Immortality Made Easy

By | December 6, 2010
4 Comments

Apparently, you can start immediately:

    • Adopt a hunter-gatherer lifestyle after 35 to 40 if Eurasian, earlier if ancestry is less Eurasian.  
    • If younger than 30 and Eurasian, continue on a post-agricultural revolution diet (or Andrew Weil-style diet).
    • Use the best modern medicine
    • Use autologous (from your own cells) tissue repair as it becomes available in five or more years
    • Use next-generation pharmaceuticals in the next 10 or more years

As reported by Kurzweil AI, this outline for how to put aging in check comes from evolutionary biologist Michael Rose as expounded at the Humanity+ conference at Caltech.

Rose isn’t the first to suggest that diet could be a key in slowing aging, but his ideas about changing diet throughout the course of one’s life are certainly unusual.

Sounds good — maybe a little too easy?

 

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  • damndirtyape.myopenid.com

    This advice makes no sense – eat paleo but only if you are older than 30?

    This smacks of way overthinking it with no empirical evidence to back any of it. To say, by implication, that you should eat one way until you are 30 then suddenly switch is such tortured logic.

    If anything, one could argue avoiding agricultural staples like refined wheat/flour, sugar, and seed oils are critical to avoiding metabolic damage that accompanies children throughout their lives if they consume those things at an early age.

    Hunter gatherers have always had far superior health than all modern agricultural nations when it comes to “diseases of civilization” such as cancer, heart disease, Alzheimers, diabetes, cavities, arthritis etc.

    The fossil record clearly shows superior markers of health and robustness in pre agricultural humans. Still today in isolated populations, modern hunter gatherers can expect to live until their 70s and 80s and well beyond with no almost increase in body fat,blood pressure, cardiovascular disease etc. Such ailments are essentially unheard of (http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/08/kitavans-wisdom-from-pacific-islands.html)

    That applies through all stages of life. Not some arbitrary curt off of 30 or so years.

  • holyspiritdenier

    Rose argues that selection pressures since the beginning of agriculture favored genes in Eurasian populations which allow us to thrive on agricultural diets during our peak reproductive years. Past those years, Rose argues, our bodies regress physiologically to more of a hunter-gatherer state.

  • stephentg

    In addition to taking care of yourself, being under 50 years of age today, and having some good luck health-wise would certainly help.

    Sounds like I’m being a bit of a wise ass, but its true.

  • damndirtyape.myopenid.com

    >>> Rose argues that selection pressures since the beginning of agriculture favored genes in Eurasian populations which allow us to thrive on agricultural diets during our peak reproductive years.

    And there is no hard evidence for his assumptions. It’s complete theory. What exactly is in grains and vegetable oils and sugar that is somehow good for you until you get into your 30s-40′s but no longer?

    Tolerating bad things when you are young and healthy should not be confused with being fully adapted to it in the sense that it the “preferred dietary regime” your body needs for maximum health. tolerated != optimal

    Does it make any sense that phytates in grains that inhibit the absorption of nutrients are GOOD for you when you are young? Or the lectins in grains that release Zonulin which causes leaky gut syndrome and autoimmune diseases is somehow a good thing as long as you are young? What are his arguments for this? Hormesis?

    I think his advice is misguided at best and dangerous at worst. Take a look around and witness the havok an agricultural based diet has wrought on the health of modern nations.

    If not for modern medicine our life expectancy and overall health would be far far worse that it already is. We have obese, cavity ridden 12-15 year olds with non-alcholic fatty liver disease and diabetes. That is what happens when you take a modern agricultural diet to the extreme. If such a diet is so healthy and we are so fully adapted to it then why are young people under 30 not thriving on our modern diets?

    Such a thing did not, and could not, happen on a hunter gatherer diet that contains no grains, refined sugar, Hexane-solvent extracted vegetable oils etc.

    If you have the time, read through this classic text on the impact that modern Western diets had invariably had on native populations. The numerous pictures included tell you everything you need to know.

    http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html