Live long and healthy

Sometimes when you listen closely to your body, the message you hear is a call not for food, but for fasting. You may observe this in animals, which abstain from food when sick, and in young children, who sometimes go days eating hardly anything at all (much to the consternation of their parents!).

Kalte Duschen haben noch weitere Vorteile: In einer Studie ließen Forschende 3018 Probanden über drei Monate hinweg täglich zuerst warm und dann abschließend 30, 60 oder 90 Sekunden kalt duschen. Die Tage, an denen sie sich krankmeldeten, sanken um 30 Prozent, Lebensqualität, Produktivität nahmen zu.

Flavors and odors are themselves a kind of food, just as important as protein and vitamins. When you eat inattentively, you miss out on these subtle nutrients. When you become aesthetically malnourished in this way, your body, craving more flavors, drives you to eat more and more food, and foods with stronger and stronger flavors. To put it in simp

More than any other tactical domain we discuss in this book, exercise has the greatest power to determine how you will live out the rest of your life. There are reams of data supporting the notion that even a fairly minimal amount of exercise can lengthen your life by several years. It delays the onset of chronic diseases, pretty much across the bo

Too much visceral fat means an overabundance of inflammatory substances, leading to chronic inflammation—a condition that’s been connected to diabetes, cancer, depression, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and heart disease.

HbA1c (usually read as “hemoglobin A1c”): “They say that, basically, you age at the rate you produce insulin. HbA1c will tell me what was the average insulin over the last 3 months. . . . I’ve found over the years that, actually, the amount of magnesium, supplemental magnesium, you consume, is the fastest way to drop that value. So magnesium is pro