General health
📚 Why Reading Books Might Help You Live Longer
Three different studies suggest that reading is associated with living longer and healthier.
Read that again.
No supplement, no special diet, no expensive equipment. Just something you learned to do as a child, and something you can do for free if you have a library card.
A 2016 Yale study of more than 3,635 adults over the age of 50 found that book readers had a 20% lower risk of death over a 12-year period compared with non-readers (PMID: 27471129).
For context, that’s a similar relative risk reduction to the association found between doing modest amounts of leisure-time physical activity and being sedentary. Not bad.
One factor that appeared to explain the difference in this study was cognitive functioning.
Reading fiction or non-fiction requires you to use short- and long-term memory (“What did that character just say?” “Which part of a ship is the forecastle?”), actively process language, focus your attention and work to understand what you’re reading.
In other words, it’s a mental workout.
Other research suggests that reading and participating in cognitively stimulating activities are associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease (PMID: 22471867). While a 3rd study suggests that people with the highest levels of lifelong cognitive enrichment developed Alzheimer’s disease, on average, around five years later, and mild cognitive impairment around seven years later, than those with the lowest levels of enrichment.
This brings us to a concept called cognitive reserve.
Think of it as a store of mental resources built up over a lifetime, and the brain’s ability to think, remember and function despite ageing or physical damage.
It’s one explanation for why two people could have similar levels of brain damage from ageing or Alzheimer’s disease, yet one might continue to function relatively well while the other experiences significant cognitive difficulties.
Now, the most important caveat: this is observational research. We can’t say that reading will prevent you from developing Alzheimer’s disease or make you live longer.
That said, the direction of the associations is clear and reading is an enjoyable habit with plenty of other benefits.
So here are my five tips for reading more:
1️⃣ All reading counts. Read what you enjoy. Fiction, non-fiction, thrillers, biographies, history, romantasy: it’s all good.
2️⃣ Aim for 10–20 minutes a day. Depending on your reading speed and the length of the book, you could get through a book or two a month.
3️⃣ Leave a book somewhere visible, and leave your phone in the kitchen when you get home from work. Make picking up a book inevitable.
4️⃣ Keep a Kindle, an e-book, or an audiobook on your phone. That way, you can read or listen whenever you have a spare moment.
5️⃣ Follow book recommendations online, join conversations about books, or find a local book club. You’ll discover books you might never have picked up yourself, and discussing what you read gives you another way to engage with the ideas.
And if you’re looking for something to read…
Save yourself from feeling uncomfortable in the doctor’s office.
Bad breath, wonky boobs and uncontrollable farts are not easy to talk about.
That’s why I wrote This Is Vital Information: Everything You're Too Embarrassed To Ask Your Doctor About.
Because the price of a book is nothing compared with the value of avoiding embarrassment.
Gut health
💨Embrace Your Farts
“As welcome as a fart in an elevator” is a particularly favourite expression of mine to describe anything you’d rather not experience.
But I want to convince you that your farts are not just something to be tolerated, but positively embraced.
Intestinal gas gets produced as a by-product of the fermentation of fibre by your gut microbiome, so the number and…ahem..intensity of your farts reflect the state of your gut.
If you experience very little flatulence, you might feel like you’re winning, but this is actually a sign that your gut microbiome isn’t doing very much. No bueno.
So you start eating more fibre, perhaps getting closer to that minimum daily target of 30g and your gut microbiome starts working overtime.
The problem is it might not actually be able to keep up with all the work it’s being given to do. This results in less efficient fermentation and more gas.
This is why it’s important to increase fibre intake slowly, no more than 3–5 g per week. For context, 3–5g of fibre can come from 40g of oatmeal, 2 slices of wholemeal bread, 40g of dry lentils or 1 tablespoon of chia seeds.
But quantity isn’t everything.
Dietary fibre is a family, not a category, and, like all families, some types of dietary fibre tend to get worked up a bit quicker than others.
Inulin, beloved of fibre gummies everywhere, is a fast-fermenting fibre, meaning it will be fermented in the first part of the colon (see the blue curve in the graph). That means a concentrated gas dump all in one go—possibly not what you want.
Slower-fermenting fibres (green curve), like wheat bran take much longer to ferment, meaning they release their gas over a much longer period.
So if you’re clearing rooms as you increase your fibre intake, that’s a sign your gut is doing what it’s meant to do.
Fortunately, your gut microbiome is highly adaptable and will produce more fibre-guzzling bacteria and less gas over time.
So embrace your farts as the unavoidable step towards improved gut health.
P.S I know many of you don’t have the time or mental energy to regularly interrogate the type of fibre in your daily meals and fill in the gaps.
That’s exactly why I wanted LOAM to contain fast-, medium- and slow-fermenting fibres. Stir one serving into your morning coffee and you’ll get 10 g of fibre—not a shabby way to start the day.
You’ll also benefit from a 6-in-1 blend that means you don’t have to think about what to eat to nourish bacteria along the full length of the colon and ensure gas is equally spread out.
REFLECTIONS
Why Efficiency Can Leave You Exhausted
William Stanley Jevons was a 19th-century English economist who made a startling observation.
As coal-powered steam engines became more efficient, the demand for coal went up, not down.
This seemed completely counterintuitive. After all, the point of efficiency is to reduce the input for any given output.
Jevons’ insight was that as the cost of producing steam power fell, people thought of new applications for it and so ended up using more steam power (and more coal) than ever before.
This situation, where an improvement in the efficiency of a process leads to an increase in its use rather than a decrease, is known as Jevons’ paradox, and I think it has applications in our personal lives.
For example, as AI models become more efficient, we start to do more with them, which might lead to an increase in the resources they use, but certainly uses up more of our time.
Here are some other examples:
- You start to earn more money, but end up spending it all, so your overall wealth never increases.
- As smartphones have made communication increasingly effortless, we’ve used them more and more leading us to neglect communication with the closest people in our lives.
- You make your workouts more efficient by doing supersets, but end up trying to do more and burning yourself out.
I’ve certainly experienced all of the above at some point or other.
Instead, it’s important to know what we’re optimising our lives for. Is it to earn more money, have more free time, improve our health or something else?
Whatever your answer, it’s vital that you use those efficiency gains to pursue that goal. Because if you don’t, you can guarantee that someone else—or the world around you—will use them for you
👋 Who are you again? I’m Karan Rajan - a doctor and curious explorer of all things health and wellness. I'm the founder of LOAM Science, a microbiome company aiming to create the best fiber product in the world! I host the Dr Karan Explores Podcast, where I talk to experts in science and medicine to cut through the BS of modern health advice. If you'd like an easy way to dig through the archive, you can ask me any questions about the podcast and talk to my digital librarian here. I've also written two books "This Book May Save Your Life" and "This Is Vital Information".
If you feel strongly about some health things or just want to say hi? Hit reply... I’d love to hear it and hear from you! (yes I read every reply!!!)
