On Longevity(eriktorenberg.substack.com) |
On Longevity(eriktorenberg.substack.com) |
Type 2 diabetics on metformin live 15% longer than non-diabetics. This is remarkable, considering how big a health disadvantage diabetes itself is.
Metformin seems to mimic fasting somehow, by interfering with mitochondrial function.
For more information, I refer you to David Sinclair's numerous discussions on this topic. He takes 1 gram of metformin per day, with his evening meal.
This is not medical advice.
Which mitigates the damage caused by the toxic components in his evening meal. If the meal is unalterable that's a good move. But most people can do a lot more good by removing the ingredients from the meal that stress the mitochondria, particularly the excess carbohydrates and polyunsaturated fats. That same deadly duo is also responsible for atherosclerosis.
https://naturallystrong.me/david-sinclair/
He's got an excellent diet. He's also got very solid reasoning behind metformin supplementation, having done years of research and investigation. He's a smart and respectable guy, operating in good faith with his research, so if you find yourself disagreeing with him over something trivial, it's unlikely you're right and he's wrong.
Implying that metformin is useful only to mitigate hypothetical harms from nutrition (a trivial dispute) is probably wrong.
Across various interviews, he's recommended metformin for exactly the mitochondrial effects you're talking about. He doesn't supplement on workout days to prevent disruption of the healing and recovery. Metformin isn't something that anyone should start taking blindly or blithely, as it can amplify damage from other circumstances, but it's got a clear place in Sinclair's regimen for very good reasons.
Metformin's longevity effects work on a lot of species. It's got solid science recommending it for life extension, like the other things Sinclair uses, but unless you're a doctor, or work with one to create a comprehensive life extension, health, nutrition, and fitness plan, metformin probably isn't a great idea. Sinclair is doing something similar to juggling chainsaws - it's really cool that he can do that, but it's dangerous for amateurs. Too many unknowable factors can blow up in your face.
Then again, maybe it'll be part of a standard regimen in the next decade, and the immortals are living among us.
You should look into SkQ1 + NAC instead.
Fairness
Only rich people will get it. (No tech has ever done this.)
Better to give money to the poor than science. (family, city, state, nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.)
Bad for society
Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.)
Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistent)
Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.)
Stop having kids
Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136)
Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age)
Old people are expensive (50% of your lifetime medical cost occur in your final year. Delay is profitable.)
Old people suck. (death is an inferior cure to robustness.)
Bad for individual
You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related)
You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?)
You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.)
Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.)
People will force you to live forever (they aren't able to do this now, why would they begin to be?)
Man up, save your family, save yourself.
P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horrible things comes true, even earlier.
P.P.S. I personally raised $27M for longevity research (SENS.org).
Though we aren't currently working on aging specifically at https://SoundMind.co, we are focused on improving sleep with one of the long-term benefits being longevity and improved longer quality of life.
We are already seeing the benefits of extending life via exercise and proper diet. Sleep is the next mountain to climb. You can't give people long life if you can't get them sleeping better, and our sleep naturally degrades as we age.
Tryptophan -> serotonin -> melatonin -> Mesenchymal Stem cells
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6329089/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24650016/
The next problem you will probably be looking at is how to use vit K1 to keep calcium out of tissues/organs/glands like the pineal gland and cysteine & manganese to make the most damaging ROS in the body less damaging.
(I'm not qualified in anything!)
This is the research around the first stimulation we are implementing https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/43/1/zsz197/5613713
The result is winners and losers - good and bad lives lived and many fates left by the road starting from the time people are born. Outcomes influenced by where you grew up, by rich or poor, good or bad schools and so on. All one can do if one find oneself at the bottom of the pile so to say is to trade ones time to offset bad beginnings. But life is short.
Time is the greatest equalizer of all, and if i could i would choose to live forever.
We'll need a different scale of maturity, too - an 18 year old adult in a relationship with a 300 year old adult makes the term "adult" ridiculously ineffective in describing anything meaningful.
Age and death and maturity tie in to almost every aspect of life and culture and human experience. We don't have the cultural tools and concepts that allow for immortality to fit. If it's achieved, the world radically changes and we won't know what those changes will be until it happens. It'd be like tasking Edison with predicting how the internet would change life, or cell phones, or asking Julius Caesar to write about how the germ theory of disease might improve the human condition. We're smart enough to predict small parts of it, but there's a whole world of ideas and behaviors that get unleashed by immortality, and a non-trivial percentage of them are probably counterproductive with regards to humanity at large (immortal Putin, anyone?)
Actually fixing dementia, even without life extension, would probably be a social revolution easily comparable with gender equality.