Matt's Health Advice in 2023

Sun 26 February 2023

Overall Goal

The overall goal is to maximize your healthspan. More and more people are making it to or close to their maximum lifespan, of something close to 100. At the same time, more people are getting lifestyle diseases that mean they will be sick a good chunk of that.

What I Eat

I would still be vegan if the health data wasn't panning out in favor of plant based diets. I believe the data demonstrates that I've lucked out and my ethical preferences match up with my health goals.

I was omnivore until age 16. I read a book that made the case for vegetarianism and adopted it. I ate dairy and egg until about age 38 or so. Despite the dairy, for most of the time I tried to be "low fat" which is somewhat contradictory if you eat any cheese at all. For this whole time I had a healthy body weight, 145-150 lbs for a 5'11" guy.

I am vegan for a bit over a decade. My lipid numbers are great. Blood pressure fine, but could be better.

What I do

I ran in high school, I did a few years or two of no particular exercise. After starting a desk job and getting colossal back pain, I started doing follow-along exercise on DVD videos. That worked out great. On and off, I did bicycling, scootering, roller-blading, hiking. I resumed running about a decade ago and have been particularly serious in the last five.

Mood

I think that we all suffer from anger, depression and anxiety in different ratios. Depending on what ratio you got, you might have a personality, or a diagnosable disorder.

Optimizing

Between eating right (vegan) and exercising (running) I'm doing pretty good. Everything else is a micro-optimization.

I'm also pushing 50. Even if you eat right & exercise you'll still age. I got grey hairs & when the knee parts fail, they really fail. Some joints have the start of arthritis. The eyes have nuisance cataracts.

Vitamins
B12. Only bacteria make it, animals don't. Heck even farm animals have to take B12.
Creatine. For sprinting & strength training
Magnesium. Because I run and sweat a lot.
Hibiscus - Weak anti-hypertensive.
Coffee - makes me type faster
Sometimes
Algal Omega Fatty Acids. They are taken up by the brain. Who knows it if helps.
Other B vitamins.

I used to, but no longer take multivitamins, the data on them was negative.

Sources

My favorite source on this sort of thing is Dr. Gregor. The rest of the sources are lost to memory, because they were books I checked out at the library.