Last updated: April 9, 2026
In This Article
January 15, 2026
Had an opportunity to talk again on Nerd Nite Tokyo. In this episode, I explained some of the longevity systems that can strongly drive your healthspan. Find out what factors are causing you to shorten your lifespan and what practical steps you can take to improve your long-term health.
Transcript:
00:00:00 – Introduction for Crissman Loomis
00:04:02 – How you’re likely to die (top causes)
00:06:27 – The 3 systems that prevent dying
00:13:08 – What you can do to prevent drying
00:13:14 – Metabolism markers explained (HbA1c, fasting glucose, VO₂ max)
00:15:16 – How to “save” the systems
00:15:41 – Walking (Is it the most powerful intervention?)
00:16:32 – Sunlight benefits
00:17:23 – The “Cheat sheet” of highest impact interventions
00:18:26 – Introduction to the Unaging Challenge
00:23:02 – Q&A
Host: So, next up, we are going to introduce someone who is no stranger to the nerd knight stage. This is his third talk here. Crissman Loomis. Crissman Loomis is a mathematician by training and a body hacker at heart, or hacking your heart.
He thrives on diving into new topics, reading the latest studies, and testing them on himself.
From experimenting with the year of veganism to gaining 9 kg of muscle in just two months, he’s always exploring new ways to optimize health and performance. Google Scholar is his go-to source for late spring. Please welcome back Crissman Loomis.
Crissman: Thanks. Thanks for the opportunity to speak tonight.
So, we started out. Thank you, Kate, for, sort of the big picture.
We’ve gone to the universe and how we got to where we are.
So, I’m going to smoothly transition from the universe and pick up from where we are to where we’re going to be and how you personally are going to die. So, we’ll go straight into the future from there.
Right. So, I’m also a mathematician. So, you’ve got double mathematician duty today. Lucky you. But lately what I’ve been doing is I’ve been researching health and how to live as long as you possibly can while working the minimum amount required to actually live that long, because I want you to have space to do all the other things.
So, I have a website unaging.com
And tonight, as we’ve talked about, as I mentioned, I’ll be telling you:
- How you’re likely to die.
- What are the systems you need to keep that from happening?
- And then what are the things that you do that would make that as unlikely as possible.
So, I hope that by the end of the talk tonight, you’ll have a few concrete ideas of things that you could actually do in your life that could help you get more of your life.
So, I have two basic topics — How you’ll die and the three systems that prevent it. And then also, I’ll be talking about the Unaging Challenge 2025.
So this is my second annual challenge, and I’ll tell you a little about the 2025 Challenge, which just finished on Sunday, and give you an opportunity if you’re interested, to register for the free program for 2026.
So with that, let’s get into it. So how you’ll buy? So we’ll start at the very top. So, some of you might recognize him.
This is Aubrey Degra. So he was one of the first people who said that basically the study of how to live as long as you possibly can should be its own study. It shouldn’t be: we’re going to try and find out things that will kill you like pneumonia or COVID, or other things, and cure them. But actually, we should try to figure out how to expand lifespan itself.
And he came up with like seven systems of various things and they’re kind of esoteric and they won’t be explained in this speech but they’re things like telomeres and your mtor passage and mitochondria functionality but I have good news for you because actually the systems that you’ll need to live as long as you possibly could are much more simple and things that you probably recognize.
3 Factors that Will Cause Your Death
1. They start out with things like your cardiovascular system.
So here we have entry number one on ways that you’re likely to die.
So about 33% according to the global health survey, died from cardiovascular issues. This covers things as diverse well from like stroke, heart attack, which is sort of a classic stroke, which can have two flavors of it. You can have a stroke where you have a blood clot that prevents blood from getting to your brain, and you can also have a stroke, which is an ischemic stroke, where basically the veins in your brain then break down, and then the blood gets into your brain directly. Both of them are bad. So avoid both of them.
So it’s one of the major causes, and it also increases as you get older. You rarely, unfortunately, sometimes you do, but rarely hear about people in their 30s or 20s having this, but as you get older in age, it’s going to become more and more a problem and exponential. It’s sort of like your veins sort of degrade over time.
And the second issue that you might have heard of, might be familiar with, is cancer.
2. And cancer is another one of the issues. It’s about one fifth of all deaths globally are from cancer. And we’re making some progress on that, but it feels like we’re not doing as well on it as we should.
3. And the third category I’ve kind of thrown in here is a catchall sort of like everything else.
These three, it’ll be in one of these three for sure.
So the everything else, it covers all of the like traffic accidents are covered in here. It covers COVID falls under this thing. All of the infectious disease that’s the largest category after a can cardiovascular cancer is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is basically saying that you can’t breathe and that’s like 4.5% and everything after that becomes much less. So it’s sort of a various basket.
But what I found as I was researching ways to live longer is that most of the way things that are really beneficial in moving the needle as far as living longer, kind of affect most of these in some way. And so even though like everything else is a catch all basket of all the other things, most of the things that you would do that would improve your general health also catch a lot of the things from the everything else.
So let me get into the specific systems that are that actually influence all of these.
So the three systems prevent it.
The 3 Longevity Systems That Determine Healthspan
1. The first system is the vascular.
So, as you can imagine, this dovetailed quite strongly with the cardiovascular systems.
So the vascular system, basically your entire blood system, is one of the, I should have more stats on this exactly how large it is, but it affects your entire body throughout, and the distribution of all the medicines, all the enzymes, and the cleanup of everything afterwards goes through the entire body. is fundamentally super important, extremely important, but it also is prone to breaking down over time because it’s kind of one of the biggest moving parts of the entire body, right?
As you’re shuttling all of these nutrients back and forth between the body, it’s extremely important, and it can start to break down. And the breakdown first of all of course is most important for cardiovascular as you can get clots from cholesterol and other things that can impede it or the vein walls themselves can become weak and then allow bleeding where it shouldn’t happen. But it also has a big effect on everything else. So your cardiovascular system because it carries your immune system carrying your white blood cells where they need to go also strongly affects how sort of all of the immune system and the other systems work together as well. In the transportation, the superighway of the body, the cardiovascular is very important and all the other effects that you get.
And the second critical system, or the ways that you measure this about the health of your vascular system, number one is your blood pressure, actually.
So they’ve had several studies that have shown that basically blood pressure is much more important than they thought. It’s one of the first things they figured out, couldn’t even do blood markers and things and realized that you could test how strongly the veins were pulsing with a mercury meter, and that’s what the original is, and that’s what the continuing measurement of it is. It should be about 120 over 80 and below.
Learn which natural strategies can help lower blood pressure.
This is one of the things that you can measure fairly easily in your own house.
I measure it daily. I’m getting the distance I guess so probably more than I need to.
Another one that you might not have heard of is Apolipoprotein B, called ApoB. This is a kind of a more sophisticated way of measuring the last one which you might have heard of which is LDL cholesterol low density lipids cholesterol. These are going to give you the best indicator of how healthy overall your cardiovascular system is.
2. So let me go ahead and jump to the next system which is the immune system.
This is another one where there are multiple failure modes. Your immune system is what’s going to respond to all of the diseases that you might catch.
And you think of this as being what protects you from COVID, protects you from the flu, protects you from all of the possible contagions that you could get.
But unfortunately, it also often times goes wrong on the opposite side where you’re catching problems that were caused by it. Arthritis, for example, is caused by an autoimmune issue, where it’s attacking your own system. So if it doesn’t have the right tuning or it’s overly sensitized then it can actually turn against your own body and cause problems in the opposite side. Again this is quite pervasive like the vascular system. It it goes throughout your entire body and so we can have issues on both sides, and for instanc,e the most important influence of the immune system is actually that it’s the primary stop of cancer.
One of the things they’re trying to work on right now is creating vaccines for cancer. But your immune system already does this.
When a cell has become has started to reproduce unnaturally, your immune system is actually the first stop that then takes those cells out to prevent cancer from spreading any further. So it’s critical for cancer and also again everything else as we get into the other infectious diseases, COVID, pneumonia, or influenza, or other things. But the other side of this as I mentioned is that also the immune system when it’s overreactive, when you have inflammation or inflammaging, the immune system itself can unfortunately cause many issues. So it’s another one of the systems that needs to be tuned, especially as you’re getting older.
And then this can be measured by CRP. For those of you who are living in Japan and having annual health checkups, this is a pretty regular one on the blood test that you’ll get every year. It’s a C reactive protein and it measures your overall inflammation. And this gives you a very good feeling for actually how active the system is. And it’s sort of a bit conflicting because if you have something that your body is fighting off an infection, you would like to be a little higher because it’s doing its job. But if you don’t currently have an infection of some kind that’s fighting, you would like it to be virtually zero, which is saying that it’s not causing any attacks on your blood system and other things that you don’t want. And the last one, WBC, is abbreviation for white blood cells, which is one of the primary things. Again, this will be measured in a standard blood test and tell you how many white blood cells you have to defend your system.
3. And then for the last of the three systems, it’s metabolism.
And this one as well is sort of like there’s a a two-sided approach to this. The metabolism is basically dealing with how well your body processes energy. And this again happens throughout the entire body. It’s one of the fundamental systems that you need to worry about. The issues with this you would know are diabetes or insulin resistance or other things or weight regulation, these kind of things that can be very negative and then cause a host of other issues with them.
This is why it’s connected most strongly with everything else, where if you have issues with your metabolism or your mitochondria, which are the small organelles inside of every cell that provide energy. So every cell in your body except for the blood cells has mitochondria, and then this mitochondria is providing all of the energy for the body. So it’s extremely important as you get older that your mitochondria continue to work at a high level, and it is one of the things that can degrade as you get older.
It is also affecting your cardiovascular system. If you have too much blood or the wrong kinds of fats within your blood system, that will cause more of a buildup that then can degrade your cardiovascular system. And also cancer as well. When cancer forms, it lives on glucose, high amounts of glucose. And so then your metabolism in some way is helping the cancer to grow itself because it’s cells that are replicating on their own.
All right, so we’ve talked about the ways you’re going to die and the systems that would support them. So llet’s get a little bit more positive and see what you can do about it.
So before we do that, let’s talk about how you can see your metabolism.
So HBA1C again a little bit esoteric, but this is a blood test that you’ll probably get with your annual checkup if you go for an annual checkup that will tell you what your average sugar level is in your blood. So it should be around 5% or so. And if it’s higher, I think around 6% or so, that’s sort of the diabetic range.
And it’s measuring over a longer period what you can tell from your glucose which is the amount of sugar in your blood can tell you in a shorter period. So your blood test will take a fasting glucose level. Generally, you want that to be a low below 100 or so. And the last one is kind of a mix of a few of them. It’s the velocity of your maximum oxygen velocity, which you can convert oxygen into energy.
So, it’s a VO2 max and this is a good end test because it’s basically testing how much oxygen you can breathe in, how much your lungs can take in, how much of that is then sent by your vascular system to your heart that is then sent around your body to be sent to the cells that need the oxygen to convert them into energy by the mitochondria and then that is measuring what the maximum output of that system is.
But has a very important impact on your overall vascular system. This is one of the first things that you’ll see improving as you get more exercise or if you’re eating the right kinds of foods. You’ll notice the VO2 max will go up. It can be measured approximately. It can be approximated by most kinds of wearables that you might have.
If you want to get really serious about it, there’s an excellent clinic in Tokyo that you can go to where you can run on a treadmill at speeds that are too high for you to sustain, and you fail, and it’ll say, “Okay, this is your maximum VO2 because you can’t run any faster.” Right? So, those are the systems.
So, let’s talk now about how to save those systems.
Low-Effort Longevity Actions
So, here’s a quick overview of the three systems in a Venn diagram because I’m sure this will be clear to everyone at an immediate glance.
So the ones that are involved here, the walking in the sunlight, are the ones that are very strong interactions, and you’ll notice that the ones that have strong interactions help and support more of these systems.
So walking is the most underrated, most powerful intervention that you can do.
Learn how daily walking can support long-term health.
Walking hits all of the three systems.
It reduces your blood pressure as well as for reasons I don’t really understand. I’m a mathematician. It really helps your immune system like it keeps your immune system the activity of your immune system goes down very significantly when you go walking.
And it also helps your metabolism because it is absorbing all the extra sugars that you have going through your system.
So, walking around 10,000 or 12,000 steps a day, this is serious time by the way. I don’t want to I don’t want to downplay this. It’s about an hour and a half to two hours of walking a day. Can reduce all-cause mortality by about 65%.
It’s the strongest intervention that I have found.
Also, sunlight is another one that’s very healthy. It helps the immune system vitamin D, which is then helpful in fending off infections. It also helps your vascular system by lowering your blood pressure, reduces nitrous oxide, which then will lower your blood pressure, and also helps your metabolism by improving mitochondrial function.
Read on to learn how UV exposure works and what it means for long-term health.
And one of the fun things I love about sunlight is that people kind of think sunlight equals vitamin D. But the later research is showing actually that across the spectrum of sunlight there’s ultraviolet which is what’s giving you the vitamin D. But then on the other side of there’s infrared and red spectrum and that is then what is improving the efficiency of the mitochondria to improve the little organels within each of your cells that provide you with energy.
So I’m going to jump from here into the tiers of what actually provides the most benefit.
This is the cheat sheet. These are the things that will give you the most bang for the buck and show you how like what the average American gets, and some of them are not very high, and they get to hear, but if you’re walking 12,000 steps, you can get over severity. They said walking is the number one intervention for everything that I’ve seen.
This is based on observational studies. You can’t do randomized control studies for death because people live too long, which is good. So observational things are where we get most of the data for these things.
But all of these things, and the top one’s the sauna, high-intensity interval training is the third one there. Which is basically where you run full out, and then you run a jog, and then full out or repeat, or other exercises.
Not smoking. I don’t think I need to tell you that smoking is bad.
Aerobic exercise and then strength training are the other A-tier things.
Learn what these numbers really mean for long-term health.
So, as you’ve been listening to this, hopefully you’ve been thinking, “These are great. I really want to do these. If only I had a program that was free that would teach me over a year how to do these things.”
So, that brings me to the 2026 Unaging challenge.
This is a labor of love. I’m a mathematician, but, this is what I’m doing full-time is basically running yearly programs to help people do the same thing.
And the first started of it basically is broken into four phases, and the first phase is the aerobic and high-intensity interval training phase.
Last year, we had 130 people sign up.
It is a challenge. So it only requires an hour and a half of exercise a week. As I said at the beginning of this, my whole point is to live as long as I can while spending as little of my time as I can to live as long as I can.
And I found basically that an hour and a half of exercise a week is enough to gain all these benefits out of it. And honestly, you don’t get that much from anymore. That’s including the walking. That’s not good. So that takes us free time. So the first four 12 weeks of it actually is high intensity interval training, and then after that we go to strength training.
Learn how the Cardio Kickoff built a strong foundation for long-term health.
So we had 130 people started. I think we had around 30 people who continued on, and we do a whole program. We teach you exactly what it is that you exercise. The good news is that you only need in this stage you only exercise go to the gym twice a week for about 30 minutes, and that’s all you need for the longevity benefits.
Actually, this is one that’s commonly done overdone because of the gym. Once you get used to it at a certain point, if you’re competitive, it can be quite addictive. A lot of people go to a lot, but we’re trying to move it in with your life and make it more manageable. So you go twice a week, and it’s 30 minutes, and the total weight that was lifted by all the competitors, all the participants, I should say, over the 12-week program last year was enough to lift a fully loaded, which is what they’re doing here.
And the third challenge you start to just walk. Walk hard, no actually, walk easy. One of the rules of the walking challenge is that you cannot speed run up the walking challenge. So any of the steps that you get in the running, which you continue to do, we’re building cats for life, you have to subtract off of your step count because only walking counts. It doesn’t add any longevity if you’re doing it too fast. We’ve already got the right values for that.
But over the period of the 12-week challenge, altogether we’ve walked 11 million steps, which is enough to go from Nome, Alaska down to Miami, Florida.
And then the last stage is the Unaging Plate Challenge, where we then take a look at your diet.
As I mentioned, this is another one of the things that the metabolism is very important for you. And the cheat sheet on this one, the number one thing that’s going to give you the most benefit is right in the middle there. It’s the olive oil.
So, gram for gram, there’s nothing better that you can do for your health than getting about 10 grams of olive oil or about 20 grams of nuts a day.
Oh, by the way, you can’t overload that one either. The first 10 grams of olive oil or 20 grams of nuts are super helpful and give you a 17% reduction in all-cause mortality. And the second 10 grams of olive oil or the second 20 grams of nuts do nothing for you. I hope they were tasty. There’s no additional benefit.
It’s got the benefit of being one of the most beneficial foods, and it’s just flat after that.
So anyways, we spend another 12 weeks, then build on top of that, while doing the running in the right amount, the exercise, strength training, and the walking in the right amount. Then we add in to tell you what the foods are that are best for you.
So this is the early adopters. I want to show it’s about real people. So these are my friends, the you know, the early adopters were the friends, pool, and family stage. I like things for my friends, and these are the people who did it. But we’ve also continued on and done it in the 2026 challenge—this 2025.
This is some feedback.
So I was like, “Okay, do I need to do this again?” Like, I did it once, and we have a Discord for support, and emails go out as well to support people. One person, Anna, said, “It’s really changed my life even though I’ve been far from perfect.” It’s a cooperative thing, not a competitive one.
And Kubasan, who is 38 years old and has two kids, said this is the best shape of his life. And he was starting from a low baseline, which I think actually makes it more gratifying.
So that’s the basics of the challenge, and honestly, that’s the basics of my speech. Thank you for listening. You can register for the 2026 challenge.
Open Questions:
Q: Sleep?
A: Well, I have to say, it’s overrated. So, like, some people, like Brian Johnson, who’s an influencer in the health world, will say it’s the most important thing. It’s at the top of his list, but I think sleep is like, you saw the tier S-tier A-tier. I didn’t get to it. It’s like C-tier, and the optimal amount of sleep is 7 hours a night.
That’s like the minimum point. But if you had to choose between sleeping eight hours or six hours from a longevity point of view, six hours is actually healthier than eight. And 5 hours is healthier than 10. So, I’m not looking at quality of life or how you feel when you wake up, but I can say that in the longevity numbers, it’s overrated.
Read on to see what research actually says about sleep and longevity.
Q: Are olives as good as olive oil?
A: Yes.
Q: So the philosophical aspect, in addition to the biological, is this movement. Is there also a focus on enjoying life more there? Because there’s a subset of individuals who really want to live long lives, but they are very publicly miserable, and they don’t appear to be enjoying their lives, and so in a way they’re just prolonging their misery. So, in addition to improving your blood work, it is also a philosophical focus on the burden to enjoy life.
A: Absolutely. So that’s why the whole point of the Unaging Challenge is to spend the minimum amount of time in the gym and the maximum amount of time doing all the other things. I sometimes feel like the worst health longevity expert because I still eat sugary foods. I drink alcohol in moderate amounts and sometimes in moderation on rare occasions. But I think it’s absolutely important that you’re going to be living for something else. So I try to keep the time as minimal as possible on the exercise and just what’s proven to be.
Q: But how about social relations? Like, put a number on how good your relationships are.
A: Social relations are super important. The problem as a mathematician, I find it really hard to quantify, right? The whole put a number, right?
I think I would definitely put it probably within the A tier. And it’s just part of like that’s one that I’m always looking for, like someone who’s got a good way to quantify the quality of your social relationships. But absolutely, has been shown repeatedly throughout studies that one of the most important things is having an active circle group, and people that you can talk to and support for this is absolutely crucial.
Again, I like, how do you put a number on how bad your relation? No, you shouldn’t try this, by the way. How bad relationships are, but I think it’s going to be equally negative. Specifically, that one, they found that people, like one of the instances where they can say this is really bad, is when someone is caring for a parent who is going through dementia, who is a single caretaker. They find that these people live much shorter, so I can say that’s about as far as I can go. I can say that yes, it’s definitely bad, but at the same time, it’s not something I would say that situation you should avoid, but yes, it’s happening.
Q: Do the positive effects add up, or do they have diminishing returns, or do they support each other and make them even better?
A: Well, These numbers are all calculated. So I took an aquarian table and calculated the hazard ratio for loc, and it quickly blew up to say you’re going to live to 200. And I just didn’t think that was really realistic. So I looked into it, and the answer is that around the age of 100, this is actually my current top-of-mind focus. Around the age of 100, you hit the maximum of the minimum of motor units that you have, and frailty sets it. And so basically, all the interventions go to zero after 100 years old, so the goal of my plan is to give you an extra 20 years of life, because that’s all you can give anyone. And so the good news of that is actually on a philosophical point of view. I quickly, even in my own calculations, realized that I’m already doing more than is useful.
I mean, that’s my plan, right? I’m walking, doing my interval training, everything, and I’m like, “and that would have me live to 100,” which is the same if I did two-thirds of that or half. So, it’s actually giving me some freedom to say, you know, having this thing, having a heavier drinking knife as opposed to the modern drinking knife or something else. I don’t worry about it as much because I’m pretty much already at the maximum that technology can provide.
Q: What happened to the sauna in the challenge? Why is there no sauna? I think that’s what they’re saying. Why is there no section where you spend a month in a song?
A: So, I reverse it as the evidence comes in, or sometimes I review it again.
I’ve got to change things. I did fast, by the way. I did five days of fasting: I fasted two days a week for a decade, and then I found a study showing that, basically, anytime you skip a meal, you’re reducing your longevity.
The sauna is basically the same thing: a discount aerobic exercise. So if you don’t run, you should go to the sauna, and it will give you extra life. But if you already do aerobic exercise for about 20 minutes a week, the sauna provides no additional benefit in longevity terms.
So when I learned that I just dropped it because I’m because the plan already has the running. So the answer is that the plan has exactly what you need and doesn’t include any additional.
Q: I thought you were supposed to do the easier one, though. So, wouldn’t it be easier?
A: Fair. Also, a good approach.
Q: What do you think is the most challenging part of the challenge? Like, what do you think would be the kind of sticking point, and how do you recommend people get through that sticking point?
A: It’s a marathon, which I find to be funny because I’ve done a marathon. I don’t consider them to be good longevity, but longevity is really all about consistency. So I don’t, I mean, an hour and a half, you know, I think for many of the people who do the challenge, that’s actually a downgrade of the time they’re spending on their exercise then. But even so I’ve been a surprise I mean, I’m doing these things but I find that just week in week out just doing the thing, even if it’s an hour and a half and recording it is much more difficult than I thought it it requires changing your habits, finding a gy,m or finding a place you can work out.
Many people do it in their own home with their own home gyms. But yeah, I’m not sure, but it seems that just doing it week after week is the biggest obstacle to doing it as opposed to it being that difficult. People have issues, as the person mentioned there, Anna, that she didn’t feel she was perfect about it, but maybe not doing a week, but then saying, “Okay, I’m doing it next week.” Being one of the most powerful things for completing.
See what makes the Unaging System work.
Host: That is an excellent place for us to end this year of Nerd Nite.
So, thank you so much. Please give another round of applause.
