00:00So in your field, we hear a lot about two different but related terms. We hear about
00:04lifespan and we hear about healthspan. Can you just describe to me the difference between those
00:09two as it relates to the work that you do every day with patients? Welcome to The Future You,
00:13a new series by Men's Health, where we talk to the leading experts in health and longevity to
00:17help you live longer and stronger. I'm your host, Rich Dormant. In this episode, we're talking with
00:22longevity expert Dr. Mark Lacks about lifespan versus healthspan. So lifespan, very simply put,
00:29is the number. The number of years you get, the number of birthday candles you get on your
00:33That's exactly right. And healthspan is the length of time that you can live independently with full
00:40function. And in a perfect world, healthspan should equal lifespan, right? I mean, I have no interest
00:46in having someone live to a hundred if they're bedbound or chair fast. I mean, that's as pyrrhic
00:52a victory as a 40-year-old woman dying of breast cancer. I want people doing the things they want
00:58to do to the very last minute. Bridge, tennis, pickleball, sex, you know, whatever it is that
01:06is what my 90-year-old says, turns your gears. So the goal is really not just to increase both
01:14healthspan and lifespan, but to bring them closer together. That's exactly right. To live as long
01:19as you can doing what you want to do without disability. So when you were starting out,
01:24what were some of the most common, say, complaints? Was it frailty? What were some of the things that
01:29the quote-unquote aging population was really dealing with that you'd heard about all the time
01:34from your patients? Disability from diseases that were not treatable. So for example, heart attacks,
01:40the rates of heart disease, particularly in men, have dropped dramatically. And in those days,
01:45if you had a heart attack in your 50s or 60s, you might be breathless. You might not be able to
01:50walk without chest pain, angina. Now we put a piece of rigatoni in one of your arteries and you
01:56can live another 20, 30 years going to the gym, right? And that did not exist. Or at least not
02:01exist commonly. Stents were started in the late 70s, right? People were felled by cancers, colon cancer.
02:07We hear all about that and the younger propensity to colon cancer. Now we do a screening procedure and
02:13those get taken out so you can go on to live another 20, 30 years and meet me. So it was not
02:20just the diagnosis, but it was the prevention piece, the diagnosis piece, and the treatment piece
02:25were just a lot different than they are. And then the public health issues, you know, smoking,
02:30which, you know, everybody smoked when I was a kid. I mean, I smoked a few cigarettes in college and
02:35rates of that have dropped dramatically. People were learning about ideal body weight. Exercise. I mean,
02:42I would say that one of the biggest breakthroughs in aging has been what we call the quantified
02:49self. And that's the Fitbit, the ring. I mean, did you have any idea 10 or 15 years ago how many
02:56steps you took in a day? No, no. And now you know that. And now you aspire to that goal. You see when
03:05you're falling off. You see on an iPhone when your gait is becoming unstable. You're learning about how you
03:11sleep, the quality of your sleep. I mean, the one thing we've been unable to do is to see how much
03:16food you put in your mouth. Everybody underestimates the amount of Haagen-Dazs, right, that they're
03:21eating. Just a spoonful. Just a spoonful. Yeah. I mean, it's really one serving, that little
03:27container. So small. But I think that day's going to come. I think there'll be an app or device that
03:32will, you won't be able to sort of delude yourself into the fact that that that that big hamburger was
03:39only 150 calories. Right.
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