People almost always guess my age as mid-20s, but suffice it to say that's not correct at all. Most of it comes down to my having assiduously avoided chronic stress my whole life, through various life choices (some would say sacrifices), which I will cover in more detail below. My take on anti-aging involves two aspects:
1) Avoiding unnatural aging
This means avoiding the unnatural things modern people do that speed up the aging process: spiking their insulin many times a day with sugary snacks, being sedentary, getting too much or too little sun, and allowing physical, chemical, or emotional stresses to build up.
2) Unnaturally avoiding aging
This means the more speculative, experimental process of trying to live unnaturally long by turning off programmed cell death, lengthening telomeres, etc. via supplementation or other novel regimens.
Things like "turning on longevity genes" could go in either category, depending on whether they are effected by natural means of more artificial means, but broadly speaking this dichotomy is important. That reason is, as LeBron James put it, "Father time is undefeated." We have no examples of people living an especially long time by using these new speculative techniques, and the science is very young. Meanwhile we have plenty of examples of people aging very prematurely due to modern excesses.
In addition, it's quite possible that attempts tried in the second category could backfire, resulting in faster aging. It's tempting to think we can just add a magic bullet that will extend our life, and maybe science has already discovered one, but until we know that for sure one might want to err on the side of caution and go ahead and take the decades of free anti-aging that are on the table when you switch from, say, the standard American diet to... well just about anything else.
However, I noticed people like talking about supplements. It's interesting science, and involves things like evolutionary biology ("Why would our DNA want us to die?") and other natural order-related things that might be able to be tied back to Bitcoin. Moreover, many supplements are of the class that compensate for modern excess or nearly unavoidable modern stresses like pollution, pesticides, radiation, job stress, chair sitting, nutrient-depleted food, and so on. These could be called "Unnatural Solutions to Unnatural Problems" (USUPs). They take an unnatural process to undo an unnatural burden. For example, taking more vitamin-C-complex vitamins than any ancient people would have consumed, in order to counter abnormal oxidation load due to modern stressors. Also, many of the supplements that seem to be in the second category, like resveratrol and astragalus, are from natural sources like grape skins.
For a person who is already pretty healthy, with a pretty good diet, no major sleep deprivation, no major toxin load or deficiencies, my general guesses as to the top effective strategies for anti-aging, after years of investigation and trying things, are as follows:
1) Minimize sources of emotional stress. If my job is stressing me out chronically by its nature, I quit it or find another way of making money. If a person is stressing me out, I'll probably stop hanging out with them. If I have some addiction, like to Bitcoin, I try to take plenty of breaks from it (really not doing a good job at that one recently
). There are of course great ways of coping, even thriving on stress and making these things work, but I have chosen an especially conservative path as I like my mental space to be very clear.
Get enough sleep, hopefully at a regular time. Mostly obvious stuff, but some people are chronically hard-driving, sometimes because they are running away from something mentally so distract themselves with staying too busy.
I could write a book on the psychological strategies I've found helpful, but this post is already long.
2) Cut the sugar and grains, especially refined grains. Probably most people know this already, but eating a lot of sugar is one of the fastest ways to age. Even things like fruit, in excess, can have similar effect. Vitamin C consumed with sugars/grains does mitigate a lot of the damage, I have heard, and it seems to jive with my experience.* It's to the extent that even the vitamin C in cheese makes cheese with toast usually better than just toast. The grain aspect is more controversial, but suffice it to say there is no way that modern grains are even prepared anywhere near properly for us to be thriving off them. I think certain people with well-functioning digestive tracts could benefit from traditional grains prepared in the traditional way, which you'd be hard-pressed to find in most supermarkets, possibly even in a health food store.
3) Fast regularly. This might seem daunting but it really isn't that hard, and the effects can be dramatic on many fronts. There are various kinds of fasting, such as water fasting, whey fasting, and juice fasting, and various types of schedules such as intermittent fasting where you skip breakfast every day, and maybe lunch, too, and block fasting where you might fast for days (some people even do weeks/months at a stretch; the anti-aging effect of longer fasts is controversial). See Dr. Jason Fung's blog and videos, which @Justus Ranvier linked, for a start on how water fasting affects aging, primarily through the lens of diabetes and obesity. As I mentioned, it's all connected. By the way, Fung and many others are also reaching the conclusion that snacking is going to age you very quickly indeed, contrary to popular trends toward eating all the time. The idea here isn't really to eat less, but to eat less often. (Which actually ends up with you eating less**, but it won't feel like that at all. I feel subjectively like I have to stuff my face as much as possible to just get my requisite calories if I eat only one meal a day; it's pretty epic feasting.)
4) Avoid junk food. Obvious, but makes a huge difference. Long story short, the unnatural oils and messed up proteins in various modern foods - even ones without sugar or refined grains - drive a large amount of inflammation at the organ and cellular level. This pushes the body toward all sorts of minor and major diseases, pretty much all of which speed up aging. There is controversy over what an ideal diet is, but any expert worth his or her salt will tell you to avoid modern atrocities like soybean/canola/safflower/corn/vegetable oil, trans fats, refined salt, unnaturally processed dairy, and deli meats with the weird additives.
I've personally found a low-carb, high-fat diet to be good most of the time, but changing up your diet is also a good idea so sometimes I will go high carb, sometimes fast, etc. As far as natural anti-aging, the idea is to keep forcing your cells to adapt. Cancer cells, for example, apparently have a very hard time adapting to the switch from high carb to low carb. It makes sense as our diet would have varied with the seasons, perhaps involving more fruit in the warm seasons and more fat in the winter, perhaps periods of fasting in the spring.
As far as unnatural anti-aging, ketogenic diets - which are extremely low carb and were probably part of natural seasonal eating variation for many ancient peoples - force your body to run on ketones, which "burn much cleaner" than carbohydrates. That cleaner burning is supposed to dramatically slow down the aging process. Whether it is a good idea to keep this up for extended periods of time is up for debate. Probably this would be a more unnatural or speculative anti-aging strategy, though I think the Inuit were pretty much always in keto. Perhaps depends on your ancestry.
5) Eat fermented foods. I don't mean just yoghurt and beer, although the best versions of those can be helpful, albeit carb-heavy. The powerhouses like real kefir (not the powdered mix stuff), natto, fermented cod liver oil, fermented butter and cheese from grass-fed cows, miso, kimchee, fermented salsa, etc. (The kefir, kimchee, and salsa should probably be made yourself, as it is very easy and cheap, and you can control the ingredients better.) Why do these help? Because your immune function, stress response, and level of inflammation are dramatically affected by the bacteria in your gut and all through your body, and most people are extremely deficient in bacterial variety.
I have found some good effect from probiotics like Primal Defense Ultra, but I doubt these are good for long-term use as they just have too few bacteria strains. You end up with a bacterial monoculture, or actually "oligoculture" of only several of the same strains in large quantities. For people who are deficient already, which is most people in advanced countries, these can work wonders for a while, but soon you'll want to move onto "the hard stuff" like those mentioned above, which may have hundreds of strains of bacteria and yeasts, and pack a huge nutritional punch.
6) Exercise. This means exercise more if you are sedentary, and less if you are an insane athlete (especially double-marathoner), as both will age you prematurely due to physical stress and any injuries you may sustain. The lymphatic system is a basically dependent on motion to move toxins through your body, for one thing, so right off the bad if you sit in a chair all day you are aging yourself more than necessary. Each kind of exercise has its own benefits: yoga, cardio, lifting, etc. The one that comes to mind most for anti-aging is High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), which stimulates growth hormone a ton while being very short and easy to fit in. I don't think you have to exercise a ton to get the maximum benefits, just do a variety. But I'm no expert and this is a controversial area.
Continued below...
1) Avoiding unnatural aging
This means avoiding the unnatural things modern people do that speed up the aging process: spiking their insulin many times a day with sugary snacks, being sedentary, getting too much or too little sun, and allowing physical, chemical, or emotional stresses to build up.
2) Unnaturally avoiding aging
This means the more speculative, experimental process of trying to live unnaturally long by turning off programmed cell death, lengthening telomeres, etc. via supplementation or other novel regimens.
Things like "turning on longevity genes" could go in either category, depending on whether they are effected by natural means of more artificial means, but broadly speaking this dichotomy is important. That reason is, as LeBron James put it, "Father time is undefeated." We have no examples of people living an especially long time by using these new speculative techniques, and the science is very young. Meanwhile we have plenty of examples of people aging very prematurely due to modern excesses.
In addition, it's quite possible that attempts tried in the second category could backfire, resulting in faster aging. It's tempting to think we can just add a magic bullet that will extend our life, and maybe science has already discovered one, but until we know that for sure one might want to err on the side of caution and go ahead and take the decades of free anti-aging that are on the table when you switch from, say, the standard American diet to... well just about anything else.
However, I noticed people like talking about supplements. It's interesting science, and involves things like evolutionary biology ("Why would our DNA want us to die?") and other natural order-related things that might be able to be tied back to Bitcoin. Moreover, many supplements are of the class that compensate for modern excess or nearly unavoidable modern stresses like pollution, pesticides, radiation, job stress, chair sitting, nutrient-depleted food, and so on. These could be called "Unnatural Solutions to Unnatural Problems" (USUPs). They take an unnatural process to undo an unnatural burden. For example, taking more vitamin-C-complex vitamins than any ancient people would have consumed, in order to counter abnormal oxidation load due to modern stressors. Also, many of the supplements that seem to be in the second category, like resveratrol and astragalus, are from natural sources like grape skins.
For a person who is already pretty healthy, with a pretty good diet, no major sleep deprivation, no major toxin load or deficiencies, my general guesses as to the top effective strategies for anti-aging, after years of investigation and trying things, are as follows:
1) Minimize sources of emotional stress. If my job is stressing me out chronically by its nature, I quit it or find another way of making money. If a person is stressing me out, I'll probably stop hanging out with them. If I have some addiction, like to Bitcoin, I try to take plenty of breaks from it (really not doing a good job at that one recently
). There are of course great ways of coping, even thriving on stress and making these things work, but I have chosen an especially conservative path as I like my mental space to be very clear.Get enough sleep, hopefully at a regular time. Mostly obvious stuff, but some people are chronically hard-driving, sometimes because they are running away from something mentally so distract themselves with staying too busy.
I could write a book on the psychological strategies I've found helpful, but this post is already long.
2) Cut the sugar and grains, especially refined grains. Probably most people know this already, but eating a lot of sugar is one of the fastest ways to age. Even things like fruit, in excess, can have similar effect. Vitamin C consumed with sugars/grains does mitigate a lot of the damage, I have heard, and it seems to jive with my experience.* It's to the extent that even the vitamin C in cheese makes cheese with toast usually better than just toast. The grain aspect is more controversial, but suffice it to say there is no way that modern grains are even prepared anywhere near properly for us to be thriving off them. I think certain people with well-functioning digestive tracts could benefit from traditional grains prepared in the traditional way, which you'd be hard-pressed to find in most supermarkets, possibly even in a health food store.
3) Fast regularly. This might seem daunting but it really isn't that hard, and the effects can be dramatic on many fronts. There are various kinds of fasting, such as water fasting, whey fasting, and juice fasting, and various types of schedules such as intermittent fasting where you skip breakfast every day, and maybe lunch, too, and block fasting where you might fast for days (some people even do weeks/months at a stretch; the anti-aging effect of longer fasts is controversial). See Dr. Jason Fung's blog and videos, which @Justus Ranvier linked, for a start on how water fasting affects aging, primarily through the lens of diabetes and obesity. As I mentioned, it's all connected. By the way, Fung and many others are also reaching the conclusion that snacking is going to age you very quickly indeed, contrary to popular trends toward eating all the time. The idea here isn't really to eat less, but to eat less often. (Which actually ends up with you eating less**, but it won't feel like that at all. I feel subjectively like I have to stuff my face as much as possible to just get my requisite calories if I eat only one meal a day; it's pretty epic feasting.)
4) Avoid junk food. Obvious, but makes a huge difference. Long story short, the unnatural oils and messed up proteins in various modern foods - even ones without sugar or refined grains - drive a large amount of inflammation at the organ and cellular level. This pushes the body toward all sorts of minor and major diseases, pretty much all of which speed up aging. There is controversy over what an ideal diet is, but any expert worth his or her salt will tell you to avoid modern atrocities like soybean/canola/safflower/corn/vegetable oil, trans fats, refined salt, unnaturally processed dairy, and deli meats with the weird additives.
I've personally found a low-carb, high-fat diet to be good most of the time, but changing up your diet is also a good idea so sometimes I will go high carb, sometimes fast, etc. As far as natural anti-aging, the idea is to keep forcing your cells to adapt. Cancer cells, for example, apparently have a very hard time adapting to the switch from high carb to low carb. It makes sense as our diet would have varied with the seasons, perhaps involving more fruit in the warm seasons and more fat in the winter, perhaps periods of fasting in the spring.
As far as unnatural anti-aging, ketogenic diets - which are extremely low carb and were probably part of natural seasonal eating variation for many ancient peoples - force your body to run on ketones, which "burn much cleaner" than carbohydrates. That cleaner burning is supposed to dramatically slow down the aging process. Whether it is a good idea to keep this up for extended periods of time is up for debate. Probably this would be a more unnatural or speculative anti-aging strategy, though I think the Inuit were pretty much always in keto. Perhaps depends on your ancestry.
5) Eat fermented foods. I don't mean just yoghurt and beer, although the best versions of those can be helpful, albeit carb-heavy. The powerhouses like real kefir (not the powdered mix stuff), natto, fermented cod liver oil, fermented butter and cheese from grass-fed cows, miso, kimchee, fermented salsa, etc. (The kefir, kimchee, and salsa should probably be made yourself, as it is very easy and cheap, and you can control the ingredients better.) Why do these help? Because your immune function, stress response, and level of inflammation are dramatically affected by the bacteria in your gut and all through your body, and most people are extremely deficient in bacterial variety.
I have found some good effect from probiotics like Primal Defense Ultra, but I doubt these are good for long-term use as they just have too few bacteria strains. You end up with a bacterial monoculture, or actually "oligoculture" of only several of the same strains in large quantities. For people who are deficient already, which is most people in advanced countries, these can work wonders for a while, but soon you'll want to move onto "the hard stuff" like those mentioned above, which may have hundreds of strains of bacteria and yeasts, and pack a huge nutritional punch.
6) Exercise. This means exercise more if you are sedentary, and less if you are an insane athlete (especially double-marathoner), as both will age you prematurely due to physical stress and any injuries you may sustain. The lymphatic system is a basically dependent on motion to move toxins through your body, for one thing, so right off the bad if you sit in a chair all day you are aging yourself more than necessary. Each kind of exercise has its own benefits: yoga, cardio, lifting, etc. The one that comes to mind most for anti-aging is High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), which stimulates growth hormone a ton while being very short and easy to fit in. I don't think you have to exercise a ton to get the maximum benefits, just do a variety. But I'm no expert and this is a controversial area.
Continued below...
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