AFR: If you want to be healthy at 80, you have to start by 50
Thirty years ago, a 54-year-old medical scientist and British health bureaucrat named Norman Lazarus was settling down to a nice dinner with his wife while on holiday in Switzerland. As he put his napkin on his lap, he saw the bulge of his middle-aged belly protruding over his belt.
Fast-forward to now: Lazarus is a twinkly-eyed, sprightly 84-year-old. Healthwise, he’s in the pink. He’s an endurance cyclist, has recently published a book, and is still working at King’s College London on unravelling the secrets of healthy ageing. His wife, June, who joined him on his health journey, is 87 and also has no age-related illnesses.
Lazarus deployed his medical know-how to develop a simple “trinity” of actions that, if started during middle-age, give you a solid shot at warding off the 20 or so avoidable diseases of age, including cardiovascular disease, pre-stroke hypertension, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, dementia, non-alcoholic liver disease, peripheral artery disease, and certain kinds of cancers.
His book, The Lazarus Strategy: How to Age Well and Wisely (Hachette Australia), is plain-speaking and impassioned. Get started, and get started now – not just for your own sake, but for the sake of our societies’ struggling health systems and ageing demographics.
He has become not only an evangelist, but a guinea pig. Tests on him and other elderly members of his cycling club show cardiovascular function equivalent to inactive people 30 years their junior, and their immune systems are still functioning at high capacity.
Ageing and slowing down is inevitable, he says, but disease and infirmity is not.
