Much to the lament of women who are still reeling over the famous quote, “It’s easier to get hijacked by a terrorist than for a single woman to find a man after she turns 40.” as we age, men die younger, and women live longer. This is true in all societies and in all countries.
Science has been trying to find the underlying answer for a long time. Is it that women talk about their emotions more to their friends so they have less pent up anger? Is it that we accessorize? Or women take better care of themselves, going to doctors more frequently than men?
And, since the hard statistics definitively show that women live longer than men, what is with this bias about older women being with younger men, since that would make more physiologic sense? And why give women who date younger men the disgusting title of cougars?
Older men who get a trophy wife are often regarded as lucky. Even Goldie Hawn said in The First Wife’s Club, “Look at Sean Connery, he can be 300 years old and still be a hunk”.
Well Japanese researchers wondered about why women live longer, too. They looked at the blood of young and old volunteers to see any gender specific differences they could tease apart. And it became apparent, that the rate of decline of certain cells of the immune system (T and B cells) was slower for women. In other words, women’s immune systems age slower than the immune systems of men. Immunity & Ageing 2013
There are many other diverse gender specific differences between Venus and Mars as we age. Women usually have more estrogen, which is protective of the heart. But many older men, especially with huge guts and lots of fat cells that are in essence estrogen producing factories, or men who drink lots of beer which is estrogenic due to the hops, will often have estrogen levels similar if not higher than older women. And in these men, these robust estrogen levels are not protective.
Bottom line is that women age differently than men, and all people age in diverse individual ways.
The good news is that we are developing technologies to improve biological aging all the time, such as bioidentical hormone replacement, digestive enzyme replacement, high intensity training and sensible exercise fitness, we have home glucometers to measure our glucose (sugar) response to specific foods in our homes to identify our friendly and unfriendly foods as far as blood sugar goes, and many more possible to-dos.
For example, women get increased risk of heart attack and heart disease as they age, similar to men. But, if around 60 years of age, both men and women start to donate blood on a regular basis, this boosts bone marrow production of healthy, younger red blood cells, this lowers excess iron which is a pro-oxidant and can also affect brain changes linked to dementia, and it improves blood viscosity (rate and ease with which our red blood cells sail, or not, through our cells) which is more a parameter linked to heart disease and stroke than even cholesterol and smoking! So you can donate blood every 56 days (if you are not anemic, don’t have an infection and a bunch of other sensible check points) and this can also boost your anti-aging efforts, and it’s free! And it saves the lives of others! Boy, that’s a win-win. You gotta love those win-wins.
So the moral of my story is older women should mate and marry younger men and they should have date-night outs every 56 nights where they both are headed for the local blood donation facility.