8

DIY IMMORTALITY

The Church of Perpetual Life’s cryonics symposium brought together the biggest names in the cryopreservation business, but that was only a sliver of the entire immortalist community. To see the whole crowd on display, I attended the immortalist version of Coachella—RAADfest. For those seeking to add years to their lifespan, the event is an essential date in the diary, when they can catch up on the latest biological research, find inspiration from motivational anti-aging speakers, and spend their hard-earned dollars on the next key tool to halt death.

Previous iterations of the annual event have been held in Las Vegas and San Diego, but in 2020 COVID-19 forced the three-day conference online for the first time, as the pandemic sent the immortalist community into isolation, justly worried the deadly virus would end their hopes of living forever. Even so, the speaker list featured some of the biggest names in the business, including de Grey and the founder of the Church of Perpetual Life, Bill Faloon.[1] As I perused the daily schedule, some of the topics up for discussion immediately caught my attention. The United States Transhumanist Party was giving an update on its progress, there was a talk on how to control aging in pets, and (perhaps most mind-blowing, given the immortalist crowd appeared to be made up mostly of the elderly) another presentation with advice on how to reverse sexual aging. From the very first minute of the event, it did not disappoint.

Before the conference got going, I became engrossed in the live chat running alongside the video stream. The virtual attendees began talking among themselves quite cordially, telling each other where they were tuning in from—and it was truly a global audience. But as the scheduled start time came and went, the digital crowd grew increasingly unruly and irritable, getting angry with the organizers. After what I felt was a very short delay, the event began. The day opened with a singer named Audrey Archer, who performed a song inspired by the fight for immortality. Although not exactly to my taste, it went down well with those in the live chat, and some of the lyrics gave me a handy preview for what was to come. “They can say it all sounds crazy, they can say we’ve lost our minds. I don’t care if they call us crazy. We can live in a world that we designed,” Archer sang, to much cooing in the live chat.

When the entertainment was done, the founders of RAADfest took to the stage—two characters we have already met, Bernadeane Brown and James Strole, the brains behind People Unlimited. While People Unlimited did not formally organize the event, it was produced by another of Strole and Bernadeane’s ventures, the Coalition for Radical Life Extension, which seeks to bring together ideas from across the life extension spectrum, from cryonicists to mind uploaders to pill-popping hippies.

At RAADfest, Strole and Bernadeane ruled over their host of digital acolytes with beaming smiles and inspirational speeches. When they first appeared on screen, the chat descended into fawning comments about how young they looked, and it was clear both of them had made considerable effort with their appearances. Bernadeane, the older of the pair at around eighty years old, wore tight black jeans, a white shirt with a black blazer, and a black tie draped loosely around her neck. She sported a metallic bob haircut and wore heavy dark eyeshadow. Strole, much taller, wore a sharp suit and tie and boasted a full head of shocking white hair. I found myself agreeing with the other attendees—neither looked their age.

Strole was calm and measured, speaking in silk-tongued motivational quips. “Don’t make yourself incidental in this movement. We’re going for a mass movement that changes the tide of death in the world,” he told the virtual audience. Bernadeane was less restrained and much more militant in her remarks, which were clearly not rehearsed. “We’re making it possible to really have the right to live free of death,” she told viewers.

When the two founders finished pumping up the crowd, the microphone moved to the event’s emcee, Joe Bardin, the communications director of both RAADfest and People Unlimited. He was a polished and charismatic host, and when I spoke to him after the event, it was clear he was an effective advocate for the cause. Many years ago, he heard Bernadeane and Strole speak, and although he didn’t embrace the idea of immortality initially, a girl he had a crush on did, so he went back. “That kept me coming back a few times until I could kind of get my mind engaged. Personally, I just didn’t really understand. I hadn’t really put it all together, but [now] I don’t know if this will make sense, but for me, the repetition of mortality, it’s just crushing,” he told me.

Bardin believes that people should consider their lives eternal already, rather than wait for a technology to save them in the future. When I mentioned the different types of immortalists and life extension enthusiasts I’d already met, he told me those wanting extremely long lives but not immortality were kidding themselves:

“I think Ray Kurzweil famously said, you’re not going to get to [when] you’re eighty or ninety or ninety-five or one hundred and five and suddenly feel like you don’t want to live longer. And Jim Strole thinks the whole thing’s ridiculous. He says if you get to two hundred and you’re feeling good, first of all, you’ll have done something amazing and you’ll have surpassed all the social norms and you’re feeling good. You’re not going to want to stop.

I’m an immortalist, but I think in the long run, anybody who’s really into longevity, it’s all going to just blend together, and even wellness. Right now, wellness is just a totally different cohort of people, and that’s why we can’t market to them. It’s a waste of our money, what little money we have for marketing. But the reality is if you’re sixty or seventy and you’re into wellness, what’s the difference? There is no difference.”

Bardin has been involved in RAADfest from the beginning. He said the initial idea was to create a platform which wasn’t just for scientists, entrepreneurs, or “the PhD crowd,” but to make the information accessible for a general audience as well. The organizers gather the most important personalities in the world of life extension and some years the event is devoted to a specific theme. For example, stem cells were big at the 2019 conference, Bardin told me, and previous years focused more on supplements or particular drugs.

The first major speaker was a man who would probably prompt arguments on any other stage but this one: Dave Asprey. The man behind Bulletproof Coffee has attained semi-priesthood status among his followers. He is wealthy, intelligent, and successful. And over the course of his thirty-minute presentation, I became worried some of his claims were not just false but, frankly, dangerous.

Asprey describes himself as a biohacker and is perhaps the most well-known among that growing cohort of transhumanists. Biohacking refers to people doing whatever they must, usually with technology, to get the most out of their bodies. This could be something simple, like exercising more often, taking a cold shower in the morning, or meditating. But the practice extends all the way to taking brain-boosting drugs, trying out experimental medical procedures, and having pieces of technology installed under their skin. The ultimate goal of biohackers is to either drastically extend their lifespan, become super-intelligent, or both.

The Hollywood movie Limitless, which starred Bradley Cooper as a man who takes a drug that makes him incredibly smart and productive, is a bible to most biohackers, some of whom believe the film could become reality. Asprey hasn’t just tapped into this market, he’s placed himself right in the center, from where he influences trends, attends events like RAADfest, and of course peddles his own range of biohacking products.

Throughout his talk, he gave the occasional disclaimer that he is not a qualified professional in the fields he was lecturing in, yet he handed out advice as if he were anyway. His first presentation of the day (he gave more than one) discussed boosting the immune system, and inevitably COVID-19 cropped up quickly. Asprey impressed the importance of exposing the immune system to regular challenges and predicted that the need for “super immunity” will soon rise exponentially. Some attendees in the chat took this to mean they shouldn’t be wearing masks in a pandemic, and a brief but fiery debate erupted over the need to wear personal protection when an airborne virus is circulating. The libertarian side of immortalism was on full display, but Rudi Hoffman, the self-styled recovering libertarian who had a talk later in the event, waded into the chat to shut the anti-mask talk down.

Asprey, who spoke at an incredible speed, moved on to an herb called andrographis. He claimed it worked on COVID-19, something that turned out to be not entirely ridiculous. Studies have suggested the natural remedy may ease some of the symptoms which arise after infection by the virus,[2] and Thailand approved its use in treating patients.[3] But the evidence, and use of andrographis, never became widespread, and scientists have stated herbal remedies lack the necessary clout to treat coronaviruses.[4]

But it was Asprey’s next suggestion that concerned me.

He told the audience to look into ozone therapy, and rectally administered ozone therapy in particular. Ozone refers to the same part of our atmosphere that protects the Earth from the sun’s radiation. It is harmful to breathe, but some reports have suggested it can help treat diseases like cancer, arthritis, HIV, SARS, some heart diseases and can activate the immune system. However, the FDA disagrees vehemently. In 2019, the agency released a statement warning against the use of ozone as a medical therapy. It said ozone is a toxic gas and has no known useful application in either supportive or preventative medicine.[5] So, just to recap: Asprey told a conference of attendees hanging on his every word to take a toxic gas and literally blow it up their own asses.[6]

I asked myself what motivates someone to suggest a thing like that, or give one of these talks at all. The answer, of course, is money, mixed with status. Asprey is an incredibly successful entrepreneur, mostly due to his Bulletproof Coffee product. Earlier in his life, he enjoyed a prosperous career as an IT executive in Silicon Valley, but success came at a cost. He became overweight, reaching three hundred pounds at his heaviest, and fell ill as a result. In 2004—a satirist could not have invented this—he traveled to Tibet to learn how to meditate and improve his well-being. While trekking in the Himalayas he was offered a cup of tea infused with yak butter, and later he said the drink made his brain feel better than it had in a long time, despite the high altitude. Asprey was so affected by this yak milk–flavored tea he attempted to make his own version when he returned to California. He switched yak milk for grass-fed cows, as yaks were hard to come by in the Golden State. He also abandoned tea and went for coffee instead, and added a purified form of coconut oil. In 2009 he shared his discovery in a blog post, and three years after that began selling his Bulletproof Coffee online.

Customers have to buy the drink in three parts—the coffee, the butter, and the oil. Asprey used his venture capital connections to secure a meeting with Trinity Ventures and asked them for $50,000 in funding to buy more coffee supplies. They gave him $9 million instead.[7] Gradually, the coffee’s popularity grew, and it blew up when Whole Foods, the grocery store chain, agreed to stock all three parts of the product. Bulletproof Coffee steadily gained celebrity fans and a cult following. Now, the Seattle-based Bulletproof 360 company has attracted more than $68 million in investment and has expanded into selling other food and lifestyle products, including t-shirts, books, and protein bars.[8]

Asprey’s story reads directly from the privilege playbook, a true hero’s tale in Silicon Valley’s age of excess. The rich white man, unhappy that his overindulgence from a well-paying job left him unhealthy, traveled to an exotic location (somewhere with fewer white people) to find spiritual enlightenment and a new way of living. But he didn’t find a charitable outlook or a zen-like philosophical balance, he found a new product to sell and a ticket to multimillionaire status. At that point, Asprey felt comfortable enough to declare himself an expert on all things nutrition and began lecturing the world on how to eat, drink, exercise, and live their lives.

He didn’t stop at selling people the coffee; Asprey devised a whole diet to go with the drink. The regimen involves eating foods high in fat, low in carbohydrates, and moderate amounts of protein, all of which was underpinned by Bulletproof Coffee. The plan also recommends intermittent fasting, the type of dieting VanDeRee was also using and something which will be covered in more detail later in this chapter. Not all nutritionists and dietary experts are convinced. Aisling Pigott, a spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association, was highly critical of the diet in an interview with the BBC in 2019. “Bulletproof Coffee is not something I’d ever recommend, because it’s introducing extra calories and extra fat in a way that isn’t providing any other nutritional value,” she said. “There is no benefit to adding butter to your coffee. With a Bulletproof Coffee–based breakfast you’re missing out on what you’re getting from a food-based breakfast—there is no protein, vitamins, or minerals.”[9]

Julia Belluz, a senior health writer for Vox, went even further. “The Bulletproof Diet is like a caricature of a bad fad-diet book. If you took everything that’s wrong with eating in America, put it in a Vitamix, and shaped the result into a book, you’d get The Bulletproof Diet. The book is filled with dubious claims based on little evidence or cherry-picked studies that are taken out of context. The author, Dave Asprey, vilifies healthy foods and suggests part of the way to achieve a ‘pound a day’ weight loss is to buy his expensive, ‘science-based’ Bulletproof products,” she wrote.[10]

Belluz found a lot of the research Asprey quoted to back up his claims was based on tests done on rats and mice, and not humans. In 2014, the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph scrutinized Asprey’s citations for the book and found them to be either seriously dated or completely unreliable. “The one about cereal grains, for example, begins with a quote from the Bible and is written by a man called Loren Cordain, otherwise known as the author of The Paleo Diet, a health plan that involves eating only foods that were available to humans during the Paleolithic (or caveman) era, and has been widely discredited. Another paper—‘Switching from refined grains to whole grains causes zinc deficiency’—is a report of a 1976 research project featuring a study group of just two people. A third study—‘Diets high in grain fiber deplete vitamin D stores’—is a 30 year-old study of 13 people. A fourth—‘Phytic acid from whole grains block zinc and other minerals’—is based on a 1971 study of people in rural Iran eating unleavened flatbread. Another is about insulin sensitivity in domestic pigs,” the article read.[11]

So how did Asprey’s views on health, become so popular? The Bulletproof Diet follows a very successful template, an easy way to capture the attention of people desperate for some kind of personal epiphany. It makes readers believe they’ve stumbled on a well-hidden secret that will put them ahead of the crowd, of their friends, and of their enemies, and comforts them with the belief that everything they’ve done in their lives up to that point is completely wrong. That narrative allows people to go all in on the diet, believing it to be everything they’ve ever wished for, a surefire miracle cure to make their bodies fitter and healthier. It’s a thought process that underpins the entire biohacking movement, and at the heart of it is Asprey, the self-proclaimed original professional biohacker.

Intermittent fasting forms another crucial part of Asprey’s regime, and he talks about it regularly, either through his blog or at events. Unlike ozone gasses up the rectum, fasting does have some scientific basis to back it up. The trend is a type of caloric restriction, where a person goes without eating for an extended period of time. Fasting has played a major part in religions for centuries, although it was never done to reap health benefits. In recent years some studies have suggested the practice could extend the human lifespan: caloric restriction has been shown to cause weight loss and prolong healthy life in a variety of species, including worms and nonhuman primates.[12] However, the side effects can be difficult to overcome, and can include fatigue, muscle wasting, and loss of libido.

These challenges were tackled by many, including Valter Longo, of the University of Southern California (USC) Longevity Institute, a pioneer in what he called fasting-mimicking diets. In a 2008 study, Longo found that fasting for two days protected healthy cells against the damaging effects of chemotherapy, while cancerous cells stayed sensitive to the treatment. This prompted Longo to create the first fasting-mimicking diet as a way to allow cancer patients or mice in a lab to enjoy the benefits of fasting while still being able to eat.

“The oncologists did not want to fast the patients, and the patients did not want to fast,” Longo said in a USC article. “We went to the National Cancer Institute, and they came up with a call for a fasting-mimicking diet, essentially saying: ‘Let’s develop something that people can eat but [that], to the body—whether it’s a mouse or a person—is going to be like water-only fasting, meaning that it will cause very similar changes, as if they were not eating at all.’ ” Longo then demonstrated that fasting for five days per month for three months caused positive changes in risk factors of age-related diseases in humans. But five days of restricting calories per month is still a big ask for most humans, and studies showed that up to 30 percent of subjects attempting the diet dropped out.[13]

A breakthrough arrived in 2012, when Satchidananda Panda at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies found mice who were given a high-fat diet for eight hours per day were healthier and leaner than mice allowed to eat the same quantities whenever they wanted. This led to the development of Time Restricted Feeding, which eventually morphed into intermittent fasting.[14] The diet usually requires going twelve to sixteen hours, or more, without eating. There are other forms, like alternate-day fasting and alternate-day modified fasting, but they all have an identical goal—to trigger the same response in the body as basic caloric restriction. That desired reaction is called metabolic switching, where cells use up their stores of fuel and then convert fat into energy, which appears to improve cellular health, thus providing better well-being at later ages. That’s the theory, and it’s backed up by a good amount of promising research and science. But as with most biohacking schemes, the long-term effects are yet to be fully studied in humans, and many agencies and organizations around the world think it’s too early to declare intermittent fasting a surefire way to extend your life.

Participants are almost certain to experience short-term side effects like grouchiness, irritability, light-headedness, and difficulties concentrating—what normally happens when you go a long time without eating.[15] However, most people are said to get accustomed to the plan within around a month, and those effects go away if they stick with the diet that long.

This kind of dieting raises other concerns, though. Intermittent fasting has been endorsed by a host of celebrities, but its popularity has spawned questions over its societal impact. An article in Quartz in 2019 asked why when men brag about not eating for most of the day it’s called optimizing, but when women talk about extreme diets they are accused of having an eating disorder.[16] This type of dieting is not right for everyone, and fasting for long periods of time could lead to an obsession about eating and an unhealthy relationship with food. As ever, the most sensible advice on the topic appears to be do what you think is best for your own body, and always talk to a physician before doing anything drastic like starving yourself.

These diets highlight the gaping inequality in the United States, and the world. While millions struggle to work out where their next meal is coming from, this band of biohackers led by Silicon Valley gurus like Asprey egg each other on to eat less and less in order to maximize their comfortable lives. Around 13.7 million households in the United States—about 10.5 percent of all households in the country—experienced food insecurity at some point during 2019, according to US Department of Agriculture data. For around a third of that number, access to food was so limited their calorie intake was reduced and eating patterns affected. And that was before the pandemic hit. An estimate by researchers at Northwestern University suggested food insecurity more than doubled in 2020, affecting 23 percent of households.[17] Were Asprey to show up at any of those households lecturing about the benefits of calorie restriction for better health, it’s fair to assume he’d get thrown out pretty quickly.

For an immortalist, calorie restriction can only take you so far toward eternal life. The gains of such a diet are minimal on their own and are most commonly paired with a strict regimen of supplements. Nearly every immortalist I met, with the curious exception of de Grey, popped pills at a rate that would embarrass a dodgy cycling team. Over the counter supplements were a hot topic at RAADfest, and every time a presenter mentioned their routine, a handful of people would ask questions in the chat about dosage, effectiveness, and where they could get their hands on the pills. Ray Kurzweil, one of the biggest heroes in the transhumanist and immortalist worlds, reportedly takes over one hundred different types of minerals and vitamins a day as part of his quest to reach the singularity. He used to claim he took over 250 supplements and employed someone specifically to sort through them each morning, but he has apparently cut that number down.[18]

Nutritional supplements are commonly used, and most doctors recommend taking a multivitamin once a day to keep the body ticking over. Every year, Americans spend around $35 billion on vitamins, minerals, botanicals, and various other supplements,[19] and research from 2019 claimed 77 percent of people in the country take a supplement of some kind.[20] Biohackers, and most immortalists, take way more than one per day, and some of the pills they’re ingesting are doing more than boosting their Vitamin C intake. Their supplements come from a wide range of sources, including obscure roots and plants, and each is said to address at least one of the issues raised in the hallmarks of aging.

Some of the most popular anti-aging supplements contain a molecule linked to a number of longevity-inspired benefits. Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) plays a key role in the cellular production of energy. It’s often written as NAD+, the name of its oxidized form, and has had rejuvenating effects in nonhuman trials. The molecule is essential for a host of metabolic pathways and is also involved in DNA repair. As people and animals age, NAD+ levels decline. Studies have shown boosting the amount of NAD+ can extend the lifespan of yeast, worms, and mice and kickstarts the mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cells.[21] Spurred on by this research, a host of companies began offering supplements containing NAD+ precursors like nicotinamide riboside (NR) and nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN).

At the time of writing, the front page of the Life Extension website, the company cofounded by Bill Faloon, featured NAD+ heavily. There’s nothing wrong with this; dietary supplements are very lightly regulated by the FDA, which allows companies to sell them even before they have passed clinical trials proving they are safe and effective for humans. There has been research conducted into these types of supplements—one clinical trial, which was funded by two of the largest companies selling them, ChromaDex[22] and Elysium,[23] showed adults taking them for six to eight weeks boosted the NAD+ levels in their blood without serious side effects. But no research proved beyond doubt that NR or NMN can improve human health, an issue that plagues the supplement world. There is very little evidence that most supplements, whether addressing longevity or not, actually make any kind of difference.

I contacted the Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS) at the National Institutes of Health to ask if there was any encouraging research at all. “There is no evidence that dietary supplements can reverse aging or increase lifespan. But the term ‘longevity’ could encompass many things, such as improving cognitive function, enhancing immunity, or reducing the risk of chronic disease,” Carol Haggans, a scientific and health communications consultant at the department, told me via email. She said there have been a few studies examining the effects of some of the ingredients mentioned above for supporting cognitive function, but most show no benefit. Haggans listed one study for NAD+ which she said studied potential cognitive improvement but showed no effect. There were several conflicting results from a few small studies examining resveratrol’s effect on age-related cognitive decline, and melatonin has mainly been studied for sleep deprivation, but “there have only been a few studies for cognitive function, and most show it’s not helpful.”

Sometimes, they aren’t just ineffective, however; they can also be damaging. The most famous case of a supplement gone wrong was ephedra, a substance naturally occurring in plants that was marketed as an appetite suppressant and energy booster. The FDA took it off the market in 2004 after 155 people died.[24] Ephedra remains the only natural supplement removed from stores by regulators.

The potential for long-term or less severe damage is mostly left unchecked. Even vitamins can be harmful: beta-carotene is believed to increase the likelihood of developing lung cancer in smokers,[25] and excess Vitamin E was found in trials to increase the risk of prostate cancer.[26]

In recent years, cancer researchers sounded the alarm over NAD+. Studies suggested cancer cells rely on the molecule to sustain their rapid growth, and limiting the supply may be a potential method to kill them. “It might still slow down the aging part, but it might fuel the cancer part,” Versha Banerji, a clinician-scientist at the University of Manitoba, told Scientific American. “We just need to figure out more about the biology of both of those processes, to figure out how we can make people age well and also not get cancer.”[27]

More cold water was poured on the enthusiasm for NAD+ in February 2019, when a Nature Cell Biology study reported the molecule may have a role in cellular senescence, one of the other hallmarks of aging. Rugang Zhang of the Wistar Institute and his colleagues found that in cells entering senescence, rising levels of an enzyme which produces NAD+ encourage the release of the damaging molecules that can cause inflammation and even cancer. Zhang warned, “We should be cautious and bear in mind the potential downside of NAD+ supplementation as a dietary approach for anti-aging.”[28]

Haggans added that the safety of supplements depends on the ingredients and their doses. “Vitamins and minerals, like magnesium, have a recommended intake and an upper limit, so we know they are safe at doses within these ranges. Other ingredients, like herbs, don’t have recommended intakes because they aren’t essential nutrients, so in many cases, less is known about their safety. Companies are responsible for determining that the dietary supplements they manufacture or distribute are safe, but federal law does not require dietary supplements to be proven safe to FDA’s satisfaction before they are marketed.” The risks associated with supplements may prove minimal, but with no regulation they are being taken every day by Americans who really have no idea what the side effects may be in the long term.

Biohackers are also fond of nootropics, the supplements intended to increase alertness, concentration, and even intelligence. But while some of them may make minimal improvements in cognitive function for a short amount of time, there is no telling what they are doing to a person’s other organs.

I asked Dr. Luigi Ferrucci, the scientific director of the National Institute of Aging, how supplement distributors were able to sell their product. He told me the ambiguity and lack of accountability helped them.

“The effect is not measurable, there is no way that somebody can tell you that’s not true,” he said. “And so I laugh when I see those advertisements, I think it’s as old as the philosophy of human beings—the idea that if you could make a pact with the devil, you will have beauty, eternal health, and incredible longevity.” Ferrucci told me he thinks the FDA’s approach to supplements is getting better, and the regulator is realizing the supplements market is “a bit tricky” and “a little bit dirty” as well.

“If you want the supplement to be prescribed by a doctor through a prescription, you have to go through FDA approval. And if you go through FDA approval, your capacity to sell it as a supplement is gone, you can’t have both. That means that if you sell something that’s really effective, you want to go through the FDA because you want it to be paid through Medicare and other insurance. But if you want that and go through the FDA, you lose your ability to sell it as a supplement. This in the long term is going to clean the field a little bit.”

The anti-aging supplement field is incredibly murky. Most are not dangerous, just a waste of effort and money and completely ineffective. Tamar Haspel wrote in The Washington Post: “That’s the dietary supplement conundrum. Most of them do nothing, so you shouldn’t take those. But the ones that actually do something are the ones that pose danger, so you shouldn’t take those either. If something really can enlarge your penis, imagine the havoc it can wreak in your liver.”[29]

In March 2020, Asprey’s Bulletproof 360 company came under the scrutiny of the FDA, and the regulator found that his promotional articles, and his method of storing supplements, were not up to scratch. The entrepreneur was sent a warning letter following a visit to his facility, in which investigators found “serious violations” of regulations governing the manufacturing, packaging, labeling or holding of dietary supplements. The reprimand also focused on certain products the company had claimed helped defeat aging. The letter quoted an article titled “13 Anti-aging Supplements to Turn You Into Benjamin Button,” which pushes readers to take Curcumin, an ingredient in the company’s Curcumin Max product.

“Your products are not generally recognized as safe and effective for the above referenced uses and, therefore, the products are ‘new drugs,’ ” the letter read. “New drugs may not be legally introduced or delivered for introduction into interstate commerce without prior approval from FDA.”

The bold claims on the Bulletproof 360 website had switched the definition of Curcumin Max from supplements to new drugs in the eyes of the FDA. While the letter was just a warning, it does at least suggest some kind of policing is under way in the dubious business of dietary supplements.

Three months later, the FDA sent another letter to Asprey, stating that it had “determined that you are unlawfully advertising that certain products prevent or treat COVID-19.” Among the many alleged cures Asprey mentioned in his article “What I Do to Protect Myself From Coronavirus, and How I Plan to Kick It if I get It,” was andrographis, which he mentioned in his talk. Asprey was reminded it was illegal to advertise a product that can prevent, treat, or cure a disease unless he possesses “competent and reliable scientific evidence,” and was told to “immediately cease making all such claims.”

Without regulation, the supplements market must seem like easy money for those practicing the age-old trick of selling so-called elixirs of life. RAADfest appeared to be full of these people. The event boasted a series of sellers, all peddling wares which promised to help immortalists and longevity advocates on their way to radically extended lives. Even if supplements really did work, it seemed their impact would be minimal for anyone attempting to reach the promised land of longevity escape velocity. And the fact that de Grey himself didn’t take any seemed to indicate they weren’t a route to immortality. But with no laws to stop them and a steady and receptive customer base, supplement peddling is here to stay. However, iffy pills are trivial compared to some of the offerings in the more experimental fields of anti-aging and regenerative medical technology.