Personalized Life Extension Conference 2012

March 4, 2012

The 2012 Personalized Life Extension Conference: Extend Your Personal Healthspan will take place  from March 31 – April 1, 2012 at the South San Francisco Conference Center.

A $100 discount on registration is now available for Kurzweil readers! Please visit this link and use code: KURZWEILAI.

Impressive results in anti-aging research mean that one day we may greatly extend human lifespan — but most of these treatments won’t be widely available for many years.

Fortunately, daily advances are being made on what each of us can do NOW to slow the aging process to a minimum, and to delay or prevent the diseases of aging. Life extension news comes out continually — faster than any one of us can evaluate it. Let’s join forces at this 2nd Personalized Life Extension Conference and determine how to take personal action.

This conference brings together those most knowledgeable to discuss best practices:

  • Expert speakers — Professional researchers and advisers working in anti-aging, life extension, and longevity-related fields.
  • Implementor speakers — Early adopters who are ahead of the curve in implementing new anti-aging techniques and can tell us how to do this as easily and cheaply as possible.
  • Participants — While some attendees will be new to life extension, based on the first conference it’s clear that this audience may be the most highly informed group ever gathered to compare personal action for anti-aging & longevity.

Topics to be covered in lectures, Q&A, and during meals and breaks include:

  • Supplements: Should we be taking resveratrol, vitamin D3, fish oil, coenzyme Q10, acetyl-L-carnitine, melatonin, DHEA, and many others. Benefits, costs, risks, and anti-aging supplement advisors to consider.
  • DNA Testing: Costs are coming down fast. We can’t re-write our DNA (yet), but there is much that can be done to “turn on” and “turn off” genes related to individual risks.
  • Telomere protection: Getting your telomeres measured, and anti-aging techniques to protect them, from inexpensive to very expensive. TA-65 is currently the latter, but we hear its cost is about to fall substantially.
  • Blood Testing: If you’re young and healthy, get extensive blood work done now to get a baseline. If older, see where you’re too low or too high and take corrective action — the “normal” range accepted by the average doctor is almost certainly too broad.
  • Finding a life extension doctor: Very few physicians are informed or even interested in anti-aging techniques. Let’s explore how to find the ones who are.
  • Gadgets: From low-end blood pressure readers and Omron pedometer, to the mid-range Zeo sleep monitor, ShoulderFlex massager, and emWave PC biofeedback, to the high-end UVB non-tanning “tanning bed” for stimulating vitamin D production, we’ll look at which equipment is safe and cost-effective.
  • Inflammation: Increasingly seen as central to the aging process, we’ll look at ways to measure and reduce this damaging process throughout the body, from taking aspirin and anti-inflammatory supplements to reducing abdominal fat and increasing dietary fiber. C-reactive protein (CRP) monitoring can track anti-aging progress.
  • Calorie restriction and intermittent fasting: It’s pretty clear these can delay the diseases of aging. We’ll hear how hard or easy they are to carry out in real life.
  • Sleep: Quantity and quality of sleep is increasingly being recognized as critically important to anti-aging; we’ll look at the factors governing these and how to control them.
  • Stress Reduction: Perhaps the most important single factor to tackle, due to its connection to blood pressure and cortisol, and yet a challenge to reduce given today’s lifestyles. Many approaches can help — yoga, humor, meditation, sex, massage, vacations, moderate exercise, downsizing, simplifying, reducing email frequency, and getting off the computer one day a week.
  • Self-experimentation: Many anti-aging techniques involve changing a parameter and tracking its effects. We’ll look at designing such experiments, learning from the Quantified Self experience.
  • Exercise: What types, what’s the minimum, and (just as important) the maximum from a longevity perspective, since overtraining can cause overly high cortisol levels.
  • Enhancement and brain function: To figure out how to live longer, it would help to be smarter. Some of us have tried mental “enhancers” such as Provigil or Ritalin; let’s compare benefits and risks. We’ll look at anti-aging supplements thought to preserve brain function, such as galantamine.
  • Anti-Aging Eating: A complex, controversial, and centrally important topic for longevity — advice to take (not the USDA), macronutrients, micro nutrients, organic vs. standard, raw vs. cooked, probiotics, what types of processing to avoid, specific “foods” to avoid including high-fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oils, techniques for weight control and reduction, how to reduce the time required. Specific foods to consider: curcumin, turmeric, cinnamon, green tea, black tea, berries, dark chocolate, and stevia to replace sugar.
  • Standards of information quality: Large double-blind studies are not available for many longevity questions, and may never be due to high costs and inability to patent existing nutrients and practices. Yet health claims must still be evaluated, using less-ideal data.
  • Mood: Optimistic people live longer, it’s claimed. We’ll look at mood-influencing supplements, techniques, and actions, from SAMe, rhodiola and Prozac to the pursuit of love and intimacy: married people and those in monogamous long-term relationships are said to live longer.