I am in the draft room with several hundred people in the Truman Brewery in London, we all shake hands above our heads, making us go to the end of another day at SXSW.
I will not lie, I expected something like this to happen at some point of the week. Strange and unpleasant moments, such as, really separate a fun conference from a boring. This particular moment is a mini flavor of a “rave longevity”: a style of events that appears worldwide, directed by those who believe that music, movement and connection can affect our long -term health and happiness.
“Genetics is a very small determinant of health; other factors are more important,” Tina Brown, a social entrepreneur and system architect who co -founded longevity, told us a few minutes earlier. “The joy of living is a really powerful motivator.”
The idea of living longer, healthier, is not new, but the science of aging is now understood better than ever, and the methods of reducing the often substantial gap between our useful life and the time we can stay healthy (known as health spans) are becoming more accessible. For some time now I have been skeptical of the idea of investing significant time and money to try to live longer, but it may be because I only assumed that it was not for people like me.
In 2017, I interviewed Bryan Johnson’s billionaire technology businessman on his mission to level everyone, including himself, implementing chips in our brain so we can compete with the IA. This conversation has dirty me over the years. Although I stayed in biohacking (I have a chip in my hand to do basic tasks related to smartphones), I would defend a cautious approach.
Bryan Johnson’s businessman talks about taking extreme measures in the name of longevity.
Since then, Johnson’s name has become a synonym for taking extreme measurements to reverse aging and extend his life, among them, injecting the blood of his 17 -year -old son in his 47 -year -old body (since then this practice has ceased to “exchange total plasma”). Search for longevity is often associated with the Biohacker Biohacker Valley Biohacker boys such as Johnson and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who makes her feel alienating and inaccessible.
That is why at SXSW London, he was curious not to see that not one, but two panels of all women who discuss the inverse aging and expanded our health. The panels were not dedicated to the type of anti-aging rhetoric with which I have grown up, which demands that women do everything in their power to stay young and beautiful. Although, like the Canadian comedian, Katherine Ryan joked during one of the panels, women should avoid stress while keeping unmarried, because “you make you ugly, be married to a loser.”
The new science of aging
Ryan hosts a podcast called What’s My Age Again?
Famous women, perhaps more than none of us, live in vanity pressure cuisine, where their appearance is constantly judged. It is fair to say that an increase in famous women, from the Kardashians to Meghan Trainor, have been vocal about all the many steps they have taken to reverse their aging.
Apart from cosmetic benefits, health and quality of life often make the most convincing case for longevity. With more women who have babies later, they want to maintain their youthful energy to be present, active parents, said Ryan. In addition, for many of us, there is an important gap between the number of years that constitute our useful life and the number of years we continue to be healthy. But many believe that this gap is ours for closing.
“The biological age and chronological age of a person often do not coincide,” said Nichola Conlon, a molecular biologist and CEO of the Healthy Nuchido Aging Company, who is a common guest at the Ryan podcast. “Everyone associates age with a number … this kind of more does not matter.”
Katherine Ryan on the left, and Nichola Conlon in Sxsw London.
In the past, scientists thought that the way we age was a fixed fixed process almost completely by our genetics. This is no longer so (as it confirms multiple Equal reviewed studies confirming aging is influenced by several factors). “Aging is a maleable process, as we are finding,” Brown said. Science evolves rapidly and even one XPRIZE HEALTHSPANOffering $ 101 million to anyone who may have a solution to hit 10 to 20 years out of someone’s age.
We know that aging is influenced by several factors, in addition to genetics, largely how we live our lives. As such, it is important that we try to understand our bodies and treat them well, which is a fairly universal advice.
“You can live healthier in the Middle Ages if you stop following the general guidelines and, on the other hand, follow your data,” said Depti Agarwal, a doctor specializing in healthy aging, during a panel about health assessment during life.
This approach, known as precision medicine, defends a tailor -made approach, instead of the single size. It takes a lot of guessing of medicine, but it is not without its criticism.
Longevity, but only for a few?
Transfering the responsibility of aging to the individual can reduce support for public health measures, said Timothy Caulfield, professor and director of research at the Institute for Health Law at the University of Alberta, speaking at SXSW, but in Atlantic’s How to challenge the podcast of death (A deep dive would recommend if you want to get more information).
Everything is very good, emphasizing that you have control over your own longevity if you have time, money and resources to take care of yourself, he said. But it is simply not the case with many people, which means that the intention of prolonging longevity has the potential to group the existing inequalities. He added that he also sends the message to people who “if you don’t do it, you are not failing.”
It also creates space for the welfare industry to exploit the concerns of people by selling products based on previous science statements that are not necessarily supported by a robust testing body, said Caulfield.
There is an important conversation to have equal access to longevity treatments, as it is more common, said Cat Wiles, founder and CSO of the Marketing Agency Spark, who appeared on the panel next to Ryan and Conlon. “We are already beginning to see signs of warning about inequality,” he said. Age extensions can increase among the rich elite, but in the poorest areas, the reverse is often true.
Private health companies are already giving people who can afford tools to improve their health, and it would be worrying to think that insurance premiums could be related to your biological age, added Wiles.
Conlon has hope, however, that we will reach a point where longevity medicine is so affordable that it will be “inaccurate” that doctors do not help you to slow down or reverse aging. Many of the most extreme measures taken by billionaire biohackets, for example, Johnson’s blood exchange, for example, will remain inaccessible (in addition to rare) for most of us. The same may not be true for other solutions.
Nuchido, Conlon’s company, makes NAD Plus supplementsThey are popular with celebrities and have some evidence that support their use for anti-aging, although they are the subject of many ongoing research.
During the Health Health Panel, Tamsin Lewis, a doctor who founded the Wellgevity Misery Company, said that intravenous Nads are not the answer to slowing down the aging rate. However, he will slow down finances. Instead, she and the other women on her panel defended prioritizing cheaper interventions.
What really works?
It may not be what you want to hear if you are willing to launch money to the problem, but the best scientific evidence that we currently have to support healthy aging and longevity are obvious solutions: we must prioritize nutrition, exposure to sunlight, movement and muscle construction.
“We bring this meat jacket, but it is very a scaffold for our longevity,” said Lewis. “It protects our brain, bones, hips, sleep and blood sugar levels.”
Other key factors include sleeping enough, minimizing stress, maximizing resilience and strengthening our emotional and mental health.
“The longevity movement has been reduced to Biohacking Bros,” said Nikolina Glauc, co -founder and Chief Executive Officer of Glycanage, a company that uses biomarkers to detect molecular diseases. The most important thing that has made a difference in his own research to extend his life is psychotherapy, he added.
When Lewis closes the session with breathing and the mini rave, I feel as if it had been on a whole journey through the culture of longevity. I feel skeptical about some of the faces in reverse aging I have found, which feel a bit like the culture of exploitative well -being dressed in a dubious science. I am also concerned about unequal access to reverse aging solutions and social and public health impacts.
At the same time, I feel promoted by some of the research currently underway, especially for what Brown calls the “connection science”, which explores through dance, music and community.
“In the end, humans must be with other people,” he said. Of all the tips I have received, it feels like the easiest to follow – and even if I do not do my clock again, at least I will keep me sensible and happy during the life of my life.
