I would not put much trust into some poorly-understood biomarkers, especially ones that have grandiose naming like epigenetic age. The naming alone implies more than I suspect these markers can deliver.
The price is also kinda ridiculous, $70 a day for meals and supplements.
Especially when an example of a biomarker is ability to hear out of the left ear. Yes, fixing that (if you could) could improve your quality of life, but unless there's a train coming from the left side, it won't make you live longer.
Those tests also seem ripe for the nocebo effect.
All this testing and measuring seems a coping mechanism for trying to find and control some sort of objective measures in squishy, uncertain, biology.
This screams of Goodhart’s Law, or gaming the metrics. Once you go around messing with biomarker of some disease (i.e., age) the metrics are no longer indicative of the underlying phenomenon.
You know what I find interesting. You pick any food or diet that you believe is healthy, and you'll find someone with some sort of credentials that will tell you otherwise.
Halfway through the article he brushes off hormetic effects. But it seems likely that a lot of things associated with health and longevity are probably hormetic.
Cold showers, hot baths, moderate exercise, low amounts of alcohol, intermittent fasting, low amounts of psychological stress... all have papers documenting beneficial effects with at least some speculating due to activating body's repair systems (hormesis).
Oh, and on the meat front, if you're into that, I'd suggest fish and birds, avoiding mammals due to the neu5gc autoimmune thing. Or at least, don't overdo it on the mammal.
<<Anyway, the idea that the beneficial effects of vegetables are due to plant defenses isn't an unusual idea
The beneficial effects of plant-based diets (according to Sinclair, podcasts) is due to lower activation of mTor by plant protein vs. animal protein (also apart
from various beneficial plant fibers, flavonols and polyphenols). Animal protein activates mTor most highly, and it is the inhibition of mTor (after main development) that correlates most robustly with healthspan.
To my best knowledge there is no benefit in low doses of alcohol.
The trick to make that visible was to exclude all those people who never drank any alcohol due to previous alcohol related health reason from the studies.
That increased health in the group of tee totaleres to such an extend that all seeming benefits of alcohol vanished.
It's hard to control for population effects for sure, but I don't think anyone has successfully done the control you stated. There are a ton of studies finding varying effects like improving "good" cholesterol, and reducing chance of coronary heart disease. But it's also been speculated to have hormetic effects, so just tossing it in there as a plausible. It wouldn't be surprising given how the vegetable thing might work.
Given alcohol crosses cultural and religious lines too, that also makes it harder to find unbiased analyses.
My personal rate of consumption is 125ml of red wine per day. That's just about in the sweet spot if there is one for beneficial effects. Also one of the better forms of alcohol for them. At any rate it's unlikely to do significant harm and is fun to consume. I'd like to note I have family members over 100 who drank red wine every day, and it might also be part of the "french paradox"
Human diets have been like that for as long as I remember. The whole cholesterol hysteria of the 90s? converted me to just not consider that science to be settled for decades. Eating a lot of veggies seems to have held up so far
Epigenetic clocks are really hit-and-miss and are mostly used at population levels and not a good way to measure changes in a single human. They may be accurate +/- 5 years, which he even says in his footnotes.
Which is not to say he didn't get a lot healthier, but the focus on biological age/epigenetic clocks seems to be more of a marketing instrument than anything else.
The muscle definition is impressive. I think there are less expensive ways to achieve this, though.
Some of the supplements are questionable here. I would be careful taking NADH supplements given some conflicting evidence of benefit.[0] I would also be careful about supplements in general given that perhaps half do not contain the main ingredient listed on the label and unlisted contaminants and fillers are often present.[1]
For someone familiar with the science can you comment on the typical uncertainty/variation in epigenetic age measurement? I love error bars, wish they were mandatory.
>Fitness Scores (ref: ACSM)
Scoring equal t to top 10% of 18 year olds in the following:
Bench press single rep max, 235lbs
Why are you comparing your max lifts against an 18 year old? Since when are they the ones lifting the most? This doesn't seem to indicate anything at all
It usually takes years of training to get to big weights and most 18 year olds don't lift at all so that "top 10%" statement is meaningless
I had a friend who was 150-160 with a 315 max so is it really?
Others who are that weight can hit 350+
To be able to bench over 200 you have to have done at least some chest/press training
That specific lift wasn't even what I took issue with, it was the fact that he's comparing himself against 18 year olds. The first lift was just left in my copy/paste
It’s better than not lifting but it’s nothing to brag about for sure. Most people I know who train or lift and are ~160lbs usually do 225lbs for reps (~5 or so).
I wouldn’t even comment on this, but did catch my eye and knocked some credibility points off / made me question significance of other metrics
Honestly, if you remove the ton of supplements he takes for dubious reason, only look at the meal and realise you can probably substitute some of the most expensive ingredients for similar but cheaper ones, it's just a fairly sane vegan diet: protein rich beans and grains, steamed greens, mushrooms, olive oil, fatty nuts.
Yeah that was my thought too when skimming over it ... A lot of it is just whole plant-based foods, and 90% of people will probably get all the benefit from just that, leaving aside all the supplements.
The one thing I think is good is the variety of ingredients/produce, and that can be fairly expensive (but probably not as expensive as what they're charging). You can do it cheaply if you live near a market, and have multiple people with a similar diet
The price is also kinda ridiculous, $70 a day for meals and supplements.