#400 I'm 40 But My Biological Age is 23. Here's How I Did It - Chris Mirabile

Chris Mirabile (0:00)

Everyone knows you could speed up aging from like smoking, for example, but no one really positioned it as, well, you could actually slow it down. What if we were to address all of the hallmarks of aging simultaneously?

Siim Land (0:11)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. My name is Siim Land, and today our guest is Chris Mirabile. Chris is an entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Novus Labs. He's also interested in longevity and slowing down his speed of aging. Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Mirabile (0:25)

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Siim Land (0:26)

Yeah, I'm glad to have you.

And you are one of those people who are also doing this kind of a Brian Johnson-like experiment with their health and longevity by trying to optimize all these different biomarkers and their biological age to be on a lower level than their chronological age. So I'm happy to have you on the podcast, and we're going to discuss different things of your results and your routines as well, and how they can implement these kind of similar routines related to diet, exercise, and supplements, and also improve their longevity in the process. But how did you get into this field, and what got you interested in trying to improve your biological age?

Chris Mirabile (1:13)

Yeah, great question. So I've been doing this for a while, actually. My initial interest in health started when I was 12 years old, and I started reading Men's Health Magazine here in the US.

But then when I was 16, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. And when you nearly lose your life, you start thinking about different things, and you look at health in a different way than a typical teenager does. So whereas prior to that experience, I was looking at health from the superficial side of just wanting to be in great shape and be attractive and play sports well. After that experience, it turned into a deeper appreciation for biology and the avoidance or absence of disease and trying to live as healthy as I can for as long as I can because I never wanted to be laying in a hospital bed again, wondering if I would wake up the next morning or not. So that experience had a really profound impact on my perspectives, life perspectives in general, but specifically how I looked at health. And so I was interested in longevity from that point forward, though I didn't think of it in the terms of longevity ever since the scientific and biological approach to lifespan has started more than 10 years ago.

That has informed my thinking a lot. But at the time, it was really just how can I avoid getting another brain tumor or cancer, heart disease, and so on for that matter. And so I've been a entrepreneur for my adult life, but in my personal life, I've been kind of obsessive about all of this, about health and optimizing it, and spent a lot of time just going straight to the primary sources, leveraging PubMed, for example. I would have ideas in my mind, and then I would look for the studies on PubMed and try to come up with my own perspectives on things. About 10 years ago, as part of that, I came across the paper, The Hallmarks of Aging, which is now a famous paper, it's a seminal paper that was a meta-analysis that looked at many other historical studies, hundreds of them, across animals and humans, and it identified, at the time, nine hallmarks of aging, or the nine biological mechanisms that take place when we get older across animals and humans.

And that was a eye-opening paper for me, because it, first of all, it gave me a lens through which I could look at my own aging and disease risk from, right? I could, rather than just, quote unquote, trying to be healthy, and following what, like, the medical establishment will tell you makes you healthy, I could actually get to a more fundamental level of health. That is the biological side of these mechanisms of aging. So the question then turned into, what could I do to optimize these biological hallmarks of aging and slow down their digression?

And then the second thing that it woke me up to was this idea that aging is actually something that's malleable. That concept had never crossed my mind prior to seeing this paper 10 years ago. And that was so empowering, because then I realized that, you know, everyone knows you could speed up aging from, like, smoking, for example, but no one really positioned it as, well, you could actually slow it down. And not everything you do for your health is going to slow it down, but certain things, if done properly, can slow it down. So that completely transformed my thinking. And eventually, a few years ago, and we can talk about this, but back in about 2017, 2018, I had an idea for what is now Novos, which is a very novel, unique approach to aging.