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Comment by schappim | Hacker News Reader

What's striking about "anti-ageing" research is how it keeps circling back to the same boring truths: don’t smoke, keep your weight down, move often, sleep properly, keep blood pressure and cholesterol in check, and go easy on the booze.

If something makes an overweight, sedentary smoker hit 100, then it’s a miracle drug. Please let me know if/when you've seen that drug...

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In the absence of actually lengthening the telomeres, everything falls short in the anti-aging department.

Most lifestyle habits contribute to shorting the telomeres as little as possible, which guarantees good health no matter the age, but still aging, albeit slower.

Given the current technology trajectory, many people including me, think that we are very close to totally stopping aging, and even reversing it.

one of the compounds mentioned in the article appears to promote telomere elongation

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

> don’t smoke, keep your weight down, move often, sleep properly, keep blood pressure and cholesterol in check, and go easy on the booze.

And UVs, don't forget UVs.

As in UV light?

Maybe it’s the clockwork orange protocol: lots of milk and Ultra Violence.

GLP-1s are the first hint of that.

You’re right. I can’t think of anything else with that level of impact. Maybe we're all just taking things like statins or blood pressure drugs for granted, but I don’t think those have much effect on people who are already healthy...

You missed the most important one, strong social connections. Maybe smoking might beat it out, but otherwise make sure you have a strong social network if you want to live longer (and with better quality of life).

This is just another way of saying there have been no big advances in clinical anti-ageing. And that's probably because little serious effort is going into it, compared with say, military spending.

It's easy to poke at the military budget as wasteful, but human history has shown that military expenditure is at a minimum, necessary. The same cannot be said of most preferred spending avenues for the cause of the day.

I'm reading that the US spends about $893 billion[1] on national defence and about $5.3 trillion on health care in 2024, with spending on track for roughly $5.6 trillion in 2025 [2][3]. These figures don't match my intuition...

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[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IN/PDF/IN1242...

[2] https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.2025.0...

[3] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/how-muc...

Are you comparing total health care spending to direct government spending on the military?

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