Episode 1 How To Stay Young

Morning, face.

Gosh, you've aged, haven't you?

'I'm TV journalist Angela Rippon and I'm now 71 years old.'

I suppose the first time I really started thinking about my age

was on my 70th birthday. That doesn't half concentrate the mind.

'I'm Dr Chris van Tulleken. I'm half Angela's age.'

I'm 36 and it's perfectly possible to get to my age without ever

really considering what it's going to be like to be old.

'We have very different perspectives on ageing

'but we both want to know how to slow it down.'

If I'm going to live till I'm 90,

if you're going to live till you're 90, how can we get there still

fit and healthy and still getting as much as possible out of life?

We'd all love to possess the secrets to a long and healthy life.

Scientists now know more about ageing than ever before.

It's one of the most exciting frontiers of modern science.

So we're scouring the world to discover the latest research

that will keep all of us younger for longer.

In this series, we'll find out what's best for both our bodies

and our brains.

This time, it's the body.

'I travel to America to meet the scientist who's discovered

'the unexpected diet that can add years to our lives.'

I think a lot of people are going to find this really surprising.

'I visit Germany to join a ground-breaking study that

'reveals which exercise holds off ageing the most.'

'I turn 80 for the day...'

I look like Donald Trump!

'..to follow the latest advice

'that can make us all seven years younger.'

Yay!

And how this 17-year-old might hold the key to cure ageing.

'Along the way, Angela and I come under close examination...'

Ooh! Dear me, eh? Oh, my goodness!

If we don't look after that, OK?

It will be a major problem.

All in the quest to discover how to stay young.

BRASS BAND PLAYS

Many of us worry about getting older.

Scientists have just developed a test that they claim can

accurately assess how well we're ageing and how long we'll live.

It's so simple, you can do it anywhere.

'Professor Janet Lord, an expert in healthy ageing, is going

'to show me what it's all about.'

Well, first of all, you need to take your shoes off. Oh, right. OK.

So you should do this barefoot. Yeah.

And then, you have to cross your legs. Yeah.

And then, try to lower yourself to the ground without touching the

ground with any part of your body - your hand, your knees, your arms.

Just go down very slowly.

Like that? Excellent. Now what?

Now you have to try to stand up, again,

without using any part of your body to help you stand up.

SHE LAUGHS

I'll have a go but I don't think I'm going to be able to do this!

Just get up the best way you can.

Aargh! SHE LAUGHS

It's harder than you think! It is, it is.

You used a knee but you're still very, very good for your age.

But, look, why...

Why does doing that, and what I just did,

why does that tell you about what's going on with my body?

You're showing how strong your muscles are and,

without wobbling at all, you're showing how good your balance is.

It's really telling us how well you're ageing.

Very good.

Let's try it out on a few more people. OK.

There we go. Right.

Who is going to be first? Can I? Yes! There you go.

'The scoring is easy.

'You start with ten points

'and then lose one point every time you have to use a hand or a knee.'

Perfect ten!

'And if you wobble, you lose half a point.'

# Fold 'em, let 'em hit me Raise it, baby, stay with me

# I love it

# Love game intuition play the cards with spades to start...#

'This sit-to-rise test came out of a recent Brazilian study.

'Scientists assessed over 2,000 people aged between 50 and 80

'and their health was followed up over a number of years.

'People's initial scores were powerful predictors

'of later health...'

Come on!

'..and how long they'd live.'

Wow!

So, all those scores that you were giving,

what do they actually mean now in terms of a long and healthy life?

If you score 8-10, you're going to have a long, healthy life. Woohoo!

We got a ten! The next bracket down is the 6-7.5 group.

Well done. Yes! Good! Good! Yes!

Compared to the 8-10 group,

they've got almost twice as high a chance of having a shorter life.

It could have been worse. I could have got a five.

The next group down is the 3.5-5.5.

They actually have almost a 3.5 times the risk of actually

not having a particularly long life.

'If you score low, the good news is you can do

'something about it by being more physically active.'

I'm a hopeless case! No, you're not.

You can improve that score by doing exercises that will help to

strengthen the body and give you better balance? Exactly.

'A single point increase in your score can

'reduce your chances of dying within six years by over 20%.

'Any exercise that targets strength, agility

'and balance will help improve your score.'

'Even just practising the sit-to-rise test itself

'is a good way to start.'

# Staying alive, staying alive

# Ah, ha, ha, ha...#

SHE LAUGHS

We all know people who seem young for their age

but why do some of us age better than others?

It's long been thought it's mainly to do with our genes.

But new research on identical twins has overturned this.

Thanks to twin studies, scientists now know that, for most of us,

how long we live is 75% down to lifestyle...

..and only 25% down to our genes.

Identical twins come from a single sperm and egg.

This is my identical twin.

We began life as a single clump of cells that split

somewhere in the first two weeks to become two separate people.

We share therefore 100% of our DNA,

and that is why it is literally impossible to tell us apart.

What about the beard? Sh!

The genes of identical twins are the same so they're perfect

for investigating how lifestyle choices affect ageing.

To prove it, we've tracked down a pair of twins who live

really different lives to discover which lifestyle ages you the most.

This is Patti - a 55-year-old professional

living and working in the hustle and bustle of Washington DC.

And this is Terry, her identical twin sister -

retired and living just yards from where they grew up

in the small East Coast town of Elkton.

Patti's hooked on the adrenaline of the city.

Terry lives slower and accepts she's a bit overweight,

unlike her slimmer sister.

We are exactly alike and total opposites at the same time!

So which lifestyle is ageing them faster?

The Twin Research centre in London has pioneered a way to answer this -

a cutting-edge blood test that can reveal,

at a molecular level, exactly how well a person's ageing.

Over the years, poor lifestyle choices

can damage the DNA in our blood and the test detects the damage.

The less damage to the DNA, the younger you are, biologically.

# London calling to the faraway towns... #

Patti and Terry had the blood test

and have now made the trip to London to find out their results

and discover how their two different lifestyles

have affected their actual biological age.

# London calling See, we ain't got no swing. #

Oh, there he is! Hi, guys. How you doing?

It's very nice to meet you. Nice to meet you!

Hi, Terry. It's great to see you. Oh, wow!

Biologically, there may be a difference,

so how do you think you're going to do?

I think that I'm younger than her.

I think I'm going to be younger than her.

So you both think you're going to be younger than the other one? Yup.

Why? I think stress is the biggest factor.

She's just sort of a higher stress person

and I'm a lot more easy-going. Um...

I'm overweight and she's not, so that's the other factor.

I kind of try to overcome the stress by having

as much activity as I possibly can and, um...

What? Why are you laughing? Because I have a lot of activity, too,

and I get up first thing in the morning

and go take care of horses and carry two five-gallon water buckets

and clean stalls and push wheelbarrows and dump manure,

so yeah, I think the activity is about to wash.

I think we're both very active.

Terry, on a day-to-day basis, do you aggressively kind of pursue

things to prolong your life with diet, with exercise?

If I were to be told, for example, that you can extend your life

by six months if you never eat chocolate again, no way!

THEY LAUGH

'To reveal who has aged less, twin specialist

'Professor Tim Spector has analysed the blood tests.'

This is the big moment.

This here gives your chronological age, 55, and you both seem

fairly sure that you're... Younger! ..on the younger side. LAUGHTER

OK? Yeah. No doubt about that.

And the results show, actually,

you are both biologically younger than average.

But that's great!

It's a fantastic result.

But the biological age of one twin is lower than the other.

That's me? That's definitely you, is it?

No, that's me. LAUGHTER

Yeah?

Yes! LAUGHTER

Sorry about that.

THEY LAUGH

One to two years' difference between you, all right.

I'm just kidding, this is great.

'So Terry is up to two years younger than Patti.'

But look on the bright side.

So, you've both done very well, you know?

One is lower than the other and why is that?

You've got less stress in your life than you have and clearly

that stress has played a role here, the difference between you.

But you're probably a little bit fitter,

carrying a little less weight... Mm-hm.

..and that has helped you as well.

So I think these are important messages,

that if everybody could be fit, healthy, de-stressed and have

the perfect diet, who knows how low you could get?

And I see that as more of an incentive to do even better. Yeah.

Exactly. Rather than a reason to relax and let things happen.

This has been really inspiring for us both.

'After smoking, stress and weight

'have the biggest influence on how we age.'

My identical twin Xand and I also took Tim's blood test.

OK, so you guys have your results.

Now, Xand and I are actually already part of your research study.

So I met Tim quite a few years ago and at that point,

Tim said to Xand that he was "a disgrace to his genes"

because he was so much heavier than me.

I think the difference will be bigger. I will be two years

biologically younger than Xand.

BUT, he is the more laid-back twin.

So you had more stress, you think?

Yeah, I am a classically anxious, neurotic, high-stress individual.

LAUGHTER

Now the moment of truth for you and Xand, then.

Ooh! Dear me, eh?

Oh, my goodness.

Biologically, we're both five years older than we should be.

There's something wrong with your test.

LAUGHTER

Both our lifestyles are equally bad for us.

Tim thinks my problem is stress.

You do have a stressful job, a stressful life.

It's possible that these are factors that you ought to be thinking about.

So this means that I can expect to get the diseases of ageing,

you know, diabetes, joint aches and pains, arthritis, dementia,

heart attack, strokes... All that stuff will happen

five years earlier for me than for the average person of my age?

Yes. How many jobs do you have?

There are three jobs. Well, there you go. All of which I struggle at.

Maybe you need to slow down a little bit and chill out and smell the roses

along the way and maybe not make it impact you on the inside.

Stress is literally shortening my life.

I'm gutted. To you guys... We're 55.

No, no, but you're not! You're 49, biologically. Well... And I'm 41!

When I met you this morning there was 18 years between us

and now there's only eight years between us!

That was a shock, but I found out in time to still do something about it,

thanks to this revolutionary test that is helping scientists

better understand how we age.

So, do you want your results from Tim Spector? If they're good.

Well, they could be worse, but not much.

So you and I are five years older than our chronological age,

than our actual age. Five years?! 41.

So we're older than we should be, is that right?

Yes, I've just said, you're 41. That's a lot!

Like, I'm not... I'm not that old. That's a decent chunk of my life. Yeah.

So why?

Well, probably because I'm quite stressed

and you've been quite overweight.

And that has cost me that much time? Yeah.

I think the really nice thing that Tim's research shows us, though,

is that we do have the possibility of change,

we can make decisions in our life about our lifestyle to lose weight, chill out...

And it will add years to our life.

And that's quite cool. It's not fate, it's not predetermined. Yeah.

'The test has driven home to me that if I want to live longer,

'I need to deal with my stress.

'And my brother needs to grapple with his diet.

'Later on, I'll be finding out the best ways for all of us

'to win years back.'

Unlike Chris and Xand, I'm not particularly stressed

and I know I'm not overweight.

People say I'm ageing pretty well.

But appearances can be deceptive.

To fully understand the ageing process,

scientists say you need to peer under the bonnet.

So, I'm going to have a full body MRI scan, to look inside me.

And I have to say, I am just a teeny bit anxious about it.

This is going to be noisy, isn't it?

It is a bit noisy, but I will give you headphones.

You've got music for me? We've got music for you, yeah. Good, right. Classical music.

Obviously, when I was in my teens, my 20s, my 30s,

even my 40s, I would have hoped that my brain

and my body was in a reasonable condition.

But it's now 71 years old.

SHE LAUGHS

It's like a sort of, um...

I'm not a Ferrari any more.

I'm a sort of, hopefully, reasonably well-preserved vintage model.

Here we go.

Fantastic. Let's start. Right.

By taking thousands of slice-like images,

this MRI will reveal exactly how my organs have aged.

My heart, my liver, my spine and my brain.

You OK?

That's the easy bit over.

The hard part will be receiving the results.

Ooh. Thank you.

Professor of medicine Jimmy Bell will interpret the scans for me.

The first time I've been able to peer inside my own body.

This is a 3-D rendering of your body

and we want to see what effect ageing might have had. OK.

So if we zoom in... So we're just going to click this here.

And as we zoom in, then we can see your spine here.

Well, most of me appears to be ageing satisfyingly slowly.

You have a very young heart.

Still your heart is very healthy.

You have got a body composition of a young person

and your muscle mass is actually substantial,

in the sense that it's actually very healthy.

It's actually quite young legs, if you don't mind my saying so.

'Well, so far, so good. But then we find something rather more sinister.'

If we actually look around the liver,

all the white bits here, and that's all what we call visceral fat.

You have a very significant amount of visceral fat.

So now we're going to zoom in to the heart.

If you look at that yellow bit around it, again, surprisingly,

you have a large amount of fat accumulated around your heart.

That physical constraint of the heart pumping against that fat

might be a problem long-term.

I'm in shock!

This is all a bit difficult to take in.

We would expect someone healthy at any age,

to have less than two litres of visceral fat.

You have between six and seven litres.

That is not good news.

I exercise, I eat well,

so where the heck has all this internal fat come from?

Normally, it's to do with lifestyle,

so we would expect someone who has a poor diet,

high in sugar or fat,

or someone who doesn't do lots of physical activity.

That's not me. But clearly, that's not you at all!

This field of science is very new so there are still unanswered questions

and women do seem to be more vulnerable than men to internal fat.

But whatever the cause, the implications for me are serious.

Internal fat is quite dangerous.

It can lead to cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes

and if we don't look after that, it will be a major problem.

This is devastating.

I had no idea that as we age, some of us

put down lots of internal body fat, so what's the solution?

Well, thankfully, scientists have recently found something

we can do to reduce this hidden threat.

There was a big shock attached to the results

and that is that I am carrying an awful lot of internal fat

particularly around my heart and that really is very worrying,

but I'm told that there is a way, of course,

of helping to get rid of all of that fat

and quite simply it is by eating a lot more high-resistance starch.

And that occurs in pulses like lentils and chickpeas.

The latest science has revealed that when high resistance starch

is eaten, it passes through to the large intestine.

There it releases an acid which enters the body

to reduce internal fat.

The trouble is for this to happen you need to eat a ridiculous

amount of lentils. Kilos a week.

Fortunately, there is an artificial alternative.

There is a concentrated form of high-resistance starch

and it's this stuff, this white powder which is called inulin

and all you have to do is sprinkle that over your food.

Now it's obviously going to take quite a while,

probably round about six months, to see whether or not

following this kind of diet is going to make any difference to me

but clearly I'm going to give it a go.

Scientists are developing a new generation of drugs which they

expect to be even more effective at reducing internal fat.

But for now, the inulin food supplement is my best hope.

What we eat is crucial to how well we age.

And a surprising discovery about the best diet

to keep us young has come from an unlikely place.

The USA, famous for fast food.

Take downtown LA, a place where fast food has replaced fresh food.

People living in areas like this are three times more likely

to die of major age-related diseases.

Of all the facts and figures, the one I think which is most

kind of telling, is that of all the meals that are eaten

in the United States, 20% of them are consumed in people's cars.

It's like a kind of enjoyable slow suicide, being deliberately

inactive while you consume vast quantities of calories.

# Take me down to the Paradise city where the grass is green... #

But just 60 miles east of LA is somewhere very different.

Tucked away in the mountains is the quiet town of Loma Linda.

Here, people live up to ten years longer than your average Californian

and scientists suspect it is largely to do with what they eat.

So I'm off to meet one of the town's oldest residents,

centenarian Dr Ellsworth Wareham,

to ask him his secret to a long life.

DOORBELL RINGS

Hi, Ellsworth. Hi there. Very, very nice to meet you.

And you.

Do you do any exercise? No.

His medical career lasted 67 years.

When was the last time you put surgical gloves on

and touched a patient? When I was 95. When you were 95? Yes.

And you are now...? 100. 100. And I'll be 101 in six weeks.

And I say I could go right now

and do any operation I've ever done and I could do it right now.

You could still put someone on a heart bypass machine. Oh, easily.

Nothing to it. A lung, for example, I could do in my sleep.

Why did you decide to stop operating at 95?

So I could spend a little more time at home.

What do you think has enabled you to stay that young?

I am inclined to believe that lifestyle has quite a bit to

do with your health.

And I'm a vegan.

Do you think that veganism, avoiding eating dairy,

butter, meat, do you think that's the most important

factor in you being a 100-year-old who looks like you are 30

years younger, has no pain and could still do heart surgery?

I think it's important.

Ellsworth has been a vegan for 50 years.

He is also a Seventh Day Adventist,

a religion which encourages vegetarianism

and the main faith of Loma Linda.

That's the University Church.

But could vegetarianism be the key to living longer?

Most of the community is now part of a world-renowned study on diet

and ageing.

As a staunch carnivore, I'm meeting Professor Of Public Health,

Larry Beeson, to see if it's really worth ditching the meat.

Hi, Larry. We've been looking forward to meeting you in person.

Well, that's really nice. Thank you so much for meeting.

We had 96,000 people filled out a 50-page questionnaire,

which was a task in itself.

In that questionnaire, we looked out what foods you ate.

Dairy and eggs and meat, fruits and vegetables and everything else.

All their different diets were compared with how well they aged.

The healthiest diet of all - vegan.

You can reduce your risk of cancer, reduce your risk of heart attack,

reduce your risk of stroke

and everything we've looked at, that's true.

The results of this study on the Loma Linda

population are really striking.

For vegans, overall mortality is reduced by a quarter compared

to meat eaters and they are half as likely to get heart disease.

Larry wants to show me around his local supermarket to explain

how simple changes to the weekly shop can add years to our life.

Bell peppers. Bell peppers. We want a yellow and orange pepper.

It's a most unusual supermarket. It doesn't sell any meat.

If my ambition is to live the longest I can possibly live,

if we're just talking about diet,

the best thing I can do is to be a vegan and then

if you add stuff to that veganism, like you start adding eggs

and milk, if you add fish, even a small quantity of meat,

you increase your risk of almost everything.

That's what the data appears to show. That's remarkable.

I think a lot of people are going to find this really surprising.

Animal protein, when eaten,

stimulates a hormone in our bodies that we all need for growth.

But as you get older, especially during middle age,

this same hormone speeds up ageing.

And so the more you replace meat protein with fruit

and vegetables, the slower you age.

Walnuts, walnuts, walnuts.

The Loma Linda study also found something else that protects us

against heart attacks - nuts.

We compared different levels of nut consumption as related to

coronary heart disease, both fatal and non-fatal,

and we found out, surprisingly to us,

at least initially, that those who consumed nuts five times per week,

that's a handful of nuts, had half the risk of a heart attack

compared to those who ate nuts infrequently.

The good fats contained in nuts reduce cholesterol in the body

and so stop your arteries from furring up.

All nuts contain these fats but walnuts have the most.

I'm guessing the butter toffee peanuts are...

We're going to fly past those. They're off the menu.

We'll get some of these raw pecans.

So nuts are an easy fix to live longer.

But for a committed meat eater like me,

going vegan is a really big ask...

..and not one I think I'll be able to stick to.

Father of us all, for the beautiful food on this table, we thank you.

Be our guest as we dine tonight, amen. Amen.

Can you pass the beans?

The table looks colourful and varied

and it is a table without any meat on it at all.

Basically the more colourful your meal is,

probably the more nutritious.

The colour is pretty good evidence that there is minerals

and vitamins behind all those colours.

I'm a fanatical meat eater

so I would eat pork every night, given a choice.

The prospect of a meal without meat is actually quite daunting.

You know, it's not necessarily easy.

But Larry explains I don't have to become a full-blown vegan

to gain extra years.

Just a small reduction in meat eating will help.

Slowly, small steps where you say,

"I'm going to try vegetarianism for one day at a time."

Right, and we can all do it. And it's probably cheaper.

The Loma Linda study is part of a whole raft of recent research

that confirms that eating less meat can slow down the ageing process.

So as a gentle start, I'm going for meatless Mondays.

New scientific studies have proved

that exercise is another major way to stay young.

As you age, your body naturally becomes more frail.

Exercise counteracts this by building up muscle

but recent research into which exercise is best at making us

stronger as we age has come up with some surprising results.

To find out more, I've travelled to the centre of Germany.

Scientists here at Magdeburg University want to discover which

of two physical activities is more effective at keeping frailty at bay.

SHE SPEAKS GERMAN

What they came up was with was a programme that involves

comparing the kind of things that you do in a gym...

..with something which is right up my street, and that's dancing.

SHE SPEAKS GERMAN

So while 20 elderly Germans danced three times a week,

another group trained for exactly the same amount of time in the gym,

doing activities like riding exercise bikes.

Both groups signed up for the long haul.

Three hours a week for six months.

But which activity was best at tackling ageing?

It was obviously important to get an accurate

assessment of the benefits of a dance class over a conventional

fitness regime and so the team came up with a really clever wheeze.

Both groups have to exercise to the same music.

MUSIC: Ooh La La by Goldfrapp

That way they were able to keep the level of exertion roughly equal.

SHE SPEAKS GERMAN

Professor Marco Narici is the specialist

in muscle degeneration for the study.

Marco, why do we get more frail as we grow old?

What is actually happening to our muscles?

Our muscles become smaller and this is a natural process.

It is almost inevitable. It affects us all.

These scans are the cross-sections of the upper thigh.

The outer pink line is the skin.

The red area is muscle with the bone in the middle.

All of the white is fat.

So you can see in a healthy young person there is a lot of muscle,

very little fat. Hardly any fat at all there. Absolutely.

As you age, the muscle shrinks.

55 years. That's a bit different. That is a bit different, yes.

There is more fat, less muscle and as we move to 80,

you are almost 40% less muscle than in your 30s.

So are you saying that it's inevitable that once

we hit our 30s, that's when our degeneration starts on our muscles?

Yes. After that, it speeds up quite rapidly

but we can do something about it.

MUSIC PLAYS

So when it came to strengthening the muscles,

which of the two sets of exercise was better? Gym or dancing?

In the blood of each participant, they looked for a protein

which showed whether their muscles were getting weaker or not.

After six months, the results were clear.

On average, the gym group had little difference,

while the dancers had a 15% improvement.

But why did dancing make the muscles stronger compared to those

working out in the gym?

Exercise done in the gym is very repetitive.

You train one muscle or just a group of muscles.

If instead you do dancing, it stimulates many more systems.

Your brain, your muscles, your tendons, your ligaments.

It is much more holistic as a form of exercise,

much more comprehensive.

All logical enough but Marco made another unexpected discovery.

Each muscle fibre, here in red, is controlled by a nerve.

They're shown in green.

There's a crucial junction which connects them.

Dancing requires more input from nerves

and so strengthens these junctions and, therefore, the muscles.

So dancing facilitates the cross between the muscle and the nerve

and that's the key. So really we should all just keep dancing.

Yes, we should. Do you dance? Erm, I probably will.

The gym group did improve, but dancing is the better exercise

because as well as being aerobic, it requires flexibility and balance.

MUSIC: Crazy In Love by Beyonce

And if this group of dancers is anything to go by, well,

they can't get enough of it because the study actually finished

after six months but they were so upset that they came back.

That was a year ago and look at them. They're still dancing.

So as we get older, we shouldn't take the foot off the gas.

In fact, if anything, we should be more active from our

30s onwards and dancing is one of the best exercises

we can do to help us stay young.

MUSIC: Eye Of The Tiger by Survivor

I'm certainly no dancer.

I've got two left feet but I do love getting up to jog.

This should go some way to tackling my main problem of stress

which is ageing me five years faster than I should be.

And I'm not alone.

In our modern hectic world,

30% of us complain of being overly stressed.

And stress can be very damaging.

When our body is stressed,

the adrenal glands, on top of our kidneys,

release a powerful hormone called cortisol.

It's essential to have some cortisol

but too much stress throws the levels out of kilter.

Over time, an excess weakens muscles, degrades bones

and can shorten your life by up to five years.

# Nobody knows me... #

That's why we should all try to reduce stress.

I've been forcing myself to work less and switch off when I can.

Yoga helps me unwind.

But yoga is not for everyone.

Some people believe in an unusual to way to relax

in one of our most stressful environments - where we work.

The company I'm visiting here near Oxford has a novel way

of dealing with stress in the workplace.

In order to keep their workforce calm,

they allow them to bring their pets into the office.

# Now I wanna be your dog

# Now I wanna be your dog... #

This charity re-homes stray dogs,

so the employees are already pet lovers.

But they're also convinced that having their dogs at work

lowers stress and makes them more productive.

Some days as many as ten dogs clock in.

This is Maisie, and Maisie is five years old.

This is Diddy, and Diddy's a lurcher and he's eight years old.

This is Pippin, he's seven years old and he's a Red Fox Labrador.

She's just generally a very happy dog

so she just makes you feel quite relaxed.

It's quite relaxing to know that when you are under stress,

you can look down and have a quick cuddle.

If I'm in the office all day at my desk,

it's important you have screen breaks, it's important you get out

and get some fresh air at lunch and having Diddy there makes me do that.

But does having their pet with them really reduce stress?

I want to put this to the test.

I'm going to deliberately stress the dog owners by making them

do tough mental arithmetic.

First without their dog and then again with their dog.

Stress causes blood pressure to rise

so we'll monitor how it changes throughout.

Hi, Francis. Have a seat. Thank you. Hi, Gemma. Hi, Kerry, have a seat.

So this is a maths test.

We want you to count backwards from 1,000 in units of seven

and we want you to do it at a good pace.

If you hesitate or make a mistake,

we're going to go back to the beginning. OK? OK. Are you nervous?

I am nervous, yes.

Start the stopwatch. Test starts now.

1,000.

993.

986.

They don't know the counting has no other purpose

than to induce stress.

I've no interest in their arithmetic.

900 and...

So many numbers!

Sure enough, all three start to show visual signs of stress.

Can you start again please?

And their blood pressure rises dramatically.

It's putting pressure on me. That's horrible.

All I could think is my dad going,

"I've paid so much money for your university degree."

I'm going to ask you to start again. Can you start again? Yeah.

ALARM RINGS

You're halfway through. What?

We've got a second test, very similar test, eight minutes long.

Oh, no. And this time you've got to count back from 998 in sevens.

We've one more surprise.

So now we're going to do the test again.

Sorry, Maisie is looking for you. Oh. Hello.

Who's this? This is my maths genius here, Diddy.

So no conferring with Diddy. OK.

Pip! Hello.

They have no idea their dogs are part of the test.

998, 991, 986.

The test worked really well.

Their blood pressure dropped considerably as soon

as the dogs arrived and overall was 10% lower.

It even helped their arithmetic.

907, 900, 893.

ALARM RINGS

We can now reveal to them that the test was really about their dogs.

For me, seeing him come into the room

when I'm under pressure, I was really quite relieved to see him.

He could just take some of that stress away

so it was nice to see him.

I'm not good at maths and that was really quite tough

but I did think that when Maisie walked in,

I remembered the pattern of the numbers better.

872.

It's lovely that we got a result

with my rather casually executed trial of three people

but of course the important thing is that result mirrors the results

that much larger studies with many more participants

run by proper scientists in lab conditions have already shown.

# Now I wanna be your dog... #

So to help stay young, you should find your own way to keep

stress in check.

Three stress busters doctors recommend are exercise,

meditation and simply me time.

MUSIC PLAYS

It's not just what we do physically that can help us fight ageing.

Scientists know that mental attitude can have a big effect too.

To experience it for myself

I'm going to do something I've never done before.

With the help of some Hollywood-style make-up,

I'm going to age from 36 to over 80 years old in just a couple of hours.

MUSIC PLAYS

I look old, don't I? It's so convincing.

I'm sure this is what I'm going to look like.

I think the nice thing is it's not horrifying, is it?

Or at least it isn't for me.

I thought I'd hate it.

I'm getting ready to go out and about

to see if people react differently to me now I'm an old man.

I look like Donald Trump.

First to test whether my makeover is convincing,

I'll try to fool someone who should know me well - my dad.

Yay! Are you Anthony? Yes. Are you Chris' dad? I'm Claire.

Claire, good to see you. Very nice to meet you. Hello.

Chris will be here in the next ten minutes.

Hi, I'm Anthony. Have we met?

We might have? You're Chris' father? That's it. And what is that like?

That's great. Good entertainment. And why are you here?

I'm here to film with Chris.

He's going to come up like it's sort of spontaneous

and start talking to us about being old. And what is it like being old?

I quite like it. Do you? Yeah. Can you not hear my voice? Yes.

You don't recognise me? Oh, that's fantastic.

Were you just going along with it? Oh, no, I didn't get it at all.

Do you get it now? Yeah. That's fantastic.

I didn't think I'd fool you for a second. No, you absolutely did.

That is so... Oh!

Well, my disguise certainly works

and I'm also heartened by my dad's upbeat approach to old age.

And that is exactly what I wanted to hear because recent studies

have found that such optimism can actually add years to your life.

There is good evidence that if you're an older person with

a positive attitude about being the age you are, that that may help

you live up to seven years longer.

Furthermore, if you are a young person with a positive attitude

about growing older, that can halve your risk of a heart attack.

So simply being upbeat can make you age more healthily.

But how we feel about ourselves

is hugely affected by how other people treat us.

Now I want to see how people respond to me as an oldie.

'People are happily getting out of my way on the stairs...'

Sorry.

..and no-one's barging past me on the street.'

And even when I provoke buses...

I don't get shouted at.

I think this guy would have tried to run me over, whatever my age.

And I've never had it so good on the Tube.

All in all, my day as an old man has made me

rather optimistic about my older self.

And few people I know are more upbeat about ageing

than a certain 71-year-old.

ANGELA LAUGHS

Now you're showing off! Nothing you couldn't do! Look at you!

What do you think? What do you think? Look at you!

Well, I have to say... Be gentle, gentle! Hold me gently!

Oh, goodness! Got to look after you, have I? Age becomes you!

Do you think so? You have aged handsomely.

So how do you feel now at 36, heading towards being 80 and 90?

I'm dreading it a lot less than maybe I... Oh, good!

..thought I would. Well, my dad was really good.

He just said he likes being old, and I think most of the people

I'm close to, who are not old but older, kind of feel the same way.

I think, if you can be in your 70s or your 80s or even

your 90s and you've still got cognitive function

and you're still relatively fit and agile and able,

then I don't think that there's anything to be afraid of in old age.

I think it's time to get it off. How do we do this, then? At the back? I don't exactly know.

Now, is this going to hurt? Yeah, just peel it.

Well, I think it will a little bit. Gently, gently, gently, gently.

Gently. How are we doing? Ah! A bit still stuck to you. Solid.

I think we're starting to peel off bits that are actually me.

Tiny, tiny, tiny bit there. How's that?

Oh, that feels good, I must say! I bet it does!

So every morning, when you look at yourself in the mirror

and you shave and you know what's in store. What's in store.

And I'm not dreading it. That's good. That's good.

So far, we've homed in on just some of the key ways to help

you stay young.

There are simple diet changes, like eating less meat and more nuts,

and for me, extra lentils and inulin.

Reducing stress is an important goal

and I was especially pleased to find out that my favourite activity,

dancing, really does work to hold back muscle decline.

But on the frontiers of science,

researchers are exploring more radical ways to tackle ageing.

For the final stop around the world,

we've come to a remote part of South America.

Here, in a small town in Ecuador,

science might have discovered the cure to ageing itself.

This young man, Yannick Castillo,

is ageing far slower than the rest of us.

Today he's leaving his family to make the seven-hour

journey to the capital, Quito.

He may look like a young child,

but he's actually 17 years old.

Yannick has Laron Syndrome,

a rare medical condition caused by a genetic mutation,

which stops him from growing normally.

Scientists hope that people like Yannick

could hold the answer to cure ageing for the rest of us

and he's keen to help.

In Quito, he's meeting two pioneering scientists,

Doctor Jaime Guevara

and Professor Valter D Longo,

Director of the Longevity Institute in Los Angeles.

Between them, they've been studying people with this extremely

rare condition for over 20 years.

Laron Syndrome is one of the rarest conditions in the world.

There is about 350 around the world

and one-third are located in the south of Ecuador,

two provinces,

the province of Loja and the province of El Oro.

Jaime realised that despite making them very short,

the syndrome has a remarkable benefit.

People with Laron never seem to get the major diseases of ageing,

such as cancer and diabetes.

Cancer and diabetes are two of the biggest killers in old age.

Jaime and his collaborator, Valter D Longo,

want to find out why people with Laron are virtually immune.

We first established that they were not developing cancer

and then we needed to have a mechanism for why this happens

and that is when we started working on their blood.

Jaime and Valter regularly test the blood of 50 people

with Laron Syndrome and in it they found something remarkable.

The blood contains very little of a particular growth factor,

one that slows down the entire ageing process.

This is why Yannick looks so much younger than his actual age of 17.

In the rest of us,

the presence of this growth factor is what makes US age.

Scientists like Valter and Jaime now plan to produce

a medicine that will recreate the age-delaying benefits of Laron.

If old age itself can be cured,

then we won't get the diseases that so often come along with it.

If we can completely cure cancer,

this only extends the human life span by three or four years.

And, why? Because right after you don't have cancer,

you are going to get cardiovascular diseases, or diabetes

or Alzheimer's etc.

It's much more effective to go after the ageing process

because this can have a very wide effect.

So a goal of modern science is to create a medicine that will

keep all of us younger and healthier for longer.

And it's closer than you might think.

This may sound like science fiction but I have with me,

dissolved in water, a drug called Rapamycin. Yeah?

So this is a drug that mimics those effects of Laron Syndrome

and it's an anti-ageing drug

and in mice, it extends the life of mice by about 15%.

So this is the elixir of life?

Well, if you're a mouse, it is the elixir of life.

If you're a human being?

Well, we don't know, we haven't done an ageing trial in humans.

The ageing scientists would say that diseases of ageing

all have the same basic root causes

and that if you target ageing

you will prevent arthritis, cancer, heart disease.

So the idea is that you live longer and you will live better.

My question is, if this gets to the human market,

is this a pill you'll be taking?

You're looking really sceptical.

Because I actually believe that you can't always take

the pharmaceutical route, you have to, at some point in your life,

take personal responsibility for your wellbeing

and your ageing, doing things like eating well, taking exercise.

This is cutting out the need to do all of that.

I get fun out of socialising, dancing, playing tennis.

There's not a lot of fun sitting at home with a telly,

a cheeseburger and a pill!

When you class it like that, you know what, it doesn't sound too bad.

A cheeseburger and a pill.

Each to his own. Whatever it takes.

Next time, we investigate how to slow down the effects of ageing on the brain.

Dementia is our biggest fear about growing old

so we go to Japan to discover what science can learn

from the diet of this 100-year-old to stave off mental decline.

And I'm with the United States Air Force

to learn their remarkable trick to stay alert for longer.

Can I apply for a job with the United States Air Force?

Certainly, yeah.

And I follow an experiment that sounds outrageous.

How injecting the elderly with the blood of young people

might reverse ageing of the brain.

Is it the fountain of youth?

It might be.

# Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother,

# You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.

# Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin',

# And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.

# Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive.

# Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive... #