We are creatures of earth, sunlight, wind, water, movement, and seasons. Every cell in the body was shaped under open skies. Human physiology evolved not in sealed rooms under artificial light, but outdoors—walking uneven ground, breathing living air, rising with dawn, resting with darkness, touched daily by sunlight, weather, plants, soil, and the countless subtle biological exchanges that happen between body and environment. The modern world has brought extraordinary convenience, but convenience often comes with invisible biological costs.

Many people now wake indoors, work indoors, travel enclosed in vehicles, exercise indoors, shop indoors, and spend evening hours bathed in blue light from screens before sleeping in air-conditioned rooms cut off from the rhythms of the natural world. The body, ancient in design though modern in setting, quietly pays attention to all of this. It registers light, darkness, temperature, movement, microbial exposure, air quality, and environmental texture in ways both conscious and unconscious. When these inputs become artificial, limited, or absent, health can begin to drift.

Sunlight is perhaps one of the clearest examples of “nature deficiency”. It has emerged as an important, if not THE most important nourishment. Natural sunlight helps regulate circadian rhythms—the internal biological clock that governs sleep, hormones, metabolism, immune function, and mood. Morning light exposure helps anchor healthy cortisol release, supports melatonin production later in the day, and improves sleep quality at night. Sunlight also stimulates vitamin D production, which influences bone health, immune resilience, inflammation control, muscle function, and even mental wellbeing. 

Yet modern life has turned many people into near-permanent indoor dwellers, living under electric light while becoming starved of one of biology’s oldest medicines.

Fresh air is another forgotten nutrient. Outdoor air, especially in natural environments, often contains compounds released by trees and plants, beneficial airborne microbes, richer oxygen dynamics, and far fewer indoor pollutants than many homes and offices. 

Research on forest exposure—sometimes called forest bathing (Japanese shinrin-yoku) —has shown reductions in stress hormones, improvements in mood, enhanced immune activity, and measurable calming effects on the nervous system. Time among trees appears to do more than relax the mind; it nourishes physiology itself.

Then there is movement—not exercise in the narrow modern sense of gym sessions and fitness routines, burpees and the like, but natural movement woven throughout daily life. Walking, stretching, bending, carrying, climbing, balancing, and simply being physically engaged with the world are profoundly regulating to metabolism, circulation, joints, muscles, lymphatic flow, and brain health. Human bodies were built for regular, varied movement, not prolonged sitting interrupted by brief bursts of exercise. Sedentary indoor life creates stagnation that the body interprets as dysfunction.

You may have heard the phrase: sitting is the new smoking.

Contact with nature also shapes the immune system in remarkable ways. Soil microbes, plant compounds, diverse environmental bacteria, and exposure to biodiverse outdoor ecosystems help educate and regulate immune responses. Some researchers believe the explosion in allergies, autoimmune disorders, and inflammatory illness may partly reflect immune systems raised in overly sanitized, biologically narrow environments. We have reduced our contact with the microbial richness that helped shape healthy immunity across human history. [The so-called Hygiene Hypothesis, which I utterly believe in).

Our bodies are an entire ecosystem and our obsession with sanitizing it leads to a collapse of a healthy system. I’m not advocating you turn up to the table with dirty hands and fingernails… well, maybe! (depends what you’ve been handling). But I remember as a kid on the farm; we’d wipe the cow shit off our hands just by rubbing them against our pants and ate our sandwiches with greenish fingers! (much to mother’s dismay) But I was never sick, except for the usual (measles, chicken pox, etc.)

Nature also heals something less measurable but equally important—the mind’s burden. The modern nervous system is overstimulated by noise, screens, speed, social pressure, information overload, and relentless artificial input. Nature offers something radically different: complexity without demand. A forest, coastline, meadow, or garden engages the senses gently rather than aggressively. The nervous system softens. Attention broadens. Thought slows. The body receives cues of safety. Blood pressure drops. Muscles unclench. Breathing deepens. The mind remembers another pace of being.

This is not romantic nostalgia. Actually it is biology.

What Can You Do?

The remedy does not require abandoning modern life or moving to a mountain cabin—though a cabin by a lake has undeniable charm. Healing can begin with small, deliberate acts of rewilding daily life. Step outside early and let morning light touch your eyes. Walk among trees. Open windows. Grow plants indoors and outdoors. Put bare feet on grass or sand if you enjoy it. 

My advice? Eat food that comes from living soil rather than industrial chemistry. Spend time where birdsong replaces traffic noise. Let your skin feel weather. Watch a sunrise. Sit beneath a tree with no agenda. Allow yourself moments not optimized for productivity.

These are not luxuries. They are forms of nourishment. We really are suffering from a “nature deficiency.”

Modern health conversations often revolve around supplements, medications, lab tests, and complex interventions. Some are valuable. But alongside them sits a simpler truth: many people are deficient not only in nutrients, but in sunlight, fresh air, natural movement, microbial diversity, quiet, beauty, and contact with the living world.

Perhaps one of the great health frontiers of our time is not discovering something entirely new but remembering something very old—that human beings are not separate from nature. We are expressions of it. 

And when we return, even briefly, to the rhythms and textures that shaped us, the body often responds with a quiet sigh of recognition, as if saying, Yes… this is what I remember.

What can I do during the workday to offset sitting all day? 

Andrew Dorsey, MS, an Exercise Physiologist at The Mount Sinai Physiolab and  Clinical Research Coordinator at Mount Sinai’s Department of Environmental Medicine, recommends to have about 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity per week.¹ That may seem like a lot, but it is manageable when you break it down. If you took three, five-minute breaks during a workday, five days a week, that’s 75 minutes. That’s already half of what you’re aiming for. 

You can incorporate movement in short, simple ways:  

• Get up from your desk, walk around, stretch, even walk in place. Just standing while you read something or take a phone call can help. It adds up over time. 

• Hold a conversation or meeting standing up!

• Make the conscious decision to take the stairs, rather than the elevator, can make a difference. If you take the stairs once a week, that is a meaningful change. You don’t have to do it daily to see benefits. 

Live better. Live longer!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

References:

1. https://health.mountsinai.org/blog/why-sitting-is-the-new-smoking-how-to-combat-the-health-effects-of-sitting-all-day/

I stand by my position. But there have been interesting developments and orthodoxy is getting interested in the issue. Maybe it’s the microbiome? There are some genetic traits (they always trot those out, as if it’s some kind of magic rite) but not enough to explain all cases. But certainly there are environmental factors too.

I agree with that!

But what interest is this to us Boomers and Oldies? Actually more than you think. Yes there has been a surge in younger kids (under 50). But we are all vulnerable to this particular grotesque tumor.

Colorectal cancer (to give it its full title) is the third-leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men and the fourth leading cause in women, but it’s the second most common cause of cancer deaths when numbers for men and women are combined. It’s expected to cause about 55,230 deaths during 2026.¹

From 2013 to 2022, incidence rates dropped by about 1% each year. But this downward trend is mostly in we older adults. In people younger than 50 years of age, rates have increased by a staggering 2.9% per year from 2013 to 2022 (as I said earlier, starting long before COVID on the mRNA vaccines which conspiracy theorists like to blame). In adults aged 50-64, the rate has increased by 0.4% per year during this time.

So it’s a real worry. And you should pay attention.

Prof. Note: Look, there are 4 main causes of disease: environmental, degeneration, genetics and malnutrition. “Faulty nutrition” would be a better term than malnutrition, since most people in the West overeat but are still malnourished. Microbes, parasites, viruses and other infections, don’t forget, are environmental in origin, meaning “in the environment, coming from outside”.

Thing is, the smart scientists are now looking at the microbiome as a real danger zone. Ironically, that is an environmental issue, since the gut is really, technically, “outside” our bodies (you could pass a string from the mouth to the opposite end, so we are really a donut!)

So is food an environmental factor. Our ultra-processed diets, plus the wrong—possibly toxic—microbes living within constitute a major environmental threat. Throw in the toxic chemical burdens, especially those which contaminate our food, and we have a problem. A BIG problem.

No question: the term “turbo-cancers” fits well with what is happening in our colons; just that the assumed cause is wrong and environmental factors are more likely to blame (yes, yes, a vaccine would technically be an “environmental” insult. But let’s not get tricky here).

Ohio State University oncologist Ning Jin has declared herself alarmed by the number of patients in their 30s and 40s with late-stage cancer in their lower digestive tract. It’s not just that these patients are decades younger than what had been typical for colorectal cancer; Jin says the tumors themselves are also more stubborn to treat.

“Even though we treat young patients with more aggressive chemo — more chemo or more surgery — patients’ outcomes are not necessarily better,” Jin says. And the disease has become the top cancer killer among people under 50 — even as death rates decline in older age groups, as I said.

It is highly unusual to see dramatic changes in disease patterns within a single generation. But that’s precisely what veteran oncologist Dr. John Marshall, head of clinical research at the Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown University, has observed.

“Thirty-plus years ago, when I first started, no one — no one; zero number of patients — were in my clinic under the age of 50 with colon cancer,” he says. “And now it is almost half of the patients that I see.”

That’s a staggering shift in demographics. Marshall says there are other changes in disease pattern, too: Earlier onset tumors tend to show up differently — more tumors are found near the rectum, lower in the tract.

Doctors claim that advances in science in recent years have made many cancers more treatable and survivable — but not colorectal cancer, which has become more lethal, striking people at younger ages. And it’s occurring more often too.

Increasingly, doctors suspect that the gut’s microbiome is a key factor behind these forms of cancer in particular.

Genetics plays some role in colorectal cancers. Dr. Jin says as many as a fifth of patients have hereditary markers — like a genetic mutation for Lynch syndrome — that increase the risk of getting colorectal cancer, among others. But genetics do not explain what drives the vast majority of cases — about 80% of colorectal cancers.

So Jin and others have concluded: “There must be some environmental factors or changes.”

“The way I think of it is, it’s our soil; it’s a very important part of our interface with the world,” Dr. Marshall says, because digestive organs’ primary role is to help incorporate the things we eat into our bodies.

“What I think is that we have somehow altered the soil in some way so that it’s now causing this phenomenon of colon cancer,” he says. “It may be causing other diseases, too. But the most striking one is colon cancer.”

Smart thinkers suspect several factors may be leading to these more frequent, virulent cancers: One is our greater reliance on ultra-processed foods, as well as plastics and chemicals that can leach into water and our bodies. Plus, there are other notable lifestyle changes: As a population, we are not as active as we used to be.

Let’s list those:

• Ultra-processed foods

• Plastics from the environment

• Chemical pollution

• Not so active

All of those factors act on our gut and can trigger widespread changes in the microbiome (the bacteria and myriad microorganisms living there). And a disturbed microbiome may contribute to colorectal cancer. 

Escherichia coli or E. coli is a part of family of bacteria that are commonly found in the human gut. Scientists found that a toxin the bacteria release is linked to some cases of colorectal cancer. Colibactin, from certain strains of E. coli and other bacteria, causes DNA damage, which could well be a precursor of cancerous changes.

Trouble is, it’s incredibly difficult to study the microbiome and it effects; it’s so VAST in scope. There are trillions of organisms down there, all sharing their own genes. It amounts to just one thing: you need to take care of your microbiome; I mean, seriously!

What Can We Do?

To keep the human microbiome thriving, the broad aim is simple: feed the beneficial organisms, avoid carpet-bombing them, and maintain the body’s natural rhythms.

1. Eat a wide diversity of plant foods—aim for 30+ different vegetables, fruits, herbs, nuts, seeds, legumes, and whole grains each week. Diversity feeds diversity.

2 Prioritize fibre-rich foods: oats, beans, lentils, onions, garlic, leeks, asparagus, artichokes, flaxseed, chia, apples, berries. Jerusalem artichokes are stars!

3. Include fermented foods regularly: Yogurt, Kefir, Sauerkraut, Kimchi, miso, tempeh, kombucha (if tolerated).

4. Eat polyphenol-rich (brightly colored) foods—these are microbial fertiliser: blueberries, pomegranate, cocoa, green tea, olives, extra virgin olive oil, colourful veggies, spices.

5. Spend time in nature— soil microbes, plants, forests, and even gardening increase exposure, especially to a very valuable microbe called Mycobacterium vaccae. It has become famous because research suggests it may help regulate immunity and positively influence mood and stress resilience.2 Get your hands dirty!

6. Avoid unnecessary antibiotics; as you know, they can dramatically reduce microbial diversity for months or longer.

7. Limit ultra-processed foods—emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners, preservatives, and low-fiber processed diets may disrupt gut ecology. Yuck. Who would eat this crap anyway?

8. Get enough omega-3 fats: walnuts, flax, chia, oily fish.

9. Correct low vitamin D if present; it influences gut immunity and microbiome balance.

10. Stay hydrated; microbes like a well-hydrated intestinal environment.

11. Chew food thoroughly; digestion begins in the mouth, and the oral microbiome matters too.

12. Reduce smoking and heavy alcohol use—they strongly disturb microbial balance. Better still STOP!

13. Don’t forget good sleep and adequate exercise. They too play a vital role.

And remember: the microbiome is less like a machine and more like a rainforest: richness, variety, and steady care make it flourish.

To your good health!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor.

References:

1. https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/colon-rectal-cancer/about/key-statistics.html
2. Holbrook EM, Zambrano CA, Wright CTO, et al. Mycobacterium vaccaeNCTC 11659, a Soil-Derived Bacterium with Stress Resilience Properties, Modulates the Proinflammatory Effects of LPS in Macrophages. Int J Mol Sci. 2023;24(6):5176. Published 2023 Mar 8. doi:10.3390/ijms24065176

But as usual, the truth is 180 degrees around: if you want to feel miserable, die young and really be a loser, don’t show respect and kindness to others. Researchers are now finding that it can prolong our lives as well.

A new study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has recently found that kindness may help slow the effects of aging.¹ While this study is not conclusive, it makes sense. If negative emotions affect us negatively, positive emotions should affect us positively. 

In this study, 150 middle aged volunteers were separated into three groups. One group did mindfulness meditation training, the second group learned about loving kindness meditation, and the third group served as the control group. The researchers measured each volunteers’ telomeres (caps on the end of your chromosomes that protect your DNA) at the beginning and end of the study. As we grow older, our telomeres get shorter. The shorter they get the shorter your life expectancy is, so they are a good marker for longevity. 

At the end of the experiment all three groups had shorter telomeres, but the group that had practiced loving kindness had less shortening than the other two groups.  The control group’s telomeres were the shortest. The researchers concluded that practicing kindness for just a few weeks slowed aging slightly, prompting hopefulness that we can slow our own aging process by doing the same thing in our daily lives. 

This is good.

Who remembers Ann Herbert’s glorious phrase Random Acts Of Kindness And Senseless Acts Of Beauty (1982)?

Written on a restaurant placemat by author Anne Herbert in 1982 as a direct counter-phrase to “random acts of violence and senseless acts of cruelty”, which we used to hear a lot. What a subversive idea, to be kind, especially in such a hostile world. It became a movement, which flourished for a time. I’m sorry to say it’s not so much in public consciousness right now. Everyone is so nervous about their own safety and the world’s future, there doesn’t seem to be time to worry about others.

It’s the wrong approach. If you look after and care for others, they will look after you. You need to be in a community that is bonded by shared humanitarian views.

Ann Herbert’s movement was FUN – playful – and encourages creating positive, unexpected moments without expecting anything in return, fostering a world focused on care, impish playfulness and joy rather than selfish gain. 

Random Acts of Kindness were small, unselfish, unexpected, and often anonymous acts of help or goodwill.

Examples: Buying coffee for a stranger, leaving a kind note, helping someone with a task, smiling at a stranger, or donating to charity.

Senseless Acts of Beauty: Creating or appreciating beautiful things that serve no practical or rational purpose, emphasizing the value of wonder, nature, and joy over utility.

Examples: Placing flowers in a neglected spot, creating public art, or creating artful surprises that serve no functional purpose.

But while you are busy doing good, don’t forget BEING KIND TO YOURSELF. This is a version of Tal Ben-Shahar’s “platinum rule”: treat yourself as you would want others to treat you! (a step beyond the “Golden Rule”: treat others as you would want them to treat you).²

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is an action-oriented approach to psychotherapy and self-healing where you learn to stop avoiding, denying, and struggling with your inner emotions and, instead, accept that these deeper feelings are appropriate responses to certain situations that really do not prevent you from moving forward in your life. Only your attitude about these tricky emotions is what sticks you in place.

With this understanding, you can begin to accept your hardships and commit to making necessary changes in your behavior, regardless of what is going on in your life and how you feel about it.

ACT was developed in the 1980s by psychologist Steven C. Hayes, a professor at the University of Nevada.³ The ideas that coalesced into ACT emerged from Hayes’s own experience, particularly his history of panic attacks. Eventually, he vowed that he would no longer run from himself—he would accept himself and his experiences.

His words are very telling:

“We as a culture seem to be dedicated to the idea that ‘negative’ human emotions need to be fixed, managed, or changed—not experienced as part of a whole life. We are treating our own lives as problems to be solved as if we can sort through our experiences for the ones we like and throw out the rest.” 

That’s just a kind of denial that never really works well. In other words a HOAX.

Truth is, practicing kindness to SELF and OTHERS can be rewarding in many scientifically determined ways:

• Kindness releases endorphins in our brain which help alleviate pain.

• People who practice kindness age slower and have less stress than average.

• Kindness improves mood and helps with depression and anxiety. It stimulates the production of serotonin, which heals, calms and increases happiness.⁴

• Kindness also releases oxytocin, which aides in the release of nitric oxide which dilates blood vessels to reduce blood pressure.

• Kindness stimulates dopamine in the brain causing your pleasure centers to light up.

• Practicing kindness improves our self-esteem.

• Being kind to others helps people bond.

Thing is, kindness is a version of love. It’s tolerance. It’s harmony. It calms and relaxes. There is abundant science showing that loving and being loved is healing, soothing and prolongs life.

It’s good for us!

This week I challenge you to willfully practice kindness. Make a point of being kind to others and being kind to yourself.  Not only will you slow the aging process, you’ll feel great about yourself while making others feel good too.  If you need a hand getting into the proper mindset for being kind to others, multi-media sensory stimulation, MMSS as I call it, can help.  Listening to a positive, motivating creative visualization audio session will help you release stress, sleep better enabling you to be kinder to yourself and others.  

Here’s the link: alternative-doctor.com/electronic-meditation

There is a lovely book which speaks admirably to this theme: The Power of Kindness: The Unexpected Benefits of Leading a Compassionate Life by Piero Ferrucci.

Ferucci argues that kindness is a fundamental key to personal happiness and a thriving world, not a mere luxury. The book, written by a transpersonal psychologist (he was a pupil of Roberto Assagioli), explores various facets of kindness like honesty, forgiveness, and empathy, presenting them as essential virtues that lead to a more fulfilling life, counteracting the coldness of modern society. It combines philosophical depth with practical advice, using stories and exercises to show how small acts of decency can transform individuals and the world.

Ferucci is a staffer at the Psychosynthesis Institute in Florence, Italy.

Be kinder and more loving!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

References:

1. Loving-kindness meditation slows biological aging in novices: Evidence from a 12-week randomized controlled trial. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 108, 20–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2019.05.020
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_C._Hayes
3. https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/the-art-of-kindness

Measuring Biological Aging

There is no single dial on the body that reads “You are 47.3 years old, biologically speaking.” Instead, we triangulate. We infer. We listen to multiple systems at once and look for points of convergence.

That said, we can now go far beyond the guesswork of old.

The first thing to understand is that biological age is not one thing. It is a composite signal emerging from many interacting systems. Any attempt to measure it with a single marker is guaranteed to be incomplete. Accuracy comes not from perfection, but from overlap—when different measures, drawn from different layers of biology, begin to tell the same story.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man re-imagined!

One of the most powerful approaches currently in use is epigenetic aging. This is based on DNA methylation patterns—chemical tags that sit on DNA and regulate which genes are turned on or off. These patterns change predictably with biological aging, but crucially, they change faster or slower depending on lifestyle, stress, illness, trauma, and environment.

Epigenetic clocks—such as those developed by Steve Horvath and others—compare an individual’s methylation profile to large population datasets to estimate biological age. When someone’s epigenetic age is higher than their calendar age, it correlates strongly with increased disease risk, frailty, and mortality. When it is lower, it correlates with resilience and longevity.

What makes epigenetic clocks compelling is not that they measure time, but that they measure cellular memory. They capture the imprint of lived experience on gene regulation. This is why they respond to interventions—diet, exercise, stress reduction, sleep, even psychosocial changes. The clock can slow. Sometimes it ticks backward.

Another major axis of measurement involves inflammatory burden. Chronic, low-grade inflammation—often called inflammaging—is one of the strongest drivers of biological aging. Markers such as C-reactive protein, interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor-alpha, fibrinogen, and white blood cell ratios reveal whether the immune system is in a state of calm vigilance or chronic activation.

An immune system stuck in alert mode ages tissues faster. It degrades collagen, damages blood vessels, disrupts insulin signaling, and interferes with repair. Elevated inflammatory markers often predict biological age more accurately than calendar age ever could. 

The importance of the immune system is such that over 35 years ago, I wrote: “We live just as long as our immune systems will allow us”.

That came from the observation of AIDS victims, whose immune systems collapsed. They aged frighteningly fast, often dying within months but suddenly looking decades older.

Then there is metabolic age, which quietly governs how efficiently the body turns fuel into life. Measures like fasting insulin, insulin sensitivity (HOMA-IR), triglyceride-to-HDL ratios, HbA1c, lactate thresholds, and resting metabolic flexibility give insight into how “old” the metabolic machinery is behaving.

Cardiovascular measures also serve as remarkably accurate proxies for biological age. Arterial stiffness, pulse wave velocity, blood pressure variability, endothelial function, and heart rate variability reflect the condition of both blood vessels and the autonomic nervous system. A heart that recovers quickly, varies its rhythm fluidly, and responds gracefully to demand is biologically younger than one that plods, stiffens, and overreacts.

Heart rate variability, in particular, is fascinating because it bridges physiology and perception. It reflects vagal tone, emotional regulation, and nervous system flexibility. High variability correlates with youthfulness, resilience, and longevity. Low variability correlates with accelerated aging, chronic stress, and disease risk. The heart, it turns out, is an excellent historian.

There is also functional age, which medicine is slowly rediscovering after decades of obsession with lab values alone. Grip strength, gait speed, balance, reaction time, VO? max, recovery from exertion—these are not cosmetic metrics. They integrate muscle strength, nerve tone, cardiovascular vitality, and metabolic health into real-world performance.

How fast do you get tired? How fast do you recover? How confidently does your body move through space? These questions often predict mortality better than sophisticated imaging.

At the cellular level, markers of repair capacity matter enormously. Telomere length was once hyped as the aging marker, and while it is no longer considered enough on its own, it still tells an important part of the story. Telomeres shorten as cells divide, but their rate of shortening varies dramatically based on stress, inflammation, oxidative load, and lifestyle. Short telomeres are not destiny, but they do signal accumulated strain.

Equally important—but less commonly measured—are markers of mitochondrial health. ATP production efficiency, oxidative stress levels, mitochondrial DNA integrity, and metabolic byproducts reveal how energetically “young” cells are. Aging, at its core, is often an energy problem before it is a structural one.

Cognitive and neurological measures also belong in any serious assessment of biological age. Processing speed, working memory, sensory acuity, sleep architecture, and circadian rhythm robustness all decline with biological aging—but not inevitably with time. Brains, like bodies, age fastest under chronic threat and slowest under curiosity, safety, and engagement.

Here is the key point that often gets missed: no single test gives you biological age. Accuracy emerges from accumulated pattern recognition across systems. When epigenetics, inflammation, metabolism, cardiovascular function, and performance all point in the same direction, you are no longer guessing. You are listening to the body in stereo.

And there is an even deeper layer—one medicine is only beginning to acknowledge. Biological age is inseparable from nervous system state. A body that feels perpetually unsafe (high active stress) ages faster, regardless of diet or supplements. A body allowed to regularly enter deep parasympathetic repair modes slows aging across every measurable domain.

This is why two people with identical lab panels can age differently over time. One heals. One doesn’t. The difference is not compliance—it is coherence.

So how do we accurately measure biological age?

We triangulate it like a constellation. We track trends over time rather than relying on single numbers. We investigate whether the organism is becoming more resilient or more brittle, more adaptable or more reactive, more coherent or more fragmented.

Back to our first metaphor, let’s say calendar age tells you how many laps around the sun you’ve completed. Biological age tells you how intact the vehicle is—and whether it’s learning how to repair itself while still moving!

Identifying reliable biomarkers of aging is a current major goal in geroscience. Things have moved very fast in the last 2 decades!

Testing Biological Age

The most widely validated and scientifically accepted biological age tests are epigenetic clocks. These look at chemical tags on your DNA — especially DNA methylation — that change in very predictable ways as your body ages.

Unlike genetic sequences (which are fixed in your DNA), methylation patterns shift depending on life history: lifestyle, stress, diet, pollution, inflammation, and even social experiences leave detectable scars on your epigenome. By reading these patterns across hundreds to thousands of sites in the genome, algorithms can estimate your “biological age” relative to a population average.

The famous Horvath clock, developed by Dr. Steve Horvath, analyzes over 350 CpG sites (regions of DNA where methyl groups attach) and has a median error of only a few years compared to chronological age — remarkably precise for a biological process.  

Commercial tests like TruDiagnostic’s TruAge and myDNAge are based on this kind of analysis — you send a blood or saliva sample, and they return an estimate of your biological age along with personalized insights. 

Researchers have also developed variations like PhenoAge, GrimAge, and the DunedinPACE clock — each tuned to different aspects of aging (disease risk, mortality prediction, aging pace, etc.). 

Telomere Length Tests. Telomeres are protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that shorten with each cell division. Early aging research popularized telomere length as a proxy for biological age. Today, we know telomere tests are noisy and less predictive than epigenetic clocks — telomeres can vary widely between individuals and even fluctuate with temporary stressors — but they still supply useful context when interpreted alongside other biomarkers. 

Companies such as Life Length specialize in telomere diagnostic services, often combining telomere length with telomerase activity (the enzyme that rebuilds telomeres) for a richer picture. 

Blood-Based Biomarker Age and Machine Learning Models. Some commercial and research programs don’t rely solely on DNA at all. Instead, they analyze panels of blood biomarkers and use machine learning (AI) to derive an age estimate based on how your physiology compares to large datasets.

These can include patterns across:

• Inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein

• Metabolic markers like glucose and triglycerides

• Hormones, cytokines, and more

Such tests — sometimes called proteomic or deep aging clocks — can use hundreds of circulating proteins and cell counts to estimate biological age and even predict disease risk before symptoms appear. 

Composite Age Scores with Frailty and Functional Metrics

Some approaches combine clinical measurements (like blood pressure, glucose regulation, body composition) with functional performance (strength, gait speed, cognitive tests) into composite indices that estimate biological age.

This is less molecular but very practical for assessing overall physiological reserve and real-world function. 

Emerging and Multimodal Tests

Cutting-edge methods blend multiple data layers — epigenetics + proteomics + metabolomics + phenotypic signs — often refined by with AI models to give an age estimation beyond what any single marker can offer. 

None of these tests claim to measure a literal “number of years lived,” because that wouldn’t be biological. Instead, they measure patterns that correlate with:

• Cellular maintenance capacity

• Immune function

• Metabolic resilience

• Inflammatory burden

• Epigenetic change rates

• Disease susceptibility trajectories

In short, they measure how your body is functioning relative to its chronological peers, which is far more meaningful for health outcomes than the number of candles on your birthday cake.

Accuracy and Real World Use

Epigenetic clocks currently represent the most scientifically robust measure of biological age available — but it’s not perfect. Different clocks can give slightly different ages, and results are influenced by which tissues are sampled (blood vs saliva, etc.), the model used, and technical variability in lab processes (no two lab give identical results). 

Many experts caution that these tests are predictive tools, not definitive statements of destiny. But compared to traditional age markers like telomeres, they are far more predictive of disease risk and mortality patterns. 

Poetically speaking, what all these tests do is read the echo of your life in your biology. They read the impact left by nutrition, trauma, adaptation, stress management, repair capacity, and systemic resilience. They capture your physiological biography rather than your chronological biography.

All of them, in their own way, try to answer one question: Is your biology older, younger, or on track — and what does that mean for your future health?

To Your Good Health,Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

Calendar age is the number stamped on your passport and defined by how many times the earth has gone round the sun since you were born. It’s what we normally mean when we refer to a person’s age.

But in terms of health, and especially longevity, we need to look at things slightly differently. Here we are concerned with how vibrant your organs and tissues are and how long they will last, starting from NOW! We call this “biological age.”

Say a person is sixty years old (calendar age) but has lived a healthy life, done all the right things and not “burned the candle at both ends”. Such a person’s body might be in roughly the same biological shape as the average fifty year-old. That would mean he or she has a biological “age” of fifty and is 10 years in credit for a long and healthy life. This individual might expect to live well past 80, maybe even 90 – 95 or more.

But another kind of sixty year-old individual who smokes, eats badly and doesn’t take nearly enough exercize might be in similar condition to someone healthy but 20 years older. Chances are her or she will die younger than the first individual, maybe a lot younger. Maybe very soon, in fact!

See it’s easy, really. 

Your calendar age is exact: you have a certificate, given when you were born, that tells us exactly how “old” you are. But how old you body “feels” and what sort of dynamic shape it’s in—actually more important—is not nearly so easy to establish.

It depends on what is happening within: are your organs doing the job as well a they should? Is some of you deteriorating, while other parts are not? See, that is important because if you are healthy in every way EXCEPT your heart is stressed, swollen and beating irregularly at times, then you might die quite soon, while MOST of the rest of you is in good shape.

Maybe everything is OK in the heart and blood vessels department but you start to lose your mental skills and grow a bit dotty over the years. That happens, but clearly the person is defined by the onset of dementia, not by heart health! He or she will be “old” before their time.

[It’s a tricky example because dementia is unlikely without considerable deterioration of the circulatory system, even if it’s undetected for a time. The blood brings nutrients and carries away toxins, so any under-performance of the circulatory system (properly called the cardio-vascular system) will have widespread aging consequences, but you get the idea].

Biological aging is intimate, cellular, and deeply personal. It unfolds not by birthdays but by biochemical conversations happening in your tissues, your mitochondria, your epigenome, your immune system, and—if we’re being honest—your nervous system’s relationship with meaning, stress, safety, and love.

To confuse the two is one of modern culture’s great conceptual errors.

Calendar age measures time elapsed since birth. That’s it. It does not care whether you slept, loved, healed, raged, starved, meditated, or laughed yourself senseless. It ticks forward with the same indifference whether you are flourishing or unraveling. Two people born on the same day share a calendar age but may inhabit bodies that differ by decades in functional capacity, resilience, inflammation, cognitive clarity, and regenerative potential.

Biological age, by contrast, asks a far more interesting question: How old is your body behaving?

It is an emergent property, not a single number. It arises from the cumulative state of cellular repair, metabolic flexibility, immune competence, hormonal signaling, mitochondrial efficiency, epigenetic regulation, and nervous system tone. It is shaped not just by genetics, but by environment, nutrition, trauma, beliefs, relationships, purpose, sleep, movement, toxins, and the stories the body has been forced to tell itself in order to survive.

Calendar age is destiny only if you believe in clocks more than cells.

At the biological level, aging is damage accumulating faster than repair. When repair keeps pace, aging slows, stalls, or even partially reverses. Yes, that is possible.

When damage overwhelms repair, biological aging accelerates—sometimes dramatically. This is why a person can “age” ten biological years in five calendar years under chronic stress, illness, or grief, and why another can appear to grow younger across a decade of conscious living.

See, cells do not own calendars. They respond to signals.

One of the most profound discoveries in modern biology is that aging is plastic. Not infinitely so, perhaps—but far more malleable than once believed. Telomeres shorten, yes, but their rate of shortening varies wildly. DNA accumulates mutations, but repair pathways can be upregulated or suppressed. Proteins misfold (which is bad), but chaperone systems can be strengthened. Mitochondria decline, but they also biogenically rebound under the right conditions. Epigenetic markers drift, but they can be re-patterned.

Biological age is not fixed at birth. It is negotiated daily.

Calendar age moves in a straight line. Biological age zigzags, stalls, accelerates, decelerates, and occasionally moonwalks backward when conditions allow. At 50 calendar years, one person may have the inflammatory profile, muscle mass, insulin sensitivity, and cognitive speed of a 35-year-old, while another carries the metabolic and immune burden of 70.

This divergence is not cosmetic. It predicts disease risk, recovery capacity, and mortality far more accurately than birthdate ever could.

What we call “aging” in everyday language is usually not aging at all—it is accumulated dysregulation. Systems falling out of coherence. Communication breakdowns between cells. Chronic low-grade inflammation smoldering like an unattended fire. Hormonal rhythms flattening. Repair cycles shortening. Autophagy (removal of dead cells and debris) slowing. Sleep architecture fragmenting. The nervous system remaining stuck in vigilance long after the danger has passed.

None of this is required by time itself.

Calendar age has no memory. Biological age remembers everything.

It remembers famine and abundance. It remembers safety and terror. It remembers loneliness, overwork, grief, unresolved shock. It remembers whether the organism felt supported or hunted by life. It remembers whether the body was treated as an ally or a machine to be driven until parts failed.

This is why two seventy-year-olds can walk into a room and feel like different species.

One carries stiffness, brittleness, and caution in every movement. The other carries fluidity, curiosity, and strength. One’s immune system is reactive and exhausted; the other’s is responsive and calm. One’s cells whisper inflammation; the other’s murmur repair. Calendar age cannot explain this. Biology can.

Modern medicine historically conflated age with inevitability. Decline was treated as natural rather than conditional. Wrinkles, sarcopenia, cognitive slowing, insulin resistance, osteopenia, immune senescence—these were framed as the unavoidable tax of time. “You’re growing old, what do you expect?”

But what we are now discovering is that many of these phenomena correlate far more strongly with biological age than with calendar age. Rather than the phenomenon of clocks ticking down, the real emphasis is systems wearing out under load.

There is also a crucial distinction between appearance and biology. Some people look young but are biologically old—propped up cosmetically while inflammation, metabolic dysfunction, and immune exhaustion quietly advance. Others look weathered but function with remarkable resilience. The grizzly old goat type of countenance. Skin is a visible organ, but it is not the whole story. Biological age lives in blood markers, tissue elasticity, mitochondrial output, cognitive flexibility, and recovery speed.

The Search For Markers Of Aging

The emerging science of aging biomarkers—epigenetic clocks, glycation levels, inflammatory indices, immune cell ratios—exists precisely because calendar age is such a blunt instrument. These tools attempt to quantify biological age, not because time matters less, but because time alone explains so little.

And here is where things get quietly radical.

If biological age is responsive to signals, then perception matters. Meaning matters. Belief matters. A nervous system that perceives life as hostile and difficult ages faster than one that perceives life as joyous and workable. A body trapped in perpetual defense spends its resources on survival, not regeneration. Over time, that trade-off becomes visible as “aging.”

The immune system, endocrine system, and nervous system are in constant conversation. Fear ages. Safety heals. Purpose stabilizes. Joy lubricates repair. Loneliness corrodes at a cellular level. Chronic resentment is not just an emotion; it is a hormonal climate.

Put another way, calendar age does not care whether your life makes sense or not. Biological age very much does care!

Perhaps the most important implication of this distinction is ethical. When society treats calendar age as the primary metric of vitality, it enforces decline narratives prematurely. People are told they are “too old” to heal, adapt, learn, love, desire, or change. Biology does not agree. Cells are opportunistic. Give them the right signals and they respond—often astonishingly late into life.

We are not aging because we are getting older. We are aging because our systems are losing coherence.

Today that coherence can be restored to degrees once thought impossible.

This is not talking about immortality. It means flexibility. It means that aging is not a straight slide into the pit (entropy), but a dynamic negotiation between damage and repair, stress and recovery, meaning and exhaustion.

In the end, the difference between the two is the difference between counting years and telling a story. Calendar age is like a tax, a tally. Biological age is a narrative story written in cells—edited daily, revised constantly, responsive to how you live, what you eat, how you breathe, how you move, how you love, and whether your nervous system believes it is allowed to rest.

To Your Good Health,Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

I doubt it.

Why do I say that? Because they are barking up the wrong tree. We don’t age due to lack of supplements. Deficiencies can have a devastating effect, true. But aging is really a process: feeling tired, running down, losing momentum and it’s THAT that will carry you over the cliff edge, if you are not careful.

You have to have a REASON to live long and just a fear of dying doesn’t cut it. We are self-propelling organisms and can work our way past most barriers. Human ingenuity is mythic! But there has to be a reason: a WHY.

Proverbially, people until the last half-century, would retire and then quickly wither away and die. It was a given! The reason pensions were originally timed  for the age of 70 (Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in Germany) was that most people are dead by then and won’t collect!

The age was later lowered to 65 and of course today 65, 70, 85 are no age at all! But that was the reality over a century ago. People EXPECTED to die in their sixties or seventies. So they did!

Fast forward to the 21st century and the world is a very different place. Life expectancy has risen steadily to an average of around 76 – 82 years for a man, depending on the country. Women, as you know, do slightly better. In the USA these figures are Males: 75.8 years, Females: 81.1 years. The top aging populations are as follows: 

Monaco (87 years), San Marino, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, Australia, Italy, Singapore, and Spain (83.8 years).1 The USA (79.61) is nowhere near, thanks to their ghastly and incompetent healthcare system, which works solely for profit and not for patient benefit (48th in the table). In fact the USA is the only country in which life expectancy has declined in recent years. Pharma and Providers profits have gone UP, while patients die sooner.

It’s a crime.

Anyway, Here Are A Few Fun Aging Facts Worth Repeating: 

1. Of all the people who have ever reached the age of 65 years, more than half of us are still alive!

2. If you reach the age of 60 in good health, you have a 50/50 chance of making it to 85 (and of course if you reach 85, you have a pretty good chance of making the century!)

3. If you make it to 50 in good health, your futurelife expectancy is now longer than what the average newborn could expect in most of human history. You essentially “outlived the past.” 

4. The fastest-growing age group in many developed nations is people over 100. We’re breeding centenarians like mushrooms after rain—this trend is explored beautifully in the United Nations report World Population Ageing 2020 Highlights, which noted a fifteenfold increase in centenarians since the 1960s.

5. Happiness tends to rise after midlife. The “U-curve of well-being” as it’s called shows that life satisfaction bottoms out in the 40s and 50s and then climbs steadily into the 70s and beyond. Older adults routinely report being calmer, less reactive, and more joyful than their younger selves. This arc shows up across 72 countries in Blanchflower & Oswald’s work “Is well-being U-shaped over the life cycle?”(Social Science & Medicine, 2008).

6. Here’s a fun one: if you’re a woman in Japan and you’ve made it to 80, your life expectancy from that point forwardis still longer than total life expectancy in Victorian England. In other words, at 80 you’re basically outliving entire historical eras!

7. The brain also gets a little magical with age (not what the propaganda says, is it?) While raw processing speed declines, pattern recognition, verbal intelligence, and emotional regulation often improve. Laura Carstensen’s work at Stanford (e.g., “Socioemotional selectivity theory”, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2006) shows that older adults are betterat prioritizing meaning, connection, and emotional balance. Aging brains become sages rather than failed supercomputers.

8. Your immune system, though it shifts with age, becomes more tolerant. Autoimmune flare risk often softens, and allergic reactions can mellow. Many people lose allergies in their 60s or 70s. So-called inflammatory cytokines are dangerous, remember. This quenching phenomenon has been noted in longitudinal studies summarized in “Immunosenescence: emerging challenges and potentials”(Nature Reviews Immunology, 2019).

9. Another demographic gem: if you’re a 70-year-old man or woman walking into a room full of 70-year-olds today, you’re statistically fitter, stronger, and mentally sharper than a 70-year-old from the 1990s. This is due to what gerontologists call the “cohort effect”—each generation enters old age healthier than the last (except in the USA). A clean overview appears in The Lancet Healthy Longevity2021 review on global aging trajectories.

And here’s a mischievous closer: your odds of living to 90 are higher today than your odds of surviving childhood were in most of human history. Aging used to be a privilege; now it’s practically a biological hobby.

What’s The Secret?

I started out this little verbal journey with one thing in mind: sharing with you the two MOST POWERFUL anti-agers and they are not supplements or biohacks!

A sense of PURPOSE and a sense of BELONGING.

A deep sense of purpose is one of the body’s quiet longevity engines, humming beneath the surface like a secret power plant. When you know why you’re here—when something bigger than your to-do list keeps tugging you forward—the entire physiological orchestra shifts its tune. The nervous system softens. The immune system steadies. Stress hormones stop behaving like jumpy toddlers. Purpose creates coherence, and coherence is biologically protective.

People with a strong sense of meaning tend to show lower levels of interleukin-6, a pro-inflammatory cytokine tied to aging. That thread shows up in Patricia Boyle’s work, “Purpose in Life and Mortality in Older Adults” (Psychosomatic Medicine, 2009), where adults with higher purpose scores were less likely to die over the follow-up period—even after controlling for health, depression, and socioeconomic factors. The body seems to listen when the spirit has direction and meaning.

Purpose also shapes behavior effortlessly. You move more. You connect more. You choose food and relationships that nourish rather than deplete. Metabolism likes that. So does the heart. In the long-running Health and Retirement Study, researchers found that individuals with greater purpose had better sleep, better lipid profiles, and reduced mortality risk (Hill & Turiano, Journal of Health Psychology, 2014).

If you haven’t already done so, you need to connect with something meaningful.

Belonging is one of the great biological love spells—so ordinary we forget its magic, so powerful it reaches into our mitochondria and whispers, stay a little longer. When you feel held by a circle of people who know you, when your nervous system can finally unclench because it trusts the room, your whole body drifts into a gentler operating mode—lower cortisol; higher oxytocin; kindlier blood pressure; the immune system stands up straighter, as if finally assured it’s not fighting alone.

Strong social ties are consistently linked with longer life, a truth spelled out beautifully in Julianne Holt-Lunstad et al.’s landmark meta-analysis, “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review” (Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. PLoS Medicine, 2010). They found that people with robust social connections had a 50% increased likelihood of survival across time—an effect size comparable to quitting smoking. That’s how deeply the body cares about connection.

Belonging also corrects our biology through behavior: shared meals, laughter, gentle accountability, and the quiet permission to be YOURSELF. In Dan Buettner’s work on long-lived communities (The Blue Zones, National Geographic Books, 2012), every region overflowing with centenarians is woven through with strong social bonds.

When we feel we belong, life itself becomes less hazardous and more luminous—and the body votes to keep the experience going.

Keep your love letters to me coming, especially those of you over the age of 80!

To your health,
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

Sources:

https://www.ndtv.com/travel/countries-where-people-live-the-longest-7903093

United Nations.
2020. World Population Ageing 2020 Highlights. New York: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division.
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/content/world-population-ageing-2020-highlights

Armitage, Peter; & Doll, Richard.
1954. The Age Distribution of Cancer and a Multi-stage Theory of Carcinogenesis. British Journal of Cancer, 8(1): 1–12.
https://doi.org/10.1038/bjc.1954.1

Blanchflower, David G.; & Oswald, Andrew J.
2008. Is Well-being U-shaped over the Life Cycle? Social Science & Medicine, 66(8): 1733–1749.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2008.01.030

Carstensen, Laura L.; Isaacowitz, Derek M.; & Charles, Susan T.
2006. Socioemotional Selectivity Theory and the Regulation of Emotion in the Second Half of Life. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(4): 207–211.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2006.00433.x

Pawelec, Graham; et al.
2019. Immunosenescence—Emerging Challenges and Potential. Nature Reviews Immunology, 19(5): 295–305.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41577-019-0179-7

Steves, Claire J.; Spector, Tim D.; & Jackson, Samuel H. D.
2012. Ageing, Genes, and Cohort Effects: The Meaningful Increase in Health at Older Ages. The Lancet, 379(9824): 1295–1296.
(See also subsequent cohort-effect analyses in The Lancet Healthy Longevity, various issues, 2021–2023.)

Life table data for survival probabilities (e.g., “of all humans who ever reached 65, more than half are alive today”).
World Health Organization. 2019. Global Health Estimates. Geneva: WHO.
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 2019. World Population Prospects 2019. New York: UN DESA.
These datasets support the demographic calculations regarding modern survival past age 65 compared to historical cohorts.

Dan Buettner’s work on centenarians trends (supporting the “fastest-growing age group” comment).
Buettner, Dan. 2012. The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. National Geographic Books.
(Originally based on U.S. Census Bureau and U.N. centenarian data demonstrating dramatic growth in the 100+ population.)

We’ve all said it: “Let’s sleep on it.” Often when something troubling feels overwhelming today, it seems more manageable after a good night’s sleep. Why? Because sleep — especially REM-sleep (dream-sleep) — is healing. It helps process psychological stress, integrate difficult experiences into our mental framework, and reduce the sharp edges of what otherwise would feel unbearable.

Walker’s point: it isn’t time alone that heals all wounds. It’s time in sleep, and especially dream cycles (REM), that provide emotional convalescence. Research supports this: sleeping on things allows emotional memory processing and diminishes the raw intensity of trauma.

Beyond mental healing, the scope of sleep’s importance spans every major physiological system — neurological, lymphatic, immune, hormonal, cardiovascular, metabolic. Chronic sleep deprivation appears to be associated with myriad poor health outcomes including poorer cognitive function, impaired immunological responses (such as reduced efficacy of vaccines) and an increased risk of diabetes and obesity, to name but a few. 

Indeed lack of adequate quality sleep can kill! It has been shown experimentally in rats that total sleep deprivation is rapidly fatal in a comparable time frame to total food starvation, on average 15 days. 

Absence of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep was similarly fatal in about 15 days whilst selective suppression of non-REM sleep was also fatal but in a longer time frame (around 45 days).¹ 

So this is important” take notice!

Immune system vulnerability

Your immune system strongly depends on healthy sleep. In one experiment, healthy subjects restricted to four hours of sleep for one night experienced a 70 % drop in key cancer-fighting immune cells (natural killer cells). This shows just how quickly sleep deprivation can meaningfully impair immune defense. ² 

Hormonal ageing and male health

Sleep restriction also profoundly affects hormonal systems. In a study on healthy males restricted to just four or five hours of sleep per night for a week, testosterone levels dropped to the equivalent of a man ten years older. In other words: chronic short sleep pushes physiological ageing forward.³ 

Summary: Sleep as system-wide reset

Sleep isn’t something you get after life’s work is done; sleep is the foundation layer of life’s work. Without it: immune fragility, hormonal inversion, cardiovascular stress, impaired cognition, emotional dysregulation — all climb quickly. The data support Walker’s statement that sleep is not optional. ⁴ 

Get your sleep, for sure, and then fit in life and duties around that, without disturbing your sleep routine.

Here are evidence-based, medically-grounded tips to improve sleep quality — particularly useful for those of you with demanding schedules, irregular nights, or intermittent insomnia.

1. Prioritize regularity

Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day(yes, weekends too). Consistency anchors your brain’s 24-hour clock (the circadian pacemaker) and strengthens sleep quality. ⁵ 

Instead of just setting your wake-up alarm, consider a “time-for-bed alarm”. That’s your cue to wind down behaviorally, reducing the “lying awake wondering if I’ll sleep” trap.

2. Create darkness in the last hour

Light at night suppresses melatonin release — melatonin signals the body that it’s night and time for sleep. So: in the final hour before you plan to sleep:

• Dim the lights by about half.

• Turn off screens (computers, tablets, phones). Blue-light plus cognitive/emotional arousal from scrolling kills sleep quality. Consider blackout curtains or reducing ambient light from devices/chargers.⁶ 

3. Keep your bedroom cool

Your body temperature needs to drop by about 1 °C (or 2–3 °F) for optimal sleep onset and maintenance. That is why you may have trouble falling asleep in a “stuffy” room. A room that’s too cold is better than one that’s too hot. Aim for ~18 °C (?65 °F). Layering (hot water bottle, socks) is fine — just the ambient room should be cool.

4. Don’t linger in bed awake

If you’re in bed for more than ~25–30 minutes and you’re still awake, get up. Lie-waiting teaches your brain that “bed = being awake”, which undermines sleep associations. Instead: get out of bed, go to another room, do something quiet and relaxing (not screen-heavy), and return when sleepy.

This may feel counter-intuitive, especially when you’re exhausted, but it resets the bed-sleep connection.

5. Moderation of caffeine & alcohol

• Caffeine: Blocks adenosine, the chemical that builds “sleep pressure” while awake. Caffeine late in the day undermines sleep onset and depth. 

• Alcohol: While it may sedate you initially, it suppresses REM sleep and causes frequent awakenings. That compromises the essential emotional-processing phase of sleep.⁶ 

After a bad night: don’t over-compensate

If you had a terrible night, resist the impulse to: wake up later, nap longer, or go to bed earlier. These all disrupt your schedule and can lead into a cycle of poor sleep. Instead: get up at your usual time, avoid long naps, wake gently, go about your day. Your brain will rebuild healthy sleep momentum.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

In today’s hyper-connected, 24/7 culture, sleep is undervalued. We mistakenly treat it as “lost productive time,” when in fact it is the time our brain and body use to restore, repair, and integrate. According to Walker, “[Sleep] is the single most effective thing that we can do each and every day to reset our brain and body health.” ⁷ 

Ignoring sleep is not just sub-optimal; data show it increases risk for serious disease: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular events, impaired immunity, accelerated aging, cognitive decline. 

There is compelling epidemiological data around daylight saving time changes. When we lose one hour of sleep in the spring, there is a ~24 % relative increase in heart attacks the next day. Conversely, when we gain an hour in the fall, heart attack rates drop by about 21 %. These shifts underscore how finely tuned our cardiovascular system is to sleep adequacy.

Other correlations: road traffic accidents spike, suicide rates shift, even judge sentencing shows variation with less sleep. The less you sleep, the worse the decision-making, the poorer the self-regulation.

One study even saw a drop in quality foods chosen by participants who were sleep deprived. Subjects had a significantly greater desire for high-calorie, weight-gain-promoting foods.⁸ 

Sleep needs to be addressed with the same urgency as diet, exercise, medication. Often times sleep is the hidden variable.

Final Summary & Patient Message

Sleep is not optional. It’s a non-negotiable component of health. Treat it as your life-support system.

For patients: frame sleep as the foundation of your prescription: fix the sleep schedule, advance the dark-cool environment, reduce screen/blue-light exposure before bed, moderate caffeine and alcohol, and rescue the behavioral association between bed and sleep.

Summary Of Healthy Sleep Habits

Bedtime Routine

Set regular hours. Go to bed and wake up at the same time daily (weekends included).

Use a “to-bed alarm.” Set a reminder 30–60 min before target bedtime.

No screens 1 hour before bed. Dim all lights by half.

Keep bedroom dark, cool, and quiet. Ideal room temp ? 65 °F (18 °C).

During the Night

If you can’t fall asleep after ~25 min:  Leave bed, go to another dimly lit room, do something calm (reading, breathing, quiet music).

Return to bed only when genuinely sleepy.

Avoid heavy meals, alcohol, and caffeine within 3 hours of bedtime.

Daytime Habits

Get morning light exposure (10–20 min) to anchor circadian rhythm.

Exercise regularly, but finish intense workouts ? 3 hours before bed.

Caffeine cut-off: No caffeine after 2 p.m. (earlier for sensitive patients).

Skip long naps. If necessary, keep naps < 30 minutes before 3 p.m.

If You Had a Bad Night

Do nothing extreme…

? Don’t sleep in late, to try and catch up.

? Don’t nap long hours, to try and catch up.

? Don’t go to bed early, to try and catch up.

? Don’t overload on caffeine, to stay awake!

Just resume your regular schedule; your sleep drive will self-correct the next night.

When to Seek Further Evaluation

Persistent insomnia > 3 months.

Loud snoring, choking, or witnessed apneas (stopping breathing).

Excessive daytime sleepiness.

Restless legs, parasomnias, so-called narcolepsy (falling asleep without choice during the day) or shift-work insomnia.

Ask your doctor a referral for sleep study (polysomnography) or CBT-I (cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia).

Finally, One Last Resource!

This one is massive. Falling asleep means dropping from beta-frequency brainwaves to alpha (12 Hz), to theta (4 -6 Hz) and then delta (0.5 – 4 Hz), which is deep sleep. So what if you could hum to the brain and persuade it to drop gently from beta, to alpha, theta and then into delta. You would fall asleep (couldn’t help yourself, actually)!

Well, it can be done. I am associated with a device which can deliver these soporific brain frequencies. It’s called the Kasina and it wraps 4 different sleep aids into one pleasant “mind walk.” I have had patients say they could not stay awake till the end!

The 4 modalities are:

1. Binaural beats

2. Photic driving (flashing lights)

3. Slow relaxing music, integrated with the sounds

4. A calm, relaxing voice giving you instructions to travel in your mind in creative ways.

Go here to learn more.

To your good health,Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

SOURCES:

1. Brain, Volume 141, Issue 6, June 2018, Pages 1884–1886, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awy115
2. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/01/27/what-an-insomniac-knows
3. https://time.com/7160802/sleep-longevity-live-longer-health/
4. Br J Gen Pract. 2018 Apr;68(669):193. doi: 10.3399/bjgp18X695609
5. https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/10/17/whywesleep/
6. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/matthew-walker-on-improving-sleep-quality
7. https://www.cogneurosociety.org/going-deep-sleep-matthew-walker/
8. Nat Commun. 2013;4:2259. doi: 10.1038/ncomms3259

Just don’t expect to read about it in the press or hear a TV segment that shares these remarkable discoveries. For the longest time now, “science” has  been conducted in the media. You have journalists “commenting” on things they don’t even understand but they do know their job: they have been told to trash contrary voices and take down personalities with dissenting views.

This is blared across headlines and the public assumes that there is a science debate going on. NO THERE ISN’T. It’s just character assassination. And there are always creepy individuals to step up to the plate and lie or dissemble. One wonders are they getting paid? Or just vicious nasty human beings who seek the chance to pour evil on good!

Take an article which ran recently in the doctors’ daily blog MedPage Today (Sept 30^th): it was a takedown of actress and activist Jenny McCarthy. She’s a shining light in social media with millions of followers and what I consider quite balanced and sensible views. 

But she was labelled an “antivaxxer”. That’s always a good start if you want to destroy someone’s credibility. In fact it’s a lie. In her own words she considers herself in favor of “safe vaccination” (well, who isn’t?)

But she dared to get in on the Tylenol (acetaminophen) debate and therefore she must be destroyed.

My readers will probably remember I was there long before the current wave, with reservations about Tylenol and its possible role in autism. Nearly 10 years ago I drew attention to the fact that Cuba had a very high rate of vaccination (over 99%) and yet almost NO autism, coming in at around 0.00168% of the population!¹

Surely this is a screaming siren calling attention to the fact that all current theories are probably wrong? Well, this is another “I told ‘em” but now everyone seems onto the story. And good job it is so.

Note: What is highly significant is that, here in the USA doctors routinely advise acetaminophen/paracetamol as a prophylactic for the fever that commonly accompanies vaccination, even up to five days beforehand! In fact some kids get their first autistic symptoms before vaccination!

In Cuba, the drug metamizole is most commonly prescribed for fever and NOT acetaminophen/paracetamol.

“While some of McCarthy’s claims are rooted in truth,” the critical piece said, “An expert told MedPage Today that McCarthy mischaracterized the relationship between acetaminophen and glutathione and manipulated information to fit an agenda.” 

Oh, just exactly like normal scientists then! As for “expert”, I would say dimwit. But we’ll come to that in a moment.

Glutathione is, of course, our number #1 detox molecule. Without it, we’d be dead in hours.²

“But what if your body is low in glutathione?” Jenny McCarthy posited. “What if that detox methylation system gets kind of jolted, broken, if you will, lowers so that it cannot detox the adjuvants, the aluminum in the body? Then it winds up floating around the body, attaching to brain, gut — you name it.” 

McCarthy recommended not taking Tylenol before or after vaccines and to get glutathione levels checked. Here’s where the blog trotted out a phoney as an “expert”

“I personally have never ordered a glutathione level or checked it in my entire life as a toxicologist,” Lauren Shawn, MD, an emergency medicine physician and medical toxicologist at Phelps Hospital in Sleepy Hollow, New York, told MedPage Today. “Glutathione level itself is not really clinically relevant to me in my practice.”

She’s a toxicologist and glutathione is not relevant to her practice? It’s like saying she’s cardiologist but doesn’t need a stethescope and can’t read an EKG!

As for vaccines, Shawn said that the recommendation to not take acetaminophen or other anti-inflammatories before a shot is to avoid blunting the immune response and has nothing to do with glutathione or fears of toxicity. Lying again: the 99% reason doctors prescribe acetaminophen is to control the fever which almost invariably results from a shot.

And goes on with breathtaking ignorance, to say, “Taking acetaminophen afterwards to manage symptoms is absolutely fine.”

She clearly has not read the latest science that shows acetaminophen to be a very toxic substance which no one should take, ever.

Toxicity from acute or chronic overuse of acetaminophen is an actual concern, and N-acetylcysteine, which helps the body make glutathione, is the antidote. NAC is a precursor of glutathione.³

In an online video, McCarthy shared that she and her son, who has autism, both have naturally low glutathione levels, even though she didn’t take acetaminophen before or after vaccines, and they both get weekly glutathione IV infusions.

The Dimwit Continues

Shawn said glutathione is one of the hot new treatments in alternative medicine, even though evidence doesn’t support the therapy. This is a criminally negative doctor talking. There are TONS of papers on the clinical importance of glutathione in medicine and health.

“Best-case scenario you’re giving yourself expensive urine,” she added. Ah, the old “expensive urine therapy” ploy. Well, statins give you VERY expensive urine, for no real benefit. Same with anti-depressants.

Shawn also said anti-vaxxers like McCarthy and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “use the big medical terms and words, and they sort of touch on things that are kind of correct,” but don’t have the expertise to analyze and understand the data.

So… if someone says something that’s accurate and true, you can discredit them by saying they don’t have the expertise to analyze and understand the data. Well, how expert do you have to be to understand that Tylenol is repeatedly associated (lots of studies!!) with psychological damage and social withdrawal. Loss of positive empathy, they call it… kind of like autism?⁴

“I just think it’s so dangerous that these celebrities and non-healthcare professionals are saying things as the truth without real evidence or understanding of what they’re saying, and they’re convincing other people to follow their lead,” Shawn said.

She’s lying, of course, because there is lots of evidence for what McCarthy is saying. Yes. She’s not medically trained. But any intelligent person can understand the issues, if you just read the science (which Shawn clearly has not done!)

The article for MedPage Today was written by under-performing journalist Rachael Robertson.

One of the comments below her article was by an RN: 

Why do we even have to listen to those WITHOUT ANY MEDICAL BACKGROUND? They have their own agenda and don’t listen to anything they don’t agree with. Seems like anyone who wants some publicity can start spouting their views. Is there any common sense left?

We have this expression in England (from centuries past): The pot calling the kettle black. Get it?

To your good health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

Main Source:

https://www.medpagetoday.com/popmedicine/cultureclinic/117722

Citations:

1. https://alternative-doctor.com/cause-of-add-acetaminophen-during-pregnancy/
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4684116/
3. https://www.jci.org/articles/view/110853?utm_source=chatgpt.com
4. Front. Psychol., 29 March 2019. Sec. Perception Science, Volume 10 – 2019 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00538

The number 10,000 came originally from a Japanese company that was selling pedometers in 1965, and they gave it a name that, in Japanese, means ‘the 10,000-step meter.’ It became a buzz in Japan but not here in the West, until the publication of Hill’s book (2004).

Lou’s article is reporting on an Australian study in published the Lancet Public Health (2025) investigating exercize for physical wellbeing (particularly heart health), and psychological health, which is not the same.¹ 

It is no surprise that upping your exercize game and making sure you do at least 10,000 steps a day makes you feel fitter, fresher, brighter. It lowers the risk of dementia. Reduces cancer mortality and the incidence of type 2 diabetes.  It’s good for heart health too. However, there is no magic to the number 10,000. Its origin is in marketing, not physiology or science. 

And now, to the relief of many, this large meta-analysis demonstrated convincingly that 5,000 – 7,000 steps a day will do the job nicely! That’s great because 10,000 steps a day (5 miles approximately) is all very well for youngsters but for us Boomers, it’s quite a target. 

And maybe you live in a neighborhood where being out walking isn’t safe or you feel unsteady on the sidewalks or (as in Las Vegas where I live) whole sections of the sidewalk are missing, forcing you onto the road.

Basically—up to a point—the more you walk the more your health will benefit. There was a significant reduction in risks of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease incidence, dementia, cancer incidence, cancer mortality, type 2 diabetes incidence, depressive symptoms and falls in people logging more steps; the sweet spot was around 5,000 to 7,000 steps per day, with not much extra benefit by doing more! 

Compared with 2,000 steps per day, walking 7,000 steps per day was associated with:

• A significant 47% lower risk of all-cause mortality

• A significant 25% lower risk of incident cardiovascular disease incidence

• A significant 47% lower risk of cardiovascular disease mortality

• A non-significant 6% lower risk of cancer incidence

• A significant 37% lower risk of cancer mortality

• A significant 14% lower risk of type 2 diabetes

• A significant 38% lower risk of dementia

• A significant 22% lower risk of depressive symptoms

• A significant 28% lower risk of falls

“Although 10,000 steps per day, an unofficial target for decades without a clear evidence base, was associated with substantially lower risks for all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease incidence, cancer mortality, dementia, and depressive symptoms than 7,000 steps per day, the incremental improvement beyond 7,000 steps per day was small, and there was no statistical difference between 7,000 steps per day and a higher step count for all the other outcomes,” the investigators wrote in Lancet Public Health.

And in case you are wondering, other research has shown that physical activity can be done on a daily or saved for just 1 or 2 days of the week. Either will bring health benefits.

Thing Is We Need Exercize

We are biological movers; lying and dozing in warm water like hippos or crocs is not for us humans! There are two problems with activity as we age: the loss of muscle power and the general slowing down that comes so easy to us, despite trying to keep it at bay.

Fight back, we must. I find that having a PURPOSE to exercize makes it a happier event: walking to the coffee shop, doing a circuit of the local block, or getting involved in a sport, such as badminton, pickle ball or tennis.

Don’t under-estimate dance. It has advantages over and above the energy output: a good sense of rhythm and music, which are enjoyable anyway; a feeling of grace and beauty (over and above the sweating!); and it works well in short bites, which walking and cycling do not!

Fitness Rings

No need to actually count steps! In the old days I used to have a pedometer. They didn’t seem very durable and in any case I was always misplacing them. These days it’s easy! Even your smart phone or watch will count your steps!

But recently I have gone one further and bought one of those ring health monitors. It looks just like an ornamental ring on my finger (right hand) but actually it’s a clever electronic device, which can monitor your heart rate, HRV, breathing, sleep patterns and steps.

While still fairly new, these smart rings have gained momentum in the fitness industry, since these fitness trackers are much more discreet than watches and bands. In recent studies they’ve been shown to be just as accurate as traditional fitness tracker watches and bands (although the level of accuracy may vary brand to brand).²

The Oura Ring is supposed to be the gold standard model. But I think it’s a rip off: you buy the ring and then you have to pay a monthly fee to access the software. A $300 ring with a $10 monthly subscription ends up costing you $420 in the first year, and $720 over three years! Get tired of paying and you waste the purchase cost of the ring!

I have the RingConn, founded in 2021 by three doctors and launched in 2023. It is sold outright (around $300) and you get the software with it, for life. You can get models in gold, silver, black and rose. For just$1 you are sent a box of different size rings to try on and see which best fits your hand.

The RingConn has a unique shape to it; instead of a circular band, the ring has a rounded square shape, which is supposed to fit the contours of your finger better and also help measure metrics more accurately.

The RingConn has three distinct sensors:

• A 3D accelerometer, which tracks movements and aids in activity tracking

• A temperature sensor to detect skin temperature and provide health and wellness indicators

• A PPG (photoplethysmography) sensor that tracks heart rate and cardiovascular health

Thus the device can be used to track and measure sleep stages and give you sleep scores and readiness insights—as well as stress levels, steps, period forecasts (for women), and overall calories burned. It claims to be the first smart ring to detect sleep apnea, a very dangerous and often missed health condition.

The main complaint I have is that the step count is often suspiciously high and I think not quite accurate. But plenty good enough to make day-to-day, not absolute, comparisons.

[I am not an agent for RingConn and earn no commissions from them].

With or without a smart ring, walk your way to happiness and a long life!

To your good health,Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

References:

1. “Daily steps and health outcomes in adults: a systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis” Lancet Public Health 2025; DOI: 10.1016/S2468-2667(25)00164-1.
2. J Korean Med Sci. 2024 Jan 15;39(2):e18.  doi: 10.3346/jkms.2024.39.e18

I like his point but—just to clarify—the Law of 70s in not like the 80/20 rule (applies to almost anything), it’s actually a financial multiplier formula. Turns out that it measures the time it takes for interest or other value to double in value. It’s simply 70 divided by your growth rate. So if your interest increases  regularly at 10% a year, it will take 7 years to double your holdings (70 divided by 10). If it grows at 5% then it will take 14 years, right? (70 divided by 5). Simple. But not really relevant!

On with the 70s then. Dr. Ham has uncovered a few startling ones:

• A Korean War study examined the coronary arteries of American soldiers who had died in their 20s and found that 70% of them had atherosclerosis (with 5% having up to 90% narrowing of the arteries)

• 70% of heart attacks happen to those with normal LDL cholesterol levels

• 70% of heart attacks are caused by early smaller soft plaques in the coronary arteries rather than the older more calcified obstructive plaques

• More than 80% blockage in your left anterior descending coronary artery puts you at a greater than 70% chance of sudden death (not for nothing, the left anterior descending coronary artery is christened “the widow maker”!)

The point is that, with serious atherosclerosis starting in your 20s (often in the teens: fact), the possibility of being pretty clogged at say 55 or 65 is rather high. That means an awful lot of guys (yes, men preponderate) are going to drop dead unexpectedly. The first symptoms of heart trouble may be, as a friend joked, waking up in Heaven!

What can you do to protect yourself?

The first step is to get a status report. That can be done by asking for a calcium heart scan. It’s a kind of CT scan and you don’t have to swallow any preliminary dyes, etc. Just turn up! The more calcium you have deposited in your coronary arteries, the more danger you are in. Results above 500 are actually very dangerous.

But here’s the major point: sudden blockages (a so-called “coronary”) that take you out in less than a minute don’t usually come from these old, calcified obstructions.

70% of heart attacks occur from plaques that are more newly formed, that are soft and not calcified. These can rupture, like a pimple, and their content can lead to a blood clot that suddenly fully obstructs the heart vessel. In these cases, a stent can be life-saving as it allows blood to flow. But as a real solution, stenting is worthless and survival figures show it. As with a bypass, it’s really just like a plumber fixing a short section of rotten pipe when the whole plumbing system is rotten and weak. 

Doesn’t make sense.

So what do we do? We get rid of the coronary artery calcifications! Easy to say but surely not easy to do? Well, it’s not as difficult as you might think. You just have to go about it the right way. As in all things, you don’t have to get to zero; just reduce your body’s burden to where it can cope.

A 20% – 50% reduction will get you right back into the safety zone. Be assured, coronary artery calcification can be reversed.

Step #1. ABANDON ALL MEDS

There is no drug that will undo the years of unhealthy living. You’ve got to grasp that. With cardiovascular disease (heart attacks and strokes) riding as the number one killer in all the civilized world (but worst in the USA) you have to figure that DOCTORS ARE NOT ON TOP OF THIS.

The reason is simple: they are distracted by drugs and the fake science, such as the smoke-and-mirrors surrounding statins. They simply prescribe the latest drug “solution” to the problem and do not take the trouble to look upstream and find the real cause of the adverse condition, which is ALWAYS about diet and lifestyle. It is NOT about pathogens, it is NOT about genes, it is NOT about fats or cholesterol, it is NOT about deficiencies…

It’s about throwing the wrong things at your body which are causing widespread (so-called systemic) inflammation. I’m talking about wrong foods, faulty nutrition (not quite the same thing), toxic chemicals, EMF radiation, vaccines, wrong sleep and wrong movement patterns. And of course don’t forget stress, which is right up there, though not as an immediate cause of coronary artery calcification!

Step #2. OVERHAUL YOUR DIET

I do NOT mean follow the dogmas: the high carb, low carb, low fat, vegetarian, plant-based (again, not quite the same thing), calorie controlled, keto or whatever…

I mean ASK your own body what foods IT likes and dislikes! You are the most recent step in an evolutionary line that has been experimenting and diversifying for millions of years. It makes NO SENSE whatever to suppose we are all the same and need the same things to eat for optimum health. No sense whatsoever. But that’s what medical “science” is based on.

As it happens, we are into my wheelhouse. At my age I could now be considered the doyen of food and environmental allergies and their multiple and varied effects. We early adventurers produced MIRACLES by eliminating select foods from a person’s diet. I don’t mean just casein and gluten allergy; you can tell an absolute phoney “expert” by that, it means they just Googled for their “knowledge”. There is more, MUCH MORE, to food allergies than that.

Anyone who has done their time—and I admit there are almost none of the 70s and 80s pioneers now left alive (me, Damien Downing, Jean Monro, Sherry Rogers, and a few others)—will tell you a person can react to anything, anything at all.

I rarely use the term food allergy or food intolerance these days. I call ‘em BANDIT FOODS, which is a sort of social media thumbnail concept. It works.

I wrote a book guiding you on how to help your body by learning how to question it and get real, safe, answers as to what to eat and what to avoid. For many, it’s the compete opposite of the government pyramid or what wannabe nutritionists are telling you. We’re all different!

Get the book here.

Step #3. THE RIGHT NUTRIENTS.

Here’s where the right nutrients really do help. Viz:

Vitamin K2 is great at de-calcifying coronary arteries. Ideally you need to take several milligrams daily. Most supplements are pitiful and supply around 100 mcg or 200 mcg. Not enough if you are serious.

Personally, I take Koncentrated K, which is a blend containing all-natural versions of vitamin K1 and K2, plus Astaxanthin. Vitamin K1 is phylloquinone and MK4 (25 mg) and MK7 (0.5 mg) menaquinones or K2s. These are the highest doses of any product on the market. You can buy the product on Amazon.

[Incidentally, you should take this even just to counter the effect of vitamin D,  which is great to take, but it does tend to deposit calcium in your blood vessels, where we DON’T want it]

Vitamin C 

Vitamin C does a lot of great things. But you may not know how vital it is for a healthy heart and blood vessels. Simply put, there is a cogent theory that thickening of the arteries is a kind of scurvy (vitamin C deficiency disease). According to this model, which I embrace entirely, the arteriosclerotic plaques are just non-healing scars produced by the lack of vitamin C. The thickening is the body’s response and includes the use of cholesterol derivatives. BUT CHOLESTEROL DOES NOT CAUSE THE PLAQUES. It just heals them. That’s why statins are, basically, just based on junk science.

You need to take 5 – 10 grams daily, as a minimum. You’ll likely get diarrhea and abdominal pain if you try! But there is an answer: my own Super C is especially formulated to get round this problem. But as I have written all along, it may not suit everybody. After all: we are all different! 

Buy some Super C from Dr. Keith’s Own

Live well, Live long!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor