Читать книгу You: Staying Young: Make Your RealAge Younger and Live Up to 35% Longer - Michael Roizen F. - Страница 11

Stuff breaks. Cars, computers and relationships all have their own breaking points. And to suggest that stuff will not break either through acute injury (a fire in a building or a torn knee ligament) or from wear and tear over time (a fifty-year-old road or an overused back) would be misleading. While it’s obviously important to keep your biological systems from breaking down, the real secret to longevity isn’t whether or not you break; it’s how well you recover and repair when you do. Our bodies, in fact, weren’t designed not to break down (legs as thick as trees may not break, but they wouldn’t be very nimble). They were designed with a great efficiency and ability to repair themselves.

As with a car, you’ll get a lot more mileage out of your body if you perform routine maintenance. Ageing is essentially a process in which your cells lose their resilience; they lose their ability to repair damage because the things you might never have heard of (until now), like mitochondria and telomeres, aren’t working the way they should. But it’s within your power to boost that resilience and keep your vehicle going an extra couple of hundred thousand miles.