TomBAvoider

I agree, but lucky with what? I'd say genes. It's not like he carefully picked them, he chanced into them, pure luck. After all, luck in other contexts is not dispositive. Most folks fail to reach 110 not because they got killed by the routine meteor, or because of any other luck dependent accident. Accidental deaths are rather low on the "cause of death" list, so getting lucky on that score will not buy you much. The vast majority of people are "lucky" enough not to die due to any accident. The thing that exercises (heh!) me is the universal claim that your life/healthspan is in your own hands. All those stats saying that only 10-20-30% of your life/healthspan is gene-dependent. If that were true, you'd expect health nuts to be overrepresented among the oldest old, centenarian/supercentenarian crowd. Yet that is clearly not true. If anything it seems the opposite. So, I suspect that lifestyle, diet, exercise and other modifiable factors have a much more limited impact than commonly claimed. I think the reality is that each of us has a certain genetically determined health/lifespan potential, and *within* the parameters of that potential, you might have some limited control. If your potential is 80 years, at best with optimal practices you'll reach that 80, but never 81, or Calmet's 122; with poor practices, maybe 78, 76, or disastrous alcoholism 50. Conversally if Calmet were a health nut, maybe she'd hit 125? It's the genes.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/man-110-still-drives-car-234745761.html Still lives independently and has no problem with daily living tasks, drves his car. Doesn't exercise, never did, though is "active". No special diet, eats whatever he wants. Drinks Ovaltine daily. Smoked for 20 years until 70. Drank a lot of milk as a young man. It's all about the genes, folks. A male supercentenarian is very rare. And here we have one with indifferent diet, former 20-year smoker, who never exercised. Would you pick him as a candidate for a supercentenarian? The man is in excellent health, never any health problems. Yet folks like Peter Attia go to extravagant lengths to implement "science based" (he's an MD!) heathy lifestyles and exercises maniacly... yet has had multiple surgeries already and he's not even 60. You wanna bet Attia - or any of the other prominent health nuts - will last anywhere near 110? Like I always say, it's all about your genes. No matter what you do, you have very little control over your health and longevity, regardless of what the health gurus claim. OK, now I have to go exercise - which I hate and only do, because of the alleged health benefits. I hope I can live in relatively good health until my 80's before I croak.

There's a great article in Gizmodo about the modern Mechanical Turk of AI. In one of my previous posts on AI, I mentioned how the claims of self-driving cars being actually controlled remotely by human supervisors reminded me of the Mechanical Turk fraud back in the day, where a machine was allegedly constructed that was supposedly able to play chess, and in reality it had a human chess master hidden inside actually doing the chess moves. This article describes 10 such extremely prominent cases of claims made for AI software, app, service where the actual work, the real heavy lifting was done by humans, often surreptitiously. The important thing to remember, is that they don't just involve some small AI startups, but the biggest names in tech, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and of course Elon Musk - this ranged from simply misleading claims to outright fraud. The whole field is rife with scams, fraud and hype. You cannot take any AI claims at face value. No doubt there are legitimate AI applications, and there is potential for current and future benefits, but we are a very, very long way from the insane hype cycle claims out there. Incidentally, it seems even in an area I personally had great hopes for AI in, medical diagnosis, AI has been disappointing - in this case discovering colon cancer from blood samples, where AI transpired to be a dismal failure; oh well, I guess colonoscopies are still the gold standard, and my next colonoscopy is in nine years from now - somehow, I sense that AI will not substitute by reading out blood samples... we'll see, they've got nine years.

How crooked? If they're not so crooked that they make cleaning impossible, then what other harms are there from crooked teeth? I don't know. Perhaps they lead to loss of teeth in time due to poor alignment? I would guess it all depends on the degree of crookedness. Of course, there may be aesthetic considerations, but looking strictly from a health point of view, I suppose an orthodontist might be in a better position to evaluate the role of tooth alignment. As to grinding, I am not sure how connected it is to crooked teeth. My teeth are not crooked, yet each and every dentist and periodontist claims I grind my teeth. They recommend a plastic guard for the night. I have not done it. I have been ignoring that advice for some 40 years now and have still not died due to teeth grinding. FWIW, I am not aware of grinding my teeth, but they all swear I do. I don't think they're all making it up, but they base that in part on the prominence of my jaw muscles. Yet, I tend to chew my food pretty strongly and have eaten a lot of nuts daily, and f.ex. almonds can be a real exercise for your jaw muscles. A night guard is for the night, and is not going to fix the impact of chewing on my teeth during the day. My periodontist recommends soaking the almonds to soften them... I have no intention of engaging in any such unappetizing practice. I've been warned that I'll wear my teeth to nubs without a guard for the night and must stop chewing on hard foods. Maybe. But I'm moving along my sixth decade of life, and the teeth are still not nubs. I might regret it, but I'll take my chances with teeth grinding. YMMV.

Well, there are a number of yt channels that I follow, but for many, you sort of have to take a corrective, you can't just take them at face value. Dr. Greger, has a vegan bias and tends to be rather selective, but what I like is that he brings up interesting papers. I like the plant chompers guy. Peter Attia has interesting guests sometimes, but you really have to pick and choose. And so on, in no particular order, Lustgarten, Miche Phd, Sheekey, Carvalho, Brad Stanfield, Inside Exercise, Andy Galpin, Nutrition by Science, physionic, mic the vegan, layne norton.

Gee, who ever thought he was "reliable"? I listened to one episode, and immediately saw that his shtick was to take some initial findings and wildly extrapolate into confident recommendations. Worthless. Plus his recommendations fall into the completely useless and impractical category. The episode I listened to featured his supposed area of expertise, where he made a series of recommendations about exposing your eyes to various light conditions in just the "right way" - which encapsulated everything wrong with such "guru" podcasts; shaky science wildly exaggerated and claimed with 100% confidence, married to completely impractical routines that are supposedly going to benefit you. Who the F**k has the time to waste every morning on this speculative cr*p?? If you were to take seriously every recommendation from every one of these gurus, you would need not 24 hours a day, but 10,000 hours where the foot guy recommend 10 minutes of feet exercises, the back guy 15 minutes, the ear guy 7 minutes and so on for 10,000 hours of "health" routines every single day, and then comes Hubernan to add more time wasting snake oil on top of that. The hell with all those guys. All they ever do is pad their own pockets by wasting your time and attention to make money for themselves selling you nothing but a false dream. Waste of time. Another grifter, another hypester, another useless supplement pusher trying to scam you.

It's instructive to read old articles going back decades (and at this point, centuries) where prominent scientists, leaders in their fields have made predictions about how the future will look like, technology etc. You then compare it with the actual outcomes. Same with various doom (or glorious future nirvana) predictors. All have been consistently wrong. What all those wrong predictions have in common, the fundamental flaw underlying and the consistent mistake is the straight trend line extension. A crude example is how once it was predicted that given the increasing density of New York and increased need for horse carriages for transportation, and how much waste each horse generated, New York would inevitably drown in sh|t. It was a straight line extension of trend lines: number of people --> more, horse carriages --> more, density --> increasing, ergo result --> amount of horse waste --> drown. What it never factored in, was a disruption in the trend line of horse drawn carriages to cars, and so the horse waste is limited to Central Park. The same linear extension you see over and over and over again. Malthusian gloom prediction? Population growth, arable land, agricultural efficiency --> trend lines extended = mass die off in famine. Straight trend line extension. And wrong. Social trends and technology stimulate adaptations and responses in countless unpredictable ways. A trend doesn't just continue unimpeded - almost immediately it generates a response that breaks the trend line, so any prediction that rests on a simple straight line extension is doomed and destined to be wrong. We see this mistake repeated so often, it's just comical. There's this guy, Peter Zeihan, who is a lecturer somewhere and very popular on the corporate speech circuit and social media these days, whose shtick is making grandiose predictions about the near future - "China will starve and collapse", "Russian war will cause world-wide famine, collapse of German economy and Europe freezes" etc., and because the time horizon is so short, we get to see how comically wrong his predictions are. His stock in trade and technique is always the same. Grab some statistic or fact, draw a straight line extension of a trend, and announce a grand dramatic conclusion. So, Russia/Belorus produce the majority of some key ingredients in fertilizer, war disrupts access --> trend line extended, world-wide famine; Russia supplies majority of natural gas to Europe, supplies stop --> line extended, Europe freezes, German industry collapses, Germany is de-industralized. Of course, fertilizer from Russia is stopped, new sources are found and today we have excess grain production and record low grain prices; new gas is sourced, and natural gas prices are dramatically lower than even before the war. Zeihan is of course super popular, everyone listens to him, and nobody is fazed by how ludicrously and consistently he's wrong, meanwhile he is not the least chastened by how wrong his predictions turn out to be, and he keeps churning out these dramatic predictions which people love to hear (drama!), and his straight trend line extension shtick is all he uses, at this point he can't be unaware of this basic flaw, but the fees he generates are very nice, so why change... basically, a grifter. And really how surprising is it? Straight trend line extension is the easiest thing in the world. Any idiot can grab some fact and extend a trend line, and presto, a prediction! How can Johnny reach the moon from his back yard? Why, he puts one brick on another, that's already higher than the first, then another brick, then another, extend the trend line, and there you are, he reaches the moon! Just extending a trend line and calling it a day is so very, very, very much simpler than trying to anticipate how this trend will trigger another phenomenon, and in turn yet another in so many complicated and unanticipated ways that trying to predict how that whole complex matrix will look like far into the future is a thankless task indeed. As Yogi Berra said, making predictions is hard, especially about the future. So very much simpler to just grab a trend line and draw a pencil line straight, and there you have it, blissfully free of having to think and anticipate all the interactions and complications, all those troublesome realities of the actual world out there, rather than our cozy fake model we've built in our prediction bubble. And so convincing to the rubes out there! "Yep, true, definite fact that Europe runs on Russian gas... holy moly, right, doom ahead, wow, WOW!". The work is both easy, (just straight line extension!) and rewarding - perfect for all the hypesters and grifters out there, and so many delicious dreams to sell for the rubes to salivate over. We've seen the same brain-dead straight trend line extension in all the technology hype decades past, and it's no different with AI. Let's take some data mining and pattern recognition give it a sexy name AI, stretch the trend lines to absurd lengths with zero reference to any possible complicating factors which may interrupt our cozy model and there you have it, a cornocupia of absurd and laughable predictions about the brave new world of AI.

Yes, without some substantial genetic interventions, you are not going to gain more than a few years at most (even assuming that something like rapa actually slows down the rate of ageing in humans). It seems, that pharmacological agents are much less effective in longer lived species. The simpler the organism, the greater the effect - worms longer than mice, mice longer than dogs, monkeys and humans barely if at all. Healthy living (diet, exercise, avoiding alcohol, tobacco etc.) will simply allow you to come closer to your maximal lifespan potential, whatever that may be - for some of us, our bodies even with the best care were not designed for more than 80 or so, others have bodies with 100+ potential. But for real extention, lifestyle or even drugs are useless. For that, it comes down to genetic alterations. No matter how you starve, feed, exercise, drug or supplement a mouse, you are never going to get it to live as long as a naked mole rat. They have different genes. Until we humans alter our genes, we will gain next to nothing substantial. Some animals live for 200-500 years - it's not lifestyle, it's genes. And sadly, for anyone alive today, such genetic interventions will probably not be available. That will happen only for some lucky future generations. So why bother at all today, with our poor tools of lifestyle (and maybe drugs)? Personally, I'm shooting for healthspan. I don't count on 100+; I'm hoping that if all I get to is 85, at least I'll be a highly functioning 85, both physically and especially mentally - and even that is a very, very big ask and challenge... just look at all those lifelong health freaks who only last to their 70's or 80's often with pitiful mental capacities remaining. It's not easy to overcome your genetic destiny and limitations. All those healthy and still capable 90+ year olds? Quite rare, statistically. You hear about them precisely because they're rare. And btw., they often don't engage in especially dedicated health routines. It's mostly genes and luck. Think of Jack LaLanne and his brother. Jack was a lifelong diet and exercise freak who dedicated countless hours to taking care of his health - he didn't even make it to a 100. His brother, who did none of this, lived just as long as Jack (I think even a couple months longer). And both of them have been outlived by centennarians who have done nothing healthwise either. It's mostly genes. Just because you dedicate your life to your health guarantees nothing, as countless health gurus who drop dead early on, demonstrate (speaking of "outlive" - for some reason I have a feeling Peter Attia will not be beating any longevity records... sadly, he may not even participate in the sport he's been dedicating himself to - the "centennarian olympics"). That's why, if you manage to affect your healthspan even a little by all your efforts, you have truly accomplished a very difficult task. I'll count myself as very lucky to be a high funtioning 85-year old. More I don't have much hope for. Genetic alterations, the only real hope for humanity.

BPA? Why just that? The concern is with ALL plastics and compounds derived from them. Given the microplastics issues, I personally try to avoid all plastics in contact with my food. Mind you, plastics are impossible to avoid 100%, not just because they're in the food we eat (especially seafood), but because we breathe them in, and not just the volatiles they exude, but micro and nano-particles we breathe in. Anyone living anywhere else than possibly some remote jungle, is breathing in plastics. And we know that these settle in the body with deleterious results. Recently, there was a study out of Italy which showed that microplastics are incorporated into plaque and those with a lot of those plastics are 400%-500% more prone to fatal CV events. That's just the CVD effects. Not only do we absorb plastics, but they have documented negative health effects. So while plastics are impossible to avoid, it still makes sense to minimize exposure. Plastics in contact with food are an obvious target. I try not to eat or drink from plastic containers. However, not all alternatives are safe - glass and ceramics can be a source of heavy metal exposure, particularly lead; that wooden bowl/cutting board/spoon/spatula etc. - what was that wood treated with? And so on - plastics are not the only material of concern in contact with our food and beverages. Plastics are recent, but the problems are ancient - see the Romans and their lead lined vessels, or even prehistoric humans with meat burned over a fire - for that matter the smoke from cooking stoves, wood and also gas are a well known negative from ancient to modern humans. As a funny side note, I was suspicious of plastics all my life, based on nothing more than the fact that plastics often have a smell, sometimes a very strong, foul smell. I figured that something that exudes such strong smell, the volatile compounds cannot possibly be good for you in the context of historical exposure - we evolved alongside strong smelling food fruits vegetables and so on, but plastics are a very recent invention, especially as proliferated everywhere in recent decades. And there have never been long term exposure studies conducted. All that has always left me quite worried about plastics and other relatively (evolutionarily) recent substances that we put in contact with our food. So I've tended to avoid plastics in this context since I was a teenager. The recent concerns therefore do not seem to me to come as any great shock. I think many of us have had similar worries for a long time. YMMV.

As you know, the ancient rule applies: "dose makes the poison". Rapa is/was used as an immunosuppressant in organ transplants, but at lower doses it has been documented (human trials of a rapa analogue showed enchanced immunity against infectios agent, augmenting effectiveness of vaccinations) as an immune system rejuvenant. There also appears to be some evidence of cancer suppresion. All in all, an enchanced and rejuvenated immune system appears to be one of the most prominent effects of rapa (and its analogues). Again, however, dosage is critical, and unfortunately this is very unclear insofar as there are no validated dosage protocols for longevity and health promotion in humans. It is also possible that the optimal dosage may have a pretty narrow range (i.e. there isn't much of a safety margin), you derive benefits in a somewhat small window. Also absorbtion is an issue, and early experiments in mice failed because straight rapa wasn't assimilated at all - you need a pharmaceutical formulation for it to work (which is why FDA approved rapa analogues are preferred by many). And as I mentioned, there is a great deal of uncertainty because the effective equivalent dosages in mice are drastically higher and would be toxic in humans, which puts a big question mark over the entire enterprise in people - it would't be the first time when an agent that works great in animals fails completely in humans. There's growing suspicion that rapa would work best in humans combined with other agents. And perhaps there will be modified rapa derived agents that would work better (centered around suppressing complex I while sparing complex II). Bottom line, it's very early days for rapa use in humans for longevity/health purposes, and at this time remains a highly speculative endeavor. But as I said, there's the pressure of time, and not all of us have the luxury of waiting on more solid scientific evidence, and some may feel forced to gamble.

Understandable caution, but isn't the whole longevity endeavor on big gamble? Given the limitations of conducting human lifespan intervention studies (an RCT trial running 100+ years anyone?), there isn't a single human such study, nor will there ever likely be one. All you'll ever have is animal studies at best (monkey studies of 40+ years), so you either take a more or less well calculated gamble based on animal results or give up alltogether since the FDA can't clear any such drug for humans given that no such studies will be conducted. Some folks have decided that rapa is a worthwhile gamble, and perhaps the dog studies were a factor in such decisions. Few things are a certainty in medical science, so if someone wants to gamble on some intervention I would not condemn them. Isn't the origin of this very board and website the result of such a gamble by CR enthusiasts? It's all a gamble. And as gambles go, rapa seems not the worst of it - there are some human rapa-analogue results (immunity related) that may be suggestive, and no evidence of harm (to this point) other than minor ones like canker sores, so as far as drug interventions go, you could do worse. Obviously it's a gamble and nothing is certain (not even dosage!), but hey, it's either that, or do nothing. We could wait for more studies of rapa analogues, but time marches relentlessly, and not all of us have the luxury of waiting. You take your shot, and the chance that you may shorten and worsen your life, or do nothing. Each of us has to make that decision on their own.

Right. I don't think Kaeberlein should be responsible for every random person grabbing his research to make money. As long as he dosn't profit or in any way endorse those schemes, of course. He may not even be aware of this person, but yes, how to disassociate yourself from such folks becomes a full time job. The dog studies to date are suggestive, but have not been completed, so a lot of work remains before one can even begin to think of clearing rapa for dog longevity indications. Naturally, desperate pet owners will grab onto any hope, so any preliminary results should always come with plenty of caveats, cautions and warnings.

To be fair, Matt is very careful and nuanced in making any claims for rapa. I've listened to many hours of his interviews on many podcasts, and he certainly is careful not to hype rapa, so he definitely is not your classic hypester. And the fact is, that unlike for most of the supplement/pharmaceuticals out there (certainly resveratrol!), rapa actually has some very solid results, and Matt's studies are well designed. So cautious optimism wrt. dogs and rapa seems not unwarranted. Of course we still need to wait on more results, and caveats always apply, but if there is such a thing as scientifically and ethically sound studies (and we all better hope there is!), then I feel Kaeberlein qualifies. Clearly, this doesn't mean rapa research in mice or dogs necessarily translates to humans (especially that mice were exposed to massively larger doses than humans), and Matt to his credit never pushed rapa in humans - this remains a personal call and a deliberate gamble - which includes your pet - (I think Kaeberlein personally takes it), so you get to roll the dice as you see fit. I'm obviously not opposed to the search for longevity interventions, just opposed to hype and hucksterism. Insofar as Sinclair and Kaeberlein are concerned I think they belong on the opposite sides of this divide. YMMV.

I'd just like to point out, that I have been way, way, WAY, ahead of the curve when it comes to Mr. Sinclair. From the beginning, when he first came onto my radar years ago, at the start of the resveratrol hype, I pegged him as a snakeoil salesman, simply based on his classic shyster MO - he checked off all the boxes that identify such operators, and I denounced him as such. Btw. his mouse studies never showed max longevity benefits of resveratrol, at best a normalisation of lifespan in obese mice, and since then doubt has been cast on those studies too. There was nothing there, let alone grounds for wild claims. He certainly made out like a bandit in the stock buyout of his scientifically worthless biotech company, and has been a supplement pusher with one dubious pill after another. The man has been a shameless huckster spinning his money making schemes for so long now that it's a real puzzle as to why anyone would buy a single thing from his recommendations. Hypersters have existed long before PT Barnum cashed in from the suckers, but as he observed, a new sucker is born every minute. And we live in a time of extraordinary proliferation of HYPE, as we see every day in the headlines and breathless reporting about the next grand revolution that will radically change human history and achieve perpetual motion based on AI self-driving fusion powered quantum computers that will upload your brain into immortality on Mars, blah, blah, blabbity blah. Good on Matt, for calling out Sinclair, but sadly there's an endless supply of these hypesters, just as there is of the suckers who listen to them.

When it comes to weight training, I use lighter weights these days. I'm less worried about volume. It's about the ratio of weight to volume. I even use very light weights, like 50lbs, in a weight vest for squats. I do deep squats (a$$ to grass), 32 minutes nonstop with a 50lbs weight vest, twice a week. Never have a problem with my knees or other joints/tendons/muscles. When I was using heavier weights on an olympic bar (holding it behind my back, like Hackenschmidt), I had some soreness around my patella. I've given up the bar in favor of a weight vest, and lowered the weight. No problems.