Results from nine months on Blueprint

Been on Blueprint for nine months now. A quick glance at a few markers:

A snapshot of other activities

Blueprint activities Jan/Feb 2022

CapsoCam details: I swallowed this pill, the size of a baby carrot, after fasting for 24 hours. Then took laxatives for 6 hours. It reemerged 10 hours and 38 minutes later, having taken 33,537 images of my intestinal tract.

Main things we were looking for: lymphoma, Crohn’s ulcerations, small bowel cancer, diverticula, and polyps. Nothing found. Most common small bowel changes with age are motility, peristalsis reduction, dysphagia and enteric neuropathy.

Advantages of small bowel pillcams include screening and baseline results for n=1 study. See a ten second clip at Blueprint in Jan/Feb notes.

Exploring the future of being human

My primary objective with Blueprint is to explore the future of being human. Food, supplements, sleep and exercise are necessary for life, however not the primary motivators for most. Blueprint has automated these basics so that I can reallocate my attention to a new horizon of human exploration. For example, I no longer have to deal with the complicated decision making about what to eat. My body — through all the measurements I do — tells me what it needs. I also no longer deal with the emotional turbulence that accompanied my binge eating, second servings, and endless rationalizations for bad eating behavior. What a relief that’s been.

Here is one way to think about why building these systems are useful — questions I’ve contemplated for myself and others:

If you felt energized instead of lethargic, what would you dream of?

If your body didn’t have debilitating aches and pains, what would you be doing?

If you weren’t battling depression, what might life feel like?

If you weren’t in cognitive decline, how would you use your mind?

You get the point. When the basics are solved, each of us can level up. John Adams argued eloquently about this at a larger scale, noting that entire generations sometimes do the tough work to free up future generations:

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

With some personal momentum around my Blueprint regimen for food, exercise and sleep, I’ve recently turned my attention to the psychological, spiritual and imaginative aspects of this exploration. This picture was taken last weekend with some friends. The attire was unusual for me, but wearing it in public provoked my brain. Alerting me to the invisible borders of social norms. Norms standardize, which is helpful; but they also straightjacket.

Footnotes:

1. Biological age shows if you are at lower or higher risk for something versus a healthy person of the same chronological age (ref). A more detailed explanation: biological age describes the difference between a healthy population’s score for each chronological age and an individual’s score. Specific markers that are highly correlated with clinical outcomes, and which meet specific biological age marker checklist quality criteria must be selected, and can be combined, to create valid biological age results. The more individual biological age markers that are combined, the more accurately you can predict health, rejuvenation and lifespan. Read more about Blueprint’s 15 Criteria for Biological Age Determination.
2. NAD increased from 26 umol/L to 36 umol/L. Dosing, based upon measurement, with nicotinamide riboside (NR).
3. Heart input includes only Max Heart Rate (improved from 169 bpm to 183 bpm). We’ve only done one echocardiogram. Need two before adding age scores.
4. White Blood Cell Age includes EPI TOC methylation marker, principal component analysis predicted telomere length methylation marker, QFISH median and 20th centile PBMC telomere length, with additional markers to improve this model ongoing.
5. HRV raised from 37 to 54 (Whoop 7 day average rMSSD deep sleep 5 min HRV)
6. Our skin biological age calculations include a full-body, 60+ point measurement system using Merz, Visia, and autofluorescence imaging. The April 2021 biological age score is an approximation because the full suite of measurements were not yet completed.
7. Oral health, gums: a) No bleeding, even w/ robust probing. My dentist comments that I have the gums of a teenager. b) Recession — improved from .28 mm to .20 mm, age reduction 40 to 35
8. Epigenetic biological aging, wrote up an explanation: An epigenetic age reduction world record?
9. DunedinPoAm is an epigenetic marker that measures the pace of aging. A new marker from 2020 and is still in the clinical validation phase. Is a high standard deviation marker. Similar to hsCRP (inflammation), DunedinPaAM is a multi-system marker and better used in combination with others.
10. Inflammation marker: hsCRP (.80 to .18 mg/dL, age 10. 80% reduction). hsCRP is a multi-system marker, which we normally do not use by itself as a biological age marker. Using here for the simplicity of conveyance. Read more how we determine biological age markers.
11. Fitness scores are listed out in monthly notes.