Butter Coffee Beats Death

The Existential Dread of Biohacking

This is part one of a two part series.

Introduction

Biohacking in the nutrition space often refers to those who use nutritional interventions to optimize their own biology. Think of the Dave Asprey bulletproof coffee craze, the idea of putting butter in one’s coffee helped them think better and live longer. A common fixation these biohacking groups have is the search for longevity. Longevity in this instance refers to  promoting or preserving youth and vitality via delaying the human aging process. Many believe a change in diet will somehow lead to a prolonged life. These beliefs give a contemporary lens to the fear of death and the end. We will cover some of the empirical science behind the relationship between diet and longevity, we will also apply the view of death from various schools of philosophy including existentialism, stoicism, and epicureanism (this will be covered in part two).

The Science

The empirical support for the relationship between longevity and diet seems to come mostly from mechanistic and animal research. This is problematic as these studies cannot be reliably translated to humans. Fruit flies are commonly used as test subjects in this area of research, their life span is about 90 days. Humans on average tend to live longer than 90 days. Trying to extrapolate research to humans in this case would be inappropriate but that doesn’t stop many people from doing it. Two of the most prolific concepts related to diet and longevity are fasting and autophagy.

Fasting can refer to periods of time where a person is not consuming food and has no food in their digestive system. The definition of fasting is contentious as it can mean many different approaches to many different people. There are numerous approaches to fasting such as the 16:8 protocol, eating one meal a day, skipping days of eating, skipping meals, etc. Therefore, this introduces issues when discussing fasting as an intervention for health as we do not have a definitive definition for what fasting is. Furthermore, the health benefits commonly associated with fasting are the same health benefits commonly seen with typical caloric restriction.

Calorie restriction means reducing average daily caloric intake below what is typical or habitual, without malnutrition or deprivation of essential nutrients. A study seeking to address the relationship between caloric restriction and longevity was the CALERIE trial. The results from the CALERIE trial indicate modest caloric restriction of about 12 percent reduces cardiometabolic risk factors after two years. These risk factors included reducing LDL cholesterol, reducing total cholesterol, decreasing blood pressure, and increasing insulin sensitivity. This showcases the possibility of modest caloric restriction improving cardiometabolic health outcomes but we do not know whether this plays out for more than two years. The benefits commonly cited for fasting are nearly the same as typical caloric restriction and the evidence for caloric restriction leading to improved longevity is limited.

A seemingly vague term thrown around is “autophagy”. What is autophagy? Autophagy is a process of targeted cellular destruction that seems to act as quality control for a cell. In essence, the cell is sort of “cleaning itself” by getting rid of harmful molecules or dysfunctional parts of the cell. This process begins to stall as we age, leading to progressive accumulation of damaged proteins and cellular organelles to occur. Some genetic work in mice shows early mortality if the genes related to autophagy are messed with, this research points to the importance of autophagy for physiological processes. Of course we cannot overextrapolate mice studies to humans but we do know this process seems to be an important cellular process.

Some of this mechanistic work showcases increased levels of neuronal autophagy with short term fasting in mice. However, this does not necessarily tell us much without human clinical trials and outcome data. Interest in this topic is justifiable as autophagy relates to aging, brain health, cancer, and more. We just need to specify how this process exactly works in humans, what does increasing autophagy actually mean, how this process specifically relates to disease outcomes, and tested interventions (in humans) showing the efficacy of manipulating autophagy through something like fasting. The evidence just is not there, which describes most of the biohacking community.

Hype often overshadows evidence in these “biohacking” communities. Maybe this is due to the fear of death.