Spring Chicken!

Photo credit: Janet Donovan

“It’s fitting that you guys are having this great party for me because as I was writing this book – at the very beginning of it – Peter was at the back of my mind, or maybe the forefront of my mind,” said Bill Gifford, author of  the New York Times best-selling book Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (Or Die Trying) at the home Irma and Dan Maldonado at Washington Harbour. “A few years ago we had a high school reunion, a 25th … sorry 15th high school reunion … and Peter showed up and he had an intense corporate job, stressful. I’ll just say he wasn’t in the best shape.” Peter is Peter O’Toole with whom he went to high school at Maret in Washington, DC., who subsequently moved on to his own company in communications and public affairs.

Marc Aldeman, Peter O’Toole and Dan Maldonado

“Spring Chicken is a full-throttle, high-energy ride through the latest research, popular mythology, and ancient wisdom on mankind’s oldest obsession: How can we live longer? And better? In his funny, self-deprecating voice Bill Gifford takes readers on a fascinating journey through the science of aging, from the obvious signs like wrinkles and baldness right down into the innermost workings of cells. An intoxicating mixture of deep reporting, fascinating science, and prescriptive takeaway, Spring Chicken will reveal the extraordinary breakthroughs that may yet bring us eternal youth, while exposing dangerous deceptions that prey on the innocent and ignorant.” Grand Central Publishing

“I’ve known Bill Gifford since we were in 9th grade at the Maret school just up the road,” responded Peter. “Back then we both weighed about 90 pounds. We both had long flowing locks; Bill’s was golden and mine was a nice chestnut brown. Father time has kind of done his work over the years. Bill has done a lot of work over the years too. Right now he is number 8 on the New York Times best-seller list. He’s breathing down the neck of Amy Poehler, he’s in front of Lena Dunham and other people like Stephen Hawking. That’s why we’re here tonight.”

Peter O’Toole

“He was a little heavy and not in the best shape,” said Gifford who stayed on message. “Wow, middle age. We’re in middle age. As I got into the research that image never left me. There are these major studies that say that your health status in middle age predicts your trajectory through the rest of your life. It’s kind of horrible to think about it. All these things like your blood pressure, your weight and your cholesterol and all that stuff of middle age that is this crusty period. So here’s my friend Peter. I was like ‘Oh man, he’s not heading in a good direction.’ Then, through the magic of Facebook a couple years later there’s Peter doing a half marathon in Miami and he’s doing one in the Hamptons, he’s running and we go out to dinner and he looks like that. He looks like he just came off the soccer field of Maret 30 years ago.” Or, we might add, the cover of GQ.

“I spent years geeking out with these scientists, digging into the biology of aging,” Gifford added. “By doing those half marathons and making running and making exercise a part of his life, my guinea pig here had reversed the aging process at the cellular level. They found that exercise reverses aging at the level by what genes are expressed and even the aging of your mitochondria, the little power plants in your cells. It’s the most powerful anti-aging drug that we have so far.“

Irma Maldonado with daughter Eve O’Toole

“Since this is Washington, I’m going to talk about Washington too. A lot of this is policy driven. I think it’s really important to have things like the Capital Crescent Trail right here. It brings people like Peter out of the woodwork so they can go do what they want to do if they want to take charge of their own destiny, the way he did.  It’s really important to have places for people like that to go to. The second thing is, I spent a lot of time with these scientists researching the aging process and they’re really close to hacking and almost turning off the aging process. They can do it in lab animals, just like that. It’s no big deal to make a mouse live twice as long. The National Institute of Aging is like the step child of the National Institutes of Health. The amount of money that they spend on aging research is in grants like tens of millions of dollars. Cancer gets 5 billion dollars. Yet, aging is the prime risk factor for cancer. The prime risk factor for cancer is in your pocket, it’s in your wallet, it’s your diver license, it’s your birth date. Aging is the key to so many of these problems that we’re thinking about health care reform and rising health care cost. I’ll get off my soap box. Everybody, go have a glass of red wine.”

Hosts Dan and Irma Maldonado, Peter O’Toole, Eve O’Toole, (Bill Gifford), Kimball Stroud and Marc Adelman

Hollywood on the Potomac sat down with Gifford to discuss treatments like crushed dog testicles. Repeat – crushed dog testicles.  We thought you might want to get on board with that one.

Q: Why this subject for a book? What motivated you to do it?

A: Well part of it was hitting middle age but really it was having two dogs who had been litter-mates and I’d seen them go from little puppies to being very elderly and one of them actually passed away, he passed away right before I decided to start writing. So that was the galvanizing thing. He was twelve years old. He did really well and his sister is still alive. She’s fourteen and I’m in awe of her now. It was just watching the whole process play out in about a decade that got me very curious about it.”

Q: Tell us what you found out when I toss out a word.

Supplements: “Prove it”

A: You know, the way supplements are regulated in this country, it doesn’t help consumers make intelligent choices. They’re not required to prove that the supplement does what you say it does. So people are out there sort of on your own basically. I don’t know if that makes sense. I’d say unproven and unnecessary.

Exercise: “Best anti-aging drug known to man”

A: At the cellular level to stop aspects of the aging process, it’s incredible. If it was a drug it would be the best drug ever.

Diet: “Less is More”

A: I don’t believe in putting walls around your diet necessarily but the most interesting thing to me is the power of not eating. So the power of intermittent fasting – and that can be either a day a week when you eat slightly – like half of what you would normally eat – or it could be skipping a meal, skipping breakfast or compressing your eating into an eight hour window every day. All these things have been shown to have benefits to both … less in terms of weight but in terms of cellular function.

Michelle Obama: “Her message is great”

A: You know, it’s pretty basic. Eat fresh food and move around. I mean I agree totally.

Ice water:  “Scary! But healthy”

A: Most exciting non-dangerous thing I’ve ever done but cold water therapy seems to stimulate sort of a production of good fat in your body so it changes your bad white fat to good fat so that’s really cool and helps with things like blood pressure. The downside is you might have a heart attack when you jump in the cold water. Once a month would be enough for me. I’m a lot less scared of cold water than I was. I swam in the Hampton Bay in April. It was about forty-eight degrees and I felt great for about a month. If it doesn’t give you a heart attack, it will make you live longer.

GDF11: “Promising.”

Bill Gifford

Q: What is it about mice that makes them sort of the symbol for experimentation?

A: “They’re cheap and it’s a standard laboratory animal. They know how to extend life span in mice about twenty-five different ways and because the National Institute on Aging is so underfunded, they use mice. There’s a lack of imagination there that they’re not translating these things into the treatments that human beings can use: Treatments that can help us live longer, healthier lives. So there needs to be some sort of shake-up or a major funding, change in funding priorities, so we can move forward.

Q: So you have you reviewed all this stuff intellectually, scientifically and emotionally. How many years do you think, from your observations, it will take to get a solution to the aging process?

A: Depends what you mean by a solution because there are things that are just either being used now that we’re finding out also happen to delay aging. I mean this drug called Mutformin that millions of diabetics already use that have been shown to extend the lifespan of mice but it also extends lifespan of people. Diabetics taking Mutformin actually live longer than people without diabetes which is normally going to be the other way around, diabetics should die earlier.

Dan and Irma Maldonado

Q:  Let’s say that people do live another ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. We’re already having problems with Medicaid and Medicare. Doesn’t it drastically change the social dynamics of economics instability?

A: If people are healthier in their old age, which is kind of a goal, then Medicare and Medicaid would save money but the whole retirement debate is different.  The retirement age was set when life expectancy was sixty-five or slightly less and it was supposed to be indexed as life expectancy. So I mean that probably has to be looked at regardless. Jay Olshansky ia sort of the leading demographer of aging and he’s concluded that delay in aging … if we push it back seven years…. actually has a net benefit to the economy in terms of productivity, reduced healthcare costs and stuff like that for about seven trillion dollars.

Q: If you were to choose a number how long would you like to live?

A: 99

Q: Why 99?

A: At 99 I’d like to die parachuting….into the ice water.

In the end, Gifford suggest you just go out in the sun and get your Vitamin D going. “That’s even better.”

Bill Gifford on Dr. Oz: