of mine, has made some important discoveries that a fasting mimicking diet really only a couple of days a month improves blood chemistry.
I looked him up at boom. Walter Longo dot com has the Secrets to life, which apparently are not secrets if you just give him away for free at a white page. Seriously check that out. Among the bull of points was eat mostly vegan plus a little fish, limiting meals with fish to a maximum of two or three times a week. Choose fish crustacean mollusks with a high omega three, omega six and vitamin B twelve content like salmon, anchovy, sardines, trout, clams.
Pay attention to the quality of the fish, choosing those with low levels of mercury, and confine all eating to within a twelve hour period. For example, start after eight am and n before eight pm. Don't eat anything within three to four hours of bedtime. There you go, now, regar day. There is no mention of Miller High Life or spiking your folgers with gas station whiskey or smoking cigars, so just probably don't do that anyway. That information was
at Walterlongo dot com. What is the hardest thing about your job or the part about your job that you dislike the most?
Well, there's nothing that I dislike. I'm happy to say that I'm no longer running large training grants, and I'm no longer the director of the Alzheimer's Center, which was another twenty to thirty hours a week on top of everything else I do. So I'm a seventy nine and I am enjoying the freedom to not have a large number of people answering to me, and I have a group of highly talented, highly motivated people in my research lab and we're making doing a lot of good science.
What's your favorite part about the field or what you do? Surprise, Yeah, I still get a lot of it right.
Well, the complexities of biology are just awesome, amazing, and every year there's a new level of mechanisms subselularly or in how organisms talk, how organs talk to each other. It's just endlessly fascinating.
Does this man slow down? Do you have a seventh book on the way?
Yes, there's going to be a popular level book on air pollution in the next year. A year and a half.
That's great. Do you drink a lot of caffeine? How do you do all this?
I have two cups of coffee a day.
Yeah, it seems to be working. I know.
That's all I Need's all you need.
So I'm spending the last two minutes of my time with him, just really going for it.
Yeah.
Oh, it's a very stupid question. Did you ever see the movie Benjamin Button? And how did you feel about it?
And not Little children anymore?
Benjamin? I did see it. I thought it was clever, Okay. I enjoyed the script writer's imagination and could second guess some of the decisions. I saw that what five years ago?
Yeah, I was just curious. It seemed like it would be right for a lot of mistakes in aging.
But well, I mean, go to the movies to be entertained, read a novel to be entertained. These are signed. This is not a scientific experience.
It was not a documentary.
From what I recall, It was an amusing fantasy.
Any other things that you're excited about working on, or you think people should know about the aging process or taking care of themselves.
Well, I'm collaborating with some anthropologists and a group of people who live in the Bolivian Amazon. And what's fascinating about these people that simon a. They're living under conditions that of two hundred years ago without medication, and they're growing their own food, and they all have high levels of infection. Some of them get to the age seventy or eighty. But what's remarkable a small nobody lives much
over eighty. What's remarkable is that their levels of arterial aging are twenty five years slower than in North America, and they have almost no heart attacks or strokes. So we're trying to understand what aspects of their environment, their diet, and interaction with their genes might slow the arterial aging touch such a degree.
Do you think there's anything about the gut biome that's at play there?
That's an open question. I don't know.
We'll see. I guess there's a surprise and a puzzle waiting for you with that. Yep, thank you so much for letting me ask you so many questions. Thank you so much, good questions, he said, I had good questions, y'all. He does not hate me. So after the interview was in the mics, we're off, doctor Finch said, I asked great questions. I was doing a service for science by making the podcast. I honestly almost joy webbed in my
car on the drive home. He's just super focused and all science on the outside with a very warm and curious heart. I love him. He's great, and he returned my email so fast. I'm a big fan. So to learn more about doctor Caleb Finch's work, you can go to Aliward dot com, slash ologies, or follow the links in the show notes to my site. I post all kinds of info about his studies and other studies mentioned in the episode. Again, his latest book, Global Air Pollution
in Aging Reading Smoke Signals. It's even available on Amazon, as are many of his other books. Ologies is at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at ali Ward with one L on both and thank you Hannahlippo and Aaron Talbert for moderating the wonderful nook of the Ologies podcast Facebook group. Thank you Ologies transcribers for all the work you're doing to make the back catalog accessible to our d and heart of hearing friends. Merch is available at
ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch for helping me manage that thanks to new interns Harry Kim and Caleb Finch. Caleb just started a very fun new podcast called You're Never Too Old about anime and comic books and pop culture. You can check that out.
Thank you to assistant editor Jared Sleeper of the podcast Make Good, Bad Brain for helping with edits and with a little research too, and of course to editor Write or Die To at least age one hundred and twenty two Stephen Ray Morris, who puts the pieces all together. He also hosts the podcast The per Cast and see Jurassic right now. If you stick around to the end, you know I tell you a secret. This week's secret is that I have Christmas gifts I haven't mailed yet.
I see them every day. It produces a shamewave, so I got to do that. I'm sorry Jennifer, and also Sophia and Hannah and Aaron. I love you all. I should go to the post office. Also, as long as I'm apologizing, I'm sorry to ERICU RVT of thirteen years, who left a four out of five star review because they were po that Eternal episode implied veterinary medicine was
more routine and less dirty than fieldwork. I was so wrong to say that that medicine can be very gross and difficult, and I'm so sorry to have minimized that aspect. That medicine is dope as hell. I'm so sorry that I made it sound more routine, that was hyperbolic and jocular, and I apologize. I hug you in high five you. Also, if you want to say hi, or you have a suggestion for improvements to show maybe before leaving it in a review, just email me at Hello Ali Ward at
gmail dot com. You can also tweet at me or dm me on the grams. I respond to as many as I humanly can. I read pretty much everything you guys send me, even if I am not able to write you back. I truly love and welcome suggestions on how to make ologies even better. One more secret, I drank Taiwanese cheese tea three times this week. I loved it every time.
Okay, b'erebye, Pacaderman's College, Mambiology, cry doo, Zoology, Lithology, zechnology, meteorology, wold of Pedacology, ethnology, seriology, philology.
I am old, how old are you? Sixteen?
And my grandmother