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Comment by asdfman123 | Hacker News Reader

The most useful health advice is to get cardio and strength training in and eat real foods.

Everything else is a hyperoptimization. Some hyperoptimizations are marginally useful, some aren't actually useful at all.

Humans were built to eat real food, and they were built to use their bodies.

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Important to get your vo2 max up, as highest as possible, because folks with elite vo2max are dramatically more likely to survive longer than baseline averages.

Also important to focus on getting strong as possible, in both bone and muscle, with some focus on fast twitch muscles. A lot of elderly death can be attribute to some sort of falls. Even if they survive the fall, it can be a road to a fast death.

Another thing not to neglect is to make sure you have movement patterns and that you focus on fortifying the body against injuries. Lifting extreme weight won't do you any good if you can't lift more, ditto for running.

I've been listening to peter attia's new audiobook too. solid stuff.

But where exactly do i find these 'medicine 3.0' doctors. My pcp still uses 'misguided' tests like LDL for cholesterol, serum creatine for renal function ect. Doesn't do host of other tests that he recommends doing by saying insurance won't cover it.

I don't even know where to get my vo2 max tested. I have apple watch which gives me wildly different number than my garmin ( 32 vs 49). I am pretty sure both those numbers are wrong. I am not paying $300 to get my vo2 max tested privately.

The reality is that unless you can afford to pay for high-end concierge medicine you're going to have to manage most of it yourself. Regular primary care physicians don't have time to deal with non-standard preventative care for people who are basically healthy. You can order many blood tests directly from reference labs such as LabCorp without a doctor but you'll probably have to pay out of pocket.

You don't need any fancy equipment to get an accurate VO2 Max estimate. Just do a Cooper test by running as far as you can in 12 minutes and then plug the distance into a formula.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_test

Modern fitness trackers such as recent Garmin watches can also make fairly accurate VO2 Max estimates but you have to give them enough raw data to work with. That means recording several running or cycling (with a power meter) activities of varying lengths at maximum effort. If you don't hit it hard then the device will still make an estimate but it's likely to be way off.

https://www.firstbeat.com/en/science-and-physiology/fitness-...

thank you. I will try the cooper test this weekend in the gym.

I think I would set a budget aside for those sort of things. Accumulating 25 dollars a month to get a vo2 max test isn't as painful as spending 300 dollars of money you don't have. That comes to exactly once a year.

I already spend 300+ dollars a month on health insurance, and I already see how much hospital bills was already costing me(I was hospitalized twice in the same year). I rather spend them on tests which are much cheaper in comparison.

That being said, it's sure a good idea to get one's finance in order, which is what I am working, to facilitate important purchases(such as a foldable bike).

That is generally correct, but I wouldn't focus too much on VO2 Max as a single metric. As Goodhart's Law states: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

All else being equal, a higher VO2 Max is better. But in reality we have limited time to train and have to make trade-offs. As a (mediocre) endurance athlete, my race performance has improved even though my measured VO2 Max has declined. Most athletes can only sustain their VO2 Max output for 6 - 10 minutes but I am more interested in being able to hold a high percentage of VO2 Max for a much longer period. I could change my training plan to focus specifically on optimizing VO2 Max but would that actually reduce my risk of premature death relative to what I'm doing now? Doubtful.

Agree with your other points.

It's probably harder to cheat a metric that's physical/biological.

I would say your race performance is different than the goal of increasing longevity. What matters more is how important vo2 max is to longevity.

I'm not talking about cheating a metric. VO2 Max is correlated with longevity but it's likely just a proxy for several other factors. I'm sure I could boost my VO2 Max by a few points if I focused on training that but I'm skeptical whether that would make me healthier than maximizing performance over longer efforts. We just don't have clear data to say one way or the other.

My personal trainer says once you lose the fast twitch muscle, it’s gone for good and most people have lost it by age 70 or so.

Reducing average sitting bout length has as big an impact as exercise. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41569-021-00547-y

> In this Review, we make a case for an approach to preventing and managing cardiovascular disease that involves ‘sitting less and moving more’.

Its not just 'Reducing average sitting bout length ' though right ?

Also this seems like self reported observational studies?

Right, both exercise and sitting bout length independently are important. You just can't completely exercise away the impact of sitting alone.

> eat real foods

This is kind of a meaningless statement. Those of us that already know about nutrition are going to read that and go "he means eat a small amount of meat, lots of fibrous vegetables, avoid added sugar, high gi carbs" etc etc. But you're basically communicating nothing.

Real foods to me means foods that our ancestors ate for millenia and it was perfectly clear. Another way of putting it would be, foods that don’t come in too much packaging and foods that our grandparents would recognize.

I like "prefer buying stuff from the outer ring of the supermarket" as good general advice.

Michael Pollan wrote about this concept in In Defence of Food. He's also known for the idea of "eat food, mostly plants, not too much". His book goes on to explain what he means by "food" and mentions only eating from outer part of the super market where the fresh meat counters and vegies are.

Michael Pollan was incorrect about plants, though -- it turns out you can just cut plants out of your diet entirely and experience excellent health and fitness as a result.

I follow enough to know that you can remove plants; humans have shown they can survive (thrive even) on a large variety of diets and lifestyles. Do you have any links to something I can read about that you should? that is, the benefits of removing plants entirely outweighs consuming some of them.

I found this podcast interview with Dr. Georgia Ede convincing: https://www.peak-human.com/post/dr-georgia-ede-on-the-shocki...

Hadn’t heard that one before but that seems like good advice.

although I tend to agree with this concept applied to food and diet, I must state that I find it weird to refer to our ancestors for insightful wisdom when by nearly every record-able metric things have gotten steadily better in nearly every way.

I don’t know about that. When I see the lean and fit people in photos from just 50 years ago compared to the walking inflammation I see around me in daily life, I question that assumption.

This may be bad advice for those of us whose grandparents are British, or the other European cultures whose foods are just potatoes, bread, cevapi, and other things all universally colored brown.

Most other European countries seem proud of their food heritage, so it might be limited to England although I'm skeptical about even that as I've had a damn good English breakfast in London.

London should be thought of as a different country to the rest of it.

Former Yugoslavians I've met aren't particularly dismissive of their own food, but they do admit it's not got vegetables in it.

Probably depends on where in former Yugoslavia you’re talking about. I’ve had many amazing dishes in both Slovenia and Croatia.

> he means eat a small amount of meat, lots of fibrous vegetables, avoid added sugar, high gi carbs

You understood it

love this term of "hyperoptimization", something in the direction an optimization in the penny-wise/pound-foolish space, an imprudent optimization if you will.

And to fast. Do intermittent fasting regularly. If you can, do a 3-day fast once a month or a week fast once every 6 months. To lose weight, eat fewer normal sized meals with a larger pause from the last to the first, not smaller meals spread over a large period. Also get your vitamin D, and magnesium, calcium, zinc. I take 4k IU of VitD and have never felt better.

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