Lifespan

[7Wannabe5]

@IlliniDave:

Yes, and also alcohol, pain-killers, and probably pot and pornography. Hooking up with somebody new and/or younger does help to extend sexual lifespan, but usually constitutes yet another expensive vicious cycle. Has to be in top 5 reasons why formerly affluent men die broke. OTOH, if new, younger partner is also maybe a vegan chef and/or hot yoga instructor then, still super expensive, but might be worth it.

[chenda]

I believe there are now actually official sugar daddy parties which, well, do exactly what they say. The men need a credit reference and the women need to pass a hotness test of some sort and be under a certain age. Although it sounds so cringe I don't think I could even work the cloakroom.

[7Wannabe5]

@chenda:

Grasshopper, relaxing through the cringe will grant you the power that transcends both youth and beauty.

[chenda]

@chenda:

Grasshopper, relaxing through the cringe will grant you the power that transcends both youth and beauty.

That's certainly my back up plan.

[NewBlood]

Have you looked into claims the Blue Zones are based on bad data?

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v1.full

I also see articles that say they are good data:

https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontol ... ogin=false

It's hard to know what to trust.

I just finished reading Antifragile. A few bits that I found very interesting about this (bold emphasis mine):

Recall from the lung ventilator discussion this practical consequence of Jensen’s inequality: irregularity has its benefits in some areas; regularity has its detriments. […]
Perhaps what we mostly need to remove is a few meals at random, or at least avoid steadiness in food consumption. The error of missing nonlinearities is found in two places, in the mixture and in the frequency of food intake.
[…]
So if you agree that we need a “balanced” nutrition of a certain combination, it is wrong to immediately assume that we need such balance at every meal rather than serially so.
[…]
Why? Because deprivation is a stressor – and we know what stressors do when allowed adequate recovery. Convexity effects at work here again: getting three times the daily dose of protein in one day and nothing the next two is certainly not biologically equivalent to “steady” moderate consumption if our metabolic reactions are nonlinear. It should have some benefits – at least it is how we are designed to be.

I speculate, in fact I more than speculate: I am convinced (an inevitable result of nonlinearity) that we are antifragile to randomness in food delivery and composition – at least over a certain range, or number of days.

And one blatant denial of convexity bias is the theory about the benefits of the so-called Cretan (or Mediterranean) diet that triggered a change in the eating habits of the US enlightened class, away from steak and potatoes in favor of grilled fish with salad and feta cheese. It happened as follows. Someone looked at the longevity of Cretans, cataloged what they ate, then inferred – naively – that they lived longer because of the types of food they consumed. It could be true, but the second-order effect (the variations in intake) could be dominant, something that went unnoticed by mechanistic researchers. Indeed, it took a while to notice the following: The Greek Orthodox church has, depending on the severity of the local culture, almost two hundred days of fasting per year; and these are harrowing fasts.

[…]

during Orthodox Lent, a forty-day period in which almost no animal product can be consumed, no sweets and for some sticklers, no olive oil.

[…]

Remarkably, while fish is banned, most days, shellfish is allowed, probably as it was not considered a luxury item. The compensation for the absence of some nutrients from my daily diet will take place in lumps. I will make up my deprivation of what researchers (for now) call protein from fish on days it is allowed, and of course I will ravenously eat lamb on Easter Day, then consume dis-proportionally high quantities of fatty red meat for a while thereafter.

Now what he calls fasts are mostly food restrictions as far as I can tell. It's made me want to try following that "fasting" calendar just to see how that feels. (after Lent. I just had pie. It's pi day on my calendar)

(edited for typos)

[J_]

Yes Taleb has strong views about health, he also mentions the big risk of hospitalisation, because of the many mistakes made there.

Corpus Hippocrates:
"A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how by his own thought to derive benefit in his illnesses".
Hippocrates remarks about nutrition (food and drinks), about air quality, about what kind of movement are beneficial for us, are still the very same as now, even those tips are more than 2500 years old.

There is a great analogy between the ERE wisdom: Not spending is much easier than earning extra money. And: avoiding illnesses by living a healthy regimen is much easier than restore health.

To do the Taleb test: Hippocrates lived 90 years, Caldwell Esselstyn American physician is 90 years old, many writings about health and Colin Campbell is 89 years old (China studies). All have, with such a long lifespan, skin in their game!