I quickly browsed the culture of longevity. This is my understanding of reverse aging

I stood in the Truman Brewery in London, a road room with hundreds of people, and we all shook hands above our heads, towards the end of another day at SXSW.

I won’t lie-I hope something like this will happen sometime in the week. Weird, alternative moments like this do separate interesting meetings from boring ones. This particular moment is a mini flavor of “Long Live Bliss” – an activity style that pops up around the world, run by those who believe in music, sports and connections, affects our health and happiness in the long run.

Social entrepreneur and systems architect Tina Brown told us a few minutes ago. “The joy of life is a very powerful driving force.”

The idea of ​​living longer and healthier lives is nothing new, but the science of aging is now better understood than ever before, and the ways in which we reduce the often huge gap between our lives and the time we are able to stay healthy (called healthy spans) have become easier to use. I’ve long suspected investing a lot of time and money to try longer – but maybe it’s because I just thought it wasn’t someone like me.

Back in 2017, I interviewed Bryan Johnson, a billionaire tech entrepreneur, about his mission to upgrade everyone by implanting chips into our brains so that we can compete with AI. This conversation has bothered me over the years. Even if I dabbled in my own biohackers (I have chips in my hands to perform basic tasks related to smartphones), I advocate for a cautious approach.

Since then, Johnson’s name has become synonymous with extreme measures to reverse aging and prolong his life – in which the blood of his 17-year-old son was injected into his 47-year-old body (he has since stopped this practice and instead favored “total plasma exchange”). The pursuit of longevity is often associated with Silicon Valley billionaire biohacker boys like Johnson and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, which makes them feel alienated and inaccessible.

That’s why at SXSW London, London, I’d love to see an all-female panel discussing reverse aging and expanding our health span. The panels aren’t addicted to the kind of anti-aging rhetoric I grew up with, which requires women to do everything they can to stay young and beautiful. Even when Canadian comedian Katherine Ryan jokes in one of the panels, women should stay single and avoid stress because “it makes you ugly and marry losers.”

The new science of aging

Ryan hosted a podcast called “What is my age?

Celebrity women, perhaps more than any of us, live in a dressing table cooker, where her appearance is often judged. It is fair to say that the surge in famous women from the Kardashians to Meghan trainers has been proclaiming many steps they have taken to reverse aging.

In addition to the benefits of cosmetics, health and quality of life benefits are often the most compelling cases of pursuing longevity. Ryan said that as more women have children, they want to keep their youthful energy in the presence. Again, for many of us, there is a big gap between the number of years that make up our lifespan and the years we remain healthy. But many people think that this gap is our end.

“A person’s biological age and age age usually don’t match,” said Nichola Conlon, molecular biologist and CEO of Nuchido, a health aging company, a regular on the Ryan podcast. “Everyone associates age with a number…it doesn’t matter anymore.”

In the past, scientists believed that our age was a fixed process, almost entirely dependent on our genetics. That’s no longer the case (as confirmed by multiple peer-reviewed institutes that confirm aging. “As we found, aging is an extensible process,” Brown said. Science is moving rapidly, and there’s even an Xprize HealthSpan that offers $101 million to anyone who can come up with solutions to reduce someone’s age by 10 to 20 years.

We already know that aging is affected by various factors besides genetics – in large part the way we live. So it is important that we have to try to understand our bodies and treat them, which is very common advice.

“If you stop following general guidelines and follow the data, you can live healthier in middle age,” said Deepti Agarwal, a doctor who specializes in healthy aging.

This approach, known as precision medicine, advocates a tailor-made approach rather than a health-friendly approach. It requires a lot of speculation, but not without criticism.

Lifespan, but only for a few?

Timothy Caulfield, a professor and director of research at the University of Alberta Institute for Health Law, said shifting the responsibility for aging to individuals reduces support for public health measures, not speaking on SXSW, but on How to Fight the Death Podcast in the Atlantic (I recommend delving into it if you want to learn more).

It’s all very stressful, he said, and if you have the time, money and resources to take care of yourself, you can control your lifespan. But this is not the case for many, which means that seeking to extend lifespan has the potential to exacerbate existing inequalities. It also sends people a message, he added: “If you don’t, you fail.”

This also creates space for the health industry to tap into people’s anxiety by selling products based on rough scientific claims that aren’t necessarily backed by strong evidence, Caulfield said.

As it becomes more mainstream, there is an important conversation to go for lifespan therapy as it becomes more mainstream, he appears on the panel along with Ryan and Conlon. “We have begun to see warning signs about inequality,” she said. The age span may increase among the wealthy elite, but in poorer areas, the opposite is often true.

Wells added that private health companies are already giving those who have the ability to afford tools to improve their health and are concerned that they think the insurance premium may be related to your biological age.

However, Conlong hopes we can reach the point where longevity medicine is so affordable that doctors don’t help you slow down or reverse aging. Doctors who will become “immoral”. Billionaire biohackers (for example, Johnson’s blood exchange) have taken many more extreme measures – probably still inaccessible for most of us (and unpleasant). Other solutions may not be the case.

Conlon’s company Nuchido has produced NAD Plus supplements that are popular among celebrities and have some evidence to support their use for anti-aging, although they are the subject of many ongoing research.

Intravenous NADS is not the answer to lower your aging rate during the Health Span group, Tamsin Lewis, a doctor who founded De-Aging Company Wellgevity. However, it will slow down your financial situation. Instead, she and other women in the group argued for priority for cheaper interventions.

What actually works?

If you are ready to invest money in the problem, this may not be what you want to hear, but the best scientific evidence we have to support healthy aging and longevity is the obvious solution: We need to prioritize nutrition, exposure to sunlight, exercise and building muscles.

“We wear this meat jacket, but it’s a scaffolding for our longevity,” Lewis said. “It protects our brain, bones, hips, sleep and blood sugar levels.”

Other key factors include getting enough sleep, minimizing stress, maximizing resilience and enhancing our emotional and mental health.

“The Longevity Movement is in trouble among biohacker brothers,” said Nikolina Glauc, co-founder and CEO of Glycanage, adding that the biggest thing she has made in her own pursuit of life extension is psychological therapy.

When Lewis ended the meeting with breath and a mini carnival, I felt like I was always in the entire culture of longevity. I was suspicious of some of the expensive reverse aging options I encountered, and felt a bit like an exploitative healthy culture, dressed in a questionable scientific outfit. I also worry about the lack of access to reverse aging solutions and the impact of social and public health.

At the same time, I feel excited about some of the research being done right now, especially what Brown calls “connection science,” which she explores through dance, music and community.

“In the end, humans need to be with other people,” she said. Of all the suggestions I received, it felt like the easiest to follow – even if it didn’t lower the clock for me, it would at least keep me sane and happy for the duration of my life.