The Vaccinated Protect the Unvaccinated

If 234 000 deaths from COVID-19 could have been prevented with a primary series of vaccinations (https://bit.ly/3XrFXfz) between June 2021 and March 2022, I estimate that 140 400 of these deaths would have been among Republicans. This is, of course, not a surprise because Republicans are less likely to be vaccinated than Democrats, and, as the Texas Department of Health put it, “Texas Data Shows Unvaccinated People 20 times More Likely to Die From COVID-19” (https://bit.ly/3H0ACog). T...

 The Myth of Individual Responsibility Regarding Obesity

When mining jobs disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s, communities were left with neither industrial employment nor the agricultural infrastructure that had once sustained them. Into this vacuum stepped corporations like Dollar General, which has explicitly targeted rural communities with limited retail options. The company now operates over 17,000 locations nationwide, becoming the primary food retailer in many Appalachian communities while offering primarily processed foods with long shelf l...

 Vitamin D and Omega-3 Slow Aging

Previously in DO-HEALTH (including all 2,157 participants), we reported that omega-3 alone reduced the rate of infections by 13% (ref. 22) and the rate of falls by 10% (ref. 23), and all three interventions combined showed a significant additive benefit on reducing prefrailty by 39% (ref. 24) and incident invasive cancer by 61% (ref. 25) over a 3-year follow-up. The aim of the DNAm analysis in DO-HEALTH Bio-Age was to assess the effects of the interventions at the molecular level. Three of th...

 Why Humans Evolved to be Active

Humans of all to be much more physically active than our ape ancestors. Typical chimpanzee walks maybe two to three kilometers a day, and they take maybe what, three, 4,000 steps a day. A typical hunter-gatherer takes about 15 to 20,000 steps a day. Per kilo hunter-gatherers spend about twice as much energy per kilo on being physically active per day than our ape cousins. And importantly, that physical activity occurs as we age, right? So Americans are pretty inactive, as we all know. A typ...

 Our Life is What We Pay Attention To

When our attention is lured, herded, and commandeered in such a way, our full human potential is profoundly subverted. “Our life experience,” William James once said, “will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.” We become what we attend to — nothing more, nothing less. A steady and exclusive stream of reality TV, entertainment gossip, social media chatter, and “breaking news” about the latest celebrity scandal or Trump’s most recent tweets — all...

 Nicotinamide riboside (NR) Increases NADP

In the first controlled clinical trial of nicotinamide riboside (NR), a newly discovered form of Vitamin B3, researchers have shown that the compound is safe for humans and increases levels of a cell metabolite that is critical for cellular energy production and protection against stress and DNA damage. Studies in mice have shown that boosting the levels of this cell metabolite—known as NAD —can produce multiple health benefits, including resistance to weight gain, improved control of bl...

 Shorter People Live Longer

The study was conducted to evaluate one aspect of the entropy theory of aging, which hypothesizes that aging is the result of increasing disorder within the body, and which predicts that increasing mass lowers life span. The first evaluation of the impact of human size on longevity or life span in 1978, which was based on data for decreased groups of athletes and famous people in the USA, suggested that shorter, lighter men live longer than their taller, heavier counterparts. In 1990, a study...