The Longevity Book: The Science of Aging, the Biology of Strength, and the Privilege of Time

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The Kaufmann Protocol: Aging Solutions by Dr. Sandra Kaufmann: This no-nonsense life extension book focuses on specific longevity interventions, mainly supplements, that the author has examined and determined hold the most promise based on the science available and her own scoring matrix. This 2022 publication adds on to, but doesn’t replace her original 2018 longevity guide. For much of our lives, our rejuvenation program is dormant. This is because “activating a program that reroutes so much energy away from reproduction to use for protection and repair would not be advantageous.” “These alternative programs have probably evolved to deal with periods of starvation by minimizing growth and ageing, while also stimulating regeneration.” G]enes that have become altered as a result of your lifestyle can actually be passed down to the next generation. That means that the DNA each one of us receives from our parents is influenced not only by the lifestyle of our parents but also our grandparents and our great-grandparents and our great-great-grandparents" (p. 65) Trying to extend your lifespan by increasing your intake of vitamin C is like trying to improve a Mozart symphony by increasing the number of cello players. ... It took billions of years of evolution for it to reach the current state of near-perfection. We cannot expect a simple supplement to make something that's almost perfect even better

Longo tries, with partial success, to look at a broader range of evidence than many researchers, focusing on what he describes as 5 pillars: The other way—and this is something that they didn’t really discover, but they talk about it—is that the timing of eating may be as important as the nutrients. One of the ways that this longevity pathway, which is a molecular pathway, gets turned on is by fasting. After he lost his medical license in Kansas, he got mad and decided he was going to run for governor. He made barnstorming public speeches. He would show up in an airplane in small towns and gave speeches from the airport, with all the people there. He came within a whisker of becoming the governor of Kansas. He probably would have done it if the election hadn’t been purposely rigged by the Democratic Party. At that time, he probably would have been the governor of Kansas, which shows that things haven’t changed so much since the 1930s. You are officially in the menopause when a full year has passed since your last period, what doctors call the final menstrual period, or the FMP" (p. 112)This book is like a textbook and I'm a student in Mrs. Diaz's class haha This past chapter was all on menopause. 99% of the chapter on menopause I had no idea about so that was really interesting. Howard’s simple question—and this is key, the simplicity of Howard’s approach—cut through all of that. By asking me what I was optimizing for—and the correct answer, in general, is healthy longevity—I was forced to reconsider what I was doing to myself, why I was doing it, and its consequences. Many of the pharmaceutical studies we rely on do not take sex into consideration. Since hormones fluctuate over the course of a month, tests that use females can be a lot more complicated to analyze than tests that use males. Without taking hormonal shifts into account, it is impossible to determine how treatments might affect a woman over the course of a month." (pp. 55 - 56)

For those who follow Attia’s podcast, many parts of the book will be familiar. He mixes an accessible, story-telling style with a medical vocabulary that can be at first daunting, but then reassuring: he’s certainly done the research himself. As a practicing clinician, he sees a lot of the health issues that impact longevity first-hand, and he also has a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. Diaz and Bark authored The Body Book, which is information about nutrition, exercise and cultivating strong habits, along with some of the latest scientific insights about overall physical health. The thing is, the author recommends a hard-core vegan version of the mediterranean diet with a bit of fish here and there. Simply because he is Italian and got to know a bunch of very old people from a small village near his home town. It seems extremely dangerous to assume that whatever these people ate must be good simply because the sample size is so tiny. These people clearly had extremely good genes. Comments requesting medical advice will not be responded to, as I am not legally permitted to practice medicine over the internet.

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In some instances, the text is unnecessarily egocentric. No problem with citing and explaining data generated by the author but I don't see the need of repeating in each sentence that he, and his group, was the one that discovered.. , or that X company, which he founded..., etc etc. Following a common practice, only the first author is cited when the list of authors of a paper is too long... unless he is in the author list.. then the first author + Longo, V. is cited, just in case readers forgot that these were HIS data, even after being mentioned in the main text. These sentences, together with the constant re-repetitions, are more typical of (bad) politicians or marketers than serious scientists and may give readers the false impression that the information in the book is just marketing. Longo talks somewhat like advocates of a paleo diet, but instead of arguing that the last 10,000 years of evolution were unimportant for nutrition, Longo errs in the other direction, by focusing more on what our grandparents ate, combined with what people eat in Blue Zones. W]hile women are being prescribed more medication than ever before, not all of those medications are properly tested for use by women." (p. 54) For readers wanting a more accessible, conversational introduction to longevity science, well-known self-help guru Tony Robbins’s new book, published with the aid of famous futurist (and X-Prize founder) Peter Diamandis and neurosurgeon Robert Hariri, is worth a look.

In general, there are several defects that make reading of the text less attractive. It is a pity as it would not be a difficult task to make an interested story from the info given in the text. Dr. Barzilai, who founded the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is another giant in the life extension research space (he’s running the TAME trial to see if metformin has anti-aging effects on humans), and his new book covers all his aging research findings and possible applications. Since then, he’s worked diligently on furthering his research, leading to a record for the longest-lived laboratory rat, and to a new study, published in 2023, suggesting an average biological age reversal of 67% in rats injected with “plasma from young adult pigs.”Manage stress by meditating daily. There's many types of meditation and it's important to find the one that suits you. Clear your mind from the constant chatter about past and future and just be in the now. Antioxidants - found, for example, in vitamins E and C - help the body fight the damaging effects of oxidation, a natural process that occurs in your cells when they produce energy." (p. 79) Yes: I skimmed only the sections of The Longevity Book that interested me. What I read was impressive in its own way. For cardiovascular disease, the evidence is stronger: Lindeberg's table 4.1 compares the U.S. to Uganda in 1951-1956, showing how many deceased men had signs of previous myocardial infarction at autopsy: 124 out of 508 in the US had such signs, versus 1 out of 517 for similarly aged men in Uganda! Why exercise is the most potent pro-longevity “drug”—and how to begin training for the “Centenarian Decathlon.”