This Will Probably Kill You (Not Clickbait)

5 years ago I was sure I'd cracked the longevity code: bulletproof coffee, nootropics. My friends thought I'd lost it, and I'd condescendingly explain mitochondria to them.

Then Goldman et al. (2023) came out: there is no evidence bulletproof coffee does anything for you. What there is: 230 calories and 84% saturated fat in a single cup. So for 5 years I drank a fat bomb, sincerely believing it was making me smarter 🤡

But!

Coffee is small stuff. The problem runs deeper.

I ran into a chart recently. The average European lives ~82 years (Eurostat, 2024). But "living" and "living properly" are not the same thing. After 60, most people's health drops below 50% of their peak. The last 15-20 years you're not living, you're running out the clock. Every year a new "you can't do that anymore."

And it hit me: there's lifespan (how many years you're alive) and there's healthspan (how many years you're actually alive, without chronic limits, with a clear head, still able to do what you loved at 25). Bang. The realization. For 5 years I'd been trying to hack the first one while completely ignoring the second. So I started digging.

If you don't smoke and don't do extreme sports, there's a ~80% chance one of the "four horsemen" kills you: cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegeneration or metabolic syndrome. In the US in 2024, the first two alone killed 1.3 million people (CDC).

So the logic is simple: want to live long, slow the horsemen down. You won't avoid them entirely, but you can push them back.

"I'm 23, I'm healthy, I'll deal with it when it gets bad. What f**king horsemen." I thought that too. Three problems with it:

1/ These diseases start developing 10, 20, 30 years before the first symptom. Atherosclerosis doesn't show up at 60. It's been accumulating since 30.

2/ Medicine still can't stop them. Only slow them.

3/ By the time symptoms appear, you're at a late stage. You can delay the ending, you can't roll it back.

Plus. Extra Life (highly recommend) has a sobering chart: strip out infectious disease (antibiotics, hygiene) and mortality has barely moved in 100 years. The diseases that killed us in the 1920s are still killing us. So the person to count on is mostly yourself.

TL;DR

If you do one thing after this post: get your labs done. What gets measured gets managed.

Which ones? Next time.

Stay tuned 🧬🧬🧬