VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Jane Rogers: Welcome back. I’m Jane Rogers. We have covered so much ground, starting with the longevity lifestyle, and what molecules to consider to slow aging and get more quality years in your life. In this module, we’re going to dive into longevity technology to measure and optimize. There are fancy high-tech options and old-fashioned low-tech gadgets. There are options for the budget sensitive and for the maximizers with more to put into it.

There is hyped-up marketing in the longevity sector. We all know that, but be careful that although a technology you’re considering might help with a specific goal, that goal might not make a difference for your longevity. Many of the things we’re going to talk about are new technologies and therefore, the time and expense to rigorously test each hasn’t happened yet. Be aware that if you buy something and then you rarely use it, that’s not going to help you out either. Finally, Cutting Edge Health has zero affiliation with any of the products I’m going to show you.

Let’s start with devices that can help you track and analyze the physical activity that you want to do. There are activity tracker watches like the Apple Watch, the Samsung Galaxy watch, the Garmin Venu, and Fitbit devices. The downside. The apps that come with these devices are not as specialized, especially when it comes to making recommendations. You typically have to download a separate app for the sleep side of things versus the activity.

To go into much depth, there’s the WHOOP wristband to track physical activity, which you can get used on eBay for less money. Then there’s the Oura Ring for tracking physical activity, heart rate, heart rate variability, and recovery. I wear an Oura Ring. I would say WHOOP [00:02:00] and Oura really stand out with their apps. They constantly remind you about your goals and whether you’ve accomplished them for the day. Also, the WHOOP and the Oura Ring shine for sleep tracking. I’ll get to sleep tracking in just a bit.

Speaking of tracking physical exercise, a technology just to be aware of is Far Infrared Light. Of course, actually, exercise is better, but you have similar benefits that you get from exercise with Far Infrared Light. The Far Infrared waves go right through your skin and they get to the organ level. They heat you up from the inside out. You sweat just like exercise, your heart rate increases, and so on. There’s a product called HigherDOSE, which offers a Far Infrared blanket, which you can see here, or you can purchase entire Far Infrared saunas for a few thousand dollars. These do make you sweat.

Moving on, we just discussed Far Infrared Light and there’s use of Near Infrared and red light together, called photobiomodulation. It does not make you sweat, but it has some good health benefits like improving mitochondrial health and increasing ATP, which gives your cells more energy. The value of these is that with more energy, your cells are better able to repair themselves and to function properly.

I’m embarrassed to show you this furnace room. It’s got all of our junk in here, but this is where I do the ZAAZ. I do, do this every morning. I turn on the Joovv light so that I maximize my time. The ZAAZ will vibrate you, supposedly gives you more bone density. When NASA astronauts went up into space, [00:04:00] they came back with more bone density, I’ve read, after they use something like this. You turn it on and it slightly shakes you, and then you also then get the infrared light. This is a Joovv and it gives you something called photobiomodulation. It helps reduce inflammation, it helps your skin cells turn over faster.

Usually, I don’t do it with any clothes on because you want all the light hitting you. Speaking of light, to get a good night’s sleep, you need to optimize your circadian rhythm. There are devices like Hue Wi-Fi light bulbs. The two pack for $90 or there are other brands that recently launched that you could find on Amazon or at Costco that also perform similar functions to Hue but are less expensive. With these, you can get red or amber light in the evening. With these colors of light, you’re increasing your melatonin production before you go to bed and you’ll get better sleep.

I find I actually feel tired shortly after turning red or amber lights on. You can use candlelight in the evening to achieve the same uptick in melatonin, and that’s the cheapest of them all, or there’re amber-tinted eyeglasses for $25. You can wear these in the evening. What you don’t want is blue light from a computer or a TV monitor before bed, that isn’t conducive to your circadian rhythm. Great sleep is important for longevity. When you’re sleeping, you want darkness. Blackout shades are an option, but inside the bedroom, even those tiny little LEDs on your electronics, those blue green, yellow white lights can negatively impact your sleep.

In order to really block all that and not taping a little square of cardboard on top of every single LED light, you can consider getting a $20 sleep [00:06:00] mask. I love my sleep mask. I use the Mercola sleep mask with lavender. They last forever. I give them as holiday presents. In the sleep tracking category, the WHOOP or an Oura Ring work well. The Oura Ring gives you a whole lot of information. It’s one device I cannot imagine being without. Here’s my Oura Ring data. There’s the amount of deep sleep and REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. You want 25% of your sleep time spent in deep sleep, and 25% spent in REM sleep.

The Oura Ring measures how long it takes for my resting heart rate to hit a low point in the night, signaling my body’s recovery. The earlier the low point, the better recovered you are. A signal of whether or not to take it easy the next day. The Oura Ring measures body temperature and how long it takes to fall asleep too. This data illustrates well for me that if you can measure it, you can change it. When I first got my ring, I was only getting three minutes a night of deep sleep. I had no idea it was pathetic.

You can’t repair or recover with that kind of sleep. Now I’m getting at least an hour each night and it’s one of the areas I’m still trying to optimize further. There is always something, isn’t there? An Oura Ring is not an accurate as an in-lab sleep study, but it does well enough.

Sara Mednick: We actually use the Oura Ring in my lab to remotely measure people’s sleep in research studies. The thing is that they give you a number. It’s not the same as what I would get if I was bringing you into the lab and I had polysomnography, and I had electrodes on your brain, and I was measuring your heart rate. I could measure all these things from medical-grade devices. I think the Oura Ring, the reason why it is as good as it is, is because they [00:08:00] actually have done a lot of work to validate their algorithm to polysomnography, to the medical grade pornography. They’re doing as best as they can with the information that they have.

Jane: Some device that’s most helpful to getting more deep sleep from me are sleep temperature modulating devices like the Chilipad, starting at $640, which I do love, the BedJet, or the Eight Sleep, which starts at $2,200. The value of these devices is that sleep temperature can have a significant impact on the quality and duration of your sleep. Anything that improves your sleep is good for your longevity.

Another sleep optimization idea is to block noises that can cause you to wake up. I actually wear Bose headsets when I sleep, but they are big. Better for most are spongy earplugs put in correctly. To do that, you roll them with your thumb and your fingers, pressing them in until they’re needle-thin. You reach behind your head with the opposite hand and pull your ear outward and upward. While you’re doing that, you stick the squish-down point of the earplug into your ear canal, and as that earplug opens up again, all the sound is gone. You should only feel the end of the earplug once it’s in your ear. Do it again if it feels like a sticking out more and earplugs are cheap.

There are also white noise machines and white noise apps, which you can play on speakers loud enough to hear. Another thing that can improve your sleep quality actually takes place in the morning. We are up bright and early, and we are walking to get coffee. The real reason we’re walking is because we want the light of the morning right away, right when you wake up because it’s for the circadian resetting of your clock. The circadian rhythm. [00:10:00] It doesn’t take that long. You’re supposed to walk 10 minutes with somebody, be in conversation. It’s supposed to be good.

Being outside like that is circadian rhythm entrainment, which even though it happens in the morning, it still maximizes the quality, duration and the onset of your upcoming sleep that night. You want high lux warning light even if it’s cloudy, when the sun’s low in the sky. It’s absolutely free. In addition to this, make sure you get 30 minutes of time outside before lunch. You’ll sleep much better by doing this. If you can’t get out, consider a SAD lamp. You can find then on Amazon for around $60. Then a little bit of an upgrade would be SAD glasses for $150.

The next category for longevity technology is diet and metabolism. One technology for tracking is a smart scale. The Withings Body Comp scale is a good tool to be able to measure how your lifestyle interventions are impacting your cardiovascular health and your visceral fat. Continuing with diet and metabolism, blood glucose monitors fall into this category. They’re typically associated with diabetics. That’s what they were designed for, but many of us trying to increase our health spans are now using them to track our blood sugar.

Low insulin levels are linked to longer life spans in many animal species. There are the old-fashioned finger prick monitors, and then there are the continuous glucose monitors. CGM for short. Like FreeStyle Libre and the Dexcom G7, they offer automated measurements every few minutes for a couple weeks, which then sync with your phone. Here is my partner wearing a FreeStyle Libre continuous glucose monitor this morning as I’m working on this lesson.

A healthy range like 80 to 90 milligrams [00:12:00] per deciliter fasting and at least below 100 is advised. With this reading, which was just after he ate breakfast, the reading is higher. By tracking my own blood sugars carefully using finger prick and the Continuous Glucose Monitors, I was able to get and keep my sugars down as they’re called in North Carolina where I now live. I have used the CGM multiple times, and each time, it stays in your arm for about two weeks.

I’m not currently using it. I find once that you know what spikes your sugar. For me, it’s apple sauce and potatoes, I don’t need to use it regularly anymore. Maybe just once a year after that. You can consider this to be a short-term expense. Each CGM is about $100. Speaking of tracking blood sugar, there are CGM smartphone apps like Nutrisense, January.ai, Veri, and Levels that complement the CGM hardware.

You pay for this, but they also enable you to get the CGM device to stick to your arm rather than have to see your doctor and ask for a prescription. I have found some docs are hesitant to prescribe the CGM if you’re not a diabetic. Some of these apps offer personalized diet consultation with a dietician. Other use AI to make recommendations in real time, and each is different with a different price point.

Next for diet and metabolism are diet trackers apps like Noom, which is one of the most popular apps out there for diet, Lifesum and Fooducate. The next category is psychology and cognition. One of the best ways to be able to improve psychology and cognition, and optimism, and reduce anxiety, and so on, is through meditation. There are apps like Calm and devices like Muse or HeartMath that can improve overall health [00:14:00] by a reduction in the stress hormones. The Muse device is one that measures your brain waves, and it can help to reinforce the meditation process.

The next category is your environment, which includes breathing clean air, reducing pollution and allergens. A study by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago known as EPIC, found that pollution causes slightly greater impact on death than smoking does. There are air purifiers on Amazon in the $100 range. Consider an excellent air purifier like the AirDoctor, which has a better budget sensitive price tag at $300 than the HEPA filter like the Molekule at $1,000. Getting one of these will help your bodies toxin exposure, and they are imperative if you live in a place with wild fires and their toxic smoke like we do in the summer.

On to the topic of skin aging. There’s microneedling and vampire facials also known as PRP or Platelet-rich plasma. Both of these use devices that make thousands of microincisions in your skin with tiny needles signaling to the body the need to repair. Vampire facials had growth factors that are collected from your blood via centrifuge and are applied during the microneedling process, which is thought to accelerate regeneration and recovery.

There’s also the Joovv, which I mentioned earlier. They start at $500. It speeds cellular turnover in the skin on your face. If I miss a couple days of Joovving, I can really see the difference in my face. These are examples of some of the latest longevity technologies. In conclusion, I have put together a few recommendations to consider for both someone who is budget sensitive and then someone who’s a maximizer with more to invest. [00:16:00]

For physical activity, the budget sensitive, you can start with a Fitbit activity tracker for $99. You could also consider something like the Oura Ring for $300, or Apple Watch or WHOOP for a monthly membership fee of $30. You can find the Apple Watch and the WHOOP preowned on eBay for less.

For maximizers, I would recommend the Oura Ring or the WHOOP. How about for the budget sensitive in terms of light, how about candles? Those are pretty cheap. Amber glasses for $25. Outdoor morning light, that’s completely free. Colored lights from Amazon or Costco, and a SAD light, which are in the $60 range. For maximizers, you could add to that list SAD glasses at $150 and hue lights which are $90 for a pack of two.

For sleep, consider ear plugs for $5. A sleep mask for $20. For sleep maximizers, consider adding a ChiliPad for $640 or Eight Sleep for $2,200. For diet and metabolism. Budget sensitive, get a basic blood glucose monitor. It comes with a handful of test strips for about $40. For maximizers, get a continuous glucose monitor for $100 and consider also getting a $150 Withing body comp scale for the pulse wave velocity and visceral fat measurements.

Psychology and cognition, do meditation on your own, which is free, or an app for around $9 a month. Maximizers, get the app and consider a Muse for $250 or HeartMath for $180. In the environment category, a bedroom filter, you can get for as little as $99 on Amazon. Put it in your bedroom because you spend the most time there, or you can spring from Air Doctor, an excellent device [00:18:00] for $350. If you’re a maximizer, you can get entire HVAC systems for $1,000 or more that have HEPA and UVC built right into them, or you can also get HEPA filters like a Molekule in all the rooms that you tend to spend time in. Molekules are $1,000.

Then skin health. You could consider something like PRP, Platelet-rich plasma microneedling if you really want to take your skin to the next level using technology. The cost for the budget sensitive could be under $300. For maximizers, microneedling with the PRP and possibly a small Joovv, which is $500. One that’s big enough to do your face all the way down to your hips has now climbed to $1,600.

I hope this was all helpful. Thank you for your time. May we live better, longer. Have a great day.

Longevity Technology List for Budget Sensitive and Maximizers:-

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PhTiVf4aPrzTTPF98RUY1Qgp55QEMySI/view?usp=sharing