Why spend time and resources in activities you know significantly damage your health? Doing so steals the most valuable possession possible - years of healthy life that might have let you reach an age of radical life extension - from the person you will one day be. You're picking your own pocket, cutting your future self short. For example: "The smoke of cigarettes represents an important accelerator of the aging process, both directly through complex mechanisms mediated prevalently by excessive formation of free radicals, and indirectly by favoring the appearance of various pathologies ... smoke compromises not only life expectancy, but also the quality of the life, favoring the occurrence of non-autosufficiency. Smoking is an important risk factor for many diseases, such as cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. ... Non-smokers have a much higher life expectancy than smokers, and the suspension of smoking is accompanied, even in the elderly, by an increase in the survival time due to the reduction of smoke-induced biological damage. ... Among [centenarians], smoking is extremely rare, and even when it occurs among them, it is correlated almost exclusively to bad health conditions and non-autosufficiency, indicating that it compromises health status and the quality of life even in extremely long living subjects."
16
Aug
2007
The Theft of Self-Damage
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First Steps
The Causes of Aging
- Accumulating AGEs
- Buildup of Amyloid Between Cells
- The Failing Adaptive Immune System
- The Failing Innate Immune System
- Declining Lysosomal Function
- Mitochondrial DNA Damage
- Nuclear DNA Damage
- Buildup of Senescent Cells
- Other Causes of Aging
Archives and Feeds
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Required Reading
- Calorie Restriction
- The Community, Visualized
- Cryonics
- Engineered Negligible Senescence
- Envisaging a World Without the FDA
- How to Argue for Longevity Science
- Introductory Articles
- The Odds of Human Longevity Mutations
- The Need For Activism and Advocacy
- Stem Cells, Regenerative Medicine
- Twelve Ways to Extend Mouse Life Span
- Transhumanism and Human Longevity
- The Vital Debate in Aging Research
- What is Anti-Aging?
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