Longevity Without a Fortune
A three-year personal experiment. Three cohorts. One personal n=1. Under $3,000.
The cookbook in 50 words: Three years of disciplined personal longevity experimentation. Four data layers (exome, focused bloodwork, IgE/GI inflammation, wearable). The Universal Four supplements at $40/month. Three protocol tiers from $900 to $15K/year. Three small cohorts (~50 participants total) plus one personal n=1: 10-year drop in biological age, under $3,000 out of pocket. Not medical advice. See methods.
My father was a geneticist. He died in 2015. What he drilled into me was simple: go back to first principles, demand peer-reviewed evidence, and be honest about what the data can and can't tell you.
In Q2 2022 I pointed that discipline at the consumer longevity space and didn't like what I found. Parts of it were priced like luxury goods. Parts of it were marketing running ahead of any actual science. So I dropped back to one question: what data do I actually have access to that is credible and peer-reviewed? I've spent thirty years building AI systems in environments where bad data costs more than money. That same filter is what I applied here.
Answering that took a year. I built a small AI pipeline to chew through the data, formalized a program around it, then ran it through three small cohort experiments over 2022–2024. (Thirty-five enrolled in the third cohort. Eighteen finished — the dropoff itself was a finding.) Once the numbers held across cohorts I ran the same program on myself. The result: a 10-year drop in biological age, currently more than five years younger than my chronological age, for under $3,000 out of pocket. (Biological age measured via DunedinPACE — see § 2.1 for the full testing stack.)
This cookbook is the public version of what I learned. Every recipe is a decision I actually made — or chose not to make — and you should be able to reproduce any of them without a clinic, a proprietary supplement program, or the cost structure the celebrity versions quietly depend on. Six chapters, twenty recipes.
I'm not selling anything on this page. The barrier to real control of your healthspan isn't money — it's knowing which tests to order, what to ignore, and how to turn the results into the next ninety days of decisions. That's what this book is.
Results at a glance
Aggregate across three small cohort experiments I ran between 2022 and 2024. See § 6.1 Aggregate Results for the full breakdown.
Table of contents
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A year-by-year chronicle of the experiment: GI-focused diagnostics in 2022, the genetic layer in 2023, the three cohort trials, and the n=1 I ran on myself.
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Four data layers, each one adding signal the others can't.
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Four universal supplements for almost everyone.
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Skeletal muscle is the biggest lever on healthspan after thirty-five.
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Three budget tiers, minimalist to full-stack.
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What the three cohort experiments and the n=1 on myself actually produced.
How to read this
Every recipe follows the same structure: Problem (the decision you're facing), Solution (what to actually do, with costs, doses, and grades), Discussion (the reasoning and the edge cases), and See Also (cross-references to other recipes that touch the same decision).
Inline callouts flag tips (things that compound), warnings (where the conventional advice gets it wrong), and notes (caveats worth naming out loud). Anything in monospace is a specific value — a test code, a dose, a cost, a grade — that I want you to read precisely.
Pick a recipe, act on it this week.