
The Secret to a Longer Life? Don’t Ask These Dead Longevity Researchers - onuralp
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/opinion/sunday/longevity-pritikin-atkins.html
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jakobegger
Make sure to read the article all the way to the end; I think it’s quite a
powerful statement.

We’re too focussed on our individual choices, looking for elusive cures for
aging; instead of fighting for things we know will help.

Reducing engine emmissions will make us live longer. Reducing pesticides will
also make us live longer. Limiting work hours will make us healthier.

But instead, we pretend that our health is defined only by our individual life
style decisions, and let the industry do whatever they want.

~~~
jack9
> Make sure to read the article all the way to the end;

> Today, the greatest threat to your life span may be the Trump
> administration’s assault on public health and medical research

Yeah, the end turns it into "what you can do to live longer is fight the trump
administration". When paired with the lack of information presented in the
article, makes it seem like some pedestrian political clickbait.

~~~
jakobegger
Don’t get too hung up on the Trump part, it’s not the important part.

The important argument is that our incredible success in extending human age
over the last century is not due to individual lifestyle changes, but societal
changes.

If we want to live longer, we need to stop poisoning our environment.

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bwang29
I think the article is saying that there are way too many confounding
variables in determining the probabilistic nature of longevity and so far due
to the fragments of data, contradictions in data, challenges in tracking,
uncaptured info, it is extremely difficulty to meaningful understand what
people could do to slowdown aging without running controlled study on
thousands if not millions of people.

However, say someone really wants to figure this out, they really want to know
every component of every meal people eat, every activity or habit and every
moment of their lives in terms of heart rate and metabolism and provide a
device to easily track all these and make sure the data is for anonymized for
research only, and they managed to convince millions of people to implant such
device at their birth, and they figured this out in 500 years and found a
formula to extend life indefinitely, I wonder if this would introduce the
classic “the rich/wealthy lives forever” scenario, or the alternative scenario
where the knowledge of longevity could hurt genetic evolution as a whole.

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baxtr
I believe to know, what might make me live longer, my body often tells me:
sleep more, eat less, avoid too much meat, fat and sugar, don’t drink etc.

Many times, I catch myself thinking though: do I really wanna miss out on a
great moment/feeling just to live a couple of years longer with a broken body
and/or mind?

I can enjoy now. Who knows if I can then.

~~~
Y7ZCQtNo39
Males in the USA have an 81% chance of living to age 65 [1]. I think it makes
sense to take care of yourself. Of course, allow yourself the occasional
indulgence.

Your habits of your 20s and 30s could significantly impact your 40s and 50s.
Taking care of yourself means enjoying more great moments later on too. Also,
taking care of yourself can be in itself enjoyable. Pick up a sport, or if
you're not competitive, make going to the gym a social thing. And eating
healthy can certainly be tasty.

[1]:
[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TO65.MA.ZS?locat...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TO65.MA.ZS?locations=US&view=chart)

~~~
shrimp_emoji
>Pick up a sport, or if you're not competitive, make going to the gym a social
thing.

Gross. Just run or, preferably, swim for 40 minutes to some hardcore music[0].
Let the endorphin high melt the pain and carry you through!

>And eating healthy can certainly be tasty.

It can be tasty when you consider fruit. When you consider everything else,
it's misery. We evolved to crave sugar and fat. Gg

But you have to _deprecate_ mouth pleasure for a more durable basis of well-
being, which is being healthier, and well-being is important because you want
to live for as long as possible so you can someday witness the year of the
Linux desktop!

[0]: [https://youtu.be/Ihi_kJJj_8A](https://youtu.be/Ihi_kJJj_8A)

~~~
majewsky
> When you consider everything else, it's misery.

You're really missing out there. A friend of mine has given up meat for lent,
and we're now trying a bunch of vegetarian recipes. It fits quite well because
I've recently started looking into Indian cooking where you can do a lot
without meat.

The only problem is that I absolutely despise all the stuff around cooking
(searching for recipes, shopping for ingredients, doing the dishes, people
that insist that cooking is super-easy and judge you for not doing it more
often).

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reasonattlm
Mildly amusing, but basically silly. There is a reason why everyone in the
past failed, and that is because they didn't have sufficiently advanced
biotechnology to (a) understand the causes of aging in terms of specific low-
level cell and tissue damage, and (b) identify and build ways to repair those
forms of damage.

We've only had a way to progress towards therapies for aging with this model
of development for somewhere between 30-50 years, and no way to make progress
towards therapies for aging with anything short of massive war-on-cancer style
programs prior to the last 20 years. (Those programs didn't happen, but in a
different world could have; arguably it wouldn't have made much difference as
to where we are now, just as the war on cancer has only been a foundational
effort for the last ten years of exponentially rapid development just prior to
the advent of universal effective cancer therapies. It is possible that
senolytics could have happened much earlier, decades ago, but finding and
validating the candidate drugs would have been very hard back then). But now
everything in biotech costs 100 times less than it did not so very long ago -
that is really why things are heating up in applied longevity science.

The article also commits the usual journalistic sin of equating every effort.
There is a vast difference between all of: eating a different diet; running a
pharmaceutical discovery program aimed at a mechanism of aging; running that
program to build a way to replicate calorie restriction; running that program
to kill senescent cells or clear glucosepane cross-links. These activities
have radically different expectation values in terms of best plausible
outcome.

The biggest mistake most people make in their approach to the new world of
rejuvenation science is to think of every possible methodology as having
similar best plausible outcomes in terms of years gained. Nothing could be
further from the truth.

~~~
drharby
Suppose short of an eccentric bankrolling a jumpstart to institutionalizing a
longevity research culture (for discussions sake, lets say Elon or the ghost
of howard hughes) how do you imagine todays research culture would evolve into
the necessary scale such longevity research would allegedly require?

~~~
reasonattlm
An aging research community already exists that is ten times or more larger
than would be needed to get to a comprehensive implementation of mouse
rejuvenation after the SENS Research Foundation model in ten to twenty years.
They are just largely not working on that. Amyloid removal is about the only
area that does have a lot of attention focused on it.

The next few decades will be a slow process of proving that the SENS model
works well, and that other models don't work well, when it comes to reversing
age-related disease and producing rejuvenation in older individuals. There
will be reluctant acceptance on the part of the mainstream, and development
will largely shift to what works, slowly and late.

This can be seen in its infancy today in the rapid progression of work on
senolytics. In just six years, clearance of senescent cells has already far
outpaced the past few decades of work on calorie restriction mimetics,
producing more impressive and reliable results in animal studies. Things that
work are hard to ignore, so everyone now retrofits senescent cells into their
models of aging and development - that didn't include them seven years ago -
and continues to try to ignore the rest of the SENS to-do list. Senolytics
development is becoming heavily funded, and is on its way to the clinic.

This process will reoccur every time the poorly funded bootstrapping side of
the SENS research community manages to advance to the point of a technology
demonstration, which happened in 2011 for cellular senescence. Expect this to
happen for cross-link breaking sometime in the next few years, which will be
just as impressive for cardiovascular aging as senescent cell clearance is for
inflammatory/fibrotic conditions of aging.

One would hope that at some point, some people involving in this process make
the realization that they could just implement the rest of SENS themselves,
with the successful biotech company they are involved in. There are a number
of existing companies/groups where this may well happen, if they grow
sufficiently large.

------
agumonkey
Allow me to ask this related question: of our modern (if I may say so)
societies, in our modern era; we see a lot of improvements and optimisations.
But I rarely see ideas about the simple question of happiness.

It's as if we think happinnes comes by x or y (in here longer existence).

~~~
p1mrx
Well, what would a society that optimizes for happiness actually do
differently?

~~~
danieltillett
Kill all the unhappy people. Such an action would be be the most effective way
of raising the average level of happiness.

No society should ever optimise for a single simple factor.

~~~
majewsky
That's Goodhart's law, by the way. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases
to be a good measure." Because people game it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

There's a related memorable, though probably untrue, anecdote about a Soviet
nail factory: [https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22375/did-a-
sov...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22375/did-a-soviet-nail-
factory-produce-useless-nails-to-improve-metrics)

~~~
danieltillett
It is not quite the same as Goodhart’s law as it is more a philosophical
position in that even if it was not possible to game, we should never do it.

~~~
agumonkey
it's odd because recently I felt most "modern" society is based on gaming
things until things break.

~~~
danieltillett
Yes that certain is true :)

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danieltillett
Deathism appear to be rather popular here on HN [0].

0\.
[https://hpluspedia.org/wiki/Deathism](https://hpluspedia.org/wiki/Deathism)

~~~
vedloseper
I think individual death is necessary for the greater of tapestry of life to
flourish and to be something worth being involved. Most great people I ever
knew or read seem to share this "live and let live" attitude. In contrast, the
individuals who really really want to live forever are the ones that bore me
to death after 5 minutes.

~~~
jimrandomh
Some people are boring, therefore everyone should die? Are you sure you've
thought that through?

------
jostmey
It is easier to market something as the "cure" than to actually discover and
_validate_ a cure

~~~
stochastic_monk
Just like, in spite of the fact that cancer cannot be cured, it’s a lot easier
to market research to “cure” it rather than “treat” it.

~~~
danieltillett
Of course cancer can be cured. What I wish we did is spend more on preventing
cnacer, but the regulatory system basically makes this impossible.

~~~
stochastic_monk
I don’t think so. Cancer is constantly being evolutionarily selected for.
Eventually it finds a way to circumvent the cell’s regulatory system. In a way
that you didn’t intend, you’re right it’s a problem with regulation.

It seems to me to be a truism, much more akin to thermodynamics than typical
biology.

~~~
danieltillett
Yes but we know from large long lived animals like elephants and bowhead
whales that the cancer rate can be very significantly reduced. If we had the
same anticancer systems as the bowhead whales basically no one would get
cancer even if they lived for a 1000 years. This is what we need to be working
on.

