I remember well visiting the shoe store as a youngster and putting my feet in the X-ray machine to determine how the shoes fit. You could see the outline of the shoe and every toe in detail. As a precocious 6th grader, I was placed in the non-graded class in school with primarily polio victims – no vaccine yet available in the mid-forties. And every cut, potentially deadly before the advent of antibiotics, was liberally slathered with iodine. Since I came into the world eighty-four years ago, the medical field has made enormous progress – in fact, I shouldn’t even be here – male life expectancy in 1935 was a mere sixty years.
In the early 1960”s I began taking a simple vitamin supplement, joined Life Extension Foundation (LEF) in 1980 for their monthly newsletter, and remember well reading “Life Extension”, a book by Durk and Sandy in 1982. Thus, began a forty-year interest in taking ever increasing quantities of potentially life extending supplements. For most of those years I followed the recommendations of LEF. An avid tennis player since age 40, I added a light gym workout in my 50’s. I basically sought the easy path – taking a pill - not through diet, fasting or extreme exercise.
My GP’s through the years made fun of my supplement regimen, and I found it difficult to choose between the various health options, and more recently, anti-aging protocols available. The decision dilemma continues today. Josh Mittledorf, Vince Guillermo and others have provided valuable background, and in recent years, anti-aging trials employing worms, flies and Wistar rats provided clues to thwarting human aging. Human trials simply take too long. Only since the arrival of the Horvath DNAm clock has it been possible to measure actual biological aging. Finally, an aging clock! Now at age 84, my DNAm age is between 70 – 75. If the clock is a true measure of biological age, I’ve managed to shave about 10 years off my chronological age.
It’s therefore with great anticipation, that I await the results from Bruce Klein’s spreadsheet of anti-aging data from among the early adopters of anti-aging protocols. It includes relevant supplement use, real and methylated age, diet, exercise, and other bio-aging data. This is a massive task and I wish him well. It goes without saying that the more participants and data accumulated, the more relevant the results. Will one or more supplements jump out as significantly delaying the aging process? That would be the dream of every startup in the anti-aging community, and every individual seeking a long and healthy life.
A big thank you to Longecity, Mind and other members who are promoting and supporting the aging and biomarker study. Hopefully a majority of Longecity’s members will participate in this invaluable addition to the field of anti-aging. To paraphrase, “Ask not what Longecity can do for you, but what you can do for Longecity and the entire anti-aging community.”.
Finally, when the Beta test of Bruce’s spreadsheet is completed, perhaps it can be offered to the various other Longevity clones in the community for their use – or better still, sponsor an open access version to the entire anti-aging community. Perhaps companies like Zymo would consider sponsorship for access to the results.