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Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

After looking a bit into the longevity stuff I’ve come to the conclusion that 80% of the benefits for health come from simple habits: sleep well, move daily, work-out regularly, eat fresh and moderately, and maintain social connections. That’s it.

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Oh, and of course genetics. Doesn't matter very much if you have a genetic pre-disposition to some bad disease and you don't know that. So, make sure you're getting screened per recommendations!

Apparently, the less paperwork you deal with, the longer you live. Somewhere out there, a 132-year-old is thriving simply because no one ever processed their birth certificate — and correlational data suggests that weak administrative systems might just be the true secret to longevity, sparing people the existential stress of ever having to file anything at all

Is this because the poor record keeping is a vector for fraud?

https://www.nst.com.my/world/world/2024/12/1148062/bad-recor...

if there is a natural disaster, which happens frequently at the southern point of Japan (a blue zone for longevity) then records can be destroyed. when records are destroyed you just have to ask folks what their birthdays are. Turns out you can collect retirement early if you say you were born years before you actually were.

There are drugs like metformin which appear to have a drastic affect on lifespan in patients with or without diabetes.

But yes generally, premature death seems to come from bad lifestyle choices over a lifetime, so being proactive is gonna yield the greatest return.

I take Metformin and don't have diabetes, but don't think there's much of a chance of significant benefits. Would expect diabetics etc to have noticably higher healthapans offset by the diabetes symptoms. It's been a heavily-taken drug for decades...

Metformin is a prescribed drug, so how do you obtain a prescription if you're an otherwise healthy person (i.e., someone w/o diabetes)?

Know a doctor.

Isn't there some liability there?

It's also not a prescribed drug everywhere. Some countries do let people make medical choices on your own without needing to have your hands held by some legal gatekeeping for even minorly risky drugs.

Not the parent, but I take it by going to any pharmacy in Ukraine and asking for it. Prescription not required. In my case it’s part of a treatment protocol for insulin resistance but the pharmacist doesn’t ask and I don’t tell them.

When I lived in Georgia it was also that easy.

Yeah, and I don’t expect any new simple solutions to suddenly be discovered either.

That's the gist of it, plus supplements +drugs. I think the bottom line is that people are becoming more accepting that extending lifespan is a good and possible thing, but we aren't close to knowing how to do it. So we grasp at whatever we can, even if it's ineffective.

Its funny to me, because there’s many strong studies that basically show the life expectancy for vegetarians is about 10 years higher, but most people including myself wouldn’t become a vegetarian despite the clear health benefits.

Couldn't this be, maybe, one of those "correlation is not causation" thingies?

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