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Locke comments on Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 2 - Less Wrong
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What practical things should everyone be doing to extend their lifetimes?
Good question.
Its probably easier to list things they shouldn't be doing that are known to significantly reduce life expectancy (e.g. smoking). I would guess it would mainly be obvious things like exercise and diet, but it would be interesting to see the effects quantified.
What about vitamins/medication? Isn't Ray Kurzweil on like fifty different pills? Why isn't everyone?
And Aubrey de Grey doesn't take any. (http://www.quora.com/What-supplements-does-Aubrey-de-Grey-take-to-stay-young-if-any/answer/Aubrey-de-Grey)
Laziness and lack of information
Isn't Less Wrong supposed to be partially about counteracting those? The topic must have come up at some point in the sequences.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/a60/quantified_health_prize_results_announced/
It's unclear whether taking vitamin supplements would actually help. (See also the Quantified Health Prize post army1987 linked.)
Regarding medication, I'll add that for people over 40, aspirin seems to be a decent all-purpose death reducer. The effect's on the order of a 10% reduction in death rate after taking 75mg of aspirin daily for 5-10 years. (Don't try to take more to enhance the effect, as it doesn't seem to work. And you have to take it daily; only taking it on alternating days appears to kill the effect too.)
Basically, any effective plan boils down to diligence and clean living. But here are changes I've made for longevity reasons:
You can retain nervous control of your muscles with regular exercise; this is a good place to start on specifically anti-aging exercise.
Abdominal breathing can significantly reduce your risk of heart attacks. (The previously linked book contains one way to switch styles.)
Intermittent fasting (only eating in a 4-8 hour window, or on alternating days, or a few other plans) is surprisingly easy to adopt and maintain, and may have some (or all) of the health benefits of calorie restriction, which is strongly suspected to lengthen human lifespans (and known to lengthen many different mammal lifespans).
In general, I am skeptical of vitamin supplements as compared to eating diets high in various good things- for example, calcium pills are more likely to give you kidney stones than significantly improve bone health, but eating lots of vegetables / milk / clay is unlikely to give you kidney stones and likely to help your bones. There are exceptions: taking regular low doses of lithium can reduce your chance of suicide and may have noticeable mood benefits, and finding food with high lithium content is difficult (plants absorb it from dirt with varying rates, but knowing that the plant you're buying came from high-lithium dirt is generally hard).
Can you cite a source for your claim about lithium? It sounds interesting.
He's probably going off my section on lithium: http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#lithium
Ah, yes. Sounds like it. Interestingly, the Quantified Health Prize winner also recommends low-dose lithium, but for a different reason: its effect on long-term neural health.
I don't think it's really a different reason; also, AFAIK I copied all the QHP citations into my section.
Gwern's research, as linked here, is better than anything I could put together.
Are there studies to support the abdominal breathing bit? If so, how were they conducted?
The one I heard about, but have not been able to find the last few times I looked for it, investigated how cardiac arrest patients at a particular hospital breathed. All (nearly all?) of them were chest breathers, and about 25% of the general adult population breathes abdominally. I don't think I've seen a randomized trial that taught some subjects how to breath abdominally and then saw how their rates compared, which is what would give clearer evidence. My understanding of why is that abdominal breathing increases oxygen absorbed per breath, lowering total lung/heart effort.
I don't know the terms to do a proper search of the medical literature, and would be interested in the results of someone with more domain-specific expertise investigating the issue.
What is your method of intermittent fasting?
Don't eat before noon or after 8 PM. Typically, that cashes out as eating between 1 and 7 because it's rarely convenient for me to start prepping food before noon, and I have a long habit of eating dinner at 5 to 6. On various days of the week (mostly for convenience reasons), I eat one huge meal, a big meal and a moderately sized meal, or three moderately sized meals, so my fasting period stretches from 16 hours at the shortest to ~21 hours at the longest.
I'm not a particularly good storehouse for information on IF- I would look to people like Leangains or Precision Nutrition for more info.
thank you. It seems like there's a lot of contradictory opinions on the subject :(
I seem to recall a study suggesting that it can be bad for adults to drink lots of milk (more than a cup a day).
Bad in what way? The majority of humanity is lactose intolerant and should not drink milk for that reason. And milk contains a bunch of fat and sugar which isn't exactly good for you if you drink extreme amounts. Is that what you are talking about, or is it something new?
I've found it: it was in “Fear of a Vegan Planet” by Mickey Z. It suggests milk can lower the pH of the blood which will try to take calcium from the bones to compensate it, citing the 1995 radio show “Natural Living”. (It doesn't look as much as a reliable source to me now as I remembered it did.)
I've found materials both supporting and refuting this idea. It IS possible for diet to effect your blood pH, but whether or not that effects the bones is not clear. Here are two research papers that discuss the topic: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21529374 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3195546/?tool=pubmed
Thank you
“Everyone” is tricky, since the main causes of mortality vary with your age. Anyway, I'd say, not smoking, exercising, not being obese (nor emaciated, but in the parts of the world where most Internet users are, short of anorexia nervosa this isn't likely to be a problem), driving less and in a less aggressive way, not committing suicide... Don't they teach this stuff in high school?
The last sentence is patronizing, and especially inappropriate in a thread about asking stupid questions.
To the extent that a given fact about life extension can be sneered at like that I would assume that the question was intended to encompass facts of at least one degree less obvious. ie. "What practical things should everyone be doing to extend their lifetimes apart from, you know, breathing, eating, sleeping, drinking?" is implicit.
Yes, they do teach this stuff in high school (and middle school and elementary school for that matter), but they generally had an agenda significantly different from "give students the most accurate possible information about how to be healthy." Based on my admittedly anecdotal recollections, the main goals were to scare us as much as possible about sex and drugs and avoid having to explain anything complicated. As such, I would trust the LW community far more than what I was taught in school.
Of course, if you want to get your health advice from DARE and the Food Pyramid, I guess that's your right.
Michaelcurzi's How to avoid dying in a car crash is relevant. Bentarm's comment on that thread makes an excellent point regarding coronary heart disease.
There is also Eliezer Yudkowsky's You Only Live Twice and Robin Hanson's We Agree: Get Froze on cryonics.
I follow the "Bulletproof" diet.
Donate to SENS.