maia comments on Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 2 - Less Wrong
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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.