Who really ages faster: men or women?

🤠 Happy Friday!

We lost an American icon this week. Country music legend Dolly Parton passed away at the age of 80. The 10-time Grammy Award-winning country artist had a career that spanned more than six decades, which includes a Dollywood theme park and global literacy efforts through the Dolly Parton Imagination Library.

When Dolly turned 80 back in January, she put aging to bed: "If you allow yourself to get old, you will... I ain't got time to get old!"

May we all live each day a little more like Dolly and get a little sparkle on everything while we’re at it.

Today’s headlines: 

A large-scale new study found that women and men don’t age at the same rate, but the more surprising finding is about who has more to gain from changing their habits.

What researchers found

When researchers tracked more than 236,000 UK Biobank participants, looking at how lifestyle, environment, and social factors can affect biological aging (how fast your cells age), they found that women were more likely to show signs of accelerated biological aging than men. Heavy TV time in particular seemed to hit women harder than men.

Men are also more likely to benefit from cleaning up lifestyle habits: researchers estimate that a man who fixes every lifestyle factor could slow accelerated aging by 41.7%, whereas a lifestyle refresh for women might only slow aging by 15%.

Why this matters

Aging is not fixed at birth. Based on this study, the payoff of cleaning up lifestyle could be larger than most people assume, especially for men.

More specifically:

The takeaway: Diet, screen time, and sun habits are some of the most powerful anti-aging levers available— and this study suggests that men might just have a lot of room to benefit.

The surprising thing that happens to a person’s brain when they draw with strangers.

Written by: Rachel Rhee

Turns out, a crayon and a stranger might be all you need to feel less alone.

Researchers at ETH Zurich wanted to know if connecting with someone from a different generation could ease loneliness more than connecting with someone from the same generation, and whether that connection would show up in actual brain activity, not just in how people said they felt.

They paired 61 sets of strangers, some the same age and some decades apart, and had them draw together once a week for six weeks while wearing brain-activity tracking caps.

Intergenerational pairs (ie, a Gen Xer paired with a Gen Alpha) reported feeling less lonely and more connected than same-age pairs throughout the six weeks, even though both groups' loneliness eased at roughly the same pace session to session. In other words, cross-generation pairs weren’t just improving faster; they were simply less lonely the whole way through.

Drawing together also led to more interpersonal neural synchrony, meaning their brain patterns became more in sync compared to drawing alone.

Why this matters

Both older and younger participants in the cross-generation duos felt the effects. It was not just one age group who benefited. 

With isolation being one of the most important health risks of our time, this study provides a meaningful signal that connection across age groups, not just between any two strangers, may be an especially effective way to combat it.

The takeaway: A low-key shared activity like coloring with a stranger, especially someone from a different generation, could reduce loneliness, which becomes especially relevant in an aging population.

Which one helps protect memory and thinking?

Your Oura ring may suggest taking it easy after a rough night, but researchers from McGill University discovered that rest isn’t the only rebound.

Napping v exercise: Not the lesser of two evils

In a recent study, 54 people were asked to stay awake for 30 hours. Then they either did a short 20-minute bout of moderate-to-vigorous activity, took a 90-minute nap, or did nothing before completing an image-memory task. 

A few days later, when researchers tested their memory again, they found that both the nappers and exercisers remembered significantly more, but for different reasons:

What does this mean for you? Recovery doesn’t always mean stillness. Though neither practice will fully replace lost z’s, a nap or a short bout of moderate-to-vigorous exercise may help protect memory after the occasional bad night.

On 8/31: Virtual coffee talk (in CIRCLE)

Women in the Livelong Women’s Circle group should join us for our monthly virtual coffee talk about health, aging, and life.

Collagen isn’t a scam, but are you using it right?
It’s allergy season. Diet might help improve symptoms.

Highlighting your responses to last week's question, featured in your gut bacteria may be eating you. We asked:

Ever heard of “zombie cells”?

More than half of you don’t know about the zombie apocalypse aging your cells… a bit dramatic, BUT the idea stands that aging cells often release inflammatory signals (these are senescent ‘zombie’ cells), and these signals can fuel aging in the cells around them. 

As scientists uncover ways to stop the apocalypse, an anti-inflammatory diet, cardiovascular and strength training, and strong relationships may help.