Why

Fighting Genetics and Disease Prevention

This all started with a few blood panels I have gotten over the course of the last decade; by and large, even while eating what I thought was a pretty healthy diet (lean meats, high protein, low sugar, reducing junk food, moderating calorie intake, resistance training 4x per week, playing sports), my LDL cholesterol was consistently in the 140-150 range, which was pretty confusing to me. Based on what I knew at the time, I was doing most things right. During the COVID pandemic I started the journey of immersing myself in the scientific literature to figure out what I was doing wrong. How Not to Die by Michael Greger really opened my eyes as to the stark difference of what the science actually says vs what we have been told all of our lives. 

Through the process of trying to decrease my cholesterol and broadly prevent my genetically predisposed heart disease, I realized much of the same interventions can prevent the other main types of diseases, many of which are in the top 10 of leading causes of death in the USA. 

In this case, why not optimize what I’m already doing and create a plan that will prevent all the leading diseases, and therefore increase lifespan. 

Shortest path to happiness? 

Could this approach also just make me feel better for longer? In theory, I think the goal for me in the long term is to maximize the magnitude of “happiness”, which I define as the visceral enjoyment of reality that could be measured by motivation, mood, satisfaction, and gratitude, multiplied by the amount of time you spend in that “net positive” state. 

Happiness = Positive Feelings x Time 

If we were to model this out mathematically, let’s say during a given week, we can develop a strategy to have an “optimal week” or one that you can definitively say “yes that was a good week”. We can bucket this lived experience into 2 general approaches. Let’s define a +10 as best day ever, 0 as neutral, and -10 as worst day ever. 

Total Happiness Points: 18

Total Happiness Points: 9

In terms of racking up the most points, it seems like Approach 1 wins, even though Approach 2 had more high magnitude days. But how do you get to Approach 1? I think this level of mental stability, motivation, mood, satisfaction, gratitude, etc, can be achieved through 3 pathways: I’ll use the analogy of car racing going forward. 

Building a better car: Neurological infrastructure

If you want to win a race (happiness) it makes the most sense that building yourself a fast and spec’d out car would give you the highest chance. Yet most people prefer to try to win the race with broken down or rusty cars and then don’t understand why they can’t get what they want. To me, optimizing mental and physical health in this way is the simplest manner to give yourself the best foundation to attack each day with mental alertness and energy, and this compounds over time to generate a very satisfying reality. Now obviously, people can still win races with money (genetics) or in spite of a bad car (bad habits) with high intelligence or skill, but if you want the highest probabilistic chance of success, the better car has the better chance. 

Learning how to drive the car: Psychology

The foundation isn’t everything; it’s more of how you build on top of this foundation and use the increased brain power to good use. You still have to learn how to drive the car and develop a strategy to win the race; this is psychology, and the basis of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in which people strive to identify and change negative thought and behavior patterns. Once you build these habits and work on being present, augmented by practice like meditation, yoga, breathing, etc, you can develop a much more stable and less volatile mental framework. However, it’s pretty hard to meditate when your neural circuitry is too weak to handle the onslaught of emotions and stressors we humans have to deal with on a frequent basis; hence, the better car. 

Choosing which races to participate in: Philosophy

After you have developed a good car and racing strategy, you can focus on putting together what you have learned to develop higher level frameworks for how you want to guide yourself throughout life, what paths you want to take and your motivations for taking these paths. Sometimes choosing the race that will give you the most success itself is a skill, honed by years of experience and practice. Developing a clear life philosophy, motivations, and purpose will help you live a longer and better life. It also makes decision making easier when you have deeply thought about where you are going and why. 

Financial Wealth vs Physical/Mental Wealth

Financial wealth building and saving money for retirement has a generally positive connotation in society, and the advice for most people is to strive towards some level of financial independence. The end goal of this wealth building over time is to not have to rely on constantly working to achieve passive income after you retire. Once you "retire", you have a good chunk of money to really spend on what matters and have a lot more time to do it. To achieve this, we are taught to make financially "responsible" decisions; in other words, maintain good financial health until we retire. We achieve financial health by

• Not spending too much money (Spending less than what you earn to save long term) 

• Not spending money on things that don't provide much long term value (most of the time) 

• Focusing on long term goals to attain financial freedom during retirement

• Making some sacrifice and building good habits, (saving, budgeting, investing, etc) as long as it's not compromising short term happiness

Overall, we have accepted the general framework that relying on short term pleasure by buying shiny nice things will harm your financial health in the long run. Seems pretty straightforward. For some reason, to attain physical and mental health, we contradict these same principles; we rely on the short term enjoyment of food that is going to decrease long term health. Tell people to sacrifice short term enjoyment for long term financial health? That's financial responsibility. Tell people to sacrifice short term enjoyment for long term physical and mental health? All hell breaks loose.  

It's an interesting phenomenon because no one considers the reality of "retirement". By and large, most people that attain wealth and financial freedom still suffer from the same diseases and poor quality of life, and at that point money can do very little for you. Would you rather have a ton of money but can't get out of bed by yourself and end up in a hospital while your family watches, or have less money to spend but are in good physical and mental condition and can be an independent enjoyer of life well throughout retirement. We can achieve the latter by simply applying the same principles to physical/mental health as we do to financial health: 

• Not spending too many calories (Cutting back on overeating to live a better life long term) 

• Not spending calories on food that doesn't provide much long term value (most of the time) 

• Focusing on long term goals to attain physical/mental freedom during retirement

• Making some sacrifices and building good habits, (eat less, eat plants, exercise more etc) as long as it's not compromising short term happiness

Anti-aging

I would define anti-aging as being able to maintain or “freeze” current mental and physical capabilities, avoiding the natural decline we experience over time. The science is very promising as to the capability of diet/exercise to greatly reduce aging that we so commonly assume is a given. Heart, skin, bones, nails, eyes, ears - you name it, and you can anti-age it. Disease prevention also has a high level of overlap with preventing common unhealthy aging mechanisms, and thus was an easy enough addition (with maybe an extra focus on some food groups). 

The non-overlapping portion would include things like

1. Using plant protein isolates instead of animal protein isolates (whey, casein) 

2. Maintaining a caloric deficit for as long as possible

3. Keeping protein intake around 1g/kg and focusing on muscle maintenance instead of muscle growth (in today’s world this sounds like blasphemy). You can still gain plenty of strength this way. I’m still a recovering high-protein user so I’m trying out 1.5g/kg currently to test the effects on my muscle mass. (Previously was at 2g/kg) 

4. Reducing injury risk by not resistance training in the <5 rep range. 

5. Preferentially favoring certain food groups (mushrooms, greens, berries, etc) because they have specific anti-aging compounds; instead of eating generally healthy foods that taste good. 

6. Using sunscreen daily, each time before going outside

These may not work for everyone and are definitely an extra optimization step that is difficult to measure, but since these are not difficult to include in the overall plan, we can make our biohacking anti-aging compliant as well. 

Caveat: Sustainability > Optimization

By no means am I advocating for an extremely stringent plan that you have to force yourself to follow. The plans I have laid out here on this website are simply guidelines and a process I have found helps me clarify and implement health optimizations. I definitely do not follow this plan myself on a daily basis - traveling, having fun, and making memories are still priorities for me. My main goal is to adhere to this plan most of the time and I have the belief that through my hundreds of hours researching these topics, it should be pretty optimal even if not followed to the tee. At the end of the day being 80% optimal for 40 years is much better than holding myself to perfection, burning out, and giving up a few months down the line. And I know this firsthand because during COVID, I tried to have an even more strict plan; eating unsalted and heaping platefuls of microwaved frozen veggies a couple times a day, and resenting every meal I had to eat. I definitely eat much more enjoyable food now and through simple recipes on weekdays and moderation on the weekends, the overall journey feels pretty great so far.