This is not what I want to hear.
“The important thing is that if you’re younger, you’ve got longer to do things to push that decline back a bit. I call it a health pension. The more you save when you’re young, the more benefit you see years later.”
“You can still do things that increase your luck up until your mid-twenties,” he says, giving the example of future-proofing lung capacity with lots of aerobic exercise and and brain connectivity by reading a lot.
Taking cues from biohacking tech bros like Bryan Johnson, whose search for the fountain of youth involves weird science and blood infusions from his 17-year-old son, I’ve been doing a lot. I’ve breathed pure oxygen in pressurised hyperbaric coffins, I’ve frozen myself in cryogenic chambers, I’ve bathed in red light saunas, I’ve mainlined vitamins and enzymes with IV drips.
Writer Nick Harding has an ‘exhausting’ regime including supplements, exercise and cryogenic chambers (Photo: Supplied)
When I share my regime with the Professor he raises an eyebrow.
Tregoning, who is 47, should know. A professor of vaccine immunology at Imperial College London, he has spent the best part of the last two years testing longevity boosting theories to see if any work. The result is his book, Live Forever?: A Curious Scientist’s Guide to Wellness, Ageing and Death. His preoccupation started after he found a grey chest hair and also realised he was holding his phone further and further away in order to see the text on it.
First, he worked out statistically what he was most likely to die of, the top five killers of men in the UK being heart attacks, dementia, lung failure, cancer and strokes.
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Read MoreHe then used gene sequencing (a laboratory technique that determines the order of the chemical bases in an organism’s DNA) to see if he had any genetic risk factors that predisposed him to any of the conditions on the grim list. The information was inconclusive.
The tests did provide some determinants however, such as whether he had the cystic fibrosis gene.
Tregoning then underwent a whole-body analysis which involved complex blood tests.
I’ve spent a lot of time around the biohacking community. They are a serious bunch. They can also be defensive, given that the science behind a lot of longevity fads and tech is tenuous at best. Tregoning, on the other hand, is funny, cynical and a somewhat reluctant biohacker, which comes across in his book, which is as entertaining as it is informative.
Professor John Tregoning believes it’s important to do more of the things you love with the people you love (Photo: Light Republic Photography)“I did three samples,” he explains. “I did a baseline. I then had a curry and some lager. And that didn’t change anything. And then I had lots of fibre, the recommended daily amount, which is 30g, way more than I normally eat. That did change my microbiome, but I don’t know if it changed it for the better or worse, because it’s so complicated.”
“So, who knows?” he shrugs. “Some of them are doing good things. Some of them are doing bad things.”
“If you took your stomach contents and injected them into your arm, you’d die of sepsis,” he says flatly.
“And it was really expensive,” he continues. The £160 meal plan consisted of two cups of soups and a bag of olives a day.”
He did lose a belt size in five days, however.
“Don’t smoke, don’t drink, eat healthily, exercise. The benefits of those four things apply to all your organs,” he explains. “And hearing aids are really important for reducing the risk of dementia.”
“Social isolation is really bad for you. The US Surgeon General says it’s equivalent to about 15 cigarettes a day or six alcoholic drinks a day in terms of increasing your risk of mortality,” he says.
“I think quality has a quantity of its own,” Tregoning continues. “If you make sure the things you do have a social, a physical and a cognitive element, you will be healthier for longer.”
“I was always a bit sniffy about that. But actually, I think it’s really healthy,” he admits.
There is a caveat to this advice, however. You can be socially active, play tennis every day and eat well, but your lifespan is still determined by fate.
As for my regime, the professor tells me that there is a lack of high-quality evidence for the benefits of high-dose vitamin infusions, but that while cryotherapy may be good for repairing sports injuries it does have risks.
“Oxygen is quite poisonous,” he adds. “There’s a risk of it forming free radicals and doing damage to the DNA.”
“People latch onto a single study of 10 people and say, ‘this supports the argument that I want to make’,” he observes. “We use flies and worms and mice because they grow quickly so you can get to the end state of the experiment or test faster, but you can’t extrapolate everything from that.”
“You can’t disprove his (Johnson’s) argument without him dropping dead,” concludes the professor. “One of us will be right.”
Live Forever?: A Curious Scientist’s Guide to Wellness, Ageing and Death is out now
Professor John Tregoning’s book on ageing (Photo: Supplied) Read More Details
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