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There's a fascinating tension with anti-aging drugs, which is that your preference would obviously be to take them as early as possible, so you spend more time at a younger age as opposed to just prolonging the last years of your life, where you'll be stuck in a nursing home anyway.
But taking experimental drugs while you're young is also much higher risk, and you might see people sacrificing their 20s for the sake of their 70s in a way they end up regretting, even if there aren't any side effects.
Taurine and Vitamin E are readily available and seem prudent.
For melatonin, tryptophan plus niacin would maximize the serotonin pathway (note this is dangerous when used with SSRIs).
How many of these are easily available? I had no idea that royal jelly is sold as a supplement.
There's also a fascinating tension with physical exercise, which is that your preference would obviously be do it as early as possible, so you spend more time at a younger age as opposed to just prolonging the last years of your life, where you'll be stuck in a nursing home anyway.
But doing exercise while you're young is also much higher risk, and you might see people sacrificing their 20s for the sake of their 70s in a way they end up regretting, even if there aren't any injuries.
That said, even with risk of injuries it feels like a no brainer to be active and to be active from an early age.
Also I don’t think people should wait until their late 50ies to make sure they get enough vitamin c to “avoid sacrificing their 20ies”
If we really manage to crack the code on aging, How certain are we that it's merely something to be delayed? Apparent age is at least somewhat reversible via lifestyle factors e.g. diet/exercise/sobriety.
Especially selegiline, MAOIs are dicey business.
> Fast for short intervals regularly, and longer fasts as they feel good to you.
You can effectively do this every day if you just eat once per day. When I was properly obese, this technique resulted in rapid weight loss. Zero exercise was required to see results, which was good at the time because the not eating part was about all I could handle.
Being in a fasted state is as close as you can get to actually reversing aging. Your body engages in a process called autophagy when nutrient-sensing pathways are down-regulated. When you are stuffing your face constantly (i.e., every ~8 hours), there is less opportunity for this mechanism to do its job.
While autophagy does correlate with fasting and some studies link it to health markers, it should be noted that it usually takes at least 18 hours of continued fasting to even start and only goes into full swing after 48 to 72 hours. It is also an extreme cell response that is associated with high levels of cellular stress, which might have understudied long term detrimental effects. A simple calorie reduction either by eating fewer highly processed meals or regular intense exercise is much more universally accepted as longevity boosting, because it combats overweight, which is by far the most common disease that shortens general lifespan in the western world. There's really no good reason to force your body through these extreme diets. Don't be overweight, don't smoke, don't drink alcohol, maybe go easy on junk food and maybe do some exercise. And get your regular medical check-ups. Then you're already at the pinnacle of clinical longevity science. There is no actual anti aging drug yet that has a proven effect on humans. Best we have are some moderately promising monkey and small mammal studies, but they generally don't translate well.
Fasting without any exercise has a hidden downside: you’re not just burning fat, you’re also burning muscle. Less muscle → lower glucose disposal capacity → systemic insulin resistance. The problem is that insulin resistance doesn’t stop in muscle — the brain is highly insulin-sensitive, and once central insulin signaling gets disrupted you start seeing network-level dysfunction and cognitive impairment (there’s a reason Alzheimer’s is sometimes called “type 3 diabetes”).
So yeah, autophagy is real, but pairing fasting with at least some resistance work is critical if you don’t want the “anti-aging hack” to backfire by accelerating muscle loss and brain decline.
See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5462531/ for brain insulin effect
Latest research (as in only ~2m old) dispels that narrative a bit but not entirely. Looks like spermidine is the autophagy signal but they’re not sure fasting does t always increase spermidine
Also…lifting light weights for like 10 minutes a day at home is a lifechanger in the early days
Associating weight loss with the healthiness of oneself is a mistake.
One can subsist on Oreos at a "healthy" weight if they consume <2,000 calories worth of cookies per day. They will not be a healthy person.
You can't meet your daily protein / caloric requirements in one meal. Also many vitamins / minerals compete for absorption so you don't want to consume all of them at the same meal either.
You are overstating the benefits of fasting. While it can be an effective weight loss strategy for some people, for those of us at a healthy weight there is no reliable evidence that it will improve lifespan compared to eating the same nutrients spread out across multiple meals.
I'm a large man and fairly active so I have to consume ~3000 kcal/day to maintain weight. If I try to eat that much in one meal it will make me physically sick. My digestive system just can't handle that much in one bolus.
Autophagy sounds like a great idea... if you completely ignore the Hayflick limit - non-cancerous human cells don't divine indefinitely!
Do you get acid reflux?
What's striking about "anti-ageing" research is how it keeps circling back to the same boring truths: don’t smoke, keep your weight down, move often, sleep properly, keep blood pressure and cholesterol in check, and go easy on the booze.
If something makes an overweight, sedentary smoker hit 100, then it’s a miracle drug. Please let me know if/when you've seen that drug...
In the absence of actually lengthening the telomeres, everything falls short in the anti-aging department.
Most lifestyle habits contribute to shorting the telomeres as little as possible, which guarantees good health no matter the age, but still aging, albeit slower.
Given the current technology trajectory, many people including me, think that we are very close to totally stopping aging, and even reversing it.
> don’t smoke, keep your weight down, move often, sleep properly, keep blood pressure and cholesterol in check, and go easy on the booze.
And UVs, don't forget UVs.
GLP-1s are the first hint of that.
You missed the most important one, strong social connections. Maybe smoking might beat it out, but otherwise make sure you have a strong social network if you want to live longer (and with better quality of life).
This is just another way of saying there have been no big advances in clinical anti-ageing. And that's probably because little serious effort is going into it, compared with say, military spending.
Be careful when reading such blogs:
> Note that the dosage in the mouse experiments is quite high — 0.1% of the body weight every day, meaning about 2 ounces a day for me (70 kg).
Mouse and human metabolism are very different. A better starting estimate would be 5g/day, not 57g/day. I hope people dont accidentally overdose themselves because of lack of a pharmacology background.
Scaling mouse doses to human by body weight is a common rookie mistake.
A better estimate for dose scaling uses body surface area. Even with that, inter-species differences don’t allow prevent extrapolation.
Scaling by body weight leads to the common mistake of dismissing mouse studies because the casual observer does the match (by weight) and thinks the dose used was excessive.
It’s such a basic topic in medicine and scientific research that I don’t trust anyone who scales by body weight.
lol, that one was really a howler.
You're spot on. But for the rest of the forum:
The most commonly accepted mouse-to-human conversion is: (D)*(3/37) = H
Where D = the mouse dose in mg/kg. H = human dose in mg/kg.
So if a 25g mouse eats 0.1% of its bodyweight in taurine, that comes out to 1000mg/kg. It translates to 81mg/kg for a human. If you weigh 100kg, an equivalent daily dose for you is 8.1 grams/day.
The rat equation is similar, but 6/37 rather than 3/37.
Lack of pharmacology background doesn't seem like the biggest issue when extrapolating from mouse to human.
> Be careful when reading such blogs
I followed a link to another blog post of theirs in which they go on a rant claiming there was a conspiracy to suppress chloroquine and ivermectin as COVID treatments. I dont think anyone should be taking health advice from this person
I just learned this the other day, but its called allometric scaling. Definitely far off linear.
Ascorbic is not a correct name of a compound. Should be 'ascorbic acid' or Vitamin C. Such sloppiness cast doubt on accuracy of the whole review.
Read a little further... it's specifically called ascorbic acid and vitamin C.
He probably just wanted to save space within the table.
This, and the fact that Ascorbic acid leads to hardening of the arteries also makes it suspect.
Many of the studies he refers to are old. There was a widely held belief in the early 1980's promoted by Linus Pauling that Vit C cured cancer.
I mean this guy is not a scientist. He's an enthusiasts aping scientific process. Look at how he talks about the "10-20% flexibility". Hypothesis assumed true, no supporting evidence. Same with his idea of being young longer. No evidence supports this, yet his comments proceed as if it's a gospel truth
These articles really need a lot of context to parse as they paint some of the compounds as having potential upside without downsides.
Metformin is amazing in people with diabetes, but among non-diabetics taking it for vague life extension claims it’s often discontinued due to side effects.
Rapamycin has fallen out of favor among many in this space because they felt it was producing net negative effects as well as causing very annoying side effects like blisters in the mouth.
I’ve followed supplement and fitness forums for years. It’s amazing how frequently a prescription medication will be held up as a wonder drug, but then people who try it discover it isn’t helping them or is even causing other problems they didn’t think about.
EDIT: There are some serious scientific errors in this blog (dose conversions from mice studies). After clicking around the author appears to be into some quackery and conspiracy theory stuff as well. I flagged this submission because it’s not as scientific of a source as it claims.
“ Josh Mitteldorf studies evolutionary theory of aging using computer simulations.”
> This is exactly why one must read the author before going into their content. What does this even mean?
From the conclusion paragraph:
> Your primary life extension program is diet and exercise. Choose a diet that works for you. Stay slim.
Considering heart disease is the #1 killer, doing whatever you can to not die from heart disease is the best place for most people to start.
Even in 2025, diet and exercise are still king.
I am very certain that framing ageing as a disease that can be treated with a drug is a false oversimplication that can not yield meaningfull results.
Personaly I love complexity and trying to parse all of the moving peices in a problem, but ageing involves an unknown total number of peieces, and what we do know is daunting, many of the biological processes operate within tollerances of parts per billion, and the large number of processes effect each other.
The worst part of "anti ageing" is that it completly ignores the reality of lifestyle inputs demonstrably having accelerated ageing effects.
cart, horse
I thought this was an informative post, but for many of these compounds the simple "life extension" metric is the one that is least interesting to me.
I have no problem dying in my 80s or 90s, but I just want to ensure that as much as possible that I have a solid mind and body right up until I die. For example, my father has been taking metformin for nearly 30 years after surviving a heart attack in his 50s (he has type 2 diabetes). He's now in his mid 80s and has basically no significant cognitive decline, despite that his father and both of his brothers had severe dementia when they died. Obviously this is just one anecdote and I'm not arguing anything about the specifics of metformin, I'm just saying that the fact he is able to enjoy such an active life in his 80s is the biggest gift - if he died tomorrow I think he and all of his family would just be so grateful at the vibrant life he had.
Heck, for me I'd be fine with a drug that slightly reduced my lifespan if it gave me better quality of life up until the end.
This is useless. It takes zero account of genetic variability. I can tell you several of those things on that list that will decrease my lifespan.
If you care about your personal lifespan, you should care about your personal genetics and your personal heritage.
This was the same stupidity we saw with the blue zones. They didn’t think for a minute that these people lived for a long time because they were eating the foods they grew up on for generations.
No such discussion is complete without mention of SENS[0] i.e. the rejuvenation approach.
Not about delaying the inevitable, but about undoing the accumulated damage of aging.
How many people can really even afford life extension? As in living all the way into 90s or 100? Your retirement savings have to be pretty solid to enjoy those extra years. It’s not like before, the game has changed.
Winner, "Ascorbic". Do they mean Vitamin C?
Would any of the OTC stuff even be effective? Melatonin, NAC, and Berberine.
A lot of people in the comments are talking about the "problem" of death and approaches to take, but really, the only thing you can do is philosophically make your peace. Anything else at this point is yelling into infinity.
It is spreading FUD wrt quercetin. It states there is just applicable one mammalian study which it doesn't even cite. In reality there have been multiple studies in humans showing no harm from a reasonable dose.
Richard Miller's Intervention Testing Program should really be your go-to for this: https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-p...
He has no conflicts of interests, works for the NIA, and he's quite open to trying other compounds, having put out the call for suggestions.
i haven't read it but i know the tl;dr. none of that shit works.
This is a great discussion on longevity, though the main article focuses heavily on mouse studies. To add to that, I've been thinking about a framework that prioritizes the existing human evidence.
My take, which I wrote about in the linked post, is to use a tiered approach:
1. Top Priority (Human RCTs): Start with what we know works in human randomized trials. This is our most solid ground and includes sustained weight loss, lowering LDL (especially with statins), intensive blood-pressure control, "polypill" strategies, and appropriate TRT for men with a confirmed deficiency. Also in this tier are things with more modest but proven benefits, like flu shots, multivitamins, and specific fish oils.
2. Second Priority (Strong Correlation): Look at interventions with strong positive associations in human studies and/or robust lifespan benefits in mice. This is where things like exercise, Mediterranean diets, social well being, coffee, green tea, fiber, and garlic fit in.
3. Third Priority (Emerging Science): Finally, consider the more experimental options that have shown promise in mice but only have early human signals. This is a long list, including rapamycin, calorie restriction, glycine+NAC, taurine, acarbose, metformin, and NAD+ boosters.
Throughout this process, the goal should be to treat existing medical issues, track what works for you personally (N=1), and always consult with your doctor. Things that are still purely theoretical should wait for better data.
Here's the full post with more detail:
http://mylongevityjourney.blogspot.com/2022/08/a-short-summa...