Scott Fulton is an extremely talented individual. He’s a mechanical engineer by training who shifted into home design with older adults in mind, forming a company called Home Ideations. In fact, he custom built his own home in Virginia using the principles from Home Ideations.

He dug deep – and still does – into how to live better as we age.

Scott is well into his 60s, is very active and excels at physical fitness, competing in ironman triathlons and long distance running.

His abiding interest in healthspan and longevity impelled him to dive into a vast trove of health data to answer one simple question: what’s the most important thing people can do for their bodies and brains that can help them live longer?

By crunching many millions of bytes of data from 700 thousand adults, spanning 10 million person years, Scott has answered the question he posed and written a book called Function that lays out his findings.

The answer to the question he posed to himself will surprise you..

Settle in for a fascinating conversation.

There are nearly 60 MILLION Americans who are unpaid caregivers today.

Now think about that; these are people who likely have full time jobs working 40 hours a week and who are working another 26 hours a week on average looking after an aging loved one.

It’s a tough picture and it’s made worse by the lack of any kind of support available in the United States.

Certainly this long term healthcare crisis (and it is a crisis by any definition of that word) is not exclusive to America alone.

There are aging populations all over the world and countless millions more caregivers but many other countries have been proactive in implementing policies designed to mitigate the pressure that unpaid caregivers experience.

Debbie Howard, a professional market researcher, knows what it’s like to be a caregiver after spending some years caring for her cancer-stricken mother.

As a result, Debbie has devoted nearly 20 years to agitating for caregivers in the U.S., forming Aging Matters International and thecaregivingjourney.com along the way.

She is our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging.

Dave McCaughan has made frequent appearances on The Art 2 Aging; he is an experienced marketer with decades of real, “in the trenches” marketing expertise and he has made the issue of marketing to an aging population a kind of mission for the past three decades.

Today, he provides another thought-provoking Point of View in which he talks about how demographers have known for decades that the world’s population is aging (some countries faster and sooner than others, like Japan for example) and that an aging population will bring unique challenges and demands before it starts shrinking.

So, if demographers have known this for more than 40 years, Dave asks, why is it now only just dawning on policy makers? Further, is encouraging women to have more babies really a viable tactic to reverse aging in any country? Or just a silly idea with no merit whatsoever (hint: it’s the latter…)?