The AI analysis found enormous variation in the health of the thymus between individual people. In some people, it stayed very active until a very old age. And other people, it actually declined very rapidly at a younger age. Importantly, thymus health correlated with a person's overall health. People who had a healthy thymus tended to live longer, have less cancer, and less cardiovascular disease.
The Israeli gerontologist has been studying healthy centenarians for years and has observed that many follow a pattern similar to Reichert's. They do not always lead a monastic, carefully balanced life. There is a great deal of biological lottery involved in longevity. But Barzilai wants to hack that lottery—to understand which numbers are the winning ones and pass them on to the rest of humanity.
Researchers administered one of four doses of stem cells to 118 people between 70 and 85 years old, all of whom had frailty. In a timed walking test nine months after treatment, those who had received the highest dose could walk about 60 metres farther, on average, than they could before treatment.
By following more than 100,000 people in the U.K. for years, researchers found that people whose food choices scored high in any one of five diet categories tended to live longer than people who scored the lowest. Specifically, the team found that even after adjusting for confounding factorssuch as whether people smoked, how much exercise they took and what their education and ethnicity wasstudy participants who tended to eat according to any one of the five diets were 18 to 24 percent less likely to die of any cause. For women, that roughly translated into an extra 1.5 to 2.3 years of life. And for men, it added about 1.9 to three years.
We compared how participants fared while eating their habitual diets with how they responded to the two diets that were low in ultraprocessed foods. During the periods when participants ate fewer ultraprocessed foods, they naturally consumed fewer calories and lost weight, including total and abdominal body fat. Beyond weight loss, they also showed meaningful improvements in insulin sensitivity, healthier cholesterol levels, fewer signs of inflammation, and favorable changes in hormones that help regulate appetite and metabolism.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to exercise - doing a variety of different physical activities every week is the key to boosting your health and living longer, a study suggests. After tracking the weekly exercise habits of 110,000 men and women in the US for 30 years, researchers found active people who did the greatest variety of exercise were 19% less likely to die during that time than those who focused on one activity. That effect was greater than for individual sports like walking, tennis, rowing and jogging. The total amount of exercise you do is still key, experts say, but doing a range of activities you enjoy can bring lots of benefits.
Even though you're working out hard, you're just not seeing loss of fat and increase in muscle. Based on his own research and experience, TRT can be almost as significant for middle-aged people as eating protein-rich whole foods or moving enough throughout the day, as testosterone starts declining for most people in their 30s, with more notable symptoms appearing around their 40s or 50s.
"As we get older, the immune system is shifting away from good inflammation," which is the body's short-term, acute response to fend off injury or infection and promote healing, explains Dr. Thomas Marron, one of the researchers leading the new study. Marron directs early phase clinical trials at The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
It got me thinking. While everyone's obsessing over the latest fitness trends and biohacking protocols, these folks have been consistently moving their bodies for decades. No fancy equipment, no Instagram-worthy routines, just simple habits they picked up long before movement became a multibillion-dollar industry. So I started asking around, digging into research, and talking to people who've stayed active well into their golden years. What I found wasn't revolutionary or complicated. It was refreshingly simple.
We are all going to die. No one is happy about that. Today, the internet is full of claims about diets and supplements that will help us live longer. One writer suggested that there are at least 320 longevity clinics operating around the world; some charge $100,000 or more annually for access to their magic elixirs. Unfortunately, the search for a formula that can prevent death, or delay it for a very long time, has a long history of failures.
Dementia is linked to changes in the brain. Health professionals used to assume that brain damage and dementia symptoms always went hand in hand. More recent research, however, shows that some people have significant brain damage yet never develop dementia. How can that be? In a previous post, I shared that dementia is defined by the inability to function in everyday life, such as getting lost in familiar places, having difficulty managing finances, forgetting to turn off the stove, or struggling with basic tasks.
You know those people who make you do a double-take when they mention their age? The ones who casually drop they're 52 but look like they could be in their mid-thirties? I met someone like this at a coffee shop last week. She mentioned her adult son was turning 30, and I nearly choked on my drink. I would've guessed she was maybe 40, tops. When I asked about her workout routine, she laughed and said she hadn't been to a gym in years.
