Last year, actor Demi Moore received widespread critical acclaim for her role in The Substance – a body horror film that considers a woman’s choice to take a revolutionary drug that, miraculously, turns her into a younger version of herself. Far-fetched fiction? Maybe not.
In Australia alone, the facial injectables industry was valued at $4.1 billion in 2023, and it’s expected to grow by 19.3% each year until 2030. The anti-wrinkle toolkit – Botox, dermal fillers and the like – is on everyone’s wish list. At your local chemist, the aisles are full of creams and pills that promise to ‘renew’ us and ‘reverse our biological age’. Even supermarket stock juices that promise to slow the process of ageing, defying the passage of time.
Here at Compass, we have written extensively about the need to combat biases such as ‘ageism’ and to abandon our fears of ageing. However, the statistical reality is that we want to prolong our youth. So, is it possible to do so safely?
In So You Want To Live Younger Longer, paediatrician, medical journalist and author Dr Norman Swan AM provides an antidote to the confusing array of pseudoscientific bottles on the pharmacy shelf. Swan has been a medical journalist at the ABC since 1982: he has long run Radio National’s Health Report, and he co-hosted the viral pandemic podcast, Coronacast. He has received multiple prizes, including a Gold Walkey and a United Nations Media Peace Prize, and is regularly consulted for health information by news sources and institutions worldwide.
Given his experience, along with the widespread public trust placed in his medical advice, Swan is a reliable source of information, and his ‘guide to longevity’ is medically backed-up, detailed and approachable.
So You Want To Live Younger Longer is aimed at an ageing population keen to avoid the onset of frailty and decline. Swan’s other books, So You Think You Know What’s Good For You? and So You Want To Know What’s Good For Your Kids, were written for a broader audience.
To begin this book, Swan reveals his own ‘egotistical fear’ of dying and explains his own intention to ‘stay young’ with personal anecdotes, underpinning his ultimately medical advice with his own experiences.
Noting that the increased likelihood of current generations surviving into their 90s and even past the age of 100, he explains the factors that differentiate us despite sharing the same biological age. From smoking and sun exposure to depression and even cellular senescence, our lifestyle decisions can speed up or slow down the ageing process, and their importance should not be understated. How, then, can we make the right lifestyle decisions?
The next sections of Swan’s book explain the decisions that we are capable of making and how they are scientifically proven to prolong our youth. Where diet forms his first concern – advocating for dietary restriction as a means of reducing oxidative stress (or what he calls ‘biological rusting’) – he later considers the effectiveness of anti-ageing pills such as Resveratrol and Metformin and the importance of regular and progressively more strenuous exercise.
Swan acknowledges the rise of plastic surgery and Botox, noting the need to be a ‘sensible and careful buyer’. He also lists a number of modifiable risk factors that can increase one’s life expectancy, from quitting smoking to reducing our blood pressure and from protecting our kidneys to ‘putting a lid on alcohol’. These methods of slowing the ageing process are far less intrusive than cosmetic treatments, yet they can bear just the same effects.
At the close of So You Want To Live Younger Longer? Swan acknowledges that not all factors are within our control. Noting that, on average, air pollution reduces three years of each human life, Swan suggests that the climate crisis affects the ageing process in a way that we cannot individually combat. Meanwhile, the food industry continues to push for the consumption of unhealthy, nutrition-poor food. The tobacco industry has nowhere near disappeared, and our lifespans continue to be significantly determined by our socioeconomic status.
However, in So You What To Live Younger Longer? Swan avoids surrendering pessimistically to this reality. Instead, he provides a clear, scientific and accessible guide as to how we might avoid the consequences of ageing.
As Swan writes, ‘So you want to live younger longer? We know how. Just gotta do it.’