Some readers (thanks Gene!) told me the recent discoveries in medecine were fascinating, but most of all, they were interested in having actionable insights into what they could do TODAY to improve their Healthspan. I’m giving a couple of prioritized measures to take. Let’s dive into it!
The Youth Pill
I will maybe dissapoint you, but just as there is no silver bullet to get rich, there is no magic pill to keep you young and healthy today (by the way, I’ll write a dedicated post about how similar longevity and money management are, stay tuned!). What we do have, however, is the ability to explore one’s health and body, and come up with a personalised, risk adjusted, long term plan to follow in order to reach 100+ healthy years. Depending on how quickly science moves forward, new breakthroughs are expected to help us improve even more our strategy and tactics, and eventually increase our odds to leave even longer and healthier lives (there’s a very interesting concept related to this, called Longevity Escape Velocity, which I’ll explain in the very following weeks).
First step: find a Medical Doctor specialized in Longevity Medecine
Every time when I think of Longevity, I first think of Money Management and try to evaluate how I would react in a similar situation. How to start in Longevity? Well, how did I start Investing in first place? A year and a half ago, I was a total ignorant in Money Management. One of the very first things I’ve done, was to get some professional help (from Finance Advisors and Investment Banks). I have considered none of what these Experts say as “Guaranteed 100% Verified Knowledge”, but I have questioned each one of their assumptions, statements and theories, and built mine on top (and most times against) those constructs. What resulted from this exploration process was a personal set of principles, convictions and an encompassing strategy which consistently guides my steps when it comes to Investing, that are sometimes similar but sometimes opposite to the so called “expert advice”.
Similarly, when it comes to Longevity, if there was only one thing you had to do to start your Longevity Journey, that one single step is, without any doubt, to find a Longevity Expert to assist you! The Human Body is a marvel of complexity, and what you’ll want to avoid at all costs is to hurt yourself by taking decisions based on an over-simplified version of what’s happening with you and how your body works. A Medical Doctor will assist you, help you take informed decisions.
Just so that you understand what to expect from such an Expert, this is how he will be able to help you:
– help you list the lab exams (blood, urine, etc.) you need to do, the ideal frequency for you, and interpret them. For example, if you have a cancer family history, you’ll want to do some detection tests more frequently. Same for Calcium Plaque for Artherosclerosis. This is highly technical, and unless you’re a health professional yourself, you’ll need guidance on it.
– help you find a Long term Longevity Strategy for you to execute. This amounts to finding the weak points in your health (current or to come), and build long term strategies to downplay them. For example, if you have a certain predisposition for Diabetes called LP(a), you’ll probably want to keep your LDL as low as possible (way below the commonly admitted threshold agreed upon in “standard medecine”).
– help you with tactics to improve (or maintain) your health, which means practical stuff to apply today. This may consist in a plethora of measures, just to give you a couple of examples: specific diet changes, physical activity, drugs, etc … This is where it gets tricky, because you’ll probably have the option to take some drugs that are commonly used for specific conditions, so they’ll improve some aspects of your health, while deteriorating some others, which may still be a good deal for you. The deeper you’ll go into it, the more this will be subject to a trial and error process, and risk adjustment.
– help you in real time with the dynamics of the whole process, how to adjust your strategy to the new scientific breakthroughs, the new problems that may arise in your health, what additional tests to do (or what to stop doing), etc. You are a living human being, you evolve, just as does the scientific knowledge associated with your body. Setting it up once and for all is great, but it’s not enough, you need to keep yourself updated!
As you see, the key word for the Assistance you’ll get from a Longevity Doctor is “help”, he will assist you, guide your journey, but you’ll have to make the final choices for yourself. You’re the CEO of your own health, nobody decides for you when it comes for such important decisions.
Important caveats here:
– just as there’s no absolute investment strategy, as each one of us evaluates and reacts to risk in different ways, there is no absolute Longevity action plan for you to execute blindly. No doctor will ever give you that (in fact anyone can tell you what to do, but that will be most likely sub-optimal). You have to find your own balance between short terms vs long terms risk, efforts and rewards. Just like in Investment, there are some no-brainers to apply with maximum confidence, but once you’ve executed that, you’ll never be able to sleep on your 2 years, you’ll never be 100% sure that you’ve taken the absolute right decisions. But you’ll improve systematically towards that goal!
– as of 2023, you’ll have a hard time finding Medical Doctors who understand what Longevity is and how to help you with it. This field is brand new, reaching some basic level of awareness in some countries and less in others. Things aren’t easy. When you’ll find such a Doctor, they may be overly expensive (I mean $30k / week), or pain incompetent. This is definitely harder that just visiting a doctor for a sore throat consultation. I’m taking about this in one of my previous posts. It’s going to be tough, but it’s definitely worth it! I’m openly sharing who’s my doctor and others I was able to find, with whoever wants to know more. Just write me and I’ll help you with that.
Next steps: some examples
I’d say that being assisted by a Longevity Medical Doctor is more or less the only aspect that should be common to everyone, and you should do prior to any concrete initiative to Improve your Long Term Healthspan. Once you have that in place, congratulations, you may be interested in taking other more tactical measures according to your preferences, lifestyle, and goals, such as:
– use some wearables. For example, I use an Oura Ring, which tracks a bunch of biomarkers, such as HRV (Heart Rate Variability), temperature, sleep quantity and quality, general physical shape, etc…
For me, the Oura Ring was a game changer, because before wearing it, I was overtraining and putting more pressure on myself that I was able to bear. This resulted in poor physical performance, a weakened immune system, chronic stress. All of these were blind spots before I was able to understand them thanks to my Oura Ring. The balance between effort and relaxation is a very important factor when it come to long term health.
– read as much as possible on longevity and functional medecine. Just as you sometimes have difficult Investment Decisions to take, and no one is more suitable than yourself to take them for you, there will be similarly difficult Health Decisions you’ll need to take. In order to be best prepared for such situations to come, you’ll have to read as much documentation as possible, on how the body works, and focus on your specific weaknesses. There are books, films, clinical studies, experts, new technologies coming down the road, in those fields. Find out as much as possible about them. Depending on how serious some condition is in your case, you may be tempted to test more or less experimental treatments (depending on the laws in your country of course).
– other tactics include CGM (Continuous Glucose Monitors), Epigenetic Clocks, Glycan Age Clocks, various invasive and non invasive tests, HBOT, Red Light Therapies, etc … but I’ll elaborate on those in detail in my next blog posts.
Overall, at first sight, it may seem a bit conceptual, daunting and blurry, but again, just as with Investing, after some time and effort to understand how it works, you’ll end up creating your own style, strategy and tactics with your own appropriate amount of regular adjustments and allocated time to it. It will most likely come down to specific measures to take in terms of food intake, physical activity, sleep/rest, lifestyle, and maybe (this is the trickiest) preventive supplements or drugs you’ll maybe take.
Telomeres are the small bits of DNA at the end of your Chromosomes. Every time one of your cells divide, and your chromosomes within those cells are copied, these bits of non-coding DNA will shorten. After a couple of dozen of divisions, the telomeres are shortened to exhaustion, and any further cell division will end up cropping small bits of your useful DNA information.
Mitochondria are the energy production factories of our cells. In short, they eat up glucose, and turn it into another product called ATP, which is used as energy currency in the cell. As we age, there are fewer mitochondria, and their quality is also lower, and without proper levels of energy, the maintenance processes of our cells are heavily impacted.
The Microbiome is the whole bacteria and other micro-organism ecosystem, which lives in symbiosis with your body, and is located in your gut. The nature of these micro-organisms, and how they interact with your gut, is closely related to your health: digestive diseases come from microbiome problems, even neuro-degenerative diseases seem to be related to it. Recent studies seem to suggest that as we age, the microbiome changes also, leading to our food being less well decomposed into basic nutrients for our body.
Our cells do not just plainly “stick” together by themselves. They’re placed in “collagen complexes”, that come in many shape and sizes, which form the basic “scallfolding” structures for our bodies. For example, the degradation of our collagen structure accounts for our skin being less and less flexible as we age, and wrinkles appearing on our faces. Collagen is produced by a specific category of cells called fibroblasts. Well, chaotic collagen creation and preservation generates not only aesthetic discomfort, but also functional damage, in our bones, our muscles, heart, etc.