Today, there is an overwhelming amount of competing health advice in the media and online. Healthline, for instance, says to eat more turmeric and nuts. At the same time, the Mayo Clinic warns that nuts need to be consumed in moderation to make sure you aren’t taking in extra calories.
Most people have also heard that they should do infrared saunas to reverse aging or that longevity drugs like Metformin and Rapamycin will extend their lives. At the same time, there are diet gurus that promote plant-based foods, while others say all meat is the way.
Then there’s exercise. Some experts say it’s more important than nutrition. Others claim we hardly need any as long as we’re smart about it. Walk 10,000 steps a day, but be careful not to overdo it, or you might injure yourself. Sleep, but not too much. Feeling stressed? Meditate! And the list goes on.
Who’s right? Who’s wrong? What’s helpful, and what’s toxic?
The truth is when it comes to hard science, there is no one path that “fits all.” Rather, according to entrepreneur Naveen Jain, the new answer for health and longevity is a customized one. His mission of “aging and illness optional” centers on the premise that everybody is different—literally!
In his new bestselling book, The Youth Formula, he presents new theories backed by science and data and provides practical advice that he says can bring down a person’s age by decades.
Rethinking Aging and Disease
In 2017, Jain began asking some critical questions about health and launched a company, Viome Life Sciences, to find out. He wanted answers to the same questions many people have today:
- Given today’s technology, why are chronic disease rates at an all-time high?
- Why are younger and more people getting sicker and dying from avoidable diseases despite the fact that interest in health and wellness is a greater focus?
- How come human lifespans are still around 80 and not significantly longer?
Jain decided it was time to bring superior data and better research to these questions, and so he amassed a team of the world’s top scientists. Together, the team took on the challenge of analyzing a massive amount of information with the most advanced technology he could access.
“We knew that AI was required to get to the root cause of aging and disease,” Jain said. “If we could identify the underlying root causes of what causes disease to happen, we figure out preventative measures.”
By crunching massive amounts of data from over 1,000,000 samples, Jain and his team have amassed over 100 quadrillion data points. Viome currently has the largest gene expression database in the world. Their work has led to many major health breakthroughs, which Jain shares in his latest book, The Youth Formula.
The Longevity Solution of The Youth Formula
Jain learned firsthand that each person’s body is unique. So, it is not possible to find one single magical quick fix that will solve the health puzzle for all of us in one go. However, what is important is to accept that we are all different. Optimal health is about measuring health metrics and adjusting our lifestyle as needed.
For instance, Jain points out that much of modern nutrition discourse is about deciding what food or vitamin is good for everyone and piling as much of that into the diet as will fit. But Jain says this doesn’t work. “We have learned there is no such thing as a universal health food,” he said. “By analyzing small samples of stool, saliva, and blood taken from at-home test kits we have learned that a healthy food like spinach can be good for you or it can actually be harmful to you.”
While spinach, for example, is often lauded as the ultimate superfood, most people may not realize that it is also one of the leading dietary sources of oxalates—a group of compounds that, while naturally occurring, can bind to essential minerals and inhibit their absorption.
Ultimately, when it comes to nutrition, staying healthy is about knowing what the body needs at the molecular level and feeding it the right nutrients.
Through monitoring and preventive measures, Jain believes that anyone who wants to can slow their biological aging and even experience “a thirty-year-old’s vitality and intellectual sharpness into your nineties and beyond.”
Better Living Through Personalized Health
The good news for us all is that illness and aging are far more under our control than most people think. Jain has learned when it comes to great health, “It’s really a matter of the choices we make every day, rather than a matter of our genetics,” says Jain.
And these days, with technology growing at an exponential rate, there are increasingly sophisticated tools driving access to better and more detailed personal health data. Jain details these precision health tools in his book.
If you’re interested in Naveen Jain’s lessons or the system behind The Youth Formula, take the time to find out more about the book yourself. In the meantime, think about the advice you’ve been given and ask if it’s really working for you.