Prelude
Published on Nov 7, 2024
For the SEO (if that's still a thing), I would just like to state that LifeProtocol is an app to log what you eat and see what comes out at the other end. It's designed to address some of the shortcomings of alternatives and make the process as user-friendly as possible.
But for now, let's take a step back...
There's an idea that one might call Solution 42 or perhaps Silver Bullet Philosophy. Adherents postulate that big problems will not be solved by small solutions. It is the belief that the little man does not, in fact, make a difference. Some may consider it a form of nihilism and do so in a disparaging way. But in many cases, it's easy to use the reality of the world to argue for this stance. The pertinent contemporary issue to which this, one might call it an ideology, may be applied is global climate change. While companies are shaming consumers into kicking in a few extra monetary units on purchases to offset emissions, and students are skipping school to glue themselves to airport runways, the 42-er is less fazed. The number of actors in this game and the irreconcilable misalignment of incentives between the uncountable world citizens is simply too great. Only a fundamental innovation in society or technology can solve this issue. If not, we will either find out it wasn't so bad in the end or the world will suffer the consequences, be it in a long, depressing decline of the natural world or the cataclysmic decimation of humanity through extreme heat, natural catastrophes, and warfare for the remaining habitable land. Or perhaps we will just terraform Mars and start growing açai berries there. The only possible outcome is whatever increasing entropy produces. The important point is that paying an extra 2% to offset your flight home for New Year won't keep world temperatures under some heat threshold. Only a groundbreaking technical innovation or a drastic global event will. Everyone places on some scale of how much they follow this philosophy, depending on the particular issue and their general nature. Regardless of where the reader places, this is an interesting lens through which to view the purpose of LifeProtocol.
So let's bring it back to our matter at hand. Minding your health is, in part, about solving the age-old problem of our seemingly inevitable mortality. And for this issue, here are a few conceivable 42-style solutions on the horizon that will make all other efforts meaningless: One idea is that we will slowly morph into a more cyborg-like existence and eventually transition onto a different plane of existence (think of the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror). Plausible... Another solution that seems tangible in the not-too-distant future, and is perhaps more appealing to some, is that we manage to reverse-engineer enough of our physical nature to create a true youth serum. We will grant ourselves regenerative abilities superior to that of the axolotl by printing programmable stem cells to inject into our bodies. Ultimately, the complexity of the human anatomy has a limit, and we must surely be getting close. Now, this is where the 42-er should listen up. Because to book yourself a ticket to the next episodes of humanity's cataclysmic impact on this planet and the universe, you will have to survive until we can live forever. And for now, that means staying healthy through the little things: exercise, sleep, not riding a motorcycle or flying down a mountain in a wingsuit, and most pertinently, keeping tabs on what you put in your body.
You can tell a story about nutrition science that goes something like this: A researcher at some university wants to publish a paper to get some citations. She realizes that no one has done a study on whether Food X increases or decreases the amount of Chemical Y found in your body. Hence, she goes out and finds some people: half of them eat the food for a week, the other half don't, and then she measures how much of Chemical Y is in their body, does some statistics, and publishes the result. Some other researcher realizes that no one has published any results on the relationship between Chemical Y and Health Outcome Z. So he goes and does a similar process: finds some people, measures some chemicals, runs some statistics, and publishes some result. It is now scientifically proven that eating Food X increases/decreases your chances of ending up with Health Outcome Z. From now on until the end of time, every other researcher that comes along will just take this as a given, and nutritionists will base their recommendations on it. Of course, this is an oversimplification, but ultimately it is a useful one, and many academics are likely to concur at least in principle.
It's easy to see the shortcomings here. At every stage of the process, trade-offs need to be made in order to generalize the findings and reach a scientific consensus. And furthermore, the current state of technology limits us to only ever studying very isolated aspects of our physiology and usually by indirect and convoluted means. So, here's another story about nutrition: When an avocado travels through your digestive system, it is broken down and processed by a combination of enzymes, acids, bacteria, etc. The composition of all the aforementioned depends on what you have eaten recently, what you ate as a child, any illnesses you may currently have, your genetic makeup, whether or not you're stressed right now, who you sat next to at the bus this morning, and probably a bunch of other factors. So no researcher at any university can really tell you confidently what that avocado will do for you now, in ten minutes, or in ten years. Even the composition of the avocado will differ greatly depending on how old it is, where you bought it, and what was in the soil it grew in. The point being that understanding the impact of what you eat on your body is a very particular matter. When some article talks about the curious diet of some elite endurance athlete, you need to remember that they have a team of people looking at their physical markers regularly and fine-tuning the intake of certain nutrients to match that profile.
All of this is to say that if
- you are someone who wants to live a healthy and long life
- you are already using some gadgets to track your sleep, your exercise, and other stuff
- you don't quite have enough money to pay for the kind of treatment that Bryan Johnson is getting
- and you also don't believe that his intentions when selling you $60 olive oil that is literally called Snake Oil are entirely pure
then you might want to consider using LifeProtocol to take the next step in scientific inquiry into your own physique.
Because some some challenges may not have small solutions, but big things have small beginnings.