Last updated: April 9, 2026
January 12, 2025
Timestamps:
00:00:00 – Introduction of Crissman Loomis
00:04:47 – Longevity Tiers
00:27:59 – Unaging Challenge Announcement
00:29:13 – Q&A Sessions
Host: Right, next up—emaciated John Cena—uh, Crissman Loomis. Uh, Crissman is a mathematician by training and a body hacker at heart. That sounds like something out of some, like, 90s movie. Uh, he loves diving into new topics, reading the latest studies, and testing them on himself.
Isn’t that like the origin story of, like, half a dozen Spider-Man villains? Green Goblin, the Lizard, Dr. Octopus… Is any, uh, someone wants to throw me—there’s got to be more, right? The Rhino? No, the Rhino is just an idiot. Um, Sandman was an accident, but there are some others, I’m sure.
Anyway, he’s done all kinds of experiments, and, uh, we’re not just talking about weird sex stuff at college. From experimenting with a year of veganism to gaining 9 kilograms of muscle in just two months—is it still on?
Some of it. Some of it.
Okay, uh, he’s always exploring new ways to optimize health and performance. Anyway, I better let him come up here and do his talk before he bursts out of his shirt Bruce Lee style. So, big hand for Crissman Loomis. I don’t know why I keep saying your name wrong. I’m sorry.
Crissman Loomis:
I can—there we go—got it. Okay, we can hear me. Oh, I can hear me so good. Okay, so, um, I’m, uh, as introduced, I’m a researcher in health and longevity, uh, and, uh, tonight I’ll be talking about, as I click through the blank screens, the tiers of longevity interventions.
So, I’ve been doing study for a long time, trying to find out what it is that really makes a difference in our lives—things that we can do that will help us to live healthier and longer. So, in doing that, I’ve come up with actual tiers to say these are the things that will give you the most benefit. And my hope is that, by listening to my talk tonight, you’ll have a better understanding of what are the things that you could change in your habits or diet that would make a material difference in how healthy and how long you live.
So, also, I’ve been trying to put this together into an Unaging Challenge, which will be starting on, uh, January 6th of next year, and I’ll talk more about that later as well.
So, the last time that I was here, I had just run a marathon.
And here, you can behold the joy and glory—the sheer pleasure—of running a marathon. So, I was—I was very happy. I was able to run it in 3 hours and 26 minutes.
“Thank you.”
My first, and maybe last, marathon. Um, but, uh, basically, I had gone through all the training and tried to do the research to find how to do that in the best time possible. And afterward, I’d been doing health research for a while.
One of my friends said, “I’m really impressed that you’re able to do that just for your first marathon ever. I—I need help getting able to walk upstairs without being out of breath. I want you to come up with an exercise program for me.”
So, like, okay, well, I—I have been doing the research. So then, I started to think, okay, well, how—what would I—what would I put into it? What are the critical components that I would teach someone to say, “Okay, give me a plan from the beginning”?
And it actually changed the way I think of it because it’s—it’s easy to say these are all good things and then give kind of a list of things. But when you say, “No, this person has this much time to exercise, what should they do with that time?”—it becomes a different question.
So, as I look through that, the first thing that I started to do is come up with, basically, what are the biggest payoffs—what do you get the most benefit for in terms of longevity? And so, then, I came up with data.
So, I’ll—I’ll—I’ll get more into this. This is basically the summary, and I’ll be going into this.
You don’t have to photograph this or anything; I’ll go into more detail in each section. But these are, then, all the interventions that you could do with your life and how much life you would get for each of them.
Okay, so let me go into—before I go into—we’ve got the S tier, A tier, AB, C, D, and Neutral. And, uh, let me tell you about the process, ’cause one of the things I’ve been asked is, “Okay, well, this sounds great, what study is this from?” This is from more than one study.
So, for each of these things—and at the very top here, I’ll use a laser pointer here—for walking, which is the S tier, the first thing I do is go to Google Scholar. I say, “Okay, well, tell me about walking and all-cause mortality. If I walk, how much longer will I live?” And, unfortunately, uh, generally, you can’t go to one answer for this. Even if I go to ChatGPT and ask it in that way, it won’t tell me.
So, instead, what I’ll get is studies like this: The Association of Daily Step Count and Mortality Among U.S. Adults.
So, I’ll go through all these studies and try and see, “Okay, well, what’s the numbers behind it, though?” Because I need—this still is not telling me how much longer I’m going to live.
And so, then, as I go through the study, eventually I’ll find something that’ll tell me what the hazard ratio is for all-cause mortality.
Right, so if you walk 12,000 steps a day, your hazard ratio for dying will go down from 100% to 0.35. So, it’s a 65% reduction in your chance of dying. Now, unfortunately, that doesn’t mean you’re going to live 65% longer—that’s not the way the math works.
So, what it’s saying is that if you had, say, a 1% chance of dying for your age and gender that year, but you walked 12,000 steps every day, then instead of having a 1% chance of dying, you would have a 0.35% chance of dying that particular year. Right? And you can run that all the way out, but, again, this is not telling me how much time I get out of this.
So, then, I would take that information, and I would put that into an Actuarial Table.
So this is the table then that tells you for every year of your life and this is based off of the United States so the uh ssa.gov website tells you what’s your chance of dying is every year and so then I apply the hazard ratio to this and then do okay did you die this year yes no and then okay here then that was your average life and then next year and then take it instead of 1% chance of dying 35% chance of dying next year and you can get an expect good lifespan.
Um all clear right okay we’ll we’ll have questions later um so then with each of these then I go through each of the interventions and say okay once I’ve tracked it down to a hazard ratio how much more life is it going to give me? And so then we can come up with a table like this.
So here’s the basis behind if you have a hazard ratio, this will then tell you basically how much more years of life you could get from this.
And the years of life here are um as a as a benchmark I’ve used a 40-year-old male and if you’re older than that you’re not going to get quite as much time. If you’re younger than that you’ll get more time. If you’re a woman you’ll get a little less time because you live longer.
So it all comes through but then now I can take a look at say okay if this gives say a 12% decrease in mortality then that means I’m going to get about another year of life out of it right? So now I can convert from having a hazard ratio for mortality premature death and convert into something that will tell me how much more extra life there on average, there are no guarantees here, I still have to walk out into the street after this is over and ride trains and other things, but on average how much longer I could expect to live or hope to live.
So then going through all the interventions I go into each of them and say okay well let’s take a look and see how that affects things right.
So if I look at say walking which is the S-tier intervention this is seven extra years of life from the 65% reduction in all-cause mortality it’s huge! This is like number one and if you read Brian Johnson or Peter ATI or the other experts they don’t even talk about it because it doesn’t show up in any of your biomarkers or anything like you just live longer and healthier you sleep better maybe you lose some weight like not OIC weight but maybe you lose some weight and you have a better life for itbut you won’t notice that in your cholesterol or other things.
Then, after that, we get to something which is, um, I think of as the A-tier, as being the active tier, because these are generally the physical activities. They give you the most reward for your effort. So, here we have things like, uh, aerobic exercise—basically jogging or riding your bicycle or something. Uh, strength training also comes here. Um, you get an extension for life for that, and then, also, we have, uh, high-intensity interval training.
Um, so, if you looked at exercise before, this is where you do a 100% effort. You try to get your heart rate to 90–100% of your maximum heart rate, and then you rest and run a little slower for a while, and then you run back again at your maximum heart rate. And this, then, on top of doing the aerobic exercise of doing a jog, if you combine these two of them together, then it gives you another, like, four years of life. It’s amazing. It has other benefits as well, but just in the straight life, this is enough to justify it.
Another thing on here that is not—a little different—is a sauna. It’s one of them. It’s a very common habit in Finland, not so much, uh, back in America, but I find I can go down to my local, um, bath here in Japan and get a good sauna. Um, but it has really strong benefits that are very—it’s about a 40% reduction in all-cause mortality.
And then, one other thing—if you look at walking, you’ll notice that there’s the green part here, which is the benefits you can get. Then, there’s a gray part over here to the left, and this is basically where the average person is. So, when I say 12,000 steps, the average person is already walking 4,000. Three to four thousand steps is pretty normal. Assuming you’re not staying in bed all day long, every day, uh, you’re getting at least probably 3,000 or 4,000 steps or so.
So, for each of these, I say, if I were to recommend this, how much would the average person get for it? But, of course, we’re all special, and none of us are average here. So, if you’re not walking at all, then you might get more benefits out of more. But also, the red items are things that are to be avoided. So, smoking is—I’m not, no, no—fast-breaking news here—is one of the most dangerous things you can do. And this is the average person across everyone. But, of course, you’re either smoking or you’re not. So, if you’re smoking, this is going to—you’ll get the whole benefit of this bar, and it’s as valuable as walking.
So, then, we got down to the next tier, which is the B-tier interventions, and I think of this as the basics.
And there are some things on here that I think are quite surprising. One—and I was super happy to find this because I like coffee quite a bit—is that drip coffee is one of the top ones in the basic tier. It’s very healthy for you.
Um, and this is one of the areas where you can do either of these things: you can either drink drip coffee or black or green tea because half of the benefit is from the caffeine. You won’t get double this if you do both, but half of the benefit appears to be from the caffeine.
CU—I can tell this—CU, they have very good studies in the UK about drinking coffee and tea, and they tell you that, basically, if you drink decaffeinated coffee, you only get half of that bar. And we’ll get to that in the lower tiers. On the flip side, the other half of it appears to be some of the chemicals inside of it. And if you drink instant coffee, you get the other half, but not the, um—you get the caffeine part, but not the chemical part. And if you’re drinking instant decaffeinated coffee, I don’t—I don’t know what you’re doing here.
So, then, the next side of this is we get into the things that are basically, um, whole grains, nuts, olive oil, glucosamine—I’ll say something about that—and fish. Whole grains are actually one of the best sources of fiber in your diet. Oftentimes, when you say you should have more fiber in your diet because it’s healthy, people think of fruits and vegetables. But actually, for calorie consumption, whole grains are the best source of this.
These are things that are sometimes unfairly impugned as not being healthy, like a granola bar or an ultra-processed cereal like Cheerios. Cheerios count—they’re good. I ate a lot of those as a kid. Whole-nut Grapes or other things are also great. Unfortunately, rice doesn’t count. Sorry—it’s a little bit over-refined. Even if you’re getting the wild rice and stuff, it just doesn’t have as much fiber as something like whole-wheat pasta or whole-grain bread.
Then, the most efficient thing—and I think I might have talked about this in my last talk—is actually nuts and olive oil. This appears to be due to the monounsaturated fats, because there’s not much else shared between nuts and olive oil, but they both have the same profile: a huge benefit for a small dose. We’re talking about a very small handful, like 20 grams—less than an ounce—of nuts a day. That gives a 17% reduction in all-cause mortality. Just that!
But the punchline of it is: if you eat two handfuls, you don’t get 34%. You still just get the 17%. It’s flat. It has this really strong peak where, yes, you totally should have done that, and now it’s just empty calories—that’s all you get. Olive oil has the same profile. And there’s one thing in common between olive oil and nuts, and that is the monounsaturated fats. So, I’m guessing avocados would also fall in the same category, but I don’t have the observational studies for that because it’s kind of more recent.
Then, as we continue down the list and talk about glucosamine—this is, uh, it’s a joint medicine; it’s a supplement. The only supplement to make the list. We actually have a lot of data on people just taking it for their knees, and we have enough of that to say from the observational data that, actually, it does reduce all-cause mortality, or premature death, by about 10%.
And then, the last one here, very popular in Japan, is fish—the only meat to be on the positive side. Well, actually, we’ll get to legumes later, but yeah, the only meat that’s positive. Up to 200 grams a day, we found that people who eat have quite a significant benefit for all-cause mortality, for lengthening your life.
So, then, as we get beyond the basics, we go to the C-tier.
These are the cautions, right? These are the things where, yeah, maybe you shouldn’t eat that. By the way, I just want to be clear—I eat all these things. It’s all about the dosage and how often you eat them. But here, we have things like processed meat, sugary beverages, red meat, and also eggs.
Processed meat is, uh, any kind of processed meat—it’s hams, salami, deli turkey (where you get it kind of in the thing), or pepperoni. Sugary beverages and this is a fun one—I oftentimes am asked, as someone researching longevity and trying to live as long as I can… I like cookies just as much as the next person, so I’m looking forward to those Christmas cookies right now. But the real place where sugar is very negative for longevity and health is when it’s liquid.
Sugar itself in snacks, frosting, or desserts is fine, but if you drink it, it just hits your body faster than your body can respond to. They find this has a very negative effect on all-cause mortality. This includes things like kombucha, which is a sweet, fermented tea. The sugar is still in it—you can see it on the label. Or if you drink coffee with added sugar, that’s also bad. But it doesn’t include things like milk, which seems to be fine. We’ll get to dairy in a minute. Other things, like orange juice or a smoothie, are still just sugar water.
Then, legumes—beans—we talked about before. They’re another great source of fiber and are very healthy. You can eat quite a few servings of that and get a benefit. Eggs, though—more than one a day becomes more negative. And red meat, which I’ve mentioned before—this is pork and beef.
Now, we get to the bottom. We’re getting into dental habits.
Here, we have flossing. They can actually track that back to increasing your lifespan. The inflammation—and, by the way, I’m a bit biased on this one; my father is a dentist, so maybe I’m trying to make my dad proud at last, taking some of his learnings. The bacterial infections that you get in your mouth spread throughout your entire body. They find the bacteria Streptococcus mutans—the cavity bacteria—in your system because of the inflammation and other issues. So, flossing once a day is a C-tier activity that can give you an additional lifespan.
Okay, so, let’s see. I should have had this, like, as a “guess what’s on the next slide,” but so now we are here at the D-tier, and I call this—I think of this—as the distractions tier.
Lots of people think these are the main things they should be doing, but the benefit you get here for the effort is not nearly as much as you would think.
Right here, we have the things that you might have thought would be on the list up at the high top, right? You’ve got fruits and vegetables. But, honestly, most of us have listened a little bit and have some fruits and vegetables most of the time. And, at about two servings, the benefits cap out. There’s just, like, you don’t get any more benefit out of it.
Lots of people who are trying to live healthy are trying to eat fruits and vegetables all day long. I did that for a year, as we mentioned in my self-experimentation. And the thing that I found that it did for me was it, uh, had my dentist warn me about cavities from too much fruit sugar, which I haven’t had since I was 15. Um, but aside from that, it doesn’t give you nearly as much benefit as some of the other healthier foods.
We also have the decaffeinated coffee and tea that I mentioned. Uh, we have hot peppers. So, here we now get into the spicy stuff, right? So, people who eat, like, a whole hot, spicy pepper at least once a month have longer longevity. Great—that’s kind of a freebie. You know, if you like it, go ahead.
Also, here we have to brush our teeth, and this is one of the funny ones that I think is sort of the evidence that there’s a real thing happening here. And it’s not just, “Of course, healthy people brush their teeth,” because you get a longevity benefit for brushing your teeth only at night.
Brushing your teeth in the morning? Great, probably gives you fresh breath—zero impact on longevity.
There’s something about before you go to bed that your salivary glands or something goes down, and you need to clean out your teeth then, and then it gives you a longer life. But the number of times a day or earlier in the day doesn’t seem to make a difference—it’s just doing it before you go to bed.
And here we have instant coffee, which is sort of… here’s where it fits. Dairy is, uh, unhealthy after about a cup or two a day. So, a cup or two a day is fine. After that, it then becomes linearly bad—the more you drink, the worse it gets.
And then we have the “no harm, no foul, no benefit.” Um, these are neutral in longevity terms. So, if you’re looking for some meat, poultry is not bad for you. It’s not good for you like fish, but it’s not bad.
And refined grains, so all those fancy cakes and desserts and stuff, is not shortening your life or lengthening it. It’s empty calories, but you can get things from other sources. So, that’s a lot of information.
And, uh, I mean, I live this because I’m reading this and trying to find these things and see how to put it together. But it’s, uh, difficult to build the habits to do this, and I’ve been talking about this with my friends and acquaintances for several years as I come up with research. This is my latest thing—did you know legumes, right? Like, um…
So, when my friend challenged me and he said, “Okay, look, give me a plan. I need to figure out what I need to do,” so then I looked at, sort of, the whole thing and I said, “Okay, well, for the plan, then we’re going to focus on the big hitters.
We’re going to hit the activity tier and the S-tier as what you’re going to get the most benefit for your time.”
One of the things that is not well known is that, actually, the dosage for this—the optimal dose—is not as much as you think. And that’s one of the things that I love when you get into the real details of the numbers. You can also see in the charts, like, okay, you ate 20 grams of nuts, it gave you a huge benefit. You ate 40 grams, you got nothing more for it.
And we see this in many of the other things as well. For instance, in the, um, aerobic training: aerobic exercise has a similar kind of trend where if you’re doing aerobic exercise every week, massive benefit of about a 35% reduction in all-cause mortality. If you’re doing it twice a week, also about a 35% reduction in all-cause mortality. There’s no increase in it, right?
So, okay, do it once a week. So I put these together in a plan and, uh, was working with my friend on them. Then, one of my other friends said, “Hey, how come he gets a plan? We would like to do this too.” So, so I’m like, “Okay.” So, I opened it up, and then about 20 of my friends, uh, signed up and said, “Okay, well, we’ll do this together.”
So, I put it together as a year-long plan. And so, for each of the four quarter-long plans—quarter-long activities to live a long and healthy life, right?—this became, then, the Unaging Challenge 2025, which I’m launching next year on January 6. It’s free. Um, I think this information is useful, and all I have to do is make a Google spreadsheet, which Google gives me for free, so I’ll pass that on.
But I’ve been very heartened to do this with my friends and to work through this together. Because I’ve been talking about exercise, and this is a great idea.
For years—and honestly—they hadn’t done much, right? But when I put it as a spreadsheet and said, “Okay, we’re all going to do this together as a challenge,” you could see how everyone else was doing; they could see what you were doing. All of a sudden, the participation went much higher, and, right, like, all of a sudden, it became real. It’s like, “Okay, we’re doing this as a challenge.”
And the whole idea behind it is, we’re going to do it for 12 weeks, right? We’ll do it for 12 weeks, and I’ll put together the structure for it so you get the best dosage out of it, you get the build-up, and you decide how to hit the benchmarks.
So, uh, as a spoiler for the first, uh, 12 weeks, that focuses on high-intensity interval training, which you have to get your heart rate up to about 90%. It’s a really hard effort. But one of the nice things about it is, is that 90% is based on your heart rate—it’s relative to wherever you start at. For the people who are not fit, they just need to do whatever would take them up to 90%. And for the people who are fit, they, they, of course, have to work harder, but it’s still 90%—like maximum effort, whatever your effort is at, that’s maximum for you.
So, I have had people who had done no training at all, um, come into the program, and they get the most benefit because they, they have a lot of room to go. And I’ve also had people who were quite trained, um, doing half-marathons and other things, who also did the program and they also found benefit from it because they learned, sort of, the optimum dose and maybe did a bit of things they didn’t know.
So, also, the other part of it is that people are free to choose whatever it is that they want to do. So, uh, one of my good friends, uh, was willing to do the challenge. He said, “I hate running. I’m not running—no, no.” I just, I’m like, “Okay.” So, he’s instead doing jumping jacks in his house to get to the maximum heart rate. So, it’s all open to you. Some people are bicycling.
Some people are using the elliptical machine in the gym. It’s all up to you for, kind of, what you feel would do that.
All I have to do is put a spreadsheet, and you put there what you did, like, how it went for you, and also what your metrics are. So, one of the other requirements that I’ve asked people to do is to get some kind of smartwatch or something that tracks the heart rate so that they can then see how they’re progressing or how it’s going, right?
So, it, it, uh, started. Um, right now, we’ve already done the cardio training. And also, we’ve done strength training, which was the second challenge. And here we have the data. This is week, uh, week one, session one; week one, session two, etc. And this is about 20 people. It’s kind of hard to process, so we’ll, we’ll put a little, uh, bit of form behind it.
So, this is the, uh, beginner gains for the win.
This is how much strength they gained. So, it’s a very simple, uh, calculation, basically just based on how much capacity they had. And the people who were the beginners trained, uh, had the most improvement—nearly twice as much over the period. I mean, a lot of that is just getting used to it, right? They haven’t done the weights before.
But people, again, were able to adapt this to what they had available. Uh, some people did this at a home gym. Some people found they had a great gym down the street and fell in love with it, and they go there all the time now. Um, but it’s able to be done with whatever you have and whatever your level is at.
And for those of us who were trained, the gains were not quite as great. But, uh, still, I was able to gain 10%, and that seemed to be fairly typical for the people who were already doing weightlifting just from going through a different structure, um, and a different, maybe, routine than people were used to, right?
So, let’s, let’s come back to the beginning of it. Well, actually, no, let’s talk about this—this is what we achieved. So, uh, over the, uh, 12 weeks in total, uh, between the 20 people and adding up all their lifts twice a week in every single lift that they did, uh, the total weight was 1.5 million kilograms of weight lifted, which happens to be the weight of a Boeing 747 fully loaded, right? So, this is effectively how much, as a team, we lifted over the 12 weeks.
But that’s, that’s the team.
To put a face to it, this is, uh, Blaine—the person who was with me and asked me, “Look, I’m getting winded just climbing a flight of stairs. I need a program for this.” And then, after working with Blaine, my other friends said, “Okay, look, we want to do this as well.” So, this is the early-adopting group—about 20 people or so—that came together to do this.
So, I’m very excited to say that, already, for the 2025 challenge, we have 100 people who are registered. We have six separate teams with about 10 to 20 people on each team. We’ll be sharing a spreadsheet for them, and, uh, there will be good data coming out of this. I’ll find out, sort of, like, what benefits people see and how they do it. And also, I plan to track more of it across the entire period.
So, my studies say that this is the minimum dose, but one of the things I’ll get to test is, during the program, to see whether that’s really true—like, were they able to maintain the benefits they got in the earlier phases? Say, during the cardio kickoff, when they’re doing a reduced amount of cardio because they’re now focusing on strength training as the primary. So, it’s a, it’s an exciting effort.
And, uh, here’s the QR code. These are all the QR codes. So, I have a QR code here, um, for signing up if you’re interested in trying a different challenge for 2025. Um, also, you can just go to unaging.com, my website, um, and take a look at it there. I have a lot of reading about all these things—about coffee, sugar, and everything else that you might want to know about.
So, uh, thank you very much for listening, and I hope you’ll join us for 2025.
“Okay, all right, so we got to do the Q&A. Sorry, I’m gonna do it from—I got to sit down here because I got to manage all the mics. Uh, what number is that, Melvin?”
Thank you. Um, is this working? Yes, yes, it is.
“Well, thanks for the talk. So, since you spent, like, so much time going through such a huge, like, you know, amount of information, I’m kind of curious as to whether you found something, like, quite curious and unintuitive. Say, like, you know, you get this substance or you eat this—whatever, like, you know, one gram is, like, the most amazing thing you get—and then you get actually negative effects.
So, can you actually reverse the effects of some good stuff, like in small quantities? And let’s say, of course, that’s true for most of the things you probably listed, but is there one thing that you thought, ‘Aha, that’s surprising?’”
Yeah, the biggest thing that jumped out for me for having—not, like, a—not like a “U” of benefits, right?—where you get a reduction, and then it kind of peaks up. But actually, I call it a “V” for weightlifting strength training.
So, the optimal amount for the longevity of weightlifting strength training is one-hour total time per week. That’s it. Like, so if you talk about someone like Brian Johnson, who lifts an hour every day… Yeah, so it’s, uh, it’s very surprising. There are cardiovascular issues and other things that happen. And if you’re lifting more than two and a half hours total time in the week, you now have a longevity rate the same as if you’d never gone to the gym in the first place.
So, I lose a lot of people when I’m talking to, you know, the gym—you know, people who love the gym. I grew to like the gym as well. They’re just like, “Okay, now I’m not listening.” But, and it’s, um, it is one of the things that I say. If you’re trying to build things, if you’re going to a competition or something, absolutely you should be going to the gym every day of the week. But if you look at it in the long term, is that a good habit to do forever? Maybe you don’t need to.
Yeah, good question, thanks.
“Yes, uh, so I have a question about the confounds in your data.”
“So, this is actually… Yeah, it’s Nerd Night, guys, come on. All right, so, uh, you’re talking about walking and aerobic exercise. A lot of the people who are doing that walking and aerobic exercise are the ones who are getting those 12,000 steps in. So, you know, most of—like, many of the people I know who get their 12,000 steps aren’t getting it by just walking around.
They’re getting their 12,000 steps by running, by doing other activities, and that gets caught by their, uh, their Fitbits or whatever else they’re using. So how are you teasing that out of the data?”
Um, the, uh, the aerobic exercise doesn’t count. Doesn’t count. Like, the study that I—How? But how are you counting?”
So, the study that I used as the reference for that one, uh, they’re using accelerometers to count the steps. And if the accelerometer is going at a pace that would, uh, be considered medium or vigorous physical activity, it’s not counted towards the step count. So, they did it algorithmically with the measurement device to say, you know, there’s a difference between when you’re running and when you’re walking and discounted all of those.
Because I had—I already knew from before that aerobic exercise gives you no benefit after the first 20 minutes or so a week. And so, I was very concerned with this question of, like, okay, and so it’s been one of the, um, challenges with my early adopters to say, “Okay, you need to walk. The challenge is to walk 12,000 steps a day, and running steps don’t count. It has to be walking in order to get the full benefit of it.”
So, it is definitely something that I’ve thought a lot about, and it appears to be very important that you make the distinction.
“Thanks for the question. I think the person at the mic gets the next question. Number one? Number one? What’s number one doing in the mix now? Test. Okay, it’s on.”
Thank you so much for an interesting talk.
“I think nowadays, managing fitness can feel like a full-time job. Like, ah, sleep this much, exercise this much. How do you manage stress? You’re telling these people, ‘You’ve got to walk 12,000 steps a day. You’ve got to run this much. You’ve got to work out this much,’ while having a life and kids. And I think stress is a big factor in decreasing longevity. So, how do you manage for that? And how, like, what if someone’s like, ‘Oh, I can only walk at night?’ How do you manage that in terms of your study?”
So, the, um, the elevator pitch—or the short summary of the study—the goal is 90 minutes of weekly exercise equals 20 extra years of expected life. Okay, so that’s the label out at the front. Ninety minutes of exercise. And, as I said, some of it, um, we go into, like, a build phase so that you get used to it. You build the habit of it. You get the benefits of it. You’re like, “Yeah, okay, this is great.” And then we drop it down.
So, in the first, uh, first challenge for the first 12 weeks, we’re doing the 90 minutes purely as high-intensity interval training, right? And then you get used to that. You kind of see how that goes. By the end of 12 weeks, maximum effort still sucks, um, but you know how to do it, and you’re used to it.
But then, after that, for the rest of the entire program, you only do the high-intensity interval training for one period of 30 minutes a week. Now we move the two of those sessions over to strength training to build on that. So, at any given time, you’re only doing 90 minutes total time a week. And honestly, by the end of it, you could be doing just 60 minutes.
But the walking is just a chunk. I have a walking desk—that’s how I do that personally. But, yeah, the entire program is designed to be something that can fit in with other things.
“Thanks. Hello, uh, I wonder if you have any idea about why walking is so beneficial? I mean, like, aerobic exercise or HIIT may increase your VO2 max, or strength training may be good for balance or reducing falls, things like that. So why exactly would walking be so beneficial, do you think?”
Yeah, it’s a great question. Um, and I’m a mathematician, not a doctor. So I, I can—that’s why I like the all-cause mortality metric, because then I can just close my eyes to the mechanisms and look: did they die early or not? Um, so I’m kind of blind to that.
I’ve seen some interesting ideas. One is that your legs are like a secondary heart. Basically, every time you move your calves, you’re helping the blood flow. This is the hardest place to get your blood to return to the heart from, and so that’s one of the theories behind it.
And then, of course, there’s the argument that programs say, “Okay, so if you sit at your desk all day and do nothing, you’ll live longer,” which goes for the whole exercise thing.
The other part of it—and this is something that I’ve just recently been exploring—is that sunlight could actually be a big factor too. It could account for maybe a third or so of the overall benefit. It’s not enough to account for all of it, but that could be one of the other beneficial parts of it—except when it’s cloudy or raining. Yes.
So, those are the things that I can think of for it. The other part is that I started out trying to look at whether it was bad to be sitting too much during the day. And that has this… like, they’re trying to say that if you sit for 12 hours at your job (because many people have jobs where you sit for a long period), that’s totally fine.
But if you sit for 14 hours a day, all of a sudden, it’s bad. And I’m like, “I’m just trying to think of what would be the mechanism that does nothing for 12 hours, then at 14 hours goes bad.” I’m like, no, what’s really happening is that if you’re sitting for 14 or 16 hours a day, you’re not walking at all, right? So that’s when I started to focus on walking—it just seems to be that it keeps you from sitting all day. That’s one of the explanations that I came up with for it.
“Okay, thanks for the question. You got the mic.”
“Okay, um, trumped—sorry, I’ll try to be quick. So everything up here is an intervention—it’s basically something, a habit, that you can change personally. It’s something you can take personal responsibility for. Yes, and all these things are great—they’re fantastic. They’re things that you should do. We’re lucky to live in Tokyo, where walking is the norm, for example.
Have you done any work or looked into environmental factors—things that, as individuals, we can’t change necessarily? Like, say, air pollution, or chronic disease caused by, um, say, infectious disease, that sort of thing? And their effects on mortality? Things that we could affect as a society, uh, the use of, I don’t know, microplastics or pesticides, and how those also factor into this?”
I’ve had, I’ve had quite a bit of thought about those things as well. Um, and my off-the-cuff response is I think some of them are overrated, like the microplastics thing—I’ve not been impressed by the studies on it. But sometimes, it is what I think limits it.
One of my theories for why you don’t get more benefits from aerobic exercise is because of the air pollution you have to breathe to get it, right? So, if you’re doing aerobic exercise, you take in about six times as much oxygen—you breathe as much as you would if you’re walking.
This could be, and according to the WHO standards, like, anyone who lives anywhere near a city is basically breathing air that the World Health Organization says is unhealthy. You have to be, like, in the forests of the Amazon or something to not be. And so that’s one place where I think that comes up.
The second thing is, uh, when I talked about the limited benefits of fruits and vegetables, I’ve seen some research that said that’s because if you eat too many fruits and vegetables, you start to get too many pesticides with them, right? And so you then have an exponential effect that causes increased cancer. And that can be solved by getting organics.
Um, uh, but for those of us who live in Tokyo, it’s not that easy. Um, so it does come in a few places. I see it oftentimes as a limit to the benefit you can get from something because, eventually, the pollution effects can become more strong.
Okay, um, yeah. Hey, here. Hi.
“So why is strength gain an acceptable pseudometric that you’re looking at in your program, and, related to that, why wouldn’t exogenous creatine or protein be an acceptable improvement to the strength gain, and hence an improvement to all-cause mortality, if it is an acceptable metric?”
Oh, they are—both of them. Um, I recommend creatine and protein during the strength training.
That’s probably where my 10% came from—it was probably the creatine.
Creatine is very safe. It’s, uh, cheap—it’s a very cheap supplement you can use that will increase your strength and endurance when you’re doing strength training. And, uh, I do recommend it. It’s well-documented, has been around for decades, and helps you lift more.
The reason that I choose strength as the metric, um, for many of these things, is because it’s difficult to find a metric that actually shows you the benefit of it. But, um, one is it’s fun—you can see the number go up. It’s like you see the results of the training that you go through.
As I said, especially for the people who are new to it, to see an 80% gain… And it’s funny because it’s a straight number that is based on the total amount of weight that you lifted. And so the people in the test were starting to game the system, right? They’re starting to do leg press, which is not the best exercise, but you can move the most weight with it. So there is a certain amount of gameplay for that.
But there’s not another metric that I know of that would represent the health gains of it. It’s kind of like walking in that we know it will extend your life. Continued strength training will maintain your strength throughout your years.
It’s the number one—an 80-year-old who lifts weights can be stronger than, like, a 20-year-old who doesn’t get off the couch. So, definitely, the training is sufficient. Then the strength and how much you can lift is a fun way to quantify.
Thank you for this.
“Okay, uh, thank you for your very interesting talk. So the data that you showed was quite interesting. Like, coming from the protein question, the natural sources of protein that you mentioned—like, red meat’s bad; we kind of all know it—but, like, legumes are slightly better. It’s in a tier, I guess?”
Legumes were C-tier, yes.
“Yeah, and, like, eggs are bad. Poultry is neutral. So, like, all the natural sources of protein—they hardly have any benefits, except fish.”
Yep.
“Yeah, I don’t consider fish because I don’t eat it.”
Okay, well then, yeah.
“Uh-huh. Yeah, they don’t even consider it meat here, so it’s fun for me. So, like, why do you think it’s kind of hinting toward a bit of exercise and a more sedentary lifestyle as a kind of mix of two? Do you think the key to longevity is that you don’t go full-on ham towards muscle building? It’s more towards endurance plus a bit of a sedentary lifestyle. It’s just a kind of mix of two, but with a more, uh, how can I say, more lenient diet—like, do not consume too much protein?”
Yes, I would. I mean, the proteins… There’s something called protein leverage, which is a specific factor that talks about how, if you don’t get enough protein in your diet, it increases your hunger quite significantly.
And this is something that people who are on a vegan diet oftentimes struggle with—it’s difficult for them to get a really high-protein source, so they want more protein. So, I am, I don’t know, pro-protein, I guess. But, um, no, like, it’s an important part.
Yes, it is. It is an overall important part. And the longevity studies definitely show that, if you’re overmuscled—even if it’s muscle—it doesn’t add extra life. It’s one of the things that they’ve shown doesn’t, um, add as much life as you would have with more of a lean build. So, I would agree with that.
Like, walking is going to get you more over the long period than, say, extensive weightlifting. And also for running as well—there’s a certain dose. And a lot of it is just about maintaining and keeping over the long period, as opposed to building up in a short period and then kind of giving up the habit.
“Okay, thank you. Last question—this is the ‘you can talk to me later’ signal.”
“Okay, hi. Um, so I have a pretty extreme question. But, um, where is the ethical limit in prolonging lifespans, considering how research is conducted and how it benefits society? I mean, Japan has a famously aging population and wouldn’t necessarily benefit.
And especially today, I mean, technology like CRISPR—which is a method of direct gene alteration—is being worked on. So how would you draw the line between a healthy life and, as mentioned before, you know, becoming the supervillain in a Marvel comic?”
Wow, we went, uh, supervillain pretty fast there. So, um, the good news or the bad news is that honestly—spoiler—is that no one really makes it past 100. Almost. Like, if you make it to 110, you’re in Wikipedia right there.
So, with all of these things, unfortunately, I—I have in my calculations for longevity, for the Actuarial Table, when I first did it, I kind of added up all the things. Then I did everything, and then it said I was going to live to be 200 years old. And I’m not going to live to be 200 years old, unless someone invents some kind of new technology.
So, um, I do think this is an attempt to live long enough till they get the, uh, supervillain serum that will enable us to live longer.
But in the more philosophical question that you point out, like, is it a good thing if we live too long? I had this argument with my mother all the time. She’s like, “We’ve got too many people already. I’m ready to die.” And I’m like, “I don’t want you to do that!”
But I think that, um, our greatest strength actually is the brainpower. And, uh, even if we think that, like, the Malthusian disaster—we have too many people, we won’t be able to survive—has always been countered by new inventions that were made by the brains that were alive at the time.
So, I think that if we continue to expand our lifespan, we’ll continue to expand the opportunities. So, I think it’s a net positive if people live longer, as opposed to a villainous action.
All right, thank you. Sorry, just juggling the mics. Which one am I on now?
All right, so, no, I’m on number two. Can I have the mic for a moment?
Oh, you want the mic for… Oh, all right. Okay, it’s on. Okay, um, all right. Thank you.
Speaker:
Thank you. Um, before we finish—before Andrew wraps things up—um, speaking of a long life, I just want to remind everyone this is Andrew’s birthday. [Laughter]
“Today we can sing. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Andrew, happy birthday to you.” [Applause]
And the people on the live stream only heard Crissman sing.
“I know. I was a little nervous about that.”
Host:
All right, thank you. Thank you, everybody. Let me, let me now wrap this up. Um, I got a couple—I need you to hit some buttons. Um, first of all, Crissman, thank you so much. Let’s just give Crissman another round of applause. Thank you so much.
