Living healthy to 160 – insulin and the genetics of longevity













Taken from Worms live longer when they stop eating  (





















20 thoughts on “Living healthy to 160 – insulin and the genetics of longevity

    • Hi Harry: that’s an excellent question and thanks for asking. I didn’t even know this was the case because I haven’t read much about all-meat diets, but I suspected it. I would think the main reason is that protein that is not needed for tissue repair and building is converted to glucose. If you eat a lot of protein in general or even a large amount in a single sitting, because the body cannot use more than about 30-50 grams per meal, the excess will be converted to glucose. This is a well-known effect of eating high protein diets that has been understood in the context of research into nutritional ketosis: eating more than a particular amount of insulin-stimulating carbs OR more than a certain amount of protein in a single sitting will push the body out of nutritional ketosis. So, this would be my guess.

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    • Thanks Marius: interesting read. Just to note that their keto subjects had insulin levels of 8 +/- 2, which for me is very high! I would consider well-adapted, steady state keto fasting insulin levels to be 1 to 3. There’s quite a bit of this kind of stuff in the book The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living by Volek and Phinney.


    • Very good! There are many excellent points to write about here. I will write an article about this stuff because it is very interesting but also complex and subtle. In fact, more subtle than the authors or these two pieces seem to appreciate. The bottom line is that our digestive system is that of an evolved vegetarian: it is much shorter than it is in our closest cousins the apes who eat mostly fibrous stuff, and it is much much shorter than that of any carnivore who eat no plant foods and therefore have extremely short intestines. Ours, has evolved a bulge at the very start of the intestine with a valve to control the flow; we call it stomach and its role it is to break down protein by secreting pepsin and HCl. Ours digestive system also has a very long intestine (compared to carnivores) in order to attempt to extract as much as it can from all the fibrous plant foods that we have evolved to eat. Three major causes of problems are: 1) if we eat two much meat WITH a lot of plant fibre and do not allow the system to clear it out before eating more of it (for us this takes 24-36 hours); 2) have a stomach that does not (anymore) secrete enough pepsin and HCl; and 3) have a pancreas that does not (anymore) secrete enough enzymes for digestion. You could read (again if you have already long ago) Why we should drink water before meals and Understand digestion for a refresher on this subject.

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  1. Thank you for this fascinating insight into the discovery of telomeres, the research of Professor Kenyon and studies on animal lifespans. And, of course, for your perspective on how this all relates to us humans. I can’t wait to read Part II of this series.

    Longevity is a subject I’m really passionate about. (Surprisingly, I found out early in life that not many people are.) 20 years ago I bought my first book on anti-aging principles and strategies – Stopping the Clock – and read many more since then.

    A few days ago I was flipping through my daughter’s geography workbook and noticed it contained a section on life expectancy with charts for all countries and continents. I’m familiar with online resources on the subject but was positively surprised to see this in the materials for primary schools. I just wonder if there are any productive discussions happening in classrooms and if teachers are capable of going beyond the usual deterministic rationale when it comes to life expectancy.

    As it’s often the case, there are two main groups of experts with opposing views regarding the subject of longevity. The first group claims that in the “western world” life expectancy for a child born today is unlikely to exceed 90 years without major new scientific advances which would allow for changes in the processes of aging. And even if science (medicine?) succeeded in eliminating all aging-related degenerative diseases, that would, in their opinion, not increase an average human lifespan by more than 15 years or so.

    The other, much smaller, group of experts (which would include you), is more optimistic and predicts new and dramatic increases in human lifespan. Some of them believe that a major shift will happen already with a baby boom generation, the reason being their totally different mentality. Unlike previous generations “they always got what they wanted” and “are simply refusing to die and will somehow find a way to stay alive”.

    But is is enough, as you write in the concluding paragraph, to keep the concentration of insulin circulating in our blood as low as possible in order to radically extend life? 10,000 years ago humans did not eat refined carbohydrates, because there were none, so they must have had rock bottom levels of glucose in their blood at all times. However, they still didn’t live nearly as long as we do today, while tortoises and some other long-lived species were Methuselahs back then already as they are today.

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    • Thank you Bostjan for the comments and question. I will address these points directly or indirectly in other articles. But here are some facts on which I base myself to claim and believe that we can live significantly longer than 100 years:
      1) studies on centenarians cited by Rosedale show that people that live to this age in relatively good health (they’re not dying in a hospital for years on end kept alive by machines) tell us that such people are found in a wide range of places on Earth, in different societies with different social and cultural habits and, obviously, different diets. Some are active, some not. Some drink alcohol, others don’t. Some are careful about what they eat, some are not. Some even smoke, while others don’t. What is found to be at least one common element in all of these individuals is that they all have very low circulating levels of insulin. Some of them, because they don’t like sweet things and thus don’t eat any. Some because their diet doesn’t contain insulin-stimulating carbs, but many of them because they have some kind of genetic predisposition for having very low insulin levels. The point Rosedale makes is that we can all have very low levels of insulin by not eating anything that stimulates its secretion. And therefore, not doing anything else than this, it seems reasonable to conclude that everyone that keeps insulin really low should live to be 100 or thereabouts. Again, this is living to 100 without doing anything else than keeping insulin low, and there are tons of other things we can do to further increase health and therefore longevity.
      2) The few places in the world where the concentration of centenarians is highest have been investigated (it’s something like 5, I don’t remember exactly), and is was found that the common elements are that they all lived active, happy, stress-free and fulfilling lives, eat only unprocessed, nutrient-dense whole foods that they grow themselves using traditional (organic) methods, never have processed carbohydrates (no desserts, no sweets, fruit only in season), and generally eat a lot of vegetables and unprocessed or unpasteurised animal products from animals living outside. At least three of these 5 societies (Japanese islander, Sardinians, and Greek islanders) eat basically only vegetables and meat or fish (no sugars, no starches, no grains). So, again, the simple conclusion is that if you eat nutrient-dense, unprocessed, organically grown whole foods with lots of vegetables and healthy animal products, never eating processed foods (especially not processed carbs), then that’s enough for humans to make it quite normally to 100 years of age.
      3) There are tons of things we can do to ensure that all of our organs and systems function at their best that go beyond eating a traditionally healthy diet. All of them will help tremendously in prolonging health and life. I have written about some of these like the kidneys, the intestines, the stomach, the pancreas and liver, but I know I have to write more about that.
      4) There are many supplements that are also known to have amazing health-promoting and life-extending properties. Obviously, these will also help a great deal in prolonging health and life. I have written about B12 and Mg, which are two of these micronutrients that are essential for long life and that both actually play a role in the preservation and health of our genes and DNA. I will write about several more as I go through this series of articles on living to 160. Of course, nobody knows what can actually be done for sure simply because it’s never been done on humans, and, in fact, because it cannot be done in a controlled experiment. But, there are nonetheless quite a few people that are, as we are, doing this experiment on themselves. Therefore, we are bound to find out eventually, at leat within our own lifetime :), how long we can potentially live.


  2. Hi.
    Great paper, I enjoyed a lot. However, I would raise some question which I find important or, at least, interesting.

    To be honest, the first time I read the paper, I thought the idea raised ethic problems or maybe science fiction, but today, after meditating the issue some days, I think the opposite terms.
    First of all, the main idea of this paper would be that there might be one ore more genes regulating our natural age, and we can modify them to increase our age, that means, we would can regulate our aging.

    As far as I understood, roughly speaking, we can live 120 years, for instance, and we do not look like as a old person, what’s more, we looked 60 years younger. Over the history of humanity, we have increased our life expectancy gradually; for example during the middle age, the average age was about 40 years, whilst in 1955 this average was about 45 years. Today, that average is, more or less, about 80 years (always talking about “developed” world).
    How were we able to increase this average dramatically in only 50 years?. The answer is clear, of course, we have improve a lot our lifestyle. Today, anyone of us lives better that one King of any Castle in the Middle Age. Our food is better (in principle), we have more comfortable houses, ours jobs do nor require physical efforts, we have heating in our houses, and so on, and, over the years, we managed to live more, and better.

    What this paper (and Cynthia Kenyon) suggests would be to double our life expectancy immediately, without expecting years to adapt ourselves to this new “feature”. This is not bad, in principle. Why would we have to wait 50 or more years?. We have already modified our environment and now we are able to live more years, so I do not see any reason to do the same with our genes.
    But, Could we handle this new situation?. I think that nobody knows how those modifications could affect us, bringing new diseases, for example.

    I will keep thinking about this issue, meanwhile if you want to watch the Cynthia Kenyon Ted Talk, this might be interesting for you.

    Thank you very. Best regards.

    Jose David.

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    • Thank you Jose David. To be clear: nobody, as far as I am aware, claims to know how to extend human lifespan considerably to beyond 90-100 years, which we see in the longest lived people in various places in the world. Cynthia Kenyon and others’ work on lifespan in simple animals is one thing, and doing this in humans is quite another. Also to be perfectly clear: there is manipulation of genes that is in principle required; it is gene expression that is modified by the concentration of insulin. It is our own genes that, without being modified externally in any way, either promote the production of protective molecules that protect and repair the DNA and organelles in the cells or not. So, to be sure, there is really no ethical component involved here, as far as I am concerned.

      The other aspect of your comment is about the slow, gradual increase in lifespan that we see in modern societies and that we attribute to improved living conditions. This is true to a great extent. Is it also true that lifespan in all modern societies is greatly extended, artificially, I would say, by medical interventions and drugs. Just imagine how many more people would die if all hospitals, doctors and medications all of a sudden disappeared. Then, we would have a much better idea of the true life expectancy. I am certain that it would be at least 20 years less than we claim it to be now. What I’m talking about is not living longer as we do today, sick and diseased, taking 20 pills a day of various drugs, doing our daily dialysis for 15 years because our kidneys failed when we were 63 years old, having bypass surgery to save us from yet another heart attack, taking out the prostate or testicles or breasts in order to try to stay alive somewhat longer. What I’m talking about is living healthy without health problems, just normal, healthy, functional and happy. Naturally, this also means that we don’t cost anything to society, unlike what the current situation is, and where everyone beyond the age of 60 costs a fortune to everyone else because everyone is always sick from something.

      At the end of all this comes the question which is the subject of this article and is about how long we can or should rightly live. We don’t really know, but what we do know is that we should be living longer than we are, probably close to at least twice as long, for the plain and simple reason that almost everything we do, eat and drink makes us age faster in the sense that it promotes more damage and less repair of cells. So, the first thing we should do is just stop doing, eating and drinking the things that make us age faster and get sick, and we’ll be already much better off than we are. And in this regard, it seems that, based on a large body of research that includes Kenyon’s, insulin regulates growth in the young and the rate of ageing and degeneration in adults by suppressing proportionally to its concentration the expression of the genes that stimulate the production of molecules that protect and repair our cells. More insulin = less protection and less repair = more degeneration = faster ageing.

      And thanks for the link to her TEDD talk. Of course, you might have guessed that I watched it a couple of times, in addition to all her several other lectures on YouTube before writing this article :)


  3. Thank you Guillaume. It’s good to know we’re doing the best we can. I’d also love to hear your opinion on the work of some gerontologists such as, for example, Aubrey de Grey who don’t focus so much on nutrition and lifestyle as vehicles to a long and healthy life but are looking for scientific breakthroughs to “engineer” a human body into super-longevity. Their research seem to be well funded but is it promising or just science fiction?


  4. Kenyon does mention lowering carbohydrate intake. She gave an interview in which she said that she had eliminated all starches and sugar from her diet. I mention this in my book, Stop the Clock: The Optimal Anti-Aging Strategy.

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  5. Hello – great article.

    I’m hoping you can provide a reference. You mentioned that when daf-2 was turned off completely, the worms would die (see quote below). Do you have a reference for this / remember where it was mentioned? I’ve read a bunch of papers on the topic, vaguely remember seeing it or hearing it from C Kenyon, but cannot find it. Thanks very much.


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    • Bi Bob: all the information I presented in this article comes from Cynthia Kenyon’s video lectures that you can watch on YouTube. Here is a playlist of 7 of her videos in which you will certainly find the reference you’re looking for:


      • Thanks very much for your reply. I actually watched the UCSF Part 1 video and at 32:55 she’s talking about turning daf-2 off, replete with a slide behind her that reads “daf-2 OFF,” and makes a caveat that, “if you turn it completely off, it’s likely that they die.” I don’t think she’s done the experiment, but seems that would be the case.

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