May be the example of mixter is not just anecdotical or even pure rationalization but hits exactly the point, because it's ALWAYS the dose what makes the medicine or the poison/the carcinogen (or something in between). That's also the deeper reason for the insight of simfish in the very first posting above:
'Many substances act like a double edged sword, not all good or all bad.'
Far instance, we all need something simple and basic like water, salt or sun light to survive or for our health, but too much of them can make us ill. The same is right with food or with physical exercise and so on and why shouldn't this be true even with nicotine or some other elements of a cigarette!? Certainly smoking goes (went?) together with social benefits of all kinds but that would be another question.
So, does anybody know here at least how MANY cigarettes Jeanne Calment has smoked a day (or a week, a month, a decade)??? And did she deeply inhale the smoke??? The language or the average thinking is very superficial in certain things but the deeper truth is something concrete!
The body has repair systems, immunosystem or even capacities to clean the lungs, so in a more complex view of systemic biology health is always a dynamic relation between all(!) the positive and negative factors we have to deal with.
spins:
'Apparently she enjoyed cycling and did so until she was 100, so lots of fresh mountain air into her lungs.'
Therefore a lot of stuff in the health section of Imminst is monocausative and undercomplex, because the statistical or epidemiological view of studies of all kinds of single factors is misleading us because it gives us a wrong overall picture. Those results are just indicators what
might be positive or negative just 'in the average' and without regarding complex cross reactions between specific inner dispositions and outside conditions, which are sometimes very different from person to person and which are permanent changing. (But a lot of this permanent changing happens at least in a periodic form: day and night, hot and cold, activity and relaxation, summer and winter, sexual desire and satisfaction, hunger and saturation and so on). This statistical average includes also the extremes in both(!) directions. So the right perspective must always be something highly INDIVIDUAL and may be all the centenarians and supercentenarians represent just an optimum of continued balancing(!) of all the life-factors we need and in avoiding special quantities/maximums of negative factors the organic system cannot deal with not only at once but even in the long run and in the very long run.
In my opinion this is a real possibility of life extension and at least for the entrance in escape velocity because we now have already an exponential increase of centenarians for about three decades in the western world what is mostly a non-specific, only statistical and more accidental effect by all the slow and unspecific bettering of general life circumstances and medical improvement, not the result of systematic approaches or long term activities of the elderly or from some results of biogerontology. And just think about the life conditions of someone who is now one hundred in his youth or for the most part of his life! Do you think Sam Walton could become 100, always working in a sawmill, getting depressions because of the great depression, not knowing exactly how much grandchildren and grandgrandchildren he has and being a stereotype of his own as the grandpa of a fairy tale-like soap opera...
!? Of course he HAD to die, because it's the stereotype, that grandpas 'must' die. May be this is the hardest killer of all, all the social expectations and projections about life and death, and every supercentenarian must have solved these social kind of problems TOO, not only the physical ones.
This possibility of life extension is not an easy way because the body breaks always in his weakest point and so you have to deal permanently with all your potential health problems in a nearly 'perfect' way. It's probably already the wrongest way to deal all the time with potential illness, we have instead to focus on the positive pole: what makes us confident, satisfied, happy, curios, vital, enthusiastic, loving and strong!!? These and other emotional states are also general feedbacks about the general functioning of the whole body.
Kevin Perrott:
'Most of the oldest old seem to have strong genetic constitutions .. they also are all optimists who don't get upset easily. I would say that these factors are much more important than any other.'
And because of the mentioned individual perspective, it's very difficult to lead a sufficient discussion about it, especially only in the internet, because all the debates lead probably only to the lowest common denominator. In the contrary everyone needs just his OWN optimum of balance - what is good or bad for you can be very much different for me - and may be the first step to solve this problem is to overcome this monocausative und undercomplex perspective. Second step: realization, that we are social beings and that health, happiness and also life extension is something what happens in face to face-communities first. Virtual communities like Imminst are only the next level or for additional mental exchange. This is - by the way - the deeper secret of the strength of traditional religions, not the logic or deeper truth of their philosophies, theologies or holy scriptures (besides the fact that they of course are seekers of immortality too, but in an ancient, metaphysical way).
PS 1:
I myself have always been a non-smoker but I was also ever fascinated by the fact, that a lot of heavy smokers REALLY got very old or - if I'm going out at night - sometimes I'm feeling rather sick because of all that smoke in the clubs by just inhaling it passively while the deep inhaling active smokers are enjoying it so much. Just a common every day experience which illustrates the complex differences of a single health problem.
PS 2 @ Matt:
'I've always believed that the best way to get to 100 + is to not smoke and to not drink alcohol... (so far I've managed both) and have a good diet... Although calment drank a lot of red wine every day apparently?'
It's a well known fact in medicine that a small(!) amount of red wine daily can be a protection against heart disease, the number one killer of today. This result comes from big studies about the nutrition and health conditions of the mediterranean population in Europe and it has essentially something to do not with the alcohol but with the combination of hundreds of additional elements you find in the red wine. (May be because of some anti-oxidential factors in it, but I don't remember it exactly.) But what is 'small' for you may not be small for someone else and even your own condition is changing always, so drinking always a fixed quantum - like the recommended (='average') quarter of a liter per day - may not be very wise. And there are lots of other diseases. May be you have exactly a specific disposition where red wine or alcohol is just very wrong.
So, stopping smoking and drinking alcohol - or reducing it too very small and occasional amounts - might be a good beginning, but conventional anti aging-medicine is not so easy as it appears sometimes, there are a lot of problems and subtle effects which might have a deeper potential for life extension on the other hand.
There's something needed like our own intuition and our own feeling of our very own body, where no 'peer reviewed study' can help us! The scientific approach ALONE misleads us from this intuition and from our emotions which are - as I've mentioned above - subtle feedback signals from our body about the whole process of dynamic homeostasis, which will - or at least shall - ever go on, whether we will develop some SENS-like therapies or not. In my opinion all these high tech-approaches do only make 'sens' in additional but they never will substitute a basic personal view and a basic personal life style, which are fundamentally orientated on life extension. Death and illness is not something what can be reduced to aging and Millions of people destroy their lifes and their health very much faster as the big difference of more than twenty years between the average and the suggested 'maximum' lifespan is permanent proving. (Or their health is destroyed by outside conditions they cannot control personally but could be neutralized in general already.)
