Senior Health Columnist
Robert Tanaka specializes in gerontology and longevity research. With a Master's in Gerontology from USC, he has studied centenarian populations across Asia and the Blue Zones, bringing unique cross-cultural insights to healthy aging.
Older adults lose muscle even when total daily protein looks adequate on paper. The variable that turns out to matter is not how much protein you eat but how it is distributed across meals — and the threshold per meal that triggers muscle protein synthesis.
Telomere length has been treated as a master clock for biological aging in popular discussions and as something more complicated in the actual research. The disconnect between what the science demonstrates and what wellness products claim has been growing for fifteen years.
Peak bone mass is reached in the third decade and declines for the rest of life. The decline is not uniform, not untreatable, and not as inevitable as the conventional framing suggests — but the window for meaningful intervention is narrower than most adults realize until it has already closed.
Five regions around the world produce an extraordinary concentration of centenarians. Their dietary patterns share surprising commonalities that challenge modern nutritional assumptions.