Part 1: Ditching wearables & gearing down

Last month, I put my Apple Watch in a drawer and went back to wearing a mechanical timepiece. Immediate relief and satisfaction. Relief from the bad habit of constantly measuring my every moment in motion, and satisfaction at terminating the no-longer-useful health-data stream I’d become habituated to.

Or maybe just comfortably numb to. (As a grammar curmudgeon, I nonetheless believe ending sentences with a preposition is just fine.)

The fact was, after years of recording most of my non-household movements by category and duration, I knew what I needed to know about how many calories a 2-mile walk or a 50-minute strength-training session burned, and whether or not I’d done enough to hit my daily burn goal. That information was no longer serving my needs.

I’m being purposely provocative about wearable devices, aware of the counterarguments. My provocation is, however, well founded. We’ve over-rotated, as tech folks are fond of saying, toward tracking our data instead of understanding ourselves.

An Apple Watch, Oura ring or Garmin device measures only what it can measure: heart rate, distance, sleep hours, pace, a “readiness score.” (Sleep stages, VO₂ max and readiness scores are estimated by algorithms, not measured.) Yes, they can reveal long-term trends. But if you’re adequately tuned into yourself, your trends become intuitive knowledge. Devices can't tell us if our balance is slipping, our hips are stiff, we’re stuck in a workout rut or if one leg is weaker than the other.

Wearables are gear. Gear helps us perform a specific function. When gear becomes a proxy for how we’re feeling about ourselves, it’s time to unplug and get back to basics.

Related read: Your body is not you

I’ve come to view wearables as potential portals to imbalance by wedding us to an unhealthy either/or: either achieve fixed daily data points or trigger an all-too-human failure response—which tends to only increase our dependence on the device and its manufacturer.

One important bit of housekeeping

In two weeks, AGING with STRENGTH’s subscription price is going up. But it doesn’t have to for you. Sign up now and lock in the current rate—just $1.23 per week—for life. Here’s an explanation of everything you get with your subscription:

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The obsession with personal-fitness data reminds me of a previous reckoning, in the early 2000s, when several marathoners tragically died from over-hydrating themselves during races following years of trendy but wrong arguments that athletes weren’t drinking enough Gatorade. It’s hard to read the first two paragraphs of the study in the above link and not feel outrage at how easily our culture (and the sports drink companies that sponsored studies that drew false conclusions) can deceive us.

The runners who died had been told to drink beyond their thirst. Essentially, to override their internal thirst signals because…data! In 2015, an international panel of experts on the condition concluded—are you ready?—that athletes should drink when they’re thirsty. Yes.

The deaths were preventable, the panel’s lead author, Tamara Hew-Butler, said, “if we just listen to our bodies.”1 That was more than a decade ago.

A modern-day fitness tracker invites the same trade: an outside instruction that can, if we allow it to, take the place of our own human signals. It’s become easy to chase the numbers the device tracks and ignore the weaknesses it can’t.

Part 2: Tune into your weaknesses, for healthy longevity

Long-term strength requires paying attention to what’s not being electronically measured, what’s not being regularly trained. It’s relatively easy to become strong in one area: your gym routine, your roadwork, the treadmill program. But developing strength across many of the most important physical domains is much harder. No one likes to train their weaknesses, even though weak spots predict earlier death.

In one well-known balance study, 1,702 people aged 51 to 75 took a one-leg test. After accounting for age, sex and underlying conditions, being unable to stand unsupported on one leg for 10 seconds was linked to an 84% higher risk of death from any cause over the following decade.2

That’s a strong argument for why training weakness will probably add healthy years to your life. But let me give you two current examples from just this past week: Gym bros failing at Pilates, and hardcore runners with weak legs.

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Gym bros failing at Pilates, and distance runners with no muscles

This recent Wall Street Journal piece (gift link) highlights how men with gym-built muscles fall apart in a Pilates class because they’re strong only in the one, narrow way they train. Showy muscles don’t get you to a healthy 80, 85, 90 years; core strength, unilateral strength, balance and flexibility can. And this week in The New York Times, an article titled “6 Things Experts Wish Every Runner Did to Avoid Injury” quoted two experts lamenting how poorly muscled many distance runners are.

“You’d be surprised how many runners are weak,” the article quoted Stuart Warden, an Indiana University professor of physical therapy, as saying. “They can run fast, they can run long distances, but when you actually test their strength, they’re relatively weak.”

Instead of only running, runners should engage in strength training focused on lower-body exercises like squats, lunges, Romanian deadlifts and glute bridges, the experts noted.

Both articles expose the danger of training only what you’re already good at. Dr. Warden went on to say in the NYT article that many running injuries come from muscle weaknesses and imbalances, with other muscles and tendons overworking to compensate. At age 35, 40, and in my case even 50, your body can still compensate without too many breakdowns.

At 55, 60 and older, not training your weak areas is playing with fire: long-term injuries that become much more difficult to recover from, and exceedingly frustrating to manage the consequences of, in older adulthood.

Part 3: How to start training your weaknesses—10 steps

Lifters skip Pilates because it looks soft. Runners skip the weight room because they identify only as runners. These are fit, motivated people. If they have blind spots, we probably all do.

Being a beginner is uncomfortable. Older adults face a version of this too, avoiding what we’re bad at; for example: balance work, flexibility training and—what I notice most conspicuously at the gym—unilateral lower-body strength.

Related read: The case for quitting bar squats

To start training your weakness, thereby rounding yourself into a durable candidate for extreme healthy longevity, thereby not leaving healthy years on the table:

1. Take that 10-second, one-legged balance test. If you can’t pass it, you know where to start.

2. Identify your strengths. They often point to your weaknesses. Gym folks often lack cardio fitness, core strength or joint mobility. Runners often lack strength. Cyclists often don’t train upper body or lateral strength. Swimmers may lack lower-body power that matters most in life’s latter third.

3. Take off your wearable device. Maybe just one day a week. To practice listening to what your body and brain are telling you, first and foremost.

4. Watch how you cheat in daily life. Pulling yourself up the stairs by the banister, sitting down to put on your socks, grabbing the door frame to get out of the car. Those small workarounds are weaknesses you’ve already found and quietly accommodated.

5. Test one side at a time. Stand, lunge, press and carry with each side alone. Most people have a weaker side, and two-legged, two-handed exercises let the stronger one cover for it. Many of my #WorkoutWednesday videos focus on developing unilateral strength and balance.

In case you missed it….

6. Ask someone who knows you what you avoid. A spouse, partner or training buddy knows your tendencies to avoid potential weaknesses, e.g., never getting down on the floor, avoiding single-leg workouts that feel awkward (because they’re showing where/how you’re weaker), or remaining in a rigidly defined workout pattern.

7. Take one class you expect to be bad at. Pilates or yoga if you lift; a weight room session if you only run or cycle; a dance class if you do neither. Navy SEAL and Army Delta trainers have put guys into comedy improv teams, on stage. Talk about being out of your comfort zone. Where you struggle in front of strangers is very useful information.

8. Fold the weak thing into your day. Stand on one leg while making coffee (I use a thick foam pad while making my latte every morning, and do hip-openers while brushing teeth before bed). Do five slow squats before you sit down to work. A few minutes daily beats a dedicated session you’ll talk yourself out of.

9. Look hardest at the habit you defend most. With sleep, food or drink, the one you’re quickest to justify is usually the one to work on. If you can find an argument for why “I can’t…” actually means “I’d really rather not…”, congratulations! You’ve identified a weak area, and you’re about to get stronger for it.

10. Expect slow progress. You’ve avoided this weakness, or these weaknesses, for years, maybe decades. Retest every month with the same tests, write down the results, and judge yourself by those rather than by a readiness score.

What did you think of this article? Let me know in a comment.

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Eat Like It’s 1899 helps you make healthy, tasty, nutrient-rich meals from whole foods in under 20 minutes (today’s recipe takes a bit longer—thanks, chia seeds!). The ELI 1899 mission is to reduce the ultra-processed, industrialized deathfood that makes big corporations rich and diminishes your health, wellness and lifespan.

For a deeper explanation of where I came up with this phrase, watch this introduction.

You get affordable, repeatable meals that taste great and serve your nutrition and fitness goals. Every episode comes with a recipe card and a protein & nutrient profile that paying subscribers can download & print.

In this episode, I bring you a layered high-protein, high-fiber breakfast that you can carry to work, school or the gym and that powers you through your morning (or probably longer, given how much nutrition is packed into this meal). The figs and banana provide natural sweetness, which I’ve aided ever so slightly in this recipe with one teaspoon of maple syrup per jar.

Not sure chia seeds are your thing? I was the same way … until I started soaking them in water and putting them on my yogurt. Chia (and figs) are nutrient-dense and fiber rich. See the nutrient card below for the full nutrition profile of the entire breakfast.

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Excuse this one small bit of housekeeping…

On October 14 this newsletter’s subscription price is going up to $79/year and $9/month, to match the new cadence of AGING with STRENGTH’s fitness, nutrition, investigative-reporting and other content. But it doesn’t need to go up for you. If you become a paying subscriber now, you lock in the current lower rate of $64/year or $8/month forever—as long as you remain a paying subscriber.

Here’s more detail about the rate change and the new content channels that I recently launched. Become a paying subscriber now, for what averages out to be $1.23 per week, and get the strength, nutrition and deep-reporting benefits that keep you informed and powerful—physically and otherwise—in life’s second half.

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Watch other Eat Like It’s 1899 episodes:

Recipe card and protein & nutrient profile

Here’s an easy-to-follow recipe card and detailed nutrient breakdown of the protein, vitamins and minerals that this meal provides per serving:

(Free subscribers can watch the entire video above. Paying subscribers get the recipe and detailed nutrition cards below.)

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Sandbag workouts for unconventional strength & power

I’m not sure there’s a more enjoyable and time-efficient method to build full-body strength and VO2 max than a 15-minute sandbag workout. You’ll feel it in every region of your body the next day, and burn more calories than seems possible in a room full of dumbbells and weight plates.

As a personal testimonial, after filming the workout in this video yesterday, I woke up feeling it (in a good way) in my shoulders, hips, lower back (in a pleasant, “oh, you worked out” kind of way) and even arms and fingers, from all the grappling and gripping. And I probably burned 400 calories, judging from how much I was sweating. Good clean fun!

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One important bit of housekeeping

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If you don’t have a sandbag, they’re not expensive to buy and fill. Alternatively, your gym may have weighted balls (aka medicine balls, as we used to call them) that allow you to do a form of these sandbag workouts.

See all Move Like It’s 1899 videos and articles here

The physiology behind sandbag workouts

All four sandbag moves train your muscles against a load that shifts as you lift it, so your legs, trunk and grip have to keep adjusting to control it. The shoulder lift and the toss add speed, and speed is what we lose first. Muscle power, meaning how fast you can produce force, declines earlier and faster with age than strength does.1 Much of that loss comes from shrinking fast muscle fibers, the ones that fire for quick, forceful movements.

In a Dutch study, those fibers were 29% smaller in men averaging 71 years old than in men averaging 23. But after six months of training, the older men’s fast fibers grew by

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I often write that strength comes in many forms, not just physical. Building strong muscles and bones is important for anyone over 50, 60, 70, but they’re not enough. What I haven’t sufficiently written about is emotional strength: what it is, why it’s important and how to build it.

Though I make my strength-training recommendations gender neutral—because roughly half of AGING with STRENGTH subscribers are women—I haven’t dived equally into the importance of emotional strength because the other half of my subscribers are, roughly, men. (Yes, I meant to write it that way.) As a species, men too often dismiss “emotional strength” for being not something: not specific, not rewarding, not masculine and, therefore, not all that important.

But it is important, because she’s not coming back…

And yet, about two-thirds of heterosexual divorces in the United States are initiated by the wife, a share that has not changed much since the 1940s.1 Data aren’t broken out by age group, but nothing in them suggests that post-50 breakups are any different. Men are nearly twice as likely as women to say the split came as a surprise.2

Divorces are only one kind of data point, obviously. But given how comparatively poor men are at maintaining social ties—one of life’s enduring true clichés, I’d say—especially after the one person they relied on to maintain them is gone, a portrait emerges of a kind of deficit of emotional strength in many men over 50.

Emotional strength is the ability to cope with, navigate and tolerate difficult emotions and life stressors without suppressing them or letting them control your actions. It’s not stoicism but, rather, the courage to feel deep discomfort, sadness or anxiety without numbing or wholly distracting yourself from it.

Whether many men deserve to be left is a worthy topic for a different essay. My argument here is that when it becomes clear that she’s not coming back, whether by death or by choice, too few men understand how to build crucial emotional resilience the way they’d create the physical version of it—for instance, by lifting heavy things.

I write that as if I’m an expert in emotional resilience. I’m not. But I do know the deep anxiety of watching someone you’ve come to count on in your life suddenly leave it, regardless of how hard you try or how many times you ask why.

Whether by death or by choice, she’s gone and she’s not coming back. The pain is spectacular. Answers are few. What do I do now? How do I recover stronger?

A field guide to handling grief and loss in older adulthood

Emotional strength is a vital life skill for everyone, of course, not just for men. But I’m making this into a mini-field guide for older male emotional resilience because, maybe, there’s an audience that needs to hear it. Not that many men on Substack or elsewhere in the saner corners of social media seem willing to risk diving into a subject that can be easy to lampoon as faux fragile, enormously entitled or supremely solipsistic.

Not that many men equate vulnerability with courage, either. But there’s still time to start.

A good reason to subscribe before October 14….

On that day, this newsletter’s subscription price is going up to $79/year and $9/month, to match the new cadence of AGING with STRENGTH’s fitness, nutrition, investigative-reporting and other weekly articles and video tutorials. But it doesn’t need to go up for you.

If you become a paying subscriber now, you lock in the current lower rate of $64/year or $8/month forever—as long as you remain a paying subscriber.

Here’s more detail about the rate change and the new content channels that I recently launched. Become a paying subscriber now, for what averages out to be $1.23 per week, and get the strength, nutrition and deep-reporting benefits that keep you informed and powerful—physically, emotionally and in a lot of other, important ways—in life’s second half.

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Most of the research supporting the advice below is on people whose spouse died, rather than on men whose wives or partners left them. But the biology isn’t very different: a lost partner registers in the brain as an injury and a craving at once.

If you’re in that spot, or somewhere close to it, these are 10 suggestions to pick up the pieces in the right ways. There are probably 100 other, perhaps better thoughts I could have mentioned instead. Let me know how you’d amend this list:

1. End all non-essential contact, and remove all the visual cues. Reminders of a lost partner activate the brain’s reward circuit in people whose grief stays stuck, and that activity tracks yearning.3 In 122 recently separated adults, more in-person contact with an ex-partner predicted higher distress two months later; the effect appeared only in those without children.4

2. Rebuild your social network, by making yourself conspicuously available to your friends and family. After widowhood or separation past 50, men reported fewer visitors while women reported no change, consistent with men relying on a partner to stay connected.5 Widowed men’s loneliness rose nearly twice as much as widowed women’s and stayed elevated for the rest of the study; after separation, men and women rose about the same.

3. Start volunteering, even for a couple hours a week. In 12,998 adults over age 50, logging 100 or more hours a year was linked over four years to 44% lower mortality, 17% lower risk of physical limitations, more purpose and optimism and less depression, hopelessness and loneliness.6 Among unemployed older adults, volunteering buffered depressive symptoms.7

4. Train your body twice a week, even if that means only brisk walks every morning. In 56,818 adults aged 50 to 102 across 20-plus countries, light-to-moderate activity twice a week or more was tied to a 51% lower rate of new depression, still 29% lower after adjusting for 41 measures of physical and mental function.8 I personally believe in the power of long, hard workouts.

5. Don’t use alcohol to self-medicate. It’s tempting. But it leads to unhealthy choices. Grief, in my experience, is an emotion that ongoing acknowledgement helps dissipate and temper. Drinking as a regular habit to dull the pain, in my experience, impairs the reckoning process.

6. If you tend to brood, don’t journal about it. In a randomized trial of 90 recently separated adults (32 men), those judged to be searching for meaning did worse for up to 9 months after expressive writing than after writing about daily routine.9 I’m not a brooder and find that writing (longhand) even painful observations helps me feel better and less burdened, so this research genuinely surprised me.

7. Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to a friend. This is one of my personal favorites, because it works. In 120 divorcing adults, self-compassion as heard by outside listeners predicted less distress at the study’s end,10 replicating an earlier finding in 109 divorcing adults that held up to 9 months.11 When I needed to, I swam out into the Pacific Ocean and talked to the waves; really, to myself.

8. Be honest with yourself… If she left you by choice, she had reasons, well-founded or not. Take time to understand that argument. This kind of soul searching is painful but leads to greater strength after the clouds break.

   1. …but don’t auto-blame yourself. “Most often the other person leaves because of their own history, world view, experiences and it has nothing to do with you in the larger scheme of things,” says reader Renee F., in a comment below this post (Renee said this has been her experience over the years and was not making a blanket declaration about all breakups).

9. Keep your meal times, bedtimes and wake times steady. Hard to do but effective. A review of 22 intervention studies in bereaved older adults, 13 randomized, found support for a therapy targeting sleep.12 A federally funded trial of about 200 bereaved adults over 60 is testing daily-rhythm regularity directly; results were not published in a peer-reviewed paper as of this writing.13

10. If you need it, get structured help. A 10-session guided online program cut grief, depression, distress and loneliness in a randomized trial of 110 people, 77% separated or divorced, average age 51.14 Divorced men had 2.4x the suicide risk of married men in a U.S. national study;15 a meta-analysis of 36 publications found unmarried men at higher risk in every subgroup, with the gap smaller after 65.16 In Norwegian registry data, separated people were 6x as likely to die by suicide as married people, with risk highest in the 30 days after separating.17 Or, take my friendly advice and find a good psychotherapist who can help you identify and break old, unhelpful patterns you may not even be aware of.

More than anything else, realize you’re not alone in being alone. That’s my message in a bottle.

What did you think of this article? Let me know in a comment.

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Eat Like It’s 1899 helps you make healthy, tasty, nutrient-rich meals from whole foods in under 25 minutes. The ELI 1899 mission is to reduce the ultra-processed, industrialized deathfood that diminishes your health, wellness and lifespan.

For a deeper explanation of where I came up with this phrase, watch this introduction.

You get affordable, repeatable meals that taste great and serve your nutrition and fitness goals. Every episode comes with a recipe card and a protein & nutrient profile that paying subscribers can download & print.

In this episode, I bring you a bright green broccoli and pea soup, topped with tofu cubes crisped in a dry pan, that takes one pot and about 20 minutes. If “broccoli soup” conjures the beige, cheese-flavored ultra-processed slop served in a TGI Fridays bread bowl—stop it! The soup in this video gets its body from a pound of blended broccoli and ¾ pound of peas…and a little bit of heavy cream.

It’s easy to make, hard to screw up and open to substitutions: any broth, any tofu; soy cream instead of dairy. The variations are endless. Each bowl has about 335 calories, 18g of protein, 10g of fiber and nearly twice the vitamin K you need in a day. See nutrient card below for the full nutrition profile. Watch the sodium, though. Between the boxed broth, the baked tofu and the frozen peas, a bowl has about 770mg before you add any salt.

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Excuse this one small bit of housekeeping…

On October 14 this newsletter’s subscription price is going up to $79/year and $9/month, to match the new cadence of AGING with STRENGTH’s fitness, nutrition, investigative-reporting and other content. But it doesn’t need to go up for you. If you become a paying subscriber now, you lock in the current lower rate of $64/year or $8/month forever—as long as you remain a paying subscriber.

Here’s more detail about the rate change and the new content channels that I recently launched. Become a paying subscriber now, for what averages out to be $1.23 per week, and get the strength, nutrition and deep-reporting benefits that keep you informed and powerful—physically and otherwise—in life’s second half.

Subscribe now

Watch other Eat Like It’s 1899 episodes:

Recipe card and protein & nutrient profile

Here’s an easy-to-follow recipe card and detailed nutrient breakdown of the protein, vitamins and minerals that this meal provides per serving:

(I know the pink banner below says “listen to the episode” but the video above is entirely free. Paying subscribers get the recipe and detailed nutrition cards below.)

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Lateral workouts for unconventional strength & power

The Cossack landmine and the single-leg Romanian deadlift landmine are two challenging landmine exercises that build deep leg and hip strength through unconventional weighted movements.

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These are called “landmines” because the barbell, protruding from its anchor, resembles an actual military landmine apparatus. If you’re not familiar with gym landmines, don’t let the name or the setup keep you from trying this workout. If your gym doesn’t have the anchor sleeve to slide one end of a barbell into, you can wedge the end of a barbell into a corner with a towel or into a weighted sandbag.

Become a paying subscriber now, for just $1.23/week, before the price goes up on October 14.

Weighted Cossack landmines are a strength + power move, because they require your hips to open up and your lower half to stabilize a weighted movement laterally.

Traditional leg training is typically one-dimensional: either a forward or up-down movement: squats, lunges and step-ups are each examples of that. But life after 50 or 60 doesn't happen in only one plane of motion. The injuries we get certainly don’t limit themselves to only forward or up-down movements.

See all Move Like It’s 1899 videos and articles here

That’s why these two moves are important to try, because they train your legs to move sideways under load and to hold you up on one foot, which makes the small stabilizer muscles in that foot, ankle and hip work harder than anything you have to do on two legs.

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Functional strength = healthy longevity

Building functional strength in life's second half is extremely important to any aging body. Older adults, especially, need to develop pelvic, hip, and deep leg strength and flexibility, not just to avoid injury but also to create more symmetry between your right and your left sides.

Don’t skip the warm up

Warming up for these is extra important, given how Cossack squats will tax your hips, hamstrings and quads. So, jumping rope for a few minutes, as I mentioned in the previous MLI 1899 episode, warms up and loosens your muscles in two or three minutes. Jumping rope also improves your VO2 max over time, which is the single best predictor of how long you'll live from a lifestyle change.

Cossack landmines: the proper weight and technique

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Reckonings is where I level with you each week—usually about the longevity industry, new aging research or the cost/benefit of a given exercise routine. Today’s reckoning is about AGING with STRENGTH’s subscription price:

Why the increase? There are three big reasons and several others (see links below).

Reckonings | Move Like It’s 1899 | Eat Like It’s 1899

Five weeks ago I started publishing three weekly franchises that give paid subscribers weekly insights, guidance, analyses and video evidence for aging with strength:

• Reckonings, on Tuesdays: a mix of critical reviews of research and Longevity Industrial Complex lies, and also my personal experiments, essays and lessons learned on aging with strength, in all its forms, after 48 years of strength training, athletic performance and 7 orthopedic surgeries. Most of these posts include a paywall, below which specific training routines and my personal insights reside.

• Move Like It’s 1899, on Thursdays: weighted strength- and power-training workout videos for building lean, durable muscle in life’s latter half (or third), with detailed progressions and regressions and physiological summaries of how the training impacts the older-adult body. All for paying subscribers only.

• Eat Like It’s 1899, on Saturdays: the video series that shows how to make healthy, affordable, protein- & nutrient-rich meals from whole foods in a regular kitchen in under 20 minutes. (The videos are free; the recipe and nutrition cards for each meal are for paying subscribers).

  become a paying subscriber

That’s 12 substantive, deeply researched and often personal installments every month, compared to the typical previous cadence of 4 to 8 monthly posts, most of which were free and not organized into categories. That evolution is my response to what AGING with STRENGTH subscribers have said they want more of.

For a longer list of examples of what you get as an AGING with STRENGTH subscriber, check out all the links on the About page.

In addition, paying subscribers also get access to the special reports, Q&As and AMAs, downloadable guides and programs that I generate on the basis of my personal strength-training, personal experimentation and investigative journalism background. That cadence has already started but will develop into a steadier stream in Q4 2026 and continue into 2027.

Paying subscribers also receive lower rates on my 1-on-1 Mayo Clinic-trained health & wellness coaching as well as the AGING with STRENGTH oceanside retreat in Santa Monica, Calif., in April 2027.1

$1.23 per week for AGING with STRENGTH—before Oct. 14

All told, that's more than 130 instructional, insightful, investigative, analytical and highly relevant articles, videos and audionotes a year—or $1.23 a week, at the $64/year rate available to you before October 14.

Free subscribers will get access to the most recent #WorkoutWednesday videos; the free portion of paid Reckonings posts; all the Eat Like It’s 1899 healthy-meal videos; and the occasional free Friday Thoughts.

(Paying subscribers get access to all 40+ #WorkoutWednesday videos in one place.)

A friendly shout-out to monthly subscribers…

Which brings me to the monthly subscribers. I’m very glad to have you, and your rate is locked, too. But let’s run the math: the current rate of $8 a month is $96 a year—or $1.84 per week. Still a pretty decent return for what you’re now getting every week. But that’s 50% more expensive than the current annual plan.

If you switch to annual before October 14, you lock in $64—and save $32 a year over the current monthly rate. After the 14th, switching to the $79 annual rate is 69% more expensive than the current annual subscription plan.

Free and monthly subscribers, now is the time to lock in your $64 subscription and all that AGING with STRENGTH now offers you, before October 14.

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Eat Like It’s 1899 helps you make healthy, tasty, nutrient-rich meals from whole foods in under 25 minutes. The ELI 1899 mission is to reduce the ultra-processed, industrialized deathfood that diminishes your health, wellness and lifespan.

For a deeper explanation of where I came up with this phrase, watch this introduction.

You get affordable, repeatable meals that taste great and serve your nutrition and fitness goals. Every episode comes with a recipe card and a protein & nutrient profile that paying subscribers can download & print.

Watch previous Eat Like It’s 1899 episodes:

In this episode, I bring you a colorful, fiber-rich and nutrient-dense vegetarian power bowl that a year ago I would have never even thought to make. Maybe because, like a lot of Gen Xers, I grew up thinking “vegetarian food” is boring, bland and not for athletes. Times have changed since 1985.

This bowl is so simple to make, so delicious to eat, so healthy for your body and brain and has so much potential for variations that it’s become one of my favorite meals, full stop. It’s packed with flavors, textures, nutrients and healthy fats. And you can’t beat the 30g to 40g of protein per bowl.

Let me know what you think.

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Recipe card and protein & nutrient profile

Here’s an easy-to-follow recipe card and detailed nutrient breakdown of the protein, vitamins and minerals that this meal provides per serving:

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First things first: I know it’s a silly photo. I’m really not trying to pretend I’m the David Hasselhoff of kettlebells. Sometimes you go with the least worst image you have. This is mine. Onward….

Kettlebells that blast your core and cut your upper body

I give you two kettlebell moves today, weighted halos and uppercuts, that do a lot for your entire midsection and core strength. Both of these workouts look like shoulder work but they’re also working your trunk, front and back.

If you have recurring lower-back issues as the result of too much sitting and not enough daily moving your body, this workout can help. It will also, after a few iterations, work your shoulders and arms to make them noticeably stronger and more defined. So it’s great for your mirror ego, too.

In the video, I’m doing these moves with a 35-pound bell. Halos and uppercuts work the muscles along your spine and across your abdomen that hold your ribs and hips still while a weight tries to pull them somewhere else, and that’s strength that keeps you upright after 50: a core that holds while the rest of you is moving across multiple planes of motion.

You don’t get hurt lifting a suitcase straight up. You get hurt turning to put it in the overhead bin. The halo trains the turning. The uppercut trains the drive.

In case you missed it: the #WorkoutWednesday video introducing foam rolling basics…

Warm-up and weight choice

I warm up with a jump rope, and I’d argue everyone over 50 should own one. Two or three minutes raises your heart rate and breathing enough to improve VO2 max over time, which is the single best predictor of how long you’ll live that you can change. It also trains coordination between your feet, hands, and eyes, which fades with age—unless you keep using it.

I’m using a kettlebell here, but you could also use a dumbbell. Start at a modest weight, and move up, instead of the other way around. If you can’t move it slowly, it’s too heavy.

The kettlebell halo workout: technique

Hold the bell sideways, with one hand through the horns, and brace your midsection.

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Why do you lift heavy things? Is it to get stronger? Or carve more defined muscles? Or become more powerful?

Which answer you choose (and there are more than just three) matters more than you may think, for reasons that go beyond how to train differently for each.

Muscle strength, size and power may sound interchangeable, but they’re not. Especially after 55 or 60, they become three distinct physical qualities, each trained differently, for different reasons, and each declining on its own schedule.

Muscle power, for example, declines more rapidly in older adulthood than muscle strength. That matters because while strength is inarguably good to have, building power—especially in your lower body and core—is what keeps you agile, quick and able to catch yourself from tripping into that first, fateful, potentially nasty fall.

Related read: The case for quitting bar squat (and 6 better workouts)

(Falls in later life are among the most reliable predictors of future falls, which are strongly correlated to the end of independent living and greater mortality risk.)

It’s certainly possible to develop muscle size, strength and power at the same time, if you train frequently enough with the proper discipline. For most people, though, it isn’t likely. So let’s break down the comparative advantages of each kind of training, regardless of whether you’re an aging gym rat or lifting your first dumbbell.

In case you missed it…

The different reasons to develop strength vs. size vs. power

Strength is the maximum force a muscle can produce at any speed. It’s the heaviest weight you can lift once.

Power is force delivered quickly. A kettlebell swing is power. So is a fast pushup, or even standing up from a low chair. Sprinting is pure power. Catching yourself mid-stumble is power that can pay a major health dividend.

Size is the amount of muscle you carry.

For anyone past 50 or 60, each goal has its case.

• Strength keeps you lifting luggage, grandchildren and yourself swiftly off the floor, and loads your bones in ways that keep them strong.

• Size gives you a protein reserve to draw on during illness or injury rehab, when the body can cannibalize muscle.

• Power declines faster than either of the others with age, and it governs the movements that keep you independent: stairs, curbs and recoveries from trips and athletic fatigue.

  

My personal take on training for size, strength or power

“Zielbauer, I’m gonna beat your ass before summer”

I’ve been training with weights since 7th grade, when John Allen, a giant 12-year-old burnout, promised to rearrange my face before the end of the school year. In response, I started working out in the basement with sand-filled plastic weights from a kit made by Sears Roebuck & Co.

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The importance of power in older adulthood

I didn’t know what I was so awkwardly training for, other than to survive John Allen’s threat (which he promptly forgot). But over most of the next 47 years, I trained maniacally for size and strength. Only after around age 58 did developing more power, speed and agility become one of my top fitness goals.

That’s because though muscle size and strength make you look and feel great, physical power is the main ingredient in maintaining walking speed, moving quickly with control and, crucially, reacquiring lost balance in a fraction of a second.

Related read: The case for quitting bench press (and 6 better workouts)

Specific exercises to train for muscle size, strength and power, and the research behind them

There’s plenty of research to support that thesis, which I’ll get into below, along with my thoughts on how to train for muscle size, strength and power. I also offer specific exercises that help you achieve each outcome.

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If your goal is strength: lift heavy

Worth repeating: No one over 50 needs to lift heavy. You can look and feel great by moderating the reps—and I say this with a “go heavy” mindset that doesn’t always serve my best interests. But if you want to get the strongest you can possibly be, lift heavy.

The best long-term evidence for this comes from the 2024 LISA trial in Denmark, a randomized controlled study of 451 adults at retirement age:

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Eat Like It’s 1899 helps you make healthy, tasty, nutrient-rich meals from whole foods in under 20 minutes. The ELI 1899 mission is to reduce the ultra-processed, industrialized deathfood that diminishes your health, wellness and lifespan.

For a deeper explanation of where I came up with this phrase, watch this introduction.

You get affordable, repeatable meals that taste great and serve your nutrition and fitness goals. Every episode comes with a recipe card and a protein & nutrient profile that paying subscribers can download & print.

Watch other Eat Like It’s 1899 episodes:

In this episode, I bring you a dish that, a few years ago, I honestly would not have thought I liked to eat, much less enjoyed making for me and my daughter. I didn’t know I was a salmon guy. Turns out, cooking it the way that you like to eat it makes a difference. And the sautéed spinach in a shallot-garlic lemon juice-and-white-wine reduction is a tasty and nutrient-dense flavor complement to the fillet, which I made with a slightly crunchy crust and a flaky, melty interior. It’s not hard!

This video is 9.5 mins—still a little long but without any flab. Expect future episodes to be 7-9 minutes.

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Recipe card and protein & nutrient profile

Here’s an easy-to-follow recipe card and detailed nutrient breakdown of the protein, vitamins and minerals that this meal provides per serving:

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It’s a phrase that means giving yourself opportunities to move your body like your forebears had to: lifting, pushing and pulling things across multiple planes of motion. Though we no longer need to drive fenceposts or chop wood or haul bricks, we can effectively mimic that human work a few times a week—just like it’s 1899, the year that arguably launched the modern age.

Why 1899?

In 1899, notable elements of society began rebelling against the technology advances that were disrupting how people had traditionally worked, moved and interacted.

Henry Ford launched the Detroit Automobile Company in 1899. Guglielmo Marconi sent the first radio signal across the English Channel. Liebig's Extract of Meat Company introduced Oxo beef stock cubes—an ancestor of what we now call ultra-processed food. In response to these and other developments:

• Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine launched in March 1899—the first mass-market American fitness publication, preaching exercise, unprocessed food and abstention from alcohol, tobacco, white bread…and corsets.

• Roosevelt’s “The Strenuous Life” speech, on April 10, became era’s most famous argument that ease and comfort cause individual and social decay.

• That same month, Sandow’s magazine rebranded to Physical Culture—the British side of the movement, built around Eugen Sandow, the first celebrity strongman.

It was a year that cemented the notion that, regardless what machines could do for us, bodies were meant to move. So, yeah, let’s move like it’s 1899.

In January, I wrote about wanting to set an ambitious, achievable expectation for my physical strength and flexibility in 2026. That became a simple, 7-word mantra that feels like the Move Like It’s 1899 origin story:

In that spirit, I created Move Like It’s 1899 to offer paying subscribers weekly weighted strength, speed, power and flexibility workouts in weekly ~7-minute videos aimed at (as the saying goes) aging with strength. Each video comes with written explanations of specific progressions and tips I’ve learned over a lifetime of athletics and almost five decades of weight training. I’ll also include a summary of the physiology of that week’s weighted movement and why it’s effective.

Move Like It’s 1899 videos will be more intense and developed cousins of the #WorkoutWednesday bodyweight workouts anyone can do in 3 minutes in street clothes. The goal for this video series to make building muscle, power & flexibility accessible to anyone to wants to have the muscle and mettle to drive a fence post or haul a wheelbarrow full of bricks…like it’s 1899.

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Why I’m starting this 1899 series with foam rolling

Subsequent videos will go heavier, with weights and workout-level progressions in multiple planes of motion, and progressions that push past what Workout Wednesday can do. But I started this series with foam rolling for specific reasons, some of them personal, that I think apply to everyone.

Forty-eight years of lifting and seven orthopedic surgeries have taught me that the workout you can’t do with proper form, flexibility and proper warm-up is often the one that hurts you, either immediately or—worse—slowly over time. A lower-back seizure has put me on the floor for hours and days, and after 50 an injury that once cost a week now costs a month. The psychological costs of starting over get harder with age.

In case you missed it: the #WorkoutWednesday video introducing foam rolling basics…

So this is the groundwork, literally: what I do on the floor before and after training so the harder episodes are ones I can keep doing. Learn these first. Everything that follows assumes you have and, more importantly, you’ll be glad you did.

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Foam-rolling progressions, and what they’re doing

Three sequences from the video, in the order I do them, with notes on what each one is working. None of this is rolling in the usual sense. The roller is a fulcrum. Gravity does the work that opens your hips, your back, your shoulders and other joints.

Let’s get started.

1. Thoracic spine opener (before a workout)

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Last month was not a good one for “longevity journalism.” Two national magazines with storied histories published articles that treat a Harvard geneticist known for lying about his scientific achievements as a wunderkind who’s about to solve aging.

Here’s Time magazine on Aug. 20: “David Sinclair’s Research Is Now Testing Whether Blindness—and Aging—Can Be Reversed.” The headline presents what Sinclair hopes the research eventually leads to as what it’s currently testing. When a headline is demonstrably false, as this one is, you wonder whether the reporting under it is worth a damn. It’s not.

Two weeks earlier, National Geographic ran a 5,100-word feature under an even more preposterous headline, “Are We on the Brink of Ending Aging?” I’ll save you an hour: no, and we’re not even close. Even the article’s hero—David Sinclair, credulously quoted issuing one unproven assertion after another as if they’re facts—admitted that much.

‘He has a long track record of doing this’

The irony of featuring a known scientific prevaricator like Sinclair, who in 2024 was forced to step down from the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research for lying about having reversed aging in dogs, was not lost on his former colleagues.

“David is particularly effective at taking credit for and running with other people’s work,” Matt Kaeberlein, a respected longevity scientist who worked with Sinclair years ago, wrote in an email in response to my questions about the two media articles.

“He has a long track record of doing this: rDNA circles (Brad Johnson),1 sirtuins (Lenny Guarente, my PhD work with Mitch McVey),2 NAD-CR-aging axis (Su-Ju lin and Shin Imai),3 epigenetics in aging/information theory (a bunch of different people way before he ever brought it up),4 reprogramming for aging indications (Yamanaka —> Belmonte and others).”5

“Getting the media to buy into the narrative is part of the magic,” Kaeberlein said. “It’s a genuine talent.”

(Note: I added the footnotes to Kaeberlein’s quote.)

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A failure to report on the longevity industry with skepticism

Below, I categorized the most impressive failures of the National Geographic feature, a 5,100-word exposition relying on weak reporting and on taking Sinclair at his word, and the much shorter Time article, a 626-word, one-source story that seems to believe anything Sinclair asserts as fact—despite contrary evidence.

Time’s article was part of a series it’s calling “Longevity Leaders 2026,” pairing Sinclair with scientists who have sterling reputations, including Shinya Yamanaka, Francesca Duncan and Robert Waldinger, and who aren’t known for stealing credit from their colleagues and lying about their work.

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Journalism should champion its audience, not its sources

Both of these articles rely on levels of credulity that would make any journalism professor slap her forehead. The National Geographic story is notable for being biased in favor of a source that provides the reporter exclusive access.

In the latter third of the piece, reporter D.T. Max follows Sinclair through his Harvard lab. Over about a thousand words, Sinclair describes results that would be among the biggest findings in modern biology. Almost none of them have been published. The article doesn’t vet them with any independent source.

The article notes that Max was the only journalist allowed into Sinclair’s lab since the ER-100 trial was announced. That could be a trove of tough but fair reporting, knowing that everything the reporter saw or heard was curated for him by Sinclair.

It’s a tough spot to be in, as a journalist. I’ve been there.

Of course, you want the access; you want to be nice to people or organizations who give you access. But you also always remember whose interests you’re championing: your audience’s. You’re the champion of your readers, not your sources.

About the worst thing a reporter can become is a stenographer for whatever comes out of someone’s mouth—even a Harvard genetics professor’s.

Lazy reporting serves not the audience or the public interest but a Longevity Industrial Complex that will say whatever it takes. And that ain’t right.

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Eat Like It’s 1899 helps you make healthy, tasty, nutrient-rich meals from whole foods in under 20 minutes. The ELI 1899 mission is to reduce the ultra-processed, industrialized deathfood that diminishes your health, wellness and lifespan.

For a deeper explanation of where I came up with this phrase, watch this introduction.

You get affordable, repeatable meals that taste great and serve your nutrition and fitness goals. Every episode comes with a recipe card and a protein & nutrient profile that paying subscribers can download & print.

In this inaugural episode…

I bring you a dish that I make once or even twice a week for me and my 11-year-old kid. Simple, delicious, whole foods packed with protein and several essential minerals and nutrients, outlined below.

This video is a bit long at 11 mins—sorry! Future videos will be 7-9 minutes.

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Watch other Eat Like It’s 1899 episodes:

Recipe card and protein & nutrient profile

Here’s an easy-to-follow recipe card and detailed nutrient breakdown of the protein, vitamins and minerals that this meal provides per serving:

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A couple months ago, I underwent two “full-body” MRIs offered by two different private companies to compare the experiences and results of each. One scan was by Prenuvo, the other by Ezra. How an asymptomatic, healthy and frequent skeptic of the Longevity Industrial Complex came to submit to two medically unnecessary MRIs is a story in itself, which I tell below.

Also, yes, the video above is of me, resonating magnetically “naked.” I assure you it’s the first and last time you’ll see my organs on the internet (or on video). But first:

About this article

Earlier this year, I was approached with an offer from a private individual: undergo two “full-body” MRIs from two of the most popular health-tech companies offering them and report my findings on AGING with STRENGTH. There were two conditions. One was that my expenses, including the cost of the scans and the time to report and write this story, would be covered by the individual, an entrepreneur in an unrelated business, who made the offer through an employee. Another condition was that this person not be publicly identified in my report.

After some thought about the ethical implications of the offer, I agreed. I could write whatever I found, as I always do, with no conditions, limitations or influence (I’ve never spoken or communicated with the person who underwrote the research below). I would receive access to a controversial longevity-industry service that would otherwise be out of my price range (or interest, frankly). I’d be compensated for my work. And I would share my reporting with you and acknowledge the terms up front.

Here’s what I found.

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Ezra and Prenuvo “full-body” MRIs, compared

Price points: Ezra’s scan cost $1,649 and didn’t go below my pelvis. Prenuvo’s cost me $2,099 (which included a $400 holiday discount) and stopped at my knees because I was too tall—something Prenuvo didn’t make clear before I paid them. Neither MRI scanned my arms. So much for “full-body.”

Facilities: Prenuvo's operation was located in the lobby of an office building 15 minutes from my home. Its operations are entirely in-house, from reception to MRI scan. Prenuvo also has an in-house group of clinicians, including several nurse practitioners (I spoke with one this week, at length). By contrast, Ezra contracts MRI services with a third-party vendor, RadNet, a nationwide chain of outpatient imaging centers. Ezra didn’t make that clear until after I sent payment, and the RadNet facility it assigned me, a 35-minute drive away, wasn’t the one closest to my home.

Ambience & services: Prenuvo’s receptionist and waiting area had the look, feel and aura of a higher end longevity clinic. Warm greetings, offers of coffee, tea or bottled water and a personal escort to a private changing room, to change into branded Prenuvo scrubs. Ezra, by contrast, felt like a typical imaging appointment. RadNet’s front desk employees were perfectly cordial but busy. After identifying me as an Ezra private client, a lab technician walked me into a mini-locker-room changing area, handed me an XL-sized pair of 100% Egyptian-cotton pajamas emblazoned with the FUNCTION HEALTH logos, and told me I could keep them after my scan.

Prenuvo also offered me a free, optional metabolic blood panel, outsourced to Quest Diagnostics, which I did. Ezra offered no bloodwork review.

Insurance plans accepted: None. This isn’t healthcare, remember? It’s health tech.

Results & follow-up: This is where the two companies differentiated themselves—in different directions. Prenuvo and Ezra each created a digital report of my MRI results, segmented by body area. Prenuvo’s scan covered head/neck; spine (cervical, thoracic, lumbar); chest, abdomen, pelvis and knees. Ezra’s MRI didn’t scan chest or knees. Prenuvo’s digital dashboard of my report was delivered within three weeks of my scan.

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Ezra’s rollout of my results was more choppy: The company first sent the faxed RadNet radiology report, written in medical shorthand. Then it sent an update. Then it sent the final, digital report, correcting a dictation error in the original report.

^{Above: A video of the Prenuvo MRI of my chest, abdomen & pelvis, from top to bottom}

Prenuvo let me speak to a human. Ezra bot-blocked me.

The area in which I was most impressed with Prenuvo and least impressed by Ezra was in the post-scan follow up.

Prenuvo reached out to offer a consultation with a nurse practitioner, with whom I had an unrushed, very personable and enjoyable 45-minute conversation about my results and what they reveal and do not reveal about my health and any need for concern or follow up.

Ezra parried every attempt I made to speak to someone about my results. Instead of a human, Ezra bot-blocked me, using its AI agent, “Fin.” When I called the phone number, the auto-voice said, “We primarily answer inquiries online” and “Press 1 to switch to a live chat via SMS.” When I did, I found myself again in a cage-fight with Fin, which told me in its anodyne, HAL-like tone that it couldn’t help me.

Data accuracy: Both companies were not as accurate as I had hoped, given the prices they charge for their services. Prenuvo identified my wrong knee as fluid-filled, which it labeled as one of the few things I should keep an eye on. It also failed to even reach my ankles, where I had hoped to gain some insight into any damage to ligaments from an old soccer injury. The MRI machine can’t reach the ankles of anyone over six feet tall.

Ezra rescheduled my MRI less than two hours before the appointment, because of what it described as a malfunction with its machine (which I later learned was actually RadNet’s). When I got my Ezra results, they included a notation that some part of my scan wasn’t readable because of movement during the scan. I had remained cadaver still the entire time in the tube.

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What “full-body” MRI scans can’t do

“Whole body” is a marketing term, not a clinical one

The limitations sections in Prenuvo’s and Ezra’s downloadable reports are an inventory of what a $2,000-and-up, whole-body scan doesn’t do (or promise to do). They don’t scan the arms past the shoulders. They didn’t reach my ankles. They don’t evaluate the coronary arteries or quantify cardiac risk—so the thing most statistically likely to kill a 59-year-old American man remains outside the scan’s competence.

They also don’t see lung micronodules. They can’t detect GI polyps and don’t come close to replacing a colonoscopy. They can’t detect skin cancer. They’re not designed for the testicles. They don’t fully evaluate the rotator cuff, ligaments or menisci. They may miss thyroid nodules under 1 cm and, according to Prenuvo’s limitations section, “occasionally” ones larger. (How occasionally, I wonder.)

What remains, then, is a solid-organ survey of the torso, head and spine.

“For wellness purposes only”

Of the two MRIs, Ezra’s protocol is narrowest: head, neck, spine, abdomen and pelvis. No chest at all. No lungs, no heart, nothing between the neck and the diaphragm. On page 4 of my report, Ezra clarifies that the service is “for wellness purposes only,” is “not diagnostic,” and doesn’t replace accepted cancer screenings.

If you’re healthy, how much do you want to pay for wellness purposes only?

^{Above: Prenuvo’s fatty liver detector scan of my liver, from top to bottom.}

Same body, different results & reasons for skepticism

Think of these two reports as a controlled experiment: my same body, scanned 8 days apart in late May, scanned by different MRI machines and read by different radiologists. Would they find the same things?

My spine. Ezra found “no significant disc herniation, central spinal canal stenosis or foraminal narrowing.” Prenuvo found multitudes of disc herniations: at C2-C3, C3-C4, C5-C6, L3-L4, L4-L5, and L5-S1—six of them, up to 4.5mm—plus mild central canal stenosis at two levels and foraminal narrowing at roughly eight.

Both readings are defensible; everything Prenuvo found is mild, and mild degenerative change is near-universal at 59. But a customer holding both reports has no way to know that. One says my spine has no significant problems. The other lists 30-plus line items of pathology-sounding findings. Neither changes what I should do, which is nothing.

^{Above: A Prenuvo image of herniation in my cervical spine. (Ezra’s scan found none.)}

My brain. Ezra’s single follow-up item—the reason my report says “non-urgent findings that require follow-up” with my doctor within 1-2 months—is its finding that I have a flattened pituitary gland with optic nerve sheath distention, possibly reflecting increased intracranial pressure. Prenuvo imaged the same brain eight days earlier and reported nothing.

Either Ezra flagged a common anatomic variant in an asymptomatic man as a doctor-visit-worthy finding, or Prenuvo failed to report the most clinically important thing in either scan. Both can’t be right, and I can’t tell which is wrong without more medicine, which is precisely the “worried well” rabbit hole that critics of these scans describe.

My kidneys. Ezra found simple cysts up to 2.3 cm plus a subcentimeter cyst on the right. Prenuvo found one 1.9 cm cyst on the left. All benign, but the counts don’t match.

My prostate. (Two words I did not envision typing on Substack, ever.) Ezra flagged heterogeneous signal and recommended a blood test to check it out. Prenuvo, running diffusion imaging Ezra apparently didn’t, found no suspicious lesion. So one company’s report sends you toward a medical test the other company’s imaging suggests you don’t need.

My knee. Prenuvo’s single “Moderate” finding—the top of its key-findings list—is a fluid pocket in my left knee that “cannot be characterized,” for which “a surveillance/investigation plan may be considered.” Except my left knee wasn’t the swollen one. My right knee was.

Post-scan quality control

Ezra’s radiologist electronically signed an impression reading “Mild heart is a sinus mucosal disease”—a dictation garble of “mild paranasal sinus mucosal disease”—which stood for 12 days until an addendum fixed it. Prenuvo’s signed report contains its own artifacts: “Small left foraminal disc herniation.’s no central canal stenosis,” and a thoracic-spine observation filed under the cervical findings.

These are mere dictation errors, not medical ones. But they made it through sign-off on documents people pay thousands of dollars for and potentially read as gospel.

Prenuvo, Ezra and the art of quasi-medical health-tech judgment calls

Pages 19-20 of the Prenuvo report explain that reporting every minor variation “could lead to unnecessary follow-up testing, increased patient anxiety, and possible harm from additional procedures,” and that a normal result doesn’t exclude disease. That’s the standard critique of consumer whole-body screening in the company’s own fine print.

It’s also a tacit admission of the underlying problem: these scans present findings whose meaning depends entirely on judgment calls the customer can’t evaluate, in a population where most findings are non-urgent noise.

Why doctors are not fans of these MRI scans

The American College of Radiology’s position is that there is insufficient evidence to justify recommending “full-body” MRI screening for people with no symptoms, risk factors or relevant family history, and that there is no documented evidence the practice improves outcomes.

A review of 12 studies found 95% of asymptomatic patients had at least one abnormal finding on whole-body cancer-screening MRI. More than 90% of those findings were not relevant. A 2026 academic review notes that adoption is being driven largely by consumer demand and direct-to-consumer platforms, while use in asymptomatic people remains controversial due to low diagnostic yield, false positives, overdiagnosis and the lack of survival outcome data.

My two reports—containing several abnormal findings that are nearly all irrelevant, plus a genuine contradiction on the brain—are a case study of exactly those numbers.

What the scans actually delivered

Here’s a short list of what I got for the money:

• confirmation that I don’t have a visible tumor in the scanned organs (with sensitivity caveats)

• a spine inventory that reads alarmingly only if you don’t consider my age, athletic background and lack of symptoms

• one ambiguous brain finding that one radiologist thinks warrants a doctor visit and another didn’t report at all

• a knee effusion (on the wrong knee)

• instructions—in both reports—to keep doing the evidence-based screening (colonoscopy, blood pressure, lipids) that Prenuvo and Ezra (aka Function Health) implicitly market these scans as transcending.

Scammy elements of Prenuvo and Ezra MRI scans

Prenuvo and Ezra aren’t that different in their grasping methods or dollar-focused business goals, considering the gold rush mentality that infects the Longevity Industrial Complex writ large. Both companies seem eager to separate wealthier worried well folks from their money, use their data for their own AI and marketing purposes and urge as many follow-up exams as possible.

Example 1: Prenuvo’s full-body scan requires you, after entering your credit card details, to agree that what you’re paying for includes an annual membership that auto-renews unless you later remember to cancel it. That’s scammy.

The Prenuvo report’s parting recommendation is a follow-up scan in 12 months, which, like it’s automatic auto-renew, is part of its profit-first, patientcustomer-second business model.

Example 2: The Ezra report includes a “Cancer Risk Assessment” that is utterly unnecessary for any customer not at risk. Ezra’s user interface also includes an ever-present “Book Now” button urging services you may not need.

Example 3: Ezra’s parent, Function Health, was co-founded by Jonathan Swerdlin, a venture capitalist, and Dr. Mark Hyman, the company’s chief medical officer who has shown himself to be less than above-board, if not intentionally misleading, about the supplements he hawks for a profit.

Also, that Function Health added Andrew Huberman, a celebrity neuroscientist known for his great appreciation of Andrew Huberman, to its advisory board is a statement. Whether that statement is that the company cares about solving customer’s healthcare problems or about acquiring their credit-card numbers is the question.

To me, at least, it’s a fairly simple one.

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What did you think of this article? Let me know in a comment.

Nutritional strength comes in many forms. The biggest one being the food we put into our bodies. Not that long ago, I stopped my habit of eating the same, ultra-processed meals I grew up eating in the Midwest in the 1970s and 80s and, even worse, the habit of feeding them to my daughter. I hated the idea that I was training her to consume industrialized deathfood1, intentionally tweaked by multinational corporations to be as addictive as possible.

My nutrition-education journey

So about two years ago, I started a nutrition-education journey. I taught myself to:

A lot to learn, after 57 years of eating whatever seemed healthy enough according to General Mills Inc., Kraft Heinz Co., Conagra Brands Inc., and The Campbell’s Co. I learned that ultra-processed foods (UPFs) account for more than three-quarters of these companies’ U.S. retail sales, according to one recent industry research report2.

So I started cooking healthy daily meals for us that were packed with protein, nutrients and whole foods from a variety of food groups.

That’s how Eat like it’s 1899 began in concept: from a desire to become a highly informed and consistently healthy food consumer.

I now prepare simple, healthy meals every day—or close to it— and have gained a lot of knowledge about choosing food groups, creating better eating habits, adding new nutrition sources to my and my daughter’s diet and eliminating other foods that aren’t serving our purposes.

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What is this thing you’re calling "Eat like it’s 1899”?

Eat like it’s 1899 is my new weekly, 7-minute cooking and food demo, recorded in my working-dad’s kitchen, that shows how to make one healthy, tasty meal at a time, in under 20 minutes, from healthy whole foods that aren’t expensive or hard to find.

I don’t use fancy cooking techniques or equipment—one pan, one pot, a sharp knife and a few spices and oils, not much else. I am not a trained chef, nutritionist or foodie. I’m a curious, self-taught older dad on a budget who taught himself how to have some fun making nutritious dinners for his kid. Why? Because I want to be able to build durable, lean muscle now so that I can walk fast and play tennis with my daughter when I’m 80.

Every Friday, you’ll get a new Eat like it’s 1899 video with a healthy meal you can easily replicate at home. You’ll also get my insights on food buying, label reading and meal-prep and -cooking shortcuts that have been taste-tested by my daughter, who does not suffer crappy meals lightly.

Paid AGING with STRENGTH subscribers, as always, get valuable extras. Including downloadable recipe cards for every meal, a free health & wellness coaching session (I’m a Mayo Clinic-trained health/wellness coach); and access to Ask Me Anything and Q&A sessions.

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Transcript of the video

Hey everybody, I’m Paul von Zielbauer from AGING with STRENGTH, and this is Eat Like It’s 1899. It’s a new video series I’m doing for the channel that’s going to bring video into my kitchen—a working dad, single-dad kitchen—to show you how I have changed my Midwestern eating habits about two years ago from eating a bunch of crap, ie, mostly processed food, to eating almost no processed food, and how that's changed not only how I feel and my health but, really, how I cook in the kitchen for me and my daughter.

What to expect every Eat like it’s 1899 video

And so this series is all about making healthy meals from whole foods that eliminate ultra-processed ultra-processed deathfood, as I call it, from the industrial food companies, and be able to make healthy meals in 15-20 minutes, not in an hour and a half with all precious little ingredients that you can only get at a farmers market. That’s not what this is.

• Healthy meals from whole foods

• No ultra-processed deathfood

• Done in 15-20 minutes

• Regular, store-bought ingredients

• Tasty & fun to eat!

Each segment will be a basic recipe that you can make for lunch or dinner in 15 or 20 minutes with affordable grocery bought Healthy whole foods that taste good. It’s got to taste good. There’s three or four things that I think every kitchen needs, not fancy kitchen, but just a working kitchen like mine to cook repeatable, healthy, tasty food day in and day out.

The 3 kitchen essentials

The first thing is just spending a little bit of money on getting a decent pan. The other essential thing is a really good knife. I spent About $200 on this particular knife. The other thing that is really important is the proper amount of oils and spices just to make sure that you’re eating healthy but also seasoning your food in a way that makes you happy.

What I do is keep a couple of essential oils on hand. I cook with a lot of avocado oil because it has a higher smoke point than extra virgin olive oil, which is an essential part of a Mediterranean diet that I’ve followed.

The other just basic essential is spices: salt, onion salt with not a lot of chemicals in it, garlic powder, definitely some fresh crushed pepper. Smoked paprika and tarragon. One other sauce is tamari. It’s a brewed sauce, similar in taste to soy sauce, but it’s, I think, much more refined and it really adds just sort of a, more of a hint than a punch in the face kind of flavor.

But really, salt, pepper, a few seasonings, dill weed, oregano, and then on the windowsill I have basil and things that I’ll put.

I also use a lot of chopped cilantro or parsley just to sort of give the dish a little bit of an aesthetic when I serve it to my kid who actually appreciates it. So that’s the essentials.

I hope you’ll join me for Eat Like It’s 1899, starting next week!

By the time I was a college sophomore, I’d worked my way up to bench pressing 295 pounds on the third set (the first two sets being warm-ups of 135 pounds x 10 reps and 225 pounds x 7). It was a big number that took years to reach. It also answered what, at that time, seemed like an important question.

“How much can you bench?”

Across species, the male gender has its performative rituals. Gorillas beat their chests. Bison ram their skulls together. Peacocks splay their tail feathers. Young men bench press. Why they do is not difficult to understand. Bench presses work the chest, shoulders and triceps in one motion. They are a staple exercise among many professional athletes and strength trainers; the NFL Combine tests prospects on how many times they can bench 225 pounds. Bench presses give your upper-body strength a universally understood number, allows you to track (or brag about) it for decades and, not least, make you look great in a t-shirt or with no shirt.

You should probably quit doing them.

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The case against the barbell bench press

It’s pretty simple: by requiring your shoulders to accommodate the fixed-plane movement of a heavily weighted barbell, instead of making the weight follow the natural paths of each arm and shoulder, you’re stressing your AC joint and rotator cuff in ways that may well accumulate into an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon.

And the act of lowering the bar to your chest forces your elbows below shoulder level, allowing a heavily weighted bar to do a lot of silent damage over time.

Stress on the rotator cuff socket

To be sure, bench presses may seem to work just fine for years and years. But as your joints grow older, damage from the pressing exercise accumulates. Research shows that the bar pushes the ball of the arm bone backward in its socket on every bench press rep, the hardest at the bottom. The rotator cuff is resisting that weight, to keep the ball centered in the socket, which is similar in design to a golf tee—a shallow curve. Load the bar with enough weight for enough years, and the cuff becomes more likely to lose that struggle—at which point the ligaments take over, and ligaments don't recover the way muscle does.1

RELATED: A few months ago I wrote about the case for quitting bar squats, because it overloads the cervical spine and allows your weak-leg side to cheat off your strong-side leg. When you’re 25, 35, maybe even 45, you don’t pay the price. That comes later, after around 55.

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Ligaments can get permanently stretched

“Ligaments are not super strong, small amounts of strain will permanently deform them,” said Alec Mckenzie, a PhD lecturer in Anatomy & Physiology at Southern Cross University in Australia and an author of a 2021 paper on the impact of shoulder hyperextension exercises like dips. “Some people push beyond their range of motion limits during these common exercises which may place strain on the ligaments, which will elongate the ligament causing instability,” he told me in an email exchange. “In exercises like the dip and bench press, the load is acting to increase this range of motion i.e., pushing the joints beyond its ‘normal’ range.”

Shoulder damage accumulates silently

That tracks with my experience. In my roughly 40 years of bench press training, at loads that ranged from very heavy to relatively easy, there was never a moment where I incurred a sudden injury. Rather, my tendons seem to have shredded and torn over time. More than any other exercise, bench presses are very likely the reason I needed surgery in my 50s to repair torn tendons in both shoulders—the left shoulder in 2017; the right one in 2025.

Shoulder trouble is one of the most common problems among long-term lifters.2

Full-thickness tendon tears are incredibly common among older athletes, studies show3. Most cause no symptoms. Until they do, including interrupting sleep and acute pain in the shoulder joints while under load. In the video below, X marks the spot where my right shoulder remains when my elbows and arms are forced to extend well below it, albeit under only 135 pounds in this case.

Don’t take just my word for it

Traditional bench press is not an upper-body strength workout to grow old with—unless you enjoy sleepless nights thanks to rotator-cuff tears, followed by months recovery time doing nothing physical after a surgical repair. Don’t take only my word for it. Here’s Mike Boyle, a 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 November about limiting bench presses for college athletes and why many of the Red Sox pitchers he’s trained actively avoid the exercise.

“They did not gravitate to the barbell bench press,” Boyle says at 31:13 into the video. But they were sanguine about doing the same exercise with dumbbells, instead of a bar, Boyle added.

To build upper-body strength that doesn’t attack your shoulder cuff, tendons and ligaments, not to mention your AC joints, several other workouts, including with dumbbells instead of a bar, offer virtually the same strength gains.4 Dumbbell-focused presses also allow your left and right chest and shoulder muscles to fire independently of one another, without your strong side compensating for your weak side. (We all have physically weaker sides).

6 better alternatives to bench press for upper-body strength

If you don’t want to give up bench presses, don’t. Just don’t say you haven’t been warned of the silent tears that can build into painful ones under repeated heavy bar loads.

But if you’re ready to build upper-body strength that is more likely to give you equal gains without a surgical intervention, here are my top six workouts with video demonstrations of each and explanations why each is better than bench presses.

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The post I published in November on VO₂ max, grip strength & balance training for non-athletes was popular then and, apparently, remains so now, because it raised a very good, very detailed reader question from Robyn E. just this week:

Reader Q&A re VO₂ max

ROBYN E.: “How to measure VO2MAX? Apple watch is useless. At 70 I have become a devotee of strict Z2 HR training rather than the Z2 Peloton Output Training and while I prioritise strength training for my osteoporosis. I am using average output watts/average HR as my proxy for VO2MAX. What are your thoughts?”

Great question, Robyn! My thoughts:

First, let us agree that when it comes to VO₂ max, Apple Watch is, indeed, useless.

Second, let’s define what we’re talking about here. VO₂ max is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can take in and use during hard exercise. Think of it as the size of your engine: the amount of air your lungs can pull in, the amount of oxygen your heart can pump to your muscles and how efficiently those muscles can burn that O₂ for energy. VO₂ max (the V stands for volume) is expressed in milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute, which is why it's a fitness measure and a body-weight measure at the same time. The higher the number, the harder and longer you can go—and the lower your statistical risk of dying early1.

The only real measurement of actual VO₂ max comes from a lab test—the mask-and-treadmill/bike protocol, typically available only at a university exercise physiology lab or sports medicine clinic. (In my case, there’s one waiting for me at Dr. Renee Young’s naturopathic center, near Santa Cruz, Calif.) Everything else, including your smartwatch, is an estimate. Needless to say, some are better than others.

In case you missed it….

That said, Robyn’s watts-per-heartbeat proxy is a solid way to track the thing that matters most, which is the direction of your VO₂ max. If your average output at the same average heart rate rises over months, your aerobic engine is improving; if it falls, it isn’t. You won’t get an absolute VO₂ max number out of it, but for training purposes do you really need one, other than post-Peloton bragging rights (not an insignificant reason, I would add)?

So my bottom line thought is: You’ve got a good system. Just keep the test conditions honest: same bike, similar ride length. Or, if you’re more like me: same jump rope workout duration, location (indoor/outdoor), interval/rest time and pre-workout nutrition plan. And remember that heat, sleep and caffeine all move heart rate.

If you ever want the real number, do a lab test once and use it to calibrate everything else. Otherwise, keep doing what you’re doing, Robyn. Strict Z2 by heart rate, plus strength work for the osteoporosis, seems like a sensible program at any age.

My supplement stack (including one must-have, one moonshot & one guaranteed result)

AGING with STRENGTH has a foundational thesis that durable longevity comes not from supplements but from doing the work: Moving like it’s 1899; eating whole foods; knowing who you really are; taking sleep seriously2; mattering; and spiritual strength (ie, resilience and personal belief systems).

But it’s Friday afternoon and, after 47 years of weight training, 7 orthopedic surgeries and two weeks shy of my 60th birthday—and maintaining ~17% body fat for the last 10-15 years—I figured it’s time to share the supplements I take to augment my fitness, strength and sleep quality.

Here are my current supplements, in short order. For the clinical background on most of them, check out my rundown of the “top 12” longevity supplements. NOTE: What follows is not a recommendation or endorsement of any supplement; rather, it’s a de facto list of what I’m currently taking and the benefits, if any, each may have on me.

Magnesium. For sleep quality and to keep your digestive tract moving right along. There are several different forms of magnesium, each with different targeted effects. I take two 500-mg magnesium oxide tablets, Walgreens brand, at night before bed. They seem to have a positive impact on sleep quality and, along with espresso-based caffeine, keeping the GI tract operationally predictable (was that subtle enough?).

Zinc. My data is strictly n of 1 and anecdotal: Since I started taking zinc and magnesium together before bed each night two years ago (thanks for the tip, mom), I haven’t gotten sick once. No colds, no nothing in two full years and counting. That is a remarkable achievement for someone with poorly draining sinuses who grew up suffering through a couple grueling respiratory infections per year.

Can I prove the daily Walgreens zinc tablet is the reason? Not at all. But if this is what a placebo effect looks like, sign me up for 30 years of it, please.

Alpha-ketoglutarate (AKG). To boost athletic performance, I decided to start taking a couple tablets every morning. There’s no significant downside, though the upside is

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If you can remotely relate to the following scenario, this post is for you:

After training regularly for weeks or months, you’ve made steady gains in your strength, muscle, VO₂ max, flexibility, range of motion or body shape—or whatever athletic mission you’ve been pursuing for what feels like half your life. You’re seeing the improvement in the mirror and feeling it in your muscles and your daily spirit. You’re stoked that, even at your stage of older adulthood, you’re getting noticeably stronger. Other people notice, too. And then it happens: work, travel, injury or family obligations disrupt your training schedule, and before you know it your last real workout was two weeks ago. You feel your hard-won gains slipping away with every additional day away from training. Muscles that were hard now feel softer. As distance from your last workout grows, frustration filters from your head into your heart and creeps into your bones, because you know what this slip back toward your athletic baseline means: starting over, again. Climbing the hill, again. Succumbing to the siren of “what’s the use?” you allow yourself to chow a slice of cake or bowl of ice cream you wouldn’t have touched a couple weeks ago, as a form of comfort from the cognitive and physical dissonance that comes from knowing you were right there, ahead of the athletic curve, pushing your upper limits. But now, what was hard is now not only soft, it’s starting to eat cake and ice cream. You wonder if this is two steps forward & one back—or vice-versa.

These liminal spaces between what feels like success and failure can feel momentous, because a body and brain that’s 50, 60 or 70 years old is all too familiar with the psychocognitive strength required to reboot one’s athletic routine. Instead of that next session starting at the advanced level you’d worked so hard to reach, you’ll need to summon willpower to train at a lower level, to avoid risking injury.

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In other words, you need strength to not only get back on your horse but also to avoid riding it too hard, too quickly. That double load can feel overwhelming.

(This state of being, by the way, is the inverse of another kind of athletic liminal space that exists just before you break through to a new level of athletic performance—when you can feel the gains you’ve been making are about to produce a significant new result. Older athletes may inhabit both spaces in the same month.)

I’ve spent enough time in each of these liminal spaces to know, as Jim McKay’s 1970s Wide World of Sports introduction put it, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Victory was easier to achieve before career, house, kids, money and age became countervailing forces. Defeat becomes more frequent with time, it seems. Whether it becomes more demoralizing over time, however, is a choice we make.

When my strength gains have slipped away, as they have many times for many frustrating reasons, here’s how I’ve addressed such defeats, even after a few bowls of ice cream (or, far more likely in my case, bags of Fritos).

• Put the two weeks or two months in context. They probably aren’t costing you as much as you think—especially if you’ve been training for years. In research on adults 55–75 from 2015, strength gains built over four months were not fully erased even after 16 weeks of total detraining—participants remained above baseline1 (only 41 people total, so don’t bank on the exact numbers).

• Tell your people you’ve fallen off your horse and need help. I’ve found that rebooting my training is a lot easier, and happens a lot faster, when I enlist the help of friends and family. When time or access to your sport is limited, they can help clear out an hour for you to restart. When I’ve kept my struggles to myself, the horse is always a lot taller and more difficult to mount. Speak up, to let your people help you motivate back to above-baseline.

• Remember that your muscle mass is still there, waiting. A meta-analysis (albeit of only six studies) restricted to adults aged 60 and older found almost no

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A medical license may be the final frontier of longevity credibility, but as more doctors abuse public trust, what—or who—is left to believe?

For most of the past year, a Substack account called Doctor Klover published detailed longevity advice almost daily, and sometimes three times a day, under an impressive credential: board-certified MD/PhD at Stanford Medicine. On July 26, I reached out to the physician behind it, Kelly Cogan-Yoo, a postdoctoral researcher in genetics with a German medical degree, to ask when and where she earned the board certification.

“I am board-certified in neurosurgery,” Cogan-Yoo wrote in a July 26 email.

The next day her Substack bio changed to say she is a “board-certified neurosurgeon-scientist at Stanford Medicine.” I also emailed questions to Stanford, where, on her university profile page, Cogan-Yoo claimed she held a California medical license and a “United States Medical License.”

I found no evidence that any of these assertions are true. The federal government does not issue medical licenses, and no one with Cogan-Yoo’s name or any variation of it holds a California medical license or a U.S. board certification, according to the Medical Board of California and a database run by the American Board of Medical Specialties. (Cogan-Yoo did not respond to my request for proof of a board certification, which she told me she received in October 2023.)

After I sent questions to Stanford about rules governing how postdocs use their university affiliation to sell products on social media, Cogan-Yoo’s board-certified neurosurgeon claim on Substack vanished. Soon after, the reference to a California medical license was deleted from her Stanford Profiles page, and the reference to a “United States Medical License” changed. Her Instagram, where she promoted wellness or beauty products and offered discount codes, was taken down.

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Playing a primary care doctor on social media

On Instagram and TikTok, Cogan-Yoo referred to herself as “Your Nextdoor PCP” and advertised her Stanford Medicine affiliation to sell products like Japanese skin cream and post videos of herself working out. (PCP is shorthand for primary-care physician.) On her page on Linktr.ee, an online shopping platform that she said she doesn’t maintain, Cogan-Yoo refers to herself as a “Board-certified physician scientist at Stanford Medicine Specializing in well-aging and longevity medicine,” offers “YOURNEXTDOORPCP” and KELLYYOOMD discount codes and promotes 16 “anti-aging” supplements like drinkable olive oil, choline, urolithin A and, for good measure, titanium cutting boards.

At Stanford, Cogan-Yoo is part of a new research initiative, MySuppleHub, to gather information from consumers of supplements of all kinds. The initiative, led by Michael Snyder, a genetics professor, lists her as a postdoctoral scholar. Cogan-Yoo promotes MySuppleHub, and Snyder, on Substack.

LongeviMed also publishes a second Substack page, called “Silicon Valley Insights,” which gives paying subscribers “thoughtful insights on technology, business, and the economic shifts shaping the world.” That blog, which has nothing to do with medical science or aging and seems to be AI produced, is produced under the LongeviMed banner by “a group of Stanford students and postdocs,” Cogan-Yoo told me by email.

Stanford and the postdoc’s responses to questions

I asked Stanford officials, including the dean of Stanford’s medical school, whether Cogan-Yoo’s use of her Stanford credential to sell supplements, and using social media and Substack accounts to publish AI-generated longevity advice and promote herself as a primary-care physician, violates university regulations or medical ethics. They did not provide answers to any of those questions.

“Stanford expects all members of our community to represent their credentials and professional qualifications accurately and truthfully,” said a university spokeswoman, Cecilia O. Arradaza, in an email. “We take any concerns about potential misrepresentation very seriously and conduct thorough reviews, taking appropriate action when warranted.”

Stanford's Administrative Guide 1.5.4, section 4, prohibits use of the university's name or trademarks in any way that endorses or implies endorsement of a non-Stanford entity or its products or services, and separately prohibits their use by faculty, staff, students or alumni “in association with any commercial activity or outside venture” or in a way that would damage the university’s reputation.

In a July 26 email exchange, Cogan-Yoo told me Stanford was aware of her posts on her Substack page, which she said she maintained with “a few friends” and her husband, “to share helpful information that we come across through our daily work.” She said she used the “Dr. Klover” pseudonym because “I have never managed a public social media account before” and didn’t feel comfortable using her real name.

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A “top 0.1%” doctor relying on AI-generated advice

It would be easy to conclude that Cogan-Yoo, who said on Substack that she’s a Korean citizen and German resident living in the United States, is just another longevity chiseler, willing to lie about her clinical background to sell products for a commission. Her blatantly misleading clinical claims and use of social media to promote herself as a longevity doctor and sell things are worth scrutinizing, as is the claim that she’s been a naive member of a group effort on Substack that her Stanford bosses knew about.

On one hand, the reason I know her identity is because she readily gave me her name when I asked, in a Substack chat I’d initiated to find out who was behind the Doctor Klover persona. (Doctor Klover has since been renamed twice, first to her full name and, one day later, to LongeviMed, reflecting her Instagram persona.) After responding to emailed questions with a mixture of real answers and false facts, she briefly became the third doctor on Substack to block me for asking unwelcome questions—the other two being Laurie Marbas and Howard Luks1— before unblocking me a day or so later.

But on the other hand, Cogan-Yoo’s professional embellishments are not new. In a now-archived Stanford profile page, she claimed to have graduated in the top 1% of her Heidelberg University School of Medicine class, and to have been “recognized as a top 0.1% resident by the Baden-Württemberg Medical Association.”

The latter claim is false, the German medical association told me. “The Baden-Württemberg State Medical Association does not, as a matter of principle, evaluate the medical competence/performance of its members,” its press office told me by email, responding to questions about Cogan-Yoo. It also said she was not a current member of the association and that the claim on her revised Stanford Profile page that the German medical association had issued her medical license was incorrect. (The page was updated a second time, after I asked Stanford for comment on the German medical association’s statement, to correct those errors.)

Michael Snyder, the genetics professor running Stanford’s new supplements research lab and the only person at Stanford to respond to my specific questions, said Cogan-Yoo had been vetted by the Stanford fellowship program. “I personally have found Kelly to be highly reliable and with high integrity,” he said in an email, responding to my questions, “but we will fix anything that is misleading or inappropriate.”

Defining misleading/inappropriate

Snyder, a serious scientist, deserves to be taken at his word. Who reading this would not want to see Stanford Medicine, and its highly regarded genetics department, transparently confront clinical legerdemain by one of its postdocs? The problem doesn’t lie in identifying the deception—this article offers a head start—but figuring out where to draw the line between merely misguided and blatantly unprofessional.

For instance, Cogan-Yoo’s Substack, now renamed LongeviMed, has a history of masquerading what is clearly AI-generated slop as first-person articles and generic commentary on other longevity-related posts. The words don’t always add up to much, but they represent LongeviMed as the work of one “physician-scientist” even though Cogan-Yoo told me by email that it was a collaboration among her and others (the number of collaborators she mentioned changed from one email to another.)

Is that misleading and inappropriate, in Stanford Medicine’s view?

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Her (and her apparent collaborators’) rebranded Substack seems more concerned with getting attention than actually helping people understand and solve health issues. A week ago, her account posted AI-generated comments on 13 different Substack posts, including my post about FDA peptide votes, using the same formulaic response, including a second paragraph that begins, “As a physician-scientist….”

The author of one such post deemed her commentary AI “blather.”

Also, there’s something unseemly about representing oneself as a primary care doctor when one is, in fact, no such thing. Though Cogan-Yoo’s Substack has changed its name several times, it apparently began, deceptively, as Your Nextdoor PCP (an acronym for primary care physician). The Substack’s url remains yournextdoorpcp.substack.com and its content has traded heavily on that name (see video below), even though there is no evidence Cogan-Yoo is licensed to practice medicine in the U.S. or is a primary care doctor at all.

Stanford Medicine did not answer my questions about whether it considers those misrepresentations misleading or inappropriate.

Who cares about one manipulative longevity Substacker?

At this point, I’d like to go back to my opening question: Who, exactly, is left to trust in an era when even doctors at Stanford feel they can get away with misrepresenting, if not outright lying about, their clinical qualifications and abusing their university credentials to make a buck on social media?

Why should we care, when many if not most of us are smart enough to sniff out truth-shading cons or avoid them altogether?

I put that question to Arthur Caplan, professor emeritus of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and a recognized authority on ethics in wellness and longevity. For one thing, he told me in an interview, Cogan-Yoo’s actions are designed to draft off Stanford Medicine’s reputation.

“People trust in them, and their credibility depends on that trust,” he said. “If someone says, ‘Hey I’m Stanford-affiliated and I have this vitamin line and i’m a vitaminologist,’ a lot of people will say, ‘Okay, I need that.’”

Potential harm to consumers

A doctor with a substantial Substack following said Stanford’s lax standards, or enforcement of standards that Cogan-Yoo has exploited, impacts consumers.

“As an academic physician, what troubles me is not only that her credentials appear borrowed, but that platforms like Substack and Instagram offer almost no friction against it,” this doctor, speaking only on condition of anonymity, told me. “Most people reasonably expect that a hospital or university affiliation stated on a major platform has been verified at least to some extent. But when it is used loosely to sell longevity advice or supplements, the audience has no easy way to tell where the institution’s judgment ends and the seller’s begins.

“That asymmetry gets exploited,” the doctor went on, “and it makes the harm hard to see until someone has already made a purchase or a clinical decision based on it. I find it hard to believe that Stanford would let people post anything on their bio without vetting. If true that is not acceptable.”

A regulatory ‘free-for-all’

The Longevity Industrial Complex is now worth more than $1 trillion, according to some estimates. “It’s growing superfast because you can make such money from it,” Caplan said. “There’s no regulation. No one’s going to jail. So you got a free-for-all for something that looks very desirable, with a lot of claims that don’t have to be proven.”

When I asked him how a postdoctoral scholar manages to get away with claiming to be a licensed California doctor on her Stanford Profiles page, Caplan said, “There’s enough money out there to get them to be a little slow on the website corrections.”

On Aug. 6, with a rewritten bio referencing a “Doctor & Scientist Duo,” LongeviMed published its first new post in more than two weeks. It’s almost entirely AI-generated.

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