Bryan Johnson has made headlines for his radical attempts to decrease his biological age, including at one point using blood transfusions from his teenage son, Talmage, in an attempt to reverse age-related cell damage. Photo / Bryan Johnson
Everyone wants to try to live a little longer - but is there a way to do it cheaply, and without undergoing bizarre procedures?
Longevity - or decreasing your biological age - has become one of the latest lifestyle trends, favoured particularly by the uber rich looking at way to “de-age” themselves.
Billionaire Bryan Johnson has become the face of the trend, making headlines for his unusual approach to try and extend his life, including plasma transfusions from his 17-year-old son.
While the actions of billionaires have dominated discussions around decreasing biological age, studies have found that there are simpler ways to extend your lifespan.
Dr Nicholas Koemel was the co-author of a University of Sydney study released earlier this year, which said that combining small, everyday lifestyle changes could lead to a longer life.
Speaking to Francesca Rudkin and Louise Ayrey on the NZ Herald’s lifestyle podcast, The Little Things, Koemel said that one of the aims of the study was to find the minimum change that you would need for longevity, based on sleep, physical activity, and diet.
“The other aim of this study was to find the optimal change - so what would be a best-case scenario.
“We found some pretty interesting stuff. So, the aim was to find the minimum in the optimal, and we were able to find that the minimum for clinically meaningful reductions in risk of mortality, so this is about 10% lower risk of mortality, just required 15 extra minutes of sleep, two minutes extra per day of moderate to vigorous physical activity, and just something like an extra half serving of vegetables per day.”
He said other studies focus on broad sweeps of behaviour, but this was unique in looking for the “bare minimum”.
He said that was to make it easier for people to find things they can change today, rather than looking at bigger-scale lifestyle changes like a total diet reset.
The extreme regimes of the likes of Johnson are not realistic for everybody, Koemel said, and studies find better behaviour change comes with simpler goals.
“Now, maybe that’s the minimum change. Maybe it’s a little bit more generalised, but offering these really, really structured regimes, you end up moving people away from... organic living and into this sort of structured confine of you need to do this at every minute of the day, and it moves away from free living and into almost a synthetic environment, and that’s not always healthy for everybody.
“We want to try to embed and to weave these into a healthy lifestyle where you can still do everything you’d like to do just in a healthier way.”
For this study, he said that they focused on sleep, physical activity and nutrition because they are incredibly intertwined, and over a 24-hour period, they “basically bump into each other at every point”.
" I like to give the example of sleep. We’ve all had that Friday night, or maybe a long working week where we can’t get enough sleep, and the next day we’re obviously a little bit fatigued.
“We’re not gonna be taking the flight of stairs. We’re going to systematically reduce the amount of movement we do, and we’re also, at least I know on my end, reaching for that extra bag of chippies or that extra bag of biscuits because we are fatigued, we are reducing our overall energy, and so that drives the appetite hormones in our bodies to reach out for more energy consumption.
“So there is a bidirectional relationship between many of the behaviours involved here. And so that’s what’s unique about this. We chose these behaviours because they’re intertwined. They’re not silos really. They’re more all interconnected as a web, an ecological web that we have to consider.”
Listen to the full episode of The Little Things for more insights from Dr Nicholas Koemel about how to extend your lifespan, and to hear from NZ Herald journalist Joanna Wane about her year long attempt to reverse her biological age and what she learnt from her experiment.
The Little Things is available on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. The series is hosted by broadcaster Francesca Rudkin and health researcher Louise Ayrey. New episodes are available every Saturday.
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