> By far the most important thing in anti aging that checks all boxes is excercise and getting nutrition right (no excess fat).

Do you mean "don't eat excess fat" or "don't have excess fat on your body"? It's not clear to me from the context.

Second probably.

Definately. The optimal body fat percantage is at about 12% for men and 15% for women, but I can't find a study that really tries to find that optimum.

There have been already studies showing that body fat percentage is a better predictor of mortality than BMI, but most studies focused on BMI in the past, as it's easier to measure.

I really appreciate this comment a lot. Feels like it hits the nail on the head.

I've seen some of the discussion about/around the Yamanaka factors and it feels like an anime plot point, honestly. I need to look more into them and understand them a bit better. They're the ones implicated in stem cells returning back to pluripotency, right (and then the long deep dive about DNA damage/repair/what the heck is happening in the disparity between repairing damage for reproduction vs the everyday repair, etc...)?

You're half right, they are only resetting epigenetics (for example DNA methylation that is important in cell specialization), not DNA.

Altos Labs being funded is both a blessing and a curse, because it funded the best researchers in this area with hundreds of millions of dollars (5-10x their salary in what they were making as university professors), but since it was founded, there are much less publications available.

I think the important thing is to concentrate on the diet and exercise and not sit around living an unhealthy lifestyle and hoping to get on one of these drugs that is possibly not that great anyway or has some serious side effects you could end up with.

It's pretty obvious older people who have kept their fitness (cardio & strength, not just one of the two) up and their weight down their entire lives have profoundly higher quality of life.

That requires a totally different lifestyle from the standard "geek lifestyle" though.

Very much so, I think it's about healthspan rather than lifespan for many people.

Hopefully we can improve that. Many people would be much more okay with feeling great up until an old age, have a few weeks of infirmity, and then pass away rather than the multiple decades of gradual decay that we have now.

Not that that's necessarily entirely realistic or possible, but it would be nice, if it is a possible thing indeedy.

What's wrong with excess fat as opposed to excess calories in the form of other macronutrients?

its a little ambiguous but they might have meant body fat, not intake....

> By far the most important thing in anti aging that checks all boxes is excercise and getting nutrition right (no excess fat).

Nutrition is difficult to get right because of the contradictory and plain harmful information that we have been receiving for so long.

For example: is fruit juice "healthy"? Not really, when you consider that you are far more likely to consume way more fruit that you otherwise would, and a lot of fiber content is removed. We are unlikely to eat 10 oranges in a row, but that's easy in juice form. That's without extra sugar - if sugar is added, then it's just a soda with added nutrients. And the problem with that is that fructose is only metabolized by the liver (turning into triglycerides), with a mechanism that's comparable to the one used to metabolize alcohol.

We have been told that fat is bad. Due to consumer demand, the industry start removing fat content. But then things taste horrible, so the solution was to add sugar.

So now we are worse off: not only we are consuming a lot of sugar (75% of all products in the supermarket have sugar, including 'salty' ones), but we haven't even attacked the problem that prompted fat removal (increase in heart conditions) in the first place. Fructose in particular turns into triglycerides, and gets stored as fat(with uric acid as byproduct, with way more free radical formation than glucose, and it even uses up ATP). It didn't address the heart issue, and actually made it worse. People have become far more obese than when they ate fats, as fats (plus fiber) make you feel full for longer. It also screws up hunger hormones and sugar is addictive by itself.

Or let's take bread. White bread is starting to get considered harmful, but then the alternative that's pushed is whole bread. It matters very little. If that's all we ate, we could have some bread, as our ancestors did. But in combination with all other crap, it's way too much sugar.

If you eat cereal for breakfast, some rice and beans for lunch with a glass of orange juice you have already exceeded dietary sugar limits by a lot. And that's a far, far healthier diet than what's done in the average household.

Whereas if you had an avocado for breakfast, meat and vegetables for lunch you would be in a far better shape (literally and figuratively) even if the second diet had more calories. Calories are not all the same, and calories contained in food are not the same as calories absorbed (or stored). We accept that, when we fuel our car, a bunch of energy in the fuel will be wasted. Somehow, when we count calories, we assume we'll absorb them all.

The end result is that we are prematurely aging (due to all the oxidative stress), getting diabetes, non alcoholic fatty liver disease, high blood pressure, gout, cardiac problems. Possibly even Alzheimers (research ongoing, but there's growing evidence) and a few types of cancers. Also oral health in general. Basically, most of the mortality these days is directly or indirectly linked to sugar and insulin resistance in general. 88% of Americans have some form of metabolic dysfunction.

> no excess fat

Too much fat is usually the symptom of a disease (generally metabolic illness). Just fat, by itself, can be ok(also depending on where it is) – there are fat people who are otherwise healthy (a tiny minority, but they exist). And there are people that are thin but otherwise unhealthy (TOFI, Thin on the Outside, Fat Inside). What commonly happens is that we get sick first (insulin resistance) and then we get fat. For most people, being obese is the symptom, not the cause.

Diabetes does not strike out of the blue, although if you ask most people, they got "surprise" diagnoses. You check your glucose levels, and they are normal. You keep checking them for a few years, they are normal. Then "out of the blue" they are outside limits, and you get a diagnosis of pre-diabetes (or full blown diabetes). What was missed all these years was that your body was fiercely fighting against the glucose increase by raising the amount of insulin produced. But there's only so much the body can make (and also the cells will be resisting that), at some point, the combination of not being able to increase production plus resistance will be too much to overcome. Insulin measurements are not part of standard bloodwork yet, but at least they are now including A1C.

Completely drop added sugar. Reduce sugar in all forms, added, "natural", it doesn't matter. A sane amount of fruits is ok for their other benefits. Increase the amount of fat and fiber. Hydrate. And then drop processed foods in general. That's how we survive until 'anti-aging' is available.

  > Completely drop added sugar. Reduce sugar in all forms, added, "natural", it doesn't matter.

i think i would also say the same about sodium as well... many foods already have natural levels of sodium already (and can be tasted/enjoyed just fine if one gets used to it)

From my experience, it's the sodium that's in things more than on them. When you look at the sodium content of a lot of processed food, the amount you might sprinkle on at serving time is pretty insignificant.