Living Forever: Immortality And The Billionaires
Immortality research — Is it really possible to get younger every day?
I’m telling people that humanity is entering the biology age. Not bio “tech” as in brute force and foreign objects, but biology using natural processes.
Understanding the way living organisms — at any size — function together.
Most people want to live a happy, healthy lifespan — of normal length.
Peter Fioretti, a real estate mogul from North Carolina, recently spoke to Business Insider about his interest in longevity. Fioretti said,
I want to be hiking and biking. I want to be able to play with my grandkids or great-grandkids — Peter Fioretti, Business Insider 25 March 2023
Five years ago, at age 58, Fioretti was diagnosed with an arterial blockage and a “cardiac age” of 68. Unhappy with the diagnosis, he visited ten specialists and now has a cardiac age of 47. He told Business Insider that he wanted to make it to 120 years old with his “mental and physical capacities intact.”
Mr. Fioretti is a couple of years older than me.
But I have a cardiac age of 34 and I didn’t visit ten specialists, including a physician “in Colorado” who “works with NFL players.”
I get one or more hours of cardio activity every day and do strength training 3–4 days a week. I’ve moved away from stress-filled, pollution-wracked Southern California to Florida’s Gulf Coast. I am no longer under overwhelming daily stress just to put food on the table and make the rent. I do self care every day. This includes spending as much time as possible playing music with my husband, kayaking, or going to the beach with my friends.
I’ve been pursuing fitness since 2018. The biggest positive change I have made recently is switching to a primarily plant-based diet. I am using Zoe Nutrition to create menus and meals each week that feed myself and my microbiome.
There’s another difference between me and Fioretti and his fellow members of an immortality “circle” that is part of a rich people’s association called R360.
You have to have a “net worth” of at least 100 million to be a member of R360.
Almost all of the online discussions of human longevity and “immortality” include the wealthiest humans. Jeff Bezos has invested hundreds of millions in immortality research, along with fellow billionaires Larry Page and Larry Ellison. PayPal and Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel has publicly pledged to “fight death.” Immortality tech startups use words like “cure death” to describe their efforts.
In 2017, New York Times’ columnist Maureen Dowd asked Thiel why he cared so much about immortality,
Why is everyone else so indifferent about their mortality? — Peter Thiel, NYT, 11 January 2017
As we out here in little soon-to-be-dead-people land-laugh: Thiel, we don’t spend our days having drinks at the Monkey Bar with Maureen Dowd, though I admit — that might well make me want to die sooner rather than later.
If people were surveyed, I’d guess quite a few, mostly male, might say they want to live a long time. The ancient “Gods” were immortal. Several Greek myths involve the idea of immortality. Ambrosia, the food of the gods, was supposed to confer immortality on those who consumed it. Most people know the myth of Tithonus: the goddess Aurora fell in love with him and made him immortal, but not eternally youthful. Poor Tithonus lived forever, but eventually shrank into a tiny grasshopper man.
Or something like that.
Official anti-aging research is ongoing.
The FAST Initiative is searching for biomarkers that are associated with aging.
The SuperAgers Family Study is studying healthy people who are over age 95.
The TAME Trial is a six-year clinical trial process with 14 research institutions studying the use of Metformin to slow cognitive decline in 3,000 people who are between 65–79.
The TAME Trial focuses on the emerging relationship between Alzheimers disease and related dementias and Type 2 diabetes.
Type 2 diabetes is caused by daily consumption of super-processed Factory Foods over a lifetime. It is not “rocket science” as to what has turbocharged the obesity epidemic and metabolic diseases, it’s just the Big Food companies advertising their poison, and poisonous lies (“losing weight is just calories in-calories out” and “willpower”) to you.
I can tell any person who is age 65 or older that switching to a plant-based diet with limited, simple proteins like fish and lean poultry, will aid in lowering blood sugar.
The same thing that Metformin does.
People are not only taking drugs like Metformin, they are also using new, expensive weight loss medications like Wegovy (semaglutide) to “lose weight.”
None of the billionaire-funded immortality institutes or startups seem to be focused on the microbiome.
But non-billionaire funded, ordinary researchers are. Irish researchers at University College Cork have studied the relationship of the microbiome to healthy aging.
Now that I’ve learned more about my microbiome, I like to think of it as like a garden inside of my body and also on my skin.
Keeping my microbiome garden healthy keeps me healthy, just as if I were growing a garden in my yard to provide healthy food.
I’m sure there are legitimate uses for Metformin and also Wegovy. But if the goal is living a healthy and high-functioning life, physically and mentally, for as long as possible?
A lifestyle change would probably be more effective and affordable than pills or injections.
Jeff Bezos may be out there paying hundreds of billions for a telomere transplant when one “secret to aging well” is affordable and possible for nearly everyone in the U.S.
Cut highly-processed Frankenfoods out of your life, eat well, plenty of plants, and feed your microbiome.
People like Peter Thiel will pay for microbiome transplants. Without supporting the microbiome with proper diet, exercise, and lifestyle changes, the transplanted microbes will do the same thing as a transplanted tomato plant that is never watered.
You can get a better effect for yourself by learning about your unique microbiome and how you can best support it through programs like Zoe Nutrition.
We were playing music downtown yesterday and friends came up and said, “We thought we were listening to the radio — ” They didn’t recognize either me or Bruce until they got close up, having not seen us in person for a few weeks.
I used to say to Bruce that we were — well, it’s a little poem.
The world turns but we go the other way
Kiss me younger every day
It should be obvious by now that 20th Century-oriented approaches to health like “a pill” or “surgery” or even “vaccinations” are limited in their effectiveness.
Bruce and I both gained a lot of weight during our difficult years in Southern California after he became ill in 2016. I doubt very much that I had a “fitness age” of 34 when I first started using a fitness tracker in 2018. At that time I weighed about 170 pounds and my average resting heart rate was 70. I probably had a fitness age much older than my chronological age, similar to massive multi-millionaire Peter Fioretti, who visited ten doctors before getting some type of advice.
Now, it’s five years later. I am 135 pounds and I have a fitness age of 34. I’m 61 years old. I have beaten Fioretti the real estate multi-millionaire at a total cost of less than $1,000, visiting zero high-end specialists.
You might say I’ve been my own “concierge medicine” doctor.
I have everything I ever wanted: a beautiful home in a safe and pleasant community. Many friends and many pleasant and enjoyable social activities. Bruce and I are playing music together. We have hopes of traveling and maybe even playing music while traveling.
I didn’t get to the point where I am happy eating the personalized nutrition that Zoe Nutrition is recommending to me all at once. As recently as two years ago, I was still eating Reese’s Peanut Butter cups every night, wondering why I was slowly gaining weight.
The first change I made to improve my health when I got my first Fitbit in December 2018 was to improve my sleep. Then I started to work on getting more steps each day. I have been at 11,000 steps a day for about two years now.
This whole process has been one change at a time, one step at a time.
Now, processed foods, especially highly-processed ones, are absolutely repulsive to me. I can’t eat them.
It is the exact opposite of a little girl who was my daughter’s grade school friend a number of years ago. This little girl’s mom and entire family were bigger people — they were Italian and her grandparents cooked traditional Italian foods. But the mom and daughter didn’t eat the traditional dinners often. They preferred fast food and convenience foods.
One day, the neighborhood kids were at our house playing and this little girl was among them. I cut up some celery, carrots, and apples and made “ants on a log” with peanut butter and raisins on the celery. A classic treat …
And the little girl burst out in tears crying, saying “I can’t eat celery! I can’t eat apples!”
The absolute top, #1 “anti aging” and wellness advice I have is —be the opposite of my daughter’s young fast-food addict friend. Get to the point that you cry when you see Chee-tos, Chex Mix, or cheese danishes.
Also, in answer to guys like Peter Thiel who can’t understand that most people do not want to “live forever”:
What most people really want is to live well during the lifetimes they do have.
Maybe the big money guys might want to stop sucking all the money and air out of aging and wellness research by funding idiotic pill or genetic manipulation research and allow actual scientists and doctors with common sense and hearts to have a chance.
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