All of the scientific evidence we know to be true today was, at some point, up-and-coming. For example, clinical studies backing the Mediterranean diet’s role in longevity or evidence showing that fermented foods are good for the gut were all novelty research studies once upon a time.
Tag: longevity
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3 Actionable Tips To Live A Healthier Life (Not Just A Longer One)
Let’s live better, not just longer.
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Amazon Walking Pad + Benefits Of Walking For Longevity
If you feel like everyone and their mother is telling you to get more steps in, we’re here to tell you it’s for a good reason. There are a ton of reasons to squeeze in regular walks, but did you know the speed at which you walk can make a big difference in the benefits to your longevity?
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Yes, There's A Longevity Vitamin (& People Over 40 Need To Prioritize It)
You’re likely not getting enough.
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Aging Might Not Be Inevitable
In 1997, a French woman named Jeanne Calment died at the age of 122. She was the world’s oldest verified person, according to the Gerontology Research Group. Her daily habits included drinking a glass of port wine and smoking a cigarette after meals (she also ate 2.5 pounds of chocolate every week). “Nobody else has lived past 120 since she died,” says Venki Ramakrishnan, the Nobel Prize–winning biologist and author of Why We Die. Indeed, while the number of centenarians is increasing every year, the number of people living past 110 is not. “This suggests that maybe there’s a natural limit to human lifespan.”
If such a limit exists, it’s one imposed by biological evolution. “Evolution wants to make sure that your genes have the maximum likelihood of being passed on,” Ramakrishnan says. “It doesn’t care about how long you live.” This explains, for instance, why there seems to be a correlation between the size of animals and their life expectancy—in general, the larger the species, the longer it will live. Most mayflies live between one and two days. Monarch butterflies can live for months. Bowhead whales live more than 200 years. Greenland sharks may live more than 500 years. “If you’re a smaller species, there’s no point spending a lot of resources maintaining and repairing the body because the likelihood of being eaten or starved to death are high,” says Ramakrishnan. “Larger species, on the other hand, will have the advantage of more time finding mates and producing offspring.”
A few species, however, seem to be exempt from this rule. The hydra, a small freshwater animal with 12 tentacles, doesn’t seem to age at all. The immortal jellyfish can even age backward. “It suggests that aging is not inevitable and that we might be able to circumvent our natural limits if we alter our biology,” Ramakrishnan says.
That is why understanding the biological underpinnings of why we age and die is such a hot topic of research today. Scientists are trying to find out how to manipulate cellular aging processes—for instance, how to destroy senescent cells (aged cells that cause inflammation), or how to reprogram cells to revert them to an earlier state of development. Over the past decade, more than 300,000 scientific papers about aging have been published, while billions of dollars have been funneled into more than 700 longevity startups, including Altos Labs, Human Longevity, Elysium Health, and Calico.
One of the most promising avenues of research involves the discovery of chemical compounds that can mimic the effects of a low-calorie diet, which is recognized as one of most well-established ways to slow down aging. One such compound is rapamycin, first discovered on the soil of Easter Island, due to its antifungal properties. “Later they found out that it was also a potent antitumor and anti-inflammatory,” Ramakrishnan says. “It’s also immunosuppressant, so it can also make people prone to infection and slow down wound healing. We need to find that sweet spot between not having the side effects and having just the [anti-aging] benefits.”
Longevity researchers are also familiar with a body of research that shows that young blood can rejuvenate old bodies—in mice, at least. This discovery came about when researchers first surgically connected the circulatory system of a young and old mouse—a technique called parabiosis—and observed that this procedure slowed down the symptoms of aging, lengthening the lifespan of the older animal by 10 percent. Ramakrishnan notes that while scientists are still trying to identify the factors in young blood that cause this effect, “there are companies that jumped the gun and started offering young plasma to billionaires.”
“While we’re waiting for all these things to happen there are things we can do.” Ramakrishnan notes. “This is likely similar to the advice your grandparents gave you. Eat moderately, eat healthy diets, get enough sleep and exercise. It turns out that each of those affects the other two so it’s really a virtuous cycle. If you do all of them at once, it works better than any medicine on the market, it has no side effects, and it’s free.”
This article appears in the July/August 2024 issue of WIRED UK magazine.
João Medeiros
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What Is Hormesis? Experts Unpack Hormetic Stressors & Benefits
High or prolonged doses of any of these behaviors or substances aren’t sustainable or healthy (spend too much time in cold water, and you’re gonna get hypothermia). But in short bursts, the little bit of irritation that these stressors cause is just enough to knock you out of comfortable homeostasis and activate a variety of cellular mechanisms and signaling pathways that promote stress resilience, repair cellular damage (via processes like autophagy), repair DNA, combat oxidative stress, produce new mitochondria, reduce inflammation, support elimination of toxins, improve blood sugar regulation, reduce risk of cancer, and more, explains Rountree.
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Want To Pick Up A New Habit? Do This To Increase The Odds Of Success
It’s always helpful to dig deeper and figure out why you want change.
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Meet the 102-year-old healthy-living pioneer who was espousing ‘wellness’ long before it was a trend
Oprah Winfrey, Madonna, Kate Winslet, Jane Fonda, and Bill Moyers have all stayed at the famous Rancho la Puerta wellness resort and spa, an exquisite collection of mountain-edged casitas, pavilions, pools, and gardens on 4,000 acres in Baja California, Mexico.
But the property’s biggest star is Deborah Szkeley, who co-founded the ranch with her husband in 1940, and now—at 102 years old—is the embodiment of all the property aspires to deliver: health, longevity, and peace of mind.
“The morning I turned 100, I lay in bed and thought, ‘Huh, I’m 100. What’s different?’ I couldn’t think of anything,” Szekely tells Fortune, sitting down recently for an interview in her hotel suite in New York City, where she had flown in from her home in San Diego to speak at two different wellness conferences. “I’ve had a lovely life and when it ends, it ends. But I enjoy it,” she says. “I really, truly don’t take on worries that I cannot do anything about. Otherwise I’d be an old lady! But where I can do something, I do something.”
The Brooklyn native has accomplished a dizzying amount in her life, including starting and running Rancho la Puerta and also the Golden Door, a luxe Japanese spa and resort in San Diego (which she sold in 1998). At 60 she ran for Congress and served as president of the Inter-American Foundation; at 80, she realized a long-held dream and founded the New Americans Museum and Immigration Learning Center in San Diego.
All are extensions of her formative years, rooted in values such as healthy living, vegetarianism, and sustainability as put forth by her mother, a Jewish Austrian immigrant and “health nut” who was an RN and the vice president of the New York Vegetarian Society who put her family on an all-fruit diet. In 1934, she made a bold decision that changed their lives forever.
“It was the Depression. And my dad was very depressed,” recalls Szkeley, née Shainman, who was 12 when her mother caught him examining his life insurance policy, and feared his suicide.
“One day my mom came to dinner and she said, ‘We’re leaving in 16 days.’ And my brother and I and my dad looked at her, and my dad said, ‘Where to?’ ‘Tahiti.’ And we said, ‘Where is that?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know. But here are the tickets.’” She had chosen the destination because of its fresh air and fresh fruits—both in short supply in New York during the Depression—and soon they all boarded a steamship, spending several weeks traveling by sea to their new home.
“And from then on, we had a different kind of a life,” the centenarian says, adding that she remembers “a lot” from the few years they spent in Tahiti, living a rustic lifestyle in a grass hut, and that she still “thinks in French much of the time” because of her schooling from that time.
While there, the family met another health-minded transplant: Edmond Szkeley, aka “the professor,” a Romanian immigrant and burgeoning health guru known for his writings and lectures on philosophy and ancient religions, exercise, and the value of fresh organic vegetables. They all eventually returned to the U.S., and Deborah’s family attended his summer “health camps.” That’s when Deborah decided to work for him and when she and Edmond fell in love. They married when he was 34 and she was just 17.
“I did it as a way of getting out,” she explains. “He was head of the British International Health and Education Society, and he was going to England. And I thought, ‘I will go to England, and if it works out, fine. If not, I’m free. I can go to France.’ And it worked out. So I stayed.”
Founding Rancho la Puerta
The new couple, in search of a place to create a health camp together, found their way to Baja, in part as a way for Edmond to sidestep the fact that he had no immigration papers allowing him to stay in the U.S. There, they settled on a vast piece of land at the foothills of Mount Kuchumaa, writing to friends with invitations to come and stay on the land.
“For $17.50 a week,” she says, “it was bring-your-own-tent.” It took off, she adds, as “my husband was well-known.”
They created their own permanent tents, soon replaced with cabanas built from surplus army packing crates, and then added vegetable gardens, exercise classes, a dining hall with mostly raw vegan food (today the menu is pescatarian), and a printing press for Edmond’s books. Advertising in Los Angeles brought in the Hollywood crowd—as it did to the Golden Door, which Deborah created in 1958 after traveling to Japan a dozen times in one year for inspiration.
The couple had two children, and today her daughter, Sarah Livia Brightwood, who has had thousands of trees planted on the property, runs the resort.
“She’s the boss,” says Deborah. “She makes the decisions … I don’t interfere.” (One of her grandsons—a professional surfer—is on the board; the other is a recent high-honors graduate of University of Southern California.)
Today Rancho la Puerta, which she calls “the ranch,” is “a small town” with 400 employees. It charges guests $5,100 and up per person for weeklong packages and is replete with 20 full-time fitness instructors, 11 gyms, a cooking school, an organic farm, three spa treatment centers, programs including group hikes and workshops, and peaceful nature trails for walking—with not a single golf cart in sight. Of its 10,000 acres, only about 300 are actively used by guests, which is part of a conscious effort towards keeping the footprint as small as possible.
“We do not grow,” says Deborah. “We’re smaller than we were, by design.”
Deborah is at the property three days a week and still holds weekly Q&A sessions with her guests to an always-packed house, often fielding questions about how she’s managed to live such a long and healthy life. People want to know what kind of water she drinks—a question that makes her laugh—and what her skincare routine is, to which she replies, “Soap and water.” As she tells Fortune, “Those are not my occupations. The fact that I don’t worry is more important than the water. I really have accepted what I can do and can’t do.”
But really: What’s her secret?
Her healthy lifestyle—including having never eaten red meat and still walking a mile a day even after twice breaking a hip (she now uses a wheeled walker)—has certainly been a contributing factor to her longevity. But Deborah knows it’s not everything: Her father lived to 81, but her mother died of cancer in her 60s. Edmond died in his ’70s (after they had separated), albeit due to his refusal to have surgery on an umbilical hernia. “He died from a strangulated hernia, as soon as he went to the hospital,” she says. She’s outlived her brother. And then there was the greatest loss of her life: the death of her son (which she declines to go into detail about).
But when it comes to having outlasted so many people, Deborah says, “I don’t think about it. You just accept.”
She tends to have much younger friends, which helps. “I’ve always had friends that are younger—because of the conversation, the theater, the plays we go to see, the activities we do, you know? They’re in their 40s,” she says. “It’s fun.”
Her advice to others seeking longevity is to keep both body and mind active—and to read a lot, as she does, favoring ninth-century Japanese mysteries. “I like Buddhism,” she says. “I call myself a Jewish Zen Buddhist.”
But an active mind, for Deborah, does not include rumination.
“The thing is I do not allow negative thoughts. We are in control. And we can say, ‘I don’t want to go there.’ You just don’t go. I don’t,” she says. “I mean, the world is a terrible place and there’s terrible things happening all the time … But I’m trying to help as many people as I can to live healthier lives.”
More on aging well:
Beth Greenfield
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Jacqueline Alnes’ The Fruit Cure reveals the truth about extreme wellness trends
We’ve all done it… Something in our body feels a little off. So where’s the first thing we turn to? Most likely, it’s Dr. Google.
Like the rest of us, that’s what Jacqueline Alnes, the author of The Fruit Cure, did when doctors couldn’t figure out the root of her mysterious illness.
“You get on a website that you think may help you,” she tells Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani on the Mindvalley Book Club. “I got onto a website that, you know, they said that eating fruit and only fruit would heal you from anything.”
That’s the claim of most diet fads or wellness crazes, right? Do this or that, and you’ll miraculously be cured… You’ll miraculously lose 10 pounds… You’ll miraculously [enter your illness here]…
Unfortunately, such promises rarely hold up and can leave even the healthiest of us feeling confused and overwhelmed. And that’s something Jacqueline, a former Division 1 athlete, found out the hard way.
Her book, The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour, is a heartfelt exploration of her experiences with extreme diets and a journey towards finding true, balanced wellness. And it can be an inspiration for you to do the same.
The Overwhelm of Wellness Trends
There’s no shortage of nutrition-related schemes, scams, and fads, especially given that over 45 million Americans go on a diet each year. From keto to fruit-only to military to a whole list of others, it can be hard to keep up.
This wellness obsession and diet mentality isn’t anything new, though. In fact, it dates back centuries.
In the 17th century, for example, people believed that specific diets could purify the body and cure diseases. Jacqueline highlighted one figure (controversial, though) from the early 1900s, Cornelius Dreyer.
Though he had “no formal nutritional schooling, no scientific evidence, and no formal research,” he advocated extreme fasting, hot water diets, and eating only fruits, claiming they could cure ailments like epilepsy and diabetes. These practices often led to severe malnutrition and even death, as evidenced by the tragic outcomes of his patients.
So why are we, as humans, so obsessed with wellness trends? Simply because the promise of quick fixes and miraculous cures is incredibly alluring. What’s more, it’s amplified by social media, a nesting ground of convincing testimonials and dramatic before-and-after photos.
I think that’s a really alluring promise that someone can make to you. Like, if someone’s telling you, ‘I know the answer,’ it’s easy to want to believe that and to say, ‘I’m so happy someone out there knows how to make me feel better really quickly with very minimal work.’
— Jacqueline Alnes, author of The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour
The unfortunate reality is, many of these extreme diets can do more harm than good. For starters, research shows they can lead to weight cycling, also known as yo-yo dieting. Your metabolism slows down, and your fat storage increases… pushing you straight into obesity.
What’s more, constantly focusing on what you can’t eat can lead to obsessive thoughts about food. You could end up feeling dissatisfied with your body image and even having eating disorders like orthorexia, the unhealthy obsession with eating in a healthy way.
How Jacqueline Alnes Found Balance in a World of Diet Fads
So how did Jacqueline, a Division 1 runner, find her way down into the dieting world in the first place? It started with a cough at the age of 18.
Taking the medication for something that seemed so ordinary led to a spiral of one-thing-after-another. Dizzy spells, first. Then, “my symptoms got stranger, where I started repeating words that people would say,” she recalls. “I started losing my memory of events, which was really disorienting.”
Desperate for answers (as anyone would be in her situation), Jacqueline turned to the internet. Based on the information she found, she started cutting out food groups without any real reason.
“I think that’s a really alluring promise that someone can make to you,” Jacqueline says. “Like if someone’s telling you, ‘I know the answer,’ it’s easy to want to believe that and to say, ‘I’m so happy someone out there knows how to make me feel better really quickly with very minimal work.’”
She believed the claims, thinking they knew what was best for her body. However, as the saying goes, you are what you eat—when you eat bad food, you’ll eventually look and feel bad, and when you eat good, healthy food, you’ll look and feel great.
For Jacqueline, the restrictive diet failed to deliver, compelling her to abandon it. She realized that true wellness isn’t about following the latest trend. Instead, it’s about finding balance and trusting her body.
Transform Your Health Approach With Tips From Jacqueline Alnes
It’s no secret that the food industry has a heavy influence on our eating habits. So the question Jacqueline raises in her interview with Kristina is, “How do we live in our bodies, even if they are flawed, and find comfort and find the ability to be in our bodies in a healthy, happy way?”
Taking her experience as inspiration, here are three things that you can do to have a more balanced, healthy approach to your wellness:
1. Take time to rest and heal
Life moves pretty fast, as Ferris Bueller says. And in this day and age where everything is at our fingertips, we often want instant fixes.
“We want information quickly, we want healing quickly, we want connection quickly,” Jacqueline says. “For me personally, I bought into those messages to the point where I wouldn’t even take a few weeks off of running to try to heal myself just because I thought I would fall behind or something.”
That was a major lesson for her. There’s a time to get up and go. And there’s a time to rest and heal.
“In the grand scheme of things,” she adds, “I wish I would have slowed down and known that it was okay to take breaks, take pauses, take rest, and search for longer, slower answers rather than searching for what was quick and what was right in front of me.”
2. Advocate for yourself
No doubt, doctors are essential to the healthcare system, and questioning their expertise can be downright intimidating. It’s important to remember, though, that they’re not always right.
“At 18, I didn’t know how to advocate for myself,” she explains. “I started distrusting myself quickly instead of saying to the doctor, ‘No, you’re wrong.’”
But the thing is, doctors are doing their best, just like everyone else. Seeing them from this viewpoint can help you take an active role in your healthcare and empower you to voice your concerns.
Ask questions, seek second opinions, and trust your instincts about what feels right for your body. If a treatment or diagnosis doesn’t sit well with you, don’t hesitate to discuss it further with your doctor or seek advice from another healthcare professional.
3. Follow a more balanced approach to healing
Most things in life work best in moderation. A little bit of this and a little bit of that equals balance. Extreme actions, however, often neglect important aspects for the sake of one focus.
That’s why extreme diets don’t work. In fact, there’s research that shows most people who diet will likely gain their weight back (or more).
So instead of relying on a single method, consider integrating various paths to wellness. For example, you can incorporate principles of intuitive eating with other wellness practices like regular exercise and mindfulness.
“I could have taken a little bit from the doctors, and I probably could have taken a little bit from another path of healing and sort of merged them together in a way that was most helpful instead of viewing one as the right and one as the wrong and vice versa,” says Jacqueline.
You can benefit from her experience by staying open to multiple approaches and tailoring them to fit your unique needs. By doing so, you create a holistic and flexible routine that supports your overall well-being.
Fuel Your Mind
If there’s one takeaway from Jacqueline Alnes’ The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour, it’s this: do not sit on your laurels.
That’s exactly what books do—they encourage you to grow, learn, and take action.
The great thing is, the Mindvalley Book Club with Kristina Mänd-Lakhiani can help you do just that. Every month, she selects thought-provoking self-help books that can transform your life, just like The Fruit Cure.
Sign up now for exclusive access to these books, insightful discussions, and weekly podcasts featuring brilliant authors.
The beauty of it is that every book has the potential to be the catalyst for your next breakthrough. All it takes is the simple click of your mouse.
Welcome in.
Tatiana Azman
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Irregular Meals, Night Shifts, and Metabolic Harms | NutritionFacts.org
What can shift workers do to moderate the adverse effects of circadian rhythm disruption?
Shift workers may have higher rates of death from heart disease, stroke, diabetes, dementia, and cardiovascular disease, as well as higher rates of death from cancer. Graveyard shift, indeed! But, is it just because they’re eating out of vending machines or not getting enough sleep? Highly controlled studies have recently attempted to tease out these other factors by putting people on the same diets with the same sleep—but at the wrong time of day. Redistributing eating to the nighttime resulted in elevated cholesterol and increases in blood pressure and inflammation. No wonder shift workers are at higher risk. Shifting meals to the night in a simulated night-shift protocol effectively turned about one-third of the subjects prediabetic in just ten days. Our bodies just weren’t designed to handle food at night, as I discuss in my video The Metabolic Harms of Night Shifts and Irregular Meals.
Just as avoiding bright light at night can prevent circadian misalignment, so can avoiding night eating. We may have no control over the lighting at our workplace, but we can try to minimize overnight food intake, which has been shown to help limit the negative metabolic consequences of shift work. When we finally do get home in the morning, though, we may disproportionately crave unhealthy foods. In one experiment, 81 percent of participants in a night-shift scenario chose high-fat foods, such as croissants, out of a breakfast buffet, compared to just 43 percent of the same subjects during a control period on a normal schedule.
Shiftwork may also leave people too fatigued to exercise. But, even at the same physical activity levels, chronodisruption can affect energy expenditure. Researchers found that we burn 12 to 16 percent fewer calories while sleeping during the daytime compared to nighttime. Just a single improperly-timed snack can affect how much fat we burn every day. Study subjects eating a specified snack at 10:00 am burned about 6 more grams of fat from their body than on the days they ate the same snack at 11:00 pm. That’s only about a pat and a half of butter’s worth of fat, but it was the identical snack, just given at a different time. The late snack group also suffered about a 9 percent bump in their LDL cholesterol within just two weeks.
Even just sleeping in on the weekends may mess up our metabolism. “Social jetlag is a measure of the discrepancy in sleep timing between our work days and free days.” From a circadian rhythm standpoint, if we go to bed late and sleep in on the weekends, it’s as if we flew a few time zones west on Friday evening, then flew back Monday morning. Travel-induced jet lag goes away in a few days, but what might the consequences be of constantly shifting our sleep schedule every week over our entire working career? Interventional studies have yet put it to the test, but population studies suggest that those who have at least an hour of social jet lag a week (which may describe more than two-thirds of people) have twice the odds of being overweight.
If sleep regularity is important, what about meal regularity? “The importance of eating regularly was highlighted early by Hippocrates (460–377 BC) and later by Florence Nightingale,” but it wasn’t put to the test until the 21st century. A few population studies had suggested that those eating meals irregularly were at a metabolic disadvantage, but the first interventional studies weren’t published until 2004. Subjects were randomized to eat their regular diets divided into six regular eating occasions a day or three to nine daily occasions in an irregular manner. Researchers found that an irregular eating pattern can cause a drop in insulin sensitivity and a rise in cholesterol levels, as well as reduce the calorie burn immediately after meals in both lean and obese individuals. The study participants ended up eating more, though, on the irregular meals, so it’s difficult to disentangle the circadian effects. The fact that overweight individuals may overeat on an irregular pattern may be telling in and of itself, but it would be nice to see such a study repeated using identical diets to see if irregularity itself has metabolic effects.
Just such a study was published in 2016: During two periods, people were randomized to eat identical foods in a regular or irregular meal pattern. As you can see in the graph below and at 4:47 in my video, during the irregular period, people had impaired glucose tolerance, meaning higher blood sugar responses to the same food.
They also had lower diet-induced thermogenesis, meaning the burning of fewer calories to process each meal, as seen in the graph below and at 4:55 in my video.
The difference in thermogenesis only came out to be about ten calories per meal, though, and there was no difference in weight changes over the two-week periods. However, diet-induced thermogenesis can act as “a satiety signal.” The extra work put into processing a meal can help slake one’s appetite. And, indeed, “lower hunger and higher fullness ratings” during the regular meal period could potentially translate into better weight control over the long term.
The series on chronobiology is winding down with just two videos left in this series: Shedding Light on Shedding Weight and Friday Favorites: Why People Gain Weight in the Fall.
If you missed any of the other videos, see the related posts below.
Michael Greger M.D. FACLM
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There Are 12 Hallmarks Of Aging — This Vitamin May Improve All Of Them
Hint: It has antioxidant properties.
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Circadian Rhythms and Our Blood Sugar Levels | NutritionFacts.org
The same meal eaten at the wrong time of day can double blood sugar.
We’ve known for more than half a century that our glucose tolerance—the ability of our body to keep our blood sugars under control—declines as the day goes on. As you can see in the graph below and at 0:25 in my video How Circadian Rhythms Affect Blood Sugar Levels, if you hook yourself up to an IV and drip sugar water into your vein at a steady pace throughout the day, your blood sugars will start to go up at about 8:00 pm, even though you haven’t eaten anything and the infusion rate didn’t change.
The same amount of sugar is going into your system every minute, but your ability to handle it deteriorates in the evening before bouncing right back in the morning. A meal eaten at 8:00 pm can cause twice the blood sugar response as an identical meal eaten at 8:00 am, as shown in the graph below and at 0:51 in my video. It’s as if you ate twice as much. Your body just isn’t expecting you to be eating when it’s dark outside. Our species may have only discovered how to use fire about a quarter million years ago. We just weren’t built for 24-hour diners.
One of the tests for diabetes is called the glucose tolerance test, which sees how fast our body can clear sugar from our bloodstream. You swig down a cup of water with about four and a half tablespoons of regular corn syrup mixed in, then have your blood sugar measured two hours later. By that point, your blood sugar should be under 140 mg/dL. Between 140 and 199 is considered to be a sign of prediabetes, and 200 and up is a sign of full-blown diabetes, as you can see in the graph below and at 1:37 in my video.
The circadian rhythm of glucose tolerance is so powerful that a person can test normal in the morning but as a prediabetic later in the day. Prediabetics who average 163 mg/dL at 7:00 am may test out as frank diabetics at over 200 mg/dL at 7:00 pm, as you can see in the graph below and at 1:53 in my video.
Choosing lower glycemic foods may help promote weight loss, but timing is critical. Due to this circadian pattern in glucose tolerance, a low-glycemic food at night can cause a higher blood sugar spike than a high-glycemic food eaten in the morning, as you can see below and at 2:05 in my video.
We’re so metabolically crippled at night that researchers found that eating a bowl of All Bran cereal at 8:00 pm caused as high a blood sugar spike as eating Rice Krispies at 8:00 am, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:23 in my video.
High glycemic foods at night would seem to represent the worst of both worlds. So, if you’re going to eat refined grains and sugary junk, it might be less detrimental in the morning, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:32 in my video.
The drop in glucose tolerance over the day could therefore help explain the weight-loss benefits of frontloading calories towards the beginning of the day. Even just taking lunch earlier versus later may make a difference, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:48 in my video.
People randomized to eat a large lunch at 4:30 pm suffered a 46 percent greater blood sugar response compared to an identical meal eaten just a few hours earlier at 1:00 pm. A meal at 7:00 am can cause 37 percent lower blood sugars than an identical meal at 1:00 pm, as you can see below, and at 3:04 in my video.
Now, there doesn’t seem to be any difference between a meal at 8:00 pm and the same meal at midnight; they both seem to be too late, as you can see below, and at 3:15 in my video.
But, eating that late, at midnight or even 11:00 pm, can so disrupt your circadian rhythm that it can mess up your metabolism the next morning, resulting in significantly higher blood sugars after breakfast, compared to eating the same dinner at 6:00 pm the evening before, as shown in the graph below and at 3:32 in my video.
So, these revelations of chronobiology bring the breakfast debate full circle. Skipping breakfast not only generally fails to cause weight loss, but it worsens overall daily blood sugar control in both diabetic individuals and people who are not diabetic, as you can see in the graph below and at 3:44 in my video.
Below and at 3:53, you can see a graph showing how the breakfast skippers have higher blood sugars even while they’re sleeping 20 hours later. This may help explain why those who skip breakfast appear to be at higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the first place.
Breakfast skippers also tend to have higher rates of heart disease, as well as having higher rates of atherosclerosis, in general. Is this just because “skipping breakfast tends to cluster with other unhealthy choices, including smoking” and sicklier eating habits overall? The link between skipping breakfast and heart disease—even premature death in general—seems to survive attempts to control for these confounding factors, but you don’t really know until you put it to the test.
Does skipping breakfast lead to higher cholesterol, for example? Yes, researchers found a significant rise in LDL (bad) cholesterol in study participants randomized to skip breakfast; they were about 10 points higher within just two weeks, as you can see below and at 4:45 in my video.
The Israeli study with the caloric distribution of 700 calories for breakfast, 500 for lunch, and 200 for dinner that I’ve discussed previously found that the triglycerides of the king-prince-pauper group (those eating more at breakfast versus dinner) got significantly better—a 60-point drop—while those of the pauper-prince-king group got significantly worse (a 26-point rise). So, consuming more calories in the morning relative to the evening may actually have a triple benefit: more weight loss, better blood sugar control, and lower heart disease risk, as you can see below and at 5:18 in my video.
If you’re going to skip any meal, whether you’re practicing intermittent fasting or time-restricted feeding (where you try to fit all of your food intake into a certain time window each day), it may be safer and more effective to skip dinner rather than breakfast.
I’m back with the next installment of the chronobiology series! I previously explored eating breakfast for weight loss (Is Breakfast the Most Important Meal for Weight Loss? and Is Skipping Breakfast Better for Weight Loss?), introduced chronobiology (How Circadian Rhythms Can Control Your Health and Weight), and looked at the science on eating more in the mornings than the evenings (Eat More Calories in the Morning to Lose Weight, Breakfast Like a King, Lunch Like a Prince, Dinner Like a Pauper, and Eat More Calories in the Morning Than the Evening).
Next, you’ll see How to Sync Your Central Circadian Clock to Your Peripheral Clocks.
The series will wrap up in the next couple of weeks. See videos and blogs in related posts below.
Note: The Israeli 700/500/200 study that I mentioned is detailed in the Breakfast Like a King, Lunch Like a Prince, Dinner Like a Pauper video if you want to know more. Also, check the corresponding blog in related posts.
Michael Greger M.D. FACLM
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Should You Do Cardio Before Or After Weights? From The Experts
On upper-body days, McKenna advises doing cardio either before or after your weight training session—whichever you prefer. Choose a form of cardio that primarily engages your legs (like running or using a stair stepper) rather than your arms.
On leg days, “I recommend a 10-minute walk beforehand to loosen your muscles and prepare your glutes, thighs, and hamstrings for strength training,” McKenna suggests. “The last thing you want is to go for a run after deadlifting 150 pounds.” If you opt for more intense cardio on these days, do it after your weight training session to avoid compromising your lifting performance.
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Lose Weight by Eating More in the Morning | NutritionFacts.org
A calorie is not a calorie. It isn’t only what you eat, but when you eat.
Mice are nocturnal creatures. They eat during the night and sleep during the day. However, if you only feed mice during the day, they gain more weight than if they were fed a similar amount of calories at night. Same food and about the same amount of food, but different weight outcomes, as you can see in the graph below and at 0:18 in my video Eat More Calories in the Morning to Lose Weight, suggesting that eating at the “wrong” time may lead to disproportionate weight gain. In humans, the wrong time would presumably mean eating at night.
Recommendations for weight management often include advice to limit nighttime food consumption, but this was largely anecdotal until it was first studied experimentally in 2013. Researchers instructed a group of young men not to eat after 7:00 pm for two weeks. Compared to a control period during which they continued their regular habits, they ended up about two pounds lighter after the night-eating restriction. This is not surprising, given that dietary records show the study participants inadvertently ate fewer calories during that time. To see if timing has metabolic effects beyond just foreclosing eating opportunities, you’d have to force people to eat the same amount of the same food, but at different times of the day. The U.S. Army stepped forward to carry out just such an investigation.
In their first set of experiments, Army researchers had people eat a single meal a day either as breakfast or dinner. The results clearly showed the breakfast group lost more weight, as you can see in the graph below and at 1:35 in my video. When study participants ate only once a day at dinner, their weight didn’t change much, but when they ate once a day at breakfast, they lost about two pounds a week.
Similar to the night-eating restriction study, this is to be expected, given that people tend to be hungrier in the evening. Think about it. If you went nine hours without eating during the day, you’d be famished, but people go nine hours without eating overnight all the time and don’t wake up ravenous. There is a natural circadian rhythm to hunger that peaks around 8:00 pm and drops to its lowest level around 8:00 am, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:09 in my video. That may be why breakfast is typically the smallest meal of the day.
The circadian rhythm of our appetite isn’t just behavioral, but biological, too. It’s not just that we’re hungrier in the evening because we’ve been running around all day. If you stayed up all night and slept all day, you’d still be hungriest when you woke up that evening. To untangle the factors, scientists used what’s called a “forced desynchrony” protocol. Study participants stayed in a room without windows in constant, unchanging, dim light and slept in staggered 20-hour cycles to totally scramble them up. This went on for more than a week, so the subjects ended up eating and sleeping at different times throughout all phases of the day. Then, the researchers could see if cyclical phenomena are truly based on internal clocks or just a consequence of what you happen to be doing at the time.
For instance, there is a daily swing in our core body temperature, blood pressure, hormone production, digestion, immune activity, and almost everything else, but let’s use temperature as an example. As you can see in the graph below and at 3:21 in my video, our body temperature usually bottoms out around 4:00 am, dropping from 98.6°F (37°C) down to more like 97.6°F (36.4°C). Is this just because our body cools down as we sleep? No. By keeping people awake and busy for 24 hours straight, it can be shown experimentally that it happens at about the same time no matter what. It’s part of our circadian rhythm, just like our appetite. It makes sense, then, if you are only eating one meal per day and want to lose weight, you’d want to eat in the morning when your hunger hormones are at their lowest level.
Sounds reasonable, but it starts to get weird.
The Army scientists repeated the experiment, but this time, they had the participants eat exactly 2,000 calories either as breakfast or as dinner, taking appetite out of the picture. The subjects weren’t allowed to exercise either. Same number of calories, so the same change in weight, right? No. As you can see in the graph below and at 4:18 in my video, the breakfast-only group still lost about two pounds a week compared to the dinner-only group. Two pounds of weight loss eating the same number of calories. That’s why this concept of chronobiology, meal timing—when to eat—is so important.
Isn’t that wild? Two pounds of weight loss a week eating the same number of calories! That was a pretty extreme study, though. What about just shifting a greater percentage of calories to earlier in the day? That’s the subject of my next video: Breakfast Like a King, Lunch Like a Prince, Dinner Like a Pauper. First, let’s take a break from chronobiology to look at the Benefits of Garlic for Fighting Cancer and the Common Cold. Then, we’ll resume checking other videos in the related posts below.
If you missed the first three videos in this extended series, also check out related posts below.
Michael Greger M.D. FACLM
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6 Surprising Vitamin D Benefits You May Not Already Know*
If bone health was vitamin D’s initial claim to fame, let’s call its role in immune health1 the thing that put this essential vitamin back on the map.* And while calcium absorption2 and immune response are fantastic ways for vitamin D to support our well-being, we shouldn’t sleep on the other amazing talents this vitamin has to offer.*
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A Beginner’s Guide To Strength Training At Home + A 4-Week Plan
Ready to begin your journey to a stronger, healthier you? Whether you’re brand-new to strength training or only have a little bit of experience from group fitness classes, I’ve created a four-week, easy-to-follow strength training guide for mbg. The goal: I want to help you feel stronger and more confident working with weights.
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4 Reasons Dance Is So Beneficial For Mental Health & Longevity
We know that exercise, broadly speaking, is great for mental health. However, many people (wrongly) think that going to the gym or doing cardio are the only “exercises” that really count, disregarding the mental health benefits of other types of movement.
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This Brain Supplement Delivers Daily Power & Lifelong Support
This advanced nootropic supplement has become an integral part of my daily endeavors to support a healthy brain span. Alongside the essential practices of improving my sleep hygiene, consuming a nutrient-rich and balanced diet, and getting consistent exercise and movement, brain guard+ provides the daily brainpower and lifelong neuroprotective support that helps round out my brain health rituals.*
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Bryan Johnson: Can this rich transhumanist beat death?
Bryan Johnson made his fortune when he sold his company Braintree to PayPal for $800 million, netting about $300 million for himself. He spends about $2 million a year creating a system to reverse his “biological age.” He’s 46 years old, chronologically, but claims he’s de-aged himself following a program he’s branded “the Blueprint protocol.”
“I wanted to pose the question in this technological age: Can an algorithm, paired with science, in fact, take better care of me than I can myself?” Johnson tells Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions.
They talked with Johnson about his daily routine, the results he’s published including measurement of his nighttime erections, the transhumanist philosophy he outlines in his free e-book Don’t Die, the role that artificial intelligence is likely to play in prolonging human life and health spans, and the value and limitations of self-experimentation in an era of pharmaceutical stagnation.
Watch the full conversation on Reason‘s YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.
Zach Weissmueller
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New Platform Positioned to Revolutionize Human Connection
Pairus Unveils Groundbreaking Platform to Combat Loneliness and Foster Meaningful Relationships
TORONTO, February 29, 2024 (Newswire.com)
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Pairus, the brainchild of visionary serial entrepreneurs Emily Lyons and Anthony Lacavera, emerges as a beacon of hope in the fight against loneliness. Lacavera, renowned for his groundbreaking ventures including the iconic WIND Mobile, and Lyons, an esteemed figure in elite matchmaking and a serial entrepreneur with a track record of over a decade of success, bring their unparalleled expertise to the forefront of the human connection revolution.Recent studies have underscored the profound impact of loneliness on both individual well-being and societal health. The World Health Organization has labeled loneliness as a pending epidemic, while the U.S. Surgeon General warns that it poses significant risks to our health, comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Recognizing the importance of relationships for longevity and overall well-being, Pairus is on a mission to combat loneliness and foster genuine connections.
At the heart of Pairus lies its groundbreaking AI technology, expertly trained by a proven best-in-class matchmaking and software development team. This sophisticated AI empowers Pairus to craft each connection with unparalleled precision, ensuring that every interaction is meaningful and authentic. With real-time access to matchmakers, exclusive in-app coaching content, a vetting process, curated meditation series, extensive verification, courses by relationship experts, and AI-based prompts for profile improvement and conversation starters, Pairus offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to enhance the user experience.
“We are thrilled to introduce Pairus to the world—a platform that goes beyond mere digital interactions to foster genuine human connections,” says Anthony Lacavera, Co-Founder of Pairus. “With loneliness reaching alarming levels globally, there has never been a more pressing need for a solution like Pairus.”
Emily Lyons, Co-Founder of Pairus and founder of the award-winning Lyons Elite Matchmaking with over a decade of experience and a dozen accolades to its name, adds, “Our mission is to redefine the essence of human interaction and bring people together in meaningful ways. With Pairus, we aim to address the profound societal issue of loneliness while fostering authentic connections that have the power to transform lives.”
Source: Pairus