Age Proof
Irish woman Professor Rose Anne Kenny is a world-renowned expert on the ageing process. She talks to Carissa Casey about holding back the years
Ask Professor Rose Anne Kenny what the most important factor in preventing premature ageing and the answer might surprise you. The question even stumped the audience at a recent Google Zeitgeist at which she spoke. Drinking lots of water? Having a healthy diet? Exercising regularly? All of these things help but one of the most powerful influencers on preventing premature ageing is having quality friendships and meeting friends frequently.
“The effect or influence of having a good social engagement is as strong as reducing cholesterol or physical activity or stopping smoking in decreasing death rates from heart disease. Being with friends is like a drug, it has the same effect on our dopamine system, which is the feel-good system,” she says. The release of endorphins and serotonin when we hang out with our friends not only de-stresses our bodies, but it also reduces cortisol, decreases heart rate and blood pressure, she explains
This is the type of medical advice most of us like to hear and are happy to put into practise. And Professor Rose Anne certainly knows what she’s talking about. She’s head of Medical Gerontology at Trinity College Dublin and runs The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). Her excellent new book Age Proof takes all of the latest research on ageing and explains it clearly in ways we can all understand. It’s a bible for anyone interested in keeping themselves as fit and healthy as possible, despite the passing of years.
While the rate at which someone ages is caused by a number of factors, she says, there are a number of things we can do to slow the process and even increase our life span.
Alongside friendship, laughter and having a sense of purpose are also hugely important. Laughter releases all those feel good chemicals as well as providing a workout for our immune systems and our hearts. Older adults laugh on average just 15 times a day, compared with children who laugh as many as 400 times a day. So watching lots of comedy shows and being around funny light-hearted people can also be added to the Professor Rose Anne’s prescription list.
Fat Busting
As for purpose, some people might struggle, particularly if they’ve retired or don’t particularly like their jobs. “You have to make a purpose,” she says. “Volunteering is one thing you could try, and also educational programs. Or even making a shopping list every morning and going out and doing that. Or make up your mind every day that ‘my purpose is I'm going to do something different that's good for me every single day’. That's a purpose.”
Food and exercise can’t be ignored. For many women, the ageing process results in weight gain, particularly during the menopausal years. Furthermore the additional weight tends to accumulate around the central area of the body. “And it's a white fat as opposed to brown fat, which is good fat. Brown fat can generate energy, but white fat cannot. White fat is toxic, which is why it's important to get rid of it. It can trigger inflammation in other cells, apart from the fat cells in our system. Inflammation is key to the aging process in cells. It accelerates and speeds up the aging process,” she explains.
The solution, aside from following a Mediterranean style diet (lots of vegetables, salads, legumes, nuts, seeds and fish), could be intermittent fasting. As she explains in her book, ketones are chemicals that break down fat. During periods of fasting, the body generates ketones and uses stored fat to generate energy. Combined with a reduction in calories consumed during the non-fasting periods, this approach is not just good for weight loss (including belly fat) but has numerous other anti-aging benefits.
There are many different approaches to intermittent fasting but the one Professor Rose Anne follows sees her eat within a six-hour window every day. “I personally skip breakfast. I don't start eating until about 1pm and then I make sure that I fill myself with salads and a bit of fish or something that I know is good but will fill me. I don't try and starve because that's when you start to have the biscuits or whatever. And then six hours later or less, I will have a main meal, and again, just stick to what we know is good; a Mediterranean-focused diet. That does shift that central adiposity (belly fat), which is very hard to shift once it's there.”
Celebrating Sex
Professor Rose Anne also recommends cold water immersion – either cold water swimming or cold showers. There’s ample evidence of its benefits, including in the area of ageing. She suggests trying a cold water shower for a week (see page 77 for how I got on with trying it).
And then there’s sex. There’s increasing evidence that sexually active older people had better mental abilities for planning and memory. These mental benefits are thought to derive from the release of oxytocin, dopamine and other endorphins during sex.
“In our study on ageing we found that 80 per cent of people who are in a couple claim that sex is very important to them. Furthermore, two-thirds were sexually active once a week, or once every two weeks. So it busts the myth that people don't enjoy sex and have sex as they get older. And even people who weren't cohabitating or in a couple - one in 10 who were unmarried or not cohabitating had a romantic partner. And the majority of them over the age of 70 and were engaging in sexual activity,” she says.
Issues around vaginal lubrication for women and erectile dysfunction for men can now be treated, she also points out.
Professor Rose Anne’s interest in ageing began when she was a young doctor. “I was training in cardiology. And part of the research I was doing was on cardiac pacemakers, putting pacemakers into people with blackouts. was seeing were older patients and I started to get interested in them. I realised that there was so little good research on aging, particularly, from a clinical perspective. There were a lot of opportunities there to do high-quality research on a very enjoyable and interesting topic. And more and more now, it has become a very popular area.”
“The older patients are so pleasurable and the whole process of researching this area is so fascinating.”
Does she follow her own advice? “Sometimes I get depressed because I know too much and I'm not following it. Whenever I feel something happening like I'm slowing down, you know? I'm not able to run as quickly or whatever I need to do. And I can explain exactly what's going on. I don't want that, but I have that.”
She does, however, have a cold shower every morning, swims at weekends, meditates and does intermittent fasting. She’s married with two boys (ages 25 and 29) both living in London. They edited the book for her.
While she’s never written for the general public before, she clearly has a flair for explaining complex subjects in a way that both engages and educates. She’s already started a second book on the autonomic system (which governs our heart, blood pressure, brain, eyes, and sexual organs).
Her message to mná na hÉireann? "Stand up and be proud and be candid."
“The sciences over the last few decades are robust and our quality of life is at its best as we age. We have more wisdom. We're not as bothered, stressed, or worried by what we now know to be trivial things for those things.
"You bring huge value to the table. Embrace it and be proud of your age. Be proud of your sexuality."