Writing about longevity topics is overwhelming at times. It spans environment, psychology, chemistry, biology, medicine and more. Money is flying around at all levels, with big name billionaires funding companies and trying all sorts of wild stuff on themselves. Longevity treatments are like diets and cures for the common cold: there are a thousand and one opinions of what protocol has the biggest impact, and every one has gurus and acolytes, deniers and detractors.
Some treatments like metformin require a prescription for an actual condition: most doctors won’t write you a script for “getting older”. Others are just supplements where you need to wade through science podcasts and literature to decide for yourself whether you want to take them (google “NMN” or “sulforaphane” or “turmeric” and see what you find). Most have at least some science behind them, some not so much…
I was struck the other week when this post from a (very) well-to-do software CEO saw a lot of interest in the twittersphere:
Available to all.
The blueprint on his website says “available to all”, but is it really, and is that the best thing given our tendency to go all in on short term fixes? At first (and second) blush it’s overwhelming: 49 supplements during the course of a day (some repeated), interacting with 30 doctors, constant monitoring, to say nothing of the estimated $2M in cost. This is a lot. Yes there are things outlined that anyone can do but I fail to see how this is a good way to introduce most people to the How and Why of reducing our rate of aging.
In stark contrast are things like:
Dan Buettner talking about Blue Zones and the simple steps that communities can take to embrace longevity, like making their cities more walkable
Dr. Andy Galpin and Dr. Andrew Huberman talking about basic, simple ways that anyone can measure and take control of their strength and fitness
Michael Easter (author of The Comfort Crisis) talking about how we can make small, incremental improvements to our lifestyle and habits to longer, healthier lives
It’s easy for anyone - myself included - to get excited when we read things like “man reduces his body’s age by 5 years, process available to all”. It’s no different than “drop 15 pounds in a month” or “get ripped abs in 2 weeks” or “deal with all your mental health difficulties with this one pill” … or “Fountain of Youth Discovered”. It’s kinda like trying to fix everything by buying a lottery ticket. Not to say that’s entirely what Bryan Johnson did, but by the time it reaches us (or if we just read the headline) it ends up looking like he made an instant change to achieve a younger mind and body.
Something funny happened once humans realized that our comfortable new lifestyles were giving us strange new maladies like heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. We invented new methods to fight back. For example, “exercise” and “dieting” are all very modern ideas.
Today when we realize something is wrong—that we’re not exercising enough or eating too much, and so on and so forth—we lean into heroics. We pack extreme efforts into short stints. It’s a new trend in the grand scheme of time and space. This trend has often backfired.
The research suggests that .. doing slightly challenging things throughout the day not only adds up to larger changes, it can also offset some of the downsides of the extremes.
— 2-Percent Challenge, Michael Easter, author of “The Comfort Crisis”
Fuck short term fixes.
For the same reason that it’s not particularly helpful to lose a bunch of bodyfat and then just put it on again, there’s little benefit to racing to reduce our metabolic age all at once only to to have poor lifestyle choices negate those gains in the following months and years. Strong99 is all about making the longterm changes to help us thrive longer in life, not just going on a longevity crash diet. It’s in the Manifesto: FUCK short term fixes. They make it seem like soon we won’t have to deal with our problems anymore. That's bullshit. We acknowledge that the discomfort, the struggle, the change, and the growing will always be there.