People are concerned with improving their diets, optimizing their exercise, tuning their supplements.  I am often asked, due to my central role in Health Extension, for health advice, for speaking slots, or for a chance to promote this or that supplement company or fitness app.

The problem is that none of these things do much good.

The billions of people on the planet are extremely diverse, and collectively practice nearly any diet and exercise regimen you can imagine, yet none show up as longevity outliers.  This means that nothing you can do dietarily is going to make a huge difference in your healthspan.  Indeed, Jean Calment, the oldest human to ever life, smoked cigarettes and ate two pounds of candy per week until she was 119.  It’s not all about diet and behaviors.  There are deeper biochemical processes controlling our destiny.

More importantly, the small stuff distracts smart people from the foundational work that needs to be done to create significant improvement in human health.

Keep in mind that many diets and behaviors are known to massively reduce your healthspan, so across the spectrum of options, the upside is small, and the downside is large.  The best advice I can give is to avoid dying for stupid reasons: eat a diverse, moderate diet, keep your stress low most of the time, exercise moderately, look both ways, etc.

As for the bgger picture: don’t be fooled into thinking you have a special route to longevity, and and be lulled into complacency.  Nothing is going to work meaningfully well until we get deeply technical biomedical interventions from labs into bodies.  That will require work, money, will, executive function, dedication, passion, collaboration, innovation, risk-taking, intellectual honesty…

For starters, come to the next Health Extension Salon!