The wisdoms of the longevity wackadoodles

Dave Asprey is one of the internet’s favourite biohackers. As his website claims, he is a four-time New York Times bestselling author, the CEO of Upgrade Labs and host of a podcast called The Human Upgrade, in which he discusses life on the longevity frontier. He wears shoes that mimic the feeling of walking barefoot, and Truedark glasses that help him sleep better at night. 

Asprey has spent $2mn of his own money researching and testing his limits in an attempt to reverse the ageing process. Once upon a time, he was a chubby 28-year-old “battling cognitive fog, arthritis, pre-diabetes [that] put him at high risk for stroke, and with the biochemistry of a 60-year-old”. Today, thanks to his “maverick” efforts, he says he identifies as 39, “because that’s what my lab tests say”. Although the “calendar” says he’s 51 this year.  

Asprey was one of the speakers at last week’s FT Weekend Festival in Washington. He was appearing, unsurprisingly, on a panel dedicated to longevity and the quest to push our lifespan to 140 years. He sat beside Pranitha Patil, the co-founder and COO of Function Health, which offers a comprehensive health-testing service aimed especially at “women, minorities and BIPOC communities”, and the rather wonderful Dr Sean X Leng, a board-certified geriatrician and professor of medicine, molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins University. (You can watch a video of what they said right here.)

Dave is an outlaw in the health science space. He experiments with unregulated ingredients and flies to get treatments — such as gene therapy — that have not been approved in the US. He’s obsessive, passionate and highly polished, like a living Ken doll, so much so that he looks a bit freakish. He boasts about his 6 per cent body fat and his regime of doing only 20 minutes of high-intensity exercise each week. He loves ice baths and enemas and “geeks out” over mitochondria. He actively encourages young people to donate their plasma, because “blood washing could be the new standard in longevity and change your Alzheimer’s risk”. It’s a somewhat vampiric take. 

He also admits that a lot of what he has done has ultimately been bunkum. As he told the audience in DC: “I could have got entirely well from being really sick for 50 grand if I had just known what I needed to do.”

One of my favourite takeaways was that the best way to prolong your life was not to worry about dying

I am not remotely interested in living much beyond 100. Approaching a half-century, I’m already preoccupied by thoughts of decrepitude and death. As my grandmother, a worldly guru who advocated for a balanced diet and a stress-free lifestyle, would say: what’s the point of living on for decades if all your friends are dead? 

Nevertheless, I have been somewhat taken in by the wellness wackadoodles: I’m seduced by the idea of making tiny changes to my lifestyle in return for a big improvement in my cognitive health. I wear an Oura ring that tracks my “readiness” and sleeping habits; and one of the most profound and inarguable facts it has revealed in the 18 months I’ve been wearing it is how absolutely devastating a glass of red or, worse, white wine is for my general health. It also hates me eating within two hours of going to bed. Or binge-watching TV shows. Being armed with this information has meant I’ve cut down my drinking hugely. It also prompts me to get in my 10,000 step-count every day. 

Some people may not love having a nanny device scold them for being inactive. But I’ve come to find the results empowering — it gives me a psychological boost as well. Hence, I understand why Asprey and Patil harness diagnostic tools to optimise their lifestyles. But I’m also conscious that too much diagnosis carries the danger of turning people into that insufferable subset: the “worried well”. 

Dave Asprey sits at the far extreme of biohackers. His schtick is “I’m a guinea pig for all your crazy research”, but in fact the scientist concurred with much of what he said on stage. I imagined that Leng, a scientific expert who adheres to the rules of peer-approved research rather than diving into trials still being limited to rodents, would despair at Asprey’s quest to live to 180: instead, the professor of gerontology most often agreed with him. OK, he doesn’t advocate taking up to 180 supplements like Asprey, he thinks that simply makes expensive pee. But he does think ice baths are a good idea if one has the physiology to stand it, he’s all for meditation, and he walks miles each day for work. 

Inevitably, the longevity mantra boils down to a lot of granny wisdom. Even Asprey’s findings are quite gentle once you find out what really works. One of my favourite takeaways was that the best way to prolong your life was not to worry about dying. Meditation seems to be genuinely one of life’s great preserving tools. Were I to become a biohacker, my five-point plan would simply rehash old favourites and try to dress them in a sexy way: use the staircase, get into the fresh air, attend to your friendships, spritz your mouth with vitamin D and take your fish oils (though Asprey advised me to switch the oil for krill). 

None of these suggestions are remotely revolutionary: they are the precise things our grandparents advocated more than a century ago. But they are increasingly becoming part of a science-based covenant in anti-ageing. Plus, it won’t cost you $2mn. Because most of them are free. 

Email Jo at jo.ellison@ft.com

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Letter in response to this column:

Condition even the Flying Finn can’t run away from / From Timo Strandberg, Professor of Geriatrics (emeritus), Helsinki University Hospital, Finland