A man of science locked himself in a 592-square-foot underwater research station for 100 days to document the effects of pressurization on the human body.
Now, having emerged from his submerged experiment, scientists studying those effects have discovered a shocking change in the man’s body—he’s 10 years younger.
The man, Joe Dituri, a former US Navy diver and expert in biomedical engineering, had experienced a 20% growth in the lengths of his telomeres.
Without explaining the complex biology of the aging process, one of its hallmarks is the shortening of telomeres, which are found on the ends of strands of DNA and act a little like the fused plastic ring around the end of a shoelace—it keeps the fabric from splitting apart.
Telomeres shorten as we age, exposing the DNA to damage, and many longevity programs today focus on halting that loss.
Another major factor was likely his body’s natural stem cell count—which grew 1,000% higher from before he went under. He experienced a 60% increase in the duration of deep sleep, the truly restorative state of sleep we all need to maintain our health that typically makes up around 90 minutes of our sleep cycle.
Altogther it served to reduce his biological age clock by about 10 years.
As Science Alert reported, before going under Dituri was focused more on what negative effects would befall him under the sea, such as a reduced exposure to vitamin D, losses of bone and muscle mass, and a reimergence of already-beaten viruses due to a weakened immune system.
However, pressure, such as is found within a therapeutic hyperbaric oxygen chamber, has been shown to have several benefits which living under the pressure of the waves seems to have replicated.
“You need one of these places that is cut off from outside activity,” Dituri told British media about his experience. “Send people down here for a two-week vacation, where they get their feet scrubbed, relax and can experience the benefit of hyperbaric medicine.”
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In the pod, he used exercise bands to complete around an hour of fitness work five days a week. This was probably substituted or supplemented by swimming, as he could go for a dive whenever he felt like it.
More research is needed to fully understand the biological effects of living under the sea. The idea of undersea spas and wellness retreats is quite a strange one, but at the moment the results are hard to argue with.
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