What The People Who Live Longest Have In Common

Hey Reader, Dr Karl here.

It shows up in the data, and it’s the opposite of what most people track.

When I plot my clients by age, something shows up that I didn’t go looking for.

The older people in my data — the ones still healthy, still going — have a much lower fasting insulin. Not lower cholesterol. Not lower weight, particularly.

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Lower insulin. The same pattern shows up in the triglyceride-to-HDL ratio: it drops with age among the people doing well.

Now, I want to be careful about what that does and doesn’t prove. This is my cohort, not a controlled trial, and there’s an obvious question underneath it: did that healthy 80-year-old always have those numbers, or did they earn them along the way? I can’t answer that from a snapshot.

But here’s what I’d say to a 15-year-old sitting high on that chart, and to anyone else reading this:

if your numbers are up there, they need to come down if you plan on a long healthy life. That’s not a threat. It’s just what the data looks like.

And the practical part is simpler than people expect. Look at the relationship between fasting glucose and HDL. If your glucose is high, your HDL is almost always correspondingly low.

So what happens if you stop chasing the glucose directly and focus on raising the HDL instead — mainly through whole-food animal protein: meat, poultry, fish?

Your fasting glucose tends to come down on its own. You’ve addressed the upstream problem instead of arguing with the downstream number.

That’s what I mean when I say the pattern tells you what to do. One number tells you that you have a problem.

The relationship between two numbers tells you where to push.

The graphs are in the video:

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To your health,

Dr. Goldkamp

That’s the whole reason I wrote Unlocking Optimal Metabolic Health: A Data-Driven Approach to Thriving at Any Age — to show you how to read your own labs, see the patterns, and act on real data instead of generic reference ranges.

📗 Grab the book Here: website​​