Tom Xants recommended me this book [1] by a leading researcher in gerontology and top dog of an Harvard anti-ageing research centre. That got me curious but before taking anyone’s advice seriously, I follow the Krauser Rule Of Data Sourcing, namely I google a picture of him to check out his physiognomy. Krauser don’t take no advice from dorks, fags, or pedo-faced bugmen. Judge for yourself.

He’s over 50 and this is an anti-ageing book so I think we can all agree Dr Sinclair passes the first smell test. I paid Kindle my £4.99 and dived into the 473-page text. What did I learn?

The book is split into three sections: past, present, and future. The past is by far the best as it focuses entirely on Sinclair’s official area of expertise, the scientific literature of ageing. He’s a legit top-tier expert in this field. He gives an outline of the health problems caused by ageing and the existing published research on fighting it (mostly in mice). His central theme is that ageing is a disease and there is no biological necessity for it. He considers various scientific explanations for the ageing mechanism and dismisses most as dealing with the downstream effects of ageing rather than the core process.

What’s the core process, Krauser?

Unwanted side-effects of the DNA repair process, that’s what. Sinclair says almost all lifeforms, including those as simple as yeast, have a survival circuit that flips between two states. Normally, the circuit is engaged in processes aiding reproduction including literal cell division and growth. There are enzymes called Sirtains that direct this process and everything is happy as Larry in good times. However, our DNA comes under daily assault by the forces of the earth causing damage to literally trillions of cells. The assault can be cosmic rays, UV light, X-rays, waste products from metabolization of food, viruses and whatnot. The point is, it’s totally normal, widespread, constant and thus every organism has evolved a survival circuit to clean up the damage. Thus your sirtains (especially sirtain 2) leave their posts doing the daily business of living and act as firefighters on your cells’ DNA, fixing it.

Eventually, the damage is too great to be fully repaired or the job takes so long that your sirtains end up neglecting their daily tasks in the rest of the cell. Accumulated damage expresses itself as an unravelling of the DNA loops, causing the nucleus of the cell to get ragged and diffuse. The information contained by the epigenome is thus lost. Sinclair calls this the Information Theory Of Ageing.

All that nasty stuff that happens as we age- grey hair, wrinkles, slow repair, inflexibility, shitting yourself, cancer etc- are symptoms of this condition. If you can find ways to reduce the severity of daily damage, and/or improve sirtain’s ability to repair it, you can delay and possibly even reverse ageing.

This theory leads to some very obvious lifestyle recommendations, especially to reduce the daily damage to your DNA: don’t smoke, don’t booze, don’t catch diseases, don’t get fat, don’t eat junk [2]. There are additional things you can do to boost your sirtain production and clean out senescent (dead/zombie) cells, such as supplementation with quercetin, resveratrol, and NMN. Sinclair also recommends regularly exposing your body to minor stresses so that the survival circuit does regular small repairs to DNA rather than infrequent big jobs. So, intermittent fasting, regular exercise, and hot/cold exposure therapy.

That’s the Past section and I found it fascinating. The Present section explores ongoing research and most-likely theoretical advances taking advantage of Sinclair’s position to be strategically located within the scientific community currently researching new therapies. He’s exceedingly optimistic but cautions that none of this research is published or long-term tested on humans. Thus it’s less robust than his Past section but gives ideas to enterprising anti-ageing fans.

The thrust of this section is that we’ll soon have some synthetic compounds, probably daily pills, that specifically address ageing. Work is ongoing to ascertain how to refresh sirtain production (which falls over time), or to splice in repair genes, or lengthen telomere and so on. He foresees a world in which we all wear sophisticated smart watches that constantly test our sweat, blood, heart rate and so on, forwarding the data to advanced computing for real-time detection of infections, poor bio-markers etc. This doesn’t seem at all far fetched to me. He explains how many age-related diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s and heart disease can be detected years before they become symptomatic. Catching them early means treating them early.

There’s also some Frankenstein stuff like genetically modifying pigs to grow organs for human transplants and 3D printers for organs [3]. Fascinating.

The last section, Future, can be completely ignored. Now he makes the same mistake 99% of scientists make when writing popular science books: he lectures us all on social and political concerns that he knows less about than the average Twitter blue check. There’s some epic faggotry in this and its a real slog with literally nothing of value worth finding. Skip it.

Finally, in the conclusion, he gets around to the bit I wanted to read all along: what is his protocol? What shit are he and his family taking to keep themselves alive longer. I’ll save you the bother and tell you right now:

1. One gram of NMN, one gram of resveratol, one gram of metformin every morning;
2. Daily dose of vitamin D, vitamin K2, and 83mg aspirin;
3. Low sugar, bread, pasta [4];
4. Skip one meal a day- basically a gay-ass intermittent fast;
5. Daily steps;
6. Gym on weekends, again a gay-ass regime of something that he should do more;
7. Blood tests every few months to check bio-markers;
8. Meat on gym days but not otherwise;
9. No smoking. Avoid microwaved plastic, UV exposure, X-rays, CT scans;
10. Stay in the shade during the day and cool in bed;
11. BMI in the healthy range which for him is 23 to 25

I’m glad I read this book because it gives a solid science-backed opinion on what causes ageing and what has been proven to work to stop it [5]. Reading between the lines it gives clear advice on how to design your own anti-ageing protocol. Well done, David.

He’ll probably live longer than me but he certainly won’t be shagging as many hot bitches. If you don’t want to live forever but you do wanna pick up the skirt, buy Daygame Overkill here for just $199. That’s less than $1 a year over your artificially-extended lifespan.

[1] Which is about as ironic as Keith Richards recommending me a book on asceticism.
[2] Sorry Tom.
[3] China has a better idea of just throwing the Muslims in concentration camps and using theirs.
[4] I’m on a high-carb bulk right now so I’m breaking this big time but my usual diet matches this advice. I’ll be back on it in a couple of months.
[5] In yeast, mice, and worms.