Forget the Blood of Teens. Metformin Promises to Extend Life for a Nickel (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Forget the Blood of Teens. Metformin Promises to Extend Life for a Nickel (2017)

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40 pointstosh33 comments

Check with your doctor with regards to consuming Metformin if you’re attempting to conceive or are going to cryopreserve semen. Also consider a semen analysis to get diagnostic confirmation of sperm quality if on the drug.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/03/birth-defects...

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-4389

uhm.. so it extends my lifetime at the cost of my lineage? lol

pemdas

Only if you take it before having kids.

I also came across similar studies years ago when looking into metformin

I’ve been taking metformin for life extension for about 5-10 years. It’s dead cheap ranging from free at some pharmacies to like $5 for six months. And I haven’t had any discernible side effects.

What’s funny though is that my insurance and some health systems now think I have diabetes and are sending me mailers and calls for diabetes interventions. So I guess their CDS is pretty simple and just looks for rxnorm metforming scripts for “undiagnosed” diabetes. I don’t have diabetes and don’t have any of the clinical markers that would indicate diabetes or prediabetes.

Just a fun fact.

This seems to require a prescription in the USA so may I assume you are not in the USA?

Or they just have a off-label prescription.

I have a prescription. I just asked my doctor and showed them a few papers I was reading and they wrote a prescription.

Because of its safety and cost, they didn’t really care.

I did the same. “Why? Sure, knock yourself out, hope it helps.”

Thanks, I was not aware this was possible.

Has it extended your life?

Yes?

I guess it hasn't killed him yet.

Or even caused any debilitating side effects.

They're still alive, so we can probably assume it's causal.

I suppose I’ll never really know since there’s not a me that’s not taking it.

But it’s less than a dollar a month and doesn’t have any negative effects so I’m comfortable risking it has no effect.

you are aware that metformin is used to treat type 1 diabetes?

Yes, of course.

It's mostly used for type 2 diabetes, not type 1.

Medicine is funny that way; if you allocute to taking some sort of medication then they will readily extrapolate that to a diagnosis. For example, my PCP had recently prescribed me some meds for no good reason. She had not ruled out other causes of a thing and she lied about the lack of side effects, so the prescription was written. Then when I entered the hospital within a few weeks, I informed them of the prescription and they immediately placed on my chart a diagnosis for the thing treated by that drug. I am confident that I do not have, and never had, the disorder they "diagnosed" me with. The hospital ran no tests and was frankly incapable of such a diagnosis on their own, so the only information they used was my verbal assertion that I was taking this drug. They didn't even see proof from my PCP. So be very careful about what you fill out in those medical histories, and be careful with your releases of HIPAA information, because they will get extrapolated and haunt you for a very, very long time.

Sounds like fasting with extra steps. Metformin changes the way you metabolize sugars, making you tolerate (and thus crave) them less. If it has life-extending properties, they're probably from the calorie restriction and you consuming less sugar in general.

We need to attack the root problem with the Western (esp. American) diet that underpins many diseases: sugar. The easiest, most cost-effective, and least side-effect-prone way of doing that is with fasting.

"The easiest way to not desire candy is to stop eating altogether" leaves a few things missing, I assume.

and I really hope it's just not 'magically your body will no longer desire sugar when you stop having sugar' -- sure, if you're not conciously aware of the whole thing I can see that working.

This isn't necessarily true.

IANAD but from what I've read Metformin influences the mTOR pathways.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6303203/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5299044/

The root problem with the American diet is that it's 3,600 calories per day. If it was 3,600 calories of fats and proteins with no added sugar, it'd still make you obese and kill you.

The solution is to eat 2,000-2,500 calories per day (give or take depending on your activity level, age, gender etc.).

Achieving this solution mostly comes down to portion sizes. For sure limiting added fats and sugars plays a role, because both of those ratchet up the calorie intake without filling you up very well.

What doesn't play a role is demonizing just the sugars - this approach is based on pseudoscience and it's guaranteed to fail. It's a tempting idea that you can still overeat if you overeat the correct stuff, but it's wrong. The current anti-sugar cult is the inverse of the 1990s "fat free" craze where people who wanted to gorge on junk food latched on to this idea that dietary fat was the real enemy, we produced lots of snacks with zero fat and tons of sugar, and Americans still kept on turning into bloated whales and murdering themselves with heart disease anyway. If we now go down some zero added sugar rabbit hole and gorge on bacon cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizzas the same thing will happen, because it really comes down to the calories.

At the end of the day you eat a responsible number of calories or you die young.

It's not pseudoscience, but since you call it that, I would love a few references.

Sugar is non-essential, i.e. you don't need sugar to live.

Table sugar (which has a lower glycemic index than bread or rice) is part glucose, part fructose. Both increase systemic inflammation and the latter is toxic to the liver and causes NAFLD. Fructose is processed the same way as alcohol.

On the other hand I find the longevity business lacking in a proven lifespan-extending supplement or diet.

Also you can be fat and healthy (overconsuming calories), as long as fat is being stored in brown adipose tissue. When it's visceral fat or it infiltrates the muscle, that's when inflammation is kickstarted and health problems become inevitable.

Metformin is a pretty nasty drug with some serious side effects on healthy people that is not proven to extend lifespan or healthspan in healthy people, and in fact makes you weak when taking it.

In fact, in 2024, it can be said it failed to live up to its hype.

Only take it if you have diabetes.

What nasty side effects do you mean?

There’s really almost none [0] with the most common diarrhea.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metformin

Not sure it qualifies as “nasty”, but performing does seem to somewhat impede expected benefits from exercise: https://peterattiamd.com/metformin-and-exercise-deja-vu-all-...

It also seems to upregulate cortisol in some cases, which is undesirable: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27459533/

These definitely don’t seem very nasty to me. I suppose it’s good to be aware of these effects, but don’t imagine them affecting most people’s decision to take it unless they are bodybuilders or something.

If you get a ‘script for this make sure it’s the extended release versions. Way less digestive problem.

Not all doctors are aware there is an extended release formula.

Take Metformin after a few bites of food (inside of a meal). I’ve also noticed that the main complaint tends to be “explosive” diarrhea (ie little warning, run to bathroom NOW). When interviewed, often patients mention eating foods they shouldn’t be eating (processed foods, fast food. Eg carb heavy junk food). I believe it’s because metformin has an effect that decreases the GI uptake of glucose and instead sheds it.

Long story short, if you have GI issues try eating different, healthier food and take metformin within the meal .

Personally I see the diarrhea as a benefit. It’s a teaching moment and heck might contribute to weight loss. Truck drivers can’t stand it though. That must be a nightmare.

For those not interested in obtaining an Rx you can look up berberine. It is closely related and OTC. Thorne/Jarrow/ or liftmode for bulk are brands I’ve used but, at the end of the day, if you aren’t running the HPLC analysis yourself then you are trusting a supplement company. Examine.com/consumerlab/labadoor for supplement reviews (for what it’s worth, again there is trust involved).

It extends life by lowering metabolism. A "dead end" life extension solution.

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