Very little research currently goes into attacking aging directly - as opposed to handling things that are in no small part downstream from aging, such as heart disease. A big reason for poor "longevity gains" is lack of trying.
Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we?
It would not raise the life expectancy to 100 years but it would considerably reduce the health burden on the economy.
Those will give you at best another marginal decade. By all means worth doing but its not radical life extension. At the same time a young body can take lack of sleep and can physically perform even if not exercising much better than an old one. So there's more to it than just lifestyle.
We want solutions that can be scaled and rolled out broadly, and "basic healthy lifestyle" ain't it.
I mean, sure, it doesn't scale as well as a magic pill as a business. But is certainly is O(n) with the number of people involved.
Compare it to being obese, wich can happen very young and is in part determined by how you are fed when you are a baby/child.
Those will give you an entire life. Living while being healthy is an entirely different life than surviving while being unhealthy.
Either way, a pill would scale better across all these people.
Why? Because there's a massive variation in people. Everyone who finds it "very easy" to as much as "sleep well, eat well and exercise" already does just that, and the implementation difficulty ramp up gets brutal quickly. It's simple to suggest and hard to execute.
Pharmaceutics are so valuable because they offer good sublinear scaling on many of the inputs. They're extremely hard to develop, but they're often well worth it, because the implementation scales in a way those "simple" solutions don't.
- noise pollution
- lack of fitness
- stimulant use during the day
- inability to manage a clean, nice sleeping environment
- obesity and sleep apnea
- a partner who can't sleep
- heat or cold in your bedroom
- mental illness
So, just from that list, we see that we'd need to overhaul housing quality so everyone has quadruple glazing and an air-conditioner, stop them chugging coffee, get them help with their laundry, fix their fitness and cure their obesity (which are themselves caused by poor sleep), and get them into therapy.
That sounds hard! Also, we're already working on a lot of it, but it's generally difficult or impossible to fix all of those problems.
A healthy lifestyle must be earned. It is a constant struggle against the fastfood industry.
Soon you'll see Coca-cola or Nestlé [0] selling both very unhealthy quasi-addictive food and drinks to kids and magic pills that cure obesity. Sounds scalable enough ?
[0] https://www.nestle.com/brands/healthcare-nutrition/medical-n...
Because although longevity is a nice recurrent idea for everyone in theory, when the rubber meets the road people routinely want to optimize time spent in living in pleasure.
The pleasurable stuff is almost all about "YOLO!" in every domain. A candle that shines twice as bright ends up consuming itself twice as fast and all that
If you think that being healthy should be a reward for a lifestyle of virtue, that's your problem, not mine. I'd rather have an actual solution than a blanket "those people don't struggle hard enough", pointed at the majority of US population that's overweight.
How about some regulation in the F&B industry? Reducing screen time at school? Those can be done now and don't really cost much.
And then make our cities pedestrian and bicycle friendly. More difficult but definitely a win.
Or would you rather pour billions hoping for a magic pill that solves it all? This is not realistic.