“There’s no such thing as ageing gracefully. I don’t meet people who want to get Alzheimer’s disease, or who want to get cancer or arthritis or any of the other things that afflict the elderly. Ageing is bad for you, and we better just actually accept that.” Aubrey de Grey

Oh, how nice it would be to live a little longer with the same pace and inquisitiveness but a youthful body! If you followed the past entries of my blog you know I am very curious about life extension research. Many care about their appearance and rather invest in anti-aging skincare than in nurturing supplements, but I start to get more and more the feeling that 2015 is going to be the year really where promising ‘longevity products’ will hit the shelves big time, either from botanical apothecaries (for holistic minds amongst us) or creations from a lab. Last week I came across two new ones: Into the Gloss just posted a link about (already sold out) Beauty Dust, a botanical apothecary version of an Anti-Aging Supplement (link) and MIT Technology Review‘s blog shared a link of Elysium, the longevity pill for 50USD/month (link). I leave it to your fantasy if Beauty dust with e.g. finely grounded pearls, Lo Han Guo and Rehmannia does anything supporting for your beauty and vitality (though I like the cute product design) but Elysium is probably one of the most promising longevity supplements so far. According to MIT Technology review Elysium comes with the nice backup of five Nobel Prize winners advising it including neuroscientist Eric Kandel, biologist Thomas Südhof, origin-of-life theorist Jack Szostak, and the 2013 laureate in chemistry Martin Karplus (read here).

But what is in the blue soft capsule that carries the name of the greek perception of the afterlife? 62-year old MIT biologist Leonard Guarente brought the Silicon Valley based startup to life and he is “convinced that the process of aging can be slowed by tweaking the body’s metabolism”. According to Guarente it’s not easy to prove the longevity effect on certain animal-test approved supplements in humans, too. So he takes the “unconventional route of packaging cutting-edge lab research as so-called nutraceuticals, which don’t require clinical trials or approval by the FDA” (read all here). Elysium’s only supplement so far is called ‘Base’ and has a supposedly potent mix of natural substances that can be found in blueberries (pterostilbene) and milk (nicotinamide riboside). They explain it as following: “it targets two critical components of human metabolism: the coenzyme nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) and a class of proteins known as sirtuins. It targets these specific biological components through a novel NAD+ precursor, known as nicotinamide riboside (NR), and a sirtuin activating polyphenol by the name of pterostilbene.”(read on here). Well, it is not very clear if Elysium will give you a little additional years, but you are for sure funding a promising life-extension research facility. Elysium is going to sales next week and if you want to be the first one to crowdfund a longevity pill you can do it here. Best and definitely packing for a bottle of Elysium’s Basis, Ea Birkkam

today: a tribute to the lab coat