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Nicklas Brendborg’s Fast Facts on Nature’s Secrets to Longevity

This eye-opening book offers a “clear and captivating” scientific deep dive into how plants and animals have already unlocked the secret’s to immortality – and the lessons they hold for us all. Read ahead for Nicklas’s five fast facts about nature’s secrets to longevity.


1. Some animals can live a lot longer than humans.

For instance: the oldest Greenland sharks almost twice the age of the U.S. and we sometimes find dead bowhead whales with harpoon tops from the mid-1800’s. Beyond the realm of animals there are tress alive today which are older than the pyramids, such as 5,000 year old Metuselah in California. The giant root-network superorganism Pando in Utah is even older than that, dating from the end of the last Ice Age.

2. The weirdest aging pattern of all, though, is the immortal jellyfish Turritopsis.

When this jellyfish is stressed, it can revert from its adult stage back to something called the polyp stage. That would be akin to a butterfly turning into a caterpillar again or to a person being stressed out at work and reverting to being a kindergartener again.

3. Jeff Bezos and other recently invested $3 billion to launch a startup called Altos Labs.

They have hired many of the most talented American aging researchers, aiming to transfer the jellyfish rejuvenation mechanisms into people and other things. Other big companies like Google are also involved in the aging field through their company Calico (California Life Company).

4. Lots of commonly recommended supplements for longevity, like vitamin D and fish oil, don’t actually prolong life at all.

The same goes for multivitamins and antioxidant supplements have actually been shown to decrease lifespan while making some cancers more aggressive.

5. Scientists have developed “biological clocks” which can be used to predict how long someone has left to live and determine the age of different tissues.

Among other things we have learned that breast tissue ages faster than the rest of the body which might be the reason breast cancer is such a common form of cancer.