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Archive for the ‘Life Extension’ Category

The Benefits of Container Liners: Leak Prevention, Shelf-Life Extension & More – Packaging Strategies

The Benefits of Container Liners: Leak Prevention, Shelf-Life Extension & More  Packaging Strategies

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The Benefits of Container Liners: Leak Prevention, Shelf-Life Extension & More - Packaging Strategies

Life Extension Survey Shows That Maintaining Memory Ranks as the #1 Brain Health Goal – GlobeNewswire

Life Extension Survey Shows That Maintaining Memory Ranks as the #1 Brain Health Goal  GlobeNewswire

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Life Extension Survey Shows That Maintaining Memory Ranks as the #1 Brain Health Goal - GlobeNewswire

Indefinite life extension: Is it a good idea? – University of Cape Town

Indefinite life extension: Is it a good idea?  University of Cape Town

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Indefinite life extension: Is it a good idea? - University of Cape Town

The Now: Could Science Really Extend The Human Lifespan? – GCFGlobal.org

Lesson 10: Could Science Really Extend The Human Lifespan?

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Despite advances in medicine and nutrition, science has had difficulty extending the human lifespan beyond a certain age. Nevertheless, scientists are researching how to push beyond these limits and increase the duration and quality of a persons life. However, the big question remains: Could science really extend the human lifespan?

The science of life extension has one main goal, which is to prolong the human lifespan while maintaining youthful health. Since antiquity, people have pursued this goal through countless medicines, diets, and scientific procedures. But now, science has the knowledge to possibly make life extension a reality.

Life extension has been in the news lately because many entrepreneurs, especially within Silicon Valley, have publicly advocated and funded life extension research. Many of these advocates are incredibly optimistic because they see human aging not as inevitable but as an obstacle that will eventually be overcome.

Currently, there is no proven method of delaying or reversing the aging process. However, there are plenty of products available that will try to convince you otherwise.

Always be wary of any drug, food, or supplement that makes anti-aging claims. Also keep in mind that in the United States, the FDA only reviews supplements for safety, not for effectiveness. This means a supplement that claims to prevent aging could actually be useless. As for cosmetics that make anti-aging claims, these products are typically designed to hide the effects of aging, not reverse aging itself.

Essentially, if an anti-aging product seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Although life extension is being researched from numerous angles, genetic engineering has shown the most promise. Some methods involve replacing damaged cells with new ones, while others alter the mechanisms of DNA. In 2017, Harvard scientists discovered how to reverse aging in lab mice by changing how their DNA repairs itself. However, it's unclear if scientists will be able to duplicate this feat in humans.

While it can't delay aging itself, replacing worn organs could help people survive the more deteriorating effects of aging. Scientists have already grown kidneys and windpipes in laboratory settings using stem cells, and theyre researching how to create more complex organs like the heart and liver. There has also been significant progress with artificial organs, partially thanks to new technologies like 3D printing.

Currently, life extension is mostly research and educated guesses. Some experts believe we are not even close to breaking through the natural barriers of aging, while others believe some form of life extension will be widely available by the middle of the 21st century.

Almost everyone wants to live longer, healthier lives, but science has a long way to go before we overcome the natural limits of the human lifespan. Although life extension technology will continue to develop, major discoveries will take decades to realize, if they are realized at all.

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The Now: Could Science Really Extend The Human Lifespan? - GCFGlobal.org

Sam Altman’s Life Extension Guy Warns of Injections That Cause Wild Tumor Growth – Futurism

Sam Altman's Life Extension Guy Warns of Injections That Cause Wild Tumor Growth  Futurism

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Sam Altman's Life Extension Guy Warns of Injections That Cause Wild Tumor Growth - Futurism

Life Extension Review 2023 – Medical News Today

Life Extension is a company that sells supplements and lab tests through its website. Customers can contact the customer support team at any time, but accessing a products certificate of analysis can be difficult.

Life Extension has been in business for more than 40 years. It claims that it sells science-backed products, such as vitamins, moisturizers, and functional foods that help target different health concerns, including weight gain, signs of skin aging, and digestive issues.

Regular customers can opt for the Autoship & Save program, which allows them to receive products every 30 or 60 days.

The company has a 12-month return policy. Customers who are unsatisfied with their purchase can return their item within this time frame. However, many customers claimed they found returning unwanted products very difficult.

Life Extension has a 1 out of 5 rating on Better Business Bureau (BBB) and 2.5 stars on Trustpilot. Customers wrote that they received a wrong order and some products caused frequent headaches, but they could not return them.

The company website does not provide lab test documents.

Positive reviews state that products are affordable and do not have a lot of fillers.

In 2017, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning letter stating that Life Extension stocks products as medications, which goes against its regulations. Life Extension suggests buying astragalus, blueberry, vitamin D, and other products from the website to treat breast cancer.

It also shared a post that mentions other items that prevent heart failure.

Life Extension may suit people looking to buy supplements that meet their daily recommended intake.

The website may serve as a one-stop shop, as it stocks vitamins, home tests, and functional foods. Individuals may use the service if they are buying different product formulations without checking multiple companies.

Vegetarians may find products that do not contain animal ingredients. However, these may still include beeswax or eggs.

Life Extension has pros and cons:

These are some of the products that a person can find on Life Extensions website:

The Female Basic Hormone Panel Blood Test measures the levels of different hormones, including estradiol, progesterone, and dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEA-S).

People do not have to fast to use this test. Life Extension recommends that people who supplement with hormones, including hormone replacement therapy (HRT), take their medication 2 hours before doing the test. The company also suggests doing the blood test between 8.0010.00 a.m.

In addition, Life Extension recommends individuals who are premenopausal take a blood sample on day 21 of their menstrual cycle. However, those who are postmenopausal can do the test on any day of the month.

This thyroid lab test provides an overview of thyroid function, as it measures the levels of:

There is no need to fast to use this test. Persons with low thyroid function may have drier skin, feel tired, and experience constipation.

Life Extension stocks a wide range of energy supplements. These are two products that people can buy to fight fatigue and feel energized.

These capsules contain is nicotinamide riboside, which may help increase energy levels and support heart health.

It also has resveratrol, which according to Life Extension, helps maintain longevity. A 2021 study notes that this may act as a life-extending agent, as it increased adult longevity in flies. However, more studies are needed.

A 2020 literature review mentions the side effects that resveratrol may cause:

The supplements are vegetarian, gluten, and GMO-free.

These capsules contain vitamin B6, sodium, carnosine, and pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ). PQQ is a vitamin that may aid longevity. It is naturally present in fruits and vegetables, such as green peppers, kiwi, and spinach.

A 2021 study found that PQQ has vitamin, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant qualities that may promote well-being, control symptoms, and prevent some illnesses.

The product is GMO and gluten-free.

Life Extension offers digestive supplements for people who may have gastric discomfort. It states that these products may help aid digestion, break down macronutrients, and relieve discomfort after eating a large meal.

A person can buy softgels, capsules, or vegetarian capsules.

These are two of the top digestive supplements:

Bloat Relief softgels are for individuals who regularly experience bloating, uncomfortable digestion, or occasional gas.

Ingredients include ginger extract, fennel seed oil, and turmeric.

The researchers behind a 2019 study note that ginger has anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and antitumor characteristics.

A 2020 review indicates that ginger may help relieve nausea and improve morning sickness in persons undergoing cancer treatment.

The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health states that large doses of ginger can cause some side effects:

Life Extension recommends these supplements for people who follow a plant-based diet. They contain vegetarian-friendly enzymes, including lactase, lipase, and xylanase.

Lactase helps the body digest lactose, a type of sugar that is present in dairy products.

They are vegetarian and GMO-free.

Life Extension stocks products that moisturize and restore the skin by reducing the appearance of wrinkles and fine lines and increasing hydration.

These are the top skin care products available on the website:

This serum supports healthy aging and contains many ingredients, including ceramides, green tea leaf extract, and sunflower seed oil.

Ceramides have water-retaining properties that help hydrate the skin. Hydration can help reduce the appearance of fine lines that may be more visible on dry skin.

Some companies also stock sunscreens containing ceramides to help protect the skin from UV.

The serum is paraben-free and not tested on animals.

This stem cell cream contains many ingredients, including lactic acid, citric acid, lecithin, and seaweed extract. It helps protect the skin from environmental irritants.

The FDA states that lactic acid helps cleans the pores, reduce dark spots, and improve skin texture.

Life Extension provides other services:

Individuals who are interested in using Life Extensions services may consider the following:

People who wish to start taking vitamins may consider consulting a doctor to discuss their safety, as some supplements interact with other medications.

They may also see a doctor if they have symptoms of digestive problems, including:

These are commonly asked questions about Life Extension.

Life Extension has a low rating on BBB and Trustpilot. Reviews state that there are no lab tests on the company website, and returning a product may be problematic.

The company has also received a warning letter from the FDA, as it sometimes claims that its products can cure or treat health conditions.

Life Extension states that its vitamins are of high quality, and it only uses raw materials. However, products do not come with a lab test result. The company asks customers to call the customer service team to provide them with the document.

It is from the United States but gets raw materials from Japan and Europe.

According to the brand, Life Extension produces its vitamins in the U.S. in line with good manufacturing practices.

Life Extension is well-known for its supplements. It sells supplements that may help people experiencing stomach discomfort, bloating, and fatigue. It also has a range of skin care products that support healthy aging.

Lab tests, such as thyroid and hormone tests, are available to order on its website.

A person may have to consult their doctor first before buying any supplements. These may not be safe, especially for those who take other medications.

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Life Extension Review 2023 - Medical News Today

Life extension: the five most promising methods so far

Most people want to live a long and happy life or at least avoid a short and miserable one. If youre in that majority, then youre in luck. Over the last decade, a quiet research revolution has occurred in our understanding of the biology of ageing.

The challenge is to turn this knowledge into advice and treatments we can benefit from. Here we bust the myth that lengthening healthy life expectancy is science fiction, and show that it is instead scientific fact.

Theres plenty of evidence for the benefits of doing the boring stuff, such as eating right. A study of large groups of ordinary people show that keeping the weight off, not smoking, restricting alcohol to moderate amounts and eating at least five servings of fruit and vegetable a day can increase your life expectancy by seven to 14 years compared with someone who smokes, drinks too much and is overweight.

Cutting down calories even more - by about a third, so-called dietary restriction - improves health and extends life in mice and monkeys, as long as they eat the right stuff, though thats a tough ask for people constantly exposed to food temptation. The less extreme versions of time-restricted or intermittent fasting only eating during an eight-hour window each day, or fasting for two days every week is thought to reduce the risk of middle-aged people getting age-related diseases.

You cant outrun a bad diet, but that doesnt mean that exercise does not do good things. Globally, inactivity directly causes roughly 10% of all premature deaths from chronic diseases, such as coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes and various cancers. If everyone on Earth got enough exercise tomorrow, the effect would probably be to increase healthy human life expectancy by almost a year.

But how much exercise is optimal? Very high levels are actually bad for you, not simply in terms of torn muscles or sprained ligaments. It can suppress the immune system and increase the risk of upper respiratory illness. Just over 30 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous physical activity is enough for most people. Not only does that make you stronger and fitter, it has been shown to reduce harmful inflammation and even improve mood.

However fit you are and well you eat, your immune system will, unfortunately, get less effective as you get older. Poor responses to vaccination and an inability to fight infection are consequences of this immunosenescence. It all starts to go downhill in early adulthood when the thymus a bowtie-shaped organ in your throat starts to wither.

That sounds bad, but its even more alarming when you realise that the thymus is where immune agents called T cells learn to fight infections. Closing such a major education centre for T cells means that they cant learn to recognise new infections or fight off cancer effectively in older people.

You can help a bit by making sure you have enough key vitamins, especially A and D. A promising area of research is looking at signals that the body sends to help make more immune cells, particularly a molecule called IL-7. We may soon be able to produce drugs that contain this molecule, potentially boosting the immune system in older people. Another approach is to use the food supplement spermidine to trigger immune cells to clear out their internal garbage, such as damaged proteins, which improves the elderly immune system so much that its now being tested as a way of getting better responses to COVID vaccines in older people.

Senescence is a toxic state that cells enter into as we get older, wreaking havoc across the body and generating chronic low-grade inflammation and disease essentially causing biological ageing. In 2009, scientists showed that middle-aged mice lived longer and stayed healthier if they were given small amounts of a drug called rapamycin, which inhibits a key protein called mTOR that helps regulate cells response to nutrients, stress, hormones and damage.

In the lab, drugs like rapamycin (called mTOR inhibitors) make senescent (aged) human cells look and behave like their younger selves. Though its too early to prescribe these drugs for general use, a new clinical trial has just been set up to test whether low-dose rapamycin can really slow down ageing in people.

Discovered in the soil of Easter Island, Chile, rapamycin carries with it significant mystique and [has been hailed] in the popular press as a possible elixir of youth. It can even improve the memory of mice with dementia-like disease.

But all drugs come with pros and cons and as too much rapamycin suppresses the immune system, many doctors are averse to even consider it to stave off age-related diseases. However, the dose is critical and newer drugs such as RTB101 that work in a similar way to rapamycin support the immune system in older people, and can even reduce COVID infection rates and severity.

Completely getting rid of senescent cells is another promising way forward. A growing number of lab studies in mice using drugs to kill senescent cells - so-called senolytics - show overall improvements in health, and as the mice arent dying of disease, they end up living longer too.

Removing senescent cells also helps people. In a small clinical trial, people with severe lung fibrosis reported better overall function, including how far and fast they could walk, after they had been treated with senolytic drugs. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Diabetes and obesity, as well as infection with some bacteria and viruses, can lead to more senescent cells forming. Senescent cells also make the lungs more susceptible to COVID infection, and COVID makes more cells become senescent. Importantly, getting rid of senescent cells in old mice helps them to survive COVID infection.

Ageing and infection are a two-way street. Older people get more infectious diseases as their immune systems start to run out of steam, while infection drives faster ageing through senescence. Since ageing and senescence are inextricably linked with both chronic and infectious diseases in older people, treating senescence is likely to improve health across the board.

It is exciting that some of these new treatments are already looking good in clinical trials and may be available to us all soon.

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Life extension: the five most promising methods so far

Want To Live Longer? How Life Extension Industry Will Reboot … – Forbes

Do you want to live a better, healthier and longer life? Me too.

Lets go back to 1937, when Albert Szent-Gyrgyi won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of ascorbic acidvitamin Cthat enables the body to efficiently use carbohydrates, fats, and protein (I use it a lot during cold and flu season, you?). It was a massively consequential discovery, as it not only saved and extended countless lives, but it also contributed to the foundations of modern nutrition. Szent-Gyrgyi, himself, was blessed with a long life; he died in 1986 at the age of 93. But he might just as well be known for what he said on his 90th birthday: I wish I could be 75 again!

No doubt, that comment elicits more than a few eyerolls today. Especially since the CDC has recently downgraded American life expectancy to just 77 years. But could 75 someday be the new 40an age by which, like Szent-Gyrgyi, were only hitting our stride? Well, if the burgeoning activity of the life extension industry is any indication, we may actually be on the cusp of making it soand enjoying life to the fullest right up to the extended end. Which brings us to the morbid thought of mortalitythat end state most of us seek to delay, if not dodge.

It may strike many as common sense that most causes of death are what we have come to understand as age-related: The longer we live, the more likely we are to develop, for example, heart disease, cancer, or Alzheimers. Therefore, a reasonable thing one can do to prevent the development of age-related diseases, is to, well, not age. It turns out thats actually not as flippant as it sounds. So, is that possible and how do we get there?

In short, all strategies for life extension revolve around a combination of three factors, all working together to fortify health and wellness for a longer haul: 1) things you should stop doing (I have a list which I mostly ignore, you?), 2) things you should start doing (honestly part of my same list), and 3) adopting the contributions of new health and wellness technologies and scientific discoveries that are helping to curb aging. All three comprise parts of a budding ecosystem that is growing into a multibillion-dollar industry on an exponential trajectory to displace everything we have come to understand as modern medicine. If just what we know today were fully embraced and actualized, the global economy could also be transformedand with it, a renaissance of human flourishing.

And we could use it. When ranking countries for life expectancy, the United States often doesnt make the top 50despite having the highest healthcare costs per capita in the world, by far. In other words, maybe were doing it wrong.

Clearly, somethings got to give. Right?

None of this is lost on the investment community, which is set to plow billions into a nascent industry that is fast approaching its inflection point. Driving that inflection is a fundamental pivot from treating symptomsthe bread and butter of the rapidly collapsing medical-industrial complexto addressing the root causes of aging and disease. Its a shift that is ushering in a new and immensely disruptive paradigm that some analysts envision creating a global market approaching $300B by 2030. Its likely bigger when you add in personalized skin health and beautynot to mention food.

Again, like many such watershed moments, this is a story of convergences. Its a perfect storm comprising new and surprising discoveries about the workings of the human body, myriad innovative technologies, coupled with an ever-increasing geriatric population. Now add to this mix an explosion in chronic diseases and a growing demand for more Personalized, Precise, Preventive, and Participatory aging therapeutics (the so-called 4 Ps) and we have a movement.

Beyond its potential for profitability, though, the longevity movement benefits from a certain intrinsic appeal: it could be a tremendous positive impact for humanity. Startups and leading global organizations are diligently at work developing the next level of health, beauty and wellness products, services and treatmentsfrom delivering mass-personalization AI technology to help consumers choose at Revieve, to science-driven wellness at Thorne HealthTech, to curing Alzheimers at Genentechall with investments beginning to show promise.

Another leading catalyst in shifting the world away from the traditional disease-focused regime in favor of targeting root causes of age-advancing chronic illnesses, is Viomea life sciences company that has pioneered the field of human gut microbiome diagnostics and treatment. I took a look under the hood to learn whats behind this longevity science and how are they rebooting an industry.

The big idea behind Viomes science is simultaneously cutting edge and ancient (stay with me here as we unpack this). It was actually first articulated in the 4th century BCby Hippocrates of Kos. Let food be thy medicine, he proclaimed, and medicine be thy food. As investors in next-gen food companies, like Manna Tree, will tell youhe was onto something.

You can think of the gut microbiome as the Chief Architect of your health. The trillions of microbes that reside in your gut help you digest food, absorb nutrients, maintain a healthy weight, neutralize toxins, fight off bad bacteria, and many other functions that are responsible for keeping you alive and healthy. How the microbes in your gut respond to the food you eat creates a chain reaction that can be beneficial to you or, if you're eating the wrong foods, can promote inflammatory activity and microbial imbalance, or, dysbiosis. In other words, the very conditions that work to curtail lifespan.

It turns out that illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, Parkinsons, Crohns, Alzheimers, arthritis, depression, and many other debilitating conditions share a common denominatorschronic inflammation for one. In fact, chronic inflammation is both a precursor and prerequisite to the onset and development of todays deadliest diseasesand aging. And all these conditions are pointing to the gut.

Its to these ends that Viomes 50+ health scores reveal ones underlying contributors to poor healthand more importantly, to identifying the microbiome-based correctives that can extend both lifespan and healthspan. Affirming both Hippocrates and Viome, Dr. Sherry A. Rogers astutely quipped, The road to health is paved with good intestines!

In a free-market, innovation-economy, Viome is certainly not alone in this endeavor. Life Biosciences and many others are also targeting the biology of aging. The emerging sector operates on the premise that aging is in fact modifiable, being caused by biological mechanisms that can be targeted therapeutically. Elysium is another. It is working to make practical the myriad scientific advancements in aging research that in turn are leading to compelling new developments that will, fundamentally redefine every aspect of how we think about healthcare. Sampo Parkkinen, Revieve's Founder and CEO agrees and believes that the world's leading brands and retailers can help consumers personalize their health, beauty, and wellness through relationship-driven commerce: "Bringing personalized solutions to worlds consumers must go beyond healthcare, into the daily products, services, and treatments people use, from skincare and beauty products to supplements and food, it should all be on the table where consumers shop, he comments."

The key to moving life expectancy forward is turning back the biological clock. The old clich goes, If I knew I was going to live this long, Id have taken better care of myself! Or, as one of my Moms favorites, actress Mae West, said, Youre never too old to become younger. The good news is that theres no time like the present to reboot and begin preparing for a healthy future. And lifestylemarked by a nutritionally-rich diet (most tell us to ditch the fast food, but not everyone can), proper exercise (yes, there is an inverse relationship between physical activity and mortality), adequate sleep (I dont get enough, you?), good stress management (how are you doing?)is also central to any life extension regime. We have been told all of this before, yet we still struggle.

That said, a central goal of lifestyle modification is not only to reduce the incidence of disease but promote healthy, successful aging. Its true that ones biological age need not match chronological age. Consider Viome founder Naveen Jain. I am 63 years old, he says, but my biological age is now 10 years younger. I have achieved this in the last two years, simply by understanding how my body works, using Viomes tools, which tell me what to eat and why and what to avoid and why. It then details the specific nutrients my body needs to live a disease-free life.

In addition to its AI-driven gut microbiome tests, the company is beginning to produce personalized supplements and formulas that combine the necessary nutrients into daily capsules, thus eliminating the need to stock dozens of products. Consequently, Naveen actually does anticipate reaching 75 but registering a biological age of just 40. Not that he expects to age in reverse, a la The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Nor is this about achieving immortality. Rather, longevity science is really more about enabling people to be as healthy as possible for as long as they are alive. It's about having the strength, energy, and vitality to do what they want to do, even possibly at 100.

I know what youre thinking, Naveen is the CEO and didnt actor George Burns live to be 100 while famously smoking cigars every day? Yes, however, Ive watched his positive transformation over the years, along with Viome customer data, the results are remarkably noticeable (but alas, Im not a healthcare professional). The early industry data now has supplement manufacturers, and companies like Amway, taking note and working determine how to globally scale and deliver personalized nutrition through mass-customization. As I have said at Northwestern Universitys Kellogg School of Management, look for a variety of co-created innovation and delivery partnershipsbetween upstarts and global 1000sin this space starting next year.

Want another view on potential impacts? Longer lifespans are an effect of the measures anyone can take to improve their healthand it seems to also be an emerging societal and economic imperative. Consider, for example, if everyone in the world were to lower their biological age by even a few years, the global disease burden would be reduced dramatically. Today, according to the CDC, six in 10 U.S. adults suffer chronic health conditions; four in 10 have two or more of these diseases. Some of these diseases are both debilitating and expensive. According to estimates by the World Economic Forum, between 2010 and 2030, the total cost to the worlds health systems will approach $50T (yes trillions). Could we cut that in half? The leaders in the life extension spaceboth startups and the big-dogsbelieve so. And supporting data is mounting.

Looking for a bottom line? Me too, hows this: if you can maintain good gut health, then that good gut health will keep the rest of you healthy. If, on the other hand, the gut microbiota are in dysbiosis, then youre up for diseases caused by the chronic inflammation that inevitably resultsthe very conditions that are know to slash human life expectancy by half.

When the experts declare the upper limits of life expectancy, we believe it like some law of the universe. When someone dies at, say, 80, we accept that theyve lived a good long life. Weve become conditioned to believe it, and like so many other things connected to ones mindset, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Normal cholesterol in a society where its normal to drop dead of a heart attack really should not be considered a good thing. Right? We dont achieve more than we expect. But if we do expect more, it must begin with an understanding of whats really going on in the body. We are starting to do that now, thanks to the biological, cellular, and genetic ground truths established by the sciences and technologies advanced by the likes of Viome, Life BioSciences, Elysium, and many other emerging players the world will soon hear about.

But what about genes? you might ask. Surely, ones genetic makeup affects lifespan, right? Interestingly, we are learning that genetics may be responsible for only a very small percentage of human diseasesthe vast majority are triggered by environmental and lifestyle factors. And both are of tremendous consequence to the makeup of ones gut microbiome, which, we are now understanding, can be the chief driver of genetic expression (or epigenetics), turning genes on and off depending upon which microbes are present in the gut.

So, while some people do hit the genetic lottery, like George Burns, the rest of us can improve our luck through lifestyle choices. But the differencenow those choices need to be informed. This is where Viomes Human Gene Expression test comes in. With its origins in biodefense science developed at Los Alamos National Lab, it reveals a true state of ones overall health, the measurable potential for developing disease, and the nutritional corrective actions one can take to restore the homeostasis that is essential to healthy longevity. Again, it seems if you can improve the health of your gut microbiome, you could also take some of your genetic fate into your own hands.

In the end, though, when all is said and done, given the events of the past few years, many have learned that there is more to life than increasing its length. To this end, we would all do well to heed the words of the 14th century holy man who wrote, It is vanity to wish for length of life, and to care little that the life should be well spent. Indeed, if were to be older, well also need to be wiser.

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Want To Live Longer? How Life Extension Industry Will Reboot ... - Forbes

Will You Live To 200? Five Levels Of Breakthroughs In …

Sergeyis the founder of the Longevity Vision Fund.

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As founder of Longevity Vision Fund, I am often asked about the most promising life extension breakthroughs, from early cancer diagnostics to human avatars and everything in between. The simple answer is that there are many but thats probably not the kind of answer you were looking for!

Instead, lets look at the latest longevity breakthroughs working on each of the five major levels of biological organization (cell, tissue, organ, organ system and organism) and what they each aim to accomplish.

1. Cells: Reprogram

Biologists classify cells as the simplest level of organization in a living organism. Aging on a cellular level is often defined as the accumulation of destructive changes caused by changes to gene expression that gradually shift our cells to aged state.

This is why its particularly exciting that a new study demonstrated that it is possible to partially reprogram old cells, allowing them to regain youthful function. Led by a team of researchers including the legendary Dr. David Sinclair, scientists used cellular reprogramming to reinstate youthful function and successfully rejuvenate old cells in the eyes of mice successfully restoring vision in a mouse version of glaucoma.

The process used by the scientists in this study, REVIVER (which stands for "recovery of information via epigenetic reprogramming"), has shown that old tissues can "keep" a record of youthful epigenetic information that can be accessed for functional age reversal.

2. Tissue: Regenerate

Numerous cells working together toward one common goal are called tissue. Tissue and organ regeneration company LyGenesis has shown that it can regrow functioning ectopic organs in a patients lymph nodes using cellular therapy.

LyGenesis co-founder Dr. Eric Lagasse first demonstrated that allogeneic hepatocytes, injected into lymph nodes of mice with diseased livers, would regenerate and take over normal liver functions. The study was also conducted in larger mammals with equally impressive results: Liver tissue grown in pigs lymph nodes could treat genetic liver diseases. Dr. Lagasse and his team believe this method could ultimately help people with various liver diseases, including end-stage liver disease (ESLD) with clinical trials in humans set to begin later in 2021.

With almost 114,000 people in the United States on the waiting list for an organ transplant, LyGenesis could relieve suffering for many. Instead of one donor organ treating one patient, LyGenesis could allow tissue from one donor organ to treat many patients. The company, whose investors include Juvenescence and my organization, Longevity Vision Fund, also has plans for kidney, pancreas and thymus regeneration. LyGenesis achievements are a crucial step toward whole organ regeneration that could, along with other upcoming technologies, allow us to live to 200 (or at least beyond the commonly accepted maximum of 120 years).

3. Organ: Rewire

The brain is the body's most complex organ, with an impressive 86 billion neurons in the human brain (all of which are in use). Neuralink, a company founded by Elon Musk, wants to make it even more functional.

The company is developing a brain-computer interface that will potentially give us the ability to control computers and smartphones with our minds! Neuralink has already demonstrated that it can record a rats brain activity via thousands of tiny electrodes implanted in its brain. Musk has also unveiled a pig with a coin-sized computer chip, which he described kind of like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires."

While a Fitbit in your skull may seem fun but hardly essential, imagine what the company could do for patients with severe age-related neurological conditions, such as dementia or Parkinsons. Neuralink is preparing for human trials and, if successful, first plans to use their devices to help paraplegics with tasks such as making mouse clicks on a computer.

4. Organ System: Reverse (The Epigenetic Clock)

An organ system is a group of organs working together to perform one or more biological functions. Our bodies are made up of 11 basic organ systems that include the nervous system, cardiovascular system and more.

Dr. Greg Fahyhas shown (for the first time in humans!) that it may be possible to reverse biological age. Participants in the trial reduced their biological age by two and a half years (on average) after one year of treatment. In addition to the reduction in biological age, the participants also showed signs of immune system rejuvenation.

The reduction in the biological age was measured by world-renowned scientist Steve Hovarths epigenetic clock. This clock works by analyzing gene expression alterations (that change throughout our lifespan in a predictable manner) to estimate a persons biological age.

5. Organism: Rewrite

We are entering an era where discovery of diseases is more often conducted at the genome level and where a growing number of studies are finding overlap between "common" and "rare" human diseases, further enhancing our understanding of the ways in which they develop. So, wouldnt it be nice if we could find a "cure for all and any diseases"and be done with it already?

It looks like we are close. Prime editing (a new generation of genome editing) can, in principle, put 89% of human diseases in purview. Prime editing may allow researchers to edit more types of genetic mutations than current "state of the art" CRISPR. Since prime editing doesnt rely on the ability of cells to divide to help make the desired changes in the DNA (unlike CRISPR), it could be used to correct genetic mutations in cells that often don't divide such as those in the nervous system. This could provide a cure for a number of previously untreatable diseases, such as Parkinson's and Huntington's.

The search for a single cause and, therefore, cure for aging has been replaced with the view that it is a highly complex and multifactorial process. Therefore, the longevity breakthroughs listed above are complementary to (rather than in competition with) each other in our quest to put an end to age-related diseases.

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?

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Will You Live To 200? Five Levels Of Breakthroughs In ...

Biomedical Research & Longevity Society – Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dietary supplement company

The Biomedical Research & Longevity Society, formerly the Life Extension Foundation (LEF), is a company founded in 1980 to extend the healthy human lifespan by discovering methods to control aging and eradicate disease. Along with the Life Extension Buyer's Club, which sells vitamins and supplements, the Life Extension Foundation (LEF) was headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It also has a call center location in Las Vegas, Nevada. The company changed its name in 2018 to Biomedical Research & Longevity Society.[1]

Along with the Life Extension Buyer's Club, the Life Extension Foundation (LEF) was headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The Life Extension Foundation (LEF) was primarily funded by the sale of nutritional supplements to members of an affiliated entity, the Life Extension Buyer's Club.[citation needed] The Life Extension Buyer's Club was incorporated in Nevada, and has a separate EIN employer number than the Life Extension Foundation. Its name was changed to the Biomedical Research & Longevity Society in 2018.[1]

In 1981 LEF recommended DHEA, in 1983 it recommended low-dose aspirin, and also in 1983 was the first organization in the United States to recommend coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10). In 1992 it introduced melatonin into its product line.

The Biomedical Research & Longevity Society, which was originally named Life Extension Foundation (LEF), was founded by Saul Kent and William Faloon in 1980.[2][3]

In 1987, the FDA raided the Life Extension Foundation's warehouse, and charged Kent and Faloon with 27 counts, including distributing unapproved drugs. 11 years later, all, by then, 56 FDA charges were dismissed by a federal judge. In 1994, Kent and Faloon opened the FDA Holocaust Museum to highlight millions of deaths they felt were caused by the FDA withholding or delaying approval of life-saving drugs and treatments.[4]

In a 2009 tax filing, the company declared assets of over $25 million and netted more than $3 million on revenue of more than $18 million that year.[5]

In May 2013, the Internal Revenue Service revoked the Life Extension Foundations tax-exempt status, retroactive to 2006.[6] Forbes reported that "The IRS' problem with the Foundation is [...] an entirely worldly one: it asserts the membership organization's operations seem to be too entwined with the for-profit Life Extension Buyers Club."[5] On August 7, 2013, LEF filed a Complaint for Declaratory Judgment in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia challenging the IRS' allegations.[7]

In 2018, foundation's tax-exempt status was reinstated retroactive to the date it was revoked, May 2013.[8][9] The Life Extension Foundation also changed its name the same year, becoming the Biomedical Research and Longevity Society, Inc., or BRLS.[1]

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Biomedical Research & Longevity Society - Wikipedia

Conscious Consumption : Sustainable Shopping Through Clothing Life Extension and BEAUTYCYCLE with Nordstrom – Marketscreener.com

Conscious Consumption : Sustainable Shopping Through Clothing Life Extension and BEAUTYCYCLE with Nordstrom  Marketscreener.com

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Conscious Consumption : Sustainable Shopping Through Clothing Life Extension and BEAUTYCYCLE with Nordstrom - Marketscreener.com

Life Extension Review – Must Read This Before Buying

About Life Extension

Life Extension is a natural brand that provides you with supplements based on scientific research to help with many different symptoms and conditions.

Carrying a range of products that aid with brain function, weight loss, energy, and more, anyone can find a supplement to suit their personal needs from this company.

Life Extension has already gained over 48K followers on Instagram and 344K on Facebook, making them popular with their fans online.

With personalized wellness specialists and magazine subscriptions available to help you with your supplemental needs, Life Extension has a variety of options for new customers who want extra information.

Through this Life Extension review, Ill be exploring the brands products, customer ratings, promotions, and more to help you decide whether these are the right supplements for you.

Life Extension is a health and wellness brand that has been around for over 40 years, bringing the public a variety of natural and nutritious supplements to help improve your day-to-day life.

Using science-backed ingredients, Life Extension has found a way to spread their vision of nutrition throughout the world.

Life Extension is based in Fort Lauderdale, FL, and manufactures its supplements in the US. Their products are GMP-approved, which means that they are made with Good Manufacturing Practices.

Life Extensions mission is simply that they are committed to finding new ways to empower you to live a healthier, richer life. The brand has their own lab through which they conduct experiments to find the best ingredients.

I will now use this Life Extension review to provide you with a few main highlights of the brand and help you gain more of an understanding of their supplements.

Read on to find out further details about Life Extensions supplements.

If you feel like your mind isnt as sharp as youd like, Life Extension Magnesium Threonate may be your best bet. This supplement is ideal for anyone hoping for a quick brain boost with long-lasting effects.

With a focus on healthy memory and youthful cognitive function, Magnesium Threonate can help you get your mind back on track.

Almost everyone has experienced the struggle of trying to focus when all you want to do is relax. Brain fog isnt easy to fight, but sometimes it can feel like theres so much in your brain that you feel like its overflowing.

Magnesium is vital for brain function, and unfortunately, your brain starts losing magnesium as you age. Because you dont get much magnesium from your diet and environment, supplements like these can give you the extra help that youre missing.

Life Extension Magnesium Threonate comes in bottles of 90 vegetarian capsules, meant to last you for 30 days. The brand offers either a one-time purchase or a subscription option for the following prices:

The brand website also offers you a 10% discount on your order by buying 4 bottles at once ($27 each).

You can find this supplement on the following retail partner websites for a one-time purchase:

The main ingredient of Life Extension Magnesium Threonate is magnesium. Magnesium[1] is essential for brain health, but it starts to deplete with age.

Although mild magnesium deficits arent that noticeable, they can get to a much more serious level. This is reflected in the number of neurodegenerative brain diseases that people experience in their old age.

Magnesium[2] is crucial in providing your brain with a boost, helping with many different cognitive functions like memory and learning. This is especially useful for people as they age because their natural magnesium levels start to drop.

Magnesium can even help after the experience of traumatic brain injury[3], protecting against neurological deficits.

Life Extension Magnesium Threonate comes with three major benefits for everyone:

When you take Life Extension Magnesium Threonate, the magnesium makes its way to your nervous system and brain. This ingredient boosts your natural properties and strengthens the connections to provide you with a long-term brain boost and improved health overall.

You should take 3 capsules of Life Extension Magnesium Threonate a day unless a healthcare provider has recommended something different. Youll see the best results if you take this supplement daily.

Losing weight isnt a one-step process. It requires many different factors coming together to make the change happen.

For most people, that can include eating well, exercising regularly, and avoiding all other temptations. But one thing people forget to add to their healthcare regimen is an excellent natural supplement.

Now Im not saying that taking a supplement can replace the hard work that comes with everything you need to do to lose weight. Still, consuming certain vitamins and minerals can make a difference that can make the process less of a struggle.

With Life Extension Body Trim and Appetite Control, you get the chance to continue making healthy choices without feeling the temptations of all the yummy cravings around you.

With its primary focus on reducing cravings and keeping you full after every meal, you may realize that your weight loss journey has taken on a much more efficient route.

Life Extension Body Trim and Appetite comes in bottles of 30 vegetarian capsules, meant to last you for 30 days. The brand offers either a one-time purchase or a subscription option for the following prices:

The brand website also offers an 11% discount when you buy 4 bottles at once. Each supplement will then cost you $20.

You can find this supplement at Walmart for $27 (one-time purchase).

Life Extension Body Trim and Appetite is made from an ingredient named Metabolaid, a unique compound made of lemon verbena extract and hibiscus.

Lemon verbena extract is derived from a plant, while hibiscus is a flower. Both ingredients have great digestive properties[4] and are useful in helping you control your appetite and curb unhealthy cravings.

There are many nutritional benefits of the ingredients in Life Extension Body Trim and Appetite, all of which work together to provide you with the best support for your digestion and weight loss.

By keeping you full and sated after a regular meal, youre not tempted to eat anything unhealthy, preventing you from overeating.

Life Extension Magnesium Threonate comes with the following benefits for those who use it:

Life Extension Body Trim and Appetite works by helping to control your appetite. A huge portion of weight gain is knowing when to stop eating, even when youre full.

So, the main ingredient in this supplement provides you with a signal so that you dont stuff yourself with food that you cant handle.

Its important that you pair this supplement with a healthy diet and exercise, so you can see the best results of this supplement. The supplement alone may not help you see the results youd like without a healthy lifestyle.

Thats why this supplement comes with a free app for you to track your progress and receive encouragement on your hard work.

You should take 1 capsule of this supplement a day before breakfast. Youll notice the best results if you take the supplement daily.

When youre so busy with life, it can get easy to get down in the dumps. No one thinks about using dietary supplements to get their energy back, but believe it or not, there are natural ingredients out there that can charge your metaphorical batteries and get you back to your peppy self.

Life Extension NAD+ Cell Regenerator and Resveratrol is an energy-boosting supplement that can jump-start your day at a cellular level. With the goal of longevity, this supplement aims to boost your cellular energy, improve your cellular metabolism, and encourage healthy aging.

Life Extension NAD+ Cell Regenerator and Resveratrol comes in bottles of 30 vegetarian capsules, meant to last you for 30 days. The brand offers either a one-time purchase or a subscription option for the following prices:

The brand website also offers a discount of 11% for a 4-pack ($40 each).

You can find this supplement on the following retail partner websites (one-time purchase):

The serving size for this supplement is one capsule, and it contains the following ingredients:

Non-active ingredients include silica, maltodextrin, microcrystalline cellulose, vegetable stearate, and vegetable cellulose to form the capsule itself.

This supplement has a few different ingredients. However, the two main ingredients are Niagen and resveratrol, which come together to provide you with cellular health and energy.

Your body naturally produces vitamin B3, which works to repair your cells and make you look younger by releasing the essential enzyme NAD+[5]. Thats exactly what Niagen[6] does as well.

Both Niagen and vitamin B3 are alternatives to each other, so this supplement contains an ingredient that may slow down aging.

Resveratrol[7] generally promotes and maintains health and longevity, ensuring that you live a long and healthy life. More specifically, this ingredient can have an impact on diseases and keep you safe throughout old age.

Other properties of resveratrol[8] include antioxidative, anti-inflammatory, and anticancer properties.

All ingredients within this supplement work together to increase NAD+ levels in your body, which has enormous benefits for middle-aged and older adults[9].

Life Extension NAD+ Cell Regenerator and Resveratrol can provide you with the following benefits:

The two main ingredients of Niagen and resveratrol work together to heal your cells and keep you healthy and young in the long-term.

Niagen increases NAD+ levels in your system to increase cellular energy, while resveratrol[10] works by managing and even preventing diseases, conditions, and aiding recovery from injuries.

You should take 1 capsule a day of Life Extension NAD+ Cell Regenerator and Resveratrol with or without food. Youll see the best results if you take this supplement daily for a whole month.

Based on this Life Extension review, many products by this brand cater to anyone over 18. This isnt uncommon, as most supplements contain doses and ingredients that may not be suited for young children.

A product like the Magnesium Threonate would be a better fit for you if youre looking to boost your brain function, whereas Body Trim and Appetite Control would be better for you if youre struggling with losing weight and keeping it off.

Meanwhile, a product like NAD+ Cell Regenerator and Resveratrol is more inclusive and almost anyone can benefit from using it, as it helps provide you with long-term cellular energy.

Please note that if you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication for any serious illnesses, have a weakened immune system, or have any severe allergies or reactions, you should speak with your doctor before taking Life Extension supplements.

Because Life Extension supplements come from natural ingredients that mimic the bodys vitamins and minerals, there are no official side effects reported about any of the products.

However, as this brand works with dietary supplements, there is still a risk that you may experience stomach cramps, nausea, or poor bowel movements. This is especially likely if you dont follow the suggested dosage.

This Life Extension review found quite a positive reaction to the products I went over. Customers rated the products highly with detailed success stories posted on the brand website, as well as partner websites like Amazon, Walmart, and iHerb.

The Life Extension products I reviewed posted the following ratings on the brand website:

Life Extension targets a variety of different goals with their many products, including improved brain function, weight loss, and boosted energy. The customers who have tried their supplements mostly had great things to say about the benefits that they experienced.

One satisfied customer commented on the change he noticed after taking Magnesium Threonate for 2 months, stating, I experienced an immediate shift in mental clarity on the first dose. Now after two months, I am excited about improved thought organization, increased multitasking ability, and increased short and long term memory.

This was supported by another post on Amazon, where a customer made a comment along the same lines, saying:

Morning of Day 4 the brain fog is gone. After 3 years of the cloud living in my consciousness slowly putting me to sleep, I have taken initiative and made the effort to stop the numbing effects of whatever it is that is slowing me down and not caring.

The Body Trim and Appetite supplement also has positive ratings. One customer commented, After taking this supplement for about a week, I did notice a change in my tendency to snack. The evening is when I tend to snack, not because Im hungry but because I have developed a really bad habit to do so. Its really helping!

The few negative reviews about this supplement were regarding the lack of results, but since all bodies are different, it can take people an additional time to see results.

The brand also holds a 3.1/5-star rating on Trustpilot, with 60% of reviews ranking as excellent. Most customer complaints are about shipping times and customer service, though that does imply that very few people have problems with the products themselves.

All in all, most people who tried the Life Extension products were happy with their purchase, and some even mentioned using them for multiple years. The brands supplements have helped many people and have reached the goals they set out to!

Based on my evaluation of the brand, its products, and the many reviews posted on multiple platforms, I think Life Extension is legit.

The brand has very clear details posted on their website and all third-party retailer sites regarding how each product works and what they are made of.

There are many customer reviews that have commented on the benefits theyve experienced since starting to take Life Extension products which make their effectiveness believable.

There are no complaints about Life Extensions shipping policy, and it seems like everyone who placed an order got their products right on time. Plus, the brand has a transparent approach to deliveries, where theyve outlined the different delivery times and prices on their website.

This Life Extension review can say with confidence that this is a legitimate supplement brand that has done its research.

This Life Extension review finds that this brand is worth purchasing for many different reasons. The variety of products, the effectiveness of the ingredients, and the glowing customer reviews are only the tip of the iceberg when you consider the positive features of this brand.

On the off chance that you buy a Life Extension supplement and discover that its not right for you, you have 12 whole months to contact the customer service team and either get a replacement product or a credit on your account.

Overall, I believe that Life Extension is worth a try.

Life Extension offers a subscription program on their brand website that allows you to get a discount of up to 11% off the retail prices of their products. If you subscribe, you will receive your supplements delivered every month.

The brand also offers the same discount for customers who opt for a one-time purchase but buy four bottles of the supplement instead of just one.

You can purchase Life Extension from its main website at https://www.lifeextension.com/. Some products can also be found at Amazon, Walmart, and iHerb.

Unfortunately, no Life Extension is not vegan. However, their products are 100% vegetarian. If you have a specific dietary restriction, you should be careful to consume Life Extension supplements. They may contain ingredients derived from live animals, such as eggs, dairy, or beeswax.

Yes, all Life Extension products are 100% gluten-free. You are safe to consume this brands supplements if you have this dietary restriction.

Life Extension offers a few different shipping options within the domestic US, including the following:

For shipping internationally, the delivery costs may vary based on where you placed the order. You can find the list of countries that Life Extension ships to at the following link: https://www.lifeextension.com/vitamins-supplements/shipping/shipping-information.

Life Extension offers 12 months to return your products without a penalty. Thats a whole year for you to change your mind! If youre unhappy with your purchase, make sure to contact the customer service team, and you can get your products replaced or add a credit to your account.

Return policies on other websites may vary.

If you have any more questions that this Life Extension review didnt answer, you can contact the company directly. They are available at different times via the following contact information:

You can also find this information at the following website: https://www.lifeextension.com/quest-com

For more health and wellness products, take a peak at these brands:

Restore Hyper Wellness

Love Wellness

Rae Wellness

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Life Extension Review - Must Read This Before Buying

How to live forever: meet the extreme life-extensionists

In 2016, an American real-estate investor named James Strole established the Coalition for Radical Life Extension, a nonprofit based in Arizona which aims to galvanise mainstream support for science that might one day significantly prolong human life. Standards in modern medicine are allowing us to live longer now than ever before. But that is not Stroles concern. What good are a few more measly years? He is interested in extending life not by days and weeks, but by decades and even centuries, to the degree that mortality becomes optional an end to The End. The deathist paradigm has to go, a line on the Coalitions website reads. Its time to look beyond the past of dying to a future of unlimited living. It describes its supporters as early-adopting advocates, numbering in the thousands.

Life extensionists (or longevists, or immortalists) fit neatly into two types. The first are rationalists: scientific researchers at the coalface of gerontology, the study of ageing, chipping away at the many technical difficulties of ending entropy. Strole is the second type. A businessman, he has no formal scientific training, but is nevertheless resolutely committed to the cause, eager to rally behind new findings. He hopes to live indefinitely, or at least until 150. But he is ultimately reliant on researchers finding a way. Consider him less a gerontological groupie than a politely optimistic mega-fan, sitting on the sidelines of science, willing on a major breakthrough.

He isnt alone. Life extensionists have become a fervent and increasingly vocal bunch. Famously, the community includes venture capitalists and Silicon Valley billionaires, non-gerontologists all, and nearly all men, who consider death undesirable and appear to have made so much money they require infinite life in which to spend it. But now mere mortals are joining the throng, heads filled with fantasies of forever. Humans have lusted after immortality for as long as they have been alive. So far the quest has been unsuccessful we still die! But good news: paradise is reported to be closer now than ever before, and private clinics and online pharmacies are promising to help get us there, there being the future, all of it.

Strole has been an evangelist of human immortality since he was a child, when his grandmother died, and he felt a pain you cant even describe, its so deep in your gut. He was 11, still new to the world, and he came to think of death, like most of us do at some point or another, as deeply unfair.

In the early 1970s, when he was in his 20s, he began touring the US as a public speaker, sharing what was then limited gerontological research, but nevertheless extolling its possibilities and advocating the anti-ageing benefits of a positive mindset: Isnt life great? You can live forever if you really try! Because Strole is not scientifically accredited, he mostly based his patter around inspirational healthy-living tips, much of which would now fall under the umbrella of common-sense wellness: exercise, eat well but not too much, look after yourself. But still his message seemed radical, and he was not always well-received. Audiences wary of Stroles ideas condemned him for testing Gods will, or disrupting the natural order. His concepts ran counter to the common world view that we live and then we die. Particularly aggravated spectators referred to him as the devil. Every now and then he received death threats.

Nevertheless, he persisted. He considered himself fortunate to work in a field that meant he was privy to insider information and he became convinced a significant breakthrough was around the corner. To fully prepare his body for the rigmarole of centuries-long life, he adopted a strict health regimen. He fasted, juiced, cleansed and devoured supplements, inviting audiences to do the same. Eventually, a community formed, driven by a shared, urgent aversion to death. We felt then how important it was to do everything you could to stay alive, he says

Strole is now 70. He lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, a desert town. In the life-extensionist mode, he avoids dairy and rarely touches bread, though he devours a whole heap of other things. Recently his diet has included pills, branded Cognitive, which he takes twice a day and claims have all sorts of nourishing effects on his brain. (What good is maintaining the body if not the mind?) The pills are part of a self-directed anti-ageing process that requires a lot of swallowing. On some days, Strole takes 70 supplements, including a tablet that energises the mitochondria (mitochondria produce energy) and whose effects resemble a shot of coffee, minus the jitters, as well as vitamins, multi-nutrients and metformin, a diabetes drug that has become so popular among life extensionists that one referred to it as the aspirin of anti-ageing. In the early mornings, when the Arizona air is still brisk, he takes a cold dip in his pool to shock his immune system into better function, and at some point or another he lies face-up on an electromagnetic mat that whirs silently against his body and opens up the veins, and engages in a breathing regime that, he says, balances the hormones.

These are typical life-extension strategies, though most people supplement regimens with their own ideas. Some fast. Others arrange expensive stem cell replacement therapies. To maintain a supple mind, the gerontologist Marios Kyriazis, who is in his 60s and heads the British Longevity Society, reads the newspaper upside down, and whenever that becomes too easy, he reads the newspaper upside down and reflected in a mirror. Think of it as an alternative to Sudoko.

What good is all of this? The current life-extensionist strategy is twofold. First, achieve a wellness foundation, Strole says. Second, stay alive until the coming gerontological breakthrough. All that is required is to live long enough for the next innovation, and presuming you do, You can buy another 20 years. Twenty years here, 20 years there, it all adds up, and suddenly youre 300. This is a common view. Last year the British billionaire Jim Mellon, who has written a book on longevity, titled Juvenescence, said: If you can stay alive for another 10 to 20 years, if you arent yet over 75 and if you remain in reasonable health for your age, you have an excellent chance of living to more than 110. To most, 110 seems a modest target. Why not forever? Its not some big quantum leap, Strole says, by way of explanation. He invokes the analogy of a ladder: step by step by step to unlimited life. In 2009 the American futurist Ray Kurzweil, another supplement enthusiast, coined a similar metaphor, referring instead to bridges to immortality.

Where to begin with the almighty question: why would anyone think this a good idea? Strole is openly afraid of death (who isnt? He argues), though he seems more motivated by a kind of curiosity. We live our lives knowing they will one day end. Imagine what we might accomplish if they didnt. (It is not clear exactly what Strole might actually want to accomplish: self-actualisation? World peace? That tricky jigsaw?) The American entrepreneur Dave Asprey, who is 46 but hopes to live beyond 180, and who takes 150 supplements a day, told me: I cant imagine running out of exciting new problems to solve!

This motivation is common the burning desire to help and it can be seen as morally virtuous or horribly presumptuous, depending on your opinion on the altruistic potential of a bunch of disproportionately wealthy, middle-aged men. (Is it possible the future will become a refuge for the rich, who experience life as a sequence of exquisite events and who might not understand the concept of entropy as relief or escape?) Few life extensionists openly admit to hedonistic impulses. You can only smoke so many Cuban cigars, Asprey says, before youre like, Ive got to buckle down. Though when I asked the British gerontologist Aubrey de Grey why indefinite life appeals, he replied, half-joking: My hot tub.

De Grey, a serious scientist, considers life extension a health issue, which is perhaps the fields most convincing argument. Gerontologists are not hoping to end death, he says. Instead, Were interested in people not getting sick when they get old. No matter how much society rails against the concept of immortality, nobody really wants to suffer through Alzheimers, or suddenly fall foul of cardiovascular disease. Gerontology is the act of developing treatments for age-related diseases, de Grey argues of reducing the causes of death, not death itself. The benefits of living longer are not the point, he says. The benefits are not having Alzheimers disease. For de Grey, indefinite life is a by-product, not a goal.

Are we anywhere near to a breakthrough? So far, research has produced modest yields. Gerontologists speak prophetically of potential, but most warn a significant human development remains somewhere far off in the distance almost in sight but not quite. Richard Hodes, the director of the National Institute of Aging, a US government agency, told me that, though research in animals has led to dramatic increases in lifespan, some of them multi-fold, There has been far less quantitative effect as those models have moved towards mammalian species. The biologist Laura Deming, who in 2011 established the Longevity Fund, a venture capital firm that supports high-potential longevity companies, told me that startups continue to successfully root out biological markers of ageing inefficient cells, mitochondrial decline but that, in humans, We really dont know right now what will work and what wont.

Much of gerontology focuses on identifying types of damage that accumulate with age and developing ways to halt or reverse that accumulation. It has been discovered, for example, that as we grow older, certain cells become ineffective but nevertheless stick around, getting in the way like comatose guests at the end of a house party. Removing those cells have helped mice have longer, healthier lifespans (this is called senescence.) Similar forms of genetic engineering have been successful in other animal models. But to reach the mainstream, gerontologists must convince government agencies to support human adoption, a complicated and long-winded task, given the general view that death is a normal human process. Why play God?

In any case, it is likely that one single longevity strategy alone wont help us much. Life extensionists enjoy a metaphor: humans are complicated machines, they say, like cars, but mushy. And what happens to a machine if you dont look after it? It rusts. It splutters and spurts, until it reaches its inevitable conclusion. De Grey considers ageing a multifaceted problem. Humans incur many different types of damage. We dont just rust. We scratch. We dent. Rubbish accumulates in our footwells and grime develops in our engines. We require multiple strategies of repair constant fine-tuning. Whats the point in removing those senescent cells if that molecular junk continues to build up?

De Grey shares Stroles belief that innovations are coming. But, unlike Strole, he considers current strategies almost pointless. He does not take hundreds of supplements. He does not pay for stem-cell transfusions. I want to wait and see, he says. At 56, he is content to sit tight for treatments that have become progressively more effective so I dont have to use clunky, first-generation therapies that may have side-effects.

This does not seem to bother Strole, nor others in the community. Time is running out! Bring on the treatments! At RAADfest, the Coalitions annual conference the Woodstock of radical life extension visitors are invited to root through the latest in anti-ageing products, of which there are many. Try DHEA PRO-25, an anti-ageing hormone. Or NAD+PRO, advertised to boost physical and mental energy. Or Piracetam, from the family of smart drugs, or nootropics, which claim to enhance brain function. Strole named the area: The marketplace of your future. It is popular among RAADfest guests for the power of its promise: the opportunity to realise the hoped-for self. This is Wellness 2.0 beyond the cosmetic. We have been anti-ageing our skin for years. Why not our insides, too?

Jim Mellon is reported to have described the longevity market as a fountain of cash, and has urged friends to invest. Business is already lucrative, but it is a market that appears to take little notice of efficacy. The majority of anti-ageing products remain unregulated patent pending, in the vernacular and more than a few appear utterly useless. Earlier this year, the US government released a statement condemning the anti-ageing fad of transfusing young blood into older bodies, a practice researchers have proved effective in mice but which, the FDA said, should not be assumed to be safe or effective in humans. (The treatments cost thousands of dollars, and led to concern that Patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors.)

A decade ago, the American Association of Medicine publicly condemned the sale of anti-ageing hormones, an industry that was reported to be worth $50bn. Despite the widespread promotion of hormones as anti-ageing agents by for-profit websites, the association said, the scientific evidence to support these claims is lacking.

The oldest person to have lived, Jeanne Calment, reached 122, though she was perhaps not the greatest example of good health: she smoked until she was 117. The most successful life-extension methods we know of seem to be those we have known all along: eat well, sleep well, exercise, reduce stress and rely on modern medicine, which has prolonged average lifespans significantly over the past 160 years.

Strole does that and more. So far its working, he says. He is 6ft 4 and 13st the perfect weight with a slick of glossy grey hair. Perhaps his regimen is effective. Or, perhaps, like Calment, he has won a kind of genetic lottery, his healthy hair predisposed. It is difficult to say exactly, but, as of this moment, he will die. What happens if a breakthrough doesnt arrive in his lifetime? Well, then were in a little bit of hot water, he says. But its better to go for it than to not go for it. Its better than just settling in. Dont go quietly into the night.

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How to live forever: meet the extreme life-extensionists

Life Extension review – 7 facts you should know [APRIL 2022]

Life Extension Review Summary

Life Extension sells reasonably priced supplements for healthy living, including supplements, creams, and more. Learn more in our Life Extension review!

Fiyin Ebemidayo, B.S.

Summary

Many customer reviews indicate that the supplements work well and are a high quality for the relatively low price. However, some of the supplements sold have dubious scientific claims and a minority of customers note that they did not feel well after taking the products.

Feature image: https://www.cheapsnowgear.com/collections/snow-backpack-for-ski

This review is written with the intent to be as unbiased as possible. However, it represents the opinion of an individual reviewer and is therefore subjective. Furthermore, at Nebula Genomics we seek to educate the public about the benefits of Whole Genome Sequencing. Information about our Whole Genome Sequencing DNA test is therefore incorporated into the review.

April 19, 2022

Cons

Life Extension was established in the 1980s. It focuses on nutritional science with the goal to provide customers with supplements for a healthier life. The company has historically been on the forefront of nutritional improvements, including the introduction of a new standard of protocols for blood screening and its industry-first recommendation of low-dose aspirin for heart disease.

Life Extensions mission is to help people lead healthier lives by consuming nutritional products. The FDA cannot approve their products, and they are not allowed to make claims concerning the use of their products. If interested, you can call them to request a certificate of analysis.

The company employs its own clinical researchers to develop its products and recommendations. Its team of industry-leading pharmacists, scientists, and physicians are committed to producing the highest quality supplements. To date, the company has put more than $180 million into research towards improving its products.

As a testament to the founders science journalism background, although Life Extension provides lengthy reports on each product, they use minimal science jargon and can be understood by nonprofessionals. Besides health supplements, Life Extension also offers laboratory tests through its partner, LabCorp. However, these tests are only available in the continental US, excluding Maryland.

Life Extension offers a range of vitamins and supplements for diet, personal care, and even pet care. They also provide a variety of lab tests, including blood and saliva tests and magazines, and published books on disease prevention, treatment, and the health benefits of vitamins and minerals.

Vitamins and Supplements

These form the bulk of products available from Life Extension. Customers can shop by type or health goal. The ordering page clearly notes how many capsules are in each order and how many days each bottle supplies.

Supplements and vitamins are available under multiple categories, with about five to fifteen products under each category. Each page has a short quiz to receive personalized recommendations based on your health condition and goal. The supplements come in bottles as either soft gels or vegetarian capsules. You can order single bottles or four bottles in a multipack bundle that is slightly discounted.

The categories under type are as follows. Note that the costs reflect original prices and do not take into account sales.

These products are organized under health goals such as brain health and energy management. Other categories include:

Diet and Lifestyle

Besides the regular vitamins and supplements on offer, Life Extension sells some products classified as supplements for staying fit. These supplements are meant to help you boost the effectiveness of your workout and exercise. They include supplements for all needs, including carbs, proteins, and calories. They also have products that can help with weight loss or gain.

Categories available under the diet and lifestyle section are as follows:

Skin and Personal Care

Life Extension offers a range of skincare and personal grooming products. These products contain various nutrients needed to keep your skin healthy and ageless, including hyaluronic acid. Life Extensions skincare products include cleansers, exfoliators, moisturizers, anti-aging, and skin tightening serums. They offer products for all skin types, dry, oily, and combination.

Like with the supplements, you can take a quiz to receive product recommendations.

Pet Care

Life Extension offers products not just for you but also for your pets. These supplements provide your cat or dog with the proper nutrients for their growth.

Life Extension offers lab tests through its partnership with LabCorp. Tests on offer include blood, breath, saliva, urinary and fecal tests. It should, however, be noted that these tests are only available in the continental United States.

Taking a test through Life Extension does not require visiting a doctor for a lab order as an order is provided for you by a licensed doctor in your state. You can carry out the blood test yourself in your house if it is only a finger prick test, but you will have to visit a LabCorp laboratory if more blood is needed to be collected. You can find LabCorp laboratories nationwide. To get priority, you can make an appointment online before visiting the lab.

Once you get your test results, you can decide to talk to one of Life Extensions wellness specialists for a review of the test results. It should be noted that Life Extension does not offer diagnosis or treatment and that the test results are informational only. We, however, recommend that you still discuss the results with your physician for a broader outlook on the state of your health.

Lab test categories include blood clotting/circulation, blood sugar, bone, cardiovascular, cholesterol, digestion, healthy weight, hormones, immune system, inflammation management, kidney/urinary, liver, mens testing, neurological, nutrition, thyroid/adrenal, and womens testing.

Life Extensions supplements are not exactly expensive, with a bottle costing between about $10 and $30. However, you should note that different supplements will have a different number of capsules in each bottle. Additionally, since supplements are designed to be taken continuously, customers will have to manage the cost regularly.

The same goes for the other nutrition and care products.

In most cases, customers can save 11% by ordering more than one bottle at a time. There is the option of signing up for auto shipping when you have products you would like to order periodically. This option allows you to receive the products automatically monthly with the added perk of free shipping and an 11% discount. You also do not have to worry about overpaying when there is a price reduction, as the amount charged is automatically updated each time.

On the other hand, the lab tests range from as low as $20 but can cost over $800 for the more complex tests.

Life Extension offers a premium membership subscription called Premier Rewards. It costs $50 annually and gets you unlimited free shipping via standard shipping and discounts on international orders. In addition, you get a 4% cashback on every order, a free subscription to Life Extensions monthly magazine, and surprise gifts during your birth month and at random times.

Life Extensions privacy policy page does not indicate any unique protocols that protect user information. Your test results may be used for research but are anonymized, so they cannot be traced back to you. In addition, user information is shared with partners, including advertisers, to serve personalized ads to you.

The supplement company continues to perform research and release new products. In 2022, new supplements include Brain Fog Relief and Waistline Control.

The company sells many of its supplements on Amazon. Here, they receive top rated rankings between 4 and 4.5 out of 5 stars. The products have been reviewed hundreds of times and some of the more popular products even have close to 7,000 ratings.

As noted in the reviews for the Two-per-Day Multivitamin, many customers felt the company has quality products and that they have seen good results, especially as they cost less than competitors. Some customers even highly recommend it, noting that they have taken them for years.

However, some reviewers indicate that the vitamin does not absorb well and they have side effects such as feeling sick after taking them. With supplements, its important to note that not every supplement works for every person and customers should consult with their doctor before adding supplements to their diet.

Before considering supplements, you may want to know more about your genetic predispositions to conditions these supplements support. Nebula Genomics offers accurate DNA testing at a reasonable price. These tests indicate genetic predispositions to characteristics and health issues, among other things.

Results on ancestry, health, food, and exercise are produced with 30x Whole Genome Sequencing, which decodes 100% of the DNA. It also gives you complete control over how your test results are handled and raw data to further explore your DNA data. This knowledge may help you and your doctor decide if certain supplements are right for you.

You also receive exclusive access to genetic information to assist your genealogical study. Regular updates and reports from Nebula Genomics bring you up to date on the newest advances in genetic science, ensuring you have continued access to the latest research.

Did you like our Life Extension review? You can read more reviews on our blog and check out our complete guide to the best DNA test kit and other home tests.

You may also be interested in these other supplement companies:

Aging:

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Life Extension review - 7 facts you should know [APRIL 2022]

Life Extension Reviews | Everything You Need To Know – Innerbody

Last Updated: Feb 7, 2022

Life Extension has always been on the cutting edge of science, breaking through boundaries of the expected to unveil longer and healthier lives for others. Many of the supplements we see on the market today were formulated by Life Extensions scientific team. Finding new pieces of the puzzle for human health becomes even more essential when most Americans have a vitamin deficiency.

But cutting edge doesnt always mean best for you. We tested Life Extension to see exactly what it is and isnt good for, so you can decide if Life Extension is right for your vitamin and supplement needs.

Editor's Summary

Life Extension makes big promises about the purity and potency of their supplements. A reliable third party generally confirms this high quality, but it may not be universally true. And the flipside of their quality control is reduced selection and somewhat higher cost.

Our Top Picks

Life Extension is known for developing high-quality, pure, and potent nutritional supplements.

Life Extension also offers competitively priced lab testing along with their industry leading vitamins, supplements, hormones, and herbs

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NAD+ Cell Regenerator

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How we evaluated Life Extension

In order to give you a complete picture of Life Extensions products and experiences, we considered fundamental factors including your user experience and the quality and variety of products they offer.

8.0 / 10

Life Extension only stocks their own brand of supplements, which is a way to produce consistent quality but also results in a much smaller catalog than their competitors have. However, as the Life Extension Foundation develops new and specific formulas, they carry specialized and hyper-specific supplements and blends that others dont.

7.9 / 10

Life Extension brags about the rigorous testing and quality assurance checks that all of their products go through. Their supplements contain no food coloring or unnecessary additives, and ConsumerLab.com gives them high marks in several categories, but our own testing raised some questions. Based on their rocky history with the FDA, the effectiveness of these supplements may vary more than Life Extension lets on.

8.0 / 10

Overall, Life Extensions products are middle-of-the-road in cost but tend toward the expensive side. All of their vitamins are similarly priced no matter how many pills are in each bottle, so keep an eye on the total pill count before you decide. Their LabCorp lab tests can get wildly expensive depending on what youre trying to find. However, with over 200 different tests to order, you can still find a relatively inexpensive look at your biomarkers. Their rewards program is hefty but costs quite a bit upfront.

8.8 / 10

The catalog is laid out clearly and makes it easy to find what you need with quizzes along the way. It is also relatively easy to get lost in their information pages: you need to jump through hoops to find full detail on their history and services.

9.2 / 10

With multiple methods of communication and specific lines for getting in touch with wellness specialists, Life Extension has made it easy to get exactly the help you need. They hold long hours, so even night owls on the west coast can get assistance. All customer service representatives we spoke with were kind and knowledgeable and those who didnt know an answer for us knew how to get us in touch with someone who did.

Why you can trust our review

Over the past two decades, Innerbody Research has helped tens of millions of readers like you make more informed decisions to live healthier lives. We extensively test each health service we review.

Our team has spent over 147 hours testing and researching Life Extension and its close competitors in order to give you an unbiased exploration of your health supplement options, free of marketing jargon or gimmicks. Through a thorough and deliberate approach to every product we encounter, we evaluate services based on adherence to quality, the latest medical evidence and health standards, and a simple question: would we buy the product or service ourselves if it werent part of our job, and would we recommend it to family and friends?

Additionally, this review of Life Extension, like all health-related content on this website, was thoroughly vetted by one or more members of our Medical Review Board for accuracy.

Originally founded as the Florida Cryonics Association in 1977 by a science journalist and a mortician-turned-businessman, Life Extension (renamed in 1980) began as an organization dedicated to extending the human lifespan. However, in more recent years, the organization has split into two halves:

Throughout this article, well refer to the Life Extension Buyers Club as Life Extension, as that is the part of the organization open for us as consumers.

Life Extension boasts a lot of firsts in product development, such as introducing:

They also have studied many new applications of known supplements, including:

Clearly, with such a strong eye for product development, Life Extension offers tons of supplements. They hold all of their products to a high standard, testing and retesting multiple times. They are transparent about their scientific processes and health and safety protocols, to the point that you can call their customer service line to get information on the Certificate of Analysis for any product you want. While their ingredients are sourced globally, almost all of their products are manufactured in the United States.

They also are a preferred brand of the third-party testing organization ConsumerLab.com. ConsumerLab.com has rated Life Extension number one with their top-rated award in three separate categories (omega-3 EPA products, internet catalog, and multivitamins) for five, six, and eight years respectively.

Despite having excellent ratings from third-party testers, Life Extension has a relatively antagonistic relationship and troubled past with the FDA. There have been 56 criminal charges levied against the founders, including distributing unapproved drugs after a warehouse raid from the FDA, but all charges were dropped by 1996. That said, Life Extension was issued a warning in 2017 for claiming that Life Extension products could cure diseases such as breast cancer.

Because the FDA doesnt regulate supplements, it is illegal for companies like Life Extension to claim that supplements will treat, diagnose, prevent, or cure diseases. Life Extension can be grandiose at times in their product descriptions, so take their word with a grain of salt.

Who could benefit from using Life Extension?

Anyone currently taking a supplement or looking for a new brand with excellent customer service and strong science may find that Life Extension fills their supplement needs. With their heavily scientific focus, those who are otherwise skeptical of supplements (based on ingredients or lack of mandatory testing) could also find their worries soothed by Life Extensions up-front policies and detail-heavy pages. Its easy to go down long, winding roads reading through Life Extensions various pages.

Despite being so scientific, Life Extension takes the time to break down their science thoroughly and with minimal jargon. Its clear that this organization was founded in part by a science journalist.

As with all supplements, if youre taking any medications or have any medical conditions, consult with your doctor before beginning a new supplement. There are lots of interactions between supplements and medications, some of which can be fatal. Vitamin K can reduce the effectiveness of blood thinners, for example, and kava can cause liver damage. Supplements are not substitutes for conventional medications, as they cannot cure, diagnose, prevent, or otherwise treat diseases.

Lab tests are only available in the continental United States (except for Maryland) and Anchorage, Alaska. If you live in New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, or Massachusetts, you will have to go through your preferred medical providers blood-testing lab rather than LabCorp.

Life Extensions catalog

A vast majority of Life Extensions products are supplements. There isnt an option to peruse all of their vitamins and supplements at once, but there are several smaller ways you can break down their catalog. You can search by type of product, which includes:

Shop Supplements

You can also sort by health goal, including:

There is a lot of overlap between categories. Some supplements can be found in multiple categories with different purposes, but for the most part, each category has five to fifteen distinct supplements specific to the aim of the category. Every page includes a short quiz for you to take, which judges your current health background and health goals and then recommends products for you.

A vast majority of these are softgels or vegetarian capsules, meaning they are specifically designed to break down quickly in the body for apt absorption. The sizes and doses found in each bottle depend on the supplement itself. Every supplement is sold in counts of 30, up to 300 pills per bottle. A few supplements offer multiple doses or sizes, but most only come in one dose and size.

Insider Tip: Based on our testing, we would recommend opting for supplements that dont arrive in tablet form. Tablets generally make it harder for your body to absorb the nutrients, and Life Extensions tablets did not disintegrate in our lab tests nearly as thoroughly or quickly as competitors tablets. Sticking with softgels or capsules is more reliable.

You can buy bottles either individually or in a multipack bundle with four bottles at a slightly discounted price.

Aside from supplemental vitamins and minerals, Life Extension offers a limited catalog of edible products. These are specifically from the Life Extension brand and focus much more on potential health benefits than other supplement companies that also sell diet products. These include:

If youre looking for supplements to add to your weight loss or athletic regimen, Life Extension also has nine different diet and weight loss supplements. For the most part, these are supplements that promote satiety, decrease appetite, and encourage the breakdown of stored fat with mostly scientifically proven ingredients. There are no products with popular but unproven ingredients.

Shop Supplements

Life Extension also offers a handful of products for skin, nails, hair, and oral care. These include supplements like collagen and biotin and probiotic lozenges for both throat health and overall oral health.

Surprisingly, Life Extension has a robust catalog of skincare products akin to something youd see in a mainstream skincare brand. They offer:

Many of these products are aimed at those who are on the older side of things. Given their history and original goals of eradicating aging and preventing death, this makes sense: protect your skin as well as your insides from the sands of time. These products have common, proven ingredients to help your skin flourish, such as hyaluronic acid and vitamin C.

If youre not sure what your skin needs, Life Extension also offers a quiz to dive deeper into your current skincare routine (if you have one) and your overall skin needs. It recommends products for you based on your results so you can dive into your own testing experience.

Not sure if Fido or Fluffys food is giving them the right nutrients? Life Extension has your furry friends back, too, with a mix of advanced multi-nutrient formulas for both dogs and cats. Both dog mix and cat mix are sold in 100-gram bottles for easy addition over the top of your pets normal food. They contain dozens of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, and probiotics not common in pet food but essential to their overall health. In other words, they help provide things your pet might otherwise be missing.

These pet care supplements are well-balanced mixes for adult pets who are average-sized. Life Extension recommends their serving sizes for six- to nine-pound cats and approximately 30-pound dogs, so scale accordingly if your pet is larger or smaller than that.

If youre going to optimize your health, it helps to know where youre starting. Life Extension offers the opportunity to order virtually any lab test that the popular brand LabCorp offers. Thats 230 tests in every form:

You can do blood tests at home if they are finger-prick tests, but larger blood tests must be done in any of LabCorps blood labs. Most of these labs are walk-in, but you can make an appointment for yourself on LabCorps website to save yourself some time as people with appointments get prioritized. With over 2,000 locations around the United States, youll be able to find a location near you.

Because youre ordering these tests through Life Extension, you cannot pay with insurance. Costs can get prohibitively expensive, but if you dont need to test your allergies by season or a complete blood youth panel (which costs over $800), you can find tests for single vitamins or biomarkers for as low as $20.

After you get your test results back through Life Extension, they recommend you call their Wellness Specialist line to review your results and answer any questions. However, if you have a primary medical provider, we recommend you let them know of your results so that they have a complete picture of your medical health.

Life Extension offers a monthly magazine that you can subscribe to through their site. This magazine is designed to keep you up to date like a blog, giving information about organic food and fitness alongside their standard science-heavy information. They list scientific study results relevant to their services from the past month and innovative treatment protocols and medical findings. Each magazine is about 100 pages long and is accessible both in hard copy and PDF.

If its your first time checking out the LE Magazine, you can get the latest issue for free without a subscription. You can either order this to your home as a physical copy or download it as a PDF. As such, there is never any cost to read the magazine. Just be sure to save it every month so you can stay up to date.

Disease Prevention and Treatment

Life Extension very literally wrote the book on using vitamins and supplements to improve your health. First launched in 1997, Disease Prevention and Treatment is now in its sixth edition and is offered online for sale. It is one of the most comprehensive textbooks available for disease treatment and management. A hard copy of the most recent edition costs $59.95 through Life Extensions site but can be found for much less elsewhere.

This textbook is immense, with over 1,600 pages on uncommon strategies and innovative approaches to improving health and disease outcomes. The book claims that procedures using their supplements can cure diseases such as cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and neurological disorders, implying that this information is hidden from the mainstream. They back up many of their 131 treatment protocols with scientific studies and aim to have the most comprehensive and recent guide to self-protection.

However, Disease Prevention and Treatment has also run into some problems with the FDA. In their 2017 letter to Life Extension, the FDA mentions that the book suggests brain tumors can be cured with specific Life Extension diet and nutritional supplements (alongside the medical oncology standard of care). This assumption of curability seems to be a trend among care suggestions in the book.

Keep in mind that all claims of treating, curing, mitigating, or preventing disease with supplements cannot be verified because we dont yet have the verifiable scientific knowledge to know if its true, despite the scientific studies they leverage. If you have concerns about specific medical issues or symptoms you are experiencing, talk first with your preferred medical provider. Life Extensions processes may work for you but clear it first to ensure the best possible outcome for your health.

Health and Wellness Market

Life Extension has one retail location in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Their Health and Wellness Market has several components:

Events at the lecture hall happen occasionally but never without lots of advertising and the potential of joining clinical research studies at the market.

The grocery store carries other brands of supplements and health foods beyond Life Extension, including Jarrow, Garden of Life, Nutiva, and Bobs Red Mill. If youd like to order a blood test through LabCorp, you can have it done there. While you might not get your results the same day, they have Wellness Specialists on location. You can bring any of your Life Extension results in, and theyll gladly sit down with you to help interpret your results.

Currently, the Health and Wellness Market is available by appointment over the phone only. It is open:

The LabCorp lab has more limited hours, closing at 2:00 PM on weekdays and 1:30 PM on Saturdays, and is closed on Sundays.

Science of Life Extensions supplements

Breaking down Life Extensions scientific merit gets complicated fast. They appear extremely scientific and accurate from the outside, with extensive testing and high ratings from third parties. After all, the other half of Life Extension is the Life Extension Foundation, a long-standing research and testing organization.

There are frequent mentions of scientific studies on product pages without ever linking or citing them, but they also claim that they can predict or unlock things years in advance of mainstream sciences understanding. Some of this is legitimate, and some of it stretches the boundaries of truth a bit.

What this means for their products is that most have an inherently experimental edge. Life Extension takes pride in their ability to be groundbreaking, but they dont always acknowledge that experimental doesnt mean better, but no one wants you to know. Experimental simply means something new, whether its a known ingredient in a new application or a new formula altogether.

Thankfully, Life Extension makes their science clear. Virtually every page on the site has scientific information woven throughout, from product pages to blogs. A vast majority of their known-ingredient supplements are dosed properly based on daily intake recommendations, unlike some large supplement retailers.

Life Extension has repeatedly gotten in trouble for claiming that their products can cure or treat diseases, and we found some of this language still lingering on the site. They also offer headlines like 4 Reasons Why Everyone Should Take Our Amino Acids, which is troublesome simply because supplements are a deeply personal health matter. Not every vitamin or supplement will work for every person, despite what their advertising might say.

Life Extension also offers a blog for science news and health news. The Health News blog is small but posts new articles frequently. These articles go into some detail on anti-aging, nutrition, and vitamins. Each piece is written by experts and scientifically reviewed by medical professionals, much like our own. A typical article goes through a recent scientific study, breaking it down into easy-to-understand language and then explaining how that might apply to you and how you could apply those findings to your life.

For example, one article discusses a study on how better diet quality correlates to decelerated biological aging, specifically a DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet that discourages the intake of processed foods. Though it has a punchy title, the article itself is clearly written and includes a list of their references for all to see. This transparency of outside research isnt something you see throughout most of the site, so its a handy look into Life Extensions processes.

There are also consumer alerts, which provide links to short articles on topics that may impact your rights to purchase substances that Life Extension sells. However, the most recent consumer alerts were in October 2019, with only seven articles in the current section, which dates back to 2015.

The navigation for their scientific research page is not particularly clear. They have multiple landing pages that look different, but all link to the same thing; it appears as though theres a newsletter you can subscribe to, but clicking the link just takes you back to the blog.

Do Life Extensions tablets disintegrate?

For any pill or supplement to work, it needs to both disintegrate (crumble into small pieces) and dissolve (combine with liquid) after its been taken. The rate of disintegration and dissolution depends on the supplement, how soluble it is, the ingredients, and hundreds of other factors. However, the fact still stands: your body cant use a supplement if it isnt absorbed into the bloodstream before being excreted. Tablets, or hard pills, are notorious for not disintegrating or dissolving correctly, as other forms have specific mechanisms built in to help.

There is no formal federal testing agency for verifying whether or not supplements actually work. Instead, we took matters into our own hands and created an artificial stomach-like environment to test some of Life Extensions most popular tablet supplements for proper disintegration. This allows our testing team to check Life Extensions disintegration quality.

Our testers received their boxes of product in Life Extension branded cardboard packaging with inspirational quotes on the inside folds. The bottles themselves were packed tightly and efficiently with Life Extension branded tissue paper and appeared to have been packed with care.

None of the supplements we tested fully disintegrated over the course of our experiment. Some mostly disintegrated but left a full-length sliver of material by the end; some barely began flaking when the experiment was over. Considering Life Extension promotes consistent, high-quality testing, we were truly surprised by these results. These findings mean that there is a chance that these supplements may not be adequately absorbed by your body when you take them. Based on our testing, we would recommend opting for supplements that dont arrive in tablet form.

Life Extension is relatively middle-of-the-road when it comes to how much youll have to pay for their products. While not horribly expensive, they arent necessarily cheap either. A majority of their supplements cost between $10 and $30 for a single bottle, though they can cost as much as $75 or as little as $4. Of course, these bottles also have anywhere between 30 and 300 capsules, so in some cases, you can get a lot more product for a lot less money.

Their other major product LabCorp blood, saliva, breath, urine, and fecal tests is considerably more expensive across the board. These can cost between $20 and over $800, depending on the size of the panel and what you are hoping to have tested. While there arent any observable trends between the testing methods, tests for single vitamins or biomarkers cost around $47. Panel tests, or those which look at more than one element of your health, sit around $150. The more complex the test, the more it will cost.

If you know youll be purchasing the same product from them repeatedly, it might be worth it to sign up for an autoship subscription. Autoship will get your product shipped to you in monthly intervals without having to reorder it, with the bonus of free shipping. They will always update your order to automatically pay the lowest price possible and have the most recent formulations.

If you know youll be shopping from Life Extension regularly, they offer a paid rewards program called Premier Rewards. After paying an annual $49.95 subscription fee, youll unlock:

Youll also receive a one-time $50 credit to your account to offset the first years subscription fee. Every purchase you make will add LE Dollars to your account, where every dollar spent is a dollar added. You can then redeem these LE Dollars to use on other Life Extension products.

Premier Rewards are also available internationally for a slightly higher $59.95. However, not every perk is available in every country, so make sure that youll be able to get what you want before registering.

If you arent interested in the Premier Rewards program, every purchase you make with an account will still earn 2% of the orders cost in LE Dollars with every purchase.

Life Extension offers two platforms to contact customer support: phone and in-browser chat.

Originally posted here:
Life Extension Reviews | Everything You Need To Know - Innerbody

$40 Off Life Extension Coupon January 2023 – CNET Coupons

Shop around to find a promo code of your choice and copy it.

Visit the website and choose the desired products.

Go to the cart page and locate the Discount code field under your order summary.

Paste the promo code youve copied, and enjoy the discount.

Make sure you want to redeem a deal thats valid

Correct the formatting of the code you pasted if necessary

Check if the discount comes with minimum order amount requirements and meet them if you havent already

Sometimes coupons apply for specific items, so ensure youve added them to your order

If you cant find any available Life Extension discount codes, theres a chance that expired ones can do the trick. Its not always possible, but sometimes expired coupons can still be redeemed. Another option is to shop in their sale section.

Currently, its possible to redeem only one Life Extension coupon per order. In other words, theres no combining coupons policy.

At present, they dont have a physical store. So, you cant redeem Life Extension online coupons.

There are endless saving opportunities on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However, after thorough research, we couldnt find available offers from Life Extension during these events.

Fortunately, you can avail yourself of great discounts when shopping at Life Extension during public holidays. Previous offers have been launched on Labor Day, the 4th of July, and Memorial Day. Their last promotions have included between $10 and 40$ savings on purchases of over $75 and $250, respectively, on Labor Day. This years Independence Day sale came with up to $45 off orders of over $250. The latest Life Extension Memorial Day sale offered $10 off $100+, $25 off purchases $200+, and $45 off orders $300+.

Shopping at Life Extension on seasonal events comes with plenty of deep discounts. Fathers and Mothers Day come with offers of between 40% and 60% off, respectively. Also, Life Extension launches annual clearance sales, available in the Summer. The beginning of the year comes with a Flash sale at Life Extension. Valid one day only, you can enjoy $50 off orders of over $350. There is also a Christmas sale. Life Extensions latest Christmas event included between $10 and $65 saving options on orders of over $100 or $450. Stay tuned for other promos the day after Christmas. Additionally, the retailer launches a Top picks sale several times a year. You can find their top picks at up to 60% off and get free shipping.

Theres a permanent sale section on the Life Extension website. There, you can find vitamins and supplements at between 25% and 70% off their regular price.

Theres no permanent free shipping available at Life Extension. That said, they often launch promotions where you can get free shipping. You can also redeem coupons to get your products without having to pay shipping fees. Otherwise, shipping charges start from $5.50.

The Life Extension rewards program, called Life Extension Premier, comes with intriguing perks. It costs only $49.95 a year, but you receive an immediate credit of $50 upon enrolling. You also get free unlimited shipping and 4% back on purchases, expressed in LE Dollars. They can be redeemed on your next order. There are other premium perks, including gifts, premium content, prompt notifications on upcoming sales, and rewards for participating in surveys.

At present, there is no available Life Extension app discount. That is due to the fact that they have not launched an app yet.

Up to now, Life Extension hasnt adopted a military discount policy. You can always pay a visit to their websites Terms of Use page for updates.

Students cant avail of special discounts at Life Extension. You can sign up for

our newsletter, and well inform you if that changes.

Currently, there are no sign-up offers available in the Life Extension newsletter. Still, signing up will get you notified promptly about different promotions and health and nutrition news.

Sometimes, Life Extension launches first-order promo codes. Customers can get $5 to $10 off on their first order, plus free shipping.

Theres a refer-a-friend policy available at Life Extension. You can receive $10 LE Dollars for every friend you successfully refer.

Under the Life Extension return policy, shoppers can return products they are dissatisfied with within 12 months of the purchase date. You can receive a replacement or refund. Contact their customer service for details.

Customers can make payments at Life Extension using different payment options. They accept the following credit cards: Visa, American Express, and Mastercard. You can also pay via PayPal, Klarna, or bank transfer.

See original here:
$40 Off Life Extension Coupon January 2023 - CNET Coupons

Shop Vitamins & Supplements – Life Extension

What are vitamins?

Vitamins are essential nutrients our bodies need for a wide array of health functions. If you eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, youre on the right path to getting the vitamins you need for optimal healththats because plant-based foods tend to be great natural sources of vitamins. For example, spinach is a great way to get in vitamin A, and many whole grains are good sources of B vitamins such as folate. And lets not forget oranges and other citrus fruits, which are a rich in vitamin C. Food isnt the only way to get vitamins, however; most famously, vitamin D is nicknamed the sunshine vitamin because you get it from sun exposure.

But even if you spend a lot of time outdoors and follow the most health-conscious of diets, you likely will need to take vitamins as supplements to achieve optimum wellness. Vitamin brands offer these nutrients as capsules, tablets, fat-soluble softgels, powders, and gummies.

People often mistakenly call minerals vitamins, because both are essential to our health. Popular minerals to take in supplement form include bone strength must-have calcium, as well as iron, zinc, magnesium and selenium. Foods are a good natural source of these minerals, but just as its difficult to get enough vitamins from our diet. We also often need to take a dietary supplement to get adequate levels of minerals.

The term supplements refers to vitamins and mineral supplements, as well as amino acids such as L-carnitine, antioxidants such as coenzyme CoQ10, and also herbals like echinacea. You may also find supplement formulas called multivitamins which contain both vitamins and other nutrients necessary for wellness.

Taking vitamins and supplements is a good insurance policy to fill in any dietary gaps. Even if your diet chock full of superfoods that are brimming with nutrition, its likely that youre missing out on some important nutrients. For example, unless you eat fatty fish regularly, you will need to supplement with omega-3 to get the heart and brain health benefits of fish oil. Beyond that, you can also supplement as part of your pursuit of a specific health goalwhether its vitamin C for immune support, collagen for healthy skin and joints, lutein and astaxanthin for eye health, sports supplements, or a specific health formula to support your healthy weight journey.

To avoid a deficiency, you should take a high-quality multivitamin that includes at a minimum vitamin B-complex (consisting of vitamin B12, folic acid, biotin and other B vitamins), vitamin C, vitamin D3, and vitamin E, as well as calcium, magnesium, and other minerals. Curcumin is a great option for heart health, brain function, comfortable joints and more; prebiotics and probiotics support optimal digestive health (and who doesnt want that?). If you follow a plant-based diet, you can obtain most of these vitamins and supplements from vegetarian capsules, including vegan vitamin D3.

Be a picky consumer when shopping for vitamins online! While youll find many natural food stores and online vitamin stores that offer a dizzying array of health products, ensure youre choosing a brand that takes a science-based approach to the formulation of vitamins and supplements. Only order health products that have been tested for efficacy and can provide a Certificate of Analysis verifying quality and safety. Ensure the supplements are being shipped from a climate-controlled facility as well, since spoiling can happen in extreme heat. A final word to the wise: always check the expiration date on your supplements before consuming!

Established in 1980, Life Extension is one of the longest-standing vitamin brands and formulates every product based on scientific research, using the dosages from clinical studies. Choose from an extensive assortment of non-GMO and gluten-free vitamins and supplements, offered at affordable prices. Plus, our Premier Rewards program gives you the chance to earn rewards on every purchase. Theres no risk to order; Life Extension offers a complete one-year satisfaction guarantee return policy. Order today!

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6 Pros and Cons of Immortality: The Ethics of Life Extension

This article is for my (J.P.s) sister.

Shes always been the one in my family most vocal about her concerns with the pros and cons of immortality.

Particularly the cons.

And I think the potential problems of increased life expectancy that she identifies are concerns a lot of people share.

Because once you get past the question of if radical human life extension is even possible, the inevitable next question is, Should we do it?

In fact, there are a lot of ethical arguments against life extension (as my sister is wont to remind me).

Im sure youve heard, or even thought of, many of them yourself.

What if only the rich can afford it?

What about overpopulation and the environment?

Wont you just get bored?

Who would want to live to 150 if youre just old and decrepit and in a nursing home all that time?

In this post, were going to try and address all these longevity objections, and more (Immortal dictators! Religious concerns! Social Security!), but first we should talk about that last question (being old and decrepit for decades) briefly.

Many people, when they think about life extension, assume the process will simply extend the tail-end of our lives, adding more years on to that period when we are beset with frailty and age-related mental and physical decline.

Stuck in a wheelchair, youll have to play bingo for an extra fifty years while youre forced to stay alive through uncomfortable tubes up your nose or something.

And believe me, no one, myself included, wants that.

But what spanners and other people interested in human longevity want is not just extended lifespans, but extended healthspans.

As we said in our very first article on human life extension here:

Human life extension addresses both chronological and biological aging; it asks not just how can we live longer, but how long can we live well. Healthspan, or the years of our lives when were unencumbered by disease or disability, addresses just that. What if you could have the body you had at 25 well into your 80s or 100s or 120s? What more could you do with those extra rich years of life? Who could you become?

The technical term for this is compressing morbidity: shortening the decrepit, morbid years and extending the healthy ones. And, as we also discussed in our first article, theres plenty of scientific evidence to suggest that anti-aging interventions can do just this in both animals and in humans.

So what well be talking about throughout the rest of this article on the ethics of life extension is not extending the unhealthy years of our lives, but extending our healthy, active, vibrant years and why (quite a few, actually) people think that could still be a bad thing.

Because this is a (really) long post, feel free to jump to the section youre most interested in, rather than read through everything.

Does death make life meaningless?

Tolstoy and Nietzsche would argue that thats absolutely the caseand theyve gotten plenty of attention for it, especially in Western culture, because it runs contrary to an unspoken assumption that death itself is what gives life meaning. Christians look forward to heaven. Jews see death as a terrible but necessary part of Gods plan. Buddhists believe death leads only to rebirth. In so many philosophical traditions, death is essential for life itself to have meaning.

Some even go as far to claim that death is required for life to have meaning. Theythe likes of the late Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl and philosopher Sir Bernard Williamspresent three major arguments against life extension:

Lets break them all down.

Religious fatalism is the belief that an individuals health is predetermined by a higher power; the individual can not and should not intervene. Religious fatalism isnt something relegated only to cults or extremists. Its significantly correlated with race, people with lower incomes, and people with lower levels of education. Religious fatalism is distinct from fatalism, in that it refers specifically to healthcare decisions. Many who believe in destiny or fate will also argue that they are predetermined to suffer from an illness or disease, and recovery will not hinge on medical interventionits up to the universe.

And, if fate does have a role in medical outcomes, intervening would be foolish. Why waste the money and resources on doing so if youre just going to die anyway? Using this logic, aging should be embraced as a natural part of life.

Following that line of thinking, the medical field should cease to exist. Forget cancer researchclose the childrens hospitals and ER rooms and eliminate the FDA. Life-sustaining drugs like insulin, Albuterol, and Levothyroxine should be banned along with seatbelts and helmets.

Of course, many who believe in religious fatalism dont necessarily want to be so prescriptive to the rest of society. They might see it as an important personal choice, but not something to put on others. Orand I find this common among my circlesits the elimination of age-related death altogether thats off-putting. Theyre completely comfortable with, say, finding a cure for Alzheimers, cancer, and diabetes, but when age itself is indicated as a major precursor to all these diseases, they shrug it off. Ageing is an essential part of life. Its not to be tampered with.

Part of the reason is because being old without being healthy is horrific. Think wheelchairs, struggling to open Jell-O cups, and slowly losing your senseseach one a tragic loss for a 15-year-old but an inevitability for someone over 90. But this goes to show that we just dont consider the elderly as human as those younger than them. Frailty is a tragedy for anyone, not just for those deemed young enough for it to be uncommon.

Thus, the indefinite extension of healthspan, or the years of our lives when were unencumbered by disease or disability, is really the ultimate goal of life extension. And many find that option far more palatable; if one practices yoga or avoids processed carbohydrates in an effort for a longer healthspan, the prospect of a lengthened lifespan becomes far more palatable.

And in the end, the ethics of life extension require that no one is forcing anyone else to live longer than they would like. Just like anyone can deny medical interventions, so too can they choose not to live longer than they believe they were destined to. That is, in my view, nothing but a personal choice.

If we were immortal, we could legitimately postpone every action forever. [] But in the face of death as absolute finis to our future and boundary to our possibilities, we are under the imperative of utilizing our lifetimes to the utmost, not letting the singular opportunities whose finite sum constitutes the whole of life pass by unused.

Frankl, in the quote above, argues that with all the time of eternity, nothing could get done. One could, theoretically, indefinitely put off confessing a love, writing a novel, or starting a company. Of course, discomfort should also be a part of the conversion; while one could choose to never eat because the process takes action, hunger is a tremendous motivator, even if one is nowhere near close to dying from starvation.

Some contemporary psychological studies support Frankl. For example, a 2007 article published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that those who encounter death over a long period are more likely to be intrinsically motivated (and actually write that novel theyve always wanted to). That said, the threat of death isnt necessarily a requirement for intrinsic motivation in general. Realistically, there is a range of reasons why people do thingsfor praise, for accomplishment, or to just do it,and very few of them have to do with the inevitability of death.

In fact, philosophers like Heidegger have argued that most people live their lives in denial of their death. One study on mortality salience (awareness of ones own death) found that research participants actively tried not to engage with their own mortalitya reaction that may be a biological response. It would be tough to argue death is the sole reason for any significant actions people take throughout their lives if theyre actively avoiding considering it.

Lets say that immortality has no effect on your motivationin fact, you have the curiosity of a 25-year-old and the body to match. Youve ticked off your bucket list. You live where you want, work where you want (if you want), and you do what you want. Life is splendid. And boring.

Desperately boring.

This could be one of the major cons of immortality, but Brooke Alan Trisel points out that not all of life is meaningful. He writes, most of our lives are neither meaningless nor meaningful, but lie somewhere between these two extremes.

I would amend his argument further to say that most moments of our individual lives are neither meaningless or meaningful, but lie somewhere in between. For example, celebrating your wedding day might be tremendously meaningful, but the hours spent visiting florists might not be.

Its true that old people experience boredom, and that that boredom can be detrimental to their health. The boredom that they experience, however, often has to do with perils of aging: loneliness, immobility, and declining faculties.

I doubt anyone would advocate that we euthanize everyone over 80 because they might suffer from boredom. Finding interest in new activities, engaging with curiosity, and experiencing excitement, joy, and contentment are all pillars of mental health. Boredom, itself, is a health issue, and not necessarily a reason to prevent life extension.

Weve all seen those dystopian sci-fi stories.

While the rich lead lives of unimaginable luxury in their space stations, enjoying near-immortality and all the sexbots they can afford, the poor toil in the spice mines below, dying early from Spice Lung or malfunctioning cheap cybernetic implants.

No one wants to live in that worldand not just because it would entail having to endure more of Matt Damons terrible acting.

And with rising concerns about wealth inequality, its entirely understandable that many people ask the question:

What if only the rich can afford life-extension treatments?

Because while global wealth inequality has actually been declining for the first time in two centuriesdue largely to the rapid economic growth afforded by technological innovation and the opening of markets, particularly in Asiasome measures of wealth inequality within countries have shown worrying rises.

So is it ethical to pursue life extension if its not accessible to everyone?

A 2016 study found that, The gap in life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of individuals was 14.6 years for men and 10.1 years for women.

However, it may not be as bad as it seems.

A more recent study that took into account income mobility (instead of assuming people kept the same income their entire lives) found a gap of only 2.4 years for men with different income levels, and just 2.2 years for women.

They did also caution that though the gap is not as large as originally thought, it has been widening slightly over the last 30 years, possibly due to differences in education levels.

In short: yes, there is already a (small) gap in the longevity of the rich versus the poor.

Will expensive life-extension treatments widen that gap so much that the poor will be doomed to die early?

The answer to that question has several components:

To answer that first component we can look at some real-world examples, both of existing anti-aging treatments already on the market, and of past medical innovations.

For instance, the diabetes drug metformin is a classic candidate for a possible anti-aging pill. According to a recent metformin meta-analysis, Diabetics taking metformin had significantly lower all-cause mortality than non-diabetics, and a host of other studies have shown other beneficial effects of the drug, like cancer protection and slower brain aging.

And the cost of this possible wonder drug?

According to GoodRx, retail costs for 60 tablets of 500mg of metformin (a 1-2 month supply) range from $9 to $16, even without insurance.

Thats about 15-25 cents a pill.

Other potential life-extension molecules are similarly cheap.

Resveratrol, another possible longevity compound, can be bought on Amazon for $16.99-$27.99 for a 30-90 supply .

Glucosamine costs as little as ten cents a pill, has been the subject of several recent studies showing it decreases all-cause mortality by as much as 39%, and may be as effective for longevity as exercise.

Aspirin (shown to extend life in male mice) costs $1 for 100 pills at my local Rite Aid.

And the list goes on.

All the ones listed above have been known about and studied for decadesin some cases over a centuryis there evidence that newly discovered and developed drugs would be similarly inexpensive?

Its likely. Take vaccines.

Vaccines are a good parallel to anti-aging medicines because they are developed to treat a deadly, widespread disease that impacts large swaths of the human population and they thus have a huge demand and a requirement to distribute to the most people possible. Both also represent huge net benefits to society compared to the costs of not treating the diseases they target (some research indicates slowing aging could save the U.S. $7.1 trillion over 50 years).

Developing a vaccine can cost as much as $2.8-$3.7 billion and yet many vaccines, including those for the most widespread diseases, are offered free-of-cost or at very low prices. For example, the flu vaccine is often free and almost always fully-covered by insurance.

Other vaccines can be had, even without insurance, for as low as $6.

Most of these vaccines have been developed only in the last few decades, and yet their cost is low enough that almost everyone can afford them. The combination of widespread demand and subsidies means that usually the obstacle to getting a vaccine is a lack of education or of desire, not of financial means.

And theres good reason to think new anti-aging treatments may be treated like vaccines. If the FDA labels aging a treatable disease (which may well happen), and since fully 100% of the population is afflicted by this disease, demand for effective longevity treatments will be so high that medical and pharmaceutical companies can afford to set prices low, since they will be selling their products to so many people.

But of course, there may be many different types of therapies and interventions that are developed to reverse and slow aging, and not all of them will be as simple or cheap as a pill or a shot.

What if more complex interventions are needed to reverse aging?

Things like gene therapy can cost millions of dollars. In fact, theres already an (unproven) gene therapy for aging on the market, similar to the procedure longevity influencer Liz Parrish of Bioviva performed on herself in 2015, and its price tag is $1 million.

Not exactly pocket change.

So lets look at how likely expensive longevity treatments are to stay expensive, such that only the wealthy can afford them.

In the last 17 years, the cost to have your whole genome sequenced has gone from roughly $1 billion in 2003, to as low as $299 today.

And most technological innovation follows this same pattern.

First an experimental, expensive innovation is developed. Wealthy early-adopters buy it (think investment bankers and car phones back in the 80s), and their purchases fund the research and development needed to improve the innovation, better distribute it, and make it less expensive. Soon, every person who wants one can afford it, and at a much higher level of quality than the original that was available only to the rich.

High initial prices of a new product are thus almost an extended form of R&D funding (and clinical testing with data provided by early adopters). The rich are essentially paying the money necessary to further develop the product and get it to the masses. What the rich pay for with money, the poor pay for with time.

Its the reason the smartphone in your pocket only costs a couple hundred dollars, and you dont need to lug a car around to use it.

Its also the reason your Apple Watch isnt the size of a room, and yet can do way more health monitoring than the early electrocardiogram machines could (and at a significantly lower price).

In fact, Elon Musks business model for Tesla was explicitly written around this principle. He designed and built an impractical, expensive electric sports car (the Roadster) and sold it at exorbitant prices to the rich, in order to fund the research and development of his more affordable mass market car, the Model 3.

And the medical market is little different from the car market (or other technology markets) in this respect. Despite lots of hand-wringing about rising medical costs, especially in the United States, most of the increase in cost is due to increased consumption, not an increase in the cost of individual medical procedures, devices, or medicines themselves (obviously there are exceptions that get lots of media coverage, but in general this is the case). As we get wealthier, it turns out, we want to buy more medical care.

Intuitively, anti-aging medicine should even help lower the total cost of medical care for people, as individuals will have to spend less on treating the very expensive chronic diseases of old-age like Alzheimers or cancer. These health-cost savings from longevity medicine are often referred to as the Longevity Dividend.

Contrary to popular belief, the real money in almost any market is not in selling boutique treatments to a few billionaires, but selling commercialized interventions to the millions (and, globally, billions) in the middle and lower classes.

Globally, the middle class accounted for $35 trillion in consumer spending, and the lower class another $8 trillion, for a combined spending power of $43 trillion. The rich (those spending over $110 a day) accounted for only $11 trillion in total consumer spending.

Globally, the middle class accounted for $35 trillion in consumer spending, and the lower class another $8 trillion, for a combined spending power of $43 trillion. The rich (those spending over $110 a day) accounted for only $11 trillion in total consumer spending.

All else equal, which market would you rather develop an anti-aging product for?

But of course, despite all this there is still a slim chance that life-extension therapies could buck every historical, technological, and market trend ever observed and somehow remain insanely expensive forever.

So if anti-aging medicines and treatments turn out to be one of those rare types of goods that will only ever be available to the super wealthy, is it moral to ban them or prevent their development?

This philosophical question can be addressed from any number of different frameworks. Its an age-old ethical question: should some people (like the rich) be afforded more opportunities than others (like the poor)?

Bioethicist John Harris offers a utilitarian perspective: If immortality or increased life expectancy is a good, it is doubtful ethics to deny palpable goods to some people because we cannot provide them for all.

Harris further analogizes, We cannot and should not seek to prevent the development of [longevity treatments], any more than we should deny kidney transplants because there are not enough kidneys to go aroundin other words, we should develop life-extension even if we cannot provide it to everyone.

Philosophy professor John Davis, in The American Journal of Bioethics, argues that,

We accept the general principle that taking from the Haves is justified only if doing so makes the Have-nots more than marginally better off. If life-extension is possible, then one must weigh the life-years at stake for those who receive the treatment against whatever burdens making such treatments available might impose on the Have-nots, who cannot afford the treatment.

The greatest burdenis that ones death is worse the earlier one dies relative to how long it is possible to live. For example, a death at 17 is much worse than a death at 97. Because life extension changes how long it is possible to live, life-extension will make death at 97 tragic in a way it has never been beforeHoweverwhen this burden is compared to the number of additional life-years the Haves will lose if life-extension is prevented from becoming available, the burden to the Have-nots is marginal compared to what is at stake for the Haves. Therefore, Inhibiting the development of life-extension is unjustified, even though it will probably not be available to everyone for a long time.

In other words, if life-extension research alleviates aggregate suffering even a little, even if only for the wealthy, anti-aging treatments are a moral good.

The rest is here:
6 Pros and Cons of Immortality: The Ethics of Life Extension

NAD+ Cell Regenerator and Resveratrol Elite – Life Extension

NAD+ Cell Regenerator and Resveratrol Elite combines NIAGEN nicotinamide riboside and ultra-bioavailable forms resveratrol with quercetin and fisetin to create an innovative nutritional supplement for longevity and youthful cellular energy production.

Resveratrol is a well-known longevity and anti-aging supplement.1 Our Resveratrol Elite formulas contains trans-resveratrol, the form associated with beneficial biological effects.2-5 Resveratrol also promotes healthy insulin sensitivity, supports a healthy inflammatory response and has been shown to promote healthy endothelial function for a healthy cardiovascular system.4,6,7

A more bioavailable resveratrol

Weve combined resveratrol with galactomannan fibers from fenugreek seeds. This makes our Resveratrol Elite formulas up to 10 times more bioavailable. This means that the trans-resveratrol in our supplements reaches higher levels in your bloodstream and circulates longer than traditional, unformulated resveratrol.

Resveratrol and heart health

One way that resveratrol promotes heart health is by helping to shield the body from oxidative stress at the cellular level.8 By inhibiting oxidative stress in your cardiovascular system, resveratrol promotes endothelial healthan essential component of living a long, healthy life.9

Resveratrol and brain health

At the same time, resveratrols ability to support cerebrovascular blood flow may also make it good for your brain: there is clinical evidence that resveratrol can help encourage youthful neurological function and with it, things like cognition. Interestingly, this same trial showed that resveratrol promoted healthy glucose metabolismanother essential aspect of healthy longevity.10

Fight general fatigue with NIAGEN

Nicotinamide riboside increases your bodys levels of NAD+, a coenzyme critical to healthy cellular function.11 In a randomized controlled trial published in 2017, older adults taking a daily dose of 250 mg of nicotinamide riboside had a 40% increase in NAD+ levels after just 30 days.2 Studies in preclinical models have shown that increasing NAD+ also encouraged healthy metabolic and cognitive function.3,4

Fisetin and quercetin

Fisetin and quercetin are phytonutrient compounds that augment trans-resveratrols healthy effects, promote cardiovascular health, support healthy cellular function, fight oxidative stress, promote a healthy inflammatory response and more.9,10

Take the fight against aging to the cellular level with NAD+ Cell Regenerator and Resveratrol Elite.

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NAD+ Cell Regenerator and Resveratrol Elite - Life Extension

Alcor Life Extension Foundation preserves 199 dead bodies in nitrogen – Goa Chronicle

USAs Alcor Life Extension Foundation has claimed that it will soon develop the scientific way to rebirth. The company, in USAs Arizona, has preserved the dead bodies of around 199 people only with the hope that once the technique is developed, they will get respite from their illnesses, and they will come back to life. With this hope of these people getting their lives back, Alcor has reserved their dead bodies in nitrogen tanks and the company calls them patients who lost their lives because of illnesses like cancer, paralysis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, etc.

Dead bodies preserved this way are called cryopreserved. Among these bodies, the youngest is that of a Thai child, who had lost her life at the age of 2 because of brain cancer in the year 2015. Alcors CEO, Max Moor has said that both of the childs parents are doctors and despite getting multiple brain surgeries performed on her, nothing helped. Hal Finney, who pioneered bitcoin, is also a patient at Alcor. After he lost his life in 2014 due to paralysis, his body is being preserved here.

The process of cryopreservation is highly different, after the legal announcement of a persons death, the blood and other fluids from the body are ejected out, which are then replaced with special chemicals, which prevent the boy from getting damaged, after which the dead body is preserved in extremely cold temperatures like glass.

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Alcor Life Extension Foundation preserves 199 dead bodies in nitrogen - Goa Chronicle

Kauai County to hand out thousands of free COVID home test kits – Yahoo News

Oct. 15Kauai County will give out thousands of free home test kits next week at various neighborhood centers.

The county, in partnership with the state Health Department, is offering about 6, 000 COVID-19 tests kits on a first-come, first-served basis, starting Wednesday. There will be a limit of five tests per person or household.

"Mahalo to our partners with the Kauai District Health Office, the Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Kauai Emergency Management Agency for making these free tests available to our community, " said Mayor Derek Kawakami in a news release. "Home test kits are one of the many tools at our disposal to reduce the risk of spreading COVID."

These COVID-19 tests have an expiration date of November 2022, officials said, but have received a seven-month shelf-life extension from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. They are set to expire in June.

The distribution schedule will be as follows :

Wednesday9 a.m. to noon, Hanalei Neighborhood Center1 to 4 p.m., Kilauea Neighborhood Center Thursday9 a.m. to noon, Waimea Neighborhood Center1 to 4 p.m., Hanapepe Neighborhood Center Friday9 a.m. to noon, Bryan J. Baptiste Sports Complex1 to 4 p.m., Lihue Neighborhood Center COVID-19 testing is also available islandwide on Kauai, with sites listed at.

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Kauai County to hand out thousands of free COVID home test kits - Yahoo News

8 Best Vitamin D Supplements to Take This Winter – CNET

In this article:

Everyone knows vitamin D -- it's the nutrient we get from the sun. Vitamin D is important for several bodily functions, the main ones being bone and muscle strength and immune function. Still, about 35% of Americans are vitamin D deficient. Research has found that vitamin D deficiencies and diseases like depression, diabetes and cancer are correlated.

Vitamin D is essential. But with winter coming and food source limitations, getting vitamin D isn't always as easy as walking out in the sun. Supplements are used to combat such deficiencies.

A note on units of measurement for vitamin D supplements -- different brands use different units in their marketing. Some measure in micrograms (mcg), while others use international units (IU). The nutritional label typically has both units and the percentage of the daily recommended value. It can get confusing.

Quick conversions that will help you read this list:

Vitamin D supplements span quality, dosage and price point. There are many options, but we narrowed it down to the top eight best vitamin D supplements.

Hum Nutrition Here Comes the Sun is the best overall vitamin D supplement because of its vitamin content and rigorous testing. According to the Hum Nutrition website, this vitamin D supplement boosts mood, maintains your immune system and aids calcium absorption.

It's a non-GMO and gluten-free vitamin D supplement free of artificial flavors, colors or sweeteners. With the serving size of one softgel, you get 250% of your recommended daily value of vitamin D. The vitamin D source was derived from lichen, which makes this vitamin D supplement great for vegans and vegetarians.

Hum Nutrition's vitamin D supplements are sustainably sourced and feature third-party testing.

Price: $19 for a 30-day supply

Vitamin D per serving: 50 mcg or 250% of the daily value

Serving size: One softgel, daily

Hum Nutrition's best features:

Things to consider:

Nature Made vitamin supplements are often my choice for budget shoppers because of the price, vitamin content and company reputation. The Nature Made Vitamin D3 Softgels are available in multiple dosages, so you can choose which works best for you. They have dosages from 25 mcg to a maximum of 250 mcg.

You really can't beat the price of Nature Made. You can get up to a 250-day supply for under $20. Not to mention that the softgels are small and easy to swallow -- and you only have to take one per day.

Price: $16.93 for a 250-day supply

Vitamin D per serving: 50 mcg or 250% of the daily value

Serving size: one softgel, daily

Nature Made's best features:

Things to consider:

If you have trouble swallowing pills, liquid vitamin D options are available the best of which is Pure Encapsulations Vitamin D3 liquid.

It's a small bottle that's easy to transport, which allows you to add it to food anywhere. It's also flavorless. Liquid supplements give you the flexibility that capsule or pill supplements can't. You can also alter the dosage based on seasons and needs. Remember to always pay close attention to how much you're ingesting.

This vitamin D supplement is sourced from lichen. It includes no artificial flavors and is gluten-free and non-GMO. Pure Encapsulation products are third-party tested by organizations like Advanced Laboratories, Eurofins and Intertek.

Price: $29.55 for 22.5 ml bottle

Vitamin D per serving: 25 mcg or 125% of vitamin D of the daily value

Serving size: One drop, daily

Pure Encapsulations' best features:

Things to consider:

For people who need a higher dose of vitamin D, -- those with malabsorption syndromes, osteoporosis or liver failure -- Life Extension Vitamin D3 supplement is a good choice. Most vitamin D supplements have 25 mcg to 50 mcg. The vitamin D supplement from Life Extension offers 125 mcg or 5,000 IU, which is significantly more than other brands.

Given this vitamin D supplement has such a high dosage, it's important to speak to your doctor before taking it. It shouldn't be taken by the average person who doesn't need a huge boost of vitamin D. Life Extension's bottle label advises you to meet with your doctor for regular blood tests to determine your vitamin D levels.

Price: $15.17 for a 120-day supply

Vitamin D per serving: 125 mcg or 625% of the daily value

Serving size: one softgel, daily

Life Extension's best features:

Things to consider:

Many vitamin D supplements happen to be vegan. However, Truvani is the best vegan vitamin D supplement. It's a plant-based and USDA-certified organic supplement sourced from organic lichens that doesn't include additives or processed ingredients. This vitamin D supplement has an average amount of vitamin D at 50 mcg. This vitamin D supplement comes in a small, uncoated tablet. It's easy to swallow, but you can also add it to smoothies or drinks and let it dissolve.

Price: $14.99 for a 30-day supply

Vitamin D per serving: 50 mcg or 250% of the daily value

Serving size: one tablet, daily

Truvani's best features:

Things to consider:

Nordic Naturals Vitamin D3 Gummies are an all-natural supplement free of artificial sugars or additives. With this vitamin D supplement, you get a solid dose of vitamin D without all the extras that gummy vitamins tend to have.

This gummy vitamin D supplement features a wild berry flavor with organic sucrose and fumaric acid sour berry coating. An important thing to note is that while the sugars included are not artificial (organic sugar cane and organic tapioca syrup), there are still two grams of added sugar in this product. It's not the highest I've seen, but it's something to consider if you watch your sugar intake closely. Added sugars are extremely common in the gummy industry -- that's how they get their delicious flavors. Unlike other brands, Nordic Naturals also offers a zero-sugar version sweetened with xylitol.

Price: $12.07 for a 30-day supply

Vitamin D per serving: 25 mcg or 125% of the daily value.

Serving size: 1 gummy, daily

Nordic Naturals' best features:

Things to consider:

Ritual is a well-known vitamin subscription service. It's the best multivitamin with vitamin D because of its traceable ingredients and dense nutrient content. According to Ritual, the Essential Multivitamin helps bone health, brain health and immune function.

Ritual multivitamins include a vegan D3 ingredient made from UK-sourced lichen. With each serving, you get 50 mcg of vitamin D, double what some supplements offer. Since it's a multivitamin, you get additional nutrients like folate and iron.

Ritual supplements are backed by a clinical study that found that the Ritual Essential Multivitamin for Women resulted in a 43% increase in vitamin D levels. It's worth noting that Ritual was involved in the study.

Price: $30 for a 30-day supply

Vitamin D per serving: 50 mcg or 250% of the daily value.

Serving size: two capsules, daily

Ritual's best features:

Things to consider:

Vitamin D is essential for pregnancy as it aids in the development of a baby's bones. Vitamin D deficiencies during pregnancy have been linked to newborns' disordered skeletal homeostasis or fractures. Experts recommend that pregnant women intake up to 4,000 IU (100 mcg) of vitamin D3 daily to prevent preterm births and infections.

Most vitamin D supplements don't offer that much vitamin D3 per serving. However, the FullWell Prenatal Multivitamin does. Developed by a fertility nutrition expert, FullWell supplements are non-GMO and free of common allergens like nuts, dairy, gluten and shellfish.

FullWell Prenatal Multivitamin includes the recommended 4,000 IU of vitamin D and all other nutrients a pregnant person needs -- like vitamins A, V, E and B6. This supplement also offers a hefty dose of pantothenic acid at 2,143% daily value and biotin at 1,429%.

Price: $49.95 for a 30-day supply

Vitamin D per serving: 100 mcg or 667% of the daily value

Serving size: eight capsules, daily

FullWell's best features:

Things to consider:

When choosing the best vitamin D supplements for this list, we considered factors like price, dosage and vitamin D source. We also paid close attention to third-party certifications that the products carry. Due to the limited FDA regulations in the vitamin and supplement industry, third-party testing and certifications are essential to determine product quality and purity. We did not test these products in-house. We relied on customer reviews for things like taste and ease of swallowing.

Our bodies need vitamin D, and as a result, there are a ton of supplements out there with vitamin D in them. From pure vitamin D supplements to multivitamins or prenatal supplements, there tends to be vitamin D in all of them. So which vitamin D supplement should you buy?

When shopping for vitamin D supplements, keep these key factors in mind:

What's the difference between vitamin D and D3?

Vitamin D is broken down into two main forms -- vitamin D2 and D3. The difference is where they come from. Vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol) is found in plant sources like mushrooms or fungi. Vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol is derived from animal sources.

How often should you take vitamin D supplements?

Unlike other nutrients, our bodies store vitamin D in fat cells, which allow them to release it when needed. Many supplements with higher doses of vitamin D are not designed to be taken each day since there likely already is some stored in the body. Taking too much vitamin D can result in stomach discomfort, weight loss and kidney issues. A lower vitamin D supplement is considered safe, particularly if you're deficient in vitamin D.

The information contained in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as health or medical advice. Always consult a physician or other qualified health provider regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition or health objectives.

Excerpt from:
8 Best Vitamin D Supplements to Take This Winter - CNET

Think Outside The (Titanium) Box: Isochoric Cryopreservation Could Save Lives – Forbes

Cryobiology illustration generated using Midjourney generative AI

Have you ever thought about what would happen if you suddenly need organ transplantation, but no one you know who is willing to donate is a match? An integral part of organ transplantation is, of course, donors and recipients, or people who donate the organs for matching people in need. They are registered within the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, an organization that arranges everyone on donor-recipient lists taking into consideration the severity of their illnesses. Their database contains all detailed information on blood and tissue types, organ sizes, medical urgency, and the geographical distance between the donor and the recipient. As soon as there is a newly available organ, a match is found throughout their database and shipped as soon as possible. Or at least thats how the system aims to work.

But there is a hidden player - cold. From Ancient Greece and Rome to modern days, our society has utilized cold in many ways, mostly to preserve food. However, in modern medicine, cold was also found in quite a few applications, such as freezing human sperm and embryos in the process of in vitro fertilization. Intuitively, modern medicine also futuristically looks at cold as a useful agent that could save our lives many years ahead, in the sense of preserving (freezing) our bodies now, and reviving them once we find the cures for untreatable diseases that may have impacted us.

But, coming back to organ transplantation, cold plays a huge role in this process. Once the organ has been removed from the donor's body, it needs to come to the recipient in the exact same functional state. Several external and environmental conditions can severely damage the organ until it's no longer of use. One of the key factors is temperature, which needs to be low enough to slow down biochemical reactions happening in the organ after extraction to prevent further damage. To successfully transport and deliver organs, they need to be kept on ice (a term called hypothermic storage), with an average temperature of +4C. Unfortunately, the heart and lungs can survive on ice for only about 4-5 hours, after which theyre no longer usable. Human organ transplantation requires intense immunological screening of both the donor and the recipient, and this period is usually insufficient to perform it. Finally, 4-5 hours is not enough for an organ to travel from Europe to the United States, for example. It's not even enough to travel within the United States, depending on the ending location, and in many cases, when paired with other logistical constraints, not even sufficient to travel from hospital to hospital. Therefore, geographical location plays a huge role in organ transplantation, and organs that cannot be delivered in a timely manner in optimal conditions will simply be lost. And that's exactly what happens because about 28 thousand organs are wasted in the United States only per year, due to poor performance of currently available preservation methods.

French Blood Bank In Bordeaux. Blood Transfusion Center, Storage Room For Stem Cells In Nitrogen ... [+] 196C. Open Vat Containing Bags Of Stem Cells. Stock Room For Cellular Therapy. (Photo By BSIP/UIG Via Getty Images)

The field of science that investigates the application of cold on biological samples is called cryobiology, whereas the process of using cold to preserve those samples is called cryopreservation. There are quite a few scientific groups, working both in academia and industry, that keep expanding the knowledge in these fields every day. The process of cryopreservation entails many steps, mainly cooling, storage, and rewarming. Each one of these steps can be divided into multiple reactions, and all of them could be performed in multiple ways. It is, however, vital that all of them are performed in an optimal way such that the biological sample that's being preserved does not get damaged, or lose its functionality upon reviving. The main problem in cryopreservation is the formation of ice crystals, that can happen at any step of the way, but mostly when samples are being either cooled to or warmed from subzero temperatures. This is a major issue because the largest part of all biological samples is water. Therefore, many research groups in cryobiology are working on ways to avoid ice crystal formation.

If successful cryopreservation and reviving of complex biological samples, e.g. human organs, was made possible without the interference of ice crystals, organs could be easily transported throughout the world without considering the time it would take to get them to their final destination or be stored for a long time until somebody would need them, as opposed to discarding and losing hundreds of them on a daily basis. Similarly, even if their functionality could be prolonged to a few days instead of a few hours, tens of thousands of human lives could be saved every year. Some researchers dedicated their whole careers to making this happen, and today I will introduce you to one of them.

In my last article on cryopreservation, I had the pleasure of interviewing the group of Dayong Gao, that works on methods to improve reviving of frozen biological samples using single-mode electromagnetic resonance rewarming. Today, I'm interviewing Matthew J. Powell-Palm, an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Texas A&M University, and a co-founder of BioChoric Inc. Following in the footsteps of his mentor Boris Rubinsky, he works on understanding the underpinnings of cryopreservation and manipulating the first major part of this process, i.e., freezing itself. The method they are establishing is called isochoric cryopreservation, a technique that could improve transplantation medicine immensely.

Cryobilogy in cancer

The History of Cryopreservation: Major Breakthroughs

By providing you a little bit of historical context, well have a look over the major breakthroughs that happened in the field of cryobiology, and that instigated the modern use of cold in medicine. The start of the modern field of cryobiology is thought to have happened in 1948, when Christopher Polge discovered the cryoprotective effects of glycerol, a cryoprotective agent (CPA) that prevents ice crystal formation through the creation of bonds with free water molecules. Since then, a huge aspect of cryobiology and cryopreservation technologies was that we can modulate a given system's chemistry by involving CPAs, which could, in theory, allow us to preserve a live biologic sample for a long time. Many more CPAs, like dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), appeared on the scene afterwards, revolutionizing the subfield of human sperm cryopreservation. In 1972, scientists Peter Mazur, Stanley Leibo, and David Whittingham published evidence of the first-ever successful cryopreservation of mammalian embryos using slow-freezing. Eleven years later, the first-ever human embryo was cryopreserved.

A turning point in cryobiology happened in the 1980s, the so-called golden era of cryopreservation. Building on seminal early work by Father Basile J. Luyet, a Catholic priest and professor who helped to establish the thermodynamic foundation of modern cryobiology, Gregory M. Fahy and William R. Fall introduced the process of vitrification to medical cryopreservation. Vitrification is a process of rapid cooling of liquid medium until it becomes a glass-like non-crystalline amorphous solid. It requires the protective effect of CPAs, which lower the freezing point of water, as a major part of biological systems. In its vitrified state, water is locked in place, preventing the formation of ice crystals, and the entire sample becomes a glass-like solid. Vitrification is used widely today in the cryopreservation of very small biological samples (specifically in in vitro fertilization and other reproductive applications), and many cryobiologists believe it could eventually be applied to freeze any biological materials, even organs and whole organisms.

Human kidney frozen in ice cube, 3D rendering isolated on white background

Using vitrification, many research groups have already been able to successfully preserve and revive different cells and tissues, showing that there is major potential in cryopreserving and reviving organs as well. One of the major focus in cryobiology research is, in fact, centered around the process of vitrification and how much and which CPAs to add during this stage, or how to remove them in the rewarming stages. But, so far, CPA-aided vitrification only enabled the routine preservation of cells and cell suspensions and failed to produce any clinically translatable technique on how to preserve any complex biological systems like organs outside of the human body.

Isochoric Cryopreservation: Out With the Old, In With the New?

Methods in cryopreservation havent changed much in the last few years but there is a different approach currently available called isochoric cryopreservation. The term stands for cryopreservation of biological tissues at a constant volume, versus the more traditional way of cryopreservation that's done at constant pressure, called isobaric cryopreservation. During isochoric preservation, the cooling process happens in a confined, constant-volume chamber, representing one of the biggest differences between isochoric and isobaric conditions. Another difference is minimized role of CPAs, which are very much needed in the classical isobaric cryopreservation, but not in several modes of isochoric cryopreservation. The advantage of isochoric freezing is that it completely avoids the question of the toxicity associated with CPA usage as well as the amount of CPAs needed to be present in the biological sample you might want to freeze. Even if there is a need to use CPAs, their concentrations would be dramatically decreased. Under isochoric conditions, a biological sample is confined within a container with high rigidity and strength, usually made out of titanium. The container is completely absent of the bulk gas phase, and is denied any access to the atmosphere, which changes both the thermodynamic equilibrium and the ice nucleation kinetics within the system inside.

Isochoric cryopreservation is a technique conceived initially by Boris Rubinsky, a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Prof. Rubinsky obtained his Ph.D. at MIT in 1981 and has been engaged in the field of cryobiology ever since. His major research interests include heat and mass transfer in biomedical engineering and biotechnology and, in particular, low-temperature biology, as well as the development of bio-electronics and biomedical devices for clinical purposes. He has also pioneered in the fields of medical imaging, cryoablation, and non-thermal electroporation. Prof. Rubinsky has been involved with more than 470 peer-reviewed scientific papers since the beginning of his career and holds more than 30 US-issued patents.

The aim of isochoric cryopreservation at Prof. Rubinsky's group is not strictly preservation of biological samples (to be revived) per se, but rather about further developing the technique to offer the world a chance for a more successful general process of cryopreserving biological samples and decreasing the using toxic CPAs. Some of their latest research includes the creation of a quantitative approach to develop a general framework for the design of metastable supercooling protocols which incorporate the phase transformation and biochemical kinetics of the system. You can find the paper here. The group has also played with carbohydrate polymer protectants, as opposed to the small-molecular weight chemical ones mostly in use nowadays, and found that they can be used to manipulate the metastable-equilibrium phase change kinetics of the system at subzero temperatures. This approach has revealed that a carbohydrate polymer can be used to help modulate the stochasticity of ice nucleation in the supercooling system, which is important to designing supercooled biopreservation protocols for practical use. This research can be read here.

It seems the group is really striving to develop and optimize an application of supercooling and freezing techniques that could be used in biomedical devices already today. Some of Prof. Boris Rubinsky's technologies were already used to treat tens of thousands of patients, and the companies he founded were acquired by the big fish, such as Cryomedical Sciences which became a $300 million NASDAQ company. A new name in the field of isochoric cryopreservation is eager to follow in these steps, and to further develop the field in his own way: Matthew J. Powell-Palm.

Future Players in Cryo-thermodynamics: Professor Matthew J. Powell-Palm

Matt Powell-Palm is one of Boris Rubinsky's former PhD students and a leader in the field of isochoric cryopreservation. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Texas A&M University, and a co-founder of BioChoric Inc. (along with his former PhD supervisor), a medtech startup that is working on transforming transplant medicine by developing methods to prolong organ preservation. He obtained his Master's degree in 2016 at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Jon Malen, and his Ph.D. in 2020 at UC Berkeley.

Currently, a central focus of Matt's research is within the field of isochoric thermodynamics and cryopreservation. His expertise revolves around the applications of isochoric supercooling and vitrification protocols and devices to improve organ preservation, conserve endangered marine animals, and improve global food storage and transportation. Even though he completed his Ph.D. only two years ago, he's already established himself as one of the leaders in the field of isochoric thermodynamics and cryopreservation with more than 25 published peer-reviewed scientific papers and numerous patents. I was honored to share the online space for some time with Matt and pick his brain on all things cryo, plus ask some additional futuristic questions.

Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD interviewing professor Matthew Powell-Palm via Zoom, September, 2022

First, I wanted to see what Matt's perspective was on different terms in cryobiology, and what he considers the differences between them.

Alex: Can you describe the differences between cryonics, cryobiology, and cryopreservation?

Matt: Cryopreservation is the application of cryobiology, and the biggest difference between it and cryonics is the end goal. The field of cryopreservation is not particularly interested in existential or societal aspects of life prolongation and is solving daily problems in medicine, conservation biology, agriculture, and in any application where the elongated shelf life is important. Cryonics is the application of cryobiology where the end goal is to prolongate a human life by freezing and reviving it in the future.

Alex: Can you talk about your current research and, specifically, the concept of isochoric cryopreservation?

Matt: Looking back on the many successes and failures of modern cryopreservation, I have been asking myself the past few years if there are any new non-chemical ways in which we can manipulate the thermodynamic behaviors of water to achieve the goal of preventing ice crystal formation below the systems melting point, which is the main problem in cryopreservation.

The umbrella technique the Rubinsky Lab has come up with leverages the effect of confinement or constant volume thermodynamic properties to manipulate phase transitions and equilibria of water. In the world around us, we are always in communication with the atmosphere as this constant and infinite pressure reservoir, and the core premise of isochoric cryopreservation processes is that we may be able to affect the phase equilibria and kinetics of water and ice by denying them access to this constant atmospheric pressure. When we do that, the natural variables that describe their existence are now constant volume and temperature, not pressure and temperature. When we confine the volume of a given system, it has a huge effect on the relationship between water and ice. We all know water expands almost 10% upon freezing, and weve all left a bottle of water or beer in the freezer only to come back and find it exploded. So lets imagine what would happen if instead of having liquid in a glass bottle, we held it in an unbreakable titanium flask. Ice will form and try to expand, but now it can't break the container or push the water out. What happens? Ice will start to expand, but the flask won't break and will instead push back on the contents within, pressurizing the growing ice and the remaining water. As a result, only a small portion of the liquid will end up as ice, even at temperatures well below the freezing point.

And isochoric conditions affect not only the equilibrium between water and ice, but also the metastability of water, the vitrification process of water, and the ice nucleation and growth process. So we are working on a broad suite of thermodynamic techniques that arent dependent on chemical intervention but enable us to reach sub-zero temperatures without ice formation in a stored biologic, which opens up many new avenues for exploration in cryobiology.

Alex: Among the classical isobaric approaches used in cryopreservation with antifreeze agents, vitrification, and rapid reheating, how is isochoric preservation better?

Matt:

You can think of the isochoric effect as being a value-add to any system. Speaking generically, our data and research suggest that if you take any classical technique or system and conduct the same protocol not under atmospheric pressure, but instead under isochoric conditions, you will encounter a lower chance for ice crystal formation. For conventional vitrification for example, you need incredibly high concentrations of cryoprotectants, usually 7 to 10 mol/L, or up to 40-50 % of the weight ratio. By using isochoric conditions, we can relieve some of the work that the chemistry needs to do in aiding glass formation, facilitating the same process of vitrification using a lower concentration of cryoprotectants, but under isochoric conditions. Similarly we can supercool metastable systems with higher reliability by confining them, we can hold equilibrium systems in a passively pressurized ice-free state, and so on.

Ill note too that a lot of the classical cryobiology literature and techniques have focused on ultra-low temperature preservation that targets months or years-long preservation, but there are all kinds of pressing medical cryobiology problems that dont necessarily require that, the most obvious being full organ preservation, where shelf-life extension on the order of even a single day would be transformative. So theres been a notable shift in the last decade towards what the community calls high subzero methods, which operate in the 0 20C range and leverage processes that aim to be much less physically and chemically intensive on the biologic than something like vitrification. Were finding that isochoric techniques can be particularly useful in this domain too, because you enter the realm where totally-CPA free isochoric supercooling or isochoric freezing protocols are very possible.

Alex: What about rapid reheating by using microwaves? How does the isochoric approach help with this?

Matt: Our goal is to build our protocol so that we ultimately wont need rapid reheating, which is required to escape the high probability of ice crystal formation when rewarming biological samples. If we can decrease the probability of ice crystal formation across the board, we would decrease the need to use rapid reheating. For example, and although I can't talk about it in too much detail, we are collaborating with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute on vitrifying whole fragments of endangered corals under isochoric conditions, which has never before been achievable. In preliminary data, we are able to reheat the system without problems at a ballpark rate of 100s of degrees C per minute. The more sophisticated electromagnetic heating techniques achieves warming up rates of thousands of degrees and up in small systems, and those methods are indeed very cool, but so far unneeded for our systems. Ill note too that another aspect of the rewarming challenge is heating the system without building up significant thermal stress, which can lead to cracking throughout the sample because of uneven heating. One advantage that the isochoric system appears so far to offer is that physically confining the volume can help stabilize the system against cracking. If your system is open to the atmosphere, as it warms, the outermost layer that's open to the environment can expand freely, and cracking can happen easily. In the isochoric system, the boundaries of the sample are constrained, and it can help with reducing thermal cracking.

Matt's answers really intrigued me. I have been looking at cryopreservation through the eyes of cryonics and improving medicine by being able to extend the time until we find cures for untreatable diseases, which would imminently save so many human lives. However, it seems one part of the field, which Matt is intensively developing with his colleagues, could help to save so many lives in the present time very soon. It seems like a real, graspable possibility.

However, this made me wonder about the field of cryopreservation I have been interested in for months now. We saw some major breakthroughs in the field a long time ago, but lately, it seems as if the progress has been really slow. Is it because the field has been focused on the complicated process of vitrification by using cryopreserving agents too much, or is there something else at play? I was interested in what Matt had to say about this.

Alex: Clearly, the field of cryopreservation has been around for quite soe time. Why did it not yet pick up?

Matt: This is a fascinating question thats obviously affected by many different factors both historical and contemporary, but one of the biggest as always is funding, plain and simple. In the 90s and early 2000s, there was vanishingly little money available for research on cryopreservation, and what money there was was sort of narrowly focused. In the last decade however, cryopreservation, which we now include under the larger umbrella of biopreservation, has become something of a space race, and funders as varied as NIH, USDA, DOD, and even NASA are now giving out money for low-temperature biopreservation research. For example, NASA is looking for ways to protect astronauts in the theoretical manned missions to Mars. Even though using cryopreservation techniques to achieve goals like that seemed like sci-fi only a few years ago, we are now seeing more and more adventurous cryopreservation ideas getting funded, and funded well, and this has enabled the modern cryobiology field to start operating at the pace expected of a cutting-edge, super-impactful branch of science.

Alex: What happened in the last 5 years in cryopreservation research that may result in a major breakthrough in industrial applications?

Matt: Oh yeah, the last 5 years have been huge. Im lucky to get to see watch this progress unfold from both the academic angle, as a professor, and the industrial and clinical angles, as a startup founder. The suite of core technologies driving cryopreservation these days has just exploded in the last half-decade or so, driven by key advances in our understanding of aqueous metastability and supercooling of bulk volume liquids, uses of electromagnetic effects and nanoparticles for rapid and uniform warming, new thermodynamic configurations like isochoric, and many more. These fresh approaches are driving work in all sorts of new applications, and bringing new interdisciplinary physical science angles to the field.

Supercooling alone is a potentially transformative technology for large clinical applications, e.g. to extend the shelf-lives of transplantable livers, hearts, kidneys, etc. Id put my money on that technique seeing the light of day in the clinic within the next 5 years, as some kind of self-contained supercooling device. In my company, we have an isochoric supercooling technique that I think can be ready for pre-clinical trials very soon, though I can't say too much there. But the potential public health benefit of stable supercooling is just tremendous. I mean, if you could extend the preservability of a heart by just 4-8 hours, you might save a thousand lives next year. Extend it by a day or two and you could potentially be saving tens of thousands of lives around the globe.

As a field, we don't need technologies that will take ten more years to develop and will enable indefinite storage of a human heartwe need technologies that will take ten more months to develop and will enable storage of a heart for just long enough to get it from the donor to the recipient!

Although Matthew didn't point it out now, he is also doing a lot of work on preserving and extending the shelf life of food, which is another pressing societal issue, given the rising problems of food waste in some regions of the world, and the lack of food in other regions at the same time. In one of the groups latest research papers, isochoric supercooling and freezing have been applied to freshly harvested pomegranate, with its shelf-life being successfully extended for a month. You can read the publication here.

At his young age, Matthew is already wearing two hats (as he candidly points out), one of an academic professor and researcher, and the other as a co-founder and owner of a start-up company called BioChoric Inc. The company carries on with its research on isochoric preservation and aims at putting applicable devices and methods on the medical market as soon as possible, with everything being rooted in peer-reviewed and solid-proof research. Matt shared with me what the first days of starting the company looked like, and what their main future goals are.

Alex: When did you start BioChoric Inc. and what drove you to it?

Matt: We started the company in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. It was a spinout out of UC Berkeley, with me and Boris Rubinsky as founders, and the impetus was a crop of data we got on the effects of isochoric conditions on the supercooling of water, which suggested to us that an isochoric supercooling approach may be immediately applicable to organ and tissue preservation. We have a couple of integral patents and papers that describe the premise that, by confining the system, we can stabilize water in a metastable supercooled state, and predict the behaviors of this state in a rigorous quantitative sense, which has so far proven very difficult in unconfined systems.

The underlying philosophy of BioChoric Inc. is the obligation we feel to make rapid if incremental progress in full organ preservation. The degree of donor organ waste and the number of people dying on organ transplanting lists every day is huge, and that made us look at everything with a more clinical perspective. That's what we're pushing forward with BioChoric, even though the company is very small for now. One unique thing about the company is that it represents most of the thermodynamic expertise surrounding isochoric systems in the world today, and we rely heavily on interdisciplinary academic collaborations to help us further build the confidence and evidence we need to start pushing our techniques to clinical markets. We haven't taken any outside funding and it's fully internal equity, even though we've been approached by investors several times. We want to make sure we are scientifically sterling, peer-reviewed, bullet-proof before we start trying for the clinic.

One of the side hats BioChoric wears is also building isochoric biopreservation platforms and devices for other labs interested in advancing the science, and the small profit we generate from that helps to sustain our early R&D efforts.

It seems Matt is fully focused on improving human lives in the sense of prolonging the time transplantation-ready organs can be preserved, and that's the main goal of BioChoric. However, Matt and Boris's company is not the only one out there that offers cryo-products, although it may be the only one with a focus on isochoric cryopreservation, at least for now. Let's see what Matt thinks about how his company compares to similar ones in the field of cryobiology.

Alex: How do you compare and compete with companies like Lorentz Bio or X-Therma? When do you think BioChoric Inc. will be ready to fundraise and go industrial-scale?

Matt: I think there are many great young companies popping up in this space, but I'm glad you bring up Lorentz Bio because it has sparked quite a bit of chatter in the community, and they're taking an approach opposite to ours I think. My generic observation is that they have tackled raising the big money first, presuming they can fill in the scientific blanks later. In our case, its the scientists who have built the company, and built it on a core piece of new science, and were presuming we can fill in the money blanks later! Both fine ways to approach the problem. But personally, Im not really in the business of speculation or gambling I'm here to make sure were producing rock-solid, air-tight science, and the fundraising aspects don't worry me as much. Maybe that's just my academic side coming out. I think historically though, companies with really high checkbook-to-scientist ratios often end up coming to companies with really high scientist-to-checkbook ratios, like ours, to license our scientifically-established techniques and products. So suffice it to say, were focused on the science first and everything else second, and we're shooting for both fundraising and expansion to industrial scale in the next two years.

As my final question, I asked Matt the same futuristic question I asked Dayong Gao's research group at the University of Washington's Center for Cryo-Biomedical Engineering and Artificial Organs in my first article on cryopreservation, which you can read here. Matt was brave enough to offer me a timeline in which we could see some real breakthroughs in cryonics, as opposed to only preservation.

Alex: When do you think we will be able to see isochoric cryopreservation being used to cryopreserve and revive a small mammal?

Matt: Interesting question! I would say within the next 5 years, we will certainly see isochoric preservation of endangered marine species. Marine biodiversity is such an unbelievably urgent problem, and we are thinking about expanding our research on coral to other marine organisms in the next few months. If things continue to go well, we may be looking at trying to deploy field-ready isochoric devices at every marine research station on Earth, as bombastic as that sounds! The problems there are just too pressing to wait. On the human organ scale, I think we will see the preservation of organs extended to at least single days within the next 5 years. And I also want to take this opportunity to give a shoutout to each and every research group working on this problem right now, because the many often divergent results from differing corners of the field each move us all forward.

I admittedly havent thought much about preserving small live mammals, so I cant speculate in a properly scientific fashion, but Ill speculate for fun! Current approaches would require us to preserve each organ of the mammal separately because the preservation process gets more complicated the more complex you go. Based on the progress in the last 5 years, we will probably see a supercooling approach to preserve every major organ separately within the next 5 years. I don't know what happens at one step higher if you would want to preserve a multiorgan construct, and what would be different about it in comparison to just one organ. The relationship of these animals with air is also more complex than with marine animals that live submerged in a liquid anyway. But as a cop-out, Ill go ahead and say that the timeline will once again depend really acutely on potential increases in funding, and it will depend on which aspects of the field will get the most funding. So, I would speculate we could see a small mammal preserved and revived in about 20 years if the funding goes in that direction. But in my opinion, there is much more pressing research to be done.

With such young and bright-minded scientists led by the field's giants, like the combination of Matthew J. Powell-Palm and Boris Rubinsky, cryopreservation is definitely looking at several major breakthroughs coming from all areas of the field in the next few years. Also, as Matt also smartly pointed out, progress coming from different areas of cryopreservation actually helps developing all areas of cryopreservation, as the complex process of cryopreservation itself is made of various tightly-bound and regulated steps that cannot work alone.

See more here:
Think Outside The (Titanium) Box: Isochoric Cryopreservation Could Save Lives - Forbes

ProLynx appoints Richard King as Chief Executive Officer and Chris Ehrlich as Board Director – Yahoo Finance

ProLynx LLC

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 20, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

ProLynx, Inc., a biotechnology company with a novel platform technology for half-life extension of therapeutics, enabling novel and potentially best-in-class treatments to be developed, today announced that Richard King, MBA, has been appointed as Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors. Additionally, Chris Ehrlich, MBA, has joined the company as a member of the Board of Directors.

As a seasoned executive in the industry with a track record of success in partnering, Richard is an excellent fit forProLynx,saidBill Rutter,a ProLynx Board member. The ProLynx Board looks forward to working with Richard and the executive team to realize the promise of our innovative technology for the betterment of patient and caregiver lives. Additionally, I am delighted to welcome Chris to the Board. His expertise in venture capital, business development and financing strengthen the capabilities of our Board.

Richard King is an accomplished executive with over 35 years of leadership experience in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. He has raised over $1bn in private and public capital, completed multiple business transactions, including the sale of Tercica, Inc., the partnership of AcelRx and Grunenthal regarding a novel pain management system, and the strategic affiliation of CALIBR with the Scripps Research Institute.

I am delighted to join ProLynx at this time, saidRichard King. The ProLynx technology is incredibly unique, enabling half-life extension of proteins, peptides and small molecules. This advancement can make existing medications more effective, better tolerated and require less frequent administration. The ProLynx technology can also be applied to molecules in development that might otherwise never be advanced due to efficacy or toxicity issues, allowing these product candidates to move forward and possibly become life-altering treatments for patients.

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Chris Ehrlich began his career with consulting firm LEK before becoming a business development executive in the pharmaceutical industry. Subsequently he was Managing Director at venture capital firm InterWest, serving on multiple company Boards. He joined Locust Walk, a life sciences transaction firm, where, as Global Head of Biotechnology and Head of Strategic Transactions, he sourced and lead multiple transactions for emerging biopharmaceutical companies.

ProLynx is in a great position with its lead development program in clinical trials to treat various cancers, as well as multiple other programs having demonstrated proof of concept across a variety of disease areas, said Chris Ehrlich. I am delighted to join the Board to help bring this novel half-life extension technology forward to advance treatment options for patients in need.

AboutProLynx

ProLynx is a biotechnology company located in San Francisco, CA, developing proprietary drug delivery technologies for half-life extension of therapeutics. The ProLynx pipeline centers on a long-acting oncology drug, PLX038, in Phase 2 clinical trials, a long-acting interleukin 15, PLX015, for immuno-oncology and a very long-acting C-type natriuretic peptide, PLX138, for achondroplasia, together with several other early-stage programs.

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Richard KingRichard@prolynxinc.com

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ProLynx appoints Richard King as Chief Executive Officer and Chris Ehrlich as Board Director - Yahoo Finance

Passive cooling system could benefit off-grid locations – MIT News

As the world gets warmer, the use of power-hungry air conditioning systems is projected to increase significantly, putting a strain on existing power grids and bypassing many locations with little or no reliable electric power. Now, an innovative system developed at MIT offers a way to use passive cooling to preserve food crops and supplement conventional air conditioners in buildings, with no need for power and only a small need for water.

The system, which combines radiative cooling, evaporative cooling, and thermal insulation in a slim package that could resemble existing solar panels, can provide up to about 19 degrees Fahrenheit (9.3 degrees Celsius) of cooling from the ambient temperature, enough to permit safe food storage for about 40 percent longer under very humid conditions. It could triple the safe storage time under dryer conditions.

The findings are reported today in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, in a paper by MIT postdoc Zhengmao Lu, Arny Leroy PhD 21, professors Jeffrey Grossman and Evelyn Wang, and two others. While more research is needed in order to bring down the cost of one key component of the system, the researchers say that eventually such a system could play a significant role in meeting the cooling needs of many parts of the world where a lack of electricity or water limits the use of conventional cooling systems.

The system cleverly combines previous standalone cooling designs that each provide limited amounts of cooling power, in order to produce significantly more cooling overall enough to help reduce food losses from spoilage in parts of the world that are already suffering from limited food supplies. In recognition of that potential, the research team has been partly supported by MITs Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab.

This technology combines some of the good features of previous technologies such as evaporative cooling and radiative cooling, Lu says. By using this combination, he says, we show that you can achieve significant food life extension, even in areas where you have high humidity, which limits the capabilities of conventional evaporative or radiative cooling systems.

In places that do have existing air conditioning systems in buildings, the new system could be used to significantly reduce the load on these systems by sending cool water to the hottest part of the system, the condenser. By lowering the condenser temperature, you can effectively increase the air conditioner efficiency, so that way you can potentially save energy, Lu says.

Other groups have also been pursuing passive cooling technologies, he says, but by combining those features in a synergistic way, we are now able to achieve high cooling performance, even in high-humidity areas where previous technology generally cannot perform well.

The system consists of three layers of material, which together provide cooling as water and heat pass through the device. In practice, the device could resemble a conventional solar panel, but instead of putting out electricity, it would directly provide cooling, for example by acting as the roof of a food storage container. Or, it could be used to send chilled water through pipes to cool parts of an existing air conditioning system and improve its efficiency. The only maintenance required is adding water for the evaporation, but the consumption is so low that this need only be done about once every four days in the hottest, driest areas, and only once a month in wetter areas.

The top layer is an aerogel, a material consisting mostly of air enclosed in the cavities of a sponge-like structure made of polyethylene. The material is highly insulating but freely allows both water vapor and infrared radiation to pass through. The evaporation of water (rising up from the layer below) provides some of the cooling power, while the infrared radiation, taking advantage of the extreme transparency of Earths atmosphere at those wavelengths, radiates some of the heat straight up through the air and into space unlike air conditioners, which spew hot air into the immediate surrounding environment.

Below the aerogel is a layer of hydrogel another sponge-like material, but one whose pore spaces filled with water rather than air. Its similar to material currently used commercially for products such as cooling pads or wound dressings. This provides the water source for evaporative cooling, as water vapor forms at its surface and the vapor passes up right through the aerogel layer and out to the environment.

Below that, a mirror-like layer reflects any incoming sunlight that has reached it, sending it back up through the device rather than letting it heat up the materials and thus reducing their thermal load. And the top layer of aerogel, being a good insulator, is also highly solar-reflecting, limiting the amount of solar heating of the device, even under strong direct sunlight.

The novelty here is really just bringing together the radiative cooling feature, the evaporative cooling feature, and also the thermal insulation feature all together in one architecture, Lu explains. The system was tested, using a small version, just 4 inches across, on the rooftop of a building at MIT, proving its effectiveness even during suboptimal weather conditions, Lu says, and achieving 9.3 C of cooling (18.7 F).

The challenge previously was that evaporative materials often do not deal with solar absorption well, Lu says. With these other materials, usually when theyre under the sun, they get heated, so they are unable to get to high cooling power at the ambient temperature.

The aerogel materials properties are a key to the systems overall efficiency, but that material at present is expensive to produce, as it requires special equipment for critical point drying (CPD) to remove solvents slowly from the delicate porous structure without damaging it. The key characteristic that needs to be controlled to provide the desired characteristics is the size of the pores in the aerogel, which is made by mixing the polyethylene material with solvents, allowing it to set like a bowl of Jell-O, and then getting the solvents out of it. The research team is currently exploring ways of either making this drying process more inexpensive, such as by using freeze-drying, or finding alternative materials that can provide the same insulating function at lower cost, such as membranes separated by an air gap.

While the other materials used in the system are readily available and relatively inexpensive, Lu says, the aerogel is the only material thats a product from the lab that requires further development in terms of mass production. And its impossible to predict how long that development might take before this system can be made practical for widespread use, he says.

This work "represents a very interesting and novel system integration approach of passive cooling technologies," says Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, who was not associated with this research. Ruan adds, "By combining evaporative cooling, radiative cooling, and insulation, it has a better cooling performance and can be effective in a wider range of climates than evaporative cooling or radiative cooling alone. The work could attract significant practical applications, such as in food preservation, if the system can be made at reasonable cost."

The research team included Lenan Zhang of MITs Department of Mechanical Engineering and Jatin Patil of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

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Passive cooling system could benefit off-grid locations - MIT News

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