This is definitely a controversial issue, and one that came up many times as I was doing research. Leonard Hayflick mentioned it several times... something along the lines of what he said in this Nautilus article [1]: "By allowing asocial people, tyrants, dictators, mass murderers, and people who cause wars to have their longevity increased should be undesirable. Yet, that would be one outcome of being able to tamper with the aging process...My personal belief is that I would rather experience the aging process as it occurs and death when it occurs in order to avoid allowing the people who I just described to live longer." We have more than doubled our life expectancy in the past 300 years. Will extending life by another 20-30 years be an overall negative? At what number of years do we draw the line? There are a lot of tough questions this topic brings up. Either way, the research is going to continue to progress, whether it be in the U.S. or in China, Japan, Germany or elsewhere, so while the work on life-extension is unlikely to be arrested, it is worth considering the implications. [1] http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/ingenious-leonard-hayflick

In reply to Justine, I understand the argument around longevity, but we are now getting into territory of extending life but only if you have the money. A direction of any kind aimed at longevity must be available to all and I think one of the major concerns going forward in many aspects of the world today is we have no clear directions or guidance on this. We have seen time and time again, that humans are not the greatest at self regulation, especially as we get higher up the socio-economic ladder. I fully get the idea of the potential benefits of allowing a life to be fully disease free and without issues, but to quote Billy Connelly (a UK comedian, getting close to the end and suffering with parkinson's disease), living longer would be fantastic if it was when you were 20 and you were partying, having fun and making love. Is it worth living another 50 years if you spend that time not being able to do the really fun stuff. A silly example I know, but it is an interesting point. Surely making life good for 80 to 90 years is good enough. Shouldn't we have a duty to allow younger people and generations to come through and live their own lives, which we are not allowing them to do at present. I'm not convinced around length of living, but as stated I see benefits of healthy current life span.

"white privileged GOP guys"? How do I put a middle finger salute in here for this racist PoS? Note all your thumbs down, smart guy.

I was really surprised too! Especially given the fact that I exercise a lot and eat modestly. It could be due to my sweet tooth, or I could blame my parents-- as it seems we do inherit some epigenetic instructions [1]. Either way, as Steven S noted, different samples (saliva, blood etc) will give you a slightly different age reading. So I’m getting a blood test to check, and who knows—maybe I’ll need to make some significant lifestyle changes! [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170717100548.htm

Justine, although longevity isn't my research area, it hasn't been definitively shown that individual methylation profiles are highly correlated with healthspan. So, I wouldn't worry too much. If you want to be comprehensive, then not only blood DNA methylation profiling could be useful, but other complementary assays such as telomerase activity, telomere length, insulin growth factor, some interleukins, dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate, etc. would provide a fuller picture of your biological age (along with saliva DNA methylation). And something as mundane as family history might trump them all. This becomes quite the rabbit hole. Also, not much is known about the role of other epigenetic mechanisms, such as histone acetylation, in aging. Perhaps your saliva methylation patterns indicate an older age, but your histone acetylation and IGF levels argue for a 24 year-old age. So, fret not and keep exercising and eating modestly as they will undoubtedly serve you well. ...at least much better than my steady diet of bourbon and copious quantities of bacon. Bringing it back to finance, this area could be an incredible for future investments. A number of the anti-senescence and senolytic compounds have many of the hallmarks of future blockbusters in this capacity. The downsides are lack of IP protection on many of them and uncertainty of how to commercialize in our current healthcare system. ABT-263, mTOR inhibitors (e.g., rapamycin), metformin, pterostilbene, UBX0101, UBX1967, and nicotinamide riboside are all quite interesting.

Wow, thank you for your note Steven. I don’t want to say too much (I just want you to write more comments!), but I did want to give a little bit of a background on one of the drugs you mentioned. Metformin is one of the most popular treatments to control blood sugar in type 2 diabetes. But in recent years, metformin has demonstrated effectiveness way beyond diabetes. A 2014 UK study initially set out to measure the effectiveness of metformin versus another first-line diabetes drug. The researchers used a data set from NHS to look at the survival rates of around 78,000 diabetics being treated with metformin, 12,000 diabetics on the other drug, and 90,500 carefully matched controls without diabetes [1]. To their surprise, they discovered that not only did the diabetics on metformin have a far higher chance of survival than those on the other drug, but they also did significantly better than the non-diabetic controls, suggesting that metformin had a general protective effect against aging. There is still a lot to learn about metformin's mechanisms of action, but researchers believe a key role is to enhance the activity of an enzyme within cells that inhibits the process of burning glucose for energy – thereby mimicking the effects of calorie restriction. There is currently a landmark study on metformin (called TAME, or Targeting Aging with Metformin), with a goal of getting the FDA to accept a drug that targets mechanisms of aging. Right now the FDA only approves drugs for specific diseases, and they don’t recognize aging as a medical condition. [2, 3] So in a way, this study is a precedent-setting test case—one that could change the rules going forward. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25041462 [2] https://www.wired.com/story/this-pill-promises-to-extend-life-for-a-nickel-a-pop/ [3] https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2019/09/tame-trial-for-the-effects-of-metformin-in-humans-to-proceed-this-year/

I really was not surprised. I think in the video she said she was 30. She looks more like 40 than 30 to me. My wife is 50 and looks younger than her honestly. One has to be careful though with these types of tests. How do we know its really accurate? Justine looked like she was going to cry when she found out her test results. This can be very stressful to some people, and honestly end up causing more harm than good from the additional stress it adds to their life. The ONLY proven method to slow aging is calorie restriction. Everything is is just theories and ideas, all unproven. Restricting your calories by 30% is not real appealing to most people long-term.

It seems that if the test Justine took to estimate her physiologic age was truly valid, you would think that every major life insurance company would be using it to set their rates. I suspect that this test like so many secondary markers that have been tried in the past will be found wanting. As an example look up the CAST trial, which decreased premature beats following a myocardial infarction, which was thought to be a good thing until they found out that the treatment arm did worse than the placebo. Has anyone tried to develop a database on highly functioning 90 year olds to try to determine some common biological advantage that they might have?

Yes you look 20! ... I have noticed a big problem in many countries. I live in Italy and grew up in Canada, and when I go abroad, I am shocked about how fatty the food is pretty much anywhere, the ice cream is sweeter, drinks are sweeter, tomato sauce has suger added! for example, in Italy I usually eat a pasta or rice dish at lunch without meat, I never add sugar to anything, and in the evening I eat some form of protean (beans, fish, meat once in a while, parmigiano cheese), no dressing or mayo etc., and I find it very very hard to keep this style of eating abroad. in North America, you ask for a small portion and you always get huge portions; eating a light pasta dish with fresh tomato or fresh vegetables without suger anywhere is difficult even if you are willing to pay. I think this is a key factor in general.

Greg T. Surprised you are still married with your tendency for needless negative personal commentary....

Spam

Yeah, no...not spam.

This topic is huge (even though the amount of research is fairly small compared to cancer and other age-related diseases). Dr. Sinclair has done a lot of really interesting research, as has Dr. Nir Barzilai and Dr. Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte (I highly recommend checking out their work). If we do a follow-up video on this topic, those would be the people at the top of my list (covering the topics of stem cell research, Yamanaka factors, metformin, mTOR inhibitors and fasting). It was definitely difficult to pare it down for this video!

Thank you for the update!

Totally agree --- I have studied fasting and it is one of the most powerful ways you can dramatically improve your health. Our bodies are not designed to be eating 18 hours a day.

Is there any scuentific proof for this theory?

I fast 5 times a week for like 20 hours, basically just eat dinner. I have been doing this for 7 years and I look way younger than my siblings (I’m the middle child)

I could not agree more Artur. Lots of research shows this to be so, in addition to eliminating sugar and processed foods. Daniel, Dr Mercola's website would be good starting point for you. Good luck!

There is plenty of evidence for the benefits of infrequent, multi-day fasts. Essentially there are no downsides, and plenty of benefits, so it's one of the better practices you can adopt. Of course, it's better if you eat less processed food period, but adding a few fasts to your year will also help.

Mauldin associate Patrick Cox has been pounding the table on the subject for a quite a few years ...

....and who on earth downvotes this video.......!!!!!!

this is a great read on this subject.

I didn’t specifically talk to Aubrey about rapamycin, we more generally talked about the human studies that were making the most progress [1]. I did however talk to Dr. Matt Kaeberlein at the University of Washington— his lab is running The Dog Aging Project [2], where they are testing the effects of rapamycin on our furry friends. Just a quick background on rapamycin for those who are unfamiliar with it: Rapamycin is an immune modulator and is given to patients receive organ transplants. The drug is produced by a soil bacterium found on Easter Island (and named after the native name for the island, Rapa Nui). The Buck Institute (one of the places we visit in the video) has done a lot of testing on rapamycin—they found that the drug can block a lot of the inflammatory secretions of senescent cells [3]. While rapamycin seems to be more effective in terms of life-extension benefits than metformin (see my metformin comment below), it also has many more side-effects: increased risk of type 2 diabetes, increased levels of cholesterol, and because it suppresses the immune system, it can make people more vulnerable to infections. So Dr. Kaeberlein wasn't recommending it for wide-spread human consumption just yet, but he mentioned he hopes the rapamycin study in dogs will raise awareness of the drug, and will eventually lead to more research on the drug’s anti-aging effects in humans. For anyone interested in learning more about rapamycin, I suggest reading about mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin). [1] https://www.lifespan.io/the-rejuvenation-roadmap/ [2] https://dogagingproject.org/ [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26147250

David Sinclair on Joe Rogan podcast.

Just a few notes I have on fasting… there isn't as much money to be made by pharma companies from this research, so there hasn't been a huge amount of investment in the topic. There has been some research in the U.S. (I highly recommend checking out this paper by Dr. Longo [1]) as well as in Russia and Germany. If you go down this rabbit hole, here are some other tangents worth considering... Dr. Cynthia Kenyon found that editing a single gene of the worm C. elegans could increase its lifespan by six-fold. The gene, daf-2, is part of what's called a ‘nutrient-sensing’ network, which makes sure an organism gets enough nutrient to fuel its vital activities. [2] The worm with a mutant daf-2 gene builds faulty receptors that limit the amount of hormones-- insulin and growth factors-- that get into its cells. These mutant worms lived far longer. According to Dr. Kenyon, “what we think is that, under conditions of stress, the levels of these hormones drop -- for example, having limited food supply. And that, we think, is registered by the animal as a danger signal, a signal that things are not okay and that it should roll out its protective capacity.” That protective capacity means an organism’s cells have increased ability to protect and repair themselves, which is what researchers *think* contributes to a longer life. And it’s thought that the FOXO3A gene variant does something similar in humans. In one study, those who had inherited this gene variant not only lived longer, but had less incidence of cancer, cardiovascular disease and cognitive decline than the controls, and were physically stronger, despite being on average 11 years older [3] Similar studies finding were repeated in populations of Han Chinese, Ashkenazi Jews, Californians, Germans, Italians and Danes. All of the functions of FOXO are not fully understood, but it is known that they “act as key regulators of longevity downstream of insulin and insulin-like growth factor signaling” [4]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18378900 [2] https://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_kenyon_experiments_that_hint_of_longer_lives [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18765803 [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26643314

This is why I love Real Vision. Thank you Steven.

The specific test I took in the video hasn't been released publicly yet (I believe it will be available in a few weeks). There are other ways of testing bioage-- some researchers I met use the website http://aging.ai/ (free to use, all you need is your blood marker information, although this does not give you any information about your epigenetics). I know some people who have used other testing kits like MyDNAge or BioViva. Depending on the sample you take (blood, urine, saliva, tissue) you may get a different age, as your skin tissue may be a different "age" than your liver, which may age at a different pace from your brain. A lot of this testing is based on Dr. Steve Horvath's work (Dr. Morgan Levine, who we talk to in the video, was one of his postdocs). The Horvath clock is able to estimate a person's age within 3.6 years on average, but certain cell types give better results-- saliva gave a prediction to within 2.7 years, some white blood cells to within 1.9 years, and brain cells to within 1.5 years.

.. that's way worst.. That's all Oreo cookies you eating Justin. We'll see consumer ready antiaging product at some point. Untill then low carb diet and exercise best bet.