Entries by Chet Zelasko

Reflections on a New Year

Welcome to 2024! Many of us look forward to the new year as a starting date to accomplish great things. Getting your health on track is almost always near the top of that list, and I’m no different. I’m also ready to teach you what you can do to improve your health this year. Let’s […]

Here’s Your Gift!

Have you missed hearing my voice? As a little gift for you, I recorded all the Memos related to the Blue Zones docuseries in one audio for your listening pleasure. The advantage is you can download it to your phone or tablet and listen to it over and over again. Instead of looking up the […]

Shhhh… It’s a Secret!

If your house is as busy as ours, you probably don’t mind that today’s Memo is very short. Here’s the deal: the next Memo will come Friday instead of Saturday and will include a freebie just for subscribers, whether you’re on the Nice list or the Naughty list. Stay tuned to see exactly what’s to […]

Lifestyle, Activity, and Aging

Here’s the question: if the subjects with the highest leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) lived longer, why did those subjects age faster based on the tests used in the study? The answer is complicated. Exercise and Longevity The researchers analyzed the data several ways. In the first analysis, they adjusted the data for sex, age, and […]

How Exercise Affects Aging

If a headline says, “exercise could make you age faster,” you know I absolutely must read it. There were a variety of commentaries on an unpublished study by Scandinavian researchers who won the Finnish national sports medicine prize; an advanced copy was published in PUBMED. Researchers used data collected from an ongoing twins study with […]

Anticipate Change

Adapt. Innovate. Improvise. Overcome. That’s a group of words I put together years ago about how to respond when faced with challenges. The approach works in the present. When it comes to changes in health that are associated with aging, we don’t know exactly what they will be. Therefore, we must anticipate what might happen. […]

Life Is Change

Do you ever think about your life in five or ten years or even longer? Doesn’t matter how old you are today, whether you’re 30 or 70. What will your life be like? Let me define it more clearly for you with this example. After Thanksgiving, Paula began setting up the Christmas tree. As she […]

Yes, the Nutrients Are There

My question is whether you get any nutrients besides sugar and fat from those marshmallow-covered yams or the green beans swimming in condensed mushroom soup and topped with fried onions from a can. The research on cooking techniques and retention of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients in vegetables and fruits is not extensive but overall, the […]

Nutrients in Holiday Foods

I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. With all the traditional and maybe not-so-traditional foods associated with the holidays, did you wonder how you fared from a nutrient perspective? We had a few of those foods that make you wonder: cheesy grits, corn pudding, and cranberry chutney to go along with the turkey. And don’t […]

Fiber: Food or Supplements?

We don’t seem to eat enough whole or minimally processed plant foods, so the researchers were trying to discover whether getting fiber, especially insoluble fiber, was better from plant material or whether taking fiber in supplement form would suffice. Researchers approached the question from the perspective of other beneficial nutrients that might be found in […]