Читать книгу You: Staying Young: Make Your RealAge Younger and Live Up to 35% Longer - Michael Roizen F. - Страница 10

Despite what you think, ageing – in the traditional way that we think of it, with everything slowly and painfully shutting down – isn’t “meant to be”. It’s not an effect of life. It’s actually more of a side effect of a grander plan for humans.

A lot of people think that creaky joints, craggy nails and cranky bowels are simply part of the deal. You get to live to eighty-something; then, in exchange, you’re going to have your fair share of misery along the rest of the way. Horrible being old, eh? Hold on. Yes, there is a trade-off, but it’s not that one. If you take a look at every biological process that happens in your body, there’s an evolutionary reason why it works that way, and that reason, without fail, is to ensure the survival of the species. That is, evolution has deemed the perpetuation of your genes to be much more important than the perpetuation of your individual life. Your biological processes are designed to protect you only long enough to reproduce and to raise your young. In fact, it wasn’t until the mid–twentieth century – at least in developed countries – that human beings could expect to live much beyond their reproductive years.

Those processes that make perfect sense for reproduction may not work in your favour as you get older. That’s ageing. The systems designed to protect you until you finish reproducing (whether you’re actually reproducing is unimportant) can be maladaptive as you age. When you look at ageing through the lens of the gene, rather than the lens of the individual, it all makes much more sense. These trade-offs are what we’ll occasionally refer to as the YOU-nified theory of ageing – the fact that ageing isn’t some master plan for life but, rather, an offshoot.