#155 Life Extension Through Diet with James Clement

James Clement (0:00)

So, it was a way of providing minimal amounts of protein and amino acids to the cell so that it keep functioning when nature wasn't providing it with a healthy amount.

So this process, which we inherited, now has not only the function of helping us through hunger, periods of deprivation, of starvation, of the feast and famine. You know, this was necessary throughout 99% of human history.

SPEAKER_2 (0:32)

Do you want to know what it is?

Siim Land (0:36)

Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_2 (0:38)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (0:44)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_2 (0:45)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (0:49)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land and our guest today is James Clement.

James is a lawyer and entrepreneur turned research scientist who works on life extension. He's best known for his 2010 super centenarian research study and was the world's 12th person to have his whole genome sequenced. James, welcome to the show.

James Clement (1:11)

Thank you very much, Siim.

Siim Land (1:13)

Yeah, and we mentioned before we started the podcast that we had a lot of similar understandings about life span extension and general health. So I'm quite fascinated to talk with you and share these ideas.

But before we do that, how did you transition from, you know, being a lawyer into life extension research?

James Clement (1:37)

Well, I was kind of a science nerd when I was younger in college, a dual major political science and psychology, and I spent about 3000 hours working for a neurophysiologist. And that got published in Science in my junior year of college. But because of the political situation, we're in Vietnam, Nixon's Watergate and all that kind of stuff, I decided to become a lawyer.

But in my third year of law school, a seminal anti-aging book written by Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw called Life Extension, a practical scientific approach came out. It was 900 pages of anti-aging science. And not all of it viewed as correct these days, but in its day, it was really the cutting edge of what was known about anti-aging. And I was absolutely hooked. And I started reading molecular biology textbooks and delving into the science. And then in the early 2000s, Aubrey de Grey, a PhD from Cambridge, started the SENS organization and started putting on scientific conferences. And I attended those and started going to other scientific conferences on metabolism and stem cells and general aging.

And eventually decided I wanted to get into this field myself completely and to become a bio gerontologist, someone who studies the biology of aging.

Siim Land (3:26)

Right. And did you get like a degree or are you just like self-educated?

James Clement (3:31)

Self-educated. Over the past nine years, I've read over 18,000 papers.

And I actually made friends with George Church. I was on the board of directors of one of the companies he founded, the first direct-to-consumer genetics company called Gnome. And when I had my whole genome sequenced in 2009, he was actually the geneticist who read my interpretation to me.

So we became friends and talked a lot about anti-aging and what I could do to help the field and decided on the supra centenarian project which I'm still involved with, but which really consumed three or four years of my life going around North America and Europe, collecting blood samples from people that were essentially 110 years and older. But we broadened it, so we also took their relatives and lowered the age to about 106 so we could get more men into the study. And eventually, we collected samples from about 60 of this age group, 106 to about 112, whole genome sequenced them, and then in 2017 gave those genome sequences database to researchers around the world for free, and there was a really great write up about the study in 2017 by Amy Harmon, a journalist for the New York Times, and we got about 12 major universities collaborating with us.

Siim Land (5:21)

Yeah, that's pretty awesome to see that people are actually doing extensive research about it, because usually it's very hard to do this, especially like super centenarian studies, and assessing people's lifespan, because they require a lot of time and a lot of attention to detail.

James Clement (5:45)

Absolutely, and there's some really great scientists that work in this field, and I definitely was inspired by near Barzilai, Tom Pearls, and Stuart Kim's work. When I met these people in person, roughly 60 people between the ages of 106 and 112, I was completely blown away by how healthy some of them were at the time I was meeting them. So, lots of men that were 100 and 809 who were living alone, still cooking their own meals, either taking mass transit or driving themselves if they had great eyesight and living a pretty normal life. One gentleman that I met had just returned from a 800 or more round trip that he took in his Mercedes sports car by himself at 109 years of age. So, just totally breaks all of the images people have of what it means to be old. These were not individuals that were wheelchair bound in nursing homes and having to be fed by the staff and things like that.