58 Quotes by S. Jay Olshansky

In Hollywood they're getting younger, but believe me, it's not the food. It's the plastic surgery.

Physical immortality is seductive. The ancient Hindus sought it; the Greek physician Galen from the 2nd Century A.D. and the Arabic philosopher/physician Avicenna from the 11th Century A.D. believed in it.

Someone will eventually succeed in this hunt for a longevity pill, and when they do, one of the greatest advances in the history of medicine will have been achieved.

You can open up a centenarian's brain, and you'll see some areas that look like that of a 50-year-old or of a 110-year-old. You can have variation in the basic process of aging, called senescence, in different parts of the same body.

The reason we have cancer and heart disease is the same reason you can't get rid of the wear and tear on your tires on your car: as soon as you use them, you are wearing them away. You can't make eternal tires, and it's the same with the human body.

In centenarians and supercentenarians - people over 110 - you see a higher level of fecundity much later in life.

The real problem is that there's a tendency to associate ageing with loss and decline and things that aren't desirable. But experiencing all that there is to experience in life - whether that's at the age of ten or thirty or fifty or eighty - is what life is all about.

If we do everything right, the best we can do is live out our potential with as little age-related disease and disability as possible.

Fixing obesity is going to require a change in our modern relationship with food. I'm hopeful that we begin to see a turnaround in this childhood obesity epidemic.