Good morning. Millions of people are spending boatloads of time and money on a quest to live much, much longer – more on that below, along with the need for jobs for young Canadians and tech workers for Ontario farms. But first:
Today’s headlines
- Britain’s Labour Party has won a landslide victory in the UK general election, sending Labour leader Keir Starmer to Downing Street as the country’s new prime minister
- Streaming platforms like Netflix and Spotify launch multiple legal challenges to Bill C-11 payments
- Hezbollah’s massive military response to the killing of a senior commander feeds fears of a Israel-Lebanon war
Sachin Patel in his portable sauna.Shlomi Amiga /The Globe and Mail
Health
No time to die
In his full-court press for a longer life, Mississauga’s Sachin Patel begins each morning with a tall glass of sea-salt-spiked water. He drinks it barefoot and shirtless outside in the sun, the better to regulate his circadian rhythms. He boosts his cardiovascular health with sessions in a portable living-room sauna, and he favours natural-fibre underwear over polyester, lest it lower his testosterone. At night, Patel bunkers down in linen bedding, to “accelerate wound healing.”
As The Globe’s Ann Hui points out, this sort of regimen barely scratches the surface of what’s come to be known as the longevity movement. Hui is the paper’s demographics reporter, covering everything from the challenges faced by Canada’s aging population to millennial burnout and Gen Z’s impact on the work force. In her new feature, she details how fairly young, healthy men like Patel are looking to improve their odds of living well past 100.
Spearheaded by a celebrity doctor, endorsed by Silicon Valley billionaires and followed by millions, the longevity movement insists you can extend both your lifespan and, crucially, your “health span,” or the number of years spent in good health. Kicking around till 140 or even 180 years old is possible, they say, provided you’re willing to follow a wildly disciplined routine of exercise, eating, fitness-tracking and supplement-taking – and shell out for the pricey full-body MRIs, cold-plunge kits and online programs that these longevity influencers promote.
Medicine 3.0
Arguably the most dominant figure in the longevity world is Peter Attia, a Toronto-born, U.S.-based physician whose book Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity has sold more than a million copies. Oprah had Attia on her YouTube channel. Gwyneth Paltrow had him on her podcast. He’s got a buzzed head and formidable biceps that he tends to show off in fitted T-shirts, and he practises what he likes to call Medicine 3.0.
Attia splits medicine into three epochs. The vast majority of human history was spent in Medicine 1.0, which relied on observation, conjecture and a good chunk of bloodletting. Medicine 2.0 was ushered in by Francis Bacon, accelerated by Louis Pasteur and includes breakthroughs such as sanitation, antiviral drugs and organ transplants. The problem with Medicine 2.0, Attia believes, it’s that it’s reactive, not proactive – practitioners only intervene once the patient is ill. With Medicine 3.0, Attia told Hui, “we can prevent or at least significantly delay the chronic diseases, like heart disease, cancer, dementia and diabetes, that kill most people today.”
Taking the plunge.Shlomi Amiga /The Globe and Mail
Some of these preventative measures, such as red-light therapy, body-fat-composition scans, sunlight exposure and ice baths, have very little evidence to back up their claims. The better ones are lifted from Medicine 2.0: Exercise, eat a healthy diet, keep good company, get enough sleep. Beyond that, says Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy Timothy Caulfield, there’s not much more we can do to extend our health spans: “Everything else is just luck.” But luck is notoriously fickle. The longevity movement gives its followers the promise of control.
Wellness 2.0
Sachin Patel became disillusioned with the mainstream medical system after an awful ordeal in the delivery room: His wife had to have an emergency C-section, then an emergency hysterectomy. Their first child would be their last, Hui writes. “There’s not a lot of external factors in life that we can control,” Patel told her. “But I feel empowered when I can decide what’s going into my body.”
In that respect, the longevity and wellness industries provide a similar appeal. We can side-eye juice cleanses and float tanks and aromatherapy and snail serums – believe me, I have, and believe me, I know that lots of people (Gwyneth!) have made buckets of money peddling this stuff. Still, having more agency in our own health care can be seductive when the system is such a reliable disappointment. Women and racialized people are far more likely to be misdiagnosed and mistreated. They wait longer to be seen in the ER. Trans and non-binary folks and low-income people routinely struggle to access care at all. An alternative therapist who spends an hour asking questions about your life sounds pretty good in comparison. If only we all could afford it.
And that’s where my sympathy for the longevity world falls apart. The biggest, richest boosters of this movement – Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, the OpenAI guy, the guy who swapped blood with his teenage son – are already fantastically well-served by the medical system. Their bodies are the best understood, their time is the most prized and they can always find ways to secure the care they need. So I might save my side-eyes for the billionaires spending mightily on a workaround for mortality – the one thing they share with everyone else.
The Shot
‘So much of what we do can be controlled by an app on my phone.’
Packing cucumbers at Mucci Farms.Geoff Robins/The Globe and Mail
In southern Ontario greenhouses, growing vegetables is an increasingly ultramodern operation – but not nearly enough tech workers want a career on the farm. Read more here.
The Wrap
What else we’re following
At home: When interest rates are so high, competition is so fierce and ghosting by employers is so common, young Canadians struggle hard to find summer jobs.
Abroad: With so many Ukrainian men away on the front lines, women are stepping into traditionally male-dominated professions such as truck driving and welding.
Looking up: An unbelievably cool “spaceship” observatory has opened in Cyprus, where stargazers climb high into the Troodos Mountains to get an unobstructed view of the skies.
Chowing down: If you, somehow, can demolish more than 58 hot dogs in less than 10 minutes, then congratulations – you’ve one-upped the new champ of Nathan’s hot-dog eating contest.