By Karen and Erica

I

s 70 the new 50? Not exactly. But in many ways, perhaps it is—at least for some people.

OK, is this just wishful thinking, now that we are at this august age?

No, actually, it is not. We really are different now than people our age many years ago. And the newest information is amazing. Our lives are getting longer by stretching out the middle.

A recent study in Finland is instructive.

Hundreds of Finlanders aged 75-80 were given a battery of physical and cognitive tests 30 years ago. The same tests were recently repeated, in 2017-2018, with Finlanders aged 75-80. The modern group showed substantial differences:

• walking speeds .2-.4 meters per second faster

• grip strengths 5%-25% stronger

• knee extension strengths 20%-47% higher

• better verbal fluency, reasoning, and working memory

The main researcher concluded:

The results suggest that our understanding of older age is old-fashioned. More years are added to midlife, and not so much to the utmost end of life.

Now this is truly consequential. We are getting more years of life, but those new years extend the middle period, not the very end part. So heathy longevity is lengthening.

How do we make sure we benefit from this extension? Scientists commenting on this, and another, study noted that two major conclusions emerge: for physical fitness, movement is key, and for cognitive fitness, education is key—likely because it leads to higher income and therefore better nutrition.

There are many reasons that people are aging better, including improved medical care and a drop in smoking, but the factors that loomed largest in the Finnish study of physical function, lead author Kaisa Koivunen says, were that the later-born adults were more physically active and had bigger bodies, which suggests better nutrition. (In 1943 Finland became the world's first country to require universal free lunch at school.) For brain function, the key seems to be more years of education. In both the Finnish and the Dutch studies, cognitive differences between the cohorts largely disappeared when researchers controlled for this factor.

For education—including education about heath—we can thank our parents, and the public health investments of prior generations. And, even though our parents almost surely did not know what we know now about the importance of exercise and nutrition, we can also thank them for making sure we understand that we can continue to shape health outcomes even as we get older. AARP notes that older people know that eating healthy foods, moving around, and pumping iron, will help to ensure that they can do what they want to do each day—so they do it. They are not dismayed by the fact that they need help, like medicine or other aids. They are grateful that they have what they need to enable them to do what they set out to do, at any age.

We would expect that these health advances would result in our looking younger, as well—more pep in our step and so on. And we likely do look younger that prior generations. But when we look back at how our parents or grandparents looked, even when they were very young, they often look older than we would expect. Not all of this can be due to physical differences. One reason people may look old is more cultural—we wear clothes or hairstyles we became familiar with when we were much younger, and when those styles eventually become dated, the wearers are viewed as old. If you want to see a pretty funny video about such retrospective aging, have a look at the YouTube video embedded in this article. Does that mean we should try to dress younger? Not at all. But maybe a style update—just to show we know what’s cool these days—is an idea. (Another idea—designers figuring out they are missing a key market.)

So what does it all mean? That 70 really is younger now than it was decades ago, in the sense that our bodies are better able to do things and our minds better able to retain cognitive ability than was true in the past. Also, to the extent we are seen as old, we can choose to update our appearance without pursuing biological youth. A recent study confirms that women our age want to look good, not young.

[A]lthough the participants objected to the negative portrayal of older women in the media and to pressures to conform to a youthful appearance, they were not unduly influenced by this. Instead they were overwhelmingly in favour of looking good rather than looking young or even looking younger and the majority was not interested in cosmetic surgery.

So yes, you are as young as you feel, and looking good, as only a woman of your age can look, will make you feel even better. Go do whatever you want, be confident that support of all kinds is available if you need it, and be glad of the health investments made by people that lived before us.

Enoy your twenty-first century age.