That’s me for 2/4. Bacon and Booze.

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You mentioned that you believe you could live to 130, and if you’d started earlier, even to 150. The idea of living to such an age seems highly improbable.

Highly improbable but not impossible given our current understanding.
We don’t even know if rapamycin can actually extend human life like it can in rats up to 60% That ALONE would translate to roughly about 130 year life span for a typical Japanese male without any other intervention.

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While I think rapamycin is great - that 60% number that many people quote is very misleading. That is the percent increase on “remaining lifespan”, for example if you give rapamycin to an 80 year old person (or group of people) and their regular life expectancy is 85, and the Rapamycin-dosed group lives to 89 that would be an 80% increase (89-80 = 9 years total, which is 4 years more than the 5 years expected, so 4 over the 5 years expected = 80%).

See:

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I guess the longest life extension was in C. elegans.

C Elegans adult somatic cells don’t divide. Hence mitochondrial issues drive their aging without senescence.

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That is not a question that is simple, if by simple you mean not subject to different interpretations. Especially if your question is seen in the context of your whole original post and my response to it.

You listed eight interventions. At best - and this is being speculative and charitable - only one of them might affect some of your body systems. Possibly not even that single one.

Before we go any further, let me get one thing out of the way. This is the internet, and not a real life conversation, so it is easy to misinterpret tone. I am on your side. I am an ally. I - desperately - want you to be right. We are in the same boat. We are facing the same enemy. We only differ in how we assess the best means and prospects of fighting our common enemy. What I post, is only with the best intention of helping to illuminate the path forward, not to “win” an internet argument, or be a contrarian, or engage in pointless scoring. I’m passionate about the fight, and so I post with energy and at length, but only in service to the ultimate goal of improving health and lifespan. So before I go any further, I extend - metaphorically - my hand in friendship: we have no beef, only a common search for truth and solutions, peace!

The only intervention on your list that has a chance to prolong max lifespan in humans by slowing down aging, is rapamycin. It is highly speculative, because we must make a distinction between prolonging mean lifespan of a cohort and max lifespan, and in mice the strongest signal for life prolongation with rapamycin was mean lifespan, i.e. having more mice achieve “old age” than if there was no intervention. But for max lifespan, the only intervention that has been shown conclusively to work in more complex animals to slow down the aging process and thus prolong max lifespan, not just mean lifespan, is CR. And an intervention you notably - and perhaps ironically - have not listed in your collection.

Note one thing about extending max lifespan - the simpler the organism, the easier it is to have a dramatic impact. In a worm that has many fewer and less complex systems than higher animals, you can prolong lifespan by 300% with all kinds of interventions, drug, genetic, food restriction etc. In mice you can get about 50% or so (with CR - about 30% with rapamycin). In dogs, cats, cows etc., possibly by 10%-15% - we hope (hasn’t been proven yet). In monkeys and especially humans, currently we have no proof - none - that any intervention, including CR (one of the two monkey CR trials failed to extend max lifespan) or rapamycin or anything else can extend max lifespan.

So, in granting you that rapamycin might extend max lifespan, I am doing so without proof, out of hope more than anything else. I too am looking to take rapamycin, and obviously I would love for it to work. But there is currently no proof in humans - or even dogs.

All your interventions at best might improve healthspan. But as the recent mouse CR study concluded, lifespan and healthspan, though related, are not the same. Being in better health might let you achieve - at best - the full potential of your lifespan - but not beyond.

Shockingly, being currently in better health, might NEGATIVELY affect your lifespan, might shorten it, through a similar modality as antagonistic pleiotropy. This is not a mere theoretical possibility - this is something that is actively discussed when scientists argue over whether there’s a U curve with exercise. You might be fitter, and stronger, and have lower mortality risk, but it might come at the cost of a shorter life. We have seen proof of that in CR studies. Exercised animals are more robust, stronger than CR’d animals, but at the extreme edge of CR, those more fragile CR’d (“in worse health”) handily outlive those healthier stronger exercised non-CR mice. The longest lived were the non-exercising extreme CR’d mice (where introducing exercise shortened their lives, thus exercise was a strongly lifespan negative intervention). Which is why in that recent mouse study they have made such a strong point of decoupling healthspan from lifespan - because it is counterintuitive to most people, I mean what’s more natural, than to think that the healthier you are the longer you will live. But it’s just not so in animals like rats/mice at least. And likely in humans - healthspan and lifespan are loosely coupled and at points divergent and decoupled. Exercise has been shown to definitely square the survival curve - it will keep you healthy and you won’t die prematurely - but it will not, repeat, NOT prolong your life. We have seen that in CR studies too - and as the mouse study pointed out. Note one interesting thing about those statistics that folks like Peter Attia like to pull out about exercise - like the VO2Max you mention in your list of interventions - the higher the VO2Max, the lower your mortality risk. Same (up to a point) with muscle mass and other fitness markers. But what does it mean? It means you are healthier - you have better healthspan - and during that period of time, your chances of dying are lower, your mortality risk goes down. But what it does not mean is that you will live longer than is your physiological limit. What it means, is your odds of dying prematurely is lowered, not that the date of your death is postponed beyond your physiological limits, that you have slowed the rate of your aging by any percentage (as you are hoping in your interventions). To slow the rate of aging, to die later than your physiological limit, you need pharmaceutical interventions or better yet, genetic manipulation - with the possible exception of CR (in humans). None of your interventions - with the possible exception of rapamycin - prolong lifespan by slowing down the aging rate as you posit.

A few points about your interventions, they address healthspan, and so do prevent many premature failures of many systems. Absolutely true. But that is not what we were talking about we were talking about extending life by slowing down the rate of aging (your hope/claim) - and that is not affected by those interventions (rapa possibly excepted). One may even argue that perhaps - perhaps - some are even dangerous, like exercise (if beyond a certain point), and might shorten your lifespan (this is speculation: we don’t know that, and your regimen is not clear enough about the degree of intensity).

The reality is that these types of interventions, broadly speaking lifestyle, diet, exercise, sleep etc., are all at best going to allow you to age to your natural limit. They will prevent accellerated aging. Like you said in your last intervention: don’t do the stupid stuff like smoking. Smoking accellerates aging. A bad diet and a totally sedentary lifestyle will shorten your life. But doing all those things right, will not lengthen your life beyond its physiological limit (by slower aging), it will prevent the shortening of it. An exercised muscle is no aging slower (beyond its physiological limit), exercise is lowering the rate of accelerated aging - old people move less than young people and their muscles actually are subject to accelerated aging, and excercise is slowing accellerated aging, not basic aging, because your muscle tissues still age. And so on for all the other interventions - they slow the rate of accellerated aging, not basic aging. To affect the rate of basic aging you need CR, perhaps rapamycin - and ultimately other drugs and genetic interventions.

There is an additional wrinkle here with the interventions such as yours centered around lifestyle factors - there is a point beyond which they don’t get you any further. You only need to exercise so much to not die prematurely - if your physiological limit is, say 95, you’ll die at 95 if you merely exercised “enough”, and being fitter yet, will only allow you to lower your risk of mortality, i.e. make it more certain that you will actually reach that 95, but still not take you beyond 95. Same with diet - you eat “well enough” and it will let you reach that 95, and eathing “brilliantly” will not get you one second longer, though maybe you’ll have better healthspan during that period of time. Same with all those minute tweaks that we all make to our heath regimens, supplements and the like - that aged garlic supplement or some tiny change in your morning routine is not adding years to your life, though if lucky, adding life to your years as the saying goes. And it is in this spirit that I admire those super exercisers like Peter Attia (and you!), but I jog at my relaxed pace with occasional spurts of HIIT, and let those better than me athletes pass me by, and I smile, untroubled by my sloth. I reckon we’ll all reach the same finish line - our inherent physiological limits. Same with diet. I eat a very healthy diet, because I like how it makes me feel. But I realize that I could eat only adequately, and live just as long. And so I feel zero guilt about that occasional fancy meal, or cookie, or glass of wine, because that will not shorten my life by one second. You can have a good healthspan up to your 95, or you can have brilliant healthspan up to your 95 - the question is, are you willing to sacrifice a lot for that brillance - not me. Although, caveat, like with my diet, if you enjoy exercise (I don’t!), it’s not a sacrifice.

By the way, real life has verified that in spades. If super healthy eating, exercising etc., were really affecting the natural limits of our physiology, you’d find health nuts overrepresented among supecentanarians. Yet, that is not so. In fact, it is often the opposite - we see a lot of very, very bad lifestyle choices among them (like the recent 110 year old who smoked for 20 years and never exercised), tons and tons of them have very iffy diets - frankly bad diets. Because it is the genes that set the limit, and lifestyle factors at best let you affect your healthspan in that time. If your body is built for 115, you will hit that number in better or worse health regardless of your lifestyle (up to a point, obviously, no 600 pound weight!). And if built for 78, that’s what you will hit no matter how much of a health nut you are - "strange, he died so early, he was such a paragon of good lifestyle, “strange, diagnosed with cancer despite exemplary lifestyle”). Your interventions will not affect lifespan, only healthspan (at best!) - rapa a possible exception.

Bottom line: we need more than the interventions you listed. We need true anti-aging drugs in addition to drugs/interventions addressing our weakest links, and ultimately genetic interventions (sadly, not in our lifetimes).

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Don’t forget about medications such as SGLT2 inhibitors that have also shown promise in human clinical trials.

But for max lifespan, the only intervention that has been shown conclusively to work in more complex animals to slow down the aging process and thus prolong max lifespan, not just mean lifespan, is CR.

For which the evidence is not overwhelmingly good in humans or apes.

You might be fitter, and stronger, and have lower mortality risk, but it might come at the cost of a shorter life

What would even be the rationale behind this? There are plenty of studies indicating that exercised male mice live longer lives on average than non-exercised mice.

Exercise has been shown to definitely square the survival curve - it will keep you healthy and you won’t die prematurely - but it will not, repeat, NOT prolong your life.

You mean beyond the maximum lifespan for a species or beyond the median lifespan? Because I’m certain the latter isn’t true.

But what it does not mean is that you will live longer than is your physiological limit.

In a non-lab environment, non-exercised humans doing CR will be killed by infections prior to reachign their physiological limit.

Your interventions will not affect lifespan, only healthspan (at best!) - rapa a possible exception.

If you are destined to die from heart disease at 80 due to genetics and take statins at age 20, you would easily life another 5-10 years until cancer gets you.

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Very well said - always bears repeating. Its very easy to mis-read peoples tone, so valuable to add some explanatory text. Thanks!

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Yes, like I said, exercise will square the survival curve - it will maximise the chance for you to reach your physiological limits (not beyond). So correct, exercised mice will live longer than non-exercised mice (which you could say have accelerated aging), but not non-exercised severely CR’d mice.

And so on. Squaring the curve, not extending. For extending, we need more than lifestyle interventions.

And correct about drugs addressing our weakest links. The weakest link will kill us every time.

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I listed eight groups of interventions.

Agree, this is a just discussion not a fight.

It’s implied in nutrient density of the food and I wasn’t impressed by the primate data, it seems like it depended on sort of food they were fed… not much difference if they were fed high nutrient density food.

Conflating Vo2 max with amount of exercise is a common mistake, it’s not a simple linear curve. Therefore obviously you can exercise someone to death, but achieving high Vo2 max is a proper balance between well executed types of exercise and recovery (and genetics).

What evidence do you have to support that statement ? We don’t know what that limit is. I think you are trying to change the goalpost by creating a rather obscure “lengthen your life beyond its physiological limit”. Because clearly those interventions extend life. You cannot use an unknown as a goal post.

You are focusing on hyped media sound bytes not actual evidence

I think you are not giving enough credit to the interventions that we already have. For example, Prostatic cancer kills men mostly very late in life, finasteride reduces the chances of prostatic cancer thus it can extend your life. Adding all of the interventions together will have a compounding effect on one’s health and can you give you a longer life, if only maybe up to that mythical physiological limit that we are yet to find.

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Re: VO2Max, yes, it’s not just the result of exercise, since you can affect it just by losing weight :slight_smile:, I was mentioning it as a shortcut without getting into subtleties.

Wrt. physiological limit - it’s akin to MK’s 900 day rule for mice and 15 day rule for worms and whatnot. If you do your mouse husbandry well, your mouse will live on average about 900 days. There will be a few outliers that will last longer, but that’s what the lifespan of the mouse is. You can affect that lifespan negatively through a bad diet, stress, sleep deprivation, ciracadian rhythm perturbations (very common in labs!), but if you get all those right, you don’s suddenly get a 1500 day mouse. You still get a 900 mouse on average plus a few genetically lucky outliers. Same for humans. That’s why I said lifestyle interventions don’t extend human life anymore than any other animal, mouse, worm, dog or monkey. No human or animal can be pointed to and said: we exercised and fed well the subject and got 120 years or 1500 days, or 50 days. There’s a physiological limit that cannot be overcome by lifestyle interventions, though drugs in simpler animals (worms, flies etc.), definitely yes, mice probably.

CR and primates - 100% agreement. Crappy diet, overeating vs CR is not the same as optimal lifestyle vs CR - that still needs to be studied and the evidence so far is mixed (in primates and humans).

Drugs to address our weakest links: 100% agreement. That’s in fact the first line approach to delaying death by repairing damage and faults. Of course a more global approach, that of slower basic aging (as you get, in f.ex. naked molerat) is a different kettle of fish and there maybe rapa is an actor. We need more. But using pharma or other interventions to fix weakest link - totally, absolutely true.

Anecdotal evidence wrt. centenarians. The numbes speak for themselves. There are researchers dedicated to studying centenarians (Nir Barzilai, f.ex.), and they will tell you exactly the same thing: the cents and supercents are all over the place with exercise and diet, and the vast majority are not health nuts, with a considerable portion having outright bad habits/diets.

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It is my understanding that naked mole rats don’t just age slower, they don’t age at all. Death rates are relatively constant by age which indicates that no aging has occured at all.

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Yes, while it’s possible you will live to 130, it’s a stretch to think that just taking rapamycin and finasteride will do that. Rapamycin has shown promising results in animal models like rats, but human data is inconsistent. For instance, two of the biggest proponents—Alan Green and Blagosklonny—passed away at ages below the average lifespan for high income white males in NY. And more recent studies like Pearl haven’t demonstrated improvements in human longevity.

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You just made my point. We don’t have controlled studies of humans kept in a laboratory to figure out the physiological limit. Consider this…

In well-maintained specific-pathogen-free animals, C57BL/6 mice should live 26-30 months on average. Mice in nature live 3-4 months on average and up to 18 months at the most.

So the laboratory mice live 10X (1000%) longer than wild mice on average… if you were to extrapolate this to humans, you would get 800 years ! :rofl: OK that’s a hell of a hyperbole because most humans have higher standard of living than wild mice, but all of a sudden a mere 60% (up to 130) increase doesn’t seem like a stretch.

BTW “pathogen free” may be the KEY to the extreme longevity - there are countless studies linking microbes to either the infection or the immune response mediated damage to the body, that can last for life time. For example, new emerging model for Alzheimer’s disease may end up being pathogen induced, that would join a long list of conditions with similar pathophysiology. So yes if kept pathogen free humans in labs for their lifetime I wouldn’t be surprised if they lived MUCH, MUCH LONGER.

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I would argue that the best dataset we have right now is from the marmoset study by Adam Salmon, where they are looking at 10% to 15% lifespan improvement. And this is with only a single longevity therapeutic, with unoptimized dosing (no optimal dosing strategy in primates has been evaluated). Does anyone really want to bet against all the other potential drugs; canagliflozin, acarbose, 17-alpha estradiol / estriol, etc.? So, at that point the 130 years seems like a not-unreasonable goal.

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Agree. I mean the Japanese are testing a monoclonal antibody biologic to REGROW TEETH… SIGN ME UP ! That sounds like crazy Science Fiction and yet here we are. The pace of research and discovery in the longevity field is accelerating.

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Animal studies often tell us very little about human outcomes. We’ve seen the same excitement around NAD, fisetin, metformin, and now rapamycin, but none have proven effective for human lifespan extension. It’s similar to hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for COVID—initial hype, but no solid results in humans. Betting on 130 years based on these studies is premature.

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Reasonable people can disagree on this, but I personally find the data compelling.

Rapamycin has consistently worked in every model organism its been tested in, typically with about 15% to 30% lifespan improvement:

  1. Yeast
  2. C. Elegans (worms)
  3. Drosophila (fruit flies)
  4. Mice
  5. Rats
  6. Marmosets (primates)

So - its not just mice.

Also - the statement “not proven effective for human lifespan” is true, but misleading. Will we (in our lifespans) ever have anything truly “proven” effective for human lifespan extension? What would that look like? How many people, in how large a study? It remains to even be defined - so I don’t expect thats a bar that any of us will see crossed in our lifetimes, but it doesn’t mean something doesn’t likely work do do this…

Regarding things working in mice, but not in humans…

Most of the mouse models are not very good models for the diseases they are trying to mimic. See more here as an example of this problem: The trouble with mice as behavioral models for Alzheimer’s | STAT

In biology of aging research the situation is vastly different; nobody is creating a special mouse model of aging. These are regular (within a range of specified sources) mice, doing regular aging. So - the “aging model” has to be accurate, because people aren’t genetically modifying the mice to seem to be aging. And, we know that aging in mice looks a lot like aging in dogs and aging in humans.

See Richard Miller’s (of the NIA ITP Program) response to this very question in an interview by a Lifespan IO person:

Lifespan IO: Yes, we’ve had a lot of success in mice, but many drugs that work in mice do not work in humans.

Richard Miller: And many drugs that work in mice do work in humans. It would be silly to maintain that the percentage that work is zero, and it would be equally silly to maintain the percentage that fail is zero.

Most of the drugs that were developed for therapeutic effect in people were initially discovered by working on mice and rats. It would be nuts to say that every drug that extends lifespan in mice will do the same thing in humans, but the work in mice is a very important foundation.

Many of the pathways that are discovered, and maybe even some of the druggable targets that are first discovered, in the mice will serve in humans – maybe the same drug, maybe drugs of the same family, maybe drugs that target the same molecule, but through a different chemical grouping. It’s necessary to be neither insanely optimistic nor insanely pessimistic.

Lifespan IO: We do have a history of failures though, such as with Alzheimer’s, maybe because mice don’t really develop Alzheimer’s.

Richard Miller: Yes, that’s true, but it’s important to recognize the brains of people and the brains of mice have a lot of things that are not in common. In terms of aging, if I tell you that I have an individual right here in front of me, in my office, that has cataracts, bad hearing, weakened bones, a poor immune system, and a relatively low cardiovascular system, you would immediately recognize that individual as old, be it a mouse, a dog, a horse, or a person. But you wouldn’t know if that’s a seventy-year-old human, or a 25-year-old horse, or a three-year-old mouse.

So, the effects that aging has on mice and on humans are – not in every case, of course, but in most cases – recognizably quite similar. And that’s true for cells that divide, for cells that don’t divide, for structures like the bones and the tendons that are mostly extracellular material. It’s true for complicated circuits, like neuroendocrine feedback circuits, it’s true for cognition.

There are just so many aspects – not all, but so many aspects of aging in humans, mice, dogs, chimps, et cetera that are the same. So, it’s very reasonable to expect that the drug that could block aging effects in all of those tissues in mice might also do very similar things in people.

Lifespan IO: But different species die in old age for different reasons. For instance, around 80% of lab mice die of cancer, I think.

Richard Miller: The specific thing that kills the animal is of secondary importance when you’re studying the biology of aging. For instance, elephants die because their teeth wear down and they can no longer eat. When they’re 60 or 70, they have lost their last set of molars and they can’t chew food anymore. Mice, at least those that are used in aging research, indeed die mostly of tumors. People that eat a lot of fatty foods and watch TV, die mostly of atherosclerosis. In people that were alive a hundred thousand years ago, the most prevalent cause of death was probably breaking a bone and not being able to keep up with the group.

The point is not what is the specific cause of death in a specific environmental setting and in a specific species. The real question is what is it that postpones age-associated decline in bones, brains, the immune system, the sensory systems, the gut, and everything else for many decades in people, for a few years in mice, and for 20 years in horses. The factors that regulate the timing of the aging process, I would guess, is very similar in nearly all kinds of mammals.

Source:

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The key to decelerating aging might lie in repairing DNA—potentially by having a younger copy of your DNA and using enzymes or proteins to fix the damage. However, this technology is still far from being realized. Even if we did achieve it, there’s the larger issue of dwindling fossil fuel resources. With about 47 years of oil left, the global economy could shift back to an agrarian model. The cost of such advanced technology would likely be prohibitive in a weakened post industrial economy, making it inaccessible to most people.

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