​Seniors Matter(s): Extending your life span!

There are actions you can take right now to increase your potential health span — with a target of making it to a healthy 100-plus years old.

I have mentioned before how much I enjoy Peter Demandis. He is a futurist who doesn’t theorize, but rather gathers all the great things that are going on in the world in Artificial Intelligence (AI driving assistance) medicine, longevity-related technologies: from Stem Cells and CRISPR, to Senolytic Medicines and Gene Therapies.

He sees these steps as a collective bridge that will get us to those rejuvenation technologies under development in the coming decades.

My goal is to live long enough to intercept the next bridge of technology, and the next one, and so on … extending my lifespan if I can.

One mistake that many of us make is to assume we’re healthy.

Until that pain in your side brings you to the emergency room, where you find out that you’ve had a disease all along.

Perhaps it’s Stage 3 cancer, or an aneurysm, or significant heart disease that could have been easily detected — or any number of 100 preventable diseases.

The unfortunate truth is that most people don’t know the actual state of their health.

Eventually, we’ll be wearing sensors that feed our AI assistant with tons of data, in a fashion that constantly monitors our health.

I have recently purchased a new Fitbit that monitors my sleeping patterns, enabling me to track my every minute and help me track patterns. I love it. I also monitor my blood pressure and it always gives such a lovely tune after 10,000 daily steps. Unfortunately, it hasn’t helped my golf game.

I believe it’s important to use the advanced diagnostics available today (MRI, CT, genomics, metabolomics) to evaluate our health on an annual basis. The goal is to find any disease at Stage 0.

Fountain Life, Human Longevity, and NextHealth are three companies that exemplify the exciting break-throughs that are happening right now. We all remember the first cloned pig.

That science has expanded exponentially into growing many organs for human replacement. All you must do is click on their sites and see what is going on.

Human Longevity was founded in 2013. The company’s annual, three-hour scan includes heart and lung CT, a full-body MRI, whole-genome sequencing, an echocardiogram, and a host of clinical blood tests.

In 2018, Human Longevity published the following data on its first 1,190 clients:
 

• Two per cent of patients had undiagnosed tumours/advanced cancer
• 2.5 per cent of patients had undiagnosed aneurysms (the No. 2 killer in the world)
• Nine per cent of patients had previously undetected coronary artery disease (the No. 1 killer)
• In total, a staggering 14.4 per cent had significant issues requiring immediate intervention, while 40 per cent found a condition that needed long-term monitoring

Some people may say: “I don’t want to know these things …” I believe you should want to know, and you should do everything in your power to solve the medical problem and take advantage of these rapidly advancing technologies to increase your life span.

We all have our genes, but it’s which of our genes are expressed that matters most.

In addition to genes, the microbiomes that you have in your gut also impact you. A revolutionary biotech company, called Viome, focuses on the 100-trillion bacteria in the gut microbiome, which transform our food into fuel. Now you can measure the gene expression of these bacteria in your gut microbiome and how these microbial genes impact your health?

Viome does this using a process called meta-transcriptome sequencing to look at what mRNA and proteins the microbes in your gut are producing.

Viome’s AI-driven platform analyzes the biochemical activity in your body by looking at your saliva, blood, and stool. Its goal is to give you an accurate picture of your unique health, and what you can do to optimize it through food and made-to-order, precision supplements and probiotics. Viome then combines this analysis with predictive bio-markers and precision diagnostics to detect cancers, metabolic and auto-immune disease, inflammation, and other chronic conditions.

Viome founder and CEO Naveen Jain puts it, “By simply analyzing your microbiome and then adjusting your diet and nutrition, and taking steps to understand what supplements you need, you can vastly improve your health while reducing your risk of disease.”

There’s a lot we can do right now to be healthier and extend our life by focusing on the basics: sleep, exercise, and diet.

Getting enough sleep is one of the most under-appreciated elements of extending our life span.

We need eight hours of sleep each night. If you think you’re one of those people who can get away with five or six hours of sleep, the scientific evidence is not on your side. Sufficient sleep improves our ability to learn, make better decisions, and it helps us better navigate emotional and social challenges with relative composure.

Physiologically, sleep has a slew of benefits, including strengthening our immune system, reforming our metabolism, regulating our appetite, and helping us to maintain a healthy cardiovascular system.

On the other hand, regularly getting less than six or seven hours of sleep each night doubles our risk of cancer and can increase the likelihood that we’ll develop Alzheimer Disease. Insufficient sleep can also contribute to major psychiatric conditions such as anxiety and depression.

One of the key lessons from the book “Why We Sleep” is: if humans had been able to evolve with the ability to get along with less sleep, then we would have. Very interesting.

Other evidence is also clear: muscle mass is one of the most important predictors of longevity. Well-known is the fact that we naturally lose muscle mass as we age, a condition called sarcopenia. You can slow, and possibly even reverse, this process with regular exercise; for instance, weightlifting and interval training.

Increasing muscle mass as you age can help to increase your life span in numerous ways. Increased muscle mass leads to higher numbers of stem cells. These are undifferentiated cells that can transform into specialized cells such as heart, liver, lung, skin, and other types of cells. As we age, our supply of stem cells diminishes, but regular exercise to increase muscle mass fights against this trend. Having more muscle mass as you age also reduces your risk of falling and any resulting injuries.

Even a small amount of weekly resistance or weight training along with the use of peptides (short chains of amino acids) can help to naturally stimulate growth hormone and increase muscle mass.

As I have written before, improving your diet can have immediate positive effects and ultimately increase your life span. (China Study, Mediterranean diet, salt, sugar, fasting, water.)

There are two actions that you can take today:
 

1. Intermittent fasting
2. Reducing your sugar intake

There are dozens of fasting programs. One approach is to skip breakfast and have a late lunch, and another is to eat 75-per-cent fewer calories two days each week.

I need to constantly remind myself to drink plenty of water! In the summer, it’s not as hard with golfing, yard work and warm walks. Ideally, you’re drinking two to three litres of water every day.

During these next decades of extraordinary biotech breakthroughs, if your goal is to live long enough to intercept those age-reversal technologies heading your way, you need to maintain your health like you do a car. It won’t run on empty or with non-working parts!

‘Till next time!