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How Cutting-Edge Science Can Reverse Your Aging - E80
14 Plays4 hours ago
Treating aging feels like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. You handle one health issue - maybe heart disease, maybe early dementia only to watch another one surface, all rooted in the same deeper process. With every year, the gap between your biological age and your energy, strength, and clarity of mind seems to widen, no matter how dedicated you are to the basics.
But what if you could go beyond managing symptoms and actually target the root causes of aging itself? How might this shift not just extend your life, but improve the quality of your years - your healthspan? What would it take to actually measure, track, and meaningfully slow the pace of decline, so extra years aren’t just added at the end, but spent vibrant and active?
This episode shines a light on the new science that flips our old understanding on its head, targeting aging at its cellular root rather than just patching symptoms. From promising molecules to next-gen wearables and breakthroughs like the $101 million XPRIZE, you’ll discover the practical, research-backed ways that people at the cutting edge are tracking, measuring, and working to slow the pace of aging itself.
In this episode you will learn:
- Why the traditional approach to age-related disease misses the root cause, and how the geroscience revolution aims to fix this.
- The basics of four leading anti-aging tools: senolytics, NAD boosters, metformin, and rapamycin.
- What human studies currently show - and don’t show - about these promising interventions.
- How wearable tech and epigenetic clocks can now track your body’s pace of aging in real time.
- How the $101 million XPrize is pushing science to target aging and boost healthspan.
- What these breakthroughs could mean for anyone wanting to take charge of their own health journey.
Resources
- Connect with Andrew on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mandrewmcconnell
- Follow Alively on Instagram for regular updates and insights: https://www.instagram.com/alively_official
- Learn more about healthspan from Andrew’s blog: https://www.mandrewmcconnell.com/blog
This podcast was produced by the team at Zapods Podcast Agency:
Find the products, practices, and routines discussed on the Alively website:
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Transcript
Introduction to Lifespan Extension and Podcast Series
00:00:00
Speaker
Repomycin is arguably the most consistent and well-studied pharmaceutical intervention for extending both lifespan and healthspan in laboratory animals, from worms and flies all the way up to mice.
00:00:16
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This is the Home of Healthspan podcast, where we profile health and wellness role models, sharing their stories and the tools, practices, and routines they use to live a lively life.
Foundational Health Toolkit Review
00:00:30
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Welcome back to the Home of Healthspan and this, the fourth part of our five-part series on the concept of healthspan. In our last episode, we built our foundational toolkit, the five pillars of a long and healthy life.
00:00:45
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We covered the how-to of nutrition, fitness, mindset, sleep and recovery, and social connection.
Gyroscience and Cellular Aging
00:00:53
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Now with our five-pillar foundation in place, we're going to go to the frontier.
00:00:59
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What if we could target aging at the cellular level? What if you could track your body's pace of aging on a wristband? This isn't science fiction.
00:01:11
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It's a burgeoning field of gyroscience. And today we're exploring the tools from breakthrough molecules to a $101 million dollars prize that aims to turn back the clock on our biology.
00:01:27
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Let's get into gyroscience revolution.
Redefining Aging with Gyroscience
00:01:30
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To understand the technologies we're about to discuss, we need to first understand a revolutionary shift in thinking.
00:01:39
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And it's called the gyroscience revolution. The traditional medical approach has been to treat individual age-related diseases as separate problems.
00:01:49
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You have heart disease, you go to a cardiologist. You have cancer, you go to an oncologist. My dad was a cardiologist, my mom was an oncologist. So this an area I kind of know. If you have Alzheimer's, you go see a neurologist.
00:02:04
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This approach is like playing a game of whack-a-mole. You knock down one problem and another one just pops up elsewhere. The Gero Science hypothesis posits there is a common underlying cause for all these conditions.
00:02:17
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That's the biological process of aging itself. Therefore, instead of playing a game of whack-a-mole, Gero Science aims to target the fundamental hallmarks of aging to delay, prevent, and even reverse multiple chronic conditions all at once.
Medical Advice Disclaimer
00:02:35
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It's about fixing the root cause, not just patching up the symptoms. This is the central why behind the exciting molecules we're about to explore. Now a quick but very important disclaimer.
00:02:48
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I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice. I am a guy doing a podcast. I do some research, but you need to go talk to a licensed registered physician before doing anything we talk about in this episode.
00:03:06
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This section is purely for informational purposes to give you a sense of what's being researched at the highest levels. Please, please, please consult a qualified physician before considering any new supplement or medication.
Exploration of Gerotherapeutics
00:03:23
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We're going to provide a simple balance overview of the four most discussed potential gerotherapeutics. making a clear distinction between animal research and what we actually know from humans.
00:03:36
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So let's start with number one, senolytics. These are the zombie cell killers. They're class of drugs designed to selectively find and eliminate senescent cells.
00:03:49
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So senescent cells are the old dysfunctional cells that accumulate in our tissue as we age. These senescent cells are often called zombie cells because they stop dividing, but they stubbornly refuse just die.
00:04:05
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They hang around, secreting a cocktail of inflammatory signals that damages all the healthy cells around them. Senolytics work by temporarily disabling the specific survival pathways these zombie cells rely upon, which effectively triggers them to self-destruct.
00:04:25
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Because it takes weeks for these cells to reaccumulate, these drugs can be taken intermittently in what's called kind of a hit-and-run approach. So what evidence do we have of this? In animal models, the results have been impressive.
00:04:38
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They've alleviated a wide range of age-related conditions. In humans, we're still in the early stages. The most studied combination we have is a combination of a cancer drug, desatinib,
00:04:53
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plus a plant flavonoid called quercetin, so disatinib and quercetin. And they've been shown to reduce the burden of these zombie cells in human subjects.
00:05:06
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However, recent clinical trials looking at conditions like age-related bone loss have shown only subtle or mixed results, suggesting their effectiveness might depend on how many of these cells a person has to begin with.
00:05:21
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So the jury is still out, but the concept is powerful. Maybe we just haven't found the right combination.
Animal Studies vs. Human Trials
00:05:28
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Second, we have the NAD plus boosters, the energy enhancers.
00:05:33
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These are supplements that provide your body with the raw materials to make more NAD plus. NAD plus is a vital coenzyme, a helper molecule that is essential for energy metabolism, DNA repair, and hundreds of other cellular processes.
00:05:50
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the problem is our natural levels of NAD plus are known to decline significantly as we get older. So how do these work? So one way is taking precursors to NAD.
00:06:02
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So things like NR or NMN, your body then synthesizes into creating more NAD plus. Increased levels then fuel your mitochondria.
00:06:13
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These are your cellular power plants in your body. And they also activate a class of pro-longevity enzymes called sirtuins, which help regulate cellular health and stress resistance.
00:06:25
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There are also ways to try and increase NAD plus directly. So some go in for IVs, some take shots, and then there are companies like Ion Layer that have patches that you can wear over course of time that ionize patches like Ion Layer and they soak into your body.
00:06:44
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So what's the evidence on this? Human clinical trials have consistently shown that supplements like NR and NMN are safe and effective at raising blood levels of NAD.
00:06:56
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Some studies have pointed to the benefits in areas like physical performance in older adults. However, many of the broader anti-aging claims you might hear, which are often derived from animal studies, are not yet conclusively proven in large-scale human trials. So this is still very early science.
00:07:14
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It makes sense, but we haven't seen the results necessarily in humans and the benefit. Third of our four that we're going to cover today is metformin.
Rapamycin and Metformin's Role in Longevity
00:07:25
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Metformin is the most widely prescribed medication for type 2 diabetes in the world.
00:07:31
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So why are we talking about it? Well, interest in metformin as a longevity agent was sparked by a large observational studies showing that diabetic patients taking the drug tended to live longer than matched non-diabetic individuals.
00:07:46
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So really paradoxical finding. So if you had diabetes, but we're taking metformin, you live longer than if you didn't have diabetes at all. Some of this, as they've re-looked at the data, may not actually hold true, but the proposed mechanism is that metformin targets several hallmarks of aging, particularly by activating nutrient-sensing pathways that mimic some of the benefits of caloric restriction and by reducing systematic inflammation.
00:08:16
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The definitive clinical trial TAME, targeting aging with metformin, it's a big study, TAME, is currently underway to test if these benefits extend to healthy non-diabetic people.
00:08:29
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There's a key point and nuance here. Some research suggests that metformin may blunt some of the beneficial adaptations we get from exercise. So this highlights, like with all of this, the need for more research before we can be sure they're truly longevity enhancing and healthspan enhancing.
00:08:47
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And the fourth that we're going to cover is rapamycin. Rapamycin is an FDA-approved immunosuppressant drug. It was originally discovered in the soil sample from Easter Island, which is also known as Rapa Nui, hence the name rapamycin.
00:09:04
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Rapamycin inhibits a key cellular pathway called mTOR, a mammalian target of rapamycin, like built around the name. It targets this pathway and acts as a master regulator of cell growth and metabolism.
00:09:19
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By inhibiting memtor, repamycin essentially tricks the cells into thinking nutrients are scarce, similar to a state of fasting. So fasting has shown benefits in animal models and some humans.
00:09:32
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And so this is a way to kind of mimic that in pill form. This activates the cellular housekeeping process we mentioned last episode, autophagy. where cells clear out damaged components.
00:09:45
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Refamycin is arguably the most consistent and well-studied pharmaceutical intervention for extending both lifespan and healthspan in laboratory animals, from worms and flies all the way up to mice.
00:09:58
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You'll hear, not human. While has been used safely in humans for decades for organ transplants, large-scale clinical trials specifically for longevity are still limited.
00:10:10
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However, its robust effects in so many animal models make it one of the most promising candidates in all of gyroscience. There are a number of physicians like Peter Atiyah who prescribe these for their patients and companies cropping up like Git Healthspan that allow you to access repamycin for those interested in its gyroprotective benefits.
Wearable Tech and Epigenetic Clocks
00:10:33
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One I won't jump in as much, but it is getting a lot more exposure now is micro dosing of the GLP one class of drugs as a lot of similar benefits, improving glycemic response, reducing visceral fat, other things, but and obviously more and more study needed there. So that's a little bonus. I'm not going to get as deep on that one.
00:10:57
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So we have these potential interventions, but how do we know if they or lifestyle changes are actually working? This is where technology is creating a powerful feedback loop.
00:11:09
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First and kind of easiest access is wearable technology. So a great case study here is the Whoop wearable and their latest iteration, they go beyond simple step counting.
00:11:21
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or HRV to track deep physiological metrics like resting heart rate, our heart rate variability, HRV, and detailed sleep patterns and VO2 max.
00:11:32
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Whoop then synthesizes all this data into a proprietary healthspan feature. which calculates your whoop age, a measure of your physiological age and pace of aging. So we talked about chronological age.
00:11:46
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What about our biological age? It's trying to get to that and calculate your pace of aging. Are you aging a year each year or less than a year? if Are you a 10th of a year each year? Or there are times that you can do really well that you are aging in reverse. You're actually getting younger. You're doing all these things that your cells are repairing better. And so you're getting younger with each year.
00:12:06
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This technology transforms the abstract concept of biological age into a tangible, trackable metric that you can see respond to your daily choices in real time. And so this will update each week, each month, and kind of see I've had times where I was negative aging and had times where 0.2, 0.5 is fast as my chronological age was going up.
00:12:30
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It's something I keep an eye on. Next is an even more precise way of measuring through epigenetic clocks. So think of these as your DNA is the hardware of a computer and your epigenome is a software that tells that hardware what to do.
00:12:50
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One type of epigenetic modification called DNA methylation involves small chemical tags that attach to your DNA and change how your genes are expressed. These methylation patterns change in predictable ways as we age.
00:13:05
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So scientists have now developed algorithms or epigenetic clocks that can read these patterns from a simple blood or saliva draw and calculate your biological age with remarkable accuracy.
00:13:18
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There are different clocks like a partner of ours age rate. There's pheno age that are pretty good at predicting health span. There's grim age, which is a strong predictor of lifespan and disease risk.
00:13:30
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And then companies like Function Health that do the blood work also incorporate biological clock estimates into its subscription blood work. The convergence of these two areas, quantifiable self-tracking and targeted biochemical interventions, is creating a new paradigm for personalized, proactive health.
00:13:50
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It moves you from being a passive recipient of generic health advice to an active manager of your own biology. you can run effective in-of-one experiments.
Healthy Aging Competition
00:14:02
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You measure, you intervene, You measure again, see what the impact is. To conclude on an exciting and forward-looking note, let's talk about the XPRIZE for HealthSpan.
00:14:14
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So you might have heard the XPRIZE, it initially came to prominence with XPRIZE for space. So the first private um spacecraft to to make it out and kind of kicked off the space race with SpaceX and Blue Origin, all these companies coming around.
00:14:32
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This serves as a powerful anchor for everything we've discussed. The XPRIZE for Healthspan is a seven-year, $101 million dollars global competition, the largest XPRIZE in history, challenging teams to develop a therapeutic treatment that can restore muscle, cognitive, and immune function by a minimum of 10 years in older adults, with the goal twenty this is not a small research grant.
00:15:00
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It is a moonshot, in the words of XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis, for healthy aging designed to catalyze an entire industry like it did for the private space market.
00:15:13
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The involvement of major sponsors like Hevolution holds amazing conferences out of Saudi Arabia. And the global biopharma company GSK demonstrates that serious capital and scientific effort are being marshaled to solve the problem of age-related decline.
00:15:31
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This immense investment signals a major economic and cultural shift, indicating that HealthSpan is moving from a niche scientific interest to a major new sector of the healthcare and wellness economy.
Gyroscience Recap and Next Episode Teaser
00:15:44
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By understanding this today, you're positioning yourself at the forefront of a wave that is on a clear trajectory to become mainstream. So we've journeyed from the foundational paradigm of gyroscience to specific molecules being tested in labs, to the trackers on our wrists and the clocks that we can read our biological age from our DNA.
00:16:07
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The science is moving faster than ever before. We've learned about the lifestyle pillars and the cutting edge science. So what now? How do you put it all together?
00:16:18
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In our final episode coming up in this series, we'll do just that. will empower you to synthesize all this information and create your own personalized, actionable plan to get started.
00:16:31
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Thank you for joining us on today's episode of the Home of Healthspan podcast. And remember, you can always find the products, practices, and routines mentioned by today's guests, as well as many other healthspan role models on Alively.com.
00:16:44
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Enjoy a lively day.