Forever Healthy Foundation is Hiring to Build a Longevity Strategy Guide
We stand at the very beginning of the era of rejuvenation therapies. The first of those therapies, the repurposed chemotherapeutic pharmaceuticals called senolytics that can clear a fraction of senescent cells from aged tissue, exist but are not yet approved by regulators. They are not widely understood to provide a likelihood of benefit. While these therapies can be obtained, and some cost little as they are old enough to be generic, they are not exactly easily available for the average individual, someone without a background in the field as it stands today. Senolytics will likely not be approved by regulators until the mid 2020s, given the usual pace of the FDA and its peer organizations elsewhere in the world.
Thus there a lasting, hazy period of transition exists between the time at which a class of treatment is created and the time at which the first concrete implementation of that class is approved, well known, and widely available. It might be a decade or two in today's regulatory environment - just look at the progression of stem cell therapies since the turn of the century. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking and none of us are getting any younger yet.
What to do about this? The Forever Healthy Foundation, allied with the SENS Research Foundation and a strong material supporter of SENS rejuvenation research programs, is planning to build a longevity strategy guide. This will be a living how-to document for people who want to do what can be done about aging in advance of the very slow turning of wheels in the medical regulatory system. The Foundation is hiring research analysts, and it looks this project will build upon the start they have made on a database of approaches. There is certainly a need for a well defined and well researched strategy for the everyday individual: all of the organizations that might produce such a guide are either hopeless compromised by their commercial entanglement with the "anti-aging" industry of fraud, pills, and potions, or have neither the interest nor the resources to tackle this project.
What I would like to see emerge from this initiative is a line drawn under every past supplement and drug that has nothing but marginal evidence, all of the over-hyped approaches that cannot in principle produce meaningful impacts on aging. That baggage does nothing but slow and clutter any attempt to work seriously on human longevity. I'd advocate a fresh start, beginning with senolytics and moving forward from there as new technologies emerge. We shall see how close to that desired goal this project comes.
Forever Healthy Foundation is Hiring a Scientific Analyst for Rejuvenation Therapies
These are exciting times. The world has started the transition from an era where we were utterly helpless about our aging process to one where aging is under full medical control, and age-related diseases are a thing of the dark past. The theoretical groundwork has been laid out, scientists have started working on the fundamentals, and the first human rejuvenation therapies are already under development and might become available in the near future.
Even with future full-scale rejuvenation therapies still out of today's reach, there is already a growing array of early-stage therapies that can be used right now to slow our aging process or reverse some aspects of aging. As much as it is a blessing to live in an amazing time like is it also a great challenge. To take advantage of these exciting developments, most of us cannot wait for half a century until we have all the knowledge, perfect therapies and decades of experience on how to implement such treatments. To navigate this time of transition, we continuously need to make very personal decisions about which treatments to apply and when. Arming ourselves with the best knowledge about therapeutic options is key.
However, most of that knowledge is distributed over various experts, specialized communities, blogs, and websites, or buried in scientific research. Thus it is quite challenging to gather reliable information and make informed decisions on planning and implementing one's own early stage rejuvenation treatments. To change this, we have set out to continuously screen the knowledge on available and up-coming therapeutic options, turn it into actionable information and make it available to those interested. To accelerate this process, we are building a dedicated team of skilled professionals.
Even with future rejuvenation therapies still out of today's reach, there is already a lot of cutting edge medical knowledge and technology that can be used right now to significantly extend our healthy life spans. However, most of that knowledge remains unused because it is either distributed over various experts, specialized communities, blogs, websites, books and news feeds or buried deeply in scientific research results. Thus it can be quite hard to gather reliable information and make informed decisions regarding our personal health and longevity.
To change this, we have set out to unify the knowledge from the world's leadings sources, turn it into actionable information and create the most effective personal longevity strategy that can be implemented at present. In the spirit of the open source community we freely share our knowledge and invite everyone to participate.
It seems that they will put everything inside, from the useful to the crap:
"Your work will cover a wide variety of topics ranging from geroprotectors to compensatory treatments such as NAD+ restoration or rapalogs and true age repair approaches such as stem cell therapies, organ regeneration, de-calcification or senolytics"
@Reason, mid 2020s are not far, 5 - 7 years from now. That is more interesting what will be next ? Which scenario is more likely to come? Dr Aubrey de Grey believes that when we have initial promising results all will go much faster:
A lot of people are inclined to say, the regulatory hurdle will be completely insurmountable, plus people don't recognize aging as a disease, so it's going to be a complete nonstarter. I think that's nonsense. And the reason is because the cultural attitudes toward all of this are going to be completely turned upside down before we have to worry about the regulatory hurdles. In other words, they're going to be turned upside down by sufficiently promising results in the lab, in mice. Once we get to be able to rejuvenate actually old mice really well so they live substantially longer than they otherwise would have done, in a healthy state, everyone's going to know about it and everyone's going to demand - it's not going to be possible to get re-elected unless you have a manifesto commitment to turn the FDA completely upside down and make sure this happens without any kind of regulatory obstacle.
Howerver, many people believe that all will be as it was before and we will have to fight for every therapy. We may only guess now, but what is your opinion?
I think it will be very awesome if in fact, this organization could produce a legit strategy to keeping us alive as long as possible with the currently available tools and knowledge. I assume this (longevity strategy) with be for the public at large as opposed to personal individuals?
It looks like a great and I know it is something they have been hoping to do for some time. Knowing how Michael and the FH team like to work I expect this will be a useful evidence-based approach to longevity and will include the practical measures we can all take now based on the research available.
Wow I was pursuing their site and there's a lot more woo than anything science based. From "toxins" to "chemicals" and advocating a paleo, gluten free diet. While I'm sure it's better than nothing, it's far from reasonable or evidence based. There's nothing wrong with phytates and most studies show they are associated with low rates of certain cancer types. The negligible mineral absorption problem is simply made up for by eating just a little bit more. Most beans are *really* high in minerals like magnesium anyway, plus really good soluble fiber for gut health. Most of their advice is simply rubbish and biased towards a mix of fad diets.
I would look to Rhonda Patrick for better diet advice if you need help making decisions, she seems grounded in what's been proven, not what some blogger says. While there's an ongoing debate about keto vs vegetarian, my diet falls somewhere in the middle.
The best collection of info on how to live healthy as long as possible that I've seen is Jeff Novick's Triage Your Health Post: http://www.jeffnovick.com/RD/Articles/Entries/2012/5/24_Triage_Your_Health_Efforts__The_Good%2C_The_Bad%2C_%26_The_Ugly.html
A more recent study just came out saying mostly the same stuff: https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.117.032047
Quite a lot of aging research involves building mimetics for the healthy eating and exercise habits everyone already knows about, and a whole lot more of the field only shows results against controls that are far from optimal on the list of simple things from the link above. Eg see this thread on CR Society: https://www.crsociety.org/topic/11699-will-serious-cr-beat-a-healthy-obesity-avoiding-diet-lifestyle/
A strategy guide that simply covers which things help make up for bad lifestyle doesn't seem that helpful. Until we have senolytics and other rejuvenation therapies that really move people toward a younger state in meaningful ways even if they've been optimizing lifestyle, any strategy guide designed to keep people healthy as long as possible would necessarily have to essentially reproduce evidence-based standard of care across all of medicine. Seems a quixotic effort.
And I agree with Nathan that the FH folks seems to have picked the wrong diet horse IMO.