A doctor who says he's reversed his age by 20 years shares the 6 bare minimum things you can do to live longer

By: Serafina Kenny

25 December 2024 at 00:05

Dr. Michael Roizen shared some bare minimum things you can do to live longer, including playing games for brain health and taking a multivitamin.

Dr. Michael Roizen/Getty

Dr. Michael Roizen is a longevity expert who claims to have reversed his age by 20 years.
There are a few bare minimum things you can do to live longer, he said.
These include getting vaccinated, playing brain-training games, and eating salmon.

It can be tough to find the time to take care of our health. But a doctor who claims to have reversed his age by 20 years said that focusing on six basics could help us stay healthy for longer.

Dr. Michael Roizen, 78, the chief wellness officer at Cleveland Clinic, told Business Insider his "biological age" is 57.6, based on the health of his organs and his risk of chronic disease. (There's no agreed definition of biological age or how it can be measured).

Roizen is all about finding lifestyle changes that can help people live healthily for as long as possible. But he said "there are small things and easy things to do that make a big difference" to longevity, even if people can't overhaul their lifestyles.

Below are the six things he thinks everyone should do to live longer.

Walk more

Roizen tries to do 10,000 steps a day as part of his weekly workout routine, and thinks that everyone should "try to walk a little more."

To add movement to his commute, for instance, he parks his car as far away from his work as possible and walks the rest of the way.

Walking fewer than 10,000 steps — a somewhat arbitrary number with its origins in marketing — still has benefits. One 2023 study by researchers at the University of Cambridge, UK, found that people who walked 75 minutes or less a week had a lower risk of dying from any cause or developing cardiovascular diseases and cancer.

Eat avocado, salmon, and olive oil

BI previously reported on the seven foods Roizen eats for longevity. But just eating three of these — avocado, salmon, and olive oil — will still merit health benefits, he said. Studies have linked all three to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease.

Have strong relationships

Nurturing friendships is a "fun" way to boost your health and longevity, Roizen said. Plus, "it's always better to do things with other people," he said.

Rose Anne Kenny, professor of aging and lead researcher on The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing at Trinity College Dublin, said that having strong social connections is just as important for longevity as a healthy diet and getting enough exercise, BI previously reported.

Play speed of processing games

A man plays a game on his phone. — Playing speed-of-processing games could benefit brain health, according to Dr. Michael Roizen.
Witthaya Prasongsin/Getty Images

Roizen recommended playing speed of processing games, which are brain-training games that research suggests might help improve how quickly your brain works. Roizen recommended two: Double Decision and Freeze Frame.

Referencing a 2017 study published in Alzheimer's & Dementia, Roizen said that practicing these games could reduce the risk of dementia. The study found that older adults who played 10 sessions of these games over an initial six-week period, and then did top-up sessions 11 and 35 months later, had a 29% lower risk of dementia after 10 years.

Roizen recommended playing these games for two hours a week for five weeks to try to replicate the study results.

Take a multivitamin

Research is mixed on whether taking multivitamins is beneficial for longevity.

Roizen cited studies that found that the risks of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and dementia were reduced in people who took multivitamins for years.

But, recent research has suggested that these findings aren't necessarily indicative that multivitamins are as effective outside study conditions. For example, a large study on over 390,000 people published in JAMA Network Open earlier this year concluded that taking a multivitamin wasn't linked to longevity. And the US Preventive Services Task Force doesn't recommend the general public take multivitamins because there's not enough evidence to show that it has any benefit.

Roizen said that he takes a multivitamin anyway to keep the overall levels of vitamins in his body stable.

Get your flu shot

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that everyone aged six months and above should get a flu vaccine every season.

But Roizen also takes it for the potential healthy aging benefits. A 2022 review of studies published in Ageing Research Reviews suggested that vaccinating older people against the flu could also help prevent dementia, possibly because it decreases inflammation in the brain.

Read the original article on Business Insider

Guaranteed basic income isn't a silver bullet, says the lead researcher behind Sam Altman's major study

Latest News

By: Beatrice Nolan

25 December 2024 at 00:00

a blue background with stacks of $100 bills — Universal basic income provides recurring cash payments to everyone with no strings attached.
Wong Yu Liang

The top researcher for a major study on guaranteed basic income says the findings are "nuanced."
The study, backed by Sam Altman, gave $1,000 a month to 1,000 low-income participants.
Elizabeth Rhodes says while the study showed benefits, it's not a quick fix for economic insecurity.

The lead researcher for Sam Altman's basic-income study says guaranteed no-strings payments are not a silver bullet for issues facing lower-income Americans.

Elizabeth Rhodes, the research director for the Basic Income Project at Open Research, told Business Insider that while basic-income payments are "beneficial in many ways," the programs also have "clear limitations."

Universal basic income, or UBI, typically refers to making recurring cash payments to all adults in a population, regardless of their wealth or employment status, and with no restrictions on how they spend the money.

Rhodes headed up one of the largest studies in the space, which focused specifically on those on low incomes rather than making universal payments to adults across all economic demographics.

The three-year experiment, backed by OpenAI boss Altman, provided 1,000 low-income participants with $1,000 a month without any stipulations for how they could spend it. The study aimed to explore how unconditional cash payments influence various aspects of recipients' lives.

The initial findings, released in July, found that recipients put the bulk of their extra spending toward basic needs such as rent, transportation, and food. They also worked less on average but remained engaged in the workforce and were more deliberate in their job searches compared with a control group.

But Rhodes says the research reinforced how difficult it is to solve complex issues such as poverty or economic insecurity, and that there is "a lot more work to do."

The Altman-backed study is still reporting results. New findings released in December showed recipients valued work more after receiving the recurring monthly payments — a result that may challenge one of the main arguments against basic income payments. Participants also reported significant reductions in stress, mental distress, and food insecurity during the first year, though those effects faded by the second and third years of the program.

"Poverty and economic insecurity are incredibly difficult problems to solve," Rhodes said. "The findings that we've had thus far are quite nuanced."

She added: "There's not a clear through line in terms of, this helps everyone, or this does that. It reinforced to me the idea that these are really difficult problems that, maybe, there isn't a singular solution."

UBI and Silcion Valley

Universal basic income has garnered significant support within Silicon Valley.

The programs have long been a passion project for high-profile tech leaders, including Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Tesla chief Elon Musk. Some argue advancements in AI, which could pose a threat to some worker's job security, have made the conversion more urgent.

Like many of his tech contemporaries, Altman has long supported UBI and even suggested an idea that involves sharing compute of a future iteration of an OpenAI GPT model, something he referred to as "universal basic compute."

Rhodes first applied for the lead researcher job in 2016 after seeing a blog post from Altman, then the president of Y Combinator, in which he announced his plan to support a study of universal basic income. At the time, she was just finishing up her Ph.D. and had never heard of Altman or Y Combinator.

"I started working on this with Sam in 2016 and at that time, so I was finishing up graduate school in social work and political science, and very outside the California Bay Area community," she said. "There was not much going on in this space, in the US. Basic income or cash transfers were still somewhat of a fringe idea."

The global interest in the study's results was somewhat surprising, Rhodes said, as the team never saw the experiment as a policy suggestion.

"It was never designed to be a policy referendum on UBI or any specific policy. It was an opportunity to really ask the sort of big, open-ended questions, you know, what happens when you give people unconditional cash to better understand the lived experiences of lower-income Americans and the challenges they were facing," she said.