I’ve watched the U.S. men’s national soccer team’s quadrennial World Cup performances for most of my life—about 12 of them. The current squad, known by the acronym USMNT, is different from any previous incarnation.

These guys are capable of competing with everyone and beating anyone, which neither I nor anyone else would have dared say during any previous World Cup. Not because of superior talent—impressive as they are, they’re not on the raw-talent level of the French, Argentine or Spanish teams—but because of a singular quality that they share with all top athletes, pro or amateur, regardless of age. So I thought I’d write a short post on this topic, for any athlete, of any gender, managing an aging body, athletic injuries or performance challenges that typically don’t show up before age 50 or 60.

What this USMNT has is self-belief, individually and collectively. Yes, they’re also flowing over with unprecedented natural-born physical talent and, unlike in years past, most are now playing with name-brand European clubs. Talent alone might let you qualify for this tournament but it won’t get you past the group stage and into the Round of 16, where this group of Americans—including many players born outside the U.S., I’ll add—now finds itself.

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Self-belief is the sine qua non of performance regardless of age. At the gym, on the courts, during the race or in the office, stoking and achieving belief in one’s ability—including the ability to outperform one’s own circumscribed expectations—fuels all positive outcomes especially in the second half of life.

It’s such a simple observation about a quality so easy to overlook.

In case you missed it….

This USMNT squad exhibits radical self-belief, and its success thus far is the result.

These guys so obviously believe they can beat anyone. Watching their passing attacks and defensive structure, you can see how confidence, born of deep self-belief, allows these players to coordinate, trust and execute. This is a lesson anyone attempting to achieve, or begin, a level of athletic performance can absorb as a foundation for success.

Lack of self-belief or simply relying on only talent, conversely, often lead to stagnation or avoidance. Francis Tiafoe, the wildly gifted tennis pro who is capable of beating anyone in the world, often underperformed, he said recently, until he committed to doing the work that winning requires. The sentiments he expressed, recorded in a recent ESPN article published after an early-round win at the French Open, hint at the need for developing foundational self-belief.

They also underscore the athletic reality that talent alone doesn’t win Grand Slam tournaments, either.

The big takeaway: Believe you can do it, and if you can’t yet, figure out why and address the cause. Such work pays for itself many times over.

One other lesson from the USMNT’s performance this summer: a trusted support network takes you far, and keeps you winning even when you yourself may not have it on a particular day or week or season. Seek out and build your trusted support team for your athletic (or professional) goals.

That’s all from the Qantas Airlines gate at LAX. I believe the next 15 hours seated in a chair in the sky will yield more aging insights from Sydney, where I’ll write more in the coming days.

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When the British Journal of Sports Medicine published a paper1 a few weeks ago showing a long-term correlation in older adults between strength training and living longer, many media dutifully reported the intriguing main finding: just 90 to 120 minutes per week of resistance exercise was linked to:

• a 13% lower risk of all-cause mortality (ie, risk of dying from any cause)

• a 19% lower risk of cardiovascular mortality (dying from heart-related causes)

• a 27% lower risk of neurological disease mortality (dying from dementia, etc.)

Mortality risk means the chance of dying; the bigger the percentage decrease in that risk, the greater the impact on longevity. As obvious or intuitive as it might seem to some people, moving your body against weighted resistance, this study suggests, could play a significant role in helping you live longer.

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But it doesn’t compare to cardiorespiratory training, and that’s one giant takeaway that nearly all the media posts on this longevity paper didn’t mention:

Cardio alone was associated with a 26% to 43% lower risk of death, compared with people who did neither cardio nor strength training.

That equates to a roughly 2x to 3x larger reduction in mortality risk than strength training alone. The study authors themselves acknowledged cardio as superior, stating on p. 881 of the journal: “[W]hile either sufficient aerobic or resistance training alone reduced mortality risk, aerobic activity conferred greater benefit”2 (italics mine).

Though not a novel declaration, it’s an important reminder that in the constellations of physical movements that may well help you live the longest, combining strength and cardio training creates greater benefits than either one does by itself. If you had to pick the exercise category with the single biggest longevity upside, aerobic fitness—affectionately abbreviated in our culture as VO2 max—is king of the exercise hill.

The paper also concluded that respondents who regularly did strength and aerobic training had up to 45% lower mortality risk than people who did little-to-no exercise.

The big takeaway: “For people who are less active, the key message is that small amounts can still matter,” said Edward Giovannucci, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors, in Harvard’s press release about the study. Also: “Building a routine gradually may be more important than trying to do a lot at once.”

But let’s look beyond only the headlines, at what this study also revealed, which you won’t find anywhere else—partly because most media reports on these results were cursory and/or misleading, and also because the full paper hasn’t been publicly released.

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Other notable features from this Harvard longevity analysis

AGING with STRENGTH obtained, upon request, a copy of the full text of the paper from one of the Harvard-affiliated authors, on which the reporting below is based.

Other less obvious findings from the full-text of the paper include:

1. a counterintuitive ratio of exercise minutes per week to increased cancer risk

2. strength training’s association with reductions in neurodegenerative (ie brain) diseases may be overstated in the data, due to reverse causation

3. doing more minutes per week of strength + cardio training was linked to reduced longevity gains compared to more modest levels of training

4. a structural weakness in the resistance-training data reporting that arguably calls into question how accurate this paper’s analytical model is

I examine each of these in greater detail below. (If you’re interested in how this research was conducted, please read this footnoted explanation.3)

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Summer vacation is a two-sided proposition. On one hand, it’s the break you’ve been waiting for, to recharge your battery. On the other hand, vacations disrupt health & wellness practices—workouts, nutrition, sleep—you’ve honed into efficient routines.

But this summer, instead of either resigning yourself to turning into a walking carbohydrate or—equally unhelpfully—attempting to stick to your regular routine to fool your fitness tracker into thinking you never left home, try a version of what I’m doing on my vacation this year: just enough.

Just enough daily movement. Just enough healthy nutrition. Just enough alcohol regulation. Just enough sleep and, if you’re the type, just enough orchestrated alone time to avoid placing yourself in a huge health & wellness hole on summer vacation.

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The “just enough” vacation health & wellness strategies

In my experience, you only need to do an itty-bitty fraction of your regular healthy-living routines to stay within striking distance of optimal. For example, instead of the normal strength-training workout you do twice a week at home, on vacation settle for a brisk 20-minute, post-prandial walk + 20 bodyweight squats while you’re brushing your teeth before bed. Anything that raises your heart rate, even for a few minutes each day, tells your body you’re keeping it top of mind. Your body will respond in kind.

Here’s my 5 specific fitness, nutrition & sleep strategies to consider on vacation:

1 | Set a minimum-movement floor

Instead of trying to replicate your regular strength or cardio routine while on vacation, replace it with a single, highly achievable daily minimum: that fast, 20-minute walk I mentioned above, and/or a 5-minute bodyweight circuit before you shower (eg, jumping squats, walking lunges, 25 slow-down, fast-up pushups). Low enough that you’ll actually do it tired, hungover or after destroying a bowl of ice cream with a beer.

The floor isn’t there to make you fitter; rather, to keep your baseline from eroding while you’re having a kick-ass holiday.

2 | Eat unprocessed food and fresh vegetables at least one meal a day

Or, if you can’t or don’t want to squeeze in a fully healthy meal in one sitting, fractionally eat the equivalent of one healthy meal over the 3 or 4 meals you have in a day: fresh berries with your pancake breakfast; a green salad with your fish & chips; lean protein with your mashed potatoes & gravy. The whole foods add up over the vacation days, and combined with your daily movement, make a big difference.

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3 | Treat alcohol as a sleep concern, not a calorie concern

A few drinks can impair your sleep quality, and bad sleep is what increases the next day’s schlub factor—the skipped walk, the second pastry, the 2pm nap that keeps you up till 2am. A simple cap (an off-night rule, or a hard number) beats willpower in the moment. For many travelers, this is the single highest-leverage point, because it cascades into everything else.

4 | Let your destination be your “gym”

Terrain does the work and doesn’t feel like maintenance. Hike the trail, swim the lake, bike the town, walk the city. You burn the calories as a byproduct of the trip you came for, and you’re not negotiating whether to drag yourself to an over-air-conditioned hotel treadmill.

5 | Substitute people for screens

When I frame pulling out my phone as time I could otherwise spend interacting with my 10-year-old, it’s an obvious healthy swap, not a sacrifice. Isolation is a genuine health variable. Vacation time is one of the rare windows to talk to strangers—the guy at the next campsite, the bartender, the couple on the trail; the gas station attendant; the immigrant busting his tail to clean your table during the rush.

The phone is the path of least resistance precisely when you have time and a reason to do the harder, better thing. Aim the freed-up attention at humans. You won’t regret it. Your kid, and family, certainly won’t.

What are your vacation health & wellness strategies? Leave a comment.

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I first heard Seals & Crofts “Summer Breeze” through either a tiny transistor radio or the shitty speakers of whatever General Motors gas-guzzler my parents drove in 1972, when the song first “hit the airwaves,” as they used to say. It’s one of those tunes that, for anyone whose early-childhood soundtrack is a carousel of Seventies radio classics, immediately transports you to a now-extinct time and place, before you had worries.

As James Seals and Dash Crofts sang the chorus:

Summer breeze makes me feel fine
Blowin' through the jasmine in my mind

I’ll admit the 7-year-old me misheard the last half as Goin’ to the bathroom in my mind (which at the time made more sense to sing about than the actual lyrics). But it didn’t matter, because “Summer Breeze” in music and lyrics made cosmic sense, even to a child, as portraying the right way to experience life’s small moments. You come home after a long day, you see the people who matter to you and to whom you matter, you sit down and appreciate the simplest of things: A June draft fluttering the curtains.

Or, translated into 2026 terms, you place your mobile device in another room, engage with people that are in front of you, not on X or Instagram, and pay attention to what is (or isn’t) happening IRL, moment by moment. And that’s it. That’s how you stay on top of the world, instead of feeling buried by it: Giving the human moments a chance to happen.

All the above occurred to me in a two-second reverie yesterday, as I sat at the bar of a low-key pub in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, with my 10-year-old daughter. It was late afternoon, and we needed a cheeseburger after a day spent outside. The iconic 10-note opening to “Summer Breeze” (which includes the distinct tones from a child’s piano) all but grabbed me by the collar, and as my kid glugged her lemonade, I told her about my “goin’ to the bathroom in my mind” mondegreen.

She laughed until lemonade dripped off her chin.

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And that’s when it hit me: I’m doing it. I’m doing exactly what Seals & Crofts were singing about. I’m sitting around with my kid eating cheeseburgers, talking with the bartenders about the tourists and the weather and the two retrievers lounging around the grassy yard: ”Blowin’ through the jasmine in my mind.”

In 1975, Seals told Melody Maker that "Summer Breeze" was intended, in a way, to free people from themselves. "A prison can be the prison of self,” he’s quoted saying, “and a person can become insecure and paranoid if he doesn't have a direction in his personal life."

It feels as if he’s talking to us, here today.

I thought of how radically different American life is today compared with 1972, when there were three network TV channels, answering machines were still science fiction and American women were still two years away from gaining the federal right to open a bank account without a male co-signer.

I thought about how the more I can keep my phone pocketed—or left behind entirely—the more I’ll probably end up face-to-face with a human who matters to me and to whom I matter (even if only a little bit), and appreciating a warm breeze through the window curtains. Or, more likely, a cool breeze.

And I thought of what the modern-day equivalents of blowin’ through the jasmine of our minds are for anyone in need of more time on top of the world and less time digging out from under it. The bridge in “Summer Breeze,” says it best:

Sweet days of summer, the jasmine's in bloom
July is dressed up and playing her tune
And I come home from a hard day's work
And you're waiting there, not a care in the world

As your summer takes shape, stay alert to your own versions of a summer breeze, in whatever form they may present themselves. Mine the lyrics of your favorite 70s songs for their analog-era wisdom—in an emergency, 80s songs might also work—and use it as an antidote, to avoid aging into a metastasizing digital-screen habit.

We all need more jasmine blowing through our minds nowadays.

† I know this is dangling modifier. But even though I’m a grammar nerd, it didn’t bother me the way “really unique” and “irregardless” do. So there it is, still dangling.

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Where, how, how often and with whom you strength train is about as personal a fitness choice as there is. That choice, in my experience, tends to correlate not only to what you want your body to look like but also how you want to feel by the time you hit the showers.

Two different kinds of gym workouts

If the goal is to punch that timecard, execute your routine, lift the weight and book a gym win, your workouts tend to go in one direction. If the goal is more akin to rebooting your operating system by going long, hard and deep into your strengths, exhausting yourself into a palpable physical, mental and emotional restoration—well, then, your workout probably goes in a different direction.

I’ve spent years regularly going in that second direction, through supersets. Supersets combine strength training with aerobic and mental conditioning that, according to scientific research that bears out my experience, confer a unique set of physical benefits that regular gym workouts don’t.

Below, I explain the physiology of those gains and the cyclic compound effect they generate. I also describe my personal lower-body strength supersets routine that AGING with STRENGTH paying subscribers can use as a customizable blueprint to condition your all-important posterior chain, as well as your aerobic fitness and mental toughness.

What are supersets?

Supersets are more intense versions of regular workouts. The word superset refers to executing sets of two or three different exercises in rapid succession without much rest in between—and then repeating that cycle for an entire workout. Supersets may incorporate different muscle groups—legs and chest, for instance—or blend related exercises focused on just one muscle group.

With supersets you’re typically:

• lifting only 50% to 75% of your maximum…

• which enables doing more reps that build into a wall of fatigue…

• because you’re resting only 30-90 seconds between sets…

A muscular flow state

That’s how mental toughness enters the superset equation: when each set leaves you breathless, you don’t cool down; you keep going. Your mind must convince your body to hit the next set in the rotation as soon as your heart rate begins to settle, without losing proper form or technique.

You sweat a lot more, burning more fat than you do in a regular workout.

And, in a major breach of gym protocol nowadays, you don’t have time or desire to look at your phone in between sets. You’re in a muscular flow state.

In case you missed it…

Posterior-chain workouts are the ones I enjoy supersetting the most, because they’re the biggest and arguably most important muscle groups, and engaging body and mind to work them to sweaty exhaustion produces as close to a calming physical reset as you’re likely to experience in a public space. As we age, lower-body strength is the engine of our mobility and supports a powerful core.

Supersets are also just plain fun because they demand all your attention; you’re captivated. I admire and respect those regular gym workouts I described above, but I often can’t carve out regular workout times that make them a habit. So whenever I do have a glorious 90 minutes or more to work out, I tend to train in supersets.

Turns out, there’s no shortage of science to support the feelings I’m describing.

The unique advantages of training with supersets

Supersets do two useful things at once: they shorten the session and keep your heart rate up. When researchers compare combining exercises this way against the conventional one-lift-at-a-time approach, the muscle and strength gains come out about the same, while the combined version finishes in roughly a third less time.12 The 50–75% load is heavy enough to build muscle and light enough to keep moving while you tire, and that pairing—moderate weight, short rest—produced the biggest changes in a 45-study review: a 4.3% drop in fat mass, a 1.9% gain in muscle mass, and a 6.3% rise in VO2max.3

If you target the same group of muscles with supersets, fatigue within those muscles accrues, and you move less total weight than you would resting fully between straight sets. Thus, the harder sessions can demand longer recovery before you train those muscles again.4

The muscle-mental resilience superset cycle

There’s one more major advantage supersets offer that the literature doesn’t mention.

Cutting the rest between sets trains local muscular endurance and, over weeks and months, builds a fitter system—one that recovers faster between efforts and tolerates more discomfort before the urge to quit takes over.

Growing more tolerant of discomfort is the definition of mental resilience.

Your ability to endure discomfort yields a physical payoff that builds mental toughness. The toughness makes the next hard session more tolerable, which produces more physical gain, which feeds the toughness again.

This cycle yields and compounds, yields and compounds. You may find that it starts to show up in other areas of your life, away from the gym or fitness. If that sounds a bit Nietzschean, there’s a reason superset workouts require more recovery time than regular gym routines.

My lower-body superset routine: a triple-strength workout

Here’s my typical 90 minute posterior-chain superset routine, which hits several related muscle groups to build muscle, modestly increase VO2 max and train mental resilience.

I’ll describe the specific movements, the number of sets and amount of weight I use for each, and estimated resting times. This is not prescriptive but rather a template anyone can adapt and edit to their liking. Tune it to your body type and fitness goals.

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Because, there’s no two ways about it: athletic injuries after 50 are harder to overcome. Sometimes they don’t go away; we just manage them. There’s a reason physically active people over 50 refer to Ibuprofen “Vitamin I.”

Wendy & Paul: Different athletic experiences & injuries

My conversation with , recorded live Friday, June 5, presents two complementary case studies in preventing, managing and recovering from athletic injuries after 50.

In one corner, there’s Wendy, 54, a helluva Spartan racer, nationally ranked in her age group. But by her own description, before 2018, she was a certified non-athlete. As you’ll hear in our conversation, she made some significant newbie mistakes as she began tuning up her body and mind to compete in timed ass-kicking adventure races after leading a life in which the hardest sprint was usually to the elevator or train platform. She’s negotiated several significant injuries, none needing surgery, thankfully.

In the other corner, there’s me, a 59-year-old lifelong, multisport athlete (soccer, squash, surfing, cycling, triathlon, tennis, track, wrestling and, yes, rollerblading when it was cool in the early 90s) and 40-year gym rat. The two decades I spent lifting heavy produced large muscles back in the day but also set in motion the consequences: a broken collarbone, a torn biceps tendon and 7 orthopedic surgeries, the last four of which all occurred in the past 9 years—since turning 50.

caveat athleta senior

In summary, my advice is caveat athleta senior—"let the older athlete beware." By all means, start or continue your physical fitness journey, in whatever form it may take, for all the inarguable reasons you’re taking it. Travel ambitiously but aware that your body is in a different place than that 32-year-old who’s loudly stacking the pulldown machine next to you.

I hope you’ll find this recorded conversation with Wendy useful and supportive. We enjoy making fun of one another in between offering our respective lessons learned from what is, collectively, more than 50 years of high-level athletic training and performance.

If you just can’t stand listening to us, though, here’s a summary of takeaways.

Paul’s takeaways

• Avoid ego loading. Overriding your body’s little yellow flags to match the high-schooler deadlifting next to you is different from progressive overload, where you’re actually listening to your body and know it.

• Stop the lifts that put you in a disadvantaged position. Eliminated barbell back squats and bench press—bar squats in particular cause damage that accrues invisibly until a back spasm puts you on the floor.

• Train unilaterally. I switched from bilateral to single-leg work (Bulgarian split squats, single-leg RDLs, lunges) so weak muscles can’t hide behind strong ones. It’s not as fun or attention-grabbing as heavy barbell squats, but very effective.

• Build from the ground up. Feet and ankles first—balance boards, retraining old injuries—because the ability to walk at speed later in life starts there.

• Warm up—you can’t keep doing your 35-year-old’s cold open. Foam roll before (to get warm) and after. Best $24 you’ll spend; 80% of your body is fascia.

• Move like it’s 1899. Multi-plane, multi-compound, asymmetric movements, not just up/down/forward/back.

• Flexibility training before bed—it accrues over time…and helps you sleep better.

• Bar hangs. Grip strength, plus letting gravity decompress your lower spine; helped my tennis elbow and shoulder. Work up with feet on a box, then one-arm hangs.

• The post-operation mental struggle is real. Surgeons don’t warn you how hard the forced inactivity is when you rely on movement to clear your head.

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Wendy’s takeaways

• Don’t try to climb Everest on day one. Her injuries—tendinitis, plantar fasciitis, a degenerated shoulder from too many burpees—all came from getting excited and diving in too fast and too heavy.

• Check the ego at the door. Leave one to three reps in reserve instead of going to failure, and change only one variable at a time—weight, reps, or sets, never all at once.

• Eat your spinach. Add the unglamorous, un-sexy work she’d neglected: yoga, Pilates, and small mobility movements.

• Be dumb strong vs. smart strong aware (see below).

• Take care of the unglamorous parts. She lives and dies by a small ball she rolls her feet on, morning and night — neglecting that is what got her plantar fasciitis.

• Moderate the things you love. Hundreds of burpees is the problem, not burpees; use AI to gauge what a given volume will do to you.

• Build in lateral movement — she’s religious about it now (lunges, BOSU work, side-to-side).

• Retro walking. Walking backward, especially uphill, for proprioception, fall prevention, knee relief, hip-flexor range, and getting the brain off autopilot.

• Treat your body like a book of matches. Keep them unlit (prevention), and when one strikes, be religious about paying attention to the niggle.

• Be mindful before rushing into surgery. She dodged a shoulder replacement by easing back into hanging with her feet on a box.

• Bar hangs for grip strength — a strong longevity predictor. No bar? Use a playground.

• Dynamic warm-ups over static stretching.

Wendy on “dumb” strong vs. “smart” strong

Maybe the single best line in this recording came after Wendy got humbled in a “Better Backs and Balance” class, whimpering, she said, “like a child.” Her diagnosis of herself: she’s dumb strong, not smart strong. She can carry heavy things, climb a rope, haul weight across a field—the big, obvious, sexy stuff.

But all the little stabilizing muscles underneath, the ones that govern balance and mobility and keep the whole system honest, she’d been quietly ignoring for years. Being able to move a heavy object isn’t the same as being durable, and the gap between the two is exactly where injuries live. So she’s doubling down on the work that doesn’t look impressive — the yoga, the Pilates, the small mobility movements — precisely because it’s the strength that doesn’t show off but keeps you in the game.

Thanks for listening and reading! Let Wendy and me know what you think in a comment.

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Earlier this week, I held my breath walking past a construction site to avoid inhaling a drifting plume of dust. I gave up breathing for a good 12-15 seconds while ambulating as briskly as possible, which got me thinking about any potential health benefits of intermittently holding breath while walking.

Or, as the scientific literature calls it, voluntary hypoventilation.

I’ll say up front that “breath-hold walking" remains mostly a scientifically untested application, so everything you read in this post is more about potential benefits, based on credible research. With that acknowledgment, here’s what I’ll say:

Holding your breath in short bouts while you walk is a no-cost, low-impact way for healthy adults to layer a mild stress onto an easy activity. A handful of adjacent research suggests a payoff.

The logic comes from altitude and athlete training. Brief exhale-holds lower blood oxygen and raise CO2, and that mild stress is what may drive adaptation. The evidence that it could have health benefits comes from neighboring studies:

• Device-based intermittent hypoxic training — breathing low-oxygen air — significantly raised VO_2max in a 2023 meta-analysis, the clearest aerobic signal in this research, though that’s a stronger stimulus than any walking breath-hold.

• Voluntary breath-hold sprint training improved fatigue resistance and lactate handling in trained athletes.

• Intermittent hypoxia combined with walking improved walking speed and endurance in patients rehabilitating from spinal-cord injury.

• Breath-hold training strengthened breathing capacity — how much air swimmers could move and how forcefully — in competitive athletes.

The common idea for all the above is the act of training one’s tolerance to rising levels of CO2—the actual trigger for the urge to breathe—so that harder efforts feel easier sooner.

None of these studies tested breath-hold walking, and none enrolled healthy adults over 50. The one robust VO_2max finding comes from low-oxygen-air training, a more intense stimulus than holding your breath on a walk.

The effect of holding one’s breath while walking may be small, since the oxygen drop that powers altitude-style adaptation generally requires hard effort that walking doesn’t supply. But they’re not nothing.

Anyone with cardiovascular, blood-pressure, or respiratory conditions should avoid this admittedly experimental exercise. But if you’re like me, interested in how far you can safely push your limits, no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential, walking breath holds may be a fun way to add a moderate edge to that routine walk to/from the store, school, pharmacy…or just to wherever your car is parked.

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I spent the last couple weeks thinking—and the last few days researching and writing—about sex. Specifically, sex after 50 and everything it offers and doesn’t offer. (If you’re in your 40s, you are, of course, welcome. There is plenty for you here, too.)

Sex after 50 is a vast and complicated subject, and writing about it wrong is incredibly easy. So I did what any self-respecting reporter with a perfectionist streak and a hearty interest in continual, lifelong sex would do: I dove into the data, all the data I could find, to see what grand portrait would emerge about how people have sex in midlife and beyond, how they fail to have sex and how they adapt—when they can’t get what they want—to at least get what they need.

The Aging with Sex special report

I put dozens of hours of reporting and fact-checking into the 10-page report below, which paying subscribers can access. The report covers 10 topics and offers a list of summary takeaways:

• How Often Are Older Adults Having Sex?

• The Types of Sex Older Adults Are Having

• Having Sex Is Good for Your Health

• Masturbation: Important, Protective and Healthy

• Polyamory and Consensual Non-Monogamy

• A 30-year Sex Recession (Thanks, Internet)

• Men: Erectile Dysfunction

• Women: Genitourinary Syndrome & Sexual Dysfunction

• Sex and Testosterone | Sex and Estrogen

• Major Barriers to Sex in Europe, Australia & Asia

• Takeaways: An Actionable Summary of the Data

How I reported it: I created this report by pulling together every credible study on sex after 50 I could find — 2015 through 2026, comprising a total of 39 footnoted sources. Then I ran it through more than a dozen rounds of fact-checking, with the help of two top-tier AI models I work with almost daily to analyze large data sets.

Sex does not stop at 50, and it’s good for your health

That’s the major headline of this report. Roughly half of adults in their 60s are still sexually active. But sex most definitely changes. Often the changes, whether from E.D., menopause, stress, or lack of a suitable partner, are navigable. For many many people of a certain age, sex becomes many things that are not intercourse.

The biggest barrier, according to the research, is partner availability and personal health. On a very bright note, the data now link regular sex to lower mortality, better cardiovascular markers, less depression, sharper memory.

The hitch in the story is that most older adults with a sexual problem never raise it and, apparently, most doctors rarely or never ask. That’s too bad, because many of the problems sex after 50 may present are treatable, by which I don’t mean just medically.

Over the coming weeks I’ll break down Aging with Sex into strategies, including:

• the cardio and strength exercises that most benefit good sex

• addressing E.D., estrogen and testosterone treatments

• what happens when traditional intercourse isn’t an option

Until then, here’s the 10-page Aging with Sex special report, which provides a foundation for all the above:

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The Wellness Industrial Complex is now worth $7 trillion. New research examined the association between how much sleep people get and how fast their organs are aging. Most media sites that covered this research published recklessly misleading headlines about what the research actually showed. See the chart below, with links to each article.

Even the Washington Post—which is still capable of quality reporting, whatever one may think of it now—ran1 a blatantly deceptive headline above a relatively accurate article that highlighted the appropriate caveats on the limitations of this new sleep research (which shows that 6 to 8 hours is what most healthy people should aim for.)

Why this matters: We all need to become better informed consumers of information that, by design or just bad reporting, so often misstates facts and misinforms the public about effective aging science, routines and supplements.

In other words, longevity literacy is a critical skill. Here’s why.

New research linking sleep duration and organ aging

A new study of about half a million British adults found a sweet spot for sleep duration: people sleeping between 6.4 and 7.8 hours a night had the youngest-looking organs. Organs of people who slept outside that range showed signs of faster biological aging. People outside this range also had higher rates of 153 diseases and were likelier to die during the follow-up period.

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The catch, which the researchers themselves flag: the study shows that long sleep and poor health travel together, but not which one is driving, so to speak. Put another way: correlation of faster aging to shorter or longer sleeping patterns doesn’t prove causation, it merely proves (or strongly suggests) a link between them.

Indeed, the likeliest story is that longer sleeping times are often a symptom of an illness already in progress rather than a cause of faster aging. So the illness or disease may be driving the sleep lengths, instead of the other way around.

With that in mind, look at how most media headlines2 on this study falsely made sleep the action that drives aging, even in cases where the article underneath the headline provide the appropriate caveats:

What would you like to AGING with STRENGTH investigate in upcoming posts?

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Don’t pump up the volume (and, for the love of all that is good and decent, don’t pump up the jam, either—both are awful 1980s songs). Instead, if you want to maximize the benefits of the time you spend working out: Pump up the intensity.

Two recent studies each make this point rather clearly. So as you head into your weekend routines, consider the quick takeaways.

Actionable takeaways from this post:

💡 Intensity beats volume: adding short bursts of vigorous effort to your weekly routine cut the risk of eight major chronic diseases by 29% to 61%, even when total exercise time stayed the same. read the study

☛ If you can run, do it in short bursts a couple times a week. Even for 20 seconds

☛ Do 10 squats holding a weighted ball or dumbbell, during the commercials

☛ Take the stairs…as fast as you’re able (and if possible, two at a time)

☛ When all else fails: jumping jacks for the daily heart-raising win!

💡 Walking is America’s favorite workout, but only about a quarter of walkers hit federal activity guidelines — pair your walks with weightlifting or a conditioning routine to actually meet the mark. read the study

☛ keep walking, but start and end walks by spending 2 minutes lifting something heavy

☛ if you walk often, consider carrying light weights or wearing a weighted vest

☛ a bag of garden soil or fitness sandbag are excellent ways to add weight to daily movement

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Training harder, even briefly, beats logging more easy/moderate minutes

A new study of nearly 100,000 adults wearing wrist accelerometers (so, no self-reporting problems that confound other studies) found that how hard you exercise matters more than how much.

People whose workouts included more than 4% vigorous activity had a 29% to 61% lower risk of contracting eight major chronic diseases—heart attacks, stroke, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune diseases, fatty liver, lung disease, kidney disease and dementia. They also were found to have a lower risk of death from any cause. The benefit held regardless of total exercise volume.

For some conditions, like autoimmune diseases and dementia, intensity mattered far more than volume. For others, like diabetes and kidney disease, both counted roughly equally.

In case you missed it:

Walking is good, but it isn’t nearly enough to maintain muscle

New research on nearly 400,000 American adults, drawn from a big annual CDC health survey, reveals that people who list walking as one of their top two exercise activities were among the least likely to hit the federal exercise guidelines (150 minutes of aerobic activity a week, plus two weekly strength training sessions), and about 23% of walkers met neither target. By contrast, people who ran, lifted weights, did conditioning work or danced cleared the combined guidelines at rates of 45% or higher. The authors call it discouraging that America's favorite exercise is also one of its least effective at the recommended dose, and they suggest pairing walking with something more demanding—like strength training—rather than treating it as a complete fitness program on its own.

I’ll leave you with this sobering chart from the above study, which tells several interrelated stories about the current state of American physical health:

The fractions of Americans who engage in physical activities

Enjoy the weekend and, by all means, keep going.

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Physical strength is so important in the second half of life (and it’s never too late to start building it). But strength alone won’t keep you quick, agile and fully physically capable of handling unexpected challenges. You also need to develop power.

Strength and power are different abilities. And here’s a sobering statistic: Once you hit 50, muscle power declines roughly twice as fast as muscle strength.1 Power is something I’ve put more personal emphasis on lately. Below, I recommend several exercises that anyone in good health can do to build strong and powerful muscles. (At bottom, I’ve also included several power exercises for people with spinal issues).

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What is “power” and why is it important?

Strength is your ability to move a heavy thing. Power is how fast you can move it. And here’s a twist that many mature athletes may not realize: Heavy strength training alone doesn’t produce meaningful power gains in older adults. You can squat twice your body weight (though I don’t recommend bar squats) but your vertical jump and chair-stand speed will barely move. The reasons are mechanical and neurological: heavy lifting trains the nervous system to produce force gradually. Power requires the nervous system to fire fast—to recruit type II fibers quickly and synchronously. Slow, heavy lifting does not.

That accelerated decline in muscle power after age 50 is, in large part, a fast-twitch fiber story, and that’s why gyms are full of strong people who haven’t trained for power. Power is what gives your muscles quickness, and quickness is what gives out first in daily life. Power, not raw strength, allows you to:

• get out of a low chair or off the ground

• catch yourself when your foot hits the curb

• climb stairs two at a time (without spilling a brimming glass of water)

• throw fast, jump high, punch/kick with force (or deflect punches and kicks)

• accelerate and decelerate

• snap a towel, pan-toss an omelette or lift luggage into an overhead bin

• catch a falling object (or return a wicked tennis or pickleball drop shot2)

Muscles don’t have to be big to be powerful. They just need to be trained to contract faster and generate force more quickly. Here’s how anyone—women and men, younger or older—can start building more fast-twitch muscle power.

15 power + strength workouts you can start doing now*

Power is moving a weight quickly. So to create more powerful muscle for longevity, the solution is pretty simple: move weight faster. You can adapt your existing workouts to do that, of course, using a “slow/down, fast/up” rhythm to any movement.

Here are 15 specific exercises (with a couple video clips) that you can do at home or the gym that are excellent for building functional power into your strength training. (Scroll to the bottom for power exercises for people experiencing spinal issues.)

• 9 of the 15 movements below have 🅗 after them, denoting exercises you can do at home with no equipment or almost no equipment

• The mace bell exercise shown the photo above is not among the 15 power exercises below, but it is a great workout. If there’s interest, I’ll create a post on it.

• I marked my favorite movements with 🤘

I’m creating a downloadable PDF for paying subscribers that includes a printable weekly planner you can put on your fridge. Look for an email from me on this early next week.

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1. Run a 1-minute experiment not reflexively looking at your phone. The next time you’re bored—or think you’re bored, because you may be only conditioned to feel bored when you’re actually full of interesting ideas and thoughts—instead of pulling out your phone, leave it in your pocket or bag for 60 seconds. Give yourself one short minute to have thoughts, let memories flood in, remember something you wanted to try or someone you want to get back to. When the minute’s up, reach for your phone, if you still want you. Try this experiment every day when you feel the urge to stare at your phone screen. Watch what happens after about 2 weeks of this daily experiment.

2. Brutally overhaul your phone’s notifications so that you:

   1. don’t hear, see or feel a buzz or ding every time you get a text or email (but can still get your calendar reminders, which are obviously important to allow through.

   2. activate the function that blocks everyone except the people you designate (ie, parents or children or school/doctor’s office) from reaching you when you’ve activated your “notifications silenced” setting.

      1. experiment with activating this setting during work or evening hours, when you really don’t want to be jumping at the phone whenever it flirps.

3. End your relationship with your phone (temporarily) every night before bed. Just for the hour before you turn the lights out. The phone should be dead to you in the run-up to bedtime.

4. Run a 1-hour experiment—are you ready for this?—leaving home without your phone. I know. It’s almost inconceivable. But it’s possible. And it’s strangely incredibly liberating. It’s like turning invisible to the world for a short time. Try it and see what happens. The Baby Steps version of this experiment is to leave work desk or office without your phone when you visit the bathroom, break room or a colleague’s desk. Graduate to spending lunch or errands without the phone.

5. Consider going back to paper when possible. It may cost a few dollars, but what about reading a paper newspaper or magazine, for instance, instead of just consuming them through a screen? Put a paper book (or, if you must, a digital book reader) on your bed pillow, to read for a few minutes in bed before sleep. Try it and see what happens.

How have you strategically tuned out of the noise around you? We’d love to hear your thoughts, experiments, wins, misses and everything in between.

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Several states restrict or prohibit doctors from promoting products they have undisclosed financial interests in. But in the above 2025 podcast, Dr. Mark Hyman and Dr. Anurag Singh, who is introduced only as an “immunology scientist,” promote Mitopure, a branded Urolithin A supplement, without disclosing that Singh is the chief medical officer of the company selling Mitopure online, or that Hyman earns commissions for marketing it on his own website.

In February, I wrote an article, “Is your longevity doctor scamming you?” that reveals how Dr. Mark Hyman regularly urges his newsletter readers to buy longevity supplements that he has an undisclosed financial interest in promoting. Which raises a bigger question.

Can doctors legally pitch supplements for money?

This article examines the legality of licensed medical professionals promoting longevity supplements in which they have an undisclosed financial interest. In response to my questions, the medical boards of California and Ohio said they would open investigations into Hyman’s marketing practices. Massachusetts may do the same but declined to answer my direct question about whether it would. In Texas, a spokesman for the state medical board said it only investigates complaints formally submitted through its online form or the mail.

lon·​gev·​i·​ty chis·​el·​er, n. someone who intentionally promotes unproven anti-aging products, claims or research for personal or professional gain.

Each state’s response is reported in detail below. But first, a brief backgrounder on state laws governing doctors, legally and ethically.

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In case you missed it:

How states regulate doctors

Every U.S. state regulates doctors and sets rules governing their conduct and business practices. State medical boards enforce punishments when licensed professionals disobey the rules. If a board determines that a doctor violated state laws or regulations, it may issue enforcement actions or recommend criminal charges.

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Dr. Hyman’s misstatements about unproven supplements

EDITOR’S NOTE: I reached out to Dr. Hyman and his website’s support staff by email last week, indicating I was planning to write about his email claims about fatty15 and Mitopure, and asking whether he believed his marketing of supplements violated laws in states where he is licensed to practice medicine. He did not respond.

fatty15: a clinically unproven supplement Hyman presents as proven

My previous article, from February, described how one of Hyman’s email newsletters had urged his readers to buy a supplement, fatty15, that he described as backed by rigorous research. He didn’t disclose that the majority of the research he cited was done by the company selling the supplement, that the research showed no evidence that fatty15 worked in humans, and that Hyman was paid by the company to promote the supplement.

Mitopure: a mitochonrial supplement Hyman earns money from on the sly

Two months later, on April 21, Hyman sent out an email pushing another supplement, Mitopure, that he also appears to have an undisclosed financial interest in promoting. Hyman markets the supplement through his website, drhyman.com, and the company that sells Mitopure online features Hyman on his own partner program web page (www.timeline.com/partners/mark-news). That email also misrepresents the scientific support for Mitopure and its benefits for people:

• every study of Mitopure on its branded webpage was funded by Amazentis, the company that sells it, and was authored by its employees, board members or scientific advisors.1

• the two muscle trials behind the strength claims both failed the main test the studies were designed to answer. In fact, the placebo worked just as well. Hyman’s email presents Mitopure’s evidence as settled science when the research reports describe themselves as only proof-of-concept studies needing confirmation.2

In a podcast3 last year, Hyman interviewed the chief medical officer of the company that sells Mitopure online, naming the product 10 times without disclosing Singh’s relationship to it or Hyman’s role as a Mitopure marketing affiliate that earns commissions from sales of the supplement through his website, drhyman.com.

Four state medical boards respond to my questions

I asked the state medical boards in California, Texas, Massachusetts and Ohio if Hyman’s promotions of supplements are violations of their laws or professional codes of conduct.

Each state medical board responded to my questions with varying levels of specificity and transparency. Two states—California and Ohio—indicated outright that they regarded my inquiry as an official complaint that they would investigate. Texas and Massachusetts didn’t explicitly say they took my questions as a formal complaint, but the language of their replies indicated that they likely did.

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Here’s how each state replied to questions about Hyman’s actions in regard to their laws.

California

California law prohibits physicians from receiving any compensation as an inducement for referring patients, clients or customers to any person or entity, under Business and Professions Code §650(a). A 2001 California Attorney General Opinion concluded that a clinician's profit-sharing arrangement to promote a third party's nutritional products to patients violates that statute. B&P §17500 separately prohibits false or misleading statements in connection with the sale of goods.

California’s response to my questions: In response to my questions, the Medical Board of California opened an inquiry into Hyman’s practices. “Your message has been forwarded to the Central Complaint Unit for review,” a spokeswoman for the board wrote in an email reply. (The Board accepts complaints via any medium, including email, mail, telephone, website form, or in person.)

California’s Department of Justice, similarly, indicated that it regarded my list of specific questions about Hyman’s promotion of fatty15 as a complaint to be investigated.

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Ohio

Ohio law uniquely allows its medical board to discipline physicians for violating the AMA’s own ethics code, incorporated into state law under ORC §4731.22(B)(18). AMA Opinion 9.6.4 expressly defines “selling” health-related products to include “endorsing a product that the patient may order or purchase elsewhere that results in remuneration for the physician” — and requires full disclosure of the financial arrangement with the manufacturer. Ohio also separately bars false or misleading advertising under ORC §4731.22(B)(5), which the statute defines to include any statement that misleads “because of a failure to disclose material facts” or that creates “false or unjustified expectations of favorable results.”

Ohio’s response to my questions: In response to my questions, the Medical Board of Ohio also indicated that it had opened an inquiry into Hyman’s practices. “If the board is made aware of allegations, it has a legal responsibility to follow its formal investigatory process,” a board spokeswoman said in an email.

Anyone can file a complaint to Ohio’s medical board. There is no statute of limitations.

Massachusetts

Massachusetts law includes the most specific rules in the country governing physicians selling outside products. The state’s Board of Registration in Medicine (BORIM) Policy 05-01 "Sale of Goods from Physicians' Offices," prohibits physicians from selling products "in a manner that has the potential to exploit patients, including but not limited to exclusive distributorships or personal branding." The policy also bars physicians from using "their office or their professional relationship with patients to promote any business venture." The policy explicitly cites and quotes AMA Code of Ethics Section 8.063—now renumbered Opinion 9.6.4—the same AMA opinion Ohio incorporates into its disciplinary statute. A separate anti-kickback statute, M.G.L. c. 175H, makes it unlawful to receive compensation as an inducement for recommending goods, although its applicability to consumer-paid supplements is limited because the statute is tied to goods reimbursable by health insurers.

Massachusetts’s response to my questions: It appears as if Massachusetts may have also have opened its own inquiry into Hyman, to determine if it should pursue a full investigation. After one spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Public Health dismissed my specific questions about Hyman’s promotion of fatty15 as “hypotheticals,” a second spokeswoman said in a follow-up email that the state board “cannot make a determination based on a complaint alone”—which indicates that the agency regarded my questions as a complaint that would receive “a preliminary screening” to determine whether it will pursue an investigation.

If the board does uncover what it considers a violation, deciding if Hyman deserves punishment would likely take months of bureaucracy.4

Texas

Texas law regulates physician advertising under 22 TAC §164.3, which deems an advertisement false or misleading if it fails to disclose that it is a paid-for presentation, or contains a testimonial without required disclaimers as to the credentials of the person giving it.

Texas’s response to my questions: The Texas Medical Board told me that “the board does consider newsletters, websites, flyers, etc. to constitute advertising.” That means Hyman's emails and website are subject to Texas's prohibition on undisclosed paid-for presentations. The board’s spokesman, Spencer Miller-Payne, said the board does not regard my specific questions about Dr. Hyman, or media reporting generally, as a complaint it would investigate. Complaints must be submitted formally online or by mail.

“If a complaint was received regarding a licensee’s advertising in violation of board rules,” Miller-Payne wrote, “we would follow our standard process, which may include informal resolution, dismissal, or formal disciplinary action.”

Anyone can file a complaint to the Texas Medical Board.

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Five recently published studies, summarized below with links and takeaways, harmonize around a few important themes for aging with strength:

• Move your body daily & lift some moderately heavy stuff a couple times a week

• Build regular meals around plants, nuts & seeds, fiber and olive oil, with lean, unprocessed protein

• Protect your sleep & be skeptical of supplements — most of the benefit other people claim from them depends on gut bacteria you may not have

The five studies below suggest strength and healthy meal plans are the two levers that keep you, your brain and the rest of your body as young as possible. Both are free, both are boring, and both—with a smidge of discipline—allow you to build muscle, slow brain aging, improve gut microbiomes and lower the inflammation that data suggest drives nearly every age-related disease.

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In case you missed it:

DISCLOSURE: I used a paid, upper-tier AI model to distill these five research papers into the concise summaries. Links to each paper are provided.

Lifting weights makes your brain look younger

Link

A two-year randomized trial published in GeroScience in February 2026 found that older adults who lifted weights had brains that looked measurably younger on MRI scans. Researchers in Copenhagen and Chile split 309 adults aged 62 to 70 into three groups: heavy lifters training three times a week, moderate lifters training once a week with home workouts, and a control group that did nothing strenuous. Both lifting groups came out two years “younger” on brain scans, the study found. The control group didn’t budge.

Takeaways:

• The benefit held a full year after training stopped

• Moderate lifters got results as good as the heavy lifters; you don’t need to train heavy

• Consistency matters more than intensity; two sessions a week is enough

Different parts of your brain age on different genetic timers

Link

USC researchers published the first study mapping how genes drive aging in specific regions of the brain, rather than the brain as a whole. The paper, out in GeroScience in December, used MRI scans from 41,708 people in the UK Biobank. They trained a computer to estimate how old each tiny piece of brain tissue looked, then checked which genes tracked with faster or slower aging in each region. They found 1,212 genetic variants that matter. Some genes accelerate aging in the areas that break down first in Alzheimer’s. Others protect the areas that go first in frontotemporal dementia.

Takeaways:

• Your brain doesn’t age as one organ but in pieces, on different genetic schedules

• Those schedules are partly set before you’re born

• In the future, a cheek swab might tell you which parts of your brain are most vulnerable, years before symptoms show up

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Eating less is still the best way to live longer, but it’s tough

Link

A major review in Nature Aging in March confirmed what researchers have known for nearly a century: eating less extends life; nothing else comes close. The review, written by longevity scientists from Oslo, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, the National Institute on Aging and University College London, synthesized decades of animal research. Humans are harder. A two-year trial called CALERIE asked people to cut calories by 25%. They only managed 19.5% for six months, then dropped to 9.1%.

Takeaways:

• Eating less extends life in animals, but it’s not feasible or fun for humans

• Humans saw better cholesterol, lower blood pressure, and slower biological aging

• Restricting calories isn’t healthy: mice on deep calorie cuts die faster from infections like the flu, and their wounds heal slower

• The study authors also flag Ozempic and similar drugs as a new way to get the benefits of eating less without the hunger

Your gut bacteria shape how you age

Link

A review in Nature Reviews Endocrinology earlier this year made a simple case: the bacteria in your gut help determine how you age, but they’re so different from person to person that generic advice rarely works.

Italian researchers pulled together the evidence showing that aging in Western populations shifts gut bacteria toward an unhealthy mix—less diversity, fewer good bugs, more inflammation-causing ones. This fuels the slow-burn inflammation that drives frailty.

The most interesting data come from people who live past 100: their gut bacteria get rearranged in a very particular way, with more of the anti-inflammatory strains.

Takeaways:

• Probiotics help a little, but not much

• The Mediterranean diet helps more, especially if you’re coming from a fast-food baseline

• Whether you benefit from polyphenols in berries, nuts, or pomegranates depends on whether your gut carries the bacteria that activate them—most older people don’t

• Movement and sleep feed the good gut bacteria

• Don’t trust supplement claims—what works for your friend may not for you

Stronger older women live longer, even if they don’t exercise

Link

Researchers at the University at Buffalo and six other institutions tracked 5,472 women aged 63 to 99 for more than eight years. Each woman did two simple tests at the start: squeezing a grip meter, and standing up from a chair five times. They also wore activity trackers for a week. Nearly 2,000 women died during follow-up. The weakest had three times the death rate of the strongest, according to the study, published in JAMA Network Open in February.

After the researchers controlled for everything they could, including age, weight, smoking, chronic illness, inflammation, how much the women actually moved and even how fast they could walk…

Takeaways:

• …Strong women still had a 33% lower risk of dying (these were all women past menopause)

• The effect held in women who barely exercised at all, and in women who used walkers

Was this post helpful, a colossal waste of time or something in between? Let me know what you’d like to see covered more, or less, in a comment.

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The U.S. is the only country where a majority of people view other folks as moral failures. Yes, you read that right.

A majority of Americans believe that the morality and ethics of other people are “bad” instead of good, according to a Pew Research survey published last month.1

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Second-worst place in this 25-nation canvass of moral judgement belongs to Turkey (aka the Republic of Türkiye), where 49% of survey respondents said other residents are moral and ethical failures. Behind Turkey were—in declining order of rates at which people view their compatriots as amoral turds—Brazil, Greece, France, Italy, South Africa, Hungary, Argentina and Nigeria.

Canada, adorably, had the lowest percentage of people (7%) who think poorly of others (a rate seven times lower than Americans.) Canada! So cute! 🤗

If I sound a little cynical, I apologize. As a Gen Xer, part of me can’t help it, and the other part of me isn’t really sorry.

The power—amid pessimism—of tumbling into kindness

If this survey—the first of its kind by Pew—isn’t depressing enough, consider that it was conducted more than a year ago, before the wheels started to feel like they were, if not falling off this big American bus of ours, then at least starting to shudder.

Whatever your level of cynicism toward other folks around the country nowadays, I raise this survey on AGING with STRENGTH to make a simple point, and perhaps issue a simple, uncynical plea, about the importance of growing older with kindness.

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The silver lining

It won’t be easy. But here’s a very slight but notable silver lining in the Pew survey: Older Americans (age 40 and up) were less likely than younger Americans to judge others as morally bad. Not by that much—50% vs 57%—but relatively speaking, it’s a good sign that age may, indeed, preserve our abilities to presume positive intent among others.

People over 40 have lived through enough—enough political cycles, enough national crises, enough personal betrayals and reconciliations—to know that moral judgment of entire populations is a blunt instrument. The 57% of younger Americans calling their fellow citizens morally contemptible are a generation that has grown up on digital screens. People who've been around longer came of age looking at other people, listening to other people and, just maybe, have had more actual humans in their lives who complicate making any sweeping moral verdict.

Coming of age in analog > coming of age digital

If you’re a Boomer, your get-on-with-it-already reputation is legendary, so no surprise there. But if you’re Gen X, you came of age in a culture that prided itself on irony and detachment, yet here you are, marginally more willing than the generations after you to give your neighbors the benefit of the doubt. Whatever that says about what people learn as they age—about the limits of judgment, the complexity of other people's lives, the cost of sustained contempt—it's worth sitting with.

Sitting with it is one way to let the kindness rise higher in your gut, in your mind, and push down the quick judgments we’re all growing uncomfortably comfortable making about folks who reside outside our respective bubbles, be they cultural, political, socio-economic, geographical, professional, creative or—speaking for myself here—athletic.

Tumbling is hard at this age. Kindness may be harder

Kindness doesn’t always seem like a coveted, admired or possible virtue these days. I’m not great at displaying it, in traffic, at the end of a hard week, in the face of the anonymous dumpster fire that is social media these days. I’m convinced by its difficulty that it’s an essential element of aging, because we’re all becoming creatures of greater habits, to one extent or another.

Let’s make being good to one another, and ourselves, one of those enduring habits.

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My self-criticism started two weeks ago and continued into this week.

“Dude, it’s been at least a week since you had a proper workout. You haven’t surfed in, what, two months? You still haven’t finished the major article that you promised yourself you were going to publish. Three days last week you failed to leave the house. Your heart rate hasn’t exceeded 95 beats per minute since March. You’ve fallen off your nighttime stretching routines. You’re flossing less. And here you are, eating a bag of Fritos at 11pm, watching NHL highlights on YouTube. 👏🏼“

I feel schlubby and contagious

I couldn’t make sense of why I wasn’t even attempting to be more physically, mentally, emotionally, nutritionally and productively excellent. I felt schlubby—my expression for unambitious and unappealing. This descent into achieving only a fraction of what my ambition expected of me wasn’t exactly a banner ad for aging with strength.

What it was, I came to understand, was necessary. We all need time off from our relentless self-improvement schedules. It can be messy. Our bodies may slow down before our brains figure out what the hell is going on. Whereupon we may fill the void with self-criticism and self-loathing.

I’ve written about the importance of self-forgiveness and how your body is not you—meaning it’s worthy of your compassion and respect. But this was a different feeling, a different need. It was a need to pause, to press the brake and get off the optimization train to wander around the rocks and dirt beyond the station, looking at my palms, rubbing the calluses and wondering what, exactly, I’m doing out in this Fritoed wilderness. Far, far away from my self-optimization routines.

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Though painful at times, after two weeks wandering through the Fields of Schlub, I figured it out: my body just needs a break; my brain, similarly, needs downtime away from the work of self-improvement. I think they actually end up working in my favor, setting myself up for a bigger leap forward, after a temporary step backward. To quote Nirvana from 19911:

I’m worse at what I do best
And for this gift I feel blessed

Sometimes, we need to loosen our grip on the daily or weekly need to be slightly more excellent than we were last week. Consider this a gentle reminder to give yourself permission to wander through your own Fields of Schlub when your body or brain or heart decides to strategically pause your optimization routines.

Just avoid the Fritos.

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I have fond memories of my heavy squat sessions. They were often on Friday nights, when the gym was empty but for the true believers. The core of my routine was 8 sets of 10 reps of 225 pounds. The endorphins, the sweaty heart-rate spike and the iron-denominated gains in strength were addicting; the return to existential baseline real.

“The king of all exercises”

Weighted back squats are one of the most demanding compound movements there is, because they recruit multiple muscle groups and joints simultaneously. NFL players, powerlifters and generations of coaches and dedicated gym rats the world over swear by them. They’ve long been considered one of the most complete lower-body exercises. They’re good at making your butt and legs look great. And they show the world—quite literally—how much of it you can shoulder.

And you should probably quit doing them.

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For most people over 50 (and, very arguably, anyone) bar squats are not the best way to achieve well-balanced, injury-free lower-body strength for the long haul. Back squats tend to exploit pre-existing structural problems in your hips, glutes and core and create the potential for insidious, slow-developing back, pelvic and knee injuries that, in midlife, become harder to heal.

Also, squats aren’t even the best way to make your butt look great.

To build lower-body strength, balance and stability, several other workouts beat squats, and I’ll get into those below. But first, the case against bar squats—and some context:

I know people love their bar squats. After 40-odd years, however, I reluctantly stopped doing them, once it became painfully clear how they were setting up my body for pain and injury. I know I’m not alone and, conversely, also that my experience isn’t universal and that lots of people love squats. Which is why I’m hoping you’ll….

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The case against weighted back squats

My argument is simple: Though legendary, bar squats—especially at or above body weight—are an outdated way to build lower-body strength. Depending on how hard and heavy you go, I’ve come to think of them as the workout equivalent of petting the bison in Yellowstone National Park: kinda not worth the risk.

Bar squats create lumbar spine compression

When you descend into a loaded barbell squat, you put your lumbar spine under significant compression. One study, albeit from 41 years ago, demonstrated that at loads between 80% and 160% of body weight, the compressive force on the lumbar spine can reach 6 to 10 times body weight.1

Heavy bar squats combined with deep knee flexion, in particular, carry increased risks as discs L4-L5 (the primary load-bearing segments of the lower spine) and L5-S1 (the lowest movable segment) are being compressed and sheared simultaneously while in a mechanically disadvantaged position.2

Back squats exacerbate your accumulated asymmetries

Back squats tend to magnify the asymmetrical muscle development that almost all of us have to some degree—a slight lean to one side, one hip dropping slightly lower than the other, a tilted sacroiliac joint, one foot turned out more than the other. Over time, these asymmetries tend to concentrate stress on one SI joint more than the other, which is a common source of the chronic, hard-to-diagnose low back and hip pain that long-term heavy squatters—me included—often develop in their 40s and 50s.

Beware the asymmetric, tilted SI joint. When SI joints are continually stressed by asymmetrical loading under heavy compression, the surrounding ligaments and joint surfaces can become chronically irritated in a way that is genuinely difficult to treat and often misdiagnosed as a lumbar or hip problem.

This is where the insidious negative impact of bar squats can become a problem, because SI joint dysfunction tends to accumulate quietly and become a nagging problem—the low-grade but persistent pain that seems to live in the middle of your lower back that you can’t stretch or massage away. (Once again, I’m speaking from personal experience.)

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Okay, but what about people who haven’t been damaged by four decades of heavy squats?

Other reasons to ditch loaded back squats

At 50 or older, mobility deficits tend to become baked in from decades of sitting, asymmetrical muscle imbalances and accumulated tightness. All these factors, I believe, argue against starting a new habit of squatting with a heavy bar on the back of your neck.

Hormonal changes that reduce the protective buffer. Particularly in women post-menopause, high-compressive loading of knees and hips under a barbell becomes a different proposition after 50 when hormonal support for ligaments, tendons and cartilage diminishes.

The human tendency to ego load. Who among us isn’t susceptible to throwing more weight on the bar in an attempt to impress everyone else in the gym, none of whom actually notice?

Joint pathology accumulates silently. Plenty of people in their 50s have cartilage degradation, meniscus degeneration or disc issues that don’t produce symptoms during most movements but can flare up under barbell squat mechanics.3 That footnote refers to a 2024 paper in the Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology that identifies excessive arching of the spine and knee valgus (inward movement under load) as the two most common problems in older adults who do bar squats, creating the potential for injury, on top of all the other factors mentioned above.

In that regard, I’m pretty much Exhibit A for my argument to ditch bar squats. I can squat heavy, and my form may look fine at first glance. But as you watch the above video, notice how much my left knee wanders with each rep, relative to the red vertical line (my right knee also does but not as much). That’s knee valgus, likely a function of weak hip stabilizer muscles, including medial glutes.

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I hadn’t noticed that movement until I recorded myself, and for anyone who continues back squats, I recommend they do the same, from the front, side and rear, to understand exactly how their bodies may be compensating to manage the weight.

Further below, I offer a video of me doing a different weighted leg exercise that works the same muscles but without the lateral knee movement.

Don’t take just my word for it

As it turns out, some heavy hitters in the professional strength and conditioning world have come out in favor of ditching bilateral back squats. Here’s Mike Boyle, a renowned former strength & conditioning coach for the NHL’s Boston Bruins, the U.S. Women’s Olympic Ice Hockey Team and the Boston Red Sox, speaking in September on Peter Attia’s podcast (before Attia’s troubles) about why he moved away from training athletes on bilateral back squats:

Boyle argues against bilateral training in favor of unilateral strength work, which I was heartened to hear because it validated one of my favorite lower-body strength routines—it’s No. 3 in my list below.

6 better alternatives to squats for lower-body strength

If back squats work for you, and you love them and you’re convinced your form is excellent and you don’t want to give up the exercise, don’t. Just don’t go heavy.

But if you’re willing to consider better strength workouts for your legs and core, here are my top 6 strength workouts with explanations why I think each is superior to back squats.

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Are you happy? I don’t know anyone who says they are, except for few venture capitalists. The rest of us are moving too fast, talking too fast, listening too fast, eating too fast, and just trying to keep up too fast. This is neither a healthy nor good way to age with strength. Something about the way we’re living now has to change.

1966: The 59th Street Bridge Song → 2026: The 59th Open Browser Tab Song

The most famous anthem for slowing down to savor life’s simple pleasures may be Simon and Garfunkel’s 1966 classic, The 59th Street Bridge Song. It documents what life was like about 300 years ago, kicking around cobblestone streets, talking to flowers and taking afternoon naps. Here’s what I believe that song would have turned into, had a young Paul Simon written it today:

The 59th Open Browser Tab Song
Slow down, you swipe too fast
You got to make the doomscroll last
Just puttin’ down my soulless phone
Looking numb and feeling shitty
Ba da-da da-da da-da, and self pity

Hello shitpost, you’ve got ‘em going
I’ve come to watch the anger growin’
Ain’t you got no memes for me?
Doo-ait-n-doo-doo, feeling shitty
Ba da-da da-da da-da, and self pity

I got no job (do you?) no deepfakes to peep
I’m laid off and lousy and ready to weep
Let ChatGPT drop its algos on me
Life, it’s over, AI’s winning

(If that didn’t make any sense, here’s The 59th Street Bridge Song’s actual lyrics.)

Why life now feels too fast, and what to do about it

Relentlessly adopting ever more technology is perhaps the primary way that many of us become trapped in the cultural speed cycle that only seems to be accelerating with AI-everything-all-the-time. (There are other ways, too, such as over-exposure to present-day politics, but I’ll focus here on the tech and AI.) But it’s not only the speed of the changes but the opacity of what’s causing them, who’s influencing them and why that is creating a sense that we no longer have agency in how we get to live our lives.

The feeling that you don’t know what you don’t know can be incredibly destabilizing.

We’re at only the beginning of a massive—to use the technical term—enshittification phase of our professional and personal lives, in which trying to understand and keep up with the changes that we are continually told are good (really good!) for us can often lead, instead, to more stress, uncertainty, dysfunction and a lower quality of life.

For a clever take on this idea, watch this:

Disenshittifying AI to slow down your life

Ignoring AI isn’t the answer, and learning how to functionally use it will be, for anyone who needs to professionally function or understand how other people do, essential. Because it creates that critical sense of agency. For example, I’m not a tech person but I use AI every day to solve practical business problems, test arguments, understand complex subjects and be more creative.

In the past week or so, I’ve used paid versions of AI to:

• identify false claims about longevity supplements, including those made by well-known longevity doctor who shall remain nameless (Mark Hyman)

• plan two summer vacations (because the original plan fell through)

• create a spreadsheet of my 2025 business income and expenses for my taxes

• examine the condition of a 150-year-old gold coin

• examine aging research claims made in published scientific papers

• create images to top off AGING with STRENGTH articles

• understand the circular financing problem at the heart of “AI bubble risk”

• transcribe the audio of two hour-long interviews of , for a profile I wrote of her for the forthcoming issue of Geezer magazine

• find the best credit card offer with the best benefits for the lowest annual fee

• proofread my articles before I publish — though I still missed a typo (since fixed)

• ruthlessly cuss out Claude.ai after I caught it condensing two of Sari’s remarks in the raw transcript of our interview, contrary to my explicit instructions.

What I have not used AI to do is write this or any other AGING with STRENGTH article. Because certainly you’ve noticed how many other Substacks, including many doctors, have begun feeding readers dense slabs of AI-generated Content that feels like it came from a vending machine running an Nvidia chip.

However, in the spirit of stress testing my ideas on practical steps we can take to slow down our lives and recapture a diminishing sense of agency, I did what any modern reporter would do: I asked the most robust AI model I can find. Here’s what my paid version of Claude (Sonnet 4.6) had to say about how to slow down your life in actionable ways—and its rather candid response to my interrogation of its answers.

Disclosure: I think some of Claude’s recommendations are effective. Including committing to mastering an analog skill—resistance training, sport shooting, restoring bicycles or cooking, for instance—and trying a weeklong “information fast.”

Keeping the phone pocketed more often, and keeping it quiet always

One habit I changed that had a cascading effect on slowing my life down is refusing to pull out my phone on the walk home from my daughter’s school in the morning. Like almost every other parent, once you see the kid walk past the gate, I’d pull out my phone and occupy my brain with…nothing really important. But one day a year or more ago, I forced myself to keep the phone pocketed and just walked home occupied by only my thoughts. About a week later, I no longer had the urge to “enphone” myself on the walk home, and since then, I’ve also been able to stop habitually looking at it while in grocery check out lanes, waiting rooms and the car, at stoplights.

I also don’t allow emails and text messages to ding, bleep, buzz or vibrate my phone. As a result, I can focus without interruption when necessary, and life feels a little slower and more on my terms. I check texts a few times a day, in batches. Your friends and family may complain at first, but they get used to it. I still regress to checking scores of teams playing sports I care nothing about, just because. But keeping the phone quiet has made me feel less like Harrison Bergeron (thanks, Kurt Vonnegut) and more like a pre-internet version of myself.

Going back to writing hand-written letters

One of the cultural truths that Geezer has proved, as a print-only, thrice yearly coffee-table magazine with original reporting and writing about the Gen X aging experience, is that people are hungry to read real words on real paper written by other real people. (That appeal crosses generational frontiers: Geezer has, to our surprise, a growing number of Gen Z and Millennial readers. I think they react to Geezer the same way I reacted to grainy, 1960s film footage of Sasquatch: “What the hell is this?”)

Which got me thinking about starting a new thing: writing a hand-written letter and mailing it, in an envelope addressed by hand and affixed with a stamp, every month to whomever wants to receive one. The letters will be four handwritten pages, give or take, and include notes and observations about the analog world that keeps life interesting, and will probably also have some drawings from my 10-year-old daughter, an artist at heart.

Whoever wants to receive these mailed letters will get one, for a flat rate of $8 a month. I’ll create a website dedicated to this idea shortly, but I thought I would first share it with you, dear readers. If you’re interested, you can message me here

…or use my ko-fi page to set up a monthly $8 payment (and cancel anytime).

If you hate that I’m even writing about this idea, please leave a comment. Any honest feedback is good to have. Be sure to explain why you hate it.

Until my next post, on more unconventional strength training movements, consider experimenting with AI, to build agency, and reading paper, to keep one foot in the analog world.

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The BLUF (bottom line up front): Research into the biology of long-living older adults reveals unique differences in so-called super agers and centenarians vs other people, and suggests what we can do to help us live longer, too.

The bodies and brains of very old and healthy people are roadmaps with some useful directions for people interested in aging with existential strength.

Two recent studies examined complementary facets of what separates so-called super agers—people who live well into their 80s in superb health—and centenarians from everyone else. Each report suggests that the biology of staying remarkably fit in body and mind may be far more flexible than most people over 50 have been led to believe.

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Join me on a live chat on Wednesday, March 4, at 10am Pacific Time / 1pm Eastern Time / 6pm GMT. Join me for a lively conversation about aging, ageism, strength & fitness, food & nutrition, sleep, stress, sex, menopause (I’m not an expert but I recently interviewed someone who is), and any other subject relevant to life after 45. I’ll happily take your questions, suggestions, curses and criticisms.

Find the chat thread here: https://www.agingwithstrength.com/chat

In other words: the new science supports the idea that moving your body with purpose daily, and feeding it whole food and clocking sufficient sleep, puts you in position for maximum healthy longevity. (For paying subscribers, here are several actionable recommendations to move and feed your body like its 1899).

What the centenarian & super ager studies revealed

The research on Swiss centenarians (press release here; scientific paper here) finds that certain 100‑year‑olds have blood protein patterns that look more like those of middle‑aged adults.

The new examination of brain tissue taken posthumously from “super‑agers” in their 80s (decent NYT summary here; scientific paper here) finds that they made roughly twice as many new brain cells as their peers, helping them keep unusually sharp memories.

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Together these findings suggest that, even very late in life, the brain and body can stay far more youthful than we once thought.

• People in their 80s with exceptional memories are still growing roughly twice as many new brain cells in a key memory region as their peers, the super agers study found. The study also found that Alzheimer's leaves marks on the physical structure of brain cells before those cells even start changing how their genes behave — suggesting the disease may be taking hold earlier than previously understood.

• 100‑year‑olds who reach that age in relatively good shape carry blood protein patterns that look closer to those of middle‑aged adults and, fascinatingly, have significantly lower levels of antioxidant proteins than the standard geriatric population—the opposite of what one might expect, since antioxidants combat “free radicals” that damage cells, proteins, fats and DNA.

  • A note about the paper’s methodology: The researchers did not document nutrition, exercise or lifestyle factors. Rather, they drew blood from 39 Swiss centenarians 100–105 yrs old, a few dozen hospitalized octogenarians (aged 80–90) and 40 healthy younger adults aged 30–60, then measured 724 proteins across inflammatory and cardiovascular panels. The paper is part of a larger analysis of centenarians called The SWISS100 Project.

For anyone over 50, 60 or 70, that raises the stakes on unglamorous habits—how often you actually move, how hard you exercise, what you eat, how well you sleep, and whether you keep forcing your brain to learn difficult new things—because those day‑to‑day decisions appear to feed directly into the same systems that help a small minority stay sharp and physically capable deep into old age.

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Put yourself in position to live healthier for longer by:

• Moving your body. Every day. With purpose.

  • Walking every day is good. Walking briskly is better.

  • Three-minute mini-workouts you can do at home in street clothes with no equipment help build strength & flexibility across multiple planes of motion.

  • Resistance training builds muscles you’ll need.

• Shopping for whole foods (ie, food that spoils if you don’t eat it) and think of eating meals based on lean meats & fish, beans & legumes, olive/avocado oil and greens.

• Sleeping 7–8 hours a night, optimally on a regular schedule.

• Working on one hard mental task each week (learn, practice, or memorize something new).

• Practicing daily gratitude and, by all means, daily self-forgiveness.

See you on Wednesday’s live chat, if you can make it.

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The billion-dollar longevity industry has become the Las Vegas of clinical science: a faux oasis that cares about only one thing—taking your money. To do that, Vegas built casinos; longevity marketers just lie.

Longevity literacy is therefore a skill—the ability to understand how a growing society of wellness chiselers and charlatans present half-truths as settled science and unproven supplements as the best $149 purchase you’ll ever make—but only if you act now.

lon·​gev·​i·​ty chis·​el·​er, n. someone who intentionally promotes unproven anti-aging claims or misrepresents science for unacknowledged financial gain.

Below are three recent examples of how agents in the Longevity-Industrial Complex take advantage of their own readers—their most dedicated customers—to enrich themselves or burnish their reputations. I know some AGING with STRENGTH readers don’t enjoy articles like this one and, candidly, I don’t enjoy writing them. But I believe pushing back against wellness hype is important, to set a standard for the future.

Let’s get into each longevity literacy example in detail.

1 | Dr. Mark Hyman misrepresents research to sell a supplement

Hyman is a well-known and relentless figure in Big Longevity. He runs his own branded website and co-founded an online wellness site, Function Health. He’s published best-selling books and prominently advertises his proximity to famous influencers.

On Sunday, subscribers to Hyman’s newsletter woke up to an email, titled, “A Non-Negotiable in My Healthy Aging Routine.” In the first paragraph, Hyman presents his hook, which is “the science behind how you can slow biological aging,” and then baits that hook with a saturated fatty acid called C15:0, which, Hyman says, has “caught my attention.”

Turns out there’s a C15:0 “standout supplement” called fatty15. Hyman enthusiastically recommends it, citing 15 research papers to support his assertion that fatty15 can “improve our everyday lives.” And, as luck would have it, fatty15’s manufacturer is offering Hyman’s “community” a 20% discount.

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But what he presents as a personal anecdote of research and discovery is, in fact, an unacknowledged sales pitch.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: I reached out to Dr. Hyman and his website’s support staff by email several time, asking for his response to my questions about his financial relationship to fatty15 and his interpretation of the clinical studies about its active ingredient. He did not respond. A representative from the DrHyman.com support staff replied, suggesting I review Hyman’s website writings.

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The undisclosed commercial relationship

Though he doesn’t acknowledge it in his email, Hyman financially benefits from fatty15 sales (the supplement’s website identifies Hyman as a paid promoter of the product). Hyman also sells fatty15 directly through his own website, with his own branded product page and has a promotional code relationship with the company.

Hyman’s email structured as a personal letter from a doctor (“as I dug into the emerging research…”) is actually cloaked marketing of a product pipeline.

The intentional misrepresentation of research to sell supplements

Hyman’s email dives into what seems like convincing evidence that fatty15 is a supplement with a proven clinical track record. Hyman cites no fewer than 15 research studies. But in fact:

• Almost none of the research Hyman cites was conducted in humans, and the two studies that were found effects too small, too narrow, and too preliminary to support anything he's claiming

• Several of the 15 cited studies are authored by the co-founder and CEO of fatty15’s manufacturer, Seraphina Therapeutics.

• Several other papers Hyman cites studied only mice, rabbits, or dolphins, or involved petri-dish experiments on isolated human cells — the kind of early-stage science that routinely fails to translate into human benefits.

• The only human clinical trial of C15:0 supplementation in Hyman's entire reference list involved 30 obese 20-year-olds, and across most key measures—cholesterol, blood pressure, glucose, and inflammation—found no significant improvements.

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None of the 15 papers Hyman cites is a randomized, controlled trial testing C15:0 in healthy middle-aged or older adults — which is precisely the population to which he’s surreptitiously marketing.1

I asked two longevity scientists about Hyman’s representation of the research behind fatty15. One of the scientists said the supplement may have potential but has “extremely weak evidence for human benefit at this point.” The other scientist called Hyman’s email “100% advertisement.”

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“I looked up this product…a while back and read through a lot of those papers,” this scientist told me. “There is no data worth citing, all conjecture and animal data designed to sell a ‘new’ type of fatty acid.”

The sad part is that C15:0 might turn out to have real benefits for people. Hyman’s fatty15 hustle may turn out to be everything he already says without evidence that it is. But when a doctor says things that aren’t fully supported by science, it’s a longevity scam.

2 | Katie Couric Media disguises a supplement ad as straight journalism

Before she became infamous for hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, Katie Couric had been famous for being a journalist, and rightly so. Today, she runs what appears to be a rather successful media company that blends soft-focus marketing content with some wellness advocacy. But Couric still trades on her previous career as a broadcast news maven, so when her company publishes what looks like reporting, there’s an expectation of transparency and truth.

Which is why I was surprised when I came across a Katie Couric Media article whose headline, I’ve Tried Countless Wellness Products — This One Is Different, sounded like straight-up marketing. The subtitle, Showing your liver some love has never been easier, felt like Marketing 101. But okay, I’m an old-school reporter. Maybe I was just being a curmudgeon.

Turns out the article, whose opening line is, “I’m a sucker for a good Instagram ad,” is a wet-kiss “advertorial” for a liver supplement called Dose. But there’s nothing at the top of the post to alert readers. To the contrary, the post is presented as a piece of (flabby) reporting. To appear more like a real news story, it even includes an interview with “an expert in the dietary supplement and nutrition market,” Kiran Krishnan.

“As an expert, Krishnan can vouch that the brand has done rigorous clinical research,” the article squeals, “to show that Dose’s clinically backed formula is effective in supporting liver health.”

What the article does not disclose is that Krishnan is a member of Dose’s scientific advisory board. At the bottom of the piece, an icon reveals that it was “sponsored by Dose,” and the penny dropped for this reporter.

So it’s an ad. Who cares?

As with Hyman’s email, you may ask: What’s the big deal? Anybody with a nose for b.s. would quickly determine that this fluff piece wasn’t a New York Times investigation. And that’s a fair point. What’s also fair is treating your readers, who are your customers, with enough respect to be transparent in your operations. In this case, that means putting the sponsorship notification at the top of the post, so readers can decide for themselves what value, if any, to give a piece of marketing schtick masquerading as reporting.

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Transparency doesn’t sell supplements, apparently.

3 | A university dementia study opts for misleading clickbait headlines

Could diet soda increase dementia risk? That was the head-turning headline of a recent article by the University of Miami’s medical school (or probably more accurately, the school’s marketing department) to stoke attention to its new analysis.

When a university medical school publishes research, there’s a very reasonable expectation of accuracy, without which public trust in even that institution will quickly fade. I’ve written previously about Stanford aging research that didn’t quite back up what the medical school’s press release claimed.

But I haven’t before seen a university medical school so blatantly imply a potential spit-out-your-diet-soda conclusion—drinking Diet Coke could bring on dementia—before acknowledging a few paragraphs later that, in fact, it doesn’t.

“A new analysis…suggests that drinking diet soda every day may be linked to a higher risk of developing dementia,” the article, published Jan. 26 by Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, reported. Some 15 paragraphs later, the article casually mentions that:

”41% of high diet soda consumers in the study had diabetes, compared with 18% of the rest of the cohort.

“When researchers repeated the analysis excluding participants with obesity or diabetes, the association between diet soda and dementia disappeared.”

Translation: Nevermind! Nothing to see here, folks. Thanks for coming.

That’s why I believe it’s necessary to publish analyses of poor or disingenuous longevity and wellness marketing intentionally disguised as honest reporting. In this case, a peer-reviewed research paper published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease stood up a straw-man argument with a juicy headline before essentially knocking it down.

Yet another reason why longevity literacy matters now more than ever.

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