Last week I co-hosted an event for New York’s YPO Women on female longevity at the Parsley Health center in NYC along with two brilliant speakers: nutrition expert JJ Virgin, and Melanie Goldey, CEO of Tally Health.
It was exactly the kind of event I live for: a room full of motivated, curious women ready to be healthier than ever. We dug deep into the science of what makes longevity different for women and why it matters.
While women live longer than men, we spend an average of 12 years in poor health vs. just 10 for men. That’s 16% of our total lifespan.
Longevity and health optimization are fields dominated by men. The loudest voices in the space are men (many of whom speak authoritatively about women’s health) and the majority of longevity research has historically been done on men (or very small groups of elite female athletes).
But women have different physiological needs and we age in unique ways.
Part of why is the fact that women go through two major health events—pregnancy and menopause—which have a lasting and defining impact on bone, brain, heart, and metabolic health that prime us for chronic disease in unique ways.
During pregnancy, for example, many women experience depleted omega-3 levels. We literally build our babies’ brains from the fat stores in our bodies, which can contribute to mood disorders, brain fog, and inflammation. Postpartum, women lose up to 23% of muscle mass during lactation, setting them up for weight gain in midlife.
Estrogen decline during menopause hits almost every aspect of our health:
- Brain cells become more vulnerable to the effects of amyloid-B proteins, which is why women are 2x more likely to get Alzheimer’s disease.
- Loss of estrogen leads to worse blood sugar control while weight gain for women often starts in the early 40s in perimenopause and increases by an average of 1.5 pounds each year. Together, these two factors help explain why 4 in 10 women over 40 have metabolic syndrome and nearly 20% have diabetes.
- Women lose 10-20% of their total bone mass after menopause, which is why osteoporosis is 5x more likely in women 50+ than men.
- Estrogen also offers protective effects on heart health by controlling cholesterol levels and reducing arterial fat buildup; the loss of estrogen accelerates heart disease.
Add to all of this:
❌ Sedentary lifestyle: Accelerates muscle and bone loss, increases insulin resistance, and slows metabolism.
❌ Chronic stress/high cortisol: Promotes belly fat, muscle loss, and sleep disruption that accelerate telomere shortening.
❌ Poor sleep: Reduces cellular repair, raises inflammation, and impairs hormone balance.
❌ Environmental toxins and hormone disruptors: Exposure to BPA, phthalates, and parabens messes with hormone balance and contributes to earlier menopause. Women have higher exposure than men—we use 13 personal care products on average each day.
❌ Cultural norms about women’s bodies: The pressure to be small discourages women from weight training and building lean muscle mass.
❌ A medical system that wrongly discouraged HRT for decades
It’s a perfect storm for women experiencing worse health and faster aging velocity than men.
So, what do we do about it?
JJ, Melanie and I covered a lot in our conversation. The full extent of our talk is available as a customized women’s longevity protocol for Parsley members but I wanted to share the top takeaways with you here!
💪 Forget weight—body composition is the metric that matters.
We’ve made women obsessed with their weight as a measure of health. It’s time to deprogram.
- A full-body DEXA scan is the current gold standard for understanding your body composition (lean mass vs. fat mass, plus bone mineral density). Do one annually or at least check in with a body composition scale every month or two. Your weight might stay the same but if you’re trading fat for muscle, you’re improving.
- 18-24% body fat is ideal for metabolic health, longevity, and hormone balance.
- JJ turned me on to supplementing with Fortetropin; clinical data show 2.5 g/day for eight weeks leads to an average gain of ~2.5 lb of lean muscle mass and ~1 lb of fat loss without changing exercise habits.
💪 Get stronger, not smaller.
Grip strength is an underrated longevity vital sign. The TL;DR: it’s a proxy for total body strength and predicts all-cause mortality better than blood pressure or BMI.
- You should have a grip strength between 27 and 32 kilograms in your 30s, 25-30 kg in your 40s, 24-28 kg in your 50s, 22-26 kg in your 60s, and 18-22 kg over 70.
- You’re also looking for relative symmetry. I discovered I have a 17% difference between my left and right sides (I’m right handed) which tells me I need to prioritize functional exercises (e.g., deadlifts, squats, farmer’s carries) that help me even out.
- You can get your grip strength tested by your doctor or by a personal trainer. Or you can buy an at-home hand dynamometer for about $30 on Amazon.
- Supplementing with Urolithin A (500-1,000 mg/day) can improve muscle strength and endurance in middle age.
💪 Eat 30g of protein in your first meal of the day.
Distributing your protein intake evenly throughout the day helps overcome anabolic resistance (i.e. the age-related decline in your body’s ability to build muscle).
- Aim for 25–30 g of high-quality protein per meal.
- My go-to intermittent fast break right now is a Parsley Rebuild Clean Protein smoothie. (Pro tip: most vegan protein powders aren’t complete proteins and therefore aren’t as useful for building muscle. Parsley’s is enhanced with branch chain amino acids to make it complete.) I add almond butter, spinach, olive oil, frozen blueberries, and cinnamon to mine.
- I’m also adding 5 mg of essential amino acids (EAAs) after my morning workout. EAAs are essential for muscle growth and repair but can’t be made by your body.
💪 Balance is BS. Resilience is Everything.
I’ve basically thrown the word balance out the window. Stress is inevitable; it’s how we recover that matters. Data in tens of thousands of users from Tally Health showed that positive stress management practices like meditation and yoga had the biggest impact on epigenetic markers of aging—even more than diet and exercise. Get better at recovery by:
- Tracking HRV with a wearable (like Whoop, Oura Ring, or Apple Watch). HRV is a marker of your body’s ability to respond to stress and relax again. Meditation and vagus nerve stimulation, which I wrote about recently, have also been shown to improve HRV.
- HIIT workouts. HIIT workouts train your body to move in and out of stress with ease. Regular people need to develop the same ability to kick into a high stress state of performance and then quickly recover as an elite athlete. Research shows 2-3 HIIT sessions per week can meaningfully improve HRV.
- Hot/cold therapy trains the body for resilience. Heat therapy (sauna) followed by cold plunge (just 2 minutes is enough to shiver which beiges fat, making it more metabolically active) then sauna again is a training ground for your nervous system. Just note: don’t train cold.
💪 Get proactive with lab tests.
I see a lot of women subconsciously scared to get labs. This is heartbreaking for me. We have shamed women for their weight, defining their worth by a number on a scale for so long that many women shy away from numbers all together, including their own biomarker data. But if we want to be healthier in the next 10 years, women should be testing a full panel of functional biomarkers at least twice a year.
- Start with my comprehensive preventative testing checklist.
- At Parsley we developed a Female Functional Age Score™ to zero in on six factors that have the biggest impact on women’s health: thyroid, heart health, metabolic health, nutrient and toxin levels, and inflammation.
What I’m reading this week
#1 Exercise increases your odds of surviving cancer by 37%
We already know that exercise is our #1 longevity drug. This is a constant refrain of experts like Peter Attia and JJ Virgin and backed by decades of high-quality research, but we haven’t heard much about how exercise impacts cancer. So I loved reading this newly published article in the New England Journal of Medicine about the latest science behind how exercise improves cancer survival.
Colorectal cancer patients enrolled in an exercise program with a trainer had a 37% lower risk of death after eight years and a 28% lower risk of their cancer coming back or developing a new cancer.
Overall, the program prevented one death for every 14 people who joined it.
My personal motivation to get into medicine was losing my grandmother too early to colon cancer. But as much as I do for my health, I find exercise is the thing that falls by the wayside more than anything else. This study lit a fire for me to get moving and I hope it does for you too.
#2 Are microplastics a new reason you can’t fall asleep?
For me, nothing feels worse than a bad night’s sleep. As a genetically slow caffeine metabolizer (like 50% of us) I stop drinking coffee at 9 a.m. to avoid any lingering effects and won’t travel anywhere without my eye mask and mouth tape. But sometimes it feels like I’m doing everything right and still have a hard time sleeping so I felt both terrified and vindicated when I read an article this week about how the chemicals in plastic disrupt sleep in a way similar to caffeine.
According to the peer-reviewed study, the plastic-associated chemicals we’re absorbing through our air, water, food, and skin, can shift your body’s internal clock by up to 17 minutes; they activate the body’s adenosine receptors, which regulate sleepiness and alertness (and also play a key role in inflammation).
I recently wrote about how microplastics are everywhere, how to limit exposure and how to detox what we can. The reality is microplastics aren’t going anywhere any time soon, so I take this news as meaning we have to do even more to counteract their effect on sleep quality.
What do you do? Other than avoiding caffeine too late in the day, limiting alcohol, sleeping in a cold dark room, and locking your phone in a box to prevent pre-bed doomscrolling, the best way to counter this plastic-driven clock disruption is to power on our natural melatonin production through:
😴 200-400 mg of magnesium glycinate to support melatonin and relaxation
😴 200mg of “phos serine” (phosphatidylserine) to reduce nighttime cortisol
😴 5 minutes of deep breathing to reduce evening cortisol (and support melatonin synthesis)
How to be healthier than ever
🧬 Amino appreciation: I recently shared on Instagram why I add 5 mg of essential amino acids to my supplement stack and whether you need them to support your longevity goals.
💧Drink up: I finally got sick of trying to find the best countertop water filter and installed a PUR faucet system. Long-term, I’m planning to install a reverse osmosis filtration system in our house for optimal water quality, but this was an easier, cheaper install and I’m resting easier knowing my family’s NYC drinking water is free of lead, microplastics, and mercury.
🏋️ Check your body composition: If you haven’t had a recent DEXA scan, stay up-to-date on your body composition with an advanced at-home scale. I like this one from Withings that offers segmental body composition and tracks visceral fat and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).