Dr. Henry Lodge graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981 and from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1985, where he received the Robert Loeb Award for Excellence in Clinical Medicine. He did his Internship and Residency in Internal Medicine at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. After complet-ing his training in 1988, he joined the faculty of the medical school at Columbia University, where he has been ever since. He is named in “Who's Who in America,” “Who's Who in the World,” “Who's Who in Medicine and Healthcare,” and “Who's Who in Science and Engineering,” as well as in the “Best Doctors in New York” and “Best Doctors in America” surveys. Dr. Lodge is a past president of the New York Clinical Society and a past president of the Presbyterian Hospital Alumni Association. He is a member of the American College of Physicians and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine. Dr. Lodge is the co-author of the best selling books, Younger Next Year and Younger Next Year for Women: A Guide to Living Like Your 50 Until You’re 80 and Beyond.

CRAIG PEPIN-DONAT: Well, I really need to let people know, when I talk about your busy schedule, a little bit about your background. I mean, after all, you do operate one of the largest and most prestigious medical practices in New York City. So, a lot of times people use the phrase “taking time out of your busy schedule” loosely, but you’re schedule is particularly hectic, isn’t it?

DR. HENRY LODGE: There doesn’t seem to be quite enough hours in a day.

CRAIG PEPIN-DONAT: So, I’ve read your entire book, Younger Next Year, and I’ve gone through most of Younger Next Year for Women. Of course, I also had the opportunity to interview your co-author, Chris Crowley. He was phenomenal—very inspirational. Your books are really universal, I think. They’re not just for people who are getting old, they’re really just for anyone who wants to live better; anyone who wants to improve their health; and, anyone who wants to find out all of the answers. So, I want to dig right in and start out by having you give a little background on your practice and on your patient, Chris Crowley, and how he and other patients led you to write Younger Next Year?

DR. HENRY LODGE: Well, the remarkable thing is that the conception of aging is changing profoundly, and it’s dragging along all of our old emotions about the biology of health at any age. So, it’s leading this revolution in how we think about health, fitness, emotional well-being, et cetera, really starting in your ‘20s and going on to your ‘90s.
What happened in my practice was that as I went along in the years, I saw people aging in two very, very different ways. One was the standard American model, which is about as miserable as you could think. But, also along the way, you saw lots of people who went from 30 to 40 or 60 to 70 or 70 to 80, and who were having wonderful rides along the way. When you look at what they were doing, there were very strong common themes running throughout their lives. Of course, at the same time, there was an ongoing explosion of molecular biology, and the fundamental mecha-nisms by which our bodies remain young and strong and vibrant were becoming clear-cut, and it was exactly the same information. The lifestyle that you lead to stay young and vibrant and have a wonderful quality of life at any age is completely in synch, as you would expect with the molecu-lar biology that has come out of the labs in the last decade and which has been responsible for a whole series of Nobel prizes.

CRAIG PEPIN-DONAT: Right. Were there some specific things that you discovered with Chris Crowley, your patient there, that kind of led you to think, “Hey, let’s do this together. Let’s write this book”?

DR. HENRY LODGE: Well, what’s wonderful about working with Chris is that he was the demo model. So, there are a couple of points about this. Chris first came in to see me when he was 65 years old, and he was having pretty much the standard American experience of aging at that point, which was sore joints, apathy, weight gain, and all the rest of it.
So, working together over the course of five years in writing the book, with Chris basically taking charge of all of this, he transformed his body so that at age 70, he went out and got tested by Lance Armstrong’s trainer in Colorado, and he scored in the top 10% of American men ages 40 to 45 for aerobic fitness.

CRAIG PEPIN-DONAT: Wow.

DR. HENRY LODGE: So, what Chris did was to take a 65-year-old body and turn it into an extraordinarily fit 45-year-old body over the course of a couple of years of hard sustained work. What’s so good about him, in Chris, as a demo model is that there’s nothing extraordinary about him except his commitment to the process. He was never a wonderful athlete, and he wasn’t in great shape starting out, but what it shows is that—and this is brand new information over the last decade—you can reverse the huge majority of functional aging in America within a few months and certainly within a few years by simply changing the way you live. That really has been an extraordinarily optimistic and hopeful message.
Chris serves a wonderful role because he’s every man and every woman. In other words, there’s nothing extraordinary about him except that he decided to go down this different road, and it points out that it’s open to everyone.

CRAIG PEPIN-DONAT: Right, so there are specific lifestyle changes that people can make. I want to talk about those things today. But first, I would like to talk a little bit about what Chris describes as you being the brains of the operation and for you to clearly outline some of the more scientific issues related to aging. Chris had a very inspirational message and he was fantastic, but your book goes into some pretty wild detail about Darwinian forces, preservation of the species, and about how our closest ancestors are things like algae, bacteria and yeast. The average person needs to be able to wrap their minds around that. So, what does all of that mean to them?