What this is

The Longevity Desk is a newsletter about longevity and healthspan. It exists because most writing in this space is either a sales funnel wearing a lab coat, or a literature review so hedged it tells you nothing.

Who writes this

One editor, no sponsor, and no name on it yet. That last part is deliberate rather than an oversight. This is a subject where a name follows you around, and I have not decided I want mine attached to it permanently. What I can offer instead is a method you can audit, which I think is worth more than a byline you cannot.

This started with a torn hamstring. I was told to expect the better part of a year and no lower body work, decided I was not going to accept that, ran a peptide protocol I had read about, and was training again in about three months. I have no idea whether the peptide did it. There was no control and no measurement, and no way to separate it from rest, rehab and luck. One result and a strong feeling is exactly what the rest of this field is built on. When I went looking for the study behind the number on the label, I could not find one, and that is when this became a research project instead of a protocol.

The rest of it is my parents. Both are diabetic, and watching them work out what to take, what it was doing and who to believe is where the three pillars on this site came from. They are not abstractions here. Chronic inflammation, insulin resistance and mitochondrial dysfunction are the things quietly running my family, and most of the people I know are somewhere on the same road without a map.

So every entry starts with the question almost nothing else in this field answers: not what the dose is, which any vendor page will tell you, but which paper it came out of. Then every claim gets checked against the source it cites, one at a time, rather than against a summary of it. Across the ten most recent compounds, 485 claims were checked, 108 were corrected before publication and six were thrown out. What could not be established is written down as what could not be established, which is why you will read “I could not find a study” here and never “no study exists.” Only the first one is a claim I can stand behind, because it is about a search rather than about the world.

If you followed me elsewhere under another name, that was me.

What you can expect

Every claim here is measured against the same question: what does the research actually say? Not what a supplier says about it, and not what sounded compelling on a podcast.

That means the answer is sometimes disappointing. Plenty of interventions with genuine mechanistic plausibility have never been tested properly in humans, and where that’s the case, this newsletter says so in the text rather than burying it under confident prose. Preliminary evidence gets labelled as preliminary. Animal data gets labelled as animal data.

The editorial spine is three interlocking mechanisms that sit underneath most age-related disease: chronic inflammation, insulin resistance and mitochondrial dysfunction. Most pieces here trace back to at least one of them.

What you won’t find

No dosing protocols, no stacks, and no “what I take” lists. Those are the products of a different business model, and they’re where this subject reliably goes wrong. There is a vendor table, and it is deliberately not a list of shops worth buying from — it records what each one publishes about what is in the vial, including the ones that publish nothing.

There is no miracle compound section, because there are no miracle compounds. The interventions with the strongest evidence behind them are boring, well established, and almost impossible to shortcut: sleep, muscle mass, sane eating patterns, not smoking.

How this pays for itself

Through affiliate links to a price directory, and nothing else. The compound cards carry “compare prices” links to a separate site run by this publication; those links can earn a commission, and every page that carries them says so beside them. The findings printed next to a paid link are the same ones that would be printed without it, including the unflattering ones. The vendor sourcing table carries affiliate links as well, disclosed at the top of that page.

There are no advertisers and no sponsors, and the newsletter is free.

Any commercial relationship that would affect what gets covered or how it’s framed is one this publication won’t take.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, it gets fixed and the correction is noted rather than quietly edited. Write to hello@thelongevitydesk.org.