CEO Chris Mirabile, Founder & CEO of NOVOS, is a serial entrepreneur and longevity expert, hosted a webinar focusing on all things longevity technology to slow down your aging. Chris goes over applications and devices that can help you be younger for longer.
Full Transcript
Grace: Welcome everyone. My name is Grace De Leon, senior associate brand manager at NOVOS. I’ll be your host for today’s event. As we all enter, I would love to know what part of the world you’re calling in from. Feel free to type in the chat box where you’re currently located. We’ve got a global audience today, people calling in from Miami, the UK, Cupertino, Canada. That’s awesome. I’m currently located in New York. Some of the NOVOS team members are in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Miami, Phoenix, L.A. County. So we’re all over the world today.
All right. Before I get started, I want to go over a couple housekeeping items. First off, I want to thank those of you who have already submitted questions. During the event, you could submit more questions in the Q&A box. If you see a question you like, you can upvote it. At the end of the presentation, the Q&A will begin. We will record and share this event barring technical difficulties. Okay, everyone, it’s time to get started.
I would like to give a warm welcome to NOVOS founder and CEO Chris Mirabile, a serial entrepreneur and longevity expert. Chris’ interest in health began when he was 12 and evolved into a passion after he was cured of a brain tumor when he was 16. Chris has researched and integrated longevity practices and interventions into his life for more than 10 years. He has achieved a biological age 13.6 years younger than his chronological age. According to epigenetic tests like DunedinPACE, he is aging 31% slower biologically than his chronological age. He created NOVOS, a nutraceutical company with some of the world’s top longevity scientists and MDs that help people take control of their health spans and lifespans. Welcome Chris.
Chris: Thank you, Grace. Welcome everyone to our now fourth webinar. So let me get started here. So today’s webinar is focused on longevity technologies or more properly stated technologies that can have an impact on longevity. It’s presented by me, Chris Mirabile, founder and CEO of NOVOS. So first with the disclaimer, nothing that I’m about to share is medical advice. Of course, always consult with a professional health expert, ideally specialized in supplements, nutrition and preventative medicine before implementing any changes in your medication, diet and other lifestyle and health matters.
So with that out of the way, the agenda for today. First, we’ll start with an introduction. We’ll then go into technologies that cover physical activity, diet and metabolism, sleep and recovery, psychology and cognition, environment, the hallmarks of aging. Then as a bonus, superficial aging or skin health, which I know many people care to know more about. Then finally, Q&A.
So with that said, as I do at the beginning of each of my webinars is I just want to make sure that everyone’s clear on the idea of longevity and health span versus lifespan, especially for those who are newer in our community and just joining us for the first time. So when you think about health, if you consider the Y axis on the left of being health versus disease and the X axis at the bottom being time, so essentially birth to death, you can see that the typical health trajectory is one that starts healthy and then declines with time. By middle age, typically forties, fifties, sixties is the end of one’s health span.
So health span being defined as a period without a chronic illness. Typically in forties and fifties is when somebody comes down with their first chronic illness and then that can cascade into two or three illnesses and eventually can lead to death oftentimes in the sixties or seventies. Now, the longevity perspective is one in which we are looking to maximize health span for as long as possible and to then have the period in which somebody does have a chronic illness or disease as short as possible and as sudden as possible. So rather than it being decades with a disease, it’s only a matter of months or years with that disease before one passes away at a much later age than the typical person would pass away.
So with that said, the last webinar I presented was on longevity lifestyle. Sorry. The last one was longevity tests, but the one prior to that in August was longevity lifestyle. Today’s longevity technology webinar essentially covers technologies that are intended to measure and optimize those lifestyle variables. So if you haven’t seen that video, it’s worth going back and viewing it. You can go to YouTube and search for NOVOS webinar longevity lifestyle. I encourage you to watch that to have more context into why we’re recommending these types of technologies according to these different categories.
So the categories of technologies relevant to longevity, I mentioned them earlier in the agenda. To that point, each one of these has specific goals that we’re trying to achieve with each of these technologies by category. So this is a preview of them. You don’t have to read all of them now. As we go category through category, I’ll emphasize what we want to increase and what we want to decrease. The capabilities of these technologies. We have both high tech and low tech that we’re going to be presenting today. So not everything is these fancy new gadgets and software. Some of them are very simple old fashioned technologies, but nonetheless are very valuable for longevity.
Each of these technologies falls into one of three categories or sometimes more than one of these three. It’s either tracking, so it’s data collection. This tends to be hardware devices. It’s analyzing, so it’s taking that data and then performing analysis. Ideally, it’s also providing actionable feedback. This is where the software layer comes into play. Then integrate, so this is either physiological or environmental integrations. This can be in the form of both high and low tech hardware devices.
So the considerations for us to have as we step into this presentation is, first, that technologies are only as good as compliance. So make sure when you’re considering the possibility of integrating one of these technologies into your routine, that it’s something that you’re going to comply with. Otherwise, you’re just spending your time and money on something that’s not going to end up providing the value that you’re hoping it will. Second is many technologies are overhyped through marketing. Although they may help with a specific goal, it might be a health goal that they do help with, they won’t necessarily make a difference for longevity.
Number three is not much research for most of the technologies that I’m going to present has been done as it pertains to longevity. Because technologies are new and longevity studies take a lot of time and a lot of money. This is also a rapidly evolving space and there hasn’t been as much research when it comes to technology on longevity. But nonetheless, we can discuss what’s available in the market right now and its theoretical value, that is what we believe will have an impact on longevity.
This presentation is not exhaustive. It’s a small subset of all available technologies. The technology universe is enormous, so it would be impossible for us to cover everything. This is just a subset of the technologies that we find to be particularly interesting for the sake of longevity. Finally number six is that NOVOS has zero affiliation with any of the technologies shared in this presentation other than NOVOS’ own products, two of which we will mention at some point in the presentation. So it’s an unbiased perspective or minimally biased perspective on the technologies that we’re going to share.
So the first category is physical activity. For this, the goals are to increase your activity or your caloric expenditure is one way to measure activity. Time is another way, and then to the point of time is time in a heart rate zone. So cardiovascular heart rate zones are an easy way to be able to measure your degree of exertion and how much exercise you are performing for your cardiovascular system. At the same time, we want to reduce over training and minimize the chances that that takes effect in the first place. One way to measure this is with HRV, which stands for heart rate variability, as well as inactivity. We want to reduce inactivity or time just sitting still.
The rationale for this is that all hallmarks of aging are improved by exercise. The second is that reduction in the risk for cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, diabetes, many forms of cancer, all cause mortality can decrease by more than 35% from just 90 minutes of physical activity per day, and more than that with vigorous exercise. You can see that on the chart on the bottom right where the blue dotted line is vigorous exercise, the bottom is moderate exercise and then the solid line is averaging and the total. You can see the reduction in mortality based on the number of minutes of physical activity per day which is on the X axis at the bottom of the chart.
Over-training, why is this a problem? Well, it causes excess inflammation, poor sleep and negative health outcomes. This is not an issue for everyone. I would say majority of people need to get the motivation to exercise enough in the first place, but there’s a subset of us who actually overdo it and push ourselves too hard. We need to be cognizant that that can actually have negative health outcomes as well.
So how much exercise? Well, there’s a paper in the journal Frontiers in Endocrinology. The paper is called Aging Hallmarks: The Benefits of Physical Exercise where you can find this table and you can see the amount of aerobic exercise at moderate intensity and vigorous intensity, muscle strengthening and flexibility that is recommended based on their research for older individuals.
So for physical activity devices, let’s start with something that can help you track and analyze your physical activity. For that, we recommend you look into the Oura Ring and the WHOOP wristband. I’m wearing an Oura Ring myself. It’s a very popular device. The WHOOP wristband is as well. These are activity trackers that are capable of measuring a wide range of actionable biometrics. The applications that come with these devices provide recommendations as well. The value of this is that you can track your activity, you can track your sleep, which we’ll talk about in another category, you can track your recovery and heart rate variability, your body temperature and more.
So HRV is good for stress and recovery activity. It’s good to look at your net calories and the time spent in each of the heart rate zones and inactivity time. These are some of the more valuable physical activity features, specifically when it comes to longevity.
Next is for tracking and analyzing, very similar devices. These are devices like the Apple Watch, the Samsung Galaxy Watch, the Garmin Venu, Fitbit devices. These track similar metrics to Oura and WHOOP, but they have added features like GPS and music. So you don’t necessarily have to bring your smartphone with you to be able to track the distance you walked or ran or to listen to music. However, what I would say is that the apps that come with these devices are not as specialized, especially when it comes to making recommendations. You typically have to download a separate app for the sleep side of things versus the activity. To go into as much depth, I would say that WHOOP and Oura really stand out with their apps.
Now with these devices, you can measure caloric expenditure, heart rate zones, VO2 max, and with most of them you can also measure HRV. They’re also capable of tracking your sleep. The value of this, as well as the Oura and WHOOP devices, is that they can motivate activity, the carrot and stick. They constantly remind you of your goal and if you’ve accomplished your goal for the day and it does have a real impact on your likelihood of getting up and being a little bit more active each day. They can help you with heart rate based training, which is a fantastic way to really build up your cardiovascular system without overdoing it. To that point, they can help you to avoid over-training.
Now, that is tracking and analysis in terms of integrating physical activity. Obviously, the best thing you could do is actually exercising cardiovascular and muscle building and so on. But in terms of technologies, one novel technology to share is something known as far infrared. So far infrared uses light to generate body heat and it doesn’t heat the air around you, but it provides many of the same benefits that you would get from exercising. So the infrared light, you wouldn’t feel it necessarily, but the infrared waves actually permeate the skin and get to an organ level and they’re basically heating you from the inside out. So you’re getting a lot of the benefits of breaking a sweat from exercise, your heart rate increases and so on.
So there’s a product called HigherDOSE which offers a far infrared blanket, which you can see here at the top image. There are also free-standing lamps that you can get for relatively little money on Amazon, or you can purchase entire saunas for a few thousand dollars. That can be free-standing saunas in your home. The value, like exercise, some early studies indicate that these types of saunas may improve conditions like high blood pressure, heart failure, dementia, type II diabetes via things like insulin sensitivity, and depression. Now, far infrared is not necessarily better than traditional saunas. It’s just that these are more portable, they’re a little more trendy. It might be easier to integrate a far infrared sonnet than a traditional sauna.
So next category is diet and metabolism. The goals for diet and metabolism are to increase your nutrient intake, macro and micro, and increase your insulin sensitivity. Your goals are to decrease visceral fat, decrease blood glucose, insulin, triglycerides, LDL and other metabolic markers. The rationale for this is that, number one, visceral fat increases the risk of heart disease and heart attacks, type II diabetes, stroke, Alzheimer’s, as well as certain forms of cancer.
High blood glucose is a sign of type II diabetes or pre-diabetes and can cause glycation, which then leads to accelerated aging, and other diseases of aging including Alzheimer’s, cancer and cardiovascular disease. There are studies that find that low insulin levels are linked to longer lifespans in many animal species and high triglycerides and LDL as we all know can lead to cardiovascular disease.
So when it comes to technologies, one technology for tracking is the Withings Body Comp Scale, which can measure pulse wave velocity and visceral fat. So pulse wave velocity is good to measure cardiovascular health, which I’ll talk more about in the moment. Then of course there’s the all important visceral fat levels. So the value of this is that pulse wave velocity measures the elasticity of your arteries and is a marker of cardiovascular health, which declines with age. Visceral fat, that is the fat that surrounds your organs and high levels of visceral fat increase your risk of aging related diseases and death.
So this scale is capable of measuring both pulse wave velocity and visceral fat, both of which can be impacted by things ranging from activity to diet and the foods you take in, supplementation and so on. So this is a good tool to be able to measure how your lifestyle interventions are impacting your cardiovascular health and your visceral fat.
So next, for diet and metabolism, you can track with blood glucose monitors. Now, they’re typically associated with diabetics. That’s what they were designed for, but many health enthusiasts now use it because they can be used to help you to manage blood glucose fluctuations and to determine which foods and lifestyle changes impact your blood glucose levels the most. So of course you’ve got the traditional finger prick monitors as they’re oftentimes called, which are an economical option. But then the newer options are called continuous glucose monitors or CGMs, devices like the Freestyle Libre and the Dexcom G7. These are less invasive. They offer automated measurements every few minutes, which then sync to your phone.
The value of these devices is that by lowering blood glucose and insulin to a healthy range, it will reduce cross-linking and hardening of the arteries, ultimately decrease the risk of pancreas and kidney failure, which would occur if you had high levels of blood glucose, strokes, heart attacks, blindness, and a weakened immune system. Overall, in general, even if you don’t have high blood glucose levels, if they’re moderately high or pre-diabetic, it’s still good to get them in a healthier range like 80 to 90 milligrams per deciliter fasting or at least below 100.
So on that same theme, adding another feature to this going beyond just tracking, but now analysis. There are CGM smartphone apps like Levels, Nutrisense, Veri, January.ai. These are add-ons that compliment the CGM hardware. They also enable you to get the CGM hardware rather than having to see your doctor and ask for a prescription, which they might be hesitant to do if it’s not for specifically diabetes. These companies can help to prescribe the devices to you, the CGM hardware to you.
The value of this beyond what you would get by simply getting the CGM is that they provide tools to analyze your diet and lifestyle and more easily highlight how they impact your blood glucose. They provide recommendations that you can use for self experimentation with the goal of ultimately understanding which foods and habits will yield positive and negative effects. If you’re interested in these, I recommend you look into each of these companies because they all have a different angle or proposition. Some of them offer personalized diet consultations with a dietician, others use AI to make recommendations and observations in realtime. So it’s worth looking at each of them. They also have different price points.
Nextfor diet and metabolism is diet tracker apps like Noom, which is one of the most popular apps out there for diet, Lifesum and Fooducate, which can be used to monitor caloric intake, macro ratios and micronutrient intakes like vitamins and minerals to help you maintain a diet and achieve your health goals. The Fooducate app is interesting where you can take pictures of labels at the supermarket and then it can give you a rating on the healthiness of that specific food. The value of this is that diet is much more than just measuring your glucose. You want to work towards proper macronutrient ratios, micronutrient intakes and eating healthier foods, building healthy dietary habits that can have long-term effects on all of the hallmarks of aging.
So the next category is sleep. Your sleep, the goals are to increase efficiency, increase deep NREM duration, have four to six cycles of sleep per night and circadian entrainment. At the same time, you want to reduce the time to onset within reason, of course. If you fall asleep within a minute of getting into bed, you’re probably exhausted, but you also don’t want to toss and turn or take more than five to 10 minutes to fall asleep. Now, you also want to reduce your wakings and arousal.
The rationale for this is improved metabolism. So when you sleep better, you have better blood glucose control and you have fewer cravings for unhealthy foods. You have improvements in toxin removal. So when you sleep, your glymphatic and lymphatic systems are activated. Glymphatic system, recently discovered in the last few years, is similar to your lymph nodes or lymphatic system but it’s in your brain. The reduction in risk for neurological decline, things like dementia, as well as cardiovascular disease.
So when it comes to devices for sleep. Sleep tracker apps like Rise, and then devices like a Biostrap Active and then the previously mentioned Oura and WHOOP or the smart watches. They measure relevant sleep quality and duration markers. For example, blood oxygen levels, heart rate variability, the sleep stages and the duration of those stages, time until sleep onset, your body temperature, et cetera.
The value of this is that sleep repairs, it consolidates your memory and normalizes metabolism. Having poor or inadequate sleep is associated with Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, depression, and more. So understanding the quality of your sleep and what impacts it equips you with the tools to make a significant upgrade on your life today, and of course your longevity for tomorrow.
So sleep devices that you can integrate into your routine. Sleep temperature modulating devices like the Chili Pad, the BedJet, Ooler, and Eight Sleep. They each aim to keep you at the perfect temperature to encourage maximum sleep efficiency and then to gently wake you up in the morning with heat. Eight Sleep includes an app that tracks sleep and makes recommendations, but it’s also the most expensive of all of the offerings. The value of these devices is that sleep temperature can have a significant impact on the quality and duration of your sleep, and anything that improves your sleep is good for your longevity. Sleep is one of the most neglected aspects of health and we’re seeing the repercussions of that today in the form of cardiovascular, Alzheimer’s diseases and so on.
So other devices that are less expensive that can be integrated. These are related to evening light conditions, which can have a significant impact on your ability to fall and stay asleep. There are devices like Hue wifi light bulbs, or there are other brands that recently launched that you can find on Amazon or at Costco that also perform similar functions to Hue but are less expensive. You can also buy red or amber lights or amber tinted eyeglasses. All of these can improve your sleep onset and quality. What you want to avoid is white light, blue light, bright lights in the evening. You want it to be more lower lux, so more like candle light, ideally, which is another option that’s the cheapest of them all, I guess, is you can have candles lit.
But for those who want the convenience, you can either wear the amber eyeglasses and keep all of your light bulbs in place or replace them with something like Hue where you can change the color temperature throughout the day to reflect outdoors. The value of this is that you’re strengthening your circadian rhythm, you’re increasing the endogenous melatonin production, and you’re experiencing the longevity benefits from improved sleep.
Next when it comes to sleep, there’s light conditions during sleep, they matter as well. They can have a significant impact on your sleep quality. Darkness is best and even those tiny little LEDs on your electronics, those blue and green and yellow lights and the white lights, they can negatively impact your sleep. There are studies that have found that to be the case. So blackout shades are one option, but in order to really block all of that and without putting tape on top of every single LED, you can consider getting a sleep mask. This is the cheapest option, it’s the most portable option. It’s the one that I personally use myself.
The value of this is improvements in sleep quality, reductions in wakings and micro arousals. Micro arousals are when you wake up and you’re not conscious of it, but they eat away at the quality of your sleep. So you may wake up multiple times every 10 minutes, 20 minutes and have no idea that you are, but it’s disrupting the restorative benefits of your deep sleep or your REM sleep or interfering with your ability to get into those stages in the first place.
Next, when it comes to your sleep environment, your auditory environment during sleep, specifically the reduction of noises that can cause you to wake up are also critical. Note that you often don’t consciously wake from the noises just like from these little lights in your room, but they are nonetheless reducing the effectiveness of your sleep. White noise machines are an option. You can also download apps on your smartphone that produce white noise, and if your speakers are loud enough, great, or you can plug your phone in or use Bluetooth speakers to make them louder without having to purchase a white noise machine. But ultimately, my personal favorite is earplugs.
Now when it comes to earplugs, a lot of people don’t find value from them because they’re not putting them in their ears correctly. So I’ve included this little cartoon here which shows what you’re supposed to do, which is to roll the earplugs so that it’s very, very thin, almost needle thin. Then you put your arm around your head and you lift your ear up. Ideally, you’re also pulling the lobe down and you’re inserting that and you’re holding your finger on it until it fully expands. When it fully expands, you will feel like you have just gone deaf. Everything will be muted and you’ll know you got it right. If you don’t do it that way, earplugs won’t do very much for you.
Now, reducing the sounds in your sleep environment will reduce the arousals, improve the quality of your sleep, and this is ultimately a very inexpensive technology hack. This is a low tech hack of course. So another thing that can improve your sleep quality actually takes place in the morning. So this is circadian rhythm entrainment, which maximizes the quality duration and the onset of your sleep or the speed at which your sleep onset takes place. So you want high lux morning light, very, very bright luminescence. You want to get outdoors. That’s the best thing you can do. It’s absolutely free, even if it’s a cloudy day, spend 20 to 30 minutes outdoors.
If you get up before the sun rises, or for some reason you can’t get outdoors, then consider getting a SAD lamp. You see that in the bottom right corner here. You can find them on Amazon for not too much money. Then a little bit of an upgrade would be SAD glasses, which you see on the top right corner. The benefit of these is it doesn’t tie you down to the lamp. In other words, you can continue your morning routine, walk around, do things. I don’t know if you want to go in public with them, but you can wear these while going about your day which is a nice feature.
The value of these is strong AM retinal light signals, the brain’s hypothalamic central clock, the suprachiasmatic nuclei or the SCN, and circadian rhythms impact sleep and wake cycles, energy levels and your metabolic health. So overall, this is really good to help you become more tired at night, to sleep better and have more efficient sleep, and then to wake up more energized, have that morning AM cortisol release for a short duration that gets you out of bed energized. This is one of the best ways to be able to enforce that or reinforce it in your daily routine. So improvements in the circadian rhythm will lead to improved sleep and its associate benefits, energy, physical activity, mood, dietary choices and metabolic control, including your insulin sensitivity and your blood glucose levels.
For the next category, we have psychology and cognition. The goals for this are to increase optimism neurostimulation and BDNF, brain-derived neurotropic factor, and you want to decrease stress and anxiety. So the rationale for this is that brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF, declines with age, but high levels are associated with neuroplasticity, so your ability to learn and to adapt, memory and reductions in depression, reduction in stress and associated hormones like cortisol, not the acute amount that helps you wake up, but chronic cortisol, of course, reduce blood pressure and blood glucose, improve sleep, reduce the production of lipopolysaccharides, LPS, which are a form of endotoxins and other harmful molecules.
To that point, women with stress or anxiety are two times more likely to die of heart disease, stroke or lung cancer. That figure increases to 3X for men. Also to the point of optimism, pessimists have a 42% higher risk of death than optimists. So one of the best ways to be able to improve psychology and cognition and optimism and reduce anxiety and so on is through meditation. There are apps like Calm and devices like Muse that can improve overall health via reduction in these stress hormones.
So the Muse device is one that measures your brainwaves and it can help to reinforce the meditation process. It can speed up the rate at which you’re able to learn how to meditate and to get into a meditative state. This newest Muse device, which is pictured here, can also be used during sleep and can measure some sleep metrics as well. The value of this is that meditation has been shown to reduce anxiety, stress, depression, blood pressure, all while regulating mood and improving memory sleep and immune health. Meditation has also been shown to increase the BDNF.
Other devices for psychology and cognition are touch therapy devices like Apollo Neuro and Cove, which have research demonstrating benefits associated with reduced stress. So these are vibrating devices. The Cove device, unfortunately, the parent company went out of business back in December, but you can probably still find these devices at a discount on sites like eBay. That stimulates the vagus nerve and I personally own the device and find value from it in terms of calmness and improvements in sleep.
To that point, according to Cove’s research, those using Cove twice a day experience 41% less stress, 50% better sleep, 39% improvement in focus and memory. For the Apollo device, which can be used at different areas, from your leg to your arm, your chest and so on, their research found 40% reduction in stress and anxiety, 11% increase in heart rate variability, up to 25% more concentration and 19% increase in deep sleep.
The next category is environment. So we’ve spoken about environments in other contexts like sleep, for example, but those technologies were really intended specifically for sleep. So for this I’m going to speak about environments purely as environments, and this is for the topic of clean air and to reduce pollution and allergens. A studied by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, known as EPIC, found that pollution causes slightly greater impact on death than smoking does, three times more than alcohol use and unsafe water, and six times more than HIV and AIDS.
If you live in a city with large amounts of pollution, or you have allergies which constantly tax your body by activating your immune system, you should consider getting a HEPA filter. So HEPA filters, they set a high standard for filtration of macro and micro air pollutants and they remove at least 99.97% of dust, pollen, mold, bacteria, and any airborne particles with the size of 0.3 microns or greater. The newer filters, they also add a UVC light which can further kill bacteria, mold and viruses.
The value of these is that improvements in air quality will reduce your body’s toxin exposure, and in the case of allergies, they’ll lessen the burden on your immune system. This is something important to keep in mind. Your immune system being chronically activated is taxing to your body and it’s also causing inflammation in your body. It’s not something commonly thought about, but if you have allergies and you’re constantly suffering from them, that is putting a tax on your body that you want to try to reduce. One way to do so is to clean the air with a HEPA filter.
So the next category is hallmarks of aging. These are the biological causes of aging, which you can learn a lot more about on the novoslabs.com website. That’s how we formulate our products through the lens of impacting these hallmarks of aging. The goals are to increase the function of the hallmark and of course to decrease the dysfunction of the hallmark. So in other words, to bring it back to its young, youthful state as much as possible. Much of what we’ve been mentioning in this presentation has favorable impacts on the hallmarks of aging. For example, I mentioned how exercise favorably impacts all of the hallmarks of aging. But this section is for technology that’s particularly focused on the hallmarks more so than on the other categories.
The rationale for this is the hallmarks of aging are the fundamental reasons why we age. So by directly addressing them, we stand the best shot at slowing and even reversing the aging process. So this very sophisticated technology is a hyperbaric oxygen therapy tank which increases air pressure by 200 to 300%. When you do that, your lungs can gather a lot more oxygen which helps fight bacteria, triggers the release of growth factors and stem cells which then promote further healing.
The value of this is that hyperbaric oxygen therapies bring improvements in telomere length. There is a recent study in Israel I believe that found it increases in telomere length. So shorter telomeres are one of the hallmarks of aging. They can increase the risk of death from digestive tract cancers and coronary heart disease. They also reduce senescent cells. Studies looking at senescent cells in mice found that by reducing those senescent cells, it increased the mice longevity by 36%. So reducing senescent cells, which are essentially zombie cells which have no practical function, they are simply releasing inflammatory molecules that damage nearby cells, reducing them can have a positive impact on your longevity. Hyperbaric oxygen also holds promise for reductions in cognitive decline. There’s some studies ongoing for this, not far enough along to be conclusive.
So for the hallmarks of aging, something less expensive that you don’t have to go to a medical clinic or spa for our near infrared and red light therapies. So as opposed to far infrared that I talked about before, this is near infrared. It’s closer to the visible light spectrum, and then red light, very specific wavelengths that you want for the near infrared and the red light. These therapies have been found to improve mitochondrial health, your mitochondria. Mitochondrial dysfunction being one of the hallmarks of aging, and your mitochondria being the power plants of the cells that decline in number and function as you age.
Increasing their output of the cellular energy currency ATP is the goal. ATP is essentially what the mitochondria produce when they take the fat and the carbs and the protein from your meals and convert them into energy that your cells are able to use. That’s the ATP. So devices range from facial masks to lamps to LED panels. The value of these is that with more energy, your cells are better able to repair themselves and to function properly. So near infrared and red light devices have some evidence that they may be able to improve wound healing, hair growth, reduce inflammatory pain, improve skin health and improve collagen or increased collagen production.
Finally, for hallmarks of aging, when it comes to tracking and analyzing, we recommend the NOVOS Age kit. So NOVOS Age kit is an epigenetic clock which helps you understand your biological age, and perhaps most importantly, your pace of aging. NOVOS Age utilizes the latest third generation clock as opposed to other companies out there selling first and second generation clocks. This is the latest called DunedinPACE. It was developed by researchers at Columbia University and Duke University.
The value of this is that it’s the latest technological advancement in longevity research that helps you understand how your lifestyle and interventions are impacting how fast or slow you’re aging. So you could, for example, use NOVOS Age to start to see what your pace of aging is, then learn about different interventions you can take from diet to activity supplements and so on, integrate that into your life, and then after six months or 12 months as we recommend, you take NOVOS Age again and you see how you have slowed down the pace of your aging. It’s a great metric to be able to do that and it also correlates to disease risk and mortality risk and so on.
Onto the topic of skin aging, which I know a lot of you are excited to hear about. So the goals for skin aging are to increase moisture, collagen and cellular turnover and decrease lines, wrinkles, dark spots, senescent cells, and crosslinks. The rationale for this is who doesn’t want to look good? So when it comes to that, there are at home and clinical lasers that are used for skin resurfacing and can be ablative or non-ablative. So ablative lasers, they target the top layers of the skin to remove them and trigger the body to then replenish that skin. These require more recovery time. Ablative lasers you need to go to a clinic for or a spa for, and you’re not going to want to be out in the sun or see people socially for that matter for a number of days after the therapy.
Non-ablative lasers on the other hand, they target deeper, the wavelength goes deeper, and they are intended to stimulate collagen growth and to plump up the skin. For this, you can purchase at-home devices. For example, the Tria laser or the best at home laser, I believe was what’s known as the ReAura laser co-produced by Philips and one of the biggest names in laser therapies which is Fraxel. But that was discontinued the number of years ago. Though you can sometimes find the devices on websites like eBay.
Now, although lasers can increase collagen synthesis and potentially reduce senescent cells, there’s some concern about how they might impact stem cells from repeated administration. Now, this is not based on any research that finds that they damage stem cells. It’s a hypothesis that they potentially could because when you’re damaging cells, you may also in the process damage stem cell. So to that point, I think it’s worthwhile to keep an eye out and possibly, hopefully someone is motivated to do a study on this to see how these lasers impact stem cells. So at this point, not a reason to discontinue use of the lasers, but it is something to be mindful of. The value of lasers is improvements in skin lines, wrinkles, sun and age spots, all while improving the tone and texture of the skin.
Another approach you can take, perhaps even better than the lasers is microneedling and vampire facials, also known as PRP or platelet-rich plasma. Both of these use devices that make thousands of micro incisions in your skin with these tiny little needles signaling to the body the need for repair. Now, vampire facials, they add growth factors that are collected from your blood via centrifuge and are applied during the microneedling process, which is thought to accelerate regeneration and recovery. So essentially your blood is collected, it’s put into centrifuge and spun very fast, and then you have plasma. That plasma is very high in growth factors.
That plasma is applied to your skin as a serum as the microneedling is taking place. So as these tiny needles are injected into your skin, it’s pushing that plasma into your skin as well. Those growth factors are signaling to the body to repair more rapidly than they probably otherwise would. So the value of this is improvements in skin texture, collagen production in lines and wrinkles. PRP microneedling is also claimed to help with people who are losing hair. You can see from this image here that someone with acne scars, for example, and skin discoloration and issues with texture has a significant improvement. Typically within two, three, four sessions, you can in some cases completely reverse acne scars.
Finally, when it comes to skin aging and tracking and analyzing that skin aging, we recommend FaceAge, which is a free tool that utilizes artificial intelligence to visually measure your facial age. So this is something produced by NOVOS, and our algorithms are based on deep learning and mimic human perception of aging. The algorithm has been trained on more than 12 million images and validated by human dermatological experts. So when you go to novoslabs.com/faceage, ideally with a smartphone, with a newer higher resolution camera, you take a selfie, and from that you get seven outputs.
One is your perceived facial age. That is going to take into account not just your skin health, but also your bone structure, your facial adipose or fat tissue, and so on, your perceived eye age, your eyebag score, your facial wrinkle score, facial uniformity score, facial pore score, and finally your facial redness.
So to wrap up and bring it all together, our recommendations for longevity tracking. First and foremost is to measure. So you can’t fix what you can’t measure. Leveraging these types of technologies that measure relevant markers is critical. Number two is then assess. So evaluate results after some time has passed. Formulate hypotheses for changes. Sometimes apps from these technologies can help you to come up with these hypotheses or suggestions or recommendations. Then focus on how to slow the aging process by integrating these changes.
Then three, integrate. Integrate the intervention, document your lifestyle at the time so that you can minimize confounding factors. You don’t want to go from being very stressed or drinking alcohol to having low stress and no alcohol and thinking it was your intervention that changed when it was actually these other confounding factors that led to the changed outcome.
So ultimately, what should you personally do? Everyone’s different. So it’s really up to you to decide what works best for you and what’s most important to you. But I put together a few recommendations for people to consider for both the budget sensitive customer and then someone who’s a maximizer who’s not as focused on budget, of course, not going all out and purchasing every single thing I suggested.
So for physical activity for the budget sensitive, you can start with a Fitbit activity tracker for only $99. You could also consider something like the Oura Ring or Apple Watch or WHOOP pre-owned that you can find on eBay for less money. For maximizers, I would recommend the Oura Ring or WHOOP.
For diet and metabolism. Budget sensitive, get a basic blood glucose monitor. This comes with a handful of test strips. For about $40, you can typically get one of these and you’ll have enough strips to get a fundamental understanding of your fasting blood glucose when you first wake up, your pre-meal blood glucose, your one hour postprandial, so that’s one hour after a meal, and then your two hour postprandial blood glucose, and to do that with a number of meals that you typically consume each week. Then of course, understanding which meals are better for your blood glucose and which ones are worse. For the maximizers, get a continuous glucose monitor and consider also getting the Withings Body Comp Scale for the pulse wave velocity and visceral fat.
Sleep and recovery. Get earplugs for five bucks. It’s the best return on the investment I’ve ever made in my health. Sleep mask for $20 and amber colored glasses for only 20 or $25. For maximizers, get the earplugs and sleep mask and consider getting Hue lights. Psychology and cognition, meditation or get an app that’s either going to be free if you do the meditation on your own or the app around $9 a month. Maximizers, get the app.
Environment, bedroom HEPA purifier you can get for as little as $99 on Amazon. Put it in your bedroom because you spend the most time during the day in your bedroom. If you happen to work from home, you can physically carry that into your home office environments as well to keep that air pure. That’s the budget way to do it. If you’re a maximizer, you can get entire HVAC systems for a thousand dollars or more that have HEPA and UVC built-in. Or you can also get HEPA filters in all of the rooms that you tend to spend time.
For the hallmarks of aging. If you’re budget sensitive, take the NOVOS longevity quiz. You can find it at novoslabs.com on the top right corner of the website. This will give you a score based on your lifestyle and how conducive it is to longevity. Then you can take that test again after three or six months after you’ve integrated some lifestyle changes and see if your score improves. This is like a surrogate marker for the hallmarks of aging. They would be loosely correlated. For maximizers, take that quiz but also get NOVOS Age which is the most powerful way available on the marketplace to be able to measure your biological rate of aging.
Then skin health, FaceAge, use that for the budget sensitive, it’s perfectly free. Maximizers, use that as well, and then consider something like PRP microneedling if you really want to take your skin health to the next level using technology. So the cost for the budget sensitive, it would be under $300, which is not cheap, but when you consider the degree to which this can make a positive influence or impact on your health and in the long term on your longevity, I think it’s well worth the money. So with that said, that’s the presentation and I’ll open the floor up for questions.
Grace: Wow. Chris, thank you so much. That was great. I love that last slide. We have Lana in the chat saying she loved that last slide. Feels like a little shopping cart. You can pick and choose where you want to spend and invest. Awesome. One question that we received a lot is what are the interventions that you take part in? What technology devices do you currently use?
Chris: Good question. So let’s go back here. So I’ll go category by category and then try to remember other things I might be doing. So I have the Oura Ring. I also have the Apple Watch Ultra because I do a lot of running and weightlifting and I find that this is easier to be able to track the actual workout than the Oura Ring is where with this I can just quickly hit a button and start, whereas with the Oura Ring, I need to go into the app and it’s not taking as frequent measurements as the watch does.
For diet and metabolism, I have used the CGM and the Levels app multiple times. I’m not currently using it. I think it’s one of those things that when you use it a few times, you learn a lot about yourself and then you don’t need to use it regularly anymore. So you can consider this in terms of expense as a short term expense, maybe three months or so, and then you can move on or maybe do it once a year thereafter.
For sleep and recovery. Earplugs, 100%. Sleep mask, yes. I do have Hue light bulbs in my home as well, which I sync with my Alexa and my iPhone Siri. So I can say to either of them set all of the lights to red or to orange or yellow, depending on the time of day. I can also set a clock to it, which is very helpful. Psychology and cognition. I used to have the Muse many years ago. I used it. I liked it when I did use it. Don’t use it anymore. I learned how to meditate and I don’t find a need for that device anymore. So now I just meditate on my own without an app.
Environment, I do have a filter in the HVAC unit which I invested in this year. I have a HEPA filter in the bedroom. Hallmarks of aging. I’ve done NOVOS Age obviously and the longevity quiz. For skin health, I have experimented with microneedling, PRP, facial lasers and so on. I mentioned the Cove device. I have that as well. That is the vagus nerve stimulator that vibrates. I find some benefit from it. At the price point, if money’s no object, it might be worth getting. If your budget sensitive, I’d say you can hold off on that purchase.
Those are the main things that come to mind right now. When it comes to the body cooling devices for sleep, like Eight Sleep and Ooler and so on, I have had one of them before. I wasn’t crazy about it. I wasn’t able to tune the temperature perfectly and I was waking up because of it. I’m sure if I was more patient with it, I would’ve had a better outcome, but I find that by turning on the ceiling fan and having the AC on at night and keeping the room very cool, that’s adequate for me to sleep well. Maybe I’ll try them again sometime in the future. A member of our team loves it and has data to prove that he has better sleep as a result of it and better HRV scores. So I might try it again, but to this point I’m not using it.
Grace: That’s great. Thanks for sharing. If you want to know more about Chris’ regimen, you can go to his blog, slowmyage.com. I’m going to add that in the chat right now for you. Another question we frequently get is with all of these electronic devices, should we be concerned about EMFs?
Chris: Electromagnetic frequencies, it’s a very commonly heard concern. In terms of looking at the research around them, there hasn’t really been any research that seems to suggest that it is a significant concern or risk. I think it’s a lot more theoretical concern, but practically speaking, the results aren’t as significant. Now, it’s one thing having your cellphone in your front pocket and everything from the temperature of that device to possibly the frequencies might have an impact on, for example, testosterone levels and sperm levels. But again, whether that’s from the temperature of the device or the frequencies is not definitively known.
When you consider other devices like an Apple Watch or an Oura Ring, the amount of, first of all, the frequency, but also the amount of energy behind that frequency which is more important is so low that the chances that it’s having any sort of impact on physiology I think is quite low. So it’s something you can be aware of and there are ways to try to minimize that exposure. But in terms of those who are shielding their body with copper cloths and so on, I think that that’s overkill, and to a degree paranoia. I don’t think that there has been any significant solid replicated research on this to find that these types of devices have a significant negative impact on our health.
Grace: That’s good to know. Thank you. What do you think the most important technologies or categories to focus on from a longevity perspective are? For example, is sleep more important than exercise?
Chris: That’s a great question because there there’s no clear answer to it. It really depends on the individual, right? What I would say is you have to reflect on yourself and you can probably identify what areas can use the most improvement. Because between diet, and by extension supplementation, which I would say is in a sense related to diet, it’s something that you are orally taking in and your body is metabolizing, exercise and activity, and then rest and recovery, and by extension sleep. Each of these are critical for your short-term health and your long-term health. If you neglect any of those, you’re setting yourself up for illness.
So we each know whether we’re eating as well as we can or we’re as physically active as we should be and we have as much muscle as we should have or if we’re resting enough or overexerting ourselves or sleeping well enough, right? So I would say whatever it is that stands out to you as an area in need of improvement, that’s what you should focus on. When it comes to making these investments, that’s probably the area that you should be making the investment, not necessarily the area that you’re most excited about. You might love exercising and want to buy the newest exercise device, and you’re not crazy about sleeping and you neglect it, but that’s probably the area that you should be investing your money.
Grace: It’s a little bit of a reality check for me because when you put it like that, I’m like, “Okay, I need to invest in sleep.” All right, we’re going over time, but do you have time for one more question?
Chris: Sure. One more works.
Grace: Okay. How would devices contribute to understanding the added value of supplements?
Chris: Ah, good question. Supplements like NOVOS Core and NOVOS Boost perhaps.
Grace: Exactly.
Chris: Or general health supplements like selenium and iodine and so on and so forth. That’s a great question. So I’d have to put some thought into it. But certain devices that might be worth or certain outputs that might be worth tracking, I would say one is sleep. So the quality of your sleep, the duration of your sleep, that can be impacted by supplements. For example, ingredients in NOVOS have been found to improve sleep, magnesium, L-Theanine, lithium, and a couple of others. So that’s something you might see after using it regularly, see some improvements in sleep metrics.
Pulse wave velocity that I mentioned from the Withings Scale, that can be impacted by your physical activity as well as blood pressure. Your blood pressure can be impacted by things like your diet, getting adequate potassium, and potassium you can supplement, magnesium again, which is in NOVOS, can impact your blood pressure. Your stress levels will impact your blood pressure, and that can be reduced by ingredients in NOVOS like the lithium, the L-Theanine, Rhodiola, the magnesium. So that’s something you might see an improvement on is pulse wave velocity, or in general, your blood pressure might also see improvements.
Your physical activity levels. If you’re overall improving your health by getting the necessary nutrients to keep you in a healthy state and energized, you might find yourself more physically active without even intentionally doing it. You might move more. So tracking your physical activity and caloric expenditure might or might not, but there’s a possibility that you can see improvements in that from supplements.
Then of course, NOVOS age test, the epigenetic test, your epigenome can be impacted by deficiencies in certain nutrients and vitamins as well as by having a sufficient intake of them. So if you are supplementing after I would say six months at a minimum, ideally as much as 12 months, NOVOS Age can very well potentially show an improvement in your score from supplements. Of course, it would be ideal that you’re also improving other aspects of your life as we share on our blog, novoslabs.com/blog, or on webinars like this where you’re addressing your diet as well, your activity and your sleep. But supplements of course have a very profound impact on your overall health.
Grace: Thanks for sharing. I’m going to link in our previous webinar where Chris discussed longevity tests, how to track different types of integrations. So I’ll link that right now. That is all we have time for today. But before I sign off, I want to let you know that you can ask us questions anytime. We have a link in our Instagram bio called Ask NOVOS Anything. I’ll link it here for you. If there were questions we were unable to get to today, you’re more than welcome to go there now and add your questions in there and we’ll do our best to get back to you.
We plan on keeping this link up indefinitely so you can ask us any longevity, biohacking, and health and wellness related questions. If you’re interested in learning more about how to live younger for longer, our blog is a great resource for tips and tricks on how to do so. I will link that right now. That’s all I have for you on my end. Chris, did you have any last remarks you wanted to share?
Chris: I guess I would just share that these technologies are intended to assist you in your longevity journey. They’re not going to solve any problems for you, so go into this with a firm understanding of what is needed to improve your health, which as you shared, we share a lot of information about that. Then look to these devices as things that you will be compliant with, first and foremost, and that are going to make the most impact your health considering where you personally are on your journey. I wish you the best.
Grace: Thank you very much. A special thanks to everyone who attended today. We look forward to hosting more events like these in the future. Bye.
