Better Health Care Newsletter - July 2025

With 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 each day, it’s not hard to see why aging well — even spectacularly well — has become a leading obsession of our era.

The good news is that yes, there are practical ways to extend life, and more importantly, healthy life. And it can be done without busting the bank. But discerning the difference between nonsense and wisdom remains as important in the quest for long life as it has been since time immortal.

The ancients included among their deities the youth goddess Hebe and the young male immortal Ganymede. The Bible makes passing reference to the prodigious life (900+ years) of Methuselah. Alexander the Great reportedly searched for magical, rejuvenating waters, while Ponce de Leon quested for the Fountain of Youth.

In a modern time of major medical advancement, the uber-wealthy have put longevity into a prime focus as never before. Super aging has become a gilded pastime for the 1% who command more of the globe’s riches than 95% of the rest of the population.

While the billionaires’ attempts to extend their lives to the extreme yet may yield important breakthroughs for everyone else on Earth, other medical-scientific research is illuminating more practical possibilities for regular folks.

Their lives and well-being, studies show, can benefit from common sense, easier steps to keep them healthier and happier — without breaking the bank or even imperiling well-being with untested approaches. Indeed, as more Americans seek to live longer, they also are asking how capably they will move into their senior years. The focus no longer is solely on life spans but also on “health spans” — the time in which older adults stay well enough to enjoy their extended time with meaningful pursuits, friends, and loved ones.

For the super rich, a pricey passion

Those who fly in private jets and live in mansions on sprawling estates (with the requisite pools, tennis courts, stables, 10-car garages, etc.) — well, who would blame them for wanting to keep living the good life for as long as possible? After all, if you’re spending 10,000 bucks a day on the good life, it will take around 274 years to burn through your first billion. So more time is needed.

Still, many of the rich, especially tech moguls from Silicon Valley, are expending almost unimaginable dollars and time to pursue longer lives.

They spend long hours exercising, often to extremes. They follow plans with plenty of high intensity cardio and weight training. They fast. They adopt ever-changing diets — including regimens with stringent caloric intake or focusing on eating only fruits, vegetables, or proteins in high amounts. They dunk themselves in ice baths, experiment with hyperbaric chambers, and sleep with devices that bathe them in light from a certain part of the spectrum (red). They meditate. They experiment with prescription medications in unproven ways, popping as many as dozens of pills daily, including the diabetes drug metformin, or rapamycin, an anti-rejection transplant med.

Bryan Johnson, a tech mogul, has become a poster dude for pushing the limits on life extension. He is reportedly spending $2 million annually, not just to avert aging but aiming for endless living, as a Netflix documentary described it in Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. In his practices, described in some news articles as “creepy,” Johnson — estranged from the Mormon faith — has fixated on the vitality of his 18-year-old son. The lad, among other things, provided his pops with monthly plasma transfusions as part of an anti-aging approach that the Federal Food and Drug Administration moved to squash over concerns about donor exploitation, the Guardian newspaper reported.

Because tech bros have gone deep on longevity, a bunch of them see a future in which humans take on increasing biomechanical aspects of their bodies and brains. Some tech futurists see a sci-fi time they have deemed the Singularity, in which humans have evolved and merged with super artificial intelligence. Longevity will be a mooted concern because, these theorists say, human consciousness will not be tied to a human body but will exist, say, in a computing cloud.

A billionaire research funding boom

The wealthiest of the wealthy — guys like Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Peter Thiel (PayPal and Palantir), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Sam Altman (Open AI), Sergei Brin (Google), and Larry Page (Google) — have publicly invested huge sums in enterprises promising to find ways to help humans live longer and healthier. With such deep-pocketed funders, top-flight medical experts are striving to alter or reverse complex aging processes with human cells and genes. The experts hope to fiddle with molecular matters in the body. The billions of dollars have spawned outfits like:

§ Altos Labs, which is focused on reprogramming cells from their adult state into earlier, more youthful versions

§ The Methuselah Foundation, which says it wants to make 90 the new 50 by 2030

§ Calico Labs, which is researching aging and ways to battle age-related illnesses

§ Retro Biosciences, which studies cellular reprogramming and plasma therapies

The furious efforts to reverse or halt aging have generated not only hope and optimism but also doubt and criticism. As the New Yorker reported of the movement to reverse or overcome aging:

“Many in the life-extension movement are quacks or hacks who peddle pills, potions, and false promises; longevity skeptics tend to see the loss of our capacities as something to accept, not avoid.”

A legendary billionaire who has sunk his time and resources into improving global health and wellness in decidedly pragmatic ways — like battling infectious diseases among the poor — is skeptical about his wealthy peers’ fixation on aging. As the Guardian reported:

“[W]hat is it with middle-aged male billionaires and anti-aging research? Has the penny dropped that they, too, will one day fade away? Is rejuvenation science poised to swell their fortunes further? Or – and humor me for a moment here – could this be about the greater good? Asked about the trend after Calico launched, Bill Gates was scathing: ‘It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer,’ he told an “ask me anything” forum on Reddit.'”

It’s not just living long, but healthy, too

Meantime, the rest of us outside the gilded palaces keep receiving jarring data on U.S. longevity.

As the Bipartisan Policy Center has reported:

“A new study in Lancet indicates that the United States ranks 49^th in the world in life expectancy and is forecasted to fall to 66^th by 2050. The … administration and Congress should resolve to set a bipartisan and national goal to reverse this increasing gap and raise life expectancy for all Americans. The reasons for the U.S. lag in life expectancy are well-documented and predate the Covid-19 pandemic. Between 2014 and 2016, the country experienced its first three-year decline in life expectancy since the 1918 Spanish flu. Key factors included a plateauing in the decline of cardiovascular deaths, a rise in diseases of despair such as drug overdoses, suicide, and alcohol abuse, and the obesity crisis. Preventable deaths from Covid-19 plunged us further back compared to peer countries and our rebound has been slower than that of these countries.”

The center also noted that “In setting a national goal to raise U.S. life expectancy, one might argue for greater attention to issues such as accelerating adult smoking cessation, decreasing gun violence, reducing the uninsured, or increasing investments in housing or education.” Experts also highlighted the need for more attention to reducing obesity, improving primary medical care, and ensuring the nation is well-prepared for future pandemics.

A life lived well

As experts increasingly have observed about the people of this graying nation and their well-being, it isn’t enough to focus on how many years people live. It also is vital to ensure they stay healthy as they age.

Dame Linda Partridge, a professor at University College London’s Institute of Healthy Aging, told the Guardian this:

“We’re living longer and longer already. People are suffering from disability and loss of quality of life because of aging. That’s what we should be trying to fix. We should be trying to keep people healthier for longer before they drop off the perch. Stay healthy then drop dead, die in your sleep. I think that’s what most people want.”

Researchers have embarked on a parallel track in studying and thinking about aging, the New Yorker has reported, noting that medical experts also are targeting individuals’ health span. A prime advocate for thinking about this aspect of senior life is Peter Attia, a medical school graduate, surgical dropout, and a one-time McKinsey consultant:

“Attia, now 51, has become convinced that science, technology, and targeted work can solve a uniquely modern problem: the ‘marginal decade’ at the end of our lives, when medicine keeps us alive but our independence and capacities bleed away. It’s a scandal, in his view, that our life span has grown so much more than our health span.”

His controversial prescriptions for seniors to stay healthier — including high-intensity exercise, diet, and an array of team medical approaches (including extensive testing such as “full-body MRIs, body-fat-composition scans, DNA analyses”) — seek to answer the challenge described in the New Yorker article. It was written by Druv Khullar, a contributor to the magazine and a “practicing physician and an associate professor at Weill Cornell Medical College.” As he noted of U.S. longevity:

“Many of us have come to expect that our bodies and minds will deteriorate in our final years—that we may die feeble, either dependent or alone. Paradoxically, this outcome is a kind of success. For most of history, humans didn’t live long enough to confront the ailments of old age. In 1900, a baby born in the U.S. could expect to live just 47 years, and 1 in 5 died before the age of 10. But 20th-century victories against infectious diseases—in the form of sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccines—dramatically extended life spans, and today the average newborn lives to around 77. Lately, though, progress has slowed. In the past six decades, medicine has added about seven years to the average life span—less by saving young lives than by extending old ones, and often in states of ill health. In many cases, we’re prolonging the time it takes to die.”

Attia himself has acknowledged that the pursuit of an improved lifespan can be taxing and individuals must weigh the time, energy, and resources they commit to this goal — which can become as consuming as the efforts by elites to live longer or “reverse” aging. As the New Yorker reported:

“The quest for physical optimization can easily become a substitute for deeper fulfillment. A decade ago, Attia exercised 28 hours a week and observed a strict ketogenic diet. His ‘biomarkers were out of this world,’ he has said, but he refused cookies that his children baked for him and pasta during trips to Italy. ‘I was doing everything to live longer, despite being completely miserable emotionally,’ he writes in [his book] Outlive. In a recent interview with the [New York] Times, Attia said that, before attending an event at his son’s kindergarten, he thought for a moment of the downsides: it would eat into his time for squats and deadlifts. ‘That’s costing me a little in terms of fitness,’ he said. ‘But that’s the trade-off I wanted to make.’”

Khullar, in profiling Attia and the teams he assembles to consult with clients about improving their lifespan, expresses admiration and even jealousy at the intense attention lavished on those who can pay their consulting fees — reportedly $150,000 annually: “I was envious that the doctors could pay so much attention to one patient. Attia had time to ask how well this person flossed—something I don’t ask my wife, let alone the patients I see in 15-minute increments.”

But as noted by the author and other experts interviewed in the article, including Ezekiel Emanuel — an oncologist, a health-policy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and a special adviser to the Obama Administration —the interventions recommended for an improved health span need not be costly and intensive. As Emanuel observed:

“The idea that you’re going to get another healthy decade of life just by doing the things [Attia] says is hocus-pocus. No one’s got that evidence.”

A common-sense approach

Common sense and practicality make it unlikely that most seniors will spend the time, money, and other resources that the top 0.1% might try to improve their golden years.

But they might not need to, according to serious medical experts like Eric Topol.

Topol has a sterling CV, as an M.D., cardiologist, and chair of the Department of Translational Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. He is director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and a senior consultant at the Scripps Clinic, Division of Cardiovascular Disease. The institute’s website reports that Topol “has published more than 1,300 peer-reviewed articles, with more than 300,000 citations.” His distinguished study has made him not only a member of the National Academy of Medicine but also “one of the 10 most cited researchers in medicine.”

And he is now 71 years old, so he has a personal stake in this stuff.

After writing three bestsellers, Topol recently put out a fourth work that has won considerable media attention: Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity. It tracks his years of personal interest and scientific scrutiny of an all-important topic, including his expert dashing of the current, costly dives into genetic approaches to aging and improving the health of older adults. As he explained to USA Today:

“[S]ome years ago we did a study we called the Wellderly, and we enrolled 1,400 people, average age of almost 87, who had never had a chronic illness, an age-related disease. And we thought the whole genome sequencing was going to demystify everything. But as it turned out, we found very little. And so really the emphasis that has been put on our genes for healthy aging is misplaced. It’s a small component, but there are many other factors, especially what I call lifestyle-plus factors, that appear to play the dominant role.”

He also undercuts the theory, popularized in a recent Netflix series, that clusters of long-lived people in spots around the world provide important information for healthier aging. He told USA Today:

“I’m so glad you asked about that because now we have to consider the ‘Blue Zones’ as a real myth. The more it’s been looked into very carefully, the absence of evidence for the healthy aging longevity in these zones of the world has never been confirmed. Poor records and inability to confirm the data about these people that were thought to be these special, exceptional, healthy agers is a real problem. There’s no question that we, as I present in the book, you know, a 98-year-old people who are completely healthy, never had an age-related chronic disease, but there doesn’t appear to be any zone in the world that is special. There may be a cluster of people here and there like in Okinawa or Italy as was presented in Blue Zones. But it’s been hyped up unfortunately to the nth degree, and it just lacks the substantial evidence to support it.”

Research recommended

So after a deep dive into the existing research — with his expert knowledge, experience, and skepticism — what does Topol recommend to improve regular folks’ health and life spans?

(What follows is derived from his interviews with USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.)

Exercise — Do it regularly, several times a week. Keep moving, every day. Take on both cardio workouts and lift weights, slowly, carefully, and in appropriate measure.

Sleep — Get plenty of it, especially of the deep variety. Go to bed and awaken on a regular, set schedule. Aim for seven hours of sleep, including deep slumber because, he says, this helps clear waste products from the brain.

Diet — Eat in moderation and seek out more plant-based meals. Shun fast- and ultra-processed foods (like bacon, sausage, and deli meats). Limit the consumption of red meats (beef, pork and lamb). Most folks do not require additional protein, as some faddists are suggesting.

Mental health — As the New York Times reported of his prescription: “Managing stress, and improving your mental health more broadly, are critical for lowering your risk of chronic disease and mortality. Get outdoors more and put great effort into socializing with friends, family, and others.

For those interested in learning more about health spans and aging well, Scientific American has posted online its special edition with multiple articles on the topic. The New York Times recently interviewed geriatricians for their suggestions on how seniors could bolster the quality and duration of their lives, with many of these experts making similar suggestions to Topol’s.

The newspaper added excellent other ideas: Don’t smoke. Work with your doctor to control chronic conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, cholesterol, and weight gain. And think positively about life.

The perils of isolation and loneliness

For those interested in enjoying a longer, healthier and happier life, keeping up social contacts is not a nicety, it is a must, experts say. As a recent article in the Atlantic magazine reported:

“Loneliness has a physical effect on the body. It can render people more sensitive to pain, suppress their immune system, diminish brain function, and disrupt sleep, which in turn can make an already lonely person even more tired and irritable. Research has found that, for older adults, loneliness is far more dangerous than obesity. Ongoing loneliness raises a person’s odds of death by 26% in any given year …”

Alas, as the magazine reported in a separate article:

“Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data, going back to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20%, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

Folks across the country, the magazine reported, citing various studies, spend record amounts of time cocooning, mostly alone, in their homes. They are screen-bound, fixated on smartphones, tablets, and gigantic TVs with seemingly endless streaming content.

These societal changes can be especially pernicious for older adults, piling on to negative stereotypes (based in reality) that seniors turn into isolated shut-ins. As the National Institutes of Health reported:

“The number of older adults age 65 and older is growing, and many are socially isolated and regularly feel lonely … Older adults are at higher risk for social isolation and loneliness due to changes in health and social connections that can come with growing older, hearing, vision, and memory loss, disability, trouble getting around, and/or the loss of family and friends. People who are socially isolated or lonely are more likely to be admitted to the emergency room or to a nursing home.”

Isolation increases the risks of a range of health conditions, the NIH reported, adding:

“People who are lonely or socially isolated may get too little exercise, drink too much alcohol, smoke, and sleep poorly, which can further increase the risk of serious health conditions. People who are lonely experience emotional pain. Losing a sense of connection and community can change the way a person sees the world. Someone experiencing chronic loneliness may feel threatened and mistrustful of others. Emotional pain can activate the same stress responses in the body as physical pain. When this goes on for a long time, it can lead to chronic inflammation (overactive or prolonged release of factors that can damage tissues) and reduced immunity (ability to fight off disease).”

In contrast, social contacts — especially with loved ones and friends — can be a fundamental way for more people to find purpose, meaning, and happiness in life, research shows. As the Atlantic reported on a big, lengthy study of Harvard students and Boston residents:

“Since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been investigating what makes people flourish. After starting with 724 participants—boys from disadvantaged and troubled families in Boston, and Harvard undergraduates—the study incorporated the spouses of the original men and, more recently, more than 1,300 descendants of the initial group. Researchers periodically interview participants, ask them to fill out questionnaires, and collect information about their physical health. As [research leaders] we’ve been able to watch participants fall in and out of relationships, find success and failure at their jobs, become mothers and fathers. It’s the longest in-depth longitudinal study on human life ever done, and it’s brought us to a simple and profound conclusion: Good relationships lead to health and happiness. The trick is that those relationships must be nurtured.”

It requires self-reflection, commitment, and energy to keep in touch and close with friends and loved ones. Men are not good at this. Still, as the Harvard study experts wrote:

“It never hurts —especially if you’ve been feeling low—to take a minute to reflect on how your relationships are faring and what you wish could be different about them. If you’re the scheduling type, you could make it a regular thing; perhaps every year on New Year’s Day or the morning of your birthday, take a few moments to draw up your current social universe, and consider what you’re receiving, what you’re giving, and where you would like to be in another year. You could keep your chart or relationships assessment in a special place, so you know where to look the next time you want to peek at it to see how things have changed. If nothing else, doing this reminds us of what’s most important. Repeatedly, when the participants in our study reached old age, they would make a point to say that what they treasured most were their relationships …

“Relationships keep us happier and healthier throughout our life spans. We neglect our connections with others at our peril. Investing in our social fitness is possible each day, each week of our lives. Even small investments today in our relationships with others can create long-term ripples of well-being.”

Recent Health Care Developments of Interest

Here are some recent medical- and health-related news articles that might interest you:

§ It’s past time to rethink the fiction that marijuana use is relatively harmless. As the New York Times reported: new research [has] found that use of the drug is associated with a higher risk of stroke and heart attack, including among younger adults. The analysis, which examined data from 24 studies and was published in the journal Heart, also found that marijuana use was associated with a twofold increase in the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. While this data only shows a correlation and cannot prove that marijuana caused these effects, it is well-established that the drug can raise blood pressure and heart rate and alter the heart’s rhythm, said Dr. Ersilia DeFilippis, a cardiologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. And a number of other studies have also suggested a link between the drug and cardiovascular issues. The analysis comes at a time when nearly half of U.S. states have legalized marijuana for recreational use, and when a record share of U.S. adults — 15% in 2022 — report using it. Emilie Jouanjus, the senior author of the new study and a pharmacologist at the University of Toulouse in France, said that while there may be good reasons for people to take marijuana, including for stress and anxiety, patients can’t assume that it is harmless. She and other experts said that everyone should be treating marijuana with caution …”

§ Even as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. takes steps that critics say will gut the effectiveness of vaccinations, formidable groups are working to circumvent his plans at the federal Health and Human Services agency. As the Washington Post reported: “Professional medical societies, pharmacists, state health officials, and vaccine manufacturers, as well as a new advocacy group, are mobilizing behind the scenes to preserve access to vaccines. The groups are discussing ordering vaccines directly from manufacturers and giving greater weight to vaccine recommendations from medical associations. And they are asking insurance companies to continue covering shots based on professional societies’ guidance instead of the federal government’s, according to more than a dozen people familiar with the conversations, including some who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private discussions.”

Kennedy, in the meantime, has created a global furor by attacking Gavi, the global organization that this country helped to found and that assists in purchasing vaccines for children in poor countries, the New York Times reported. In brief and unsupported remarks, he accused the group of “ignoring” science and said the United States would renege on its $1-billion-plus financial support for Gavi — a move that critics said imperils the health and lives of millions of poor kids around the globe.

§ Patients, doctors, and hospitals have railed against insurers’ ever-increasing requirements for preauthorization, especially because this test- and procedure-delaying practice too often results in health-threatening denials. Trump Administration officials have announced that a coalition of insurers has voluntarily agreed to do better — to speed up their procedures, reduce the requirement for many tests and procedures, and to be clearer and more transparent about why they decide what they do. They also have pledged that medical and not clerical personnel will be involved in their decision-making. The improvements, which are supposed to take effect by the year’s end, sound promising. Skeptics abound.

§ The federal Food and Drug Administration boxed itself in as it tried to respond to the huge demand in this country for more affordable, generic prescription drugs, according to ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative site. The agency’s disturbing response was to give “more than 20 foreign factories a special pass to continue sending drugs to the U.S. even though they were made at plants that the agency had banned. The medications came mostly from plants in India where inspectors found contaminated drugs, filthy labs and falsified records. The agency did not proactively inform the public when drugs were exempted from import bans, and it did not routinely test the medications to ensure they were safe.” ProPublica also found that “Some of the drugs were recalled — just before or just after they were exempted — because of contaminants or other defects that could cause health problems, government records show. And a ProPublica analysis identified more than 600 complaints in the FDA’s files about exempted drugs at three of those factories alone, each flagging concerns in the months or years after they were excluded from import bans in 2022 and 2023.”

HERE’S TO A HEALTHY 2025 — AND BEYOND!

Sincerely,

Patrick Malone
Patrick Malone & Associates