Youthful Longevity: What it is, What it's Not, and Why it Matters.

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work”, said Woody Allen, “I want to achieve it through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen, I want to live on in my apartment.”

So, what youthful longevity is not, is somehow living forever, or even that much longer. What it is, is living as well as possible for as long as we can. It’s connecting the Y-axis that is our healthspan (how well we live) with the X-axis that is our lifespan (how long we live). It’s getting as much out of life as we can possibly get, as we enjoy this brief flash of light and sound, in the darkness and silence of eternity.

What the pursuit of youthful longevity is, in practical terms, is the resolution of chronic and popular health problems, before they have a chance to manifest. The entire focus of our almost five trillion-dollar Indefinite Management of Chronic Disease (IMCD) industrial complex is on the war against cancer, the war against heart disease, and the war against obesity. But as the saying goes “what you resist persists” and today the biggest killers of Americans are cancer, heart disease, and all the comorbidities that come along with a nation that’s 39.6% obese.

How can we ‘cure’ those health problems we’re told are inevitable and incurable today, by focusing on youthful longevity, and striving towards living to 100 vibrant, productive, and fulfilling years tomorrow? Although, if you speak with centenarians, and there are around ninety thousand of them today throughout the United States, they will offer many hypotheses of why they remain relatively healthy and live so much longer than the average person.

Richard Overton, who lived to 112, credits a shot of bourbon and a few puffs of a fine cigar, lit directly from his gas stove, as a contributing factor to his longevity. British WWI veteran Henry Allingham attributed living to 113 years to “cigarettes, whiskey, and wild, wild women.” And then of course there's Jeanne Louise Calment, who ate a pound of chocolate every week, smoked cigarettes virtually all her life, drank alcohol regularly, and lived to 122 years and 164 days.

But basically, and with all due respect, these people have no idea of why they won the salubrious lottery of relative immortality. It’s kind of like the gambler who credits the rabbit foot in his pocket for his lucky streak. In reality, these fortunate people accidentally figured out how to optimize their genetics through some combination of lifestyle habits, environmental factors, nutrition choices, and health-hygiene, while minimizing the damage from their less-healthy vices.

There are two ways of curing incurable health problems, for the first, we’ll need a time machine. So that we can take you back ten or so years to when the first seemingly unrelated symptoms began to manifest. Bumpy fingernails, skin rash, chronic headaches, digestive problems, bloody stool, inexplicable weight gain, or insomnia.

The second way of curing incurable health problems, is to never get them in the first place, and it only requires the kind of advanced technology that is readily available today. The Cone Beam Scanner, for example, allows for a three-dimensional x-ray of the oral cavity and is the best way to detect a silent tooth infection. Many functional medicine oncologists in fact will not take on a client, unless that test is done, and the infection ruled out or corrected. Because what may seem like an unrelated issue within the oral cavity sucks up the attention of the immune system, like an old, poor-efficiency air conditioner drains the electric energy from the available power within your home. Placing undue stress on the fuse box and electrical system that runs all the other appliances and circuits.

After we get the ‘all clear’ from the Biomimetic Dentist, we’ll assign a ScHO Practitioner to our client, whose primary job is to become the world expert in what this unique individual needs to function at the peak level of health expression, in the moment, and for the duration of their extraordinarily long life. We begin with thorough blood work to identify any nutritional deficiencies, or toxicity, like heavy metals and parasites. We test the digestive biome to make sure you can effectively assimilate the nutrients from your food choices. And we test your genetics to figure out the best way for you to interact with your environment to hopefully circumvent catastrophic health problems.

Our team of ScHO Practitioners are all seasoned FNPs who are trained by some of the more extraordinary physicians like Danielle Roberts, DO, Joshua Rosenthal, MD, Jimmy Kilimitzoglou, DDS (Biomimetic Dentist) as well as renowned geneticists', scientists, and digestive biome experts who specialize in human optimization, and youthful longevity.

We also engage world-renowned experts, like Naomi Wolf, who is the ScHO Keynote at this upcoming Youthful Longevity Conference, to understand the undercurrent of the systems that are blindly driving our society to chronic disease and early demise. This event in fact will look to feature remarkable people who have been sounding the alarms of the perverse incentives resulting in more government control, less autonomy, and waning lifespan potential, for the citizens of our great nation.

Perhaps there is not much we can do to fix this broken system, as it struggles to breathe under its own weight of financial insolvency and moral confusion. But what we can do is design an entirely new system, one that we can use to get the most living out of our life and pass on a legacy of youthful longevity to our children.

And that’s why it matters.

Alex Lubarsky is the founder of ScHO, Inc. and author of “Youthful Longevity: Why Living to 100 Vibrant, Productive, and Fulfilling Years is Your Birthright and Mandate.”