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Our DNA is not our destiny.
Youth → broken DNA → genome instability → disruption of DNA packaging and gene regulation (the epigenome) → loss of cell identity → cellular senescence → disease → death.
After twenty-five years of researching aging and having read thousands of scientific papers, if there is one piece of advice I can offer, one surefire way to stay healthy longer, one thing you can do to maximize your lifespan right now, it’s this: eat less often.
In animal studies, the key to engaging the sirtuin program appears to be keeping things on the razor’s edge through calorie restriction—just enough food to function in healthy ways and no more. This makes sense. It engages the survival circuit, telling longevity genes to do what they have been doing since primordial times: boost cellular defenses, keep organisms alive during times of adversity, ward off disease and deterioration, minimize epigenetic change, and slow down aging.
A popular method is to skip breakfast and have a late lunch (the 16:8 diet). Another is to eat 75 percent fewer calories for two days a week (the 5:2 diet). If you’re a bit more adventurous, you can try skipping food a couple of days a week (Eat Stop Eat), or as the health pundit Peter Attia does, go hungry for an entire week every quarter.
Study after study has demonstrated that heavily animal-based diets are associated with high cardiovascular mortality and cancer risk.
When researchers studied the telomeres in the blood cells of thousands of adults with all sorts of different exercise habits, they saw a striking correlation: those who exercised more had longer telomeres.
One recent study found that those who ran four to five miles a week—for most people, that’s an amount of exercise that can be done in less than 15 minutes per day—reduce their chance of death from a heart attack by 40 percent and all-cause mortality by 45 percent.33 That’s a massive effect.
exposing your body to less-than-comfortable temperatures is another very effective way to turn on your longevity genes.
Another thing you can try is activating the mitochondria in your brown fat by being a bit cold. The best way to do this might be the simplest—a brisk walk in a T-shirt on a winter day in a city such as Boston will do the trick. Exercising in the cold, in particular, appears to turbocharge the creation of brown adipose tissue.52 Leaving a window open overnight or not using a heavy blanket while you sleep could help, too.
It’s true: there are no biological, chemical, or physical laws that say life must end. Yes, aging is an increase in entropy, a loss of information leading to disorder. But living things are not closed systems. Life can potentially last forever, as long as it can preserve critical biological information and absorb energy from somewhere in the universe.
We’ve known for a long time that greater parental age is a risk factor for disease in the next generation. That’s the power of epigenetics. But mice treated with rapamycin buck this trend. When researchers from the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases inhibited mTOR in mice born to older fathers, the negative impact of having an old parent went away.
Recent results indicate high blood sugar can also speed up the epigenetic clock.
chemical derivatives of them, are produced in abundance by stressed plants; we get resveratrol from grapes, aspirin from willow bark, metformin from lilacs, epigallocatechin gallate from green tea, quercetin from fruits, and allicin from garlic.
And because NAD is used by over five hundred different enzymes, without any NAD, we’d be dead in thirty seconds.
Treatments that work through insulin or mTOR signaling typically favor females, whereas chemical therapies typically favor males, and no one really knows why.8
A similar story is being written about the failed blood pressure drug Gencaro. It worked well on a subset of the population and, if revived by the FDA, would become the first heart drug to require a genetic test.
I’ve noticed a definite tendency to eat fewer calories, reduce animal-based aminos, engage in more exercise, and stoke the development of brown fat by embracing a life outside the thermoneutral zone.
United Nations demographers anticipate that our total global population will plateau, reaching about 11 billion people by the year 2100, then stop and drop from there.55
“Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future,”
The cost of an innovative medicine to prevent diabetes: $147,199. Of a cancer treatment: $498,809. Of a pacemaker: $1,403,740. Of an “antiaging compound” that would extend healthy years by a decade: a mere $8,790. Goldman’s numbers support an idea that should be common sense: that there is no cheaper way to address the health care crisis than to address aging at its core.
Most people who want immortality are not afraid of death. They just love life. They love their family. They love their careers. They would love to see what the future holds.
those who believe they are happy and secure in their careers can enjoy what has come to be known as “a miniretirement”—a year off to travel, learn a language or musical instrument, volunteer, or refresh and reconsider the ways in which they are spending their lives.
so if I do take a supplement, I look for a large manufacturer with a good reputation, seek highly pure molecules (more than 98 percent is a good guide), and look for “GMP” on the label, which means the product was made under “good manufacturing practices.” Nicotinamide riboside, or NR, is converted to NMN, so some people take NR instead of NMN because it is cheaper. Cheaper still are niacin and nicotinamide, but they don’t seem to raise NAD levels as NMN and NR do.
