When speaking about Sardinia they keep saying that their diet was mostly vegetarian:
"The classic Sardinian diet is plant based, consisting of whole-grain bread, beans, garden vegetables, and fruits. Meat is largely reserved for Sundays and special occasions. Sardinians drink wine moderately."
Truth is that the Shepherds (the centenaries are mostly found in this group) were actually eating more animal protein and fat compared to the rest of the population.
They can keep lying to most people just because you can't understand Italian but whenever people from those towns are interviewed they always repeat that they were not vegetarians.
Here a quick translation from this yt video:
Graziano who got to 102
got asked if he got to 102yo
because he had always followed a
mediterranean diet.
He asked what's that?
It means that you always ate vegetables.
Vegetables are bad for you, I
ate the grass of 100 sheeps because
I ate the sheeps. And indeed
he only ate meat, meaning that this whole
alimentation thing should be checked again.
Wait, when people (mainly Americans) say "Mediterranean diet" do they think it's mainly a vegetarian one? That would be so wrong in so many levels, I am from a coastal really Mediterranean city and we def eat meat and fish (both traditionally and currently).
The main differences I'd say from growing up with local food compared now with other international food is the extra use of olive oil (vs other oils or butter), that normally in our food it's easier to tell where the ingredients came from vs some other more processed diets, extra bread/wheat use, and that even when we eat meat, it's not a "meat fest" like American bbq, it's normally accompanied with other food. And of course the use of local ingredients, which is particular to our diet but I'd guess most "regional diets" have this in common (with their particular ingredients).
I can't quickly find the paper but I recall having read something along the following lines: there were several areas in Greece where people consumed meat and cheese heavily but the life expectancy was decent. A subsequent investigation showed that the villagers had a very common SNP (mutation) which reduced the efficiency of LDLR (essentially making their bodies ingest less of the "bad" cholesterol into the bloodstream). And the theory went that since these populations had the same diet for centuries, everybody who was not very adapted to it sort of died out / was outcompeted in a Darwinian way by folks who had this genetic adaptation. So yes, a Sardinian villager may live to 102 eating solely mutton; it doesn't mean that the outcome would be as good if you took a random sample of Californians (for instance) and had them use the same diet.
My bet as someone who has traveler to Sardinia often is that this is much less about meat consumption and rather more about stressors like lifestyle, quality of air, water etc.
Even if the people ate meat there at the same proportion as a modern city dweller did: no hormones, probably orders of magnitude less toxins, traces of pharmaceuticals etc.
A lifestyle that doesn't know many sources of anxiety or stress and includes daily physical activity (walking instead of driving for a start) and an air quality opposite that of any big city just remove a lot of sources of what mostly kills people that could live longer otherwise.
Heart disease, cancer, stroke and (possibly) Alzheimer's disease.
The Mediterranean diet also means you can strike diabetes off the list.
I've spent a bit of time in Sicily, Italy and Sardinia. I agree with what you're saying, but I bet the locals eat less meat and better quality meat than the average American. They're also active and outside a lot.
Every once in a while, there's a news interview with a 100-year-old who swears that their secret to a long life was to drink enough whiskey to take the edge off all the cigarettes. I can't help but think that all these individual anecdotes are little more than confirmation bias.
The meat is bad for you propaganda.
Cannot believe people buying that.
It is known for millennia that a varied diet including vegs fruits and yes meat and fish is healthier then skipping any of those.
But somehow now when overpopulation makes our hunger for meat less convenient it becomes suddenly unhealthy.
Of course I understand that the antibiotic and and heavy metal infested meat and fish we eat is way less healthy then the meat our ancestors would eat.
There are MULTIPLE factors involved in getting to a population that is high in centenarians. Diet is only one factor and finding some meat-eating-only shepherds in such a population doesn't prove THAT MUCH unless, I guess, someone simply wants to confirm that a fad-diet "can work" for some folks (while ignoring other factors like physical activity, stress, and lifestyle).
Seems to me that this kind of article always comes to the conclusion that the best / healthiest / longest lived / etc. diet is one that the authors feel is virtuous in some way. It might just be coincidence but it's an odd one if so.
I'm Sardinian and I can confirm we are the opposite of vegetarian, big majority of typical Sardinian dishes are meat based, the most famous of them being "Porceddu" that is simply slow cooked on open fire baby big.
In the mountain areas is typical to eat sheep and on the costal area is typical to eat fish
This is a running theme for Blue Zones and centenarian research data, just a bunch of really blatant falsehoods packaged as trendy diet advice (e.g. suggesting that the Okinawan diet is low in meat, which is based on some weird game of telephone around discussions of WWII starvation diets, when in reality the Okinawans get a large proportion of their calories from lard and have the highest meat consumption in Japan). I wouldn't quite call it a "scam" but I would call it extremely misleading.
Centenarians are really a special group. My doctors assure me, independently, that even though applied nutrition science is in general very poor once you are past any basic nutrient deficiencies, that a plant based diet is overwhelmingly correlated with better health outcomes. Perhaps not vegetarian, but definitely limiting animal products.
Also they could be eating local, fresh ingredients without the processed preservative-filled junk food and sugary drinks we get on demand for $1 in the western world on every street corner.
- To respond to one criticism seen widely here, the authors claim to have validated ages with historical municipal birth records in all the Blue Zones. I cannot speak to these particular zones, but I've been doing genealogical research on my own ancestry and I am absolutely blown away by the ubiquity and detail of both municipal and Catholic church records in Sicily in the 1800s. Preunification Italy was under the rule of various northern European countries and was heavily influenced by their standards of record keeping. I cannot say if this applies to the other countries in the book, but generally speaking, just because these records are old doesn't mean they are bad.
- One thing that was very notable in the books but isn't discussed very much is that, with the exception of the Loma Linda cohort, the Blue Zone areas are all quite poor. They all primarily eat food they are able to grow or harvest themselves, out of necessity, which encourages simple and consistent diets. They have routine, simple lives that are made fulfilling by concentrating on community, family, and friends. They are content with what little they have and do not strive for more than they need.
I found the books quite inspiring. I think the lessons learned are good, even if they won't get me to 100. In any case I've felt much better and lost weight on a closer-to-Blue-Zone diet than I did before.
> Preunification Italy was under the rule of various northern European countries and was heavily influenced by their standards of record keeping
The only part of italy under rule of northern european countries was the northeastern portions which were part of the Austrian empire (if you consider austria as northern european, which it usually isn't)
Sicily was last under "northern european" control in the 13th century
One Ikarian in particular, Stamatis Moraitis, moved to America when he was 22 years old to pursue the American dream. He was a painter, and immediately started having success, bought a house, married, and had 3 kids. At the age of 66 years, he developed terminal lung cancer. Instead of dying in America, he decided to move back to Ikaria and moved in with his parents. He started breathing the air, drinking the wine, and eating a Mediterranean diet. After a few months, he planted a garden not planning on ever getting to harvest the vegetables; 37 years later he has a vineyard producing 200 L of wine a year. His secret he says? “I just forgot to die.”
This is where I think the article loses its credibility significantly.
This was likely tuberculosis and not lung cancer. Autopsy series have shown that TB is easily confused with cancers. 40 years ago the diagnostic tools available were very crude.
There is a crackpot promoting weird cancer therapies in my country who claims to have cured himself of metastatic sarcoma, but a peer reviewed medical analysis of the details suggests that was also TB.
The story is repeated all over the internet but even reasonably thorough articles fail to bring medical clarity. It’s always “nine doctors agreed”, “x-rays showed terminal cancer”, etc. In 1976, when he was diagnosed its possible, though somewhat unlikely he had a chest CT since scanners were just becoming available then. More importantly, what no accounting of this history mentions is a biopsy. Without a tissue diagnosis and without sophisticated imaging the story is sketchy.
Japanese women have 1/8 the occurrence of breast cancer compared to American women. This changes when they relocate to the US. One study found the seafood diet to be a big factor. Most of these blue zone places are islands and coastal areas and the low meat intake mentioned probably doesnt consider fish a meat.
BTW the anti-cancer component of sea food is Iodine.
Jarring that after years of lurking HN I come across a reference to someone I know personally. While I can’t speak to the legitimacy of the original cancer diagnosis, I can say that family oral history from long before the Blue Zone popularization is filled with this kind of story. Immigrants (usually first or second generation) returning to the island to get well. Anecdotal to be sure, and there are stories in the same vein about many old country birthplaces, but the supposed healthful qualities of the island have a long history, stretching back into antiquity.
Still anecdotal but more personal: the original immigrant generation that I descend from all died nonagenarians or over 100. There seems to be diminishing returns on that sadly, as each successive generation’s life expectancy seems to be more “normal.”
Literally every story about kooky shit is like this. If you walk around SF's Sunset District on a Sunday, you'll get like 5 flyers in 10 minutes telling you that with Falun Dafa you can cure leukemia or some such shit.
I lived in Loma Linda for a few years (in Southern California, 60 miles east of LA), which is one of the blue zones
It is predominantly a 7th day Adventist community. Notably they prioritize healthy lifestyle and typically are vegetarian as well as avoiding alcohol, caffeine, etc.
There is also a big medical school and hospital complex in the city and many people that live there work in the healthcare field.
Another fun fact about Loma Linda is that it was one of the last places in the country to get USPS service on Saturdays. Up until around 2010 they had regular mail deliveries on Sunday instead.
That paper has not been published, despite being posted several years, and the top comment under it seems to supply a decent counter claim with evidence. My guess is it's not as accurate as to support your claim of "pure nonsense."
I was a 4th generation Seventh-day Adventist myself. My great grandparents and grandparents all lived very long lives, and so did many people we knew. For them, living a physically healthy life is part of their religion, and it does increase longevity.
My family left when I was a teenager, and I never looked back -- but I'm writing to say that at least the Loma Linda site isn't nonsense.
Your posted article highlights a really great statistical principle that I also discovered on my own owning a really rare car: if someone (company) claims to have parts in stock, it was most likely due to a database error, not the actual parts, because the probability of having the parts was so low. Reports of highly improbable events are probably not true in general.
That seems to explain incredible longevity also- if it basically doesn't actually happen, then instances of it are therefore actually instances of error/fraud.
This is what I commented last time this rebuttal paper made the rounds on HN:
While I've also conjectured in the past that at least a good chunk of extreme supercentenarians are due to anagraphical errors if not outright fraud, I do not think that the paper support the thesis well.
For starter they do not have a global model, it seems that they handpicked different statistics for different areas that support their thesis (they do not even show anything concrete for Japan).
Regarding Sardinia, their numbers seem actually wrong: looking at the raw Istat data the numbers for 55 year life expectancy for the Sardinian provinces seem in line with the rest of Italy (95-96%) putting Sardinia somewhere in the middle of the (quite tight) Italian distribution.
It is possible that the researcher averaged the data over a longer period of time that I bothered to look, but the paper doesn't discuss the methodology.
Their fitting, p value not withstanding, also seem a bit adventurous; the fact that all and almost only Sardinian provinces are extreme outliers should have been a tell. The rest of the Italian provinces are in a tight uniform cluster.
Sardinia, except for a very brief period in the mid 2010s,has only 4 provinces, so it is possible that messed up their data extraction (they show 8 provinces).
Also Sardinia is not particularly poorer than the rest of Southern Italy and actually has a lower crime rate (which they suggest but not outright state is a factor).
A better paper would probably try to build a single model for Japan, Italy and US using actual mortality, crime and poverty rates.
The Danish Twin Study established that only about 20% of how long the average person lives is dictated by our genes, whereas the other 80% is dictated by our lifestyle.
And then lists 9 things that fit with the idea of moving back to the passive solar design vernacular architecture and walkable mixed-use neighborhoods that used to be more the norm before we became victims of our own success and began tearing down SROs left and right and zoning Missing Middle housing out of existence (in the US, at least).
TL:DW; They go to a Blue Zone village Seulo in Italy's Sardinia Island and spend some time there. The village looks pretty normal in general, they use technology they have plastics all over the place, they eat meat drink wine - albeit locally sourced. On thing that stands out is, maybe, the active lifestyle of the old people and strong community.
Interesting how #1 seems to imply but not explicitly call out the relationship (or lack thereof) with motor vehicles. Their widespread usage in the US is one of the contributing factors in obesity.
Love how headline is ambiguous, makes it sound like that from birth in Blue Zones, it only takes a decade to reach 100yo, as if only in the Blue Zones, the Earth orbits the sun 10 times faster, or there is some other effect causing rapid aging there.
Guys, one of they key points seems to be too that all blue zones will have great weather and a lot of sun. There is another study which shows that more people die in the winter. Therefore if your winter is mild then it is less likely that you die https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/07/10/more-people-die-winter-...
> Wine @ 5. People in all Blue Zones (except Adventists) drink alcohol moderately and regularly. Moderate drinkers outlive nondrinkers. The trick is to drink 1 to 2 glasses per day (preferably Sardinian Cannonau wine), with friends and/or with food.
I thought that the “one glass on wine per day” recommendation had been debunked. Is it still debatable?
My maternal grandparents are in their mid 90s and my paternal grandmother lived to 97 (minus one week).
My maternal grandfather's 8 siblings are alive - save for one who died in a car accident.
One thing they all have in common is that they survived a war which took 15% of the population of this country at the time. Generations after them didn't have nearly the same life expectancy.
This is all anecdata, but perhaps there's some selection bias contributing to the result here.
While I agree with most of the critics towards the article and the author (who by the way, is a friend of Peter Diamandis who also happens to run a scammy longevity clinic), (some) reasons behind the longevity of many of those centenarians have been identified: low mTOR activity and high omega 3 intake. mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin) is a nutrient sensing enzyme particularly sensitive to some amino acids like Leucine found in meat and whey protein.
Rapamycin (Sirolimus), an immunosuppressive drug was found to considerably inhibit mTOR activity. Past clinical trials recently showed considerable lifespan extension in multiple animal models and will likely work in humans. It’s one of the too drugs found in the ITP trials (1). If I’m not wrong, they are even starting trials now and new ones will come soon. That’s because, as the name implies, that enzyme is part of all mammals.
Lots of people experiment with safe dose ranging from 5 to 10mg once a week and report lots of benefits, few side effects (doses aren't as high as if used by organ transplant receivers).
I’m in my 30s so I’m not willing to take any risks with those. I move, I eat a Mediterranean-ish diet, take Vitamin D3, K2 and Omega 3d and eat no sugar. But if I was past 60 I’d definitely ask my doctor.
That being said, this is not radical life extension. That would likely be possible with upcoming therapies like partial reprogramming or senolytics. But it definitely is promising and will possibly help living a longer and healthier life if repurposed for other diseases than simply immunosuppression.
I'm not sure I buy their list of what makes people live longer, but I found it interesting that 3/5 locations seem to be ~40 degrees north latitude (and 3/5 islands, all locations are very near oceans/seas). It makes sense that all locations would be in warmer areas, as that vastly reduces the dependency on meat consumption, but more bias towards the equator would be expected if that was all. 40 south only touches the edge of Australia and the tail of South America, but I wonder how the life expectancy compares?
[+] [-] codeflow2202|3 years ago|reply
"The classic Sardinian diet is plant based, consisting of whole-grain bread, beans, garden vegetables, and fruits. Meat is largely reserved for Sundays and special occasions. Sardinians drink wine moderately."
Truth is that the Shepherds (the centenaries are mostly found in this group) were actually eating more animal protein and fat compared to the rest of the population.
https://snipboard.io/gbi9JY.jpg
They can keep lying to most people just because you can't understand Italian but whenever people from those towns are interviewed they always repeat that they were not vegetarians. Here a quick translation from this yt video:
Graziano who got to 102 got asked if he got to 102yo because he had always followed a mediterranean diet. He asked what's that? It means that you always ate vegetables. Vegetables are bad for you, I ate the grass of 100 sheeps because I ate the sheeps. And indeed he only ate meat, meaning that this whole alimentation thing should be checked again.
https://youtu.be/LQTocSMm7tw?t=647
[+] [-] franciscop|3 years ago|reply
The main differences I'd say from growing up with local food compared now with other international food is the extra use of olive oil (vs other oils or butter), that normally in our food it's easier to tell where the ingredients came from vs some other more processed diets, extra bread/wheat use, and that even when we eat meat, it's not a "meat fest" like American bbq, it's normally accompanied with other food. And of course the use of local ingredients, which is particular to our diet but I'd guess most "regional diets" have this in common (with their particular ingredients).
[+] [-] dpq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] virtualritz|3 years ago|reply
Even if the people ate meat there at the same proportion as a modern city dweller did: no hormones, probably orders of magnitude less toxins, traces of pharmaceuticals etc.
A lifestyle that doesn't know many sources of anxiety or stress and includes daily physical activity (walking instead of driving for a start) and an air quality opposite that of any big city just remove a lot of sources of what mostly kills people that could live longer otherwise.
Heart disease, cancer, stroke and (possibly) Alzheimer's disease.
The Mediterranean diet also means you can strike diabetes off the list.
[+] [-] thorin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbg721|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orcasushi|3 years ago|reply
Of course I understand that the antibiotic and and heavy metal infested meat and fish we eat is way less healthy then the meat our ancestors would eat.
[+] [-] crispyambulance|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taneq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maury91|3 years ago|reply
In the mountain areas is typical to eat sheep and on the costal area is typical to eat fish
[+] [-] harpersealtako|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lr4444lr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuckinhell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sizzle|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rowanG077|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobbyasdfasdf7|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HanShotFirst|3 years ago|reply
- To respond to one criticism seen widely here, the authors claim to have validated ages with historical municipal birth records in all the Blue Zones. I cannot speak to these particular zones, but I've been doing genealogical research on my own ancestry and I am absolutely blown away by the ubiquity and detail of both municipal and Catholic church records in Sicily in the 1800s. Preunification Italy was under the rule of various northern European countries and was heavily influenced by their standards of record keeping. I cannot say if this applies to the other countries in the book, but generally speaking, just because these records are old doesn't mean they are bad.
- One thing that was very notable in the books but isn't discussed very much is that, with the exception of the Loma Linda cohort, the Blue Zone areas are all quite poor. They all primarily eat food they are able to grow or harvest themselves, out of necessity, which encourages simple and consistent diets. They have routine, simple lives that are made fulfilling by concentrating on community, family, and friends. They are content with what little they have and do not strive for more than they need.
I found the books quite inspiring. I think the lessons learned are good, even if they won't get me to 100. In any case I've felt much better and lost weight on a closer-to-Blue-Zone diet than I did before.
[+] [-] arlort|3 years ago|reply
The only part of italy under rule of northern european countries was the northeastern portions which were part of the Austrian empire (if you consider austria as northern european, which it usually isn't)
Sicily was last under "northern european" control in the 13th century
[+] [-] bennysomething|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garyfirestorm|3 years ago|reply
This is where I think the article loses its credibility significantly.
[+] [-] Gatsky|3 years ago|reply
There is a crackpot promoting weird cancer therapies in my country who claims to have cured himself of metastatic sarcoma, but a peer reviewed medical analysis of the details suggests that was also TB.
[+] [-] kashunstva|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|3 years ago|reply
BTW the anti-cancer component of sea food is Iodine.
[+] [-] feerfreeflight|3 years ago|reply
Still anecdotal but more personal: the original immigrant generation that I descend from all died nonagenarians or over 100. There seems to be diminishing returns on that sadly, as each successive generation’s life expectancy seems to be more “normal.”
[+] [-] renewiltord|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jquery|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobkg|3 years ago|reply
It is predominantly a 7th day Adventist community. Notably they prioritize healthy lifestyle and typically are vegetarian as well as avoiding alcohol, caffeine, etc.
There is also a big medical school and hospital complex in the city and many people that live there work in the healthcare field.
There are of course plenty of other explanations.
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JackFr|3 years ago|reply
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v2
“Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud”
[+] [-] SideQuark|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TimTheTinker|3 years ago|reply
My family left when I was a teenager, and I never looked back -- but I'm writing to say that at least the Loma Linda site isn't nonsense.
[+] [-] _yb2s|3 years ago|reply
That seems to explain incredible longevity also- if it basically doesn't actually happen, then instances of it are therefore actually instances of error/fraud.
[+] [-] gpderetta|3 years ago|reply
While I've also conjectured in the past that at least a good chunk of extreme supercentenarians are due to anagraphical errors if not outright fraud, I do not think that the paper support the thesis well.
For starter they do not have a global model, it seems that they handpicked different statistics for different areas that support their thesis (they do not even show anything concrete for Japan).
Regarding Sardinia, their numbers seem actually wrong: looking at the raw Istat data the numbers for 55 year life expectancy for the Sardinian provinces seem in line with the rest of Italy (95-96%) putting Sardinia somewhere in the middle of the (quite tight) Italian distribution.
It is possible that the researcher averaged the data over a longer period of time that I bothered to look, but the paper doesn't discuss the methodology.
Their fitting, p value not withstanding, also seem a bit adventurous; the fact that all and almost only Sardinian provinces are extreme outliers should have been a tell. The rest of the Italian provinces are in a tight uniform cluster.
Sardinia, except for a very brief period in the mid 2010s,has only 4 provinces, so it is possible that messed up their data extraction (they show 8 provinces).
Also Sardinia is not particularly poorer than the rest of Southern Italy and actually has a lower crime rate (which they suggest but not outright state is a factor).
A better paper would probably try to build a single model for Japan, Italy and US using actual mortality, crime and poverty rates.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|3 years ago|reply
And then lists 9 things that fit with the idea of moving back to the passive solar design vernacular architecture and walkable mixed-use neighborhoods that used to be more the norm before we became victims of our own success and began tearing down SROs left and right and zoning Missing Middle housing out of existence (in the US, at least).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
[+] [-] mrtksn|3 years ago|reply
TL:DW; They go to a Blue Zone village Seulo in Italy's Sardinia Island and spend some time there. The village looks pretty normal in general, they use technology they have plastics all over the place, they eat meat drink wine - albeit locally sourced. On thing that stands out is, maybe, the active lifestyle of the old people and strong community.
[+] [-] danuker|3 years ago|reply
There are many more studies linking diet and health.
Here is a non-profit presenting them.
https://nutritionfacts.org/
[+] [-] nostromo|3 years ago|reply
And so... https://www.amazon.com/dp/1426209487
They usually also have a company with the same name that sells speaking engagements or consulting... https://www.bluezones.com/
And of course, you need a modestly astroturfed Wikipedia article... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_zone
And don't forget a TED Talk! https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100
[+] [-] kfarr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hartator|3 years ago|reply
That seems a little of a stretch to find commonalities.
[+] [-] Maursault|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franze|3 years ago|reply
If you search for outliers, you will find outliers.
Looking for correlation between these outliers, does not equal that the correlation between them, is the causation of each of these outliers.
[+] [-] throwaways85989|3 years ago|reply
Several countries on this list are "low" trust societies?" so the data could be explained very well with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=404IeUzGNZ4
[+] [-] flixo4711|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] janaagaard|3 years ago|reply
I thought that the “one glass on wine per day” recommendation had been debunked. Is it still debatable?
Here is one source: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/aug/23/no-healthy-l...
[+] [-] emmelaich|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tade0|3 years ago|reply
My maternal grandfather's 8 siblings are alive - save for one who died in a car accident.
One thing they all have in common is that they survived a war which took 15% of the population of this country at the time. Generations after them didn't have nearly the same life expectancy.
This is all anecdata, but perhaps there's some selection bias contributing to the result here.
[+] [-] arboghast|3 years ago|reply
Rapamycin (Sirolimus), an immunosuppressive drug was found to considerably inhibit mTOR activity. Past clinical trials recently showed considerable lifespan extension in multiple animal models and will likely work in humans. It’s one of the too drugs found in the ITP trials (1). If I’m not wrong, they are even starting trials now and new ones will come soon. That’s because, as the name implies, that enzyme is part of all mammals.
Lots of people experiment with safe dose ranging from 5 to 10mg once a week and report lots of benefits, few side effects (doses aren't as high as if used by organ transplant receivers).
I’m in my 30s so I’m not willing to take any risks with those. I move, I eat a Mediterranean-ish diet, take Vitamin D3, K2 and Omega 3d and eat no sugar. But if I was past 60 I’d definitely ask my doctor.
That being said, this is not radical life extension. That would likely be possible with upcoming therapies like partial reprogramming or senolytics. But it definitely is promising and will possibly help living a longer and healthier life if repurposed for other diseases than simply immunosuppression.
(1) https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-p...
[+] [-] wtetzner|3 years ago|reply
I wonder how true this is, given that carbs trigger mTOR harder and longer than protein, and the Mediterranean diet seems pretty high-carb.
In any case, if you're worried about mTOR, intermittent fasting is probably the simplest life-style change you can make.
[+] [-] slyall|3 years ago|reply
Not many people are going to survive catching covid 20 times in their 80s and 90s.
[+] [-] t-3|3 years ago|reply