The Best New Ways to Live Healthier—and Longer—From Apps to Experimental Treatments
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If it seems as though you’re being bombarded with more and more methods of buying your way into a longer life, full of enhanced and extended vitality… well, you are. “I think the amount of science emerging in our understanding of longevity—the reframing of aging as a disease, in a sense, as a phenomenon that can be treated—is really exciting,” says Mark Hyman, M.D., a longevity specialist. His new book, Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life, argues that we can become biologically younger, even as we age chronologically, by eating the right foods, prioritizing sleep and exercise and trying therapy. (He is 63, with an alleged chronological age two decades younger, and plans to still be hiking, heli-skiing and having sex at 100.)
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As with any new frontier, plenty of wellness prospectors are panning for gold, offering everything from apps that recommend lifestyle changes to clinics whose bespoke treatments aim to help you achieve your fitness goals faster. But remember, much of this requires serious work—so just how high up the mountain to enhanced longevity should you climb, and how do you know when you’ve reached the summit?
Tier One: Medical Metric-Tracking Apps
START: Download the InsideTracker app, which delivers health-improvement recommendations based on your medical data. Its Ultimate add-on ($659) sends a real-life healthcare professional to collect blood samples, then analyzes 44 biomarkers to calculate how well you’re aging against established standards.
LEVEL UP: Steel your nerves and subscribe to Viome, another newfangled health service, to examine your gut microbiome via a self-collected stool sample ($149). Pre- and probiotics custom blended according to your test results run $70 a month.
FALL BACK: Return to square one when you get more obsessed with gathering information about yourself than with actually implementing the suggested changes. “Collecting data for data’s sake” is counterproductive, according to Harry Jameson, CEO of Pillar, a company that creates wellness programming for high-end hotels, residential developments and corporations. (Memberships at London’s new Raffles Hotel will launch this month.) “So should you track it? Yes,” he says. “But only if you’re going to do something about it.”
Tier Two: The Doctor-Enhanced Training Regimen
START: Book an appointment at Advitam, the New York City “metabolic aesthetics” clinic run by plastic surgeon David Shafer, M.D. Here to boost progress toward your health goals, specialists design a custom cocktail of peptides, which are administered via IV and intramuscular injections at regular intervals, starting at $750 a month. Shafer says the treatments can speed up weight loss, enhance muscle-building and even help you heal from surgeries faster.
LEVEL UP: Don’t want to do your amplified workouts on your own? Enroll in a membership at a health facility such as London’s plush Lanserhof at the Arts Club (about $4,800 to $14,500 annually), where you can do everything from your daily iron-pumping and cardio to cryotherapy and full-body MRIs under the supervision of licensed trainers, physical therapists and physicians.
FALL BACK: Restart this level when you mistake the enhancements for the source of your progress—and reverse your gains by overdoing it at happy hour or during dessert. “The best patients already have a good diet, are already exercising, already take care of themselves, but feel like they’re not reaching their maximum potential,” Shafer says. “And then this is what pushes them over the edge.”
Tier Three: The Cord-Cutting Wellness Vacation
START: Check out our guide to the world’s newest (or most improved) wellness retreats, select one of the five properties featured therein, and book a week—plus as many additional training sessions, treatments, and classes as you think you can handle.
LEVEL UP: For the deepest dive into improving your physical, mental and emotional states, check into the Kusnacht Practice, a Swiss health clinic whose clients check in for discreet and comprehensive analysis of everything from their cholesterol to their psychology. A week here will set you back about $117,000, though the suggested minimum stay is longer. (Some clients remain well past 30 days; at least one spent a full year.)
Why so long? Each resident is assigned a team of 35, composed of several physicians, a psychiatrist, a dietitian, and a chef—you even get a dedicated wellness buddy should you check in solo. Together they scour thousands of data points to identify virtually every method that might enhance your longevity and craft a plan for you to integrate the right ones into your everyday life.
FALL BACK: You get so obsessed with health that, after checkout, you stop living in the real world. “If you go out with friends and you are the only guy not having fun, before you know it, it will hurt all your relationships in life,” says Kusnacht Practice CEO Eduardo Greghi, a passionate polo player who indulges in the occasional glass of Bordeaux—and doesn’t mind if some clients do, too.
Tier Four: Your Own Private Laboratory
START: Have a zest for trying the most cutting-edge treatments you can get? “There’s a whole category of therapies that are emerging on the experimental side that are a little more invasive, more intensive, a little more costly,” Hyman says, pointing to hyperbaric oxygen therapy, ozone therapy, exosomes, stem cell treatments, and plasmapheresis, a method of cleaning the blood purported to help prevent inflammation.
LEVEL UP: All the experts interviewed by Robb Report for this story said they’d install a hyperbaric oxygen chamber in their homes if space and money—a top-of-the-line model costs about $136,000—were no object. For his part, Greghi has a room in his home dedicated to massage and intermittent hypoxia-hyperoxia treatment (IHHT), an oxygen protocol that removes damaged mitochondria and encourages the development of new ones. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from installing both a hyperbaric chamber and an IHHT system.
FALL BACK: You buy into a fashionable therapy that hurts more than it helps. “You’re kind of in new territory, and it’s not always evidence-based, and you’re experimenting on yourself,” Hyman says. “When you do that, you might see benefits, but you also might see harm.”
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