r/blueprint_

This is it.
Everything learned spending millions on longevity.

From: Your Immortal Unc and Auntie.
To: Our Immortal nieces and nephews.

0. Sleep is the world's most powerful drug.
1. Be in your bed for 8 hours
2. Same bedtime every night, any time before midnight
3. Don’t eat right before bed
4. Calm foods for dinner
5. No screens 1 hour before bed
6. Avoid added sugar (be aware it’s in everything)
7. Avoid all things in an American convenience store
8. Avoid fried foods
9. Shoes off at the door
10. Eat whole foods, particularly veggies fruits nuts legumes berries
11. Walk a little after meals or air squats
12. Get your heart rate high routinely
13. Lift heavy things
14. Stretch daily
15. Water pik, floss, brush, tongue scrape, morning and night
16. Make an effort to drink water
17. Get sunlight when you wake up (UV is low)
18. Protect skin in midday sun
19. Stand up straight
20. See at least one friend once a week
21. Avoid plastic where you can (in all things)
22. Circulate air in rooms
23. When stressed, breathe, learn to calm your body
24. Go to the dentist
25. Avoid sitting for long times
26. Protect your hearing, the world is too loud
27. Alcohol is bad for you
28. Finish coffee before noon
29. Avoid bright lights after sunset
30. If obese, look into a GLP
31. Sleep in a cold room
32. Texting while driving is dangerous
33. Turn off all notifications
34. Limit social media use
35. Don’t smoke anything
36. If you struggle to sleep, read a physical book before bed
37. 1 hour before bed have a calm wind down routine: bath, read, light walk, listen to music
38. The body is a clock and loves routine. Have a daily morning and evening schedule.
39. Avoid long distance travel where you can
40. Baby steps first: incorporate new things slowly
41. Do less… most things don’t work.

Bonus points if you get your blood checked.

Start here, it will change your life.

Closing out the stack breakdown thread with a pattern post, because after going through 30+ stacks this week (Just here on reddit), the same mistakes kept showing up and they cluster into two distinct groups depending on how deep someone is into this.

The beginner mistakes are unsurprising but persistent. The sophisticated-stacker mistakes are more interesting because they happen to people who've already done the homework, read the studies, and built thoughtful protocols. Both groups have blind spots.

Here are the patterns.

The 5 Mistakes Everyone Makes

These are the ones I saw across nearly every stack regardless of experience level. They're not subtle. They're the supplement industry's bread and butter, most products are sold in a way that makes these mistakes almost inevitable.

1. Confusing compound dose with elemental dose

This was the single most common error. It showed up in probably half the stacks I reviewed.

"Magnesium glycinate 400mg" usually means 400mg of the compound, which contains about 56mg of actual elemental magnesium. The studied effective dose is 300-400mg elemental. So someone thinking they're hitting their target is often at 15-20% of it.

Same problem applies to:

• Zinc (zinc picolinate vs zinc bisglycinate vs zinc oxide all have different elemental ratios)
• Calcium
• Iron
• Magnesium L-threonate (only ~7-8% elemental, so a 2000mg cap delivers ~140mg elemental)

Labels are designed to make the bigger number on the front of the bottle look meaningful. Always read the supplement facts panel and look for the elemental amount, not the compound weight.

2. Underdosing fish oil because of bottle math

"1200mg fish oil" almost never means 1200mg of EPA+DHA. It means 1200mg of total fish oil, which typically contains 200-400mg of actual omega-3s after subtracting the filler oil.

The therapeutic target for general health is 1-2g combined EPA+DHA. For inflammation, autoimmune, cardiovascular protection, or higher training volumes, 2-3g. Most people are at 25-50% of that without realizing.

Check the supplement facts panel, find the EPA line, find the DHA line, add them, and multiply by the number of capsules you take. That's your actual dose. If it's under 1g combined, increase capsules or switch to a concentrated formulation (Cal Gold Omega 800, Nordic Naturals ProOmega, Carlson Elite EPA Gems all deliver 1g+ combined per 2 capsules).

3. Stacking by category instead of by goal

The most common stack architecture problem. People build their stack by adding "one thing for mood, one for energy, one for cognition, one for sleep, one for joints, one for immune" and end up with 15 supplements covering 8 unrelated goals, none of them optimized.

The fix is brutal but effective. Write your actual top 2-3 goals on paper. Then audit every supplement against those goals specifically. If it's not serving one of those 2-3 goals at the right dose, it's noise. Cutting a stack by 40% almost always improves both adherence and effect because you're focused on what actually matters to you.

"Just generally healthy" is not a goal. "Improve sleep onset" is a goal. "Lose body fat without losing muscle" is a goal. "Reduce inflammation from heavy training" is a goal.

4. No baseline labs

You can't optimize what you don't measure. Yet most people are running 8-15 supplement protocols without ever testing:

• 25(OH)D. The single most commonly under-tested vitamin, and most people are either deficient or megadosing
• Ferritin and TSAT. Iron status flies under the radar and matters more than people realize
• B12 with MMA and homocysteine (serum B12 alone is unreliable)
• Full thyroid panel including TPO antibodies (not just TSH)
• Fasting insulin and HbA1c
• hs-CRP
• Total T, free T, SHBG, sensitive estradiol (in men, the standard E2 assay is unreliable)

A baseline panel costs $150-300 once a year. It tells you whether you actually need what you're taking, whether your doses are working, and whether there's something more serious driving the symptoms you're trying to manage. Most stack optimization questions become obvious when the labs are on the table.

5. Treating symptoms while ignoring the obvious bigger lever

This was the most predictable pattern. Someone takes ashwagandha, magnesium glycinate, glycine, and apigenin for sleep and drinks coffee at 4pm. Or runs a five-supplement T-optimization stack while sleeping 5 hours. Or stacks longevity compounds while eating ultra-processed food, drinking three nights a week, and carrying 30 lbs of visceral fat.

Supplements get treated as the lever when they're actually the smallest lever available.

The hierarchy of leverage for almost any health goal:

1. Sleep
2. Food and body composition
3. Training (resistance + cardio)
4. Stress, alcohol, caffeine timing
5. Medical conditions properly diagnosed and treated
6. Then supplements

Most people invert this hierarchy because supplements feel like action while the basics feel like discipline. Stacks get bigger as compensation for not addressing the bigger levers. The bigger levers don't get easier to ignore they just compound silently while the supplement spend grows.

The 5 Mistakes Only Sophisticated Stackers Make

These are different. These are the mistakes people make because they've read enough to be dangerous. They show up in stacks with KSM-66 ashwagandha and methylated B-complex and IFOS-certified fish oil. Stacks that look sharp on the surface but have systemic issues underneath.

1. Optimizing labs that don't need optimizing

The most common pattern in this group. Someone with total T of 580 ng/dL takes ashwagandha, tongkat ali, boron, zinc, and shilajit to "boost T." Their T is fine. Population mean for their age is around where they are. What they're actually optimizing for is the number and the number was never the problem.

This shows up everywhere in the longevity-adjacent space:

• "Optimizing" normal cholesterol with bergamot and berberine when LDL is 95 mg/dL
• Pushing fasting glucose from 88 to 82 with cinnamon and chromium
• Trying to drop hs-CRP from 0.6 to 0.3
• Pushing estradiol down with DIM when it's already mid-range

The diminishing returns hit fast. After labs are in healthy range, additional supplementation rarely moves anything meaningful. The energy is better spent on the lab that's actually off, or the lifestyle variable that's actually off, or accepting that the body has tight homeostatic control and you're going to fight it for marginal gains.

The deeper version of this mistake: optimizing labs for their own sake without a corresponding symptom or risk factor. A normal T is not a problem to solve. A normal cholesterol is not a problem to solve. Find the actual problem first.

2. Stacking methyl donors without checking COMT or methylation balance

This is one of the more common issues in sophisticated stacks. Someone reads about methylation, adds methylfolate, methyl-B12, SAMe, betaine (TMG), and choline, layered on top of an already methylated B-complex. For most people, fine. For a slow COMT phenotype (about 25% of the population) it's actively bad.

Slow COMT means catecholamines clear slower. Layering methyl donors on a slow COMT can produce paradoxical anxiety, irritability, sleep disruption, and brain fog. The opposite of what the methyl donors were supposed to do.

If you're stacking aggressive methyl donor support, either know your COMT status (23andMe or Ancestry data run through Promethease/Genetic Lifehacks works) or watch for the specific signs (over-methylation symptoms: anxiety, agitation, insomnia, racing thoughts after adding the methyl donors). Niacinamide 50-100mg is the classic methyl group buffer for COMT-slow phenotypes who need methylation support but can't tolerate the full load.

Adenosyl-B12 is often better tolerated than methyl-B12 in slow COMT. P5P with riboflavin works as a non-methyl B6/B2 pairing. The toolkit exists, but it requires knowing your phenotype.

3. Underdosing speculative compounds in expensive blends

I see this constantly with longevity stacks. Someone is paying $80-200/month for a multi-ingredient NAD+/longevity blend with 250mg NMN, 100mg NR, 160mg "liposomal NAD+," and 50mg trigonelline. Each ingredient is at 30-50% of the studied dose. The product looks impressive on the label and does very little in practice.

The clinical dose ranges for the major longevity compounds:

• NMN: 500-1000mg/day
• NR: 300-1000mg/day
• TMG: 500-1000mg/day (especially paired with NMN/NR)
• Spermidine: 1-5mg/day
• Sulforaphane: 10-40mg/day SGS equivalent
• Fisetin: 100-500mg/day pulsed
• Ca-AKG: 1-2g/day

If you're going to take these compounds at all, dose them properly. Buying a four-in-one liposomal blend at sub-therapeutic levels for each is paying premium for placebo. Either commit to clinical dosing on the one or two you care about, or don't bother. The middle ground is the worst of both worlds.

Also, oral NAD+ itself is largely theater. NAD+ as a molecule doesn't survive digestion intact. It's broken down to precursors and reassembled. Putting "NAD+" on a label is marketing, not biology.

4. Running cycling protocols that look correct but don't address the actual mechanism

Sophisticated stackers know to cycle things, but the cycling doesn't always match the reason. Common patterns:

• Zinc cycled but without copper paired. Cycling zinc helps avoid copper depletion in theory, but it's actually the ratio that matters. 15mg zinc with 1-2mg copper daily, no cycling needed, is cleaner than 30mg zinc with breaks.
• Ashwagandha cycled without thyroid consideration. Cycling ashwagandha is fine, but the real issue most people miss is that ashwagandha modulates thyroid (often raises T4/T3). If you have any thyroid condition or take thyroid meds, cycling doesn't solve the interaction.
• Caffeine cycled without addressing CYP1A2 metabolism. People cycle caffeine to avoid tolerance but ignore that their genetic CYP1A2 status means they may be metabolizing caffeine slowly enough that their afternoon coffee is still affecting sleep. The fix isn't a cycle. It's a cutoff time.
• Senolytic protocols on calendar timing instead of context. Pulsed fisetin once a month is fine, but the senolytic protocols that have actual mechanistic support are spaced by senescent cell burden, which we have no good way to measure. So most "pulsed fisetin" is more ritual than science. Take it or don't, but don't assume the calendar matches the biology.

Cycling is a tool, not a virtue. Make sure the cycle addresses the actual mechanism of the supplement's downside, not just a general sense that "cycling = sophisticated."

5. Treating undiagnosed medical conditions with supplements

This was the most concerning pattern in the high-end stacks. Sophisticated stackers are more likely to do this, not less, because they've gotten good at managing symptoms with supplements and have lost the habit of going back to medical workup.

The cases I saw this week alone:

• A 30-something male with bottomline B12 and "slow gut motility"; almost certainly H. pylori or autoimmune gastritis that needed actual workup, being managed with B12 capsules and digestive enzymes.
• A 40-something on a sophisticated longevity stack with ferritin 553, low ceruloplasmin, high free copper, elevated aldosterone — almost certainly hemochromatosis + primary aldosteronism + likely MASLD, being managed with antioxidant stacks and supplements that may actually be making the iron picture worse.
• A late-30s TBI patient with low T, low GH, and documented pituitary damage; running a thoughtful neuroprotective stack but not on hormone replacement, which would be 10x more impactful than the supplements.
• A 24-year-old final-year med student with chronic fatigue, autonomic dysfunction, gut dysmotility, and prior copper-zinc imbalance; managing with a sophisticated stack while the workup for POTS, MCAS, hypermobile EDS, and SIBO had never been completed.

The more comfortable you get optimizing yourself with supplements, the easier it becomes to substitute that for real medical workup. Sophisticated stackers especially fall into this because they trust their own protocol and have often had bad experiences with dismissive doctors.

Supplements are downstream of diagnosis. If your symptoms have a name that hasn't been confirmed by appropriate workup, that's the conversation, not stack optimization. The cost of investigating is low. The cost of missing a treatable diagnosis for years is enormous. I see the back end of that in the ICU and it's not abstract.

So, the conclusion here:

The beginner mistakes are about dose, math, and labels. The sophisticated mistakes are about ego, blind spots, and substituting optimization for diagnosis.

Both groups share one core pattern: the supplement layer is asked to do work it can't do. For beginners, that work is "fix everything I haven't addressed in the basics." For sophisticated stackers, that work is "compensate for medical questions I haven't asked because I trust my protocol."

The honest answer for both groups is the same. Supplements are 15-20% of the picture, no matter how good they are. The basics (sleep, food, training, body composition, alcohol, stress, properly diagnosed and treated medical conditions) are the other 80-85%. The stack works when it's amplifying a foundation that's already solid. It doesn't work when it's substituting for one.

If you've made it this far in the thread, take one thing from this post and act on it this week. Not three things. One. The biggest leverage move is usually the one you've been avoiding.

Thanks to everyone who posted stacks. This was a useful week.

Quick context so you know who's typing:

I am an ICU resident but supplements have been my obsession for 12 years, worked with manufacturers, formulators, nutrition clinics, and done online consults building and auditing stacks. I know the industry from both sides: the science, and how the sausage gets made.

Drop your stack in the comments and I'll break it down. What I'll cover:

• What's actually doing something vs what's filler
• Doses (most people are under or over, rarely correct)
• Form and bioavailability (magnesium oxide vs glycinate is not the same conversation)
• Timing and stacking interactions (some of your stuff is canceling other stuff out)
• Redundancy. you're probably paying for the same mechanism three times
• What's missing for your actual goal
• Brand red flags if you list them (I will NOT mention any brands unless you asked me to)

Format your comment like this so I can actually help:

• Age, sex, weight (rough is fine)
• Goal (performance, longevity, sleep, recovery, mood, whatever)
• Current stack with doses and timing
• Relevant labs if you have them (don't post full panels, just flagged values)
• Meds. this matters, some supplements wreck drug metabolism
• Diet basics (omnivore, vegan, low-carb, etc.)

I'll be honest. If your stack is good I'll tell you. If you're wasting money on a supplement with no clinical endpoint or taking 5g of ashwagandha because an influencer told you to, I'll tell you that too. Evidence-based, not vibes-based.

This is NOT medical advice. Talk to your own doctor before changing anything, especially if you're on prescription meds.

I'll work through these as I have time over the next few days.

This should not be possible.

Studies show that 100% of men have microplastics in their semen. I am the first human ever to show a complete reduction to zero.

This may be a world-first breakthrough in fertility research.

I had 165 microplastic particles in my semen just 18 months ago. Now, I have zero.

Five published studies have measured microplastics in human semen. Two found them in 100% of men. The other three found then in 44 to 76% of men tested, but those used methods that miss the smallest particles and the clear ones. Corrected for that, the real rate is likely 100%. Almost every man alive has plastic in his semen right now. The same applies to testicular tissue, testing 100% positive for microplastics.

Microplastics hurt sperm.

Human studies show the impact of various types of plastic, associated chemicals, and other toxins on male fertility:

+ 60% fewer normal shaped sperm (from PFAS)
+ 5x higher odds of low sperm count (from PTFE)
+ 10% lower sperm concentration (from PTFE)
+ 15% lower swimming ability (from PTFE)
+ 41% lower swimming ability (from PET)
+ 12% lower sperm swimming ability (from BPA)
+ 3x higher odds of low sperm count (from Phthalates)
+ 2x higher odds of poor swimming (from Phthalates)

The effects compound: each extra type of plastic drops sperm swimming ability by about 21%.

This matters even if you’re NOT trying to get pregnant.

Sperm count is one of the cleanest biomarkers of overall health we have. And microplastics don't stop at the testes.

The same particles are showing up everywhere we look. Studies show 4.5x higher rate of heart attack, stroke, and death in people with microplastics in their arterial plaque vs. those without. Microplastics were also found in 100% of human placentas tested.

100% of post-mortem human brains tested positive for microplastics. Brain concentrations rose ~50% between 2016 and 2024, and now sit at roughly 11x the levels found in the liver or kidney.

Where do these come from?
+ PTFE, commonly in non-stick pans
+ PET, water bottles
+ Phthalates, makes plastic soft and bendy
+ BPA, can linings
+ PFAS, stain-resistant fabrics & food packaging

Inside the body, plastic causes a kind of cellular rust. It triggers inflammation in the testicles, kills the cells that make sperm and drops testosterone. It's been confirmed across 39 animal and cell studies, then in human data.

MY PROTOCOL:

Note, what I did is n=1, not a controlled trial, I cannot prove cause.

1. Sauna (dry). My toxin blood panel confirms sauna clears plastic related chemicals: BPA, phthalates, PFAS, flame retardants, pesticides. The plastic particles themselves are too big to sweat out directly. Heat may activate other clearance routes: bile flow through the liver, the cell's internal cleanup system, and the gut barrier. Humans have almost no enzymes that can break plastic apart, so the body has to physically push it out.

2. Reverse osmosis water filter. Drinking water is likely a major source of microplastic getting into your body. A reverse osmosis filter pushes water through a very tight membrane and strains the particles out. I filter everything I drink.

3. Trying to rid my environment of the big plastic items: cutting boards, cups, plates, food storage containers, non-stick pans, cling wrap, tea bags, water bottles, kitchen utensils, kettles, and synthetic clothing. Note, as hard as I try, I'm always finding new plastic things in my life. This can be all-consuming thing so try to just knock out the big ones.

I did all three interventions at the same time. I cannot say which one did the most work. What I can say is this: going from 165 to zero in 18 months is possible.

Results:
Nov 2024: 165 particles/mL
Jul 2025: 20 particles/mL
Apr 2026: 0 particles/mL

The 18 month window also captures roughly 7 full spermatogenesis cycles.

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hello yall, i want to know how to make blueprints (vehicle/car) on my ipad. I want to make some like on this website: https://www.the-blueprints.com/ . I have everything i need to make some:

iPad + Apple Pencil

PC

I would rather do it on the ipad tbh. but ill wait for your tips/answers 😄

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What is helping against grey hair? What does Bryan do?

My brain became 40% more child-like in 3 minutes. This is what it felt like.

Me: “What question do we ask them next?”
My daughter: “Are they scared of the dark too?”

My six year old daughter and I were playing an imagination game. In this one, aliens had just landed on earth and we were asking them questions.

Listening to her thoughts and exploration as we interviewed the aliens brought me endless joy. As hard as I tried, my adult brain didn’t have the same flexibility and freedom. She reached where I couldn’t. My brain was trapped in adult-patterns that felt inescapable.

I'd always assumed that gap was permanent.

5-MeO-DMT proved me wrong.

After my large 28 mg dose, my brain patterns became 40% more original.

The technical name of the marker is Lempel-Ziv complexity. It’s a measure of how varied and distinct a brain signal’s patterns are. The lower the LZc score, the more predictable your brain patterns are. The higher the score, the more varied, distinct and neuroplastic.

5-MeO-DMT was like a magic potion transforming me from adult to child.

The morning after the dose, I awoke to a feeling of giddiness. Butterflies floated in my stomach as I imagined what surprises the day may bring. The gray clouds of adult-dread that typically overcast my mind were gone. It was all sunshine.

In my hotel room, I took a quick shower and then ran to a local cafe. I wanted to surprise Kate with a morning coffee before she woke up. I knocked on her door. Confused and barely able to see, she opened upon hearing my voice. I embraced her, teasing and flirting. She wrapped both her hands around the warm mug and I opened the curtains to let in the joy.

We had a flight to catch so she showered and packed up. Not having time that morning to exercise, I decided to sprint down the hallway, and then skip back. Energy overflowed. The world felt light and right. It was a new me, with new patterns, and a fire for life.

Kate was amused, observing and wondering what was going on. Life was like this for days.

Now seven weeks post dose, it’s faded. The longing for that state has not.

When I imagine the future, I remind myself that I’m now mostly blind to the power of awe and wonder. I am trapped in a 48 year old brain that is weighed down by barnacles and stuck in patterns.

> I want the future more than my adult brain can see.
> I hunger for life more than my adult brain can understand.
> Children are wiser than we give them credit.
> Intelligence may not be about what you think you know.
> But in the vast, endless space of curiosity and wonder.
> Unburdened by the world.

Notes:

1. To our knowledge, this is the first publicly available human recording of this signal under 5-MeO-DMT. Seen before with psilocybin and N,N-DMT.

2. Thank you AWEAR for the EEG device and Joseph Chen for help with the data analysis.

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I've tried going a few weeks without any high dopamine activities that can be addictive. No porn, no yummy but unhealthy food, no video games. After a bit, life becomes very stale and empty. This emptiness creates fear, and leads to negative symptoms like restlessness at night giving poor sleep.
I have to be getting my dopamine from something. If not these addictive habits, where else? Sure I keep myself busy with other activities during the day, but those activities don't satisfy my dopamine centers

so I started working out a year ago and I had to stop because I work full time and I have a business that I run part time, I know the best thing to do is to work out early to avoid adrenaline spikes before bed and be able to have good sleep but if I workout early I feel fatigue so I end up working less or worse

I basically wake up

workout and do some cardio

breakfast

take my meds (adhd meds, concerta and I also take a beta blocker)

go workout on my standing desk and walking pad or just at my normal desk

if I do only cardio my day is great and I feel energetic, lifting kills me.

I ended up quitting and only doing cardio

I'm 24 6ft 190 lbs and I started lifting again two days ago and everything sucks again keep in mind I literally can walk on my walking pad for 4 hours and do a 10 min run and I feel nothing I feel overall better and great but with lifting I feel tired and I also get great sleep because by the time I go to bed I feel tired af

I also don't really lift heavy I just do a full body workout 3 times a day because my schedule is busy and I want to build and maintain some muscle and be lean thats it

Magic mushrooms dropped my sperm count 69%.

90 days later, my motile count in top 1% of all males.

To our knowledge, this is the first time this has been documented in a human.

Here is what we think happened.

Sperm cells have tiny receivers on them called 5-HT2A receptors. Psilocybin turns those receivers on for 4-8 hours which causes the sperm to start swimming in wild, frantic patterns way too early. Like a sprinter who runs full speed before the race even starts. They burn out and the test sees them as broken.

At the same time, psilocybin spikes your stress hormones cortisol and ACTH and elevates prolactin. High prolactin tells your body to slow down sperm production. So the factory got a pause signal right in the middle of making a batch.

Your body makes a completely new batch of sperm every 9-11 weeks. Three months later I retested. Every single number came back better than before taking magic mushrooms. We don't yet know if psilocybin triggered the improvement or if my baseline was already trending up.

Either way, these are my best fertility markers ever measured:

Total motile count: 411 million
Motility: 64%
Morphology: 12%
Concentration: 212 million
Count: 642 million

To put these numbers into perspective: the WHO considers a motile count above 42 million as normal, mine is 411 million, nearly 10x.

And a normal concentration is 16 million (mL), mine is 212 million (mL).

It appears that the factory shut down for one cycle and then rebuilt everything from scratch.

After psilocybin, I did 5-MeO-DMT, which doesn't appear to cause the same problem. It clears your body in 1-2 hours which isn’t long enough to trigger the receptor effect.

Note: I also did extensive travel including a trip to China, and had 3 weeks of disrupted sleep in December 2025. Both could have nudged my numbers down, but neither explains a 69% drop on their own.

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Hello, I’ve been taking longevity mix and essential capsules for over a month and my sleep got dramatically worse, from my usual 20-30 min of awake time, now it’s over 2 hours every night, I feel like I’m spending most of my night trying to fall asleep or to fall back asleep and that I wake up every 5 min. I skipped BP products for a week and my sleep returned to normal, so I am sure that they are the cause. In a strange way, even with way less sleep and of poor quality, I have way more energy and am less sleepy during the day than with 8 hours of sleep without, but I don’t think that 5-6 hours of sleep are good in the long run and my nights are horrible. Any similar experience? I don’t know which of them - longevity mix or capsules causes this. I would really like to continue the supplements but not at the price of my sleep. Thank you

People mistakenly believe peptides are only good.

Peptides can be bad, too.

They can cause adverse effects. Some dangerous.

I did a peptide experiment and measured its effects in my body. The results are complicated.

I tried a peptide called CJC-1295.

It pushed my growth hormone up by ~8x. That’s good. That’s what it was supposed to do.

But, it also came with adverse effects:
> increased my morning fasted blood sugar up 20%
> increased stress hormone by 12%
> tanked my REM sleep by 23%
> made my pancreas work 53% harder and was still losing to rising blood glucose
> increased my insulin resistance by 50%

These were the most obvious side effects, and I only ran a very narrow panel for this experiment.

So I’m sure there’s more.

I stopped after two doses, without even reaching the intended target dose.

For those of you new to peptides, your body sends instructions to itself using tiny chemical messengers called peptides. There are thousands of them.

For example, GLP-1s are drugs that take an existing class of short-lived peptides and modify them to extend their activity duration, which turns them into drugs, following rigorous clinical testing.

CJC-1295 is one of those peptide-drugs. It tells your brain to release more growth hormone. Growth hormone is your body's signal to build muscle, repair tissue, and recover.

However, and like most grey market peptides, CJC-1295 did not succeed its clinical trial, and hence never became an “official” drug.

There is a version called CJC-1295 with DAC. DAC is an attachment glued onto the peptide that makes it last for days in your body instead of hours. One shot, longer effect, just like GLP-1s.

Why people use it: more growth hormone could mean better recovery, leaner body, faster healing.

The experiment I completed.

Two injections a week of CJC-1295 with DAC:
> 1.2 mg
> 1.8 mg

48 hours after the first injection I was nearly comatose. It felt like severe jet lag, the type you’d feel after traveling nine time zones. My sleep was wrecked and I felt continuously awful.

My REM sleep dropped by 23%. REM is when your brain processes memories and repairs itself. Less time for my brain to repair itself. During the experiment, I never felt rested and always fatigued.

Why we chose CJC-1295 with DAC.

Some will say we picked the wrong peptide. They will say I should have used a different version, CJC-1295 without DAC, mixed with another peptide called Ipamorelin. We went with CJC-1295 with DAC instead as it has the most controlled studies.

CJC-1295 with DAC has 2 controlled trials in healthy adults. Ipamorelin alone has 1 controlled trial in healthy adults, plus 1 study that failed when they tried it on bowel surgery patients. The mix of the two has zero controlled trials.

On Ipamorelin, it copies a chemical called ghrelin, the one that makes you hungry. On its own it gives you a quick burst of growth hormone that fades fast. It does not keep your longer acting growth signal (called IGF-1) up. Clinics mix Ipamorelin with CJC-1295 no-DAC because the two together are supposed to work better. But we don’t know if that’s accurate because we don’t have trial data.

This is a problem with peptides. Almost none of them have been tested properly. We are flying blind. Most of what people use is based on what someone said online, what a clinic claims, or what a friend reports from their subjective feelings.

Peptides have the potential to be great when well-studied.

https://preview.redd.it/httq92h11zzg1.jpg?width=988&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cbee47f943ce06fa28943331e80c1a12e44ca0c8

Capitalism has always valued money over human life. It's a key defining factor. It doesn't care about humans, animals or the environment as long as it can squeeze one more buck out of whatever given enterprise. Microplastics in everything from the ocean to our bodies? Caused by the plastic industry refusing to change because it's cheaper to keep going the way they always have. Genocides and war (very deadly, definitely not helpful for creating eternal life, very bad for the environment), kept going by weapons manufacturers who'd have to shut down if we actually introduced peace and made war illegal. Carcinogenic materials and ingredients used in clothing, every day items and beauty products. Bad or insufficient quality of food, and the aim to make everything as addictive as possible so people keep buying more. Landfills full of fast fashion clothes. Health problems due to stress from unsustainable work schedules. AI. Countries that are being exploited to the bone with children working in mines and sweatshops and people having to inhale toxic fumes all day every day. The list is literally endless. Capitalism is the root cause of so many issues and the machine that makes those issues persist and escalate. Capitalism is the number one death machine.

It's so baffling to me how he seems to be knowledgeable on a lot of things but doesn't draw this final, very obvious conclusion. If he wants to stop death, he should be very loudly anticapitalist.

I know that it is basically unrelated to Bryan’s general work, but with a team that has spent so much time and energy studying so many aspects of the human body I was wondering if there was any information that has come out of all of the studying that would be applicable to the process of foreskin restoration.

There is a fairly large community of people with that goal and any amount of information that could help that community with positively impact a lot of people