The Next Frenzy in Anti-Aging Supplements
Baran Dilaver
BARAN DILAVER (USA)
Co-founder @ Wonderfeel | Entrepreneur| Creator | Inventor
What I really love is when different fields converge. When we combine the wonders of nature with rigorous academic research, we find solutions. Certain elements and compounds in nature can be used as medicine.
Summary
- Biohackers serve as frontier pioneers who drive scientific research by sharing feedback on holistic and integrative health approaches ahead of formal clinical studies. - Human clinical trials for NMN and NAD+ precursors show significant improvements in cognitive function, insulin sensitivity, aerobic capacity, and sleep quality. - Ergothioneine is a potent, adaptive antioxidant that accumulates in damaged tissues for 30 days and shows significant potential for treating neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. - Compounds from olive plants, such as hydroxytyrosol, provide anti-tumor, anti-inflammatory, and neuroprotective benefits while effectively lowering bad cholesterol. - Integrating natural compounds with rigorous clinical research aims to disrupt mainstream medicine by proving that plant-based elements can serve as effective medical treatments.
Article
Decoding And Recoding Nature At Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam
Clinical Science Met The Biohacking Frontier
At Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam, held in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on 15 and 16 October 2022, Baran Dilaver delivered a brisk and provocative presentation titled *The Next Frenzy in Anti-Aging Supplements*. It was, in essence, an argument for a new détente between two worlds that have often eyed each other with suspicion: the hard metrics of clinical science and the fast-moving, self-experimental culture of biohacking.
Dilaver’s central claim was both simple and ambitious. Longevity science, he argued, had reached an inflection point. The old divide between natural compounds and medical legitimacy was beginning to fray. In its place stood a more radical proposition: that plant-derived and food-derived molecules, when subjected to rigorous human study, could become serious interventions in the campaign against ageing, cognitive decline and metabolic dysfunction.
“Biohackers are usually one or two steps ahead of science,” Dilaver told the audience. “You are bold, you communicate with each other, you share feedback, and science learns from you.”
It was a flattering line, but not an empty one. The speech repeatedly returned to the idea that frontier communities often identify possibilities before institutions are ready to validate them.
The New Legitimacy Of Natural Compounds
Dilaver framed his talk around convergence. Academic researchers, he said, spent decades isolating mechanisms. Clinicians sought efficacy and safety in human trials. Biohackers, meanwhile, tested the edges of lived experience, often noticing subtle effects long before they appeared in journals.
His contention was that these three streams were now meeting.
That matters because much of mainstream medicine has historically been ill-equipped to deal with compounds that are neither wholly pharmaceutical nor merely nutritional. If an ingredient can be found in food, plants or fungi, there is often little commercial incentive to fund the kind of long and expensive trials that would move it into the medical mainstream. The result is a strange impasse: promising molecules remain culturally popular but scientifically under-leveraged.
Dilaver’s answer was not to reject medicine, but to broaden it. He spoke of a future in which compounds from nature were not dismissed as folk wisdom or wellness fashion, but tested, refined and deployed with clinical seriousness.
NMN And NAD Research Entered An Acceleration Phase
The most developed part of the presentation focused on NMN and NAD+ precursors, molecules that have become staples of longevity discourse. Here, Dilaver suggested, the field had moved beyond speculative excitement into something sturdier.
“We are in an acceleration point with NMN and NAD research,” he said. “We went from cell studies to animal studies to human clinical trials, and the results are truly remarkable.”
According to the studies he cited, human trials had shown significant improvements in cognitive function, insulin sensitivity and aerobic capacity. He also referenced gains in sleep quality and athletic endurance, particularly through more efficient oxygen utilisation in cells and muscle tissue.
The promise of this line of research lies in its breadth. If the findings continue to hold, NMN may not be relevant only to lifespan enthusiasts chasing abstract longevity markers. It may also matter to ordinary people concerned with fatigue, metabolic health, exercise tolerance and age-related decline in mental sharpness.
Dilaver also underscored what he described as the compound’s safety profile, noting that NMN is native to human biology rather than an alien chemical intruder.
What Biohackers Noticed Before The Studies Caught Up
Yet some of the most intriguing material in the talk came not from formal trial endpoints but from anecdotal feedback. Dilaver described reports from users who experienced reduced pain, even though NMN is not marketed or understood primarily as an analgesic. He also shared an intimate and almost comic example from his own household: his wife, he said, noticed unexpected regrowth in thinning eyelashes and eyebrows.
These stories were not presented as proof. Instead, they served a different function. They illustrated the value of distributed observation, the quiet intelligence generated when large numbers of people track what happens in their own bodies and compare notes.
“The feedback we get from people is super important,” Dilaver said, “because it allows us and other scientific institutions to focus on what the next area of research should be.”
It was a revealing moment. In his telling, biohacking was not merely consumer experimentation. It was an informal surveillance system for future science.
Ergothioneine Emerged As A Quiet Contender
If NMN occupied the familiar centre of anti-ageing discussion, ergothioneine represented the more mysterious edge. Derived largely from mushrooms and described by Dilaver as an “adaptive antioxidant”, the compound was presented as one of the most underappreciated molecules in the longevity landscape.
Its appeal, as outlined in the talk, lay in its unusual behaviour. Unlike many antioxidants that are rapidly cleared from the body, ergothioneine can accumulate in tissues for up to 30 days, particularly where there is damage or oxidative stress. That trait, Dilaver suggested, made it a compelling candidate for neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s, dementia and Parkinson’s disease.
He noted that the compound is found in high concentrations in mother’s milk and that babies possess specific receptors for it, an evolutionary clue that hints at deeper biological importance. He also referred to ongoing high-level academic interest, including a five-year Alzheimer’s clinical trial by an Oxford professor known for work on antioxidants.
For a field crowded with loud claims and fashionable ingredients, ergothioneine sounded almost old-fashioned: obscure, expensive, mechanistically intriguing and still waiting for broader recognition.
The Entourage Effect Offered A Blueprint For Future Supplements
One of the speech’s most compelling conceptual turns came through cannabis. Dilaver used the history of cannabinoid research as a model for understanding how nature might be “decoded” and then “recoded” into more precise interventions.
The lesson, he argued, was that biological effects are often not driven by a single isolated compound. Cannabis became legible to medicine not only because CBD demonstrated clear benefits, particularly in epilepsy, but because researchers gradually realised the plant was a complex ecosystem of cannabinoids and terpenes. Their interactions mattered.
This, he suggested, is the essence of the “entourage effect”: one plus one can equal three.
Such a framework has implications well beyond cannabis. It challenges the reductionist instinct to extract a single molecule and discard the rest. In its place is a more ecological view of therapeutics, one in which combinations from plants may outperform purified isolates under certain conditions.
For biohackers and supplement makers alike, that idea is seductive. For clinicians, it poses a formidable challenge: how do you preserve complexity without sacrificing reproducibility?
Olive Polyphenols Pointed To Another Untapped Frontier
Dilaver also turned to olive-derived compounds, especially hydroxytyrosol, as another example of nature’s underexploited pharmacology. He described the molecule as anti-inflammatory, neuroprotective and beneficial in lowering bad cholesterol, while also pointing to anti-tumour potential.
The olive tree has long occupied a comfortable place in nutritional advice, especially within Mediterranean diet research. But Dilaver’s argument pushed further. He suggested that what is often treated as dietary background may in fact contain compounds worthy of much more targeted medical study.
This was the broader theme of the presentation: the substances we have normalised as food may still conceal a pharmacopeia in plain sight.
A Movement That Wanted To Be Taken Seriously
There was, beneath the technical references, a cultural argument running through the talk. Dilaver was not simply promoting ingredients. He was asking for a reordering of authority.
The biohacking world, often caricatured as reckless or fad-driven, was recast as an early-warning and early-discovery system. Science, in this framing, was not dethroned, but asked to become more responsive to signals emerging from people who were experimenting with nutrition, supplementation and self-tracking at speed.
“Longevity biosciences is at an inflection point,” Dilaver said. “We are going to get so many benefits from all the great research coming out.”
By the end, his invitation was collaborative rather than evangelical. “There is so much to learn from you,” he told the audience. “Let’s share this journey together. There is so much to learn and so much to gain.”
The Real Frenzy May Be Credibility
The title of the presentation promised “the next frenzy” in anti-ageing supplements, but frenzy was not quite the mood in the room. The deeper story was about legitimacy.
At Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam, Baran Dilaver sketched a future in which supplements were no longer split between hype and dismissal. In that future, the most interesting compounds would not be judged by whether they came from a lab or a mushroom, an olive leaf or a metabolic pathway. They would be judged by whether they worked, how they worked and for whom.
That is a more demanding standard. It is also a more hopeful one.
If Dilaver was right, the next chapter in longevity will not be written by science alone, nor by biohackers alone, but by the uneasy, energetic and increasingly consequential conversation between them.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam