Читать книгу You: Staying Young: Make Your RealAge Younger and Live Up to 35% Longer - Michael Roizen F. - Страница 13

Spend any time at a deli counter, and you know that Swiss cheese has two different looks. Big holes or small holes, all in random order and patterns. A good way to think about ageing is to imagine yourself looking through a dozen slices of stacked-up Swiss cheese (see Figure Intro 2). If the holes are small and the slices are thick, you can’t see through the stack. Now pretend that each of these Swiss cheese slices represents a layer of protection that your body provides to prevent ageing. People who are vibrant and strong may have small holes in their system – stuff that lets through a few problems, but nothing too major. Maybe they’ve got a little hole in their slice of heart health, and a few little holes in their slice of brain health, and a medium-sized hole in their slice of chromosome health. Nothing major lets you see through the stack.

FACTOID

Currently, there are more than six thousand centenarians in the UK. This number is expected to increase to forty thousand in 30 years’ time. (The Guardian, 18 January 2006)

As ageing takes effect, however, those holes can get a little bigger, or the cheese can get a little thinner. When big holes from one slice perfectly align with big holes from another slice, then, in effect, you’ve got big problems. That’s a little bit what ageing is like: the small problems may not have a big effect here and there, but when they grow, and when they interact with other problems, then you’ve created what we like to call a (cue scary orchestra music) web of causality. That’s when seemingly small health problems spiral into bigger ones – all possibly triggered by several different causes.

Figure Intro 2 Cheese Doodle Each layer of resilience we have against ageing is like a slice of cheese. The differences in hole size, number of holes and thickness of slices describe how we protect ourselves against ageing.