.jpg?trim=407,0,407,0&width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800)
Kayla Barnes starts off her day at 5:30 a.m. with an oral routine: brushing, flossing, tongue-scraping, WaterPik, and once a week oil-pulling — an Ayurvedic practice that refers to swishing oil around in the mouth for 15 minutes — with an ozonated olive oil. Then she does light therapy with both a red light and a blue light — “the red light reduces inflammation in the gums. The blue light is for whitening” — and has a big glass of water with electrolytes. After that, “I sit down on PEMF (Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Therapy) for about 25 minutes,” she says, which is “like grounding on steroids”. First used by veterinarians to try and heal broken legs in horses, a PEMF machine, which Barnes has in her house alongside a host of other biohacking technology, generates a magnetic field that many believe is good for healing injuries and targeting inflammation. Consumer-grade machines cost about $2,000.
During the time she’s attached to the PEMF machine, Barnes does “brain training, meditation, a little bit of prayer” and “gratitude practice”. It’s a good time to fit in this routine because electronics can’t be used around the magnetic interference of PEMF, so she takes time “setting my mind before the day sets it for me”. And then she gets morning sun — she lives in LA, so it’s “pretty much sunny all year around” — which takes 10 minutes on a bright day and up to 30 if it’s cloudy.
Then she has a “protein coffee,” which is “an all-organic biodynamic coffee” mixed in with “colostrum” (yes, the early liquid from the first days of breastfeeding, although the source is bovine rather than human), “organic vitamins, five grams of creatine, collagen and peptides”.
That coffee sets her up nicely for the gym. “I do work out between five to six days per week at the gym,” she says. “Sometimes I do modified workouts at home if I have a bit of a busy schedule. But in my training regime, I really am focusing on all areas of longevity. So we want to talk about strength things like compound lifts, so squats, dead lifts.” Although she’s only in her early 30s, she’s already planning for perimenopause and menopause, strengthening the bones and the muscles surrounding them so her body is in peak shape when it begins to experience those hormonal changes. She also does VO2 max cardiovascular training on an AI power fitness bike ($500), a walk in the hills with her husband, and a comprehensive stretching routine.
Following the workout, she’ll sit down and take a look through her biometrics. Barnes wears an Oura ring — a piece of health tech beloved by biohackers, which is worn on the finger like any other ring but tracks sleep and physical activity, and costs around $400 — and has a number of other trackers in her home, including a bioelectrical impedance scale. Each week she’ll do a deep dive into “lung health, blood pressure, my body composition — so that’s weight, but also muscle mass and bone density,” as well as “my sleep score — deep sleep, REM sleep — all of my general biometrics”.
Once she’s done with the biometrics, she jumps in the sauna. Her sauna has red light therapy built into it, so she can do both at the same time (to install one in your house, prices start at $2,000.) Depending on where she is in her menstrual cycle, she’ll then either do cold therapy (while in the follicular phase) or simply take a shower (bleeding week) and get ready for breakfast. Her breakfast — with ingredients all sourced from the notoriously expensive LA grocery store Erewhon, where the average weekly grocery shop costs about $500 — incorporates all the food groups, with an emphasis on fermented foods (“at the moment I’m doing a fermented carrot sauerkraut”.) She’ll often have eggs and lentils, along with broccoli or sprouts, and some kale salad with avocado and extra-virgin olive oil. At the end, she has a coconut yoghurt with Zen basil seeds — “it’s like half your daily fiber in two tablespoons” — and blueberries, walnuts and hemp seeds.
At that point, she starts work for the day. Her work station is set up with a host of technological biohacking paraphernalia, which she uses while she’s working at her laptop — a NanoVi, which delivers pure oxygen through a nasal cannula; the PEMF again; a hair cap that she affixes to her head and that delivers red light therapy directly to her follicles, as part of her “hair protocol”; another gadget that delivers “intranasal photobiomodulation,” i.e. shines red light upwards into the nose as “red light therapy for the brain”; and a LYMA Laser for her skin — all while sitting in her orthopedic Anthros chair. Every 90 minutes, she’ll get up to exercise, either on the walking pad in her living room or outside (“I typically get minimum 10,000 steps a day, but usually it’s more like 12,000.”) Unsurprisingly, none of this tech comes cheap, either. The NanoVi Exo is priced at $14,250 and most intranasal devices start at $500. A LYMA Laser starter kit is priced at $2,695, with monthly refills costing $149. The Anthros chair is a relative steal at $2,000. And all the while, a $2,000 Jaspr air purifier whirs in the background.
Barnes’ work involves putting together her “Female Longevity Optimization” plan, a five-day course with daily newsletters that provides daily information about biohacking to over 300,000 subscribers and costs $200 a year. In the interest of transparency, she shares her labs publicly on her website. With one click, you can view everything from her dental X-rays to the results of a stool sample taken to profile her gut microbiome. There are brain scans, ovarian follicular analyses, and images of her coronary arteries. Her height and weight (5ft 8in, 123.4 pounds) and fat mass percentage (18%) are shared publicly too. Her daily newsletters — with subjects like “Optimize your mid day routine!” and “Stem cells for longevity!” — include YouTube how-to videos with thumbnails of her and her husband, Warren, California-photogenic, leaning in to kiss each other lightly while dressed in artfully loose, monochrome shirts and pants.
After a few hours of work — including three walking breaks — Barnes goes into her hyperbaric chamber, a pressurized oxygen chamber (for a home unit, you’re looking at between $7,000 and $20,000), and increases or decreases the pressure according to how much stress her body can take, again according to her menstrual cycle. Then she’ll start making dinner, usually organic fish and vegetables with whole grains. She’s very particular about what she eats, increasingly so: “I make every single meal, and I live in LA but there’s only one place that I’ll even eat at, at this point. I don’t go out to restaurants.”
Barnes and her husband go for another walk in the hills — 50 minutes — and when they get back, it’s sunset, so all the lights in the house are changed from blue to red. They’re in bed by 8.30pm, every night.
If you think her daily routine has little room for spontaneity, you’d be correct. But Barnes doesn’t care about that. “I feel best having a nice routine,” she says. Once a month, she’ll have friends over for dinner, but they come at 4.30pm so she can still make her 8.30 bedtime. “I think my friends love doing all this stuff, too,” she adds. “Like, they’re obsessed with coming over and doing my hyperbaric oxygen chamber or like, I’ll put them on a bio-impedance scale at my dinners, or I’ll be passing around a grip strength tester.” What’s she missing, really, she wonders? Going out late and drinking alcohol? “I think it’s a little bit self-harm-ish to be going out late and be drinking an obscene amount of alcohol,” she says. “We’ve called it normal, but you really are harming yourself on a pretty frequent basis if that’s how you’re living.”
Barnes didn’t grow up this way. She was raised in a fairly unhealthy environment, she says, and her family aren’t quite as enthusiastic about her routine as her friends. “I remember years ago when I had a Dexcom glucose monitor on, my mom was like: Oh my gosh, how did you get diabetes? You’re so healthy! And I’m like: No, I didn’t get diabetes. I’m doing this to check my blood sugar because I want to, you know? And she said: That is absolutely insane.”
Coming out of a low-income, all-American childhood, Barnes knew “I would have to optimize my biology to really build the dream life that I wanted, which by the way I now have.” It took a lot of work and a lot of experimentation. And over five years, she’s trialled a lot of different technologies. After the wildfires in California last year, she had two-and-a-half liters of plasma removed from her body in an effort to filter out the toxins her body had accumulated from the low air quality (“You make new plasma within 24 to 48 hours,” she says, adding that she thinks of it “kind of like an oil change” for your car.) And she was convinced to have a hyperbaric chamber installed in her house after she saw how her biometrics jumped up from the data on her Oura ring once she stepped inside one.
Barnes, who is 35, and her husband, Warren Lentz, 38, have been consistent in one claim: they are aiming to live for over 150 years. Their carefully constructed protocols certainly work for them. Barnes in particular has been putting in a lot of work to make sure that they are made appropriate for their gender — building in extra meditation and extra sleep time for women, for instance, and changing sauna temperatures and oxygen pressure according to menstrual cycles rather than using one set metric like men do.
Even if some of it is the placebo effect, then, what’s the harm?
The harm we didn’t anticipate
Dr. Jason Kovacic is an internationally acclaimed cardiologist, executive director of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, Australia, and professor of medicine in cardiology at Mount Sinai in New York. Over the past few years, he says, he’s become more and more aware of the biohacking trend — and more worried about what it might mean for those who practice it to the extreme.
“I think it’s pretty clear there’s not one real leader in the field, whether ice bars or barometric pressure, sauna, nutrients, supplements, juicing — there’s a proponent of all of these things and more,” he says. A surprising amount of people, he adds, have expressed an interest in testing since the extreme biohacker Bryan Johnson appeared on The Kardashians in February. People are experimenting widely in pursuit of longevity, all with the sense that it just can’t hurt. That, Kovacic says, is a misguided assumption.
“It starts with taking a multivitamin a day. If you are getting a healthy, well-balanced diet and you don’t have any specific metabolic issues that are leading to specific vitamin or deficiencies, there’s actually very little evidence to say that a multivitamin tablet will be helpful,” he says. “But the flip of that is one multivitamin tablet a day, over the counter in a pharmacy, is extremely unlikely to be harmful. So in that situation, I don’t have a problem with my patients taking a multivitamin a day. Then from there, it gets more complicated.”
One patient he recently heard about had moved from a multivitamin to taking excessive amounts of vitamin B6, and ended up with peripheral neuropathy — where the peripheral nerves, which connect the brain and the spinal cord, are damaged or destroyed — as a result.
“Then you get to things like hyperbaric oxygen,” Kovacic says, “which can be quite expensive for people that are buying these chambers, getting oxygen tanks delivered — you know, it’s a lot of money and I think the data supporting hyperbaric oxygen, for example, is really patchy at best. I mean, there’s a couple of papers suggesting that telomere length is longer and that that may be the case. But it’s a massive jump — a massive, massive jump — to go from ‘you’ve got longer telomeres in a small group of highly selected people in one or two clinical studies’ — it’s a massive adjunct going from that to saying you’re going to live longer.”
Longer telomeres are central to biohacking, mentioned frequently in pretty much every piece of biohacking literature, from newsletters to websites to physician-adjacent medical clinics. Telomeres — which are endcaps on pieces of DNA and protect it from damage — have been thought for a while to be key to extending life. A number of studies have drawn an association between longer telomeres and longer lifespan. And that seems to make sense, because a lot of DNA-damaging habits — like smoking — shorten your telomeres. Your cells get shorter and shorter each time they replicate, until eventually they simply die. The telomeres keep them around longer, which logically should be a good thing. People with shorter telomeres often appear, through various internal tests, to have an older “biological age” than their actual age.
The aim behind things like hyperbaric oxygen and strictly regulated diets is to lengthen those telomeres. A Mediterranean diet rich in legumes and whole grains does, indeed, seem to lead to longer telomeres.
Unfortunately, studies done in the past two years have poured some cold water on the telomere theory. Despite flying in the face of what is understood, some people with very short telomeres seem to have very long lives. A 2023 study suggests that those with very long telomeres might actually be keeping their cells around far too long, allowing cancerous tumors and other catastrophic mutations to proliferate. The fountain of youth might actually be poisoned.
“What we don’t know is what are the off-target effects of things like hyperbaric oxygen,” says Kovacic. “That have a whole bunch of other changes — blood viscosity, blood clotting, and other things that we just don’t know about in the endocrine and immune systems.” There have been many, many studies where something like telomere length “looks fantastic,” he adds, “but then we actually then do a big trial and say: Does it save lives? Does it stop heart attack, stroke, and death? The answer is actually no, it goes in the opposite direction because there’s off-target effects we didn’t anticipate.”
Not only do people fail to think about those unexpected effects, but they also sometimes seek to cash in on “biohacking” techniques that are downright dangerous. When I asked Kovacic about the plasma removal therapy that Kayla Barnes says she undertook after the California wildfires, he’s especially concerned.
“I think it’s unethical to take her money to give that kind of a therapy, to be honest,” he says. “There’s no data to support it. And taking off two liters of plasma — that’s a massive drop in blood volume. It depends a bit on the technical details of how they did that, but that volume of plasma removal could be dangerous. They may have done a plasma exchange, they may have taken plasma off and given back saline or another solution, but — especially in the context of an acute wildfire — there’s no data to support that removing two liters of plasma to take out toxins is going to be beneficial.”
‘There, there, honey, it’s menopause’
In a polished, red and white building on Union Street in San Francisco and another in wealthy Palo Alto stand the two Biohackr Health clinics, state-of-the-art facilities run by the founding team of Dr. Lori Bluvas MD — a San Francisco-based OB-GYN – and Dr. Lauren Greenberg, a plastic surgeon with a clinic on Stanford’s campus who specializes in breast and facial surgery. What began as a drop-in center that focus on anti-ageing and IV therapies has bloomed into a business that offers emerging treatments and regimens to a broad clientele aimed at improving cognitive, physical and sexual health.
“I think that both of us, when we got to be women of a certain age, became very interested in all of this because of medicine, but also because of what was happening to ourselves,” says Greenberg. “And there’s really kind of this void. I have found that so much of the biohacking world feels like snake oil to me.”
Coming from the medical world themselves, Greenberg and Bluvas knew two things: firstly, that women are often ignored and their issues are often downplayed by doctors; and secondly, that medicine in the U.S. is a capitalist practice often tainted by sales and marketing.
“I just went to my national plastic surgery meeting and everyone is trying to get me to carry their skin cream,” Greenberg says, as one example. “They show me pictures before and after. I don’t always know when the ‘after’ picture is taken. Is it the same light filter? And if it’s making skin better, show me the biopsy. Show me the histologic biopsy where you show me that the collagen and elastin is thickened, because all of these multimillion-dollar companies have that test. And if they can’t show it to me, it’s because it didn’t show what they wanted it to.” There are “20 million companies” who turn up to such medical conferences to sell to doctors, she says, and they throw exciting-sounding buzzwords like “exomes” (another biohacker beloved) and “regenerative medicine” around while often trying to manipulate their actual findings. Even for seasoned physicians, it’s a lot to wade through.
Bluvas concurs: “I’ve had sales reps come to my office talking about how great this or that blood pressure medicine is. But I will look at their research and the average age of their person will be 67 years old or 72 years old, you know, and it’s only a tiny portion of women. You know, I’m an OB-GYN, so my patients I’m treating with blood pressure are 15 years younger and all women… They will present it to me as the best new high blood pressure medicine under the sun. ‘Oh, we have great studies to back it.’ I’m like: Yeah, great studies in a very narrow demographic, you know, not great studies for [a woman] who’s 36 years old. … I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I mean, we’re a capitalist society. These companies are here to sell us things.”
Because medical research is so behind in terms of showing outcomes for women, Greenberg and Bluvas do their own deep-dives into new treatments in their areas of expertise. It’s something they think is especially important, considering the Trump administration’s latest attacks on anything perceived to fall under the umbrella of DEI.
“I have a friend who’s in OB-GYN at Stanford, and she has a bunch of grants, and if the word ‘woman’ is in the grant, it now gets unfunded,” says Greenberg. “And she’s at Stanford and it has already happened to her. Going forward, being able to kind of research this, I think, is going to be impaired. And in my dream state for Biohackr, we will do some studies which may not be quite as scientific, as we’re not funded, but we do have a large patient base and [we can] try to again bring some science to this area of things.”
Greenberg and Bluvas aren’t surprised that women in particular have started expressing such interest in the biohacking space in the past few years. “I think you’ve seen such an explosion because a lot of women who are very empowered and intelligent hit menopause and went to their doctors, and their doctors said: ‘There, there, honey, it’s menopause, and you need to just deal with it,’” says Greenberg. “And we were like: ‘No. There needs to be a better way.’”
That’s especially urgent, she adds, considering that menopause now takes up between a third and a half of a woman’s life: “If you go through menopause when you’re around 51 and you live to be 86, it is that amount of your life. And so it used to be that people didn’t live that long past menopause. So I don’t think that this was so much of a factor, or they weren’t as active. They weren’t working, they weren’t traveling and hiking Mount Kilimanjaro when they were 70, which they are now… [In the United States], we live longer, but we aren’t healthy at the end of our lives. So how can we improve that? And then to do that, you can’t start when you’re 70. You have to start when you’re 40 and 50.”
Biohacking is a nascent practice, however, and it’s open to abuse. I ask Bluvas and Greenberg about colostrum, one of the main ingredients in Kayla Barnes’ morning coffee. Colostrum is an immune-rich, high-fat liquid that all mammals make in the early days immediately after giving birth, a kind of “super-milk”. Humans make it for their children, of course, but the popular supplements take it from cows.
“The benefits of colostrum are the antibodies that come over, for human people and human babies,” says Bluvas. “Obviously, that’s not going to be able to cross species. So in terms of the immunology benefits of colostrum, you sort of don’t get that.” There might be something in the concentrated fats, she says, but she’s skeptical.
What both Bluvas and Greenberg are enthusiastic about, however, is creatine — “which every post-menopausal woman and every man over 50 should be on” — and testing for NAD levels. Levels of NAD — molecules that are essential for molecular energy production — tend to decline as we age and are therefore touted as “signs of your biological age” in biohacking circles. At the Biohackr offices, blood spot tests are taken for NAD levels, and other scans and bloodwork are suggested according to one’s family history (Greenberg’s father died young, from a sudden heart attack at 52, so she keeps on top of her cardiac panel.) Along the way, they’ve done some experimentation with their own numbers and had some surprising results. When Bluvas went through early menopause, she began experiencing joint pain. Much to her surprise, testosterone pellets alleviated it.
Refusing to wait for a problem
Hang around biohackers long enough and you’ll hear the term “longevity escape velocity”. This is the idea that at some point in the near future, advances in medical science and biotechnology will happen fast enough that they can extend human life expectancy by more than one year for every year that passes. In other words, if you can stay healthy and relatively youthful, new treatments and technologies might emerge quickly enough to keep extending your life faster than you’re aging. From a biohacking perspective, this means using diet, supplements, wearable tech, and experimental therapies now to slow aging as much as possible in the hope of reaching that tipping point. If you can just keep chasing health until we reach “escape velocity,” goes the theory, you might be able to live forever: you’re the rocket ship blasting up out of the atmosphere that can actually escape the earth’s orbit and power through into outer space.
This is how biohacking fundamentally differs from traditional medicine, even when it’s being practiced by medical doctors: “Traditional medicine waits for you to have an issue,” says Greenberg. “You have high blood pressure, you have diabetes, and then you treat it — as opposed to saying: Ooh, this has been trending in a bad direction. You’re pre-pre-diabetic.”
Biohacking tech can now put people more in tune with their bodies than they ever were before, she adds: “You can do a continuous glucose monitor, which I’m obsessed with, and you can see what spikes you. And it turns out that’s very individual. So I’ve done it, [clinic lead nurse] Atousa has done it, and when I did it, rice sends me through the roof, oatmeal sends me through the roof. Bread is relatively better for me. Pasta is relatively better for me. So in my head, before I had done this, those were all equivalencies. And if you’d said, you know, eat a tortilla or eat steel-cut oats, I would’ve for sure said the oats are better for me. And it isn’t, for me.”
Everyone at the Biohackr clinic practices what they preach. Atousa Habibi, who is a registered nurse with broad experience across the medical spectrum and has also worked as an aesthetician, is the one who, in her own words, is “boots on the ground, who sees the patients and brings them in and starts the whole process of the biohacking”. When she had her NAD levels tested, she says, her numbers were “clinically deficient, the lowest of the low”. That was a shock for her.
Habibi brought biohacking to her 80-year-old mother after she moved into the clinic. “She had a full hysterectomy at the age of 52,” she says, “and I just saw her suffering. She went from the liveliest mom to…” Her voice cracks with emotion. “You know, it makes me emotional thinking about it because I’m like: If she had this help years ago — 20, 30 years ago — how would she be now at 80?”
One big issue is that studies done into hormone replacement therapy for postmenopausal women have been few and far between, and some recent findings were flawed. “There was a Women’s Health Initiative study back in the year 2000, which basically pooh-poohed hormone replacement for postmenopausal women, for 20 years,” says Greenberg. “And it turns out it was a very flawed study.”
On top of that, blanket pronouncements about how postmenopausal women should be treated led to failings at the individual level — including for Habibi’s mother. “People were so focused on breast cancer and how hormone replacement as you get older can increase your breast cancer risk,” Greenberg continues. “Except for Atousa’s mom, when you don’t have a uterus, you don’t have to do progesterone — and estrogen only actually decreases your breast cancer risk… And so if someone doesn’t have a uterus, they should probably be on estrogen because it’s going to decrease their breast cancer risk, and it’s going to help their bone health, lower the risk of dementia by 60%. It’s going to help their heart, help their skin.” Considering that this was a “known fact” before the study, according to Greenberg, it does seem particularly upsetting that Habibi’s mother never received such advice from her own doctor in the immediate aftermath of her hysterectomy. It certainly underlines how, for men, biohacking might be about escape velocity, but for women, it often might simply be about leveling the playing field.
How to age backwards
A host of studies in the past 10 years have shown in clear terms how underserved women have been by traditional medicine. We know that women with chronic pain issues are left in more severe pain and for longer than their male counterparts. Across the board, women are left longer without a diagnosis for their serious health condition. And we know that the general perception of what health issues look like — for instance, a heart attack, which often comes with “atypical” symptoms for women such as nausea and sudden jaw pain — are heavily weighted toward the male experience.
But Greenberg and Bluvas want to aim higher than leveling the field, and they believe women are owed that individual attention. They’ve seen the results themselves. “I’ve done some testing [with multiple pieces of tech] just to see, you know, how am I aging? And when they tell me what my biologic age is, it tends to be 10 to 11 years younger than my age,” says Greenberg. “And they all are consistently saying that. It is fabulous. And like, yay me. But also, it’s telling me that there’s something about what we are doing that is making a difference.”
“We haven’t done a very good job as a global planet in looking after women as we should have,” says Dr. Jason Kovacic, the cardiologist. “And I think what we’re seeing with biohacking is that women want to have all the same level of treatments and outcomes and benefits from healthcare that men have enjoyed. And as we know, the clinical trials, clinical trial data, drug therapies and so on have been skewed towards men’s health rather than women’s health over the last 50 years as a sort of modern era of medicine has come about. And women want what they’re entitled to, which is the same sort of benefits from the healthcare system.”
His “biggest concern about biohacking,” however, is that too many people pursue it as a hobby while ignoring the elephant in the room. “There is an abundance of robust data,” he says, “and I think nobody will argue with that. A healthy diet, regular exercise, healthy body weight, well-controlled cholesterol, optimal blood pressure, optimal glucose control and avoidance of diabetes, not smoking, and getting the right amount of sleep — there is an abundance of evidence for all of those things, those eight things. Life’s essential eight, we call them. And what I worry about is biohacking shifting our attention away from these critical eight factors, when there is proven data to support the importance of these factors. And I do get concerned that people are paying inordinate amounts of money for all sorts of biohacks when they haven’t got these eight fundamental things optimally set up in their own life.”
When he talks to patients about these issues, he adds, “I’m very aware of people that are not getting the right amount of sleep or they’re a bit overweight, or they still occasionally socially smoke or whatever, that are still investing money in biohacking. And it’s just wrong to be putting your faith into unproven therapies and ignoring the proven fundamentals.”
An erosion of trust in medicine — partly driven by genuine concerns about discrimination, and partly by the rise of nefarious narratives such as the anti-vaxxer movement — has led to an uptick in people’s interest in “hacking” their own bodies. And then, of course, there’s social media, its obsession with looking much younger than your years, and a volatile political environment in which people are desperate to regain some kind of control over their personal situation. When Kayla Barnes first got into biohacking, she was “shocked” that her doctor had simply dismissed some of her most fundamental health concerns and hadn’t even told her that telomere tests and gut microbiome analyses were available.
Barnes knows that most people won’t have access to a personal sauna or the ability to install a hyperbaric oxygen chamber in their home. But she says she wants people to know “that you can get incredible results with just free or low-cost practices.” Most of what she does is still dependent on closely following Kovacic’s “essential eight”.
She’s still interested in the cutting-edge, hacky, self-experimental side, too, though. That’s partly because she’s simply an enthusiast in the space — and partly because she knows women are still waiting for research, so she’d like to get ahead of it while she’s still young. Studies take a long time, and a lot of us don’t have the time to wait for medicine to right all its wrongs.
“I’ve been using hyperbaric [oxygen] because we know it is great for brain health,” she says, as an example, “but I’m excited about the studies for fertility there. We know that it helps improve sperm quality, but the studies for women are still undergoing.” She smiles a gently ironic smile. “I mean, imagine that, right?”
