Biohacking age – Will high tech nutrition make you live forever?
Biohacking became an umbrella term for all sorts of forms of DIY biology like self-experimentation, nutrigenomics, or people that alter their body by implanting self-made cyber devices.
It covers a lot of ground from tracking your sleep and diet to taking charge of your biology and fighting aging, even using testosterone or blood transfusions.
Biohacking is essentially man’s quest to cheat death and enhance his capabilities using the best resources available to him. It rests on the idea that the human body can be taken over, evaluated, enhanced and calibrated like a machine.
Like alchemists, some biohackers look for the fountain of youth by taking science into their own hands and by developing and experimenting with chemical compounds, nutrition and implants on a scale never before seen. And real-life implementation is never far behind. Sweden’s largest rail operator SJ, is now allowing customers to use implanted microchips instead of traditional tickets.
The end game
This broad term group became known at some point in the 80s, with the advent of the first forms of DIY biology, when people bought lab materials and DIY kits and started experimenting in their homes. It took off from there and it has now gained a lot of support in Silicon Valley as entrepreneurs try to discover high tech remedies to prologue human life as much as possible, as well as the enhancement prosthetics or chip implants that would secure direct access to the internet.
The proponents of biohacking imagine a world where you can be completely connected to information with the help of ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces like Neuralink, which have NFC and USB like implants, and relinquish bad eating habits by replacing them with Eco-friendly, customized supplement intakes.
All those upgrades will allow humans to perform better, get information easier and correlate their actions much better. Like a high tech beehive, humanity could reach and overcome new challenges, be more creative and more efficient. At least that’s the theory.
There is no easier first step to taking charge of your body than by changing dietary habits that you have indulged in for years. If you put things into perspective it sounds like any other diet you might have tried.
But biohackers think it’s not. For them, it’s not about counting calories and regular meals. It’s about measuring metabolic markers and treating your body like a system that can be quantified and optimized for the best performance outcomes.
It sounds fancy, exciting, high tech and easy to get the most from. The I phone of nutrition.
But what does it mean?
Well at the moment biohackers are experimenting with low intakes of food, complemented by supplements and long fasting periods. If you strip away all the glamour, it looks nothing more than what boxers have been doing for decades before official weigh-ins. To put it simply, they eat less and at larger intervals, exercise moderately and use vitamins and other nutritional boosters to make up for the things the body no longer receives through eating.
If you don’t strip away all the glamour, you can find out the things that differentiate biohacking from dieting or fasting.
Like the fact that the precise measurements are taken with complex scientific equipment, or that supplement intakes are specifically catered to every individual following regular medical testing.
Studies, performed long before biohacking was even a thing, have shown that lower-calorie diets do indeed prologue life. And they do so by preventing the number one cause of most deadly afflictions.
For example, a low-calorie daily intake will not cause your body to suffer from the high blood pressure levels associated with heart attacks.
That is exactly what biohackers are driving at in their on and off the grid nutrition experiments. And some self-experimenters like the famous Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, real estate investor Ari Rastegar, or Silicon Valley millionaire Serge Faguet have already been hard at work testing out these theories for years.
Will you get to be 150 years old?
People that support biohacking are quite fond of this particular argument. The nutritional part of DIY biology is actively looking for ways to prevent or cure the most common afflictions that shorten your lifespan. Human life expectancy has indeed increased a lot in the last two decades, and not only in the so-called western world. All over the globe people are living longer now than they did in the past and this trend is set to continue. So far it has been all through better healthcare, better access to food and housing. Lately, the torch has been passed on to changing eating habits.
Of course, political changes regarding childbirth, wars and industrial development have taken their toll one way or another over the years, but the combination of the aforementioned factors was instrumental in lengthening the world average lifespan rates from 48 years in 1950 to 72.2 in 2017.
The maximum confirmed lifespan recorded for any human stands at 122 years and was reached by Jeanne Calment who lived between 1875 and 1997. Biohackers hope to match or better that on a wide scale and there is some truth and some real science behind their quest.
Their form of caloric restriction could reduce metabolism, a trait common in people that live to be over 100. Reducing the basal metabolic rate to a level where it increases life expectancy is tangible and seems the right path to follow.
But doctors and nutrition experts are skeptical. After all, no amount of supplements can replace food and the chemical, structural and cellular effects it has on our bodies. Think vitamin C or fat. They are both very hard to compare in the effects they have when taken from fruits or meat versus vitamins and fish oil pills. Moreover, any leap in lifespan will be subject to genetics, inherited afflictions and possibly mental illness. So you will most likely not get to blow the candles on your 150th birthday, and if you do you probably won’t remember it.
Like any recent trend that started a movement, biohacking has its fair share of con-artists and eccentric over-achievers and the term has yet to crystallize into its final form, but for now, biohacking seems like the new frontier for adventurous, tech-driven innovators. Like with any new and exciting frontier opportunity, if you want to try biohacking to lengthen your lifespan you will be doing it at your peril.
It covers a lot of ground from tracking your sleep and diet to taking charge of your biology and fighting aging, even using testosterone or blood transfusions.
Biohacking is essentially man’s quest to cheat death and enhance his capabilities using the best resources available to him. It rests on the idea that the human body can be taken over, evaluated, enhanced and calibrated like a machine.
Like alchemists, some biohackers look for the fountain of youth by taking science into their own hands and by developing and experimenting with chemical compounds, nutrition and implants on a scale never before seen. And real-life implementation is never far behind. Sweden’s largest rail operator SJ, is now allowing customers to use implanted microchips instead of traditional tickets.
But what does biohacking mean when it comes to your lifespan?
The end game
This broad term group became known at some point in the 80s, with the advent of the first forms of DIY biology, when people bought lab materials and DIY kits and started experimenting in their homes. It took off from there and it has now gained a lot of support in Silicon Valley as entrepreneurs try to discover high tech remedies to prologue human life as much as possible, as well as the enhancement prosthetics or chip implants that would secure direct access to the internet.
The proponents of biohacking imagine a world where you can be completely connected to information with the help of ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces like Neuralink, which have NFC and USB like implants, and relinquish bad eating habits by replacing them with Eco-friendly, customized supplement intakes.
All those upgrades will allow humans to perform better, get information easier and correlate their actions much better. Like a high tech beehive, humanity could reach and overcome new challenges, be more creative and more efficient. At least that’s the theory.
How is biohacking supposed to help you live longer?
There is no easier first step to taking charge of your body than by changing dietary habits that you have indulged in for years. If you put things into perspective it sounds like any other diet you might have tried.
But biohackers think it’s not. For them, it’s not about counting calories and regular meals. It’s about measuring metabolic markers and treating your body like a system that can be quantified and optimized for the best performance outcomes.
It sounds fancy, exciting, high tech and easy to get the most from. The I phone of nutrition.
But what does it mean?
Well at the moment biohackers are experimenting with low intakes of food, complemented by supplements and long fasting periods. If you strip away all the glamour, it looks nothing more than what boxers have been doing for decades before official weigh-ins. To put it simply, they eat less and at larger intervals, exercise moderately and use vitamins and other nutritional boosters to make up for the things the body no longer receives through eating.
If you don’t strip away all the glamour, you can find out the things that differentiate biohacking from dieting or fasting.
Like the fact that the precise measurements are taken with complex scientific equipment, or that supplement intakes are specifically catered to every individual following regular medical testing.
Studies, performed long before biohacking was even a thing, have shown that lower-calorie diets do indeed prologue life. And they do so by preventing the number one cause of most deadly afflictions.
For example, a low-calorie daily intake will not cause your body to suffer from the high blood pressure levels associated with heart attacks.
That is exactly what biohackers are driving at in their on and off the grid nutrition experiments. And some self-experimenters like the famous Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, real estate investor Ari Rastegar, or Silicon Valley millionaire Serge Faguet have already been hard at work testing out these theories for years.
Will you get to be 150 years old?
People that support biohacking are quite fond of this particular argument. The nutritional part of DIY biology is actively looking for ways to prevent or cure the most common afflictions that shorten your lifespan. Human life expectancy has indeed increased a lot in the last two decades, and not only in the so-called western world. All over the globe people are living longer now than they did in the past and this trend is set to continue. So far it has been all through better healthcare, better access to food and housing. Lately, the torch has been passed on to changing eating habits.
Of course, political changes regarding childbirth, wars and industrial development have taken their toll one way or another over the years, but the combination of the aforementioned factors was instrumental in lengthening the world average lifespan rates from 48 years in 1950 to 72.2 in 2017.
The maximum confirmed lifespan recorded for any human stands at 122 years and was reached by Jeanne Calment who lived between 1875 and 1997. Biohackers hope to match or better that on a wide scale and there is some truth and some real science behind their quest.
Their form of caloric restriction could reduce metabolism, a trait common in people that live to be over 100. Reducing the basal metabolic rate to a level where it increases life expectancy is tangible and seems the right path to follow.
But doctors and nutrition experts are skeptical. After all, no amount of supplements can replace food and the chemical, structural and cellular effects it has on our bodies. Think vitamin C or fat. They are both very hard to compare in the effects they have when taken from fruits or meat versus vitamins and fish oil pills. Moreover, any leap in lifespan will be subject to genetics, inherited afflictions and possibly mental illness. So you will most likely not get to blow the candles on your 150th birthday, and if you do you probably won’t remember it.
Like any recent trend that started a movement, biohacking has its fair share of con-artists and eccentric over-achievers and the term has yet to crystallize into its final form, but for now, biohacking seems like the new frontier for adventurous, tech-driven innovators. Like with any new and exciting frontier opportunity, if you want to try biohacking to lengthen your lifespan you will be doing it at your peril.
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Loves to play with new ideas, binge writing, traveling and gourmet coffee. Professional writer of non fiction with over 8 years experience in putting words to paper. Fan of iconic movies, sports, The Arctic Monkeys and city breaks. Yes, he knows how good his coffee is.