> I believe that everyone, even the skinny folks, should be on GLP1 drugs for the longevity effects.
Are you for real? Serious question.
Are you for real? Serious question.
> I think I will wait for some version that does not cause "strong nausea, extreme fatigue, brain fog, and constipation".
Did fasting help with weight control. Why are you considering these drugs ?
I am not considering these drugs. I responded to "I believe that everyone, even the skinny folks, should be on GLP1 drugs for the longevity effects."
When I was doing keto, I never experienced the keto flu that many complain about. If these are the same symptoms, maybe the same benefits are achieved without taking the drug.
You can get brain fog from a large caloric deficit before your body adjusts to it, which this by design, will induce.
I don't know, but I'd be fine gambling on it. You don't seem to be, which is also fine.
[0]: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/can-calorie-restrict...
The point that I'd like to make is- if you think a comparison between hunter/gathers and the modern human is illustrative for a diet where our phenotype thrives best, sure, their food arrive at more irregular intervals than the modern human and they probably binged on what was in season at the time (which might give us pointers for our own diet) but I think the concept of perpetual calorie restriction as a full time human diet is infantile and quacky.
But so, the idea that everyone should take drug designed to make you thin by making you not feel hunge including thin people is scary.
I see a lot of health influencers always say whatever diet they are doing is best because nothing bad has shown up on their bloodwork.
I am not really sure if bloodwork is all it takes to asses your health.
Many people have this weird view of the "bloodwork" where they treat the results of them like a character screen in an RPG game.
> where the medical system is focused less on charging people money and more on evidence based treatments, blood tests are done to find something specific, not to "see how a person is doing"
I am not sure what insurance you are using in USA but my insurance is super stingy about approving any blood tests that doctor doesn't think are super necessary. All the health influencers i mentioned in earlier comment seem to be paying out of pocket for tests like 'insulin sensitivity' because insurance doesn't pay for those.
The fact that your father got diagnosed too late is incredibly sad, and I truly feel for you, as that's the disease that took my grandfather too. But that does not offset the fact that if you screen people "yearly" you end up with more unnecessary interventions, painful tests, and potential false positives, and generally bad outcomes than if you don't do it.
You could just as easily find a story about someone who had an unnecessary blood test that revealed something potentially troubling, they went to have a more invasive tests that resulted in them getting hurt from treating what turned out to be a false positive.
Sure, but only one bit of evidence.
For example, there's evidence that on a population level routine screening for prostate cancer may do more harm than good, because it frequently isn't lethal, and the resulting interventions (often for false positives) can have a negative impact themselves.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/when-prostate-tes...
> The American study found annual screening did not lower the chances of dying of prostate cancer.
> A recent Johns Hopkins University study found surprisingly high rates of hospitalization after prostate biopsies and a 12-fold greater risk of death in those who develop infections.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130929142622.h...
> "Yet in order to prevent one death from prostate cancer in the 1,000 men screened for PSA, the number of biopsies would double with 154 additional prostate biopsies, and, of 35 additional prostate cancers diagnosed, 12 additional cases of impotence and three additional cases of incontinence would occur. Thus, the harm from routine PSA testing can have a serious effect on the quality of life of patients and provides additional evidence against the use of organised screening for prostate cancer," he says.
My original comment still stands.
https://www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/types/prostate/screening/s...
It is not. Steve Jobs had good bloodwork and low BP, still died a a few years later.
Steroid-taking health influencers like to show bloodwork to convince followers they are still healthy. Let's see 20+ years down the road...
If true, it suggests being superpower smart ignoring advice is a life threatening condition.
But it also says CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) has even slimmer: next to none in their language.
I think people's eagerness to jump from changes in markers to actual longevity is quite unfortunate. Medical "breakthroughs" often founder on such confusion and amateurs approaching things this way. See Goodhart's Law [1] (much as I generally regret the hn/geek tendency to lean these law, here it's reasonable).
Though communicating the difference between things that are only proven on surrogate markers and things shown to actually affect the real desired outcome is important, I agree.
No drinking alcohol, like metformin?
If so, I suspect you could get a large fraction of the improvement gained from a population-wide deployment of these drugs, at zero cost, if everyone just stopped drinking alcohol. "But that's unreasonable!" Right, so if that's also required for taking this drug, then....
I take Metformin (not for diabetes, but weight and age) and my doc has never said a word about alcohol. A quick google suggests the possible bad interactions are diabetes related, so probably not applicable.
It’s listed as an example of a drug that has the “disulfiram effect” when mixed with alcohol.
See the “Similarly acting substances” section of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disulfiram
Yeah, look at all these super-old people like Alan Greenspan, Warren Buffett, Kissinger, Munger who pretty much have terrible diets, obese, no exercise yet still going strong, productive. Shows the power of genes. "Your BMI is below 23, therefore we will skip the colonoscopy and prostate/PSA exam and blood work," said no doctor ever (unless the doctor wants to get sued, I suppose).
It's that underlying foundation that you don't see that gives them the margin to have a burger.
I don't buy your theory that secret to longevity is a personal chef or a nutrition expert.
Not to mention that makeup, specific lighting, timed pumps and short term dieting tricks can be used for movies. How an actor looks on the day of a shoot isn't how they walk around looking.
There are lots of surprising findings w/r/t pharmaceuticals if you start really digging. Lots of missed opportunity for overall improvement in the human condition that aren't being exploited.
The Promotion and Marketing of OxyContin: Commercial Triumph, Public Health Tragedy
> From 1996 to 2001, Purdue conducted more than 40 national pain-management and speaker-training conferences at resorts in Florida, Arizona, and California. More than 5000 physicians, pharmacists, and nurses attended these all-expenses-paid symposia, where they were recruited and trained for Purdue's national speaker bureau.
> One of the cornerstones of Purdue's marketing plan was the use of sophisticated marketing data to influence physicians’ prescribing.
> Purdue “aggressively” promoted the use of opioids for use in the “non-malignant pain market.” A much larger market than that for cancer-related pain, the non–cancer-related pain market constituted 86% of the total opioid market in 1999. Purdue's promotion of OxyContin for the treatment of non–cancer-related pain contributed to a nearly tenfold increase in OxyContin prescriptions
> A consistent feature in the promotion and marketing of OxyContin was a systematic effort to minimize the risk
> Controlled drugs, with their potential for abuse and diversion, can pose public health risks that are different from—and more problematic than—those of uncontrolled drugs when they are overpromoted and highly prescribed.
These drugs are not of that nature.
It didn't give me nausea but it did give me dry mouth and made me not really want to eat. However, when I got home I was ravenous and would always eat two dinners.
Similarly, that Penicillin turned out to save millions of lives, doesn't mean that these drugs will be very beneficial.
Every day is a new day, every event a potential surprise...
> Every day is a new day, every event a potential surprise...
This is a thought terminating cliche, and has no bearing on pharmacology and societal impact.
These drugs are about to be very heavily prescribed, and widely introduced - when, in fact, they should be slowly rolled out to those who need them the most. People who should be given this drug are those whose weight is so severe that it has immediate effects on negative health outcomes.
There are going to be people who want to drop a couple of BMI points in time for Summer without eating and exercise, and any doctor (or person) who enables this use in the short term (the next 5 years, at least) is irresponsible.
In fact, your example of penicillin is a perfect example: who cares about any potential downsides to a drug when not using the drug has the downside of death?
Also, fuck 'longevity.' The population of the world has doubled during my lifetime and this is a Bad Thing which is wiping out vast numbers of other species. Call me misanthropic if you like but humans are overrated and the maximization of our species' footprint is not a desirable outcome. I expect to live for a shorter time than my parents have (partly due to my own choices, partly environmental factors) and while that's disappointing in some ways I've been fortunate enough to enjoy reasonably good health and resultant quality of life. My idea of biological success is no living to the greatest age possible but having sufficient fitness and autonomy to be physically and mentally active while I'm alive. I have enough experience of injury and near-death situations to know that I'm OK with dying, and have no intention of begging to escape the inevitable.
More about our socioeconomic and political structure than raw population numbers.
Every piece of meat, for example, require the conversion of plant matter into meat. There's going to be energy loss. If we eat more plants and less meat, we would pollute less, and less meat animals and presumably more wild animals.
My idea of biological success is no living to the greatest ago possible but having sufficient fitness and autonomy to be physically and mentally active while I'm alive.
Unless you die in an accident, you're going to live longer due to being healthier.
You are making assumptions, about his lifestyle choices.
Also, medicine might have improved, but so have subjectivly stress and fear and terror (economic outlook, climate change, etc..) A good reminder to turn that smartphone off now.
Seriously, 30-40 years ago I would have eagerly agreed with you. Much as I continue to like technology and feel optimistic about it overall, I greatly doubt that a century from now there will be any non-military space colonies in existence; long term existence is more likely to exist in silico than for biological bodies. One major influence on my thinking about this is the fact that we landed people on the Moon from 1969 to 1972 and then just gave up on it for 50 years. Now in middle age, I cannot overstate my sense of betrayal by earlier generations that decided to devote themselves to financial engineering instead.
You could be right though, haha. I felt exactly the same way when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. Space was dead, there's no future, etc etc
What if we all live forever? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...