ISLAMABAD –While many women may feel a face-lift or anti-ageing creams are the only ways to look young, a study has suggested it is the smile that holds the key to looking younger than one’s actual age.
According to German researchers, the simple act of smiling takes years off a person’s age. It is likely we consider people who are happy as being attractive in other ways - including being younger than they actually are, sources reported.
Temporary wrinkles caused due to grinning also make it more difficult to judge a person’s age and so may lead to those doing the guessing to err on the side of caution.
Manuel Voelkle, of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, asked over 150 men and women of different ages to judge the ages of the faces in more than 1,000 photographs. He concluded: “Facial expressions have a substantial impact on accuracy.” Relative to other facial expressions, the age of neutral faces was estimated most accurately, while the ages of those displaying happy expressions was most likely under-estimated.
“The study also revealed that the older faces are more difficult to judge than the younger ones.
The age of those doing the judging was also important. In general, elderly people overestimated the age of those photographed, while younger people shaved a year or two off. Women also fared better, with older female faces estimated on average to be three years younger than their male equivalents, the journal Psychology and Aging reports.
What food should you eat to slow the effects of ageing?
While people generally turn quite anxious about their body’s condition as they age, a US academician has claimed that once individuals reach their 90s their body in fact stops ageing.
According to Michael Rose, a professor of evolutionary biology, if you are lucky enough to live that long, you stop ageing.
To actually get to that moment, Rose suggests adopting a ‘Stone Age’ diet since the age of around 30.
Grains and dairy products should be avoided and seafood, fruits, nuts and vegetables embraced.
Writing in the New Scientist magazine, Rose states that switching to the sort of diet favoured by our hunter-gatherer ancestors could speed up the advent of the healthy part of old age.
 The University of California professor practices what he preaches, as he says, “I have been following such a diet - avoiding grass-derived foods, such as grains, rice, corn and sugarcane, and anything made from milk - for two years and the results have been good.” Rose’s advice is based on the observation that, in general, we do not get sicker and sicker as we get older and older.
While your health may not be great, it is not getting worse, he maintains. He says that when we are young, our bodies are probably better able to cope with modern diets. But as we age, we would be better suited to a caveman diet. “The discovery that ageing stops suggests that the age-old desire to radically extend the human life span is a real possibility.”
Has science finally found the answer to why we age?
Scientists have claimed to develop a technique that they say may lead to a longer life. Unfortunately, the treatment is only fit for pets at the moment.
The possible cure for age related problems is a drug, which protects telomeres, sections of DNA believed to be the key to ageing.
However, the treatment is not yet considered safe for humans, and may first be tested on dogs and cats by being added to pet food. Scientists think that ageing is caused by the telomeres in our genes shortening over the course of our lifetime.
Now, a US research team may have found a way to slow or even reverse this shrinkage, which could theoretically lengthen our lifespan. The team is led by Bill Andrews, a scientist based in Nevada who is the founder of Sierra Sciences. He founded the company to find a way to prompt cells to produce telomerase and protect himself from decay.
The new findings suggest that nearly 40 different substances could contribute to the production of this enzyme. “Inducing cells to produce telomerase would be a great medical advance,” Andrews said.”
The substances we have found can achieve this but we have to be cautious and there is no chance of getting medical approval for human use for some years,” he cautioned.