Episode Transcript
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina Del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one Oho six point seven light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Thank you for listening to Get Connected. By twenty thirty five,
the number of people in the US over the age
of sixty five will outnumber the people under eighteen in
this country for the first time in history. So our
population is aging rapidly, but one of the greatest challenges
for US is being socially isolated. For example, older adults
are more vulnerable to illness or injury when we don't
(00:34):
have a person to call for help. As we're collectively
getting older, how can we age well? What is there
to learn from countries with long life expectancies who make
social health a priority. In Healthy to one hundred, how
strong social ties lead to long lives, longevity expert ken
Stern reveals the key components that globally contribute to longer,
(00:54):
more enriching lives. Ken Stern, thank you for being on
Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Thanks for having me on the show.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Ken Stern is a nationally recognized expert on longevity and aging.
He is the founder of the Longevity Project and hosts
the popular Century Lives podcast from the Stanford Center on Longevity.
So it wasn't that long ago, ken Stern, that life
expectancy in the US was on par with other wealthy countries.
But that is not the case anymore. And it's not
(01:21):
just the length of our lives, it is the quality
that's right.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
So you're exactly right.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
So if you turn the clock back to say, nineteen
to eighty, the US was it wasn't the first in
life expectancy, but it certainly wasn't last among economically developed countries.
But today we're last both in life expectancy and more importantly,
in what's called healthy life expectancy, the number of years
you can expect to live in good health, And we
(01:48):
trail every other single economically developed countries in the world,
and often not by a small amount you can live.
You can expect to live almost a decade longer in
good health in Japan than you can in.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
The US now.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
So as US life expectancy has not grown on par
with so many other countries, our levels of social engagement
have also gone down. What does the research say about
social engagement and overall health?
Speaker 3 (02:15):
What we have now in this country is loneliness, epidemic.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
The VEC Murphy, the former Surgeon General, declared that about
two years ago, and the focused on loneliness because it
has a direct and important effect on our health.
Speaker 3 (02:29):
Being lonely is equivalent to.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
Smoking fifteen cigarettes a day in terms of our health
and life expectancy. And I mean, what has happened between
nineteen eighty and today is that social connection, the amount
of time we spend with other people has declined as
we spend more and more time with our own technologies,
first television, now phones.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
So let's talk about some of the countries with most
long lived citizens, how social health is implemented in the
workplace when it comes to volunteering those sorts of things.
I found it fastating your travels, especially in Asia. So
we'll start with Japan because we always think of them
as having the most long live citizens. I believe they
are the most long lived in the world. Nearly forty
(03:09):
percent of companies in Japan now hire workers past the
age of seventy, something that would be unheard of in
the US, and often with specialized programs to retain them.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Yeah, so really important.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
So I went to five countries for this book, Japan,
South Korea, Singapore, Italy and Spain. Japan is in fact
the longest lived country in the world. The median life
expectancy for women Japan is now ninety half the women
alive and Japan will live to more than ninety years old.
It's really an extraordinary thing. And part of it is
(03:47):
what's going on is Japan is not the only only
longest lived country. It's also the country with the most
older workers, both by numbers of percentage. And that's because
people in Japan associate work with social connection and having
per and those things are really quite important to our lives.
When I talk about working longer, it's not necessarily a
popular topic among people. A lot of people get it,
(04:10):
but they don't necessarily want to work in the same way.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
And what's happened in Japan is they've created essentially a
second economy for older workers.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
A lot more part time work, a lot more flexible hours,
a lot more job sharing, a lot more assistive technology.
All those things made working longer not only possible but attractive.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
To older workers.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
I'd like to ask about something very specific, just because
this is kind of fascinating to me. But it's not
only programs, it's technology can you talk about the muscle suit.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
Yeah, So when I was in Japan, I strapped on
the muscle suit, which is a exoskeleton that's designed to
help any worker, but specifically older workers work who are
doing physical labor work longer. So it doesn't actually do
the work for you, but it eases pressure in your
back and makes lifting and moving things a lot easier.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
So I put it on. I lifted for site.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
I lifted without being turned on a basket of fifty
pounds of weights, which wasn't easy, and then they turned
it on. It still wasn't easy, but it was a
lot easier than before and designed to help think about
how can you reduce wear and tear across the lifetime
but also make it easier for older workers to be
physically active longer.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
You're right, people don't want to talk about retirement as
something that maybe you would push off. But you bring
up the point in the book as life expectancy has
increased over many decades. This number sixty two, sixty five,
it feels a bit arbitrary. What did you learn about
workers who continue with pleasure, assuming they enjoy what they
(05:41):
do working into older age.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
People who work past sixty five's a lot of research
on it.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
It's good for your health, it's good for social connections.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
Perhaps not all jobs, they're sort of a small category
of what they call bad jobs that raise more stress,
but by and large, working longer is good for life,
expecting and seeing, specifically good for healthy life expectancy. And people,
I think are beginning to know that the actually the
fastest growing component of the American labor forces people over
age of seventy five, still a small, small percentage, but
(06:11):
it's growing rapidly, as is the workers over sixty five.
And that's because I think increasingly people understand that there's
a loneliness to a lot of people's retirements, loss of purpose,
loss of the You fall off the cliff when you
leave work, and work.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Social connections behid, and that's not good for you. So
you see a lot of stories.
Speaker 4 (06:32):
Jane good All famously worked till ninety one. Mel Brooks
has just announced a new movie that he's going to
start produce at Starr, and he's ninety nine, come out
when he's one hundred and one. Those are extreme cases,
but it reflects, I think a growing trend that we
understand the importance of work to our social connections.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Our guest is ken Stern. He's a nationally recognized expert
on longevity and aging and best selling author. He's been
a frequent contributor to a wide variety of publications, including
Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and Slate. His new book is
Healthy to one hundred, How strong social ties lead to
long lives. You're listening to get connected on one O
six point seven light FM. I'm Mina del Rio Moving
(07:09):
to Singapore. Every citizen there is eligible for free courses
in the Skills Future Program. What is that?
Speaker 4 (07:17):
So? Another way of being socially connected is lifelong learning. Again,
we've largely confined, at least formal learning to the first
quartile of life, something we stop at eighteen or twenty
one or twenty five. Other countries longer lived countries have
reframed their educational system so that you can learn across
the life course while you're working, in terms of skills,
(07:40):
but also into retirement. Because lifelong learning is great for
social connection and engagement. A lot of our friends come
from our school life, not because we're a friendlier then,
but because we were approximate to people for lots and
lots of hours. So countries like Singapore have not only
sort of committed to life long learning, they have put
their money where their mouth is. They essentially a fund
(08:01):
people to learn across the life course.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
So the Skills Credit.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
In Singapore is essentially a program to give essentially free
education to people across the life course. So you can
take courses mostly in person as a way of learning
new skills or just learning things that are interesting to you,
but engage with other people who are have similar values,
(08:26):
similar interests, which is great for social connection and ultimately
great for health.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
What did you learn also about intergenerational connections? What opportunities
are there in collaboration when ages are mixed.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
So the writer Mark Friedman says, the generations fit together
like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and there's putting the
generations together is important for the health of elders. But
it's also important, perhaps the most critical factor for.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
The development of young people.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
So a lot of countries, the US is considered by
many to be the most age segregated society. You're more
likely to be friends with someone of a different race
than you are of someone ten years younger or.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
Older than you.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
Other countries are really focusing structurally on keeping the generations together,
whether it's and housing or at work, and creating incentives
for families to stay together or just people of different
generations to mix and mingle in ways that historically we
did naturally but lost in the urbanization of the twentieth century.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
Some of that is also done through things like volunteering.
Volunteering in the US has interestingly been declining since around
two thousand and five, in part because we're ironically less
socially connected.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
Yeah, yeah, so volunteering, of course, it's important society, but
it's also important to the idea of social connection health
and you know, it was accelerated by the pandemic, of course,
But really technology has taken us away from the connections
that drive volunteering. The things that actually get people volunteering
is to have a friend ask you to volunteer. But
(09:57):
we have fewer friends now. More and more people are
reporting having no friends, and the number of people report
having six or more friends to decline by about two
hundred percent since the turn of the century. And that's
because technology. Just take a subway or a bus, everyone
has heads down their phones, were not relating to each
other as we need to as humans.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
What does Italy seem to be getting right about volunteering, then.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
So Italy, I mean there are cultural differences, of course,
in the countries I visited and know, Italy is a
much more socially engaged country. They rely less on technology,
they spend lots more time at meals together Americans do
and most countries do. But they've also, as they have
grappled with a much older society and a declining birth rate,
(10:44):
have focused on older volunteers and create opportunities essentially from
whole cloth, create essentially a volunteer culture.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
When I was visiting, I.
Speaker 4 (10:53):
Remember going to a senior center in town called Omina
in northern Italy, and there were about thirty people older
than me.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
I'm sixty two. They're all older than me.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
It was impossible to tell who is the volunteers and
who are the participants of the senior center. It didn't
really matter, because they're building a culture where people of
all ages, but particularly in the second half of life,
really can engage and support each other as the age.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
At a time when, as I mentioned at the beginning,
and you mentioned numerous times in the book, so many
Americans are turning older every day. Ten thousand Americans are
turning sixty five every day. Can you talk about the
importance of changing what we're doing now? Why does this
matter for the larger community?
Speaker 4 (11:33):
Yeah, so that's exactly right. So this is what's called
peak sixty five. More people in the United States are
turning sixty five than ever before, ten thousand a day.
We're a much older society and that changes sort of
the economics of the country. So we have a labor challenge,
but it also means that we need to keep older
Americans engaged and healthy. And the way you do that
(11:57):
a is a little bit to redefine what older is,
because we have adopted definitions of old that made sense
one hundred years ago but that don't make sense anymore.
And find opportunities to support people in their fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties,
nineties stay engaged, whether that's through work or volunteering or learning,
or in generational relationships, or just redesign our cities to
(12:21):
provide opportunities for people to be together in important ways.
Other countries have begun to grapple with it. They think
of social health and social connection as a public health priority,
and we need to do the same.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
And as you continue this work and you're sixty four
or sixty two. I'm sorry, I'm fifty four, so I'm
above the waterline as well. As you continue to study aging.
What are some ways you have rethought your own social health,
your own aging.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Yeah, what a great question.
Speaker 4 (12:50):
So you know, when I started this work, I would
have probably given the answer to that most Americans give,
like what's the most important your health? Would probably said
something about exercise and nutrition, act of sealth care.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Those are all important.
Speaker 4 (13:04):
But I wouldn't have thought about social connection and fighting
the loneliness epidemic. I do now, So it's changed how
I think about work. I mean, ordinarily I would probably
a lot of my friends are retiring. I would be
thinking that it's time to start retiring. I don't think
that anymore. I'm at work, as so many older workers
told me, until I can't. That's how I think about work,
(13:28):
because that's a source of I wouldn't be talking to
you today. With that work, I wouldn't be engaging with
so many different people, And I think that's really changed
my view. I also changed my view of the importance
of trying to find friends and social connections of different generations.
I tell the story of going to a wedding and
(13:49):
being seated with a table with people I didn't know.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
The only thing that we.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
Had in common were our age, and they were great,
But I'd much rather have been engaged with of different generations,
and that's really changed my view on trying to find
people of similar interest but not necessarily a similar age.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Ken Stern's book is Healthy to one hundred, how strong
social ties lead to long lives. Thank you for being
on to Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Thanks for having me on the show. Enjoyed the conversation.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one oh six point seven light Fm. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website for
downloads and podcasts at one oh six to seven lightfm
dot com. Thanks for listening.
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