Book Title: Longevity Guidebook: How to Slow, Stop, and Reverse Aging – and Not Die
From Something Stupid
Author: Peter Diamandis
Publication Details: Powell Ohio: Igniting Souls, 2025, 208 pages, $14.87
Longevity is one of the fastest growing industries globally with theories and recommendations coming out rapidly. This book is a wild ride through the current science of extending longevity. It opens with a question. Has the first person who will live to 150 already been born? This guidebook is devoted to making that happen.
Peter Diamandis, MD, is a graduate of Harvard Medical School who chose not to pursue a medical specialty to devote his work to engineering and being an entrepreneur. His earned a BS and MS at MIT studying biology and physics. He is best known as the founder and chair of the XPRIZE Foundation and he is the cofounder (with Ray Kurzweil) of Singularity University.
Diamandis’ previous books reflect his passion and positivity that we can create the future.1-4 Longevity Guidebook is a description of a medical practice he founded, Fountain Life. These high cost longevity clinics are located in Dallas; Orlando; Naples, Florida; White Plains, New York; Miami; and Houston. Others will follow in Los Angeles and Phoenix in 2025.
Longevity Guidebook opens with what one would expect from wellness advice, chapters on nutrition, exercise, and sleep. These provide good, well-established information with useful tables for use with patients, especially for exercise and sleep. The nutrition information is solid but contains too much promotion of products he recommends, but does not sell. He admonishes, “Don’t die from something stupid,” such as preventable heart disease, stroke, or cancer.
Where the book goes off target is with the “Longevity Pharmacy” of medications, supplements, and “cutting-edge therapies.” He takes and recommends 75 supplements and medications daily! He gives a scientific explanation for each. Despite scientific plausibility, all of this is unproven to extend a healthy life.
Diamandis also recommends and provides in his clinics an extensive array of laboratory tests and most are done very 3 months! The annual cost of participation in this longevity experiment is close to $30,000 annually! Extending healthspan this way would be a full-time activity, and very expensive.
I write this book review because I believe family medicine educators should be aware of these efforts. Fountain Life is not alone. A colleague of mine recently became medical director of Humanaut Health, based in Austin, Texas with clinics in three locations.5 One of my patients recently enrolled in Human Longevity in La Jolla, California, a clinic started by Craig Venter of the Human Genome Project.6 There are a number of high-cost longevity centers internationally.7
Some family physicians are likely to become involved with these efforts. I am not recommending them and they are only within reach to the wealthy. The Longevity Guidebook reads like a grand experiment. STFM members should have some familiarity with this activity and may incorporate a few validated longevity efforts into their teaching and practice. For example, David Sinclair, PhD, a longevity scientist at Harvard Medical School, recommends three supplements: Nicotinamide, Resveratrol, and Metformin, as part of his longevity recommendations.4 I take these daily.
Those involved in longevity practices consider aging a disease.8 I would not go that far but we are genetically programmed to get old and frail before our life ends. Efforts to biohack aging continue to grow in popularity. We have been doing that since the start of the 20th century when our average human lifespan was in our 40s. How far we can extend healthy life is an interesting topic, and one worth watching.
There are no comments for this article.