A man who chose to liver underwater for 100 days detailed the surprising impact it had on his body.
While most of us sit around trying to challenge ourselves to making it to the gym three times a week - and still failing - in 2023, Dr Joseph Dituri decided to challenge himself to spending a staggering 100 days in a habitat located 30 feet under a Florida lagoon.
Dr Dituri didn't just do the challenge for the hell of it though, but as part of an experiment to see how living underwater for such an extended period of time could affect his body and ultimately to research a type of medicine that can help deliver oxygen to the human body under high pressures by helping it to grow new blood vessels.
The challenge saw the scientist and former naval officer scuba dive into a 9m by 9m room and monitor his body's reaction to the extreme pressure of living underwater for so long - supervised by medical, psychological and psychosocial experts.
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What was the underwater experiment about?
The retired US Navy Commander-turned-professor swam into his new 100-square foot habitat approximately 'two-thousandths of a league under the sea' at Jules’ Undersea Lodge in Key Largo.
The professor then began to live in 'isolation' for the entire duration of the mission, which has since been titled 'Neptune 100'.
A press release explained: "Part of the work will see a psychologist and a psychiatrist monitor the effects he experiences while in an environment similar to extended space travel.
"It's an isolating confined extreme environment. And as humans, we really need to figure out how we're going to be living in that (environment) if we're going to expand our planet, if we're going to go interplanetary, if we're going to find all the cures that we need to find."
What happened when Dr Dituri was underwater?
According to the professor, the experience underwater made him 'younger'.
The scientist closely monitored how the long-term extreme pressure was affecting him and, when he wasn't working on that, he taught school kids online from his watery digs.
Just one month into his experiment, Dr Dituri and his team even discovered a species - a single-celled organism that is now being studied by microbiologists.
Talking to The Independent at the time from his underwater tank room, Dr Dituri said: "We believe [it] is a brand-new species to science.
"People have dived in this area thousands and thousands of times - it’s been here, we just didn’t look."
What effects did being underwater have on Dr Dituri when he came out?
When he resurfaced in June 2023, Dr Dituri went on to claim that a lot of areas of his health had improved, including longer telomeres - which are structures on chromosomes that are often linked to extending life.
Dr Dituri told WKMG News in Orlando: "I'm 56 now. My extrinsic [biological] age was 44. When I got out of the water, my extrinsic age was 34.
"So, my telomeres lengthened. I actually got younger when I was under the water."
When he emerged from his underwater mission, Dr Dituri claimed that blood tests showed a 50 percent reduction in every inflammatory marker in his body.
Callum Jones