Kenneth Scott is no ordinary 81-year-old. He’s an energetic and passionate longevity biohacker with a biological age of 18. I recently met Kenneth at the Longevity Summit in Dublin. The spritely octogenarian is a significant influencer in the longevity space, presenting at global conferences, and interacting with researchers and companies developing longevity therapies. I spoke to him on our regular #WednesdayWellness to find out what it is like to be an 81-year-old living with the internal biology of an 18-year-old. And how his knowledge, experience, and outlook hold hope for millions around the world to live better for longer.
Kenneth Scott believes we were not born to die
From the outset, it is clear Kenneth Scott firmly believes our bodies were born to live, not to die. However, he says he is not a radical trans-humanist. He does, however, believe the concept of immortality is realistic and not a far-fetched fantasy.
Citing science, Kenneth kicked off our discussion citing, “The groundbreaking Nobel prize (2012) winning work of Gurdon and Yamanaka showed that our cells have all the genetic information to live and thrive! We need only half to nurture them properly. The human body has enormous cellular potential and the possibility of immortality.”
Living a full life forever
Over his lifetime Kenneth Scott has been actively involved in a whole range of different areas. As a military officer, he was an aeronautical engineer responsible for aircraft maintenance in the Royal Canadian Air Force. His formal training was as a mathematician, with his doctoral work in geometry. He was an economist in labor economics in the Canadian government. With his wife Christine, he established an IT company that had as its major customers Pepsi Cola and Coca-Cola, providing cutting-edge software to enhance their businesses. In the dot-com era, he was CFO of a company that was a forerunner of YouTube. He firmly believes in the incredible potential that long life and perhaps immortality possess. He also owns and manages an extensive and expanding real estate portfolio located in Canada and the United States.
Kenneth Scott’s biological vs chronological age
It’s one thing watching Kenneth in our Instagram interview below, to meet him in person. And while he has let his hair go grey, and is not indulging in radical plastic surgery like others may be doing, Kenneth’s biological age is well below that of his peers. His biological age (according to the tests he has undertaken) is that of an 18-year-old. He says, “I believe a more accurate description is… yes, I’m 18, but I wear the 81 to sort of give me some maturity.”
Really? How does that work, I asked him.
“I’ve had about 15 different biological aging tests and have gotten different ranges, but 18 is there. So while I think the diagnostic science has yet to settle down, I am now testing 18 years which is a 62-year age difference. I had a birthday party last year where I called it my 81-18 birthday,” he chuckles.
Now that we have some context to Kenneth’s aging profile, I was curious to know when he started focusing on his longevity plan.
How does he do it?
“I would say that was probably 60-odd years ago when my grandfather passed away. He had a few rough years before he died. I decided then I didn’t want to go that way. And even more, I didn’t want to live a life like he did as he got older. So I started to try and do things at that time, that I thought would be helpful. “
“So I did a little bit of health stuff. I jogged a bit. I’ve never been a fanatical athlete, but I always try and exercise, and I try to eat well. And sadly, in those days, we had much less knowledge than we have today. That was the start of when we created the modern concept of nutrition, where we poison our bodies with all sorts of extra calories and huge amounts of food that biologically we never evolved to deal with. So for many years, I sort of tried to eat good food, but didn’t succeed. And over time, of course, I started to deteriorate a bit, although I tended to be better compared to my peers.”
Kenneth Scott before his morning jog
You are what you eat!
Then in 2002 he started to have problems with allergies and was on antibiotics all the time. Kenneth had a battery of tests to work out what was going on.
“And then I remembered some really important nutritional information that my grandmother once gave me. She said, you know, it is not very complicated. You are what you eat!”
“So I decided to stop eating, to see what would happen. I fasted for about four or five days, and all my allergy problems disappeared. My sinuses cleared for the first time in decades. That started me on the path of listening to my body and not to the doctors. I can discuss my concerns with doctors, but you know, I’m responsible for my body. Unfortunately, the damage had occurred over the previous 50-odd years, and a couple of years later, in 2004 I ended up with stents in my heart.”
Kenneth found that upsetting.” You know, that’s irreversible surgery. They’re there, it’s not good. And at that time, I was going through my father’s decline, and that was even more depressing. After he passed away, I read a book called *Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease written by Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., an internationally known surgeon, researcher, and clinician at the Cleveland Clinic.”
Address the cause, don’t just treat the disease
Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., developed a groundbreaking program backed by irrefutable results from his 20-year study proving changes in diet and nutrition can cure heart disease.
He argues that conventional cardiology has failed patients by developing treatments that focus only on the symptoms of heart disease, not the cause.
Based on the groundbreaking results of his 20-year nutritional study—the longest study of its kind ever conducted— with irrefutable scientific evidence, Dr. Esselstyn convincingly argues that a plant-based, oil-free diet can not only prevent and stop the progression of heart disease but also reverse its effects.
Explains Kenneth Scott, “And what caught my attention about that title was the word reverse. I read the book on an overnight flight. The next morning, I was on a diet that Dr Esselstyn suggested in his book.
No fish, meat, dairy, or added oils
He explains. ” It’s a diet of no fish, no meat, no dairy, no added oils. I went on to that diet very religiously and kept to it for about eight or 10 years. Within the first three years, it had turned my life around. I hadn’t thought I was a heavy person, but I lost something like 15% of my body weight in about two months. I went back to the weight I had when I was 18.”
“One of the questions I ask people. Okay, you’re not obese. What did you weigh when you were 18? What do you weigh now? The difference between when you finished high school or a young adult and what you weigh today is fat that you’ve accumulated, and you shouldn’t be walking around with excess fat. This fat is caused by the food that you eat. So the most important thing is food!
Kenneth admits he has moved beyond just food to a whole range of other things when it comes to improving his longevity outcomes. He adds, “For example, it’s not just what you eat, it’s what you drink. I make every effort to drink water that doesn’t have microplastics, doesn’t have chlorine or fluoride or any of those other additives.”
Biohacking for longevity
Kenneth Scott is also clear about dealing with toxins in our environment: “I don’t typically put anything toxic in or on my body. Even my clothing. Any clothing that I buy I wash before I wear it. I don’t want any of that poison on my skin.”
He adds, “I live in places where the air is clean, and all of that stuff that comes into your body is what wears it out. So that was sort of the start, and that got me to a stage where I was feeling good again. Finally, at the age of 73, I started along this path that you call biohacking. This is essentially about taking advantage of the science that is out there, and listening to my body and believing that I can achieve things.”
“I think it’s important that our mind believes we can get young. We live in a culture where we are raised to die. As children, we’re taught we’re going to die. We’re taught throughout our lives that we’re going to die. Our religion tells us we’re going to die. Our society tells us we’re going to retire and have golden years before we die. So I won’t retire. I won’t look forward to the golden years.”
“One of the things that you asked me in Dublin was, why do I believe I can live forever? I certainly hope so.” says Kenneth. “The work of Gurdon and Yamanaka showed us that we have all of the information in our bodies to be young again. “
Nobel Prize for Medicine
Just to place this statement into context, The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute awarded The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2012 to John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka.
Do you think you can live forever following these guidelines, or what more will it take?
I asked Kenneth about his mortality. Of course, he is very upbeat.
“I’m going to live my golden years now, and I will keep working. And I think that that mental attitude is incredibly important. There are 140 trillion cells in our body. About 30 trillion or so have our DNA in them. And if you stop breathing, you know what happens to those poor cells? You’re guilty of mass cellular genocide. You’re letting those cells die, and I don’t want to be guilty of that. I want those cells to keep living just as long as possible.”
Kenneth Scott is the CEO of his Own Health
Kenneth and I spoke about all the hype around the longevity space at the moment. My personal view (at LongevityLive.com) is that the longevity biohacking space at the moment is dominated, mostly by people who have lots of money, with substantial airtime on social media, who don’t want to die. So we’re getting this message out that those people are going to live and the rest of us are going to die. That seems pretty elitist to me. What does Kenneth Scott think?
“As I say, I think the most important thing anybody can do, and if you do this it will open the opportunities for other things, is to get your body into a fundamentally healthy condition. This is largely a matter of what you eat, breathe, and drink. Unless you get your body sort of clean and healthy you cannot expect to live a longer happier or even immortal life. Also, I don’t think you can do the fine-tuning, to immortality. This fine-tuning often takes a bit more money and a more venturesome spirit.”
So what he is saying is that most likely we will, as of today, need some form of therapeutic intervention to reach the goal of immortality,
“Your diet and mindset won’t get you over that line. But it will get you very close to it.”
Investing in longevity
Keneth Scott is not only the CEO of his businesses, but also his health.
“I don’t rely on a government to tell me what I can and cannot do. I’m not a bioscientist, but I have been a scientist and an engineer. My doctoral work is in mathematics. I’m not stupid. I can work my way through this stuff, and I can weigh the risks for myself. Importantly, I know my body, which is different than other bodies, as we’re all unique. And so I worked out my program. Yes, of course, some of the things that I do cost a bit of money. However, I think that by making those investments for myself, I opened the path for those services to be available for others down the road at a lower price.”
“I think we can get to the stage where we can take control of our medical processes in our governments and get out of this concept that we’re going to let people get sick and then pump them full of drugs. We need to move instead to a role where our governments focus on keeping us healthy. And then if we need some support to prevent the aging from progressing, that’s where the funding goes. “
Of course, every country has different standards and interpretations of dietary guidelines. Kenneth shares my concerns about the lack of proper labeling and also the high additional salt, sugar, and preservatives that we know are plowed into most factory-produced food. Even food we think is healthy.
Kenneth says: “The reality is the quality of food has gone out the window. And everyone should understand that the word preservative is synonymous with poison.”
Take charge of your health
Kenneth Scott admits he is “Terribly selfish. Now, as we’ve said, I’ve been around for 81 years. I’m not going to embark on a 20-year program testing this, that, or the other thing to keep government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, or food manufacturers happy. What I want to do is keep my body looking forward, believing it can exist, wanting to be healthy, and I achieve that.”
What about his daily supplements?
So what does Kenneth Scott take daily in the form of supplements?
“I do not have a rigorous approach to supplements. On an intermittent basis, I take the following:
- B12 (to support my plant-based diet).
- Zinc picolonate, 50 mg.
- Quercitin, 500mg these two for protection).
- Senolytic activator from Life Extension (weekly).
- Vitamin C, 1 gm.
- B complex.
- Multivitamin.
- NMR.
The above is more or less daily unless otherwise noted. In addition, I take a few supplements which most people consider to be bio-hacking. These are dasatinib + quercitin, every two months, and rapamycin.”
Science is evolving fast
While science is evolving fast, I get the impression from Kenneth Scott that there is no quick fix yet.
“You can’t abuse your body for 50 or 60 years and then turn it around in one day. And of course, unfortunately, we’ve got this instant gratification approach that is promoted, particularly with drugs that will cure whatever diseases that have arisen from poor health So we need to get out of that. But beyond that, what’s been exciting for me is that I’m an investor in some of the biotech companies, and I think that the area of repair biotechnology is very exciting.”
Kenneth explains that one of the companies he’s investing in, Repair Biotechnologies, is developing an enzyme that will go into his body and remove atherosclerotic plaque.
Atherosclerosis is the usual cause of heart attacks, strokes, and peripheral vascular disease – conditions that all together are called cardiovascular disease, the No. 1 killer in America (and elsewhere).
The therapy still has to be tested on humans so it is at least five years away from public announcements. However, Kenneth has pretty strong views on human testing in the longevity arena. He says he is often one of the first humans to experience therapies. The rejuvenation effects of these experiences have given him record-breaking, youthful biological age scores.
The race to immortality
At 81 going on 18, the real question is, will these new therapies help Kenneth achieve mortality?
“Well, I don’t have the feeling that I can waste five years waiting for permission for new therapies I believe in to be tested on humans. I think that sometime in the next six to nine months, I would like to get a chance to put some of that into my body. And so I’m an investor, but I’m also a guinea pig. “
Kenneth is quick to point out though, that this is his preference and not the norm. “I am different though. I know enough about science to know what I’m doing. I would never suggest anybody should do this unless they know what they’re doing,”
He has been a guinea pig before with good results on his health. For the past many years, he has been involved in testing and receiving the latest evolving longevity therapies. These include the Khavinson peptides, amniotic exosomes (from CRM Lab), VSELs (the technology of Dr. Todd Ovokaitys), follistic gene therapy (from Minicircle), rapamycin, and many others. He’s also lined up for treatments to restore mitochondria (Mitrix) and klotho gene therapy (Minicircle).
Fascinating really.
End note
Kenneth is a very busy man with lots to look forward to. The last time we spoke he was on his way to the RAAD Festival in California. It strikes me that he packs more into his life than most. It’s inspiring and truly is an example all of us can learn from.
Will he always stay forever young? Well, there’s a part of me that would really like to believe he will.
Watch the full interview with Kenneth Scott below by clicking on our Instagram link
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Find out more about Kenneth Scott
He is not only a biohacker and influencer but also an active investor in startup companies and clinics in the longevity field. He focuses on technologies that offer the promise of rejuvenation.
Such investments include leading biotech companies such as Repair Biotechnologies (targeting atherosclerotic plaque), Leucadia (targeting Alzheimer’s disease), OncoSenX (targeting cellular senescence), LentoBio (targeting presbyopia), Auctis (developing stable anti-body technology), Cypris (targeting glioblastoma). In addition to investing, he often serves as a board member and/or advisor to these companies.
