[troutman]

Originally Posted by jolinar of malkshor

It does sound like sci, in fact it still is. Get the book. They explain it really well. The major thing about the book is that they explain to you how to live to reach that day. They claim that if one follows their directions you would increase your life span by several decades.

Although interesting, I would say the book is speculative. There are certainly many critics/skeptics of these ideas:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m.../ai_n29309524/

WHAT DOES AMERICA'S LEADING integrative medicine gum Andrew Weft have to say on the subject of aging and longevity? In Healthy Aging he agrees that "There are no anti-aging medicines. Scientific evidence is incomplete at best, and totally lacking at worst, for all of the products and services."

Kurzweil is a denier who is running scared and wants to believe he can cheat death. He is brilliant in his own field, but is a poor judge of medical studies. He has fallen into the same trap Linus Pauling did when he aggressively promoted vitamin C and orthomolecular medicine on the basis of preliminary evidence that was later discredited. It is sad to see a good intellect fall prey to obsessions and delusions; it is sadder to see those delusions aided and abetted by a medical doctor in a folie a deux; it is sadder still when books are published encouraging others to share their delusions.

Oh, by the way, he [Weil] sells the supplements he recommends.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=346

Much nonsense has been written in the guise of longevity medicine. In Fantastic Voyage, Ray Kurzweil explains why he takes 250 pills every day and spends one day a week at a clinic getting IV vitamins, chelation, and acupuncture. He is convinced this regimen will keep him alive long enough for science to figure out how to keep him alive forever. In Healthy Aging, Andrew Weil chips in with his own mixture of science and magic. I pointed out the flaws in their reasoning in a review for Skeptic magazine – available online. There are many other popular books that promise to tell you how to live longer. Most of them amount to little more than speculation based on extrapolations from animal studies, in vitro studies, and odd non-clinical facts.

There simply is no evidence that any intervention will extend the human life span. The most promising idea from animal studies, severe calorie restriction, is not practical or palatable and would make adequate nutrition difficult. We don’t know how to prolong human life to, say, 130 years; but we do know how to prevent a number of diseases from causing premature demise at 60 or 70. That’s what real “longevity medicine” means.

To counteract all the belief-based and speculation-based “longevity medicine,” we needed a science-based longevity book. And now we have it. Carl Bartecchi, MD and Robert W. Schrier, MD have written a book entitled Living Healthier and Longer – What Works, What Doesn’t. The price is right – it is available online for free download.

This book is based firmly on science. It covers major diseases, risk factors, and the interventions that have been tested and shown to improve outcome. It doesn’t promise survival beyond the expected life span, but it shows you how to minimize the risk of avoidable diseases and live as long as possible given the constraints of genetic inheritance and the accidents of chance.