If you aspire to live a long life, don’t wait until you are 60 to pursue it, advises Dr. Jeffrey Galvin, director of the Vitality Medical Wellness Institute  North Carolina. The earlier you begin living a lifestyle aimed at longevity, the more likely you are to reach your 90’s and beyond in health, he suggests. 

“How do we build vibrant, healthy 90-year-olds?” he asks. “We start with 30 and 40-year-olds, maybe 50-year-olds.”

Galvin anticipates technologies, just over the horizon, that will radically extend human life. And current research (on mice and other animals) seeks to remove a body’s degraded cells and replace them with younger ones as a vehicle toward longevity..

But Dr. Galvin’s practice, the Vitality Medical Wellness Institute in Charlotte, NC, is not just trying to enable patients to live longer but also to enable them to be healthier as they age. “The idea is you want to stay healthy and performing really well for a long time,” he says.

Dr. Galvin wants to optimize peoples’ performance as long as possible and lessen the decline that often precedes death. He thinks it better to live to 90, and have just two years of decline rather than endure decades of decline even while living longer.

Another reason to strive for a healthy life sooner rather than later, he says, is that the life-prolonging technologies to become available in a few years won’t be accessible to the unhealthy. But,“If you’re 75 and you’re in top shape, then you’re going to absolutely be eligible for those therapies.”

He laments that most doctors treat disease and symptoms to manage decline but don’t show interest in patients’ overall health. He doesn’t blame the doctors themselves — “The system is not set up for you to be healthy,” he asserts.

Major causes of death — strokes and heart attacks, cancer, Alzheimer’s — must be minimized in advance. That entails evaluating family history and personal risk factors, testing for disease markers and planning how to uproot these potential seeds of death. “It really is important to do this testing and look at people’s baseline health,” Dr. Galvin says. “We reverse chronic disease, because you can’t really optimize until you get rid of all the underlying problems.”