Which supplements can help me live longer and healthier?

Health Hacker Australia > Articles > eli5 - explain it like I'm five > Which supplements can help me live longer and healthier?
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There are two main ways to provide the nutrients and myriad of compounds that can help your body operate at its best and improve both lifespan and healthspan. One is to include foods and adjust your diet, however, we don’t always have that option to due various constraints such as taste and lifestyle. This is where supplements step in to provide the essential components of those foods as extracts or via chemical synthesis.

Here we explore the supplements you can incorporate into your lifestyle to get those identified goodies that keep us healthy for longer. This is the second of three articles on increasing health and life span. Our article on foods will have some overlap with this article as in many cases supplements are a derivative of food.
As always, we do our best to validate any information presented however, we cannot guarantee the accuracy of statements made here and does not constitute medical advice. Please check with your healthcare professional before making changes to your diet and lifestyle.
We have included as many references as possible to back our claims and for you to click into to investigate further for yourself. We encourage anyone seeking to improve their health via supplementation to take some time to research it’s effects, side effects and dosage.

Mitochondrial support

Mitochondria are organelles, basically, little functional units within cells, much like an organ is to our body. They provide power to our cells by delivering ATP to the cells and are thought to once be free-ranging bacteria. It is thought that the break down of mitochondrial function is one of, if not the main contributor to ageing. We’ve used SelfHacked and SelfDecode in many of our references as they often provide useful information such as dosage and side effects. Please ensure you click through and take some time to understand each one before you add anything to your routine and, as always, speak to your doctor or health care professional before making any diet or lifestyle changes.

So, what can we do to support mitochondria? Supplements that show to be beneficial for mitochondria include:

Autophagy and Senolytics

Put simply, autophagy is the process by which our cells do spring cleaning. Senolytics are molecules that help senescent cells to be discarded and recycled. Senescent cells are cells that are no longer healthily dividing via apoptosis.

Microbiome

There are many overlaps with the microbiome as it does have links to many facets of our health and nutrition. It makes sense right? This is where our food goes after we chew and swallow it and it gets broken down by the stomach. It’s where our body absorbs much of its nutrients. There are two main types of bacteria in the gut, firmicutes and Bacteroides and, you want a good balance of these two.

Pre-biotics

Prebiotics are foods that support the bacteria in our guts. They assist bacteria by providing the compounds and molecules they need to flourish. If we do not support our gut bacteria, no matter how many new ones we introduce, they simply won’t survive and be healthy.

Pro-biotics

Pro-biotics are additional bacteria that we introduce to our gut. We do this if we have reason to believe our own population has died out or not healthy, or, perhaps they simply don’t have a long life. Either way, it’s important to understand that this is only part of the equation and that, simply dumping more bacteria in our gut, isn’t always the best approach. pro-biotics are good for improving the biodiversity of our gut bacteria species.

As you now know, there are many supplements that are shown or suspected to assist in longevity and general health. They won’t all work for you and some may not work at all as we learn more about them. The best advice we can give is to only add 1 at a time and give your body time to respond so that you can learn how it is interacting and impacting your body. Keep a journal and makes notes on how you feel, quality of sleep, energy levels, eating habits and more. This will help you go back and see what supplements worked and which didn’t. As you build your stack, you should remove supplements that are not doing anything for you and add in new ones as you learn about the effect and doses for each.

This article is version controlled and will be updated as new facts come to light or as errors are corrected. The current version is 1.1

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