Childhood has the secret to longevity: Valentí Fuster's recipe for aging well

BarcelonaIf there is a secret to aging well, it seems likely that Valentí Fuster knows something about it. At 83 years old, this global reference in cardiology is participating in one of the Generation+ meetings organized by Caixabank to talk about the challenges of longevity in the economy and health. He does so with a lucidity unusual for someone who was on a plane traveling from the United States just three hours ago. The audience, of course, wants to know the recipe of a man capable of still balancing the role of director of the Cardiovascular Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York with the direction of the National Center for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC) in Madrid.

"Prolonging life does not mean that its quality increases. The opposite is happening," he states at the very beginning, and explains that he discovered early on that "the problem was not the prolongation of life, but its quality." For this reason, he says, he moved from researching the disease to preventing it. Once this premise is established, Fuster develops it. To ensure aging in the best possible conditions, it is above all necessary to take care of the brain and heart from an early age. Do we do it enough? "I am optimistic about what we can achieve, but pessimistic about what I see," he maintains.

He immediately details his reasons for optimism. He explains that the risk factors for heart attack and brain deterioration are the same, and that there are tools to prevent both. As he enumerates, there are eight dangerous elements: obesity; high blood pressure; high cholesterol; diabetes; smoking; not exercising; eating poorly, and sleeping little. It is when talking about how to fight them that Fuster – who admits that in his case the only one he fails to meet is sleeping a lot – reveals his recipe: movement, avoiding loneliness, and motivation.

He, he explains, does half an hour of stationary cycling five days a week. A recipe to which he adds his vocation, conversing and seeing friends, and another remedy that goes beyond the trident he showed before. Dedicating some time each day – 15 minutes – when he arrives at work to "doing nothing" beyond meditating, thinking about what has been done well, what poorly, and what can be improved not only at work but also at home, with family or friends. "The most important thing is the fifteen minutes that one does nothing but think," he stresses.

And the reasons for the pessimism? An alarming, he highlights, increase in blood pressure in people of all ages. For this reason, he remarks, it is important to make the decision to take care of oneself and, above all, to do it early. "The disease begins very early, the heart is the manifestation of extending or not life, and the brain is the quality," argues the cardiologist, who insists that the key to aging well lies in childhood. "In the first ten years of life, it is fundamental to take care of health. Here we must begin," he concludes. For this reason, he is concerned by the fact that in school there is no subject on how to take care of oneself. A topic about which, he has announced, he has decided to publish a book soon aimed at children.

Sustainability

Next to him sits the chairman of Caixabank, Tomás Muniesa, who highlights the importance of thinking about a group—the elderly—that is increasingly gaining demographic weight in our society. He provides some figures to frame this challenge. In Spain alone, in the next decade, five million people will reach retirement age, while those reaching working age will not even total two million. A gap that could put the economy to the test. For this reason, he also recommends not waiting until retirement is near to take a moment to think about it.

Fuster puts another piece of advice on the table related to the importance of motivation among the elderly. "We all must have a vision of what talents we have to do something different from what we do now when we are older. Retirement does not exist, it is an absurdity. You have to do something that is new, and that motivates you. And that is important for life," he argues. Muniesa, who explains that Caixabank currently pays 34% of pensions in the State and reveals, as a sign of the increase in life expectancy, that they have a thousand clients who are over one hundred years old, takes up Fuster's gauntlet. "We must not think about retirement, but about active retirement. About what you will do, how you will occupy yourself, and what you have to do to be able to achieve it," he concludes.