By Valérie Orsoni — Biohacker & Longevity Expert
Valérie Orsoni is a biohacker, author of 56 books, and founder of biohacker.fr. She has been tracking her biology through N=1 self-experimentation protocols since 1998. She is recently completed her Stanford Genetics Longevity Research certification program and is currently enrolled in the Stanford Medicine nutrition science program. She was named in the Top 50 Longevity Leaders by Life Spanning magazine and is currently the #1 on the Longevity Cup Leaderboard (chronological age -23 years).
Warning: This is a LONG piece with a ton of info…take your time reading it. Sit down….drink some water….breathe…and read :)
Lung function is one of the biomarkers almost nobody in the longevity space tracks.
We obsess over HRV, glucose, telomeres, epigenetic age.
Meanwhile the organ that determines how much oxygen actually reaches every one of those optimized cells gets a single spirometry blow at a routine physical, if that.
I’ve been guilty of the same neglect for most of my biohacking life.
I had a full pulmonary function work-up done in Berlin in August 2025 at the YEARS CLINIC: whole-body plethysmography, spirometry, diffusing capacity, respiratory muscle function, FeNO for airway inflammation, the whole battery.
I had no problem and no symptoms.
Nothing on that panel would have raised a flag with a pulmonologist, and I wasn’t chasing a diagnosis.
But a handful of markers, specifically airway resistance, gas transfer efficiency, and respiratory muscle strength, weren’t sitting where I wanted them: below the reference range instead of comfortably inside it.
Nothing was broken.
That’s exactly the point. I didn’t wait for something to break, or for a symptom to show up, before I acted.
I decided to make my lungs a dedicated 12-month focus anyway, because this is what biohacking actually is: acting on the earliest, quietest signal of a potential future problem, years before it would ever surface as a symptom, instead of waiting for a diagnosis to force your hand.
In just a year, my airway function improved by 74%, my gas-transfer efficiency by 45%, my respiratory muscle strength by 23%, and my peak flow by nearly 17%.
Again, I had no lung disease, no symptoms and nothing a pulmonologist would have considered alarming.
My lungs were “normal.” But normal was not optimal.
I focused on four specific interventions, including one unusual daily practice from a country most of us totally ignore when it comes to longevity. I believe this particular intervention played a major role in my biggest improvement.
Here is exactly what I did, what each test revealed and what the science actually supports.