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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Travel has a way of exciting new ideas, new spirits, new ways of thinking. The farther from home you go, the bigger your thoughts and ideas become. During my recent two weeks in Sydney, my first experience of Australia, I caught myself contemplating the notion of becoming powerful.

I don’t mean just physically or professionally. But powerful as a human exercising full agency in life, and burning with a hard gem-like flame1.

Becoming powerful, or more powerful, after 45, after 50, after 60—a number I’m going to hit in about 4 weeks (a fact that continues to blow the mind of this surfing, sprinting, ego-lifting, occasionally sophomoric 42-year-old-at-heart2) is important and necessary, to age with maximum healthy years. I’m not arguing for the cartoon version of the word, mind you, but the more durable, effective, positive and gratifying kind of powerful, which forces us to figure out what we want from this one life.

Becoming powerful, or more powerful, is a potent form of longevity. When you approach mastery over the life areas you care about most, your relationship with the world begins to change. Negativity starts bouncing off you instead of sticking; optimism radiates from you, like a broadcast signal that beckons other like minds; and bullshit stops bothering to even ring your buzzer…or maybe you just stop noticing when it does.

I think of personal power as manifesting in six forms: physical, nutritional, emotional, cognitive, spiritual and social. (Not coincidentally, these are also the manifestations of strength this Substack is built on.) To bring those six forms to life requires building actions, habits, mindsets—choose the descriptor that works for you—that allow you to flex each of the physical form, the cognitive form, etc., as you would any developed muscle in your body.

These are my 16 moves to become powerful, or more powerful, in life’s second half. Each is strategic and effective, I’ve found—either because I’ve managed to make them habits or am finding out how difficult doing so is. I elaborate on each below.

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16 power moves for your second half

1. Pay attention

2. Persist—90% of power is not quitting

3. Eat the Fritos, move on

4. Choose action over inertia

5. Know why you deserve it

6. Constantly ask “What if?”

7. Embrace beginner’s mind

8. Get wet and sandy

9. Schedule bullshit time

10. Carve and protect your morning 10

11. Feed your body, brain & soul

12. Be kind to your carcass

13. Look better each month

14. Spend your no’s

15. Practice mattering

16. Lift heavy things

How to put each power move into action

1. Pay attention

We live in a distraction economy that is lethal to a quiet mind. Your attention is a currency, and how you spend it says a lot about what you value or don’t value. I like this formula: attention = satisfaction. Each side of the equation grows or shrinks in parallel. When you talk with a friend, cook a steak, do a split squat, watch a film or debate a strategy, the level of your attention determines the quality of the outcome. Depth of focus makes people powerful.

Two Harvard guys built an iPhone app that pinged 2,250 people at random moments and collected about 250,000 reports on what they were doing and how they felt. People’s minds were somewhere other than the task at hand almost half the time. Where the mind was predicted happiness better than what the body was doing.

2. Persist—90% of power is not quitting

You may have noticed that many of my replies to comments on AGING with STRENGTH articles end with a short imperative: “Keep going.” What so often separates people who achieve big things from those who don’t is plain, boring persistence. Refusing to quit is among the most underrated personal powers.

Example: I’ve been strength training for 47 years, showing up quarter after quarter, working back from tears in tendons and holes in cartilage and grinding through the misery of working my way back from weakness and schlubbery after each of my seven orthopedic surgeries. I didn’t persist because I wanted muscles so badly but because I had trained my body and brain to want the feeling of working those muscles. I knew my why, and it kept me coming back, even after months-long surgery recoveries.

Persistence = expertise. Not to get Gladwellian, but I figure I needed about 10,000 hours to develop my expertise in writing, strength training, parenting, curling a soccer ball into the upper 90, and journalism. I’m still working on surfing, tennis and Substacking.

Becoming an expert through persistence makes you powerful.

3. Eat the Fritos, move on

If you’re like me, you will eat the entire, party-size bag in one sitting. This will happen on a random Tuesday evening, whereupon you decide that your incandescently poor food discipline means you’re just a flabby, undisciplined piece of crap who, late in his sixth decade, is not worthy of his lofty goals (more on that in #5, below). Self-condemnation is not powerful. Powerful is forgiving yourself for not being a machine, taking a moment to inquire what may have prompted the lapse, and resolving to only eat half the bag next time. Self-empathy = strength.

Two Berkeley psychologists ran four experiments on exactly this question: does going easy on yourself after a screwup make you soft? To the contrary. People told to respond to a personal failing with some self-directed kindness came back more motivated to fix it, and studied harder after a bad test, than people who got a pep talk about self-esteem.

4. Choose action over inertia

I’m convinced that most powerful people have watched “Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town,” the 1970 stop-motion animation classic, because they all do what Kris Kringle preaches: Put one foot in front of the other. Powerful people keep moving forward, they choose creating over deliberating, and accept imperfections as a cost of labor. Progress = balance. My least productive weeks are the ones I spend going backwards: re-reading, re-tweaking what I’ve already published instead of churning out the next imperfect article, live interview or audiocast. Reviewing what’s already done may feel like work, but it’s yesterday’s. Becoming powerful means habitually pushing into new territory—just like young Kris Kringle.

Steven Levitt built a website where people stuck on a real decision—quit the job, end the relationship, move—flipped a virtual coin and reported back. More than 20,000 coin tosses later, people the coin told to make the change were more likely to make it, more satisfied with the decision, and measurably happier six months on than those told to stay put.

5. Know why you deserve it

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What’s News? is a critical look into the latest aging & longevity news and ideas.

Summary—Global life expectancy rose over the past three decades, from 65 years in 1990 to 74 in 2023. But healthy life expectancy rose slower, from 56 to 63. The difference between these two measures is what demographers call the morbidity gap, and it widened in 203 of 204 countries over that period, according to a new analysis published in The Lancet Public Health. Palestine was the only exception, the paper said. The United States has the largest morbidity gap on Earth: 14.0 years, although Australia and Canada, at 13.9 and 13.7 years, respectively, aren’t far behind. Worldwide, people now spend almost 15% of life in poor health. In 1990, that figure was 13.6%.

Five general causes account for most of those unhealthy years. Musculoskeletal disorders lead at 1.8 years, driven mostly by low back pain. Mental disorders follow at 1.6 years, sense organ diseases at 1.1, unintentional injuries at 0.9, and other non-communicable diseases at 0.8. Women live longer than men but also spend more of that time sick: a 12.1-year morbidity gap for women vs 9.3 years for men.

Insight—Some of the increase in the morbidity gap is due to better and more available medical treatment, which the authors acknowledge. Stop people from dying of heart attacks, and they live long enough to acquire back pain, hearing loss or depression.

Musculoskeletal disorders are the single largest contributor to the global morbidity gap. In high-income countries, they and mental disorders together account for more than a third of that gap. Falls rank fourth worldwide. Low bone-mineral density sits in the top ten global risk factors, alongside high fasting plasma glucose and high BMI.

Context—The study comes from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, the shop that runs the Global Burden of Disease project and supplies the population health numbers most governments and the WHO rely on. The Gates Foundation paid for it and had no role in the design or the findings. The underlying data is public.

These are modeled estimates built from surveys and registries, not a clinical trial, and the authors say the trend holds because 203 countries point the same way, not because any single country’s number is airtight.

Takeaways (and what each one means for you)

• The biggest single contributor to years lived badly is musculoskeletal problems, and the biggest piece of that is low-back pain.

  • what it means for you: train your posterior chain—butt, legs, back—like the longevity intervention that it appears to be.

• Falls are the fourth-largest contributor globally.

  • what it means for you: balance and lower-body strength, once again, are important in older adulthood.

• Low bone mineral density ranks in the top ten risk factors worldwide.

  • what it means for you: resistance training + proper nutrition is a proven formula for strengthening bones.

• In high-income countries, the leading risk factors are high fasting glucose and obesity.

  • what it means for you: tending to your metabolic health may add healthy years to your life and/or avoid unhealthy years.

• Morbidity is spreading across a larger segment of adult life, not remaining concentrated at the end. The paper found the gap widening across the whole adult course.

  • what it means for you: start visualizing now the habits that will help keep you healthy later in life, or, if you’re already later in life, next week and next year.

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What’s News? is a critical daily look into the latest aging & longevity news & ideas.

Summary

On Thursday an FDA advisory committee voted to loosen the 2023 ban on four of the seven peptides under review—BPC-157, TB-500, KPV and MOTS-c—opening a path for compounding pharmacies (the specialty shops that mix drugs to order) to make and sell them. The BPC-157 vote was 8 to 6. The remaining three—DSIP, Semax and Epitalon—are up for a vote today, Friday, July 24. The votes are nonbinding, and the committee broke with the agency's own scientists, who said the drugs have not been adequately studied in people. Weeks earlier, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who calls himself a "big fan" of peptides and says he has used them, added eight new members to the panel; six of them sell peptides. You can read the who-and-how in this New York Times article. What follows is the part the coverage skips: what the research on these four drugs actually shows.

Insight—what the peptide studies show

Let’s start with the one that got the most attention.

1. BPC-157 (the higher-profile half of the so-called “Wolverine stack”) has a large animal record and almost no human one. The most recent systematic review, published last year in an orthopaedic journal, screened 544 papers and found one human study that qualified: a retrospective look at 12 people who had the peptide injected into an arthritic knee, seven of whom reported relief lasting more than six months. Everything else the review included, 35 of 36 studies, was done in animals, much of it by a single Croatian research group going back to the 1990s1. The authors graded the human evidence at the two lowest tiers science recognizes, and noted that no clinical safety data exist at all. The first formal human safety test appeared in early 2025: two healthy adults given intravenous infusions, no control group, measuring only whether their organ markers moved. They didn’t. As of this spring there is still no randomized trial of BPC-157 in humans for any condition.

2. TB-500 (the other half of the “Wolverine stack”) is a lab-made fragment of a natural protein, thymosin beta-4, and it reached the wellness market by way of the racetrack, where it’s given to horses and greyhounds. The human trials people cite tested the full protein rather than the fragment being sold, and most of those were never published or failed to show it worked. TB-500 itself has essentially no completed human trials. The one cancer signal in the literature is not reassuring: in a study of gastrointestinal stromal tumors, higher levels of thymosin beta-4 tracked with more aggressive disease and worse outcomes. That tracks: the peptide's job is to grow blood vessels and move cells around, which are the same two things a spreading tumor needs.

3. MOTS-c is the least tested, and therefore least credible, of the four peptides the FDA panel approved Thursday. The single human trial anyone can point to did not test MOTS-c. It tested a modified analog, run by a company called CohBar, in 88 volunteers over 28 days. The drug cleared its safety check and showed no clear benefit…and then the company dissolved and the program stopped. What’s sold today as MOTS-c rests on claims derived from mouse and cell studies, and the FDA had already flagged it for immune-reaction risk.

4. KPV is a cream (the 3 other peptides are injected) and carries the most modest claim of the group: an anti-inflammatory fragment tested mostly in mice with inflamed colons. Human data is close to nonexistent.

The FDA’s peptide voters

Kennedy added eight new members before the vote, six of them peptide sellers. Add the standing members whose businesses also stand to gain, and the panel was loaded with financial interest in its own decision. Here is who they are, and what each has at stake.

The peptide sellers:

• Gabriel Alizaidy, MD—scientific director, Maximus Health (Iowa). Sells growth-hormone peptides and GLP-1 “microdosing”; fun fact: the company drew an FDA warning letter in June for false claims about its compounded weight-loss drugs.

• Asare Christian, MD—founder, Aether Medicine (Philadelphia). Sells BPC-157 and other peptides for pain, muscle and what it dubiously refers to as “longevity.”

• Melissa Loseke, DO—chief medical officer, Re-new Institute (Omaha). A concierge clinic selling hormone and regenerative therapies.

• Haleem Mohammed, MD—global chief medical officer, Gameday Men’s Health, which runs a retail chain. Sells sermorelin peptide injections.

• Joshua Starbuck, MD—chief medical officer, Makena Health (Maui), a concierge “longevity clinic” (I’m using quotes because the phrase itself is hyperbole) that markets peptides.

• Kris Wusterhausen, DO—founder, The Resurge Clinic (Texas). Regenerative “clinic” marketing peptide and hormone therapies.

The rest of the industry bloc includes:

• Bobby Harshbarger, PharmD—Tennessee state senator and pharmacist at his family’s Premier Pharmacy. His mother, Rep. Diana Harshbarger, lobbied Kennedy to loosen peptide rules.

• Timothy Fensky, RPh—compounding pharmacist and consultant. Compounding pharmacies would gain the right to make these drugs.

• David Pope, PharmD—chief pharmacy officer, Xifin Pharmacy Solutions, a pharmacy-industry firm.

Context

Kennedy frames the move as harm reduction. The ban, he argues, only pushed users toward gray-market vials, and regulated compounding would be safer. The problem surfaced at the hearing. When supporters asked for guardrails, purity testing and mandatory harm reporting among them, the FDA said it has no power to require them, because compounding pharmacies answer to state boards rather than the agency. “I don’t have those regulatory authorities,” one official said. The safety upgrade on offer depends on rules the FDA can’t write. Peter Lurie of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, who testified against the change, said the people who manufactured demand for these drugs were seated to certify it.

Takeaways

• Thursday’s vote lets pharmacies make these drugs, nothing more. Whether they work, or are safe, remains to be seen.

• The human evidence is minimal in all 4 peptides. BPC-157 has one retrospective study of 12 knees and a two-person safety pilot; TB-500 has essentially none; the lone MOTS-c “human” trial tested a different molecule; KPV is mostly mouse work.

• “No reported side effects” in the context of these peptides usually means no one has looked long enough, or in enough people.

• Thin data can’t confirm benefit, and it can’t rule out harm, including whether the blood-vessel growth that BPC-157 and TB-500 trigger could feed an undetected tumor.

• When the people vouching for a drug also sell it, don’t take their word for it.

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The takeaway: Aging research that isn’t fully transparent allows the media to misinform readers, misrepresenting what the science actually shows.

The journal Geriatrics published a Yale study with an unusually hopeful message about growing old: a lot of folks 65 or older appear to get measurably fitter, physically and intellectually, as they age. Drawing on federal data from more than 11,000 older Americans followed for up to 12 years, the researchers found that 45% of those measured in both domains improved in cognition or physical ability.1 The study presented positive age beliefs as a key predictor of who improved.

Unsurprisingly, national media ran with the story—the Washington Post; Scientific American; AARP—with the dominant headline being: aging is not a headlong descent into the grave, and positive beliefs about it lead to better outcomes.

I believe that’s true; it’s no small reason why I launched AGING with STRENGTH 22 months ago (and why I plan to build out its value proposition in the near future—more on that in an upcoming post). But one of the reasons many of you read this column is because it challenges convenient headlines on aging research and flips over stones everyone else, including researchers, leave unturned.

What I found, after interviewing the Yale’s lead researcher and reading the study’s full text and citations, is that this paper gets too many things wrong or not exactly right. It suggests causality its data don’t support and appears to mischaracterizes evidence.

I spent nearly three weeks researching and then working out how to present these findings. I continually asked myself, “Who cares?” to keep this report relevant to AGING with STRENGTH readers, and not venture too far into the scientific weeds.

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Specific failures in Yale’s research into positive aging beliefs

Author’s note: The critiques below lean on principles like causation, correlation and odds ratios. I added footnotes to provide clear, plain-English explanations.

Yale’s aging beliefs paper did a few things that I wished it wouldn’t have, given the public hunger for greater transparency and accuracy in longevity-related communications nowadays:

• It strongly suggests a one-way causal story—positive age beliefs leading to better health—even though the data it reports cannot establish causality2

• It didn’t mention evidence consistent with a two-way relationship: healthier behavior and better function may also foster more positive beliefs about aging, not just the reverse

• Though it lists factors it controlled for (depression, sleep, isolation, marital status, cardiovascular disease and diabetes, education, race, APOE43), it didn’t mention the possibility of other confounding influences like income, healthcare access, exercise or personality traits4—all plausible drivers of both age beliefs and health outcomes

• The study didn't explain, in plain English, how statistically modest the data showed positive age beliefs to be as a predictor of improving health (odds ratios = 1.04 to 1.22), or how weak the correlation was (r = 0.09) between physical and cognitive health improvements occurring in tandem5

• It misapplied a French philosopher's analysis of how biologists define aging and mischaracterized a WHO handbook on eldercare to support its assertion that most people believe older age is, respectively, largely “a process of loss,” and “a time of inevitable and universal cognitive and physical decline”

Before examining that last critique in greater depth, it’s worth stating clearly that the Yale study’s main argument is well established and feels intuitively right: how optimistically we view our remaining years must influence how we age. The argument rests on decades of research, much of it conducted by the paper’s main author, Becca Levy, a highly regarded Yale professor of public health and psychology. In 2022, Dr. Levy published a book, “Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live.”

That depth is why these specific critiques of Yale’s research are worth raising. Also, the most rigorous science shows its work and highlights what it doesn’t know, as I point out below. So, I did what the media coverage of this study6 apparently did not: I read the PDF of the full paper and of several of its citations. And I wrote to Dr. Levy with questions, three times, and she responded three times.

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The Yale study’s lead author’s response to questions, Pt. 1

Dr. Levy's replies were gracious and detailed and leaned heavily on the paper's own language and framing, which she said is based on stereotype embodiment theory. She created the theory in 2009 to explain how age stereotypes influence older adults’ health. On the science, she engaged directly, conceding that the study never tested the reverse direction and that the relationship is likely reciprocal. But none of that reasoning appears in the paper itself. My questions about the two outside sources were not addressed in substance.

“I do think that health behaviors are likely involved in the improvements we observe,” Dr. Levy wrote in responding to my initial questions, “and it is also likely that there is some back and forth dynamics with age beliefs contributing to better health behaviors and then these behaviors reinforcing positive age beliefs.” Her own stereotype embodiment theory, she noted, proposes that “health behaviors are a central pathway for age beliefs to impact health in later life.”

Dr. Levy also pointed to studies that test the reverse direction—health and functioning predicting later age beliefs—while emphasizing that in those analyses, effects are stronger from age beliefs to health than the opposite direction. That is broadly consistent with some longitudinal work she cited.7

But then I asked about those two curious citations the Yale study used to support its argument that “the predominant narrative of aging” is one of “inevitable and universal decline.” And this is where, in the absence of relevant data to support that claim, I believe the Yale paper got it wrong.

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People don’t believe aging sucks as much as Yale says they do

“A dominant belief about aging held by scientists, health care professionals, and the lay public,” the authors write in the paper’s introduction, is “that it is a time of inevitable and universal decline in functioning.” The next sentence adds: “A review of scientific definitions concluded that ‘Aging is consensually described as a process of loss’” (italics mine). (The study later refers to “the focus” on aging as a time of decline as a “predominant trend.”)

Curious about why any scientific description of aging would focus only on loss, I looked up the citation, which points to a 2020 paper by Maël Lemoine, a full professor of philosophy of medical sciences at the University of Bordeaux, whose definition of aging seems to be unduly grim:

An examination of the full paper8 from which the above abstract is pulled makes clear it’s a conceptual review of the evolutionary theory of aging rather than a definition of modern human aging or aging beliefs. Using it that way invites more questions than answers.

Misstating the World Health Organization’s views on late adulthood

Where the Yale paper appears to misstate fact is its characterization of the WHO’s 168-page handbook, Integrated Care for Older People, or ICOPE, published in 2024 to provide guidance for person-centered assessment and care. The authors cited the handbook to bear out their claim that even the world’s most prominent public health organization defines aging strictly as decline.

But the WHO handbook doesn’t say what Yale says it says.

According to the Yale authors, the WHO handbook indicates that (quoting the Yale study here) “the best way to measure cognitive and physical capacities in later life is to classify these domains as either showing or not showing decline. Therefore, the corresponding WHO assessment tool does not allow for the possibility of improvement in these domains.” (italics mine)

However, the WHO manual doesn’t mention a “best way” to measure health capacities. The manual includes a screening tool, built to flag patients for fuller assessment, but that hardly justifies characterizing the WHO publication as not allowing “for the possibility of improvement” among older people.

To the contrary, page 3 of the handbook features a panel, titled “Ageism,” that condemns the aging views that the Yale study’s authors claim it holds.

The Yale study’s lead author’s response to questions, Pt. 2

About the use of a biological theorist’s definition of aging

In response to my question about why the study ran with a definition of human aging taken from a philosopher’s view of biological aging, Dr. Levy did not offer a direct reply. The paper’s aim, she wrote, was to challenge the “widespread myth” that aging is characterized by only decline. “There is evidence from a number of places that this myth is widely held.”

Quoting directly from the study (which cites her book as a source), Dr. Levy cited two surveys:

“A global survey of nearly 40,000 people found that 65% of health care professionals and 80% of lay persons falsely believed that all older persons develop dementia. A nationally representative survey found that 77% of Americans aged 40 and older think that their cognition will decline.”

The surveys are damning evidence of widespread bias. But expecting some cognitive decline is not the same belief as decline being inevitable and universal. Believing all older people get dementia, moreover, is a specific factual error about disease, not a philosophy of aging.

About the study’s claim that WHO believes the “best way” to classify aging is only in terms of decline

My final question to Dr. Levy was whether her paper’s assertion about the WHO’s ICOPE handbook was incorrect, given that A) the handbook’s clinical purpose is to identify older adults in need of intervention, B) its screening tool, like most others, is built to detect deficits, and C) the decline/no-decline rubric that the Yale paper says shows the WHO’s negative view of aging appears only in Step 1, the basic screening assessment, and its stated purpose is to flag older people for fuller assessment and trigger interventions to "slow or reverse" those declines.

In response, Dr. Levy, a scientific advisor to the WHO's Campaign to Combat Ageism, said the WHO is “doing great work addressing ageism” and noted how its screening tool flags declines for further assessment. Her email did not address the question of whether the study misinterpreted the WHO’s view of aging.

Why scientific transparency matters, and an example of what it looks like

When I first went deep into the weeds of this Yale aging beliefs study, it was out of curiosity: wasn’t reverse causation (healthy living → positive aging beliefs) also possible and, if so, why didn’t this peer-reviewed paper even mention the idea?

As I read further into the citations, the language seemed dispositive about causation being one way, but not the other. And the paper’s juxtaposing its support for positive aging beliefs against what it claimed is a near-global consensus that aging is a downward-facing dog—it didn’t feel appropriately cautious in the way most research is presented.

That matters because all of us, as consumers of aging research, deserve clarity. Clarity about whether a behavior causes a health outcome or is only associated with it. Clarity about why we should accept a baroque definition of aging from a philosopher in Bordeaux. Clarity about why a WHO screening tool should be taken as evidence that the organization can’t fathom aging as anything but a subtraction.

A dataset’s limitations matter. Causality (or its absence) matters. Being scientifically clear to the public about what data reveals and what it leaves open to question (eg, directionality) is what creates a literate, informed aging public.

And then, by chance, I came across another aging science paper that examined walking speeds in older adults, which makes clear the limitations of its findings.

The paper, published in Neurology9 this month, found a link between “super movers”—people 80 and older who maintained walking speeds far faster than their peers—and slower cognitive decline and lower risk of cognitive impairment. However, the Neurology paper explicitly flags the observational limit, cites competing directional explanations and addresses causality directly, stating:

That’s what scientific transparency looks like.

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

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What’s News? is a critical look into the latest aging & longevity news and ideas.

Summary: A new scientific analysis of 49,000 British adults suggests for the first time that filtered-coffee drinkers tended to look biologically younger than non-coffee drinkers, and that instant coffee drinkers look biologically older. The research also indicated the more filtered-coffee drinkers drank, the stronger the anti-aging effect. Researchers compared coffee habits—instant, filtered, or other—against three lab-based measures of how well people’s bodies were aging. These measures were taken only once, when participants enrolled. Two of these measures were overall "body age" scores, drawing on batches of routine health readings (blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, inflammation and markers of kidney, liver and lung function) into a single estimate of whether a person's body looked older or younger than their actual age. The third measure looked at the length of participants’ telomeres—the protective caps on the ends of DNA strands inside white blood cells, which grow shorter as cells age. The human data came from the U.K. Biobank, a research database of more than 500,000 U.K. volunteers recruited between 2006 and 2010. The researchers adjusted for income, education, smoking, weight, and health; the filtered-coffee result holds up well, while the instant-coffee result is weak and could be explained by factors that weren’t measured.

Insight: Instant coffee is brewed coffee dried into soluble crystals, and some researchers classify it as an ultra-processed food, though that label is disputed. That extra processing is the obvious place to look for a chemical explanation of why instant coffee drinkers may look older, but the paper doesn’t go there. Instead, it says filtered coffee may carry more of coffee's main antioxidants—chlorogenic acids—though the authors borrow that claim from other research rather than measuring it in their own participants. Paper filters trap cholesterol-raising oils called diterpenes (which espresso, brewed through metal filters, sadly does not), though instant coffee is low in those, too, so diterpenes can't explain why instant would be worse for you. The one mechanism the researchers did find in their own data was inflammation: a blood marker called GlycA accounted for roughly a third of instant coffee's statistical link to faster aging. But because everything was measured at a single point in time, even that can't tell us whether the inflammation came before the aging or after.

Context: This appears to be the first study to test how coffee brewing method, rather than coffee overall, tracks with biological aging, which makes it novel but also hardly conclusive. As a one-time snapshot, it shows only an association between drinking a certain type of coffee brew and biological aging, not a causal connection. Participants reported their own coffee intake. They were almost entirely white, so the findings may not extend to other populations. Earlier research has raised more questions than it answered. One genetic analysis in 2023 tied instant coffee to shorter telomeres, for example, while other work from 2021 found coffee broadly protective. This paper doesn't settle those questions.

Takeaways:

• Filtered coffee brewed through a paper or metal filter (drip, pour-over) showed the clearest and most durable link to a younger biological age, and the effect climbed with every cup.

• Instant coffee’s “ages you faster” inference in this paper is not a strong one. A single unmeasured factor could wipe it out, so there’s little reason to abandon Folger’s Crystals over this … if Folger’s crystals is really your thing.

• Food scientists disagree whether instant coffee qualifies as an ultra-processed food vs. just a processed food. But if it melts in hot water, is it really coffee?

• If you’re an espresso-coffee drinker, you’re not getting much useful data from this work. You’re still getting coffee's documented health benefits while taking on a modest cholesterol bump from the unfiltered diterpenes. If you want espresso's cholesterol load minimized, you can always pour it through a paper filter.

• If you want to hedge your instant-coffee bet, check out what this fellow suggests.

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What’s News? is a critical look into the latest aging and longevity news & ideas.

Summary: A July 13 Washington Post column, written by a gastroenterologist, begins by saying claims about the health benefits of spicy food have “a strong scientific basis,” but then spends most of its remaining words hedging on how much. The ingredient at play here is capsaicin, the compound that makes red chili peppers hot.

The column’s headline misleadingly suggests spicy food “could lead to greater longevity”—a claim unsupported by the research cited below it. Though inconclusive and sometimes contradictory, the data is still worth understanding.

The column cites two sets of research: A 2015 Chinese study that found near-daily chili eaters had a 14 percent lower risk of death, and a 2017 U.S. study indicating hot-red-chili eaters were about 13 percent less likely to die. The Chinese study asked broadly about spicy food, most of it fresh or dried chili; the U.S. study asked specifically about hot red chili peppers (or, for Gen X readers, red hot chili peppers). Neither paper looked at hotter varieties like habaneros or ghost peppers. And, it’s worth repeating, neither proves chili is the reason those people lived longer.

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The column describes what red chili’s active compound does to, and for, us:

• capsaicin works on so-called heat receptors, called TRPV1, scattered all over the body, from skin to gut

• on the topic of heart health, the column points to observational links between capsaicin and reduced heart disease and stroke

• it mentions some early evidence that capsaicin may increase “good” HDL cholesterol (small 2017 trial) and help burn a few extra calories (2024 trial)

• it refers to a 2017 study finding that people who routinely eat spicy foods ate about half a teaspoon less salt a day and had lower blood pressure, in part because capsaicin makes food taste saltier

• it overwhelms pain nerves (which is why capsaicin topical creams ease pain), doesn’t hurt a healthy stomach, and, at everyday doses, actually lowers acid and may even protect against ulcers.

A 2006 trial even exonerated chili as a cause of hemorrhoid flare-ups, and though the published evidence of it as either a protector or potential risk magnifier of gut-cancer picture is mixed, that evidence seems to lean toward it being more protective.

Context: Spices have been used as folk medicine for centuries, but data connecting them to how long people actually live is recent. The 2015 Chinese study above was the first large one to link regular chili eating to lower death rates; the 2017 U.S. study was the first to test whether that finding held outside Asia. A 2019 Italian study of nearly 23,000 adults pointed the same way, finding that people who ate chili four or more times a week had roughly a 23 percent lower risk of death overall. The benefit held regardless of how healthy the rest of their diet was. Pool these studies together and regular chili eaters again show lower overall and heart-related death rates, though the individual studies vary quite a bit (see this 2021 meta-analysis).

Insight: What’s still missing in this body of chili research is a study that randomly assigns people to eat chili or not and then follows their health metrics. Everything so far is observational, which means researchers can see the pattern but can’t confirm chili is driving it. Chili eaters may simply differ from non-eaters in ways no one measured. On the plus side, heavy chili eating correlates to lower death rates, and small trials hint it may increase energy burn and help the stomach lining heal at ordinary doses. On the negative side, heavy chili eating has been linked to much higher stomach-cancer risk in some populations; the stomach-protective effect reverses at very high doses; and big concentrated doses can make, to put it bluntly, your butt hurt—a trial found chili worsened acute anal fissures.

Takeaways:

• If you already like spicy food, keep eating it. In the Chinese study, the benefit maxed out around 3-5 days a week.

• If chilis aren’t your thing, don’t force it. There’s still no proven longevity benefit.

• The most practical, testable payoff is that chili makes food taste saltier, which may help reduce high blood pressure.

• Fresh or dried whole chilis beat concentrated capsaicin pills. The longevity data cited above is from people eating chili in food; the downsides (stomach irritation, worse anal fissures) tend to come from big, concentrated doses.

• The eating pattern most reliably tied to a longer life remains the Mediterranean diet—whole foods, plants, healthy fats—of which chili is an optional part.

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Summary: Dr. this week translated an invited review he and Stanford's Tony Wyss-Coray just published in Nature Medicine, “Biological Aging Clocks in Health and Disease.” The bottom line up front is that your birthday is a lousy measure of your age, and we can finally do better. Large-scale proteomics—reading thousands of proteins from a tube of blood, then letting AI sort out which ones track which organ—has debunked the idea that we age at a steady, linear clip. Multiple studies now point to three distinct waves of aging clustering around 34, 60 and 78. Worse (or better, depending on how much you really want to know), our organs don't age in lockstep. In Britain's National Survey of Health and Development, 1,800 people all born in the same week of 1946 were tested at age 63; their organs and immune systems spanned roughly a 10-year range in biological pace. But this “ground truth” goes deeper than organs. A study published two weeks before this review assessed more than 40 cell types across more than 60,000 people, and found about 1 in 4 had accelerated aging in at least one cell type. People whose brain astrocytes (cells that support neurons) aged fast developed Alzheimer's at 12.6x the rate of those whose astrocytes aged slowly. Among people carrying two copies of the APOE4 risk allele, the gap approached 40x. Two systems keep surfacing as gatekeepers: the brain and the immune system (Topol’s excellent book, “Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity”—more on that below—also discussed these two organs as drivers of human aging). When brain and immune system age at a normal pace, survival over 15 to 17 years approaches 100% even when other organs are aging badly. His closing thought is classic don’t-buy-the-longevity-bullshit Topol advice: do not buy the direct-to-consumer aging tests currently on the market. The methylation-based clocks being sold now, Topol writes, lack standardization and reliability and (surprise! not surprised) cost a fortune. The organ and cell clocks with real promise are not commercially available yet.

Context: Topol—a cardiologist, the founder-director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and a shrewd arbiter of health science and research—produces one of the best publications on Substack, regardless of category. (Last year, I sat down with him in person for nearly three hours to discuss the biggest insights from the “Super Agers” book. Read Part 1 of our lengthy Q&A here; Part 2 is here.)

Insight: This is the rare longevity post that tells you not to spend money. Topol argues that biological age is finally becoming measurable at a granular level and, critically, that it appears to be modifiable: the NSHD organ clocks were worsened by adolescent overweight, smoking, lack of education and life adversity; they were protected by sustained physical activity, among other factors. But the field's commercial edge is racing ahead of its evidence base, and the Longevity Industrial Complex will happily sell you an "epigenetic age" today. Topol is launching a randomized trial this month to test whether aggressive lifestyle change with 24/7 coaching lowers Alzheimer's biomarkers in high-risk people.

Takeaways:

• Aging isn’t a smooth slope. It comes in waves—at roughly ages 34, 60 and 78.

• Your organs age at different speeds. In a cohort of people born the same week, organ ages varied by about a decade.

• The brain and immune system look like the master switches. When they age normally, survival stays remarkably high even if other organs are struggling.

• Lifestyle shows up in the proteins. Sustained physical activity was one of the protective factors. Smoking, adolescent overweight and chronic adversity did the opposite.

• Don’t waste money on an aging clock right now. The tests on the market lack standardization and reliability. The good ones aren’t for sale yet.

• Read the big numbers carefully. The 12.6x and 40x Alzheimer's figures come from observational studies. They show a clock predicts disease. They don't yet show that changing the clock prevents it. That's what Topol's new trial is designed to find out.

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What’s News? is a critical look into the latest aging & longevity news and ideas.

Summary: In January, I wrote about building physical strength and flexibility in 2026 using a simple, 11-syllable mindset (see the Context section below). And now I find something approaching communion with Sebastian Langdell, a Baylor University English professor, who wrote a New York Times op-ed (gift link!) this week about his circuitous journey in creating a strength training habit for himself. He writes about the almost inescapable fitness advice pushed by the big podcast names that hold themselves out as experts on the subject. There’s Tim Ferriss on fasting; Peter Attia on ketones; Bryan Johnson on transfusing his son’s plasma; Andrew Huberman on the best way to char a steak (nevermind that steak char is something akin to cancer dust). To Langdell, each seemed to be playing off clichéd masculinity tropes, which, he wrote, made him feel rather hollow.

Only after he began following fitness concepts pursued by artists—cartoonist Alison Bechdel; novelist Laura van den Berg; singer Harry Styles, who has credited writer Haruki Murakami’s book on running with freeing Styles “from the idea that music had to be an unhealthy profession”—did professor Langdell find an open door to the kind of non-preening strength he was looking to build in midlife. (I also invited him to join AGING with STRENGTH, to find a like-minded community of active, intelligent, grounded believers in strength in all its forms, not just physical.)

Insight: We’ve all had enough of the myth of the ripped older man as an avatar of late-adulthood fitness (haven’t we?). There’s nothing wrong with building lean muscle, eating well and staying in incredibly good shape. Just look at 60-something Lenny Kravitz. But the bro-y idea that fitness after 50 requires questionable biohacks, pricey supplements or giant muscles of the cartoonish variety rendered by AI, above, is obnoxious overkill.

Takeaway: Aging like an ass-kicking artist is underrated. Which is why I instead advocate the Move like it’s 1899 mindset: “Move your body. Every day. With purpose.”

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What’s News? is a critical look into the latest aging & longevity news and ideas.

Summary: Researchers in Spain scanned the brains of 144 people in the Basque region, a place where speaking three or four languages is unremarkable. They fed the scans to an AI that was trained on the brains of 728 other people and asked the AI to guess how old each brain looked, based on how well its circuits were wired together. Bilinguals came out roughly 6 years younger than their actual age. Trilinguals, 7. People with four languages appeared to be 13 years younger.

Insight: This was a talk at a neuroscience conference, not a peer-reviewed paper. Research based on 144 people split four ways (ie, about 36 per group) is methodologically thin. The decreases in brain age are strange: one extra year for a third language…but six more for a fourth? Also, people who juggle four languages tend to be well-educated, well-traveled and socially busy. The researchers say languages "slow" brain aging—suggesting causation. But their data can't show that.

Context: The languages-aging argument has been running for two decades, and it’s been a very mixed scientific bag. Headlines often wrongly imply (or outright state) causality that the data don’t support—as the press release about this study and the Guardian’s write up about it each do. The language-aging investigations started in earnest in 2007, when a Toronto team looked at 184 dementia patients and found people who speak two languages showed symptoms about four years later than folks who speak only one. Other studies since have found delays in the range of ~4 to 5.5 years. But many others found no effect at all. A 2020 meta-analysis offered what amounts to a split verdict: bilingual people may develop dementia later but they're no less likely to develop it, and the studies feeding that conclusion were inconsistent enough to make the study authors regard them as biased.

Takeaway: A 13-year effect from an unpublished abstracted presented at a conference isn’t breaking new ground but, rather, adding another stratum to the argument over whether language-learning impacts longevity.

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Greetings from Sydney, where cold and rain prevail, large pear-shaped men inexplicably jog shirtless and a very, very carefully brewed flat white is never more than a block away. After a week down under, instead of staying relentlessly on message—which is boring in politics and doubly so on Substack—I’d like to give you a few first, perhaps incorrect impressions of Australia’s largest city (and perhaps also its emptiest—where the hell is everyone?)

A city of solitude (at least in July)

With slightly more than 5.6 million inhabitants, Sydney is barely more populous than Melbourne, but by any big-city American standard this is a remarkably uncrowded burgh. Sydney's built-up urban area contains only about 2,000 people per square kilometer—making it a third less crowded than Los Angeles, less than half as dense as Chicago, and about 80% less crowded than New York City. Walking over the spacious walking bridges and through its residential neighborhoods made me think of that wide shot near the beginning of “28 Days Later” portraying a virtually empty downtown London.

I’m not complaining; I’m rejoicing. After 25 years living in New York, Los Angeles and the Bay Area, Sydney is a city with room to breathe. Being so unsullied by urban humanity feels rejuvenating.

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Winter in July

As does Sydney’s windy, rainy winter chill, which, this being mid-July, I’m smack in the middle of. After 15 years in Los Angeles, I find the Southern Hemisphere cold and rain a welcome change. The physiology of transporting your body to a different season via a 13-hour plane ride isn’t entirely new to me.

A decade ago I spent a lot of time on planes from LA to Southeast Asia, where everything is different the moment you clear airport customs and immigration. But experiencing an Anglophone population insulated by thick puffy jackets in July with monsoon-like rain swirling and then abruptly halting feels new, distinct and, in a small way, surreal.

Is there anything more Australian than ocean pools?

Along Sydney's coastline, some 30 ocean pools sit carved into the sandstone shelves where the surf breaks. By ocean pools, I mean ocean water held in outdoor swimming structures, a few feet from the roar of breaking ocean waves.

In the right lower corner of this video, recorded Sunday, you can glimpse the outlines of the ocean pool at Dee Why’s beach, north of Sydney:

First Nations people swam in natural rock pools here for generations before colonization; the built versions began appearing in the nineteenth century, when councils and community subscriptions funded seawater baths like Bronte’s, cut into the southern headland in 1887, and McIver’s at Coogee, which opened in the 1860s and remains reserved for women and children.

Olympians Fanny Durack and Mina Wylie trained in these pools before taking gold and silver in the 100-meter freestyle at the 1912 Games in Stockholm, and Depression-era relief labor built many more through the 1930s. A century on, the pools remain. Each morning, year round, swimmers descend the cliff stairs to stroke laps in water the tide replaces twice a day, while waves crash over the walls beside them.

Here’s the ocean pool at Bondi Beach, at dusk on a Sunday, with no swimmers:

Sydney’s coffee culture cures trans-Pacific jet lag

I’d heard about the city’s robust coffee obsession and figured it was hyperbole. What city, on what continent, isn’t relentlessly hailed by desperate travel bloggers for its incomparable coffee culture?

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I was wrong about Sydney’s. Though not a natural-born fan of the ever-popular flat white (I’m more a three-shot, 2% latte guy), I can honestly say the coffee here, in addition to being reasonably priced, reduces jet lag by approximately…checks notes…73%, give or take. Perhaps even more impressive, though, are the baristas here. They’re chatty, make extended eye contact and seem to genuinely appreciate your business. I haven’t seen one human queue for coffee, either. There are simply too many coffee shops—and too few people per square kilometer—to cause a queue.

The large shirtless men do queue for beer, however. But that’s another story.

What are your impressions of Sydney?

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What’s News? is a critical look into the latest aging & longevity news and ideas.

Summary: A study of nearly 4,000 adults published in Neurology found that people in their 80s who walk exceptionally fast for their age—the fastest 9%, dubbed “super movers”—are about 50% less likely to develop cognitive decline than their slower peers, according to an NPR report. The super movers also tended to hold onto more volume in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center, and some stayed mentally sharp even while carrying the amyloid plaques and tangles linked to Alzheimer’s, suggesting that staying active may make the brain more resilient to age-related damage. Genetics accounts for a large share of who becomes a super mover, researchers said, but everyday habits—exercise, diet, sleep, stress management and social connection—matter a lot. The form of movement (walking, swimming, cycling) counts less than doing it consistently.

Insight: Walking speed has become one of geriatric medicine’s most useful vital signs, because moving well draws on so many systems at once—muscle strength, balance, coordination, heart, lungs, and the nervous system—that gait speed serves as a rough readout of overall health.

Context: Earlier research established that slow walking in older adults predicts falls, hospitalization and shorter life expectancy. Research also tied regular exercise to larger hippocampal volume and higher levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, a protein that supports the survival of neurons. This new study extends that work by flipping the lens to the fastest agers rather than the frailest, and by testing the muscle-brain link in people over 80. It arrives alongside broader dementia-prevention research, including the Lancet Commission’s estimate that addressing 14 modifiable risk factors could prevent or delay nearly half of dementia cases. One open question the study can’t settle is whether fast walking protects the brain or simply signals a brain that is already aging well—the authors suspect both are true.

Takeaway: It’s not easy to become a “super movers”—walking at roughly 3 m.p.h., at or after age 80. But even if you can’t, what matters most is walking regularly, at any speed.

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What’s News? is a critical look into the latest aging & longevity news and ideas.

Summary: A July 7 article in Nature says that big-budget trials that put older adults through intensive lifestyle overhauls—better diet, exercise, mental and social stimulation, blood-pressure control—have found real but tiny cognitive benefits, and none has yet shown that healthy habits actually prevent dementia. The often-cited figure that 45% of dementia is preventable is a population estimate, not a personal guarantee: you can do everything right and still get Alzheimer's. The advice is still worth following for your heart, mood, and overall health, but it's no guarantee against dementia, which comes down partly to genetics and luck.

Context: Know and understand the risk factors for dementia, to minimize them (the chart above tells the story).

Takeaways (5 rules to protect your brain after 50)

1. Guard your heart to guard your brain
   Get your blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar checked regularly, and treat problems early. What protects your arteries also protects your memory.

2. Move most days
   Aim to be active every day with walking, gardening, cycling or any movement you enjoy; it doesn’t have to be the gym to help keep dementia risk down.

3. Eat simple, real food
   Base meals on vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts and healthy fats, and keep ultra‑processed foods as occasional extras, not everyday staples.

4. Stay connected and curious (learn new things about topics you enjoy)
   Make time for friends, family and community. Take time to learn new things (eg, music chords; a few phrases in your favorite languages; quantum entanglement) and read for pleasure daily…all activities that research shows keep brains healthy.

5. Address any hearing loss that occurs in midlife
   Use hearing aids if you need them, because hearing is a risk factor for brain-related health conditions.

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What’s News? is a critical look into the latest aging & longevity news and ideas.

Summary: I’m posting this screenshot of an otherwise non-public letter published this week in the journal Nature. The letter, from three scientists from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, disputes a recent critique (by a noted skeptic of so-called blue zones) of a paper they wrote 10 years ago on the limits of human lifespan. The scientists claim that the oldest living human at any given time is probably around 115 and that the chances of anyone living past 125 is less than 0.0001%.

Context: Plenty of scientists, and many, many venture-backed longevity entrepreneurs, dispute the 125-year human age limit. These guys think someone will probably reach 126 by then end of this century. Bryan “Don’t Die” Johnson, the star of a 2024 Netflix series called “The Man Who Wants To Live Forever,” probably won’t. The oldest verified human in history was Jeanne Calment of France, who lived to 122 years and 164 days before dying in 1997. No one since has been verified to reach 125.

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Update July 7, 2026 — The Americans’ remarkably poor performance vs. Belgium in the Round of 16 highlighted, by virtue of their absence, just how important the qualities described in detail below are to success, for a team or an individual. The explanations for why these players’ self-belief and mutual support vanished against a talented and (unfortunately, from an American perspective) externally motivated Belgian team, I’ll leave to others. The shame of it is that this U.S. squad had so much going for it, until—through no fault of its own—it had so much going against it.

July 2 — I’ve watched the U.S. men’s national soccer team’s quadrennial World Cup performances for most of my life—about 12 of them. The current squad, known by the acronym USMNT, is different from any previous incarnation.

These guys are capable of competing with everyone and beating anyone, which neither I nor anyone else would have dared say during any previous World Cup. Not because of superior talent—impressive as they are, they don’t have anything close to the raw talent of the French, Argentine or Spanish teams—but because of a singular quality that they share with all top athletes, pro or amateur, regardless of age. This difference-making quality is essential for any athlete managing an aging body or athletic injuries or the kinds of performance challenges that typically don’t show up before age 50 or 60.

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

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Takeaway #1: Self-belief is the sine qua non of performance regardless of age. At the gym, on the courts, during the race or in the office, stoking and achieving belief in one’s ability—including the ability to outperform one’s own circumscribed expectations—fuels all positive outcomes especially in the second half of life.

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

In case you missed it….

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

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

Takeaway #2: Lack of self-belief, conversely, incinerates performance quality. Francis Tiafoe, the wildly gifted American tennis pro ranked 19^th in the world and capable of beating anyone, spent years losing to far less talented competition before he committed to doing the work that winning requires. The sentiments he expressed, recorded in a recent ESPN article published after a fourth-round loss at the French Open in June, hint at the need for developing foundational self-belief that enables raw talent to flourish.

Takeaway #3: a strong support system keeps you performing at high quality even when you yourself may not have it on a particular day or week or season. Another lesson from the USMNT’s performance this summer. Including its terrible showing vs. Belgium. Belgium may have won the game, anyway, even without the red-card/political interference controversy that almost certainly interfered with the Americans’ self-belief and intrapersonal support system on the field. But what made the game so disheartening to watch was the lack of energy, spirit and (from a global opinion perspective) support the U.S. played with. The coordination and focus required to be in the right spot at the right time—so evident in previous matches—vanished against Belgium. That’s not entirely because of Belgium, either.

Even if you yourself don’t have a red-card/political interference controversy shaking your foundations at the gym, on the court, on the roads or in the office, keep in mind the importance of building your support network of trusted humans.

Because playing without it isn’t pretty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Other notable features from this Harvard longevity analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The “just enough” vacation health & wellness strategies

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

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

1 | Set a minimum-movement floor

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 | Let your destination be your “gym”

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

5 | Substitute people for screens

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

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

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

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

As James Seals and Dash Crofts sang the chorus:

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

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

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

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

She laughed until lemonade dripped off her chin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We all need more jasmine blowing through our minds nowadays.

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

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