Businessman Francisco Larrey Marco, founding partner of the Longevity World Forum meeting, recently held in Madrid, talks about longevity and prevention, advances in gene therapies, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, but defends that exercise continues to be the best medicine for body and mind.
When talking about longevity, what does it mean to move from a reactive model to a preventive one?
We are facing a paradigm shift in geroscience with the objective of acting on the biology of aging and a commitment to the personalization of medicine. One of the main conclusions of this Longevity World Forum is to know that we must work, with firm steps, for the effective implementation of this new model in which we will go from curing to preventing. The experts, scientists and technologists who have participated in this edition have agreed on the need to work on the so-called 4Ps medicine: personalized, predictive, preventive and participatory. As Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said in the inaugural lecture: “We need to prevent aging before diseases appear.” A personalized approach to the characteristics of each patient is necessary to determine whether the objective is to prevent, delay or treat. In any case, a natural decline begins at age 30, so it is recommended to start actively taking care of your physical and mental health from that age or earlier.
What role can companies and civil society play to fill nutrition, exercise and sleep deficiencies before frailty appears?
We live in a very stressful world with a high level of mental activity and, above all, a lack of connection encouraged by the use of digital devices… All of this ultimately means that our circadian rhythm does not work the way it should and that in many cases it is difficult or impossible to disconnect, relax or lower cortisol. Therefore, the part of sports activity, nutrition and sleep play an essential role in rebalancing external factors. Exercise should be scheduled for 3-4 days a week and nutrition should be taken care of with specific programs that can be promoted by the companies themselves for employees or by citizens themselves. Exercise is the best medicine for the body and mind. It causes the body to enter a virtuous circle that delays the appearance of diseases associated with aging.
From your experience as an entrepreneur, how can the market contribute to healthy aging without falling into miracle solutions or excessive medicalization?
From my experience, the key is prevention. And, in this sense, being able to use what the market puts at our disposal to add value to achieving this objective. Using wearables such as advanced heart rate monitors, the Whoop bracelet or the Oura ring, which provide us with a lot of data to adapt our lifestyles, is always a good idea. Information is power and we can do control analytics and epigenetic tests that calculate our biological age and allow us to modulate and identify where we are doing things well or where we can improve. From there, a specific plan must be defined for each person based on their lifestyle, their level of stress and their personal family situation.
It has been repeated in the congress that “we do not age by getting older, but by losing functionality.” What should be done at 40-50 years of age to reach adulthood with autonomy?
Above all, from the age of 40 or 50 you have to focus on sports activity to work on muscle generation. Hence, I would recommend exercising them 3 or 4 days a week with specific strength work for each person’s level and thus be able to progressively increase and increase muscle mass. This is combined with cardio exercises and can be enhanced using supplements such as creatine or other proteins, all depending on the fitness level of each individual and their age.