This video is sponsored by professional photographers of America. Join a community of over 33,000 photographers and find equipment, insurance, education, and business tools made specifically for photographers like you. This is the Veyonus Vespera observation station, and this is an asked photography kit that I put together to do everything the Vespera does, but I put it together using various spare parts I already had around. Despite their very different looks, these two kits are incredibly similar on paper. They use the same camera sensor, the same optics, identical specs there, the ability to automate most imaging tasks, including finding deep sky objects and focusing on them. They also both happen to cost $2,500 US when bought new today. And in this video, I've put them head to head on the same night, and I'm going to compare what it's like actually using these two setups under the stars, and then also see if there's any difference in the final images that we can create with them. Hello, my name is Nico, and this channel is all about asked photography. One trend in asked photography is always more automation. And by automation, I mean the system itself takes over many of the tasks that we once did manually, like figuring out where to point the telescope or focusing the telescope, all these kinds of little things that we used to do with our hands. And this Vespera is on the cutting edge of automation. Veyonus has really created a very sleek system for taking images of the night sky. And of course that won't be for everyone, but as a bit of a tech head gadget freak kind of person myself, I had a blast playing with it. But before I jump into a full review, let me start with just a couple disclosures. This Veyonus Vespera and all the accessories were sent to me by Veyonus for the purpose of making a video review, but they have no input into what I will say in the video, no money has exchanged hands, and when I'm finished reviewing it, I'll be sending this back to them. In my spare parts kit, the only thing I didn't purchase myself is the Star Adventurer GTI mount, which is still on extended loan from Skywatcher USA. So thank you to them. So why am I making this video? Well, Veyonus approached me asking if I wanted to review the Vespera. I looked into it and I looked at the spec sheet and I realized, huh, you know what, I have everything I need to make my own Vespera of sorts by putting together various parts I had lying around or I could cannibalize from other rigs. And then when I totaled what all of that would cost, all these parts to buy new, it came to $2,500, which is exactly what Veyonus is selling the Vespera for. So now I was even more intrigued because you'd think, okay, these two kits have the same sensor, the same kind of optics. They're gonna probably take similar photos and the overall price is the same. So why would you go for this one or this one? And basically what are the advantages and disadvantages of going with something like this, the super sleek Vespera versus my more Frankenstein's monster of a setup over here? Well, that's the main thing I'm gonna explore in this video and of course I've had the chance to take them out under the stars and do a little bit of head to head matchup so we'll compare the images coming from these kits. I took pictures of the Horsehead Nebula at the same time under the exact same sky. So let's first take a look at the Vespera and the reason Veyonus calls this the Vespera observation station is that it's combined a telescope, a motorized mount, a camera, an autofocuser, a computer, and a Wi-Fi antenna all into one streamlined package. There's literally just one button on this to turn it off and on and then after that you have to control it through the app. So you do need an Android or iOS device to use this. You don't need cell service, that's important because often when I'm out somewhere dark I might not have good cell service. This station does create its own Wi-Fi network that you connect to, the Vespera network. And then from there setting it up is very incredibly easy and seamless. From taking it out of the box, not knowing anything about it, to start taking photos, my first object was the Dumbbell Nebula literally took about 10 minutes and was incredibly low friction. I think anyone could start on astrophotography with this device. I didn't question what was happening at any point. I enjoyed seeing it work and make little noises and it was telling me what it was doing on screen and also telling me fun facts about space. This setup on the other hand, the spare parts build here took me well over an hour to get going and even then it wasn't really working to its full potential. And keep in mind, I'm an experienced astrophotographer but this was a new rig so there's always plenty to go wrong with a new rig. One of the things that did go wrong was the ASIR Plus was new to me. I'd been putting off learning it even though I've had it for a while. And so it took me over an hour, partly because I had major connection issues when trying to control the ASIR from my Android smartphone. Basically it just kept creating that Wi-Fi network, allowing me to connect and then disconnecting. The Wi-Fi network would disappear even though I was standing right next to it. And this persisted even though I restarted it a few times. But let me make clear, I think this was some kind of user error probably. I'm just, I'm not trying to diss the ASIR. I know it's a very popular device but more of what I'm trying to point out here is that putting together a kit like this one from all these various parts that you have to know how to use, that's gonna require a lot more troubleshooting and finessing before you can make it into a stable imaging system. So your first night, your first two nights, maybe even your first several nights out, you can expect to have to fine tune this and really get to grips with how everything here works together. And for people like me that's part of the fun of astrophotography. But I can totally see someone else would rather just get on with it and have a more turnkey system like this one. That's what this Vespera really sort of excels at. And so before I even got this one working, I had already taken nice pictures of the dumbbell nebula and the Cygnus wall with the Vespera.  I tried their dual band, narrow band filter. And I gotta say, they made this so easy to install a filter.  I've never found an easier way to change out filters than what they've done here. I should also point out while we're looking at the front of the Vespera that Veonis did send me this review unit out with the hygrometer, which is a tiny little $100 add-on you screw in right here. And what that does is it measures the water vapor in the air so that the system knows how to keep the telescope and the filters free from due. And I don't know without this add-on if we might've had problems with due but I probably would get it for my environment out here. Let me take a moment here to speak about this video's sponsor which is PPA, Professional Photographers of America. I've been a member for a few months now and I'm very happy with what they offer as part of a membership.  I'm just going to highlight some of the ones that I think are most important to me as primarily an astrophotographer. Well, we all know that astrophotography gear can get very expensive. I have $5,000 worth of gear right here in front of me. And so to tell you the truth, all my photography and astrophotography is probably one of my biggest investments. It's worth definitely more than my car. So I've often thought that I'd really like to ensure my equipment and have insurance, you know, just like I have for my house and my car. Well, PPA makes that super easy because membership includes photography equipment insurance. And it's a very nice plan where if something breaks and you need full replacement, it's a $350 flat deductible or if you can get your equipment repaired, then it's just a $50 flat deductible. And that's a much better deal than what I get with my renters insurance. I did check out the terms. And so this equipment assurance alone makes it worth it for me, but they also offer data recovery services. That could be a huge deal if you're doing sort of a one of a kind event. And then lastly, PPA is very active in terms of photography, education and training. And I know that many of my viewers practice other forms of photography outside of Astro. And I think this is a great group to get involved with to up your game in many different areas of photography. So if that sounds intriguing to you, follow the link in the video description for a special discount on your membership. Now let's go through some of the pros and the cons of using the Vespera versus my spare parts build. Okay, starting with ease of use and as you imagine, the Vespera is very easy to use. I'm gonna get two thumbs up there. The spare parts rig, I was sort of torn between a pro and a con. I would say that for a beginner, there's just too many things to learn and too many things to go wrong to call it easy to use. So I'm gonna give it a thumbs down for ease of use. But keep in mind with that that if you practice a few times, maybe five times, it can get quite easy to use. It's really just a matter of putting in the time. But with the Vespera, there's really no downtime. You immediately understand how to use it. Cause there's just really nothing to learn. It does everything pretty much automatically. In terms of weight, the whole Veyonus Vespera with all the optional filters in its backpack, the backpack you can buy for it weighs 14 pounds. So really very lightweight. The spare parts rig is just a bit over 20 pounds. And that includes the counterweight that comes with the Star Adventure GTI. So I'd say both are lightweight but the Vespera is incredibly lightweight. It's just 14 pounds total. And in terms of packability, the Veyonus Vespera, everything fits into a backpack that you can buy optionally for it. It's all very compact and yeah, really, really packable. The spare parts rig, you could pack it all up. I think it'd be hard to sort of fit everything in in a nice way all assembled like it is there. So even though you could pack all of it into a backpack, I think you would want to take out off all the cables and then reassemble those. So it's not quite as easy to pack and unpack. Okay, and then in terms of upgradeability, the Veyonus Vespera does have a few accessories you can buy. There's a solar filter and narrowband filter and a light pollution filter. And then there's the hygrometer, which is for controlling the dew heater. And those are really the only upgrades at the moment. They may come out with more, but based on how the Vespera is designed, you sort of have to go with upgrades that the Veyonus may provide. While the spare parts rig, you could really change out any part of this. You could change out the mount. You could change out the optics. You could change out the camera. You could add a guide scope, which we'll talk about. So it's completely upgradeable. You can do anything you want with it. In terms of cost, I'm giving these both moderate thumbs down. I mean, in terms of what they do, they're fairly priced. $2,500 is just sort of what you can expect if you want this fully automatic system with autofocus and go-to and all that. But I think there are much less expensive ways to get into astrophotography that will give you just as good, if not better results. So I'm a big advocate for starting with a DSLR and lens. And if you do that from a dark sky with a nice mount, you can get amazing results that way. So if you're not so concerned with all the auto features, all the automated features, I think you can get a much less expensive rig going because you're not paying for things like an autofocuser or a mount that has go-to and a computer that can do plate solving and all of these different features. In terms of flexibility, I guess this is sort of similar to upgradeability, but it's related in the sense that with the spare parts rig, I could upgrade something, like upgrade to a mono camera with a narrowband filter and that would very much change the nature of the rig. If something's going wrong, I can also quickly change out a single part and get it working again. So it's flexible. Well, with the Veonis Vespera, if something did go wrong with it, I wouldn't have any idea how to fix it because it's basically a black box of a machine. You don't open it up because there's no visible screws or anything. It's sort of like an iPhone or something. So in terms of flexibility, it's not the best. And then in terms of the results, I think both did pretty well. I'm gonna show those right now and you can decide for yourself, of course, but I would give them both a thumbs up. So let's move over to Pix Insight here and we can look at some of the results. Now, since these were using the exact same optics, a 200 millimeter focal length lens at F4 with the same chip and IMX462 by Sony, the single frames look remarkably similar. You can see the composition is slightly different in terms of the rotation. That wasn't something I really had much control over but the horse head is centered on both. You can see spot sizes of stars are similar, the amount of detail, the amount of noise, all of this is very similar in a single frame. Now where it got a little bit more interesting is in the full integration of about 70 minutes on each. So here is the full integration of my spear parts kit. And now let's look at that compared to the full integration with the Vespera. And there are some minor color differences. I don't know what to account for that but this one just looks like a little bit more of a gent on the Vespera but I don't know why exactly. The main thing though that I've, I notice if we zoom in on both and if we sort of look at, yes, this area right here, this is what I call walking noise but see how on the Vespera, the walking noise is curved. Well, on my kit, the walking noise is very much in these straight diagonal lines which we are very common with an equatorial mount that isn't auto guided or that isn't dithered between auto guided exposures. I don't know if I really have a preference between these two examples of walking noise but it is interesting how with the alt as mount we get the curved and with the equatorial mount we get the straight walking noise. And this plays out in the rejection patterns as well. You can see because this is an alt as mount you get all of this field rotation and that also means that over time you lose more and more of the frame. So if we went out to two hours or three hours we would start losing even more of the overall frame due to that field rotation. Well, that's not true with a equatorial mount although if your polar alignment isn't very good you'll get worse and worse walking noise like we see here. Now to go back to our chart and I was talking about upgradability and flexibility with the spare parts rig. If we were to add on a cheap guide scope and auto guiding camera we could really minimize this walking noise and it would basically eliminate it because if you auto guide your exposures and then you dither occasionally between sub exposures you can break up this noise pattern that's created and get a very clean result. Well with the Vespera I haven't seen anything about dithering it should be possible for them to dither even without auto guiding just by because it's controlling the pointing it can do plate solving and all that so I could see in a future upgrade maybe they could introduce that in the software. Okay, a little bit of an editor's update here while I've been working on this video Veonis released this mosaic or panorama mode on both the Vespera and the Stelina and when I was reading through this article I was definitely interested in trying it but then I got down to this paragraph and it says that the way this mosaic mode works is actually through the dithering effect and they specifically call out that this is going to have an impact on inherent defects of the sensor noise and hot pixels. So I really wanna try this but at the same time I need to get this video out so for now we'll just have to trust that this does really work and it would definitely even the score a bit I think between my spare parts rig and the Veonis Vespera because with my spare parts rig I would have to add on a guide scope and guide camera in order to dither between exposures while with the Veonis telescope you can do it through this mosaic mode. Now again, I haven't tried this so I don't know how easy it is or if there's any drawbacks but it seems like it would just be the way to go with this telescope. So very exciting news if you already own this telescope and if you've tried it let me know in the comments and let everyone know how it works but in any case I think you can see that with either of these final results you could process them to sort of minimize this noise in the dark areas and get a very nice end result. I don't see a major difference between these two in terms of signal to noise ratio or star size or anything like that so I think you'd be quite happy using either setup. So I think that's it for this one. I'd be happy to answer any questions in the comments as always and until next time this is Nico Carver, Nebula Photos, Clear Skies.


Hello everyone, my name is Malavika Raghavan and my colleague Anubhuti Singh and I are delighted to have our paper accepted at the 2020 Centre Banks of the Future Conference. We are researchers in India working with the Future of Finance initiative at Tvara Research where we address new challenges for regulation given the waves of digital innovation currently sweeping financial services. One of the big bets that Indian policy makers have made in the last few decades is to invest in vast public digital infrastructures to enable financial services in India. In addition to investing in traditional areas like payment systems and co-banking services, they have also built a vision for a large scale consumer data aggregation and sharing in the financial sector. And our paper focuses on one novel piece of this public digital infrastructure vision for consumer data sharing called account aggregators by our central bank, the Reserve Bank of India or RBI. In our paper titled the regulation of information flows as central bank functions, implications from the treatment of account aggregators by the Reserve Bank of India, we tried to pass the RBI's regulatory approach to this new class of financial data intermediaries and especially the decision to license them as non-bank financial providers. At a more fundamental level, our paper asks this question, should central banks regulate and enable the flow of personal information? In the next few minutes, my colleague Anubhuti and I will tell you a bit about why this question is important, what account aggregators are and the issues from the regulation of data intermediaries that arise when financial authorities get involved, not just in India but also from open banking regimes globally. We think this question is important because the growth in consumer data aggregation and sharing services in finance is a trend that's been seen around the world. Energy service providers like Plaid and Yodly have been providing these services for years but using their own platforms and our APIs. The Indian approach, therefore, in this context is quite unique and different because here the RBI has taken a leadership role not only in developing a new regulatory form for these financial data intermediaries but also mandating a specific type of technical design with requirements for APIs and so on that need to apply to the system and every account aggregator that is built. So what are account aggregators? Essentially, they are entities that will collect and share consumer's financial information securely from the entity that holds the consumer data and has a relationship with them to entities that might request this information and along the way collect the consumer's consent. Interestingly, our regulations require that the data flows must be encrypted and that the account aggregators themselves must be data blind and have no connection with any financial transaction that follows as a consequence of data sharing. More interestingly, the RBI also made a regulatory choice in the regulations creating these account aggregators to license them, as I mentioned, as NBFCs on non-bank financial companies in the Indian regulatory parlance. This raises an important question for us. What are the consequences of a central bank regulating data intermediaries as non-bank financial institutions? My colleague, Anuputi, will hopefully outline some of the concerns that this question triggered for us as well as how we attacked it in our paper for this conference. Hello, I'm Anuputi Singh, co-author of this paper and I will go over Malika's question about the consequences of a central bank regulating data intermediaries as a non-bank financial institution. As Malika mentioned, the RBI regulates account aggregators as a non-bank financial company or NBFCs. Traditionally, while NBFCs are not banks, they play an important role in the delivery of credit to harder to serve segments that traditional banks have not been able to reach. Previously, categories of NBFC license had only been granted for core investment activity and credits. The NBFC AA license appears to be the only NBFC license category that exists to facilitate information flow rather than any direct financial activity. Comparing this approach to open banking approaches in the Bahrain and the European Union reveals some differences. For instance, open banking enables data sharing mainly geared at providing consumers with a consolidated view of their financial information to enable payments rather than wider data sharing. A new class of licenses for such activities were rooted in the payment regulatory regime rather than the banking regime. Interestingly, when account aggregators were first mentioned by the Indian Central Bank in 2015, they were conceived to be open banking style account information service providers. By 2016, when the final regulations for account aggregators were released, this vision had morphed into one which foresaw a system of data blind intermediaries. The shift in the account aggregators modeled no longer aligns with those of global open banking approaches. What are the implications of account aggregators being regulated as non-bank financial companies? Does this signal a new direction? An intent by the Indian Central Bank to regulate all information flows in the financial sector, which would have implications beyond finance for all of the data economy? This has deeper implications for understanding what the extent of core central banking functions will be for central banks of the future. For our analysis of these questions, do read our paper. We look forward to your feedback and interacting with you for the central banks of the future conference in November 2020. Thank you.


All right, okay, so this, this, this presentation really wouldn't have been possible without some of my colleagues, Associate Professor Joe Hurley, Chainson, Kave Delami and Andrew Butt who are all located at RMIT University in Melbourne. The website for the project is down at the bottom left and some of the funding came from the Australian Government's Department of Infrastructure Transport, regional development and communications under their smart cities and suburbs programme. We were, we were really fortunate in getting this grant in 2017 and our original proposal basically was quite similar to the app that Makoto described, Professor Yoko Hari described in his keynote presentation, which enables people to find a cool route going from A to B. And so this presentation is just to talk a little bit about the context of our own challenges that we're facing in Australia and how we design that digital interface. I think the, the basic sort of introduction and the sort of plan for the talk is really three main points is that firstly heat is going up and greenery is going down in Australian cities. You'll see in a minute that we're facing quite a significant challenge. At the same time, I think we have all of the tools available to us, lots of different lots of different increasingly detailed data sets, especially around heat and about green space. A lot of that data is becoming increasingly real time. And so there is an urgent need to actually design that information in such a way that it can be used by people on a daily basis and can be used perhaps even in an emergency situation, for example. And then the third point is just to describe a little bit about the case study from Bendigo in Victoria. So just for those of you that aren't familiar with Australian geography, I'm talking about the far southeastern corner of Australia that's in Victoria. And Bendigo, you can see on the map on the left hand side is located about an hour and a half drive around about 120 kilometres northwest of Melbourne, so in an inland area. The first point I was making is that heat is going up in urban Australia and it's coming to become a really serious natural disaster in its own self. It's well known, for example, that Australia is particularly affected by wildfires or bushfires on a regular basis. And one of the most well known ones in recent years is the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, which affected the outskirts of Melbourne in February 2009. And in the course of a day killed 173 people who were unfortunately killed directly through the fire. But the actual heat itself during that heat event that caused the fire, in fact epidemiologically speaking, killed 374 people. And you can see why when you look at the graph on the right hand side. This is work produced by some colleagues led by Steph Jacobs at the University of Monash. And what's really interesting about this graph is that it shows that during that single day in February 2009, what was considered thermally comfortable was pretty much dominating the day from 8am right through to 8pm. So pretty much a 12 hour straight period of very challenging heat circumstances. But what you can see in the graph as well is that the apparent temperature was quite low because typically bushfire days, especially the really dangerous bushfire days, were characterized by very, very high hot winds. So not only is it in the high 30s or the low 40s, but also extremely windy. And that would say, well, that's great, because of course the wind helps you to cool your body. But in this paper, they actually calculate that you need to be cooling your body at the rate of around two litres per hour of drinking, which is about the same amount of drinking rate as a marathon runner. So obviously that's very challenging for aged people and for children, and for those without access to air conditioning. And of course, heat has a very serious productivity loss in 2015. It's being calculated to have a loss of six billion US dollars. And yet at the same time, sadly, because a huge amount of development occurs in Australian suburbs without needing to go through any kind of planning permission or any kind of regulation at all. Canopy cover is actually being lost in Australian suburbs. So you can see on this little picture here, which is in Western Australia, typical quarter acre block, relatively small house size of about 120 square metres, with a big backyard has been replaced largely by swimming pools and by hard surfaces. You could almost say that the situation has gone from one where the garden was big enough once to be able to play tennis in. And then the garden has been reduced to the size where it's barely big enough to play ping pong. The left hand side shows that this we did a review of all local government areas led by my colleague Joe Hurley and actually Steve in his, Steve lives Lee yesterday in his keynote presentation mentioned this work, how the great majority of local governments actually saw a decline in canopy cover. You can see the blue on the left hand side, and only a few actually see a rise in canopy cover between 2013 and 2020. And of course, the red lines there show various increases in hard surfaces. But increasingly, we have more and more detailed information, but I think such as this one for heat, and this one on the right hand side for heat vulnerability. But the trick I think for us as planners and by academics is how to introduce that information into people's hands in a way that they find as useful as possible. So it becomes a question really about the urgent need is one about adaptation. It's about providing that information in a way that's very useful to people. And we actually assisted the city of Greater Bendigo. You can see the picture here on the right hand side to design an app that was suitable for their needs. And it wasn't just about the app, it was also about the data production process that we went through that I want to emphasize now. So for those of you that aren't familiar with Bendigo, it's a population of around 100,000. It gets very hot in the summer. It's very, very dry. Only annual precipitation of around 512 millimeters per year. So typical continental and Mediterranean type of climate. We conducted a review of different kinds of apps that are used for route planning and for adaptation to heat. I'll provide you with the reference to the paper in a minute here. But you can see how it's certainly not a unique idea. There are different organizations from Longereve City in Milan. There's a Paris app, which I'll talk about in a minute. There's various private providers, Walkonomics and Walkspan, for example, that are trying to achieve the same thing. The European Union, for example, has funded the Extreme app, which enables users to adapt to heat using their phones. Similarly, the City of Paris has provided this map and app service on the right-hand side that enables users to identify where there are cool islands, as opposed to heat islands in the city. And the Singapore government provides a park connector network website as well that tries to achieve something similar. What we were trying to do was to get people to think about their local environment and to say, wouldn't you rather be walking along the street, such as this, which has lots of green canopy, as Makoto was talking about, rather than a street like this, which has much less. And we approached this from both, from different levels, kind of a quantitative as well as a qualitative perspective, because following Professor Yokohari's talk, we recognized that heat is not just purely something of measurement alone, but it's also very much embodied, it's psychological, it's also even cultural. And so we tried to capture that as much as possible by examining what is the meaning of shade and how we can best capture that information. So we did various qualitative interviews and focus groups. We explored the different types of shade that exist in Bendigo. Basically, we're trying to look for different groups of people and how they understand heat and shading, according to different age groups and different vulnerability levels. In fact, we engaged specifically as part of the design process for the app with walking groups and with school children. We produced the composite map initially from two-dimensional GIS, but then we realized that that wasn't going to be enough. And so we used, we downloaded all of the street view images for the city. It's more than 100,000 street view images every 10 meters. And we generated a sky view factor for that. So you can see here on the top right of the slide, as Google Street View Image basically looks like that, like a big ribbon really of image. If you wrap it around in a circle, then it produces a hemisphere. And using machine learning, we were able to identify the green areas as opposed to the sky areas, and then was able to automatically calculate how much sky you could see at every individual location throughout the city. And the city was able to use that information to be able to say, oh, well, look at this. There's hardly any trees in this neighborhood. It's where people are particularly vulnerable. There's a large proportion of people who live on their own who are older than 65. We need to plant more trees there. So that's been one good outcome. But we also worked very closely with a small local company based in Victoria called POSIC who provide a public GIS system for the city. And they were able to overlay existing information and to produce this route mapping algorithm that shows you on the one hand, the shortest route in red, and the cooler route, but which is slightly longer in the middle. And what was good in Professor Yokohori's talk earlier was that someone asked, well, how many people use it? And actually we, this is not really an app. So it's not a question of downloading the app. You can just view it very easily through a browser on the phone. And you can see that when it was launched in December 2019, there's been consistent use, but especially during the summer. And in fact, we anticipate the way the app is designed is that people will have maybe their daily walk that they will use. And perhaps maybe a walk to school or walk to the shops or a dog walk. And there'll be interested just to maybe use it once or twice, just to sort of visualize where the coolness might be. So it's not going, we don't anticipate that something like this would be used like Google Maps as frequently as that. And it would be very difficult to actually design an app to sort of try to replace people's use of something like Google Maps, but it's more like an adjunct to Google Maps. We published the work. Summarized within a couple of minutes or so? Yes, I'm just coming to the ending now. So yeah, there's more information here in these papers. You can just look them up very easily if you wish. And that's it from me. So over to the other presenters. Thanks very much.


So, without further ado, may I present the founder and director of nutritionfacts.org Dr. Michael Greger. There may be no such thing as dying from old age. From a study of more than 42,000 consecutive autopsies, centenarians, those who lived to be 100, were found to have succumbed to disease in 100% of the cases. Though most were perceived even by their physicians to be healthy just prior to death, not one died of old age. They died from disease, most commonly heart disease. If aging kills via diseases, why wasn't my book How Not to Die? All the longevity book anyone needs. In it, I ran through preventing, arresting, or reversing each of our top 15 killers starting with heart disease, not only the number one killer of centenarians, but of men and women across the board and projected to main that way in the decades to come. But is it really? Because the single greatest risk factor for most of our killer diseases is how old you are. One could argue that the leading cause of death is actually aging. The rate of death increases exponentially for age-related diseases such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, dementia. So yes, within the same age brackets, having a high cholesterol can increase your risk of heart disease up to 20-fold, but an 80-year-old may have 500 times the risk of having a heart attack compared to a 20-year-old. Now, the reason we focus on things like cholesterol is because it's a modifiable risk factor. But what if the rate of aging was modifiable too? Instead of our current kind of piecemeal approach focusing on individual diseases, what about slowing down the aging process itself?  But even if all forms of cancer were eliminated, the average life expectancy in the U.S. would only go up about three years. Why? Because dodging cancer would just mean delaying death from a heart attack or stroke. If one age-related ailment doesn't get us, another will. So rather than playing guacamole by tackling each disease separately, slowing down the rate of aging could potentially address all these issues simultaneously. Imagine if there were an intervention. They didn't just reduce your risk of the leading killers, but also arthritis, osteoporosis, sensory impairments, because risks tend to double every seven years. Like if the average 65-year-old had the health of the 58-year-old, slowing aging by even just seven years could cut everyone's risk of death, frailty, and disability in half. That's why I wrote How Not to Age. The problem is that the anti-aging field is said to be a fertile ground for cons, scams, and get-rich-quick schemes. As a former president of the Gerontological Society wrote, there have been few subjects that have been more misleading to the uncritical and more profitable for the unscrupulous. Not only does the popular literature on the subject harbor a huge amount of misinformation, but most age-researching scientists, widely known to the public, are said to be unscrupulous purveyors of useless nostrums, according to the editor-in-chief of the leading gerontology journal. When it comes to something as life and death important as to what to feed ourselves and our families, we should rely not on anecdote, but on evidence. That's why I cite everything to the teeth. How not to die at about 2,000 citations. How not to die at 5,000 citations. How not to age ended up with 13,000 citations. All of which I have hyperlinked for you online to access all the original sources so you can download the studies and read them all yourself. My aim was to cover every possible angle for developing the optimal diet and lifestyle for the longest, healthiest lifespan based on the best available balance of evidence. My inspiration for writing the book was a consensus document, interventions to slow aging in humans compiled by the top researchers in the anti-aging field, the likes of Drs. Longo, Sinclair, Fontana. They were brought together to identify the most promising strategies to combat aging. They identified a list of essential pathways. For example, drugs that can block the hormone IGF-1 or drugs to block the pro-aging enzyme tour. But I realized as I looked through this way, every single one of these pathways could be regulated through diet. That became the first section of the book. The term anti-aging has been much abused in popular culture, attached to all manner of unproven products and procedures, whereas the term should really be reserved for things that can delay or reverse aging by targeting one of the established aging mechanisms, the so-called hallmarks of aging. The common denominators of the aging process, like, for example, the buildup of misfolded proteins that can be disposed of through autophagy. See, at any given time, most of our cells are producing and assembling more than 10,000 distinct proteins, each of which can become misfolded or damaged at any time and require cleanup in aisle three. So, but during times of excess nutrition, our body figures, why bother? We can just toss it in the corner, make another. Having evolved in the context of scarcity, our body expects to fall on the hard times any day now and can put off spring cleaning until then. These days, those lean times hardly ever come, so our cells just continually end up hoarding junk. That's where autophagy comes from. From the Greek words for self-eating, it's a housekeeping process by which defective cellular components are broken down and scrapped for spare parts. This doubles as both kind of salvage operation and quality control, clearing out some of the damaged debris implicated in the aging process while renewing our cells in a sort of cellular reset. As one review put it, the janitor is the undercover boss. Our ancient ancestors often went for several days without food, so autophagy was constantly being switched on, but these days, our cells no longer need to kind of clean out the corners for sustenance and so the tainted heaps just pile higher and higher, which isn't good because autophagy is essential for lifespan extension. It's not only necessary, but sometimes sufficient for increasing longevity. Self-digestion for lifespan extension. Boosting autophagy alone can boost lifespan, at least in mice, by an average of 12%, and it also boosts health span. Unfortunately, our body's ability to take out the trash declines with age leading to this vicious cycle. Garbage builds up accelerating aging, which leads to more garbage buildup. No wonder the drug industry so eager to pharmacologically modulate autophagy to combat aging, but we can do it naturally. One way is through fasting. Unfortunately, autophagy doesn't really maximally ramp up until after a day or two of fasting, which may be too long to do it unsupervised. Fasting more than 24 hours should probably only be done under medical supervision, ideally in a kind of live-in clinic. In other words, don't try this at home. This is not just legalistic mumbo-jumbo. For example, normally your kidneys dive into sodium conservation mode, but should this response break down, you could rapidly develop an electrolyte abnormality, which might only manifest as nonspecific symptoms like fatigue or dizziness, which could be easily dismissed until it's too late. Thankfully, there's another way to activate autophagy. You can fast or go fast. Exercise induces autophagy. As one of the researchers said, I've always known exercise was good for you, but when we found out it increases autophagy, I finally got a treadmill. You have to do it enough, though. Autophagy is activated after 60 minutes of moderate intensity exercise, but only 20 minutes fails to move the needle. What about diet? Any foods to avoid? In 2021, we found out that acrylamide can inhibit autophagy, at least it sells in a petri dish. Acrylamide is a toxin concentrated in french fries and potato chips that's formed during the frying process. The fact that high acrylamide exposure is associated with as much as double the risk of premature death would be consistent with an anti-autophagy effect, though diminished life spans among eaters of fatty salty snacks isn't exactly a revelation. You can't know if it's cause and effect until you put it to the tip. Very nice. Before being asked to eat a bag of potato chips every day for a month, study subjects were given weeks of boiled potatoes mixed with the same amount of fat and salt as the chips compared to the fatty salty boiled potatoes. Their C-reactive protein levels shot up 50% on the chips, suggesting chronic ingestion of acrylamide-containing products induces a pro-inflammatory state. However, deep frying causes the formation of all matter of undesired foodborne toxicants so we can't be sure it was the acrylamide. As one of the earliest geriatric medicine textbooks presently concluded back in 1849, frying is an abomination. If you just must have your french fry fix, air frying produces about 90% less acrylamide. Anything that can help? Well, you know, starving yourself generates discomfort, but there is something that activates autophagy that many people find comforting. Coffee. At a human-equivalent dose, both regular and decaf rapidly induce autophagy within hours in mice and coffee can extend the lifespan of some rats. But what about people? Well, in humans, we only have observational research, but today about 20 studies have followed more than 10 million people over time and those drinking three cups of coffee a day, 13% lower risk of dying from all causes put together. And decaf appears to be just as protective, so it's not the caffeine. Coffee contains more than a thousand bioactive compounds. The polyphenolchlorogenic acid is the most abundant antioxidant in coffee, so researchers started there and indeed was found to enhance autophagy in human cells. More than 100 coffees have been tested and the chlorogenic acid levels vary by more than 30-fold. Interestingly, the major contributor to this wide range is Starbucks with its extremely low chlorogenic acid content, thought to be because they roast their beans so dark that they destroy it. Freeze drying is okay. And brood has more than espresso. Paper filtered is the best because it traps the cholesterol-raising compounds in coffee, perhaps explaining why those drinking filtered coffee had even lower mortality rates than those drinking unfiltered coffee. Any food components that can activate autophagy? Spermedine, the longevity elixir...  Spermedine and its by-product spermine are actually found throughout the body when it was later independently discovered in the brain and the muscles. They called it neurodine and muscular mean until they found out it was all the same compound and so naming rights defaulted to the less palatable original. Our body can make it from scratch, but we can boost levels by eating Spermedine-rich foods, which is good news because Spermedine levels tend to decline with age, dropping more than half by the time we reach our 50s. This decline is seen across the biological spectrum with one remarkable exception, naked mole rats, also known by their more cuddly nickname, sand puppy, considered to be a non-aging mammal without any visible signs of aging, almost no decline in physiological function over decades, no typical signs of aging like loss of muscle mass or fertility, perhaps in part because they're able to maintain their high levels of Spermedine, something that you also see in human centenarians. The cause and effect, extra Spermedine was fed to animals and induction of autophagy by Spermedine promotes longevity, increasing life fans of mice, for example, by as much as 25%. In a database of more than a thousand life extending compounds, among the small subset with the fewest side effects, Spermedine has the largest documented lifespan extension. Longevity can be improved even when started late in life, kind of the human equivalent of changing your diet when you're already in your 50s. Anti-aging effects were found in the heart and kidneys, rejuvenating immune function, delaying brain aging, and improving cognitive function. Yeah, but this was in animals like fruit flies and mice. I mean, who cares if Spermedine cures flies of senior moments? What about in people? Hundreds of men and women, their 40s through 80s, fall for 20 years and after looking at 146 different components of their diets, the single most predictive of longevity was Spermedine. How much Spermedine are they eating? Higher Spermedine intake is linked to lower mortality. Those who consume the most Spermedine had a reduced risk of death from all major causes, which is what we'd expect from an anti-aging compound. Critically, the survival advantage persisted even after controlling for dietary excellence, meaning it wasn't just because they're eating healthier foods in general, but specifically Spermedine-rich foods in particular.  Well, the reduction in mortality risk, between getting more than 12 milligrams of Spermedine today, compared to getting less than nine, was as if those eating more Spermedine were 5.7 years younger. It's as if by eating certain foods, they were able to kind of effectively turn back the clock nearly six years. The findings were so extraordinary, the researchers sought to replicate their results in a whole new set of individuals, indeed, arrived at the same conclusion. This led some to propose that Spermedine may be an anti-aging vitamin. When we're younger, we seem to be able to make it up, but as we get older, we may need to start ensuring we're getting enough in our diet to maintain autophagy into old age. Well, if Spermedine is going to be considered an anti-aging vitamin, where is that vitamin found? Beans are said to have the highest natural amounts, but I compiled a list of the top Spermedine sources and pig pancreas beat up bean burritos for the bronze. This is virtually every food, averaging at least two milligrams of Spermedine per serving with a fermented soy food called Tempe leading the list, along with plain white mushrooms. While some have suggested the genetic engineering of Spermedine-rich crops, they're already a plethora of naturally Spermedine-rich foods. As a certified dark green leafy snob, I was begrudgingly impressed to see lettuce score so high. The lettuce is so light, a hundred grams serving would be about three cups of lettuce, but even the Spermedine little side salad could certainly really add up. In the book, I spent a lot of time going through the entire list, but the single most concentrated source is wheat germ with two and a half milligrams of Spermedine and just the seven grams and a tablespoon. This is also the cheapest source, costing as little as two cents per milligram. You can't get a lot of pancreas for two cents. Does wheat germ actually do anything? Let's randomize people to some dinner rolls and find out. A randomized double blind pilot in which older adults were secretly slipped some Spermedine in the form of wheat germ baked into dinner rolls versus placebo rolls with wheat bran instead and those with mild dementia improved way beyond all available anti-dementia drug treatment so far. Admittedly, that's not saying much, but what's the harm of sprinkling a little wheat germ on your food? The latest Alzheimer's drugs don't appear to work at all. All you get for your $56,000 is a dramatically increased risk of swelling or bleeding into your brain. When the FDA approved it anyway, the head of the American Geriatric Society replied, my head just exploded. Maybe they just got to slip the dose of the drug. Anyway, lots of other clinical Spermedine studies, and just to wrap up this section, autophagy is considered the primary system for cleaning the body from the inside out. And we can boost autophagy with aerobic exercise, skipping fries and chips, drinking coffee, and eating specific foods to reach a target of 20 milligrams of Spermedine a day. I offer similar diet and lifestyle takeaways for each of the other 10 anti-aging pathways, but don't have time to touch on them because there's three other major sections to the book. Part two focuses on the diets and lifestyles of the healthiest and long-lived populations around the world. The odds of living to 100 have risen from approximately 1 in 20 million to as high as 1 in 50. Why do some people make it and others not? It's not just a matter of picking better parents. Studies following identical twins suggest that only about 25% of the variation in lifespan is explained by genetics. So what can we do for the majority over which we may have some control? The media loves stories of hard-living centenarians who attribute their longevity to some combination of lard, vodka, and favorite brand of cigarette. But how do the oldest and healthiest really eat and live? That's what we have the blue zones for areas of exceptional longevity around the world where there may be 10 times the rate of those reaching those triple digits actually named for a color that a demographer used and a kind of heat map mortality around the globe. What lessons can we learn? Well, the Blue Zones Organization distilled findings from more than 150 dietary surveys from the world's longest-living people to create a set of 10 food guidelines. The foundation of the Blue Zones food guidelines is making your diet at least 95% plant-based, avoiding highly processed foods, emphasizing beans as a healthier source of protein, water as the best beverage, and nuts as the healthiest snack. That's the foundation. The final five guidelines are go easy on fish, eliminate eggs slash sugar, reduce dairy, and retreat from meat, noting that blue zone centenarians only eat about two ounces of meat or less, about five times a month. Historically, there have been five recognized blue zones, but only one survives and thrives to this day. The red, white, and blue zone, the seven-day Adventists in Loma Linda, California, with perhaps the longest life expectancy of any formerly studied population in history. There are a number of shared Blue Zones lifestyle characteristics, family coherence, avoiding smoking, daily exercise, social engagement, but plant-based nutrition appears to be the principal component, alone accounting for about half the difference in lifespan. No surprise since the number one risk factor for death in the United States is the American diet. So unsafe sex, bad. Sedentary lifestyle, bad. Alcohol and drugs, especially tobacco, bad. Cigarettes only killing about a half million Americans every year, whereas our diet kills many more. We are what we eat, which is good news because it means we have the power. Changing from a more typical diet to a more optimized diet starting at age 20 would be expected to increase the lifespan of women by about 11 years and men by 13 years. The largest life expectancy gain would be made by eating more legumes, beans, split peas, chickpeas, and longevity. So if there's one thing we could eat, legumes for longevity. Hummus for health. Then comes whole grains and nuts and eating less meat. Not for the few of you who aren't 20 anymore. Not to worry. Starting eating healthier at age 60 could still mean adding eight or nine years to your lifespan. Even starting at late as age 80 could add years. Changing your health destiny can start tomorrow morning at breakfast. And it doesn't take much. The NIHARP studies the largest forward-looking study on diet and health in history based on its six million person years of observation, replacing just 3% of daily caloric intake from animal protein with plant protein was associated with a 10% decrease risk of overall mortality of both men and women, just swapping 3% of all the animal protein sources. Eggs were found to be the worst. Swapping in 3% of plant protein for egg protein was associated with twice the benefit. 20% lower mortality for swapping in a few British beans for breakfast instead. Harvard researchers found that when it comes to premature death process, meat was the worst followed by eggs. In essence, they found that tuna salad may be better than egg salad or BLT, but a bean burrito beat out the bunch. When it came to death from all causes put together, plant protein beat out every type of animal protein including dairy, fish and chicken. A 3% swap from chicken to chickpeas or fish to falafel was linked to a 6% decrease risk of premature death. But does eating healthy actually slow down aging? Randomize hundreds of women to a diet centered around healthy plant foods or exercise or neither, and though the physical activity failed, those in the plant-based dietary intervention group had a significant slowing of biological aging. Of course, it isn't just about adding years to your life, but life to your years. One healthy aging index was devised to measure functional impairments, vitality, mental health, physical health, substituting even just 1% of calories from plant protein for animal protein appeared to lead to significant less deficit accumulation and substituting 5% may reduce the risk of dying from the greatest deficit, dementia. That may help explain why those who don't eat any meat at all may be up to three times less likely to become demented. But again, it's not all or nothing. In fact, the worst thing about humanity's diet is neither animal nor vegetable, but mineral, sodium. Here are the top five fatal flaws of our diet. Millions of deaths may be attributed every year to knocking in of whole grains, not eating enough fruit, not enough nuts and seeds, not enough vegetables, but the single deadliest ingredient in humanity's diet is something we get too much of. And that's salt, our number one dietary risk factor for death. A recent whopping study, for example, more than a half million people found that those who salted their food at age 50 appeared to have about a two-year lower life expectancy compared to those that didn't. So, just swapping out the salt shaker for some salt-free seasonings or salt substitutes could potentially add years to your life. How do we know it's cause and effect? Five kitchens at a veteran's retirement home were randomized into two groups for a few years, offering meals salted either with regular salt or unbeknownst to them a 50-50 blend of regular salt, sodium chloride with a salt substitute like these potassium chloride. The kind of salt was the only difference between the meals and cardiovascular disease death rates plummeted by 40% in the folks getting the reduced sodium blend. The new difference in life expectancy between the two groups at age 70 was equivalent to that which would have occurred naturally in 14 years, meaning simply switching to even just half potassium salt which you wouldn't even be able to taste the difference of appeared to effectively make people more than a decade younger when it came to the risk of premature death. What are the likes of the Salt Institute have to say about public health recommendations to reduce sodium intake? Well, in testimony before a congressional committee the presumption that healthier diets would cut healthcare costs was challenged. Indeed, one process food defender testified, healthcare expenditures increase if lifespan is prolonged. I mean if people eat healthier and live longer, it could be more expensive. Noting that if tobacco were banned, the increase in expected lifespan would increase the cost of care of old people. Think how expensive it would be if people started taking care of themselves and didn't conveniently die on time. Ultra-processed foods, often packed with added salt, sugar and fat, consistently account for more than 50% of our dietary caloric intake. More than half of our diet is junk. Not surprisingly, those foods are associated with significantly increased risk of dying prematurely. So just cutting back on animal foods isn't enough. Healthy plant-based diets are associated with significantly lower risk of dying, but unhealthy plant-based diets are not. In the Harvard cohorts, the more you minimize meat, eggs and dairy, the lower your risk of death falls. But that's only if you're eating healthy plant foods. If you instead just pile on the junk like chips and soda, you can increase your risk of death overall, even if animal product consumption remains low. Same in the Million Veteran Program study. Healthy plant foods reduce their risk of death, but if your idea of a plant-based diet is fries and a Coke, you're not doing your body any favors. Same with the risk of cognitive impairment. Only healthy plant foods reduce risk. The same with dementia and depression. The same with frailty. Healthy plant foods, good, plant-based junk, bad. That's why Cornell Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry T. Colin Campbell coined the term whole food plant-based diet as a physician. Terms like vegetarian, vegan just tell me what you don't eat.  Professor Campbell's physician son and daughter-in-law tried putting a group of vegetarians and vegans on a whole food plant-based diet. In eight weeks, they lost 10 pounds, dropped their LDL cluster off 15 points. In other words, vegans may benefit from eating a little more plant-based, too. Now, meat is a problem in terms of lifespan. Eating a burger may cut one's life as short as smoking two cigarettes. So if it wouldn't even occur to us to light up before and after lunch, maybe we should choose the bean burrito instead. There are certainly ways to make meat safer, though. For example, one of the ways whole food plant-based diets can help is by reducing the load of gerontotoxins, age-accelerating toxins, such as advanced glycation improx, also known as glyotoxins or AGEs, an acronym intentionally chosen to emphasize their toxic role in age-related disease. AGEs occur naturally in animals, but dry cooking methods can generate 10 to 100 times more when muscle cells rupture under dry heat, highly reactive compounds combined with the blood and body sugars to form AGEs within the meat. So even without cutting down on meat, you can significantly cut down on glycotoxin intake just by switching up cooking methods. The safest ways of cooking meat are moist methods, such as boiling, poaching, steaming, stewing. Check out what happens when people are randomized to a meal of fried or broiled chicken breast and veggies or the same meal with the same ingredients, including the oil, but with steamed or boiled chicken breast instead. That single high AGE meal with a fried or broiled breast induced a profound impairment of artery function within hours. I mean, the steamed chicken still impaired artery function, but not as much as the fried or broiled. So we can eat an age-less diet by switching to moist methods, for example, but dietary approaches are said to have zero commercial value. And hey, stewed chicken may not be as tasty, but it may not just take a drug to block AGE absorption every time we eat. I mean, it does lower your blood levels of AGEs is just activated charcoal, like when people are poisoned or for like drug overdoses, right? I'm sure our AGEs would also go down if we chased our chicken with some Ipacac, too. What about fish? Unfortunately, our oceans have essentially become humanity's sewer. Everything eventually flows into the sea. So the consumption of contaminated seafood has become the main route of human exposure to chemical pollutants. Yes, a variety of foods are affected, but the number one source of DDT, fish. Number one source of PCBs, fish. Salmon is the worst when it comes to PCBs followed by canned tuna. Salmon also has the highest levels of dioxin-like compounds. So on the one hand, fish has long been viewed as a healthy dietary component because of those long chain omega-3s, but on the other hand, we're so polluting our world that we're now seeing heavy metals, pesticide, flame retardants in fish, forever chemicals, which may explain why, despite their omega-3s, there's been a failure to consistently observe beneficial effects of fish consumption. So if we had a time machine to go back before the Industrial Revolution, that'd be one thing, but now we have studies like this where mice-fed commercially available farmed salmon fillets with common levels of persistent organic pollutants were found to develop insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, abdominal obesity, fatty liver, chronic low-grade inflammation. So even just background levels of pollutants that might be presumed to be safe could completely counteract the potential benefits of the omega-3s, in particular leading to metabolic issues. Now for mercury, it's more about brain health. Hundreds of thousands of babies born with brain damage every year, seemingly as a consequence of their mother's consuming mercury-contaminated fish during pregnancy, with the resulting loss of intelligence estimated to cost billions of dollars of lost productivity every year. In the aging literature, there are cases like this, man with progressive memory loss, tentatively diagnosed with Alzheimer's dementia, his friends and families assumed he was nearing the end of his life. But a detailed history revealed that he had consumed swordfish once or twice a week when the fish was removed from his diet, his mercury levels fell, and his memory bounced back, no more dementia. So it seemed he didn't have Alzheimer's after all, but rather mercury poisoning from a handful of monthly meals of contaminated fish. You can see the same remarkable reversals with hair loss. Now here's a common story, perimenopausal woman seeks help for hair loss, blood tests indicate elevated mercury levels, but then no wonder because she had a diet high in tuna. But within two months of stopping fish, her hair started growing back and eventually her hair re-grew completely. So doctors should consider screening for mercury toxicity when they see hair loss since there's something we can do about it. Instructing patients to reduce fish intake could offer relief of symptoms on covered dietary habits that may be a source of heavy metal induced hair loss, though admittedly sometimes heavy metal can lead to too much hair. What about alcohol? That's from plants? Sorry to be Dr. Buzzkill, but alcohol appears to be humanity's seven leading cause of death and disability, but at the safest level of drinking is none. But wait a second, what about the famous J-curve, where light to moderate drinkers appear to have lower mortality rates than the T-totalers at zero drinks a day? This may just be an artifact of the systemic misclassification of former drinkers as lifelong abstainers. This leads to the so-called sick quitter effect, where the reason a person may be a non-drinker is because drinking made them sick, thereby making current drinkers look good in comparison. It's the same reason studies can find higher mortality among those who quit smoking compared to those who continue to smoke. It's not that abstention led to poor health, but poor health rather led to abstention. When researchers went back and controlled for the error of misclassifying former drinkers, the J-curve disappeared. No more apparent benefit to moderate drinking. In other words, compared to true abstainers, the more alcohol, the more disease, with no apparent protection at low levels of consumption. Even red wine, unfortunately, interventional trials show that wine can cause inflammation within hours of consumption, both red and white, significantly more than just drinking sugar water, and you get a surge of fat in your bloodstream that you don't get, drinking de-alcoholized red wine, the same wine with the alcohol taken out. What about just taking supplements of the red wine compound resveratrol? Oh, you mean the supplement found to nearly triple the loss of brain tissue compared to placebo? No, thank you. The healthiest beverages are probably water and tea, increasing tea consumption three cups a day may decrease the risk of premature death from all causes by 24%. This applied to both green and black tea, though green may have a slight advantage. Part of this protection may be a lower risk of pneumonia. There have been five randomized controlled trials showing that those randomized to green tea are about a third less likely to come down with the flu, for example. Within just one hour of drinking a single cup of green tea, we can significantly cut down on the rate of DNA damage in ourselves because green tea significantly boosts the activity of DNA repair enzyme in our body that can fix DNA damage. And within a month, drinking two small daily cups of green tea can improve DNA resistance to free radical damage in the first place, indicating that green tea has significant genome protective effects or DNA protecting effects. Tons more about individual foods and beverages in the book, but let's move on to part three, where I get into the nitty gritty. What can we do to protect our bones? Bowls, bladder and circulation are hair, hearing, and hormone balance.  Let me just share a few quick pearls. For example, did you know that 85% of bone-related fracture risk has nothing to do with bone mineral density? That's just been drilled into our heads by big farm and a billion dollar bone density screening industry. Fractures are primarily due to falling, not osteoporosis. So it's the age-related muscle loss and impaired balance that may be breaking most of our bones, which is good news because there's something we can do about it. Seven randomized controlled trials, strength and balance training, cut fracture rates nearly in half, and that's just during the trial in the five years after this one-year study ended, those who had previously been randomized to the combined strength and balance group suffered 74% fewer fractures. That's far more effective than osteoporosis drugs like Fosamax that can cause fractures, atypical femoral fractures in as many as 1 in 300 uses. They're called atypical because they occur not after a fall or trauma but just during routine activities like walking, twisting at the hip or just standing still. Thanks to the drug, your femur, your thigh bone, the biggest bone in your body just cracks in half. Too cruel an irony from a drug that's supposed to protect your bones. This is what it looks like on x-ray. Ouch. After bones, I talk about preserving your bowel function in chapter number two. Randomized constipated diabetics to either cookies containing a tablespoon, a day of ground flax seeds, or flax-free placebo cookies for 12 weeks and not only does the flax improve constipation symptoms but resulted in 8-pound weight loss over placebo, 25-point lower blood sugars, an astounding drop in hemoglobin A1c and 17-point lower LDL cholesterol, all for about 10 cents a day of ground flax seeds. For a head-to-head test between flax seeds and psyllium, sold as metamucil, a third cookie group was added with about 10 grams of psyllium and the flax seed beat out the psyllium for constipation relief, weight, blood sugars and cholesterol and is about four times cheaper. Flax seeds were also directly compared to the prescription laxative lactulose and worked better as well. Bladder function, prevalence of overactive bladder syndrome increases with age reaching about 1 in 3. No wonder bladder-relaxing drugs are a multi-billion dollar industry yet may only reduce bathroom breaks by about half a pea a day compared to placebo. But a quarter teaspoon a day of dried cranberry powder works nearly four times better, about two fewer daily trip to the bathroom over placebo and that's without any of the drug side effects, dry mouth constipation sedation, impaired cognition, rapid heartbeat, urinary retention and the visual disturbance that lead almost two-thirds to stop taking the drugs whereas cranberries are just tangy. Urinary incontinence is a common problem among older adults, particularly women, thanks to childbirth. Systemic menopausal hormone therapy like premarin actually makes it worse but local vaginal estrogen may help. What works five times better than estrogen cream though, kegel exercises, pelvic floor exercises as I detail in the section jacked-in-the-box. For men, urinary issues are more an enlarged prostate problem having to get up multiple times a night, wee hours of the night. Cranberries to the rescue there again, even just a eighth of a teaspoon a day of powdered cranberries can significantly improve prostate symptoms. You can buy cranberry powder in bulk at a cost of less than a penny per day. What about sol-palmetto, the most common herbal supplement used for prostate symptoms based on dozens of randomized controlled trials involving nearly 5,000 men? No clinical benefits, but pumpkin seeds work. More than a thousand men with prostate symptoms were randomized to either about a tablespoon a day of plain pumpkin seed kernels, a proprietary pumpkin seed extract or placebo. The study was funded by the drug company that made the supplement, but the supplement totally flopped while the pumpkin seeds themselves worked. Pumpkin seed oil was pitted against the leading drug for hair loss in women, a little less than a quarter teaspoon applied to the scalp once a day versus a dose of the drug, and they both worked, but the drug worked better. But rosemary oil, however, may be more closely matched. A hundred balding men were randomized to twice a day minoxidil like Rogaine versus a rosemary lotion. It took six months, but significant comparable improvements in hair counts in both groups with no significant difference between the two. The rosemary lotion appeared to work as well as the drug. If you want to give it a DIY try, you can pre-mix about 10 drops of rosemary essential oil to each fluid ounce of your favorite lotion and rub a quarter teaspoon on your scalp twice a day. Cost-wise, that much rosemary oil would come out to be about a penny per week. Let's move on from hair highlights to hormones. I touched upon how menopausal hormone therapy can increase the risk of urinary incontinence, but that's not all. If a thousand post-menopausal women take the standard hormone regimen for 10 years, you'd not only expect 876 extra cases of urinary incontinence that they would not have gotten otherwise, but nine more cases of invasive breast cancer. Eight more cases of heart disease, probably 22 more cases of dementia, 21 more cases of gallbladder disease, nine more strokes, and 21 more blood clots, though not a single partridge nor pear tree. However, hormone therapy is highly effective in decreasing menopausal hot flashes. Is there any way to keep cool without the clots in cancer? In the U.S., menopausal hot flashes are considered inevitable, but there isn't even a word for hot flash in Japanese. And this may be due to their greater consumption of soy foods, but you don't really know until you put it to the test. Harvard's Center of Excellence in Women's Health funded a randomized crossover trial of a half a cup of unsalted soy nuts a day and achieved about a 40 to 45% reduction in hot flashes within two weeks compared to the control group. Given that a plant-based diet may also be effective for managing menopausal symptoms, researchers decided to combine the two of plant-based diet plus whole soybeans. In fact, two randomized controlled trials found that plant-based nutrition with a daily half cup of cooked whole soybeans can reduce the number of serious hot flashes by 84 to 88% within 12 weeks. Overall, most randomized to the plant-based bean group ended up free of moderate to severe hot flashes compared to about 95% sill suffering in the control group. Lots of other things can help whole fennel seeds powdered into capsules to pit them against placebo and a double-blind trial significantly improved menopausal symptoms at a dose of about a teaspoon a day. Fenugreek may also help at a dose of one and a half teaspoons a day though not as much as hormones but without the side effects. Though fenugreek can make your pee smell like maple syrup, sounds like a bonus. The nice thing about studying spices is you can, entire servings can be stuffed into a pill to pit them against placebo. A quarter teaspoon of black cumin powder a day led to significant improvements in memory and other tests of cognition within nine weeks compared to placebo. Black sesame seeds, less than a teaspoon a day of ground black sesame seeds stuffed into capsules against placebo drove down systolic blood pressures by about eight points within a month. If sustained, that alone could decrease the risk of stroke by about a quarter. What else can we powder? Strawberries, osteoarthritis patients were randomized to two ounces of freeze-dried strawberry powder versus a fake strawberry flavored and colored placebo powder and compared to placebo, the real strawberries significantly decreased constant pain, intermittent pain and total knee pain and improved disability and overall quality of life. Osteoarthritis is the most frequent cause of physical disability among older adults yet how do we treat it? Acetaminophen, Tylenol is considered the first-line painkiller but guess what? It doesn't work. I mean it works just not much better than a sugar pill but at least it's not going to make things worse. Like other things we doctors have cooked up like steroid injections which actively worsen joint deterioration and offer no greater pain relief than placebos or arthroscopic surgery which may end up tripling our risk of ending up having to get a total knee replacement.  Tastier smoothies? And listen to the quarter of a teaspoon of ground ginger a day can beat out placebo for joint pain. Researchers conclude ginger therefore is recommended as a safe drug for these patients but by drug they just mean a couple pinches of the ground ginger you can buy at any store. There was even a study on topical ginger at least when applied to the scrotum paper thin slices of ginger applied over the inflamed testicles and the researchers were on the ball healing nearly three times faster than the control room. There have been more than a hundred randomized controlled trials on ginger shown to help with nausea and vomiting and everything from COVID to PMS Heavy periods, painful periods, migraine headaches Multiple sclerosis in the list goes on Bottom line, mounting evidence suggests ginger can promote healthy aging What about garlic? Clinically proven to protect against those who want to suck your blood Literally, a hundred marines were randomized to a clove a day or a placebo and those on garlic had significantly fewer tick bites though sadly garlic does not appear to help against other blood suckers So far I've touched on preserving your bones, bowels, bladder, hair, hormones and joints but preserving your mind is the largest chapter in the book because dementia is one of the most pressing public health problems and most feared condition of later life There's a common misconception that we have no control over whether we develop dementia but the good news is that although Alzheimer's may be incurable at least it is preventable There's an emerging consensus that what's good for our hearts is also good for our heads Because clogging of the arteries inside the brain with atherosclerotic plaque is thought to play a role in the development of Alzheimer's dementia this is what our cerebral arteries should look like open, clean, allowing blood to flow throughout our brains This is what atherosclerosis in our heads looks like Clog with cholesterol, closing off arteries, clamping down blood flow What kind of brain arteries do you want in your head? Too much cholesterol in our blood is unanimously recognized to be a risk factor for the development of Alzheimer's disease Those with a total cholesterol of 225 or more may have nearly 25 times the odds of ending up with amyloid plaques in their brain 15 to 15 years later Cholesterol explains how the Alzheimer's gene, apoE4, ravages the brain After all, apoE is the primary cholesterol carrier inside the brain LDL cholesterol in those with bad gene variants of apoE averages 40 points higher, but switch people to a diet lower in animal fat That cholesterol difference can be effectively smoothed out so diet can trump genetics This may explain the so-called Nigerian paradox where they have among the highest rates of the Alzheimer's gene but some of the lowest rates of Alzheimer's disease How is that possible? Genes load the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger The paradox may be explained by their low cholesterol levels probably because of their diet's low in animal fat Human beings may have evolved to maintain an LDL cholesterol level of around 25 but the average in the Western world is approximately 120 No wonder heart disease is the leading cause of death in high-income countries and dementia is killer number two That helps to explain why the so-called Alzheimer's gene is the single most important gene when it comes to longevity too which is good news because even if we've been dealt some bad genetic cards we still may be able to reshuffle the deck with diet So in terms of dietary guidelines for the prevention of Alzheimer's we should center our diets around vegetables, legumes, fruits, and whole grains In other words, the dietary pillar of lifestyle, medicine, whole food, plant-based nutrition or even simpler plants, plants, and more plants Any plants in particular? Note that the director of Loma Linda's Alzheimer's Prevention Program single up berries and greens eating strawberries and spinach can mitigate age-related cognitive decline in rats But what about in people? When the cognition of hundreds of twins was followed over a decade consuming the berry pigments in less than a quarter cup of blueberries a day or about a cup of strawberries was associated with slowed cognitive aging by about four years and nearly all the randomized controlled trials on blueberries and cognitive performance found improvements in at least one brain domain perhaps because blueberry consumption can improve blood flow to certain critical regions of the brain Now the one study that flopped mixed the berries with milk and we know that the addition of milk can prevent the artery protective effects of tea and prevents the bump in antioxidants that you'd normally get eating dark chocolate and impairs the absorption of the autophagy activating compounds in coffee What about mixing berries and cream? The antioxidant activity of blueberries is not just impaired by milk, check this out Researchers found that the total antioxidant capacity of our bloodstream measured in two different ways shoots up within an hour of eating a cup and a half of blueberries with water and remains elevated five hours later With milk, maybe we'd expect like less of a bump but in fact they ended up worse than when they started after eating a whole bowl of blueberries they ended up with less antioxidant capacity in their body because they ate the blueberries with milk One reason greens may be referred to as an anti Alzheimer's plant is because dark green leafy vegetables can also improve blood flow in the brain that's called antelopexyl trials, randomized older adults to the greens pigments found in a cup of days worth of cooked kale and see significant improvements in complex attention, cognitive flexibility and those randomized even just half a cup of kale's worth of the cruciferous compound sulfurefane got significant improvements in processing speed and working memory Here's the rate of cognitive decline in elderly men and women eating a serving a day of green leafies Compared to those only eating greens about once every ten days Are you sitting down? The rates of decline among those who consumed one to two servings of greens a day was equivalent to being eleven years younger So now are you sitting down to a big salad? Greens come up in chapter after chapter What's the recommendation for preventing age-related macular degeneration? Are leading cause of blindness? Or even treating it in its earliest stages? Consume a diet high in green leafy vegetables We're talking two to three servings a day So at least greens at every lunch and supper with bonus points for sneaking them into breakfast and like a green smoothie In fact blending greens can triple the bioavailability of a key vision-protecting nutrient The main reason greens make it into my anti-aging eight though is because of the nitrates And the serving two of cooked greens can slow our metabolic rate For the same reason that a little shot of beet juice can help freedivers hold their breath longer Because it improves the efficiency of our mitochondria, the little power plants in ourselves Allowing us to effectively extract more energy from each breath Another dietary intervention that has a similar effect on slowing metabolism is calorie restriction The candle that burns half as bright burns twice as long But instead of starving all the time you can just eat a big salad What else can greens do? The Harvard Nurses Health study that consumption of leafy greens appeared to protect against the development of frailty And when put to the test in a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial The equivalent of two-thirds of a cup of spinach led to a significant boost In muscle strength, muscle quality, and muscle mass in older men and women A single cup of cooked greens worth of vegetable nitrates significantly boosted maximal power And velocity in quads so much it was functionally equivalent to acutely reversing the effects of several decades of aging A single cup of cooked greens Of course when most people think about maintaining muscle mass into old age They don't think spinach, they think protein But if you put together all the randomized controlled trials Of adding extra protein to the diets of older men and women You find no evidence that adding protein increases muscle mass restraint Okay, yeah, but what if you have sarcopenia, excessive age-related muscle loss, right? Surely then protein helps, right? No, no significant effect on physical performance or muscle strength What does work? Exercise When it comes to age-related muscle mass, it's use it or lose it Maybe exercise plus protein? No! Protein supplementation does not significantly augment the effects of strength training in older adults In fact, one of my anti-aging eight is protein restriction Why do longevity experts like Walter Longo recommend people cut down on protein to live long? Here's what Luigi Fontana wrote in his book, he's the director of another leading longevity research center Excess protein may not mass your muscles, but it will accelerate aging How do you boost the pro-longgevity hormone FGF-21 dietary protein restriction? How do you suppress the age-accelerating enzyme IGF-1? You do it through dietary protein restriction How do you suppress the so-called motor of aging mTOR dietary protein restriction? In fact, protein restriction was the only intervention I could find that could slow down all eleven of the aging pathways Which is good news because it's easier to cut back on protein than to cut back on everything and walk around starving all the time And it may even be easier than that Most or all of the life-extending benefits of protein restriction Maybe due to just restricting particular amino acids like methionine, in that case You could even keep your protein intake the same but just swap sources from animal proteins like meat to plant-based sources like beans So in humans, methionine restriction can be achieved using a predominantly plant-based diet Which makes methionine restriction feasible as a life-extension strategy Of course, drug companies look at this same data and think, what pharmaceuticals can we develop to? Mimic these dietary interventions Anything else that can maintain muscle mass other than greens and machines? How about cocoa beans? Older men and women are randomized to a single tablespoon of regular cocoa powder a day Experienced a significant improvement in muscle strains, muscle mass, and all four measures of physical performance And no, the study was not funded by Hershey's Unfortunately, the tastiest cocoa did not work as well The control groups here were just given the same amount of highly dutched cocoa, alkalized cocoa Where some of the bitter compounds removed during the dutching process are the very flavonoids responsible for the benefits But natural cocoa is so good, it can improve walking performance in those with peripheral artery disease Not only by improving blood flow, but as muscle biopsies showed, by improving mitochondrial activity This is consistent with improved mitochondrial structure as well Biopsies taken from people's quads, though this study was actually funded by Hershey's What else can cocoa do? Increase the circulation within our skin, boosting at 70% within two hours after less than a tablespoon Do that every day, and within three months you end up with significantly improved skin thickness, density, and hydration But no change in wrinkles, however, keep it up for six months And you do see an improvement in wrinkles, a significant decrease in wrinkle depth Along with an improvement in skin elasticity within 12 weeks All by making your life a little more chocolatey by just adding some natural cocoa powder to your daily diet I put it in my oatmeal with some canned water-packed tart cherries for a chocolate-covered cherry sensation What else can we do for our skin? Well, there certainly are other antioxidant, anti-inflammatory glycotoxin-free foods So when patients inquire about a diet that might contribute to younger-looking skin Evidence supports a recommendation to follow a whole-food, plant-based diet But the most important thing to prevent skin aging is avoid the sun Exposure to sunlight may account for 90% of visible skin aging That's why dermatologists agree there's nothing more important to slow the signs of aging than to protect your skin from the sun Check out this trucker who spent years getting more sun on the left side of his face from the driver's side window So, the gold standard is considered to be the use of sunscreens in the daytime and so-called retinoids at night They're talking about a prescription-only form of topical vitamin A Also known as Ultran's retinoic acid or Tritinoin sold as Retin A That has been widely proven to improve skin performance The skin appearance, the only problem is that it may kill you Topical tritinoin therapy and all-cause mortality randomized controlled trial had to be stopped early Because significantly more people were dying in the retinoic acid group compared to the placebo cream group When applied topically, one day percent is absorbed into the bloodstream Could it be killing people? Well, while the debate continues as to whether the increase in deaths was just some statistical fluke or real biological effect Tritinoin continues to be banned in Europe for cosmetic purposes So, what can we use? Topical niacinamide, also known as nicotinamide is described as one of the best studied anti-aging skin cream ingredients Which is not saying much But it has been shown to reduce yellowing, wrinkling, blotchiness and dark spots in aging facial skin For example, significantly reducing crow's feet wrinkles around the eyes This was a split face study in which 64% of the niacinamide side eye wrinkles had moderate or market improvement compared to 0% of the placebo side eyes Topical vitamin C, also similar improvements over placebo wrinkles, salinus and skin tone or firmness Unfortunately, vitamin C is unstable in creams turning an unsightly brown when it oxidizes limiting its shelf life So instead, what the skin industry does, skin care industry, they use these stable vitamin C esters or derivatives But there's no evidence that these compounds have comparable effects, likely because they're poorly absorbed Oh, excuse me, and only minimally convert to the active form But the good news is you can make your own The 10% solution using that study retails for a ridiculous $127 an ounce But you can make a DIY solution more than 2,000 times cheaper By simply buying a scorpic acid in bulk and mixing 3 grams into 30 grams of water at a cost of about a nickel per ounce Drip a few drops into the palm of your hand and use your fingertips to apply it over your face, neck, upper chest Just don't get it in your eyes And look, you can do the same thing with niacinamide which can be even more ridiculously priced But you can buy it in bulk as well at a 5,000% discount All right, I can go on and on, certainly the book does But let me close out by going back to the basics From the anti-aging journal Rejuvenation Research Finally, a regimen to extend human life expectancy Was it some exotic new stem cell treatment or gene therapy? No, it was a reference to this Harvard analysis More than 100,000 men and women were followed for decades and even just basic lifestyle behaviors Appear to translate to 12 to 14 extra years for the average 50-year-old Even at age 50, we may be able to add an extra dozen years to our lifespan even at age 70 There could still be 10 extra years on the table And if you clean up your life before 50, nearly 18 years, maybe up for grabs Based on these simple common sense behaviors That's the kind of life extension extrapolating from some of these lab animal experiments But after decades of research and hundreds of millions of dollars later Efforts to translate these results into humans have largely been in vain Yet here we are with human data suggesting dramatic life extension is available to all of us Right here, right now, the trillion dollar pill that anti-aging biotech has been promising us Is here, it just effectively has to be administered in the produce aisle and the gym Turning back the clock, not with a drug or a DeLorean But just by eating and living more healthily A mid-life shift between the ages of 45 and 64 to even the barest of minimums The barest of minimums So what are we talking about? At least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day Walking even just 20 minutes a day, maintaining a healthy weight and not smoking Can result in substantial reduction in mortality even in the immediate future We're talking a 40% lower risk of dying in the subsequent four years The researchers conclude that making the necessary changes to adhere to a healthy lifestyle Is extremely worthwhile and middle age is certainly not too late to act You hold the power Okay, so I was only able to get to about 100 studies, just 12,900 to go For the other 99%, you'll have to wait for the book But it's available for pre-order now And all proceeds I receive from the sales of all my books are donated directly to charity I just want you and your loved ones to enjoy the longest, healthiest life Thank you so much