In this month’s newsletter, I briefly touched on a concept I call “health auditing.” I wanted to expand on it here because I think it offers a useful middle ground in our increasingly data-saturated health culture. Sleep tracking, fitness tracking, calorie counting, and even advanced blood testing have become mainstream over the last few years, and already we’re starting to see the debate pick up as to how helpful (or harmful) these approaches truly are. While there are obvio

Many of us probably already have a sense of why we should be healthy and encourage health among the population, though we so often lose sight of our motivations behind this. I am as guilty as anyone of occasionally slipping up on my habits, and I have found that the solution tends to trace back to reconnecting with my purpose for the behavior. In other words, I have to take a step back and remember what I am optimizing for by doing these things. This is the sort of conversati

From viral TikTok posts to direct endorsements from the Secretary of Health and Human Services, people are talking about peptides as the next big thing in the field of medicine. Let’s start by clarifying that a peptide is simply a short chain of amino acids (typically in the range of 2-50 amino acids), whereas a protein is a longer chain of amino acids (typically 50+). Just as proteins are an incredibly broad, diverse class of molecules, the same is true about peptides. Thus,

What if I told you the health metric most consistently associated with longevity is essentially never even tested at annual physicals or doctor's visits? That's right: you've likely heard us comment before on VO2max as an incredibly important number to know for predicting both your lifespan and healthspan. This number has long been neglected by modern medicine as it has historically been thought of solely as a marker of exercise performance. Additionally, as we'll see in a mo

If you have trouble sleeping, you’re far from alone. Around 30% of U.S. adults report such difficulty, and it’s one of the most common things that we are asked about in the clinic. In terms of what we can do about it, our starting point is always the same. Adequately addressing sleep hygiene (sleep environment, sleep timing, diet, caffeine, etc.) leads to improvement in many cases. Beyond this, cognitive behavioral therapy focused on insomnia (CBT-I) is far and away the most