Tick Tock… Goes the Death Clock?

This fun little test will ask a few questions about you and your lifestyle, and then make a prediction of your personal life expectancy, based on global statistics from the World Health Organisation.

And then the countdown starts… Literally, it generates a clock for you to see your life-seconds ticking away—this may or may not delight you, but it sure is a curiosity.

Their “Letters” page has a lot of reactions from people who just got their results (spoiler: people’s perspectives on life vary a lot)

Who mostly uses this service? According to their stats page, it’s mostly curious under-45s, with gradually less interest in knowing about it from 45 onwards… until the age of 70, when suddenly everyone wants to know about it again!

So Is It Possible To Pause The Clock On Aging? – Q&A Spotlight Interview

Life extension is sometimes viewed as the domain of the super-rich, and with less than half of Millennials (and almost none of Gen-Z) having retirement plans, often those of us who aren’t super-rich have more mundane (and immediate!) goals than living to 120.

And yet…

Middle class and working class life-extensionists do exist, even if not garnering the same media attention. We think that’s strange—after all, while the whimsies of the super-rich may be entertaining to read about, it’s not nearly as applicable to most people as more relatable stories:

• The twenty-something who gives up smoking and adds (healthier!) years to their life
• The thirty-something who adopts a plant-based diet and is less likely to die of heart disease
• The forty-something who stops drinking, and avoids health conditions and mishaps alike
• The fifty-something who reconsiders their health plan in light of their changing body
• The sixty-something who takes up yoga, or chess, or salsa dancing
• The seventy-something who gets asked what their secret is
• …and so on

But these are ideas, textbook examples. What if we make it more personal?

We interviewed 10 Almonds subscriber and longevity enthusiast Anastasia S., and here’s what she had to say:

Q: What does life extension mean to you, in your life?

A: To me, the key is healthy life extension. People often joke “I don’t want to live longer; the last years are the worst!” but they’re missing the point that after a certain age, those difficulties are coming whether they come at 50 or 70 or 90. Personally, I’d rather keep them at bay if I can.

Q: How do you do that?

A: Firstly, which won’t be a shock: good diet and exercise. Those two things are possibly the biggest active influences on my longevity. I’m vegan, which I don’t think is outright necessary for good health but done right, it can certainly be good. In this house we eat a lot of whole grains, beans, lentils, vegetables in general, nuts too. As for exercise, I do 30–60 minutes of Pilates daily; it’s nothing fancy and it’s just me in my pajamas at home, but it keeps me strong and fit and supple. I also walk everywhere; I don’t even own a car. Beyond that… I don’t drink or smoke (probably the biggest passive influences on my longevity, i.e., things that aren’t there to make it shorter), and I try to take my sleep seriously, making sure to schedule enough time and prepare properly for it.

Q: Take your sleep seriously? How so?

A: Good “sleep hygiene” as some call it—I schedule a little wind-down time before sleep, with no glaring screens or main lights, making a space between my busy day and restful sleep, kicking anything requiring brainpower to the morning, and making a conscious choice not to think more about those things in the meantime. I take care to make my sleeping environment as conducive as possible to good sleep too; I have a good mattress and pillows, I make sure the temperature is cool but cosy. I have a pot of herbal tea on my bedside table—I hydrate a lot.

Q: Do you take any supplements?

A: I do! They’re mostly quite general though, just “covering my bases”, so to speak. I take a daily nootropic stack (a collection of supplements specifically for brain health), too. I buy them in bulk, so they don’t cost so much.

Q: This seems quite a healthy lifestyle! Do you have any vices at all?

A: I definitely drink more coffee than I probably should! But hey, nobody’s perfect. I do love coffee, though, and as vices go, it’s probably not too bad.

Q: How’s it all working out for you? Do you feel younger?

A: I’m 38 and sometimes I feel like a teenager; sometimes I feel like an old lady. But the latter is usually for social reasons, not health-related reasons. I do have streaks of gray in my hair though, and I love that! If people don’t notice my grays, then they often think I’m in my 20s, rather than pushing 40. A little while back, I was stopped in the street by someone wanting to sell me a change of household utilities provider, then she stopped herself mid-sentence and said “Oh but wait, you look a bit too young, never mind”. Most general metrics of health would put me in my 20s.

Q: That’s interesting that you love your gray hairs, for someone who wants to stay young; is it an exception?

A: It’s more that I want to minimize the problems that come with age, and not everything’s a problem. Gray hairs are cool; joint pain, not so much. A long life rich with experiences is cool; memory loss, not so much. So, I try to keep healthy, and wear my years as best I can.

Q: Sounds good to us; good luck with it!

A: Thank you; I do my best!

Here at 10 Almonds, we love featuring what our readers are doing to improve their health; if you’re willing to be featured in our newsletter, let us know by replying to this email (where an actual human will read it, we promise!)

Busting The Myth of “Eight Glasses Of Water A Day”

Everyone knows we must drink 8 glasses of water a day, or else we’re going to get a failing grade at being a healthy human—like not flossing, or not using adequate sunscreen.

But… Do we? And does tea count? How about (we dare but whisper it) coffee? And soda drinks are mostly water, right? But aren’t some drinks dehydrating? Are special electrolyte drinks really better? There are so many things to consider, so many differing advices, and it’s easy to give up, or just choose what to believe in as a leap of faith.

A quick brain-teaser for you first, though:

If coffee and soda don’t count because they’re dehydrating, then what if you were to take:

– A concentrated tiny cup of espresso, and then a glass of water, would the glass of water count?

– Or (we don’t relish the thought) what if you took a spoonful of soda syrup, and then a glass of water, would the glass of water count?

If your answer was “yes, it’s a glass of water”, then why would it not count if it were taken all at once (e.g. as an Americano coffee, or a regular soda)?

If your answer was “yes, but that water might only offset the dehydration caused by the coffee/syrup, so I might only be breaking even”, then you were thinking about this the right way:

How much water you need depends on many factors that can be affected by what else you are consuming and what else you are doing. Science loves averages, so eight glasses a day may be great if you are of average health, and average body size, in a temperate climate, doing moderate exercise, and so on and so on.

If you’re not the most average person of all time? You may need to take into account a lot of factors, ranging from what you ate for dinner to how much you perspired during your morning exercises. As you (probably) don’t live in laboratory conditions, this can become an impossible task—and if you missed (or guessed incorrectly) even one factor, the whole calculation will be thrown off. But is there any other way to know?

What of the infamous pee test? Drink enough to make your urine as clear as possible, and if it’s dark, you’re dehydrated, common wisdom says.

In reality, however, that tells you not what’s in your body, but rather, what got ejected from your body. If your urine is dark, it might mean you had too little water, but it also could just mean you had the right amount of water but too much sodium, for instance. A study of this was done on athletes, and found no correlation between urine color and actual bodily hydration when measured directly via a blood test.

So, if we can’t just have an app tell us “drink this many glasses of water”, and we can’t trust urine color, what can we do?

What we can do is trust that our body comes with (for free!) a wonderful homeostatic system and it will try to correct any imbalances. If you are thirsty, you’re dehydrated. Drink something with plenty of water in, if not plain water.

But what about special electrolyte drinks? If you need salts, you will crave them. Craving a salty snack? Go for it! Or if you prefer not to snack, do a salt lick test (just put a little salt on your finger, and taste it; if it tastes good, wait a minute or two, and then have a little more, and repeat until it doesn’t).

Bonus Tip:

1. Make sure you always have a source of hydration (that you enjoy!) to hand. Maybe it’s chilled water, maybe it’s a pot of tea, maybe it’s a sports drink, it doesn’t matter too much. Even coffee is actually fine, by the way (but don’t overdo it).
2. Make a personal rule: “I will always make time for hydration”. That means, if you’re thirsty, have something with water in it now. Not when you’ve finished what you’re doing (unless you really can’t stop, because you are a racecar driver mid-race, or a surgeon mid-operation, or something), but now. Do not postpone it until after you’ve done some other thing first; you will forget and it will keep getting postponed. Always make time for water.