The Benefits Of Young-Blood Transfusion Don’t Come From Drinking It!:
So since the time of the alchemists, Ponce DeLeon, and probably even before the Ancient Egyptians,
Immortality and Eternal Youth have been among mankind’s fondest fantasy-goals as many of you might guess.
But thanks to some very silly editors and the internet, an old-wives’-tale with a tiny shred of truth has been recently-circulated in a stupid, yet seasonally-appropriate game of “Telephone”. -Drinking human blood…
Seasonally-Appropriate Stupidity
So we’ve all seen the monster-movies with the scary-vampires,
Not the sparkly-ones; the other guys that would bite your face off in a heartbeat.
And since the Dark-Ages, that myth of drinking-blood as a source of eternal youth has been kicking-around, even without Bram Stoker.
As luck would have-it, editors at The Sun UK are so ingeniously-stupid they misrepresented the modern-science that Really Does support a kind-of vampirism to increase youthfulness,
As Actual vampirism.
And the answer is No, you DO NOT drink someone else’s blood; but you Do transfuse a part of it, and yes it does work. Read on to find out how…
Just Saying, It Goes Without Saying:
Just in case there were any doubts, let’s just get it out there.
Drinking blood of any kind, yours, other people’s, or animal’s is a generally-terrible idea.
Worse than going nut-zombie and eating squirrel brains.
Especially if you have any sores, cheek-bites, or lesions in your mouth or esophagus,
It’s just a fantastic way to pick up lots of different infections, diseases, dread-mahocus, overload your system with iron or ferritin, and generally get really sick.
Internet Echo-Chamber To The Not-Rescue:
Who knows why, but maybe editors at The Sun just read their own agenda in to sensationalize science.
-But then, you tack-on The Internet Echo Chamber on top of that,
It gets re-posted on the estimable NY Post,
Then out to bastions of re-quoting like The India Times, Boston Magazine,
And then best-of-all: Twitter!
Which at that point, as we know, all hell generally tends to break-loose.
Dogs and cats sleeping together! Mass Hysteria!
But this is all based on real work that actually started with much older stuff in the 1950s,
Followed by Stanford, Harvard, and the paper both of the previous rags quoted by a researcher called Linda Partridge.
Linda Patridge Makes A Great Point:
Linda probably read the same research we did, and in her paper she just tried to make an excellent point about The Science Of Low-Hanging Fruit.
We don’t really know the full-spectrum of all active-components in the Harvard+Stanford research beyond 1 compound,
But we do know it works.
And Linda’s point was to say there are a ton of problems that particularly affect the 1st world,
And Aging is at the center of all of them.
So whether or-not we understand it fully, both Linda and Peter Thiel (who she is not affiliated with in any way),
Both recognize that there is an opportunity to improve lives with simple means,
Until the Science catches up to all the specifics and we can do it in a less Medieval way.
Here’s How Transfusion Of Young-Blood Really Works, Instead Of Drinking It:
In a series of tests by both Harvard and Stanford,
Test-mice had their circulatory-systems joined between an old mouse and a young mouse.
Those simultaneous transfusions improved just about everything in the old mice.
Brain-Activity, Muscles, Exercise Ability, Intelligence, and Memory at the minimum.
They even started moving around like young mice, too.
Other tests have even shown improvement in freaking joint-cartilage as a result of the same/similar procedure.
Even the one Linda cites in her paper showed that purified plasma from human cord-blood improved cognitive-function and activity in the hippocampus of older test-mice.
-Not directly-ingested blood all on its own.
Ambrosia Will Do Something Similar For $8000.00:
The way that Peter Thiel’s company Ambrosia wants to do it,
Is to charge people $8000.00 for 4 transfusions totaling 1.5 Liters,
And this will be using similarly-purified blood-plasma from tested & cleared disease-free young people between the ages of 16 and 25.
-Hopefully, they will find a way to take equal parts of the older-person’s blood out first and dispose of it also, Because…
PLOT TWIST! Being The Opposite Of A Vampire Works Too!:
Interestingly-enough, you too can gain a small part of these benefits,
Just by doing something that helps everyone out and has been recommended by public health officials forever.
Donating to Blood-Banks!
Yup, one of the reasons women are theorized to have longer lifespans than men is that up to a certain age, they lose more blood than men.
And some intrepid researchers out there have noticed strange-effects from the reverse-vampire procedure.
At least one person found that after aggressively-donating as much blood as the law and his health would support,
(iirc, 1 pint a month)
JUST LIKE THE TEST MICE, his previously-gray hair turned from salt & pepper back to his natural color!
All without the benefit of Nice&Easy by Clairol.
It May Have Similar Benefits To Intermittent-Fasting:
And this turns out to be a light-version of another recently-discovered source of youth: Intermittent-Fasting!
Because one of the big biological-processes that regimen is believed to initiate is: Autophagy.
-A process the body uses to accelerate the cleaning out of very specific types of wastes & buildups,
Specifically our recently-discovered nemesis: Senescent/”Zombie”-Cells.
It May Also Speed-Up Disposal Of Zombies:
Because if you listen to chatter on aging-related issues,
One of the things scientists hypothesize about Gray Hair is that you get a Zombie-Cell next to one of your color-producing cells in your scalp,
And it starts kicking out all those weird, inflammatory chemical compounds into the cells around it, screwing them all up,
And turning-off the ability of that melanocyte to make your hair its natural color.
There might even be some association with Hair-Loss too,
According to a new study on chemicals that can go through your cells and clean out inflammatory-junk called GSLs.
How Can You Do It Yourself?:
Ok, Step 1: Don’t drink other people’s blood. You will give yourself Hepatitis, Kuru, Rabies, then throw-up, and then die.
Step 2: Don’t go vampire on a goat, either. You’ll just get something lovely like Scrapie, Mad Cow Disease, Hoof & Mouth, then throw-up, and then die.
But what you CAN do is what we implied above.
1) Donate Blood Regularly if you’re cleared by all the right doctors.
2) Try Intermittent-Fasting also if your doc OKs it.
2a) The best way is to do the Time-Restricted-Eating version of this
2b) By Eating the same number of calories
2c) But just do it in an 8 hour window with 16 hours of your day set to consuming no other calories
2d) Yes, the first day is hell. But after that you’re good.
And until science goes further by
1) Creating a safe-to-use Zombie-Cell cleaner,
and,
2) Creating a Cocktail of ALL the positive-factors in young-blood besides just the first one they identified, called GDF11,
That plan is really the best approximation there is to receive similar non-vampire, non-Ambrosia benefits,
Aside from the standard: Eat Right, Exercise, Don’t Smoke, De-Stress, etc., and Living To 100 stuff.
What Does This Look Like In The Future?:
Honestly, as is true with many things Silicon Valley is willing to put VC money behind,
The first few versions of it for probably a Decade or so will be Very Expensive and reserved for only a very few people.
But after they work the kinks out & refine the process a few versions down the road,
Some version of this process will become commonplace for everyone over the age of 30 as standard preventative-medicine.
Because Linda Partridge is a very-smart and forward-thinking person.
If you can avoid or reduce a huge basket of problems that people accrue simply as part of the aging-process,
With a kinder-gentler version of a procedure pioneered by Ancient Romanians, Dark-Ages Countesses, Scottish Novelists, and Kate Beckinsale,
VC Early-Adoption Will Democratize & Scale Eventually:
Then why not do it?
People may not achieve that Alchemist/Ponce DeLeon/Dorian Gray ideal of Eternal Youth,
But what if they live 30% longer?
And feel 30 Years Younger while they do it?
That sounds like a freaking Win/Win, right?
Take the best care you can of yourself,
Make the absolute most positive, fun, energetic, best of the time you do have while you’re here!
But some day in the future maybe we’ll all get a non-drinking version of young-blood transfusions to keep ourselves youthful as long as we can; no vampires or zombies required.
Photo Credits: Sir Christopher Lee as Dracula in “The Horror Of Dracula”, by Terence Fisher, Anthony Hinds, Jimmy Sangster, Jack Asher, Bill Lenny, Hammer Film Productions, The Rank Organisation (UK), and Universal International
Links:
• Source: Snopes
• Source Study: Nature – Facing up to the global challenges of ageing [PDF] (Linda’s original article)
• HHS – Human umbilical cord plasma proteins revitalize hippocampal function in aged mice [PDF]
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