Amy Meyers RD, CLT

06/17/2026

Strength training lowers death risk. The benefit caps at about two hours a week.

A new analysis pooled three Harvard cohorts. 147,374 adults. Up to 30 years of follow-up. 35,798 deaths. Resistance training time was self-reported repeatedly across the follow-up window. The analysis is observational, which means it cannot prove causation. It can map the dose-response curve, and the shape of that curve is the entire point.

The shape is consistent across every major cause of death. Risk drops fast as weekly training rises from zero. By 60 minutes a week, most of the benefit has already happened. By 120 minutes a week, the curve goes flat. Past two hours, more lifting did not produce further reductions in any outcome the study measured. At the plateau, compared to no resistance training, all-cause death was 13% lower. Cardiovascular death was 19% lower. Neurological death was 27% lower. Cancer was the only outcome that did not follow the same curve. The cancer benefit appeared only at low volumes (1 to 59 minutes per week) at 9 to 12% lower risk, and by the time training crossed two hours, that signal was gone.

This is where the broader literature matters, because the Zhang paper is not an outlier. It is the largest cohort to date to confirm a curve that pooled data was already showing four years ago. Shailendra et al. (2022, Am J Prev Med) ran a meta-analysis of 10 prior studies looking at this exact question. They reported a 15% reduction in all-cause mortality from any resistance training, with a peak benefit of 27% reduction at around 60 minutes per week, and explicitly noted that reductions diminished at higher volumes. Same curve. Same plateau. Same peak benefit window. The Zhang 2026 analysis confirms the shape with a sample size more than ten times larger and a follow-up window long enough to capture neurological mortality, which prior cohorts were underpowered to detect.

This consistency matters because the field has had a quiet running disagreement about whether resistance training's mortality benefit is real or whether it is mostly a marker of people who are generally more health-conscious. The shape of the curve is the strongest argument against the marker hypothesis. If the relationship were purely confounded by lifestyle, you would not expect a clean, replicable dose-response with a plateau at the same time window across independent cohorts. You would expect the benefit to track total exercise volume and not flatten. It does flatten. And it flattens in the same place every time.

Adults who layered meaningful aerobic exercise on top of their resistance training saw the largest reductions in this analysis, up to 47% lower all-cause death at the high end of combined volume. This is also consistent with the broader literature. Every major cohort that has looked at combined activity has found that aerobic plus resistance outperforms either alone, often by a large margin. The lifting plateau is a real ceiling on what more strength training can buy you. It is not a ceiling on what more total exercise can buy you.

The mechanistic reading is that resistance training and aerobic training drive partly overlapping and partly distinct biology. Resistance training is doing most of its work on muscle mass, insulin signaling, glycemic control, and skeletal strength. Those adaptations saturate. The marginal lifter going from zero to two hours a week gains them. The marginal lifter going from two to four hours a week has already captured them. Aerobic training drives cardiac output, mitochondrial density, endothelial function, and VO2 max. Those pathways do not saturate at the same training volume. The combined effect on mortality is larger than either alone because the two stimuli are not doing the same job.

The minimum effective dose for the survival benefit of lifting is closer to 60 minutes a week than to the 150 minutes the guidelines push. The optimal dose is about two hours. Past two hours a week, hours four through ten are doing something for your physique, your strength, your enjoyment, your performance. They are not doing anything additional for your death risk in this dataset. If your goal is longevity rather than performance, two hours a week of lifting plus 150 to 300 minutes a week of moderate aerobic activity is the combination the data supports.

This is observational data. Self-reported exercise time is noisy. The cohorts skew toward US health professionals, which means the population is healthier and more educated than the general population. The study measured time, not intensity, exercise selection, or program design. The 47% figure for the combined group is the upper bound and applies to high aerobic volumes. The 13/19/27% reductions for lifting alone at two hours a week are the more defensible numbers.

Lifting cuts death risk. The benefit plateaus at around two hours a week. The way to move the number further is to stack cardio on top, not more sets.

Zhang et al., Br J Sports Med, 2026
Shailendra et al., Am J Prev Med, 2022

06/06/2026

For 50 years, eggs were treated like a cardiovascular threat. The 1960s dietary guidelines capped cholesterol intake at 300mg per day. Two eggs put you at the limit. The advice moved millions away from the food, and away from a nutrient profile we didn't fully appreciate at the time.

A new study from Loma Linda University followed 39,498 adults age 65 and older for 15.3 years. The team linked Adventist Health Study-2 dietary records with Medicare diagnoses. Over that window, 2,858 participants developed Alzheimer's disease.

The dose-response was clean.
Eating eggs 1 to 3 times a month: 17% lower incidence vs never-eaters.
2 to 4 per week: 20% lower.

5 or more per week, roughly one a day: 27% lower.
The mechanism story isn't new, but the cohort scale and 15-year follow-up are. Eggs are the densest natural source of choline in the American diet. One large egg supplies roughly 33% of the daily choline requirement. Choline is the substrate for acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter that drops in Alzheimer's. Donepezil, the most prescribed Alzheimer's drug, works by blocking acetylcholine breakdown. The disease is partly defined by cholinergic neuron loss.

Egg yolk also delivers lutein and zeaxanthin. These are the only two carotenoids that cross the blood-brain barrier and accumulate in cortical tissue. Higher tissue levels track with better processing speed and memory across multiple older-adult cohorts. Yolk also contains DHA, primarily in phospholipid form. Phospholipid DHA enters the brain more efficiently than DHA in triglyceride form, which is the dominant form in fish oil capsules.

Now the caveats, because they matter.
This is observational. Causation cannot be drawn from a cohort study. The Adventist Health Study-2 cohort skews heavily vegetarian and health-conscious, so people who eat eggs in this cohort do not look like the average American egg-eater. The "never eats eggs" comparison group is largely vegan, which is its own dietary pattern with its own complications. Reverse causation also has to be considered. People in early Alzheimer's often change eating patterns before diagnosis. Some of the apparent protection could be that healthier brains keep eating eggs, not the other way around.

The mechanism story I outlined above is supported by adjacent literature, not by this paper. The study did not measure choline status, lutein levels, or DHA in tissue. It measured eggs in, dementia out.

What we can say honestly: in a 40,000-person cohort followed for 15 years, egg intake tracked with substantially lower Alzheimer's incidence in a dose-response pattern. The mechanism is biochemically plausible, supported by other lines of evidence, and consistent with what we know about acetylcholine and brain carotenoid status. The randomized trial that would prove causation has not been run.

The practical version: if you are over 50 and not allergic, eating an egg most days has stronger evidence behind it for brain health than most products marketed for the same goal. Five days a week was the dose with the lowest risk in this cohort. Even 1 to 3 per month showed measurable benefit.

For 50 years the question was whether eggs were dangerous to your heart. The data behind that fear was always weaker than the guidelines made it sound, which is why the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans quietly removed the 300mg cap. The brain question got asked too late.

Oh et al., J Nutr, 2026 (DOI: 10.1016/j.tjnut.2026.101541)

05/27/2026

The Recommended Dietary Allowance for protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day. For a 70 kg adult, that is 56 grams. The number has been treated for decades as if it represents an optimal target, the amount everyone should aim for. It does not.

The RDA was established through the National Academies' Food and Nutrition Board and traces to classical nitrogen balance studies. It is designed to identify the lowest intake at which nitrogen losses are matched by intake in approximately 97.5% of the population. In other words, the RDA is the floor below which protein deficiency becomes likely. It is a public health threshold, not a recommendation for physiological optimization.

That distinction matters most for older adults. After roughly age 50, skeletal muscle becomes progressively less responsive to the same dose of dietary protein, a phenomenon researchers call anabolic resistance. The amount of leucine and essential amino acids that triggered a full muscle protein synthesis response at 25 produces a blunted response at 70. To get a comparable signal, older adults appear to need more protein per meal and more across the day.

A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis by Nunes and colleagues, published in the Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle, pooled 105 randomized controlled trials in 5,402 participants. Looking specifically at adults aged 65 and older, the authors found that gains in lean body mass clustered between 1.2 and 1.59 grams per kilogram per day. Below that range, gains were smaller. Above approximately 1.6 g/kg, additional protein produced little further benefit in non-resistance-trained populations, though resistance-trained individuals may benefit from somewhat higher intakes.

This is not a directive that every older adult should eat 1.6 g/kg. The Nunes meta-analysis describes where benefits cluster in the available trial data. The optimal intake for a given individual depends on resistance training status, kidney function, total caloric intake, protein source quality, and how protein is distributed across meals. The point is that 0.8 is almost certainly too low for muscle-related outcomes in older adults, and the relevant range sits meaningfully above the RDA.

The intake gap matters because most older adults are not even hitting the floor. A 2019 NHANES analysis by Krok-Schoen and colleagues found that up to 46% of US adults over 71 consumed less than 0.8 g/kg of protein per day. The conversation about whether the target should be 1.0, 1.2, or 1.6 is happening at the academic level while a meaningful share of the population is still below the deficiency-prevention threshold.

For scale, a 70 kg older adult eating 1.4 g/kg would consume around 100 grams of protein per day. A cup of plain Greek yogurt delivers approximately 23 grams. Three large eggs add 18. A 4 oz portion of chicken breast contributes about 30. A 4 oz serving of salmon adds another 28. None of those individual portions is unusual. The challenge for many older adults is appetite, dentition, food cost, and meal frequency, not the math.

The honest takeaway. The 0.8 g/kg RDA is a deficiency-prevention threshold from nitrogen balance studies. It was never designed to optimize muscle outcomes in older adults. Modern evidence points toward 1.2 to 1.6 g/kg as the range where muscle-related benefits cluster in pooled trial data, with the precise individual target still debated. The more urgent gap is that a substantial fraction of older adults are not meeting even the floor.

Nunes EA et al., J Cachexia Sarcopenia Muscle 2022
Krok-Schoen JL et al., J Nutr Health Aging 2019

05/21/2026

Here we go again: new research finds more exercise and better sleep can protect your brain from dementia. More confirmation that the basics we have all been talking about for years do indeed play important roles in the development, or avoidance, of dementia. Let’s all address these and reduce the global burden of dementia. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/aging/dementia-risk-lifestyle-changes-middle-age-walking-sitting-sleep-rcna267107

12/31/2025

“The findings indicate that the LEAP program decreased gastrointestinal symptoms for individuals with IBS”

Provide scientific evidence to support improvements in nutrition and health for individuals with medical conditions.

12/09/2025

Stress kills neuroplasticity, the very thing that keeps your brain youthful.

Chronic stress lowers BDNF, the protein that helps your brain learn and adapt. When BDNF drops, your brain becomes less flexible.

If you experience stress on a regular basis, here’s what I recommend:

➡️ Prioritize 7-8 hours of sleep with consistent wake-up and bedtime

➡️ Move your body every day even if it’s just for 10 minutes

➡️ Spend a few minutes in intentional breathwork

➡️ Build in short breaks throughout your day to reset your nervous system

➡️ Stay connected to people who help you feel grounded

12/06/2025

Quality sleep is one of the most powerful ways to support brain repair, memory consolidation, and long-term cognitive resilience. The habits we practice in the hours before bed help signal to the brain that it is safe to slow down and begin this restorative work.

Here are a few simple habits that support deeper, more restorative sleep:

➡️ Eat your final meal earlier in the evening (at least 2-3 hours before bedtime)

➡️ Reduce evening blue light exposure

➡️ Keep your bedroom cool (ideally between 60–67°F) and dark

➡️ Follow a consistent sleep schedule

➡️ Limit late-night stimulation

➡️ Build a relaxing wind-down routine

12/01/2025

Round two of how to fit 40 grams of fiber into your day!

What are your favorite fiber-rich foods?

12/01/2025

If you followed along with my highlights from the Probiotics, Prebiotics, and New Foods Conference, you probably noticed a common theme—fiber.

Based on my takeaways from the conference and its brilliant presenters, 40 grams of fiber is a good fiber target for many people.

It may sound like a lot, but keep in mind that most people only get in 10-15 grams of fiber daily in Western nations.

The example below illustrates a variety of plant foods, along with their serving sizes, that collectively provide 40 grams of fiber. I hope that once you see it illustrated in this way, it doesn't seem so daunting!

12/01/2025

The most effective way to support your gut microbiome is through plant foods that are high in polyphenols, fiber, and prebiotics. 🌱 🫐 🧄