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 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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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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