I ran across something interesting the other day.

Apparently, your pancreas has a bedtime.

Not that it crawls under the covers and pulls up a blanket. But it does seem to pay attention to whether it’s getting close to yours.

And that could make a difference in what happens when you eat dinner.

Most of us know about melatonin. It’s the hormone that helps signal to our bodies that nighttime is approaching.

What I didn’t know was that the cells in our pancreas responsible for producing insulin also have receptors for melatonin.

And when melatonin levels rise, insulin production can decrease.

Which raises an interesting question.

What happens if you eat the same food at different times of the evening?

Researchers decided to find out.

In a study involving 845 adults, participants were given the same glucose drink on two different occasions.

Once, about four hours before their usual bedtime.

And again, just one hour before bedtime.

Same people. Same amount of glucose. Different timing.

The results?

When participants consumed the glucose closer to bedtime, their blood sugar response was about 8% higher, while their insulin response was about 7% lower.

Their melatonin levels were also considerably higher.

And here’s another interesting wrinkle.

Researchers found that a common genetic variation affecting melatonin receptors made some people more sensitive to the timing difference than others.

So two people could eat the same thing at the same time and have somewhat different responses.

Now, before we all start setting alarms to remind ourselves when to eat dinner, there are a few things worth remembering.

This was a glucose test, not a plate of steak and vegetables.

And the researchers were measuring short-term changes in blood sugar and insulin, not whether eating late would eventually cause diabetes or shorten anyone’s life.

Still, I find the whole thing fascinating.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about what we eat.

Protein. Carbohydrates. Fat. Calories.

And those things matter.

But apparently, the clock on the wall might have something to say about dinner, too.

I don’t know that this means everyone needs to eat earlier. People’s schedules, sleep patterns, and individual responses vary.

But it does give us another piece of information to consider.

And I have to admit, I rather like the idea that my pancreas has an opinion about when I should be eating.

Even if it hasn’t bothered to tell me directly.

Peggy never had a Barbie when she was growing up.

Now she has two.

One in each of our RiversZen studios.

They’re not your ordinary Barbies, either. They’re the poseable kind, with joints that allow you to put them into all sorts of positions.

And believe me, we’ve tested that claim.

Somewhere along the way, Peggy started putting Barbie into different poses around the studio.

Then the students got involved.

And that’s when things got interesting.

We’ve come into the studio in the morning and found Barbie hanging upside down from the camera.

She’s done headstands in the windows.

She’s been here, there, and everywhere, twisted into positions that would probably make a yoga instructor jealous.

And we never quite know where we’re going to find her next.

The funny thing is, nobody is in charge of Barbie.

Peggy loves posing her, but the students have pretty much taken ownership of the whole business. Someone moves her, someone else comes along and gets another idea, and the next thing you know, Barbie’s hanging upside down somewhere.

It’s happening in both studios.

And it’s been going on for years.

I have to tell you, it’s actually unbelievable what these people can do with that Barbie.

Peggy went through her childhood without one.

Now she’s got two, and apparently an entire community of adults who can’t keep their hands off them.

I ran across an interesting conversation with Dr. Jason Fung the other day.

Fung is one of the better-known advocates of fasting. He’s written books about it, treated patients using it, and spent years explaining why going without food for a while can be beneficial.

But apparently he’s been reconsidering a few things.

Not whether fasting works. He’s actually become more enthusiastic about some of its possibilities.

What caught my attention was something else.

What if you could eat a little something and still get much of the benefit?

Traditionally, fasting meant no food. Water, perhaps black coffee or tea, and that’s about it.

Now Fung is talking about modified fasting. Bone broth. A few olives. Even specially designed five-day eating plans that provide a limited amount of food.

There’s research behind some of these approaches, particularly what’s called a fasting-mimicking diet. Studies have found improvements in certain metabolic health markers.

That doesn’t mean eating a handful of olives produces the same results as going without food for five days. We don’t know that.

But the possibility is interesting.

Because I suspect there are plenty of people who might be curious about fasting but have absolutely no desire to go three or five days without eating.

I’m not particularly interested in convincing them they should.

What interests me is the larger idea.

How often do we make something so difficult that we never get around to doing it?

I’ve seen people hesitate to start exercising because they can’t devote an hour to it.

Or worry about stretching because they can’t get into the positions they see somebody else doing.

Peggy and I have spent years telling people to work with the body they’ve got today. Some days that means doing less. Some days it means discovering they can do more.

And sometimes the version you can actually do turns out to be pretty darn useful.

I don’t know how the research on modified fasting will eventually shake out. And longer fasts certainly aren’t appropriate for everybody.

But I’m glad people are asking whether there might be another way.

It makes me wonder how many other things we’ve made unnecessarily difficult.

What if you don’t have to do something perfectly to get much of the benefit?

One of the things we hear from people is that their balance isn’t what it used to be.

Maybe they notice it putting on their pants. Maybe turning around feels less certain. Maybe they reach for something and suddenly find themselves taking an extra step.

Or maybe they’ve started avoiding things because they’re afraid of falling.

The good news is that balance is something you can work on.

Peggy and I have spent years

incorporating balance into our classes. And one thing we’ve learned is that you don’t improve balance by simply standing there hoping you won’t fall over.

You have to challenge it.

But you also have to give yourself a safe way to practice.

First, find out what needs work…

Read more

I’ve had people tell me I shouldn’t do things for most of my life.

Sometimes they were right.

Sometimes they weren’t.

And sometimes I went ahead and did it anyway, just to find out.

Some decisions worked out beautifully. Others were spectacular failures.

That’s life.

But here’s something I’ve never quite understood.

When did somebody else’s opinion become more important than our own curiosity?

We spend a good portion of childhood being told what we can and can’t do. Parents, teachers, all sorts of people making decisions for us.

That’s understandable. Kids need some guidance.

But eventually we’re supposed to grow up.

And somehow, a lot of us keep looking around for somebody to tell us what we’re allowed to do.

Can I start a business? Change careers? Learn something completely new? Move somewhere different?

What will people think?

There’s a question that’s stopped an awful lot of interesting things from happening.

And sometimes nobody even tells us no.

We imagine what they’ll think. We imagine the criticism. We imagine looking foolish.

Then we talk ourselves out of it.

Nobody had to stop us. We did the job ourselves.

I’ve made plenty of decisions that didn’t work out. And I suspect there are people who could happily remind me of a few.

But I’ve also had some wonderful experiences because I went ahead when somebody thought I shouldn’t.

I listen to advice. Sometimes I even take it.

But there’s a difference between listening to somebody and handing them the steering wheel.

And the older I get, the less interested I am in letting somebody else decide what I’m allowed to explore.

You don’t need permission to try something.

You don’t need permission to make a mistake, either.

Somewhere around 3,400 years ago, a group of military commanders found themselves in a bit of trouble.

Their army was surrounded.

They needed reinforcements. Soldiers, horses, chariots. The whole works.

So they sent a message to the king asking for help.

And apparently, they included a little something extra.

Essentially, if you don’t send reinforcements, don’t blame us when this whole thing goes to hell.

I love that.

Here they are, facing a potentially disastrous military defeat, and somebody is making darn sure the responsibility is properly documented.

You can almost picture the conversation.

“We need more soldiers.”

“And horses.”

“Chariots, too.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. Make sure he knows this isn’t our fault.”

The message was written on a clay tablet, part of the administrative world of the ancient Hittites. It survived for roughly 3,400 years before archaeologists brought it back into the light.

Think about that.

We’ve gone from horses and chariots to airplanes, computers, satellites, and artificial intelligence.

And somewhere, right now, somebody is sending an email that says:

“As previously discussed...”

Thirty-four hundred years of progress.

At least now we have a CC button.

I’ve had a pretty long relationship with marijuana.

I smoked it in college, and on and off through the years. My good buddy Lou was a diehard marijuana user, and whenever I went over to his house, I’d usually partake.

So I’m not coming at this as somebody who’s never tried the stuff.

I actually enjoyed it for years.

Eventually I tried gummies, too. And I enjoyed those. Although looking back, I sometimes wonder how much of that enjoyment was nostalgia for my younger days.

Or maybe I just liked the sugar since I eat very little…

Peggy tried marijuana a few times over the years, but it never really did anything for her. She wasn’t a regular user.

Now, bakery? …That’s an entirely different story when it comes to Ms Peg.

But we’re talking about marijuana today.

For a while, I thought cannabis helped me sleep. Maybe it did. But I also noticed that the next morning I didn’t always feel quite as mentally sharp as I wanted to.

Nothing dramatic. Just a little off.

And I started wondering whether the benefits were worth it.

I eventually stopped using it, probably seven or eight years ago.

I haven’t missed it.

Lately I’ve been reading more about cannabis, especially how many people are using it regularly and how it’s being marketed.

And something about the whole conversation bothers me.

Marijuana is legal in a lot of places now. You can buy it in all sorts of forms, with products marketed for relaxation, better sleep, pain relief, and just about anything else you might want.

I’m not arguing that it should be illegal.

But when did we start confusing permission with safety?

Alcohol is legal, too. We’ve had a pretty long relationship with that stuff, and we know it can do some serious damage.

Legal doesn’t mean harmless.

And cannabis isn’t harmless, either.

Research has found that regular, heavy cannabis use can lead to dependence and problems with attention and memory. Cannabis use disorder is real, and studies continue to raise questions about what frequent use does to the brain.

That doesn’t mean everybody who enjoys a gummy is damaging their brain. And it doesn’t mean cannabis can’t provide genuine relief for some people.

But it does mean there are questions worth asking.

I keep coming back to my own experience.

I enjoyed it. I thought it helped me sleep. But was I actually better off the next day?

For me, the answer wasn’t convincing enough to keep using it.

And I wonder how often we ask ourselves that question about things we’ve made part of our routines.

Not just cannabis. Alcohol, too. Or any number of things we keep doing because we enjoy them, because they’re familiar, or because everybody else seems to be doing them.

I’m not interested in telling people what they can or can’t put in their bodies.

But I am interested in what happens when something becomes so socially acceptable that we stop questioning it.

We’ve gotten pretty enthusiastic about giving people permission.

I wonder if we’ve gotten equally enthusiastic about asking what that permission might be costing us.

That’s what I call most of my classes.

Sometimes I throw Qigong into the name, but the foundation is pretty much the same.

Breathe. Move. Stretch.

It sounds like I sat down one day, figured out the three most important things for staying healthy, and built my classes around them.

Not even close.

Back in 2007, I was facing seven surgeries. I wasn’t particularly excited about that prospect, so I started looking for another way.

Resistance stretching was what changed things for me.

Muscles contracting while they’re being stretched. Strength and flexibility working together instead of being treated like separate projects.

That opened a door I didn’t even know existed.

Then breathing came later.

I’d heard yoga instructors talk about the breath, of course. And I practiced.

But it took time before I began to appreciate just how much difference breathing could make.

About twelve or thirteen years ago, I started practicing Tai Chi.

I loved the forms. There’s something beautiful about those movements. But I also found myself feeling restricted by them. I wanted more freedom to explore, to move differently, to follow what my body was telling me.

That’s how I found Qigong.

Over the years, I’ve studied with different Qigong masters, exploring their approaches to breathing, movement, and the relationship between the two.

And something clicked.

It felt like the final piece of what I’d been putting together all those years. Not something I’d planned. Just another discovery that turned out to be a big one.

These days, Qigong is how I start every morning.

I get out of bed, put the coffee on, and do a short Qigong practice while it’s brewing.

Nothing elaborate. Just breathing and moving.

I incorporate Qigong into almost every class I lead ... even chair and drum classes.

It’s become one of the most powerful parts of my practice, and I can’t imagine starting my day without it.

And then there’s movement.

You have to move.

I don’t care how wonderful your stretching routine is or how beautifully you breathe. If you spend the rest of your day sitting in a chair, you’re missing a pretty important part of the equation.

Get up. Walk around. Bend over. Reach for something. Get down on the floor once in a while.

And preferably figure out how to get back up.

Over the years, those three things gradually came together.

Not because I read about some magical three-part formula.

Because I lived it.

I’m 73 now. Still teaching classes, still moving, still learning things about my body that surprise me.

I give resistance stretching enormous credit for changing the direction my life was headed.

And I believe the breathing and movement practices I’ve added over the years have helped me keep going.

So when it came time to name my classes, I didn’t have to think very hard.

Breathe. Move. Stretch.

Pretty much what it says on the label.

Somebody farted in class.

Now, this happens occasionally. We’re all human. Normally everybody politely ignores it and we keep going.

But this time the gentleman responsible started giggling.

And that was it.

Once he started laughing, the rest of us didn’t stand a chance.

Some how the conversation turned to what farts smell like.

One woman announced that hers smelled like hamburgers.

The gentleman in front of her said his smelled like roast beef.

Apparently we had an entire barbecue going on.

Then we got into why our own farts never seem quite as offensive as everybody else’s.

Bob and I started reminiscing about the good old days when you could load the kids into the car, roll up the windows, lock them, and let one rip.

A captive audience.

Those were simpler times.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I noticed Peggy had gotten awfully quiet.

Now, Peggy and I grew up in very different households.

In my family, farts were funny.

In Peggy’s family, farting was practically a criminal offense. Especially at the dinner table.

You could be sent to the bathroom to clean your pants out before you were allowed back among civilized people.

And here she was, all these years later, married to me.

Surrounded by people comparing their farts to various cuts of beef.

I sometimes wonder what goes through that woman’s head.

Actually, I’m probably better off not knowing.

I’ve done this more times than I can count.

I’m tired.

So I sit down.

Makes perfect sense.

Twenty minutes later I’m still sitting there and now I’m really tired. Apparently there may be a reason for that.

A new study pulled together data from 8,223 people in 14 countries. Instead of asking people six months later how active they thought they’d been, researchers had nearly a million hours of actual movement data from accelerometers, along with more than 321,000 reports of how people were feeling at the time.

And one of the strongest connections they found was between moving and feeling energetic.

Not running a marathon.

Not crushing a workout.

Moving.

Now, this is where the internet will inevitably turn this into:

TIRED? NEVER REST. SCIENCE SAYS GO FOR A WALK.

No.

Sometimes you’re tired because you’re tired. You didn’t sleep. You’re sick. You’ve been working your ass off. Your body needs a break.

If so Sit down. Take a nap. Go to bed.

But I think there’s another kind of tired most of us recognize. The I’ve been sitting here so long I don’t feel like getting up tired.

And the strange part… sometimes waiting until you have enough energy to move may have the whole thing backward.

The researchers found that people tended to feel more energetic after periods when they’d been moving. They also found the reverse: when people felt more energetic, they tended to move more afterward. The effects weren’t huge and they weren’t the same for everybody.

So which comes first?

Apparently both.

Move a little, feel a little more energetic. Feel a little more energetic, move a little more.

There’s even older experimental research pointing in the same direction. Sedentary people who regularly felt fatigued were assigned to low-intensity exercise, moderate exercise or no exercise for six weeks.

Both exercise groups reported more energy. And the people doing the easier exercise actually had the bigger reduction in fatigue.

I like that part.

Because maybe the answer when you’re sitting there feeling like a slug isn’t:

Get your butt to the gym.

Maybe it’s just:

Get out of the chair and see what happens.

That’s a considerably smaller project.

There’s a funny thing about the floor.

You don’t think much about being able to get down there until you start wondering whether you’re going to be able to get back up.

Maybe you want to play with your grandkids.

Maybe you want to get down there with the dog.

Maybe there’s a stretch you want to do that just works better on the floor.

Or maybe something rolled under the damn couch.

Being able to get down on the floor and get back up is one of those ordinary abilities that turns out to be a much bigger deal than you thought.

Peggy said something when we were talking about this that pretty much nails it.

It’s like being able to reach your arms overhead and get something off the top shelf.

You don’t ever want to lose that ability.

The longer you can keep doing these ordinary things, the longer you have freedom.

The longer you can run your own life.

So when somebody tells Peggy or me, “I’m having trouble getting up from the floor,” we don’t immediately tell them they need stronger legs.

First we ask them what’s happening.

Then, if they can safely do it, we ask them to show us.

How are you actually getting down there—and how are you trying to get back up?

That’s usually where we start.

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You’ve probably heard that the whole 10,000 steps a day thing was basically invented to sell pedometers.

That’s pretty close to true.

Back around 1965, a Japanese company called Yamasa introduced a pedometer called the manpo-kei.

Roughly translated:

10,000 steps meter.

It was a nice round number. Easy to remember. Easy to market.

It was not the result of some giant scientific study where researchers discovered that the human body requires precisely 10,000 steps.

Which is why people now love pointing out:

You know that 10,000-step goal? It’s just marketing.

Except the story got weird.

In 2022, researchers looked at 78,430 adults in the UK who had worn accelerometers to measure how much they actually moved. Then they followed them for nearly seven years to see who developed dementia.

More daily steps were associated with lower dementia incidence.

And where did the researchers estimate the greatest reduction?

9,826 steps a day.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

Nearly sixty years after somebody in Japan put 10,000 on a pedometer, science wandered in and said:

Well...

That’s actually not a terrible number.

Now, 9,826 isn’t magic either.

This was an observational study. It can’t prove that walking those steps prevented dementia. And the researchers found meaningful associations at much lower numbers too. Around 3,800 steps a day was already associated with substantially lower dementia incidence.

So please don’t walk around your living room at 11:47 tonight because your watch says 9,743.

There is no cliff at 10,000.

I just love that one of the most famous supposedly arbitrary numbers in health got a second act.

Marketing guessed 10,000.

Science came back with 9,826.

Not bad.

Rune Sætre and Vegard Sørlie were hoping for a quiet start to metal-detecting season.

They picked a field near Rena in eastern Norway that apparently nobody had ever searched with metal detectors before.

Why that field?

Basically, why not?

They asked the farmer for permission and started walking.

Beep.

Silver coin.

Then another.

And another.

By the time they’d found 19 of them, they had enough sense to stop.

This was no longer two guys wandering around a field with metal detectors. They called the archaeologists.

The next day the count reached 70.

The county archaeologist, May-Tove Smiseth, figured maybe they’d find a few hundred.

They passed 500.

Then 1,000.

Then 3,000.

Eventually they reached 4,886 silver coins.

Norway had never found a Viking Age coin hoard this large.

So they searched the field.

They excavated it.

They brought in ground-penetrating radar.

Nothing.

Apparently 4,886 was the number.

The farmer, Ole Erik Hørstad, had a farm to run, so he planted his grain.

End of story.

Except the field wasn’t done.

After the grain was harvested, they went back.

Beep.

Another coin.

Then another.

Coin number 5,000 came out of the ground in late September.

It was an Otto-Adelheid penny, a German coin roughly a thousand years old.

And then they kept finding more.

As of the latest report I could find, they’re at about 5,200 coins.

The detectors are still beeping.

Just a little less often and a little deeper.

I love this story.

Somebody probably buried all that silver around 1046 or 1047.

Most of the coins came from England and what is now Germany, but there are also coins from Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Norway, Bohemia and even the Islamic world.

Which makes you wonder how the heck all of them ended up together in a field in Norway.

Archaeologists think the coins may originally have been buried in a leather pouch or something similar. The container disappeared centuries ago, and generations of farming scattered the coins through the soil.

But nobody knows who buried them.

Or why.

Or why they never came back.

One archaeologist made a pretty good point:

You don’t forget where you buried almost 5,000 silver coins.

Something happened.

We just don’t know what.

And a thousand years later, two guys looking for a quiet start to metal-detecting season wandered into the field.

Beep.

We threw away all our nonstick pans.

Not because I’d done some exhaustive investigation into PFAS.

They were flaking.

I don’t know whether eating tiny pieces of a frying pan is dangerous. I just decided I’d rather not eat the frying pan.

We’ve been through this for years. Buy a good nonstick pan. Take care of it. Wooden utensils. No metal. Do everything you’re supposed to do.

About a year later, the coating would start coming off.

We even bought the Ninja pans that were supposed to last forever.

They didn’t.

So Peggy and I finally said the heck with it and switched to cast iron.

And I love cast iron.

Ninety percent of the time.

Then I want three or four scrambled eggs.

Holy moly!

Suddenly nonstick cookware seems like one of mankind’s greatest achievements.

So I started wondering whether we’d overreacted. If I bought another nonstick pan and it eventually got scratched, would I actually need to throw the darn thing away?

Turns out the answer is a little strange.

The coating on most nonstick cookware is PTFE, commonly known by the brand name Teflon. And yes, damaged PTFE coatings can shed tiny particles. Researchers have demonstrated that in laboratory experiments.

Some of the numbers sound terrifying. One study estimated that a badly damaged coating could release millions of micro- and nanoparticles under its experimental conditions.

Which naturally becomes:

YOUR FRYING PAN IS POISONING YOU.

Except that’s not what the study showed.

It showed that particles can come off.

It did not show that eating those particles causes disease.

In fact, Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment says tiny PTFE particles accidentally swallowed from a scratched coating aren’t expected to harm us because PTFE is extremely inert and isn’t digested. The FDA also says properly manufactured nonstick coatings are tightly bound to the cookware, with negligible migration of the smaller PFAS molecules people are often worried about.

There’s another confusion here too.

PTFE isn’t the same thing as PFOA, the chemical that was historically used in manufacturing some fluoropolymers and has legitimate health concerns. PFOA was phased out by major U.S. manufacturers years ago.

So scratched nonstick cookware doesn’t appear to be the toxic emergency the internet sometimes makes it out to be.

There is something I wouldn’t mess around with, though.

Heat.

Get PTFE ridiculously hot—around 680°F—and it can begin breaking down and releasing hazardous fumes. That’s a documented problem.

So don’t leave an empty nonstick pan sitting on high heat while you wander off to see what Peggy is doing.

But scratches?

We know particles can come off.

We don’t have good evidence that accidentally swallowing those particles is hurting people.

Which brings me right back to our kitchen.

Would I keep using a pan that’s badly scratched and flaking?

Nope.

Not because I’ve discovered it’s poisoning me.

Because it’s coming apart.

A frying pan isn’t a family heirloom. If pieces of the darn thing are ending up in my food, I’m replacing it.

But after looking into all this, I may also do something I didn’t expect when I started:

Buy another little nonstick pan.

Just for my scrambled eggs.

And when it starts flaking apart in a year?

I’ll complain about it.

Throw it away.

And probably buy another one.

The world has gotten very good at making exercise complicated.

What should you do?

How much?

How hard?

How long?

And now, apparently, we need to worry about what time it is.

Morning workouts.

Afternoon workouts.

Circadian rhythms.

Hormones.

Find your biological peak.

Researchers recently decided to test that last one in older adults, and I love the way they did it.

First, they brought people into the lab at 8 AM, noon, 4 PM and 8 PM and tested their physical performance.

That let them figure out something different for each person:

When are you at your best?

And:

When are you at your worst?

Then they randomized them.

One group trained at the time their bodies had performed best.

Another group trained at their worst time.

That’s the part I love.

If timing really matters, don’t compare some arbitrary morning group with an evening group. Find out when Dave performs best, then make poor Dave exercise at exactly the wrong time.

For 12 weeks, participants did two supervised whole-body resistance-training sessions and one moderate cycling session each week.

So what happened?

Both training groups got stronger.

Both gained muscle.

But training at someone’s biologically best time provided no meaningful advantage over making them train at their worst time.

Basically, their muscles didn’t seem to give a damn what the clock said.

Now, this doesn’t settle every question about exercise timing. The study wasn’t testing whether late exercise affects your sleep, whether timing changes blood sugar, or when an athlete might perform best. And the participants were around 67 years old on average…not extremely old or frail.

It answered a much narrower question.

Do older adults need to find their magical time of day to get stronger and build muscle?

This study gives us no reason to think they do.

I find that wonderfully reassuring.

Because there are already enough reasons not to exercise.

If mornings work for you, exercise in the morning.

If four o’clock works, exercise at four.

If 7:30 tonight is when you’ve finally got an hour, apparently that’s fine too.

Your biceps don’t own a watch.

You sit down at a restaurant hungry.

Before the steak arrives, before the fish, before the chicken, before the salad, somebody puts a basket of warm bread six inches from your face.

Well, heck.

Of course you eat it.

Turns out that may be almost exactly backward from what it should be.

Researchers took 11 people with type 2 diabetes and gave them the same meal on two different days: chicken, salad, broccoli, bread and orange juice.

Same food. Same calories.

The first time they ate the bread and drank the orange juice first. Then they waited 15 minutes before eating the chicken and vegetables.

A week later they reversed it. Chicken and vegetables first, then the carbs.

What happened surprised me.

When the carbohydrates came last, the rise in blood glucose was substantially smaller. Insulin levels were lower too.

Nothing had been removed from the meal.

They just changed the order.

Now, eleven people is eleven people. I’m not rearranging my entire life around one tiny study.

But researchers kept looking.

A later study in people with type 2 diabetes found much the same thing. Another small study in people with prediabetes did too. Eating the protein and vegetables… or even vegetables alone… before the carbohydrate portion changed the glucose response afterward.

Which sent me down another rabbit hole.

We spend a large amount of time talking about what we eat.

Carbs. Fat. Protein. Fiber. Calories. Sugar.

Apparently when one food follows another may matter too.

That doesn’t make bread bad. It doesn’t mean everybody needs to sit at the dinner table with a stopwatch and wait ten minutes before being allowed to approach the potato.

Please don’t do that.

It does make me look differently at that restaurant bread basket.

They don’t bring it after you’ve eaten your salad and half your dinner.

They bring it when you’re hungry.

Sometimes before you’ve even figured out what you’re ordering.

And this may be the part I like most: trying this doesn’t require buying anything, measuring anything or downloading another damn app.

Next time you eat a meal with vegetables, protein and something starchy, eat the vegetables and protein first.

Leave the bread, rice, potato or whatever else until later.

See what happens.

Maybe nothing.

Maybe you notice you’re less interested in the bread by then.

Maybe your glucose monitor tells you something interesting if you use one.

Or maybe you simply discover that the bread basket has been running the whole operation for years.

Susannah Mushatt Jones ate four strips of bacon every morning. Not occasionally. Every morning. Then she’d have scrambled eggs and grits.

She lived to 116.

Naturally, people wanted to know her secret. TIME actually asked her shortly before her 115th birthday.

“I don’t have a secret,” she told them.

Apparently nobody was satisfied with that answer because we are still talking about the bacon.

I love these stories.

Emma Morano lived to 117 and ate raw eggs for something like 90 years. A doctor had recommended them when she was a teenager because she was anemic, and she just kept going.

Another woman who made it to 117, Maria Branyas, ate about three yogurts a day.

Misao Okawa loved mackerel sushi.

Violet Brown ate fish and mutton.

And somewhere right now somebody is probably putting together a longevity diet consisting of raw eggs, bacon, yogurt, sushi and mutton.

Good luck with that.

We do this every time somebody lives an extraordinarily long life.

What’s your secret?

We seem convinced there must be one.

Bacon.

Beans.

Olive oil.

Never getting married.

Getting married.

Going to church.

Having a drink every day.

Never touching alcohol.

Walking.

Sleeping.

Yogurt.

The problem is that somebody who lives to 115 isn’t exactly an average human being who happened to choose the correct breakfast. They’re an extraordinary biological outlier.

Researchers actually study people who live that long because there appears to be a substantial genetic component to extreme longevity. That doesn’t mean what they did during those 115 years didn’t matter. Of course it matter do.

It means we probably shouldn’t look at one thing they ate and turn it into instructions.

Susannah Jones never smoked or drank and reportedly slept about ten hours a night. She also ate four strips of bacon every morning.

Which one got her to 116?

I have no idea.

Neither did she.

In fact, when TIME reminded her that she was about to turn 115, she didn’t offer some profound reflection on longevity.

She said:

“I’ll be 115? I ain’t gonna be 115. Nope.”

Maybe that’s the best longevity advice I’ve heard yet.

Not because it’ll help you live longer.

Because at least she wasn’t trying to sell us anything.

You back out of a parking spot and suddenly realize you can’t see behind you quite as well as you used to.

Or somebody says something behind you and instead of turning your head, you turn your whole damn body.

When did that happen?

Sometimes you know.

You slept funny. You spent six hours staring at a computer. You did something yesterday that your neck apparently objected to.

Sometimes you have no idea.

And sometimes it has been sneaking up on you for years.

Someone comes to Peggy or me and says, “I can’t turn my head to the right.”

Okay.

Show me.

That’s usually where we start.

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Scientists recently found an amoeba in Lassen Volcanic National Park that apparently doesn’t know where complex life is supposed to stop.

Its name is Incendiamoeba cascadensis. It can reproduce at around 145 degrees Fahrenheit, remains active even a little hotter than that, and researchers found it could briefly survive temperatures around 158 degrees by changing into a protective form.

I don’t know about you, but at 158 degrees I’m pretty sure I’ve stopped being Dave and started becoming dinner.

What fascinates me isn’t that we found another weird amoeba. It’s that we thought we knew something.

There are temperatures where complex cells aren’t supposed to be able to keep doing all the complicated things cells have to do. And then somebody went poking around in hot water at Lassen and found this thing.

Living there.

Apparently unimpressed with our limit.

I love stuff like this. Every once in a while nature looks at something we’ve carefully put in the THAT CAN’T HAPPEN box and says:

You might want to get a bigger box.

I learned something important about myself this morning.

I speak French.

I did not know this until today.

Peggy may not know it yet either.

We were talking about my writing and why lately it has started feeling more like me again. For a while I think we had edited some of the life out of it. Too careful. Too polished. Too worried about whether every story had a point.

I used the word milquetoast.

That is a ridiculous word.

I’ve probably heard it most of my life. I knew roughly what it meant. Bland. Timid. Wishy-washy. Somebody unlikely to pound his fist on the table and yell, “Jesus Christ, give it a try.”

But I had never really thought about the word itself.

Milquetoast.

Who the hell spelled it that way?

I assumed it must be French.

Malk toastique?

That’s how I say it.

You have to put a little upturn in your voice at the end. Not enough to make it a question. Just enough so the person listening knows that you know exactly what you’re saying and can speak French.

Malk toastique?

Ooh la la.

There is one small problem.

As far as I can tell, there is no French word malk toastique.

I made it up.

This is where a sensible person would have returned to the original conversation.

I did not. I did some research…

It turns out milquetoast comes from a comic-strip character named Caspar Milquetoast, created by cartoonist H. T. Webster about a hundred years ago.

Caspar was timid. Meek. The sort of guy who apparently looked at life and hoped life wouldn’t notice him looking.

Webster named him after milk toast.

Actual milk toast.

Toast with warm milk poured over it.

Apparently people ate this.

Maybe they still do.

I don’t know.

But now I had gone from believing I spoke French to discovering that one of the English language’s stranger insults was named after soggy toast.

This was already a pretty good morning.

And then ChatGPT screwed it up.

Somewhere in my research it decided I had said Melba toast.

I guaranteee you I had not said Melba toast.

I hadn’t even been thinking about Melba toast.

ChatGPT just wandered into the room carrying Melba toast like it belonged there.

Normally this is the point where you’re supposed to get annoyed with artificial intelligence.

“No, you idiot. I said milk toast.”

Instead I thought:

Actually... I like that too.

Because now I wanted to know why the hell Melba toast was called Melba toast.

Which is how Nellie Melba entered the story.

Her real name was Helen Porter Mitchell. She was an Australian opera singer and apparently a very big deal around the turn of the twentieth century.

Melba came from Melbourne.

Of course it did.

And she knew the legendary French chef Auguste Escoffier.

Now we have a Frenchman.

Just not where I put him.

Escoffier created foods in her honor, including Peach Melba, the dessert with peaches, raspberry sauce and vanilla ice cream.

He is also associated with Melba toast, those ridiculously thin, crisp little pieces of toast that always look to me like somebody sliced bread on a machine designed for microchips.

So let’s review.

I started out talking about why I wanted to stop editing the weird tangents out of my writing.

I said milquetoast.

I decided it was French.

It wasn’t.

I invented Malk toastique?

Ooh la la.

Then I discovered a timid comic-strip character named Caspar who was named after soggy toast.

Then an artificial intelligence got confused and handed me a completely different toast.

That toast led to an Australian opera singer.

The Australian opera singer led to a French chef.

The French chef led to peaches and ice cream.

And somehow, after taking the longest possible route, I finally got to France.

This is exactly the kind of shit I’ve been editing out.

And I think I’m done doing that.

I spend a ridiculous amount of my life going down rabbit holes. Peggy has lived with this for decades. One thing reminds me of another thing, which reminds me of something that happened 40 years ago, which makes me wonder who invented the zipper, and pretty soon I have 17 tabs open and have forgotten why I sat down.

Sometimes I find something useful.

Sometimes I learn something fascinating.

And sometimes I discover that I speak a language that does not exist.

Malk toastique?

Ooh la la.