Happy Monday, Cleanish squad! This week, we're talking about what aging well actually takes…not the version sold in bottles, but the version that decides whether you can carry your own groceries in at 70 or play with your grandkids. We’ll share an interesting study behind it, and a test you can run at your kitchen table in about a minute. We also dug into where the 21-day habit rule came from, because the answer is stranger than we expected.

— Lacey Baier, Dustin Baier

I've bought under-eye cream, and biotin for the backs of my hands and my neck, and collagen to help with the elasticity I keep losing. I've started putting sunscreen on my hands and face after about twenty years of not bothering. I tried dyeing my hair to cover the grays and, for now, have decided against it.

All these are my attempts at aging gracefully. But look at the list: every single thing on it is about the part of aging that other people can see. They’re about what I worry about when I look in the mirror. That's what aging gracefully means the way it gets sold to us. It means aging invisibly.

Nobody has ever sent me an email about my grip strength, or explained its importance in an ad.

In February, JAMA Network Open published a study of 5,472 women between 63 and 99 who were followed for about eight years, and the researchers measured two things: how hard each woman could squeeze with her dominant hand, and how fast she could stand up out of a chair five times without using her arms. For every 7 kilograms of grip strength, they found 12% lower mortality. For every 6 seconds faster on the chair stands, 4% lower.

Two tests, no bloodwork. You can do the chair one right now at your kitchen table: sit, stand, five times, arms crossed, and time it. Grip strength takes a little squeeze gauge, which runs about twenty-five dollars.

Here's the part that got me, though.

Researchers have known for a while that stronger people tend to live longer, and the usual objection is that stronger people are also more active people, so maybe it's the moving around doing all the work. It's a fair objection, so this team took it apart. Instead of asking the women how much they moved, they strapped accelerometers on them for a week and measured it, along with how much time they spent sitting, how fast they walked, and their levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation. Strength still stood on its own.

The finding even held for the women who weren’t hitting the recommended 150 minutes of exercise a week. Not one of them was doing what she was “supposed to be doing.”

There are two caveats with this study. One: these women averaged almost 79, so this isn't a study about being in your forties. And two: this study was observational, which means it found a pattern, not a cause. Nobody proved that getting stronger adds years to your life. What they showed is that strength tracks with something real, separate from everything else they could think to measure.

The lead author, Michael LaMonte, made a point of saying you don't need a gym for any of this. Soup cans work, books work, anything your muscles have to push against.

The interesting thing is that nobody markets protein as an anti-aging product. It gets sold as a gym thing, or a weight loss thing. But protein is what your muscles are built out of, and muscle is the thing this whole study is measuring.

So take the chair test and write your time down. Then, pick up something heavy a few times a week and see what the number does in three months.

Carrying all the groceries in from the car in one trip. Opening a tight pickle jar. Getting out of a low chair without pushing off the arms. Getting a suitcase into the overhead bin without asking for help. Saying yes to a mountain bike ride.

Strength is the thing that decides which of those I keep, not the creams. I'm not giving up the cream, but I would like to change what I say to myself in the mirror.

That's aging gracefully.

Maybe you’ve heard before that it takes 21 days to build a habit. I decided to look into it. Turns out it traces back to a surgeon in the 1960s, describing how long his patients took to get used to seeing a new face in the mirror. That's the whole origin. There is no habit research behind it at all.

Given this, researchers at the University of South Australia went looking for a real number by reviewing studies covering more than 2,600 people. From their research, they found habits start forming around the two month mark, with a median of 59 to 66 days and a range running from four days to 335.

The review also found what makes a habit stick: repetition and timing. Habits added to a morning routine held up best. Whether you enjoy it matters, too, and so does planning the thing out in advance rather than intending to get to it.

Most of this is common sense. The surprise for me, at least, is the runway. It's longer than we were told, and only a few things shorten it.

Here’s what I take from this…

If you've ever started something, white-knuckled it for three weeks, and then quit because it still felt like work when you expected it to get easier, that wasn't a failure of will. You quit at the spot the myth told you to be finished, roughly a third of the way in.

Want to read further on this study? Here's the research.

The gym kept me out for years, mostly because everyone in there seemed to know something I didn't. Here's what I did in those first few weeks to get comfortable enough to make it a habit. Watch on YouTube →

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3%-8%

is how much muscle mass we lose per decade between ages 30 and 50.

Then, it speeds up. Past 50, it's 5% to 10% a decade.

Menopause gets blamed for a lot of this, and the picture there is murkier. Perimenopausal women average about 2.5% less lean mass than premenopausal women, and postmenopausal women about 5.7% less.

And whichever is doing the work, the fix is the same: resistance training and enough protein to support it.

Sources: UCLA Health; Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle 2026

🧠 Nearly half of dementia cases may trace to risks you can change

Lund University followed about 500 healthy adults for four years. Smoking, high blood pressure, heart disease, and high cholesterol were all linked to damage in the brain's small blood vessels. Those four were not linked to the proteins behind Alzheimer's. So this is the kind of brain damage you can do something about, and for most people, it's a big piece of the risk.

🎨 The FDA is retiring two food dyes the industry already stopped using

Orange B, used on hot dog and sausage casings, hasn't been certified since 1978. The revocation takes effect September 8. Citrus Red No. 2, approved in 1959 for coloring orange peels, hasn't been certified since 2020 and is only proposed for removal so far. Neither has been in real use for years, so this is not a change to your groceries.

🫀 An AI blood test flagged heart disease up to 15 years early

Researchers at the University of Hong Kong built a tool that reads nearly 3,000 proteins from a single blood draw. In people already at high risk, it flagged six cardiovascular conditions up to 15 years before symptoms. It beat standard genetic risk scores, which is the interesting part, because genes are fixed at birth, and proteins move with how you're actually living.

🥤 A daily glass of juice was linked to lower depression scores

Newcastle University split 42 low-produce eaters into three groups of 14 for four weeks. The group that hit five a day with help from a daily juice or smoothie scored 2.52 points lower on a 27-point depression scale than the group that changed nothing. Both scores were in the minimal-to-mild range to begin with. The Fruit Juice Science Centre funded it.

Researchers at the University of Washington looked at 204 countries over three decades and their analysis ran in The Lancet Public Health. They measured the gap between how long people live and how long they stay healthy. The research team calls it the morbidity gap.

The United States has the widest morbidity gap on earth at 14.0 years, with Australia at 13.9 and Canada at 13.7 right behind.*

That is 17.8% of an American lifespan spent in poor health.

Since 1990 the world gained about nine years of life expectancy and about seven years of healthy life expectancy, so the countries that added the most years are the same ones banking the most sick ones.

The sick years are spread across adult life, not saved up for the end. The gap widens through your forties, fifties, and sixties.

*These are modeled estimates, not actual head counts.

Sources: Hay SI, Nam P, Saqib H, et al. "Global, regional, and national trends in the morbidity gap and contributing diseases, injuries, and risk factors, 1990-2023," The Lancet Public Health, Volume 11, August 2026; Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

Losing the same fifty pounds five times means I've tried nearly every rule out there and watched most of them fall apart. A few held up. These are the ones I'll still defend. Read it →

Four versions, all out of a blender in about 15 minutes. The oatmeal one has 15 grams of protein in a serving of three, and they freeze for two months, so you can meal prep one day and enjoy the rest of the week. Get the recipe →

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