Ryan J. Rossner, PhD

So apparently Pareto’s Principle, or “80/20” is widely enough known that I got good-naturedly laughed at the other night for saying I had never had anyone ask me the 80/20 for longevity 🙂

The 80/20 principle basically states that about 80% of your benefits come from about 20% of your efforts

So, here’s my first pass quick sketch of 80/20 for longevity:

1. GET OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY Don’t smoke, drink to excess, get excessive UV exposure, or do other highly risky stuff. Avoid excessive chronic stress. Your body will break down on its own without you accelerating the process
2. DO COMMON SENSE STUFF Exercise, eat pretty darn healthy (Pollan/Mediterranean/sometimes clean keto for my money), sleep well, get nature exposure, drink water, have strong relationships and meaningful work.
3. LONGEVITY THERAPIES
   • Rapa 2-5mg/week would be my personal top choice
   • Metformin/telmisartan/statin/etc. would be second-tier choices
   • Fisetin 20mg/kg plus Bioperine 2 consecutive days per month (senolytic)
   • Supplements: Vit D, Fish Oil, etc.

🙂

One cool thing that emerges from this infographic is how decarboxylated amino acids are some of the most badass molecules around (tryptamine, GABA, agmatine, phenylethylamine, etc.)

Week 1 saw me get a little leaner, but I decided to re-try keto starting week 2 (6/30/22). These past two weeks lead to unprecedented physique progress!

Highlights:

• Bodyweight 196.4 (down from 215 mid-May!) I don’t think I’ve been under 200 lbs since my sophmore/junior year of high school 🙂
• Bodyfat probably 10-12%, but certainly the leanest I’ve been in my life (after two weeks of dieting!)
• Occasional hiccups in subjective well-being (GI distress/nausea, lethary, anemia, acidosis…) but all were correctable on the scale of hours. Everything leveled off by the end of week 2
• Weekend carbohydrate ingestion for metabolic flexibility and psychological rest

The diet:

• Shakes: 20g collagen, 30g C8 MCT powder
• Meals: 1 tin sardines in water, 2 tbsp EVOO, ~10 pumpkin seeds

Week 2 I added glutamine to the shakes to stave off catabolism, but week 3 i switched to BCAAs (ideally just leucine since it’s purely ketogenic, but couldn’t source isolated leucine yet). I think the BCAAs accelerated body composition changes and fended off fatigue compared to glutamine.

I ingested a lot of ketone salts week 2 and the start of week 3, but had serious GI issues (literally just constant diarrhea ) and I think some acidosis (uncontrollable sweating, weakness, no heat tolerance). Mid-week 3 I added the BCAA and cut out the ketone salts and felt a lot better.

I ate 500-1500 cal/day from the above menu most days until mid-week 3. Did my regular workouts M-F and hiked on the weekend between weeks 2 and 3 when I re-carbed. Also threw in my first caving experience week 3 Wed which was waaay harder (tighter squeezes) than I expected. Week 3 Thursday I was exhausted, anemic, acidic, hot, and generally miserable. This prompted iron supplementation, BCAA addition, and I just finished week 3 feeling super strong and looking by far the leanest I have!

Just re-carbed tonight (week 3 Friday) and am going to do a sprint workout tomorrow (Sat) morning to utilize that glycogen 🙂

I generally really like this model: weekdays keto + leucine + Zone 2 cardio + weights

• Weekdays: keto + leucine + Zone 2 cardio + weights
• Saturday: recarbed sprints
• Sunday: salad (!) + hiking

I’ll probably stick with this until my bodyweight levels off as low as feels healthy, then play with things from there 🙂

Notes:

• Collagen prominence because of amino acid profile I consider longevity-optimized (low sulfur, high Gly/Met ratio)
• lots of supplements (separate post)
• Sardines for EPA/DHA and satiety, EVOO because I think it’s one of the healthiest foods on Earth

I’ve recently become more interested in the world of peptides- short chains of amino acids. There are a number of peptides widely used for therapeutic purposes these days, eg pentadecapeptide BPC-157. I just read Candace Pert’s assertion that “God is a neuropeptide” in her 1997 book Molecules of Emotion. Haha, this immediately makes me wonder about a tetragrammaton peptide “YHWH,” but that’s an aside. These molecules, including synthetic ones that we come up with, just seem to have tremendous therapeutic potential because they’re realtively easy to make and deliver and they’re so many peptides possible with the amino acid alphabet.

Here I’m going to list peptides as a learn about them along with their single-letter amino acid sequences and some notes about them. Please suggest any peptides that aren’t listed!

• BPC-157
  • GQPPP GKPAD DAGLV
  • Sworn by in the fitness world for injury healing and overall well-being.
• TB500
  • 43 amino acids
  • Often coupled with BPC-157
• HGH Fragment 176-191
  • YLRIV QCRSV EGSCG F
  • Partial sequence of HGH protein that is claimed to promote lipolysis.
• Epithalon
  • AEDG
  • Telomere elongator?
• Pinealon
  • EDR
• GHK-Cu
  • Purported wound healing, etc.
• Semax
  • MEHFP GP
• Selank
  • TKPRP GP
  • Synthetic tuftsin (TKPR) analog.
• Enkephalins
  • Met-enkephalin: YGGFM
  • Leu-enkephalin: YGGFL
  • endogenous opioids, nociception
• Substance P
• Peptide T
• Endorphin(s)
• Oxytocin
  • CYIQNCPLG
  • “cuddle hormone”
• Humanin
• Endomorphin
  • YPWF
• Creatine
  • GN
  • Truly great sports/longevity supplement 🙂
• Glutathione
  • ECG
• Aspartame
  • Me-DF
• Carnosine
  • beta-AH
  • pH buffer, related beta-alanine is a really good sports supplement
• N-acetyl Carnosine
  • cataract prevention
• Tetragrammaton?
  • YHWH
  • YHVH
• Barettin (sponges)
  • cyc-WR

In longevity research, there’s tons of animal studies looking at amino acid restriction- usually Met/Cys or some BCAA combo. In the fitness world, there’s almost exclusively aa-boosted products- high BCAA, high glutamine, etc. At the 2022 AGE conference, there were multiple presentations on the superiority of temporary Met restriction vs. chronic Met restriction. I’m really eager to try Met restriction, but it’s just not easy in combination with a high protein diet.

I analyzed available protein powders and got the following data. I’m going to try 1+ weeks of collagen (affordable from Bulk Supplements on amazon) with added Tryptophan and Glutamine and report changes in body composition, athletic performance, and subjective well-being.

What i see in the figure below is that collagen, gelatin, and beef bone broth powder are relatively low in Met/Cys and super high in Gly, which I have read is favorable for longevity. I love tryptophan (happy feelings!) and glutamine (anti-catabolic w/o mTOR activation + gut health) so I’m gonna add those in because I want more of them.

After seeing other galaxies for the first time this Spring through a 20″ Dobsonian telescope near Big Bend (Bortle 1!), I felt compelled to understand the scale of space. Getting these numbers and ratios was extremely satisfying. There’s a pretty nice symmetry with human-scale in the middle, also it’s cool that these are all kind of circles/spheres. I definitely wonder about the extremes- subatomic particles approaching Planck Length and the size of the Universe/Multiverse.

No discussion of numbers of this sort would be complete without referencing two of my favorite books:

• Cell Biology by the Numbers, also https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/search.aspx
• Spectrums

I bought an infrared reptile heating bulb from PetCo/PetSmart for about $30, and I hold it on my face for about 5 minutes at night before bed when I feel like it. I perceived an improvement in skin quality resulting from this, and I definitely enjoy the warmth on my face 🙂

Reading the so-called “Western Canon” of classic literature informed my lyric writing and tremendously enriched my life. Below is a list (kind of a trophy case, but also will hopefully help me identify major gaps) of books I’ve read. Also listed are two books of criticism that really helped me orient myself to classic literature. Haven’t read literature in awhile, so might take me awhile to recall enough to flesh out this list…

Criticism:

• The Western Canon – Harold Bloom
• Sexual Personae – Camille Paglia

“Western Canon”

• Epic of Gilgamesh
• Bible (about half)
• Quran (about half)
• Analects of Confucius
• Gawain and the Green Knight
• Dante’s Paradiso
• Shakespeare (about half)
• Don Quixote
• Paradise Lost (parts)
• Moby Dick – Herman Mellville
• The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Great Gatsby
• Ulysses – James Joyce
• Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
• Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
• Point Omega – Dom Delillo

Targeted:

• Thomas Pynchon – Gravity’s Rainbow?
• Hadji Murad – Tolstoy
• Lolita – Nabokov

Here are some peer-reviewed scientific articles that aren’t about longevity but that are fascinating.

• The Iron Sulfur World, Gunter Wachtershauser (1992)
  • A patent lawyer with a chemistry degree, Wachtershauser was encouraged by his philosopher friend Husserl to publish this 125 page article speculating that the proto-metabolism ultimately leading to all life on Earth began around iron-sulfur clusters near hot ocean floor hydrothermal vents. To this day, the catalytic core / electron highway in our energy-generating mitochondria are composed of… you guessed it- iron-sulfur clusters 🙂
• Directed Panspermia, Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel (1973)
  • Scientific luminaries speculate about extraterrestrial origins of life on Earth

Here are some amazon links to and thoughts about some books on dimethyltryptamine (DMT), an endogenous (our bodies/brains make it!) psychedelic that is hypothesized to be responsible for near-death experiences (NDEs) and other mysterious experiences (alien entity contact, outer space travel, formation of the soul in the developing human fetus…). More to come…

• DMT The Spirit Molecule, Rick Strassman MD
  • First federally funded research in decades, early 1990s
• Tryptamine Palace, James Oroc
  • Looks at 5-MeO DMT, the chemical sibling of DMT that is less visually immersive but arguably more psychologically intense. 5-MeO DMT is found in desert toads and in ayahuasca.
• The Cosmic Serpent, Jeremy Narby
  • Looks at ayahuasca and possible connections to DNA, pretty interesting.