You Should Focus on THESE 4 Things for Your Health & Longevity | 67 - HSM #9
Your health doesn't need to be complicated. With so much conflicting information out there, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and unsure of what truly works. At the Optispan Podcast, we focus on cutting through the noise and providing you with clear, evidence-backed solutions that will make a noticeable difference in your life, rather than creating incremental change or no change at all.
In this episode, Matt goes through the Optispan "Pillars of Healthspan" and explains how these pillars intersect and impact aging and age-related disease prevention. He describes various simple strategies for improving one's weakest pillar, including reducing sugar in coffee, improving sleep hygiene, fostering social connections, and more; and encourages listeners to self-assess, use diagnostics, and seek assistance to enhance their health span trajectory where appropriate.
Check out the links below for further information and/or reading about some of the things we discussed in this podcast episode. Note that we do not necessarily endorse or agree with the content of these readings, but present them as supplementary material that may deepen your understanding of the topic after you listen to our podcast. This list is in no way exhaustive, but it’s a good start!
How to practically change your behaviors | Peter Attia & James Clear
This snippet of the Peter Attia Drive podcast features New York Times bestselling author James Clear, who wrote the book "Atomic Habits". Clear suggests focusing on displacing bad habits with better ones, and describes how it can sometimes take removing oneself from old environments to do this ("environment is like a form of gravity...it just pulls on you").
Good genes are nice, but joy is better
The Harvard Study of Adult Development is a multi-decade longitudinal effort to track hundreds of Americans in order to gain insight into adult physical and psychological changes. A fascinating finding from the study, which began in 1938, was that close relationships predict life satisfaction and happiness better than do social class, IQ, or genetics. Harvard Medical School Professor of Psychiatry George Vaillant told the Harvard Gazette that "the key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships.”
Ultra-processed foods such as cereals, breads, and packaged snacks—the foods one often finds in the middle aisles at the grocery store—may be to blame for a lot of the American obesity crisis. This study compared a group of adults receiving ultra-processed foods to a group receiving unprocessed foods. The group on the ultra-processed diet consumed more calories and gained more weight than the group on the unprocessed diet, despite both groups' meals being matched for calories, energy density, macronutrients, sugar, sodium, and fiber.
Ultra-processed foods: what they are and how to identify them
While most of the foods we consume are processed to at least a small degree, some processed foods are worse for you than others. This paper describes pragmatic and simple ways to identify whether a given food is “ultra-processed”—that is, made using specific ingredients and manufacturing processes designed to create low-cost, long shelf-life, convenient, and hyperpalatable foods.
Healthy aging: The ultimate preventative medicine
Matt and colleagues make the case for placing greater emphasis on research into the biology of aging in a review for the journal Science. Traditional biomedical research has created significant advances in medical care by focusing primarily on understanding and treating individual diseases, but has not addressed the accumulation of age-related morbidities in aging populations. The study of aging biology, or geroscience, aims to plug this gap by identifying the mechanisms that underlie aging and developing interventions to extend healthy lifespan. By targeting aging processes themselves rather than individual diseases, researchers hope to delay the onset and progression of various age-related conditions.
