Hello there and welcome to the introductory guide to health & longevity by Munich Centenarians.As a student club trying to promote and contribute to a shift towards higher health standards in society, we see it as part of our mission to try to be as helpful as possible in supporting the people who engage with our initiative with taking meaningful practical steps towards prioritising their own health.At the same time, we also see it as our critical responsibility to be careful not to present ourselves as subject matter experts - which we are not. And as a result, we try to avoid being overly prescriptive and also try to not promote only the most extreme ways of going about health optimisation.In this theme, we have designed this introductory guide not in an attempt to tell you specifically what to do when it comes to health. Instead, the following guide aims at providing a high-level holistic overview over the topics of health & longevity and a range of sub-topics, components, and questions you might want to consider and reflect on.That being said, we hope the following guide manages to be informative and useful without being prescriptive, hopefully triggering enough self-reflection and contemplation to start or support your own and individual journey & relationship with health.
Before talking about anything else related to health & longevity, we first need to align on what it is we are actually referring to when saying these words.And whilst there are many ways to define and understand what it means to be healthy, and what it means to pursue longevity - two separate things - we as a student club like the way it is holistically explained and visualized in the following video by M.D. Peter Attia.
In the video, Attia does two main things:First, he defines health broadly as the combination of your cognitive and physical abilities. Together they form what is also referred to as your health span - the state of your cognitive and physical abilities at any one given point in time. By definition, once cognitive and physical abilities have completely vanished, a person is literally dead.Secondly, he defines longevity as the pursuit of trying to improve or maintain your health span for as long as possible. The length of your life is also referred to as life span and simply represents the number of years you have lived. Interestingly, the defined goal of longevity is not necessarily to extend life indefinitely and achieve immortality. Instead, the priority is set on reducing the amount of life time spent at a low health span where the quality of life is presumably low and the amount of resources required for life preservation are incredibly high.And whilst these definitions of health on one hand, and longevity on the other hand, are admittedly very broad, the goal of prioritizing health is very clear: The pursuit of longevity is less about trying to live forever and more about making sure that the time we are alive, we spend at a level of health that allows us to have a quality experience of life.
Having broadly defined health & longevity, the next key question has to be: Why might we want to pursue it? Because unless we have a good reason for why health is desirable, why even bother to continue discussing it?Whilst the reasons for wanting to be healthy throughout your life most likely vary from person to person, their current phase of life, and above all are subject to individual beliefs, plans, and goals, here is a collection of reasons you might want to consider or might even resonate with.
Sometimes more, sometimes less, more for some than others, life is undoubtably challenging. And it is almost guaranteed that throughout a lifetime, seriously difficult times will arise that will push you to your edge. Prioritising health and treating it as the foundation to everything else you do and are as person, in theory, provides a way to ensure that during these challenging times, you have as stable of a foundation as possible to rely upon in dealing with these challenges.
When we are young, physical activities, the ability to move and having energy in general is something that is easily taken for granted. Regardless of that, these physical and cognitive abilities naturally decline over time to the point where simple things like carrying a grocery bag or riding a bicycle might no longer be as simple as they once seemed. Preserving your health over the decades is fundamentally about ensuring that you get to operate your life with a youthful ease for as long as possible, and that both practical tasks as well as enjoyable experiences remain accessible to you for as long as possible. From practical tasks like carrying luggage, to joyful experiences like being able to travel, play team sports, play with your grand children, or having sex, health is the precondition to all of them and will either enable or deny you access to these activities throughout your life.
A sick person or person with declining physical & cognitive abilities, independent of the cause or whether or not the person could have done things differently, is a burden on others. This goes specifically for severely impacted or sick people, but equally goes for people simply in decline and becoming increasingly less capable. Caring for sick people not only costs resources and blocks medical staff, but it also costs the time and worries of the close people around you like your family and close friends. In that sense, prioritizing your health is as much an individual and selfish pursuit - you reaping the benefits of feeling better and being more capable as a human - as it is an act of social responsibility - reducing the financial and emotional burden on others and maybe even being able to take on the role of someone who can support others instead or requiring help themselves.
At a certain point, the loss of physical and cognitive abilities inevitably translates into a loss of independence. Closely linked to the previous argument about reducing the burden on others, the argument of preserving independence comes from the more self-centered perspective but is something to seriously consider.
Whether you are willing to face it or not, as a living human being, you, your body and your cognitive abilities are in some state that is either closer or further away from being in a optimally healthy state. And so whilst it is very much understandable that not everyone might seek to optimize their health to the highest possible level where a lot of sacrifices might have to be made in other areas of life, ignoring the state of your health completely seems somewhat ignorant when considering that your health not only fundamentally impacts your own experience of life but also affects the people around you. In that sense, one might argue that acknowledging health as some form of priority in your life is among other things also an act of facing reality and acknowledging that you and your health are not independent entities but are deeply intertwined - whether you like it or not, whether you are busy or not, whether you find the topic interesting or not.
When talking about health, hardly anyone would say no to health if it did not come at any cost. But in reality, maintaining and specifically regaining health are of course challenging endeavors that require time, financial resources, strategy and consistency. But what plays an equally big role is the perspective you take on. If we can learn to enjoy the pursuit of health, exercising, eating whole foods, spending quality time with others, going to bed on time knowing that it will help us feel good the next day, the pursuit of health & longevity might suddenly not just be a big cost anymore but in itself might turn into something enjoyable that can be treated as a valuable part of one's life.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, it seems almost everyone would like to be healthy and would like to be healthy for as long as possible or at least for as long as they get to spend their life with the people they love.And so if health is generally accepted as being desirable, the real and much more important questions are: What price needs to be paid in order to achieve and maintain it? And how does this change peoples' willingness to pursue health?Important to highlight is that the way the previous sentences are phrased fundamentally implies that the pursuit of health is a sacrificial one, an opinion that some would disagree with, but in the pursuit of anything, it seems undeniable that at the very least some trade-offs need to be made in order to achieve a desired goal. Whether these compromises are in their nature more sacrificial or come in exchange for something else in the form of a trade-off shall remain open for discussion at this point.But the key point we want to stress here is that even if the pursuit of health is looked at as a pursuit with compromises, sacrifices and/or trade-offs, the amount of trade-offs remains and individual choice.There might be individuals so focused on achieving as close to scientifically perfect health as possible that their willingness to make trade-offs in other areas of life is high. The extreme on the other end would be an individual who is not willing to make any trade-offs or compromises or sacrifices in other areas of life to improve their health.Between these two extremes, there is a wide-range of combinations of different levels of trade-offs to achieve different levels of health.And whilst this is of course a simplified model, it helps reduce the polarity of pursuing health and helps clarify the individual freedom in designing your own relationship with health. This way, your personal aspirations, not just in regards to health, but also in regards to other goals or priorities you might have in other areas of your life, get taken into account.Defining some ideal trade-off point when it comes to health is where opinions drift apart, sides form, and the real debate about the pursuit of health begins. Without judgement, the following tries highlight some of the common views and arguments against the pursuit of health and their underlying assumptions. They are highlighted here not to paint them as being wrong arguments, but simply to highlight their argumentative mechanics.
In the above statement or argument, the idea is not that health is not desirable, but the willingness to sacrifice short-term - potentially health destructing - experiences and the resulting immediate joy or satisfaction, is limited.The underlying assumption here is that the pursuit of health is a sacrificial one that in its nature is difficult and straining as opposed to enjoyable. Optimizing your life for health is thereby seen to come at the cost of missing out on fun and memorable experiences in exchange for a difficult and painful struggle to achieve health.As a result, the common conclusion is that health of course needs to be maintained to some functional level so that the individuals can pursue their fulfilling and enjoyable experiences, but pursuing health to higher, more extreme levels is seen as an unworthy trade-off. In the person's mind, this trade-off does not provide an overall increase in quality of life because the pursuit of health is a struggle and does not provide any fulfillment in itself.
In the above statement or argument, the idea is again not that health is not desirable, but being able to bring up the effort to take meaningful steps to a healthier life is looked at as a time and resource-intensive act that is regarded as a privilege that the individual cannot afford at this point in time since they are too occupied by other, currently more urgent responsibilities and/or challenges.The underlying assumptions are threefold. The first two assumptions should be obvious. First, taking meaningful steps towards health & longevity is considered time-consuming and/or resource-intensive. And second, at the current point in time, the individual cannot afford to make this time or resource investment. The third important component here is that the future price to be paid for the negligence over the person's health might not be as deeply considered or at least is not heavily weighted in the conclusion.Again, this argument is not necessarily wrong or invalid. Given certain levels of desperation in other areas of life, this argument might be perfectly valid. For others, it might be a form of self-deception or ignorance.
In the above statement or argument, the person doesn't necessarily state that they don't care at all about their health, but they simple create distance between themselves and a more intensive pursuit of health by stating that they themselves contend with their current health levels as defined by their physical and cognitive abilities.This suggests a more short-term vision on life that may not take future decline of health and its implications into account. The assumption seems to be, that if the person is fine with their current health level, their health will decline at a rate that will continue to allow them to be fine with their health over the years. Whether this assumption is true or not will certainly depend on what the individual's current level of health is and other factors that influence the decline of health. But it may also very well be a false assumption that will be realized too late.
The first part of this statement is an acknowledgement of that fact that we only live in the present and that the future is tied up in all kinds of uncertainties. By this logic, the value of the person's future lifetime gets relatively decreased compared to the present, given that its duration and existence is in question.And whilst the acknowledgement of an uncertain future is hard to argue, undervaluing your potential future lifetime in regards to your health efforts might come at an expensive price later on, potentially including the burden of regret.
This last statement points at a certain lack of control and helplessness in pursuing health. Genetic predispositions, uncontrollable environmental factors, maybe even fate, are painted as standing in the way of controlling or meaningfully impacting the progression of health. And as a result, the conclusion is that no amount of sacrifices or compromises are worth to be made in order to try to achieve health. And whilst there certainly may be factors influencing health that might not be in the person's control, it seems that for most people there would probably be a range of factors that they could control to some extent to positively influence their health.
Given that an individual wants to pursue health to some individually chosen level, let us now transition to the practical side of this pursuit and discuss three high-level components that might be useful to be aware of.The underlying assumption of the following is that health can in some form be determined or quantified for individual parts of the human's physiology and cognitive abilities, and that for each of these assessments or measurements, it can clearly be said what would be more or less ideal states.As an example, we can take a look at a person's VO2 Max value - the highest rate at which an individual can take up, transport, and use oxygen, a key metric for evaluating respiratory fitness.In this example, it is clear that a higher VO2 Max value is desirable.
The idea of improving health is assuming that for whatever metric you are looking at that somehow quantifies or evaluates your health, you are currently in the acceptable or good range and you are trying to improve this health metric to be better or ideal. In other words, you are pushing ahead to achieve a level of health that serves you well not just in the short-term, but provides you with some slack for keeping acceptable or good levels in the future as well.
The idea behind regaining health is assuming that for whatever health metric you are looking at, you have experienced some form of extreme decline - even relative to your age - and you are now trying to get back to a stable baseline relative to your age.Whether from an injury, something health destructive you experience regularly at work, or a genetically caused medical issue, something has significantly set your health back in some area and you are now facing the struggle of trying to regain a stable baseline.As an example, after a leg injury, regaining health might mean regaining your previous levels of strength and flexibility.Regaining health or the extreme of trying to reverse age is generally considered very resource-intensive and difficult, because you are not building on a stable foundation, but you are trying, successfully or unsuccessfully, to restore a severely declined health metric.
Maintaining health assumes you have established good or even optimal levels of health in one or more areas and you are trying to preserve this good or optimal status for years to come. This might mean proactively and continuously pushing for for slightly above good metrics to take future decline into account, and it might also include trying to minimize the risk of loosing the progress that has been made. An example would be preserving muscular strength by regularly exercising and stressing your muscles, whilst also taking measures to actively avoid injury.
An obvious part of trying to practically preserve health over the years has to be to understand what works against it.And whilst this topic is much too complicated to cover in depth or perfect scientific accuracy in this guide, the following tries to capture the rough idea behind the term aging and the forces that gradually erode our bodies.
Every day our cells experience random molecular errors - DNA mutations, protein misfolding, mitochondrial wear - and the systems that repair these errors - DNA‑repair enzymes, proteostasis networks, mitophagy - become less efficient with time. Genetics, lifestyle, and sheer chance can make these errors occur faster, but they are fundamentally inevitable.
Injuries, UV radiation, pollutants, poor diet, chronic stress, and other environmental factors add extra damage on top of the internal errors.When the accumulated internal faults combine with the cumulative external wear, they overwhelm the body’s maintenance mechanisms, leading to the progressive loss of physical and cognitive function that we call aging.
Given a very basic understanding of the term aging and the forces that gradually erode our bodies over time, this section continues with the focus on practical things you might want to take a deeper look at that are impacting - positively or negatively - your health. Some of these categories you might have more control over than others, but for all it seems undisputed that they have some or even a severe impact that adds up over the years.As a clear disclaimer, this section does not claim to be a perfectly comprehensive list and does not go deep into any of the listed categories. Instead, the goal is to provide a holistic overview to give you as much clarity over the landscape of things you might want to try to practically be aware of and optimize.
To address the aging caused by internal internal errors, understanding your genetic make-up might prove useful in identifying predispositions that might have been researched to increase the risk or rate of certain errors that might lead to an increased rate of decline in one or more parts of your body. Whether there are treatments or practical steps to take to intervene into any identified risks is a whole different question entirely and new challenge in itself. But knowing what you might be fighting against seems the most reasonable strategy in trying to effectively maintain your health over the decades.
Whilst the debate about the topic of nutrition and specific diets spans a wide range of opinions, the shared consensus seems to be that what we consume certainly impacts us and our health to some extent. When thinking about nutrition, we want to highlight a few core topics you might want to consider or learn more about: There is the amount of calories you provide your body with. There is the question of which specific nutrients and minerals this intake contains. And there are specific compounds like caffeine, alcohol or even prescription drugs that have additional effects on your physiology and cognition. Whether nutrition is the best umbrella term or not, if you want to optimise and maintain your health, it seems reasonable to carefully consider all of these topics and again maybe even involve professionals, to help cover your gaps in knowledge or to verify your own implemented practices.
The way we use and move our bodies seems to undoubtedly be another core component of health that plays a key role in the positive or negative development of our physical but also cognitive abilities. Including strength, flexibility, coordination, stability, and respiratory fitness, our usage of the word movement here tries to capture the entire range of physical capabilities.
As an umbrella term, the idea of rest refers to everything related to recovery and regeneration. Sleep being the most obvious form of rest that seems to have a massive impact on all other aspects of your health, there might be other forms of rest also with the power to positively or negatively contribute to your rate of aging - breathing exercises potentially being one of them.
When thinking about health, the topics of nutrition, movement and rest usually are the first to come to mind. But just a little less obviously linked the health, the relationships we have, their frequency and quality also seem to significantly contribute to the state of our body and cognition by for example having the power to reduce stress.
From UV exposure and pollutants in the air, to temperature and blue light from our devices, there are a range of environmental factors positively or negatively affecting your aging process. And whilst negative environmental factors tend to be more obvious like polluted air as an easy example, the potential positive effects of the heat exposure of a sauna would also fall into the category we are trying to capture here.
As a reminder that this is not a scientific article and does not claim completeness, there may be all kinds of other factors or areas of life impacting your aging process. Whether you have control or influence over all or any of these factors is again a different question. But if it is your goal to optimize for health, to whatever extreme, it seems logical or strategically useful to try to gain as comprehensive of an overview as possible of all of these factors. This way you have more information and options to implement interventions and practices, which should in theory increase your chance of evading destruction as best as possible. The practical and logistical challenge of all of that, as well as your ability and willingness to manage it, is again its own topic and individual challenge that might be constrained by things like time, financial resources and maybe even intellect.
Biomarkers is a term that often gets thrown around between health & longevity enthusiasts. The core idea behind it is that if we can quantify our health in as much detail as possible, we can then more effectively experiment with different routines, behaviors, interventions and treatments to determine what it is that actually positively impacts our unique individual physiology & cognition, and which things do not or may even have unintended destructive side effects.The precondition to this would of course be that there need to be tools and techniques to accurately measure the health of our body and all of its parts.Here again the difference between theory and application needs to be highlighted. In an ideal word, all of us would have free access to a data base that perfectly quantifies our body's health status in real-time across hundreds of biomarkers, perfectly capturing our health in numbers.From there on, the game would simply be to experiment with methods, behaviors and interventions to improve these numbers across the board.In reality, as of right now, this is not the case. Whilst some measurements like body weight seem reasonably accessible through home scales that provide relatively accurate results, other markers like your V02 max or the percentage and distribution of your visceral fat are much harder to come by and require significantly more expensive tools that are neither affordable nor convenient for regular measuring.Regardless of the practical challenge of obtaining accurate and regular measurements of your health, the idea should be clear: Continuous measurement of your unique individual physiology is the only way to reliably experiment with protocols and treatments to determine whether or not they are positively or negatively impacting your health.
The way you choose to go about your health or lack therefore is your choice if you happen to live in a free country. And even if you do choose to pursue health and your desired level of it, the way you do that is again your choice.This section of the guide is not here to tell you that there is one way to pursue health or what you should do.But it is to showcase the strategic, systematic and data-driven approach that seems the most logical if you're goal is to maximize health - which it might not be for you individually.
The underlying assumption of this first step is that whilst you might have your own opinion of how healthy you currently are, this oral self-assessment is most likely neither reliable nor does it help to derive any useful information on how to practically proceed in your attempt of improving and maintaining health.In other words, getting baseline measurements is about getting specific and accurate insights into the health status of specific parts and systems of your body, its functionality, as well as your cognitive abilities.A baseline measurement then allows you to do two things:First, it allows you to more accurately judge and be aware of the health problems you have to work on to solve short-term issues, but also prevent short-term issues from turning into much harder to solve long-term issues.The second benefit of baseline measurements is that they allow you to track and verify your progress in step 3. This way you can identify trends in the progression of your health and also verify through experimentation if the things you do on a regular basis are making you age faster or helping you age gracefully.
Baseline measurements of your health are useless if they are not combined with the implementation of routines, practices or treatments in an attempt to improve them.But since you are most likely not a subject matter expert on all health metrics, since you might also have practical or financial constraints in implementing certain known routines or treatments, since you most likely will not always find the best routine or treatment on the first attempt, and since on top of that you also have a unique physiology that you need to take into account, this crucial step of implementing actual interventions will not only require the most work but also the most grit and patience.At the end of the day, the key to remember is that you are not implementing any routines or practices carelessly. You do some research, maybe consult healthcare professionals for expert advice, but independent of that, you verify the real progress made or not made after a reasonable amount of time by continuing with step 3 - remeasuring and assessing the success or failure of your implemented practices.
As already mentioned in step 2, step 3 is about continuing the cycle of measurement to allow you to evaluate the success or failure - or partial success or partial failure - of any implemented practices, routines or treatments.We do want to stress here that a health optimization system at this level will require planning, resources, and the ability to practically manage it all. But at the same time, it should also be stressed that the scale of this system is something you can control. Do you track over 100 detailed health metrics and implement various micro routines and treatments, or do you start with a few core metrics and start with a minimalist set of routines that fit your lifestyle and provide the most benefits for the invested time & money? The design of your health system is yours to mold and yours to evolve over the years.
Based on your assessments of the measurements taken in step 3, you are now in a position to make adjustments to routines and practices.And whilst it should be clear that it is most likely not always going to be possible for your to identify clear causal relationships between things you implemented and things that changed in your physiology, the cycle of repeated measurements and readjustments will still help you keep close tabs on the progression of your health. This will help identify issues as early as possible, and hopefully also help you focus on things that actually make a difference.
So far in this guide, we have looked at the topics of health & longevity primarily from the perspective of the individual. But when looking at these topics from a societal perspective, a bunch of additional important questions arise that lead to a new and bigger discussion.And whilst this guide cannot cover all possible questions, sides and opinions of this debate, the pursuit of life extension as part of the pursuit of longevity is a good example that highlights the separation of the individual point of view from the societal one.From an individual's point of view, it seems understandable that the individual would most likely like to be as healthy as possible for as long as possible if that can be achieved while maintaining a joyful experience of life. But when we look at the implications of this relatable individual interest on a societal level, a critical question arises: If everyone lives longer, what are the implications on the healthcare system, the retirement system, politics, societal ideas and beliefs, innovation, wealth distribution?Another interesting and critical discussion we want to highlight is the question of the government's right & role in enforcing certain health standards. If we look at health as something that not only impacts the given individual themself, but also has the potential of negatively impacting the life of others through a loss of productivity or an increased consumption of medical resources, is that sufficient of a reason to legitimize the government taxing health-negligent people in some kind of way? And if so, what could or should such a system look like?As a student club, we do not claim to have the answers to all or even any of these important questions. But we hope that through raising and sharing these questions, we can collectively make progress towards developing ideas, systems and strategies that can help both individuals and our society as a whole to become healthier and more capable.
Having tried in this guide to provide as holistic as possible of an overview over not only the high-level components of the practical side of pursuing health, but also highlighting the personal questions you might want to ask yourself, the key step left is to reconnect to reality and ask yourself:Do I identify and resonate with the need for health in my life, not just now but in the coming decades? And if so, to what extent am I willing to make adjustments and potentially also sacrifices in other areas of life? Given this profile, what are practical steps that I can start taking to set myself up for a healthy present and future.In this guide, we do not want to tell you how or where exactly you should start. But focusing on key aspects of movement, nutrition and sleep seem to be the most reasonable places to address first.As always, reality is often more complicated and nuanced than this guide could ever be. From lack of knowledge, to time & financial constraints, to preexisting health issues, you might be restricted in all kinds of ways. But at the same time, you have no better option than to start somewhere and build from there. Your health is not a problem you get to buy yourself out of or exchange for some other problem - at least as of now. Your health is something that impacts everything you do and will continue to do so whether you are face it or not.Managing your own health both for the sake of yourself and the people around you who depend on you, your strength and support might arguably be one of the most under appreciated responsibilities of life.With our student initiative, we are trying to address this by trying to remind the people who interact with our club of the following: The value of health is not health itself but what it enables you to do and experience in life. You might learn to enjoy the pursuit of health itself, but ultimately even that then becomes an experience enabled through health. As a result, health does not necessarily have to be your hobby. But because your health has such a fundamental impact on your life regardless of your inherent interest in it or lack thereof, it seems reasonable and obvious to assign at least some of your attention and time towards it.
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