New Seafood Superfood, Apple Watch Health Age, Botanical Drugs, Cannabis IQ, and Blueberries

Dave Asprey (0:01)

I'm Dave Asprey. That's Dave spelled D-A-I-V-E. And this is your 10-minute weekly upgrade on the biggest stories in biohacking, longevity, and the world of health. Let's go.

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This week, we have anti-aging lipids from C-squirts, major Apple Watch health upgrades, a surprising FDA move on botanical drugs, cannabis and long-term brain health, and a blueberry compound that may change how muscle cells handle fat. Some of this could become extremely useful.

Let's start with the weirdest one. You may have seen headlines saying, a compound found in C-squirts and edible seafood, reversed signs of aging in mice. Researchers gave aged mice purified plasmalogens, and the mice performed better on memory tests, rebuilt synaptic structures, showed less brain inflammation, and even grew darker, thicker hair.

Plasmalogens are specialized fats that make up part of your cell membranes, especially in the brain. Levels tend to decline with age, and researchers have connected low plasmalogen levels with neurodegenerative disease. Membrane biology is so important because the quality of your cell membranes affects signaling, inflammation, mitochondrial function, and how efficiently neurons communicate. That tells me membrane composition deserves a lot more attention in longevity research. The first problem is that these sea squirt plasmalogens also oxidize easily, so formulation and storage could make a huge difference. But this gives more credence to our pescatarian friends out there. Keep plasmalogens on your radar, but I'm not ordering sea squirt smoothies yet.

Now let's move from experimental brain rejuvenation to something millions of people can measure on their wrist. Apple just announced the Apple Watch Series 12, and the health upgrades go well beyond a screen refresh. The new Health Sensing System measures heart rate every five seconds throughout the day, which Apple says is 60 times more frequent than the background heart rate readings on Series 11 That resolution feeds a new readiness score, built from sleep, activity, training load and other physiological signals, plus a health age feature comparing your metrics to your chronological age. Really love that addition. The company ran what it calls a scientifically rigorous study across more than a thousand participants and says the result puts Apple Watch ahead of other wearables for heart rate accuracy.

The hypertension detection is the most interesting piece to me. It doesn't take a single blood pressure reading. The optical heart sensor feeds an algorithm that analyzes how your blood vessels respond to each heartbeat tracked passively over rolling 30-day windows, and the watch alerts you if it detects a consistent pattern suggesting hypertension. Since hypertension is often silent and easy to miss even at a doctor's visit, a background system that watches for the pattern over weeks rather than one office reading is a meaningfully different approach. This is something we have been waiting on wearables adding for a very long time. The watch also still runs a single lead ECG on demand to check for signs of atrial fibrillation, and it keeps an AFIB history that estimates how much time you spent in that rhythm over the previous week if you've already been diagnosed. Apple is also integrating Quest Diagnostics testing directly into the Health app, so users can order a panel covering more than 50 biomarkers without leaving the app. That means the watch now combines passive daily heart monitoring, a 30-day hypertension pattern check, on-demand ECG, and actual lab blood work in one place.

20 years ago, getting this kind of continuous cardiovascular data required specialized clinical equipment. Nice work, Apple.