Why should you care about longevity?
Some people say they are too young to think about longevity, and there are far more important things to care about in their 20’s. However, as stated in my first first-author paper, aging starts long before we can actually see its manifestation. Your body starts aging at the molecular level early in development, and in parallel to you getting stronger and smarter in general, it already accumulates damage in tissues causing some of your functions to decline early in life.
For instance, your thymus, which dictates how strong your immune response to new infections is, starts shrinking when you are as young as 1 year old. It shrinks by 30% by the time you are 25 and gets almost fully replaced by fat when you hit 65. Therefore, the adaptive immune system is strongest in our childhood and teenage years and declines with age since then.
Aging typically occurs as a development of one of the aging-related diseases: cancer, heart disease, diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases, and chronic respiratory diseases. Even though usually these diseases get noticed after 50 years old, they take decades to develop.
For example, an average American has around 40% chance of getting cancer at an invasive site in their lifetime and a 20% chance of dying from it. But mutations that drive developments of cancers occur from several years up to 40 years before cancer diagnosis depending on a cancer type. Therefore, if you start health interventions and improve your immune function early enough, you might eliminate cancerous cells and avoid developing the disease.
Diabetes, one of the most prevalent diseases in developed countries has an average onset age of 45. Diabetes is a disease of aging since 10% of the US population has it if all age groups are combined, but as many as 1 out 2 people over 65 years old have it. About You don’t get diabetes quickly. First, you develop prediabetes that makes you likely to develop diabetes within the next 10 years. 1 out of 3 out adults in the US is prediabetic. But this is a reversible condition. Temporarily following a ketogenic diet is proven to reverse insulin resistance and decrease the risk of diabetes. Therefore, knowledge of how to reverse pathological health conditions and optimize your health as early as possible will give you more time to do so. Knowledge is power!
Type 2 diabetes
A CDC study estimates that the lifetime risk of developing type 2 diabetes is 40.2% for men and 39.6% for women.
Diabetes, one of the most prevalent diseases in developed countries has an average onset age of 45.
Diabetes is a disease of aging since 10% of the US population has it if all age groups are combined, but as many as 1 out 2 people over 65 years old have it.
You don’t get diabetes quickly. First, you develop prediabetes that makes you likely to develop diabetes within the next 10 years.
1 out of 3 out adults in the US is prediabetic. But this is a reversible condition. Temporarily following a ketogenic diet is proven to reverse insulin resistance and decrease the risk of diabetes. The earlier you find out you have impaired insulin sensitivity, the easier it is to fix it.
Insulin is a hormone that allows tissues to absorb sugar from the bloodstream inside the cells to utilize it for energy. Insulin is produced by specific cells in the pancreas called beta cells.
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) occurs when the body is not able to use insulin properly which results in having too much sugar in the blood.
There are two main reasons for T2D:
1. Loss of insulin sensitivity => glucose concentration is not decreased by secretion of insulin
2. Too few beta cells => low insulin secretion
So a person can have normal beta cell function but have reduced insulin sensitivity, i.e. be insulin resistant, and another person can have normal insulin sensitivity but too few beta cells, i.e. not enough insulin, and both people will develop diabetes.
And these are not independent of each other. Typically, insulin resistance promotes beta cell failure, but reduced beta cell numbers can cause insulin resistance as well. And usually, T2D patients have both reduced insulin sensitivity and insulin secretion.
Therefore, in order to study the pathogenesis of diabetes, you need to measure both insulin sensitivity and function of beta cells which is assessed by the secretion of insulin.