I also believe that the low carb diet approach is better than a plant based diet.
I was plant based during the pandemic and lost a lot of body composition. I’m 6’2” and dropped to 165 lbs from 185 lbs on a plant based diet. My T also dropped significantly.
I’ve slowly added added meat back in and removed carbs and I’m back to 182 lbs. I feel and look much healthier.
I’m trying the carnivore/ketovore diet for 90 days then will get bloodwork.
Carbs and sugar are your enemy is my approach
I tend to aim to keep my carbs level low and eat omnivore, but I am not persuaded that keto is the way to go. I do, however, try to kick into elements of ketosis with MCT oil and/or ketone esters. Intermittent ketosis seems OK, but trying to stay continually in ketosis does not appear warranted.
I am also 6’2", but would like to be perhaps 5 lbs lighter than my current 181 lbs (82 kg) although I do intend getting drunk when having dinner later today which won’t assist me in reducing weight.
On the other hand I now have my record low figure of under 0.16mg/L (0.016mg/dL) for C Reactive Protein
This is a good table that looks at the distribution of serum CRP by age and sex in two different locations. Sadly the columns are messed up.
https://academic.oup.com/view-large/200176855
That makes my figure (which happens to be lower than Bryan Johnson’s notwithstanding the fact that I am 17 years old than him) something which would be low for a male in the 25-34 age range.
How important serum CRP is is a matter for discussion, but I consider it one of the key markers.
So interesting! For those of you who are taking melatonin, I’d be interested in your protocol. I’ve been taking 3 to 5mg HS for over 30 years now (I travel for a living quite a bit and I change time zones between the US and Europe), but the dosages recommended in this article are monumentally higher than what I’m familiar with. (I was involved in sleep research for several years, but that was a while back.) What’s everyone else doing, dosage-wise?
I recently started taking 5 MG of melatonin based on the MB paper. I have also experimented with Glycine. Improving my sleep has been one of my main focuses. Both are less extreme than giving up alcohol which I’m also considering. I may also add tadalafil (unrelated to sleep). So that leaves me with:
Rapamycin.
Urolithin A
Metformin
Acarbose (only with high carb meals; less than 5-7 times a month)
Sirt6 Activator
Fisetin (high-dose two days a month)
NMN combo powder
5-day fasting quarterly
I think it’s pretty well-established, that some of these (e.g., NMN) don’t promote longevity, but I still take them.
What I am tending to do with alcohol at the moment is to make sure I don’t get drunk two days in a row. Often the first drunken night I end up sleeping reasonably well, but the second one can be a bit of a mess.
I also take dihyromyrectin and pantethine to minimise the effects of alcohol. There will always to some extent be the rebound, however. That can cause sleep issues.
I take 24 before bed and avoid blue light, leave 12 on the bed stand in case I have to wake up for something.
Mostly for sleep, but it is supposed to be a longevity thing so I’m not too worried and have no side effects.
Unfortunately, alcohol is much more damning. Sleep quality is just as important as sleep quantity. Alcohol fragments your sleep and suppresses REM sleep. Given how important wine is to my life this is quite a blow!
I agree with you. My sleep and recovery scores from WHOOP and or Oura ring are much lower when I drink. I have been trying some KAVA KAVA alternative and tried limiting the amount of alcohol which seems to help. HRV resting heart rate are the most noticealbe changes.
Whenever I drink, it takes far too long for my heart rate to dip. I would have to stop drinking at noon, which sort of defeats the purpose.
Anyone interested in longevity should be laser focused on sleep. I highly recommend Matthew Walker’s book “Why We Sleep”. Or any podcast where he is being interviewed, and they are legion.
If you don’t want to give up alcohol check out Zbiotics. Dave Asprey did a recent podcast with the scientist who developed this probiotic you consume prior to drinking alcohol which nullifies most of the deleterious effects.
I use a fitbit. If I drink then obviously the effects follow the drinking. Hence if I finish drinking at 2pm rather than 8pm then the consequences differ in timing.
There are substantially three phases. Firstly the ethanol phase, that can see my blood pressure go down, but my heart rate does not massively go up. Then the acetaldehyde phase, this is where the damage is done and my heart rate goes up. Then the acetate phase. At this point vasodilation kicks in which pushes up my weight until the acetate effects have gone which may take a day. All these phases overlap although acetate and ethanol does not necessarily overlap that much depending upon the period for which I drink. If I take pantethine then this speeds up the conversion from acetaldehyde into acetate. I also tend to take dihydromyrecetin which also seems to help. If I take more pantethine then my heart rate during the conversion of acetaldehyde into acetate is higher and I get warmer.
Hence if I drink for more than one day my resting heart rate goes up each day until it stabilises in the upper 60s. If I stop drinking it drops down (that in part is a fitbit artefact as actually my average sleep rate when drinking jumps quite a bit) and stabilises in the low 50s. My HRV as measured by elite goes down.
So if we look at the last week and the average sleep heart rate (ashr) whilst asleep
Friday night 2 bottles cider, 2 bottles beer 30cl whisky ashr 61 hrv 51
Sat (no exogenous alcohol) ashr 53 hrv 67
Sun (30cl whisky, 2 bottles beer, 2 pints cider - more pantethine) ashr 75 hrv 49
Mon (none) ashr 55 hrv 61
Tues (none) ashr 55 hrv 65
The pattern is reasonably consistent. Historically (say 5 years ago). I was a really heavy drinker most nights (ie a bottle of wine and say 2 litres of beer)
I am currently of the view that if I drink it should really be for only one day/evening on the trot and I should then have a day without booze.
The alcohol rebound effect can cause sleep problems. That is because of the removal of ethanol from the GABA receptors ethanol being GABA ergic.
I find it requires an HPA cycle (ultradian cycle) after being woken by alcohol rebound to return to sleep. It may be possible to shorten this with a cox-1 inhibitor such as aspirin, but I am quite unhappy about cox-1 inhibitors even though aspirin only really lasts 36 hours (on a straight line basis as cox-1 is recreated by the cells)
Wow! Your alcohol HRV’s are about where my non-alcohol levels are - jealous! I did note that you are using a fitbit, which some of the HRV gurus are not fans of since not an ECG, but still impressive.
I appreciate your extensive research and trials with various approaches…Thank you!
I use a fitbit and a polar. I think the fitbit is not particularly reliable for hrv. I use polar H10 to register the data, but elite to do the analysis. It is important to distinguish between the figures because fitbit tends to record some 20ms plus less than elite/polar.
I am quite pleased with my biomarkers on my current protocol. I am currently planning on taking my next dose of Rapamycin in 2023.
Natural NMNT inhibitors? Now I will add vanilla to my coffee.
another longevity regimen:
This framework is heavily based on Peter Attia’s longevity toolkit, Dr. Howard J. Luks’ book Longevity… Simplified and Forever Healthy’s longevity strategy. There are many things that I haven’t introduced in my framework yet. I intend to improve it over time.
For what it’s worth my protocol, which has been a little bit messed up recently because I’m traveling back and forth to Europe frequently is something like this.
Once weekly infrared sauna.
Resistance training/HIT three times a week.
I eat within a 12 hour window- This is down from 16:8 which I did for about a year-interestingly my blood markers were great then, but I’ve found it hard to maintain. Mainly because I was missing dinner with my kids.
My most previous blood before I started taking Rapa was actually my best for a while. Came in at 38.7. I’m 48.
Supplements:
Vitamin D3 1000IU per day
AKG-going to drop this soon and switch to Urolithin A
Magnesium L Threonate
Melatonin-1mg
Carnosine 500mg
Zinc 15mg per day
Astaxanthin 4mg. I was taking 8mg at one point, but started noticing numbers and tingling in my fingers. It stopped as soon as I lowered the does.
TMG - I have high homocysteine and this helps bring it under control.
I also take Methyl Folate and Methy B12, but alternate between days.
I’ll also occasionally take Glycine and NAC, but infrequently.
I’ve now added Rapamycin. I’m at 4mg a week. Going to give it a month and then increase my dosage to 6mg.
My diet is mostly Mediterranean- whole Foods, although it’s been hard to maintain with all the traveling.
Right now I’m working on lowering my LDL naturally-When I was fasting 16:8 it went down around 70.
I’m also trying to figure out how to lower my fasting glucose, it’s hovering around the low nineties, which is too high.
Just an aside to this thread, related to rapamycin. I spoke to one notable researcher at the Longevity Summit who has done rapamycin-related research (and there were a lot of them there), and one of his comments to me was that if he were head of the FDA, he’s make sure that rapamycin was available for free to everyone in the country.
Talking with people at the Longevity Summit about rapamycin is like talking about aspirin in any “normal” crowd, just a regular part of a medical discussion.
@RapAdmin Have you considered adding a longevity regimine section on your profile intake for each new / exhisting member? Thanks for the update on the Longevity Summit.
Thats a good idea. Let me see how I might be able to implement that. One of the concerns is you want to make registration for new users as easy and hassle free as possible, so I’m concerned that if you throw up a question asking them to input their longevity regimen right at the start it might scare people away (I don’t know about you, but I hate websites that ask you for a ton of information upfront to get access to the site… I usually bail out of those, as do most people). That would be my only concern. Perhaps if there was a way to have people add it later. But that gets more complex.
Yes, I agree and making it optional may work. It would be fun to look up some of the members and see what they are doing.