Prime Time - Jane Fonda [140]
I have—rather late in life—begun to feel the exhilaration of no longer acting from a “tiny portion” of myself. My wish is that all of us experience this and, thereby, become “pilgrims of the future,” using our lives to complete ourselves—to develop our bodies, our minds, our hearts, and our souls to become all we can be and then use all of it for something beyond ourselves.
Ours is the first generation to be well prepared for a vital Third Act. As women, we’ve got the numbers, the consciousness, the health, and the knowledge to make us better able to meet whatever challenges this last act may bring. I believe that our actions, like stones tossed into a pond, will ripple to every inlet of society. As we shape our own last third of life, so do we help to transform the experience of age for ourselves, our men, and our children … modeling what it means to live an examined life of reflection, compassion, and balance.
Bonus Photos
Turn the page to see exclusive photos from Jane Fonda’s 73rd Birthday party.
Me with Rosario Dawson and her beau, Mattieu.
Michael Black, Lily Tomlin, Arnold Steifel.
Jane and Warren Beatty.
Jane and Sean Penn.
Jane, Richard, and Chelsea Handler.
Warren Beatty, Cindy, and Alan Horn.
APPENDIX I
Summary of Main Areas of Anti-aging Research
Calorie-Restriction Diet
Working with mice almost thirty years ago at UCLA, the behavioral geneticist Dr. Richard Sprott and his colleague and mentor, Dr. Roy Walford, discovered that you could start calorie restriction in middle-aged mice and still have the possibility of increasing their life span by 15 or 20 percent. Now the executive director of the Ellison Medical Foundation, Dr. Sprott discussed the effects of calorie restriction on life span at an Age Boom Academy seminar I attended in 2007 at the International Longevity Center.
“Here is the only experiment that actually changes life span,” Dr. Sprott said. “It can extend life span from two to six times longer in mice, small worms, fruit flies, and dogs. There are ongoing experiments with a large number of self-volunteer humans, and with nonhuman primates, that appear to be working but are not completed yet. What it demonstrates is that if you reduce your calorie intake by 45 percent, or roughly down to a diet of 1,250 calories a day (but in the face of otherwise excellent nutrition so you create a state of undernutrition without malnutrition), this can, in these experimental models, produce about a 40 percent increase in life span.” Dr. Sprott said that they do not know yet if a similar kind of change in diet would produce comparable increases in human life spans. “There are good genetic reasons why it might and good genetic reasons why it might not,” he noted. “There are certain behavioral reasons why it is hopeless. Bob [Butler] and I both know the foremost human practitioner of this therapy, who bet his life on the fact that it would work, and it didn’t.” An experiment was started in 1989 with the rhesus monkey, a species closely related to humans. These monkeys can live up to forty years, so it’s not a short experiment. Dr. Sprott said, “We are starting to see statistically significant improvement in survival and resistance to disease and favorable effects on brain aging.”
SIRT1 and Resveratrol
In their research, Dr. Sprott and his colleagues discovered a universal gene. Found in plants, in bacteria, and in humans, it seems to control the aging process and appears to underlie many of the benefits of the calorie-restriction diet. The gene is called SIRT1, and it is activated by a molecule called resveratrol, which is found in the skin of red grapes (and