#can someone get me into a placebo group in a trial because I really think that might do it
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i think pink is my new fav colour :) my mom said it best: "i think you like pink and you just tell yourself you don't." lol. i ordered fold over pink flared leggings from Ardenes with a black butter long sleeve zip up sweater but i wish i just got the strawberry milkshake lululemon define jacket to match the leggings. maybe in december, i'll treat myself to it.
for now, i'm already buying my new hearing aids which is $7k!! plus my bff, cousin and i are looking at cruises for january. it makes me kinda nervous because i hate spending lavishly when i'm not earning an income but like, that's life. all students are broke, first of all. and getting co-op in the future should help. i already know where i want to work for 4 co-op terms and that's not including studying abroad in Europe. vaccinology research in biostats, game programming, medical imaging lab, aerospace tech company. i'd also settle for accessibility web design because that's pretty cool. it's all just really awesome and that's why i want a career in computer science at least to have that foundation really opens doors for me. i just know that i'll get tired of health research. it's different when it's more theoretical or translational, but clinical aspects of research that involves a heavy level of manipulating variables (and not in a good way), these are peoples lives we're talking about, it's just so heavy. it's different in business where it's like X and Y generates revenue. it doesn't really matter what X and Y is because the result is positive for the business and accumulates growth. but with health research, the actual result isn't positive for the real life people who are needing care. i just can't fuck with that. that's why i prefer to stick to the methods, and that goes for anything and everything. predictive modeling to assess potential adverse reactions to vaccines (efficacy and safety) based on new or historical information rather than controlling placebo groups to achieve statistically significant results even when it's not true to the sample size. although, it's still cool to learn about. i just think it's scary that there's such a fine line between theoretical and clinical statistics. it's all fun and games until someone is denied medical care, so it's like i want to take that into consideration. it's also not necessarily the branch that deals with engineering and innovation. and i like the latter part better and then generating insights and trends based on the new and improved cool thing with a theoretical basis and talk of application that never really happens. no because it's about ethics.... i am not fucking with clinical trials or some weird voodoo science shit like that. bioinformatics has a very clinical aspect to it with drug development and so it has the potential to be misleading in the ways i described. this is why i like computational neuroscience as a growing field. it's mostly theoretical without any real clinical basis and it's just so cool. the clinical application can also be totally harmless like robotic assistance tools to aid people suffering from neurodegenerative disease. if people could just take a look at our volatile healthcare system, maybe they'd stop worrying about AI taking over and realize that people are the problem. a neuro PhD student (she does opioid receptors in the brain as it relates to pain perception-- don't quote me on that) she posted an article from class where they used brain organoids and implanted them into rats who've sustained brain injury and found that the brain was establishing real connections with the artificial brain resulting in improved symptoms. so that is neuroengineering principles and from there, you could make predictions about interactions between organoids and host tissue, emphasizing understanding of neural connectivity and recovery etc. there's just so much that you can do with it. and after learning the harsh truths about clinical research, i don't think i'm very interested in that, no longer.............
i've got a few more items to drop off at salvation army this weekend and have to do a walmart and dollarama run.
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hi could someone gather all my diagnoses and write an article about how they all have super positive outcomes so I can placebo effect or project or whatever it into existence. thanks.
#since most/I think all of my diagnoses are neurological#this _should_ work#right?#can someone get me into a placebo group in a trial because I really think that might do it#i mean maybe not#but like#I haven't done that yet#and it's not like anything else has worked#fnd#functional?#yeah right#its only function is pain
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“Subliminals cannot change you from human to werewolf/lycanthrope/shapeshifter/whathaveyou! Out of all the things that can happen, that is not one of them, and most likely, if you're using subliminals to try and change into a werewolf, it's a waste of time, and you're getting scammed by someone. I know the idea of subliminals stretches far and wide to many different groups, but trust me, it isn't possible to change physical traits via subliminals. You can change mental traits and perceptions through subliminals (via the placebo effect), but changing physical traits, especially DNA, is out of the range of what any subliminal can do. Just because your subconscious picks up on the fact that you want to be a shapeshifter or werewolf does not mean that it will subconsciously tell your mind to reform and change it's DNA just for that. Any physical change that does happen is either in the range of what your body can naturally do (for example, losing weight easily due to believing you have more energy to exercise when in reality it's the same amount you've always had), or will not happen. I know a lot of subliminal makers claim to have the subject of the subliminal helping them make it (for example, a subliminal to turn someone into a werewolf might claim to have a "real werewolf" backing it), but this means absolutely nothing when it comes to how legitimate the actual product is. You do not know who is the person backing it, nor whether their claims are actually verified-for all you know you could be dealing with a set of people who are just out to con you, and claim to be werewolves, but are the furthest thing from. Even then, while there could very well be a real werewolf or shifter behind it, this does not inherently mean that the product works, or that the werewolf or shifter backing it has your best interests at hand. All that glitters is not gold. Werewolves and other shapeshifters, besides the shifting, usually do not have other powers or magical elements to them, nor are there any "requirements" for being a shifter, so a lot of the "additional effects" some subliminal makers claim that their subliminals add for the sake of the subject are plain unnecessary. Werewolves and other shifters do not have to be inherently straight or cisgender, and there is no war between shifters and any other group at this point in time. There is and should be no reason for subliminal makers to add these things in, especially if they claim to have real weres and shifters guiding them, ones who claim to have shifted, have experience under their belt, and thus are assumed to know their stuff. Last but not least, do not pay money for these things! Seriously. If anyone requires money from you for subliminals, or gives you a trial period but then wants you to "upgrade" through payment, or requires you to keep paying in order to "experience the full effects", you're probably being scammed. I know some people who do think subliminals have an effect will read this and get angry, or otherwise claim that it works for them. But, does it really work for you? Ask yourself this honestly: If you've been using them, paying for them even, do you notice actual physical effects along the lines of transformation? Or are you just experiencing muscle aches, back spasms, the normal things any human can get? Have you actually physically shifted, fully, due to the subliminals? Does it have effects on other people besides you in the same way, or are you an unique case? If so, why? Regardless of who you are, or what you believe, don't throw common sense and safety out the window when searching for answers to your problems, and don't fall for scams like these.”
Credit: https://similarworlds.com/Haylani
#kadota#kadota blog#werewolf#werewolves#real werewolf#werewolf community#shapeshifter#wolf#wolf shifter#wolven community#lycan#lycanthrope#physical shifting
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How biohackers are trying to upgrade their brains, their bodies — and human nature
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9 questions about biohacking you were too embarrassed to ask.
Even if you haven’t heard the term “biohacking” before, you’ve probably encountered some version of it. Maybe you’ve seen Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey extolling the benefits of fasting intermittently and drinking “salt juice” each morning. Maybe you’ve read about former NASA employee Josiah Zayner injecting himself with DNA using the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Maybe you’ve heard of Bay Area folks engaging in “dopamine fasting.”
Maybe you, like me, have a colleague who’s had a chip implanted in their hand.
These are all types of biohacking, a broad term for a lifestyle that’s growing increasingly popular, and not just in Silicon Valley, where it really took off.
Biohacking — also known as DIY biology — is an extremely broad and amorphous term that can cover a huge range of activities, from performing science experiments on yeast or other organisms to tracking your own sleep and diet to changing your own biology by pumping a younger person’s blood into your veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging. (Yes, that is a real thing, and it’s called a young blood transfusion. More on that later.)
The type of biohackers currently gaining the most notoriety are the ones who experiment — outside of traditional lab spaces and institutions — on their own bodies with the hope of boosting their physical and cognitive performance. They form one branch of transhumanism, a movement that holds that human beings can and should use technology to augment and evolve our species.
Some biohackers have science PhDs; others are complete amateurs. And their ways of trying to “hack” biology are as diverse as they are. It can be tricky to understand the different types of hacks, what differentiates them from traditional medicine, and how safe — or legal — they are.
As biohacking starts to appear more often in headlines — and, recently, in a fascinating Netflix series called Unnatural Selection — it’s worth getting clear on some of the fundamentals. Here are nine questions that can help you make sense of biohacking.
1) First of all, what exactly is biohacking? What are some common examples of it?
Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a different definition of biohacking. Since it can encompass a dizzying range of pursuits, I’m mostly going to look at biohacking defined as the attempt to manipulate your brain and body in order to optimize performance, outside the realm of traditional medicine. But later on, I’ll also give an overview of some other types of biohacking (including some that can lead to pretty unbelievable art).
Dave Asprey, a biohacker who created the supplement company Bulletproof, told me that for him, biohacking is “the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside you so that you have full control over your own biology.” He’s very game to experiment on his body: He has stem cells injected into his joints, takes dozens of supplements daily, bathes in infrared light, and much more. It’s all part of his quest to live until at least age 180.
One word Asprey likes to use a lot is “control,” and that kind of language is typical of many biohackers, who often talk about “optimizing” and “upgrading” their minds and bodies.
Some of their techniques for achieving that are things people have been doing for centuries, like Vipassana meditation and intermittent fasting. Both of those are part of Dorsey’s routine, which he detailed in a podcast interview. He tries to do two hours of meditation a day and eats only one meal (dinner) on weekdays; on weekends, he doesn’t eat at all. (Critics worry that his dietary habits sound a bit like an eating disorder, or that they might unintentionally influence others to develop a disorder.) He also kicks off each morning with an ice bath before walking the 5 miles to Twitter HQ.
Supplements are another popular tool in the biohacker’s arsenal. There’s a whole host of pills people take, from anti-aging supplements to nootropics or “smart drugs.”
Since biohackers are often interested in quantifying every aspect of themselves, they may buy wearable devices to, say, track their sleep patterns. (For that purpose, Dorsey swears by the Oura Ring.) The more data you have on your body’s mechanical functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you — or so the thinking goes.
Then there are some of the more radical practices: cryotherapy (purposely making yourself cold), neurofeedback (training yourself to regulate your brain waves), near-infrared saunas (they supposedly help you escape stress from electromagnetic transmissions), and virtual float tanks (which are meant to induce a meditative state through sensory deprivation), among others. Some people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these treatments.
A subset of biohackers called grinders go so far as to implant devices like computer chips in their bodies. The implants allow them to do everything from opening doors without a fob to monitoring their glucose levels subcutaneously.
For some grinders, like Zoltan Istvan, who ran for president as head of the Transhumanist Party, having an implant is fun and convenient: “I’ve grown to relish and rely on the technology,” he recently wrote in the New York Times. “The electric lock on the front door of my house has a chip scanner, and it’s nice to go surfing and jogging without having to carry keys around.”
Istvan also noted that “for some people without functioning arms, chips in their feet are the simplest way to open doors or operate some household items modified with chip readers.” Other grinders are deeply curious about blurring the line between human and machine, and they get a thrill out of seeing all the ways we can augment our flesh-and-blood bodies using tech. Implants, for them, are a starter experiment.
2) Why are people doing this? What drives someone to biohack themselves?
On a really basic level, biohacking comes down to something we can all relate to: the desire to feel better — and to see just how far we can push the human body. That desire comes in a range of flavors, though. Some people just want to not be sick anymore. Others want to become as smart and strong as they possibly can. An even more ambitious crowd wants to be as smart and strong as possible for as long as possible — in other words, they want to radically extend their life span.
These goals have a way of escalating. Once you’ve determined (or think you’ve determined) that there are concrete “hacks” you can use by yourself right now to go from sick to healthy, or healthy to enhanced, you start to think: Well, why stop there? Why not shoot for peak performance? Why not try to live forever? What starts as a simple wish to be free from pain can snowball into self-improvement on steroids.
That was the case for Asprey. Now in his 40s, he got into biohacking because he was unwell. Before hitting age 30, he was diagnosed with high risk of stroke and heart attack, suffered from cognitive dysfunction, and weighed 300 pounds. “I just wanted to control my own biology because I was tired of being in pain and having mood swings,” he told me.
Now that he feels healthier, he wants to slow the normal aging process and optimize every part of his biology. “I don’t want to be just healthy; that’s average. I want to perform; that’s daring to be above average. Instead of ‘How do I achieve health?’ it’s ‘How do I kick more ass?’”
Zayner, the biohacker who once injected himself with CRISPR DNA, has also had health problems for years, and some of his biohacking pursuits have been explicit attempts to cure himself. But he’s also motivated in large part by frustration. Like some other biohackers with an anti-establishment streak, he’s irritated by federal officials’ purported sluggishness in greenlighting all sorts of medical treatments. In the US, it can take 10 years for a new drug to be developed and approved; for people with serious health conditions, that wait time can feel cruelly long. Zayner claims that’s part of why he wants to democratize science and empower people to experiment on themselves.
(However, he admits that some of his stunts have been purposely provocative and that “I do ridiculous stuff also. I’m sure my motives are not 100 percent pure all the time.”)
Getty Images/iStockphoto
An illustration of a brain hemisphere with chips embedded.
The biohacking community also offers just that: community. It gives people a chance to explore unconventional ideas in a non-hierarchical setting, and to refashion the feeling of being outside the norm into a cool identity. Biohackers congregate in dedicated online networks, in Slack and WhatsApp groups — WeFast, for example, is for intermittent fasters. In person, they run experiments and take classes at “hacklabs,” improvised laboratories that are open to the public, and attend any one of the dozens of biohacking conferences put on each year.
3) How different is biohacking from traditional medicine? What makes something “count” as a biohacking pursuit?
Certain kinds of biohacking go far beyond traditional medicine, while other kinds bleed into it.
Plenty of age-old techniques — meditation, fasting — can be considered a basic type of biohacking. So can going to a spin class or taking antidepressants.
What differentiates biohacking is arguably not that it’s a different genre of activity but that the activities are undertaken with a particular mindset. The underlying philosophy is that we don’t need to accept our bodies’ shortcomings — we can engineer our way past them using a range of high- and low-tech solutions. And we don’t necessarily need to wait for a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, traditional medicine’s gold standard. We can start to transform our lives right now.
As millionaire Serge Faguet, who plans to live forever, put it: “People here [in Silicon Valley] have a technical mindset, so they think of everything as an engineering problem. A lot of people who are not of a technical mindset assume that, ‘Hey, people have always been dying,’ but I think there’s going to be a greater level of awareness [of biohacking] once results start to happen.”
Rob Carlson, an expert on synthetic biology who’s been advocating for biohacking since the early 2000s, told me that to his mind, “all of modern medicine is hacking,” but that people often call certain folks “hackers” as a way of delegitimizing them. “It’s a way of categorizing the other — like, ‘Those biohackers over there do that weird thing.’ This is actually a bigger societal question: Who’s qualified to do anything? And why do you not permit some people to explore new things and talk about that in public spheres?”
If it’s taken to extremes, the “Who’s qualified to do anything?” mindset can delegitimize scientific expertise in a way that can endanger public health. Luckily, biohackers don’t generally seem interested in dethroning expertise to that dangerous degree; many just don’t think they should be locked out of scientific discovery because they lack conventional credentials like a PhD.
4) So how much of this is backed by scientific research?
Some biohacks are backed by strong scientific evidence and are likely to be beneficial. Often, these are the ones that are tried and true, debugged over centuries of experimentation. For example, clinical trials have shown that mindfulness meditation can help reduce anxiety and chronic pain.
But other hacks, based on weak or incomplete evidence, could be either ineffective or actually harmful.
After Dorsey endorsed a particular near-infrared sauna sold by SaunaSpace, which claims its product boosts cellular regeneration and fights aging by detoxing your body, the company experienced a surge in demand. But according to the New York Times, “though a study of middle-aged and older Finnish men indicates that their health benefited from saunas, there have been no major studies conducted of” this type of sauna, which directs incandescent light at your body. So is buying this expensive product likely to improve your health? We can’t say that yet.
Similarly, the intermittent fasting that Dorsey endorses may yield health benefits for some, but scientists still have plenty of questions about it. Although there’s a lot of research on the long-term health outcomes of fasting in animals — and much of it is promising — the research literature on humans is much thinner. Fasting has gone mainstream, but because it’s done so ahead of the science, it falls into the “proceed with caution” category. Critics have noted that for those who’ve struggled with eating disorders, it could be dangerous.
And while we’re on the topic of biohacking nutrition: My colleague Julia Belluz has previously reported on the Bulletproof Diet promoted by Asprey, who she says “vilifies healthy foods and suggests part of the way to achieve a ‘pound a day’ weight loss is to buy his expensive, ‘science-based’ Bulletproof products.” She was not convinced by the citations for his claims:
What I found was a patchwork of cherry-picked research and bad studies or articles that aren’t relevant to humans. He selectively reported on studies that backed up his arguments, and ignored the science that contradicted them.
Many of the studies weren’t done in humans but in rats and mice. Early studies on animals, especially on something as complex as nutrition, should never be extrapolated to humans. Asprey glorifies coconut oil and demonizes olive oil, ignoring the wealth of randomized trials (the highest quality of evidence) that have demonstrated olive oil is beneficial for health. Some of the research he cites was done on very specific sub-populations, such as diabetics, or on very small groups of people. These findings wouldn’t be generalizable to the rest of us.
5) This all sounds like it can be taken to extremes. What are the most dangerous types of biohacking being tried?
Some of the highest-risk hacks are being undertaken by people who feel desperate. On some level, that’s very understandable. If you’re sick and in constant pain, or if you’re old and scared to die, and traditional medicine has nothing that works to quell your suffering, who can fault you for seeking a solution elsewhere?
Yet some of the solutions being tried these days are so dangerous, they’re just not worth the risk.
If you’ve watched HBO’s Silicon Valley, then you’re already familiar with young blood transfusions. As a refresher, that’s when an older person pays for a young person’s blood and has it pumped into their veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging.
This putative treatment sounds vampiric, yet it’s gained popularity in the Silicon Valley area, where people have actually paid $8,000 a pop to participate in trials. The billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has expressed keen interest.
As Chavie Lieber noted for Vox, although some limited studies suggest that these transfusions might fend off diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis, these claims haven’t been proven.
In February, the Food and Drug Administration released a statement warning consumers away from the transfusions: “Simply put, we’re concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies. Such treatments have no proven clinical benefits for the uses for which these clinics are advertising them and are potentially harmful.”
Another biohack that definitely falls in the “don’t try this at home” category: fecal transplants, or transferring stool from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of an unhealthy recipient. In 2016, sick of suffering from severe stomach pain, Zayner decided to give himself a fecal transplant in a hotel room. He had procured a friend’s poop and planned to inoculate himself using the microbes in it. Ever the public stuntman, he invited a journalist to document the procedure. Afterward, he claimed the experiment left him feeling better.
But fecal transplants are still experimental and not approved by the FDA. The FDA recently reported that two people had contracted serious infections from fecal transplants that contained drug-resistant bacteria. One of the people died. And this was in the context of a clinical trial — presumably, a DIY attempt could be even riskier. The FDA is putting a stop to clinical trials on the transplants for now.
Zayner also popularized the notion that you can edit your own DNA with CRISPR. In 2017, he injected himself with CRISPR DNA at a biotech conference, live-streaming the experiment. He later said he regretted that stunt because it could lead others to copy him and “people are going to get hurt.” Yet when asked whether his company, the Odin, which he runs out of his garage in Oakland, California, was going to stop selling CRISPR kits to the general public, he said no.
Ellen Jorgensen, a molecular biologist who co-founded Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, two Brooklyn-based biology labs open to the public, finds antics like Zayner’s worrisome. A self-identified biohacker, she told me people shouldn’t buy Zayner’s kits, not just because they don’t work half the time (she’s a professional and even she couldn’t get it to work), but because CRISPR is such a new technology that scientists aren’t yet sure of all the risks involved in using it. By tinkering with your genome, you could unintentionally cause a mutation that increases your risk of developing cancer, she said. It’s a dangerous practice that should not be marketed as a DIY activity.
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“At Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, we always get the most heartbreaking emails from parents of children afflicted with genetic diseases,” Jorgensen says. “They have watched these Josiah Zayner videos and they want to come into our class and cure their kids. We have to tell them, ‘This is a fantasy.’ ... That is incredibly painful.”
She thinks such biohacking stunts give biohackers like her a bad name. “It’s bad for the DIY bio community,” she said, “because it makes people feel that as a general rule we’re irresponsible.”
6) Are all these biohacking pursuits legal?
Existing regulations weren’t built to make sense of something like biohacking, which in some cases stretches the very limits of what it means to be a human being. That means that a lot of biohacking pursuits exist in a legal gray zone: frowned upon by bodies like the FDA, but not yet outright illegal, or not enforced as such. As biohackers traverse uncharted territory, regulators are scrambling to catch up with them.
After the FDA released its statement in February urging people to stay away from young blood transfusions, the San Francisco-based startup Ambrosia, which was well known for offering the transfusions, said on its website that it had “ceased patient treatments.” The site now says, “We are currently in discussion with the FDA on the topic of young plasma.”
This wasn’t the FDA’s first foray into biohacking. In 2016, the agency objected to Zayner selling kits to brew glow-in-the-dark beer. And after he injected himself with CRISPR, the FDA released a notice saying the sale of DIY gene-editing kits for use on humans is illegal. Zayner disregarded the warning and continued to sell his wares.
In 2019, he was, for a time, under investigation by California’s Department of Consumer Affairs, accused of practicing medicine without a license.
The biohackers I spoke to said restrictive regulation would be a counterproductive response to biohacking because it’ll just drive the practice underground. They say it’s better to encourage a culture of transparency so that people can ask questions about how to do something safely, without fear of reprisal.
According to Jorgensen, most biohackers are safety-conscious, not the sorts of people interested in engineering a pandemic. They’ve even generated and adopted their own codes of ethics. She herself has had a working relationship with law enforcement since the early 2000s.
“At the beginning of the DIY bio movement, we did an awful lot of work with Homeland Security,” she said. “And as far back as 2009, the FBI was reaching out to the DIY community to try to build bridges.”
Carlson told me he’s noticed two general shifts over the past 20 years. “One was after 2001, after the anthrax attacks, when Washington, DC, lost their damn minds and just went into a reactive mode and tried to shut everything down,” he said. “As of 2004 or 2005, the FBI was arresting people for doing biology in their homes.”
Then in 2009, the National Security Council dramatically changed perspectives. It published the National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats, which embraced “innovation and open access to the insights and materials needed to advance individual initiatives,” including in “private laboratories in basements and garages.”
Now, though, some agencies seem to think they ought to take action. But even if there were clear regulations governing all biohacking activities, there would be no straightforward way to stop people from pursuing them behind closed doors. “This technology is available and implementable anywhere, there’s no physical means to control access to it, so what would regulating that mean?” Carlson said.
7) One of the more ambitious types of biohacking is life extension, the attempt to live longer or even cheat death entirely. What are the physical limits of life extension?
Some biohackers believe that by leveraging technology, they’ll be able to live longer but stay younger. Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey claims people will be able to live to age 1,000. In fact, he says the first person who will live to 1,000 has already been born.
De Grey focuses on developing strategies for repairing seven types of cellular and molecular damage associated with aging — or, as he calls them, “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.” His nonprofit, the Methuselah Foundation, has attracted huge investments, including more than $6 million from Thiel. Its aim is to “make 90 the new 50 by 2030.”
Wondering whether de Grey’s goals are realistic, I reached out to Genspace co-founder Oliver Medvedik, who earned his PhD at Harvard Medical School and now directs the Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering at Cooper Union. “Living to 1,000? It’s definitely within our realm of possibility if we as a society that doles out money [to fund research we deem worthy] decide we want to do it,” he told me.
He’s optimistic, he said, because the scientific community is finally converging on a consensus about what the root causes of aging are (damage to mitochondria and epigenetic changes are a couple of examples). And in the past five years, he’s seen an explosion of promising papers on possible ways to address those causes.
Researchers who want to fight aging generally adopt two different approaches. The first is the “small molecule” approach, which often focuses on dietary supplements. Medvedik calls that the “low-hanging fruit.” He spoke excitedly about the possibility of creating a supplement from a plant compound called fisetin, noting that a recent (small) Mayo Clinic trial suggests high concentrations of fisetin can clear out senescent cells in humans — cells that have stopped dividing and that contribute to aging.
The other approach is more dramatic: genetic engineering. Scientists taking this tack in mouse studies usually tinker with a genome in embryo, meaning that new mice are born with the fix already in place. Medvedik pointed out that’s not very useful for treating humans — we want to be able to treat people who have already been born and have begun to age.
But he sees promise here too. He cited a new study that used CRISPR to target Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a genetic disorder that manifests as accelerated aging, in a mouse model. “It wasn’t a total cure — they extended the life span of these mice by maybe 30 percent — but what I was very interested in is the fact that it was delivered into mice that had already been born.”
He’s also intrigued by potential non-pharmaceutical treatments for aging-related diseases like Alzheimer’s — for example, the use of light stimulation to influence brain waves — but those probably won’t help us out anytime soon, for a simple reason: “It’s not a drug. You can’t package and sell it,” he said. “Pharma can’t monetize it.”
Like many in the biohacking community, Medvedik sounded a note of frustration about how the medical system holds back anti-aging progress. “If you were to come up with a compound right now that literally cures aging, you couldn’t get it approved,” he said. “By the definition we’ve set up, aging isn’t a disease, and if you want to get it approved by the FDA you have to target a certain disease. That just seems very strange and antiquated and broken.”
8) Biohackers also include people who engage in DIY science without experimenting on themselves. What’s that form of biohacking like?
Not everyone who’s interested in biohacking is interested in self-experimentation. Some come to it because they care about bringing science to the masses, alleviating the climate crisis, or making art that shakes us out of our comfort zones.
“My version of biohacking is unexpected people in unexpected places doing biotechnology,” Jorgensen told me. For her, the emphasis is on democratizing cutting-edge science while keeping it safe. The community labs she’s helped to build, Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, offer classes on using CRISPR technology to edit a genome — but participants work on the genome of yeast, never on their own bodies.
Some people in the community are altruistically motivated. They want to use biohacking to save the environment by figuring out a way to make a recyclable plastic or a biofuel. They might experiment on organisms in makeshift labs in their garages. Or they might take a Genspace class on how to make furniture out of fungi or paper out of kombucha.
Experimental artists have also taken an interest in biohacking. For them, biology is just another palette. The artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr from the University of Western Australia were actually the first people to create and serve up lab-grown meat. They took some starter cells from a frog and used them to grow small “steaks” of frog meat, which they fed to gallery-goers in France at a 2003 art installation called “Disembodied Cuisine.”
Boris Roessler/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg used DNA samples she received from Chelsea Manning to recreate various possible physiognomies of Manning’s face. The 3D-printed masks formed an art installation called “Probably Chelsea.”
More recently, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has used old floral DNA to recreate the smell of flowers driven to extinction by humans, enabling us to catch a whiff of them once more.
And this summer, a London museum is displaying something rather less fragrant: cheese made from celebrities. Yes, you read that right: The cheese was created with bacteria harvested from the armpits, toes, bellybuttons, and nostrils of famous people. If you’re thoroughly grossed out by this, don’t worry: The food won’t actually be eaten — this “bioart” project is meant more as a thought experiment than as dinner.
9) At its most extreme, biohacking can fundamentally alter human nature. Should we be worried?
When you hear about people genetically engineering themselves or trying young blood transfusions in an effort to ward off death, it’s easy to feel a sense of vertigo about what we’re coming to as a species.
But the fact is we’ve been altering human nature since the very beginning. Inventing agriculture, for example, helped us transform ourselves from nomadic hunter-gatherers into sedentary civilizations. And whether we think of it this way or not, we’re all already doing some kind of biohacking every day.
The deeper I delve into biohacking, the more I think a lot of the discomfort with it boils down to simple neophobia — a fear of what’s new. (Not all of the discomfort, mind you: The more extreme hacks really are dangerous.)
As one of my colleagues put it to me, 40 years ago, “test tube babies” seemed unnatural, a freak-show curiosity; now in vitro fertilization has achieved mainstream acceptance. Will biohacking undergo the same progression? Or is it really altering human nature in a more fundamental way, a way that should concern us?
When I asked Carlson, he refused to buy the premise of the question.
“If you assert that hackers are changing what it means to be human, then we need to first have an agreement about what it means to be human,” he said. “And I’m not going to buy into the idea that there is one thing that is being human. Across the sweep of history, it’s odd to say humans are static — it’s not the case that humans in 1500 were the same as they are today.”
That’s true. Nowadays, we live longer. We’re taller. We’re more mobile. And we marry and have kids with people who come from different continents, different cultures — a profound departure from old customs that has nothing to do with genetic engineering but that’s nonetheless resulting in genetic change.
Still, biohackers are talking about making such significant changes that the risks they carry are significant too. What if biohackers’ “upgrades” don’t get distributed evenly across the human population? What if, for example, the cure for aging becomes available, but only to the rich? Will that lead to an even wider life expectancy gap, where rich people live longer and poor people die younger?
Medvedik dismissed that concern, arguing that a lot of interventions that could lengthen our lives, like supplements, wouldn’t be expensive to produce. “There’s no reason why that stuff can’t be dirt-cheap. But that depends on what we do as a society,” he said. Insulin doesn’t cost much to produce, but as a society we’ve allowed companies to jack up the price so high that many people with diabetes are now skipping lifesaving doses. That’s horrifying, but it’s not a function of the technology itself.
Here’s another risk associated with biohacking, one I think is even more serious: By making ourselves smarter and stronger and potentially even immortal (a difference of kind, not just of degree), we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to alter their biology — even if they don’t want to. To refuse a hack would mean to be at a huge professional disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for remaining suboptimal when optimization is possible. In a world of superhumans, it may become increasingly hard to stay “merely” human.
“The flip side of all this is the ‘perfect race’ or eugenics specter,” Jorgensen acknowledged. “This is a powerful set of technologies that can be used in different ways. We’d better think about it and use it wisely.”
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Josiah Zayner is a biohacker who’s famous for injecting himself with the gene-editing tool CRISPR. At a time when the technology exists for us to change (or hack) our own DNA, what are the ethics of experimenting on ourselves, and others, at home? On the launch episode of this new podcast, host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks to Zayner about how he’s thinking about human experimentation today. Plus: new efforts to come up with a code of conduct for biohackers, from legislation to self-regulation.
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How biohackers are trying to upgrade their brains, their bodies — and human nature
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9 questions about biohacking you were too embarrassed to ask.
Even if you haven’t heard the term “biohacking” before, you’ve probably encountered some version of it. Maybe you’ve seen Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey extolling the benefits of fasting intermittently and drinking “salt juice” each morning. Maybe you’ve read about former NASA employee Josiah Zayner injecting himself with DNA using the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Maybe you’ve heard of Bay Area folks engaging in “dopamine fasting.”
Maybe you, like me, have a colleague who’s had a chip implanted in their hand.
These are all types of biohacking, a broad term for a lifestyle that’s growing increasingly popular, and not just in Silicon Valley, where it really took off.
Biohacking — also known as DIY biology — is an extremely broad and amorphous term that can cover a huge range of activities, from performing science experiments on yeast or other organisms to tracking your own sleep and diet to changing your own biology by pumping a younger person’s blood into your veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging. (Yes, that is a real thing, and it’s called a young blood transfusion. More on that later.)
The type of biohackers currently gaining the most notoriety are the ones who experiment — outside of traditional lab spaces and institutions — on their own bodies with the hope of boosting their physical and cognitive performance. They form one branch of transhumanism, a movement that holds that human beings can and should use technology to augment and evolve our species.
Some biohackers have science PhDs; others are complete amateurs. And their ways of trying to “hack” biology are as diverse as they are. It can be tricky to understand the different types of hacks, what differentiates them from traditional medicine, and how safe — or legal — they are.
As biohacking starts to appear more often in headlines — and, recently, in a fascinating Netflix series called Unnatural Selection — it’s worth getting clear on some of the fundamentals. Here are nine questions that can help you make sense of biohacking.
1) First of all, what exactly is biohacking? What are some common examples of it?
Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a different definition of biohacking. Since it can encompass a dizzying range of pursuits, I’m mostly going to look at biohacking defined as the attempt to manipulate your brain and body in order to optimize performance, outside the realm of traditional medicine. But later on, I’ll also give an overview of some other types of biohacking (including some that can lead to pretty unbelievable art).
Dave Asprey, a biohacker who created the supplement company Bulletproof, told me that for him, biohacking is “the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside you so that you have full control over your own biology.” He’s very game to experiment on his body: He has stem cells injected into his joints, takes dozens of supplements daily, bathes in infrared light, and much more. It’s all part of his quest to live until at least age 180.
One word Asprey likes to use a lot is “control,” and that kind of language is typical of many biohackers, who often talk about “optimizing” and “upgrading” their minds and bodies.
Some of their techniques for achieving that are things people have been doing for centuries, like Vipassana meditation and intermittent fasting. Both of those are part of Dorsey’s routine, which he detailed in a podcast interview. He tries to do two hours of meditation a day and eats only one meal (dinner) on weekdays; on weekends, he doesn’t eat at all. (Critics worry that his dietary habits sound a bit like an eating disorder, or that they might unintentionally influence others to develop a disorder.) He also kicks off each morning with an ice bath before walking the 5 miles to Twitter HQ.
Supplements are another popular tool in the biohacker’s arsenal. There’s a whole host of pills people take, from anti-aging supplements to nootropics or “smart drugs.”
Since biohackers are often interested in quantifying every aspect of themselves, they may buy wearable devices to, say, track their sleep patterns. (For that purpose, Dorsey swears by the Oura Ring.) The more data you have on your body’s mechanical functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you — or so the thinking goes.
Then there are some of the more radical practices: cryotherapy (purposely making yourself cold), neurofeedback (training yourself to regulate your brain waves), near-infrared saunas (they supposedly help you escape stress from electromagnetic transmissions), and virtual float tanks (which are meant to induce a meditative state through sensory deprivation), among others. Some people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these treatments.
A subset of biohackers called grinders go so far as to implant devices like computer chips in their bodies. The implants allow them to do everything from opening doors without a fob to monitoring their glucose levels subcutaneously.
For some grinders, like Zoltan Istvan, who ran for president as head of the Transhumanist Party, having an implant is fun and convenient: “I’ve grown to relish and rely on the technology,” he recently wrote in the New York Times. “The electric lock on the front door of my house has a chip scanner, and it’s nice to go surfing and jogging without having to carry keys around.”
Istvan also noted that “for some people without functioning arms, chips in their feet are the simplest way to open doors or operate some household items modified with chip readers.” Other grinders are deeply curious about blurring the line between human and machine, and they get a thrill out of seeing all the ways we can augment our flesh-and-blood bodies using tech. Implants, for them, are a starter experiment.
2) Why are people doing this? What drives someone to biohack themselves?
On a really basic level, biohacking comes down to something we can all relate to: the desire to feel better — and to see just how far we can push the human body. That desire comes in a range of flavors, though. Some people just want to not be sick anymore. Others want to become as smart and strong as they possibly can. An even more ambitious crowd wants to be as smart and strong as possible for as long as possible — in other words, they want to radically extend their life span.
These goals have a way of escalating. Once you’ve determined (or think you’ve determined) that there are concrete “hacks” you can use by yourself right now to go from sick to healthy, or healthy to enhanced, you start to think: Well, why stop there? Why not shoot for peak performance? Why not try to live forever? What starts as a simple wish to be free from pain can snowball into self-improvement on steroids.
That was the case for Asprey. Now in his 40s, he got into biohacking because he was unwell. Before hitting age 30, he was diagnosed with high risk of stroke and heart attack, suffered from cognitive dysfunction, and weighed 300 pounds. “I just wanted to control my own biology because I was tired of being in pain and having mood swings,” he told me.
Now that he feels healthier, he wants to slow the normal aging process and optimize every part of his biology. “I don’t want to be just healthy; that’s average. I want to perform; that’s daring to be above average. Instead of ‘How do I achieve health?’ it’s ‘How do I kick more ass?’”
Zayner, the biohacker who once injected himself with CRISPR DNA, has also had health problems for years, and some of his biohacking pursuits have been explicit attempts to cure himself. But he’s also motivated in large part by frustration. Like some other biohackers with an anti-establishment streak, he’s irritated by federal officials’ purported sluggishness in greenlighting all sorts of medical treatments. In the US, it can take 10 years for a new drug to be developed and approved; for people with serious health conditions, that wait time can feel cruelly long. Zayner claims that’s part of why he wants to democratize science and empower people to experiment on themselves.
(However, he admits that some of his stunts have been purposely provocative and that “I do ridiculous stuff also. I’m sure my motives are not 100 percent pure all the time.”)
Getty Images/iStockphoto
An illustration of a brain hemisphere with chips embedded.
The biohacking community also offers just that: community. It gives people a chance to explore unconventional ideas in a non-hierarchical setting, and to refashion the feeling of being outside the norm into a cool identity. Biohackers congregate in dedicated online networks, in Slack and WhatsApp groups — WeFast, for example, is for intermittent fasters. In person, they run experiments and take classes at “hacklabs,” improvised laboratories that are open to the public, and attend any one of the dozens of biohacking conferences put on each year.
3) How different is biohacking from traditional medicine? What makes something “count” as a biohacking pursuit?
Certain kinds of biohacking go far beyond traditional medicine, while other kinds bleed into it.
Plenty of age-old techniques — meditation, fasting — can be considered a basic type of biohacking. So can going to a spin class or taking antidepressants.
What differentiates biohacking is arguably not that it’s a different genre of activity but that the activities are undertaken with a particular mindset. The underlying philosophy is that we don’t need to accept our bodies’ shortcomings — we can engineer our way past them using a range of high- and low-tech solutions. And we don’t necessarily need to wait for a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, traditional medicine’s gold standard. We can start to transform our lives right now.
As millionaire Serge Faguet, who plans to live forever, put it: “People here [in Silicon Valley] have a technical mindset, so they think of everything as an engineering problem. A lot of people who are not of a technical mindset assume that, ‘Hey, people have always been dying,’ but I think there’s going to be a greater level of awareness [of biohacking] once results start to happen.”
Rob Carlson, an expert on synthetic biology who’s been advocating for biohacking since the early 2000s, told me that to his mind, “all of modern medicine is hacking,” but that people often call certain folks “hackers” as a way of delegitimizing them. “It’s a way of categorizing the other — like, ‘Those biohackers over there do that weird thing.’ This is actually a bigger societal question: Who’s qualified to do anything? And why do you not permit some people to explore new things and talk about that in public spheres?”
If it’s taken to extremes, the “Who’s qualified to do anything?” mindset can delegitimize scientific expertise in a way that can endanger public health. Luckily, biohackers don’t generally seem interested in dethroning expertise to that dangerous degree; many just don’t think they should be locked out of scientific discovery because they lack conventional credentials like a PhD.
4) So how much of this is backed by scientific research?
Some biohacks are backed by strong scientific evidence and are likely to be beneficial. Often, these are the ones that are tried and true, debugged over centuries of experimentation. For example, clinical trials have shown that mindfulness meditation can help reduce anxiety and chronic pain.
But other hacks, based on weak or incomplete evidence, could be either ineffective or actually harmful.
After Dorsey endorsed a particular near-infrared sauna sold by SaunaSpace, which claims its product boosts cellular regeneration and fights aging by detoxing your body, the company experienced a surge in demand. But according to the New York Times, “though a study of middle-aged and older Finnish men indicates that their health benefited from saunas, there have been no major studies conducted of” this type of sauna, which directs incandescent light at your body. So is buying this expensive product likely to improve your health? We can’t say that yet.
Similarly, the intermittent fasting that Dorsey endorses may yield health benefits for some, but scientists still have plenty of questions about it. Although there’s a lot of research on the long-term health outcomes of fasting in animals — and much of it is promising — the research literature on humans is much thinner. Fasting has gone mainstream, but because it’s done so ahead of the science, it falls into the “proceed with caution” category. Critics have noted that for those who’ve struggled with eating disorders, it could be dangerous.
And while we’re on the topic of biohacking nutrition: My colleague Julia Belluz has previously reported on the Bulletproof Diet promoted by Asprey, who she says “vilifies healthy foods and suggests part of the way to achieve a ‘pound a day’ weight loss is to buy his expensive, ‘science-based’ Bulletproof products.” She was not convinced by the citations for his claims:
What I found was a patchwork of cherry-picked research and bad studies or articles that aren’t relevant to humans. He selectively reported on studies that backed up his arguments, and ignored the science that contradicted them.
Many of the studies weren’t done in humans but in rats and mice. Early studies on animals, especially on something as complex as nutrition, should never be extrapolated to humans. Asprey glorifies coconut oil and demonizes olive oil, ignoring the wealth of randomized trials (the highest quality of evidence) that have demonstrated olive oil is beneficial for health. Some of the research he cites was done on very specific sub-populations, such as diabetics, or on very small groups of people. These findings wouldn’t be generalizable to the rest of us.
5) This all sounds like it can be taken to extremes. What are the most dangerous types of biohacking being tried?
Some of the highest-risk hacks are being undertaken by people who feel desperate. On some level, that’s very understandable. If you’re sick and in constant pain, or if you’re old and scared to die, and traditional medicine has nothing that works to quell your suffering, who can fault you for seeking a solution elsewhere?
Yet some of the solutions being tried these days are so dangerous, they’re just not worth the risk.
If you’ve watched HBO’s Silicon Valley, then you’re already familiar with young blood transfusions. As a refresher, that’s when an older person pays for a young person’s blood and has it pumped into their veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging.
This putative treatment sounds vampiric, yet it’s gained popularity in the Silicon Valley area, where people have actually paid $8,000 a pop to participate in trials. The billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has expressed keen interest.
As Chavie Lieber noted for Vox, although some limited studies suggest that these transfusions might fend off diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis, these claims haven’t been proven.
In February, the Food and Drug Administration released a statement warning consumers away from the transfusions: “Simply put, we’re concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies. Such treatments have no proven clinical benefits for the uses for which these clinics are advertising them and are potentially harmful.”
Another biohack that definitely falls in the “don’t try this at home” category: fecal transplants, or transferring stool from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of an unhealthy recipient. In 2016, sick of suffering from severe stomach pain, Zayner decided to give himself a fecal transplant in a hotel room. He had procured a friend’s poop and planned to inoculate himself using the microbes in it. Ever the public stuntman, he invited a journalist to document the procedure. Afterward, he claimed the experiment left him feeling better.
But fecal transplants are still experimental and not approved by the FDA. The FDA recently reported that two people had contracted serious infections from fecal transplants that contained drug-resistant bacteria. One of the people died. And this was in the context of a clinical trial — presumably, a DIY attempt could be even riskier. The FDA is putting a stop to clinical trials on the transplants for now.
Zayner also popularized the notion that you can edit your own DNA with CRISPR. In 2017, he injected himself with CRISPR DNA at a biotech conference, live-streaming the experiment. He later said he regretted that stunt because it could lead others to copy him and “people are going to get hurt.” Yet when asked whether his company, the Odin, which he runs out of his garage in Oakland, California, was going to stop selling CRISPR kits to the general public, he said no.
Ellen Jorgensen, a molecular biologist who co-founded Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, two Brooklyn-based biology labs open to the public, finds antics like Zayner’s worrisome. A self-identified biohacker, she told me people shouldn’t buy Zayner’s kits, not just because they don’t work half the time (she’s a professional and even she couldn’t get it to work), but because CRISPR is such a new technology that scientists aren’t yet sure of all the risks involved in using it. By tinkering with your genome, you could unintentionally cause a mutation that increases your risk of developing cancer, she said. It’s a dangerous practice that should not be marketed as a DIY activity.
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“At Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, we always get the most heartbreaking emails from parents of children afflicted with genetic diseases,” Jorgensen says. “They have watched these Josiah Zayner videos and they want to come into our class and cure their kids. We have to tell them, ‘This is a fantasy.’ ... That is incredibly painful.”
She thinks such biohacking stunts give biohackers like her a bad name. “It’s bad for the DIY bio community,” she said, “because it makes people feel that as a general rule we’re irresponsible.”
6) Are all these biohacking pursuits legal?
Existing regulations weren’t built to make sense of something like biohacking, which in some cases stretches the very limits of what it means to be a human being. That means that a lot of biohacking pursuits exist in a legal gray zone: frowned upon by bodies like the FDA, but not yet outright illegal, or not enforced as such. As biohackers traverse uncharted territory, regulators are scrambling to catch up with them.
After the FDA released its statement in February urging people to stay away from young blood transfusions, the San Francisco-based startup Ambrosia, which was well known for offering the transfusions, said on its website that it had “ceased patient treatments.” The site now says, “We are currently in discussion with the FDA on the topic of young plasma.”
This wasn’t the FDA’s first foray into biohacking. In 2016, the agency objected to Zayner selling kits to brew glow-in-the-dark beer. And after he injected himself with CRISPR, the FDA released a notice saying the sale of DIY gene-editing kits for use on humans is illegal. Zayner disregarded the warning and continued to sell his wares.
In 2019, he was, for a time, under investigation by California’s Department of Consumer Affairs, accused of practicing medicine without a license.
The biohackers I spoke to said restrictive regulation would be a counterproductive response to biohacking because it’ll just drive the practice underground. They say it’s better to encourage a culture of transparency so that people can ask questions about how to do something safely, without fear of reprisal.
According to Jorgensen, most biohackers are safety-conscious, not the sorts of people interested in engineering a pandemic. They’ve even generated and adopted their own codes of ethics. She herself has had a working relationship with law enforcement since the early 2000s.
“At the beginning of the DIY bio movement, we did an awful lot of work with Homeland Security,” she said. “And as far back as 2009, the FBI was reaching out to the DIY community to try to build bridges.”
Carlson told me he’s noticed two general shifts over the past 20 years. “One was after 2001, after the anthrax attacks, when Washington, DC, lost their damn minds and just went into a reactive mode and tried to shut everything down,” he said. “As of 2004 or 2005, the FBI was arresting people for doing biology in their homes.”
Then in 2009, the National Security Council dramatically changed perspectives. It published the National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats, which embraced “innovation and open access to the insights and materials needed to advance individual initiatives,” including in “private laboratories in basements and garages.”
Now, though, some agencies seem to think they ought to take action. But even if there were clear regulations governing all biohacking activities, there would be no straightforward way to stop people from pursuing them behind closed doors. “This technology is available and implementable anywhere, there’s no physical means to control access to it, so what would regulating that mean?” Carlson said.
7) One of the more ambitious types of biohacking is life extension, the attempt to live longer or even cheat death entirely. What are the physical limits of life extension?
Some biohackers believe that by leveraging technology, they’ll be able to live longer but stay younger. Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey claims people will be able to live to age 1,000. In fact, he says the first person who will live to 1,000 has already been born.
De Grey focuses on developing strategies for repairing seven types of cellular and molecular damage associated with aging — or, as he calls them, “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.” His nonprofit, the Methuselah Foundation, has attracted huge investments, including more than $6 million from Thiel. Its aim is to “make 90 the new 50 by 2030.”
Wondering whether de Grey’s goals are realistic, I reached out to Genspace co-founder Oliver Medvedik, who earned his PhD at Harvard Medical School and now directs the Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering at Cooper Union. “Living to 1,000? It’s definitely within our realm of possibility if we as a society that doles out money [to fund research we deem worthy] decide we want to do it,” he told me.
He’s optimistic, he said, because the scientific community is finally converging on a consensus about what the root causes of aging are (damage to mitochondria and epigenetic changes are a couple of examples). And in the past five years, he’s seen an explosion of promising papers on possible ways to address those causes.
Researchers who want to fight aging generally adopt two different approaches. The first is the “small molecule” approach, which often focuses on dietary supplements. Medvedik calls that the “low-hanging fruit.” He spoke excitedly about the possibility of creating a supplement from a plant compound called fisetin, noting that a recent (small) Mayo Clinic trial suggests high concentrations of fisetin can clear out senescent cells in humans — cells that have stopped dividing and that contribute to aging.
The other approach is more dramatic: genetic engineering. Scientists taking this tack in mouse studies usually tinker with a genome in embryo, meaning that new mice are born with the fix already in place. Medvedik pointed out that’s not very useful for treating humans — we want to be able to treat people who have already been born and have begun to age.
But he sees promise here too. He cited a new study that used CRISPR to target Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a genetic disorder that manifests as accelerated aging, in a mouse model. “It wasn’t a total cure — they extended the life span of these mice by maybe 30 percent — but what I was very interested in is the fact that it was delivered into mice that had already been born.”
He’s also intrigued by potential non-pharmaceutical treatments for aging-related diseases like Alzheimer’s — for example, the use of light stimulation to influence brain waves — but those probably won’t help us out anytime soon, for a simple reason: “It’s not a drug. You can’t package and sell it,” he said. “Pharma can’t monetize it.”
Like many in the biohacking community, Medvedik sounded a note of frustration about how the medical system holds back anti-aging progress. “If you were to come up with a compound right now that literally cures aging, you couldn’t get it approved,” he said. “By the definition we’ve set up, aging isn’t a disease, and if you want to get it approved by the FDA you have to target a certain disease. That just seems very strange and antiquated and broken.”
8) Biohackers also include people who engage in DIY science without experimenting on themselves. What’s that form of biohacking like?
Not everyone who’s interested in biohacking is interested in self-experimentation. Some come to it because they care about bringing science to the masses, alleviating the climate crisis, or making art that shakes us out of our comfort zones.
“My version of biohacking is unexpected people in unexpected places doing biotechnology,” Jorgensen told me. For her, the emphasis is on democratizing cutting-edge science while keeping it safe. The community labs she’s helped to build, Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, offer classes on using CRISPR technology to edit a genome — but participants work on the genome of yeast, never on their own bodies.
Some people in the community are altruistically motivated. They want to use biohacking to save the environment by figuring out a way to make a recyclable plastic or a biofuel. They might experiment on organisms in makeshift labs in their garages. Or they might take a Genspace class on how to make furniture out of fungi or paper out of kombucha.
Experimental artists have also taken an interest in biohacking. For them, biology is just another palette. The artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr from the University of Western Australia were actually the first people to create and serve up lab-grown meat. They took some starter cells from a frog and used them to grow small “steaks” of frog meat, which they fed to gallery-goers in France at a 2003 art installation called “Disembodied Cuisine.”
Boris Roessler/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg used DNA samples she received from Chelsea Manning to recreate various possible physiognomies of Manning’s face. The 3D-printed masks formed an art installation called “Probably Chelsea.”
More recently, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has used old floral DNA to recreate the smell of flowers driven to extinction by humans, enabling us to catch a whiff of them once more.
And this summer, a London museum is displaying something rather less fragrant: cheese made from celebrities. Yes, you read that right: The cheese was created with bacteria harvested from the armpits, toes, bellybuttons, and nostrils of famous people. If you’re thoroughly grossed out by this, don’t worry: The food won’t actually be eaten — this “bioart” project is meant more as a thought experiment than as dinner.
9) At its most extreme, biohacking can fundamentally alter human nature. Should we be worried?
When you hear about people genetically engineering themselves or trying young blood transfusions in an effort to ward off death, it’s easy to feel a sense of vertigo about what we’re coming to as a species.
But the fact is we’ve been altering human nature since the very beginning. Inventing agriculture, for example, helped us transform ourselves from nomadic hunter-gatherers into sedentary civilizations. And whether we think of it this way or not, we’re all already doing some kind of biohacking every day.
The deeper I delve into biohacking, the more I think a lot of the discomfort with it boils down to simple neophobia — a fear of what’s new. (Not all of the discomfort, mind you: The more extreme hacks really are dangerous.)
As one of my colleagues put it to me, 40 years ago, “test tube babies” seemed unnatural, a freak-show curiosity; now in vitro fertilization has achieved mainstream acceptance. Will biohacking undergo the same progression? Or is it really altering human nature in a more fundamental way, a way that should concern us?
When I asked Carlson, he refused to buy the premise of the question.
“If you assert that hackers are changing what it means to be human, then we need to first have an agreement about what it means to be human,” he said. “And I’m not going to buy into the idea that there is one thing that is being human. Across the sweep of history, it’s odd to say humans are static — it’s not the case that humans in 1500 were the same as they are today.”
That’s true. Nowadays, we live longer. We’re taller. We’re more mobile. And we marry and have kids with people who come from different continents, different cultures — a profound departure from old customs that has nothing to do with genetic engineering but that’s nonetheless resulting in genetic change.
Still, biohackers are talking about making such significant changes that the risks they carry are significant too. What if biohackers’ “upgrades” don’t get distributed evenly across the human population? What if, for example, the cure for aging becomes available, but only to the rich? Will that lead to an even wider life expectancy gap, where rich people live longer and poor people die younger?
Medvedik dismissed that concern, arguing that a lot of interventions that could lengthen our lives, like supplements, wouldn’t be expensive to produce. “There’s no reason why that stuff can’t be dirt-cheap. But that depends on what we do as a society,” he said. Insulin doesn’t cost much to produce, but as a society we’ve allowed companies to jack up the price so high that many people with diabetes are now skipping lifesaving doses. That’s horrifying, but it’s not a function of the technology itself.
Here’s another risk associated with biohacking, one I think is even more serious: By making ourselves smarter and stronger and potentially even immortal (a difference of kind, not just of degree), we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to alter their biology — even if they don’t want to. To refuse a hack would mean to be at a huge professional disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for remaining suboptimal when optimization is possible. In a world of superhumans, it may become increasingly hard to stay “merely” human.
“The flip side of all this is the ‘perfect race’ or eugenics specter,” Jorgensen acknowledged. “This is a powerful set of technologies that can be used in different ways. We’d better think about it and use it wisely.”
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Josiah Zayner is a biohacker who’s famous for injecting himself with the gene-editing tool CRISPR. At a time when the technology exists for us to change (or hack) our own DNA, what are the ethics of experimenting on ourselves, and others, at home? On the launch episode of this new podcast, host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks to Zayner about how he’s thinking about human experimentation today. Plus: new efforts to come up with a code of conduct for biohackers, from legislation to self-regulation.
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How biohackers are trying to upgrade their brains, their bodies — and human nature
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9 questions about biohacking you were too embarrassed to ask.
Even if you haven’t heard the term “biohacking” before, you’ve probably encountered some version of it. Maybe you’ve seen Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey extolling the benefits of fasting intermittently and drinking “salt juice” each morning. Maybe you’ve read about former NASA employee Josiah Zayner injecting himself with DNA using the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Maybe you’ve heard of Bay Area folks engaging in “dopamine fasting.”
Maybe you, like me, have a colleague who’s had a chip implanted in their hand.
These are all types of biohacking, a broad term for a lifestyle that’s growing increasingly popular, and not just in Silicon Valley, where it really took off.
Biohacking — also known as DIY biology — is an extremely broad and amorphous term that can cover a huge range of activities, from performing science experiments on yeast or other organisms to tracking your own sleep and diet to changing your own biology by pumping a younger person’s blood into your veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging. (Yes, that is a real thing, and it’s called a young blood transfusion. More on that later.)
The type of biohackers currently gaining the most notoriety are the ones who experiment — outside of traditional lab spaces and institutions — on their own bodies with the hope of boosting their physical and cognitive performance. They form one branch of transhumanism, a movement that holds that human beings can and should use technology to augment and evolve our species.
Some biohackers have science PhDs; others are complete amateurs. And their ways of trying to “hack” biology are as diverse as they are. It can be tricky to understand the different types of hacks, what differentiates them from traditional medicine, and how safe — or legal — they are.
As biohacking starts to appear more often in headlines — and, recently, in a fascinating Netflix series called Unnatural Selection — it’s worth getting clear on some of the fundamentals. Here are nine questions that can help you make sense of biohacking.
1) First of all, what exactly is biohacking? What are some common examples of it?
Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a different definition of biohacking. Since it can encompass a dizzying range of pursuits, I’m mostly going to look at biohacking defined as the attempt to manipulate your brain and body in order to optimize performance, outside the realm of traditional medicine. But later on, I’ll also give an overview of some other types of biohacking (including some that can lead to pretty unbelievable art).
Dave Asprey, a biohacker who created the supplement company Bulletproof, told me that for him, biohacking is “the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside you so that you have full control over your own biology.” He’s very game to experiment on his body: He has stem cells injected into his joints, takes dozens of supplements daily, bathes in infrared light, and much more. It’s all part of his quest to live until at least age 180.
One word Asprey likes to use a lot is “control,” and that kind of language is typical of many biohackers, who often talk about “optimizing” and “upgrading” their minds and bodies.
Some of their techniques for achieving that are things people have been doing for centuries, like Vipassana meditation and intermittent fasting. Both of those are part of Dorsey’s routine, which he detailed in a podcast interview. He tries to do two hours of meditation a day and eats only one meal (dinner) on weekdays; on weekends, he doesn’t eat at all. (Critics worry that his dietary habits sound a bit like an eating disorder, or that they might unintentionally influence others to develop a disorder.) He also kicks off each morning with an ice bath before walking the 5 miles to Twitter HQ.
Supplements are another popular tool in the biohacker’s arsenal. There’s a whole host of pills people take, from anti-aging supplements to nootropics or “smart drugs.”
Since biohackers are often interested in quantifying every aspect of themselves, they may buy wearable devices to, say, track their sleep patterns. (For that purpose, Dorsey swears by the Oura Ring.) The more data you have on your body’s mechanical functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you — or so the thinking goes.
Then there are some of the more radical practices: cryotherapy (purposely making yourself cold), neurofeedback (training yourself to regulate your brain waves), near-infrared saunas (they supposedly help you escape stress from electromagnetic transmissions), and virtual float tanks (which are meant to induce a meditative state through sensory deprivation), among others. Some people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these treatments.
A subset of biohackers called grinders go so far as to implant devices like computer chips in their bodies. The implants allow them to do everything from opening doors without a fob to monitoring their glucose levels subcutaneously.
For some grinders, like Zoltan Istvan, who ran for president as head of the Transhumanist Party, having an implant is fun and convenient: “I’ve grown to relish and rely on the technology,” he recently wrote in the New York Times. “The electric lock on the front door of my house has a chip scanner, and it’s nice to go surfing and jogging without having to carry keys around.”
Istvan also noted that “for some people without functioning arms, chips in their feet are the simplest way to open doors or operate some household items modified with chip readers.” Other grinders are deeply curious about blurring the line between human and machine, and they get a thrill out of seeing all the ways we can augment our flesh-and-blood bodies using tech. Implants, for them, are a starter experiment.
2) Why are people doing this? What drives someone to biohack themselves?
On a really basic level, biohacking comes down to something we can all relate to: the desire to feel better — and to see just how far we can push the human body. That desire comes in a range of flavors, though. Some people just want to not be sick anymore. Others want to become as smart and strong as they possibly can. An even more ambitious crowd wants to be as smart and strong as possible for as long as possible — in other words, they want to radically extend their life span.
These goals have a way of escalating. Once you’ve determined (or think you’ve determined) that there are concrete “hacks” you can use by yourself right now to go from sick to healthy, or healthy to enhanced, you start to think: Well, why stop there? Why not shoot for peak performance? Why not try to live forever? What starts as a simple wish to be free from pain can snowball into self-improvement on steroids.
That was the case for Asprey. Now in his 40s, he got into biohacking because he was unwell. Before hitting age 30, he was diagnosed with high risk of stroke and heart attack, suffered from cognitive dysfunction, and weighed 300 pounds. “I just wanted to control my own biology because I was tired of being in pain and having mood swings,” he told me.
Now that he feels healthier, he wants to slow the normal aging process and optimize every part of his biology. “I don’t want to be just healthy; that’s average. I want to perform; that’s daring to be above average. Instead of ‘How do I achieve health?’ it’s ‘How do I kick more ass?’”
Zayner, the biohacker who once injected himself with CRISPR DNA, has also had health problems for years, and some of his biohacking pursuits have been explicit attempts to cure himself. But he’s also motivated in large part by frustration. Like some other biohackers with an anti-establishment streak, he’s irritated by federal officials’ purported sluggishness in greenlighting all sorts of medical treatments. In the US, it can take 10 years for a new drug to be developed and approved; for people with serious health conditions, that wait time can feel cruelly long. Zayner claims that’s part of why he wants to democratize science and empower people to experiment on themselves.
(However, he admits that some of his stunts have been purposely provocative and that “I do ridiculous stuff also. I’m sure my motives are not 100 percent pure all the time.”)
Getty Images/iStockphoto
An illustration of a brain hemisphere with chips embedded.
The biohacking community also offers just that: community. It gives people a chance to explore unconventional ideas in a non-hierarchical setting, and to refashion the feeling of being outside the norm into a cool identity. Biohackers congregate in dedicated online networks, in Slack and WhatsApp groups — WeFast, for example, is for intermittent fasters. In person, they run experiments and take classes at “hacklabs,” improvised laboratories that are open to the public, and attend any one of the dozens of biohacking conferences put on each year.
3) How different is biohacking from traditional medicine? What makes something “count” as a biohacking pursuit?
Certain kinds of biohacking go far beyond traditional medicine, while other kinds bleed into it.
Plenty of age-old techniques — meditation, fasting — can be considered a basic type of biohacking. So can going to a spin class or taking antidepressants.
What differentiates biohacking is arguably not that it’s a different genre of activity but that the activities are undertaken with a particular mindset. The underlying philosophy is that we don’t need to accept our bodies’ shortcomings — we can engineer our way past them using a range of high- and low-tech solutions. And we don’t necessarily need to wait for a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, traditional medicine’s gold standard. We can start to transform our lives right now.
As millionaire Serge Faguet, who plans to live forever, put it: “People here [in Silicon Valley] have a technical mindset, so they think of everything as an engineering problem. A lot of people who are not of a technical mindset assume that, ‘Hey, people have always been dying,’ but I think there’s going to be a greater level of awareness [of biohacking] once results start to happen.”
Rob Carlson, an expert on synthetic biology who’s been advocating for biohacking since the early 2000s, told me that to his mind, “all of modern medicine is hacking,” but that people often call certain folks “hackers” as a way of delegitimizing them. “It’s a way of categorizing the other — like, ‘Those biohackers over there do that weird thing.’ This is actually a bigger societal question: Who’s qualified to do anything? And why do you not permit some people to explore new things and talk about that in public spheres?”
If it’s taken to extremes, the “Who’s qualified to do anything?” mindset can delegitimize scientific expertise in a way that can endanger public health. Luckily, biohackers don’t generally seem interested in dethroning expertise to that dangerous degree; many just don’t think they should be locked out of scientific discovery because they lack conventional credentials like a PhD.
4) So how much of this is backed by scientific research?
Some biohacks are backed by strong scientific evidence and are likely to be beneficial. Often, these are the ones that are tried and true, debugged over centuries of experimentation. For example, clinical trials have shown that mindfulness meditation can help reduce anxiety and chronic pain.
But other hacks, based on weak or incomplete evidence, could be either ineffective or actually harmful.
After Dorsey endorsed a particular near-infrared sauna sold by SaunaSpace, which claims its product boosts cellular regeneration and fights aging by detoxing your body, the company experienced a surge in demand. But according to the New York Times, “though a study of middle-aged and older Finnish men indicates that their health benefited from saunas, there have been no major studies conducted of” this type of sauna, which directs incandescent light at your body. So is buying this expensive product likely to improve your health? We can’t say that yet.
Similarly, the intermittent fasting that Dorsey endorses may yield health benefits for some, but scientists still have plenty of questions about it. Although there’s a lot of research on the long-term health outcomes of fasting in animals — and much of it is promising — the research literature on humans is much thinner. Fasting has gone mainstream, but because it’s done so ahead of the science, it falls into the “proceed with caution” category. Critics have noted that for those who’ve struggled with eating disorders, it could be dangerous.
And while we’re on the topic of biohacking nutrition: My colleague Julia Belluz has previously reported on the Bulletproof Diet promoted by Asprey, who she says “vilifies healthy foods and suggests part of the way to achieve a ‘pound a day’ weight loss is to buy his expensive, ‘science-based’ Bulletproof products.” She was not convinced by the citations for his claims:
What I found was a patchwork of cherry-picked research and bad studies or articles that aren’t relevant to humans. He selectively reported on studies that backed up his arguments, and ignored the science that contradicted them.
Many of the studies weren’t done in humans but in rats and mice. Early studies on animals, especially on something as complex as nutrition, should never be extrapolated to humans. Asprey glorifies coconut oil and demonizes olive oil, ignoring the wealth of randomized trials (the highest quality of evidence) that have demonstrated olive oil is beneficial for health. Some of the research he cites was done on very specific sub-populations, such as diabetics, or on very small groups of people. These findings wouldn’t be generalizable to the rest of us.
5) This all sounds like it can be taken to extremes. What are the most dangerous types of biohacking being tried?
Some of the highest-risk hacks are being undertaken by people who feel desperate. On some level, that’s very understandable. If you’re sick and in constant pain, or if you’re old and scared to die, and traditional medicine has nothing that works to quell your suffering, who can fault you for seeking a solution elsewhere?
Yet some of the solutions being tried these days are so dangerous, they’re just not worth the risk.
If you’ve watched HBO’s Silicon Valley, then you’re already familiar with young blood transfusions. As a refresher, that’s when an older person pays for a young person’s blood and has it pumped into their veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging.
This putative treatment sounds vampiric, yet it’s gained popularity in the Silicon Valley area, where people have actually paid $8,000 a pop to participate in trials. The billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has expressed keen interest.
As Chavie Lieber noted for Vox, although some limited studies suggest that these transfusions might fend off diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis, these claims haven’t been proven.
In February, the Food and Drug Administration released a statement warning consumers away from the transfusions: “Simply put, we’re concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies. Such treatments have no proven clinical benefits for the uses for which these clinics are advertising them and are potentially harmful.”
Another biohack that definitely falls in the “don’t try this at home” category: fecal transplants, or transferring stool from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of an unhealthy recipient. In 2016, sick of suffering from severe stomach pain, Zayner decided to give himself a fecal transplant in a hotel room. He had procured a friend’s poop and planned to inoculate himself using the microbes in it. Ever the public stuntman, he invited a journalist to document the procedure. Afterward, he claimed the experiment left him feeling better.
But fecal transplants are still experimental and not approved by the FDA. The FDA recently reported that two people had contracted serious infections from fecal transplants that contained drug-resistant bacteria. One of the people died. And this was in the context of a clinical trial — presumably, a DIY attempt could be even riskier. The FDA is putting a stop to clinical trials on the transplants for now.
Zayner also popularized the notion that you can edit your own DNA with CRISPR. In 2017, he injected himself with CRISPR DNA at a biotech conference, live-streaming the experiment. He later said he regretted that stunt because it could lead others to copy him and “people are going to get hurt.” Yet when asked whether his company, the Odin, which he runs out of his garage in Oakland, California, was going to stop selling CRISPR kits to the general public, he said no.
Ellen Jorgensen, a molecular biologist who co-founded Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, two Brooklyn-based biology labs open to the public, finds antics like Zayner’s worrisome. A self-identified biohacker, she told me people shouldn’t buy Zayner’s kits, not just because they don’t work half the time (she’s a professional and even she couldn’t get it to work), but because CRISPR is such a new technology that scientists aren’t yet sure of all the risks involved in using it. By tinkering with your genome, you could unintentionally cause a mutation that increases your risk of developing cancer, she said. It’s a dangerous practice that should not be marketed as a DIY activity.
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“At Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, we always get the most heartbreaking emails from parents of children afflicted with genetic diseases,” Jorgensen says. “They have watched these Josiah Zayner videos and they want to come into our class and cure their kids. We have to tell them, ‘This is a fantasy.’ ... That is incredibly painful.”
She thinks such biohacking stunts give biohackers like her a bad name. “It’s bad for the DIY bio community,” she said, “because it makes people feel that as a general rule we’re irresponsible.”
6) Are all these biohacking pursuits legal?
Existing regulations weren’t built to make sense of something like biohacking, which in some cases stretches the very limits of what it means to be a human being. That means that a lot of biohacking pursuits exist in a legal gray zone: frowned upon by bodies like the FDA, but not yet outright illegal, or not enforced as such. As biohackers traverse uncharted territory, regulators are scrambling to catch up with them.
After the FDA released its statement in February urging people to stay away from young blood transfusions, the San Francisco-based startup Ambrosia, which was well known for offering the transfusions, said on its website that it had “ceased patient treatments.” The site now says, “We are currently in discussion with the FDA on the topic of young plasma.”
This wasn’t the FDA’s first foray into biohacking. In 2016, the agency objected to Zayner selling kits to brew glow-in-the-dark beer. And after he injected himself with CRISPR, the FDA released a notice saying the sale of DIY gene-editing kits for use on humans is illegal. Zayner disregarded the warning and continued to sell his wares.
In 2019, he was, for a time, under investigation by California’s Department of Consumer Affairs, accused of practicing medicine without a license.
The biohackers I spoke to said restrictive regulation would be a counterproductive response to biohacking because it’ll just drive the practice underground. They say it’s better to encourage a culture of transparency so that people can ask questions about how to do something safely, without fear of reprisal.
According to Jorgensen, most biohackers are safety-conscious, not the sorts of people interested in engineering a pandemic. They’ve even generated and adopted their own codes of ethics. She herself has had a working relationship with law enforcement since the early 2000s.
“At the beginning of the DIY bio movement, we did an awful lot of work with Homeland Security,” she said. “And as far back as 2009, the FBI was reaching out to the DIY community to try to build bridges.”
Carlson told me he’s noticed two general shifts over the past 20 years. “One was after 2001, after the anthrax attacks, when Washington, DC, lost their damn minds and just went into a reactive mode and tried to shut everything down,” he said. “As of 2004 or 2005, the FBI was arresting people for doing biology in their homes.”
Then in 2009, the National Security Council dramatically changed perspectives. It published the National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats, which embraced “innovation and open access to the insights and materials needed to advance individual initiatives,” including in “private laboratories in basements and garages.”
Now, though, some agencies seem to think they ought to take action. But even if there were clear regulations governing all biohacking activities, there would be no straightforward way to stop people from pursuing them behind closed doors. “This technology is available and implementable anywhere, there’s no physical means to control access to it, so what would regulating that mean?” Carlson said.
7) One of the more ambitious types of biohacking is life extension, the attempt to live longer or even cheat death entirely. What are the physical limits of life extension?
Some biohackers believe that by leveraging technology, they’ll be able to live longer but stay younger. Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey claims people will be able to live to age 1,000. In fact, he says the first person who will live to 1,000 has already been born.
De Grey focuses on developing strategies for repairing seven types of cellular and molecular damage associated with aging — or, as he calls them, “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.” His nonprofit, the Methuselah Foundation, has attracted huge investments, including more than $6 million from Thiel. Its aim is to “make 90 the new 50 by 2030.”
Wondering whether de Grey’s goals are realistic, I reached out to Genspace co-founder Oliver Medvedik, who earned his PhD at Harvard Medical School and now directs the Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering at Cooper Union. “Living to 1,000? It’s definitely within our realm of possibility if we as a society that doles out money [to fund research we deem worthy] decide we want to do it,” he told me.
He’s optimistic, he said, because the scientific community is finally converging on a consensus about what the root causes of aging are (damage to mitochondria and epigenetic changes are a couple of examples). And in the past five years, he’s seen an explosion of promising papers on possible ways to address those causes.
Researchers who want to fight aging generally adopt two different approaches. The first is the “small molecule” approach, which often focuses on dietary supplements. Medvedik calls that the “low-hanging fruit.” He spoke excitedly about the possibility of creating a supplement from a plant compound called fisetin, noting that a recent (small) Mayo Clinic trial suggests high concentrations of fisetin can clear out senescent cells in humans — cells that have stopped dividing and that contribute to aging.
The other approach is more dramatic: genetic engineering. Scientists taking this tack in mouse studies usually tinker with a genome in embryo, meaning that new mice are born with the fix already in place. Medvedik pointed out that’s not very useful for treating humans — we want to be able to treat people who have already been born and have begun to age.
But he sees promise here too. He cited a new study that used CRISPR to target Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a genetic disorder that manifests as accelerated aging, in a mouse model. “It wasn’t a total cure — they extended the life span of these mice by maybe 30 percent — but what I was very interested in is the fact that it was delivered into mice that had already been born.”
He’s also intrigued by potential non-pharmaceutical treatments for aging-related diseases like Alzheimer’s — for example, the use of light stimulation to influence brain waves — but those probably won’t help us out anytime soon, for a simple reason: “It’s not a drug. You can’t package and sell it,” he said. “Pharma can’t monetize it.”
Like many in the biohacking community, Medvedik sounded a note of frustration about how the medical system holds back anti-aging progress. “If you were to come up with a compound right now that literally cures aging, you couldn’t get it approved,” he said. “By the definition we’ve set up, aging isn’t a disease, and if you want to get it approved by the FDA you have to target a certain disease. That just seems very strange and antiquated and broken.”
8) Biohackers also include people who engage in DIY science without experimenting on themselves. What’s that form of biohacking like?
Not everyone who’s interested in biohacking is interested in self-experimentation. Some come to it because they care about bringing science to the masses, alleviating the climate crisis, or making art that shakes us out of our comfort zones.
“My version of biohacking is unexpected people in unexpected places doing biotechnology,” Jorgensen told me. For her, the emphasis is on democratizing cutting-edge science while keeping it safe. The community labs she’s helped to build, Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, offer classes on using CRISPR technology to edit a genome — but participants work on the genome of yeast, never on their own bodies.
Some people in the community are altruistically motivated. They want to use biohacking to save the environment by figuring out a way to make a recyclable plastic or a biofuel. They might experiment on organisms in makeshift labs in their garages. Or they might take a Genspace class on how to make furniture out of fungi or paper out of kombucha.
Experimental artists have also taken an interest in biohacking. For them, biology is just another palette. The artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr from the University of Western Australia were actually the first people to create and serve up lab-grown meat. They took some starter cells from a frog and used them to grow small “steaks” of frog meat, which they fed to gallery-goers in France at a 2003 art installation called “Disembodied Cuisine.”
Boris Roessler/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg used DNA samples she received from Chelsea Manning to recreate various possible physiognomies of Manning’s face. The 3D-printed masks formed an art installation called “Probably Chelsea.”
More recently, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has used old floral DNA to recreate the smell of flowers driven to extinction by humans, enabling us to catch a whiff of them once more.
And this summer, a London museum is displaying something rather less fragrant: cheese made from celebrities. Yes, you read that right: The cheese was created with bacteria harvested from the armpits, toes, bellybuttons, and nostrils of famous people. If you’re thoroughly grossed out by this, don’t worry: The food won’t actually be eaten — this “bioart” project is meant more as a thought experiment than as dinner.
9) At its most extreme, biohacking can fundamentally alter human nature. Should we be worried?
When you hear about people genetically engineering themselves or trying young blood transfusions in an effort to ward off death, it’s easy to feel a sense of vertigo about what we’re coming to as a species.
But the fact is we’ve been altering human nature since the very beginning. Inventing agriculture, for example, helped us transform ourselves from nomadic hunter-gatherers into sedentary civilizations. And whether we think of it this way or not, we’re all already doing some kind of biohacking every day.
The deeper I delve into biohacking, the more I think a lot of the discomfort with it boils down to simple neophobia — a fear of what’s new. (Not all of the discomfort, mind you: The more extreme hacks really are dangerous.)
As one of my colleagues put it to me, 40 years ago, “test tube babies” seemed unnatural, a freak-show curiosity; now in vitro fertilization has achieved mainstream acceptance. Will biohacking undergo the same progression? Or is it really altering human nature in a more fundamental way, a way that should concern us?
When I asked Carlson, he refused to buy the premise of the question.
“If you assert that hackers are changing what it means to be human, then we need to first have an agreement about what it means to be human,” he said. “And I’m not going to buy into the idea that there is one thing that is being human. Across the sweep of history, it’s odd to say humans are static — it’s not the case that humans in 1500 were the same as they are today.”
That’s true. Nowadays, we live longer. We’re taller. We’re more mobile. And we marry and have kids with people who come from different continents, different cultures — a profound departure from old customs that has nothing to do with genetic engineering but that’s nonetheless resulting in genetic change.
Still, biohackers are talking about making such significant changes that the risks they carry are significant too. What if biohackers’ “upgrades” don’t get distributed evenly across the human population? What if, for example, the cure for aging becomes available, but only to the rich? Will that lead to an even wider life expectancy gap, where rich people live longer and poor people die younger?
Medvedik dismissed that concern, arguing that a lot of interventions that could lengthen our lives, like supplements, wouldn’t be expensive to produce. “There’s no reason why that stuff can’t be dirt-cheap. But that depends on what we do as a society,” he said. Insulin doesn’t cost much to produce, but as a society we’ve allowed companies to jack up the price so high that many people with diabetes are now skipping lifesaving doses. That’s horrifying, but it’s not a function of the technology itself.
Here’s another risk associated with biohacking, one I think is even more serious: By making ourselves smarter and stronger and potentially even immortal (a difference of kind, not just of degree), we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to alter their biology — even if they don’t want to. To refuse a hack would mean to be at a huge professional disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for remaining suboptimal when optimization is possible. In a world of superhumans, it may become increasingly hard to stay “merely” human.
“The flip side of all this is the ‘perfect race’ or eugenics specter,” Jorgensen acknowledged. “This is a powerful set of technologies that can be used in different ways. We’d better think about it and use it wisely.”
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.
Listen to Reset
Josiah Zayner is a biohacker who’s famous for injecting himself with the gene-editing tool CRISPR. At a time when the technology exists for us to change (or hack) our own DNA, what are the ethics of experimenting on ourselves, and others, at home? On the launch episode of this new podcast, host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks to Zayner about how he’s thinking about human experimentation today. Plus: new efforts to come up with a code of conduct for biohackers, from legislation to self-regulation.
Subscribe to Reset now on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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How biohackers are trying to upgrade their brains, their bodies — and human nature
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9 questions about biohacking you were too embarrassed to ask.
Even if you haven’t heard the term “biohacking” before, you’ve probably encountered some version of it. Maybe you’ve seen Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey extolling the benefits of fasting intermittently and drinking “salt juice” each morning. Maybe you’ve read about former NASA employee Josiah Zayner injecting himself with DNA using the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Maybe you’ve heard of Bay Area folks engaging in “dopamine fasting.”
Maybe you, like me, have a colleague who’s had a chip implanted in their hand.
These are all types of biohacking, a broad term for a lifestyle that’s growing increasingly popular, and not just in Silicon Valley, where it really took off.
Biohacking — also known as DIY biology — is an extremely broad and amorphous term that can cover a huge range of activities, from performing science experiments on yeast or other organisms to tracking your own sleep and diet to changing your own biology by pumping a younger person’s blood into your veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging. (Yes, that is a real thing, and it’s called a young blood transfusion. More on that later.)
The type of biohackers currently gaining the most notoriety are the ones who experiment — outside of traditional lab spaces and institutions — on their own bodies with the hope of boosting their physical and cognitive performance. They form one branch of transhumanism, a movement that holds that human beings can and should use technology to augment and evolve our species.
Some biohackers have science PhDs; others are complete amateurs. And their ways of trying to “hack” biology are as diverse as they are. It can be tricky to understand the different types of hacks, what differentiates them from traditional medicine, and how safe — or legal — they are.
As biohacking starts to appear more often in headlines — and, recently, in a fascinating Netflix series called Unnatural Selection — it’s worth getting clear on some of the fundamentals. Here are nine questions that can help you make sense of biohacking.
1) First of all, what exactly is biohacking? What are some common examples of it?
Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a different definition of biohacking. Since it can encompass a dizzying range of pursuits, I’m mostly going to look at biohacking defined as the attempt to manipulate your brain and body in order to optimize performance, outside the realm of traditional medicine. But later on, I’ll also give an overview of some other types of biohacking (including some that can lead to pretty unbelievable art).
Dave Asprey, a biohacker who created the supplement company Bulletproof, told me that for him, biohacking is “the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside you so that you have full control over your own biology.” He’s very game to experiment on his body: He has stem cells injected into his joints, takes dozens of supplements daily, bathes in infrared light, and much more. It’s all part of his quest to live until at least age 180.
One word Asprey likes to use a lot is “control,” and that kind of language is typical of many biohackers, who often talk about “optimizing” and “upgrading” their minds and bodies.
Some of their techniques for achieving that are things people have been doing for centuries, like Vipassana meditation and intermittent fasting. Both of those are part of Dorsey’s routine, which he detailed in a podcast interview. He tries to do two hours of meditation a day and eats only one meal (dinner) on weekdays; on weekends, he doesn’t eat at all. (Critics worry that his dietary habits sound a bit like an eating disorder, or that they might unintentionally influence others to develop a disorder.) He also kicks off each morning with an ice bath before walking the 5 miles to Twitter HQ.
Supplements are another popular tool in the biohacker’s arsenal. There’s a whole host of pills people take, from anti-aging supplements to nootropics or “smart drugs.”
Since biohackers are often interested in quantifying every aspect of themselves, they may buy wearable devices to, say, track their sleep patterns. (For that purpose, Dorsey swears by the Oura Ring.) The more data you have on your body’s mechanical functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you — or so the thinking goes.
Then there are some of the more radical practices: cryotherapy (purposely making yourself cold), neurofeedback (training yourself to regulate your brain waves), near-infrared saunas (they supposedly help you escape stress from electromagnetic transmissions), and virtual float tanks (which are meant to induce a meditative state through sensory deprivation), among others. Some people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these treatments.
A subset of biohackers called grinders go so far as to implant devices like computer chips in their bodies. The implants allow them to do everything from opening doors without a fob to monitoring their glucose levels subcutaneously.
For some grinders, like Zoltan Istvan, who ran for president as head of the Transhumanist Party, having an implant is fun and convenient: “I’ve grown to relish and rely on the technology,” he recently wrote in the New York Times. “The electric lock on the front door of my house has a chip scanner, and it’s nice to go surfing and jogging without having to carry keys around.”
Istvan also noted that “for some people without functioning arms, chips in their feet are the simplest way to open doors or operate some household items modified with chip readers.” Other grinders are deeply curious about blurring the line between human and machine, and they get a thrill out of seeing all the ways we can augment our flesh-and-blood bodies using tech. Implants, for them, are a starter experiment.
2) Why are people doing this? What drives someone to biohack themselves?
On a really basic level, biohacking comes down to something we can all relate to: the desire to feel better — and to see just how far we can push the human body. That desire comes in a range of flavors, though. Some people just want to not be sick anymore. Others want to become as smart and strong as they possibly can. An even more ambitious crowd wants to be as smart and strong as possible for as long as possible — in other words, they want to radically extend their life span.
These goals have a way of escalating. Once you’ve determined (or think you’ve determined) that there are concrete “hacks” you can use by yourself right now to go from sick to healthy, or healthy to enhanced, you start to think: Well, why stop there? Why not shoot for peak performance? Why not try to live forever? What starts as a simple wish to be free from pain can snowball into self-improvement on steroids.
That was the case for Asprey. Now in his 40s, he got into biohacking because he was unwell. Before hitting age 30, he was diagnosed with high risk of stroke and heart attack, suffered from cognitive dysfunction, and weighed 300 pounds. “I just wanted to control my own biology because I was tired of being in pain and having mood swings,” he told me.
Now that he feels healthier, he wants to slow the normal aging process and optimize every part of his biology. “I don’t want to be just healthy; that’s average. I want to perform; that’s daring to be above average. Instead of ‘How do I achieve health?’ it’s ‘How do I kick more ass?’”
Zayner, the biohacker who once injected himself with CRISPR DNA, has also had health problems for years, and some of his biohacking pursuits have been explicit attempts to cure himself. But he’s also motivated in large part by frustration. Like some other biohackers with an anti-establishment streak, he’s irritated by federal officials’ purported sluggishness in greenlighting all sorts of medical treatments. In the US, it can take 10 years for a new drug to be developed and approved; for people with serious health conditions, that wait time can feel cruelly long. Zayner claims that’s part of why he wants to democratize science and empower people to experiment on themselves.
(However, he admits that some of his stunts have been purposely provocative and that “I do ridiculous stuff also. I’m sure my motives are not 100 percent pure all the time.”)
Getty Images/iStockphoto
An illustration of a brain hemisphere with chips embedded.
The biohacking community also offers just that: community. It gives people a chance to explore unconventional ideas in a non-hierarchical setting, and to refashion the feeling of being outside the norm into a cool identity. Biohackers congregate in dedicated online networks, in Slack and WhatsApp groups — WeFast, for example, is for intermittent fasters. In person, they run experiments and take classes at “hacklabs,” improvised laboratories that are open to the public, and attend any one of the dozens of biohacking conferences put on each year.
3) How different is biohacking from traditional medicine? What makes something “count” as a biohacking pursuit?
Certain kinds of biohacking go far beyond traditional medicine, while other kinds bleed into it.
Plenty of age-old techniques — meditation, fasting — can be considered a basic type of biohacking. So can going to a spin class or taking antidepressants.
What differentiates biohacking is arguably not that it’s a different genre of activity but that the activities are undertaken with a particular mindset. The underlying philosophy is that we don’t need to accept our bodies’ shortcomings — we can engineer our way past them using a range of high- and low-tech solutions. And we don’t necessarily need to wait for a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, traditional medicine’s gold standard. We can start to transform our lives right now.
As millionaire Serge Faguet, who plans to live forever, put it: “People here [in Silicon Valley] have a technical mindset, so they think of everything as an engineering problem. A lot of people who are not of a technical mindset assume that, ‘Hey, people have always been dying,’ but I think there’s going to be a greater level of awareness [of biohacking] once results start to happen.”
Rob Carlson, an expert on synthetic biology who’s been advocating for biohacking since the early 2000s, told me that to his mind, “all of modern medicine is hacking,” but that people often call certain folks “hackers” as a way of delegitimizing them. “It’s a way of categorizing the other — like, ‘Those biohackers over there do that weird thing.’ This is actually a bigger societal question: Who’s qualified to do anything? And why do you not permit some people to explore new things and talk about that in public spheres?”
If it’s taken to extremes, the “Who’s qualified to do anything?” mindset can delegitimize scientific expertise in a way that can endanger public health. Luckily, biohackers don’t generally seem interested in dethroning expertise to that dangerous degree; many just don’t think they should be locked out of scientific discovery because they lack conventional credentials like a PhD.
4) So how much of this is backed by scientific research?
Some biohacks are backed by strong scientific evidence and are likely to be beneficial. Often, these are the ones that are tried and true, debugged over centuries of experimentation. For example, clinical trials have shown that mindfulness meditation can help reduce anxiety and chronic pain.
But other hacks, based on weak or incomplete evidence, could be either ineffective or actually harmful.
After Dorsey endorsed a particular near-infrared sauna sold by SaunaSpace, which claims its product boosts cellular regeneration and fights aging by detoxing your body, the company experienced a surge in demand. But according to the New York Times, “though a study of middle-aged and older Finnish men indicates that their health benefited from saunas, there have been no major studies conducted of” this type of sauna, which directs incandescent light at your body. So is buying this expensive product likely to improve your health? We can’t say that yet.
Similarly, the intermittent fasting that Dorsey endorses may yield health benefits for some, but scientists still have plenty of questions about it. Although there’s a lot of research on the long-term health outcomes of fasting in animals — and much of it is promising — the research literature on humans is much thinner. Fasting has gone mainstream, but because it’s done so ahead of the science, it falls into the “proceed with caution” category. Critics have noted that for those who’ve struggled with eating disorders, it could be dangerous.
And while we’re on the topic of biohacking nutrition: My colleague Julia Belluz has previously reported on the Bulletproof Diet promoted by Asprey, who she says “vilifies healthy foods and suggests part of the way to achieve a ‘pound a day’ weight loss is to buy his expensive, ‘science-based’ Bulletproof products.” She was not convinced by the citations for his claims:
What I found was a patchwork of cherry-picked research and bad studies or articles that aren’t relevant to humans. He selectively reported on studies that backed up his arguments, and ignored the science that contradicted them.
Many of the studies weren’t done in humans but in rats and mice. Early studies on animals, especially on something as complex as nutrition, should never be extrapolated to humans. Asprey glorifies coconut oil and demonizes olive oil, ignoring the wealth of randomized trials (the highest quality of evidence) that have demonstrated olive oil is beneficial for health. Some of the research he cites was done on very specific sub-populations, such as diabetics, or on very small groups of people. These findings wouldn’t be generalizable to the rest of us.
5) This all sounds like it can be taken to extremes. What are the most dangerous types of biohacking being tried?
Some of the highest-risk hacks are being undertaken by people who feel desperate. On some level, that’s very understandable. If you’re sick and in constant pain, or if you’re old and scared to die, and traditional medicine has nothing that works to quell your suffering, who can fault you for seeking a solution elsewhere?
Yet some of the solutions being tried these days are so dangerous, they’re just not worth the risk.
If you’ve watched HBO’s Silicon Valley, then you’re already familiar with young blood transfusions. As a refresher, that’s when an older person pays for a young person’s blood and has it pumped into their veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging.
This putative treatment sounds vampiric, yet it’s gained popularity in the Silicon Valley area, where people have actually paid $8,000 a pop to participate in trials. The billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has expressed keen interest.
As Chavie Lieber noted for Vox, although some limited studies suggest that these transfusions might fend off diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis, these claims haven’t been proven.
In February, the Food and Drug Administration released a statement warning consumers away from the transfusions: “Simply put, we’re concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies. Such treatments have no proven clinical benefits for the uses for which these clinics are advertising them and are potentially harmful.”
Another biohack that definitely falls in the “don’t try this at home” category: fecal transplants, or transferring stool from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of an unhealthy recipient. In 2016, sick of suffering from severe stomach pain, Zayner decided to give himself a fecal transplant in a hotel room. He had procured a friend’s poop and planned to inoculate himself using the microbes in it. Ever the public stuntman, he invited a journalist to document the procedure. Afterward, he claimed the experiment left him feeling better.
But fecal transplants are still experimental and not approved by the FDA. The FDA recently reported that two people had contracted serious infections from fecal transplants that contained drug-resistant bacteria. One of the people died. And this was in the context of a clinical trial — presumably, a DIY attempt could be even riskier. The FDA is putting a stop to clinical trials on the transplants for now.
Zayner also popularized the notion that you can edit your own DNA with CRISPR. In 2017, he injected himself with CRISPR DNA at a biotech conference, live-streaming the experiment. He later said he regretted that stunt because it could lead others to copy him and “people are going to get hurt.” Yet when asked whether his company, the Odin, which he runs out of his garage in Oakland, California, was going to stop selling CRISPR kits to the general public, he said no.
Ellen Jorgensen, a molecular biologist who co-founded Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, two Brooklyn-based biology labs open to the public, finds antics like Zayner’s worrisome. A self-identified biohacker, she told me people shouldn’t buy Zayner’s kits, not just because they don’t work half the time (she’s a professional and even she couldn’t get it to work), but because CRISPR is such a new technology that scientists aren’t yet sure of all the risks involved in using it. By tinkering with your genome, you could unintentionally cause a mutation that increases your risk of developing cancer, she said. It’s a dangerous practice that should not be marketed as a DIY activity.
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“At Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, we always get the most heartbreaking emails from parents of children afflicted with genetic diseases,” Jorgensen says. “They have watched these Josiah Zayner videos and they want to come into our class and cure their kids. We have to tell them, ‘This is a fantasy.’ ... That is incredibly painful.”
She thinks such biohacking stunts give biohackers like her a bad name. “It’s bad for the DIY bio community,” she said, “because it makes people feel that as a general rule we’re irresponsible.”
6) Are all these biohacking pursuits legal?
Existing regulations weren’t built to make sense of something like biohacking, which in some cases stretches the very limits of what it means to be a human being. That means that a lot of biohacking pursuits exist in a legal gray zone: frowned upon by bodies like the FDA, but not yet outright illegal, or not enforced as such. As biohackers traverse uncharted territory, regulators are scrambling to catch up with them.
After the FDA released its statement in February urging people to stay away from young blood transfusions, the San Francisco-based startup Ambrosia, which was well known for offering the transfusions, said on its website that it had “ceased patient treatments.” The site now says, “We are currently in discussion with the FDA on the topic of young plasma.”
This wasn’t the FDA’s first foray into biohacking. In 2016, the agency objected to Zayner selling kits to brew glow-in-the-dark beer. And after he injected himself with CRISPR, the FDA released a notice saying the sale of DIY gene-editing kits for use on humans is illegal. Zayner disregarded the warning and continued to sell his wares.
In 2019, he was, for a time, under investigation by California’s Department of Consumer Affairs, accused of practicing medicine without a license.
The biohackers I spoke to said restrictive regulation would be a counterproductive response to biohacking because it’ll just drive the practice underground. They say it’s better to encourage a culture of transparency so that people can ask questions about how to do something safely, without fear of reprisal.
According to Jorgensen, most biohackers are safety-conscious, not the sorts of people interested in engineering a pandemic. They’ve even generated and adopted their own codes of ethics. She herself has had a working relationship with law enforcement since the early 2000s.
“At the beginning of the DIY bio movement, we did an awful lot of work with Homeland Security,” she said. “And as far back as 2009, the FBI was reaching out to the DIY community to try to build bridges.”
Carlson told me he’s noticed two general shifts over the past 20 years. “One was after 2001, after the anthrax attacks, when Washington, DC, lost their damn minds and just went into a reactive mode and tried to shut everything down,” he said. “As of 2004 or 2005, the FBI was arresting people for doing biology in their homes.”
Then in 2009, the National Security Council dramatically changed perspectives. It published the National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats, which embraced “innovation and open access to the insights and materials needed to advance individual initiatives,” including in “private laboratories in basements and garages.”
Now, though, some agencies seem to think they ought to take action. But even if there were clear regulations governing all biohacking activities, there would be no straightforward way to stop people from pursuing them behind closed doors. “This technology is available and implementable anywhere, there’s no physical means to control access to it, so what would regulating that mean?” Carlson said.
7) One of the more ambitious types of biohacking is life extension, the attempt to live longer or even cheat death entirely. What are the physical limits of life extension?
Some biohackers believe that by leveraging technology, they’ll be able to live longer but stay younger. Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey claims people will be able to live to age 1,000. In fact, he says the first person who will live to 1,000 has already been born.
De Grey focuses on developing strategies for repairing seven types of cellular and molecular damage associated with aging — or, as he calls them, “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.” His nonprofit, the Methuselah Foundation, has attracted huge investments, including more than $6 million from Thiel. Its aim is to “make 90 the new 50 by 2030.”
Wondering whether de Grey’s goals are realistic, I reached out to Genspace co-founder Oliver Medvedik, who earned his PhD at Harvard Medical School and now directs the Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering at Cooper Union. “Living to 1,000? It’s definitely within our realm of possibility if we as a society that doles out money [to fund research we deem worthy] decide we want to do it,” he told me.
He’s optimistic, he said, because the scientific community is finally converging on a consensus about what the root causes of aging are (damage to mitochondria and epigenetic changes are a couple of examples). And in the past five years, he’s seen an explosion of promising papers on possible ways to address those causes.
Researchers who want to fight aging generally adopt two different approaches. The first is the “small molecule” approach, which often focuses on dietary supplements. Medvedik calls that the “low-hanging fruit.” He spoke excitedly about the possibility of creating a supplement from a plant compound called fisetin, noting that a recent (small) Mayo Clinic trial suggests high concentrations of fisetin can clear out senescent cells in humans — cells that have stopped dividing and that contribute to aging.
The other approach is more dramatic: genetic engineering. Scientists taking this tack in mouse studies usually tinker with a genome in embryo, meaning that new mice are born with the fix already in place. Medvedik pointed out that’s not very useful for treating humans — we want to be able to treat people who have already been born and have begun to age.
But he sees promise here too. He cited a new study that used CRISPR to target Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a genetic disorder that manifests as accelerated aging, in a mouse model. “It wasn’t a total cure — they extended the life span of these mice by maybe 30 percent — but what I was very interested in is the fact that it was delivered into mice that had already been born.”
He’s also intrigued by potential non-pharmaceutical treatments for aging-related diseases like Alzheimer’s — for example, the use of light stimulation to influence brain waves — but those probably won’t help us out anytime soon, for a simple reason: “It’s not a drug. You can’t package and sell it,” he said. “Pharma can’t monetize it.”
Like many in the biohacking community, Medvedik sounded a note of frustration about how the medical system holds back anti-aging progress. “If you were to come up with a compound right now that literally cures aging, you couldn’t get it approved,” he said. “By the definition we’ve set up, aging isn’t a disease, and if you want to get it approved by the FDA you have to target a certain disease. That just seems very strange and antiquated and broken.”
8) Biohackers also include people who engage in DIY science without experimenting on themselves. What’s that form of biohacking like?
Not everyone who’s interested in biohacking is interested in self-experimentation. Some come to it because they care about bringing science to the masses, alleviating the climate crisis, or making art that shakes us out of our comfort zones.
“My version of biohacking is unexpected people in unexpected places doing biotechnology,” Jorgensen told me. For her, the emphasis is on democratizing cutting-edge science while keeping it safe. The community labs she’s helped to build, Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, offer classes on using CRISPR technology to edit a genome — but participants work on the genome of yeast, never on their own bodies.
Some people in the community are altruistically motivated. They want to use biohacking to save the environment by figuring out a way to make a recyclable plastic or a biofuel. They might experiment on organisms in makeshift labs in their garages. Or they might take a Genspace class on how to make furniture out of fungi or paper out of kombucha.
Experimental artists have also taken an interest in biohacking. For them, biology is just another palette. The artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr from the University of Western Australia were actually the first people to create and serve up lab-grown meat. They took some starter cells from a frog and used them to grow small “steaks” of frog meat, which they fed to gallery-goers in France at a 2003 art installation called “Disembodied Cuisine.”
Boris Roessler/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg used DNA samples she received from Chelsea Manning to recreate various possible physiognomies of Manning’s face. The 3D-printed masks formed an art installation called “Probably Chelsea.”
More recently, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has used old floral DNA to recreate the smell of flowers driven to extinction by humans, enabling us to catch a whiff of them once more.
And this summer, a London museum is displaying something rather less fragrant: cheese made from celebrities. Yes, you read that right: The cheese was created with bacteria harvested from the armpits, toes, bellybuttons, and nostrils of famous people. If you’re thoroughly grossed out by this, don’t worry: The food won’t actually be eaten — this “bioart” project is meant more as a thought experiment than as dinner.
9) At its most extreme, biohacking can fundamentally alter human nature. Should we be worried?
When you hear about people genetically engineering themselves or trying young blood transfusions in an effort to ward off death, it’s easy to feel a sense of vertigo about what we’re coming to as a species.
But the fact is we’ve been altering human nature since the very beginning. Inventing agriculture, for example, helped us transform ourselves from nomadic hunter-gatherers into sedentary civilizations. And whether we think of it this way or not, we’re all already doing some kind of biohacking every day.
The deeper I delve into biohacking, the more I think a lot of the discomfort with it boils down to simple neophobia — a fear of what’s new. (Not all of the discomfort, mind you: The more extreme hacks really are dangerous.)
As one of my colleagues put it to me, 40 years ago, “test tube babies” seemed unnatural, a freak-show curiosity; now in vitro fertilization has achieved mainstream acceptance. Will biohacking undergo the same progression? Or is it really altering human nature in a more fundamental way, a way that should concern us?
When I asked Carlson, he refused to buy the premise of the question.
“If you assert that hackers are changing what it means to be human, then we need to first have an agreement about what it means to be human,” he said. “And I’m not going to buy into the idea that there is one thing that is being human. Across the sweep of history, it’s odd to say humans are static — it’s not the case that humans in 1500 were the same as they are today.”
That’s true. Nowadays, we live longer. We’re taller. We’re more mobile. And we marry and have kids with people who come from different continents, different cultures — a profound departure from old customs that has nothing to do with genetic engineering but that’s nonetheless resulting in genetic change.
Still, biohackers are talking about making such significant changes that the risks they carry are significant too. What if biohackers’ “upgrades” don’t get distributed evenly across the human population? What if, for example, the cure for aging becomes available, but only to the rich? Will that lead to an even wider life expectancy gap, where rich people live longer and poor people die younger?
Medvedik dismissed that concern, arguing that a lot of interventions that could lengthen our lives, like supplements, wouldn’t be expensive to produce. “There’s no reason why that stuff can’t be dirt-cheap. But that depends on what we do as a society,” he said. Insulin doesn’t cost much to produce, but as a society we’ve allowed companies to jack up the price so high that many people with diabetes are now skipping lifesaving doses. That’s horrifying, but it’s not a function of the technology itself.
Here’s another risk associated with biohacking, one I think is even more serious: By making ourselves smarter and stronger and potentially even immortal (a difference of kind, not just of degree), we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to alter their biology — even if they don’t want to. To refuse a hack would mean to be at a huge professional disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for remaining suboptimal when optimization is possible. In a world of superhumans, it may become increasingly hard to stay “merely” human.
“The flip side of all this is the ‘perfect race’ or eugenics specter,” Jorgensen acknowledged. “This is a powerful set of technologies that can be used in different ways. We’d better think about it and use it wisely.”
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Listen to Reset
Josiah Zayner is a biohacker who’s famous for injecting himself with the gene-editing tool CRISPR. At a time when the technology exists for us to change (or hack) our own DNA, what are the ethics of experimenting on ourselves, and others, at home? On the launch episode of this new podcast, host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks to Zayner about how he’s thinking about human experimentation today. Plus: new efforts to come up with a code of conduct for biohackers, from legislation to self-regulation.
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How Russia’s Rushed Covid-19 Vaccine Could Backfire
When Vladimir Putin announced Tuesday that Russia had approved a coronavirus vaccine — with no evidence from large-scale clinical trials — vaccine experts were worried.
“I think it’s really scary. It’s really risky,” said Daniel Salmon, the director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Salmon and other experts said that Russia is taking a dangerous step by jumping ahead of so-called Phase 3 trials, which can determine that the vaccine works better than a placebo and doesn’t cause harm to some people who get it.
Unlike experimental drugs given to the sick, vaccines are intended to be given to masses of healthy people. So they must clear a high bar of safety standards. If hundreds of millions of people get a vaccine, even a rare side effect could crop up in thousands of people.
Over the course of the past century, researchers have developed increasingly powerful ways to test vaccines for safety and effectiveness. Some of those lessons were learned the hard way, when a new vaccine caused some harm. But vaccines are now among the safest medical products in the world thanks to the intense rigor of the clinical trials tracking their safety and effectiveness.
This testing typically begins before a single person has received a new vaccine, when researchers inject it into mice or monkeys to see how they respond.
If those animal studies turn out well, researchers then enlist a few dozen volunteers for a Phase 1 trial, in which all volunteers get the experimental vaccine.
Doctors typically keep these volunteers under observation to make sure they don’t have any immediate negative reactions, and to see whether they make antibodies against a pathogen. It’s not uncommon for people to feel achiness in their muscles or even a mild fever, but these mild symptoms typically don’t last long.
If Phase 1 trials do not turn up serious safety problems, then researchers usually move to a Phase 2 trial, in which they inject hundreds of people and make more detailed observations.
The first clinical trials on coronavirus vaccines started in March, and now there are 29 underway, with more to launch soon. Companies such as AstraZeneca, Moderna, Novavax and Pfizer are beginning to share optimistic early results: So far, they have only detected mild or moderate symptoms and no severe side effects. Volunteers have also produced antibodies to the coronavirus, in some cases more than are produced by people who have recovered from an infection.
But no matter how promising these early results, Phase 3 trials can fail.
The timing of Russia’s announcement makes it “very unlikely that they have sufficient data about the efficacy of the product,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician and infectious disease expert at the University of Florida who has warned against rushing the vaccine-approval process. Dr. Dean noted that even vaccines that have produced promising data from early trials in humans have flopped at later stages.
In a large, randomized control trial, researchers give the vaccine or a placebo to tens of thousands of people, and wait for them to encounter the virus in the real world. “Then you wait to see, do they get sick or not. Do they die or not?” said Dr. Steven Black, a vaccine expert with the Task Force for Global Health.
The Russian researchers have not yet begun that crucial test.
In June, the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology at the Health Ministry of the Russian Federation registered a combined Phase 1 and 2 trial on a vaccine called Gam-COVID-Vac Lyo. The researchers planned to test it on 38 volunteers.
They said that the vaccine was made from an adenovirus — a harmless cold virus — carrying a coronavirus gene, similar to what AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson are using in their vaccines. The technology is still relatively new: The first adenovirus vaccine for any disease was approved for Ebola in June.
Since then, Russian officials have claimed that they would be moving the vaccine quickly into manufacturing. Mr. Putin’s announcement on Tuesday made it official. Yet the institute has never published its Phase 1 and 2 trial data.
At Mr. Putin’s announcement, Russia’s Minister of Health, Mikhail Murashko, declared that “all the volunteers developed high titers of antibodies to COVID-19. At the same time, none of them had serious complications of immunization.”
That is the sort of result you’d expect from a Phase 1 trial. It doesn’t tell you if the vaccine actually works.
“This is all beyond stupid,” said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. “Putin doesn’t have a vaccine, he’s just making a political statement.”
On Tuesday, the Russian institute put up a website claiming that a Phase 3 trial would begin the next day involving more than 2,000 people in Russia as well as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Mexico.
All other Phase 3 trials of coronavirus vaccines currently underway are more than ten times larger than that, with 30,000 volunteers apiece.
Dr. Nicole Lurie, a former assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and currently an adviser at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, said the lesson that the U.S. government should draw from Mr. Putin’s announcement is clear.
“This is exactly the situation that Americans expect our government to avoid,” she said.
A faster process
Along with determining whether the vaccine protects people, Phase 3 trials can reveal uncommon side effects that may not have shown up in the comparatively small number of volunteers who enrolled in the earlier phases.
Just because someone gets sick or dies after getting a vaccine, however, doesn’t necessarily show that the vaccine was the culprit. By comparing large groups of people who received the vaccine versus the placebo, researchers can identify unusual clusters of cases in the vaccinated participants.
Along the way, vaccine developers share these results in reports to government regulators and in peer-reviewed papers for scientific journals. Outside experts then evaluate the data from Phase 3 trials and give their recommendation to the F.D.A., which then decides whether to approve a vaccine for widespread use.
“It’s not enough for me to say I have a great product,” said Dr. Salmon. “Before you use it, you need other people to really look at the data and be convinced that the benefits outweigh the risks.”
And even after a vaccine is licensed, researchers still keep an eye on it to make sure it’s safe. As millions of people get a vaccine, even rarer side effects may emerge over time. It’s also possible that certain groups of people, such as children or the elderly, turn out to face risks from a vaccine that weren’t immediately clear from the Phase 3 trials.
Regulators can then make adjustments to the vaccine — changing the dose, for example — to make it safer.
In July, a team of researchers at Tel Aviv University reviewed licensed vaccines in the United States over the past 20 years and concluded they were “safe, with no important post-approval safety issues.”
Putting in safeguards slows the development of vaccines. In recent years, new outbreaks such as Ebola, SARS and pandemic flu strains have spurred vaccine makers to look for ways to speed the process without sacrificing safety.
Now, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, they’re putting those ideas into practice.
One way to safely accelerate vaccine trials is for regulators to prepare in advance to analyze each batch of data, so that they can cut down the time between trials. Vaccine manufacturers have already been demonstrating to regulators that they can make coronavirus vaccines safely on an industrial scale, long before the vaccines themselves have made it through clinical trials.
But researchers are still figuring out how SARS-CoV-2, the name of the virus that causes Covid-19, makes us sick and evades the immune system.
Adding to the complexity, vaccine makers are testing out just about every technology they can for a Covid-19 vaccine. Some of the experimental vaccines are based on old designs, but others have never been approved for use in humans for any disease.
Dr. Black and his colleagues have been working with CEPI, a nonprofit organization that is accelerating the development of vaccines, on a new set of safety procedures for some Covid-19 vaccines, including those developed by AstraZeneca, CureVac and Novavax.
The researchers have come up with a set of potential medical complications that vaccine trials should pay particular attention to. They have addressed the possibility that the vaccine could actually make people prone to worse cases of Covid-19, for example. Fortunately, the research so far shows no sign that this is happening.
CEPI is coordinating the sharing of data among vaccine developers. By pooling the safety data from different vaccine developers, Dr. Black said, CEPI will be able to detect rare side effects that they might not have even considered as possible risks.
Andrew Kramer and Katherine J. Wu contributed reporting.
The post How Russia’s Rushed Covid-19 Vaccine Could Backfire appeared first on Shri Times News.
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Hydroxycut Gummies Review
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Hydroxycut Gummies Non Stimulant Review
Everything you ever needed to know about Hydroxycut gummies in 2020 (an independent review based on science). How quickly does it work? How does it compare to the best weight loss supplements on the market? What if any are the side effects and alot more besides. The main hydroxycut guide can be found HERE and all the individual product reviews can be found HERE. Find out more about us Here.
I have a question for you Which Hydroxycut product has to most calories and carbs? It might seem like a rather strange question
Because I am guessing you are here to lose them! I will reveal all in the compare section but first An important bit of information for you. Did you know nearly all hydroxycut
Weight loss supplements contain just 2 major ingredients?
By the end of this article you will know which weight loss pills Are you best option to finally start your transformation.
So let’s delve in and learn abit about Hydroxycut gummies.
What is this supplement?
Hydroxycut Gummies are one of the many dietary supplements offered by Hydroxycut. Hydroxycut is manufactured by Ioveta Health Sciences, a company that is focused on the fitness and nutrition industry and is based in Canada. The company has many brands in its wardrobe called MuscleTech, Six Star Pro Nutrition, Purely Inspire and Hydroxycut. According to loveta hydroxycut is the best selling dietary supplement in America. You may have seen the company prominently advertised on ebay and everywhere else you go online. Especially if you happen to visit a page about hydroxycut. So are gummies your best option despite the dubious past?
How Does it Work?
Hydroxycut Gummies are said to be non stimulant tasty sweets that will weight help you lose weight and also provide healthy vitamins. The main ingredient C. canephora robusta (green coffee extract) contains chlorogenic acid that aids in fat burning according the manufacture but despite the claims we found the science was less than overwhelming.
What are the benefits?
This product is simply for individuals who may have a problem swallowing pills. Hydroxycut Gummies are for people who are aiming to lose weight but at the same time still want to satisfy their sweet tooth. What makes it more appealing to individuals is its fruity taste and candy like feature though it has to be said that not everyone thinks it tastes that nice! . But hang on is there another motive? Well yes because you see if you really like the taste and associate it with losing weight the company hopes you will buy more quickly!
When you factor in that a daily dose is 6 gummies and a bottle contains 30 gummies in under a week you will need a refill! Well 5 days to be precise. the question is does it actually taste that nice? I mean sure, I can see the appeal. The ideal of treating yourself to sweets and losing weight at the same time whoo hoo now that is my kind of supplement. But hang on until you read the customer reviews and read the science. I have a mission for you to feel alive and sexy again to dance in front of the mirror and slip into those old clothes once more.
Can Hydroxycut Hardcore help you lose weight?
While Hydroxycut hardcore claim to help you lose weight. There are really no recorded studies that prove it’s efficacy. The only scientific proof cited is for C.canephora robusta – Green Coffee Extract (45% chlorogenic acid). However only 2 small studies were carried out both showing modest weight loss when combined with a low calorie diet. The US National Library of medicine had this to say.
The evidence from RCTs seems to indicate that the intake of GCE (green coffee extract) can promote weight loss. However, several caveats exist. The size of the effect is small, and the clinical relevance of this effect is uncertain. More rigorous trials with longer duration are needed to assess the efficacy and safety of GCE as a weight loss supplement. Bare in mind the above is a look at all the scientific papers out there. Gummies do contain folic acid and apple cider so let’s check them out in the ingredient section all is not lost!
Customer reviews and complaints?
Most review websites featuring Hydroxycut products make money promoting the supplement so can be discounted. The reviews on the official website are mostly bogus in our opinion or paid for. In fact on the official website nearly all supplements have a huge approval rating from customers with hardly any negative reviews. However it is quite telling that on Amazon the percentage of negative reviews for the same products increases. Here is one example of a bogus review fromt the official website. “I feel awesome! I’m stronger and fitter than ever. I feel confident, capable, strong and focused like I can do anything I put my mind to!” ~ Natasha, Sacramento CA.
The shocking thing is i found evidence of suspicious positive reviews on amazon as well and I elaborate in this article. Out of all the supplements the team researched hydroxycut was probably the worst offender for planted fake reviews on the official websites and also via Amazon. The same names popping up giving wonderful scripted sales messages outlining key selling points. Another tactic offered employed by companies in Amazon is to simply pull a product when it gets to many bad reviews and then make a new listing. How many times have you gone straight to the customer reviews? I Know I do and we are not alone in this. The customer reviews are the single most important deciding factor for people buying. Does a huge company leave it to chance? The answer is no! I discuss this more in a dedicated article because it would take too long to dissect here but for now here is a selection of some of the real reviews. Verfied – Bree6900
Save your money, these are not worth it!! If I could give it negative stars I would Not worth the money!! If I could give it negative stars or get my money back..I would! Terrible headaches! I read the reviews and decided to try this product to help me with my appetite. I’m always hungry and I was hoping it would curb my desire to eat. Most of the reviews were favorable and I understand that we all might or might not like something based on taste, smell or how it makes us feel (and that is ok).
First day after taking this product I developed a headache with an hour or so (2nd time I tried them – 2days later..headache again!) Actually, I didn’t like the taste (like cough medicine flavor) and way tooo much sugar has been added to this product. Of course, they are trying to make it taste better. Even that would have been ok if they worked and didn’t make me feel like crap. Headaches, nauseous just ill feeling and only curbed my appetite for an hour and that was taking 3 which is the recommended dosage. A waste of my money and I wish I could return them but since I can’t, maybe I can help someone else save some of theirs by giving an honest review. Genesis Marie – Amazon
Please don’t waste your money! We all know the stimulating and truly effective weight loss drugs were taking off the market or the ingredients used that were previously effective are no longer being used in these products. Don’t waste your money anymore. Even after going to a GNC store, I was told that all of their products do not contain any ingredients that will induce weight loss unlike in previous years. These products no longer contain what older formulas contained to help weight loss, therefore making them useless.
Kat Epple I couldn’t stand this product. The smell when you open the bottle is horrendous. The taste is even worse, not to mention the texture. It was like chewing rubber and they seriously upset my stomach, which I didn’t expect as I’ve used hydroxycut for years. Sadly, not a product that I will buy again.
What is the science?
There are only two recorded scientific studies to back up the efficacy of Hydroxycut gummies.
As both presented on Hydroxycut’s official site, on one scientific study conducted in 2006, there were two groups tested. One group took in C. canephora robusta for 60 days and lost an average of 10.95 lbs, while the other group took a placebo and lost about 5.40 lbs. Both groups followed the same calorie-reduced diet. You should be aware however that the weight loss is actually 5.5lbs and 2.5lbs when you take into account the placebo groups also lost weight. So one study showed the ingredient C. canephora robusta helped some people lose just over 2.5lbs in a month.
Ingredients
Aside from C.canephora robusta – (Green Coffee) 1 serving of 3 gummies contain 5 grams of sugar which is 1/5th of the daily recommended sugar intake according to the American Heart Association (AHA). So a supplement intended to help you lose weight will use up ⅖ of you daily allowance of sugar which severely restricts you eating habits for the rest of the day.
Pantothenic Acid – vitamin B5, this helps in creating blood cells and also helps convert the food you eat into energy.
Biotin – B-vitamin that also helps your body convert food into energy.
Thiamin – vitamin B1, allows your body to use carbohydrates as energy.
Riboflavin – a vitamin that promotes your overall health and well-being.
Zinc – this is an important element in regulating your immune system. It also enhances one’s testosterone production and reduces the effects of erectile dysfunction.
Selenium – this improves one’s fertility and cognitive functions.
In addition, its other ingredients are Vitamins A, C, D, E, K and B12, Niacin, Folic acid, Iodin, and Sodium. While it is nice that hydroxycut gummies is composed of vitamins as well as the main weight loss ingredient. I am sure you are aware that multivitamins can be purchased for a few dollars.
Side Effects
Reported side effects include jitteriness, nausea, palpitations, insomnia, and anxiety. Other possible side effects are diarrhea, high blood pressure, jaundice, cardiovascular problems, vomiting, seizures, abdominal pain, fatigue.
How Do you Take the Supplement
This dietary supplement can be taken 2 times a day or as advised by a healthcare professional. Take note that you must not exceed the recommended dose which is a total of 6 gummies. As for your daily intake, it is best that you take one serving of the supplement roughly about 30 to 60 minutes before your two largest meals. As much as possible avoid having a snack between meals or after dinner. It is also important that you not exceed taking 2 gummies in a period of 4 hours as well as 6 gummies in a period of 24-hours. On the official hydroxycut website they suggest the following.
It is highly recommended that you take Hydroxycut Gummies for 8 to 12 weeks and pair it up with a decreased-calorie diet and of course, exercise. In addition to this, you must also drink 8 to 10 glasses of water each day.
Cost and Where to Buy hydroxycut non stimulant gummies?
The cost of Hydroxycut Gummies is typically $20 for 90 which will last 15 days at the recommended dose. They come in flavours Fruit and Mixed Fruit. Amazon and from the following vendors
Official Hydroxycut’s website for ($20.99 for 90)
Walgreens.com (only in store price not given) iherb ($28.56 for 90)
What do other websites say about Hydroxycut?
Healthline (This review is old and outdated) At the end of the day, Hydroxycut may be useful as a fat burning tool in the short term, as long as you’re also eating healthy and exercising. But, same as with any other weight loss method, it won’t lead to long-term results unless followed by a lasting lifestyle change.
Medicalnewstoday.com Bottom Line: Several controlled trials in humans show that green coffee bean extract can lead to significant weight loss. However, these studies were relatively small and some of them were industry sponsored.
The above statement by medicalnewstoday a respected websites but the statement is not supported by the facts. The central scientific source most quoted for dietary research is the U.S. National Library of Medicine which states the following.
“The evidence from RCTs seems to indicate that the intake of GCE can promote weight loss. However, several caveats exist. The size of the effect is small, and the clinical relevance of this effect is uncertain. More rigorous trials with longer duration are needed to assess the efficacy and safety of GCE as a weight loss supplement
How Does it compare to other dieting supplements?
Do hydroxycut gummies make the top 10 list? Go here to find out.
Pros and Cons?
Pros
Maybe more enjoyable to consume compared to diet pills
Does contain many vitamins
Cons
The main ingredient offers very small weight loss and only if you are on a diet
Contains 5 grams of sugar which is 1/5th of the daily recommended sugar intake
If you use the maximum dose of 6 gummies per day a 30 pill jar does not last very long
Subject to above average amount of poor reviews
Guilty of planting fake positive reviews on the official website and on Amazon
Final Verdict
If you don’t like the idea of swallowing a pill, hydroxycut Gummies might seem appealing. But we found this product had far to many negative reviews for our liking and the key scientifically tested ingredient only promises modest weight loss if you follow a low calorie diet. There are several more potent offerings on the market which we include in the top 3 weight loss supplements.
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Source: https://hydroxycut.reviews/products/hydroxycut-gummies-review/
from Hydroxycut Supplement Review https://hydroxycutreviews1.wordpress.com/2019/10/18/hydroxycut-gummies-review/
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Text
Hydroxycut Gummies Review
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email
Hydroxycut Gummies Non Stimulant Review
Everything you ever needed to know about Hydroxycut gummies in 2020 (an independent review based on science). How quickly does it work? How does it compare to the best weight loss supplements on the market? What if any are the side effects and alot more besides. The main hydroxycut guide can be found HERE and all the individual product reviews can be found HERE. Find out more about us Here.
I have a question for you Which Hydroxycut product has to most calories and carbs? It might seem like a rather strange question
Because I am guessing you are here to lose them! I will reveal all in the compare section but first An important bit of information for you. Did you know nearly all hydroxycut
Weight loss supplements contain just 2 major ingredients?
By the end of this article you will know which weight loss pills Are you best option to finally start your transformation.
So let’s delve in and learn abit about Hydroxycut gummies.
What is this supplement?
Hydroxycut Gummies are one of the many dietary supplements offered by Hydroxycut. Hydroxycut is manufactured by Ioveta Health Sciences, a company that is focused on the fitness and nutrition industry and is based in Canada. The company has many brands in its wardrobe called MuscleTech, Six Star Pro Nutrition, Purely Inspire and Hydroxycut. According to loveta hydroxycut is the best selling dietary supplement in America. You may have seen the company prominently advertised on ebay and everywhere else you go online. Especially if you happen to visit a page about hydroxycut. So are gummies your best option despite the dubious past?
How Does it Work?
Hydroxycut Gummies are said to be non stimulant tasty sweets that will weight help you lose weight and also provide healthy vitamins. The main ingredient C. canephora robusta (green coffee extract) contains chlorogenic acid that aids in fat burning according the manufacture but despite the claims we found the science was less than overwhelming.
What are the benefits?
This product is simply for individuals who may have a problem swallowing pills. Hydroxycut Gummies are for people who are aiming to lose weight but at the same time still want to satisfy their sweet tooth. What makes it more appealing to individuals is its fruity taste and candy like feature though it has to be said that not everyone thinks it tastes that nice! . But hang on is there another motive? Well yes because you see if you really like the taste and associate it with losing weight the company hopes you will buy more quickly!
When you factor in that a daily dose is 6 gummies and a bottle contains 30 gummies in under a week you will need a refill! Well 5 days to be precise. the question is does it actually taste that nice? I mean sure, I can see the appeal. The ideal of treating yourself to sweets and losing weight at the same time whoo hoo now that is my kind of supplement. But hang on until you read the customer reviews and read the science. I have a mission for you to feel alive and sexy again to dance in front of the mirror and slip into those old clothes once more.
Can Hydroxycut Hardcore help you lose weight?
While Hydroxycut hardcore claim to help you lose weight. There are really no recorded studies that prove it’s efficacy. The only scientific proof cited is for C.canephora robusta – Green Coffee Extract (45% chlorogenic acid). However only 2 small studies were carried out both showing modest weight loss when combined with a low calorie diet. The US National Library of medicine had this to say.
The evidence from RCTs seems to indicate that the intake of GCE (green coffee extract) can promote weight loss. However, several caveats exist. The size of the effect is small, and the clinical relevance of this effect is uncertain. More rigorous trials with longer duration are needed to assess the efficacy and safety of GCE as a weight loss supplement. Bare in mind the above is a look at all the scientific papers out there. Gummies do contain folic acid and apple cider so let’s check them out in the ingredient section all is not lost!
Customer reviews and complaints?
Most review websites featuring Hydroxycut products make money promoting the supplement so can be discounted. The reviews on the official website are mostly bogus in our opinion or paid for. In fact on the official website nearly all supplements have a huge approval rating from customers with hardly any negative reviews. However it is quite telling that on Amazon the percentage of negative reviews for the same products increases. Here is one example of a bogus review fromt the official website. “I feel awesome! I’m stronger and fitter than ever. I feel confident, capable, strong and focused like I can do anything I put my mind to!” ~ Natasha, Sacramento CA.
The shocking thing is i found evidence of suspicious positive reviews on amazon as well and I elaborate in this article. Out of all the supplements the team researched hydroxycut was probably the worst offender for planted fake reviews on the official websites and also via Amazon. The same names popping up giving wonderful scripted sales messages outlining key selling points. Another tactic offered employed by companies in Amazon is to simply pull a product when it gets to many bad reviews and then make a new listing. How many times have you gone straight to the customer reviews? I Know I do and we are not alone in this. The customer reviews are the single most important deciding factor for people buying. Does a huge company leave it to chance? The answer is no! I discuss this more in a dedicated article because it would take too long to dissect here but for now here is a selection of some of the real reviews. Verfied – Bree6900
Save your money, these are not worth it!! If I could give it negative stars I would Not worth the money!! If I could give it negative stars or get my money back..I would! Terrible headaches! I read the reviews and decided to try this product to help me with my appetite. I’m always hungry and I was hoping it would curb my desire to eat. Most of the reviews were favorable and I understand that we all might or might not like something based on taste, smell or how it makes us feel (and that is ok).
First day after taking this product I developed a headache with an hour or so (2nd time I tried them – 2days later..headache again!) Actually, I didn’t like the taste (like cough medicine flavor) and way tooo much sugar has been added to this product. Of course, they are trying to make it taste better. Even that would have been ok if they worked and didn’t make me feel like crap. Headaches, nauseous just ill feeling and only curbed my appetite for an hour and that was taking 3 which is the recommended dosage. A waste of my money and I wish I could return them but since I can’t, maybe I can help someone else save some of theirs by giving an honest review. Genesis Marie – Amazon
Please don’t waste your money! We all know the stimulating and truly effective weight loss drugs were taking off the market or the ingredients used that were previously effective are no longer being used in these products. Don’t waste your money anymore. Even after going to a GNC store, I was told that all of their products do not contain any ingredients that will induce weight loss unlike in previous years. These products no longer contain what older formulas contained to help weight loss, therefore making them useless.
Kat Epple I couldn’t stand this product. The smell when you open the bottle is horrendous. The taste is even worse, not to mention the texture. It was like chewing rubber and they seriously upset my stomach, which I didn’t expect as I’ve used hydroxycut for years. Sadly, not a product that I will buy again.
What is the science?
There are only two recorded scientific studies to back up the efficacy of Hydroxycut gummies.
As both presented on Hydroxycut’s official site, on one scientific study conducted in 2006, there were two groups tested. One group took in C. canephora robusta for 60 days and lost an average of 10.95 lbs, while the other group took a placebo and lost about 5.40 lbs. Both groups followed the same calorie-reduced diet. You should be aware however that the weight loss is actually 5.5lbs and 2.5lbs when you take into account the placebo groups also lost weight. So one study showed the ingredient C. canephora robusta helped some people lose just over 2.5lbs in a month.
Ingredients
Aside from C.canephora robusta – (Green Coffee) 1 serving of 3 gummies contain 5 grams of sugar which is 1/5th of the daily recommended sugar intake according to the American Heart Association (AHA). So a supplement intended to help you lose weight will use up ⅖ of you daily allowance of sugar which severely restricts you eating habits for the rest of the day.
Pantothenic Acid – vitamin B5, this helps in creating blood cells and also helps convert the food you eat into energy.
Biotin – B-vitamin that also helps your body convert food into energy.
Thiamin – vitamin B1, allows your body to use carbohydrates as energy.
Riboflavin – a vitamin that promotes your overall health and well-being.
Zinc – this is an important element in regulating your immune system. It also enhances one’s testosterone production and reduces the effects of erectile dysfunction.
Selenium – this improves one’s fertility and cognitive functions.
In addition, its other ingredients are Vitamins A, C, D, E, K and B12, Niacin, Folic acid, Iodin, and Sodium. While it is nice that hydroxycut gummies is composed of vitamins as well as the main weight loss ingredient. I am sure you are aware that multivitamins can be purchased for a few dollars.
Side Effects
Reported side effects include jitteriness, nausea, palpitations, insomnia, and anxiety. Other possible side effects are diarrhea, high blood pressure, jaundice, cardiovascular problems, vomiting, seizures, abdominal pain, fatigue.
How Do you Take the Supplement
This dietary supplement can be taken 2 times a day or as advised by a healthcare professional. Take note that you must not exceed the recommended dose which is a total of 6 gummies. As for your daily intake, it is best that you take one serving of the supplement roughly about 30 to 60 minutes before your two largest meals. As much as possible avoid having a snack between meals or after dinner. It is also important that you not exceed taking 2 gummies in a period of 4 hours as well as 6 gummies in a period of 24-hours. On the official hydroxycut website they suggest the following.
It is highly recommended that you take Hydroxycut Gummies for 8 to 12 weeks and pair it up with a decreased-calorie diet and of course, exercise. In addition to this, you must also drink 8 to 10 glasses of water each day.
Cost and Where to Buy hydroxycut non stimulant gummies?
The cost of Hydroxycut Gummies is typically $20 for 90 which will last 15 days at the recommended dose. They come in flavours Fruit and Mixed Fruit. Amazon and from the following vendors
Official Hydroxycut’s website for ($20.99 for 90)
Walgreens.com (only in store price not given) iherb ($28.56 for 90)
What do other websites say about Hydroxycut?
Healthline (This review is old and outdated) At the end of the day, Hydroxycut may be useful as a fat burning tool in the short term, as long as you’re also eating healthy and exercising. But, same as with any other weight loss method, it won’t lead to long-term results unless followed by a lasting lifestyle change.
Medicalnewstoday.com Bottom Line: Several controlled trials in humans show that green coffee bean extract can lead to significant weight loss. However, these studies were relatively small and some of them were industry sponsored.
The above statement by medicalnewstoday a respected websites but the statement is not supported by the facts. The central scientific source most quoted for dietary research is the U.S. National Library of Medicine which states the following.
“The evidence from RCTs seems to indicate that the intake of GCE can promote weight loss. However, several caveats exist. The size of the effect is small, and the clinical relevance of this effect is uncertain. More rigorous trials with longer duration are needed to assess the efficacy and safety of GCE as a weight loss supplement
How Does it compare to other dieting supplements?
Do hydroxycut gummies make the top 10 list? Go here to find out.
Pros and Cons?
Pros
Maybe more enjoyable to consume compared to diet pills
Does contain many vitamins
Cons
The main ingredient offers very small weight loss and only if you are on a diet
Contains 5 grams of sugar which is 1/5th of the daily recommended sugar intake
If you use the maximum dose of 6 gummies per day a 30 pill jar does not last very long
Subject to above average amount of poor reviews
Guilty of planting fake positive reviews on the official website and on Amazon
Final Verdict
If you don’t like the idea of swallowing a pill, hydroxycut Gummies might seem appealing. But we found this product had far to many negative reviews for our liking and the key scientifically tested ingredient only promises modest weight loss if you follow a low calorie diet. There are several more potent offerings on the market which we include in the top 3 weight loss supplements.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email
from Hydroxycut Reviews 2020 https://hydroxycut.reviews/products/hydroxycut-gummies-review/ from Hydroxycut Supplement Review https://hydroxycutreviews.tumblr.com/post/188419962558
0 notes
Text
Hydroxycut Gummies Review
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email
Hydroxycut Gummies Non Stimulant Review
Everything you ever needed to know about Hydroxycut gummies in 2020 (an independent review based on science). How quickly does it work? How does it compare to the best weight loss supplements on the market? What if any are the side effects and alot more besides. The main hydroxycut guide can be found HERE and all the individual product reviews can be found HERE. Find out more about us Here.
I have a question for you Which Hydroxycut product has to most calories and carbs? It might seem like a rather strange question
Because I am guessing you are here to lose them! I will reveal all in the compare section but first An important bit of information for you. Did you know nearly all hydroxycut
Weight loss supplements contain just 2 major ingredients?
By the end of this article you will know which weight loss pills Are you best option to finally start your transformation.
So let’s delve in and learn abit about Hydroxycut gummies.
What is this supplement?
Hydroxycut Gummies are one of the many dietary supplements offered by Hydroxycut. Hydroxycut is manufactured by Ioveta Health Sciences, a company that is focused on the fitness and nutrition industry and is based in Canada. The company has many brands in its wardrobe called MuscleTech, Six Star Pro Nutrition, Purely Inspire and Hydroxycut. According to loveta hydroxycut is the best selling dietary supplement in America. You may have seen the company prominently advertised on ebay and everywhere else you go online. Especially if you happen to visit a page about hydroxycut. So are gummies your best option despite the dubious past?
How Does it Work?
Hydroxycut Gummies are said to be non stimulant tasty sweets that will weight help you lose weight and also provide healthy vitamins. The main ingredient C. canephora robusta (green coffee extract) contains chlorogenic acid that aids in fat burning according the manufacture but despite the claims we found the science was less than overwhelming.
What are the benefits?
This product is simply for individuals who may have a problem swallowing pills. Hydroxycut Gummies are for people who are aiming to lose weight but at the same time still want to satisfy their sweet tooth. What makes it more appealing to individuals is its fruity taste and candy like feature though it has to be said that not everyone thinks it tastes that nice! . But hang on is there another motive? Well yes because you see if you really like the taste and associate it with losing weight the company hopes you will buy more quickly!
When you factor in that a daily dose is 6 gummies and a bottle contains 30 gummies in under a week you will need a refill! Well 5 days to be precise. the question is does it actually taste that nice? I mean sure, I can see the appeal. The ideal of treating yourself to sweets and losing weight at the same time whoo hoo now that is my kind of supplement. But hang on until you read the customer reviews and read the science. I have a mission for you to feel alive and sexy again to dance in front of the mirror and slip into those old clothes once more.
Can Hydroxycut Hardcore help you lose weight?
While Hydroxycut hardcore claim to help you lose weight. There are really no recorded studies that prove it’s efficacy. The only scientific proof cited is for C.canephora robusta – Green Coffee Extract (45% chlorogenic acid). However only 2 small studies were carried out both showing modest weight loss when combined with a low calorie diet. The US National Library of medicine had this to say.
The evidence from RCTs seems to indicate that the intake of GCE (green coffee extract) can promote weight loss. However, several caveats exist. The size of the effect is small, and the clinical relevance of this effect is uncertain. More rigorous trials with longer duration are needed to assess the efficacy and safety of GCE as a weight loss supplement. Bare in mind the above is a look at all the scientific papers out there. Gummies do contain folic acid and apple cider so let’s check them out in the ingredient section all is not lost!
Customer reviews and complaints?
Most review websites featuring Hydroxycut products make money promoting the supplement so can be discounted. The reviews on the official website are mostly bogus in our opinion or paid for. In fact on the official website nearly all supplements have a huge approval rating from customers with hardly any negative reviews. However it is quite telling that on Amazon the percentage of negative reviews for the same products increases. Here is one example of a bogus review fromt the official website. “I feel awesome! I’m stronger and fitter than ever. I feel confident, capable, strong and focused like I can do anything I put my mind to!” ~ Natasha, Sacramento CA.
The shocking thing is i found evidence of suspicious positive reviews on amazon as well and I elaborate in this article. Out of all the supplements the team researched hydroxycut was probably the worst offender for planted fake reviews on the official websites and also via Amazon. The same names popping up giving wonderful scripted sales messages outlining key selling points. Another tactic offered employed by companies in Amazon is to simply pull a product when it gets to many bad reviews and then make a new listing. How many times have you gone straight to the customer reviews? I Know I do and we are not alone in this. The customer reviews are the single most important deciding factor for people buying. Does a huge company leave it to chance? The answer is no! I discuss this more in a dedicated article because it would take too long to dissect here but for now here is a selection of some of the real reviews. Verfied – Bree6900
Save your money, these are not worth it!! If I could give it negative stars I would Not worth the money!! If I could give it negative stars or get my money back..I would! Terrible headaches! I read the reviews and decided to try this product to help me with my appetite. I’m always hungry and I was hoping it would curb my desire to eat. Most of the reviews were favorable and I understand that we all might or might not like something based on taste, smell or how it makes us feel (and that is ok).
First day after taking this product I developed a headache with an hour or so (2nd time I tried them – 2days later..headache again!) Actually, I didn’t like the taste (like cough medicine flavor) and way tooo much sugar has been added to this product. Of course, they are trying to make it taste better. Even that would have been ok if they worked and didn’t make me feel like crap. Headaches, nauseous just ill feeling and only curbed my appetite for an hour and that was taking 3 which is the recommended dosage. A waste of my money and I wish I could return them but since I can’t, maybe I can help someone else save some of theirs by giving an honest review. Genesis Marie – Amazon
Please don’t waste your money! We all know the stimulating and truly effective weight loss drugs were taking off the market or the ingredients used that were previously effective are no longer being used in these products. Don’t waste your money anymore. Even after going to a GNC store, I was told that all of their products do not contain any ingredients that will induce weight loss unlike in previous years. These products no longer contain what older formulas contained to help weight loss, therefore making them useless.
Kat Epple I couldn’t stand this product. The smell when you open the bottle is horrendous. The taste is even worse, not to mention the texture. It was like chewing rubber and they seriously upset my stomach, which I didn’t expect as I’ve used hydroxycut for years. Sadly, not a product that I will buy again.
What is the science?
There are only two recorded scientific studies to back up the efficacy of Hydroxycut gummies.
As both presented on Hydroxycut’s official site, on one scientific study conducted in 2006, there were two groups tested. One group took in C. canephora robusta for 60 days and lost an average of 10.95 lbs, while the other group took a placebo and lost about 5.40 lbs. Both groups followed the same calorie-reduced diet. You should be aware however that the weight loss is actually 5.5lbs and 2.5lbs when you take into account the placebo groups also lost weight. So one study showed the ingredient C. canephora robusta helped some people lose just over 2.5lbs in a month.
Ingredients
Aside from C.canephora robusta – (Green Coffee) 1 serving of 3 gummies contain 5 grams of sugar which is 1/5th of the daily recommended sugar intake according to the American Heart Association (AHA). So a supplement intended to help you lose weight will use up ⅖ of you daily allowance of sugar which severely restricts you eating habits for the rest of the day.
Pantothenic Acid – vitamin B5, this helps in creating blood cells and also helps convert the food you eat into energy.
Biotin – B-vitamin that also helps your body convert food into energy.
Thiamin – vitamin B1, allows your body to use carbohydrates as energy.
Riboflavin – a vitamin that promotes your overall health and well-being.
Zinc – this is an important element in regulating your immune system. It also enhances one’s testosterone production and reduces the effects of erectile dysfunction.
Selenium – this improves one’s fertility and cognitive functions.
In addition, its other ingredients are Vitamins A, C, D, E, K and B12, Niacin, Folic acid, Iodin, and Sodium. While it is nice that hydroxycut gummies is composed of vitamins as well as the main weight loss ingredient. I am sure you are aware that multivitamins can be purchased for a few dollars.
Side Effects
Reported side effects include jitteriness, nausea, palpitations, insomnia, and anxiety. Other possible side effects are diarrhea, high blood pressure, jaundice, cardiovascular problems, vomiting, seizures, abdominal pain, fatigue.
How Do you Take the Supplement
This dietary supplement can be taken 2 times a day or as advised by a healthcare professional. Take note that you must not exceed the recommended dose which is a total of 6 gummies. As for your daily intake, it is best that you take one serving of the supplement roughly about 30 to 60 minutes before your two largest meals. As much as possible avoid having a snack between meals or after dinner. It is also important that you not exceed taking 2 gummies in a period of 4 hours as well as 6 gummies in a period of 24-hours. On the official hydroxycut website they suggest the following.
It is highly recommended that you take Hydroxycut Gummies for 8 to 12 weeks and pair it up with a decreased-calorie diet and of course, exercise. In addition to this, you must also drink 8 to 10 glasses of water each day.
Cost and Where to Buy hydroxycut non stimulant gummies?
The cost of Hydroxycut Gummies is typically $20 for 90 which will last 15 days at the recommended dose. They come in flavours Fruit and Mixed Fruit. Amazon and from the following vendors
Official Hydroxycut’s website for ($20.99 for 90)
Walgreens.com (only in store price not given) iherb ($28.56 for 90)
What do other websites say about Hydroxycut?
Healthline (This review is old and outdated) At the end of the day, Hydroxycut may be useful as a fat burning tool in the short term, as long as you’re also eating healthy and exercising. But, same as with any other weight loss method, it won’t lead to long-term results unless followed by a lasting lifestyle change.
Medicalnewstoday.com Bottom Line: Several controlled trials in humans show that green coffee bean extract can lead to significant weight loss. However, these studies were relatively small and some of them were industry sponsored.
The above statement by medicalnewstoday a respected websites but the statement is not supported by the facts. The central scientific source most quoted for dietary research is the U.S. National Library of Medicine which states the following.
“The evidence from RCTs seems to indicate that the intake of GCE can promote weight loss. However, several caveats exist. The size of the effect is small, and the clinical relevance of this effect is uncertain. More rigorous trials with longer duration are needed to assess the efficacy and safety of GCE as a weight loss supplement
How Does it compare to other dieting supplements?
Do hydroxycut gummies make the top 10 list? Go here to find out.
Pros and Cons?
Pros
Maybe more enjoyable to consume compared to diet pills
Does contain many vitamins
Cons
The main ingredient offers very small weight loss and only if you are on a diet
Contains 5 grams of sugar which is 1/5th of the daily recommended sugar intake
If you use the maximum dose of 6 gummies per day a 30 pill jar does not last very long
Subject to above average amount of poor reviews
Guilty of planting fake positive reviews on the official website and on Amazon
Final Verdict
If you don’t like the idea of swallowing a pill, hydroxycut Gummies might seem appealing. But we found this product had far to many negative reviews for our liking and the key scientifically tested ingredient only promises modest weight loss if you follow a low calorie diet. There are several more potent offerings on the market which we include in the top 3 weight loss supplements.
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Hydroxycut Gummies Review
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Hydroxycut Gummies Non Stimulant Review
Everything you ever needed to know about Hydroxycut gummies in 2020 (an independent review based on science). How quickly does it work? How does it compare to the best weight loss supplements on the market? What if any are the side effects and alot more besides. The main hydroxycut guide can be found HERE and all the individual product reviews can be found HERE. Find out more about us Here.
I have a question for you Which Hydroxycut product has to most calories and carbs? It might seem like a rather strange question
Because I am guessing you are here to lose them! I will reveal all in the compare section but first An important bit of information for you. Did you know nearly all hydroxycut
Weight loss supplements contain just 2 major ingredients?
By the end of this article you will know which weight loss pills Are you best option to finally start your transformation.
So let’s delve in and learn abit about Hydroxycut gummies.
What is this supplement?
Hydroxycut Gummies are one of the many dietary supplements offered by Hydroxycut. Hydroxycut is manufactured by Ioveta Health Sciences, a company that is focused on the fitness and nutrition industry and is based in Canada. The company has many brands in its wardrobe called MuscleTech, Six Star Pro Nutrition, Purely Inspire and Hydroxycut. According to loveta hydroxycut is the best selling dietary supplement in America. You may have seen the company prominently advertised on ebay and everywhere else you go online. Especially if you happen to visit a page about hydroxycut. So are gummies your best option despite the dubious past?
How Does it Work?
Hydroxycut Gummies are said to be non stimulant tasty sweets that will weight help you lose weight and also provide healthy vitamins. The main ingredient C. canephora robusta (green coffee extract) contains chlorogenic acid that aids in fat burning according the manufacture but despite the claims we found the science was less than overwhelming.
What are the benefits?
This product is simply for individuals who may have a problem swallowing pills. Hydroxycut Gummies are for people who are aiming to lose weight but at the same time still want to satisfy their sweet tooth. What makes it more appealing to individuals is its fruity taste and candy like feature though it has to be said that not everyone thinks it tastes that nice! . But hang on is there another motive? Well yes because you see if you really like the taste and associate it with losing weight the company hopes you will buy more quickly!
When you factor in that a daily dose is 6 gummies and a bottle contains 30 gummies in under a week you will need a refill! Well 5 days to be precise. the question is does it actually taste that nice? I mean sure, I can see the appeal. The ideal of treating yourself to sweets and losing weight at the same time whoo hoo now that is my kind of supplement. But hang on until you read the customer reviews and read the science. I have a mission for you to feel alive and sexy again to dance in front of the mirror and slip into those old clothes once more.
Can Hydroxycut Hardcore help you lose weight?
While Hydroxycut hardcore claim to help you lose weight. There are really no recorded studies that prove it’s efficacy. The only scientific proof cited is for C.canephora robusta – Green Coffee Extract (45% chlorogenic acid). However only 2 small studies were carried out both showing modest weight loss when combined with a low calorie diet. The US National Library of medicine had this to say.
The evidence from RCTs seems to indicate that the intake of GCE (green coffee extract) can promote weight loss. However, several caveats exist. The size of the effect is small, and the clinical relevance of this effect is uncertain. More rigorous trials with longer duration are needed to assess the efficacy and safety of GCE as a weight loss supplement. Bare in mind the above is a look at all the scientific papers out there. Gummies do contain folic acid and apple cider so let’s check them out in the ingredient section all is not lost!
Customer reviews and complaints?
Most review websites featuring Hydroxycut products make money promoting the supplement so can be discounted. The reviews on the official website are mostly bogus in our opinion or paid for. In fact on the official website nearly all supplements have a huge approval rating from customers with hardly any negative reviews. However it is quite telling that on Amazon the percentage of negative reviews for the same products increases. Here is one example of a bogus review fromt the official website. “I feel awesome! I’m stronger and fitter than ever. I feel confident, capable, strong and focused like I can do anything I put my mind to!” ~ Natasha, Sacramento CA.
The shocking thing is i found evidence of suspicious positive reviews on amazon as well and I elaborate in this article. Out of all the supplements the team researched hydroxycut was probably the worst offender for planted fake reviews on the official websites and also via Amazon. The same names popping up giving wonderful scripted sales messages outlining key selling points. Another tactic offered employed by companies in Amazon is to simply pull a product when it gets to many bad reviews and then make a new listing. How many times have you gone straight to the customer reviews? I Know I do and we are not alone in this. The customer reviews are the single most important deciding factor for people buying. Does a huge company leave it to chance? The answer is no! I discuss this more in a dedicated article because it would take too long to dissect here but for now here is a selection of some of the real reviews. Verfied – Bree6900
Save your money, these are not worth it!! If I could give it negative stars I would Not worth the money!! If I could give it negative stars or get my money back..I would! Terrible headaches! I read the reviews and decided to try this product to help me with my appetite. I’m always hungry and I was hoping it would curb my desire to eat. Most of the reviews were favorable and I understand that we all might or might not like something based on taste, smell or how it makes us feel (and that is ok).
First day after taking this product I developed a headache with an hour or so (2nd time I tried them – 2days later..headache again!) Actually, I didn’t like the taste (like cough medicine flavor) and way tooo much sugar has been added to this product. Of course, they are trying to make it taste better. Even that would have been ok if they worked and didn’t make me feel like crap. Headaches, nauseous just ill feeling and only curbed my appetite for an hour and that was taking 3 which is the recommended dosage. A waste of my money and I wish I could return them but since I can’t, maybe I can help someone else save some of theirs by giving an honest review. Genesis Marie – Amazon
Please don’t waste your money! We all know the stimulating and truly effective weight loss drugs were taking off the market or the ingredients used that were previously effective are no longer being used in these products. Don’t waste your money anymore. Even after going to a GNC store, I was told that all of their products do not contain any ingredients that will induce weight loss unlike in previous years. These products no longer contain what older formulas contained to help weight loss, therefore making them useless.
Kat Epple I couldn’t stand this product. The smell when you open the bottle is horrendous. The taste is even worse, not to mention the texture. It was like chewing rubber and they seriously upset my stomach, which I didn’t expect as I’ve used hydroxycut for years. Sadly, not a product that I will buy again.
What is the science?
There are only two recorded scientific studies to back up the efficacy of Hydroxycut gummies.
As both presented on Hydroxycut’s official site, on one scientific study conducted in 2006, there were two groups tested. One group took in C. canephora robusta for 60 days and lost an average of 10.95 lbs, while the other group took a placebo and lost about 5.40 lbs. Both groups followed the same calorie-reduced diet. You should be aware however that the weight loss is actually 5.5lbs and 2.5lbs when you take into account the placebo groups also lost weight. So one study showed the ingredient C. canephora robusta helped some people lose just over 2.5lbs in a month.
Ingredients
Aside from C.canephora robusta – (Green Coffee) 1 serving of 3 gummies contain 5 grams of sugar which is 1/5th of the daily recommended sugar intake according to the American Heart Association (AHA). So a supplement intended to help you lose weight will use up ⅖ of you daily allowance of sugar which severely restricts you eating habits for the rest of the day.
Pantothenic Acid – vitamin B5, this helps in creating blood cells and also helps convert the food you eat into energy.
Biotin – B-vitamin that also helps your body convert food into energy.
Thiamin – vitamin B1, allows your body to use carbohydrates as energy.
Riboflavin – a vitamin that promotes your overall health and well-being.
Zinc – this is an important element in regulating your immune system. It also enhances one’s testosterone production and reduces the effects of erectile dysfunction.
Selenium – this improves one’s fertility and cognitive functions.
In addition, its other ingredients are Vitamins A, C, D, E, K and B12, Niacin, Folic acid, Iodin, and Sodium. While it is nice that hydroxycut gummies is composed of vitamins as well as the main weight loss ingredient. I am sure you are aware that multivitamins can be purchased for a few dollars.
Side Effects
Reported side effects include jitteriness, nausea, palpitations, insomnia, and anxiety. Other possible side effects are diarrhea, high blood pressure, jaundice, cardiovascular problems, vomiting, seizures, abdominal pain, fatigue.
How Do you Take the Supplement
This dietary supplement can be taken 2 times a day or as advised by a healthcare professional. Take note that you must not exceed the recommended dose which is a total of 6 gummies. As for your daily intake, it is best that you take one serving of the supplement roughly about 30 to 60 minutes before your two largest meals. As much as possible avoid having a snack between meals or after dinner. It is also important that you not exceed taking 2 gummies in a period of 4 hours as well as 6 gummies in a period of 24-hours. On the official hydroxycut website they suggest the following.
It is highly recommended that you take Hydroxycut Gummies for 8 to 12 weeks and pair it up with a decreased-calorie diet and of course, exercise. In addition to this, you must also drink 8 to 10 glasses of water each day.
Cost and Where to Buy hydroxycut non stimulant gummies?
The cost of Hydroxycut Gummies is typically $20 for 90 which will last 15 days at the recommended dose. They come in flavours Fruit and Mixed Fruit. Amazon and from the following vendors
Official Hydroxycut’s website for ($20.99 for 90)
Walgreens.com (only in store price not given) iherb ($28.56 for 90)
What do other websites say about Hydroxycut?
Healthline (This review is old and outdated) At the end of the day, Hydroxycut may be useful as a fat burning tool in the short term, as long as you’re also eating healthy and exercising. But, same as with any other weight loss method, it won’t lead to long-term results unless followed by a lasting lifestyle change.
Medicalnewstoday.com Bottom Line: Several controlled trials in humans show that green coffee bean extract can lead to significant weight loss. However, these studies were relatively small and some of them were industry sponsored.
The above statement by medicalnewstoday a respected websites but the statement is not supported by the facts. The central scientific source most quoted for dietary research is the U.S. National Library of Medicine which states the following.
“The evidence from RCTs seems to indicate that the intake of GCE can promote weight loss. However, several caveats exist. The size of the effect is small, and the clinical relevance of this effect is uncertain. More rigorous trials with longer duration are needed to assess the efficacy and safety of GCE as a weight loss supplement
How Does it compare to other dieting supplements?
Do hydroxycut gummies make the top 10 list? Go here to find out.
Pros and Cons?
Pros
Maybe more enjoyable to consume compared to diet pills
Does contain many vitamins
Cons
The main ingredient offers very small weight loss and only if you are on a diet
Contains 5 grams of sugar which is 1/5th of the daily recommended sugar intake
If you use the maximum dose of 6 gummies per day a 30 pill jar does not last very long
Subject to above average amount of poor reviews
Guilty of planting fake positive reviews on the official website and on Amazon
Final Verdict
If you don’t like the idea of swallowing a pill, hydroxycut Gummies might seem appealing. But we found this product had far to many negative reviews for our liking and the key scientifically tested ingredient only promises modest weight loss if you follow a low calorie diet. There are several more potent offerings on the market which we include in the top 3 weight loss supplements.
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V.R. could take scary nightmares down a notch
Virtual reality could give people with nightmare disorder some relief from their frightening dreams.
As a sleep researcher, Patrick McNamara is hunting for new ways to treat people with nightmare disorder (also known as dream anxiety disorder). Being chased by a malevolent entity, McNamara says, is one of the most common recurring nightmares that patients report experiencing over and over again.
“Very often, people with chronic nightmares report dreaming about being chased or attacked by supernatural or demonic beings,” says McNamara, associate professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine. “They can’t really see their attackers’ faces but they know their intent is to harm them. People also report being chased by animals like snakes or bears. Bears are very frequent in these types of dreams, where you’re trying to get safe, throwing up obstacles between you and the attacker, feeling like you’re about to be attacked.”
A nightmare like that might give anyone a bit of anxiety. But terrifying dreams, if they keep happening, can induce far more than just fleeting fear. McNamara says recurring nightmares can have profound long-term effects, especially for children who experience them. In the US, between half and two-thirds of children and up to 15 percent of adults have frequent nightmares.
“Recurring nightmares are really significant predictors,” he says. “They foretell mental health trouble.”
For children, that trouble can come in the form of adolescent and adult psychosis, including anxiety, depression, stress, and suicidal ideation. In adults, distressing nightmares can often be a sign of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite the documented clinical effects of nightmares—including distress, loss of sleep, and generalized anxiety—McNamara says we still lack easy-to-use, effective treatments for nightmare disorders.
In the mind’s eye
Imagery rehearsal therapy, the current gold standard for treatment, attempts to teach patients to replace nightmare imagery with less frightening versions. According to McNamara, success of the treatment is varied and typically short term because it relies on a person’s ability and willingness to conjure up realistic nightmare imagery in their mind’s eye, which some patients can do better than others. Naturally, most young children are even less capable of willfully controlling an imagined visual narrative than adolescents or adults.
For people who don’t experience recurring nightmares, “the hardest thing to grasp is the idea that recurring nightmares never lose their strength,” says Wesley J. Wildman, a professor of philosophy of religion. “It’s a really painful problem to have nightmares that are just as bad the hundredth time you’ve had them.”
Ultimately, Wildman says, unrelenting nightmares can make people truly afraid to go to sleep.
Switch the visuals
For the pilot study, the researchers designed moderately frightening virtual reality imagery—such as an underwater environment in which a great white shark seems to swim closer and closer to the virtual reality user—to illicit a manageable level of fear in participants. “To treat nightmare disorders, you want to expose the person to arousing and disturbing images, but you don’t want to expose them to very scary images,” McNamara says. The goal is to treat distress rather than inflict more.
They enrolled 19 study participants who reported having frequent nightmares. Using joystick and gesture controls, participants were able to modify the threatening visuals to make them less scary. McNamara says they could, for example, use a drawing tool to cover up the shark’s teeth or a sizing tool to shrink it down. Afterward, participants were also asked to write a narrative about their newly edited visual experience.
Someone might say, “When I looked [at the shark] more closely it turned out to be a great white tuna that was going to swim by me,” McNamara says. “Suddenly that tremendous force is not after you and it’s not so threatening.”
Over the course of a month, participants continued visiting McNamara’s lab twice a week to use the Oculus headset and its joystick controls to alter scary visuals and create new narratives. At each visit, they were monitored for anxiety, nightmare distress, and nightmare effects. By the conclusion of the study, participants reported significantly lower levels of all three. The results were published in the journal Dreaming.
“We think that they learn these imagery control skills and then over a couple of weeks, those skills get transferred from their conscious state into their dream state,” McNamara says.
Although the results of the pilot are exciting, McNamara says the next step is to design a double-blind clinical trial to really test the effects of virtual reality therapy. To rule out placebo therapy effects, McNamara says such a study could involve a group of participants who do virtual reality therapy and another group of participants who do standard imagery rehearsal therapy.
“The most exciting thing about this is the potential to bring this to kids suffering from nightmares,” McNamara says. “Kids are fantastic with adopting technology, and if we can treat their nightmares earlier, we might slow down or prevent conversion into psychosis. That could save lives.”
Funding for the pilot project came from the Center for Mind and Culture and the Virginia Modeling, Analysis & Simulation Center.
Source: Boston University
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My Experience with epi-On CXL (CXLUSA)
I’ve read a lot of these types of posts, and think they are great. I didn’t see any that covered an experience with CXLUSA ‘s epi-on, so I figured I’d share mine. It’s really long, but I hope the thoroughness helps someone who’s just walking into KC and CXL. Hit me up with any questions! In 2015 I was diagnosed with keratoconus and didn’t think much of it because my vision was correctable with glasses and my doctor didn’t explain the disease to me. He vaguely mentioned some new treatment that was hitting the market and seemed leery of it. I did not realize that KC was progressive and during annual checkups, I’d keep getting a stronger prescription. In January, it was obvious that my eyes had gotten much worse. I asked what the treatment options were and he told me I was getting ahead of myself. I remembered he’d mentioned something called crosslinking at the last visit, so I went home and started researching treatment options on my own, and I’m so glad I did! Background I live in the US, am a 27y/o male with allergies and my wife informed me that I rubbed my eyes a lot more than I realized. Don’t rub your eyes! I am still able to function with glasses and understand that I am very lucky in that regard. My insurance is an HSA, so I’m used to paying for things out of pocket but was able to put away a fair amount of money to cover most expenses. I had just started a new job in January and had no vacation days saved up, so I was very concerned about how I could recover from CXL with no vacation days because everything I’d read said that recovery time takes about 2 weeks for epi-off. I was also concerned that the eye that didn’t receive treatment first would continue to progress as there is typically a 6-month gap between procedures. Through my research, I’d concluded that epi-off was the best option and began to research ophthalmologists near me that specialized in CXL. The closest I found was in Dallas (about 2.5 hours away from my house, unfortunately). I went with Cornea Associates of Texas because their website was very informative and they had great reviews online. My doctor, Dr. Alexander, is insanely smart, good at what she does, and is very reassuring. If you are in the area and have KC, I highly recommend her! She told me that they were a part of an FDA trial called CXLUSA and that she performed epi-on procedures with excellent success rates. She informed me that CXLUSA has been doing epi-on for years now but doesn’t have FDA approval. I pushed back saying that epi-off was all around better, and she said it was absolutely a proven technology, but that she has been getting great results from their special riboflavin. Additionally, the study will retreat at the cost of the materials if it doesn’t stabilize the cornea; however, they’ve only had to do a few retreats. She also told me that I could be back at work on Monday if I had the procedure done on a Friday and that she could do both eyes at the same time. From what I can tell, they don’t have approval because they refuse to do controls as they know that KC continues to get worse for most people, so they don’t want to give anyone a placebo pill so to speak. I’ll admit that I was still very skeptical about CXLUSA and kept doing research. I decided I wasn’t willing to treat both eyes at the same time just in case something went terribly wrong during the procedure; I’d still have one eye that I could work with for a while. Taking the worst first approach, I decided to have my left eye done first. I figured I’d give CXLUSA a shot and scheduled the first procedure for my left eye and only had to wait two weeks. However, I kept an appointment with another Dr. offering the FDA approved method as I planned to have my right eye done with the epi-off method once I could save up enough vacation days. The day of the procedure The day before the procedure, I woke up super early, went to work, did an intensive workout at the gym, and then intentionally only got about 4 hours of sleep that night to be as tired as possible so that I could sleep after the procedure. I went in on a Friday for the procedure, and they go in and randomly assign you to one of three groups. You all get the same riboflavin concoction, but the light exposure differs: Group 1: 4mW/cm2 light for 20 minutes Group 2: 6mW/cm2 for 20 minutes Group 3: 4 mW/cm2 for 30 minutes (this is apparently the best one) I was assigned to group 3 and was really excited as they said they had approximately a 99% success rate. They encouraged me to get both eyes treated at the same time as my chances of getting group 3 twice were low. I contemplated it but didn’t get both treated at the same time. For the most part, I wish I had… I then did a UCVA test (20/40) and BCVA (20/25) on the left eye. The procedure itself was a breeze. I listened to music and found the whole process fascinating. Afterward, my wife drove me to the hotel (as home is 2.5 hours away) and I took the prescribed painkillers and some Tylenol PM and passed out before the pain could set in. I’d say at worst my pain was a 5, even though they said it’d be more like a 9. I woke up a few times for eye drops and water but slept through most of the pain. The pain that annoyed me the most was the roof of my mouth. Did anyone else get that side effect? The next morning, I was still sensitive to light and was probably at a two in pain. I did my check up and saw 20/60 UCVA, but my eyes were so sensitive I couldn’t take the light and used the pinholes to get to 20/40. However, officially my vision was recorded as 20/60 since pinholes are cheating... By that evening I was feeling good enough to go out to eat with friends, but kept lots of eyedrops close by. I went back to work on Monday and experienced vision fluctuation (still do) and that’s frustrating but bearable. That left me with one eye untreated. I still planned to have epi-off done on my right eye, but a couple of things changed my mind. 1. Avedro announced they were moving forward with epi-on trials. That signaled a lot of credibility to epi-on CXL. I looked at the light exposure they are using and its much higher than what I had, so I imagine the pain level would be a bit more. I’m not a doctor though, so… 2. I was recovering nicely and having moments of stunning vision, but keep in mind that’s not the goal of this procedure. The most important thing is to halt the progression of KC. I had some foreign body sensation, but overall nothing to complain about. 3. The ghosting in my right eye started acting up more than I cared for about a week after my left eye was treated and it gravely concerned me. Since CXLUSA was an easy recovery time and my right eye was clearly getting worse, I went called to schedule the procedure. I was able to get the next procedure scheduled one month after my initial procedure. So I’m very pleased with the overall speed of CXLUSA and their ability to do CXL without a long wait. I was assigned to group 1 for my right eye and was discouraged that I didn’t get 3 again. They told me they still had great success with all of the groups, there was nothing I could do to get into 3, and I needed the procedure, so I went forward with it figuring that in the long run, my right eye might experience some progression. Still, group 1 CXL is still better than no CXL! I was shocked to find my UCVA in my right eye was 20/120 but was glad to see the BCVA still held at 20/20. The procedure was again a breeze, and I figured I’d have even less pain since I was getting less exposure to light this time. I was checked for epi abrasions afterward and didn’t have any. Once I got back to the hotel, I couldn’t sleep even with the Tylenol PM and pain started setting in. Pain that I hadn’t experienced before. After 7 hours, I was in agony every time I blinked. I took more painkillers and used the numbing drops this time. Only then was I able to get some sleep. I woke up the next morning still in pain and figured I’d developed an abrasion on my eye. I went in for the next-day follow-up, and they confirmed I had a tear. They explained that some people develop tears and others don’t, and they don’t know why. Sometimes people who have both eyes treated at the same time get a tear in only one eye and sometimes both. No real rhyme or reason, so keep that in mind if you are considering bi-lateral treatment. I cannot explain how good the eye bandage contact felt, talk about instant relief! Before they put the bandage in, I did my vision test. Annoyed with the pain, I rushed through the test and started to realize I was seeing way better than before. I could get to 20/40 UCVA (without the help of pinholes)!! That’s a miraculous improvement. I asked my doctor why, and she didn’t know why it was so good so soon. I was then told my vision would be blurry for weeks once my tear started to heal, but the worst of it was the first 48 hours after I got the contact bandage lens. After the 3 days, my bandage came out while I was putting in drops, so I had to start using a prescribed eye ointment until my one week follow up. It makes your vision very blurry for the first 30 minutes after application but after that it's tolerable. At my one week follow up, my doctor told me my abrasion had closed but that it would still be blurry for a few weeks as it was smoothing itself out. All the terms are relative. While I was there, they checked my left eye and I saw 20/40 UCVA and 20/20 with the pinholes (about the same). My right eye was 20/70 UCVA (some regression compared to the day after, but still much better than pre-op) and 20/40 with the pinholes. Again, vision improvement is not the goal of the procedure, but I have no other way of measuring how my eye is doing until they do the scan at 3 months. I still experience some fluctuation in my left eye, but not much. My right eye is changing a lot right now. At the 3 month mark, they do the eye topography, so I’m anxious to see how much my eye has changed and if it has flattened at all. They say you need to wait about a month before getting a new prescription and since I had my CXL spaced out, I figured I’d wait for my right eye to be a month removed from CXL before going to go to the optometrist. I’m looking forward to my new prescription, and yes, I have a new optometrist. One who is used to working with KC, and people who’ve had CXL. The overall cost of treatment was $2,900/eye (follow-ups included). Since this is not FDA approved yet, insurance won’t foot the bill. With that being said, they do offer financing if you need it. Considering this was a sight-saving procedure, I look at it as an investment and felt the money was well worth it. If money is an issue, I’ve heard that insurance is getting better at covering Avedro’s treatment. If you have KC, please don’t put off CXL!! submitted by /u/ch33rs17 [link] [comments] https://www.reddit.com/r/Keratoconus/comments/8ae7gz/my_experience_with_epion_cxl_cxlusa/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr
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A Once Per Month Shot to Treat Opiate Addiction has Been Approved
What if you could take a shot in a doctor’s office once a month in order to “cure” your drug addiction to painkillers?
That may be a reality that we are inching closer to. The FDA says that “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved Sublocade, the first once-monthly injectable buprenorphine product for the treatment of moderate-to-severe opioid use disorder.”
The question is: Can this be an effective treatment for someone who is struggling with addiction, and is it any more successful than other approaches?
The idea behind Sublocade is the same as that behind Suboxone: Replacement therapy with a synthetic and far less harmful substance. The molecules that are in Sublocade fill in the same opiate receptors that normal opioid molecules would fit into, thus reducing cravings and resulting in fewer relapses.
In clinical trials the drug proves that it is more effective than a placebo group. What I would like to have seen myself is to test Sublocade not only against a placebo group, but also against a group who is taking traditional, under-the-tongue Suboxone. The idea would be to see if taking a the medication monthly makes a big difference or not in terms of success rates.
In other words, if you are taking a daily pill in order to control your cravings, then you are very susceptible to relapse because you can make a plan that day to relapse and then avoid taking your medicine. However, if the medication is a shot in the arm and it lasts for 30 days, you really are no longer forced to make that daily decision any more. You have “bought” yourself 30 days off from having to wonder if you should keep taking your medication or not.
So the real question is: Would this show a noticeable improvement?
I want to caution people that this may sound like it is getting closer and closer to a real “cure,” but the reality is that a new medical technology like this is not a magic bullet, and they stress the fact that it only works well in conjunction with traditional therapy and peer support, such as with AA and NA meetings.
If you take the idea of the monthly injection one step further you get the concept of the surgical implant that is either permanent or semi-permanent, lasting either several years or even for a lifetime. So when we first hear the idea of a surgical implant that can last for an entire lifetime, we automatically think of such technology as being a “cure.” Just send all of the opiate addicts to get this implant, and all of their problems will be solved forever, right?
Not so fast.
The reality is often different than this. You have to remember just how inventive and persistent addicts can be. There is always a different way to accomplish something, and this rings true when it comes to self medicating as well.
Opiates may be the hot and popular drug of abuse right now, but there are dozens of different kinds of substances that can intoxicate people. If you block an opiate addict’s body from ever getting high on opiates again, you may simply divert them into exploring other substances of abuse.
The outsider tends to think of the addict in terms of their physical dependence: The heroin addict who is hopelessly addicted to a very specific substance. The alcoholic who is obviously addicted to the particular drug that is alcohol.
But the reality is that addiction runs deeper than the substance itself. The struggling addict may have discovered their drug of choice at one point and become physically dependent on it–that part of it is certainly true. But over time, the addict who is abusing a substance gets addicted to the state of being medicated more so than the substance itself.
In other words, while addiction may start out as physical dependence, it evolves into something that is emotional, psychological, and even spiritual. The addict becomes so used to self medicating that they are running away from reality, and they come to prefer the fantasy world in which they do not have to face themselves or their problems.
The true addict is not addicted to heroin or booze or vicodin. The true addict is addicted to addiction itself. They are running away from reality, and from themselves, through the use of self medicating on a daily basis. This is what addiction eventually becomes.
Sure, it starts out as a simple physical dependency on a substance of choice. But in the long run addiction is much more than just physical dependence. And that is really what I want to caution you about when it comes to the next medical “cure” that is rolling out.
Personally I have abused many different substances during my days of addiction, and I could figure out how to medicate myself into oblivion if I had to. Luckily today I don’t have to live that way, and I can face reality again because I went to rehab and found recovery.
But if someone challenged me in a hypothetical sense to get hooked on opiates and then they suddenly gave me a surgical implant that rendered opiates “off limits” for me forever, I could certainly find a way to self medicate again. I could drink alcohol instead, I could find alternative drugs online, I could come up with a way to self medicate. That is what addicts do–they get a singular focus in their mind and then they do whatever it takes in order to escape reality and indulge in fantasy again.
My hope is that, while medical technology continues to innovate and discover new ways to treat addiction, that we can be savvy enough to use these new technologies as supplemental to the real process of recovery.
Sometimes I think that the world is hoping for a medical cure that comes along and fixes everything, but the reality is that we are nowhere near that just yet. We have to be realistic and realize that the struggling addict still needs to work a real program of recovery in addition to the current medications that seek to treat addiction.
The post A Once Per Month Shot to Treat Opiate Addiction has Been Approved appeared first on Spiritual River Addiction Help.
from http://www.spiritualriver.com/news/per-month-shot-treat-opiate-addiction-approved/
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A Once Per Month Shot to Treat Opiate Addiction has Been Approved
What if you could take a shot in a doctor’s office once a month in order to “cure” your drug addiction to painkillers?
That may be a reality that we are inching closer to. The FDA says that “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved Sublocade, the first once-monthly injectable buprenorphine product for the treatment of moderate-to-severe opioid use disorder.”
The question is: Can this be an effective treatment for someone who is struggling with addiction, and is it any more successful than other approaches?
The idea behind Sublocade is the same as that behind Suboxone: Replacement therapy with a synthetic and far less harmful substance. The molecules that are in Sublocade fill in the same opiate receptors that normal opioid molecules would fit into, thus reducing cravings and resulting in fewer relapses.
In clinical trials the drug proves that it is more effective than a placebo group. What I would like to have seen myself is to test Sublocade not only against a placebo group, but also against a group who is taking traditional, under-the-tongue Suboxone. The idea would be to see if taking a the medication monthly makes a big difference or not in terms of success rates.
In other words, if you are taking a daily pill in order to control your cravings, then you are very susceptible to relapse because you can make a plan that day to relapse and then avoid taking your medicine. However, if the medication is a shot in the arm and it lasts for 30 days, you really are no longer forced to make that daily decision any more. You have “bought” yourself 30 days off from having to wonder if you should keep taking your medication or not.
So the real question is: Would this show a noticeable improvement?
I want to caution people that this may sound like it is getting closer and closer to a real “cure,” but the reality is that a new medical technology like this is not a magic bullet, and they stress the fact that it only works well in conjunction with traditional therapy and peer support, such as with AA and NA meetings.
If you take the idea of the monthly injection one step further you get the concept of the surgical implant that is either permanent or semi-permanent, lasting either several years or even for a lifetime. So when we first hear the idea of a surgical implant that can last for an entire lifetime, we automatically think of such technology as being a “cure.” Just send all of the opiate addicts to get this implant, and all of their problems will be solved forever, right?
Not so fast.
The reality is often different than this. You have to remember just how inventive and persistent addicts can be. There is always a different way to accomplish something, and this rings true when it comes to self medicating as well.
Opiates may be the hot and popular drug of abuse right now, but there are dozens of different kinds of substances that can intoxicate people. If you block an opiate addict’s body from ever getting high on opiates again, you may simply divert them into exploring other substances of abuse.
The outsider tends to think of the addict in terms of their physical dependence: The heroin addict who is hopelessly addicted to a very specific substance. The alcoholic who is obviously addicted to the particular drug that is alcohol.
But the reality is that addiction runs deeper than the substance itself. The struggling addict may have discovered their drug of choice at one point and become physically dependent on it–that part of it is certainly true. But over time, the addict who is abusing a substance gets addicted to the state of being medicated more so than the substance itself.
In other words, while addiction may start out as physical dependence, it evolves into something that is emotional, psychological, and even spiritual. The addict becomes so used to self medicating that they are running away from reality, and they come to prefer the fantasy world in which they do not have to face themselves or their problems.
The true addict is not addicted to heroin or booze or vicodin. The true addict is addicted to addiction itself. They are running away from reality, and from themselves, through the use of self medicating on a daily basis. This is what addiction eventually becomes.
Sure, it starts out as a simple physical dependency on a substance of choice. But in the long run addiction is much more than just physical dependence. And that is really what I want to caution you about when it comes to the next medical “cure” that is rolling out.
Personally I have abused many different substances during my days of addiction, and I could figure out how to medicate myself into oblivion if I had to. Luckily today I don’t have to live that way, and I can face reality again because I went to rehab and found recovery.
But if someone challenged me in a hypothetical sense to get hooked on opiates and then they suddenly gave me a surgical implant that rendered opiates “off limits” for me forever, I could certainly find a way to self medicate again. I could drink alcohol instead, I could find alternative drugs online, I could come up with a way to self medicate. That is what addicts do–they get a singular focus in their mind and then they do whatever it takes in order to escape reality and indulge in fantasy again.
My hope is that, while medical technology continues to innovate and discover new ways to treat addiction, that we can be savvy enough to use these new technologies as supplemental to the real process of recovery.
Sometimes I think that the world is hoping for a medical cure that comes along and fixes everything, but the reality is that we are nowhere near that just yet. We have to be realistic and realize that the struggling addict still needs to work a real program of recovery in addition to the current medications that seek to treat addiction.
The post A Once Per Month Shot to Treat Opiate Addiction has Been Approved appeared first on Spiritual River Addiction Help.
from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241842 http://ift.tt/2BOSjHn
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