The American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8 includes diet, exercises, tobacco cessation, sleep, weight management, cholesterol control, blood sugar control, and blood pressure optimization as things people should focus on for improved health.
A new paper
was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition looking at the connection between these Essential 8 to muscle mass, inflammation, and testosterone levels.
The paper is open access and probably worth a read, but the most interesting thing to me was the connection between testosterone and odds of low muscle mass. There was a dose dependent relationship between T levels (or SHBG for women) and both low Essential 8 score and low muscle mass. Higher T levels reduced the odds of low muscle mass and increased odds of having a high Essential 8 score.
To me, this further supports the idea that T levels are reflective of health status, where lower T levels are not only correlated with increased disease, but likely caused by them. For example, obesity greatly increases the risk of low T, and is the proximate cause of lower T levels seen in the population now vs the 1970’s. In healthy age-matched individuals living in the same areas, T levels haven’t changed by and large.
Rather than trying to “optimize T” in order to get healthy, I think the arrow should be pointing the other way for most folks, i.e. get healthy to optimize T levels.