Research notes from a curious non-expert
I am not a doctor, a nutritionist, or a biohacker. I am someone who moved to Portugal, started paying attention to how people here live and age, and became genuinely curious about what the science actually says. These are my honest notes — the books I'm reading, what I'm testing on myself, and where theory meets daily life in a Central Portuguese village.
The four horsemen — and why I think about them differently since moving here
What the science says
Peter Attia's central argument in Outlive is that the diseases most likely to kill us — cardiovascular disease, cancer, metabolic dysfunction, neurodegeneration — share common upstream causes: chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, lack of muscle mass, and poor sleep. His framework, which he calls Medicine 3.0, argues we should be intervening decades before symptoms appear, not treating disease after the fact. His emphasis on Zone 2 cardio, strength training after 40, and VO2 max as a predictor of longevity was new to me and landed hard.
What I'm trying
I've started walking more deliberately — not for steps, but for sustained low-intensity effort. The hills around our house make this easy and the terrain forces natural interval-style effort without any thought. I'm paying closer attention to protein intake. Most of Attia's framework around muscle preservation after 40 comes down to: lift heavy things and eat enough protein. I'm now doing both more intentionally.
What I'm actually experiencing
The thing that strikes me most is that the old people in this village are already doing what Attia recommends — without knowing who he is. The man three doors down is 84. He walks to his vegetable garden every morning, carries things, bends, squats. He eats lunch slowly. He sleeps after. He has never heard of Zone 2. He is also visibly stronger than men twenty years younger in any city I've lived in. This is not a coincidence and I don't think it requires a science paper to explain.
My gut health completely changed after the move — I think I now know why
What the science says
Tim Spector's work through the ZOE project has fundamentally shifted how I think about food. The microbiome — the trillions of bacteria in the gut — is now understood as a major driver of health, influencing everything from immune function to mental health to metabolic response. Spector's key findings: diversity of plant foods is more important than any single "superfood"; fermented foods measurably improve microbiome diversity; ultra-processed food damages gut lining and reduces bacterial diversity very quickly. His data suggests that two people can eat the same meal and have wildly different blood sugar responses based on their individual gut composition.
What I'm trying
I'm aiming for 30 different plant foods per week — an evidence-based target from the ZOE research. In Portugal this is genuinely easy. The village market alone has 8–10 seasonal vegetables at any given time, plus herbs, legumes, and fresh fruit. I have also started making my own fermented foods: simple lacto-fermented vegetables, homemade kefir, and occasionally homemade yoghurt from local whole milk. None of this is difficult here. Most of the older women in this village have been doing it for their entire lives.
What I'm actually experiencing
Within three or four months of moving here, something shifted. I had digestive issues in my previous life that I had normalised as "just how I am." They are largely gone. I attribute this to three things: less ultra-processed food (almost none now, because we cook everything from scratch), more diversity in my diet (the market forces seasonal variety), and significantly less stress. The gut-brain axis is real and I think I experienced the change in both directions at once.
Olive oil in Portugal taught me more about food than any book
What the science says
Michael Pollan's famous summary — "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." — sounds almost childishly simple until you start tracking how much of what most people eat doesn't qualify as "food" under his definition. His point is that the Western diet is largely a nutritional science experiment gone wrong: we extracted nutrients, fortified processed products with them, and ended up less healthy than the populations who never started. The data on Mediterranean diet adherence is some of the strongest in nutritional epidemiology — particularly around olive oil and longevity outcomes.
What I'm trying
We source our olive oil directly from a farm about 15 minutes from our house. The farmer presses in October/November and we buy a 5-litre tin straight from that press. The difference in quality compared to anything available in a standard supermarket is not subtle — the flavour, the colour, the viscosity. I use it generously on everything. I have started treating it as a primary food, not a cooking fat — a distinction Pollan makes that I now understand viscerally.
What I'm actually experiencing
What I find most interesting is watching what the elderly people here actually eat on a daily basis. It is shockingly consistent with what the longevity research recommends — and completely inconsistent with what the wellness industry sells. No supplements. No protein powder. No detox teas. They eat a lot of legumes, seasonal vegetables, olive oil, a little good bread, occasional meat (usually in stews with bones), and small amounts of wine with meals. They eat together, slowly, at a table. They don't snack. The evidence, as Pollan would say, has been sitting in front of us the whole time.
I sleep differently here — and I think I understand why
What the science says
Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep and more recent circadian biology research points to light exposure as the master regulator of sleep quality. Natural light in the morning sets the circadian clock. Artificial light at night (especially blue light) suppresses melatonin and delays sleep onset. Most people in modern urban environments are chronically misaligned with their natural sleep rhythms — too little natural light during the day, too much artificial light at night.
What I'm trying
I'm now outside in natural light within the first hour of waking — something that's easy here because there's a terrace and a view worth sitting on. We dim the house significantly after sunset. I don't have any special lights — I just turn things off. We eat dinner earlier than we did in our previous life. I'm asleep between 10 and 10:30 most nights, which would have seemed impossible two years ago.
What I'm actually experiencing
I fall asleep faster than I ever have in my adult life. I wake up without an alarm at a consistent time. I rarely feel the mid-afternoon crash that I considered a permanent feature of being human. Whether this is the light, the food, the lower stress, the physical activity, or some combination — I genuinely don't know. I suspect it's all of it together, which is exactly what the research on lifestyle interventions suggests: these things compound, and they compound quickly.
What the elderly people in this village actually do every day
What I observe
There are several people in this village who are in their late 70s and 80s. Without exception they are more physically capable than I would have expected. I have been paying attention. Here is what they actually do: they wake early, they go outside, they move constantly but without urgency — gardening, walking to neighbours, carrying things. They cook real food from scratch, mostly at home, mostly with what's in season. They eat lunch as the main meal of the day, usually hot, usually with others. They rest after lunch without any apparent guilt. They are in bed early.
What this means to me
None of this is optimisation. None of it involves a wearable, a supplement, or a protocol. It's a way of life that has been calibrated over generations to suit the human body. The Blue Zone research (Dan Buettner) identifies exactly these patterns — natural movement, plant-based diet, strong social connection, low chronic stress, sense of purpose — in the longest-lived populations on earth. Central Portugal is not classified as a Blue Zone. But walking through this village in the morning, I'm not sure that distinction matters much.
What I'm actually thinking
The honest version is this: I moved here partly for this. Not to copy these people, but to be adjacent to a way of living that reminds me, daily, that the body does not require much complexity. It requires movement, real food, rest, connection, and time outside. The supplement industry makes billions selling complexity. The 84-year-old with his vegetable garden makes none of that case.