Elysium Health Wants To Change the Way You Age – Starting With Your Cells

Up until this point, most efforts in the field of aging have a certain Star Trek-esque ring to them. Complex body scans at the push of a button, fluorescent blue drinks that fix wrinkles. It’s the stuff science-fiction authors love to imagine — everything seemingly light years ahead of the real world.

Unfortunately, we’re not aboard the USS Enterprise, and last we checked, William Shatner is no wrinkle-less immortal.

But now, we have Elysium Health — a dietary supplement company bottling serious scientific research on long-term health in an easy-to-use, easier-to-understand supplement.

Cofounder Dr. Leonard Guarente, Director of the Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at MIT, has conducted research on aging for decades. In that time, Guarente’s lab made two major discoveries that have defined his career: identifying the family of proteins called sirtuins that control the aging process in lower organisms, and demonstrating that sirtuins function only in the presence of NAD+ (that’s nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, if you’re one of those science-y types).

NAD+ is a molecule at the core of metabolism in all living cells — and we lose it as we age. His discoveries established a groundbreaking connection between aging and metabolism, which have profound implications for helping people be proactive about their health.

So in 2014, Guarente founded Elysium Health as a direct-to-consumer science company, wanting to make this and other breakthrough health research accessible. As the company’s letterhead puts it: “Working directly with the world’s leading scientists and clinicians, Elysium’s mission is to translate scientific research into effective, evidence-based products to help people live healthier, longer.”

Here’s how it works

Elysium’s first product, Basis, is a daily supplement for long-term cellular health optimization. It is the culmination of Dr. Guarente’s research and focuses on the positive health implications of NAD+ supplementation.

NAD+ makes a whole host of health-related functions possible. But our levels decline as we age, meaning that all the processes that need NAD+ — turning nutrients into energy, maintaining the health of DNA, regulating circadian rhythms, and hundreds more—may not be able to function optimally as we get older. Basis wants to change that. It has been clinically proven to increase NAD+ levels in humans by an average of 40% (check out their peer-reviewed article in Nature Partner Journals: Aging and Mechanisms of Disease). In layman’s terms: cells with easy access to NAD+ are happy cells. And Elysium Health wants your cells to be in a constant state of bliss, with plenty of NAD+.

How can one supplement do so much good? Chalk it up to Elysium’s founding team of rockstars in both the academic research and entrepreneurial communities. Boasting credentials from revered institutions like MIT, Harvard, and Princeton, Elysium’s founders combine more than 25 years of cutting-edge aging research to bring the best, highest quality supplement that existing science allows to the market. They even have several Nobel Laureates sitting on their advisory board — now, that’s what we call authority.

As a recent press article put it “…there’s a compelling argument to trust that Basis, the company’s first product, is indeed ‘the one daily supplement your cells need.’”

So, what does it mean to people like us?

“Aging is the gradual deterioration of tissues so there’s a functional decline,” says Dr. Guarente. That’s why consensus is building among scientists of a clear link between aging and today’s most prevalent health issues. “Ten years ago, the science of aging was focused on increasing lifespan. I was a big advocate of shifting our emphasis away from increasing lifespan to healthspan (the number of healthy, functional years a person lives),” says Dr. Guarente.

So the thinking is, if you can keep your cells healthy, you can enjoy a higher quality of life for longer.

Regular Basis users anecdotally share a variety of benefits from taking it, and Elysium uses this feedback to guide additional clinical trials, several of which are currently underway. heir current pipeline includes preclinical and clinical trials for skin, microbiome, muscle, cognition and circadian rhythm.

Basis starts out at $60 per bottle for a one-month supply, but you can save up to 33% with one of their subscription plans — just $1.32 per day for the annual plan — to keep your NAD+ going. And you’ll be in good company: 10% of Elysium’s customers are doctors.

The quest against aging’s influence has seen people do everything from injecting human growth hormones to transfusing blood from younger donors (yes, that’s a real thing). All Elysium suggests is that their customers take a simple daily supplement… and we don’t think you have to be an accredited molecular biologist to figure out which is better.

Learn more about Basis here. Exclusively for the holiday season, Elysium is introducing a $15,000 lifetime subscription and a more accessible two-bottle gift set for 17% off. We’re planning to gift it to our parents this holiday — hey, it’s way better than the group timeshare we almost got them.

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(via The Hustle)