Welcome to New Life Longevity
by Nils Osmar. Updated August 17, 2023. See full Medical Disclaimer
The premise of this website and the movement it’s a part of is that it may be possible for people now alive to live years or decades longer than their ancestors did.
As Dr. David Sinclair (Professor of Genetics and co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School) recently put it, “The first person who’ll live to be 150 has already been born.”
To be clear, Sinclair and other prominent anti-aging researchers are not talking about being stuck in a nursing home, hovering on the verge of death, unable to remember the names of our children or grandchildren – but of staying fit and healthy and active while living far past what most of us have assumed was a natural limit to the human lifespan – living longer while also living healthier, and (possibly) finding ways to become younger, not older, as the decades go by.
Pushing back against the aging process
You may have already decided that you’d like to live to be 100 or 120 or even longer. (I know some folks who are hoping to live past 500.) Or you may have found yourself noticing a friend or family member who’s becoming more vulnerable to ill health as a result of aging, and wondering if there might be lifestyle changes or other interventions that could help.
Do we really have to age?
Aging is a process of decline that we usually think of as beginning when we’re in our early 30s. It starts out slowly then accelerates, leading eventually to a collapse of our health and to death. It’s not the only thing that kills us, but it makes us more vulnerable to heart disease, diabetes and dementia, so is a major underlying cause of death.
We hear constantly that “aging happens to everyone” and “you can’t do anything about it.” But do we really have to age in the first place? Some researchers are starting to question this assumption. They believe that we can slow aging to at least some degree by:
- Eating a healthy diet (one that’s rich in the nutrients needed to support both our health and the health of our mitochondria).
- Restricting some nutrients that appear to be pro-aging, or even taking breaks from food entirely for a while by doing short or long water fasts or “fasting mimicking diets”.
- Exercising – particularly types of exercise such as HIIT, aerobics, and resistance training.
- Taking some very specific supplements and medications which show promise of either reversing the symptoms of aging or extending the human lifespan.
My experience: reversing sarcopenia
A few years ago, I became aware that I was going downhill, having memory problems, and developing signs of age-related muscle wasting (sarcopenia). I was getting fat (or “skinny fat“; my muscles were shrinking; my mood was sinking; I was getting weaker and looking older.
The photos below show what I looked like before and after my recent changes. I was 67 years old in the image on the left (fall 2019) and 69 years old in the one on the right, taken in the spring of 2022. I was able to lose some excess body fat, gain some muscle, and my mood and mental clarity improved also over a few months’ time.
What I’ve been doing
For more details about my protocol, see this page.
