Hearing loss: shifting gears from the ears to the brain

Posted on 24th November 2024 by Georges

Everyone knows hearing loss accompanies aging. What most don’t know is that it’s not just about the ears. As we get older, a lot of us still hear sounds just fine, but we find we can’t make out conversations in a noisy room, such as at a family gathering or in a busy café. What’s going on? The cause might actually be your brain, not just your ears. Here’s why, and (maybe) what you can do about it.

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Should I take GlyNAC to slow my aging?

Posted on 6th February 2024 by Georges

The idea is simple, with aging, levels of the antioxidant metabolite glutathione decline and as a result there’s an increase of oxidative damage and mitochondrial dysfunction (1,2). So in theory you should want to increase the levels of glutathione.

The building blocks to make glutathione include the amino acids glycine and cysteine, and supplementing with these amino acids (termed ‘GlyNAC,’ where ‘Gly’ stands for glycine and cysteine is provided as N-acetylcysteine, or ‘NAC’) has indeed been shown in humans to restore levels of glutathione (2).

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A simple way to calculate your Physiological Age

Posted on 18th August 2023 by Georges

Tracking your biological age is imperative to understanding your health, how you’re aging, and how your lifestyle or other interventions are helping (or harming) you. Here we provide a tool for users to calculate their PhysiAge scores based on their own physiological parameters. This simple equation, using just your calendar age, sex, fasted blood glucose levels, average daily step count and systolic blood pressure, is based on our 2023 publication “A metabolomic signature of decelerated physiological aging in human plasma“. Having a PhysiAge younger than your calendar age is a great indication that your lifestyle is working for your long term health. Having a PhysiAge score that is higher than your calendar age might mean there are places to improve your lifestyle. For example, your diet will (indirectly) influence your blood glucose levels and your exercise will (directly) change your average daily step count. Disclaimer: PhysiAge is not intended to serve as medical advice.

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Fungi for longevity

Posted on 21st July 2023 by Georges

Mushrooms might be one of your bets for healthy aging. Why? There are three very clear reasons. 

Firstly, many mushrooms contain non-digestible carbohydrates that benefit your microbiome (1) (and as we know, preserving your aging microbiome is one of your lifelines to health.). These carbohydrates include oligosaccharides (e.g. trehalose) and polysaccharides (e.g. chitin, β-glucans and mannans) which are readily available in culinary mushrooms (1). So, you can already eat mushrooms just for the fibers.

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Build your own blue zone

Posted on 27th November 2022 by Georges

While you think about all the biomedical discoveries emerging in aging research, flying by you in waves of popularity… antioxidants, telomeres, senescent cells, epigenetic reprogramming… it’s easy to get seduced that a magic pill will let you keep your health seemingly forever. But it would be a mistake to not look at the only thing that’s actually tangible to you right now and influencing your lifespan directly: the environment around you, right now.

Arguably, in your lifetime, the environment around you will have the greatest influence on your health and wellbeing. And if you chase a magic longevity pill to be happy, know that no pill will give you lasting happiness. Happiness is something you find in the now. So how can you make your environment right now lead you to a long life tomorrow?

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Strength training: How much for healthy aging?

Posted on 4th October 2022 by Georges

I previously discussed considerations of using metformin, rapamycin, and NAD+ boosters to promote healthy aging, and the jury was mixed for all of them. But don’t despair, there is a bullet-proof way to improve aging health: exercise. Here we’ll look at muscle-strength training.

In terms of muscle physiology, aging is accompanied by an increase in catabolism and decreased capacity for anablism. That means, ever so surely, you will undergo muscle loss. Your muscle mass will peak around age 30, and by some estimates, at the age of 70 you will have roughly 30% of this capacity1,2.

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Should I take rapamycin to slow my aging?

Posted on 9th June 2021 by Georges

The aging research world was rocked in 2009 when a study showed that giving old mice a drug called rapamycin could significantly extend their lifespan1. It was quite remarkable because it was the first demonstration that aged animals could still undergo beneficial aging interventions. Before 2009, most researchers assumed aging interventions had to start at a young age.

Since then, a lot of studies have followed, and rapamycin, the canonical ‘mTOR inhibitor,’ has been shown to extend lifespan in at least fourteen other studies, confirming the late-age treatments, showing lifespan extension in both males and females, and in various different mouse strains2. Not only that, rapamycin has been shown to extend lifespan in cancer disease mouse models, and mouse models of progeria and mitochondrial dysfunction2. And the list doesn’t stop there, rapamycin has been shown to have benefits in other mouse models, including those of heart diseases, infections, and for neurological conditions including alzhiemer’s, parkinson’s and huntington’s diseases2.

So what’s the catch—why aren’t older people all taking rapamycin? Continue reading →

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Should I take nicotinamide riboside to slow my aging?

Posted on 18th December 2020 by Georges

You may have heard of so called ‘NAD boosters,’ compounds that you can easily buy online like nicotinamide riboside (NR) and others. There’s even a high profile company offering monthly subscriptions to supplements including NR that may boost your NAD levels. It makes sense: NAD levels decline as we age, and giving NAD boosting molecules like NR (which is just a metabolite precursor to NAD) can improve health parameters and extend lifespan in mice1–3.

What’s it going to do in humans? Continue reading →

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How much protein should I have in my diet?

Posted on 29th February 2020 by Georges

How much protein should you be eating? Research from the biology of aging can help answer that, with just three facts.

Fact one: Proteins, and to be more specific, the building blocks of proteins known as amino acids, signal for a molecular pathway involving the master regulatory gene MTOR that can accelerate aging1. In lab animals, eating less protein extends lifespan, restricting certain amino acids can extend lifespan, and inhibiting MTOR with a drug known as rapamycin can extend lifespan1,2. A simple conclusion can be made from this, that eating less protein means less activity of MTOR, which means a longer life.

Fact two: One of the major threats to living independently as we age is loss of muscle mass, which progressively occurs with aging and is known as sarcopenia. This ‘muscle wasting’ that occurs as we age is due to several factors and feedback loops, the result of which is that we lose ‘anabolic capacity’ as we age, and simply can’t build muscles from the same amount of protein that we used to3. That’s why higher protein diets can actually be a good thing for the elderly, just to overcome the depleted capacity to build and maintain muscle4. So now we are saying that more protein could be good, though only when old.

Fact three: Epidemiological research shows Continue reading →

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Two strategies for population-level healthy aging – implemented in this order

Posted on 16th November 2019 by Georges

We should live in a world where everyone has the chance to age healthy. We can get there by investing in the following two strategies and implementing them in this order:

(1) Personalized health tracking and advice. Stop using antioxidant supplements, stop plastering exotic fruit extracts on your face, and stop that crazy zero-carb diet. Unless, of course, you’re tracking and know that it’s benefiting you. There’s a Dutch saying ‘meten is weten’ which means ‘measuring is knowing’ and that sums it all up. You need to understand your own body to understand if the things you are trying are working for you. That means knowing your genome, microbiome, blood sugar responses to meals, activity levels, heart rate variability, and sleep patterns, to name a few.

Why? Let’s take the case of ‘calorie restriction,’ Continue reading →

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