This Professor Was The Only Subject In His Own Aging Study, And Ended Up Reducing His Biological Age By 15 Years

Over the course of nine months, Ho adopted a series of lifestyle adjustments, including going to bed at 9.15 each night and waking at six o’clock in the morning. He also fasted for 20 hours a day, only eating between the hours of 11AM and 3PM.

At feeding time, Ho stuck to a Mediterranean diet based on leafy greens, olive oil, seeds and lean protein. He also downed a daily shake containing blueberries, red cabbage, broccoli and ginger, and enjoyed a chia seed, cacao and monkfruit pudding.

In addition, Ho performed 90 minutes of exercise each day, which included strength training and high-intensity interval training. Throughout the study, the sole participant measured various aspects of his biological health in order to obtain real-time data on the fluctuations in his physiology over time.

"We started this study to better understand what happens between annual health screenings, which most people rely on as their measure of health - to look beyond static markers and focus on how the body functions and changes in real time,” said Ho in a statement. “We know people are different from each other, but we are also different from ourselves over time.”

When the nine months were up, 47-year-old Ho had a biological age of just 31.8, according to an AI-driven tool that analyzed a series of biomolecular markers. In addition to looking dramatically healthier, Ho also displayed signs of increased cardiovascular health, with his resting state heart rate dropping from 65 to 46 beats per minute.

Metabolic switching - which refers to the amount of time it takes the body to switch from burning sugar to burning fat - is another key indicator of overall health. At the start of the study, Ho’s metabolic switching speed was over 24 hours, but dropped to just 16.5 hours by the end of the investigation.

His sleep architecture also improved significantly, with an overall increase in the amount of time spent in deep sleep each night, and far less time lying awake in bed. Overall, Ho’s nightly retreat into unconsciousness lengthened from around five hours to almost eight hours.

Despite enjoying multiple health benefits, however, Ho did express concerns that he may not be able to maintain the protocol in the long term, largely because of the anti-social nature of such a schedule. “Sometimes I had social engagements in the evening where I did not eat a single bite, and by and large people joked about it with me,” he said. “that’s not going to be possible for every social event moving forward.”

He also writes that all conclusions drawn from this study must be taken with a grain of salt, given that he was the only participant and his outcomes were not compared against an untreated control case. Despite this, however, Ho says that his findings could “help redefine how healthy aging is understood.”

The study has been published in the journal PLOS One.