Aging

Biological systems are self-maintaining. They have to be. We don’t have maintenance workers, mechanics, troubleshooters that can “take a look inside” and make sure everything’s running smoothly. Doctors perform a kind of biological maintenance, but even they are working blind from the outside. No, for life to sustain itself, it has to perform automatic maintenance work...

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup. A few extra this week since I missed last week. This week how to keep your heart 30 yrs younger, hunger induces risky eating behavior, and climate change makes oysters more dangerous. Next week’s Mindful Meal Challenge will start again on Monday. Sign up now...

The scientific literature is awash in correlations between a person’s health status and various biomarkers, personal characteristics, and measurements. As we hoard more and more data and develop increasingly sophisticated autonomous tools to analyze it, we’ll stumble across new connections between seemingly disparate variables. Some will be spurious, where the correlations are real but the...

Most people chalk urinary incontinence and excessive urgency up to age. We get old, stuff stops working, we wake up to wet sheets. Cue jokes about adult diapers and investing in “Depends” futures. It’s not entirely out of line. Aging matters. There’s just more to it. Like other aspects of “aging,” incontinence and unreasonable urgency...

Yesterday, I linked to a study showing that the beneficial effects of high levels of cardiorespiratory fitness—the kind you build with cardio/endurance training, HIIT, and sprints—have no upper limit. At first glance, this study appears to bust the “myth” of chronic cardio and the U-shaped curve of endurance training and prove that the more you train,...

As many of you know, Brad is my longtime writing partner, host of the Primal Endurance podcast and host of the weekly keto show on the Primal Blueprint podcast. Our relationship goes back 30 years to when I was Brad’s coach during his career on the professional triathlon circuit. The start of Brad’s chronic plantar...

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering two questions from readers. First, is it possible to become deficient in omega-6 fats as an adult? What would that even look like, and is there anything that might make omega-6 more important? Second is a question related to last week’s feature on prostate health. Is saw palmetto...