Ignoring genetic predispositions and accidental death, how can I maximize my life expectancy? Bonus points for peer reviewed scientific sources
* Restrict calories to 30% less than you want to eat. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19075044)
* Starve your father when he was a child. (https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,195...)
* Don't sit down very much. (http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/02/19/27946075...)
* Don't take Prilosec/Nexium/Prevecaid. (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/heartburn-drugs-proton-pump-inhi...)
* Do take Metformin.
* Consume sufficient Omega-3 (many fish-oil capsules or fewer small, oily fish).
* When > 50, take either aspirin or triflusal.
* Exercise to minimize resting heart rate.
* Meditate.
* Use sunscreen to protect against UVA.
* Don't smoke or chew tobacco.
* Minimize inflammation and inflammatory processes.
* Don't live next to a highway or urban pollution.
* Don't be poor.
* Resolve depression or sleep apnea.
* Don't eat meat, eat mostly plants. (Raw vegan is a bit hipster extreme.)
2. Exercise, preferably strenuously and several times per week.
I am not going to back that up with sources. It is easily googled and routinely ignored by people wanting fancy, quick fixes with a lot of flash.
Re accidental death:
I paid accident claims for over five years. Very few of the claims I paid were genuinely "Wrong time, wrong place. Shit happens." Not counting people gaming the system, even most legitimate claims had an element of "Why the fuck were you doing that to begin with???" In some cases, this element was glaring enough to make the claim deniable under the list of provisos that boiled down to "If you are doing something egregiously stupid and dangerous, we won't cover your so-called accident when this results in injury or death."
Some basics you probably already know:
Do not drink or do recreational drugs.
If you do choose to drink or drug, arrange ahead of time to do so under safe circumstances.
Follow the safety instructions on medication or dangerous equipment. Don't make an exception "just this one time."
Do not consistently be a horrible, horrible asshole to people. (I paid a claim where that basically got someone shot.)
If you own guns, dangerous equipment, etc, strictly follow safety practices. No exceptions.
But yeah, superficially that doesn't sound like a helpful thing to say.
That doesn't meat anything.
http://www.nature.com/nrneurol/journal/v2/n6/full/ncpneuro02...
* Eat a balanced diet, avoiding excess
* Exercise regularly, avoiding excess
* Don't smoke
* Don't drink more than a glass of alcohol each day, if at all
* Cross your fingers and hope for the best
1: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/24/can-you-get-too-mu...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Obree#Taking_the_record
If you work out in the cardio section of any gym, you will eventually see regulars who are hitting some machines very hard, with a visual appearance of anorexia. I'm sure some of those people were just skinny, but not all of them. It's not my role, as a fellow gym member, to recommend psychiatric help. But heavens knows I thought it, more than once.
In addition, gyms are built around luring in people while assuming that a large percentage of them will quickly stop attending. Some of the drop-off is just from laziness or dislike of exercise. But some of the drop-off is from going too hard, too fast, resulting in injury, especially for first-time weightlifters.
This video inspired me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo6QNU8kHxI
I know that I want to live as long as possible while maintaining the best possible health - I just need to know how to pull it off.
Though most scientific publications are "peer reviewed", most of them are not "peer replicated".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713953
As sad as it is, a significant portion of the published scientific material are false or can't be replicated.
I suppose peer reviewed scientific articles are better than old wives' tales but not by much.
> smoking alcohol? A plant based diet? Regular exercise? High mental activity?
Well according to some people, moderate drinking can reduce risk of heart attack by 30%. But who knows how valid those studies are.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/21/health/wine-healthy-food-draye...
That said, I suggest jogging regularly; just don't get hit by a bus.
One good way to live long is certainly not to die young (e.g. avoid risk factors) - would be helpful to know which of those are not as well known.
His two big things were cruciferous vegetables, so mainly brocolli, and the Indian spice turmeric. He hammered away at the importance of these two items across 500+ pages.
* Avoid smoking and excessive drinking (excess is easier to reach than you think!).
* Eat a healthy diet (not too many calories, not too many carbs, not too much saturated fat -- in order of descending importance).
* Get regular exercise. Aerobic and anaerobic, plus flexibility. You want to be supple, strong and healthy.
* Avoid occupational hazards -- for the HN crowd, probably eye problems and posture problems. Just taking regular breaks from the screen will go a long way here.
* Make sure you get good healthcare, especially when you're older (60+).
* Have good genetics. (Sorry, not much you can choose about this one.)
I agree with this notion, my practical solution to this is to not worry about drinking moderately in social situations, because it makes many of them more enjoyable
Sure, it's not guaranteed but I think we can all agree that it's a good start.
> In recent studies conducted in overweight humans, caloric restriction has been shown to improve a number of health outcomes including reducing several cardiac risk factors (Fontana et al., 2004, 2007; Lefevre et al., 2009), improving insulin-sensitivity (Larson-Meyer et al., 2006), and enhancing mitochondrial function (Civitarese et al., 2007). Additionally, prolonged caloric restriction has also been found to reduce oxidative damage to both DNA (Heilbronn and Ravussin, 2003; Heilbronn et al., 2006; Hofer et al., 2008) and RNA, as assessed through white blood cells (Hofer et al., 2008). Thus, findings of initial human clinical trials appear to support the promise of caloric restriction demonstrated in animal studies, at least in overweight adults.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622429/
> In this review article we describe evidence suggesting that two dietary interventions, caloric restriction (CR) and intermittent fasting (IF), can prolong the health-span of the nervous system by impinging upon fundamental metabolic and cellular signaling pathways that regulate life-span. CR and IF affect energy and oxygen radical metabolism, and cellular stress response systems, in ways that protect neurons against genetic and environmental factors to which they would otherwise succumb during aging.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3919445/
> The most common eating pattern in modern societies, three meals plus snacks every day, is abnormal from an evolutionary perspective. Emerging findings from studies of animal models and human subjects suggest that intermittent energy restriction periods of as little as 16 h can improve health indicators and counteract disease processes.
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/47/16647.full
One last study, separate because this is on rats.
> Among the 137 rats, the male rat which lived the longest died at 1057 days and the oldest female died at 1073 days. Both rats fasted for 1 day in 2, but the optimum amount of fasting was on the average 1 day in 3. With this amount of fasting, the life span of the males was increased by 20 per cent, and that of the females by 15 per cent., but the life span of the fasted males just reached the life span of the female controls. Pre-experimental nutritional conditions and genetic factors had a considerable influence on any specific life span. There was a high degree of genetic uniformity in spite of different regimes of feeding and fasting.
What/how do you eat in a week?
If you're curious what I eat in that window, it's mostly non-starch based vegetables, tofu, and paneer.
There's a wealth of literature on these topics, but I'll leave this here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26729882
It shouldn't be mysterious, your outlook and mood determine your behaviors. However, it goes deeper than that. As for maintaining a level of curiosity, think of the brain as a muscle. Inactivity will cause it to atrophy while exercising it will make it more robust and perhaps help prevent dementia. Our thoughts have a biological basis and like any complex, chaotic system, small changes in one area can lead to large changes elsewhere.
The human brain is literally the nerve center of our body and among its many functions are communicating, coordinating and regulating the organs and bodily functions. Particularly, it's in "control" of the endocrine (hormone) and lymph (immune) systems.
Consider this: Has thinking about your own mortality made you feel depressed? That's an example of your cortex influencing your limbic system. Have you ever seen or read anything that triggered moral disgust? The part of the brain responsible for making us gag when we eat spoiled food is activated when we find something morally objectionable or unfamiliar. Has thinking about an upcoming deadline caused such anxiety that you feel pain in your chest or become short of breath?
As a more apt answer to your question, consider the scenario of a drug addict purchasing their narcotic of choice. The anticipation they experience right before doing their drug is almost as powerful as taking the drug itself. People who do stimulants feel the need to go #2 right before doing the drug.
Employ at every time three personal high profile doctors at a salary far above what they could expect, and fire one of them each year. The choice of who is fired is based on written proposals by each of them. Having three doctors makes it possible to use majority logic. Make sure that two of them do not collude.
How? This alone would have the potential to bring down the entire plan even if someone did have the money to hire three doctors.
That is why they have to write a proposal, it could be used to get advice from someone else. Another possibility is to use a more complicated algorithm (like, if two doctors gave the same advice last year, one of them should leave this year).
>> This alone ...
That is why I mentioned it. The question was about "scientifically valid ways to maximize life", my assumption is that only one (or more) doctor could provide a valid advice, I also assumed the parent was not interested in trivial answers on an Internet forum.
HN being what it is I supposed some clever and funny algorithm would do the job (I was clearly wrong).
>> even if someone did have the money...
I do not get this part, hiring three doctors is not a big business for companies. Even if you limit it to individuals, you can look at other parts of the world, for example in India doctors start at $20,000 per year. Hungarian doctors earn roughly one tenth of what a western European doctor earns [0], etc...
[0] http://budapestbeacon.com/public-policy/hungarian-health-car...