Live Younger Longer

CHAPTER 3
A longer life in good health
I frequently tell my patients that I would like them to live 100 years and be
in the nursing home, in a wheelchair and living with dementia for only the
last three days of their lives, not the last decade. I want them to have a long
life span but also a long health span. My patients like that concept — often
times they will tell me, “Why stop at 100, doc? Let’s shoot for longer!”
While a life span counts the whole of our days, a health span counts how
many of those days include good health. Health span is the length of time in
which you go about your daily routine alert, engaged and active, before
chronic conditions like heart disease or dementia make life more difficult.
When my father was born in 1909, the average American’s life span was
around 46 years. In the early 1900s, life span and health span were about
the same. If you lived 46 years, you’d have good health and the ability to
get up and engage in your life for most of those years.
Fast forward 100 years. Americans born in 2000 can now reasonably expect
to live around 75 years. That’s a 63% increase in life span — or about a
one-year increase for every three years between 1900 and 2000.
But while life span has dramatically increased, health span hasn’t really
kept pace. Yes, people are living longer — but their health is not keeping up

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with their longevity. In fact, the gap between the average life span and the
average health span is now over a decade and widening.
Because of this gap, someone may reasonably live to be 90 years old, but
the last 10 or more years of life may be spent in a bed, in a nursing home or
with dementia. For many, this isn’t much of a life — and it’s certainly not
the life they’d dreamed of living.

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