Why hobbies – not pricey supplements – are the secret to a longer, healthier life ...Middle East

Professor John Tregoning pulls no punches. “Death is inescapable,” he says bluntly. “Everything is declining at a linear rate. Your brain connectivity declines, your lung function declines, your heart declines.”

This is not what I want to hear.

Then he delivers the sucker punch.

“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.”

“How young?” I ask.

“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.

What this means for me, aged 55, is that everything I’ve been doing in the last few years to outrun the grim inevitability of decline has been useless. I should have started decades ago.

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.

I take 20 supplements a day including anti-ageing cellular boosters such as spermidine, NAD+, and resveratrol. I monitor every aspect of my health and physical performance with three different wearable devices. I boost my microbiome with bovine colostrum and power myself with foul-tasting energy shots called ketones. Frankly, it’s bloody exhausting.

When I share my regime with the Professor he raises an eyebrow.

“It seems quite grim. I would argue that quality over quantity is better in terms of lifespan,” he says. “There’s more to it than just trying to live longer.

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.

“I was in my mid-forties; it was a delayed midlife crisis,” he says of his experiments. “I thought maybe I could apply a scientific process to it rather than just buying a motorbike.”

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.

My brother went to private school and I didn't - here are the differences we saw

“I reviewed those, then examined liver failure, kidney failure, type 2 diabetes, and frailty. That gave me a shopping list,” he tells me.

He 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.

“A lot of what came back was quite trivial. They tell you your eye colour, whether you can roll your tongue and whether you have sticky earwax,” he continues.

The tests did provide some determinants however, such as whether he had the cystic fibrosis gene.

“But I would have known that by now anyway,” he says. “The results did not say ‘you will have a heart attack when you’re 55’. They indicated some possible risks, but nothing conclusive. Genetics loads the gun; the environment pulls the trigger.”

Tregoning then underwent a whole-body analysis which involved complex blood tests.

“I had to give six tubes of blood,” he says. “They just told me that I was a bit fat, and I wasn’t as tall as I hoped I was.”

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.

“I tried to do more exercise, but I managed to tear a muscle in my calf,” he tells me. He also tried cold water swimming, eating beetroot, reducing salt and red meat. He tried brain training apps and extreme calorie restriction. He had his gut bacteria analysed.

“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.”

He explains that the human body has 45,000 genes, whereas the human microbiome has 200 million genes.

“So, who knows?” he shrugs. “Some of them are doing good things. Some of them are doing bad things.”

The one conclusion he does draw is that despite the advertising taglines, ‘there’s no such thing as a good bacterium’ per se.

“If you took your stomach contents and injected them into your arm, you’d die of sepsis,” he says flatly.

The 900-calorie a day diet made him miserable.

“And it was really expensive,” he continues. The £160 meal plan consisted of two cups of soups and a bag of olives a day.”

“I worked out that for the same money I could have bought 80,000 calories of caramel wafers.”

He did lose a belt size in five days, however.

By his own admission, many of the revelations from all this effort were not surprising.

“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.”

More intriguingly, Tregoning determined that one of the most important determinants of long-term health is social connectivity.

“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.

This realisation led him to the simple conclusion that if you want to increase your chances of living healthily for longer, do more of the things you love with the people you love and concentrate on improving quality of life.

“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.”

This realisation made Tregoning think differently about men of a certain age who take up hobbies, such as bowls, or Morris dancing.

“I was always a bit sniffy about that. But actually, I think it’s really healthy,” he admits.

He’s adopted the mindset himself and started going to history festivals. He’s also eating more vegetarian food and monitors his alcohol consumption with the Drink Free Days NHS app.

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.

“A single cell might mutate, go undetected and turn into cancer,” he warns. “Whereas that beam of sunshine that could hit a cell and break the DNA, misses, and hits something else.”

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.

Red light therapy, he continues, is safe and effective for skin rejuvenation, but the quality of the evidence “isn’t brilliant”, and more studies are needed. He has also found no evidence of benefits for hyperbaric oxygen therapy for routine use, but it is “quite useful” for anaemia from carbon monoxide poisoning, crush injuries, decompression sickness from diving, and gas gangrene.

“Oxygen is quite poisonous,” he adds. “There’s a risk of it forming free radicals and doing damage to the DNA.”

As for colostrum, he points to some evidence that suggests it’s good for mice with inflammatory bowel disease, and he can find no scientific evidence to indicate that ketones benefit sports performance, cognition or muscle recovery, even when I tell him I feel turbo-charged when I take them.

“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.”

Bryan Johnson believes you can cheat death using science. After his investigations, Tregoning has investigated the same question, and come to a different conclusion: he does not believe it is currently possible to significantly extend lifespan beyond around 125 years.

“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

Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Why hobbies – not pricey supplements – are the secret to a longer, healthier life )

Also on site :

• Lou Christie, “Lightnin’ Strikes” and “Rhapsody in the Rain” Singer, Dies at 82
• Detained Afghan’s legal entry into U.S. was ‘improvident,’ government argues
• Legendary '80s Metal Band Performs Fan-Favorite for First Time in 20 Years: 'Sounding Great'