Book Review: "Ageless" by Andrew Steele

Who loves cheap books they can read on their phone? I do. This book wasn't too expensive when I found it and well, I'm not going to lie when I say I'm not overtly interested in biology. HOWEVER, I am also aware that this book is an important read and so, I wanted to get in there. What happens when we have to confront ageing and all of the horrors that come with it? Well, if you're like me you normally turn to the fact that you don't feel like you're too old but you also have to admit that there are things you simply can't do anymore - things you used to do about ten or fifteen years' ago. Andrew Steele gets into the argument about why we should treat this concept, where our bodies work against us, rather than just looking at diseases we can see straight away. How do we cure ageing? Oh, and why should we?

One of the best things about this book is that it gives reasoning. It isn't one of those nonfiction science books which already expects the reader to be a scientist. When explaining things like the effects of ageing, we get a good flowchart-like set of reasons to follow. For example: our author explains that in the developing world, life expectancy has increased overall and that is a good thing. However, it also means that more people are going to experience the deterioration associated with old age that cannot be ignored. It's an easy argument to understand yes, but once you get your head around the fact that (as the author states) a thirty-year-old who drinks and smokes regularly would still be healthier than an eighty-year-old who goes for walks and eats all their greens - living a clean lifestyle - then you can understand more about how much deterioration goes on in ageing. It's written like a conversation with the reader to help them understand, not a topic that simply makes the writer sound more intelligent.

One of the facts I found quite interesting in the book was that there was a whale found in our modern decade with a weapon lodged in it. The whale was still alive but the weapon that was lodged in it stopped being made over one hundred years' ago. This means that the whale is over one hundred years' old - also, that also means the whale back then was big enough and in enough of its prime not to get killed by a weapon from the 19th century whaling community. 19th century whaling was apparently so prominent that we don't actually know how long whales can live as we don't have enough whales that have lived long enough.

Another thing I found intriguing about this book is that the author claims that science is like popular culture in that things ebb and flow in and out of eye via trends. People in the scientific field may specialise in something popular one decade and then, in the next decade, it could be something entirely different. This, he states, explains the reason why there weren't many scientists studying the effects of old age until the 1990s. I often thought of science as a field that would discover a problem and then try to fix it, but instead there are trendy problems worth solving and others that sit on the back-burner. This might explain why buzzwords in science-based culture are so popular such as 'mindfulness' for psychology and 'biohacking' for biology.

A classic argument people try to make is that fasting and restriction does not work and I saw this on a Facebook post only recently too. There are plenty of people who denounce it as 'junk science' where Andrew Steele actually makes an argument for slight dietary restrictions in order for us to live longer. He references a study done on mice in which certain control groups were given restricted diets. I've heard the argument that restricted diets aren't all that great but I have to say that there is already a lot of evidence for them doing at least some amount of good for people who have had illnesses such as diabetes. That's just my observation though.

All in all, I found this book to be an informative mixture of experiments and explanations, things that we should be looking at as we get older are coming to the forefront and there is plenty to analyse. I have every intention of writing something about this book in the future but for now, let's just stick to this review.