Your Life is at Stake

You are losing 5–10 healthy years, and living a stupider, sicker, poorer, and less happy life than you could be through no fault of your own:

• Shorter: US healthy, non-disabled, lifespan runs ~10 years below Australia, Korea, and Japan ¹ and they aren’t even doing things optimally. How many years are we really leaving on the table?
• Sicker: There are numerous measures from obesity (climbed from ~14% in 1980 to ~42% in 2020)² to loneliness but there are also direct killers like colorectal cancer in adults under 50, which has doubled since the 1990s and is the leading cancer killer of men under 50.³
• Impotent: Roughly 1 in 4 men newly presenting with erectile dysfunction are under 40,⁴ and male sperm counts fell ~52% globally between 1973 and 2018.⁵
• Poorer: US per-capita healthcare spending is roughly 4x its 1990 level in real terms. That means you have less relative spending power for other goods. ⁶
• Stupider: Measured IQ has fallen ~1.8 points per decade across developed nations since the 1970s — the “reverse Flynn effect” — after a century of gains.⁷
• Less happy: US teen depression prevalence roughly doubled between 2005 and 2020.⁸

Perhaps unhappiness and IQ loss isn’t a health issue you say… maybe it’s LLMs or social media or the schools.

Perhaps, but, can you rule it out? Isn’t it plausible that the ~80,000+ chemicals in US commerce, over 90% of which have NOT been tested for health effects under the original TSCA ⁹, aren’t good for us?

Maybe our caveman bodies being so polluted with space-age materials isn’t good:

• PFAS (“forever chemicals”) sit in the blood of ~98% of Americans¹⁰ and appear in ~45% of US tap water samples.¹¹
• Microplastics have been found in 100% of placentas tested,¹² ~80% of human blood,¹³ brain concentrations rose ~50% between 2016 and 2024, and roughly 0.5% of a modern brain is now plastic by mass.¹⁴
• BPA is detected in ~93% of Americans over age 6.¹⁵

Perhaps, living in a chemical experiment causes us to function less well, and, when you function less well, you are stupider, sicker, and less happy.

Systematic Pollution

How did we get here?

1. Synthetic pollution is a relatively new problem born of the post WWII industrial boom over the last 50 years. Our biggest issue is we just naively assume new synthetics are harmless.

2. Another plausible explanation is simply the incentives of Tragedy of the Commons. Each global polluter captures the local benefit while the cost diffuses into the shared fishbowl, so the locally rational move is to pollute faster e.g. the rocket in the US damages the ozone for Australia. The clouds of micro plastic in China rain down over the oceans, polluting fish exported to the United States. That sort of thing. We all live in the same fishbowl, but we usually don’t bear the full cost of our own pollution.

But ultimately, I believe the root cause is that Space Age pollution is invisible to caveman biology. Unfortunately, the price of food doesn’t include the cancer bills 50 years from now, or the allergies you shouldn’t have, so we cave people buy the cheap food that tastes good.

Since every purchase is a vote, the company making wholesome food goes out of business and the company making weaponized food grows. In this way we vote in the bad, and vote out the good.

Live Long and Prosper

Unfortunately, this all suggests that the world is not going to save us anytime soon and that we are going to have to protect ourselves. The good news is you can do it effectively today.

My family is proof, my wife and I age at three-quarters the pace of the average American, and we’re pushing toward 0.6x. This puts our life expectancy to a century. We also happen to have come from the lower middle class and become top 5% earners for our age group so we are living proof that health and success go hand in hand.

You can do the same.

This handbook is your way to see the invisible, take back control, and create your own optimal habitat. When you create an optimal habitat, longevity, happiness, and performance become the automatic default.

Follow this book blindly and you will likely get our results, or read the principles and adapt to your own system.

Hey, you

If you are a biohacker yourself or find an error, your contribution is welcome. Health and Habitats are complicated, new information is constantly being uncovered, so no doubt much of this manual will be wrong.

References

Footnotes

1. WHO, Healthy Life Expectancy (HALE) data. ↩

2. CDC NHANES, adult obesity prevalence trends. ↩

3. American Cancer Society, Colorectal Cancer Facts & Figures 2023–2025. ↩

4. Capogrosso et al., “One patient out of four with a new diagnosis of erectile dysfunction is a young man,” Journal of Sexual Medicine (2013). ↩

5. Levine et al., “Temporal trends in sperm count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis,” Human Reproduction Update (2022). ↩

6. CMS National Health Expenditure Accounts. ↩

7. Bratsberg & Rogeberg, “Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused,” PNAS (2018). ↩

8. SAMHSA, National Survey on Drug Use and Health. ↩

9. US GAO reports on TSCA; EPA new chemical review process. ↩

10. CDC NHANES biomonitoring, PFAS detection in US population. ↩

11. Smalling et al., “Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in United States tapwater,” Environment International (2023). ↩

12. Ragusa et al., “Plasticenta: First evidence of microplastics in human placenta,” Environment International (2021). ↩

13. Leslie et al., “Discovery and quantification of plastic particle pollution in human blood,” Environment International (2022). ↩

14. Nihart et al., “Bioaccumulation of microplastics in decedent human brains,” Nature Medicine (2024). ↩

15. CDC NHANES biomonitoring, BPA detection. ↩