8 Rules to Live as Long as Possible
I don’t want to die. To that end, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to live as long and as healthily as possible. I wanted to write down and circulate the basic rules I’ve encountered or come up with in an attempt to stress-test them, subjecting them to scrutiny in order to maximize the chance of identifying those that may not be correct.
Rule #1 Health is not about what you do, it’s about what you don’t do.
Blueberries are jam-packed with antioxidants, which may or may not protect you from cancer. Unfortunately, eating a bowl of blueberries after you smoke your daily pack of cigarettes likely will not cancel out the cancer-causing effects of tobacco use. If you want to avoid getting cancer, don’t add blueberry. Deduct cigarettes.
In college, I had a buddy who, from time to time, as he put it, “pissed rocks”. He thought this was a normal occurrence for all people so he never mentioned it to anyone, until one day, he had a rather big rock that wasn’t so easily pissed out. He went to the hospital. Rather than walking out with a high cost prescription with who knows what side effects, it was determined that his diet of multiple daily cans of Chef Boyardee was the cause of the problem. He stopped eating Chef Boyardee and he stopped pissing rocks.
Is your obesity or overweight creating a risk of heart-attack and causing hypertension? Lose weight by deducting carbohydrates instead of adding exercise or blood pressure medication.
Ever see a fat person running on the sidewalk drenched in sweat with a face of utter agony? Intuitively, it doesn’t make sense does it? Well, this is what happens when you try to add a solution instead of removing the cause.
Rule #2: If you look or feel unhealthy, you are.
If this is you, start looking for something that you can deduct from your diet or lifestyle. If your romantic interests aren’t finding you as attractive as you’d like, a great deal of that may be in your control. The idea that we are evolutionarily hardcoded to select a healthy mate seems very reasonable and I suspect that this eye test may even be more accurate on balance than a battery of general medical tests. So, for example, if you are excessively pale, have deep dark circles under your eyes, have fat in the wrong places (i.e. concentrated around the waist), or feel cloudy headed or tired, you need to change your lifestyle up, even if your blood test comes up fine.
Rule #3: The way your body works is not linear
Walking down a set of stairs is not equivalent to jumping from the top to the bottom. In the former case, you will arrive safely at the bottom of the stairs. In the latter case, you’ll break your leg. Let’s take water as another example of your body’s non-linearity:
Smoking 10,000 cigarettes in a year will not have an equivalent effect on your body as smoking those same 10,000 cigarettes over 20 years. Apple seeds contain cyanide — eat enough of it in one sitting and you are dead. Certain metals bioaccumulate in your system and, in the case of silver, upon exceeding a threshold can give you an irreversible disease that does not go into remission after ceasing exposure.
As much as it pains us to admit it, we don’t really know how a lot of these bio-mechanisms work, but we know enough to say that they don’t work in a linear fashion. It’s very possible that we are consuming a whole host of cancer/morbidity inducing foods, gases, liquids, etc. everyday but we do so in quantities and in time periods that our bodies are able to process without issue.
What’s the takeaway? You need to be quite careful about what you regularly expose your body to, especially when the dosage feels high relative to average exposure. Think twice about purchasing and consuming anything in Costco sized quantities.
Rule #4: The precautionary principle
It is tremendously difficult to pull off a proper longitudinal study of morbidity and its causes. Large sample sizes, long time periods, economic incentives, publication bias, academic orthodoxy, failures to understand that correlation is not causation, and selection bias (to name a few issues) can all render the conclusions of a well-respected paper totally meaningless.
Therefore, it’s probably best to use a mix of common sense and history to be your guide. For example, we can safely assume that many foods are safe to eat if we have been eating them for thousands of years without known incident. We ought to be suspicious of recent inventions such as partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, or the colloidal silver that caused that man’s skin to become silvery blue.
In order to minimize your chance of becoming unhealthy, you need to be extremely suspicious of new foods, pharmaceuticals, or even ways of doing things, as they have not yet been trial tested by years of use. For evidence of the wisdom of this adage, look no farther than the legal industry dedicated to suing FDA-regulated pharmaceutical companies and the makers and sellers of asbestos insulation.
Non-organic and GMO foods are unpopular despite claims of their “scientifically-proven” harmlessness. People have an intuitive sense of the precautionary principle and we have it because it has contributed to our species’ survival.
Rule #5: Your genetics matter
This rule means two things. First, there’s a bit of the luck of the draw here. Sometimes people are born with genes that are poorly suited for their environment and they die or become sick prematurely relative to others. That’s sad, but by and large I think your health is in your control. Look into your own genetics and heritage to determine how your ancestors lived and what they ate. You exist because they did not prematurely exit the gene pool and as such, you are likely to do just fine imitating their lifestyle and diet.
By the academic study, coffee alternates between being on California’s Proposition 65 list of carcinogen and an Alzheimer’s curing life-extending panacea. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of our studies fail to replicate because of the genetics of those who are studied. Let’s take “asian glow” as an example.
I’ve read and heard that moderate alcohol intake is good for you. At least that is the case if you don’t have the gene that makes it very difficult for you to process alcohol. Apparently, 36% of east asians experience this glowing affect paired with tachycardia, headaches, nausea.
The results of a study looking at the health effects of alcohol in moderation on East Asians are likely to have very different results from one that focussed exclusively on the descendants of German beer brewers.
There are two main takeaways here. First, the genetics of the sample group matter a lot to the conclusions of a study and thusly, the studies you hear about may or may not apply to you. Second, go hunt down your genetic ancestry, it may tell you about what you should and should not be doing for your health.
If you are a heterogenous mixture of two different ethnicities, races, or haplogroups, I have no idea how to interpret this for you. If you know, tell me!
Rule #6: Processing matters
A lot people try to avoid eating processed foods, which is a pretty good application of the precautionary principle, but how the processing occurs matters a lot. For example, eating sliced apples from a food processor probably isn’t that big of a deal. However, drinking those same apples’ juice without the fiber that naturally accompanies them may have a very different effect on your body than those sliced apples. This is true before the addition of confusing additives like xantham gum that we typically associate with food processing. Our bodies, depending on whether our ancestors had fruit to eat, are probably somewhat accustomed to and efficient at eating fruit, but I don’t think we were consuming the massive amounts of juice we do today. That fiber that we’ve been throwing away may be necessary to slow the absorption of fructose. Without it, our livers become overloaded and fill our arteries with junk that we have to clean up later. The paleo diet may be a fad, but it resonates with people for a reason. Depending on how food is processed, even ignoring additives, can change its suitability for our bodies and thus our health.
Rule #7: Your age matters
Like any machine, as it ages, its capacity to work efficiently lessens. Our bodies seem to be no different. I think we’ve all heard someone say that they cannot drink like they could when they were 19 or 20 years old. Your ability to recover from injury is greatly diminished by aging. As you age, routine, diet, and a lifestyle best-suited to you becomes increasingly important to avoid poor health.
Rule #8: Try stuff on a small scale and see what happens
According to the social security’s actuarial life expectancy table a 30 year old male and female respectively on average have another 48 and 52 years to live. That’s a lot of time to experiment at a small scale and figure out what works best for you.
The key point though is that you need to do things at a small scale and not overcommit to any one change. Hedge your bets! Use that precautionary principle! History is littered with examples of things that we thought were healthy that secretly killed us.
There are a lot of levers you can pull
- Exercise
- Mentality (i.e. do you have positive thoughts or recurring unproductive negative ones)
- Air
- Diet
- Sleep
- Sunshine
- Socializing
The list goes on…
Try stuff, see what happens, and report back! Good luck!
Acknowledgements
A lot of what I wrote above was inspired by or simply taken from Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s writings. You should go read his books if you haven’t already! At one point Taleb suggested the book Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. It’s dense but recommended as well.
