A healthy lifestyle in a pill

Finding ways to slow or reverse the aging process is big business. At the extreme end is tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who sticks to a 1,900-calorie-a-day, no-sugar diet, daily exercise, and a strict 8–9 h of sleep a night. Johnson has also set up a data-driven longevity program called Blueprint that uses experimental interventions to attempt to minimize biological aging. Other tech billionaires are looking for quicker fixes to stave off the inevitable. They are sinking huge amounts of money into longevity research through founding or investing in longevity start-ups or funding basic research. Of course, we already know that the best intervention to slow the degeneration that accompanies aging is a healthy lifestyle: most importantly, eating well and not too much, exercising, and getting enough sleep. But not everybody is able to maintain healthy habits. So scientists are now asking, If they could understand how diet, exercise, and sleep slow the negative effects of aging, could they find therapeutic solutions that mimic the effects of these habits? Could we get the benefits of these “virtuous behaviors” without the sacrifices?The skinny on caloric restriction “To date, caloric restriction is the only intervention that is proven to extend lifespan across models, including humans,” says Maria Ermolaeva, a biochemist and longevity expert at the Leibniz Institute on Ageing–Fritz Lipmann Institute. For example, Ermolaeva cites a 2017 study that found that monkeys fed a reduced-calorie diet lived longer and had fewer age-related diseases than monkeys fed a normal intake. The 2019 CALERIE trial