Questions & Answers

A: I suppose - but that's kind of like saying that eating anything besides cheap candy and fast food is only going to make for expensive crap. Sure, you could stay alive on that, but not for as long as you otherwise could, and not disease-free.

Sickcare doctors everywhere love to quote the "expensive pee" line.  However, there is some truth to it!

It all depends upon:

1) whether or not your body needs the supplement and 

2) whether or not your body can make use of the supplement in the form that it's in (bioavailability).   

If you're just taking supplements but haven't tested to see if your body even needs that supplement, you might just be wasting money. 

It should go without saying that all of the supplementation and advanced biohacks in the world are completely useless if one doesn't first have the basics fully nailed down: including their sleep, nutrition, and exercise.  No amount of supplementation can fix the damage you cause yourself by getting inadequate or low-quality sleep, getting improper nutrition, or insufficient movement & exercise.

Supplements should be exactly that - supplemental - to provide either:

a) more of what your body is no longer capable of producing on its own, 

b) what your body isn't getting enough of from your diet, or 

c) substances that might be impossible to get in quantities great enough from even a healthy diet but have been shown to promote health or lifespan.

If you're already eating a very clean, healthy, and nutrient-dense diet, you may already be getting enough of that thing that you're supplementing. That's why vitamin and micronutrient testing can be so vitally important.

If your body doesn't need it, and it's fat-soluble, then you might just be accumulating it in your tissues, and that can cause a whole lot of undesirable toxicity issues. It could be messing with your organs, your hormones, and various other blood & health markers. 

If your body doesn't need it, and it's readily water-soluble, then you're just going to pee it out, right? Seems like no harm done, other than to waste a little money, right? 

Eh, not so fast...

Let's take calcium, as an example. Long after I'd cleaned up my diet, I continued to take supplemental calcium because I believed all of the hype that EVERYONE needed additional calcium to prevent osteoporosis -- despite the fact that they later learned we were all supplementing with the wrong type of calcium, which unwittingly led to osteoporosis. Ugh.

It wasn't until I had my first Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (HTMA) that I learned that my calcium levels were WAY TOO HIGH. Like off the chart! I didn't realize it, but I was already getting plenty enough calcium in my diet from the green leafy vegetables I was eating and juicing.

But calcium is water-soluble, so how could that be a problem? Well, too much calcium can lead to the build-up of calcium deposits in the body, including around the heart. This condition, known as hypercalcemia, can occur when the body's calcium levels become too high due to excess intake or absorption, or when the kidneys are not able to properly excrete it. When excess calcium builds up around the heart, it can cause cardiac calcification. This can lead to hardening of the arteries (a.k.a. atherosclerosis), which can increase the risk of heart disease, heart attack, and stroke.

Calcium deposits in other parts of the body (known as calcification), can cause various other problems, depending on the location and extent of the deposits, including:

• Calcification in joints, such as the elbows, knees, hips, or shoulders, which can lead to joint stiffness, inflammation, and pain.

• Kidney stones, which can be extremely painful and can cause complications if they block the urinary tract.

• Gallstones, which can cause abdominal pain and other digestive issues.

• Calcification in muscles, which can cause muscle pain, weakness, and decreased mobility.

I didn't yet have any of those symptoms, but it took a visit to a cardiologist (America's Healthy Heart Doc, Joel Kahn, MD) and a Carotid Intimal Medial Thickness (CIMT) ultrasound plus a Calcium Coronary CT scan to find out if I'd done myself any harm.  Miraculously, I hadn't, but in time it certainly would have, had I not changed course.

All of this to say that even believed "healthy" supplements can be bad for us if over-done, if done incorrectly, or if done when not needed. And the only way to truly know, is to test, test, test.

A: That really depends upon where they're starting from. 

Either way, start small. Prioritize your sleep. Get out and walk more, in fresh air and sunshine if possible. Move more in general. Sitting so much is doing you no favors. 

You've heard it a million times but eat more vegetables. 

Try to eliminate packaged foods and processed meats. 

Buy organic everything and grass-fed meats. It truly makes a difference. 

You wouldn't feed a prize racehorse substandard food, so why wouldn't you give your own precious body the same consideration? You're worth more than that!

A: That's a fantastic question, but difficult to answer, as everyone is different. 

For example, decades ago I tried a completely unheard-of supplement called NADH, for cellular energy. I think I was still in my late 30s at the time, and I felt absolutely nothing from it, so I stopped taking it. Fast forward to my mid 50s, I started finding that it was taking me 2 hours to complete a 1-hour P90X workout. Then I began trying some "new" supplements called NMN and NR and noticed nothing at first, until my next workout. I suddenly had the energy to do the full 1-hour workout in the 1-hour time and had all kinds of energy left over to do another - and so I did! It became very clear to me then that I needed to be regularly supplementing my NAD levels.

It's hard to know when it's the right time to begin a supplementation or to change a dosage, until it becomes either painfully obvious or until a test exists to determine it.  The cool thing is that NOW there are all kinds of good tests for things that didn't exist before. I would definitely encourage you to "test & don't guess", wherever possible.

TAM-818 was an example of that for me. Back in 2012 I was getting ready to turn 50 and I was training for my first marathon. I was feeling full of myself, because I imagined myself to be Mr Joe Cool athlete, doing my P90X, and looking and feeling WAY better than I did in my 20s & 30s.  At that same time, I heard and read about telomeres, their proposed importance to lifespan, and about a test to determine their length. 

So I ordered & took the test, fully expecting it to say that I had the telomeres of a 20-year-old, since that's how I felt. Only it didn't say that. The report said that my telomeres were the length of a 68-year-old, and quite obviously, that scared the crap out of me!

That's when I began deep-diving into everything I could learn about health & nutrition, since fitness alone obviously wasn't enough.  

I learned that the cause of my prematurely shortened telomeres was all of the stress that I was living under from a highly stressful job and being the sole caretaker for my parents who were both battling cancer.

Exercise had been my coping mechanism for dealing with all that stress, but unwittingly, the P90X and marathon training miles were simply adding to my already crazy stress-load.  So I needed to learn to manage all of that better in order to not make it any worse! 

It wasn't until maybe 5 years later that I learned of things like TA-65 and TAM-818 that could lengthen telomeres, so I jumped on them immediately, since I had the drastic need. Both are rather expensive, especially TAM-818, so I would not be taking them at all now if my telomeres had been an average length for my age to begin with.

In fact, it's safe to say that I wouldn't have been on this fortuitous journey that I'm on now, if it hadn't been for learning of my unusually short telomeres back then. Now, even though my telomeres are much longer than for someone of my age, I'm on a roll. I plan to keep going, just to see how "young" I can be, in all aspects of my cellular health, and hope like heck that I'm not unwittingly messing myself up in some other way by doing it. However unlikely, there always exists such a possibility!

So, it should be obvious by now that I'm a firm believer in testing -- to learn what's necessary, and what's just nice-to-have -- if for nothing else, then at the very least for budgetary purposes. None of us are rolling in money. Well, none of us regular folks anyway.

If I could go back and advise my 31-year-old self, I'd stop myself from taking all of the crazy herbs and supplements that I personally did not fully understand (although at the time, I thought I did), and invest that money instead towards TESTING (if tests had even existed back then) to understand my actual needs. I would whole-heartedly recommend that for you too.

Thanks to genetic testing, I also learned that I inherited TWO genetic markers for the same macular degeneration that my father suffered from. That could have been my fate too (and still might), if I hadn't learned of it early enough to begin the mitigation process through diet, lifestyle, and the proper supplementation to address that condition specifically.

When it comes to things like donating whole blood, platelets, and plasma, I believe you're never too young to start.  Especially after 30, you'll always benefit from offloading degraded proteins and you may even save a life!  Sauna is the same - except for the life-saving part.

NMN, NR, NAD? If testing shows you need it, or if trialing it shows you a noticeable increase in your energy, then absolutely go for it! But my guess is that at 31 you don't need it yet. Your body is still very likely producing all that it needs on its own, where supplementation would be of no noticeable benefit. You could be banking that money instead into your 401k!  But once again, every body is different, and only by testing will you know when it's truly the right time for you to begin.

That said, we also need to be very careful about supplementing things exogenously that will shut down our body's own endogenous production! 

I personally believe that too many people are taking the quick & easy way out by jumping directly to testosterone replacement, without first trying natural precursors and just getting out for regular sprints and/or HIIT training, which can & will boost testosterone significantly, despite what many doctors will tell you. To me, jumping straight to hormone replacement is just following the same old flawed medical model we've been stuck under - the model that says you can't do anything for yourself naturally and instead need to rely on a doctor and the pharmaceutical industry to do it for you.  And once you start, you can never stop. You're reliant on it for life. 

So go for it, but only after you've already gotten off of your lazy butt and tried everything else that you're fully capable of doing first to raise it naturally. You need to decide if you don't mind having pellets placed in your butt or ending up with pea-sized testicles. Me? I'd rather do HIIT.

That said, too much exercise, like anything else, can also run your T right into the ground.  I have several friends and teammates who are triathletes, who have experienced this the hard way.  <sigh>  There's a sweet spot somewhere.

Self-experimentation and regular testing are the key to everything and will help you to find your own proper balance for exercise & recovery, along with fully optimized hormones plus all other blood & urine markers for cardiovascular, metabolic, fatty acid, inflammation, vitamin & mineral, electrolyte, blood, thyroid, liver, and kidney health.

TEST, don't guess.

A: I honestly don't know, but if it is, you couldn't prove any of that by me. Some people would consider where I live to be a veritable "toxic soup" of EMFs!

I live in a "smart home", with an Amazon Echo Dot in every room, 5 Wi-Fi routers throughout, a Google TV hub, Levelor hub, SmartThings hub, and a Philips Hue hub. 

All of my light bulbs are Philips Hue Bluetooth-enabled, every light switch is a Leviton Z-Wave-controlled dimmer or switch, with a half dozen or more Zigbee-controlled SmartPlugs, all 7 TVs are Wi-Fi enabled, as are their soundbars, as are all of my window blinds, dishwasher, 1 house thermostat, 2 heated-floor thermostats, Ring Doorbell, plus my sauna, and exercise bike, and I sleep on a Wi-Fi enabled cooling mattress cover. My house has a smart electric meter, on the wall just outside of my bedroom, and I also wear three different fitness trackers at all times. Oh, and I nearly neglected to mention my various PCs, laptops, printer, tablets, two smartphones, firewall, fileserver, NAS, and two Roomba vacuum cleaners. 

If everything they say about EMFs is true, I should be nothing but a pile of ashes on the floor. Still, to be cautious, I have somewhat reduced my EMF exposures over the past several years and deployed a few mitigations. 

A few years ago, I began trading out all of my Wi-Fi enabled IoT devices (switches, plugs, appliances) with the lower-energy Zigbee and Z-Wave equivalents. All of my routers and hubs reside in locations that are a minimum of 6 feet from anywhere someone might sit or stand and are at least 15 feet away from my bed, with the closest one to my living space being walled-off within a closet, which is coincidentally behind a wall of cement board and decorative rock.

I ethernet-connected my printer, desktop PC, and various other PCs, fileserver, and NAS, and disabled their Wi-Fi. I even traded-out my Wi-Fi-connected Ring Doorbell with an ethernet-connected version, and now I get far better picture and sound from it.

In 2018, I bought a Blushield Cube that resides in my bedroom (which is reportedly strong enough to protect my entire home, and likely even part of my neighbors') and a Blushield Tesla Gold Series Auto for my car. The fact that I do not seem to be affected by all of the EMFs within my home may very well be a testament to the efficacy of these Blushield products!  

I also added several various layers of shielding fabrics between my smart meter and my house in 2021 when I had the aluminum siding replaced with vinyl siding. I do understand that the aluminum siding had offered me better 5G protection, but it was ugly, had been cleaned and repainted several times, and really just had to go.

Knowing that electromagnetic radiation drops off dramatically with distance, I never hold my phone to my head when I speak on it. I always use the speakerphone feature. When in my car, I keep my phone docked to my dashboard to keep it away from my body. I also never use wireless earbuds, because I realize that the left & right buds would communicate with each other directly through my brain tissue. I use my phone's speaker as I listen to podcasts nearly all day long, or I Chromecast them to all of my TVs at once. 

When I'm listening outside of my home, I only use wired earbuds. I also use an EMF shield between my body & my phone when it is in my back pocket and use a padded EMF shield between my body & laptop when it is on my lap. Thankfully, I have no 5G cellphone towers close by - that I'm presently aware of, but obviously that's likely to change in time. Thanks to Elon and Starlink, there will eventually be nowhere to run & hide!

I do take exception when well-respected podcasters make statements like "EMFs are killing us" and "EMFs are impacting our longevity". Studies do show that direct tissue exposure can cause biological effects, and especially so in people with electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS). 

People suffering from EHS experience both acute and chronic inflammatory responses. "The biopsies taken from skin lesions of patients with EHS indicated on infiltration of the skin layers of the epidermis with mastocytes and their degranulation, as well as on release anaphylactic reaction mediators such as histamine, chymase and tryptase." [1].  The study failed however to demonstrate that EMFs were the causative factor, but they were at least associated with the number of EHS patients with those symptoms whose tissues were examined.

Speculative causes for EHS range from possible genetic factors or possibly even heavy metals in the body that are reacting adversely to the electromagnetic fields.  No one really knows yet for sure and certainly a whole lot more study is needed. But clearly some people are hypersensitive to EMFs, while others are not.  For now, by every inflammatory health marker available to me (and my reported rate of aging), I am not one of them. 

If EMFs were "killing" all of us or impacting our longevity, I of all people would have expected to see it depicted somewhere within my TruDiagnostic testing, GlycanAge testing, or other bloodwork. If and when I ever do experience a noticable effect, you can bet that I will be making changes very quickly! But until then, I look at EMFs like just any other hormetic stressor. I will expose myself to them as safely as possible (since I don't really have a choice out in the world), I will mitigate their effects with technology (like Blushield), and I will not allow them to steal my mental or emotional peace. I'll never be able to avoid EMFs, so I'd better get on with adapting to them.

[1] -Kaszuba-Zwoińska J, Gremba J, Gałdzińska-Calik B, Wójcik-Piotrowicz K, Thor PJ. Electromagnetic field induced biological effects in humans. Przegl Lek. 2015;72(11):636-41. PMID: 27012122. 

A: Technically I have six! One is my internet provider's. I got tired of it taking out my internal network whenever it acted up, so I have since disabled it's Wi-Fi transmitters and use it only as a pass-thru device. While it technically still counts as a Wi-fi router, I don't count it, which is why I only claim five. 

1 & 2) I have two meshed Wi-Fi routers for full coverage, on opposite ends of my house, with one residing in the basement. 3) I have one Wi-Fi router as a dedicated network for my untrusted IoT devices, 4) I have another 2.4GHz Wi-Fi router dedicated specifically for the remote-control of my sauna, and 5) I have another in my detached garage so that my car can get all of its regular updates and to provide coverage for when I'm out working in my backyard.

A: Twenty-five years ago, I did have a mercury problem due to fish, because I was eating canned tuna every single day! 

At the time, I'd never even heard of that being an issue, and thought I was being "healthy", until I happened upon the EPA's website warning of limiting consumption of tuna due to mercury contamination.  Naturally, this concerned me, so I asked my sickcare doctor for a mercury test. When he asked and I explained why I wanted the test, he belittled me, telling me I "shouldn't believe everything I read on the internet". 

At first, he refused to do the test, but I insisted, so he finally gave-in, treating me like I was a dumbass and telling me that I would see that he was right.  But a week later he called me in a panic, saying that my mercury was dangerously high, and demanded to know what my "exposure" was. I explained again that it was from my daily consumption of tuna. He told me that was "impossible". 

At the time, I was going though massage school and mentioned this to one of my instructors, who was a chiropractor and naturopath. He gave me a fairly simple chelation protocol of drinking only distilled water (which would leach minerals and metals from my body) and of consuming Chlorella, NAC, R-Lipoic Acid, Glutathione and Vitamin C. Sadly, I cannot recall the dosages, but at the time they seemed pretty reasonable to me. Of course, I stopped eating tuna and I did the chelation protocol for a month and asked my doctor to be retested.  

He told me there was no point to retest so soon, because it would take YEARS for the mercury to diminish, and that at my high level, I'd be stuck with Mercury in my system for life. He said I should resign myself to the nerve damage that would likely ensue. But I insisted, and so we retested. 

A week later, he called me again in shock. He said my level had "declined significantly". He didn't bother to even ask me how, but I explained anyway what I was doing to remove it, but he told me once again that this was "impossible". I told him to think again, because his own test proved otherwise. 

So I kept on with the protocol, and in about 4 months, I had no detectable mercury left in my system. And I ditched that doctor.

Now I only consume the smaller, "safer" fish, like salmon, sardines, mussels, clams, oysters, and mackerel - fish that typically do not have issues with mercury contamination. (I haven't tried herring yet.) I also do daily Cod Liver Oil from a trusted source.  And to this day, my blood level and HTMA tests report zero detectable mercury, while one of my regular sauna protocols continues to include a wide array of binders to help eliminate any heavy metals or toxins that I might have picked up.

A: I get that a lot. Most doctors only seem to prescribe T4 because the body will often take that and make the T3 from it that it needs. 

I had to argue with my endocrinologist for T3. I texplained that I was a poor converter. She was incredibly dismissive. She told me that everyone thinks that, because they read it on Dr Google, and that I shouldn't believe everything I read on Dr Google. I told her that I was the very definition of a poor converter and showed her my monthly blood labs for the previous 5 years.  She then began to take me very seriously. 

She asked who ordered all of those labs for me and I explained that I ordered them myself. She had never heard of biohacking, or anyone ever taking charge of their own health before, especially not someone moving their lab markers through diet and supplementation into optimal ranges for young athletes.

Thinking that she'd caught me in a mistake, she demanded to know why I was on so high a dosage of T4, but once I explained that her father had put me on that years earlier, she quickly changed the subject.

I was only on T4 and my T4 was already crazy high but my T3 was still way too low.  She wanted to increase my T4 even higher to compensate. I said no! I told her I wanted my T4 lowered and T3 added. She finally gave in. It took many months of dosage adjustments, additional bloodwork, and office visits (far more than it should have), before we got both to be about as close to optimal as I was ever going to get with her.  

Too often, the paid "experts" just don't give a crap. They'll prescribe you something that's "good enough", and you mistakenly believe that they did the very best they could do for you. But you have to know if what they're doing is right, or if it's half-assed. You can't just blindly trust them.   You have to be informed and then politely and respectfully ask them a lot of questions to make certain that they are informed as well.  Too often, they aren't.

You have to take control and fight for yourself if you feel they are mistaken. No one you pay is ever going to care about you (your health, your finances,etc) like you.

A: THIS question literally made me laugh out loud!  Yes, it's really hard to eat clean when everyone around you is accustomed to pizza & fried chicken, or nuggets, fries, plain white rice, and cornbread!  

Heck, it was a long road for me, even as an adult, to modify my palate toward healthier food. And no one could have convinced me as a kid to give up my peanut butter & honey sandwiches!

I'm told that you have to hide that super-palatable food from them as soon as they can switch to solid foods, otherwise, they'll quickly become addicted. And it really IS an addiction, as witnessed by the meltdown they have once you try to take it away!

I suppose that homemade fries and nuggets in an air fryer could be a "healthier" alternative? Although I'm not yet entirely sold on how "healthy" air fryers really are, but at least you'd be avoiding all of the crappy fast-food-restaurant industrial seed oils. You could maybe even make it a fun experience for your 4-year-old to see how their favorite foods can be made from real potatoes and free-range grass-fed chicken! 

Maybe you could gradually mix brown wild rice with the white, until over time it becomes nothing but brown?

Maybe you can entice them with slices of the fruit they love, like berries & bananas, with gradually less ripe bananas and slipping in some slices of raw cucumber, carrots, celery, radishes, tomatoes, and other veggies?

Maybe you can introduce them to new unfamiliar things that taste great, like ripe kiwi or mango or gogi berries, just to get them more accustomed to trying new 'strange' things?

Maybe you could entice your family into experimenting with you on growing and eating sprouts (which are SUPER easy & fun to grow), or making your own yogurt?  

Maybe you could take the lead in offering them the ADVENTURE of trying this new stuff out with you?  Once they experience the FUN of making delicious and healthier equivalents together as a family, like sourdough bread, (what kid doesn't like playing with dough?), they'll likely get hooked on that, like they would a family game night.

Now is the time my friend, to make your move, because it won't get any easier in the teenage years!  lol

To mix a whole bunch of metaphors: Slow and steady wins the race - you 've got to boil that frog very slowly - but you do have to keep moving the goal post.

That's how I got into the enormity of everything that I do today - very small incremental steps, taken over a long period of time. I was a frog boiling so slowly that I hardly even noticed. Even now, as I'm sharing all that I do on this site, I'm looking at it all and saying to myself, "Holy shit, I really do do all of this stuff!"  lol

You've got to start somewhere, and you want to end somewhere good, so now is the time to pick your direction and start down that road. 

A: That's a great question.  The basics are almost too basic for this audience, but I'll mention them anyway, as though I were advising my 35-year-old self, based upon all of the things I was guilty of:

1) Prioritize your sleep.

2) Stop drinking so much with friends.

3) Exercise, sauna, and cold showers at the gym and get outdoors more barefoot.

4) But also learn active recovery (begause that's where the gains occur) and how to properly relax so that stress doesn't age you prematurely.

5) Invest in your nutrition.  Stop eating known & unknown crap and buy clean, healthy food. And not processed paleo or keto snacks mascarading as healthy. Most of what they sell in health food stores is crap.  Buy mostly organic fruit & veggies. If it has a bar code and a list of ingredients, skip it. 

6) Invest in Testing:

a) blood & urine basic panels + lipids + hormones, and address everything that's out of whack. 

b) know your actual micronutrient deficiencies, then modify your diet or supplement accordingly to address them. 

Repeat testing as needed until you get everything fixed and optimal.  

Don't be discouraged, because this can take years. Just know that you're improving with every new iteration!

7) Choose your close friends wisely, because they're either going to support you or derail you. 

8) Build good habits around everything that would support all of the above.  Habits are like autopilot, where you eventually just do them without thinking.

Bonuses:

• Donate whole blood or plasma, since that's free or they will pay you.

• Nourish yourself spiritually in whatever manner honors your beliefs about God, or learn to grow your beliefs if you don't have any.

• Volunteer to serve at a church or other large group and grow a big community of diverse, loving, and accepting people. Don't be surprised to learn that not every church has them.  Find the right one that does. This MUST be a group & place outside of where you work (and preferably NOT in your industry), where you can feel you belong. Having a sense of identity, purpose, and belonging outside of your job (as long as it's healthy, creative & positive), is key to living a very long & happy life. A job can (and will) easily be taken away, but a community is much harder to lose. You very life depends upon having an identity, purpose, and sense of belonging that cannot be stripped away along with your job.

• Prepare yourself now for the inevitable, so that you're not stressed when it arrives.

A: I didn't initially set out to avoid aging. I set out to avoid doing dumb things.

I think I was an unusual little kid, in that I constantly observed the many various adults around me and wondered what made them happy or miserable in life, what things made their relationships successful or failures, what made them popular or outcast, rich or poor, healthy or sickly, or age well or poorly. Every older person was a life teacher and example to me, each of course in different ways.

I saw that, in everything, even despite good or bad luck, their outcomes (positive or negative) were always the result of the accumulation of their little everyday choices over time.  

I didn't want ANY of those bad results, so to me, it was obvious that I just needed to intentionally emulate all of the successful people's choices.

I plainly saw then that most of what people assume to be the inevitable and unavoidable result of aging (weight gain, low energy, aches & pains, loss of strength & ability, saggy, wrinkly skin, cognitive decline, frailty, diseases, etc.) were very much avoidable, or at least could be postponed for several more decades. I saw that the people who did certain things and didn't do other things always avoided them.  

But nobody listened to me when I pointed this out as a kid like nobody listens to me now when I point this out as an adult. So I just live what I know, and am willing to let time prove me right or wrong. So far, I've been experiencing the results I expected. 

It's funny when people learn that I'm nearly 62. Whether we've just met, or they've known me for years, they're always VERY surprised, and don't believe me at first. 

It's weird because, when I meet someone who is successful in some way, and in this case, I mean looks younger than their age, my first question is always, "So what do you do - or don't do - that makes you so successful [stay looking and feeling so young]?", because I want to ensure that I'm doing whatever they're doing.  

But no one ever asks me that. They immediately assume that I "don't look my age" due to just good luck or good genes. 

I'll explain that it didn't happen by chance, that it's from very intentional lifestyle choices. Then maybe only 1 out of 10 people will even ask what those choices involve. However, as soon as it occurs to them that they might have to give up their Diet Coke, for example, they say "Oh, I'm not doing that!", and then the conversation is over. 

I made this website to detail all of my little daily choices, accumulated over time, that are now my habits.  It's not a prescription for anyone else, it's just my answer to the question "What do YOU do - or don't do - to look and feel younger than your age?" (and to have a pace of aging that's slower than a guy who is spending millions to do the same thing.) The fact that YOU have come so far on this site to be reading this now, places you in the 1% of people who want to learn, grow, and become more. 

Even though ANYONE and EVERYONE could do similar things and have similar results, hardly anyone does. I'm not special - I simply took the red pill. And now that my eyes are open, I take the required actions.

Why does it cost me less money? 

1) I don't outsource my health (finances, or anything else that's important) to someone else.  I'll do the work myself and will gladly pay only for occasional advice as a sanity check.

2) I don't care to measure and know the age of my individual organs.  If I'm properly caring for my cells in general, then every organ is naturally going to benefit. 

3) I'm willing to live with some imperfections on my face and skin, even though I don't like them.

4) I leave no inexpensive well-studied intervention off the table, like sauna, or cold therapy. I don't know why Bryan doesn't do either one, because they're practically free.

5) I've found ways to do very expensive interventions cheaply, like plasmapheresis.  I've only just started doing it since my qualifying TruDiagnostic test in July 2023, so I'll be curious to see if it further moves the needle when I retest. Instead of paying $8-10k to have plasmapheresis performed, I'll do periodic series of twice-weekly plasma donations and THEY pay ME. In less than five donations, my entire blood volume is filtered, eliminating all of the older damaged proteins. It's a trade-off in time, rather than money, but I'm retired now so that's fine by me.  

A: I believe it's a 10. I believe that it's so important, that I would do it completely for free, and in fact, I have.

I used to donate for free through the Red Cross, and I would still much prefer that. I don't care about the money, I would like my plasma to go to burn victims, and I wouldn't have to wait 2 hours in line there just to donate.

But there are two problems:

1) My veins look terrific, but they are very surfacy, shallow, and flat and,

2) the Red Cross centers near me are staffed with very old, retired nurses.

Whenever I donate anywhere, I always pre-warn the clinician as to the tricky nature of my veins and let them know that they need to go in very steep and to stay close to the surface. They are my veins after all, and no one knows them as well as I do!  But in their arrogance, the old Red Cross nurses invariably tell me, "Son, I've been drawing blood for 30 years, I think I know what I'm doing!"

Every single time, they would refuse to listen to me.  They'd go in way too deep and end up going straight through the vein (if they even hit it to begin with), which then causes a hematoma. When they miss completely, they'll often begin moving the needle around under my skin, which is quite painful! As a result, my donations with them always leave me battered and bruised, are extremely uncomfortable, and are nearly always unsuccessful.

It got so bad after a while that whenever I would come in, they'd recognize me from prior visits and refuse to draw from me! They would send me away without even trying, blaming my veins!

So now I donate through BioLife Plasma Services, because they mostly listen to me, and when they do, my donations go smoothly.

I definitely would not subject myself to all of that if I didn't believe it was benefiting my longevity.

A: Yes, it's a way of offloading older, damaged proteins that accumulate.  That's why people pay for plasmapheresis.

You are permitted to donate up to twice per week.  I donate with BioLife Plasma Services.

About once every quarter, I subject myself to twice-weekly donations for 4-5 weeks.

The average 70 kg (154 lbs) adult has about 3.5 liters of plasma, or 50–55 mL/kg.

I weigh 75.75 kg (167 lbs), so my body contains between 3787.5 - 4166.25 mL of plasma.  They typically draw only about 835 mL from me each time I donate (based on my weight).

3787.5 mL / 835 mL = 4.535 donations

4166.25 mL / 835 mL = 4.989 donations

So this means that my entire blood volume of plasma is filtered in just under 5 donations, or in 2.5 weeks of donating. 

I like to go for 5 weeks to cycle through my entire blood volume nearly twice. I say "nearly" only because occasionally a donation attempt is unsuccessful, due to the challenging nature of my veins.

A: No. I don't think any of that would show up on a standard blood test, but possibly on an Organic Acids test (?) since it has more to do with clearing out old proteins & metabolites, just like movement, exercise, and sauna/sweating eliminate intercellular and lymphatic waste build-up.  In a car analogy, I think of it like changing your oil vs not changing your oil.

We need the right stuff coming in, but we also need to ensure that waste products get properly cleared away.

A: Well, you would have lost that bet. <sigh>

I've been vaccinated for just about everything: 

• Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR)

• Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis, 

• Polio,

• Typhoid, 

• Yellow fever, 

• Rabies, all three parts

• Hepatitis A, both parts

• Hepatitis B, all three parts 

• Shingrix, both parts - I have unvaccinated family & friends who suffered from incredibly painful shingles and even lost eyesight. No, thank you!

• Influenza annually for most of my life.

• Moderna, twice. 

By all actual measures, 

• none of these have negatively impacted my health, longevity, or pace of aging, 

• my arm never became magnetic, 

• I didn't get "chipped", and 

• Despite conspiracy theories to the contrary, my blood and tissue Mercury level has remained ZERO.  I have truly gotten more Mercury from eating a can of tuna.

I guess I'll never understand the folks that fear getting Mercury poisoning from a vaccine, but then regularly consume sushi. Let that sink in.

Instead of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, I prefer to go with "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger." ;)

A: I'll bet you're right.  While your skill is crazy-impressive, I'm not here to compete with you.  I'm just here being me.

A: My sauna was one of my first and is still my very best and most favorite investment I ever made into my health and longevity.  Have you never heard of Dr Rhonda Patrick and all of her research (and references to all of the studies) into sauna usage? She has YouTube videos that you could watch for weeks, just on the benefits of sauna therapy.  I have no idea why Bryan ignores all of this.

Mine is in my basement laundry room.  It's a Clearlight Sanctuary 3 Infrared sauna from HealWithHeat.com. It comes with both far infrared and regular infrared light panels, but I have also modified mine to contain near infrared flood lights that additionally provide even more heat, per the video "How To Add Near Infrared To ANY Far Infrared Sauna (for $100 bucks) - NIR FIR Sauna Hack" by Matt Justice. 

I try to use my sauna every single day after my workout, but sometimes life gets in the way.  At a bare minimum, I use it 3 times/wk, and usually for 25-45 minutes. 

Before that, I used gym saunas, but they were kind of disgusting, if you know what I mean. 

I also used a "car sauna", sort of as a joke for social media. It consisted of my black car with black interior, parked in full sun on a 90F degree summer day, with the engine running and front & rear heaters on, plus seat heaters on, and lots of thick towels to protect the seats!  It would get blistering hot in there -- exactly how hot I never knew, because my LED thermometers always blanked-out after 120 degrees.  Even though it was sort of a joke, it was also highly effective! But the off-gassing from all the vehicle's plastics was probably killing me slowly.  😉

A: In order to maximize my time efficiency and maximize my exercise compliance, I began investing decades ago into home equipment and have continued to add challenging new workout toys ever since. (For a cool example, look up "Beckford Bar"). 

I no longer have wasted drive-time getting to the gym, don't have to wait my turn on a machine or rack, and never have to wipe down someone else's sweat, plus I can pop downstairs at any time for an exercise snack.  That's also why the background looks like such a mess in my treadmill pictures. I'm still in the process of cleaning up & putting things away after remodeling the entire house last year. It's a very small house, with every inch utilized to the fullest.

I may need to sign up for a gym again though. I don't own a stair-stepper (although I do own a Maxi Climber), but I need to train for my upcoming climb of Mount Kilimanjaro. We don't have a lot of big hills in Detroit or its surrounding suburbs, other than trash mounds, so I'm either going to have to drive to one of those nearby that I can access & train on, or it's back into a gym I go. Ugh.

I do miss the gym's group exercise yoga & Pilates classes, though. I met a ton of terrific people there doing that.  I still do enjoy drop-in classes outdoors in parks, and now that I've got time, I may even join a studio.  

To all the bros who only push weights with the other bros in the gym, all I can say is, "Dudes, you have no idea what you're missing out on!"

A: I use my new Carol Bike now on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and P90X has a workout for every day of the week, alternating weight days and cardio days. So when I'm in the groove, I'm doing some type of P90X workout every day.  

But just like with the sauna, life sometimes gets in the way. For example, nearly the entire month of December, I couldn't get in *any* workouts.  The two week of Christmas play performances (began Nov 30, plus all of the rehearsals before), and volunteering at an Operation Christmas Child distribution center in between, took up all my time, wore me down, and threw off both my sleep and nutrition. So as a result, I suffered from the same type of flu that everyone else had, until Christmas. I only just began feeling normal again at the start of February.  I think I looked like absolute crap in my New Year's Day pictures, but it is what it is.

Michigan winters can be rough, even without all the snow, It's been cloudy & rainy here for weeks, so I've gotten almost no natural sunlight and continue to deal with sinus drainage. Covid came around again and some friends tested positive. I don't know if I had it again or not, but whatever it was, it derailed my regular workout routine.

I just retested again for nearly everything (TruDiagnostic, GlycanAge, DoNotAge NAD, LifeLength telomere, SpectraCell Micronutient, and Life Extension Cardio Core panel), on February 1st, so I'll be curious to see if any of this shows up in my results!

A: I'm retired now, but I was intentionally up-spending and investing heavily over the last few years while I was still working, in preparation for this. 

In, 2020-2023, I was spending about $30-$40k per year:

• Blood Labs & Longevity Testing alone (CGMs, elite blood-marker & hormone panels as I worked to get everything locked-in, full genome DNA sequencing, TruDiagnostic, GlycanAge, and various other DNA testing & analysis) had all been incredibly expensive - a whopping $10k each year.

• My Health food (which for me is my everyday groceries) and restaurant spend has been less than $300/month.

• Supplements were about $600/month.

• Prescription peptides & bioregulators were around $5k/yr.

• The rest was spent on biohacking conferences and travel, running events & travel, athletic apparel, personal care products, and biohacking & fitness equipment, which consisted of large one-time investments, like my sauna, my Joovv light, Normatec compression boots, AmpCoil, Beemer, Carol AI bike, and AssaultRunner treadmill.

I intentionally invested very heavily in all of that while I was still working, so that now in my retirement, those expenses are off of my balance sheet. 

My expenditure will drop substantially for 2024 and beyond, because:

• I've learned all that I care to know about how my diet affects my blood sugar and insulin levels, so the huge expense of experimental CGMs is over.

• My entire genome has been sequenced and my ancestry is known, so DNA testing for me is done.

• I can now cut back substantially on my monthly Blood Labs, as I have nearly everything completely dialed-in now. Basic monthly panels will be sufficient to verify if I'm still on track.

• Through better sourcing, my peptides & bioregulators expenditure for all of last year was already reduced down to under $1k.

However, I don't foresee my supplements or grocery expenditure changing all that much, and my Biohacking Conference travel will actually increase.

I also have not completely taken off the table the idea of doing a full-body stem cell make-over at some point. 

THAT is something I'll seriously have to start saving pop-cans for.

A: Sadly, I agree. Many brands of almond milk contain all kinds of extra crap in them and nearly ALL of them contain the wrong kind of added calcium (calcium carbonate). It's been an aggravation of mine for a long time. It's just another example of something that should be healthy that the food industry has managed to screw up in their processing. 

I do know that some people make their own almond milk. I'm very tempted, but that would require yet another outlay of time and effort for me, and that currently makes me resistant. If I can lean how to make it quickly & easily, then I could be swayed. The same with homemade kombucha and coconut yogurt - they're just a matter of time and exposure for me.

Meanwhile, I'm stuck with store bought almond milk until I can find a better liquid to mix my protein shakes in.

A: Love?? Ugh. I've always hated marathon running!  And I truly suck at it!  lol

I did my first marathon in 2012 at the age of 50, when Team World Vision came to our church (Northridge Church in Plymouth, MI).  250 of us non-runners signed up to run the Chicago Marathon in order to raise money to build wells to bring clean water to communities in Africa.

More than 800 children under age 5 die every day from diarrhea and dehydration caused by contaminated water, poor sanitation, and improper hygiene. We wanted to do something about that.

Plus, I thought it would be an incredible opportunity to learn from seasoned multi-marathoners - all of their tricks and tips for how to properly train, fuel, finish, and survive such a thing - and it really was! 

Unfortunately, I run like a lead-coated sloth, so I found absolutely none of it to be enjoyable!  But I finished anyway! While my goal was five and a half hours, it took me 6 hours and 20 minutes. Apparently, I really like putting the 'endure' into endurance running. 

I had fully intended to be a "one & done" marathoner, but the following year (2013), "Team World Vision Detroit" was formed, and our race was to be The Detroit Free Press Marathon. Silly me, I signed up again, because how could I not run my own hometown?

I was well-trained by then, having just finished Chicago, so running wasn't as great of a chore for me, but I still hated it. 

By Mile 20 I was on track to PR, but I encountered another runner who was really struggling. Her name was Ernestine, and she said this was her third attempt at completing a Marathon, and she feared that she wouldn't make the cutoff again this time.  I checked my run watch and told her "Just stick with me. Together we can make it!" 

So she did - and we did! Together we finished in 6:20, the identical time as my first marathon.  But somehow this one felt far more meaningful to me, because it wasn't all about me - it was about helping someone else - and that made all the difference.

I retired from running after that, but for the next 8 years I remained on the team. I still fundraised and served the team by shuttling equipment, staffing a cheer station, and handing out water at group training runs.

But in 2022, the team decided to do a 10-year anniversary run in the Chicago Marathon. I was intriged to see if a ten-year-older (60) now-biohacking me could at least match, if not beat, my ten-year-younger self's time, so I came out of running retirement to train. 

Then something really weird happen.  I kinda-sorta didn't hate running so much. I mean, I still really sucked at it, but I didn't hate it! And despite aquiring neuromas in both feet during training, I finished Chicago in 6:13:14, a "personal record" (PR), and then I ran the Detroit Free Press Half Marathon the very next weekend.  In my marathon pictures, I just smiled through the pain and tried to keep my entire body relaxed to keep the neuromas from flaring up even more.

I believe that I'm through with full marathons now. At least until I turn 70, and then maybe we'll see? If a group of friends decide to run Chicago again then, I could be dumb enough to be tempted. For now, I'm only considering do an occasional destination 5K or half marathon, just for fun, if a bunch of my friends are also doing it.  

A: I've been doing P90X regularly since April 2008. P90X alternates strength and cardio days, so I've always been a fan of both.  

I'm still a huge fan of the original P90X, even after all these years.  I enjoy running and yoga and Pilates too, but nothing gets me more into shape than P90X. At the risk of sounding like a paid endorser -- which I am not -- I've done MANY other Beachbody online workouts as well, but I always come back to P90X.  It has everything: weight training, cardio, yoga, kenpo, plyometrics, and a killer ab workout.  It's extremely challenging, but it's also very worth it! 

Before marathons, I enjoyed doing sprints with a 50lb weighed vest. But once I made the switch to endurance running, I had to swap out the cardio workouts of P90X for my run training.  I'm very lean, so I didn't have the energy or the body fat to burn to do both.  

As it was, I'd constantly burn muscle during run season. I just couldn't consume enough carbs and fat to keep it.  I'd always put the muscle back on again in the off season, but at my age, that's becoming increasingly harder to do!  Since building and maintaining muscle is so vital to longevity, I can't keep affording those strip-down phases anymore.

I now plan to get back into weighed vest sprinting again, and focus on more muscle-building endurance events, like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, the American Lung Association's Fight for Air Climb, and the Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim, which are all in my plan for this year. 

A: For me, it's been sheer coincidence that a good sense of community is a cornerstone of longevity (as witnessed in Blue Zones). I had no knowledge of that when I started attending a church. 

I was always more of a loner, a wallflower, and felt invisible for most of my life.  I was very spiritual, but not at all religious -- not a "church-goer" at all.

When I was really little, my older sister told me about Jesus and how He had died on a cross for me, and that made a really big impact on me. I mean how could you not fall in love with someone who loved you so much, that they'd give up their very life for you? Or a God that loved you so much, they'd give up their only Son?

As I got older, I was raised catholic, and quickly found I couldn't ask any "challenging" questions about God or Jesus, lest a nun correct such impertinence with a ruler. I tried reading the Bible but all we had was a King James version, and I couldn't make heads or tails out of that! Instead, I learned everything I could about God by reading books on just about every other religion except for "my own". And I certainly was not a fan of "Christians", based upon all of the outspoken examples I'd encountered to that point. 

Still, I felt drawn to God. I sensed that I was lacking in spiritual nutrition, even though I had no idea what that nourishment would consist of.  I could feel that there was a "God-sized hole" in my life, so when I moved back to MI in 2001 to take care of my folks who were battling cancer, I asked my best friend to help me to find a good local church.

He took me to a very small church, one where everyone knew everyone and their business. At the end of a very ho-hum service, I was called out from the pulpit as "The newcomer" and I was asked to stand and give my testimony.  Hell, I didn't even know what a "testimony" was!! I was petrified! And I hate being the center of attention. Public speaking still terrifies me! I told my buddy, "Don't ever do that to me again! There's got to be somewhere else!"

The next week, he took me somewhere else, and the exact same thing happened! Finally, he took me to Northridge, a ten-thousand-member mega-church. From the moment I sat down, the worship music had me in tears. The talk itself astounded me!  And fitting with my comfort, I was completely anonymous and invisible there!  I knew that I'd found my church-home.

After a few years, I got hounded by a different friend into serving at the church, until I said "yes". Of all the things they could have had me do, they put me as a door greater outside the back entrance - the center of people's attention as they came in. Yikes!

I ended up serving outside that door for the next 10 years and got to know and be known by hundreds (if not thousands) of good-hearted people! So much for being anonymous and invisible!

The thing is, none of that was an accident. While I was finally learning about Him, God was giving me exactly what I needed, and gradually, through serving, He changed me and my life completely.  "I was once one way, now I'm another." No longer invisible or a wallflower, I can walk into a party of total strangers and feel completely comfortable to work the room.

He's done so many seemingly impossible things in my life since then that I've Iearnd to simply trust Him and say "yes" to scary things, like doing a marathon, performing on stage in front of an audience, and traveling to foreign countries - things I'd previously had absolutely no desire to do whatsoever!

The incredible "secret" is that by volunteering to serve others, you end up getting back so much more! It hardly seems fair, but that's God! 😄

I now belong to 4 very different, yet equally awe-inspiring churches.  If you're at all curious, please check out some of their online talks:

• NorthRidge Church - mega-sized non-denominational

• Church of The Way - small non-denominational

• Metro City Church - medium-sized non-denominational

• Gilead Church - medium-sized Baptist

And as a single guy that's never had kids of my own, I now have hundreds of church kids who run to me and hug me, and I have dozens of church families who treat me like one of their own.  It's all been a blessing beyond my wildest dreams, because, who doesn't want to love and be loved?  

It is now and always will be thanks to my very large community, that I will remain forever young -- if not still in body, then in spirit.

A: