Reverse aging? ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
| The latest thing that biohackers are talking about is reversing aging. There are two groups of people who’ve convinced themselves of a couple of things about "reversing age." The first group thinks they are already able to reverse aging. They’ve settled upon certain biomarkers that, if collated and plugged into an algorithm, can tell you your "biological age." If you improve those markers, you reduce your biological age. The number goes down, and that supposedly means you’ve gotten younger. Things like sleep score (itself a number that purports to capture a bunch of different biomarkers and provide a nice, neat, clean answer), VO2 max, blood glucose, insulin, and dozens of others are "appropriately weighted" to supposedly reveal your biological age. Ridiculous. Health cannot be totally encapsulated by a number, no matter how many factors go into calculating that number. Numbers cannot capture whether or not you can run up stairs, play a pickup game of basketball, carry your groceries up three flights of stairs without needing to recover, wake up excited to work on something new, or stay mentally sharp during a long conversation. No number reflects the totality of what it means to be a healthy human. One's biological age score is either a false positive or a false negative. If you're going to rely on numbers, I'd argue that it's actually smarter to look at the biomarkers and ignore the "biological age.". Thinking you know how to appropriately weigh each biomarker to determine the biological age is pure folly. How do you know if insulin is more important than VO2 max, or vice versa? You don't. Try to add hundreds of biomarkers. The more you add, the better. Still not good enough, and still throwing out a false positive, but at least you'll be incorporating more inputs. The other group are the ones who assume that at some point in the near future, someone—never the person making the claim—will be able to reverse aging at the cellular level. And, miraculously, the people making these claims always seem to believe they’ll survive just long enough for the technology to take effect. This is deus ex machina. This is God coming to save you. This is lite science fiction. This is magic. They never reveal (because they have no real expertise) how the "technology" will mechanistically reverse aging. They just assume that someone else will figure it out. Don't count on it. Let me know your take on the whole concept of reverse aging. Leave a comment over on Facebook or Instagram. |
|
|
|
|
No longer want to receive these emails? Unsubscribe.
Mark's Daily Apple 1101 Maulhardt Ave. Oxnard, CA 93033 |
|
|
|
|
