Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1. Who. Why is the word “who” for some reason different from, like, every other vowel in the English language. I mean, aside from stupid spelling stuff (stough?) routinely ridiculed by writers of all ilks (see: “enuf”), this one just strikes me as some kind of combination of silly and wrong.

“Who’s” means “who is”, as in “who’s going to mass tonight?” Totally get that. Not unusual in the least. It’s the possessive that runs afoul of literally every other vowel I can think of at the moment (no bonus points for finding another example unless it’s in your own 1000 work weekly missive). “Whose”. Why? Why do we need another way to assign ownership when [‘s] works perfectly well for every other noun?

Who’s going to tell me whose dumb idea this was?

2. Semiquincentennial. The unabashedly awkward word for 250th anniversary. Yesterday was the 250 Anniversary of “the shot heard round the world”. 250 years ago the American Revolutionary War tipped off with the Battles of Concord and Lexington (Massachusetts). If my math is correct that means Paul Revere careened across the (then) verdant fields and deserted roads of Greater Boston crying out “the British are coming”, his historic ride ending with two lanterns alight in the belfry of the Old North Church.

The British would come by sea.

T’was a time when every person educated in America learned the story of Paul Revere’s ride in grade school. We all learned that he earned his living as a silversmith; everyone could tell you that it was “one if by land, two if by sea.” The concept of American exceptionalism was introduced in grade school, Manifest Destiny in Jr. High, and the American Dream that came of these was the collective pursuit of our lifetimes. Generation followed generation. Even the schism that was our Civil War became taught as a single narrative, one that became more and more singular across the nation as we moved through two World Wars.

It wasn’t until the 1960’s that folks began to question the narrative. Largely, it seems, in response to the Viet Nam War and the “question everything” mantra in vogue, especially in our universities. Veils were parted and we were privy to an unvarnished view of contemporary leaders and historical figures alike. Our history, and with it the mores and behavior of our historically important figures were reexamined. Initially this reexamination was simply in the revealing of more facts about these (mostly) men, facts largely un-recalled in the shared history books or our youth.

Eventually, though, through the application of present day customs and mores to actions taken by individuals hundreds of years ago in worlds that bare only glancing resemblance to our modern societies, we have begun to forget just how singularly unique this American Revolution was at the time, and quite frankly for more than 150 years thereafter: we were the first people to shrug the yoke of imperialism in revolt, and to resist re-cloaking ourselves in anything that resembled it for 250 years. Unlike England (Oliver Cromwell), France (Napoleon Bonaparte), or Latin America (too many to mention), America did NOT slide back into dictatorship.

And yet, over the last 75 or so years we seem to have forgotten that ours is a nation that has continued to grow closer and closer to achieving Jefferson’s famously declared rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Rather, we have seem to have chosen to emphasize failures of our forebearers to live up to both the written principles on which our country was founded, and our more modern interpretation of those principles. Ours is progress that has hardly traveled a straight line toward success. Time and again from the founding of our country until today we learn of the hypocrisies of our leaders. Washington, Jefferson, and even Franklin were slave owners. Jefferson, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, Clinton and Trump, all serial philanderers. Our quest for racial equality has hardly been a straight line race from the Confederate South to the present.

Here is Allen C. Guelzo in yesterdays WSJ: “But the failure to live up to principles is a common human failure. It may be precisely the loftiness of the Revolution’s principles that gives us high expectations of ourselves and then triggers a woe-is-us sense of disgusted resignation when we fall short.”

But principled progress we have had, and principled progress we seem to be destined to have. We need not ignore historical hypocrisy or mistakes. Indeed, we most assuredly should not forget or ignore either. We should rather acknowledge the inexorable history of success, however crooked the timeline has been, and use this as enduring fuel to drive us over the next 250 years. It is the principles of our nation’s founding, the principles that drove Paul Revere on his ride, the principles that gave fire to those first patriots in Lexington and Concord that should drive us through the haze of invective and rhetoric of our day.

We should be listening to the echo of that fateful shot 250 years ago, and directing our gaze to the trigger of its source.

3. Easter. A friend posted a very funny video of Jon Stewart of the Daily Show beseeching his fellow Jews to “step it up” in the battle between Easter and Passover for the hearts and minds of children. Look for it. It’s just full of funny lines. For example, Stewart laments that Christians can count on luminaries such as (former) NFL quarterback Tim Tebow to spread the word, while there has yet to be a superstar Jewish NFL quarterback. As an aside, as a Catholic, I would reply that Mr. Stewart’s people are killing it in the comedy realm vs. Christians, but you get the idea. He lays down his trump card right at the beginning: chocolate vs. matzo. Coulda dropped the mic right there.

There is certainly a much, much deeper meaning to both of these religious days of course. The death and subsequent ascension of Christ is the single most significant aspect of the Christian faith: humans are saved and a path to Heaven is opened through the miracle of Christ rising from the dead. Passover is also a story of salvation, albeit a less ephemeral, more concrete one: God, through Moses, leads his people out of slavery through the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea. Both stories invoke a God who is present in the daily life of his people. Both religions celebrate this on holidays around which a part of their calendar revolves. All who follow either religion are asked to believe that the stories are factual.

Are they? Could they be? Are the stories of the death and resurrection of Christ and the parting of the Red Sea by Moses the AP news accounts of their day? Or are they allegorical, fables meant to teach the underlying principle of a kind and gracious God who awaits us at the end or our days? Here, I would say, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether you are poor, powerful, or somewhere in between, because it is the viewpoint that matters, not necessarily the facts. You either believe in something that came before and will be there after, or you don’t. The facts, in this case, don’t really seem to matter.

In the end it still comes down to faith.

On this day when Christians join in worship to celebrate an empty tomb while Jews gather around a table with an empty chair in the hope that Israel will join them, today at least we see the best of what religion can offer to people of faith. There is a certain hopefulness in both Easter and Passover, a hope that there IS a God, and that there IS something to come. Faith, though, is not limited to the Christian or Jewish religions, nor is it limited to these highest of holy days. The religious have faith 24/7/365, right? So, too, do those of faith who are not necessarily religious in the Judeo-Christian sense. One thinks of the deep spirituality of indigenous peoples around the world, for example, Islam, or the other great religions of the East like Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and the like. In all there is a deeply felt faith that there is more, in the end, than 3 squares and a place to lay your head.

In the end it still comes down to faith.

Happy Easter. Happy Passover. I’ll see you next week…

1. Blogviate. To bloviate via a blog.

Today is the 16th anniversary of this silly blog. I’ll circulate the original post this week. Launched on this day in 2009 for the sole purpose of emptying out my “internal hard drive” so that I could refill it with more drivel. It’s been a great ride!

Thanks for coming along.

2. Adumbrate. To report or outline. Not at all what I was expecting.

Seems to me the “dumb” in the middle should have more influence. You know, like the “reporting” you’ve found here.

3. Healthspan V. Connection is the last piece of the Healthspan puzzle. Originally noted by the researchers of the Harvard Happiness study that followed the Class of ’55 through their post-collegiate lives, close personal connections are strong predictors of health and happiness as we grow older. This remarkable study was later combined with an equally wonderful cohort of young men from the public high school in nearby Revere, and subsequently has been expanded to include their spouses, children, grandchildren, and so on.

Through all of these generations the results have been consistent: the presence and maintenance of close personal relationships is strongly associated with an increase in happiness, and a delay in the onset of the effects of chronic disease and aging. The conclusion of the original Harvard study was very specific: happiness and its effects were present if one of the men had 3 or more close personal friendships. Interestingly their wives did not count toward the 3 (Note: I could find no mention of same sex partners). As the study expanded and examined the health and happiness of all family members it became clear that ANY close personal relationships counted, the more the better.

It should be noted that the most recent reportage in the book “The Good Life” reviews data that includes only the first few years of our new age of “remote connection” through the various tools of the internet. The influence of these relationships is therefore predicated on proximity: they took place “in real life” as we now say. The relationships that show a beneficial effect on Healthspan take place side-by-side and face-to-face. Perhaps the addition of our myriad new modes of communication enhance this proximity effect. It remains to be seen if our very new world with all of its “together while apart” connections will have a similar effect.

For now the final key that unlocks our Healthspan potential is creating and nurturing close personal relationships with family and friends. That this should be so seems obvious. Nonetheless, it is fascinating and more than a bit comforting to see it objectively confirmed over 4 generations.

4. Next. Consistent with this, Beth and I made a quick trip to Cincinnati last weekend to see our friends Bill and Nancy. Outside of our siblings and their spouses they are the couple with whom we have had the longest continuous friendship. We met in grad school, and for almost 30 years lived less than an hour apart as we raised our families and marched through our careers. Those families shared something like 28 or 29 consecutive Christmas night dinners. Married a month apart, the four of us have celebrated most of our anniversaries together; this year we will travel to Italy for our 40th.

So much of what we’ve experienced together has occurred pretty much on schedule. “What comes next?” was almost as predictable as the changing of the seasons. Kids were born, went to school, and fledged. Mostly on schedule. Both couples became empty nesters at about the same time. Bill and I went through the phases of our surgical careers, again, mostly on schedule. Each of us made one very major change in our practices here in Cleveland, and we expected that our glide paths to retirement would also be fairly similar. Bill opted to step off the practice carousel in favor of a medical director job with one of the big industry players in early 2020, but even so, it appears that we are still running side-by-side as we come to the finish line.

And so it was that we four found ourselves returning again and again to the question of what comes next. None of our parents really asked themselves that when they still had some control over the answer. Only Bill’s Mom is left of our 8 parents and sadly she was not any more receptive to the entreaties made by Beth and Nancy to the other parents that they proactively decide what the last third of their lives might look like. “Big Red” has channeled Beth’s parents and my Mom, digging in her heals and insisting that she is completely capable of handling life on her own in the family home. It was a hard landing for all of our folks, and terribly difficult for the rest of us to watch.

What about us, then? We have watched our parents fail to plan for what inevitably comes next. Retirement, for example, just happened. Even my father-in-law, so fixated on retiring at 55, spent very little time thinking about what that would mean and what comes next after retirement. More problematically, he also failed to effectively communicate whatever he may have been thinking with my mother-in-law. She never really made clear her desires or plans, leaving them in separate row boats, adrift on the same ocean, miles apart.

I don’t think this is really the case with either Beth and me or Bill and Nancy. From our discussions with one another last weekend it is clear that both couples are intensely engaged in the back and forth necessary to be in the same row boat headed toward the same beach. After a couple of days chatting and a week or so to digest the conversations, it appears that we have all learned the lesson so painfully taught by our parents’ endgames. The decisions we must make are all fairly obvious; make the decisions you must make when you still have the ability to make them for yourself.

What’s next for us is retirement. When and then where. In all likelihood “when’ will be the kicker; where can be changed at almost any point. Both Bill and I have toiled in worlds where our work has brought us great measures of respect. Indeed, if anything our results have continued to improve over time, and the respect accorded us therefore not simply due to our longevity. We have remained relevant, contributing to the continued development of our respective fields, even at this later stage of our careers. Interestingly this actually makes it harder to retire. Meaningful relevance and the respect it brings is heady stuff, no matter what kind of work you do. How else to explain the Jamie Dimon’s of the world, let alone the Buffet’s and the octogenarians shuffling in the halls of government?

When to retire seems to be the first of a series of “whens” awaiting, and perhaps the easiest. Neither one of us wants to stay beyond the point when we are no longer relevant or, Heaven forbid, discover that we have stayed too long. After that comes the hard parts. When do we leave our homes? When do we accept help in the basic blocking and tackling of daily life? When do we relinquish our agency? Having seen the end of our parents’ journeys will we have the perspicacity to decide when it’s “when”? Will we have the courage?

In the end “next” always arrives, we just don’t know when.

I’ll see you next week…

It’s Masters weekend in the golf world. Today, for one day of the year, I will allow myself to want.

You see, golf, like baseball and other games, is woven into the fabric of certain families. Taught either game by our fathers, we are filled with memories of times spent in and around our game. Mileposts are tagged with golf-related markers for the men in my family. Some are from outings of our own, and some from trips to watch others play. Most simply revolve around the simple act of watching a tournament together on TV. Fortunate are those who have something like this.

My Dad was very generous with his sons when it came to golf (one sister took up the game after she grew up and got married). Generous with access (club, equipment) and generous with his time. The golf course was the one place where we knew he’d be OK with us. Oh sure, our shenanigans and occasional tantrums provoked every bit of his Dickensonian parenting style, but still, the golf course was where we eventually bonded as 3 adult men. Joined by my sister’s husband we made up a very special foursome, indeed. We 3 younger men repaid my Dad for his generosity by taking him on epic golfing boondoggles, and by sharing that space in front of the TV as often as we could.

What does this have to do with ‘want’, you wonder. Alas, no one needs to play golf, save perhaps for a few hundred pros of course. Over the years our family foursome was buffeted by the economic winds of life, just like all other families, but we were able to sail through and continue our odyssey. We all wanted to play, and our respective families wanted it for us, too. In time, at least for two of us, our bodies failed and what it would take to play impinged on true family needs. Worse, my Dad’s mind has failed him as well, and the memories that tie this story together are as lost to him as the proverbial duck hook into the woods.

There, in a nutshell, lies the ‘want’. I’ve long since lost the desire to play golf, and I can honestly say that I do not miss the game itself. I’ve played thousands of rounds; I’ve had a good run. The game of golf owes me nothing. No, it’s not the act of playing that I miss, the physical aspect of the challenge that I allow myself to want on this one day. What I want, of course, is one more round with my Dad, my brother Randy, and my brother-in-law Steve.

On this one day I allow myself to want the surgery that would return me to the game regardless of all the needs that would suffer because of it. Just for one day. I pretend. I imagine the joy on Steve’s face as he shoots even par on the the back nine of the hardest course we ever played together, winning the family grudge match. I can see the evil grin on Randy’s face as he gets deeper and deeper under my skin and beats me for the 1000th consecutive time, his game as flawless as ever. I hear my Dad cackle as he drops yet another long birdie putt on top of one I’d just sunk, sure that I’d beaten him this time, cringing at the thought of him telling and retelling the story for years to come.

In the end that would be enough, I think. When I call my Dad late today and we “watch” the back nine of the Masters together it would be enough to know that he remembers. We’ll talk about our adventures with Randy and Steve, and we’ll pretend that he remembers those times when we marked our journey by the exploits of the golfers on TV. Jack’s putt on 15. Tiger’s improbable chip in on 16. Ben sobbing on the 18th. Pretend that he remembers laughing at me after dropping that putt on top of mine, that one fine day when all we wanted was to play golf together.

Today…just today…club in hand, phone to ear…I will want.

A note from 2025: This year is like every year since I first wrote the above. Have I returned to the game? Meh. Hardly. I walk the course with club in hand and play at playing golf, solely for the pleasure of the company of men who feel about golf the way my Dad, Randy, and Steve did and do. I will want this weekend as I have wanted since my Dad fell ill. Of that I am sure. Perhaps my sister Kerstin’s husband Jimmy will join the family foursome, and we will make new memories together. I do miss the company of golf.

I do want to experience that again.

1) Collabrity. Collaboration among celebrities. Used to describe a bunch of my colleagues at a conference.

Should be a word.

2) BLUF. Bottom Line Up Front. Mandatory strategy when presenting to the Department of Defense. Probably not a terrible strategy for slightly lower pressure presentations like our discussions a couple of weeks ago about how to educate our colleagues on mite-eradication.

Lower pressure, that is, unless you see a mite.

3) Beaker. Wordless Muppet’s character with hair that looked oddly similar to frozen vertical gummy worms. Strangely and consistently hilarious.

And apparently the inspiration for the most au courant hairstyle of the young male.

4) Healthspan 5. Supplements. The Holy Grail of longevity, right? Just give me a pill. No exercise. Eat whatever you want. Sleep when you’re dead. 300 yard drives until your 80, right out of a bottle. People have been talking about this since I was in grade school. Every single longevity “expert” has at least one chapter on this. Some, like Sinclair, have made their biggest marks doing research with this as the ultimate goal.

For the moment there is no magic bullet; what we have at the moment is supplements.

No reason to embellish, this is a pretty straightforward area at the moment. While there is literally a laundry list of stuff you COULD use, the list of stuff that is reasonable to add in at this stage is actually rather short. Over 40? Take one baby aspirin per day. Got any reason to take a statin? Just say yes. Metformin, the ubiquitous medication for Type 2 Diabetes has been shown to lengthen the telomeres, the end caps on chromosomes. Longer telomeres mean a younger chromosome. 500 mg/day, 1000 if you have an abnormal HbA1c or fasting glucose. There are almost no side effects and Metformin is so old that it is usually free.

How about stuff that is singularly associated with longevity and Healthspan? Nicotinamide Mono-nucleonside (NMN) is an NAD facilitator, increasing the efficiency of cell metabolism. 1000mg/day. Tirmethylglucolyte (TMG) facilitates the activity of NMN (500mg/day). Resveratol, the antioxidant made famous by 60 Minutes is somewhat controversial, but in my reading it is either beneficial or neutral; add in 1000mg/day. Round out your kit with 4-5000IU of Vitamin D3, 180-360 IU of Vitamin K2, and ~2500mg of re-esterified Omega-3 fatty acid and you have a cutting edge but conservative longevity supplement strategy.

Note that none of this is FDA-tested let alone approved. I am not providing medical advice or writing a prescription. This is my take-home from extensive reading and it is what I am doing at the moment. I am investigating “Fatty-15”, a newly discovered omega fatty acid found in healthy dolphins and will return someday with my thoughts.

I mean, if you could be as cool as a dolphin just by taking a pill…

5. Discoarse. Conversation or communication that is uncouth, unsavory, and impolite. Should be a word.

I think discoarse as I have defined it is a very apt description of the state of our national conversations. All of them. I find almost all of them to be lacking politesse in all ways. My granddaughter Lila once asked me what it sounded like if you were “reading cursive”. I really love that. The speech writers who backed people like JFK and Reagan spoke in cursive. Heck, Churchill THOUGHT in cursive and simply told the world what he was thinking. Now? There’s no elegance or style. Everything is a full-frontal assault. It’s as if everyone we read about on all sides of government is speaking in the big, bold, not very precise block letters we see in kindergarten homework.

It’s all so very coarse.

And so very personal. Vindictive and personal. It’s as if all of governance has been distilled down to nothing more than one zero-sum game after another. A policy installation is only successful if it knocks out an incumbent statute, a “game” that makes the writer of the new rule the winner at the expense of whoever wrote the prior one. As if a signature goal of every new policy is to turn the creators of the older policy into losers. What ever happened to working toward a common good? You know, something we would all rally around. I seem to remember that non-zero pursuits, the rising tide lifting all boats and all, I remember when that was how our leaders talked to one another and to us.

It’s been a very long time since all of us peasants out here in the villages were entirely in the dark about what actually went on in D.C. That all probably went away in the late ’60’s with Viet Nam and all that came with it. Would we have thought about “Camelot” in such romantic ways if we knew as much about what was going on as we came to know about the Nixon or Clinton administrations? Doubt it. But come on, they at least made an effort at smoothing out the bad news. Now? Language as if drawn by the literary equivalents of brutalist architects, laden with invective and shouted in ALL CAPS from the social media site of the moment. Next thing you know we’ll have a Senator channeling Khrushchev and pounding a podium with his shoe, or a couple of Members paying homage to Jackson era political battles by throwing down MMA style in the aisle during a House session.

Good idea, bad idea, idea you simply don’t care about, the discussions are toxic. Honestly, it just makes all of us Chez bingo unhappy; I don’t think we are alone in that. It’s ugly and unseemly and it reflects poorly on all of us, not just the folks who are supposed to be looking out for the common good. You can argue about who started it all and when, but whoever and whenever, it is now so coarse that it makes many (most?) people unhappy just from the listening.

Our public discourse has become coarse bordering on vulgar. We are all the lesser for it.

I’ll see you next week…

1) Leveret. A juvenile hare. No reason, really. Just thought you might like to know.

2) Coterie. A small group of people sharing a common interest, often exclusive, which is sometimes the point.

We were just in the Palm Beach area. Totally get it.

3) Buffet. When I look at Warren Buffet I always think that he looks happy. Don’t you think? For what it’s worth I always thought the same whenever I saw a picture of his corporate foil and friend Charlie Munger who died last year at 99. Munger always seemed to have a little edge, be a bit cranky or grumpy, but behind it I always sensed a little twinkle in his eyes as if he was playing with his audience. Warren Buffet and Charlies Munger always look like they are having fun.

Why does it seem like all of the other billionaires in our midst aren’t?

I look at any number of these “masters of the universe” and they all seem to be missing something. Wanting something. Other than the joy of garnering greater riches–especially if it comes in the form of some kind of victory over someone else who loses money–it just seems as if they aren’t all that happy. Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, the Google/Alphabet guys old and new. Or Tim Cook, the guy who runs Apple, worth a couple of billion dollars on the low side: have you ever seen a picture of him smiling or read a story about whatever it is that makes him happy? Neither have I.

For sure there are some billionaires out there who seem to be yucking it up and having a grand old time. Steve Ballmer may be getting more joy out of owning a professional sports team than any other person on the planet. Still, for every Steve Ballmer there are two dozen Stan Kroenkes walking around as if they are constipated. Searching for the thing. Seeking whatever’s next. Never enough. Nothing to really make them happy more often than they are not. Some seem to be trying really, really hard to at least LOOK like they’re happy, but I’m not too sure if it’s working.

With his beautiful and very bright fiancé balanced on his newly bulging biceps as he juggles the billions in his bank account, Jeff Bezos just never seems to have that Charlie Munger twinkle in his eye, no matter how hard he seems to be trying.

4) Second. In a Sunday NYT Magazine interview Denzel Washington was proving to be a difficult subject for the reporter. Notoriously reticent and progressively less transparent as he has gotten older, Washington turned the tables on the reporter and began to interview HIM. “What is your SECOND favorite thing? Everyone can name their favorite; I want to know what your SECOND favorite is.” It’s a great question, one that engages the reporter (and yet another question that Denzel declines to answer!) and keeps the interview moving. I’ve been mulling it over for about a week after returning home from our excellent visit to Hortilano’s winter home.

Denzel is right, your favorite thing is an easy call for almost everyone. Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows that my favorite “thing” is Beth and our marriage. Hands down. There is a big gap, at least for me, between numbers one and two, which is why I spent a little bit of time thinking about it. My second favorite thing is “connecting”. Either creating a new connection for myself, or fostering a connection between two or more people I know and like who might benefit from making a connection themselves. At this stage in my life, having made and tried very hard to keep track of all sorts of connections both personal and professional, it’s kind of fun to offer up those introductions and then watch to see if they take the ball and run. Typically there is no benefit accruing in any column for me, just the satisfaction that I was able to share a tiny bit of myself while trying to help in a tiny way.

I’ll bet your favorite thing jumps right out whenever you are asked. Let me connect you with Denzel Washington: what is your SECOND favorite thing?

5) Nemesis (HT Rachel Feintzeig). Irish dementia: you forget everything except the grudges.

You are likely a very nice person. Really. I’ll bet you are. Your successes have been achieved through hard work and perseverance, and you have made herculean efforts to reach whatever peak you’ve been aiming for without having resorted to climbing on or over others who may have been on the same path. Your goal was arriving at your successes by taking the high road. Then you look around and maybe you haven’t climbed quite as high as you’d dreamed and you look at the super successful for clues to why that might be.

Maybe you need to take a page out of Michael Jordan’s playbook and either find or create a nemesis. Jordan was infamous for taking even the most trivial things personally and using them to fuel the fire. Ever wonder why underdogs sometimes topple the top dog? It’s all about taking umbrage at the fact that you’ve been declared “less” which gives you the incentive to prove that whoever did so is wrong. You don’t necessarily need anything special in your nemesis; either a mortal or a venal nemesis, a bit of a grudge that was created or arose organically, will do.

Something to light a fire under your ambition.

6) Non-Zero. So much “I win/you lose” in our world today, eh? Not that it’s really new, but it has certainly been stripped of any of the veneer of politesse. Made me think of a piece I wrote some years ago about “non-zero” approaches to interactions of all sorts. I reprise it here:

“Do you know people who seemingly can only feel good about themselves if someone else has fallen? Folks who cut others down in an effort to build themselves up? Everything, every encounter big or small, is a little Zero-Sum game. There can only be a winner if someone loses.

Have you ever listened to them talk? Their words are like little knives, meant to produce tiny injuries as they convey information. Many times these injuries are purposeful; other times they constitute collateral damage. What is notable is that the only effort that is apparent is the effort to wound, never an effort to protect or cushion or even prevent unintended injury. No opportunity is too small, and the effort to prevent injury seemingly too great, to miss the chance to inflict damage. You never know when that damage might helpfully/hopefully weaken someone to whom you might some day be compared.

Content and tone are inextricably mated. How you communicate expresses not only your thought but also your intent. Kindness, or not even that but neutrality, puts the content squarely in focus. Central. Untarnished. Funny, but speech meant to communicate and harm is often preceded by some qualifier such as “no offense” or “bless your heart”, as if that somehow makes the speaker blameless for any damage downstream.

The sad thing about this whole gig is that the person who seeks to elevate himself by bringing another down, seeks the win by creating the loss, achieves nothing of the kind. At best…at the very best, the situation created results in a loss for the other, but no more than a draw for the instigator. Which, if you’re keeping score, is actually NOT a Zero-Sum game at all, is it? Nor is it a Non-Zero Sum game, one in which both sides win, or one wins to the other’s neutral “draw”.

Nope, tearing another down in the vain hope that such a thing will boost you up, get one in the “win” column, is actually the third type of game, the Negative-Sum game. NOBODY wins.

Who would want to play THAT game? Who wants to be THAT person?”

7) Healthspan 5. As long as I’m sitting here with some time on my hands, how about a quick entry into our Healthspan series on the importance of sleep. Pretty on point with some of the stuff above, right? I mean, how’re you gonna win if you’re getting plenty of sleep? Well, as it turns out, some of the biggest winners in every competitive arena are also some of the most effective sleepers.

Lots of what we know about sleep is actually old news. Humans sleep in 90 minute cycles, plus or minus a few minutes. Each cycle includes a light or shallow phase, a rapid-eye movement or REM phase during which we dream, and two deep-sleep phases. A successful night’s sleep will entail sleeping through some multiple of 90-minute cycles. For instance, your sleep-driven recovery is actually much greater if you sleep for 7 1/2 hours (5 cycles) than if you sleep for 8 hours because you are awakening mid-cycle from a deep sleep phase.

Sleep is where our myriad systems recover and prepare for the coming day. Physical recovery is easy to understand: we really don’t move in our sleep. Our central nervous center recovers as well. Indeed, we can measure the quality of our autonomic nervous system recovery by tracking our Heart Rate Variability (HRV), the beat-to-beat variation of our heart rate. Higher is better. HRV is what all of our fancy monitors measure to give us our “readiness” value. This is how you can examine individual factors from the previous day and how they affect sleep and recovery. For example, the two things that typically reduce your HRV are very intense exercise and alcohol consumption.

Do what you have to do to sleep without interruptions for 4, 5, or 6 cycles each night. Go to bet and awaken at roughly the same time each day. Measure your sleeping patterns with some sort of tracker (Whoop is the most versatile all-purpose tracker on the market, probably followed by the Apple Watch), and keep track of things that detract from high quality sleep (like alcohol). Remember that you are playing the long game, trying to not only live longer, but in the doing also pushing back the onset of the ravages of the chronic illnesses associated with longer lives.

You know, so you don’t fall asleep on the loo.

I’ll see you next week…

1) Salubrious. Healthy or health-giving. Always thought it kinda meant the opposite, actually. That middle “loo” make me think of lubricated. Gonna add this to my working vocabulary.

2) Botulism. A disease in which there is an infestation of bots (HT Joseph Epstein). Given our success in preventing the original I see no reason why we shouldn’t re-purpose this perfectly appropriate word for our modern world.

3) Pronk. A vertical leap without a running start. Associated with the African gazelle-like Blackbuck which is capable of clearing a 6 foot fence by springing straight up from all fours, making them terrifically difficult to keep them contained.

Should be re-purposed as a description of a far-fetched statement or other declarative over-reach. “Ivermectin as a cancer cure? What a pronk!”

4) Bland. Scrolling while riding shotgun (Beth does a super-majority of the driving when we are out of town) I came across something about the de-colorization of the Western World. Probably on Xter. Pretty funny that it happened while we were driving in South Florida, too. When I was a young boy visiting my grandparents in Miami I was always amazed and delighted by how colorful everything was compared with the rather drab tableau of the dying mill town where I grew up. Pastels were the thing, but here and there you’d find a grand slash of bright primary colors as well.

And the cars! The post I read had a graph of the decline in the number of colors we now see on the roads. Back in the ’60’s and 70’s it seemed as if every third car was some outlandish orange or green. And not just in Miami but everywhere, even in Southbridge. Now? White, black, and grey lead the way. Even the reds, blues, and greens are muted, as if grey or black was mixed in with the primary colors resulting in something which is less, you know, colorful.

It made for a fun little driving game over the last couple of days in Florida. We pointed out each joyously, outrageously colored vehicle. Each time we saw one we described a car from our past. Parking lots were just a big blank canvas of dull with only the very occasional spark of color. Where did this come from? Where did all of the colors go? And it seems to be price and scarcity agnostic; the Ferraris and Bentleys were just as bland as the Hondas and the Hyundais. As if adopting the colors of the herd somehow concealed the fact that you were in a Maybach.

Thank Heavens for the dune buggies, the last vestiges of color on the road.

5) Healthspan 4: Fitness. Not gonna lie, when I embarked on this Healthspan series I envisioned consecutive weeks of posts culminating in a nice, tidy progression and conclusion. Funny, stuff just kinda got away from me along the way. For those who wish to have things a bit more organized and accessible, and for both of you who miss my long-form posts, at some point after I finish I will put them all together in what I hope will be a more cohesive, coherent manner. For the moment, on to fitness.

Those of you who’ve been hanging around here and the CrossFit.com site of years past are probably slightly surprised and perhaps amused that it’s taken the poet laureate of fitness so long to address the physical aspects of prolonging lifespan in this series. Count me as both. Still, if you read parts 1-3 you will see a very clear and strong influence from some of the earliest foundational writing about what it is that made (and perhaps still might make) CrossFit a touchstone for the kind of physical attributes one might seek to enhance in order to push the inevitable ravages of age and chronic disease further into one’s future. While a super-majority of those who seek to guide us to a longer life lived better put the biggest premium on aerobic fitness/VO2 Max kinda stuff, if you read all the way through you eventually find an admission that one must also be strong, at least adequately strong, in order to continue to move through the paces of aging.

Indeed, they almost sound like CrossFit adherents: work capacity across broad time and modal domains.

In reality only two discrete fitness metrics have been adequately studied by researchers who study aging, aerobic fitness and strength, and so I will limit my advice accordingly. The first of these is rather easily addressed because the bar is actually quite low: get off the couch. Peter Attia has called exercise the most powerful anti-aging drug yet discovered. Countless studies have found that rather low levels of activity lead to significant increases in longevity and decreases in the effects of chronic disease.

If you want to be more analytical about this than simply counting your daily steps start with determining your max heart rate (HRM). Unless you have done VO2 Max testing or had a recent cardiac stress test you can do a quick and dirty calculation by subtracting your age from 220. There are five HR “Zones” or target levels, but it looks like only two of them really matter: Zone 2 (60-70% HRM) and Zone 5 (90-100% HRM). Sure, you can geek out on the subtleties of the other three, and good on ya if you’re going to exercise enough to do so, but you don’t really have to. 75-100 minutes of Zone 2 exercise each week, with 2 sessions lasting 10-15:00 in Zone 5 and you are likely to garner more than 90% of the possible healthspan benefits in the kitty. Walk, jog, bike, row swim, dance, it doesn’t matter. You’re off the couch.

But of course, if your skeleton and your muscles can’t cart cart around your crazy strong heart and bellows-like lungs your endgame is still gonna be lousy. The goal is to be able to lift your caboose off the loo when you are 92. To do so you will have to channel your inner Arnold and “pick things up and put them dowwwwn.” In some way, shape or form you need to incorporate resistance exercise along with your aerobic efforts. Want a fancy body post-50? Go for it. Judgement-free zone here on the blog. Be a body builder and lift weights (with proper form) to your heart’s delight.

Just never, ever skip leg day!

Classic calisthenics (pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, air squats), power-lifting (especially squats and deadlifts), or a well-rounded program using resistance bands (check out the program on billrussell.com for a joint-friendly, mature athlete-friendly program) are all options. The bottom line is that it makes no sense to be able to run an 8:00 mile at age 70 but be too weak to pick up a case of beer to celebrate. 3 sessions per week is probably an optimal schedule, neither so much that you risk injury nor too little that you risk becoming delicate.

No one should expect to pronk at 80, but getting your butt off the couch and doing both strength and aerobic exercise is a salubrious endeavor. While you’re at it, why not exercise in bright red or iridescent green kit. You know, like the bathing suit you wore while driving your baby blue VW Beetle to Spring Break in Ft. Lauderdale back in the day.

I’ll see you next week…

“Quitting on top is not the same as quitting.” Bob Myers, former Golden State Warriors GM to Adrian Wojnarowski, St. Bonaventure Basketball GM and former ESPN NBA analyst.

Media of all shapes and sizes is simply filled to the brim this weekend with questions about what will become of the players, coaches, and other various “names” if the Kansas City Chiefs win an unprecedented third Super Bowl in a row. Will Travis Kelce drop to a knee at midfield and deliver a diamond to the left hand of his girlfriend, sending them off on the next phase of their fairy tale? Or how about Andy Reid, the storied coach who brought the trophy to both Philadelphia and KC? I mean, no one, not even Don Shula or Chuck Noll pulled off three in a row. Dropping the mike and exiting stage left at that point would be the epitome of “quitting on top”.

And yet, neither is likely to happen.

Who among us is not familiar with the saying “winners never quit; quitters never win”? You don’t have to come from a sports-crazy family to have heard that at least once from your parents. Heck, even my in-laws, two educators who were raising three daughters, with only a passing interest in sport of any kind, and that only as spectators, almost certainly used that exact phrase when it was time for one of the girls to suck it up and carry on. But the reality is that everything eventually has a logical conclusion, a time when being done is simply the only conclusion, that is not really quitting at all.

Think of a pair of wrestling shoes left as the retiring wrestler leaves the ring one final time.

Wojnarowski, Woj to millions, had reached a kind of peak in the world of basketball commentary. This had been his stated goal since early in college, and he spent nearly a decade at the top. Unlike the athletes who provided the fodder for his missives, Woj left his shoes in the ring while still performing as well, or better than his earlier years, and showed no signs of having lost a step on the competition. Why did he leave the arena while still at the top of his game? It seems that his particular “top” was a plateau rather than a peak, and it took just as much time and effort to remain on that flat as it had taken to arrive there. Time he’d not given to family or friends. A plateau that, however wide, still had little room for anything or anyone else if one was to stay. Having given what it took to get there he looked around and saw other places to put that time, other places to be that had room for others to join him, and he climbed down.

Does that mean he quit? I admit that I have never experienced the kind of peak that Woj reached. Certainly not as an athlete or in the professional world of my day job. Never a valedictorian or MVP, busiest, richest, or firstest. And yet I get everything about both what it was that Woj set out to achieve, how he pursued it, what it took to get there, and why and when he decided that he was, indeed, on top, could stop and move on.

Some people carry on because they simply can’t think about what else they might move on to. Doctors are notoriously like this. Come to think of it, so are lawyers and politicians. Athletics and athletes provide an excellent window through which to observe this. Why, for instance, does Lebron James still toil in the NBA? Near the top, but no longer truly there, player or team. For every Barry Sanders who walked away from the NFL when he was by far the best running back in the league, or Andrew Luck, the Colts quarterback who retired because he looked ahead and simply didn’t see enough added to his life by playing any longer, there are a dozen Brett Favre’s or Aaron Rogers who simple play on until their battered bodies are scraped off the field, legacies diminished by not quitting while on top.

One is left to wonder why as much about Tom Brady and his last few years as one wonders if, say, George Blanda would have mustered on for 26 years had he made Tom Brady money. Woj walked away from the money, too. Not Lebron James or Andrew Luck money, but Barry Sanders money for sure. Is it the fame? The rush of the bright lights? Of, I dunno, mattering? It brings to mind “Encore”, a lesser known song written by the great Stephen Stills: “Whatcha gonna do when the last show is over? And whatcha gonna do when you can’t touch base? And whatcha gonna do when the applause is all over, and you can’t turn your back on what you face?” I’d be willing to bet that the endorphin rush of seeing something you wrote being tagged a massive “Woj bomb” was comparable to nailing a 3-pointer at the buzzer in a mid-season NBA game or being summoned back to the stage for an encore.

So why now? There were surely more “bombs” to drop just as Mr. James will surely drop more game winners and Stephen stills will play one more song, before he leaves the arena. Adrian Wojanowski hasn’t reached out to let me know, and for sure Lebron James won’t be any more likely to take me into his confidence or take my advice than he did back in his first stop in Cleveland (search “Random Thoughts” for “It’s Not About the Money”). But still, I think Woj has shed enough light on his decision (written in places such as the NYT, WSJ and Sports Illustrated) to see that he might very well have been reading my drivel all along: Woj realized that he is more than what he does, and that reaching a summit that turned out to be a high plateau was enough. Especially one that only had room for one.

And so congratulations and good luck with your Bonnies, Woj. Someday you will quit that job, too, whether or not you make it to the top there, too. Who you are and what you do will continue to intersect over your lifetime. You know what else folks say about this kind of stuff? “It’s lonely at the top.” If you get to the top and discover that there isn’t room there for you and the people you love, well, quitting at the top might turn out to be the ultimate type of winning after all.

I’ll see you next week…

Thoughts while walking on a beach past the sandcastles of those who would be gods…

I try to live a life that others could emulate. It is not the only life worth emulation, but it is my hope that it is one that could be. After all, I have children. I have grandchildren. I often find myself at professional meetings among colleagues, many of whom are 5, 10, and 20 or more years my junior. I see in many of them the shadow of my younger self. Driven and focused, mostly in the pursuit of “more.”

It’s more than a little trite, but man, if only I knew then, when I was a child, when I was a younger professional, a younger parent, what I know now about “more”.

Don’t get me wrong, “more” is good. It is usually decidedly better than “less”. Having had both at various times in my life this is pretty clear. What I’ve learned, though, is the overarching value of “enough”. “Less” and “more” always come in the context of a comparison with some thing or some person, a time or place against which the you and the now are measured and compared. Under the microscope, always trying to measure up, both “more” and “less” can feel kinda lousy.

“Less” is obvious in the lousy feeling arena; no need to expand there. If you think about “more”, ever “more”, there is no end to it. It’s a hopeless chase, an endless endeavor, forever chasing “more”. You are Sisyphus; the boulder will never reach the summit.

“Enough”, though, is sublime. Personal. Poetic. “Enough” lives within you. It might mean more to someone and less to another, but in the end it is a wonderfully liberating concept. “Enough” is a one-word Emancipation Proclamation for a life.

“Enough” is a feast.

I’ll see you next week…

“You can’t out train a lousy diet.”–Greg Glassman.

To entertain both a long and a healthy life one must address how we go about fueling said life. Ya gotta eat. It’s WHAT you choose to eat, and let’s face it, HOW MUCH you eat that determines the effect of nutrition on your Healthspan. Add in at least a little bit of thought about WHEN you eat and you have the basic outline of how you can design your own personal plan for eating your way to a longer life that is freer from the ravages of chronic disease.

Or so says the guy who chose to not only have that extra glass of wine, but did so after consuming a bowl of ice cream after the stop time of my eating window had passed.

Let’s lay down some stipulations before we start. First, there is really no settled science behind any recommendations on what constitutes the one, best nutrition plan. Literally, none. This is me, giving you my distillation of my research and a view of what I am trying to do for myself and Beth. In this effort we probably represent the area under the fattest part of the curve (pretty good, huh?) of folks who live in North America. We looked at obtaining all manner of “properly” sourced foods (e.g. prairie-raised naturally fed protein sources) and found the process to like paying for the privilege of having a second job. So we shop in a grocery store and buy what is available there. We eat at home 5 or 6 days a week. There are a couple of allergies that force us to be a bit particular about recipes but don’t affect our Healthspan-driven options.

Start at the beginning: how much should you eat? Easiest answer ever…LESS! You almost certainly get more food through your pie hole than you need. Heaven knows I do. To know how much you should eat it is first necessary to know how much you are consuming now by measuring literally everything containing calories that you consume. There are any number of apps you can use (we used MyFitnessPal). Prepare to be shocked at what you find. Your 1800 calorie macro diet or 14 block Zone more than likely only represents 75% or less of your actual consumption. Knowledge is power; you need to know the baseline.

Eat primarily to fuel your life. Eat to support your daily activities and your efforts at fitness. I know, eating (and drinking) can be a source of meaningful pleasure, especially when it is done with friends and loved ones. Don’t give that up. What we are talking about is your regular nutrition. Think about the challenges that being less strong will pose for you as you get older. You are most likely under-serving protein. We lose muscle mass as we age, even if we strength train. Everything I’ve read says that we should be eating more protein.

What kind of protein? Again, my choices are driven by the reality of my suburban life. It is just too hard and too expensive to eat red meat from animals that provide the same quality protein as they did 100 years ago. By and large it seems that we should all be eating more plant-based protein at the expense of industrially produced animal-based protein. Fill in the spaces as you will. We eat fish and some poultry chez us.

Processed foods, while extremely convenient, all seem to contain stuff we just don’t need, and many are specifically engineered to encourage over-consumption. Sugar is mostly not great. High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is straight up bad. While some will exclude most, or all carbohydrates (so-called carnivore diets), most of us prefer a diet that contains carbs of some sort. Learn the Glycemic Index and choose foods that have a low GI. Oranges and apples over bananas and mangoes. Green beans and Brussel sprouts instead of rice or pasta. Mushrooms. How about fat? Sure! Again, just be mindful about the fat. Don’t let some manufacturer mass-produce your fat intake. Avocados and macadamia nuts.

You get the picture.

How about the “When” to eat. Man, what a mess this is. Total see-saw. Eat when you are hungry vs. eat on a schedule. Traditional 3 squares or time limited. If you think the research on fasting makes sense (there is data suggesting that fasting increases longevity to a degree that is greater than just the caloric restriction) do you do a traditional long fast or do something like Intermittent Fasting? And if it’s IF how big is the window during which you eat? FWIW I find the evidence for fasting, specifically time-limited eating or IF, to be moderately compelling. Not more than the HOW MUCH or WHAT research but enough to dabble in IF most days. YMMV.

I guess it’s time to talk about alcohol. Listen, I do love me a delicious glass of “Tuesday wine” or a well-made “Side-swiped”. Research is all over the map on low-consumption levels, but heavier consumption levels have pretty much always been found to be bad for you. Stuff like liver disease we all know about, but there are some really nasty cancers (tongue, throat) that are definitely strongly associated with heavier drinking, to say nothing about not-so-great behaviors like driving under the influence. What is controversial is the question of low to moderate consumption. One or two drinks per day. All of the research, and I mean all of it on both sides of the conclusion fence, is flawed. Poorly controlled, under-powered studies that fail to filter out confounding factors are the rule.

I’m afraid there are no absolutes when it comes to alcohol. For every study that says every drop of alcohol, whether it’s pear vodka or Puligny-Montrachet, is poison there is one that purports to show that moderate consumption reduces all-cause mortality when compared to no consumption. Every “social coin” has a “heads” picture of close friends sharing a bottle of wine as they commune over a shared meal on the other side of a “tails” depicting a family destroyed by some drink-driven debacle. Can you effect temperance, or are you more aligned with Samuel Jackson who would say that forbearance is the easier path? For the time being, at least with moderate intake, the science isn’t helpful enough. You will have to be thoughtful and decide for yourself.

Test to help stratify your health risks. Eat to support your daily activities including the exercise that we will discuss in Healthspan Part 4. Remember, you are not just doing this for yourself, but for all of your friends and family members who want you to stick around and be healthy as long as possible.

1) Anniversary. Our beloved daughter Megan and son-in-law Ryan celebrated their 10th wedding Anniversary yesterday. 10 years! Man, what a ride for them. For us. The first of our kids to marry, Megan was singing along to the radio on the way to school when she promised me that “Butterfly Kisses” would be our Daddy/Daughter song. And in a blink of an eye, there we were, holding each other so tightly, dancing all alone to “Butterfly Kisses”, just like Megan promised.

Their light continues to shine. Happy Anniversary!

2) Ask. Ask for it. This comes up every now and again. If you want something, at least something that is reasonable to want, go ahead and ask for it. Thinking about this always makes me think about Wayne Gretzky: “you miss every shot you don’t take.” Mr. Gretzky didn’t score every time he got a shot on goal; sometimes the goalie made a save. For sure life is like this.

No one gets everything they ask for. I made a big ask of someone I am just getting to know in my professional world. We both acknowledged that, but he thanked me for making the ask because it made clear my commitment to both the endeavor we were discussing and my willingness to commit to both it and to him. Had I not asked he might not have gleaned that knowledge from the rest of the conversation, and for sure the likelihood of achieving my personal goal would be close to zero.

Take the shot. It’s the only way to score. Ask for it.

3) Temperance. This week’s “musings…” continue my exploration of extending Healthspan, the combination of longevity with health and well-being, as I tackle nutrition. Trust me, nutrition following on last week’s mini-rant on “Dry January” is pure coincidence. I will touch on the alcohol pseudo-controversy below, but I stumbled on this gem from an earlier time that sets the stage rather nicely. To be honest I actually tried to find this post last week. Herewith, gently updated thoughts on temperance:

“Beth and I have been on an adventure cruise, a quest of sorts. We’ve been exploring the wonders of the classic cocktail. Equal parts alchemy and indulgence, our trip has been more exciting (as all adventures are) because of the little bit of risk involved.

What if we find one (or two, or…) we really like?

Like many pleasures to drink is to willingly hold the proverbial double-edged sword in your hand; in this case the sword just happens to look like a martini glass. Alcohol as both a substance and a subject is complex and rife with controversy. It’s legal, but only to a point. It’s beneficial, but with a caveat–people who drink just enough live longer than those who drink more or not at all. As a chemical it’s a depressant, and yet in many circumstances it imbues joy in those who imbibe. It all comes down to a fine and delicate balance, not unlike a perfectly aged wine.

The matter of regulation intrudes on the pleasure. Knowing the existence of the second edge and maintaining an awareness of its cut is both necessary and nettlesome. If you find this lurking behind every glass it may rob you of the joy; if you careen from joy to joy you will inevitably suffer and bleed. Temperance, then, is the essential ingredient, the co-pilot who must be ever present on this particular trip.

Ah, but temperance, willful self-control can feel like a 50 MPH governor on a Ferrari, especially if you make the Indiana Jones-like discoveries we’ve made. It might be so difficult and so distasteful that you decide to roll your dice on the “not at all” line. “Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.” Samuel Johnson. Indeed, temperance is so often fueled by the wraith “guilt.” There’s joy and pleasure to be had, but what if there’s too much? Ah, guilt.

It’s all so complicated, not unlike the math involved in the archaic elixirs we’ve been experiencing. So very hard sometimes to ease off the throttle without the aid of the governor. If the “Gizmo”, the “Sideswiped”, and the “Carro del Lô” be guilty pleasures we might ask my interesting discovery, the socialite Charlotte Stockdale, what she thinks of such things.

“I don’t have a guilty pleasure. I don’t really feel guilty about anything. What’s the point?”

As out of the corner of your eye you see it, the shadow of the double-edged sword, one edge Samuel, the other Stockdale.”

5) Healthspan Part 3: Nutrition*. “You can’t out train a lousy diet.” –Greg Glassman (and likely others)

To entertain both a long and a healthy life one must address how we go about fueling said life. Ya gotta eat. It’s WHAT you choose to eat, and let’s face it, HOW MUCH you eat that determines the effect of nutrition on your Healthspan. Add in at least a little bit of thought about WHEN you eat and you have the basic outline of how you can design your own personal plan for eating your way to a longer life that is freer from the ravages of chronic disease.

Or so says the guy who chose to not only have that extra glass of wine, but did so after consuming a bowl of ice cream after the stop time of my eating window had passed.

Let’s lay down some stipulations before we start. First, there is really no settled science behind any recommendations on what constitutes the one, best nutrition plan. Literally, none. This is me, giving you my distillation of my research and a view of what I am trying to do for myself and Beth. We shop in a grocery store and buy what is available there. We eat at home 5 or 6 days a week. There are a couple of allergies that force us to be a bit particular about recipes but don’t affect our Healthspan-driven options.

Start at the beginning: how much should you eat? Easiest answer ever…LESS! To know how much you should eat it is first necessary to know how much you are consuming now by measuring literally everything containing calories that you consume. There are any number of apps you can use (we used MyFitnessPal). Prepare to be shocked at what you find.

Eat primarily to fuel your life. Eat to support your daily activities and your efforts at fitness, not the production of fat. Think about the challenges that being less strong will pose for you as you get older. You are most likely under-serving protein. We lose muscle mass as we age, even if we strength train. Everything I’ve read says that we should be eating more protein.

What kind of protein? Again, my choices are driven by the reality of my suburban life. By and large it seems that we should all be eating more plant-based protein at the expense of industrially produced animal-based protein, especially red meat. Fill in the spaces as you will. We eat fish and some poultry chez us.

Sugar is mostly not great. High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is straight up bad. Learn the Glycemic Index and choose foods that have a low GI. Oranges and apples over bananas and mangoes. Green beans and Brussel sprouts instead of rice or pasta. Mushrooms. How about fat? Sure! Again, just be mindful about the fat. Don’t let some manufacturer mass-produce your fat intake. Avocados and macadamia nuts.

You get the picture.

How about the “When” to eat. Man, what a mess this is. Total see-saw. Eat when you are hungry vs. eat on a schedule. Traditional 3 squares or time limited. FWIW I find the evidence for fasting, specifically time-limited eating or IF, to be moderately compelling. Not more than the HOW MUCH or WHAT research but enough to dabble in IF most days. YMMV.

I guess it’s time to talk about alcohol. I’m afraid there are no absolutes when it comes to alcohol. All of the research is flawed. Poorly controlled, under-powered studies that fail to filter out confounding factors are the rule. For every study that says every drop of alcohol, whether it’s pear vodka or Puligny-Montrachet, is poison there is one that purports to show that moderate consumption reduces all-cause mortality when compared to no consumption. Can you effect temperance, or are you more aligned with Samuel Jackson who would say that forbearance is the easier path? For the time being, at least with moderate intake, the science isn’t helpful enough. You will have to be thoughtful and decide for yourself.

Test to help stratify your health risks. Eat to support your daily activities including the exercise that we will discuss in Healthspan Part 4. Remember, you are not just doing this for yourself, but for all of your friends and family members who want you to stick around and be healthy as long as possible.

I’ll see you next week…

*A stand-alone expanded post on Healthspan and nutrition is coming this week.