How to Live a Long and Healthy Life — Without Overthinking It

Every year, you pick an out-of-the-box hobby, like artisanal chocolate making, and attempt to master it. What is your 2026 pursuit, and why is taking up new interests important?

My wife is a dancer. I’m terrible at dancing. So I’m going to learn how to dance. It’s really about keeping mentally fit longer into life. Our mental abilities decline as we age, and that’s just sort of an inevitability. The rate of decline is affected by two things. One is where you start. It’s called cognitive reserve, and one of the major ways we get cognitive reserve is getting more education. Then, because you started from a higher level, that mental impairment is pushed out years and decades.

But along the way, there are things you can do to keep your mind making connections — and not simply live off the old connections.

That means taking up new mental challenges. Joining a book club and reading new books and deeply analyzing them. Or volunteering so that you have a schedule, you have other people depending on you, and you confront challenges and resolve them. It can be learning a new language or a new instrument. You could use travel as a way of learning new things about culture and history. Those kinds of things are really important to keep your brain and the connections among your neurons very alive.

What are the other simple rules for a long and healthy life?

The first one is: Don’t take excessive risks. Don’t smoke, wear your seatbelt and get your vaccines. Number one on my list for people who are over 50 is the shingles vaccine. Not only does it prevent painful shingles, but it lowers your risk of dementia. There is nothing you can do better for yourself in the vaccine era, so don’t be a schmuck; don’t not take it. The same goes for the RSV vaccine and the pneumococcal vaccine.

The second rule is about the importance of social relations. As people age — and I can see it with my mother, who’s 92 — people die, and your social circle becomes constricted. So it’s important to make new friends. They don’t have to be other older people. You can tutor or volunteer in schools or libraries to make connections with people who aren’t necessarily your age. That’s a good thing.

The third rule is staying mentally engaged, which we talked about.

The fourth is eating well. Stop drinking sodas; stop with the packaged, ultra-processed snacks; eat fermented food; eat more fiber. So if you want a great breakfast, it’s yogurt (for fermentation) with berries (for fiber) and hemp hearts (for protein).

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Fifth: Exercise, and there are three kinds of exercise. There’s balance, which is really important as we grow older, so we don’t fall over. Do 20 minutes of yoga to keep those limbs limber; there are lots of yoga instructions online. Second, there’s aerobic exercise to get your heart and lungs moving. Just walking around is a good thing. I like to bike ride. The last one is to strengthen your muscles. After 60, we lose about 6 to 8 percent of our muscle mass per decade. The best way to keep it is to lift weights, to stress your body by running, walking, bicycle riding or swimming.

The last rule is to sleep. Unlike exercise or making friends or eating well, you can’t will sleep to happen. And sleeping aids like melatonin don’t work, because while they affect the circadian rhythm, they don’t really affect adenosine, which is a key chemical for sleep. What you can do is avoid naps, caffeine and alcohol after 2 p.m. — all of those are sleep disruptors.

Since you helped devise the MyPlate dietary guidelines 25 years ago, what is your take on the new, upside-down food pyramid?

I'm against almost everything — maybe even everything — RFK Jr. has said on vaccines, but on the food thing, he’s going largely, but not exclusively, in the right direction. Cut down on your ultra-processed foods, cut down on your sugar, cut down on your salt, eat more plant protein, eat more fiber, eat more dairy (and whole-milk dairy is fine) — I agree with all of that.

What I don’t agree with is this emphasis on more and more protein, and on beef, including beef tallow. That’s just not scientifically supported. I don’t agree with the attack on seed oils like canola. It’s true that olive oil is the best oil, but not everyone can afford it. So we need to recognize that canola oil is perfectly healthy. Finally, I disagree with this emphasis on “eat saturated fats.” That is not true. We’ve got a lot of evidence that saturated fats are not good, and certainly not good with carbohydrates, which is a major part of a lot of people’s diets.

You’ve publicly expressed concerns about the new U.S. childhood immunization schedule. Can you elaborate?

Well, it’s just wrong. I told my daughter, who has a newborn, “Just follow the Academy of Pediatrics. Just tell your doctor you want the old schedule.”

For older people, I’ve mentioned the three biggest vaccines, and I would add a fourth and fifth — the COVID and flu vaccines. Many of us older people might also consider getting another measles shot, because measles is spreading, and you probably haven’t gotten it since you were a kid. I just got mine. It’s cheap, easy and relatively painless.

What wellness fad makes you the most frustrated?

Simply chasing the latest fad is a trend that drives me nuts. Most of it is nonsense.

The rules I put in my book are universal and age-old. Hippocrates knew about eating well and exercising. Aristotle spends two chapters in his book The Nicomachean Ethics talking about the importance of friendship for human beings to flourish.

For more on Emanuel's take on brain health, read this article on AARP’s Staying Sharp.