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News and ideas worth your attention.
Four decades of writing on living long and living well, with 1,000+ posts on functional and longevity medicine.
451 written by Dr. Frank Lipman
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Dec 23, 2024 · Healthy Aging14 Articles on Anti-Aging and Longevity Therapies Driving Healthspan Innovation from 2024
In a lot of ways, 2024 has been a watershed year, especially when it comes to advances in the longevity field. And while we may not have yet unlocked the secret to eternal youth quite yet (we’ll leave that to the Twilight crew), just about every day we’re gaining more insights on how to get closer to it and live longer lives with plenty of health and vitality ideally, right up ‘til our last breath. With this in mind, for this end-of-the-year review I wanted to share some of the most interesting reporting on anti-aging and longevity strategies to inspire your journey and offer a quick inside look at these exciting discoveries.
Dec 16, 2024 · Healthy Aging13 Headline-Making Reports and Research on Longevity from 2024
For those of us who have the privilege of aging with health and vitality, the longevity news this past year is giving us even more insights into the multiple aspects of the aging process that we want to combat. So, whether you’re a fit 25-year-old hiker, or a power-lifting retiree, there’s much to learn from these recent reports from longevity’s cutting edge, so check out a few of the year’s best.
Dec 9, 2024 · Health & WellnessReader’s Choice: 13 Most Popular Dr. Lipman Posts of 2024
Over the past twelve months on the blog, we’ve covered a lot of longevity-focused and anti-aging ground! Each post has been about exploring compelling health and longevity pathways and connecting with readers. Some articles emerged as clear favorites, sometimes to my surprise. What made it to the top of the anti-aging must-read list? Posts on maintaining brain health, heart health and managing metabolism ranked high, while posts on red light therapy and biohacking followed close behind. It’s tough for me to pick personal favorites, so I’ve left it to the readers to decide – and here are their 13 top choices for 2024. Enjoy!
Dec 2, 2024 · Healthy Aging7 Ways Longevity Starts with Your VO₂ Max
Why does cardio fitness matter so much to longevity? Cardiovascular fitness, best measured by assessing your VO₂ (oxygen consumption), is one of the most powerful indicators we have to measure your overall health and longevity potential. Your ‘VO₂ max’ reflects how efficiently heart, lungs, and muscles function together to keep the body moving when it’s working hard. Research indicates that higher VO₂ max levels are associated with a lower risk of mortality and a longer lifespan, which is the main reason I encourage everyone to work on improving their VO₂ max.
Nov 25, 2024 · Healthy Aging9 Life-changing Ways to Tend to Your Soulspan
As my readers know, I often talk about ‘health-span,’ the number of years we’re able to physically function well. Well, soul-span speaks to an even bigger issue, as in, what are you doing with all those years? What good is a long life with a well-functioning mind and body if the time you spend on the planet lacks meaning or purpose? I think if we’re honest enough to ask that question, we already know the answer. Which begs the question: how to cultivate and nourish your ‘soul span’ to help seed a happier, and yes, healthier life?
Nov 18, 2024 · Nutrition6 Ways B12 Keeps Mental and Physical Health Humming
Vitamin B12 is one of those unique substances that does so much good that I urge anyone interested in health and longevity not to overlook it. One big reason to keep your levels topped up? It’s great for brain health and keeping your mood on an even keel – just what our difficult times require. What else can B12 do for you? Tend to the essentials like heart health, energy levels, and neurological function and so much more. My advice? Top off your tank every chance you get!
Nov 11, 2024 · Healthy Aging7 Crash-free Ways Ketones Energize Your Life – and Support Your Longevity
Energy. We all need it and want to get more of it, in as healthy a way as possible. In short, we’re all in the market for a healthy energy hack and I’ve got one you might not be aware of – ketones. True, people who have experimented with the keto diet are familiar – the whole point of the no- or super-low carb diet is to cue the body to produce ketones for energy. But even they may not realize you can actually take a ketone supplement, not only to support energy production but also to enjoy an impressive roster of other benefits.
Nov 4, 2024 · Healthy AgingIntroducing ApoB: The Essential and Inexpensive Heart Test You Must Ask for to Live Long and Well
As we get older (and we all, for the most part, do), we tend to worry most about diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. Understandably so. But what people often forget is that heart attacks are still the biggest killers in the U.S. and in the whole industrial West. But here’s the thing. Unlike those other lethal diseases, cardiovascular disease, or atherosclerosis, shouldn’t be that difficult to prevent or combat. The fatty plaques that can develop in your arteries usually take decades to grow into life-threatening terrors. We know we can stop this progression, especially of early-stage disease, and, in some cases, even reverse it, with the right diet and physical activity and, when necessary, cholesterol-lowering drugs.
Oct 28, 2024 · Healthy AgingBeyond Big Muscles: Creatine’s Big 4 Anti-Aging Bonuses
While many athletes take creatine to boost performance, endurance and recovery, you might be wondering, what’s the benefit of taking creatine for a regular civilian like me? Well, if you’re starting to age – and face it, we all are – studies suggest that the benefits of creatine supplementation go well beyond just adding muscle. It’s got the potential to be a powerful anti-aging and longevity ally, enhancing everything from bone density to cognitive function.
Oct 21, 2024 · Health & Wellness9 Essential Stress Reduction Tips and Techniques for High Anxiety Times
Be it situational or chronic, we all know that stress brings with it some significant, health-torpedoing downsides, making our approach to how we manage stress more mission critical than ever. Managing stress well starts with reminding yourself there are many ways to diffuse it, and being conscious of all we can do to release stress quickly and in healthy ways. Though avoiding stress altogether is virtually impossible, the key to doing it well is to pack your mental health toolbox with as many stress-busting techniques as possible, so you can tap into them whenever you feel stress levels start to rise.
Oct 14, 2024 · Healthy Aging9 Longevity and Anti-Aging Secrets of Seaweed
Often the easiest health hacks are the dietary ones, and leaning into superfoods is a delicious, no-brainer way to get our wellness and longevity compass pointing in the right direction. Chances are you’re already tucking into a number of the superfood classics a few times a week – think blueberries, spinach, avocados, etc. But you may be overlooking seaweed, one of nature’s most unassuming superfood treasures, packed with the power to enhance our healthy aging process.
Oct 7, 2024 · Health & Wellness10 Ways to Mind Your Mental Health and Heart Connection
By now, regular visits to our primary care doc have made most of us aware of the obvious cardiovascular disease risk factors, things like high Apolipoprotein B, high blood pressure, high blood sugar. But what often gets ignored is our mental health which, the most recent research is making clear, is a major part of the heart disease story and indeed may be what’s helping make the conventional risk factors so toxic in the first place. Mental health issues can drive up heart risk directly, as is the case with blood pressure, or indirectly, when they give rise to bad lifestyle choices which eat away at heart health in different ways.
Sep 30, 2024 · Gut HealthDitch Your PPIs: 5 Secrets of Making Peace with Stomach Acid
In the right amounts, stomach acid is great stuff: it helps to break down the food you each, and also helps the body extract essential nutrients, like vitamin B12 and the mineral magnesium. As well, it’s responsible for maintaining the proper acidic environment in the stomach that helps stop most bacteria, viruses and fungi in their tracks. So making it all disappear (to an extent) with PPIs is to my mind counterproductive to good health in both younger folks and particularly older ones.
Sep 23, 2024 · Healthy Aging7 Do-Right-Now, High and Low Tech Ways to Avoid Alzheimer’s and Dementia
When the brain starts to fail, the consequences are devastating, life-changing, in the worst possible way. Small wonder the mere mention of words like cognitive impairment, dementia, Alzheimer’s – whether it’s in relation to ourselves or our loved ones –strikes fear in our heart. What’s more, the rates of these debilitating neurological conditions are expected to skyrocket in the next 20 years as the population ages and life expectancies increase – we’re looking at you Gen X and younger Boomers. The good news there is a lot you can do to steer clear.
Sep 16, 2024 · Healthy AgingWant to Live Long and Well? Your Oral Microbiome Can Help
One of the most intriguing, and most important, bacterial ecosystems we have is the oral microbiome which really isn’t a single microbiome at all but rather a collection of neighboring bacterial populations, approximately 700 strains in all, that have colonized our gums, tongue, the mucous lining of our cheeks and the surface of our teeth. This is some of the most densely populated bacterial real estate in the body with its primary function being to maintain our oral health – think cavity-free teeth and pink gums resistant to infection and recession.
Sep 9, 2024 · Healthy AgingPerfect Pairing: Harnessing the Anti-Aging Power of Methylene Blue and Red Light Therapy
I am a big proponent of health-promoting therapies and two of the ones I’m now regularly using in my practice are red light therapy and methylene blue. The extraordinary benefits of combining the red and the blue, two modalities which, in different ways, both stimulate the powerplants inside our cells, the mitochondria, with the result that the body has more healing energy on tap. Each therapy enhances the other, creating a synergistic effect that I like to call, 1 plus 1 equals 3. Or, combine and conquer! Here are my thoughts on how to put them both to work for you.
Sep 2, 2024 · Health & Wellness11 Ways a Balanced HPA Axis Changes Your Health Forever!
Let’s face it, just about all of us hate the feeling of being under too much stress. Not only because being stressed feels lousy in the moment, but living with it, unrelieved, day in and day out, is a major starting point for physical dysfunction and disease, with ripple effects felt across virtually every cell in your body – a big potential downside to all that interconnection. One way to understand what’s going on? Technically speaking, it’s the disruption of the ‘HPA’ or ‘hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal’ axis, which refers to the ongoing conversation between different body systems that, between them, regulate the response to stress, both acute and chronic. Learn to keep it on an even keel and you’ll be on your way to a much healthier, happier and, very likely, longer life.
Aug 26, 2024 · Healthy Aging7 Reasons Why You Need More Protein to Age Better – and 6 Ways to Get Yours
Just about every day patients ask me how they can age well, or at minimum, do it better than their parents and grandparents did -- and the good news is that many of them can! As the biology of aging has evolved over the past few decades, we now know so much more about how to help our bodies age more slowly, in better health, than ever before. Granted, we’ve not quite figured out how to stop aging but there are a number of steps we can take, starting now, to get into a slower aging groove. One of the biggies is protein. While it may not seem like an obvious clock-stopper, as we age, increasing protein intake becomes especially important – and a lot of people overlook this relatively simple, longevity upgrade.
Aug 19, 2024 · Healthy AgingTwo Heart Tests You May Need — But Don’t Know About
Nothing is more essential than taking care of your heart. Heart attack risk increases significantly when underlying issues go unchecked and yet many people overlook the importance of understanding their cardiovascular system until it's too late. This is where diagnostic tests that capture images of your heart should enter the picture, revealing artery-blocking plaque before it becomes problematic. Having this kind of information now empowers you to take control of your heart health while there’s plenty of time to do something about it. In fact, most heart attacks should be preventable. Cardiac imaging tests remind us that we don’t have to let the coronary vessels deteriorate. With a little extra effort, we all can nip atherosclerosis in the bud – and that’s music to your heart’s ears!
Aug 12, 2024 · Healthy Aging7 Ways Alcohol Hurts Your Heart – and Ages You Fast
When it comes to alcohol consumption, as you might imagine, I’m really not a fan. As much as it may not seem to be a big deal – it is, after all, available everywhere – alcohol is a toxin, and it’s one that far too many people pour into their bodies multiple times a week. We use alcohol to unwind, relax, commune with others, feel more festive or enhance a nice meal. These are all understandable motivations but the trouble is, alcohol has enormous potential for dependency, more rapid aging, shortened longevity – and the exceedingly difficult-to-reverse specter of heart damage to boot.
Aug 5, 2024 · Healthy AgingThe Life-Changing Benefits of Balancing Blood Sugar — and 9 Ways To Do It
There are a million reasons not to eat sugar, to purge it from your life and not look back. No news there. What may be news to a lot of people though is all the far-reaching, systemic damage the stuff does to multiple aspects of your physiology when you’re not paying attention. In other words, that cookie isn’t just a cookie, it’s a weapon of health destruction. Turns out, the optimal functioning of so much of you – and down the road, your longevity – suffers when you bomb it with sweet stuff. With that in mind, it’s helpful to understand the profoundly positive impact that balancing your blood sugar levels has on your health – and how to stabilize those levels so you can stop trouble before it starts.
Jul 29, 2024 · Healthy AgingProtect Your Brain – and Keep It Younger Longer — With Red Light Therapy
It almost goes without saying that keeping our bodies and brains healthy for as long as possible is a worthy endeavor and anything we can do to realize that goal is a worthwhile pursuit. That’s why I encourage everyone with a brain to protect (which would be all of us) to give it some extra TLC by adding red light therapy to their healthy lifestyle playbook. Why? Because RLT’s potential to help keep brains young and robust is a brain-saving opportunity few of us can afford to miss!
Jul 22, 2024 · Nutrition6 Ways to Crush Food Allergies and Handle Your Histamines
One of the best ways to handle your histamines is to consider the potential allergens you may unknowingly be putting into your body multiple times a day, and that’s food. Certain foods may be causing you a lot of physical grief (in the form of allergy symptoms) while also compromising the health of your gut and immune system to boot. And just to make the story more interesting, some foods produce their own histamines which make them more likely to trigger your body’s allergic over-reaction. So, how about putting a stop to all that?
Jul 15, 2024 · Health & WellnessThe Dangers of Forever Chemicals and 6 Ways to Avoid Them
For many years, we in the integrative medical community have known that toxic chemicals are something to avoid at all costs, the thinking being that the lighter our ‘toxic load’ and the fewer industrial chemicals we ingest, the better and more sustainable our health will be. That’s still the idea. But over the last few years, the unsettling news about the pervasiveness of ‘forever chemicals’ or PFUAS (aka ‘per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) has brought a new awareness about just how difficult they are to avoid. In short, they are everywhere and stemming the tide will take some doing – both on a personal and global level.