Are by far the simplest, cheapest, and most well documented way to extend life by quite a lot. We have lots of evidence to back calorie restriction. We know that eating more earlier in the day vs later means your insulin levels can recover better (or something?). We know eating certain types of fats is bad for you, and eating certain types of other things are good for you. Exercise, or at least the right kind of exercise (seems like there are open questions here, like how much is actually important) is healthy.
Then there are a number of pills you can take. When it comes to the pills we have a lot less evidence. From what I've seen there are probably a dozen or so pills, each one with bits and pieces of science surrounding them, that will maybe have some impact on mortality or aging. Some of the research does seem quite compelling - niacin, for example, seems to be pretty well researched and is actually prescribed at times. Niacin is also one of the pills you'll see come up a lot if you start looking into anti-aging. Others like resveratrol (which, actually, appears to be old news - people have moved on, it seems, to more bioavailable substances) have a lot less research, though they're promising.
If you're willing to spend 100-200 dollars a month or so it seems that you can get most or all of these. I don't think any research has been done on what taking all of these will do to you, but there is research on how the chemicals behave and I suppose from there people seem to draw conclusions on interactions.
Interestingly, from what I've read a lot of the popular "anti aging" trends like anti-oxidants are, more or less, very much debunked. My understanding is that while anti-oxidants absolutely do what their name implies in a lab setting, most of them tend to not do a damn thing in humans with regards to oxidation. So who knows what is or isn't going to work.
From my layman understanding, if you're ~20 years old you can basically just not fuck up super hard and wait another decade and we'll know a lot more. If you're 30, definitely start taking health seriously but maybe don't worry so much about downing 50 supplements that only have a bit of backing research. If you're 40 and above, and your goal is life extension... you might have to take a gamble.
If you're interested, I found this channel quite interesting - I appreciated the guy always citing studies (and he explicitly calls out why he thinks the study is or is not high quality).
This FAQ definitely seems to be a good 'one stop shop' for learning the state of things, without being prescriptive.
I'm not a doctor. I just got interested in the last few weeks about this stuff. None of this is without risk - that much is obvious. Only just the other day I was reading a post by someone who ended up in the hospital with liver failure that very possibly could have been tied to their supplementation. If you start taking pills that you don't understand you seem very likely to fuck things up - some pills require that you take other pills also, for example lots of nootropics will fuck you up if you don't get enough choline in your diet. All of this is to say, there's cool and promising stuff here, but do your own research, and if you're very young and healthy don't stress about this stuff yet - the first step is always diet and exercise.
I agree with everything you’ve written there, apart from the idea that diet & exercise will extend your life by quite a lot, and the idea that you’ll have to gamble with interventions now if you’re in your 40s. There’s simply no behaviour or treatment today that will significantly extend the maximum human lifespan; unfortunately doing so will require years of scientific and technological innovation. Even caloric restriction looks monumentally feeble as an intervention, especially weighed against the effort involved.
As you say, one big question is how to do a wait calculation for your own personal timeline – at some point (we hope) the interventions will get more efficacious and have fewer adverse effects. The skill (luck?) will be judging when the benefits outweigh the risks for your personal circumstances, as your body ages and your risk profile increases. But at this point in history, there’s no evidence that we’re anywhere near a longevity escape velocity scenario, and your couple of years extra life from present day efforts should be enjoyed on its own terms, not as some sort of key to unlocking immortality.
I think that last part is leaned on heavily by this industry to oversell things to people; it amounts to little more than religious faith at this point in history. They are selling what they have to hand, but when we try to judge those interventions objectively, they’re just not that effective (including diet & exercise).
They are ahead of the beauty-led anti-aging industry in that they are at least doing science, so there is hope for the future.
> apart from the idea that diet & exercise will extend your life by quite a lot
But there's quite a lot of research on this?
> and the idea that you’ll have to gamble with interventions now if you’re in your 40s
You don't have to. Feel free not to. But if your goal is life extension based on research, you only have what's available today, and around your 40s is, again from my layman reading, when your body starts to really age hard.
> There’s simply no behaviour or treatment today that will significantly extend the maximum human lifespan
If you're saying "living past 125" isn't possible even if you start now, sure, but longevity is more about feeling 40 when you're 60, avoiding potential issues like heart attacks and alzheimers, etc. It is not about living forever as you seem to be saying, and maybe that's a larger misconception. Living longer, sure, but mostly it's about living better.
I haven't seen a single person, anywhere, in everything I've read, saying "I'm trying to live forever". They're all saying "I don't want dimentia, I don't want a heart attack, I want to walk around and travel and live life well at 70 and 80".
And as for life extension, there's actually plenty of research on things you can do to extend your life. Again, not past 125, but past 70 - diet, exercise, niacin, etc are all pretty well established.
> but when we try to judge those interventions objectively, they’re just not that effective (including diet & exercise).
This doesn't seem to actually be the case. I'm surprised anyone would say that intervention treatments for something like avoiding heart disease aren't effective.
Yes, the numerous studies and meta-analyses I’ve seen suggest an effect of between 1–10 years of healthy lifespan added. That’s certainly not nothing, but considering that life expectancy at birth is around 80 years in developed countries, you’re talking about something that represents 1/8 of that context.
around your 40s is [...] when your body really starts to age hard
I guess from a technical standpoint, you’re really ageing from birth. You certainly start to see the Gompertz curve start to bite in your 40s though, as the net metabolic damage starts to compound.
Living longer, sure, but mostly it’s about living better
I’ve never really understood this argument. Avoiding the diseases of ageing will ultimately lengthen your life. Avoiding them all indefinitely would lengthen your life almost indefinitely (there is still a non-zero risk of dying without ageing of course).
Look, death and disease are scary. They’re existential threats. Focusing on diet and exercise is great fun, has a host of incidental benefits, and returns the locus of control to yourself; however it cannot do all that much to really deflect the asteroid of ageing in the long run. I just want people to be aware of what the magnitude of the effects actually are, and not get sucked into the hype machine. I suppose sometimes it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive...I certainly hope that the state of the art advances fast enough to save us all, and that’s basically based on nothing. Supplements like Niacin are just a flat-out bust: https://www.cochrane.org/CD009744/VASC_niacin-people-or-with...
In fact, it’s highly improbable that any one oral drug or supplement will significantly alter the core pathology of ageing (and therefore reduce the risk of all age-related disease in one go). That’s because the human body is a highly complex, tightly-coupled system that is not designed to be reverse-engineered or modified, and because the soma and the germ line split so long ago.
The evidence on exercise is extremely poor. In cultures that promote athleticism the sheer willingness to exercise correlates so strongly with healthiness that it's extremely hard to control for. And even then meta studies give you at best only a few extra years.
Exercise itself is a risky activity. Over a lifetime the risk of injury is non-trivial.
Studies that go against this pro-exercise bias are usually ignored[0].
> (seems like there are open questions here, like how much is actually important)
Yes, see this part of my post. It does seem that lots of types of exercise are not at all necessary for health.
This trial, for example, shows that HIIT for 3 intervals of 2-3 minutes had better impact than HIIT for 4 intervals of 4 minutes. So obviously there's still a lot to learn.
There's also research showing impact on blood glucose levels when you exercise before/ after eating, etc. "Exercise" is a big lump of a term, but there's a massive amount of research into different kinds - far more research than with almost any of the pills you can take.
Oh, there's absolutely a huge body of evidence showing exercise has "beneficial" effects on this or that measure. But it's hard to go from there and claim a huge life expectancy increase.
> There's also research showing impact on blood glucose levels when you exercise before/ after eating, etc. "
And we had studies showing that fructose has undesirable effects in that area. But so far most studies tracking food consumption in real life situations don't show anything bad happening.
Most of the world already believes exercise must be good for you, how many researchers are designing studies trying to uncover negative effects? Probably very few.
When most studies struggle badly to show anything above 5 extra years it's in the placebo category. Optimism might as well get you more [0].
Longevity studies in humans are pretty hard. You have to wait until the person dies. So instead signals are used, like "had non fatal heart attacks", if you're lucky. Most signals are going to instead be closer to "lowered or raised some metric that, from other research, we believe will lead to longevity".
I don't know how many papers there are on negative vs positive effects of exercise, but HIIT has had plenty of research done explicitly to determine safety, or to see if there are more effective exercises with lower rates of injury.
No question that there are very, very few studies that are directly "X leads to longer or better life", it's just "X leads to Y, we separately think Y leads to a longer or better life". Of course that's not as good... but it's a symptom of those studies being expensive and difficult.
They are hard, but we do have some. And even the most naive physical activity level vs all-cause-mortality studies show a mild effect at best. No controls.
Common sense would tell you that physical activity has to spuriously correlate with healthiness. Many conditions will simply render you unable (or less able) to exercise.
So what are the odds a properly designed longitudinal study would actually yield a bigger life expectancy increase? Seems very unlikely to me. The ones that we do have set an upper bound as far as I'm concerned. Almost certainly has to be lower.
I understand that you're talking about a specific kind of exercise and most of what's out there doesn't speak to that. But nonetheless I'd be very skeptical given how little effect has been shown for general physical activity. And we do have plenty of similar studies showing random benefits of various exercises in a clinical setting.
* What you eat
* When you eat
* How much you eat
* Exercise
Are by far the simplest, cheapest, and most well documented way to extend life by quite a lot. We have lots of evidence to back calorie restriction. We know that eating more earlier in the day vs later means your insulin levels can recover better (or something?). We know eating certain types of fats is bad for you, and eating certain types of other things are good for you. Exercise, or at least the right kind of exercise (seems like there are open questions here, like how much is actually important) is healthy.
Then there are a number of pills you can take. When it comes to the pills we have a lot less evidence. From what I've seen there are probably a dozen or so pills, each one with bits and pieces of science surrounding them, that will maybe have some impact on mortality or aging. Some of the research does seem quite compelling - niacin, for example, seems to be pretty well researched and is actually prescribed at times. Niacin is also one of the pills you'll see come up a lot if you start looking into anti-aging. Others like resveratrol (which, actually, appears to be old news - people have moved on, it seems, to more bioavailable substances) have a lot less research, though they're promising.
If you're willing to spend 100-200 dollars a month or so it seems that you can get most or all of these. I don't think any research has been done on what taking all of these will do to you, but there is research on how the chemicals behave and I suppose from there people seem to draw conclusions on interactions.
Interestingly, from what I've read a lot of the popular "anti aging" trends like anti-oxidants are, more or less, very much debunked. My understanding is that while anti-oxidants absolutely do what their name implies in a lab setting, most of them tend to not do a damn thing in humans with regards to oxidation. So who knows what is or isn't going to work.
From my layman understanding, if you're ~20 years old you can basically just not fuck up super hard and wait another decade and we'll know a lot more. If you're 30, definitely start taking health seriously but maybe don't worry so much about downing 50 supplements that only have a bit of backing research. If you're 40 and above, and your goal is life extension... you might have to take a gamble.
If you're interested, I found this channel quite interesting - I appreciated the guy always citing studies (and he explicitly calls out why he thinks the study is or is not high quality).
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpcvPcHJVOkO9Qp79BOagTg
This FAQ definitely seems to be a good 'one stop shop' for learning the state of things, without being prescriptive.
I'm not a doctor. I just got interested in the last few weeks about this stuff. None of this is without risk - that much is obvious. Only just the other day I was reading a post by someone who ended up in the hospital with liver failure that very possibly could have been tied to their supplementation. If you start taking pills that you don't understand you seem very likely to fuck things up - some pills require that you take other pills also, for example lots of nootropics will fuck you up if you don't get enough choline in your diet. All of this is to say, there's cool and promising stuff here, but do your own research, and if you're very young and healthy don't stress about this stuff yet - the first step is always diet and exercise.