Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research
ldeming.com
ldeming.com
While I’m hopeful bio/chemistry/genetic research will help enhance life quality/longevity my focus has been largely lifestyle to go along with a few supplements.
Sleep: minimum of 7 hours Fitness: strength & movement, yoga/stretching, low impact long duration activity to protect joints Mental Fitness: intellectual challenges such as reading long-form and learning to code Mindfulness: managing stress/anxiety Engagement: with family/friends Environment: trying to maximise time in healthy environments and limiting my time in unhealthy environments Hydration: lots of water, no juices/sofa, rarely any alcohol Nutrition: Intermittent fasting(18/6 5 days a week), ketogenic diet, no processed sugars
Supplements used:
Resveratrol Ubiquinol NAD Thiacin Fish Oil Ginkgo
Before I hit 50, I made the shift away from trying to maximise performance and shift focus towards durability/longevity.
I have an outlier score( to the good side) for telomere length, so I’m biased towards believing it helps, but all I can do is all I can do and make the most of every day and remember to have fun along the way.
I had put on weight due to a few persistent training injuries.
I lost 22kg fairly quickly combined with a return to durability/longevity focused fitness.
Anecdotally, I actually feel my cognitive ability has improved. I feel sharper and able to focus better/longer and have been published far more after than prior.
However, I have to admit that I need to stay quite well hydrated or else I start feeling slower/foggier, I reckon it could be both diet and age related.
I feel like I am fastest/sharpest in the morning prior to a late lunch when my eating window opens.
I do eat breakfast on weekends and have the occasional cheat meal approx once per month.
Just my anecdotal experience.
It’s an interesting concept with one of the founders Dr Elizabeth Blackburn awarded the Nobel Prize for her work on telomeres.
It’s worth mentioning I’d probably question and disparage The results if they were poor :)
Apparently it’s common for poor results to lead to bad feedback and excellent results to lead to good feedback.
So be warned I’m pretty biased!
I understand there is a lot of uncertainty around this area, but I’ll be very interested in learning why you felt the ketogenic diet in particular was suitable to be a central part of a regime aimed at longevity?
according to this visualization of the idea: https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time/
Hence there's still a point to trying to live longer, even if the value of each additional time period decreases.
Anyway, that's if you agree that model! There's a couple of other things I'd consider without even examining it's core assumptions: memory fades over time - time earlier in my life might not contribute as much to my perceived time, as recent time does; what if you spend your early life just getting to the place you want to be (resources, self-development etc)? Extra time in that place could be very valuable!
The visualisation sidesteps the problem by starting at year one. You can also add arbitrary constants or other tweaks, but then the idea lose its elegance and you can make it say anything you want.
One could say that's because I lacked the experience to interpret and store my sensations at the time, and that those were gradually gained, but to my view that's not a refutation but actually reenforcement of the argument. I'm still learning higher level abstractions every day; the tools to more efficiently store sensation are gathered as new sensations are gathered.
When I was 14, every day at work was radically different than the last. At 44, they're pretty much the same. When I was 14, 8 hours was like forever. These days, if you asked me at 9PM, there might be a 2-3 second delay for me to remember if I worked at all that day.
As life goes on novelty of new moments goes down.
You could say this explains or underlies the Janet model.
But one can seek out novelty to slow down time. In the extreme you could “reset”, move away from everything you know, and start from scratch.
I have no evidence for any of this other than my own perception. Does anyone know where to find more discussion on this topic?
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(14)...
For the uninitiated and otherwise unaware, many studies regarding illnesses, disease, nutrition, exercise, medicine, etc. perform clinical trials with mice. Resultant publications are picked up by news outlets who headline the results, without the caveat that the results were only found in mice. Mice are, notably, not humans and the results don't (in fact, rarely ever) carry over 1:1.
Interesting way to display the data but from my understanding this theory isn’t accurate. Having memorable moments is what makes time seem longer. That’s why when we’re younger and try new things all the time that period seems memorable.
Going to the same job in the same place for years makes it feel like time flies by because there is no new experience in that period.
You got me for a moment.
I find it hard to overeat a low carb diet, so if mice feel the same way, they would then benefit from caloric restriction on such a diet.
https://khn.org/news/a-fountain-of-youth-pill-sure-if-youre-...
Re reservatol, the jury is really out on that one too. [3,4]
[1] https://theconversation.com/of-mice-and-men-why-animal-trial...
[2] https://www.nature.com/news/chilly-lab-mice-skew-cancer-stud...
[3] https://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/2019/10/29/david-sincl...
[4] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/diet-rich-resveratrol-of...
Imagine life with no kids and the joy they bring, a stagnation in all societal structures, no turnover of ideas (loosely quoting "agendas don't die; people die").
I'm sure such a civilization would be very stable, but won't have any extreme sports.
That aside, we could populate the solar system just as well with people who live a healthy century.
It only takes a few months to get to Mars with the current technology.
Will you join me in making this dream come true?
Although I'd assume that we have left our biological bodies behind before that.
I would actually suggest that anyone reading this is likely to be too old to benefit. Thinking otherwise is completely fine, but we must acknowledge that the temptation towards motivated reasoning is unusually strong in this case.
I would also like the breakthroughs to be many centuries in the past, with all the biological and societal bugs worked out before I arrive :)
Would I want to live in a world where people don’t have kids, where people can take as much time as they want because time is infinite, a world where you wouldn’t even go out on the street for the chance something would happen to you and deprive you of eternal existence? I’m not sure, and in any case, it will be a vastly different future.
Imagine Mark Zuckerberg running his empire for 900 years straight.
I want to live 900 years and explore every discipline under the sun. I want to travel the world twenty times, read every book, see a hundred thousand sunsets.
Don't tell me I or anyone else doesn't deserve that. Evolution left us with bodies that don't permit it, but we'll escape that limit someday.
With kids around, there’s just something biologically soothing that tells you “you’ve done your part. You can leave this world at peace”.
I know it’s not the same for everyone but on a humankind level, that’s exactly how it works.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
Humans excel at surviving as a group, which is a very different - sometimes contrasting - thing.
The problem with this is, personal harm it causes aside, if all adults wanted to be infinite children, it wouldn't leave space to (at least compete with) the incoming, actual children. It would cause great intergenerational conflict. Not leaving resources for the next generation also means endangering the continuity of species altogether.
If we take a step back, one might even argue that this is already what is going on today.
If I could add 10 years on to my 30s I would. But adding 10 years into my 80s doesn’t seem worthwhile.
"Death is very likely the best single invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." - Steve Jobs
I know my life is accreting old biases and obstacles. Today and for years to come (I hope) I have more to do, but some day I will become an agent of stagnation instead of advancement.
Nobody wants to die. But in the big picture, the alternative is worse.
Steve Jobs also talked about "the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything." But I can't be a beginner again and again and again: some day my biases/old-dreams and stale-ideas/past-successes will dominate. Nobody has an endless capacity for creating the new.
Surely you can be a beginner again. Pick something you've never done before, and do that. As fledgling as humanity is, humans already have millions of different traditions and areas of study. Just pick one (or many).
You run out of those things shortly after birth. The vast majority of the aspects of everything that you attempt are familiar, and you have already developed habitual approaches to them. Having "never done something before" is shorthand for some experience having some aspect that you have never experienced before, not complete novelty. I'm going to build the strategies of flying a spaceship on the strategies I built learning to drive a car, which were built on the strategies I built learning to walk, which were built on the strategies I built learning to crawl, to manipulate my parents by crying, to identify distinct objects using my eyes, etc...
Eventually, the actually novel part of any new experience becomes vanishingly small. If anything, the ability to enjoy novelty, or to even see things as novel, is increased with our ability to forget. Maybe for a society, the ability to innovate relies on the ability to leave behind a bunch of brains whose plasticity has long been lost due to a lack of mental exercise.
Only difference is that in the last few centuries, there had been technological and scientific changes.
What changes? it's certainly isn't that old men die faster so that we embrace newer ideas faster. The old guards probably lived longer on average thanks to medicine.
As I grow older, I can see how my thinking is affected by my past. Someone with an unencumbered perspective will do the new thing, when I cannot.
There's a lot of possibilities that will open up as our tech advances. Say, wiping all memories of your field so you can learn it again with a fresh mind. Spawning short-lived digital clones of your mind with the mental 'temperature' turned up, in whatever way that's possible- maybe just dose them up with synthetic lsd in different doses- and observe the results. Lots of ways to get novel ideas without having to rely on wastefully growing billions of brains (and the attached bodies!) before throwing them, and most of the information in them, away to rot.
Now our problem is even having the ability to assimilate enough established knowledge during a lifetime to have a chance of making any novel contribution. The obvious endgame to AI is a dream of being able to assimilate information and innovate indefinitely.
I love driving my motorcycle, and I'm well aware of the risks involved.
Now let's imagine a world where they cure aging. When dying in an accident, you could lose a whole lot more than now.
I'm pretty sure we would quickly evolve to a society where we minimize the risk to die to almost 0. I do not want to live in such a oversafely world.
Besides, I'm very happy with 70 or so years here, and try to enjoy all of it. The next generations will inherit it all.
People will still be able to have kids. In fact in many cases people will be able to have as many kids as they normally would. As long as the fertility rate is less than 2 children/woman, the total population will still converge even if no one dies. Places like South Korean have a fertility rate of 1 c/w, which would produce a mere doubling of the total population.
Converge to what? How?
Σ (generation_n)
always converges to some finite number when generation_(n+1) = k * generation_n has k < 1, which is equivalent to <2 immortal children per woman.
I don’t think that’s a good model, as people who want more offspring will out-reproduce those who don’t, but that’s an argument for another time.
This argument assumes the offspring behaves in the same way as their parents. I don't see that necessarily being true. Even if that is the case, there are legislative solutions.
I’m still unclear on the point of life, but I’m not convinced it’s that kind of optimization exercise.
It may be quite reasonable for someone to prefer a more dynamic society and social structures caused by an average life span of 50 years, while at the same time preferring themselves and their loved ones to live for 100+ years on average. The question of "do you want to live much longer" is not the same as "do you want everyone to live much longer"; accepting that death and "forced turnover" has some positive role in how societies function (e.g. that you can't have eternal dictators because, in the worst case, eventually they die of old age) is compatible with still wanting death to be something that happens only to someone else whom you don't know or don't like. It's hypocritical but realistic - there's no reason to assume that longevity advances will be distributed to be evenly available.
This is spot on, and exactly what is going at the genetic level.
The reason we have sexual reproduction as opposed to mere cloning ourselves is the fact that environment that the initial set of genes worked well changes over time and the genes have to continuously innovate and experiment to have a chance in adapting to the new environment. Sexual reproduction introduces this variability to build these A/B/C... tests in the form of mini niches we are constructing.
Granted, humans don't only reproduce genetically but also memetically, to borrow from Dawkins. And the memetic transmission is complicated, on one hand technology makes it trivial for ideas to spread, on the other hand 1-1 care of grandparents and parents still matter a lot for example in child development. But at the genetic level, wishing to extend life means essentially "cloning" one's genes more and more into the future.
Humans that live for extended periods of time would be able to make progress and keep knowledge alive for longer periods of time facilitating an acceleration of progress made -> repeat.
You are also assuming that we fix aging but we make no progress in other domains. Would you really care how old you were if you could "download" yourself in a new replica at will? ie technology was so advanced that we would maintain our biological form only because we would like to experience things our ancestors did, not because it would be necessary.
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Also, when people say longevity there are at least 2 things that are mingled together. One is: living longer but the other one is just improving the quality of life. So whenever you are afraid of this new future, picture people living 20% longer only, but their life quality into their 80s and 90s would be the same as a person today in their 40s.
Who would not want to have a better quality of life and instead of spending their last decades watching as their body fails and things get worse and worse?
Enhancing health basically means you live longer. If you don't want to live longer then don't be healthy.
I didn’t like extreme sports when I was young, but maybe if I was 10,000 years old, I’d think screw it and have a go at BASE jumping...
>When questioned further on the matter, he denied that he has ever injected himself with a "young person's blood,"
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
* What you eat
* When you eat
* How much you eat
* Exercise
Are by far the simplest, cheapest, and most well documented way to extend life by quite a lot. We have lots of evidence to back calorie restriction. We know that eating more earlier in the day vs later means your insulin levels can recover better (or something?). We know eating certain types of fats is bad for you, and eating certain types of other things are good for you. Exercise, or at least the right kind of exercise (seems like there are open questions here, like how much is actually important) is healthy.
Then there are a number of pills you can take. When it comes to the pills we have a lot less evidence. From what I've seen there are probably a dozen or so pills, each one with bits and pieces of science surrounding them, that will maybe have some impact on mortality or aging. Some of the research does seem quite compelling - niacin, for example, seems to be pretty well researched and is actually prescribed at times. Niacin is also one of the pills you'll see come up a lot if you start looking into anti-aging. Others like resveratrol (which, actually, appears to be old news - people have moved on, it seems, to more bioavailable substances) have a lot less research, though they're promising.
If you're willing to spend 100-200 dollars a month or so it seems that you can get most or all of these. I don't think any research has been done on what taking all of these will do to you, but there is research on how the chemicals behave and I suppose from there people seem to draw conclusions on interactions.
Interestingly, from what I've read a lot of the popular "anti aging" trends like anti-oxidants are, more or less, very much debunked. My understanding is that while anti-oxidants absolutely do what their name implies in a lab setting, most of them tend to not do a damn thing in humans with regards to oxidation. So who knows what is or isn't going to work.
From my layman understanding, if you're ~20 years old you can basically just not fuck up super hard and wait another decade and we'll know a lot more. If you're 30, definitely start taking health seriously but maybe don't worry so much about downing 50 supplements that only have a bit of backing research. If you're 40 and above, and your goal is life extension... you might have to take a gamble.
If you're interested, I found this channel quite interesting - I appreciated the guy always citing studies (and he explicitly calls out why he thinks the study is or is not high quality).
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpcvPcHJVOkO9Qp79BOagTg
This FAQ definitely seems to be a good 'one stop shop' for learning the state of things, without being prescriptive.
I'm not a doctor. I just got interested in the last few weeks about this stuff. None of this is without risk - that much is obvious. Only just the other day I was reading a post by someone who ended up in the hospital with liver failure that very possibly could have been tied to their supplementation. If you start taking pills that you don't understand you seem very likely to fuck things up - some pills require that you take other pills also, for example lots of nootropics will fuck you up if you don't get enough choline in your diet. All of this is to say, there's cool and promising stuff here, but do your own research, and if you're very young and healthy don't stress about this stuff yet - the first step is always diet and exercise.
I agree with everything you’ve written there, apart from the idea that diet & exercise will extend your life by quite a lot, and the idea that you’ll have to gamble with interventions now if you’re in your 40s. There’s simply no behaviour or treatment today that will significantly extend the maximum human lifespan; unfortunately doing so will require years of scientific and technological innovation. Even caloric restriction looks monumentally feeble as an intervention, especially weighed against the effort involved.
As you say, one big question is how to do a wait calculation for your own personal timeline – at some point (we hope) the interventions will get more efficacious and have fewer adverse effects. The skill (luck?) will be judging when the benefits outweigh the risks for your personal circumstances, as your body ages and your risk profile increases. But at this point in history, there’s no evidence that we’re anywhere near a longevity escape velocity scenario, and your couple of years extra life from present day efforts should be enjoyed on its own terms, not as some sort of key to unlocking immortality.
I think that last part is leaned on heavily by this industry to oversell things to people; it amounts to little more than religious faith at this point in history. They are selling what they have to hand, but when we try to judge those interventions objectively, they’re just not that effective (including diet & exercise).
They are ahead of the beauty-led anti-aging industry in that they are at least doing science, so there is hope for the future.
But there's quite a lot of research on this?
> and the idea that you’ll have to gamble with interventions now if you’re in your 40s
You don't have to. Feel free not to. But if your goal is life extension based on research, you only have what's available today, and around your 40s is, again from my layman reading, when your body starts to really age hard.
> There’s simply no behaviour or treatment today that will significantly extend the maximum human lifespan
If you're saying "living past 125" isn't possible even if you start now, sure, but longevity is more about feeling 40 when you're 60, avoiding potential issues like heart attacks and alzheimers, etc. It is not about living forever as you seem to be saying, and maybe that's a larger misconception. Living longer, sure, but mostly it's about living better.
I haven't seen a single person, anywhere, in everything I've read, saying "I'm trying to live forever". They're all saying "I don't want dimentia, I don't want a heart attack, I want to walk around and travel and live life well at 70 and 80".
And as for life extension, there's actually plenty of research on things you can do to extend your life. Again, not past 125, but past 70 - diet, exercise, niacin, etc are all pretty well established.
> but when we try to judge those interventions objectively, they’re just not that effective (including diet & exercise).
This doesn't seem to actually be the case. I'm surprised anyone would say that intervention treatments for something like avoiding heart disease aren't effective.
Yes, the numerous studies and meta-analyses I’ve seen suggest an effect of between 1–10 years of healthy lifespan added. That’s certainly not nothing, but considering that life expectancy at birth is around 80 years in developed countries, you’re talking about something that represents 1/8 of that context.
around your 40s is [...] when your body really starts to age hard
I guess from a technical standpoint, you’re really ageing from birth. You certainly start to see the Gompertz curve start to bite in your 40s though, as the net metabolic damage starts to compound.
Living longer, sure, but mostly it’s about living better
I’ve never really understood this argument. Avoiding the diseases of ageing will ultimately lengthen your life. Avoiding them all indefinitely would lengthen your life almost indefinitely (there is still a non-zero risk of dying without ageing of course).
Look, death and disease are scary. They’re existential threats. Focusing on diet and exercise is great fun, has a host of incidental benefits, and returns the locus of control to yourself; however it cannot do all that much to really deflect the asteroid of ageing in the long run. I just want people to be aware of what the magnitude of the effects actually are, and not get sucked into the hype machine. I suppose sometimes it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive...I certainly hope that the state of the art advances fast enough to save us all, and that’s basically based on nothing. Supplements like Niacin are just a flat-out bust: https://www.cochrane.org/CD009744/VASC_niacin-people-or-with...
In fact, it’s highly improbable that any one oral drug or supplement will significantly alter the core pathology of ageing (and therefore reduce the risk of all age-related disease in one go). That’s because the human body is a highly complex, tightly-coupled system that is not designed to be reverse-engineered or modified, and because the soma and the germ line split so long ago.
The evidence on exercise is extremely poor. In cultures that promote athleticism the sheer willingness to exercise correlates so strongly with healthiness that it's extremely hard to control for. And even then meta studies give you at best only a few extra years.
Exercise itself is a risky activity. Over a lifetime the risk of injury is non-trivial.
Studies that go against this pro-exercise bias are usually ignored[0].
[0] "This result suggests that daily strenuous exercise as an occupation shortens rather than prolongs the lifespan." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0476-6
Yes, see this part of my post. It does seem that lots of types of exercise are not at all necessary for health.
This trial, for example, shows that HIIT for 3 intervals of 2-3 minutes had better impact than HIIT for 4 intervals of 4 minutes. So obviously there's still a lot to learn.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31565193/
And then there's SIT, reduced exertion HIIT, etc. Lots of different stuff here.
> Towards the minimal amount of exercise for improving metabolic health: beneficial effects of reduced-exertion high-intensity interval training
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00421-011-2254-z
There's also research showing impact on blood glucose levels when you exercise before/ after eating, etc. "Exercise" is a big lump of a term, but there's a massive amount of research into different kinds - far more research than with almost any of the pills you can take.
> There's also research showing impact on blood glucose levels when you exercise before/ after eating, etc. "
And we had studies showing that fructose has undesirable effects in that area. But so far most studies tracking food consumption in real life situations don't show anything bad happening.
Most of the world already believes exercise must be good for you, how many researchers are designing studies trying to uncover negative effects? Probably very few.
When most studies struggle badly to show anything above 5 extra years it's in the placebo category. Optimism might as well get you more [0].
[0] "Optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in 2 epidemiologic cohorts of men and women" https://www.pnas.org/content/116/37/18357
I don't know how many papers there are on negative vs positive effects of exercise, but HIIT has had plenty of research done explicitly to determine safety, or to see if there are more effective exercises with lower rates of injury.
No question that there are very, very few studies that are directly "X leads to longer or better life", it's just "X leads to Y, we separately think Y leads to a longer or better life". Of course that's not as good... but it's a symptom of those studies being expensive and difficult.
Common sense would tell you that physical activity has to spuriously correlate with healthiness. Many conditions will simply render you unable (or less able) to exercise.
So what are the odds a properly designed longitudinal study would actually yield a bigger life expectancy increase? Seems very unlikely to me. The ones that we do have set an upper bound as far as I'm concerned. Almost certainly has to be lower.
I understand that you're talking about a specific kind of exercise and most of what's out there doesn't speak to that. But nonetheless I'd be very skeptical given how little effect has been shown for general physical activity. And we do have plenty of similar studies showing random benefits of various exercises in a clinical setting.
No. Just No.
Let longevity come. Let immortality come. Let us live forever, sail the heavens, and travel to every world, every star, every galaxy, everywhere.
Life been tough, sure, but never at at any point did I think death is comforting, not even at the lowest point.
I think of it as, if my loved one (or me) were in the hospital with a fatal disease, but there was a cure, I would want the cure. I can't really see myself saying "Yeah, but death is so beautiful..."
I see aging the same way, as another fatal disease and I'd cure it if I could. I don't hope for an indefinite period of old age, but an indefinite period of good health, like 20-30s.
Where is the difference?
Not sure what the downvotes are about but problems of longevity is studied under vampire stories, e.g. Interview with the Vampire. They eventually get nihilistic and lost in ennui because they have lost connection with past and future generations and lost a lot, if not all, meaning in their life.
There is a school of psychotherapy (existential psychotherapy) that builds around death along with other existential problems (isolation, responsibility, meaning). A proper relationship with death seems to be meaning enhancing and anxiety alleviating than not, but it heavily clashes with other people who don't simply want to think about death.
So if you make a chart, please make it accurate.
Therefore I couldn't trust the rest, since it might all be "drawn from the wrist".
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...
Shows heart disease as #1 with 3 million deaths but separates the cancer types.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cancer
Says there were 9.6 million deaths caused by cancer, so more than 3 times the heart disease amount.
So the two causes heart disease and cancer are mostly comparable in terms of number of people killed.
"Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally, and is responsible for an estimated 9.6 million deaths in 2018. Globally, about 1 in 6 deaths is due to cancer."
> So you are wrong.
Please be more careful in making this statement. The evidence you present should allow the reader to make their own decision.
Huh missed that, thanks for pointing it out!
I guess that this statement compares combined cancer types with the combined cardiovascular diseases [1]. Then, yes, cancer is #2. But the cardiovascular diseases can't really be summarized by "heart disease" because they include stuff like stroke as well.
So I wouldn't really say that OP is right.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...
PS: Also note that in a sibling comment I already stated that I got the death count of heart disease wrong.
If you look at improving your health, I am right.
Most people think you should prevent getting cancer (as I did before). But actually, you should put more emphasis on preventing hearth and artery disease, since it is the cause of more deaths! (I hope this last part is cleared out).
Plus, it is also more clear on how to prevent that, than how to prevent cancer.