Longevity Now

I spent a lot of money and I felt like garbage. It’s taken me a month to recover from my experience at the Longevity Now conference in a Costa Mesa hotel, where I ate mint-chocolate clay off a stick, sweated in an infrared rave sauna, and munched on oddly delicious cookies with the consistency of custard. I learned about successful self-dentistry while choking down a $24 smoothie made of pumpkin oil and coconut lard that looked like cold diarrhea, then took a seat in an auditorium for a lecture on “re-wilding,” where I plugged my hand into the floor via alien nipple and learned how we may be evolutionarily turning ourselves into Grays.

This is what I do for fun. Not to make fun, but to have it. I believe in the power of a healthy body—when all is said and done, all we really have for ourselves is our animated flesh vehicles. As a result, I’ll try seriously anything, knowing I’m experimenting with my body of my own free will.

There have been times in my life when my refrigerator looked like the stockroom for a crazy person’s space diet. This is when, as recommended by a reputable and knowledgeable quantum reflexology analysis practitioner, I was taking upward of 120 herbal pills a day, plus “nano drinks,” plus wrapping my torso in cotton flannel soaked in castor oil, followed the next day with very localized mud packs along specific meridians of my body, twice-weekly (at least) enemas, and mineral foot soaks. Every meal began with a stomach-prep tea, was accompanied by enzymes, and ended with hydrochloric acid. I was doing simultaneous heavy metal detoxification, parasite purging, organ healing, and electromagnetic frequency remediation, and it was extremely intense and extremely expensive. I was kind of ugly during all of this, crying a lot, losing weight to the point of looking nearly skeletal, and overly sensitive, but the outcome, once I did take myself off the rigorous program and started skewing my food-to-pills ratio back toward the former, was noticeably increased health and immunity, a much more vibrant and positive outlook on life, clearer skin, and physical comfort in my body where before there was little.

This is the tip of the iceberg, meant for illustrative purposes so you know I’m not, like, dabbling in Whole Foods-style self-health endeavors, dropping $200 on supplements that will expire before they’re ever finished because there’s a lack of self-discipline. I’ve done stuff to myself that's pretty speculative, some of which was almost back-room in nature, emanating heavy don’t-ask-too-many-questions-or-you’ll-get-ejected vibes. The one thing I’ve learned though is that the pivot point of health is what you put into your body—first and foremost, whatever you call food.

Before allowed down the escalator to the longevity wing of the Costa Mesa Hilton, every entrant had to sign an “event liability waiver,” which stated in many different ways that this was not a place of legal medical guidance and we could not sue in any micro-manner for anything we might pick up here and apply to our lives. For filling out a pre-conference survey, asking us what we were hoping to get out of the experience, we each received an orange-flavored raw chocolate bar, the first ingredients listed in which were “amour and gratitude.” Also, on the label it says the chocolate bar is free of “nasty funk.” Personally, that is exactly what I want to eat, something beautiful and pure, treated with kindness and appreciation, that is intended to go through my body and hopefully spread the same (though hypothetically I am curious if “malice and apathy” were the main ingredients, what would it taste like?). The FDA can’t regulate stuff like food infused with intention, though, and in fact couldn’t regulate much else found at the Longevity conference.

As I made my way through the many booths bearing raw treats and the purest whatever, the first thing I noticed was how everyone spoke in hushed tones, terrified to say what their product may provide health-wise, lest an undercover agent for the FDA come and bust them. They could give out whole folders of printed information, but could offer nothing statistical or explanatory on the label itself, nor deliver information from their lips. This meant all of us were kind of wandering around, sampling stuff, not exactly sure what we may or may not be doing to our bodies.

Eating kale chips or tossing back algae shooters, you’re fine. But once you start getting into the deep stuff, like dropping ant essence, colostrom, obscure Chinese herb blends, or super ionic minerals into your smoothie, you’re taking it to the next level. When you start talking about your smoothie as a “treatment,” that’s the FDA’s jurisdiction. When you start talking about it as “food,” that’s the USDA. The truth is that this stuff is both, and no one regulates that wild ‘n’ free space.

Not that I want anyone to. Look at what happens once we incorporate ingestibles and bureaucracy: The USDA is to thank for genetic modification in our food, which toxicology experiments show cause organ damage and cancer and have other dangerous side-effects; the FDA is in charge of regulating the drugs that help cure or alleviate those diseases, which are constantly in shortage. And both are basically up for sale, as they are government agencies and are sweet on lobbying.

The point is that government, no matter what angle you approach it from, has forced health into isolated, extreme movements that’ve gone underground to survive. If you want your prescription drugs, you’re sifting through some shady internet underworlds; if you want access to your latest super-food supplement, you’re in the basement of an excessively beige suburban hotel dodging long-winded folk who want to talk about you entering their salt-crystal field as a metaphor for personality type. There are kinder exceptions, of course—your aunt’s medicine cabinet, for example, or tiny independent health food stores in remoter areas—though no matter how you’re going about it, you’re experimenting.

At Longevity Now, a bed dressed in sheets woven with silver filaments that connected via plug to only the third prong in a socket beckoned those in need of a good night’s grounding. The process is called Earthing and it’s theoretically a good idea: As humans increasingly insulate ourselves from the actual earth via our shoes and stuff like pavement, this claims to be one way to get us literally connected back to the parts of the earth that can absorb gnarly charges and nurture. This process was also made available to all who entered the lecture hall, which I mentioned previously: you were issued an electrode bearing the male end of a snap, which connected to a cable beneath each chair, and these cables were also plugged into only the "ground" in the outlet. (So many people put the electrodes on the back of their necks, which, once plugged in, made them look scarily cyborgian.) I think I spend enough time doing actual grounding, though, by walking in the woods and touching plants, and this, combined with that $24 lard and oil smoothie full of herbs and minerals and mushrooms and tocotrenols, had a crazy effect on me.

Woozy and nauseated, I struggled to listen through Daniel Vitalis’s lecture about getting ourselves strong as a species that’s grown sedentary, thermally monotonous, increasingly distanced from nature and our food supplies, full of chemicals, and physically pathetic. Tips: Go camping, eat a variety of non-GMO produce, drink pure water, play, wear those prehensile frog shoes. He, like all the other speakers, amplified his information via headset to a seated public who liked to clap their version of “Amen.” And I was right there with them, for what I could muster, even though I had a horrible migraine and I felt like I was about to puke. I'll gladly take an off day experimenting with health, attempting to get some more information, over ignorance and fewer options.

It really is true, on the whole we’re overfed, malnourished, and diseased, and while there are tons of small communities all over this country planting produce gardens, we have no widespread way to fix it. Not with healthcare—how many people do you know without insurance? (Though healthcare in any region is based on societal mythology; ours happens to believe people in white lab coats cure us, and I personally don’t want what they have to offer.) There's a crisis-style shortage of drugs—especially “generic sterile injectibles,” which sounds so scary to think that’s even needed in surplus—and a shortage of access to whole, healthy foods. True wellness is such an extreme, underground movement, one that costs a lot of money, when things that promote decently good health should be a universal convenience.

I ran into someone I knew the second I walked in, then two more shortly after that—a good sign, I think, that serious health is not just for  for Suzanne Sommers-style menopausal horse pee devotees and last-ditch-effort types trying to reverse their issues before diabetes claims a few fingers. I think we each felt the longevity scene was at least a little bit weird, in some way or another. And thank goodness for all the kooks and the pukey adventures, because otherwise, sitting through lectures on health is insanely boring.

@lizzyarmstrong