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When Louise and I were first married and she was pregnant with our first child, we got serious about vegetarianism and nutrition. Every weekend we’d head to the farmers market in Detroit and come home with organic fruits and vegetables by the case. Our thinking was simple: whatever was in those cases was what our new baby was going to be built out of, so it had better be the real thing.

New research suggests that our obsession with “organic” and locally farmed food was a good choice; the food we find in grocery stores today simply isn’t the same as what was available decades ago.

The first shock study came about twenty years ago, when biochemist Donald Davis of the University of Texas compared USDA measurements of nutrients in 43 different fruits, grains, and vegetables between 1950 and 1999. Over that half-century, the median crop lost 6 percent of its protein, 16 percent of its calcium, 15 percent of its iron, about 20 percent of its vitamin C, and 38 percent of its riboflavin.

And now, two decades later, a new review in the peer-reviewed journal Foods found things have gotten worse, calling the results “alarming” and pointing to multiple recent studies showing nutrient levels in grocery-store staples are down by between 25 and 50 percent.

The earlier studies concluded the problem was that our soil was being depleted of nutrients, with farmers adding in chemical fertilizers that just promoted growth but did little to provide trace minerals and produce micronutrients. This more recent study, though, points the finger of blame to the plants themselves.

They took the older, more original versions of these grocery plants and grew them in the same soil next to the newer, often genetically-modified versions that are bred to increase the size and yield of their fruit, grain, or edible portion of the vegetable. It turned out the soil was a minor variable compared to the genetics of the plants.

Scientists call this the “dilution effect” because when you breed a plant to grow bigger and faster — and then jack it with fertilizers — it bulks up on water and starch faster than it can produce the nutrients that we need.

Every plant we eat carries the result of millions of years of evolution working out how many nutrients each root, leaf, fruit, and grain needs to be appealing and supportive of the animals higher up the food chain who eat it.

“Good” plants get tended and supported, and their seeds get spread by animals that eat them and then release the seeds with their nutrient-rich feces. “Bad” plants have to go it alone.

Davis had noted years ago that there’s a well-documented trade-off between fruit size and its vitamin C content per gram or ounce of fruit flesh. And what’s happened here in America, where factory farming has become dominant, is that our “food scientists” with the Big Ag outfits have chosen size over nutrients.

And then there’s the global warming aspect of this nutrient crisis. Last year researchers at Leiden University pulled together nearly 60,000 measurements across 43 crops and found that plants grown in the carbon dioxide levels we’re headed toward have less zinc, iron, and protein. So it’s not just Big Ag; it’s also Big Oil and Big Coal that’s depleting our food of nutrition.

And then, of course, there’s the dirt itself. Before factory farming, it was itself a nutrient-dense mixture of decaying plant matter, fungi, and bacteria that all served to help transfer sugars and minerals between plants and soil and, sometimes, between plants themselves.

National Geographic reported, that heavy irrigation and chemical fertilizers disrupt that relationships, basically killing off our soil. When geologist David Montgomery at the University of Washington compared eight pairs of neighboring farms, the ones that had spent years rebuilding their soil with cover crops, diverse rotations, and no tilling grew food with 34 percent more vitamin K, 15 percent more vitamin E, and 17 percent more vitamin B2 than the conventional farms next door. Feed the life in the soil, in other words, and the soil will feed you.

That said, even if you’re eating vegetables from the supermarket that don’t show up on the organic aisles it’s still important to maintain a diet heavy on plants. The real damage done to us by our food supply happens when we refine these foods, cook them intensely enough that they’ll last in a frozen meal or a can, or mix them with lab chemicals to create ultra-processed “foods.”

So, if possible, find a farmer who’s building their soil instead of pouring it full of chemicals and buy from them. Shop in the organic aisle; they’re becoming more prevalent even in “normal” supermarkets and often the prices aren’t that different from the factory-farmed stuff. And if you have a patch of dirt or can tend some pots, plant some heirloom varieties of the veggies and fruits you like and feed them with composted kitchen scraps.

It’s fun, rewarding, and will keep you healthy!

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Back in the late 1970s, when Louise and I were running a residential treatment program and school for abused and emotionally disturbed kids, we took the children off the standard institutional diet. Out went the dyes, the artificial flavors, the sugary cereals and the boxed dinners, and in came real (vegetarian) food cooked fresh every day from scratch.

While it’s impossible to know how big a factor that was (we were also on a remote forest-covered lake and had some great therapists), kids who were given up on as being incorrigible or uneducatable were soon ready for reintegration into the normal school system and a foster home.

While Ben Feingold told me diet was a huge factor in kids’ behavior, and we did a small study on salicylates in their diet that I published in 1980 in the Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, I was always skeptical. Until now.

Last week, researchers at UC San Francisco published a small trial in JAMA Psychiatry that looked at what happened to people clinically diagnosed with depression stopped eating ultra-processed food (UPF). For four weeks they ate a diet that cut their UPF consumption by more than 85 percent.

And, sure enough, their depression eased with their depression eased, with moderate to large improvements showing up on three separate measures. Their anxiety scores got a little better, as well.

Similarly, in 2017 an Australian team led by Felice Jacka ran the SMILES trial, taking 67 people with moderate to severe depression and giving half of them coaching toward a Mediterranean-style diet (fresh foods, mostly vegetarian/pescatarian) while the other half got supportive counseling from trained professionals. After twelve weeks, 32 percent of the food group were in full remission from their depression, compared with of the the people who just got counseling.

Two years later, researchers at Macquarie University tried a three-week version of the same study with depressed university students. The students who cut back on processed food and ate more vegetables, fish and olive oil reported significantly less depression, and the improvement was still clinically evident a full three months later.

Then came the really big large-population studies, a gold standard in health science.

Harvard researchers followed almost 32,000 nurses for decades and found that the women eating the most ultra-processed foods had about a 50 percent higher risk of developing depression than those eating the least. (Of particular interest: artificial sweeteners stood out as the worst offenders.)

A massive review in The BMJ pulled together 45 separate analyses and tied these UPF foods to 32 different kinds of harm, with anxiety and other common mental disorders at the top of the list.

And just this week another British study looked at more than 46,000 people born around the end of postwar sugar rationing. Those who spent their first thousand days of life — from the womb to their second birthday — under sugar and meat rationing were less likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety as adults.

Why would a bag of potato chips or too many sodas slam into your mood with such impact? The UCSF team suspects the gut-brain connection.

Their idea is that the emulsifiers, preservatives and other industrial additives in these products wear down the gut’s protective lining, which sets off low-grade inflammation that travels through the whole body and triggers a freak-out (my term, not theirs) in the brain. Dr. Nyasha Chagwedera, who led the study, put it this way.

“Junky processing may harm your gut in ways that ripple up to your brain.”

Older cultures wouldn’t find any of this surprising. They were not just careful about what they ate, but had a story about every edible plant or animal in their world; it’s how both cultural and “safe-to-eat” information was transmitted from generation to generation. And it worked until we turned our food system over to the giant corporations and their “food scientists” to figure out how to make things more profitably.

As a result, today the CDC says fully 55 percent of the calories Americans eat now come from ultra-processed products, and for our kids it’s closer to a shocking 62 percent. We — and our kids — are up against some of the most well-paid scientists and greedy capitalists on the planet.

So try this: give yourself four weeks, the same stretch the UCSF volunteers got. Read the ingredient list on everything you buy, and if it’s got anything on the list that you wouldn’t find in your own kitchen, put it back. Cook simply, and notice how you feel in week one and again in week four. And if someone you love is struggling with depression or anxiety, pass this along and offer to do it with them.

No country should have to accept a food supply that makes its people sick and sad because that’s what’s most profitable, and the science is now on our side when we say so out loud.

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Forty-some years ago, when our three kids were small and I thought I understood how the world worked, I’d sit in the half-dark and watch Louise nurse one of our children. My assumption was that it was a simple plumbing process, with glands producing milk that the child took in and the nourishment helped them grow.

It was a very Cartesian perspective: mechanical. Plumbing. Food.

Turns out that I was wrong, and new research tells us how amazing, how miraculous, even, is the complexity of this simple system of providing nourishment to our (and, presumably, every other mammal’s) young.

A researcher named Katie Hinde was a postdoc examining hundreds of rhesus money breast milk samples when she noticed something that shouldn’t have been there: the milk wasn’t the same from mother to mother. There was different milk for sons than for daughters, richer in fat and protein for one, larger in volume for another. When she ran the numbers again the pattern held, causing her to dig in and discover this astonishing dance of nature.

It turns out that mom isn’t just a milk dispenser. Her body listens to the baby’s body and reacts in really significant ways. The infection-fighting white cell count in breast milk can climb from a normal 2,000 cells per milliliter to over 5,000 with the macrophages quadrupling, then, when the child recovers from the illness, the numbers settle back down.

There are different levels of fat and sugars at different times of day, presumably matching a baby’s cycles of activity and sleep. There’s a complex of sugars fine-tuned to nourish the baby’s gut bacteria, providing for a lifetime of good digestion and nourishment. Hind made the point that mother’s milk is both food, medicine, and a form of signaling between baby and mom.

Mom’s body finds out that baby needs extra macrophages, fat, sugars, proteins, etc., by mom’s nipples absorbing some of the baby’s saliva, which contains the chemical signals that let mom know everything that’s happening with the child at that time. It’s so complex that this system can even communicate specific pathogens attacking the child so mom’s breasts can manufacture specific types of antibodies.

So much for Renee Descartes, who told us that the entire universe — and every living thing in it — is just a super-complex machine, that the world is basically a clockwork of dead parts and intelligence only shows up because one of those machines (our brains) became sufficiently complex.

Life is, it turns out, something quite different. It’s part of why you can take your car apart in your driveway, put it back together, and start it up, while if you take a cow apart you’ll never be able to get it to moo again. Life and consciousness just can’t be explained by the old Cartesian model.

Instead, there’s a billion-year-old process that happens millions of times a day in nurseries all over the planet and it’s smarter than any pharma company could ever even imagine: real-time, personalized, immune medicine, custom-blended for one specific child at a time.

And it turns out we never discovered it before Hinde came along because nobody thought to look or because the baby formula industry had long ago convinced us that they had everything figured out. She pointed out in her study that we’ve exhaustively studied male erections for a century but never bothered to look into mother’s milk, showing how male- and money-skewed our priorities are.

After all, premature babies in the ICU could really use this personalized immune signaling long ago; the cost of not looking is being paid by the smallest and least powerful among us.

So, have you walked past something “ordinary” for years, only to look at it closely one day and discover it was anything but? Tell our community here what you finally noticed, and what it changed…

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The Wall Street Journal, in an article by Sumathi Reddy titled “You Gorged on Your European Vacation but Lost Weight. Why?” noted in their opening paragraphs:

“Shelly Wegman enjoyed all the good stuff on a two-week trip to Rome and Tuscany last year, indulging in pasta, wine, bread, fresh fruit and vegetables, and of course, gelato.

“The effect on her waistline wasn’t what she expected: She actually lost 2 pounds, says Wegman, a registered dietitian in Raleigh, N.C.

“Americans who eat their way through European vacations sometimes come home surprised to see a lower number on the scale. I had the same experience on a recent trip to Portugal’s Azores islands, where I indulged in specialty cheeses, breads, cakes and the sweetest pineapple I’ve ever tasted—without gaining a pound.”

So, what’s this all about? Is there science behind these claims?

When Louise and I lived in Germany years ago, the thing that surprised me most wasn’t the language or the trains: it was the bread. We had our own bakery at the Salem International complex in Stadsteinach, and the bread was like nothing I’d ever tasted. The same was true from the small, family-owned “commercial” bakeries in town.

You bought it in the morning from a bakery where somebody had been up since four and it had a lifespan — you had to eat it within a few days — the way living things do. Then we came back to the States in 1988 and I once watched a loaf of supermarket bread sit on the counter for two weeks, still soft, still springy, still perfectly cheerful.

I remember standing there thinking, “This can’t be good.” If a Twinkie can last over a month without refrigeration — or 44 years, as one apparently did — that suggests that the yeasts, molds, and even bugs that may otherwise like to make a meal of it simply can’t; it’s too toxic for them.

I’m reminded of our years living in Germany back in the 1980s because there’s been a wave of stories lately — beyond just the WSJ piece — about Americans who spend a few weeks in Italy, Spain, France or elsewhere in Europe, eat pasta at lunch and bread at dinner and gelato in between, drink wine every night, and come home a few pounds lighter.

The usual explanation is that they walked more, and sure, they probably did (although some dispute it), but actual science suggests there’s something fundamentally different between the diet most Americans eat and what most Europeans prefer.

Scientist Kevin Hall’s team at the National Institutes of Health admitted twenty volunteers to a metabolic ward for a month and fed them two diets, two weeks each: one was filled with ultra-processed foods that Americans typically eat, some every day, and the other made from whole, fresh ingredients.

The meals were matched for calories, sugar, fat, sodium, fiber, and macronutrients. Nobody was told to restrict anything, be it quantity, frequency of eating, or portion size.

They found that when people were on the ultra-processed weeks, they ate roughly 500 more calories a day, ate faster, and gained an average of two pounds over two weeks. On the whole-food-diet weeks, however, they lost that weight back.

The CDC reported last year that ultra-processed foods today make up 55 percent of all calories consumed by Americans over the age of one, and a stunning 61.9 percent of what our kids eat.

On the other hand, backing up these anecdotal reports from tourists, researchers across 22 European countries writing in the European Journal of Nutrition found the range of ultra-processed foods consumed by locals runs from 14 percent in Italy up to a high of 44 percent in the less-healthy UK.

In other words, an Italian child and an American child are not eating variations of the same food supply, even when it’s mostly pasta and pizza. The Italians are eating actual whole foods, while the majority of Americans — we, with our obesity and metabolic disorders problem — are eating stuff created in a laboratory.

As Julia Bellluz writes in her brilliant Substack newsletter:

France’s relatively low obesity rate and higher propensity for cooking and eating well are not accidents of history. They were carefully fostered by policy and regulation. When Americans visit Paris and marvel at how svelte people are, it’s not because the Parisians have superior willpower. They are objects of their environment, just as Americans are objects of theirs.

She notes that pretty much everybody is just a short walk away from a store where they can pick up fresh ingredients for dinner, and most shop multiple times a week to keep everything as fresh and new as possible. It’s built into European culture.

But it’s not just how freshly-picked or unprocessed a food in Europe may be; there are other dramatically real differences between the food you’ll find on that continent and what you can buy on ours.

Consider the additives. Europe approves somewhere in the neighborhood of three to four hundred in total across the entire European Union; we allow several thousand chemicals in our food.

And our government isn’t bothering to test them; instead of the European precautionary principle that says you must prove something is safe before putting it into the food supply, we wait for cancers and deaths to show up before investigating.

The Environmental Working Group found that of the 766 new food chemicals introduced into our food supply since 2000, 756 of them were declared safe by the companies selling them, not by the FDA. That’s the GRAS or “generally recognized as safe” loophole, written in 1958 for things like vinegar and baking soda, that’s how these lab-made industrial compounds end up in our groceries.

Pesticides tell the same story. Nathan Donley’s peer-reviewed analysis in Environmental Health found 72 pesticides approved for use here that are banned or being phased out in the EU because they cause cancer, neurological damage, or other illnesses, and over 322 million pounds a year of these poisons are sprayed on American crops.

Which brings us to wheat, and to the gluten intolerance that’s so endemic now in America (but still rare in Europe) that restaurants are now routinely putting gluten-free bread and bun options on their menus.

In the late 1990s, American farmers began to routinely spray glyphosate on wheat shortly before harvest to dry it out. This practice — that Italy has banned outright — kills the plants and thus makes the stalks more brittle so when the threshing machines harvest the crop they pick up a slightly higher percentage of the grain heads that they would have if the plants were still green. It’s done, in other words, to increase profits.

A careful review in Frontiers in Microbiology lays out the puzzle: double-blind trials show gluten doesn’t actually produce symptoms in healthy non-celiac people, yet millions of Americans have begun reporting over the past two decades that we feel better when we quit wheat.

It turns out that glyphosate blocks a metabolic pathway that both plants and bacteria use but animals don’t, which is why it was called “harmless to humans.” The problem, though, is that our gut bacteria (being closer to plants on the evolutionary tree) require that same plant-based pathway, and the beneficial bacteria in our guts appear to be even more vulnerable to it than the opportunistic ones.

On top of that, Bob Kennedy has been claiming for years that glyphosate causes cancer, and the World Health Organization has concluded that glyphosate is a “probable carcinogen.” Multiple families successfully sued Bayer for millions when family members who used Roundup died, at least until the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court threw out their lawsuits. (Justice Jackson wrote that the ruling “departs from the near unanimous view of the many state and federal courts.”)

And our money-corrupted EPA now permits Americans to have a daily glyphosate intake that’s more than three times what European regulators allow. We may have spent twenty years blaming an ancient grain protein for what a modern herbicide is doing to us.

And then there’s the plastic. Researchers who bought 111 protein products in and around Portland, my own city, found microplastics in 88 percent of them, with significantly higher levels in the heavily processed items.

Chicken nuggets, for example, carry roughly thirty times more microplastic per gram than chicken breast. Every grinder, emulsifier, conveyor, and pouch in the ultra-processed system throws in a little more plastic detritus. The particles are even turning up in human brains, and now we’re finding them in higher concentrations in autopsies of people who died with dementia.

The difference between America and Europe isn’t culinary, it’s philosophical. Europe operates on the precautionary principle: prove it’s safe, then sell it. America operates on what I’d call the litigation principle: sell it, and if enough people get sick, their survivors can sue.

That’s the predictable result of a corrupt political system in which agribusiness “invested” a record $178 million in lobbying in a single year, and where, ever since Citizens United, the industries being regulated can now spend without limit to buy both politicians and threaten legal action against regulators.

This is why the answer isn’t the Mediterranean Diet, or keto, or any of the variations that are so popular right now here in America. Those are simply strategies for trying to lose weight or stay healthy in a system with a poisoned food supply.

Europeans, on the other hand, aren’t following a diet; they’re just eating “safe” food, because their governments still make their domestic food-processing industry prove safety before they can sell them.

We shouldn’t have to fly to Rome to feel healthy again, and a good start for those of us who must eat on this continent is to buy fresh, locally-grown, ideally organic food and make as many as possible of our meals at home.

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Nature is powerful medicine. Multiple studies over the years have found that people in hospitals with windows overlooking nature recover and heal faster than those without. And I remember the years when Louise and I ran a community for abused kids that was out in the woods of rural New England, it always seemed that taking them on nature walks calmed them down more than anything else, including most of the meds.

Last month, a team of researchers from six countries published an argument in Communications Health that nature should be thought of as a therapeutic tool in and of itself, and should be available to everybody. They point out that worldwide anxiety is up 63 percent and depression up 26 percent just over the past 15 years, and argue that much of this is the result of what they call “nature deprivation.”

The solution, they recommend is something called “nature-based mental healthcare” or NBMHC, citing multiple studies showing the power of regular immersion in nature as a psychological tool every bit as important and effective (and sometimes more so) as pharmaceuticals.

Ralf Buckley, the lead author, points out that more than half of all doctor visits these days are now about some aspect of mental rather than physical health, but mental health gets roughly half of one percent of public health funding.

— A 2007 study found that “forest bathing” — a Japanese concept that’s taken hold around the world, basically standing in the forest and pausing to take it all in — measurably reduces levels of cortisol, the “stress hormone.”

— A 2010 study discovered that the anti-cancer immune system “killer cells” (NK cells) in our bloodstream jacked up by exposure to nature:

“…2-night/3-day trips to forest parks enhanced human NK activity, the number of NK cells, and intracellular anti-cancer proteins in lymphocytes, and that this increased NK activity lasted for more than 7 days after the trip in both male and female subjects.”

Follow-up research found that even a one-day trip to the forest similarly increased killer cell activity, helping prevent cancer in people for at least a week thereafter.

I’ve been drawn to nature my entire life, from exploring forests and a nearby stream as a kid to Louise and my weekend trips to Portland’s Forest Park to climb the foothills of the Tualatin mountains.

And it’s not just the physical activity; when “forest bathing” is compared to working out in a gym both produce physical improvements, but the psychologically positive effects of forest bathing far outstrip those of simple exercise.

Louise and I, however, live in a city with the largest urban park in the world with over 80 miles of trails in it. And we have a good enough income to afford a car to drive to it, something many people simply can’t do.

Pointing specifically to this imbalance in access to nature caused by financial status, the authors of that first study I mentioned argue that nations should start thinking of natural spaces as part of the panoply of psychotherapeutic tools available to society, rather than decorations or recreational opportunities for people who can afford to get to them (or pay for a park pass, like in many parts of America; here in Portland, Forest Park is free).

I wrote a while back about awe being the cheapest medicine we’ve got, but cheap isn’t the same thing as accessible. In the medical context, we spend a fortune on both physical and psychological tools to repair people, but nature is almost never (other than the hospital windows studies and changes in new hospital construction) considered as a therapy.

Buckley’s team calculated back in 2019 that national parks contribute upwards of five trillion dollars a year to the global economy through the mental health benefits to visitors alone; that’s roughly five hundred times what the world spends maintaining protected areas that, it turns out, can be so critical to improving mental health (with considerable side-benefits for physical health).

Nature, it turns out, is the cheapest, safest, best-tolerated intervention in the entire mental health toolkit, but has been quietly reclassified as, essentially, a consumer good, now only available to people who have a car, a weekend, and enough disposable income.

Teddy Roosevelt understood the importance of wilderness areas instinctively and intuitively, having used nature for years to treat his own asthma and “weak constitution.” It’s why he set aside over 230 million acres of wilderness as national parks, land that sadly today’s administration is trying to sell off to donor drilling and mining operations as fast as it can.

China, on the other hand, having examined this type of research and drawing on centuries of folk medicine pointing in the same direction, has, according to researchers, a “national health strategy includes nature-therapy infrastructure in 1200 forest reserves, to provide a billion person-hours per year.”

Nature should be available to everybody, and our urban planning and policies should make sure that we have wild spaces and public transportation cheap enough to get pretty much everybody to the wild spaces.

Let your state legislators and city council know, and put together a plan to get yourself into nature at least once a week!

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There’s a grove of old growth a couple of hours from where I live, Douglas firs so old and so tall that walking into it feels like walking into a cathedral somebody forgot to put a roof on.

The light comes down green and slow. The traffic noise in your head, the one that never quite stops, goes quiet. The first time I stood in there I caught myself doing the thing we all do when something is too big for us: I stopped narrating.

For a few minutes there was no running commentary, no to-do list, no me in the usual sense at all, just the trees and the smell of duff and a silence with actual weight to it. I came out feeling scrubbed clean, and I couldn’t have told you why.

Now I can, because the scientists have started measuring it.

This past winter a team at McGill, working with colleagues in Chile, examined more than a hundred brain-imaging studies of what actually happens inside our heads when we spend time in the natural world. What they found is a kind of cascade.

The brain processes the fractal patterns of nature, the branching of a fern or a river delta, far more easily than the hard edges and blinking screens of a city, so the sensory load drops almost the moment we walk outside.

As it drops, the body slips out of fight-or-flight; the heart rate slows, the breath deepens, and the amygdala, our little threat alarm, settles down.

Then attention, which we normally have to force, begins to restore itself on its own.

And finally the brain networks tied to anxious, repetitive, self-focused thinking grow quiet.

The researchers found that as little as three minutes can start the whole thing rolling. Three minutes.

That last part, the quieting of the self-focused machinery, is where this gets interesting, because it’s the same thing researchers keep finding when they study awe in particular.

A growing body of work shows that “positive awe,” the feeling we get from vastness, from a night sky or a mountain or a piece of music that lifts the top of your head off, nudges the nervous system out of fight-or-flight and into the rest-and-digest state, while quieting the very parts of the brain that keep us trapped in our own small story.

The psychologist Dacher Keltner, who’s spent decades on this, sends people out on what he calls “awe walks”, and finds they come back with lower stress, less inflammation, and a stronger pull toward generosity and connection. Awe doesn’t just feel good. It measurably moves us out of ourselves and toward each other.

Awe works by making you feel small, and it turns out that feeling small, for a few minutes, is exactly what an overloaded nervous system has been starving for.

Here’s what gets me, though. We treat all of this as a luxury. Wonder is the thing we’ll get to once the inbox is clear, something you schedule a vacation around once a year if you’re lucky.

But the science is saying nearly the opposite: that awe is maintenance, as basic to a human animal as sleep or clean water, and that we’ve built a civilization almost perfectly designed to keep us from it.

We’ve paved the groves, lit up the night so thoroughly that most of us can’t see the Milky Way from our own backyards anymore, and filled every spare second with a screen engineered to hold our attention precisely by keeping us agitated and self-focused, which is to say in the exact brain state that nature dissolves.

The people who never lost this knew it in their bodies.

Years ago, Louise and I had the honor of spending time with the psychologist Robert Wolff, who spent years deep in the Malaysian jungle with an aboriginal people called the Sng’oi. He wrote a book about it, and I wrote the foreword to it: Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing.

What struck Wolff, what changed him, was that the Sng’oi had an uncanny, intuitive sense of the living world around them, a way of knowing that came not from analyzing the forest but from being so woven into it that the line between self and place wore thin.

They weren’t taking awe walks. They were simply at home, in the way our whole species was at home for three hundred thousand years before we built walls and started calling the outside “scenery.” Wolff came back convinced that we haven’t evolved past that way of being. We’ve just forgotten it.

I’m not romanticizing here. I like antibiotics and hot showers and the laptop I’m typing this on as much as the next person. But I think we’ve made a quiet, costly trade, swapping a baseline of belonging for a baseline of low-grade alarm, and then wondering why so many of us feel frayed all the time.

The good news, and it really is good news, is that the door back is almost absurdly easy to open. You don’t need the cathedral grove (though I’d recommend it) or the forest where Louise and I climb a mountain every weekend. You just need three minutes and a little attention.

So here’s what I’d suggest, and it won’t cost you a dime. Once a day, find something bigger than you and give it your full, undivided attention for a few minutes.

The sky doing its slow evening thing. A tree you’ve walked past a thousand times, looked at as though you’d never seen it before. The ocean if you’re near it, a thunderstorm if one rolls through, the frankly unreasonable fact of a single leaf.

Don’t photograph it. Don’t narrate it. Just let it be too big for you, and notice what happens to the noise in your head. Your nervous system already knows exactly what to do. It’s been waiting for you to stop and look.

And then tell me about it. What reliably stops the running commentary in your head and fills you with that good, dissolving smallness? A place, a piece of music, a view, a memory? Leave it in the comments, because every one you name is a door somebody else can walk through. Let’s draw a little map together of all the awe that’s hiding in plain sight.

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We treat loneliness as a private failing. The science, however, says it’s a survival signal, every bit as urgent as thirst.

For a good stretch of my life I lived on a floating home, tied to a dock with a couple dozen other houses that rose and fell with the water. (If you’ve never lived on a moorage, the thing nobody tells you is how loud the river is at night, all that slapping and creaking, until one day you stop hearing it and start sleeping better than you ever did on dry land.)

What I remember most, though, isn’t the water, or even the rocking motion at night that sent me into dreams of flying. It’s that you couldn’t get to your own front door without walking the length of the dock, past everyone else’s living room windows, which meant you couldn’t really disappear.

You’d head out to the car with your head full of some deadline, and somebody would be coiling a hose or hauling in groceries, and there’d be a few words, and the deadline would loosen its grip just a little.

I didn’t think of any of that as medicine at the time. I do now.

Because a sweeping review of more than two hundred studies, published by researchers at Portland State (my old neighbors, more or less), landed on something that sounds obvious until you sit with it: you can be surrounded by people all day and still be “starving.”

The team looked at loneliness in the workplace, and what they found is that the feeling has almost nothing to do with how many bodies are in the room. A crowded office, in fact, can be the emptiest place on earth. Loneliness, they write, is the gap between the connection we have and the connection we need, and that gap can open up in a packed elevator as easily as in an empty apartment.

Here’s the part that reframed the whole thing for me. The researchers describe loneliness as a biological signal, much like hunger or thirst, a built-in alarm that evolved to push us back toward the group.

We don’t shame people for being hungry. We understand that hunger is the body’s way of saying it needs something to stay alive. Loneliness is the same machinery pointed at a different need.

Loneliness isn’t evidence that something’s wrong with you; it’s evidence that something’s missing, and that you’re built to go find it.

That reframe matters, because we’ve spent a couple of generations treating loneliness as a character flaw, something to be embarrassed about, something you’re supposed to fix quietly and alone (the cruelest possible instruction).

One of the study’s authors, Berrin Erdogan, put it plainly when she said loneliness isn’t a personal problem so much as a business problem, something baked into how we design our jobs and our buildings and our days.

And the stakes aren’t soft. The U.S. Surgeon General warned a few years back that chronic loneliness carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Last summer the World Health Organization concluded that social disconnection is now tied to roughly 100 deaths every hour, more than 871,000 a year. That’s not a metaphor: that’s a body count.

So how did the most relentlessly social primate on the planet end up here? My own bias, and I’ll own it, is that we built it.

For three hundred thousand years we lived in bands of a few dozen people who couldn’t survive without one another, where cooperation wasn’t a virtue you chose but the water you swam in.

Then, in the blink of an evolutionary eye, we invented agriculture and stored food, creating a way of life that treats connection as optional.

We laid out suburbs you can’t walk across, built jobs that reward you for keeping your head down, handed everyone screens that simulate company while quietly substituting for it, and wired up an economy that calls you a “consumer” instead of a neighbor.

We optimized for efficiency and privacy, we got both, and the bill came due as an ache nobody could name but we now know is called lonliness.

The dock worked because it made disappearing inconvenient.

That’s all. It wasn’t some enlightened community of seekers (we were as ornery and private a bunch as you’d find anywhere); it was just a piece of physical design that made small daily contact unavoidable, and small daily contact turns out to be most of the whole game.

The WHO report says as much, listing things like walkable space and decent public transit as protective factors, which is a polite way of admitting that loneliness is partly an architecture problem.

I don’t have a program for you. I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they can sell you your way out of this, because the real answer is so unglamorous it barely fits in a sentence: we have to put ourselves back in each other’s path on purpose.

Not a grand gesture. The barista whose name you finally learn. The neighbor you wave down instead of waving at. The standing Tuesday call with the old friend, the choir, the volunteer shift, the porch you actually sit on.

The research bears this out, by the way; the things that moved the needle weren’t dramatic, they were small and repeated, like volunteering and simply showing up to the same group of people often enough that you become a familiar face. Familiarity is wildly underrated. So is the plain act of being reachable.

Maybe that’s part of why I keep talking into a microphone every day after all these years, and why I keep writing to you here. A radio show is a strange, one-way sort of dock, but it’s a dock (and I do take calls for half of every show). We find each other where we can.

The hopeful thing, the thing I keep circling back to, is that if loneliness really is hunger, then it has a remedy as ordinary as a meal. You don’t have to fix your whole life. You just have to answer the signal, one small contact at a time, and trust that the body that’s been doing this for a few hundred thousand years still knows exactly what it’s reaching for.

So here’s what I’d love from you: tell me about one small piece of “design” in your own life that keeps you connected.

The standing dinner, the dog you walk at the same hour as the same strangers, the dock.

What actually works? Drop it in the comments and let’s build a list together, because somebody reading this is hungry tonight and doesn’t have a word for it, and your ordinary answer might be the very thing they needed to hear.

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Years ago I lived on a forty-six-foot boat in a marina in Washington DC, and one of the things I learned in that strange floating neighborhood was how quickly genuine community springs up when people are forced to depend on each other a little.

My slip-mates and I checked each other’s lines before storms. We loaned tools. We watched each other’s boats when somebody was traveling. When the power went out, we found each other on the dock with flashlights and made sure everyone was warm.

The marina had a covered pavilion with a couple of picnic tables, and on warm nights it would fill up with neighbors who’d brought a bottle of wine or a plate of something. Nobody RSVP’d. You just showed up. If you didn’t show up for a few days running, somebody knocked on your hull to make sure you were all right.

It wasn’t that we were unusually friendly. It was that the architecture of the place made avoidance impossible.

You couldn’t get to your home without walking past several other people’s homes. You couldn’t fix your boat without your neighbor seeing you fix it. You couldn’t ride out a storm without checking on the boat next to yours, because if their lines slipped, your boat was in danger too. Interdependence was built into the bones of the place. And out of interdependence, almost without anyone meaning it, came friendship.

I think about that marina a lot now, because the world we’ve built for most Americans does exactly the opposite job. A landmark report from the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection, released last June, found that one in six people on Earth is now persistently lonely, and that loneliness is contributing to around 871,000 deaths a year, roughly a hundred an hour.

That puts loneliness, the WHO concluded, in the same public-health tier as tobacco, alcohol, and air pollution. The former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who co-chairs the commission, made the same point in a slightly different frame in his 2023 advisory: being chronically lonely is roughly as bad for your body as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

Heart disease risk goes up about thirty percent. Stroke risk goes up about thirty-two percent. Older adults who are chronically lonely have about a fifty percent greater risk of developing dementia. And on the mental-health side, lonely people are roughly twice as likely to develop depression as their well-connected peers.

What I find most heartbreaking in the data is the age distribution. Most of us imagine the lonely person as an elderly widow in a small apartment, and certainly that exists. But the WHO found that the loneliest age group on Earth right now is teenagers, with roughly 21 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds reporting that they feel lonely most of the time. Among adolescent girls, the figure rises to nearly a quarter. These are the kids growing up with phones in their pockets that promised infinite connection and delivered the opposite.

Murthy and the commission aren’t subtle about why this is happening. We didn’t fall into loneliness by accident. We engineered it, decision by decision, over the course of about seventy years.

We zoned single-family suburbs that put working adults in cars for two hours a day, alone, with no porch and no sidewalk and no corner store to walk to. We bulldozed the dense, mixed-age neighborhoods where people of different generations lived on top of each other and rebuilt them as office parks and parking lots.

We replaced the corner tavern, the union hall, the church basement, the lodge meeting, the garden club, the bowling league, and the family dinner table with a screen. We made it normal for grandparents to live a thousand miles from their grandkids.

We let the institutions that used to put humans in front of each other on a recurring schedule (small businesses, downtowns, community theatres, public libraries, neighborhood schools) be hollowed out one by one. Robert Putnam laid out most of this in Bowling Alone twenty-five years ago. We’ve spent the time since proving him right.

The good news, and there is some, is that public-health researchers are finally starting to talk about loneliness the way they once talked about tobacco. A team led by Tyler Prochnow at the Texas A&M School of Public Health published a paper in Public Health Reports in January arguing that the same playbook that brought down American smoking rates by sixty percent in fifty years can be applied to loneliness now.

Smoking didn’t decline because individual smokers gritted their teeth harder. It declined because we changed the environment around the smoker. Cigarette ads got banned. Public spaces went smoke-free. Tobacco taxes went up. School curriculums changed. Doctors started asking about it at every visit. Insurers started covering cessation. Most importantly, the cultural meaning of smoking shifted, from sophistication and freedom to a slow, chemical kind of harm.

Prochnow and his colleagues argue we can do exactly the same thing with loneliness now: change the policies, redesign the spaces, screen for it in clinics, fund the helplines, denormalize the digital substitutes, and shift the cultural story from loneliness is a personal failing to loneliness is what happens when human beings are placed in environments human beings were never built to thrive in.

I’m not waiting for the policy. None of us should. The marina taught me that human beings will form a community wherever the architecture allows it, and that the architecture, in our own lives, is mostly something we control.

Most of you reading this can do at least three things this month that will measurably change your own loneliness numbers and somebody else’s.

Eat dinner with another human being three times a week, even if it has to be takeout in their kitchen or yours.

Walk somewhere on foot at least once a day where you might run into a neighbor and have to say hello.

And pick one institution in your life that requires showing up in person on a recurring basis (a Sunday service, a yoga class, a quilting circle, a poker night, a writing group, a community garden, a contra dance, a twelve-step meeting, a softball league, a community choir, an AA meeting, a town meeting) and commit to it for a season the way you’d commit to a job.

Don’t make it conditional on whether you “feel like it” on a given Tuesday. Treat it the way our great-grandparents treated church: as a non-negotiable rhythm that builds the muscle of belonging over time.

And if you have an elderly neighbor, knock on the door. Just knock. Bring a piece of fruit if you need an excuse. The data on what a brief, regular human visit does for an isolated older person’s biomarkers is close to miraculous, and the data on what it does for you is almost as good.

The WHO report is titled From Loneliness to Social Connection. It’s a hopeful title, and I think it earns the hope. We made this. We can unmake it. Loneliness is not a character flaw. It’s a public-health emergency hiding in plain sight, and the cure for it is each other.

Tell me in the comments what you’re going to commit to this month. Or tell me what’s already working in your life, the structure that’s keeping you tied to other humans, so the rest of us can borrow the idea. We’re a wisdom school here, which means our experiments belong to all of us.

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When I was twelve I had a bicycle, a Boy Scout knife, a library card, and what amounted to a couple of square miles of free range. My parents had no idea where I was most afternoons, and I had no real idea where they were either. We met up at dinner, told each other the day’s news, and went back out.

I built a treehouse with friends I’d known since first grade. I dammed a creek with rocks and caught frogs. I walked into the woods with no destination and came back when I was hungry. I read books up in trees. Some afternoons I was bored out of my mind, and that boredom was the soil in which I grew everything I’d later become.

A twelve-year-old today has a different life. The library card has been replaced by a piece of glass that knows them better than their grandmother does, that follows them to bed and wakes up before they do, and that has been engineered, with the same techniques I learned decades ago in advertising and broadcasting, to keep their eyes on it for as many hours as possible.

The treehouses are mostly gone. The creek’s fenced off or paved over. Free range, for most American kids, has shrunk to the distance between the bedroom door and the school bus, and even that distance is patrolled.

Now we have hard data on what that’s costing them. A study published December 1st in the journal PEDIATRICS by a team from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, working with researchers at UC Berkeley and Columbia, looked at over ten thousand American adolescents and found that owning a smartphone at age twelve is associated with higher rates of depression, obesity, and insufficient sleep.

The younger the kid was when they got the phone, the worse the obesity and sleep problems got. And in maybe the most damning finding, kids who reached twelve without a phone but then got one between twelve and thirteen had more mental health problems and worse sleep at thirteen than the kids who stayed phoneless.

That’s not screen time in general. That’s the smartphone specifically. The thing in their pocket. The thing in the dark beside their pillow.

I’m not surprised. I spent the early years of my career in advertising and broadcasting (writing copy, running radio stations, building ad campaigns for clients large and small) and I learned, the way every working ad person learns, how to manufacture wanting.

You learn the hooks. You learn how to plant a hunger that the product is the only answer to. You learn that attention is a finite resource and whoever captures it wins. None of that knowledge was secret. It was just the trade.

What’s different about the smartphone is that the techniques have been turned, full force, on children who’ve barely learned to read. Notifications are slot-machine pulls. Likes are dopamine reinforcers. Streaks are addiction-engineering. The endless scroll is a Skinner box you can hold in one hand.

None of that is metaphor. The people who designed these systems have been frank about it; many of them won’t let their own children near a phone, which is one of those small details that ought to be on the front page every day until the country wakes up.

What we’re discovering, study by study and casualty by casualty, is that there are developmental tasks a twelve-year-old’s body and mind absolutely have to do (move, sleep, wonder, get bored, fight with friends, make up with friends, walk in the woods, lie in the grass and look at clouds, have unsupervised conversations about the things twelve-year-olds talk about) and that all of those tasks are being displaced, sometimes silently and sometimes not, by the device.

My friend Joseph Chilton Pearce, in his beautiful book Magical Child, laid out what each stage of childhood is actually for. Each stage opens a window. If the window is open and the child gets what they need (movement, story, embodied experience, the felt sense of mattering to a real community), the window closes around a strong, integrated adult. If the window is open and the child gets a slot machine instead, the window still closes. Just not around what was supposed to be in there.

This is also where the Edison Gene comes in.

I’ve written for years about the kids we now call ADHD, the so-called hunters in a farmer’s world, the kids who learn through doing and moving and building and arguing and questioning rather than through sitting still.

Those kids are particularly catastrophic targets for the smartphone, because the phone hijacks the very systems (novelty-seeking, dopamine, immediate reward) that make a hunter-mind brilliant in the right environment and miserable in the wrong one. Hand a hunter-mind kid an infinite-novelty machine that punishes them every time they put it down, and you’ve built a private hell for the very child whose gifts the world most needs.

So what do we do? The study’s lead author, Ran Barzilay, is gentle about it, and I respect that. He notes that smartphones can do good things too: keep families in touch, give a lifeline to a queer kid in a rural town, help a curious mind learn anything they want. He’s right. I’m not arguing for phoneless purity.

I’m arguing for delay, and for rebuilding the village around the child. The two go together. You can’t take the phone away if there’s nothing else there. A bored, unsupervised, friendless twelve-year-old in a suburb where every other twelve-year-old is on a phone has nowhere to go but onto the phone too. That isn’t a choice the kid is making. That’s a vacuum the kid is filling.

The good news is that parents have started organizing. The American Wait Until 8th movement has signed up well over a hundred thousand families pledging together not to give their kids a smartphone until at least the end of eighth grade, on the simple insight that the pledge only works if your kid’s friends’ parents take it too.

Across the Atlantic, Smartphone Free Childhood launched in early 2024 from a single WhatsApp group in Suffolk and now has over three hundred thousand parents in its network, with offshoots in more than thirty countries.

School districts from Florida to California are banning phones from the school day, and the kids, after a couple of weeks of withdrawal, look up and notice each other again. Whole school cafeterias get loud again, the way cafeterias are supposed to be. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy made youth social media use an official public health priority back in 2023. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is on parents’ nightstands across the country. The conversation has shifted. The data is now in the chamber.

What I want to say to every parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, godparent, neighbor, and teacher reading this is simple: delay the phone, and rebuild the village. Twelve is too young. Thirteen is too young. Fourteen is borderline.

And while you’re delaying, give them what twelve-year-olds actually need. Trees. Tools. Bicycles. Time. Other kids who aren’t on phones either. A grandmother to bake with. A trail. A creek. A book read up in a tree. A dinner table where the phones are face-down in a basket by the door.

The childhood you remember (or wish you’d had) wasn’t an accident of nostalgia. It was a setting in which a particular kind of human being could grow up. We can build that setting again. It just takes a few of us to start.

If there’s a kid in your life heading for that twelve-year-old threshold, share this piece with their parents. Send it to the grandparents. Send it to the teachers. Talk to two other families on your street and start your own little wait-until-eighth pact, even if you’re the first ones to do it. And tell me in the comments how it’s going. Some of the most useful wisdom on this site comes from your stories, not mine.

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For half of my life I thought something was wrong with me because I regularly woke up in the middle of the night. Sometimes it was around one or two in the morning, sometimes closer to three.

I’d lie there staring at the ceiling, frustrated that my body refused to do what everybody said it was supposed to do, which was sleep straight through the night. I even tried sleeping pills for a while, trying to force myself into the modern expectation of a single, unbroken block of sleep. It never felt right and it never solved the problem.

But then, a few decades ago, I discovered that what I was experiencing was not a disorder at all but a very old human pattern with deep historical roots and, I believe, an evolutionary purpose. Once I learned that, everything changed for me.

Instead of fighting my own biology, I began working with it.

Before the industrial revolution and the bright electric lights that came with it, sleep looked very different for most people.

Historians digging through diaries, medical texts, church documents, and literature from medieval Europe through the early nineteenth century kept finding references to something they called “first sleep” and “second sleep.”

It turns out that people went to bed shortly after nightfall, slept for three or four hours, then naturally woke up for anywhere from half an hour to a couple of hours.

During that quiet “middle period” they prayed, wrote letters, had long conversations, made love, tended fires, checked on animals, or simply rested. Then they went back to bed for their second sleep until dawn.

This pattern was so common that it was rarely explained. Writers simply assumed everyone understood what first sleep was.

Doctors wrote about treatments that should be taken after waking from the first sleep. Priests advised using the waking period between sleeps for devotions. It was so ordinary that nobody thought to label it a problem until we started using artificial light.

What fascinates me is how universal this pattern appears across time before modern lighting. The historian A. Roger Ekirch documented references in hundreds of sources, and not just in Europe. Segmented sleep is described in ancient Greek texts, medieval Chinese medical writings, and accounts of pre industrial Africa and South America.

In other words, all over the world humans shared this rhythm.

The real anomaly is our insistence today that eight hours of uninterrupted sleep is the “normal” human state. It is not. Instead, it’s what happened when we flooded our evenings with artificial light and compressed our waking hours into a rigid industrial schedule.

We decided that nighttime was for sleeping and daytime was for working, and then we coerced our biology into fitting that mold.

Once I understood this history, my own nightly awakening suddenly seemed ordinary. What had felt like a sign of anxiety or insomnia turned out to be the leftover echo of a pattern shared by billions of ancestors over tens of thousands of years.

But the history alone was only part of what made the insight transformative for me. The piece that resonated most deeply came from thinking about why this pattern existed for so long, kind of a variation on my Hunter/Farmer theory to explain ADHD.

When I look back at the lives our ancestors lived for most of human history, it makes perfect sense that sleep would be broken into segments. Small bands and tribes lived close to the ground, surrounded by animals, unpredictable weather, and the possibility of danger.

Moving through a world like that required both rest and vigilance. Staying alive depended on maintaining a watchful presence even through the night. If everyone were fully unconscious at the same time, the group would have been vulnerable.

But if people naturally drifted in and out of sleep at different times, there would almost always be someone awake enough to hear a branch crack, stir the fire, or sense an approaching threat.

Seen that way, my habit of waking up in the dark suddenly felt like something ancient in my bones. It felt less like a flaw and more like an evolutionary safety mechanism, a built in system for collective protection.

When I wake now, I sometimes imagine that long line of ancestors stretching behind me, keeping quiet watch around their fires under the stars.

Something about that image is comforting. It makes those dark early morning hours feel gentle rather than stressful. Instead of lying there with a racing mind, I keep a book next to the bed and read for half an hour or so. Almost every time it settles me back into sleep without effort.

The moment I stopped treating the awakening as a problem, my body relaxed, and my sleep improved.

I suspect that many people experience the same pattern without realizing how normal it is.

Our “medical” modern culture has done a remarkable job of convincing us that sleep must look a certain way, and if it doesn’t, we must be doing something wrong. But when you peel back the last couple of centuries of artificial light and industrial schedules, a very different picture emerges.

Sleep is fluid. It responds to light, temperature, seasons, stress, safety, and the presence of others. It looks different in winter than in summer. It changes as we age. And for most of our history it unfolded in two natural waves, with a quiet, contemplative space in between.

Learning this allowed me to look at my own nights with new eyes. Instead of resisting my biology, I now welcome that gentle waking period as part of a rhythm far older than any modern prescription.

If you’re someone who wakes in the night and worries that something is wrong, consider the possibility that nothing is wrong at all. It may be that your body remembers something ancient. It may be that you are simply keeping watch with countless generations who came before you.

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One of the strangest things about turning 40 is discovering that your body has quietly changed the rules without asking your permission. You eat like you did at 30 but gain weight anyway. You sleep the same hours but wake up less restored. Injuries linger a little longer. Inflammation pops up in unexpected places.

It’s easy to think you’re doing something wrong, but the truth is that the body after 40 begins shifting into a new phase of life, one that requires a different relationship with food, timing, and recovery.

And one of the most remarkable discoveries of modern biology is that this phase of life unlocks a superpower we didn’t even know we had until recently: the ability to clean, repair, and recycle damaged cells through a process called autophagy.

Autophagy literally means “self-eating,” although it’s not as grim as it sounds. It’s the body’s housekeeping system, a kind of overnight janitorial crew that moves through your cells identifying broken proteins, damaged components, misfolded structures, and accumulated waste, and then breaks them down into materials the body can reuse.

When autophagy is humming along, inflammation drops, energy becomes steadier, the immune system functions more smoothly, and the slow drift toward age-related disease decelerates. When autophagy is interrupted—usually because food comes in too frequently—those damaged bits of cellular machinery accumulate, and the whole system feels sluggish, inflamed, or prematurely old.

Scientists have known about autophagy for years, but only recently have we realized how profoundly meal timing influences it.

When Louise and I were first married, more than half a century ago, we read Arnold Ehret’s old book Rational Fasting. His basic argument was simple: most people eat too frequently, and the body functions better when it gets long breaks from digestion.

It made sense to us. So, early in our marriage, we decided to follow his advice and skip breakfast entirely. We’d have just two meals a day—lunch and dinner—and give our bodies a long stretch each morning to rest and repair.

That was 53 years ago. We’re still doing it. We’ve never been breakfast eaters, except on an occasional weekend splurge or vacation.

And it’s been surprisingly easy. In fact, what astonishes me now—after decades of living this way—is how normal it feels to only eat twice a day, and how pleasant the sensation of mild hunger can be.

Not the distracted, irritable hunger that comes from blood sugar swings, but a gentle awareness that your body is ready for nourishment. That feeling makes lunch taste better than any breakfast ever could. It’s a kind of earned hunger, the way people in traditional societies experienced food: not as constant grazing, but as a rhythm.

What amazes me is that modern science has circled right back to what Ehret was talking about in 1910 and what humans practiced for hundreds of thousands of years. Every major longevity researcher today—from Satchin Panda to David Sinclair—talks about time-restricted eating windows.

The most popular forms, like 16:8 or early time-restricted feeding, simply replicate what Louise and I stumbled into by reading a century-old naturopathic book. And the science is increasingly clear: these longer stretches without food activate autophagy, reduce insulin resistance, lower inflammation, and improve metabolic flexibility in people over 40 in ways no traditional diet ever has.

This isn’t about deprivation. It’s about giving the body space to take care of itself. The “overnight repair window,” as some researchers call it, begins a few hours after your last meal and strengthens the longer you go without triggering insulin.

Most Americans close that window before it even opens by snacking at night, eating late dinners, and waking up to immediate calories. But when you finish dinner earlier and let your digestive system rest until midday, it feels as if the whole body exhales.

One of the ironies of the modern longevity craze is that wealthy people now pay small fortunes chasing the benefits of autophagy through pharmaceuticals rather than timing their meals.

Rapamycin, for example, is currently the hottest anti-aging drug in elite circles. It appears to stimulate some of the same cellular cleanup pathways that fasting does. But using it requires a prescription, careful dosing, medical supervision, and it carries real side effects, immune suppression among them.

It’s a powerful drug, no question, but it’s telling that people are willing to take something that serious to mimic a process their bodies already know how to do for free if they simply extend the time between meals.

Autophagy works whether you’re wealthy or not, whether you have access to cutting-edge medicine or not, whether you’re 40 or 70 or 85. The machinery is built in. You just have to stop interrupting it.

Your body is not your enemy in midlife or older age. It’s trying to tell you something. It wants longer evenings without food. It wants a break from constant digestion. It wants the chance to clean up yesterday’s cellular mess before today’s begins.

When you give it that space, everything becomes easier: sleep deepens, inflammation drops, weight stabilizes, mood smooths out, and energy returns in a way that feels almost like youth but calmer, steadier.

If there’s a lesson here, it may be that aging isn’t an inevitable decline so much as a request for partnership. The body is always asking us to work with its rhythms rather than against them.

When you honor that rhythm—by eating less often, by letting hunger come and go without fear, by trusting the long arc of biology—you discover the remarkable truth that repair, renewal, and vitality aren’t things you have to fight for: they’re things your body is waiting to do as soon as you get out of the way.

Autophagy is not a miracle. It’s simply the body remembering what it’s always known: healing happens when you stop eating long enough to let the repair crew come out at night and in the morning.

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There’s a strange and damaging myth in our culture that the mind inevitably declines after 40. We treat the first half of life as the real story and everything after midlife as some sort of long, sad epilogue. People joke about “senior moments,” about names slipping away, about walking into a room and forgetting why.

But what if the story we’ve been told about the brain after 40 is simply wrong? What if the changes we experience from midlife into our 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond aren’t signs of decay but signs of adaptation, recalibration, and even growth?

The human brain is not a static machine that wears out like an old engine. It’s a living, plastic organ that reorganizes itself in response to every season of life.

And the truth is that the brain in midlife and older adulthood is doing something profoundly sophisticated: it’s trading raw speed for depth, swapping brute-force memorization for pattern recognition, and exchanging impulsive reaction for contextual understanding.

When you’re young, you remember every detail; by midlife and especially older age, you forget some details but gain the ability to see the big picture. You can feel it happening inside yourself.

You don’t store facts as sharply as you once did; instead, you connect them more meaningfully. You don’t chase every thought; you track the ones that matter. You become less interested in trivia and more interested in truth.

Neurologists now know that the aging brain often becomes better at regulating emotions, resolving conflicts, and integrating complex experiences. The two hemispheres begin to work together more efficiently. Creativity doesn’t vanish; it changes form.

If the younger brain is a spark, the older brain is a slow-burning flame, brighter in a different way. Those so-called “senior moments” that people worry about are often the harmless result of a mind that’s prioritizing wisdom over noise. You forget the name of an actor in a movie you saw in 1997 but instantly recognize when someone is lying to you, or when a situation doesn’t feel right, or when the real meaning of a moment is hiding just under the surface.

A younger brain might have stored more data, but an older brain reads the world with a deeper, more intuitive literacy.

That shift starts around 40 and continues in fascinating ways through 50, 60, 70, and well into the 80s and 90s. Even very old brains continue to form new neural pathways. They regenerate connections, respond to enrichment, and adapt to challenge.

People in their 70s often show higher scores in measures of emotional well-being than people in their 30s. People in their 80s can show greater life satisfaction than they had in midlife. The brain seems to reward long life not with decline but with perspective.

Think of all the times you’ve said something like, “I wouldn’t have known how to handle this when I was younger.” That’s not nostalgia. That’s neurobiology.

Of course the brain slows down. Processing speed drops. Names slip away. But slowing down isn’t the same thing as breaking down. A violinist who plays more slowly isn’t less of a musician; they may even be more expressive.

The brain over 40 becomes more selective, more focused, sometimes more cautious, sometimes more bold. It stops wasting energy on nonsense and pours its resources into meaning.

That shift is invisible in most clinical measures, because modern psychology still fetishizes quick recall and speed-based tests. But the most important work the brain does after 40 has nothing to do with speed. It has to do with integration, wisdom, synthesis, and emotional resilience.

And the mind doesn’t stop growing at 60 or 70 or 80. Older adults often perform better at tasks requiring strategy, judgment, and conflict resolution. They regulate stress differently. They take fewer unnecessary risks. They develop what psychologists call “emotional foresight,” the understanding of which choices will matter a week from now or a year from now.

This is why grandparents are often such stable presences for children. It’s why older adults are often the ones who can calm a turbulent room. Their nervous systems know something younger nervous systems don’t.

The deepest tragedy is that our culture treats these changes as flaws instead of the gifts they are. We treat middle age as the beginning of invisibility and older age as a kind of disappearance.

But if you look closely, what really disappears after 40 aren’t people’s capacities; it’s the frantic energy that once masked their deeper intelligence.

A 60-year-old may not memorize a list of 20 nonsense words as fast as a 20-year-old, but a 60-year-old can tell you with astonishing clarity what those words actually mean. An 80-year-old may pause a moment to find the right phrase, but then they’ll say something that lands with the weight of eight decades of lived experience, something no 25-year-old could produce if they tried.

We also now know that purpose, curiosity, engagement, and challenge keep the brain young in ways no supplement can.

People over 60 who remain mentally active show slower cognitive aging. People in their 70s and 80s who maintain social engagement actually grow new neuronal connections. Learning — whether it’s a language, a craft, music, technology, meditation, or even a new philosophy — physically reshapes the brain at any age. The brain changes because we change, and we change because life keeps calling us to expand.

If you’re over 40, or 60, or 80, the changes in your mind don’t mean you’re losing yourself. They mean you’re becoming a different version of yourself; often a wiser, calmer, more discerning one.

And if culture tells you that aging is a story of decline, look at your own experience instead. Notice how much more you understand now. Notice how differently you see what really matters. Notice how you respond to challenges that would have knocked you down when you were younger.

And when you forget a name or misplace your keys, remind yourself that your brain is busy doing the work of a lifetime: turning experience into meaning, memory into perspective, and years into wisdom.

We don’t celebrate this enough. We should. Because the midlife brain and the older brain aren’t fading versions of youth. They are the culmination of everything a mind can become.

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I grew up on the edge of Lansing, Michigan, with a stream just down the road and woods that felt like a secret frontier. We all did: the neighborhood kids, barefoot in the damp grass after rain, boots mucked up with creek-silt, hands scrubbed raw from climbing fallen logs and digging in the undergrowth. Getting in the dirt was part of childhood. We didn’t ask permission from microbes.

So when I read the recent report in The Guardian about Finnish nursery experiments transforming children’s health by simply letting them play in real soil, sand, leaves and forest-floor, I felt the past crash into the present and I knew again that the story of our species and our health lies in that innocent, messy contact.

In Finland, at a daycare centre in Lahti (north of Helsinki), the researchers from the Natural Resources Institute Finland adopted a radical experiment: rip out the asphalt, dig into the soil, roll out a live carpet of forest-floor moss and blueberry bushes, build compost heaps for children to feed, invite the kids to play, dig, muddle, get their hands in it.

The result, in a two-year study of three- to five-year-olds, was striking: children in the “rewilded” yards had fewer disease-causing skin bacteria (like Streptococcus) and showed stronger immune regulation (increased T-regulatory cells) within weeks. Gut microbiomes were healthier, inflammatory-associated Clostridium levels dropped.

This is the antithesis of today’s “modern” societal perspective on childhood and nature.

On the one hand, we have the modern obsession with pristine, sanitized lives: rubber-surfaced playgrounds, plastic mats, antibacterial everything. On the other, there’s the simple fact that our inner biology, our immune systems, our gut and skin microbiomes, were forged in the wild: the wild of forest floors, streams, soils, plants, bugs.

As I argued in my earlier essay “It’s All One Thing – The Story of the Worms” here in Wisdom School, our estrangement from that substrate is the seed of auto-immune disorders, of chronic inflammation, and a body that’s forgotten it’s actually part of nature.

In Michigan I was lucky: the woods and stream were mine for the exploring. I remember fingers crawling over moist logs, the smell of leaves turning, the damp cold run-off water slipping under my boots. I didn’t know at the time that those experiences were more than play: they were calibration.

They were training my immune system, teaching my skin and gut to know what nature looked like and smelled like and felt like. To know that dirt is not an enemy. And those childhood experiences are probably why I’ve never been troubled by autoimmune disorders or asthma.

So let’s call this what it is: a radical restoration. Not of some exotic wilderness, but of our lost contact with the natural microbial terrains that co-evolved with our species. The Finnish results are more than a Kindergarten trend; they’re a signal of what our children—and we all—are missing.

Here are some of the stakes:

• When kids play in dirt rich with soil microbes, their immune system steps into a healthier balance: fewer disease-causing bacteria on the skin surface, greater regulation of internal immune responses.

• The “outer layer” of biodiversity—soil, plants, forest floor—directly influences the “inner layer” of biodiversity in our bodies, our skin, gut, and airways. This is co-evolved, not incidental.

• The modern shift away from exposure—to “sterile” play surfaces, indoor confinement, sanitized surfaces—may appear benign, but it’s been quietly shaping the epidemic rise of allergies, auto-immune disorders, and inflammatory diseases that both disturb the quality of life and can shorten lifespan itself.

• This is not just personal wellness: it’s ecological and societal. The health of children, the immune burdens we carry, the resilience of future generations: all of this ties back to whether we let the next generation touch the living earth.

In the Finnish classroom yard they said: “We’re moving the action from inside to outside. We want to show the children nature so they learn about it.”

That sentence is packed. Show the children nature. Let them learn through contact, through play, through mess. Not as a museum piece, not as a “nature corridor” behind a fence, but as the ground they run on, dig in, climb across, whose bugs and fungus mix with theirs.

So, I want to issue a personal call to you—if you have children, nieces, nephews—or if you’re planning for grandchildren—or if you’re simply human, who used to feel the dirt under your fingernails and the creek cold on your shins—do this: Let the next generation get messy.

Plant a compost heap. Bring real soil into the sandbox. Create a border of moss and stones. Let the rain puddle, let the bugs crawl, let the children burrow. Let the forest floor not be exotic but ordinary.

I remember that stream down the road from the house I grew up in, the woods on the edge of Lansing, the sticky Michigan clay, the little fish, frogs, and crawdads under rocks, the mud mixing into water. I remember coming home with smudged socks, grass stains and a face kissed by sap.

I didn’t know at the time that I was feeding my immune system. I simply knew I was alive and it was a thrill.

We’ve forgotten that aliveness. Our culture has prized immaculateness, separation from the “dirty” wild, the exclusion of microbes like we exclude strangers. Yet the wildness is in us. The soil is in us. We’re made of the same living matrix as the tree roots and the beetles and the moss. Broken contact with that matrix isn’t harmless: it’s a literal loss.

In the wise old words I referenced in “It’s All One Thing”: “When we remove ourselves from that web of life, we do so at our own peril.”

The Finnish story is not just cute or scientific: it’s urgent. Rebuild our contact with the living earth. Let children scoop sand and soil, let them bury their hands, let them build mud-cakes like Aurora in Finland’s day-care. Laugh as they smear soil on their faces. It’s not chaos: it’s calibration.

Yes, modernization has brought us many gifts. Clean water. Sanitation. Vaccines. But modernization taken too far, with too much separation from our biological roots, leaves us with immune systems that misfire, bodies that mistake harmless soil microbes for threats, children who never taste actual dirt. The Finnish experiment is clear: get back to the soil, get back to the forest floor, get back to the messy, ordinary earth.

And the earth—our living earth—benefits too. More forest-floor carpets. More compost heaps. More kids playing outside, fewer rubber mats, fewer sterile boxes. We begin to treat biodiversity as not just glamorous (rainforests, coral reefs) but local (yard patches, old tree stumps, rain puddles). We begin to remember that our health is tied to the health of that biodiversity.

So my invitation to you: On your next weekend, find a patch of ground the kids (or you!) can mess with. Dig into it. Feel the soil. Let a leaf rot into the compost. Let worms do their work. Let the world pull you back. Because we’re not apart from nature: we are nature. And when we pretend otherwise, we hurt ourselves and the world around us.

It’s time to stop treating microbes as abstract threats or invisible villains. They are—and have always been—our companions, our allies, our ancestral family. The Finnish children’s laughter in the sandy forest-floor yard is our ancient laughter too.

Let’s dig in.

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I’ve always believed that work is more than simply earning a living. Louise and I have started multiple companies over the 53 years we’ve been married, and in each case we hung a mission statement on the wall, something larger than profit, something meant to orient us toward contribution and meaning.

For our advertising agency it was “making the world a better place by improving communication among people.” For the community for abused kids it was “saving the world one child at a time.” For our travel agency it was “bringing people together and broadening their understanding of humanity with travel.” For our herbal tea company it was “helping people get healthier.” Each mission guided decisions when the next pitch came in, or when we opted to decline something that didn’t align (we refused tot take advertising clients from the meat or tobacco industries, for example).

In those early days, it might have seemed a luxury—or perhaps a distraction—to speak of purpose. But as I’ve aged and, frankly, reflected on what gives life its quality, I’ve grown convinced that this sense of purpose is not optional: it’s essential. And science now points to exactly that: living your life with a sense of purpose is strongly associated with greater longevity and healthier aging.

According to the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health one of the best-evidenced routes to better health is the trio of sleep, diet, exercise and two additional factors: social connection and sense of purpose. Looking at the “Blue Zones”—regions of the world where people live markedly longer, healthier lives—one of the core habits is simply that they live with purpose.

When I look back, I see how those mission statements made the work itself richer and the journey more sustainable. In the ad agency, we weren’t just chasing the next campaign; we were asking, “How will this help people understand each other better?” In the travel agency, it wasn’t just booking flights and hotels: it was envisioning how one human meeting in another country might change a life. In the herbal tea business, it wasn’t just selling tea bags it was helping someone feel better, reduce inflammation, or reclaim energy.

The money matters—of course it does—but if the money is detached from something meaningful, I’ve found the work doesn’t feed you in the same way. Today, with my radio/TV show and this newsletter, we’re still pursuing what we feel is a purpose greater than our own little lives.

Louise and I found that when our mission was clear, decision-making got easier. When something felt off-mission, we’d pause. We’d ask ourselves: does this move fit our “bringing people together” ethos? If the answer was no, we often walked away.

That said, when it aligned, the energy in the business changed. Clients felt it. Our teams felt it. And I believe our own resilience felt it, because we were working for something bigger than ourselves.

And that brings me to happiness, which is different but intimately connected to purpose. In the hair-on-fire startup days, long hours were inevitable. But when you’re forging something aligned with your values, the fatigue carries a different emotional weight. The long hours feel less like a grind and more like part of the journey. You’re building not just a company, but a piece of something meaningful. Over time that builds into a layer of fulfillment that goes beyond paycheck and title.

Then there’s the longevity piece, which recent science solidly backs up. If we want to live longer, healthier, more vibrant lives, it’s not only about the spinach salad and mountain climbing on weekends (though those matter). It’s about meaning, connection, a reason to get up in the morning.

The Blue Zones research lists “living with purpose” as a key factor among people who regularly reach age 90 or 100. And the Columbia research underlines that sense of purpose and social connection are two big pieces of the healthy-aging puzzle. So yes, our mission-driven work may very well be one of the better investments we’ve made, both for our businesses and for our lives.

I don’t claim that every day is perfect or that having a mission makes everything magical. There have been leaner seasons, distractions, the temptations to chase only “what pays.” But I write this now because I want to offer you the same prompt we used again and again: What is your mission?

What statement can you live by, hang on your wall, carry written on the back of a business card where you can see it every time you open your wallet, whisper to yourself when the morning alarm goes off? And then ask: does what I do today bring me closer to that mission, or steer me away?

If you have that mission, your work takes on two purposes at once. Yes, it makes you a living. But it also fosters meaning. It helps you connect. It helps you draw a circle of impact around you. It helps you ride the waves with calm because you know what you’re for. And it helps you stack up days that feel not just long but full, both for you, for others, and for the living of it.

Louise and I still look at those mission statements. They may have slightly shifted languages over the years, but the core remains. And on the days when the to-do list looms, when the road seems longer than expected, we lean back into the mission: improving communication, saving kids, bringing people together, helping people get healthier. And now using media to tell the truth and rescue democracy.

Because that mission lifts the work out of the grind and places it inside the story of our lives.

If you’re reading this and are wondering whether your work has a why, you’re not alone. Many of us drift into “what pays” mode. But turning toward purpose doesn’t require switching industries or starting a new company. It simply requires aligning the job you have (or the business you run) with a reason that outlasts the paycheck. And that alignment may well give you two dividends: deeper happiness and longer, richer life.

If you’re ready, try writing your mission on a sticky note. Hang it somewhere you’ll see it (I used to put mine on the bathroom mirror, and had a card in my wallet). Then let it guide you today.

You may find that your next task, your next meeting, your next idea takes on a new shape. And faster than you expect, you’ll be stacking not just work hours but days of meaning.

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As Louise and I have aged (our 54th wedding anniversary is in two weeks), we’ve noticed that one of the biggest challenges is keeping our posture straight and our bones from getting brittle. There’s science behind this challenge, and it gives us all suggestions for “keeping young.”

Bone is one of the few tissues in the human body that remains alive and dynamic from birth to death. It’s not the rigid, inert structure most people imagine when they think of skeletons. In fact, it’s constantly growing, dying, dissolving, and rebuilding itself through a delicate dance between two main kinds of cells—osteoblasts and osteoclasts.

This balance is what keeps us upright, protects our organs, and allows our muscles to move us through life. But as we get older, the harmony between building and breaking begins to shift, and the results can be devastating. Understanding how that process happens—and how we might slow or reverse it—is one of the quiet frontiers of aging science.

Bone is built primarily by osteoblasts, the construction workers of our skeleton. They take raw materials—calcium, phosphate, and collagen—and create new bone matrix. This matrix starts out soft, like scaffolding, then mineralizes into the hard tissue we recognize as bone. Opposing them are osteoclasts, which act more like demolition crews. They dissolve old or damaged bone so it can be replaced.

In a healthy adult, these two systems are in balance: every bit of bone that’s broken down is replaced by new bone. But that balance depends on a complex interplay of hormones, mechanical stress, and nutrients that becomes harder to maintain with age.

When we’re young, our bodies prioritize growth and repair. Hormones like growth hormone, estrogen, and testosterone all signal bone-building cells to stay active and reproduce. Even the act of moving—walking, climbing stairs, carrying groceries—tells our bones to stay strong.

Osteoblasts thrive on impact; they literally sense mechanical stress and respond by building more bone where it’s needed. That’s why astronauts lose bone density in zero gravity and bedridden patients lose it quickly in immobilized limbs. Bones are designed for stress. They grow from it, adapt to it, and depend on it.

But aging quietly changes the equation. By the time most people reach their 40s or 50s, osteoblasts start slowing down while osteoclasts keep right on working. Estrogen and testosterone, which protect against bone loss, begin to drop. In women, the sharp decline in estrogen during menopause often leads to an acceleration of bone loss so dramatic it can reach one to two percent per year.

The result is a net thinning of the bones that can culminate in osteopenia or osteoporosis. What’s more, osteoblasts themselves become less responsive to mechanical stress and less efficient at mineralizing new bone, while their numbers dwindle with each passing decade.

Yet, there’s another layer to this story that is both hopeful and cautionary. Bone cells are not fixed in number; they arise from progenitor cells—stem-like precursors in the bone marrow and periosteum (the thin tissue surrounding bones). These progenitor cells can, under the right conditions, become new osteoblasts.

Exercise, especially high-impact weight-bearing exercise, stimulates their differentiation. Nutrients like vitamin D, calcium, and magnesium fuel the process. Even exposure to sunlight, through its effect on vitamin D synthesis, plays a critical role in signaling these cells to mature. In a very real sense, every step we take outdoors in the sunshine is a small act of bone regeneration.

On the other hand, disuse and a sedentary lifestyle send the opposite message. When bones aren’t stressed, the progenitor cells shift toward becoming fat cells instead of bone cells, and osteoclasts take over the stage.

This explains why modern sedentary living, coupled with diets low in essential minerals, has created an epidemic of bone fragility even among people who think of themselves as healthy.

It also explains why impact—whether from walking, jumping, or resistance training—isn’t just good for muscle tone; it’s a direct message to your bones to stay alive.

There’s a growing body of research exploring how bone regeneration might be enhanced as we age. Some of it focuses on pharmacological ways to stimulate osteoblast activity or block osteoclast overactivity, like the bisphosphonate drugs or parathyroid hormone analogs now used for osteoporosis. Others look at stem cell therapies that could replenish the aging pool of bone-forming cells.

But many of the most effective tools we already possess are natural. Regular resistance training, adequate protein intake, and maintaining proper levels of vitamin D and K2 can have profound effects on bone density. The simple act of impact—bones striking the ground, muscles tugging on tendons, joints bearing weight—remains the single most powerful way to keep bones young.

The idea that bone “knows” when it’s being used and responds accordingly is one of nature’s most elegant feedback loops. It means that our skeleton is not a fixed thing but a living organ that senses and adapts to our behavior.

When we stop moving, bones interpret it as a signal that they’re no longer needed and begin to fade away. When we challenge them, they thicken, harden, and renew themselves. Even in old age, this feedback loop can be reawakened, though the gains are slower and more fragile than in youth.

In the larger metaphor of life, bone regeneration is a quiet but powerful reminder of resilience. Every day, millions of microscopic breaks form in our skeleton, and every day they are healed. It’s a never-ending cycle of destruction and renewal that mirrors our emotional and spiritual lives. The same principle applies: stress and impact, handled well, make us stronger. Avoiding stress entirely—physical or emotional—leads to a kind of decay. Growth comes from the right kind of pressure.

So while supplements and science continue to explore the biochemical angles of bone regeneration, the most profound lesson may be a behavioral one. Move every day. Load your bones. Walk, climb, stretch, lift, push.

Feel the impact of your feet on the ground, because your bones are listening. They respond to every signal of life you send them, even late into old age. They want to grow. They’re built to grow. But they require our participation—the literal weight of our will—to keep doing it.

In the end, strong bones are not just the foundation of our physical structure but the embodiment of our relationship with gravity, effort, and resilience itself.

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This past weekend, Louise and I took our weekly 2-mile hike through Portland’s Forest Park, climbing the equivalent of 30-40 stories up trails that follow the urban hills of the Tualatin Mountain range. My heartbeat, which usually only gets into the low 130s on such a hike, was spiking 145 on my Apple watch.

That was when I realized the only liquid I’d drank since before going to bed was a half a cup of coffee. I pulled out a bottle of water and downed about 8 ounces of it; within 10 minutes my heartbeat rate was down to the 120s. (My resting rate is 57.)

Apropos of this, I’ve noticed something over the past few years that both surprised and concerned me: I rarely feel thirsty anymore.

When I was younger, thirst was like an internal alarm clock: loud, immediate, and impossible to ignore. Now it’s mostly silent. My body still gives me signals, of course. My urine will turn dark, my mouth will go dry, or I’ll feel a faint lightness in my head if I stand up too quickly. But the actual sensation of thirst—the prompt that once made me go to the sink and get a glass of water—has nearly disappeared.

It turns out this isn’t just a personal quirk. Once we pass around 60 (I’m 74), the systems in the brain and body that govern thirst lose their previous sensitivity. The hypothalamic osmoreceptors that once reacted quickly to rising sodium levels or falling fluid volume just don’t sound the alarm the way they used to.

At the same time, aging muscles shrink and total body water declines, so we have a smaller margin for error. The kidneys lose some efficiency in concentrating urine, which means we lose more water than we think. Add in common medications in older adults—like diuretics or antihypertensives—and it’s easy to see how dehydration can become a chronic, low-level condition without a senior citizen ever feeling like anything is wrong.

Studies back this up. Surveys suggest that somewhere between a quarter and nearly half of older adults are underhydrated on any given day. UCLA Health has noted that up to 40 percent of adults over 65 experience chronic dehydration. Researchers writing in journals like Nutrients and The American Journal of Epidemiology have described how age-related changes in fluid balance, thirst perception, and kidney function combine to create what they call “low-intake dehydration.”

It’s not the dramatic, hospital-level kind kind of dehydration caused by vomiting or fever. It’s the slow, quiet kind that builds over days or weeks when you simply don’t drink enough because your body doesn’t ask you to.

And here’s where it becomes more than an inconvenience. There’s growing evidence that chronic dehydration in older adults may increase the risk of heart attack and stroke.

The connection isn’t speculative. When you don’t take in enough water, your plasma volume drops. Blood becomes thicker and flows more slowly. That increased viscosity raises the likelihood of clot formation, especially in blood vessels already stiffened by age or plaque.

Researchers who followed older adults in the Adventist Health Study found that those who drank five or more glasses of water a day had a significantly lower risk of fatal coronary heart disease than those who drank two or fewer, even after accounting for lifestyle factors. Other studies have pointed to how rising blood sodium concentration and reduced plasma volume can trigger vascular inflammation, increase endothelial stress, and strain the heart.

Even modest dehydration can provoke the body to constrict blood vessels and raise heart rate to maintain pressure. In someone with aging arteries or mild diastolic dysfunction, that extra strain adds up.

A NIH-supported analysis has suggested that staying well hydrated may reduce the long-term risk of heart failure. There’s also research connecting dehydration and short-term stroke risk in people with atrial fibrillation.

When blood thickens, clots can form more easily and travel to the brain. A recent paper in Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases outlined how both physiological aging and cardiovascular medications make older adults uniquely vulnerable to this cycle. The authors weren’t fearmongering; they were sounding an alarm modern medicine has largely overlooked.

To be clear, no one is claiming dehydration alone causes strokes or heart attacks. Much of the evidence is observational, and many of the mechanisms are inferred from lab and animal studies. But the convergence of data, biologic plausibility, and lived experience points in the same direction: once you’re north of 60, letting yourself slip into even mild dehydration is a cardiovascular stressor. But you might never feel thirsty while it’s happening.

That puts the burden back on awareness and habit, which is trickier than it sounds. I’ve had to train myself not to wait for thirst as the signal to drink water. Instead, I pay attention to things I used to ignore: the color of my urine, whether my mouth feels slightly tacky, whether my energy dips for no obvious reason.

Some days I do well. Other days I look at a glass sitting next to me in the late afternoon and realize I never touched it. I’ve started keeping water or green drinks at arm’s reach, drinking a glass in the morning before coffee, and sipping throughout the day whether I feel like it or not. I also remind myself that fluids don’t just come from water; herbal teas, broth, juicy fruits, and soups all help. The goal isn’t to drown myself; it’s to stay ahead of the deficit my body no longer warns me about.

The research suggests that roughly 1.7 liters a day is a reasonable floor for most older adults, adjusting for heat, activity, and health conditions. But the exact number matters less than the consistency. I’ve also found that pairing water with routines—like writing, reading, doing my radio show, or meals—keeps it effortless.

None of this is glamorous, but neither is a stroke. Every cell and capillary depends on hydration to do its job. When we’re young, the scaffolding of youth masks a lot of neglect. Past 60, the bills start to come due.

There’s a cultural habit of treating hydration as a lifestyle tip rather than a medical issue. But for older adults, it may be one of the simplest and most powerful cardiovascular interventions we’ve overlooked. The blood gets thicker, the vessels get stiffer, the kidneys get slower, and the brain gets quieter about thirst. That’s a setup that deserves attention.

I’m not interested in alarmism; I’m interested in staying alive, aware, and functional for as many years as I’m given. Water is cheaper than heart surgery and quieter than an ambulance.

So I no longer wait to feel thirsty. That signal retired before I did. I watch my body’s other indicators, I err on the side of drinking before I need it, and I treat hydration not as an afterthought but as part of aging consciously.

If you’re over 60 and you’ve noticed the same thing—that you almost never feel thirsty anymore—you’re not imagining it. The system has changed. Fortunately, we can change with it.

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There are moments when science throws us a curveball so surprising that it forces us to reimagine what we thought we knew about health and disease. The recent research on lithium and Alzheimer’s — the condition that took my mother — is one of those moments.

For decades lithium has been the province of psychiatrists, a blunt but effective drug used to stabilize the wild swings of bipolar disorder. Its side effects are notorious, and its therapeutic range so narrow that physicians monitor blood levels with the vigilance of a hawk. Nobody outside psychiatric wards or academic circles thought of lithium as a potential shield against dementia, much less as a mineral whose absence might trigger it.

And yet here we are, looking at evidence suggesting lithium — an elemental salt so basic that it shows up in trace amounts in rocks, soil, and even drinking water — could play a vital role in protecting the brain against the most devastating illness of aging.

The findings are dramatic enough to stop you in your tracks. A study published in Nature this summer revealed that mice bred to develop Alzheimer’s‑like pathology recovered memory and cognitive performance after being given tiny doses of lithium orotate.

Even more strikingly, the brains of those mice reversed the classic hallmarks of the disease — amyloid plaques and tau tangles that have baffled scientists for decades.

This was not incremental improvement or a slowing of decline; it was actual reversal.

When researchers examined human brain tissue from people who had died with Alzheimer’s, they found that the affected areas were depleted of lithium, consistent with the notion that amyloid plaques sequester lithium and rob brain cells of its protective presence.

We’ve known for a while that lithium has neuroprotective effects. At the cellular level it inhibits GSK‑3β, an enzyme deeply implicated in amyloid and tau formation. It boosts BDNF, a natural fertilizer for neurons that nurtures connections. It stimulates neurogenesis in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory hub, and stabilizes calcium regulation inside neurons, which otherwise can go haywire and cause cell death.

These mechanisms help us make sense of why, over the years, population‑level studies have found correlations between lithium in drinking water and lower rates of dementia and suicide. What once looked like curious footnotes now seem like early signposts pointing toward a deeper truth.

But here comes our reality check: animal studies are not the same as human evidence. The lithium in question was lithium orotate, a compound that can navigate past the brain’s defenses more effectively than traditional lithium carbonate used in psychiatry. It’s available over the counter in tiny doses, quantities vastly smaller than the therapeutic ranges used for mood disorders.

Enthusiasts online are already claiming lithium orotate as a cure for dementia, although that may be premature, and potentially dangerous. Lithium is not harmless; even low exposures can affect kidney function, thyroid health, and heart rhythms. The leap from promising animal research to self‑medication is the kind of shortcut that too often ends in tragedy; always run supplements past your physician before taking them.

Still, the excitement is justified.

Alzheimer’s has long been among the most frustrating fields of medical research. Billions have been poured into drugs targeting amyloid plaques, only to see patients continue into confusion and decline. The pharmaceutical industry has doubled down with diminishing returns while caregivers and families struggle.

To have something as simple — and unglamorous (and unprofitable, as it can’t be patented) — as a mineral salt show such profound effects feels almost heretical. It challenges our obsession with high‑tech solutions and reminds us how often we overlook the fundamentals.

There is also something profoundly poetic here. Lithium is the lightest metal in the periodic table, the element that powers our modern devices, suddenly recognized as an ancient protector of the mind. Our ancestors ingested it through natural springs and unfiltered water.

In regions where aquifers contain more lithium, communities have long shown lower rates of mood disorders and cognitive decline. For those of us living on processed foods and filtered water, perhaps we’ve stripped away even the trace mineral protections that nature once provided. Science is only beginning to explore how much micro‑doses of elemental nutrients shape mental resilience over a lifetime.

The responsible path forward is clear. We need rigorous, well‑designed human trials to determine whether micro‑physiologic doses of lithium can slow — or even reverse — Alzheimer’s progression in people. We must learn which forms of lithium work, what safe dosages look like, how long it takes to see benefit, and who is most likely to respond.

We need to know whether lithium should be part of a broader strategy including exercise, diet, cognitive engagement, or even alongside new drug therapies. And we need regulators and public health authorities watching closely as supplement makers — already eager to cash in — rush to market. Right now, 1 mg. and 5 mg. supplements of lithium orotate are widely available over-the-counter, but the safety and efficacy studies on humans are still ongoing; again, check with your doc.

Until then, the wisdom for most of us is to resist the allure of self‑medication and instead recommit to the broader foundation of brain health. The fundamentals remain: nourish your brain with whole plants and omega‑3s, move your body, keep your mind curious and connected, manage blood sugar and blood pressure, avoid toxins like tobacco and excess alcohol.

Beyond the scientific implications lies a deeper spiritual lesson. Alzheimer’s has been cast as a great thief, robbing identity, memory, connection, even the ability to recognize loved ones. For families, it is one of the most devastating illnesses. To imagine that something as humble as restoring a missing mineral might offer protection is to confront the unseen threads that connect us with the living earth.

Minerals in soil, water, the balance of elements in our bodies shape not just our physical health but our very consciousness. In a culture enamored with synthetic solutions, perhaps the universe is nudging us back toward humility. Sometimes healing comes not from invention, but from rediscovery.

Regardless of whether lithium becomes part of the standard toolkit against Alzheimer’s, this discovery demands a deeper gaze. It challenges science to move beyond the next drug molecule and consider nutrition and environment as foundational to well‑being. It urges public funding for research not just driven by patents. And it reminds us to listen to the wisdom hidden in the elements beneath our feet.

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Before writing this article, I sat at my desk and stared out the window at the trees around our house for about ten minutes. Here’s why.

In a world buzzing with stimulation — music in earbuds, screens flickering, messages pinging — our minds rarely get a moment of stillness. Yet, that stillness is where some of our most incredible brain work happens.

Neuroscience has revealed a hidden network in our brain, the “default mode network” (DMN), that springs into life when we disengage from the outside world and retreat into our own thoughts. Born from detailed brain‑imaging research, the DMN activates not when we’re focused on tasks, but when our minds wander, reflect, imagine, and daydream.

This isn’t idle time: it’s cognitive gold, shaping creativity, self‑reflection, memory, mental health, and learning.

Emerging studies emphasize how critical it is to schedule downtime, those moments when your mind is free to roam. Research published earlier this year in Nature reports that mice exploring virtual environments without explicit tasks or rewards still experienced meaningful neuroplastic changes.

Those mice learned new tasks faster later on than their task‑trained peers, suggesting that undirected exploration primes the brain for learning ahead of time. This underscores that downtime is not wasted; rather, it’s the brain’s backstage rehearsal preparing us for future demands.

Our DMN is far from isolated; it collaborates dynamically with other networks like the executive network (EN) and the salience network (SN) during daydreaming and creative thinking. Studies have shown that these networks interplay, allowing spontaneous thoughts and creative insights to emerge, making mind‑wandering a surprisingly rich cognitive state.

Over two decades of research has deepened our understanding: the DMN supports self‑narrative, social cognition, memory recall, future projection, and the very essence of our sense of self.

Allowing these internal narratives to form requires us to embrace times when external input drops away, and internal reflection takes center stage. Positive, constructive daydreaming (PCD) — where we envision future possibilities creatively — has been linked to richer grey matter volume, planning, impulse control, and emotional regulation. Despite the misconceptions that daydreaming is unproductive, PCD helps us connect emotional insight with forward‑looking imagination.

Moreover, quiet walks, moments without earbud‑driven distractions, and periods of single‑task focus help the DMN do its work. Even just stepping away from intense focus — like using the classic 25‑minutes‑on, 5‑minutes‑off technique — turns on the DMN, making room for creative connections and internal processing.

In this age where endless stimulation can feel productive, scheduling moments of “doing nothing” actually fuels mental clarity and innovation.

Beyond creativity and planning, the DMN plays a vital role in mental health. Dysregulation of its connectivity is linked to rumination, depression, anxiety, and loneliness. But when we’re intentional about downtime — especially with self‑aware, positive daydreaming — we strengthen mental resilience, empathy, and self‑understanding. Positive, constructive daydreaming fosters reflection, compassion, and moral thriving; traits essential not just to our personal wellbeing, but to building more just communities.

Some may worry that letting their mind wander will derail productivity. But neuroscience tells us otherwise: the DMN doesn’t shut off during tasks; it deactivates when needed and reactivates when the moment for internal work arrives.

Its ability to switch appropriately is key to cognitive health. Indeed, studies of resting‑state brain imaging show that well‑regulated DMN activity supports learning, attention, memory consolidation, and the integration of new insights.

In short, the brain’s default mode network thrives not in constant motion, but in carefully timed stillness. It’s a launchpad for creativity, self-reflection, memory, learning, and mental health. To tap into its power, we must break the habit of endless external stimulation and make room for internal quietude.

Here’s a simple invitation: build intentional “unstructured time” into your day. It could be a short walk with no podcasts, a few minutes of unscripted thought, or checking out of sensory input while washing dishes or staring out a window. These moments may feel like nothing at all, but neuroscientists suggest they’re when your brain is most productive, most alive.

So go ahead. Schedule time to daydream, to reflect, to wander, but really wander. Your brain’s default mode network is counting on it.

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What if I told you that a diabetes medication that costs less than a dollar a day might hold the key to your living not just longer, but healthier? What if this same drug, which has been safely prescribed for over 60 years, could potentially slow the aging process itself, all while protecting your brain, heart, and other vital organs from the ravages of time?

That drug is metformin, and the emerging science around its anti-aging properties is nothing short of astonishing.

A Humble Beginning, An Extraordinary Discovery

Metformin’s story begins centuries ago in medieval Europe, where physicians used an herb called Galega officinalis — commonly known as “goat’s rue” — to treat various ailments. In 1918 a scientist discovered that one of its ingredients, guanidine, could lower blood sugar. The modern version, metformin, was first used to treat diabetes in France in the 1950s and approved by the FDA for diabetes treatment in the United States in 1994.

But here’s where the story gets fascinating: researchers began noticing something unexpected about people taking metformin for diabetes. They weren’t just living with better blood sugar control — they were found to be living longer, healthier lives than even normal, healthy people who don’t have diabetes!

The Longevity Connection: What the Science Shows

Research suggests metformin has anti-inflammatory effects that could help protect against common age-related diseases including heart disease, cancer, and cognitive decline. This isn’t just theoretical: the evidence is mounting from multiple directions.

Studies have revealed that people taking metformin show a reduced risk of several types of cancers, including gastrointestinal, urologic and blood cancers. Even more intriguingly, there’s research pointing to improved cardiovascular outcomes in people who take metformin including a reduced risk of cardiovascular death.

Perhaps most exciting of all, a British study found a lower risk of dementia and mild cognitive decline among people with type 2 diabetes taking metformin. In our aging society, where dementia affects millions of families, this finding alone deserves serious attention, and it appears to apply to people whether they’re diabetic or not.

Breakthrough Primate Research: A Six-Year Brain Regression

The most compelling recent evidence comes from a groundbreaking 40-month study published in the prestigious journal Cell in 2024. Researchers studied healthy male cynomolgus monkeys aged 13–16 years (equivalent to 40–50 years in humans) and found that metformin administration resulted in a roughly 6-year regression in brain aging.

This wasn’t just about one organ system. The study encompassed a comprehensive suite of physiological, imaging, histological, and molecular evaluations, substantiating metformin’s influence on delaying age-related phenotypes at the organismal level. The researchers used cutting-edge techniques including DNA methylomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics to create innovative aging clocks that could measure biological age with unprecedented precision.

The geroprotective (preventing aging) effects on primate neurons were partially mediated by the activation of Nrf2, a transcription factor with anti-oxidative capabilities. This gives us insight into exactly how metformin might be protecting our cells from the oxidative stress that drives aging.

How Metformin Targets Aging at the Cellular Level

The beauty of metformin’s potential as an anti-aging intervention lies in its multi-faceted approach. Researchers are looking at how the drug may help improve energy in the cells by stimulating autophagy, which is the process of clearing out or recycling damaged bits inside cells.

Think of autophagy as your body’s cellular housekeeping system. As we age, this system becomes less efficient, allowing damaged proteins and organelles to accumulate. Metformin appears to kick this system back into high gear, helping cells maintain their youthful function.

Researchers also want to know more about how metformin can help reduce inflammation and oxidative stress, which may slow biological aging. As one researcher explained it: “When there’s an excess of oxidative stress, it will damage the cell. And that accumulation of damage is essentially what aging is.”

The TAME Trial: Testing the Longevity Hypothesis

Recognition of metformin’s potential has led to the design of multiple landmark clinical trials over the past few decades. The TAME (Targeting Aging with Metformin) Trial is still going, with a goal of providing proof-of-concept that aging can be treated, just as we treat diseases.

This represents a paradigm shift in medicine. If aging is made an indication of a secondary biological mechanism, the TAME Trial will mark a paradigm shift: from treating each age-related medical condition separately, to treating these conditions together, by targeting aging per se.

The implications are staggering. Rather than waiting for heart disease, cancer, or dementia to develop and then treating each separately, we could potentially prevent or delay all of them simultaneously by targeting the aging process itself.

Real People, Real Results

The theoretical is becoming practical for many Americans. Michael Cantor, an attorney, and his wife Shari Cantor, the mayor of West Hartford, Connecticut both take metformin. Michael started taking it about a decade ago when his weight and blood sugar were creeping up, while Shari began during the pandemic after reading about its potential protective effects against infections.

The Cantors are in their mid-60s and both say they feel healthy and have lots of energy. Both noticed improvements in their digestive systems; feeling more “regular” after they started on the drug. As Michael puts it: “We all want to live a little longer, high-quality life if we can.”

And I can tell you from my own experience of taking it daily for about 3 years now, my side-effects are minimal and I feel great for a guy who’s 74 years old; Louise and I climb a mountain twice a week, walk miles every day, and our aging seems to have paused (although this is entirely subjective).

The Cost Factor: A Dollar a Day for Longevity

One of the most remarkable aspects of metformin’s potential is its accessibility. Metformin costs less than a dollar a day, and depending on insurance, many people pay no out-of-pocket costs for the drug. Compare that to the tens of thousands of dollars many anti-aging interventions cost, and metformin’s appeal becomes even more compelling.

This isn’t some exotic compound available only to the wealthy. It’s a generic medication that’s been safely used by millions of people for decades. It’s also available online from sites like agelessrx.com.

Beyond Diabetes: Who Might Benefit?

Here’s where the story gets particularly interesting for those of us without diabetes. Doctors have long prescribed it off-label, that is, to treat conditions outside its approved use, including: Prediabetes, Gestational diabetes, Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), and, now, longevity.

Safety Considerations: What You Need to Know

Like all medications, metformin isn’t without potential side effects. They include nausea, stomach upset, and diarrhea, although when they happen these tend to be mild. Research shows a small percentage of people who take metformin experience GI distress that makes the drug intolerable. And, some people develop a b12 vitamin deficiency.

The Critical Conversation: Talk to Your Doctor

The research on metformin and longevity is compelling, but it’s important to remember that Metformin is not yet officially recognized as an anti-aging drug, and thus not currently prescribed “on-label” to extend the life span for people with or without diabetes.

That said, the evidence is substantial enough that it warrants a serious conversation with your healthcare provider. Preliminary studies suggest that metformin may actually slow aging and increase life expectancy, possibly by improving the body’s responsiveness to insulin, reduced antioxidant effects, and improved blood vessel health.

Your doctor can help you weigh the potential benefits against any risks based on your individual health profile, medications, and medical history. They can also monitor you for any side effects and ensure that metformin is appropriate for your situation.

A New Paradigm for Healthy Aging

What makes metformin so intriguing isn’t just that it might help us live longer: it’s that it might help us live better.

Studies have been stacking up. In one, published in the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, researchers found that diabetic patients on metformin lived longer than a matched group of non-diabetics who were not taking the drug. That’s astonishing.

Other large studies have shown that metformin users have lower rates of cardiovascular disease, fewer cancers—especially gastrointestinal types—and even lower incidence of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Animal research backs this up too: mice and monkeys treated with metformin live longer, have better metabolic health, and show fewer signs of chronic inflammation as they age.

We’re potentially looking at a future where aging itself becomes a treatable condition, where we don’t just wait for diseases to develop but actively work to prevent them by maintaining our cellular machinery in a more youthful state.

The Bottom Line

Metformin represents one of the most promising and accessible potential interventions for healthy aging that we’ve seen. With decades of safety data, compelling research across multiple species, and ongoing clinical trials specifically designed to test its anti-aging effects, it deserves serious consideration from anyone interested in extending their healthspan.

The dream of extending human healthspan—the years we live in good health—may be closer to reality than we think. And it might just come in the form of a simple, inexpensive now-generic pill that’s been hiding in plain sight for decades.

Important Note: This article is for educational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. Always consult with your healthcare provider before starting any new medication or treatment regimen. Metformin is a prescription medication that requires medical supervision.

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Every weekend, Louise and I visit Forest Park here in Portland, the largest wild area within a city in the world, with 5,200 acres and over 80 miles of trails. There are some pretty steep climbs and we try to get seriously out of breath.

Not only is it good exercise and a nice opportunity to get away from our electronics and just talk with each other, but communing with nature has well-known positive emotional and psychic effects that help regulate mood and even improve physical health.

On last Sunday’s walk, Louise wondered out loud if regularly walking in nature could also help reduce inflammatory conditions like asthma. It reminded me that back in the early 1990s, I met a woman named Sarah at a conference in Portland who told me something I found both fascinating and counterintuitive.

Sarah had suffered from severe asthma her entire adult life, requiring multiple medications and occasional emergency room visits. “Then I moved to a small cabin near Mount Hood,” she said, “and within three months, I was using my rescue inhaler maybe once a month instead of daily.” When I asked her what changed, she simply said, “I walk in the forest every morning. That's the only thing different in my life.”

I thought about Sarah recently when my conversation with Louise led to my reading about the “hygiene hypothesis,” first proposed by epidemiologist David Strachan in 1989. His radical suggestion was that our increasingly sanitized modern environments might actually be contributing to the alarming rise in allergies, asthma, and autoimmune disorders we’ve seen over the past several decades. It struck me as deeply ironic — our quest for cleanliness potentially undermining our health.

The hygiene hypothesis has since evolved into what scientists now more accurately call the “Old Friends'“ hypothesis. The problem isn't simply that we’re too clean; it's that we’ve lost regular contact with specific microorganisms that humans co-evolved with throughout our evolutionary history. These “old friends” — found in soil, plants, animals, and unpolluted natural environments — appear critical in training our immune systems to distinguish between harmless environmental particles and genuine threats.

Think about it: for 99% of human existence, we lived intimately connected to natural environments, constantly exposed to a rich diversity of microbes. Only in the past few generations have we created virtually sterile indoor environments, doused everything in antimicrobial chemicals, and separated ourselves from the microbial world that shaped our immune system's development. Our bodies simply haven’t adapted to this dramatic change.

The consequences are becoming increasingly clear. A landmark 2015 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine compared the immune profiles of Amish children (who grow up on traditional farms with daily exposure to livestock and soil) to genetically similar Hutterite children (who live on industrialized farms with limited direct exposure to animals and soil). Despite their genetic similarities, Amish children had dramatically lower rates of asthma and allergies, a difference the researchers attributed directly to their microbial exposure.

But what about those of us who didn’t grow up on farms or spend our childhoods playing in the dirt? If you’re like Sarah, already suffering from asthma or other inflammatory conditions, is it too late to recalibrate your immune system?

Emerging research suggests it may not be. A fascinating body of evidence comes from studies on “forest bathing” (Shinrin-Yoku), a Japanese practice of immersing oneself (with your clothes on!) in forest environments. Dr. Qing Li, an immunologist at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, has conducted extensive research showing that when people spend time in forests, they experience measurable changes in their immune function.

In one study, Li took a group of middle-aged Tokyo businessmen into the forest for three days. Blood tests revealed significant increases in natural killer (NK) cells, the immune cells that play a vital role in fighting infections and cancerous cells. More remarkably, these participants showed decreased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, the very signaling molecules that drive excessive inflammatory responses in conditions like asthma. Most surprisingly, these beneficial immune changes persisted for more than 30 days after their forest visit.

It makes perfect sense, after all. Our immune systems didn’t evolve in a vacuum; they developed in constant dialogue with the microbial world around us. When we restore some of that dialogue through forest exposure, we’re essentially reminding the immune system how it was designed to function.

This makes intuitive sense when you consider our evolutionary history. Our ancestors didn’t suffer from high rates of allergies and asthma despite (or perhaps because of) their constant exposure to diverse microbial environments. The human immune system appears to need this microbial diversity to develop properly and maintain balance.

A groundbreaking 2020 study published in Science Advances provided even more direct evidence. Researchers in Finland modified urban daycare playgrounds, replacing sterile gravel with forest floor materials: rich soil, native plants, and the diverse microbiota they contain. After just 28 days, children playing on these naturalized playgrounds showed increased diversity in both their skin and gut microbiomes. More importantly, they exhibited increases in regulatory T cells, those specialized immune cells that help prevent allergic reactions and dampen excessive immune responses.

While this particular study focused on children, its implications extend to adults as well. Our microbiomes remain somewhat plastic throughout life, capable of responding to environmental changes. When we walk through biodiverse forests, we expose ourselves to a rich tapestry of microorganisms that can influence our own microbial communities and, by extension, our immune function.

There’s another fascinating aspect to forest exposure that has particular relevance for asthma sufferers: phytoncides. These are natural oils released by trees and plants as part of their defense system against bacteria and insects. When humans inhale these aromatic compounds during forest walks, they trigger beneficial physiological responses.

Research shows that phytoncide exposure reduce levels of stress hormones, decreases sympathetic nervous system activity (associated with the “fight-or-flight” response), and enhance parasympathetic nervous system function (associated with “rest-and-digest” activities). For asthma sufferers, whose symptoms can be triggered or worsened by stress, these effects could provide additional relief beyond the direct immune-modulating benefits.

Laboratory studies have gone further, demonstrating that certain phytoncides have direct anti-inflammatory properties. Alpha-pinene, for example, a compound abundant in pine forests, has been shown to reduce inflammatory markers in lung tissue and may help soothe irritated airways, potentially reducing the hypersensitivity characteristic of asthma.

Not all green spaces offer equal benefits, however. A 2019 study published in Environmental Health Perspectives found that adults living near areas with greater biodiversity had lower rates of asthma exacerbations and hospital visits compared to those living near less diverse green spaces. This suggests that the microbial diversity of the environment plays a crucial role; old-growth forests with varied plant species likely offer greater immune benefits than manicured urban parks with limited biodiversity.

It turns out there’s a growing body of research suggesting that regular forest exposure may help moderate inflammatory conditions. The combination of stress reduction, exposure to diverse microbiota, and inhalation of beneficial plant compounds appears to create an environment conducive to immune balancing.

None of this means we should abandon modern medicine or hygiene practices. Prescription medications save lives, and basic hygiene prevents the spread of dangerous pathogens. Forest walks won’t “cure” asthma or completely reverse the effects of growing up in highly sanitized environments. But they may offer a meaningful complement to conventional treatments; a way of addressing one of the potential root causes of our modern epidemic of inflammatory conditions.

If you suffer from asthma, allergies, or other inflammatory conditions, consider adding regular walks in biodiverse natural environments to your self-care routine. Seek out older, established forests with diverse plant species rather than recently planted or highly manicured parks. Go regularly: benefits appear to accumulate with consistent exposure. And when you're there, engage fully: touch plants (safely), breathe deeply, and fully engage your senses.

The prescription for what ails us may, at least in part, be written not in the pharmacy but in the forest. Our immune systems evolved in constant dialogue with the natural world. Perhaps it’s time we rejoined that conversation.