More than skin deep

The internet was abuzz with a shock-horror story a few weeks ago when Cameron Diaz showed up in public to promote a new Apple TV film alongside Keanu Reeves. The fuss was nothing about the film. No one remembered the name of it or even what she would be portraying. What they were focused on was the fact that—wait for it—Diaz (1) had wrinkles and (2) chose not to disguise them.

“In dire need of a refresh,” one tabloid columnist concluded. “Brave!” cried her fans. What they were noting were a few tiny crow’s feet and laugh lines on a beautiful young woman.

Diaz, you see, is 53, and in Hollywoodland, being 53 without cutting, injecting, pulling or freezing your face is considered a strange anomaly at a time when facelifts, Botox and filler appointments are enjoying a more than 400 percent increase, particularly among young women between 35 and 39.

After one “tiny touch” of Botox or fillers early in her career, Diaz said she regretted it. The treatment, she said, had changed her face in a “weird way.” Thereafter, she said, “I’d rather see my face aging than a face that doesn’t belong to me at all.”

One of the latest fads among celebs is the use of “miracle” drips as a kind of insurance policy against getting older. Celebrities like the Kardashians consider it a fun girly day out to head off with one of their chums to a salon where, for a mere $900 or more a dose, they can get liquid NAD⁺ injected straight into their bloodstreams.

Justin Bieber’s wife, model Hailey, told the Wall Street Journal that she gets NAD⁺ weekly by IV, a treatment she thinks is “the future.”

“I’m going to NAD for the rest of my life, and I’m never going to age,” she once joked to Kendall Jenner on the family’s reality TV show, Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

As our Special Report, NAD+: The anti-aging drip that might not work, points out, NAD⁺ (which stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) is a coenzyme central to the work of the mitochondria, the power packs inside every cell. It transports the electrons that are essential to converting food into energy, and when levels of it are low, so is the body’s energy.

Nevertheless, despite the glowing endorsements by celebrities, NAD⁺ taken by injection isn’t really well absorbed. Increasingly scientists look to oral doses of NAD⁺ precursors, including nicotinamide, a form of good old vitamin B3, that do get absorbed and regularly converted into NAD⁺.

But there’s a deeper issue here—what contributes most to aging and longevity? The science of epigenetics has long demonstrated that the environment outside of every cell controls whether genes turn on or off, including those related to longevity. And one of the most important environmental switches is the power of your mind. It determines your ability to stay engaged and curious, to have a purpose and be of service and, most of all, to stay connected to others, particularly in a community.

This was aptly demonstrated in a study by psychology professor Barbara Frederickson and her colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Frederickson knew that psychological well-being is a great predictor of health and longevity but wondered which constituted the most powerful anti-aging lifestyle: the fulfilling life of pleasure and self-gratification that we’d normally define as “the good life,” or a life filled with purpose or meaning.

The researchers examined the gene expressions and psychological states of 80 healthy volunteers in two groups: pleasure-seekers and those pursuing a life of service and meaning. Although the members of the two groups had many emotional similarities and all claimed to be highly content and not depressed, their gene expression profiles couldn’t have been more divergent.

Among the pleasure seekers, the psychologists were amazed to discover high levels of inflammation, considered a marker for degenerative illness, and lower levels of gene expression involved in antibody synthesis, the body’s response to outside attack.

If you hadn’t known their histories, you would have concluded that these were the gene profiles of people exposed to a great deal of adversity or in the midst of difficult life crises: a low socioeconomic status, social isolation, diagnosis with a life-threatening disease, a recent bereavement.

These people were all perfect candidates for a heart attack, Alzheimer’s disease, even cancer. In a few years, they would be dropping like flies.

Those whose lives were not as affluent or stress-free but were purposeful and filled with meaning, on the other hand, had low inflammatory markers and a downregulation of stress-related gene expression, both indicative of rude good health. If you have to choose one path over the other, the researchers concluded, choosing a life of meaning over just chasing pleasure is undeniably better for your health and longevity.

It’s also a great reminder that anti-aging is not about keeping your face young. It’s about keeping your mind young: ever curious and engaged, focusing on the other, pursuing, as the ancient Greeks put it, “a noble purpose.”

That indeed is a recipe for finding eternal youth.

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