3 Steps To Healthy Life Extension

Healthy life extension is simply the use of science and technology to increase healthy life span and reduce the risk of suffering age-related conditions in later life. It is the use of the best and most proven of present day methods, while supporting research to develop more effective methods for tomorrow.

Practitioners of healthy life extension use good diet, lifestyle choices, technology, and proven medical advances to live healthy, longer lives. The medicine of today can do little in comparison to what scientists know is possible.

Aging is an enemy. It saps our strength and ability to enjoy life, cripples us, and eventually kills us. Tens of millions die from age-related conditions each and every year. Comparatively few people understand that degenerative aging can be modestly slowed with diet and lifestyle choices, as is the case for many medical conditions. Comparatively few people are aware of serious scientific efforts, presently underway, aimed at understanding and intervening in the aging process – in order to one day reverse its effects.

Yet despite amazing advances in understanding and treating age-related conditions (such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, Parkinson’s, and many others), and despite the cries of the anti-aging marketplace, the only presently available method likely to even modestly extend the healthy human life span is calorie restriction. Sadly, no medical technology yet exists that can improve upon this diet and lifestyle choice: researchers are making progress, but the field of longevity science is woefully underfunded and poorly understood by the public. Vital medical research and funding has been greatly hampered or even stopped dead in its tracks in the US and parts of Europe.

The following three steps will?get you started on the path of healthy life extension.?

Step 1: Stop Damaging Your Health
Step 2: Adopt a Better Diet and Lifestyle
Step 3: Support and Advocate Longevity Science

Step 1: Stop Damaging Your Health

Are you damaging yourself, perhaps more than you realize? Do you smoke? Do recreational drugs occupy a central position in your life? Do you eat nothing but junk food or are overweight? Do you exercise little or not at all? Do you have a poor relationship with your physician, or haven’t seen a doctor in years? If so, you have a clear starting point. Any of these things can hurt you far more than currently available healthy life extension techniques can compensate for. ?Find a physician you can trust and talk to about improving your health. You might be surprised at how easy, low-cost, and downright pleasant it is to lead a healthier – and thereby longer – life.

Step 2: Adopt a Better Diet and Lifestyle

The body is a complex, resilient machine. It’s neither difficult nor expensive to use diet and lifestyle to live a longer life.

  • Adopt a calorie restriction diet. Calorie restriction is the scientifically proven way of extending healthy life in mammals. It has a number of other beneficial effects on health, such as increased resistance to age-related disease, and is highly praised by practitioners.
  • Take a modest amount of supplements appropriate to your age and health. The Kurzweil and Grossman book Fantastic Voyage provides a good starting point for understanding the hows and whys of supplements. Visit our basic anti-aging supplements for more information
  • Exercise. The benefits of maintaining a modest level of exercise for most people have been well known for long, long time. As is also true of calorie restriction, these benefits include greatly reduced risk of suffering almost all of the common age-related conditions.

Step 3: Support and Advocate Longevity Science

Speaking out in favor of medical research aimed at extending the healthy human life span is just as important as practicing present day healthy life extension, as even the best present day practices can only make a comparatively small difference to your life span. Most age-related conditions are still incurable, and everyone becomes frail with old age. The aging process is still imperfectly understood, and causes great suffering for hundreds of millions worldwide each and every day. The medicine of the near future holds great promise – see, for example, biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey’s Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence – but this promise can only be realized if research and development is fully funded and widely supported.

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