What does my 80 year old father do to stay healthy?

This is survivorship bias at its finest.<p>What his father is experiencing is luck mixed with good genetics. Plus, additional support of good diet and exercise. Yes, we all can control our diets and exercise. However, we cannot control the medication that we take, which carry side effects. We cannot control what is in our food, we cannot control the air we breath, we cannot control cancer and hundreds other diseases. There are so MANY other factors.<p>If his father grew up somewhere where lead is a problem, I have a feeling the outcome might have been different.<p>The whole article is useless. My grandfather was an awful person, smoked all his life, drank most of it, and ate whatever he could. Lived to 78 and was healthy, at that point he committed suicide as he could not live without his wife, which passed away few months earlier. Ironically he was an awful husband.<p>This is all anecdotal and useless.

My grandfather is 88, he has definitely slowed down quite a bit lately, but his recipe for a long-life was 2-3 packs of cigarettes a day, alcoholic for most of his adult life, rarely slept more than 4 hours a day and I never ever, saw him eat a vegetable or break a sweat from exercise in my entire life.<p>I figure if I got just some of those genes, and since I never smoked, not an alcoholic and eat pretty well, I should live to be 150 or so - either that or he will be a pall-bearer at my funeral.

&gt; His resting heart rate is just below 60 beats per minute. The steps pushed it up to 155 beats per minute. (His maximum heart rate should be 220 minus his age, 80. That’s only 140 beats per minute — far below what he is capable of!)<p>Sorry, that&#x27;s not how this works. 220 - age is a very crude and not very good guess at the heart rate for a population. It is not YOUR max heart rate, and your max heart rate being higher or lower than that is not a sign of health. It is likely just a sign of your particular heart. It&#x27;s worth checking in on it every few years and knowing yours.<p>On the other hand, resting heart rate of under 60 is good. Under 50 is likely better.

&gt; Dad has no patience for those who say your healthspan is predetermined. At 80 he has no memory issues, no aches, no pains, no depression.<p>The author&#x27;s father is apparently blessed with no genetic predisposition for memory&#x2F;cognitive disorders, degenerative physical disease, etc...<p>Everybody is different. What works for the author&#x27;s father may not work for everybody else. Take the above article with a grain of salt.

If you work backwards from what kills people, you can theoretically work out what will improve your chances.<p>In the elderly, heart disease and a rapid decline in health after a broken hip are high on the list of events that lead to death. So keeping the cardiovascular system healthy, and strengthening the muscles that support balance and reduce injuries make sense.<p>Strength training and a sufficient, consistent amount of exertion each week make sense. They do not, of course, guarantee you&#x27;ll never have a genetic condition, or some other unfortunate incident. That&#x27;s not how biology and bodies work. But it does help prepare you as you age.<p>Diet seems much trickier, because dietary needs do vary somewhat depending on your specific body! The hacker approach of experimenting (and journaling) and figuring out what leaves you feeling healthy and energetic is what I&#x27;d recommend to anyone who cares!<p>So write it off as &quot;yet another&quot; anecdote if you please. But also consider whether these ideas are good for your quality of life, and if they are a trade-off worth making.

Anecdotally, most of my family members who actively tried to stay healthy died relatively early (&lt; 70 years). Those who didn&#x27;t usually lived to be at least 85. My grandfather, who never did any type of sports, ate meat every day, who came home after worked and watched TV until bedtime and who drank 1-2 liters of cider per day after retirement died at 92 and was completely healthy up until a few hours before his death.

A healthy lifestyle definitely helps, and some genetic luck. My grandfather recently passed away unexpectedly at age 88.<p>He was working in the garden daily or going for walks &#x2F; riding a bike. He had a more active social life than I did before COVID hit. He read daily, did crossword puzzles at night, and ate healthy. No mental or physical issues.<p>Lifestyle plays a role, but he was dealt good cards genetically as well which I am aware of.

Generally life extension runs up against three non-technical problems:<p>Addicts will fight VERY hard in support of their addiction. Try telling a life long sugar addict to fix their T2 diabetes by eating fewer carbs; they&#x27;ll completely explode at you. People who die from smoking were usually told about a million times to quit smoking before their diagnosis, LOL.<p>Innumerate people seem to actively oppose statistics. There is only it works or it doesn&#x27;t and they&#x27;ll have a complete meltdown at the concept that maybe 80% of lung cancer is caused by smoking and 20% for other causes therefore there is nothing they can do to alter their pre-determined destiny. Arguably belief in predestination and&#x2F;or innumeracy could be considered a mental illness (see below) but I&#x27;m specifically referencing the stubborn desire to beat the odds by ignoring the odds. (edited to emphasize, the type of thing I&#x27;m referring to is the aggressive proselytization of the idea that finding one counterexample or anecdote disproves the entire corpus of all theoretical and applied statistical mathematics)<p>Most people decline and die younger for some kind of psychological reason. They&#x27;re depressed so they can&#x27;t do anything so they can&#x27;t exercise so they get fat and die of a heart attack, they did in a certain technical sense die because they were fat, but they got fat because they were depressed. Or they have an addiction problem. Or they follow quacks because they think if martyrdom is religiously superior then punishing themselves is superior even if it shortens their life, or they follow medical advice based mostly upon making money off prescriptions, or they follow medical advice that was proven obsolete via research last century, or they are so into collectivism and &quot;fitting in&quot; that they would literally rather die than think for themselves or read a book, whatever the TV (or social media) says is not just good enough, but should be forced on people, even if it kills them.

What we really need is robust treatments that either slow down the ageing process or reverse it to some extent. There is some promising research relating to both slowing and reversing. The current approach where we treat age related disease as individual things will never really work out in the long term<p>One thing right now that is available is rapamycin which basically improves health span and lifespan for every animal it is given, won&#x27;t make you live to 150 but will probably reduce risk of disease.<p>I am considering starting rapamycin myself as my mom was diagnosed with ALS few months ago (doesn&#x27;t seem strictly genetic as her mom and dad lived relatively long and didn&#x27;t get that disease), so I might have some risk genes..<p>World where people live to 90-100 and where increasing amount have dementia or other age related disease won&#x27;t be a nice place

This is inspiring. I think tonight I&#x27;ll go for a bike ride instead of drinking and playing video games.

<i>And this fall, in Africa, I got to see him in action again. Over 16 days of “go, go, go,” my dad, who’s now 80, always seemed to be at the head of the pack. On most days we started at 6 a.m., crisscrossing the dry Serengeti, or climbing rugged rainforest terrain for hours before returning to our home base, where we ate and drank late into the night. We climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and traversed deserts. Dad was right there the whole time, pushing us all to our limits. </i><p>This sounds like superior genes more so than lifestyle . Some people&#x27;s bodies give out earlier in life...stuff like heart disease, stoke, cancer, hypertension which may or may not be related to lifestyle.

My father is 84. Never ate junk food, never smoked, never drank. He plays pickle ball four hours every day and kicks my ass when we play. Also plays volleyball and goes for long walks daily. In his 80&#x27;s, he&#x27;s in better shape and has a better life than I do at 51.

While staying active and eating healthy are very important contributors to a longer life, it seems one also needs to have a healthy social life and sense of purpose to foster the will to live longer.

you NEED to exercise YOUNG to BENEFIT when OLD<p>exercise at 80 if you never did before is not optimal<p>My two grandfathers never went to the gym yet strong physic and mind. One died in his garden, the other one died while stone cutting. Both 80+, no any supplements whatsoever

Best and Healthy diet and better sleep

stay away from social media and watch news max 10 minutes a day