The Health Diaries

How This Anti-Aging Scientist Turns His Findings Into a Lifestyle

‘I practice what I discover.’

There are many ways to live a healthy life. The Health Diaries is a weekly series about the habits that keep notable people living well.

David Sinclair is one of the world’s renowned longevity researchers. He believes that one day — sooner rather than later — scientists will be able to treat and even reverse aging. He’s spent the bulk of his career researching the pathways that control aging in the body. Sinclair, a geneticist and professor at Harvard Medical School, has helped identify the role of molecules that are potentially important for longevity, including resveratrol — found in small concentrations in the skin of grapes — and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), a compound found naturally in the body that declines as we age but may be replenished through supplements.

Sinclair is also a co-founder of Life Biosciences, a biopharmaceutical company that is investigating and commercializing treatments for aging. It’s the largest company addressing the eight pathways of what Life Biosciences refers to as age-related decline (ARD). Sinclair and his colleagues want to treat aging as a systemic breakdown of the body, rather than treating symptoms or specific conditions. Sinclair, who lives in Boston with his wife and three children, spoke to Medium about how he incorporates what he’s learned about longevity in the lab into his everyday life.

I wake up every morning at 7 a.m., and I definitely need an alarm clock. I’m not morning person.

I start the day with homemade yogurt. It’s whole milk with some special bacteria that we put in the oven. It takes 24 hours for it to culture, and it’s better than anything I know that you can buy. I sweeten it up with some stevia and throw some blueberries in there. I haven’t been sick since I started doing that a year ago.

I don’t like vegetables, but I am slowly learning to like them more. I try to eat as many as I can for my health. Green or colored vegetables are my preference, not the starchy ones. In part because of their lower caloric level, but also because of their polyphenols—small molecules that have been shown to activate the body…