Can lifestyle hacks really extend your lifespan?

When others his age might be groggily checking the drunk texts they sent the night before, Liam Rosen reviews his previous night’s sleep cycles.

The 37-year-old abstains from alcohol and sleeps with a pad under his mattress that tracks his breathing, snoring and heart rate throughout the night. Once awake, he takes a battery of supplements including spermidine, nicotinamide mononucleotide and acarbose, a drug used to treat Type 2 diabetes.

Rosen has added these measures to a healthy lifestyle of balanced diet and home gym workouts in hopes of increasing his longevity. “I was into [longevity] back when it was just called being healthy,” he said, noting that he witnessed a shift in focus during the late 2010s when he lived in San Francisco.

Today, users young and old gather in online forums devoted to longevity and biohacking to compare “stacks,” which are their often-elaborate supplement regimens, and to discuss recommendations from celebrity scientists like Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia. 

One of the most well-known personalities in the anti-aging world is David Sinclair, who studies genetics at Harvard University. In his 2019 New York Times bestseller “Lifespan: Why We Age — and Why We Don’t Have To,” Sinclair described aging as a disease that may one day be treated with emerging therapies. Like Rosen and other longevity buffs, Sinclair supports lifestyle changes he believes can halt or reverse the effects of aging, which include plenty of supplements.

So when Rosen, who now works in the sports industry in New York, heard Sinclair would be speaking in Brooklyn, he was eager to mingle with fellow longevity enthusiasts as the crowd gathered for the Oct. 22 event at Pioneer Works.

“I agree with 95% of what David Sinclair says,” Rosen said. “There is 5% which I am skeptical about.”

Sinclair’s central thesis, which he calls the information theory of aging, is that the biological effects of age are controlled by epigenetic changes. These changes govern how the different genes a person carries are expressed without altering the underlying genetic code. He believes treatments that target this epigenetic information can increase the expression of genes linked to longevity.

But Sinclair is a divisive figure in the longevity field. Charles Brenner, who studies metabolic stress at the cancer research and treatment center City of Hope, believes Sinclair is “clinging to ideas that have been fully debunked and is not a good source of evidence-based information about aging.” 

Brenner said Sinclair bases his theory of an epigenetic key to longevity on research on genes in yeast and findings in insects and mice that have not been reproduced. He argued that compounds Sinclair says can activate these purported longevity genes, such as resveratrol, have proven to be a dead end for anti-aging research.

Brenner briefly advised a pharmaceutical company founded by Sinclair in the late 2000s, and became one of his harshest critics a decade after leaving the firm due to disagreements about lifespan research, as science journalist Matt Fuchs reported for Nautilus.

After Brenner published a critical review of Sinclair’s book in 2023, Sinclair defended his ideas to the Nautilus reporter, pointing to literature he said supports his claims about longevity genes. Fuchs also noted Brenner advises a company that produces anti-aging supplements with a slightly different active ingredient than a compound that is a major research focus for Sinclair.

Sinclair attracted backlash from others in the scientific community in February after claiming that his team had reversed aging in dogs. Following these comments, he resigned from his role as president of The Academy for Health and Lifespan Research, an organization which he co-founded.

At the Oct. 22 event, part of Pioneer Works’ longrunning Scientific Controversies series, Sinclair was on a panel with Ali Brivanlou, a stem cell researcher at Rockefeller University.

The two panelists debated the philosophical nature of aging and longevity in the context of their work. Brivanlou argued that rather than a disease, aging is just a natural part of the life cycle. “Adolescence is not considered a disease,” he said, before discussing his own research into how genetic changes affect the aging process. 

He also highlighted other influences, such as a person’s microbiome, that could affect the aging process alongside epigenetic changes. Sinclair countered that epigenetic changes inform how these additional forces affect the body.

After hearing the debate, audience member and graduate student Joshua Jiao, concluded Sinclair is overselling the importance of epigenetic changes, but did not feel he was intentionally misleading the public. “Scientists are human beings,” he said. “We all have our biases.”

As for Rosen, he never actually went inside to hear Sinclair and the other speakers, preferring instead to stay outside and talk with other stragglers. “I don’t abide people lecturing at me,” he explained. “I believe that we learn best by human interaction and communication.”