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!)

We Are Such Stuff As Bottles Are Made Of

We’ve written before about PFAS, often found in non-stick coatings and the like:

PFAS Exposure & Cancer: The Numbers Are High

Today we’re going to be talking about microplastics & nanoplastics!

What are microplastics and nanoplastics?

Firstly, they’renot just the now-banned plastic microbeads that have seen some use is toiletries (although those are classified as microplastics too).

Many are much smaller than that, and if they get smaller than a thousandth of a millimeter, then they get the additional classification of “nanoplastic”.

In other words: not something that can be filtered even if you were to use a single-micron filter. The microplastics would still get through, for example:

Scientists find about a quarter million invisible nanoplastic particles in a liter of bottled water

And unfortunately, that’s bad:

❝What’s disturbing is that small particles can appear in different organs and may cross membranes that they aren’t meant to cross, such as the blood-brain barrier❞

~ Dr. Zoie Diana

Note: they’re crossing the same blood-brain barrier that many of our nutrients and neurochemicals are too big to cross.

These microplastics are also being found in arterial plaque

What makes arterial plaque bad for the health is precisely its plasticity (the arterial walls themselves are elastic), so you most certainly do not want actual plastic being used as part of the cement that shouldn’t even be lining your arteries in the first place:

Microplastics found in artery plaque linked with higher risk of heart attack, stroke and death

❝In this study, patients with carotid artery plaque in which MNPs were detected had a higher risk of a composite of myocardial infarction, stroke, or death from any cause at 34 months of follow-up than those in whom MNPs were not detected❞

~ Dr. Raffaele Marfella et al.

(MNP = Micro/Nanoplastics)

Source: Microplastics and Nanoplastics in Atheromas and Cardiovascular Events

We don’t know how bad this is yet

There are various ways this might not be as bad as it looks (the results may not be repeated, the samples could have been compromised, etc), but also, perhaps cynically but nevertheless honestly, it could also be worse than we know yet—only more experiments being done will tell us which.

In the meantime, here’s a rundown of what we do and don’t know:

Study links microplastics with human health problems—but there’s still a lot we don’t know

Take care!