David Kekich

Be Smart, Strong, and Sexy at 100 and Beyond

The following is taken from The Future of Health Now interview conducted by Ann Wixon with antiaging expert, David Kekich.
We have compiled the best, most valuable and easily applicable content from this amazing interview so
you can begin to implement positive changes today, as you strive to live a happier and healthier life now
and in the future.

Who is David Kekich?

In 1977, I founded the county's largest life insurance master general
agency, which raised 3.1 billion of premium income for First
Executive Corporation. That's when I realized people die entirely too
early. Then, almost 33 years ago, my life suddenly turned upside
down.
I was paralyzed from a spinal cord injury. Shortly after, I started
raising money for paralysis cure research. M mission started by
helping find a cure for the 150,000 Americans suffering from
paralyzing spinal cord injuries. Then it expanded to helping cure the
200 million American adults suffering from the terminal effects of
aging.
I learned that controlling human aging will be possible, but because of lack of funding, probably not in
his lifetime. In 1999, I incorporated the Maximum Life Foundation.

What is the Maximum Life Foundation?

It is a non-profit 501c3 organization incorporation dedicated to reversing the human aging
process eventually, by greatly expanding or extending the healthy lifespan.
Our mission is to raise money to get studies and tests funded. The government is certainly not
going to do it. It's got to be done by private individuals.

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What is Life Extension?

The most common term that we're used to is anti-aging.

Longevity is a very common term that refers to it.
In a nutshell, it's more quality and more quantity of life.
I like to say that we're going to be smart, strong, and sexy at 100.
100 is going to be the new 50.
By smart, I mean cognition.
When I say strong, I mean being active and being full of vitality.
My interest in life extension began in my early 30s and maybe as early as my late 20s.
I was taking supplements before most people were.
I was very much into weight training and running, distance running, and into nutrition.
Gradually it became a passion.
I saw my parents, aunts and uncles deteriorate and eventually die.
I started watching myself age and I didn't like it.
I saw my friends aging around me and I just knew there was something that could be
done about it.
Everybody wants to recapture their youth.
Finally, after all these thousands of years of people yearning for extended youth, we're
finally on the cusp of being able to have it.
Living forever is NOT the goal.
We're talking about not dying from aging.
Our goal is to maintain and improve the quality of life as we get older, not to let us
deteriorate.

Is Aging Normal?

Aging is terminal.
Some people call aging a disease, though technically it is not.
However, since that it has all sorts of negative effects, side effects and always results in
death, then it could be considered a disease. And we're looking for a cure for it.

Adding 20 Years to Your Life

Proper diet and nutrition

Exercise
Lifestyle habits (avoiding accidents and injuries)
Stress management

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Defining Proper Nutrition

Eat like the hunter-gatherers ate (the Paleo diet).

By doing a paleo diet, we can actually stop the aging process, or at least the acceleration
of the aging process.
Eliminate all grains.
Eliminate all dairy products.
Eliminate all legumes (beans and peanuts).

The Right Kind of Exercise

Long distance aerobic activity is not the way to go.

Aim for interval training.
Sprints, rest, sprint, rest. Just like our ancestors did, just like the hunter-gatherers did.
They ran they were either chasing or were being chased. And they would stop, and then
they would walk as they were gathering.
But I'd rather see somebody out there on the roads doing a lot of distance running than
sitting on their couch and eating Twinkies.
Exercise is more important as we age.

Anti-Aging Medicine

There's a specialty called Anti-Aging Medicine.

If you're not seeing a doctor who's trained in anti-aging medicine, you're probably not
getting the right medical care.
There are thousands of doctors trained in that specialty and they are trained to take care
of you, to keep you from getting sick, rather than treating you.
They spend time with you and care about you as a patient.
Look for a good anti-aging specialist.
Not that every one is good, so just because someone is an anti-aging specialist doesn't
mean they're the best.
But a regular doctor is like a mechanic.
You want somebody who's going to help you prevent aging and disease.
Anti-aging doctors inherently take more time to work with you. It's just part of their
nature.
Your doctor should have a good understanding of nutrition and hormones.

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Determine Your Biological Age

We have chronological age, which is measured by the clock or by the calendar.

Your biological age is how you compare with the average person who is your
chronological age.
You can measure that by any number of ways: skin elasticity, reflexes, skin tone, hearing
and vision acuity.
Telomeres are the ends of your chromosomes.
Every time your cell divides, your telomere shortens. They're protective ends to keep the
chromosomes from unwinding. As cells divide, they shorten.
A lot of things can shorten your telomeres, including stress and so forth.
A lot of things can maintain the length, including exercising and diet and stress
management.
The length of your telomeres is probably the most accurate determinate of your biological
age. What kind of balance you have as you age, your cognition, lung capacity, so forth.

The Longevity Escape Velocity

Gerontologist Dr. Aubrey De Grey developed the Longevity Escape Velocity.

It is the point we reach when we're adding more than one calendar year to the average
person's lifespan, no matter what your age, every calendar year.
Right now, when we live a year, we're actually adding about two or three months to our
average lifespan every calendar year.
Last year we had a little blip where obesity and things were reversing that.
But we're gradually adding more and more time to the average lifespan every year.
This average is accelerating.
We're predicting that, assuming the funding is generated for the research we're
supporting, that within 13 to 15 years, we're going to be able to gain more than one year
for every calendar year on our average lifespan.
Your day of reckoning will be moving away from you, rather than you closing in on it.
Once we reach that point and we keep maintaining our health and longevity, then we
have a much better chance to reach the day when the technologies that are going to be
able to reverse the aging process and be able to restore youth and rejuvenate us.
We are about 19 or 20 years away from being able to reverse the human aging process.
Things could move faster, they could move slower.
We could have government interference with the FDA, with regulations.
We could have government support, which would accelerate things.

The Manhattan Beach Project

In June of 2000in Manhattan Beach, California, we held our first international conference
among aging researchers and life extension researchers.
All came from various disciplines:

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o Stem cell people

o Genomics people
o Artificial general intelligence
o Nanotechnology
The purpose was to put together a scientific roadmap to be able to reverse the human
aging process.

Law of Accelerating Returns

The Law of Accelerating Returns was identified by Ray Kurzweil.

It is the difference between exponential growth and linear growth.
Let's say you start off with a dollar and you add a dollar to that dollar every year. So at
the end of the second year you'll have two dollars. And at the end of 10 years, you'll have
10.
If you take that same dollar and double it, then at the end of one year, at the end of the
first year, you have two dollars just like the first example. But at the end of the next year,
you have four dollars.
They look very similar at the beginning. And it's hard to distinguish between the two.
However, if you carry the exponential growth out to 10 years, instead of having 10
dollars, you have a little bit over 1,000 dollars. And at the end of 20 years you're going to
have over a million dollars. And at the end of 25 years, you're going to have over a
billion dollars.
Same with life extension.
The rate of progress that we're making right now in the sophistication and power of the
tools we're using to research and develop age reversal technologies is doubling every
single year.
We haven't cured cancer yet because we've been going trial and error, linear growth, one
step on top of another.
We're just now entering this exponential curve.
Knowledge and development and progress are going to explode over these next 10 or 20
years.

The Cost of Age Reversal

Todays computers are not only smaller than the prototypes, about 1,000 times smaller,
but they're about a million times less expensive.
This trend is growing at an accelerating rate.
Technology that was really expensive yesterday is really inexpensive today.
What didn't work very well yesterday works much better today.
We have to plug in the law of accelerating returns.
When the Human Genome Project was started in 1989, the projected cost was $3 billion
dollars and the projected time frame was 15 years.

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When they started the Human Genome Project, they had about 1/10000ths of the human
genome mapped. They got halfway through this project and they had 1% mapped, which
was a 100 times improvement.
They knew that if they had the same progress for the next seven and a half years, then
they would reach their goal, which is exactly what happened, except they did it a year
ahead of schedule.
Today we're mapping human genomes for $50,000, and it's going to be done at $10,000
pretty soon, then $1,000, then pretty soon it'll be $100.
We're going to each have our own individual genomes mapped.
Aging has a lot of components to it. There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle. But we put all
these together, at least for budget purposes and other purposes as well, and we came up
with the figure somewhere between $3 and $5 billion spent over 15 to 16 years.
Compare this with the $100 billion we spend in this country every 16 days on a broken
health care system.
It's going to be a fraction of what we're spending on health care right now.
Well keep people productive longer.
We're going to ease a lot of the pain and suffering.

Age and Arthritis

Exercise is important.
A lot of it's caused by food, sugar.
There are some amazing stem cell therapies now that are rescuing people from having hip
and knee replacements.
Using your own autologous, adult stem cells.
Getting them from your fat tissue or your bone marrow and then they do a little bit of
work to the cells to sort them, and then re-injecting them into where you need them.
Theyve had some amazing results right now.
There's a company in Denver called Regenexx.
There are other clinics around the country starting to do this.
They've been doing this on animals for years.
They've had racehorses that have been crippled that have come back and are winning and
have won races.
They've had dogs that could barely limp along that are now jumping up on their master's
laps and jumping up on their beds and sofas.

Age and Alzheimers Disease

We have over 5 million Alzheimer's patients in this country now.

When we hit age 85, our chances are about 50/50 of getting Alzheimers.
A lot of this can be avoided or at least delayed through supplementation and exercise.
There are some drugs being developed right now.

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There's one supplement thats a combination of 61 ingredients in high concentration,

backed by a couple thousand scientific studies on the individual ingredients.
It has been shown to reverse the symptoms of all sorts of dementia in virtually everybody
that it's been tried on.
We're trying to raise just a little bit of money right now to get it available.
A lot of those ingredients are in regular supplements that people could be taking now and
should be taking now.

Telomerase Activators

Substances that prevent telomeres, the protective caps on your DNA from shortening.
My top four are:
o Fish oil or krill oil
o Vitamin D3
o Glutathione, which is the most powerful antioxidant that your cells produce
o A good, powerful multivitamin/mineral

Our Biggest Health Crises

Obesity.
The broken health care system.
We're basically eating way too much food and the wrong kinds of food.
The answer is awareness, prevention, self-education, good nutrition, and exercise.

Future of Age Reversal

There's going to be a gradual progression.

Technology is going to make them easier for us.
Technology is going to be able to someday let us maintain our weight.
Technology is going to be some day let us enhance our strength and our endurance and
our cognitive abilities; our vision and our hearing and all of our senses.
Eventually, we're going to be in the position where we have a technology called Nano
Medicine, which is engineering at the molecular level.
We will be able to control this evolution.
When we have that capability, we're going to have the capability of restoring and
repairing every single cell in our body.
We're going to be living lives without aches and pains, without the wrinkles, without the
gray and balding heads and without the failing eyesight and the failing hearing that we
experience as we age.
We're going to have better eyesight, better hearing.
At some point in the future, we're going to be able to enjoy open-ended vitality, openended youthfulness.

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I can see the day when we can be sitting around a table, with people averaging in age
from 20 to 120, and we're not going to be able to tell the difference.
I think stem cell technology is the most profound technology in the history of medicine.
We're learning very quickly how to take adult stem cells and tweak those to work for you.
Some researchershave already build replacement organs. Theyve successfully grown
bladders and implanted functioning bladders into human beings.
They've been able to grow tracheas and implant those into human beings.
They've grown beating rat hearts. They're working on human hearts, kidneys, livers.
There's going to be a time when we're going to be able to take your stem cells and grow
whatever you need.
We're going to have replacement parts.

Final Thoughts

There's one company that has identified hundreds of aging genes.

They're developing drugs and supplements that are going to turn those genes in our favor.
The first one hit the market about two months ago.
It's called Stem Cell100.
o It makes animals live a lot longer. Their average lifespan and their maximum
lifespan in longer. It lowers blood pressure in humans.
o It raises the HDL, and lowers your blood glucose level.
The only way that we've been able to extend the maximum lifespan in mammals is by
restricting their caloric intake while still keeping them nutritionally well fed.
o We have been able to extend their lives by 30 to 40 percent, maximum lifespans
in mammals.
o They've been testing these on mice, but they started testing on chimpanzees many
years ago.
o A lot of people practice caloric restriction, and that's basically taking your optimal
number of calories, which depending on your size and on your level of activity
will vary from person to person.
o The average person's optimal caloric intake per day should be about 1,800 to
2,000 calories.
o It's not very appealing, and people aren't going to adhere to it.
o We don't know if it's going to extend lives in humans as much as animals.
o Caloric restriction acts at the genetic level. And it tells genes what to do and what
not to do.
o There are some companies developing supplements and drugs that will tell your
genes the same thing. So, you get the benefits without starving yourself.

Easily Applicable To-Dos

We're going to have a potentially extremely long and active and vibrant lifespans if we do
the right things today.

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Ground yourself in understanding, grasping the law of accelerating returns and the impact
this is going to have on your health.
Make sure that you don't get left behind, because the people you love, many of those are
going to be on that train.

Resources

Dr. Aubrey DeGrey interview

Dr. Brandon Colby interview
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