Harvard and Stanford scientists shill anti-aging nonsense. Don't fall for it.
Online wellness guru Andrew Huberman and a Harvard geneticist say "aging is a disease that can be halted" and promote a test to predict your "time of death."
As we continue exploring the physical, emotional, cognitive, spiritual and community aspects of aging with strength, keep two important things in mind:
Just because somebody has a fancy degree from Stanford or Harvard doesn’t mean you can trust them, unfortunately. See below.
To accurately learn the truth and science of aging with strength in all these facets, keep your bullshit detector on. You’ll need it.
On Saturday, a YouTube channel called Respire1 posted a remarkably deceptive 9-minute YouTube video of Dr. Andrew Huberman, a hugely popular Stanford neurologist known for venturing beyond his expertise. Titled “5 Tips to Slow Aging (and even reverse it),” the video opens with Huberman declaring: “Aging is a disease that can be slowed or halted.”
It was an appropriate harbinger of context-free conversation he and his guest, David Sinclair, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, engaged in that, because it was so pushy and unnuanced, demonstrates a disregard for their audience’s intelligence.
Offering Sinclair uncritically as a leading expert on longevity, itself, is deceptive. Sinclair has seriously impressive accolades. And he makes seriously unsupported, wildly inaccurate claims (keep reading for a doozy of an example.) Near its end, Huberman’s video reveals itself to be little more than a conspicuously veiled promotion of Sinclair’s private-equity-backed business venture.
But first, here’s the context-free nostrums Sinclair pushed on viewers that I didn’t expect from a tenured Harvard geneticist:
“Definitely try to skip a meal a day,” and ”It’s not as important what you eat. It’s when you eat during the day.” What you eat isn’t important? All of us, regardless of our fitness and health, should skip meals? Unqualified, these statements are bafflingly irresponsible.
Sinclair urges viewers to take resveritrol, a supplement made from a compound that Sinclair, via his studies on mice, has advocated for two decades as a powerful age-reversing agent. But it doesn’t seem to work for humans.
Sinclair advocates — again, free of context — the off-label use of Metformin, a prescription drug that lowers blood sugar levels in Type 2 diabetics. Research suggests it may be a potential longevity drug, but it remains controversial as an anti-aging panacea and can have significant adverse side effects if self-administered.
Some oddly tone-deaf advice — but okay. He’s from Harvard. He’s the expert.
But then this video, edited into nonstop jump-cuts and viewed more than 60,000 times in two days, takes a tell-tale turn toward what I can only surmise is intentional obfuscation. Huberman says:
“Recently, I’ve noticed that you’ve opened up a, sort of, email-slash-website that people can access to get some information about their own health and rates of aging.”
Huberman then asks Sinclair about “this test that you’ve been working on.”
This is where my reporter’s skepticism went from mild bleeping to full squawk.
Speaking in voiceover as an incongruous b-roll video of extremely old people played on the screen, Sinclair hit Huberman’s softball into a different, intentionally misleading dimension, describing what sounds like a personal-professional project:
“I want to democratize this test so that everybody has access to a score for their health, that can predict not just their future health and time of death but to change it.”
“I’m building a system that will improve not just their health now but in 10, 20, 30 years into the future. And we can measure that, and very cheaply keep measuring it, to know that you’re on the right track.”
I had two reactions to the quotes above:
Sinclair, a Harvard professor, describing a test that he says will predict a person’s time of death is a ludicrous showstopper, in my book. Huberman obviously chose to leave that claim in a video that is already riddled with distracting jump cuts.
When I heard Huberman describe “an email-slash-website” that Sinclair launched to help people get better health information, what came to mind is a relatively hokey biotechnology version of the original Craigslist: homemade, dorky but earnest — a genuine tool that will help people understand aging better.
And Sinclair plays into this charade, saying: “Go to DoctorSinclair.com and you’ll be one of the first people in the world to get this test.”
So I went to DoctorSinclair.com. What I found wasn’t a homespun web tool.
The website is a cloak for a venture-funded startup, Tally Health
Turns out, DoctorSinclair.com automatically forwards to Tally Health, a venture-backed biotechnology company Dr. Sinclair co-founded — in early 2023 — with a partner from a private equity firm, L Catterton, that incubated and holds a stake in the company. Tally Health, which recently closed a $10 million seed funding round, offers $249 biological age tests, an array of expensive supplements and a $129 (plus tax) monthly membership.
Why misrepresent Tally Health as “an email-slash-website” called DoctorSinclair.com? It makes you second-guess Huberman’s and Sinclair’s entire motivation.
Tally Health is built to sell product
Exploring Tally Health reveals a lot of information. The website offers a free biological age “quiz” — a few survey questions on nutritional, exercise, sleep and alcohol habits — that claims “over 90% of aging is determined by lifestyle and environment, rather than genetics.” That assertion is inflated compared with other informed estimates that genetics influence between 20% to 25% of individual longevity.
When I took the free quiz, I got this:
Clicking that big red bar leads to a page pitching a Tally Health membership, which includes periodic epigenetic age tests, as well as $60 ”longevity supplements designed to help further slow your rate of aging” and “targeted lifestyle recommendations based on your unique DNA.”
Sinclair’s claims examined
As for the claim that you can be “one of the first people in the world” to get the company’s proprietary test, Tally Health’s CEO said in an an interview published in February 2023 that when the company launched, it already had a waitlist of 270,000 people, and that it pre-trained its bio-age-calculating algorithms on the DNA of 8,000 people, aged 18 to 100, who signed up for the company’s original beta testing.
As for being able to continuing to measure your biological age “very cheaply,” is paying $129 a month very cheap?
As for Sinclair’s claim to have a test that will predict a person's time of death, well, that appears to be straight up crapspackle.
Which brings me to an admission.
I’m naive, sometimes
Maybe I should know better that to expect only truth and fact from trained Ivy-league (and Ivy-league west) scientists. Huberman, after all, is among many other things a YouTube influencer, his Stanford bonafides notwithstanding. He’s all over the internet with clickbaity headlines (“Neuroscientist: You Will NEVER Feel Stressed Again”) and has been thoughtfully criticized by many trained minds, including Christy Harrison’s Rethinking Wellness substack.
But I had thought he was no-b.s. And here’s why.
Huberman’s credibility: slick presentation, questionable claims
Huberman’s podcast videos are set up to underscore a no-frills, just-the-facts Stanford neuroscientist ethos. He usually appears wearing a pressed black oxford shirt, against a black background, and talks straight to the camera in punchy declarative sentences. The high-end, two-camera staging of a minimalist presentation feels painstakingly intentional.
Wikipedia’s entry on Huberman, boiled down to one main thought, suggests that Huberman has done respectable work in his field but has become known, if not infamous, for making inaccurate or unsupported claims about supplements and other wellness-related products or applications (which he may have a financial interest in promoting).
So the intention may be to grow a wildly successful, financially rewarding brand of “opinion wellness” based on the assumption that most viewers take the Stanford connection and Huberman’s unblinking truthiness as trustworthy.
Huberman and Sinclair have been on screen together for years. In a 2022 video, Huberman said he’s “partnered” with Sinclair to produce a podcast series.
Sinclair’s credibility: a serial chiseler in a Harvard lab coat?
Reading through Sinclair’s Wikipedia page shows he has a lengthy reputation for making scientifically unsupported claims and has leaned on his Harvard credentials to shill anti-aging products that don’t work and that, in the case of resveritrol, have been scientifically debunked as far back as 2005. When he’s asked to explain his support, he made excuses.
Wikipedia itself flagged its page on Sinclair, warning that in May 2023, weeks after Tally Health’s public launch, “promotional content” about the company appeared on Sinclair’s page, which Wikipedia said has been “extensively edited by the subject or someone connected to the subject.”
Curious, but not surprising. You wouldn’t want sober, scientifically backed research to get in the way of your $249 TallyAge™ results, would you?
Where all this leaves us
Of course, Tally Health may be the real deal, and its $249 cheek-swab biological age test may be a hugely important step forward for understanding how to slow or reverse human aging. But transparency and honesty also count in branding, and this 9-minute video is a management-school case study of how to destroy credibility with a large, eager audience.
Also, I acknowledge not everything is a venture-funded Sinclairian conspiracy to get you to buy expensive supplements, and there are credible scientific voices on wellness and specifically aging.
Peter Attia, whose book, “Outlive,” is very good, is one of them. A Stanford-trained doctor, he’s a also a regular guest on Huberman’s channel but tends to stick to facts and has been rightly critical of Sinclair.
Then there’s the thought one of my clinically trained friends wrote to me, after watching this perplexing video:
“Dr. Sinclair is amongst all the other white male doctors selling longevity,” she said. "I get trying to make money on some other way than patient care,” she added, “but we do not need these gigantic egomaniacs living any longer than the norm.”
Respire, the ownership of which seems intentionally withheld, is obsessively focused on Huberman, posting dozens of his videos, by what express permission is unclear.