The Buck Institute’s Eric Verdin on How to Potentially Prolong Your Life by 12 to 14 Years

Highlights

• Dr. Verdin reviews five tips that may extend your lifespan 12 to 14 years: regular exercise, minimizing alcohol consumption, not smoking, a healthy diet, and maintaining optimal weight.
• Dr. Verdin also gives a rundown of potential age-delaying compounds under investigation such as rapamycin, nicotinamide riboside, and metformin.
• He goes on to predict that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will approve potential age-delaying compounds in the next decade.

At the 2024 Longevity Summit, Dr. Eric Verdin, the President of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, relayed five tips for potentially extending your lifespan by 12 to 14 years. They include exercising for 30 minutes a day, consuming only moderate amounts of alcohol, not smoking, eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, and maintaining a healthy weight. He recommends making one change every day for a month regarding any of these five tips and guarantees you will feel much better at the end of the month.

Mouse Lifespan Extension Drugs Like Rapamycin May Extend the Number of Disease-Free Years for Humans

Dr. Verdin says that researchers are actively investigating over 100 compounds that extend mouse lifespan, some of which may receive approval for age-slowing effects in humans over the next 5 to 10 years. A few of these drugs are already FDA approved for purposes besides aging but have been repurposed for off-label anti-aging benefits. One example is rapamycin — prescribed to prevent tissue rejection in organ transplant recipients but also used for possible anti-inflammatory, pro-longevity effects. Others include metformin and acarbose — two diabetes drugs sometimes used off-label to promote longevity. Finally, Dr. Verdin highlighted how the nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) precursor nicotinamide riboside (NR), which is available as a supplement that promotes cell energy production, is under human trial investigations.

Following Dr. Verdin’s Routine to Extend Your Lifespan by 12 to 14 Years

Aside from waiting another 5 to 10 years for the approval of potential age-delaying drugs, Dr. Verdin provided insight on how to apply his five tips to extend lifespan. Following his framework for the five recommendations, he says that you can possibly extend your lifespan an extra 12 to 14 years. Along those lines, he got this estimation for the number of extra years you could live from a 2018 study that included 123,000 subjects.

Accordingly, Dr. Verdin says that the best anti-aging medicine ever is exercise. He recommends exercising for a half an hour a day, maybe taking a brisk 15-minute walk in the morning and another in the evening. Exercising for 30 minutes per day totals around three-and-a-half hours a week, and Dr. Verdin says that this amount of exercise has been associated with living about eight years longer. Not only that, but exercise suppresses depression and increases overall feelings of well-being, making it comparable to a wonder drug.

Dr. Verdin also says that people who do not drink live longer. As such, he says that regular alcohol consumption increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. Interestingly, he says that we have been sold the myth that moderate alcohol intake increases your lifespan. However, the alcohol industry has sponsored many of the studies suggesting this may be true, according to Dr. Verdin, making alcohol’s suggested benefits questionable. For these reasons, he advises that we should minimize alcohol consumption, maybe only consuming it for special occasions.

As far as not smoking goes, Dr. Verdin says that people can lose up to 10 years of life from smoking. He also says that not smoking should be a “no-brainer.”

For a healthy diet, Dr. Verdin recommends five servings of vegetables a day with an extra helping of green leafy vegetables. He also says to eat four servings of fruit a day and eat fish at least once a week. Dr. Verdin discourages drinking fruit juice, comparing it to drinking soda due to high sugar content. Instead, he recommends eating whole fruits, such as oranges, so that your body slowly absorbs the fruits’ sugar as it is released from the fruit during digestive processes.

For maintaining a healthy weight, Dr. Verdin says that this comes from exercising and eating healthy each day. Through the application of Dr. Verdin’s dietary and exercise recommendations, he believes you should progress toward a healthy weight.

Future Age-Slowing Drugs May Not Confer the Same Benefits as Dr. Verdin’s Lifestyle Recommendations

All of Dr. Verdin’s advice regarding lifespan extension encompasses minimizing risks from eating fatty foods as well as smoking and drinking alcohol. He says that starting this kind of lifestyle strategy at age 50 can prolong lifespan by close to 14 years for women and 12 years for men.

Furthermore, while possible new longevity drugs coming in the next decade or so may give you a boost in the quest to delay aging, they will not substitute for a healthy lifestyle. In that sense, adhering to Dr. Verdin’s five tips to extend lifespan may confer more benefits than any drug coming within our lifetimes.