How to Talk to People - How to Defy Death

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

Humans have always tried to prolong life and battle mortality, but what do the current influx of biohackers reveal about this era of individual responsibility?  Timothy Caulfield, a professor and the research director at the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, studies how health and science are represented in the public sphere. The lines between wellness culture, longevity, and biohacking are beginning to blur, and Caulfield offers advice about how to dodge misinformation and unproven theories while still pursuing a long and meaningful life.  Listeners, how do you think about aging? Please leave us a voicemail (202-266-7701) with your name, your age, and answers to the following questions: What aspects of aging are you nervous about? What are you looking forward to as you age? Who do you hope to be like when you are older? Is there someone in your life who has made you excited to get older? Leaving a voicemail means that you are consenting to the possibility of The Atlantic using your audio in a future episode of How To. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To support sustainable food production, BHP is building one of the world's largest hot ash mines in Canada. Essential resources responsibly produced. It's happening now at BHP, a future resources company. Do you want to live forever? I don't know. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Like, of course I want to live, like, a long and healthy and happy life. I would love to live to, like, 90. You know, enjoy the time with my family and friends.

But, like, thinking about how tired I am now at 37, like, can you imagine how exhausted you'd be at 100, 150? I don't want to live forever, but I'm really scared of death. I mean it's kind of the one thing we really don't know anything about, right? And I feel like I want to get to the bottom of everything. I want the answers, and that's one we don't get answers about. Maybe that's why we're so tired. Exhausted.

I'm exhausted. I'm Yasmin Tayeg, a staff writer with The Atlantic. And I'm Natalie Brennan, producer at The Atlantic. This is How to Age Up. Yasmin, you've been reporting on science, health, culture for the last what, decade? It's been a decade. From your perspective, does this current moment of longevity culture feel different to you? Or is this just, you know, humans have always been obsessed with figuring out how to defy death? I would say that we could look at any decade, even any century, and see that there were

health trends that were prominent. In the 1700s, people were doing bloodletting, cutting open a vein to let a couple ounces of blood out. Because they thought you could get rid of illness in the body and be healthier. And 200 years later, John Harvey Kellogg, the serial guy, he was basically like the TikTok wellness influencer of the time., he was basically like the TikTok wellness influencer of the time and he was promoting things like electric light bathing. What's that? It's lying in a box surrounded by lights. And he said this would like cure basically

any ailment. I'd give it a try. Kellogg also pushed things like three gallon enemas. Whoa. Kellogg also pushed things like three-gallon enemas because he was very into the idea of cleansing your insides and outsides to be healthy. And people loved this stuff. Like he had this spa where he would offer these treatments and so many people went. I think one thing that's really interesting to me is as this wellness culture was becoming quite popularized in the 18th century, it's

almost at the same time in which enlightenment is becoming the more dominant theory that's beginning to challenge religion. And so much of wellness culture today, to me,, feels like it's trying to be the central organizing principle in our lives that, you know, maybe religion used to take the place of. You know, I think what religion offers people is a set of instructions for living your life. Yeah. And so if that's not being passed down by God, you gotta find it somewhere else. And I think the particular flavor of wellness right now

tells us a lot about where we are culturally. I think that's right. We have an administration that's looking to prioritize or politicize health as a main tenant of its policy. There's a growing culture of people who are undergoing very extreme measures to try and live longer. And also it seems like every day I marketed a different supplement promising to improve me somehow.

And I think the big question I have though is, improve what? Like what are we really trying to address or fix? There's this idea that if you're not doing this, there's something wrong with you. It's a noble pursuit, right? It's a noble pursuit. It's a righteous movement. So, Natalie, that's Timothy Caulfield. He's a professor and the research director at the Health Law Institute at University of Alberta.

He and his research team look at the ways that health and science are represented in the public sphere. So from product labels to misinformation and the promotion of unproven theories on social media. And we talked about the ways wellness culture, longevity, and especially biohacking are beginning to blur. Well, I think that's a term that has taken on different lives, too. You know, when I first started exploring biohacking, it was very much this idea

of putting a microchip in your body or doing something kind of physical, using technology and merging it with the human body. I think biohacking now has morphed into the idea of, it includes that stuff, but it also includes using some kind of technique or procedure or supplement in order to optimize yourself. And I think in some ways, procedure or supplement in order to optimize yourself. And I think in some ways, there has been a pivot from wellness and the alternative medicine

universe to the language of longevity. And I think it's been a shift from kind of other ways of knowing and perhaps culturally different ways to approach health to the science-y kind of language of longevity. And the reality is it's all the same noise being repackaged as longevity. So can you give me an example of one or two specific forms of biohacking that have become popular? The cold plunges now has become really common.

You hear influencers talking about it's very common in the manosphere, that masculine online influencer space. A cold plunge is a pretty extreme activity, right? And you might be doing it with a community of individuals which can make it fun and make it feel like it has a little bit more validity to it. And look, there are some studies that hint that it might have an impact on your immune system, and these are very preliminary, but the reality is there is no good evidence to suggest that

cold plunges are going to have a dramatic impact on your health. And certainly there's no evidence to suggest it's going to help you live longer. And I think we see that a lot in the biohacking longevity space, sort of a misrepresentation of the the complexity and nuance of the actual relevant research. Supplements is another I think really, really common biohacking tool that we're seeing now. And again, the supplement industry is absolutely massive. It's a multi-billion dollar industry

that is built on a foundation of very sketchy, questionable science, very light regulation. And yeah, look, I want to be really careful, major caveat here, if you go to a science informed clinician and they tell you you have a specific deficiency, that's different from the messaging that is emanating about supplements from the longevity industry. So I think those are two really common examples.

I mean, I have to admit, I have done the cold plunge. I was very skeptical going in, but I really enjoyed it. I felt amazing after. And I don't want to dismiss that, right? If people do find that invigorating, that's a thing. That's a thing that's not to be dismissed. But the promise here is actual sort of biological change, right? That it's going to have a measurable impact

on how long you live. And we just don't have good studies to back that up. So what's an example of a biohacking practice that did have science behind it, but might still be problematic? There have been examples of, you know, extreme diets. You're probably familiar with the intermittent fasting trend, right? And that's a fascinating story.

There's been interesting animal studies and even sort of studies with humans that have suggested that it might promote longevity. The problem is, I think it can also, I think, promote disordered eating. Short term, like so many diets, they have helped people lose weight, but it's hard to maintain an extreme diet. There's really strong evidence to support this. The best diet is the diet that's healthy, sustainable, and works for you. That's the best diet, right?

A healthy diet is one that is healthy, sustainable, and works for you. That's the best diet, right? A healthy diet is one that is healthy, sustainable, and works for you. And that often means something that you enjoy. I have to admit, I love a cold plunge. Right? I love a cold plunge. Or I guess what I mean is I love to jump into cold water. Where do you do this? Anywhere I could jump into cold water. If I could jump in the East River, I'd be swimming in it.

Please never do that. I will never do that. On New Year's Day this year, I was at my best friend's house in LA and her parents have a pool and it was filled even though it was January. It's not heated. Okay. And I was like, it's New Year's Day, I need to cleanse. And we jumped in together and it was the just sweetest moment of my year so far, honestly.

I felt amazing for the rest of the day. I can appreciate a lot of the factors there are just I'm with my best friend and it's a special day. And as somebody who spends a ton of time in my own head, water is a thing that really brings me into my body. Yeah, and the jolt of coal just like shocks all the thoughts out of you. But I'm interested in this idea about the placebo effect. In 1955, a researcher named Henry Beecher published an influential paper called The Powerful Placebo. Its findings were debated for decades, but now there's wider scientific consensus that the placebo effect is real.

So in a classic placebo effect trial, the control group wouldn't know that they're the control group, right? So let's say one group is given a real medication and the other is given a placebo pill and neither group knows which trial they're a part of. But there was a study by Harvard Medical School that found that the placebo effect was up to 50% as effective as real drugs. Big. Huge. And they tested it by giving one group a migraine drug labeled with the drug's name.

Okay. And another group took a placebo that was labeled placebo. Oh, they knew. They knew. They knew they were getting the placebo. Which may indicate that knowing you're being subject to a placebo doesn't ruin the effects. Which is all to say, listeners who are worried about that we just ruined cold plunges for them, enjoy. Yeah, you know, if you believe it's going to make you feel awesome, it will. Maybe it will.

It maybe will. But I think, you know, what I would like to see is to reframe these practices. If you love being at your friend's house and jumping into a cold pool on New Year's Day, like, do that, absolutely. But don't believe that it's going to make you live longer or be healthier. It might make you happier. Most definitely. It might make you happier. And, you know, that's important, too. Doing things that make you happy, be in community, create joy, are good for your health.

Totally. But the promise that we're being sold that all of these very specific practices are the key to living longer, that one we need to analyze a bit. Tim, we've been talking a lot about how biohacks are promoted as science-based, even when they aren't necessarily. So I'm curious, what's the larger impact that this has on public understanding of science more broadly? We've actually done a lot of research on this. I call it scienceploitation. So you take real science, exciting science often, science that has gotten a lot of attention

in the popular press and in the information environment more broadly, and you take the language of that science in order to push misinformation or questionable therapies. One of the best examples of that, the stem cell space. I've worked in this space right from the beginning, from the late 90s forward. I've been very closely connected to the stem cell research community. It is a genuinely exciting area of research.

And there was a moment when it was the most, like it was headlines kind of research, and there was a moment when it was the most, like it was headlines kind of research field. It was controversial because it involved embryo research. And because of that, we got a lot of hyped language about the value and the potential for stem cells to revolutionize healthcare. That language, and by the way, that was hyped and probably not justified given how complex science,

science is hard. Science is hard. Stem cell, I still have to explain stem cells every time I mention them in an article. It's hard. And it remains exciting, right? It remains exciting. But that language, the stem cell language

has migrated to pop culture and it's everywhere. The word stem cell, it's on facial cream, it's on beauty products more broadly, it's on shampoo. A bottle might say contains apple stem cells or contains organic, all natural stem cells. And we know research also tells us that using science-y language like stem cells does create a veneer of legitimacy.

It does make it seem more believable, even if the use of the word doesn't fit with the product. And of course, what's really happening there is they're trying to leverage the genuine and justified excitement about a real field of research in order to give their product a veneer of scientific legitimacy. We've seen it happen with precision medicine.

Everything's personalized now. And it works. And holy cow, it really is happening in the longevity space, right? Because these are individuals that wanna lean into the cutting edge. They wanna lean into things that are sort of in front of the curve.

And so therefore it makes it more enticing, it makes it seem more legitimate, it makes it seem like they're doing the best they possibly can to live longer. And scienceploitation, as I call it, has become a very, very common marketing ploy. In fact, I think it's almost universal now. If there's a health or a nutritional product, there's almost some degree of science ploitation associated with it. Well, you know, with science ploitation so rampant,

how is the average consumer, who is maybe not super well versed in how to assess the value of a study, how are they supposed to make sense of all of this? If you see a face cream that says stem cells will renew your skin, how do you know if that's real or not? Assume nothing works. I once pitched a book called Nothing Works,

and the editor was like, okay, that's a little dark. Okay, that's a little dark. But you can almost do that. If there was some kind of revolutionary new approach to doing something, I promise we would know. There would just be this broad acceptance of it. And for most of the things that we want to improve our life, we know the answer. There really are very few, if any, magical answers. Let's remind people what works. What are those things that we should know and not take for granted?

Yeah. Look, you don't smoke. You exercise. You know, move. Just move. Do what you love, whether that's flipping tires or dancing or walking. Just do something you love. You eat healthy.

You sleep. You take the logical preventative steps, right? You wear a seatbelt, you get vaccinated, you drink less alcohol, right? Less is best. And you surround yourself with people you love and you have a good community. That's it, right?

Oh, oh, the very most important thing you need to do, pick the right parents, right? Make sure you have the right parents, right? Make sure you have the right parents, because that speaks to the genetic luck component to it. But more importantly, unfortunately, it speaks to socioeconomics, it speaks to equity, it speaks to the injustices that permeate our societies,

that really have an impact on how long you're going to live. Everything else you do, everything else you do, at best is nibbling at the edges, and might be even hurting those other things. Do you have any advice for people who are genuinely trying to understand the research? Like, they really want to figure out, is this real, interesting new science, or is it just

science exploitation? Never fall for what's often called the single study syndrome, right? So if it's one study that sort of counters a body of evidence, that's interesting. But always remember, you have to generally be patient and wait for the science to evolve, wait for a body of evidence to emerge, and wait for the science to evolve, wait for a body of evidence to emerge. And always remember that science is hard and it takes a very long time to go from an animal study to a clinical study to actually being in the clinic or being on your shelves at

a grocery store. It takes an extremely long time if it ever is going to happen at all. How do you respond to people who say that data sources are biased or corrupted in some ways? This is something I encounter a lot in my work where, for example, on a story I recently worked on about raw milk, a raw milk farmer told me that all of the data that I was looking at was produced by institutions that were funded by Big Ag.

And so how do you counter that sort of thinking? Well, so I think being transparent about that reality is important. And I think it's also important to highlight that on most of these topics, raw milk included, we can look at a body of evidence that points in the same direction regardless of who the researchers are and how they're funded. I often hear people's frustration that there isn't more scientific attention paid to alternative therapies. And perhaps if there were, we'd have more information about the benefits of cold plunges,

for example. With something like cold plunges, first of all, there has been research on it. I think there's ongoing research on it. And I applaud individuals that are working in this space. But I also, and this is where the frustration comes in. Should research really be driven by pop culture interest in a topic, or even the need to debunk something

because of the pop culture interest in the topic, or should it be driven by scientific plausibility? Unfortunately, too often, our scientific resources are devoted to topics that have become popular and we're devoting resources to them because we have to debunk them. And of course, a really good example of that is something like the Wakefield study that suggested vaccines are tied to autism. Think of the tens of millions of dollars and the resources, right? And the researcher time that's been wasted proving, you know, definitively that there's

no connection between autism and vaccines. And the only reason we had to do that is because, you know, in pop culture, that myth took on a life of its own, but we continue to study it because we need more data to debunk it. Still, I recognize and I'm glad that people want evidence on their things they're interested in. That instinct is healthy. The instinct for wanting more evidence on something and good evidence, that's a good

instinct and that should be supported. We're going to take a short break but when we come back, what's really going on here in this pursuit for longevity? So if you look at even people like Brian Johnson, I mean how often is that guy photographed with his shirt off? Every time. Have you ever seen him with a shirt on? So I think that tells us something. More on the Longevity Movement and its charisma after the break. from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe to The Atlantic. A subscription gives you access to all our award-winning journalism, and you can listen to as many articles as you want online or in the Atlantic app. Your subscription helps fuel our journalism online, in the magazine, and on our podcasts.

So subscribe today at theatlantic.com slash Podsub. Okay, Martin, let's try one. Remember big. Subscribe today at theatlantic.com slash pod sub. 25 Escape Active All-Wheel Drive from 198 bi-weekly at 1.99% APR for 36 months with $27.55 down. Wow, that's like $99 a week. Yeah, it's a big deal. The Ford It's a Big Deal event. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or Ford.ca today. So Tim, what's really going on here in this pursuit for longevity?

You know, humans have been trying to defy death forever. And I'm curious, you know, with the current longevity push, what are people really chasing? Are they really just trying to live longer? I think this is a really fascinating question because I think the answer is both yes, they want to live longer. But if you listen to these influencers and you flip through their books, they're promising more than just living longer, right? They are promising being better. They're promising sexy abs. They're promising a better love life, more success at work. It's an entire package and living better, doing it better, being better.

It's about this optimization concept. The other fascinating thing with the longevity movement, and this is interesting because I think it very much is about men, which historically was the case too, right? Living longer is very much about men. And there's this idea that if you're not doing this, there's something wrong with you. It's a noble pursuit. It's a righteous movement to be adopting all of these approaches. There's an interesting study, I think it was a qualitative study, so we have to

be careful how we interpret the data. But basically it was, you know, asking women their view on beauty products. And it was fascinating because they kind of knew they probably didn't work, maybe they worked, but they still felt compelled to use them. You know, this idea that you ought to be doing this, right? And if you're not doing this, you're failing in some way is a pressure that's always there. And is there a problem,

like what are you concerned about with that pressure existing? Well, first of all, I think that pressure is marketing tool, right? To use these often unproven therapies. I think it can be exploitive, right? And can create anxiety. There are some studies, and again,

hard to study this well, so don't over-interpret this research, but it does suggest that this kind of pressure does shift how people think about things like public health. Because the emphasis is really you. Like, it's your job, right, to do these things. And if you are not healthier and not job, right, to do these things. And if you are not healthier and not optimizing,

hey, that's your problem. It's not my problem. It's not the government's problem. It's not, you know, your community's problem. That's your problem. You know, if you emphasize sort of precision and personalization of health, it causes people to be less supportive

of public health interventions. But intuitively that feels right because it really is about you. You, you, you. The responsibility is on you. And if you're not doing it, you're failing. In pursuing all of these new biohacks, these techniques that are supposedly backed by new and cutting edge science that isn't even out there yet. It makes me wonder if there's an element of mistrust involved in rejecting that public health science

that we already have long known about. Do you think mistrust plays a role? I do. I do. I think it's really important to recognize that historically there are groups that have been treated terribly by the healthcare system, by the scientific community, women and people of colour not listened to, their problems not taken seriously by conventional medicine, the biomedical research institution has not done enough research on women. The same with people of color. So this is a genuine problem.

Unfortunately, what's happening is the wellness industry, the longevity industry, they're exploiting that issue. They're not fixing it, they're exploiting it. They're creating more distrust in the conventional system and not rectifying the problems with the conventional system in order to sell products, to sell ideologies, to sell a brand. So it infuriates me because these are real problems that need to be fixed. We didn't get it right. You know, let's try to fix the problem, not sell products on the back of the problem.

Yasmine, do you remember the other day we were working on an episode and I happened out of the corner of my eye to see on your computer a headline about having a crayon's worth of microplastic in my brain. I do remember that. You were freaked out. I did not like that. And do you remember what I asked you? What did you say? I instinctively was like, what do I do? And you said some very practical responses like, switch to glass containers, make sure your cutting board isn't plastic. But it was not enough to quiet my mind.

I spiraled for a full day. Oh. Because the things that are in my control, right, my Tupperware, for example, feel so disproportionate to all the factors that are out of my control. And so I really understand the impulse right now to want to take matters into your own hands when it comes to health and wellness, when you feel like there are all of these

systems that don't have your health in mind. That is so real. Like, that is such a real way to feel right now. Like, you are not in control of so many things that affect your health. Our bodies are supposed to be our ground zero for autonomy and control. Right. And there is something so empowering about being able to make healthy choices for yourself, especially if regulation is not keeping the plastic out of

our brains. And it's even more frustrating to realize that there are companies that know that you and thousands of other people are feeling that way and have convinced you that you can buy your way out of that fear. And that's only looking at things through the individual perspective again, right? Because I want the crayons out of all the people I love's brains too, not just my own and even all the brains I don't know. I don't want to see a crayon anywhere. You know, I didn't think of it until Tim mentioned it, but it's really true that what feels so pertinent to

this particular moment is how individualized the pursuit of living longer feels. It's all about you and what you can do. Which is so ironic because I have to guess that if we looked at the times in which the human lifespan has actually increased the most, I would guess it would be directly correlated with the invention of public health initiatives. Oh, before we started to pasteurize milk in like the late 1800s, a huge number of kids died from drinking bacteria-tainted milk. And once pasteurization became standard, it turned that around. The

kids stopped dying from milk. And then obviously vaccination, one of the biggest public health initiatives. It was estimated to have saved over 150 million lives in the last 50 years. And you know, things we take for granted, like clean water or like an actual sewage system instead of like flushing your waste into the East River, hugely decrease deaths from illnesses. But these inventions often take time, right? Like these new initiatives can move slowly. So what do we do now while we wait. So I want to zoom out a little bit and come back to this question of how are people supposed

to try to live longer if that is something they want to do. In your new book, Certainty of Illusion, you discuss the illusion of thinking you have the answers to everything because we have so much information at our fingertips. The illusion is the certainty. But how can people break free of the illusion that they can hack their way into living longer? Life is pretty random, you know, and we want to control it. And that's one of the reasons conspiracy theories emerge, right? You know, people desire patterns, they desire answers, they want answers that sort

of fit with their worldview. So, you know, recognize that there often is a lot of uncertainty and randomness, and get comfortable with that. And there's a lot of uncertainty in science. Science is about uncertainty, right? Evidence can evolve. If science said one thing 20 years ago, and science isn't a person, it's not an institution, it's not an industry, science is a process, right? And if we use that scientific process to come to a conclusion 20 years ago,

and that has evolved, science isn't wrong, that's science working, right? You know, aspirin, you know, our view on who should be taking aspirin as a preventative measure, that's evolved, right? You know, our view on using BMI as a tool for public health, that's evolved. That's a good thing, that's science evolving.

Don't view it as a reason to get frustrated about public health or the institution of science. Celebrate that evolution of science and of evidence because if you're not using that systematic tool to accumulate knowledge, if you're not using science to try to understand our world and make decisions, what are you going to use? We might have a huge breakthrough. And if that does happen, it's going to be really big news. I often ask, I did this on, on my last class, just last week, I asked the class name 10 genuinely big scientific health breakthroughs that have happened in the

last century, right? Genuinely transformative health breakthroughs that have happened in the last century, right? Genuinely transformative health breakthroughs. It's hard. It's hard, right? They've actually revolutionized. So you've got like clean water, that's more than a hundred years. You have, you know, antibiotics. The list is pretty short, right? It's pretty, pretty short. You know, the new GLP ones like Ozempic and its competitors,

I think that's fascinating, right? Recognizing that we're still accumulating evidence about side effects and long-term benefits and harms, but it's a pretty short list. And so remember that, right? Remember that and lean back and lean into those basic things we can do for ourselves and really, really importantly for our community, building communities that foster those basic things.

Aging shouldn't become a contest, you know, that you suffer through to get to the finish line. It's not a contest. And holy cow, it sounds kind of new agey for a guy such as science geek. But I think it really is about living well and enjoying life and enjoying your friends and family and enjoying the journey. How new agey is that? And the irony of course is the research tells us that living well and living a happy life and that helps with longevity too, right?

That helps that your ultimate goal too. So yeah, pulling back from this idea of optimizing every corner of your life to, hey, living well. Thanks so much, Tim. This has been such a pleasure. Thank you. Yasemin, I'm still thinking about that question that I asked you about the microplastics.

What do I do? And I think what I really wanted to hear in that moment was, it's fine. It's okay. You're like, it's not. Sorry. No, and I would know that it's not truthful, right? I know that it's not okay. It's not fine. And in cognitive behavioral

therapy, this is something called reassurance seeking. Have you heard of this? I haven't. There's this book written by these two psychologists, Martin Seif and Sally Winston, called, Needing to Know for Sure, that a friend who has a very similar internal monologue to me recommended. And it's a CBT guide for compulsive checking and reassurance seeking. So instead of trying to constantly seek affirmation that everything is okay, this book instead helps you try and sit in the uncertainty and get comfortable with the idea that often.

We just can't know what's going to happen, which is really hard. It's so hard. And I think from like a health perspective, people are bad at thinking about risk. And that's really what all of these public health interventions, all of the health interventions that are available to us are all about reducing our risk. It will make you less likely to get cancer or to have a bone fracture later in life. But it's never guaranteed. That's the whole thing about risk.

There's no 100% sure way to get rid of everything, but you're bringing that risk down a little bit, and that's the best we can do. And what I like about your conversation with Tim is that, you know, it kind of sits in a middle ground, right? We can't 100% know that a certain supplement is going to increase our lifespan. And we can't know that a new superfood is definitely going to help us age up. But there are these tangible steps that we can work into our day-to-day at any point to commit to a practice of living healthier. Yeah.

We don't have all the answers, but we have some of the answers. And I think I can sit in that. That might be enough for me. And for the days that I can't, when I can't sit in that thought, those are the days that I delight in jumping into water. That's all for this episode of How to Age Up.

This episode was hosted by me, Yasmin Tayag, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudina Bade and Jocelyn Frank. Fact check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smirziak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudina Bade and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdes. Next time on How to Age Up. I'm here to tell you that your mother and your grandmother are pretty much having a good time. What we can learn about the benefits of aging and what we still get wrong about menopause.

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