2026Journal articleFree to read
Mahin BS
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
IMPORTANT — PLEASE READ FIRST: The author is NOT a physician or any kind of medical professional. This paper is a personal conceptual hypothesis written by a layperson. It is NOT medical advice, NOT a diagnosis, and NOT a treatment recommendation. Some interventions described, including follistatin gene therapy which the author personally underwent, are experimental, are not approved by the FDA or other regulators for anti-aging or muscle-building use in healthy adults, and carry real risks. Do not start, stop, or change any diet, supplement, exercise, medication, or therapy based on this document. Consult a qualified healthcare professional who knows your individual situation.ABSTRACT: Common intuition treats aging as the inevitable cost of elapsed time. This paper offers a different, hopeful hypothesis: that biological aging is really the running balance between the damage a body sustains each day and its capacity to repair and renew itself. If that is true, then the calendar is a bystander, and the rate at which we age is something we can partly influence. The paper lays out eight everyday levers that tip this balance toward repair: managing metabolic stress, chronic psychological stress, nutrition, muscle, hydration, sleep, emotional and social connection, and the evidence-based use of modern medicine. It then looks to the frontier, where cellular reprogramming (the Yamanaka factors), follistatin gene therapy, and compounds such as the catechins in green tea and matcha may actively widen repair capacity. It also singles out the two great accelerators of damage, smoking and alcohol, and closes with a piece of arithmetic borrowed from investing: because a 10% loss requires an 11.1% gain to undo, damage is inherently harder to reverse than to prevent, and losses…
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Other / not stated
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Topics
Matcha is a main subject here (named in the keywords).
Mahin BS. (2026). The Maintenance and Repair Balance Theory of Aging: A Personal, Illustrated Hypothesis on Why Aging May Be a Problem of Damage, Not Time. Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21440267
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21440267
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