No superfood powder. No $90 longevity supplement. Part 2 of the short list that survives the evidence — and one of these three is the rare diet with an actual randomized trial behind it, which almost nothing in nutrition can claim.
I'm 60. When I dug into the food research for my own kitchen, two things surprised me: how little of the supplement aisle actually survived — and that the one eating pattern with a real randomized trial behind it was the least exotic thing on the shelf.
Nutrition is where the BS is thickest, because food is emotional and the supplement margins are enormous. Run the aisle through the BS Detector and most of it collapses into moved biomarkers and mouse studies. Three things don't. Same honesty grades as Part 1: RCT means a randomized trial proved the arrow; Cohort means large but observational; Consensus means an expert panel's synthesis.
Here's a quiet problem: the official protein recommendation (the RDA of 0.8 g/kg) was set to prevent deficiency in the average adult — not to preserve muscle in an aging one. Past 50, your body gets less efficient at turning food protein into muscle, so the “adequate” amount on the label is, for you, often too low.
PROT-AGE Study Group (Bauer et al.), JAMDA, 2013. An international panel reviewed the evidence and recommended healthy older adults target 1.0–1.2 g of protein per kg of body weight per day — well above the 0.8 RDA — rising to 1.2–1.5 g/kg during illness or recovery, and explicitly paired with resistance exercise to actually build muscle rather than just pass through.
The honest framing: this is expert consensus, not a single lifespan trial, because you can't easily randomize people's diets for decades. But it's a synthesis of a large body of muscle-metabolism research, and it lines up cleanly with why strength training works (see Part 1). Protein is the raw material; training is the signal. You need both.
What this means for you: For a 70 kg (154 lb) adult, 1.0–1.2 g/kg is about 70–85 g of protein a day — and spreading it across meals (roughly 25–30 g each) beats loading it all at dinner. Think a couple of eggs or Greek yogurt at breakfast, not a token slice of toast. Kidney disease is the main reason to check with a doctor first.
Almost every “best diet” headline rests on observational data — people who eat a certain way tend to be healthier, with all the arrow-direction problems that brings. The Mediterranean pattern is the rare exception: somebody actually ran the randomized experiment.
PREDIMED (Estruch et al.), New England Journal of Medicine, 2018 republication. Over 7,400 adults at high cardiovascular risk were randomly assigned to a Mediterranean diet with extra-virgin olive oil, the same diet with mixed nuts, or a low-fat control. The Mediterranean groups had roughly 30% lower relative risk of major cardiovascular events (heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular death).
Two pieces of honesty the headlines skip. First, that “30%” is a relative reduction — the absolute drop in event rate was a few percentage points over roughly five years, which is meaningful but less dramatic than it sounds (exactly the relative-vs-absolute trap the BS Detector flags). Second, the original 2013 paper was retracted over a randomization flaw and re-analyzed — and the main finding survived the re-analysis, which is reassuring. It's still the strongest dietary trial evidence we have.
What this means for you: You don't need a “diet” — you need the pattern: olive oil as the main fat, lots of vegetables, beans, nuts, fish, whole grains; meat and sweets occasional. The two add-ons the trial actually tested were extra-virgin olive oil and a daily handful of nuts. Start there.
We're putting omega-3 on the “what works” list with an asterisk, because it's the perfect teaching case for how confusing real evidence gets — which is exactly why it earns a spot. Eating fatty fish is well supported. Whether a supplement helps you is genuinely unsettled.
Large randomized trials disagree. Some (like REDUCE-IT, using a high-dose purified EPA) found a real reduction in cardiovascular events; others (like VITAL and STRENGTH) found little or no benefit from standard fish-oil doses in general populations. The contradictions largely come down to different doses, different formulas, and different people — not a coin flip on whether omega-3 “works.”
This is the cleanest example on the whole site of why a single headline can't settle anything. We gave omega-3 its own deep-dive precisely because it's so often mis-reported in both directions.
What this means for you: Eating fatty fish (salmon, sardines, mackerel) a couple of times a week is a safe, well-supported bet. A supplement is most defensible if you don't eat fish or have specific heart risk — and that's a conversation for your doctor, not a headline. Read the full omega-3 breakdown
Notice the theme: the wins are patterns and whole foods, not pills. That's not an accident. It's what the strongest human evidence keeps pointing at, no matter how loud the supplement marketing gets.
Our anti-aging guide collects every intervention that survives the evidence — what to do, how much, and the human studies behind each one, with zero supplement hype.
See the Full GuideFor healthy kidneys, the evidence doesn't support that fear at the intakes discussed here. If you have existing kidney disease, protein does need to be managed with your doctor — that's the one clear exception.
No. The pattern makes plants, olive oil, fish, and beans the base and treats red meat as occasional rather than central. It's a shift in proportions, not a ban.
Because the question people actually ask is “should I take fish oil?” — and the honest answer (eat fish; the supplement depends on you) is more useful than either the hype or the dismissal. It's also the clearest real-world lesson in reading conflicting trials.
— Scott Covert, 60, skeptic, not a physician. I built this for my own body first. Got a claim you want run through the BS Detector, or think I got something wrong? Tell me and I'll dig in.