TV’s Norman Lear, other SuperAgers show another side of aging

My mother lived to be 91 years old, an age her mother did not see.

She smoked and was a worrier who had lived a simple life. She walked great distances to the store most days, even in the cold of winter and summer’s heat.

My father let most things roll off his back. He enjoyed the holidays and loved company, cigars and good food. He died suddenly the year of his 80th birthday.

I have often wondered what made the difference in their longevity.

In a documentary interview with The New York Times when he was 93, renowned TV producer Norman Lear reflected on longevity:

"Often, when I'm getting dressed, I look at myself nude, dissatisfied but amused. I'll sing and dance alone in front of a full-length mirror, and I have wondered for a great many years: How do we know that's not the secret to longevity?"

Lear died last month. He was 101 years old.

In the last decade of his life, he tried to convince TV executives they should have a show on the air about older people because that population is underrepresented.

But even Lear, whose immense talent turned the sitcom into a public square by creating shows that tackled racism, poverty, classism and feminism, could not break through the industry's entrenched ageism. While singing his praises, broadcast television executives rejected what could have been Lear's final contribution, a sitcom about a retirement community.

“Guess Who Died” reached the pilot stage but was passed over in 2018.

"The right people read it, the right people thought it's funny, but the right people said it's not our demographic," Lear lamented.

Seems like a missed opportunity.

According to Statista.com, adults 65 and older spend the most time watching television, at more than four hours a day, while 15- to 19-year-olds spend less than two hours daily.

And while there is no evidence that four hours of television a day is toxic for older adults, the parade of pharmaceutical commercials promising cures for everything from hair loss to toe fungus is enough to make TV a turnoff for any age group.

Though I'm no longer shocked when I run into centenarians, I still think God has kissed them.

Dr. Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is leading a SuperAgers family study in an effort to uncover the group's secrets.

"Centenarians not only live longer, but they live healthier,” Barzilai told me. “Many of them don't get diseases until 30 years after people their children's age. They also have a compression of morbidity, meaning they are sick for very little time at the end of their life.

"Though they may have genetics for diseases for aging, they don't get those diseases. This is because they have ‘longevity genes’ — changes in their DNA that have functional consequences — that slow the biology and rate of aging.”

Barzilai’s study is recruiting 10,000 SuperAgers and their adult children to try to determine the genetics and lifestyles that might explain their longer lives.

"Some of these discoveries have turned into drugs that have passed clinical studies,” he said of such efforts. “The American Federation for Aging Research's SuperAgers family study will help identify the mechanisms that protect against human aging and related diseases in order to develop drugs that can slow aging, prevent diseases, and allow us all to live healthily most of our lives.”

Lear is an excellent example of a centenarian who lived fully all the way until his death.

And I hope that, at some point, Lear’s “Guess Who Died” finally makes it to the screen, and we can enjoy the creativity of his SuperAger mind.

To learn more about the SuperAgers family study, go online to www.superagersstudy.org