🧬🛍 22 - The Longevity Economy, Hormonal Health ToolKit
Hello👋 and welcome to Curation for Longevity by Laura Minquini. I am the founder of MYKIGAI - a discovery and recommendation platform for longevity.
In this newsletter, I look into what could help make longevity the next big consumer health & lifestyle category. 🚀
About the Longevity Economy
In case you live under a rock - Elon Musk has become the proud owner of Twitter.
As he is for free speech, he won’t ban those of us who are into longevity. Did you know Elon is not one of the so-called billionaires chasing eternal youth?
This brings me to today’s brief post about the good, the bad, and the ugly on a Bloomberg longevity feature that was recently published.
By all accounts, this was a success and one of the better pieces on the topic. The comments are mostly positive, some are hilarious, but they are not as dismissive as usual. And with 65k views, I would say that the companies featured should be happy.
The good:
They do focus on how the immediate and beneficial value of longevity is longer health-spans.
It did make my heart flutter when they said there are no-one-size fits all solutions for longevity — it’s a line on our pitch deck.
They also did a great job at explaining how innovation is usually financed by those who can afford to gamble millions, but eventually, economies of scale will drive these therapies to wide distribution.
The bad:
When the subject of billionaires was broached, they named and spent one too many shots on Elon - who as I said earlier - is not of the “let’s figure out how to live longer” type. This is, by all means, a mischaracterization.
The Ugly:
The title of the clip is “7.6 Trillion Quest for Longer Life”
The figure is credited to Oxford economics, but in reality, it was a very important study commissioned by AARP and coin the term “the Longevity Economy” to show the growing potential of the 50+ aging demographic.
The report is illuminating and I highly recommend it to those who don’t yet understand how important it is to take them into account. READ HERE
Except for the part comprising health, this figure is not reflective of the quest for longer life.
If I showed up to pitch meetings with these kinds of figures without being able to back my numbers I would be sent on my way as not knowing what I am talking about.
There must not have been any of their budget left for fact-checking. However, fact-checking is a thing media companies should absolutely do. I know this as I started my career in fashion journalism, and my Editor-in-Chief mentor was a stickler for it. If we could sort out not attributing something to Dior when it’s by Chanel, surely a business publication could see this is the wrong interpretation of the “Longevity Economy”.
I was fortunate to start my career with the most prominent fashion journalist in Canada, David Livingstone. The fact that someone described with an “intimidating intellect” chose me as his associate fashion editor for my fist editorial post is one of my prouder accomplishments. Blame him for my style in writing, mind you, he would have a lot to say about my constant typos.
David interviewed the likes of Richard Avedon, Alexander McQueen, and Karl Lagerfeld and was the only Canadian journalist to constantly be invited to Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons or personally know Karla Otto. These names might not say much to those who are not into fashion, but if you know, you know.
Lastly, why did the clip look a bit like an expensive infomercial? Silver & noise noticed too:
Hormonal Health & Longevity
Prepared by Girish Harinath
One thing that makes the biology of aging so complex is that our organs and tissues age at different rates. Hormonal health is of key importance in terms of healthy longevity, because hormones travel throughout our circulatory system. There, they influence the health of all the organs and tissues of our body simultaneously - be it testosterone, estrogen, oxytocin, or cortisol. The levels of these hormones have a “sweet spot” that drives longevity-enhancing benefits like bodily regeneration and repair. Unfortunately, our hormone levels “naturally” progress to a state of imbalance as we age, leading to weight gain, fatigue, depression and increased incidence of diseases like cancer, type II diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. The empowering news is that this “natural” progression to hormonal imbalance can be accelerated or slowed down based on lifestyle habits (i.e. sleep), supplements (i.e. maca root), and drugs (hormone replacement therapy).
So how can we optimize our lifestyle to hit that longevity sweet spot? We have put together several protocols that you can use to figure out your optimal hormone levels, natural ways to boost them, and safe/effective ways to engage with hormone replacement therapy if “natural boosters” are ineffective. We all possess the inner resources to restore our hormonal balance. Our longevity tools will give you the specific dietary changes, exercise and sleep regimens, stress reduction techniques, supplements, drugs, behavioural routines (and more!) to identify and reach your “hormone longevity sweet spot”.