Is Healthy Lifestyle Related to Longevity?

Is Healthy Lifestyle Related to Longevity? 

This post is dedicated to Alfred the rat. Alfred was a perfect companion. Kind, caring, loving and very beautiful both inside and out. 

Many of us nowadays are obsessed with a healthy lifestyle. 

Articles and news like the following keep popping up:

-Chocolate is good for you! It keeps you energized and may even prevent cancer! 

-No! False, Chocolate is bad for you!

-Coffee is bad for you!

-No, actually coffee is good for you! Three cups of it a day is healthy!

-Exercising every day is healthy!

-Exercising every day is overexercising as in not the healthiest option!

-We should all follow the paleo diet, which is the diet of our ancestors! This is the way to be healthy and live a long life!

-No! The Palaeolithic diet actually has nothing to do with how our ancestors really ate and it contains too much meat and fats. 

Seeing all these scoops, it looks like people believe that somewhere there’s a magic formula for longevity and perfect health, following which you will live longer than everyone else while being in perfect health.

The main premise is that humans have the potential to live much longer than they live nowadays. And that nowadays they don’t live to their full potential of longevity because they are being unhealthy, not doing something right, not doing something the way nature has intended and their ancestors did.

But is this really so? Does perfect, “healthy” lifestyle really lead to perfect health and longevity? Or are the cause and the effect confused between each other. In other words is it that people who are genetically healthier and stronger, like many athletes and older, 50+ fitness models we often see motivational videos of, have certain genetic predispositions for good health and THAT in turn allows them to lead active lives well into their old age, while for most people, it is their not so perfect genetic predispositions that do not allow most “regular” folks to be running every day well into their eighties and nineties. In other words, there may be a reverse relationship where the cause is mistaken for the consequence and vice versa. 

I am personally a proponent of a healthy lifestyle: eating a lot of fresh fruit, vegetables and berries, nuts and seeds, and exercising regularly positively influences your physical and psychological wellbeing. 

But is it really true that a healthy lifestyle will cause you to live well past your natural “deadline” (so to say), and prevent you from acquiring illnesses so that you will then necessarily live to a hundred in perfect health and die peacefully in your sleep. 

Can new healthy “natural” diets and regular exercise really do that? 

The fad of so-called “natural diets” like paleo diet, raw vegetarianism, and other similar diets is a relatively recent one, and has no actual human subjects yet, who would follow these diets for all, or most of their lives and live to a hundred years or more to serve as evidence that it works. 

But I tried this healthy, natural lifestyle philosophy on my two rats. So the lives of my two rats Alvin and Alfred served as a experiment to prove or disprove the premise that a healthy lifestyle can make you live longer. (Of course it is not a perfect scientific experiment, but it can serve as a starting point to get some ideas)

I studied extensively what is natural and healthy for a rat and went out of my way to have my two rats adhere to this healthy rat life style all their life in the hopes that they would live significantly longer than the average lifespan of a domestic pet rat.

And since, unfortunately, the lifespan of a pet rat is only up to 3 years at most (usually 2 years and a few months) it was easy to see to it that my rats were all their life following the optimal conditions including natural fresh diverse nutrition, regular physical exercise, positive mental stimulation and positive social relationships.

And unlike humans who may slip from their healthy lifestyle every once in a while, like on Fridays or Saturdays or when a random temptation arises in the form of a tasty smell from a nearby restaurant, my rats did not have these slips, they only received some sweet and not perfectly healthy treats on big holidays a few times a year, the rest of their life was perfectly healthy. 

It makes sense to derive some general ideas about human health from experiments on rats, because rats are actually closer related to humans than cats or dogs are. Rats, as all rodents belong to the clade and a superorder of mammals called euarochontoglires which includes rodents, lemurs (лимер) and primates (who are, as we all know, the closest genetic relatives of humans). This is, among other things, the reason why rats are often used in experiments that have their purpose in learning something about human function, in place of actual human models. 

So, for nutrition, my rats always got fresh fruit, vegetables, and berries, some grains and seeds and good-quality raw meat and sometimes eggs (since rats eat that in the wild, if they are lucky, and to steal and transport an egg without breaking its shell, wild rats actually have a very unique strategy). 

When a superintendent once came to my home to fix something and saw the table laid for my rats in their cage he said he feels jealous of my rats because they eat better than him.

Next is exercise and mental stimulation: all summer my rats Alvin and Alfred spent at least two hours each day outside in nature rummaging in the bushes or high grass in the dusk (because rats prefer dusk rather than sunlight and bushes rather than open spaces). To make my rats enjoy life and have a healthy natural lifestyle I would spend at least 2 hours a day supervising over them in the dusk, in the bushes or in high grass. By the looks of it, Alvin and Alfred seemed to enjoy pretending to be wild animals and forging for themselves for a couple of hours everyday in nature. 

Sometimes I would take Alvin and Alfred swimming in Ottawa river in summer. Rats are excellent swimmers they can hold their breath if necessary for 2 minutes and stay afloat on the surface for two days or 48 hours straight. That is part of the reason rats have spread everywhere across the globe and thrive in made-made environments like sewage systems. Wild rats can utilize your pipes to get into your home for instance through the toilet.   

And though swimming was not Alvin and Alfred’s preferred activity they did it very well on warm summer days, in the natural environment of the Ottawa River Parkway. 

In colder seasons my rats had my own room for a playground for at least 2 hours each day. The room is rather specious and has a number of places they can go and explore.       

Alvin and Alfred had social relationships with each other and with me. When one of them, Alvin, despite everything died much earlier than I expected, the remaining rat Alfred was introduced to 2 youngsters who were bought to keep him company. 

They and Alfred got along well and Alfred became their real mentor and a father-, or rather, a grandfather figure for them. At the same time the two youngsters did not annoy Alfred too much with their youthful hyperactivity and used each other as playmates, but always came to Alfred for the quiet time of mutual grooming, cuddling and sleeping. 

Having younger members of your species around can actually positively influence the sense of wellbeing and even possibly longevity of older individuals. This is why some retirement homes in Europe have offered young people a residence there, offering them cheap rooms for rent so that they would live alongside with older retired citizens and thus brighten up the atmosphere. So Alfred’s atmosphere was brightened by the two new residents: a hairless and audacious rat Arthur and a gentle beautiful blue Alvin junior. 

So my two rats Alvin and Alfred, on whom I conducted this “optimal lifestyle” experiment had all the ingredients to live past hundred years in rat terms (which would be 3.5 or even 4 years for a rat). 

Nutrition, exercise, positive mental stimulation, positive social relationships were all taken into account. 

On the other hand I knew a number of less diligent rat owners who did not do nearly as much for their rats, for example feeding their rats the leftovers of their own junk food.

So I had a chance to compare the end result in the difference of the life-span between my “super-healthy” rats and “regular” rats.

Lets now look at the results:

When Alvin and Alfred were still young they were healthy and active and did not really get sick. 

Then, despite the healthy diet with a lot of fibre both Alvin and Alfred, but especially Alvin, gained some extra weight. 

Then at about 1 year and 10 months which is the equivalent of about 53-56 human years Alvin developed lung disease. At this point we started treating him with antibiotics since healthy lifestyle alone did not succeed in preventing this illness. 

After a month of almost continuous treatment Alvin died at the age of 1 year and 11 months, one week before his second birthday. Which is a human equivalent of being about 56-60 years old and is a very average and common time for a rat to die. 

It is important to mention that it was Alfred (who lived longer than Alvin) who was actually more sickly, especially as a young rat and throughout his life he grunted and snored with his nose almost all his life especially when he was picked up or excited about something. But since the veterinarian said his lungs were healthy and clear we never put Alfred on antibiotics for that. Yet it was Alvin, who we considered to be a healthier, hardier rat, who quite unexpectedly developed lung disease that after a long battle took his life, and Alfred died much later of a completely different cause.   

So in Alvin’s case, all the measures that were taken to increase his longevity did not really achieve exactly that. And Alvin’s death was a very slow and difficult one, so that in the end, when all hope was lost, we had to ease his suffering and put him to sleep. 

Alfred died four (4) months later, which is a significant difference in rat terms. He was 2 years and 3 months old. And as I mentioned, when Alfred was exactly 2 years old, a week after Alvin’s death, we got him two young rats to keep him good company, with whom he lived for 3 months. 

Especially compared to the youngsters, Alfred was a typical old-timer: slow, lazy, clumsy. The healthy lifestyle that he led did not cause him to remain youthful-like, quick and agile. 

Moreover, Alfred, like many older male rats developed progressive loss of movement in his hind legs, pressure sores on the feet of his hind legs and abscesses on his tail for which (the sores and the abscesses) we started Alfred on antibiotics towards the end of his life. Alfred’s lower tooth also started to grow in the wrong direction so that he could no longer grind it down and regulate its growth on his own and required regular trimming at the vet clinic. As I already mentioned Alfred moved and looked like a typical senior citizen: cute, but definitely not abounding with energy and health, the way a healthy lifestyle is supposed to make you look and feel. 

Alfred died of what looked very much like a brain tumour which was apparently growing completely unnoticed and symptom-free for a time, and then, abruptly, in a matter of literally hours the symptoms appeared and progressed from minor worsening of coordination when Alfred ate in the morning, to, in the evening of the same day, the inability to keep balance and loss of movement in the whole body, to complete unresponsiveness and seizures the next morning. A hopeless condition where all we could do is end Alfred’s suffering and put him to sleep. 

So the healthy lifestyle that Alfred led did not prevent him form getting a brain tumour. Though Alfred lived significantly longer than Alvin and died at the human equivalent of 63.5 to 69 years, (2 years 3 months) which is a relatively good lifespan for a pet rat, he did not, at the same time demonstrate any wonders of longevity either. When he died, Alfred was far from being a centenarian.  

At the same time, I think it’s worth mentioning that I am sure that if I did not take such care of my rats’ health, they would have very likely died earlier of illnesses that would have been preventable. 

So in no way am I saying that smoking, drinking,, too much sugar, and regular consumption of junk food will not have a negative influence of your health, and that the lifestyle you lead does not matter.

It is just that there is only so much a healthy lifestyle can do. And making you live significantly longer past your individual natural “deadline” (literally) spelled out in your DNA is likely not something a healthy lifestyle has the power to do. 

In fact, the oldest person in the world, Jeanne (Жан Кальм) Calment in France, who lived 122 years was definitely not an adherent of a healthy lifestyle movement. She ate what she liked, did not have an exercise routine, and even smoked a couple of cigarettes a day up to the age of 117, upon which she quit but only because it got too tiresome for her to ask the staff of the retirement residence where she lived to bring her outside to have a cigaret and then back again a couple of times each day. 

But, while you are still alive, a healthy lifestyle definitely has the potential to make you feel significantly better both physically and psychologically. 

I hope my little “experimental research” into the relationship between a healthy lifestyle and longevity was interesting and somewhat informative! 

Video: 

Thank You!