Live Well, Age Well

Blood sugar is having a moment. Continuous glucose monitors have moved from hospitals to healthy people’s arms. Spike this, flatten that, eat your vegetables first. A lot of it is useful. Some of it is noise. But nearly all of it shares one assumption — that your blood sugar response is a function of what you put in your mouth. That is roughly half the story. The other half is already living inside you. What actually changes as our bodies change Start with the honest version of the aging part, because it is more nuanced than the headlines. Researchers comparing glucose handling in older and younger adults found two things moving at once. Insulin secretion declined — after accounting for insulin resistance, every measure of insulin output was lower in the older group, pointing to the pancreas working less efficiently. And insulin sensitivity declined too. But the second finding came with a caveat worth sitting with. When the researchers adjusted for body fat and visceral fat, the insulin sensitivity difference between the age groups largely disappeared. Body composition explained it better than age did. That is a more hopeful finding than it first sounds. Part of what we file under “getting older” is actually a description of what tends to happen to body composition over decades — and body composition is something you have some say over. The pancreatic side is harder to argue with. The sensitivity side is not fixed. Which raises the obvious question: what moves insulin sensitivity? Diet. Movement. Sleep. Body composition. All true, all well covered elsewhere. And something that rarely makes the list. Your gut bacteria are part of your metabolic system In Part 4 we worked through what fermentable fiber does in the colon — your gut bacteria break down what you cannot digest, and produce short-chain fatty acids as a byproduct. Butyrate is the one worth knowing by name. It fuels the cells lining your colon and helps hold the intestinal barrier together. That post treated it as a gut story. It turns out not to stop at the gut. Short-chain fatty acids do not stay in the colon. They enter circulation. And once they are circulating, they show up in places that have nothing obviously to do with digestion — influencing how fat tissue behaves, how the liver handles glucose, and how sensitive your tissues are to insulin. So the bacteria fermenting your fiber are not running a separate operation down there. They are participating in your metabolism. Which means the question stops being only “what did you eat” and becomes partly “what did you feed them, and what did they make out of it.” What a 2025 trial actually found This has been a plausible theory for a while. What changed recently is that someone tested it properly, with the specific fiber this is all about. Researchers ran a 12-week randomized, placebo-controlled trial in adults at elevated risk for type 2 diabetes. The intervention was an intrinsic chicory root fiber — fiber still inside the intact plant cells of the root, rather than an isolated extract. The results were published in Cell Reports Medicine in 2025. What they measured, and what they found: Outcome Result Whole-body insulin sensitivity Improved (p = 0.032) Peripheral insulin sensitivity Trended toward improvement (p = 0.085) Circulating triglycerides Decreased (p = 0.049) Liver fat content Trended toward a decrease (p = 0.063) Proportion of small fat cells Increased (p = 0.008) And the microbial half: the metabolic changes coincided with higher levels of fiber-degrading Bifidobacterium and butyrate-producing Anaerostipes, along with a functional shift in the gut toward butyrate production. The bacteria changed. The metabolism changed. In the same people, over the same twelve weeks, from one dietary change. How to read those numbers honestly Two of the five outcomes “trended” rather than reached significance. That is the paper’s own language and it matters — a trend is a reason for another trial, not a finding you can bank. This was also a specific population: adults at elevated metabolic risk. People who start with room to improve generally show larger changes than people who do not. Whether the same effect appears in metabolically healthy adults is an open question. What makes it compelling is not any single number. It is that the microbial shift and the metabolic shift moved together, in the direction the mechanism predicts. Why the form of the fiber mattered here One detail in that trial is easy to skim past and worth slowing down for. The fiber was intrinsic — still held inside the structure of the chicory root’s plant cells, rather than extracted and purified into a powder. That structure changes where fermentation happens. Fiber locked inside intact plant cells ferments more slowly, which means it survives further along the colon before the bacteria get to it. The researchers specifically noted a shift toward a distal butyrogenic chain — butyrate production happening deeper in the gut, where it may matter more. This is the same lesson as the antioxidant post, arriving from a different direction. Isolate a compound from its food structure and you often change what it does. The matrix is not packaging around the active ingredient. Frequently, the matrix is part of the mechanism. If that argument interests you, Part 5 makes it at length — including why concentrated antioxidant supplements failed in trials while the foods they came from did not. Fiber and protein are better together here too There is a more immediate mechanism alongside the bacterial one, and it works on a timescale of hours rather than weeks. Protein and viscous fiber both slow gastric emptying. Food leaves the stomach more gradually, glucose enters the bloodstream more gradually, and the curve that follows a meal is flatter and longer instead of sharp and short. That is the difference between an afternoon that holds and an afternoon that collapses at three o’clock. Not willpower. Gastric emptying. So the two mechanisms stack. In the short run, fiber and protein together shape the glucose curve of the meal you just ate. In the long run, fermentable fiber feeds the bacteria whose output appears to influence how sensitive you are to insulin in the first place. One works today. The other works over months. They are not alternatives. Where our bars sit in this, precisely Here is the careful version, and I want to be exact about the limits. The 8 to 9 grams of fiber on our panel is chicory root inulin — the same fiber that trial studied. That is not a coincidence of ingredient sourcing. It is on the FDA’s recognized dietary fiber list, which is why it can be counted on the panel at all. What our bars are not is that trial. The researchers used a specific intrinsic fiber preparation, at a controlled dose, for twelve weeks, in a population selected for metabolic risk. A bar is food. It is not a clinical intervention and I am not going to dress it up as one. What it is: a reliable way to get a meaningful amount of the fiber that research keeps pointing at, alongside twelve grams of protein, in a form you will actually eat on a Tuesday afternoon when the alternative is whatever is in the break room. That last part is not a small thing. The trial ran twelve weeks because that is how long this kind of change takes. Mechanisms that work over months require something you can repeat. What to actually do with this Four things, in order of how much they matter. Do this Why it works Eat fermentable fiber most days, not perfectly The bacterial shift took twelve weeks. Consistency beats intensity here. Pair fiber with protein in the same sitting Two different mechanisms, one meal — the immediate curve and the long-term adaptation Favor fiber still inside its food Beans, oats, whole fruit, intact plants. Structure appears to change where fermentation happens. Give it a week when you increase Coming from a low-fiber diet, your microbiome needs time to reorganize. That adjustment is normal. None of that requires a monitor on your arm. It requires beans, oats, vegetables, and the patience to let a twelve-week mechanism take twelve weeks. The part that surprised me I came to fiber the way most people do — as a digestion topic. Something you handle when something is wrong. A pharmacy-aisle nutrient. Four posts into writing this series, it keeps turning out to be the other thing. The barrier that holds. The bacteria that make the compounds. And now, apparently, a lever on how your body handles the food you eat for the rest of the day. We spent a lot of years treating the gut as a processing plant — input here, output there, no further involvement. That turns out to be badly incomplete. The population living down there is participating in decisions you thought were being made somewhere else entirely. You can feed them well or you can feed them poorly. They respond either way, and the research suggests they respond fairly quickly. That is a better deal than most things on offer for aging well. This post is part of the Resetting Normal Series. Read the full series: Part 1: Resetting Normal · Part 2: What’s Actually in Your Protein Bar · Part 3: Protein and Muscle as We Age · Part 4: Fiber, Your Gut, and Aging Well · Part 5: The Most Overused Word on a Health Label · Part 6: Your Blood Sugar Has a Gut Problem Here’s to aging well… Cheers! Joel J. MontesanoFounder, Five Plus Protein References Omary L, Canfora EE, Puhlmann ML, Gavriilidou A, Rijnaarts I, Holst JJ, Op den Kamp-Bruls YMH, de Vos WM, Blaak EE. Intrinsic chicory root fibers modulate colonic microbial butyrate-producing pathways and improve insulin sensitivity in individuals with obesity. Cell Reports Medicine. 2025;6(7):102237. Basu R, Dalla Man C, Campioni M, et al. Effects of age and sex on postprandial glucose metabolism. Diabetes. 2006;55(7):2001–2014. Basu R, Breda E, Oberg AL, et al. Mechanisms of the age-associated deterioration in glucose tolerance. Diabetes. 2003;52(7):1738–1748. Dried chicory root improves bowel function and increases faecal and circulating short chain fatty acids in subjects at risk for type 2 diabetes. Gut Microbiome. 2022. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Guidance, science review, and citizen petition responses on dietary fiber. June 14, 2018.

Protein has had a very good decade. It is on the front of every package, in every ad, at the center of every conversation about staying strong as we age. And it deserves the attention. I have spent three posts in this series making that case myself. Fiber has had a very different decade. Nobody is arguing about it. Nobody is marketing it. There is no fiber influencer. And that quiet is exactly the problem, because fiber is the nutrient with one of the widest gaps between what we need and what we actually eat. How wide? Researchers analyzing national nutrition survey data from more than 14,000 U.S. adults found that roughly 7% of adults meet the daily fiber recommendation — about 5% of men and 9% of women. The rest of us are somewhere below the line, most of us well below it. Average intake sits near 16 grams a day against targets of roughly 25 grams for women and 38 grams for men. We are not slightly short. We are, as a country, eating about half the fiber we need. And the reason that matters has almost nothing to do with what most people think fiber is for. Fiber is not a digestion nutrient. It is an aging nutrient. Most of us learned about fiber in the narrowest possible terms. It keeps you regular. It is what you take when something is wrong. It lives in the pharmacy aisle next to things nobody wants to discuss. That framing is not wrong, exactly. It is just so small that it misses the actual story. Here is the bigger version. Your large intestine houses a population of bacteria that you cannot live well without. Those bacteria have a job, and the job is fermentation — breaking down the fibers you cannot digest yourself and producing compounds called short-chain fatty acids as a byproduct. Butyrate is the one worth knowing by name. It is the preferred fuel source for the cells lining your colon, and it is central to keeping the intestinal barrier intact. That barrier is the thing that matters as our bodies change. Reviews of the aging gut describe a consistent pattern: microbial diversity tends to decline with age, the bacteria that produce short-chain fatty acids become less abundant, and the tight junctions that hold the intestinal barrier together lose some of their integrity. Researchers connect that combination to inflammaging — the persistent, low-grade inflammation that shows up as a hallmark of aging across nearly every system in the body. In other words: the gut does not just get less comfortable as we age. It gets less protective. And the primary thing you can feed the bacteria that hold that line is fiber. The number that made me pay attention Researchers following more than 1,600 adults aged 50 and older for a decade looked at which dietary factor best predicted what they called successful aging — reaching the end of the follow-up period free of disability, depressive symptoms, cognitive impairment, respiratory symptoms, and chronic disease. They tested total carbohydrate intake. Glycemic index. Glycemic load. Total sugar. Fiber was the strongest predictor of the group. Participants in the highest fiber intake group had close to an 80% greater likelihood of aging well over those ten years. One observational study is not proof of cause. But when the nutrient nobody markets outperforms every other carbohydrate variable in the analysis, that is worth more than a shrug. Some fiber feeds your gut. Some just passes through. Here is where the label gets interesting, and where a lot of well-intentioned shopping goes sideways. "Fiber" on a Nutrition Facts panel is a regulatory category, not a description of what something does in your body. It covers a wide range of compounds that share one trait — your small intestine cannot break them down — and almost nothing else. Some pass through largely inert, adding bulk and not much more. Some form a gel that slows digestion. And some are actively fermented by your gut bacteria, which is the category that produces the short-chain fatty acids we just talked about. That last group has a name: prebiotic fiber. A prebiotic is not a probiotic. You are not swallowing bacteria. You are sending food to the bacteria you already have, which is a considerably more reliable proposition than hoping a capsule of live cultures survives the trip. Inulin, the fiber found in chicory root, is one of the best-studied prebiotic fibers there is. In a randomized, placebo-controlled trial of 55 adults, dried chicory root increased fecal acetate, propionate, and butyrate by about 26%, with matching increases in circulating levels. Bifidobacterium and Anaerostipes — two groups central to that fermentation chain — increased three- to fourfold. Stool softness and bowel frequency improved. The effects appeared quickly and reversed when the fiber was withdrawn, which is its own kind of evidence: the bacteria respond to what you actually feed them, this week, not to what you ate five years ago. That is the distinction worth carrying into a store. The question is not how many grams of fiber. The question is what kind, and whether it does anything once it arrives. The source matters more than the number This is the part of the label conversation that almost nobody has, and it is the reason we built our bars the way we did. When the FDA modernized the Nutrition Facts panel, it did something that sounds bureaucratic and turned out to be consequential: it decided that a compound can only be counted on the Dietary Fiber line if there is evidence it produces a beneficial physiological effect in humans. Not just that it resists digestion. That it does something. Then the agency published a list. Inulin and inulin-type fructans — chicory root fiber — made the list in June 2018. Isomaltooligosaccharide, almost always labeled as IMO, did not. Two separate manufacturer petitions asked the FDA to add it. In January 2020 the agency denied both, concluding that the strength of the evidence did not show a beneficial physiological effect in humans. Now put that next to a shelf of high-fiber bars. IMO syrup is one of the most widely used ingredients in the bar category. It is inexpensive, it binds beautifully, it tastes mildly sweet, and for years it was counted as fiber. After the FDA’s decision, it cannot be. Which means a bar built on IMO either has to reformulate, or watch its fiber number fall. What this means when you read a panel If a bar shows a large Dietary Fiber number today, that number is legally required to come from fibers the FDA recognizes. The grams on the line are real. What the line will not tell you is whether the rest of the bar's bulk comes from something the agency has specifically declined to count — that information is in the ingredient list, not the panel.   So let me be direct about our own label, because we use IMO syrup too, and I would rather you hear it from me than find it yourself. IMO syrup is fifth on our PB Cacao ingredient list. It is there for structure. Without it, we do not have a bar that holds together, travels, or tastes like something you want to eat twice. It has been generally recognized as safe since 2008, it is well tolerated at the amounts in a single bar, and I have no interest in pretending it is a villain. What it is not is our fiber. The 8 to 9 grams of Dietary Fiber on our panel come from chicory root fiber — the inulin that sits second on every one of our ingredient lists, ahead of the protein. We did not pad the number. We could not have, even if we wanted to. That is not marketing language. It is a consequence of how the panel is regulated, and it is verifiable by anyone willing to read two documents. Why 8 or 9 grams, and not 15 People ask this one more than I expected. If fiber is good and most of us are short, why not build a bar with twenty grams and close the whole gap in one bite? Because that is not how your gut works. Fermentable fiber is fermented. That is the entire point. But fermentation produces gas along with the short-chain fatty acids, and the amount your system handles comfortably at one sitting has a ceiling. Push past it and the experience stops being pleasant — bloating, pressure, the kind of afternoon that makes people swear off fiber entirely and go back to eating none. Eight to nine grams in a single serving sits near the practical upper end of what most people tolerate well in one sitting. It moves you roughly a third of the way to a daily target in one bar, which is meaningful, while leaving room for the fiber in your actual meals — where most of it should be coming from anyway. A bar is not supposed to replace vegetables. It is supposed to make the day you did not eat enough of them less of a loss. One honest heads-up If you are coming from a low-fiber diet — and statistically, most of us are — give your system a few days to adjust. Adding eight or nine grams at once to a gut that has not seen much fermentable fiber lately can feel like a lot at first. That is not a problem with the bar. It is your microbiome reorganizing around a new food supply. Start with one bar a day, drink water with it, and give it about a week. The adjustment is real, it is temporary, and it is worth sitting through. Fiber and protein are better together than either is alone In the last post I made the case for protein as the anchor nutrient for holding onto muscle as our bodies change. Fiber is the other half of that equation, and the two work differently enough that pairing them changes what a snack actually does. Protein is the most satiating of the three macronutrients — more filling, gram for gram, than either carbohydrate or fat. Fiber slows gastric emptying and blunts the speed at which glucose enters the bloodstream. Put them in the same serving and you get something that keeps you full and keeps the next two hours steady — rather than the rise and collapse that sends you back to the pantry at three in the afternoon looking for whatever is closest. This is the difference between a snack that interrupts your hunger and a snack that resolves it. Twelve grams of protein and nine grams of fiber in two hundred calories is not an accident of formulation. It is the specific combination that makes the calories do work. And it is why the total sugar line matters as much as the added sugar line — a point worth reading in full in Part 2 of this series, where we walk the whole panel line by line. What to actually look for If you take one practical thing from this post, make it this sequence. It takes about fifteen seconds in a store aisle.   Step What to do What you learn 1 Find the Dietary Fiber line on the panel The honest grams — legally limited to recognized fibers 2 Read the first five ingredients Where the bulk of the food actually comes from 3 Look for a named prebiotic fiber Chicory root, inulin, or another recognized fermentable fiber 4 Check where the syrups sit Structure ingredients near the top mean sweetness is doing the work 5 Compare fiber to protein A real food bar carries both; a candy bar carries neither   That is the whole method. It does not require a nutrition degree, and it does not require trusting anybody’s marketing — including ours. The quiet nutrient I spent most of my training life optimizing protein and barely thinking about fiber. I counted grams of one and ignored the other entirely, and I would not have told you there was a cost to that, because nobody was telling anyone there was. What changed my mind was not a headline. It was noticing, over and over in the research, that the nutrient nobody is marketing keeps showing up in the outcomes that actually matter — the barrier that holds, the inflammation that stays low, the decade that goes well instead of going sideways. Fiber is not exciting. It is not going to trend. But it is one of the clearest, cheapest, most under-used levers we have for aging the way we want to age, and almost all of us are leaving it on the table. You do not need a bar to fix that. Beans, oats, berries, artichokes, and a hundred other ordinary foods will do it better and cheaper than we can. But on the days when the vegetables did not happen and the afternoon is coming at you anyway, it matters what you reach for — and it matters whether the fiber on that label is doing anything once it gets where it is going. Ours is. Eight to nine grams of chicory root fiber. Twelve grams of plant protein. No added sugar. One bar, one habit, one thing off the list. Shop LAST Bars This post is part of the Resetting Normal Series. Read the full series: Part 1: Resetting Normal · Part 2: What's Actually in Your Protein Bar · Part 3: Protein and Muscle as We Age · Part 4: Fiber, Your Gut, and Aging Well · Part 5: The Most Overused Word on a Health Label Here’s to aging well… Cheers! Joel J. Montesano Founder, Five Plus Protein References Miketinas D, et al. Usual dietary fiber intake among US adults with and without diabetes: NHANES 2013–2018. Presented at NUTRITION 2021 LIVE ONLINE, American Society for Nutrition. n = 14,640. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. Fiber intake of the U.S. population: What We Eat in America, NHANES. FSRG Dietary Data Briefs. Giannouli V, et al. Gut microbiota and ageing: mechanisms, age-related diseases, and therapeutic perspectives. Healthcare. 2026;14(14):2117. Gopinath B, et al. Carbohydrate nutrition is associated with successful aging over 10 years. The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences. 2016. Blue Mountains Eye Study, n > 1,600 adults aged 50+. Dried chicory root improves bowel function, benefits intestinal microbial trophic chains and increases faecal and circulating short chain fatty acids in subjects at risk for type 2 diabetes. Gut Microbiome (Cambridge University Press). 2022. Randomized placebo-controlled trial, n = 55. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. FDA issues guidance, science review, and citizen petition responses on dietary fiber. June 14, 2018 — identifies inulin and inulin-type fructans among non-digestible carbohydrates meeting the dietary fiber definition. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Responses to citizen petitions regarding isomaltooligosaccharide (IMO). January 13, 2020 — both petitions denied; evidence did not demonstrate a beneficial physiological effect in humans.

At some point, most of us realize that what worked in our twenties doesn't work anymore. The late dinners. The skipped breakfasts. The whatever's-convenient approach to eating. It's not that those things were ever ideal. It's that our bodies were more forgiving then. They absorbed the inconsistency and kept going. As we age, that forgiveness narrows. Not as a punishment. As a signal. Your body is asking for something more intentional — and when you give it that, the difference is hard to ignore. What "Intentional" Actually Means Intentional eating isn't a diet. It's not a protocol, a point system, or a list of foods you're no longer allowed to enjoy. It's a shift in how you think about food — from something you consume out of habit or convenience to something you choose with awareness. Awareness of how it makes you feel. How it affects your energy. How it supports — or undermines — the way you want to live. That shift sounds simple. But for most people it's a meaningful change. Because most of us were never taught to think about food that way. We were taught to think about calories. About macros. About good foods and bad foods. Intentional eating is different. It asks a quieter question: does this fuel the life I'm trying to build? How Nutritional Needs Shift as We Age This is the part most people don't talk about enough. As our bodies change, so does the way we process and respond to what we eat. Protein metabolism shifts — meaning we need more dietary protein to maintain the same muscle mass we could preserve more easily in our thirties. Gut microbiome diversity tends to decrease with age, making digestive comfort and fiber intake more important. Inflammation becomes easier to trigger and harder to resolve, making food choices a more powerful lever than most people realize. (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 2024) None of this means food becomes the enemy. It means food becomes more important — not less. The people who age well tend to be the people who figured this out and adjusted. Not perfectly. Not with obsession. Just with more intention than before. Protein — The Most Underestimated Piece If there's one nutritional shift that matters most as we age, it's protein. Muscle mass naturally declines with age — a process called sarcopenia — and the consequences reach further than most people realize. Loss of muscle affects metabolism, mobility, bone density, balance, and even cognitive function. It's one of the primary drivers of the physical decline we associate with getting older. (Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle, 2023) The good news: it's largely preventable. Consistent resistance movement and adequate protein intake are the two most evidence-backed tools for preserving muscle as we age. But here's where most people fall short — not on movement, but on protein. Studies suggest that adults over 40 consistently underestimate how much protein they actually need, and that the recommended daily allowance may itself be too low for active, aging adults. Many researchers now suggest a target closer to 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight for those focused on maintaining muscle and metabolic health. (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2024) That's more than most people are getting. And it's harder to hit than it sounds — especially without intentional choices at every meal and snack. The Gut Health Connection What you eat doesn't just affect your energy and your waistline. It directly shapes your gut microbiome — the ecosystem of bacteria that governs digestion, immune function, inflammation, and even mood. As we age, microbiome diversity naturally decreases. A less diverse gut is more prone to inflammation, digestive discomfort, and immune dysregulation. The foods you choose either support that diversity or accelerate its decline. (Nature Medicine, 2024) Fiber-rich whole foods, fermented foods, and clean protein sources support a healthy microbiome. Ultra-processed foods, excess sugar, and artificial additives tend to disrupt it. This is why ingredient quality matters — not as a wellness trend, but as a genuine health strategy. What's in your food is doing something inside your body. The question is whether it's working for you or against you. Eating for Steady Energy — Not Just Fuel One of the most immediate benefits of intentional eating is what happens to your energy throughout the day. Most people accept energy crashes as normal. The mid-morning slump. The post-lunch fog. The 3pm reach for caffeine or sugar. None of that is inevitable. Blood sugar stability — achieved largely through what and when you eat — is one of the most powerful determinants of daily energy, mental clarity, and mood. Foods that spike glucose sharply tend to crash it just as hard. Foods that release energy slowly and steadily keep you level, focused, and functional throughout the day. (Funky Fat Foods, 2023) Intentional eating isn't about eating less. It's about eating in a way that keeps your body — and your mind — running the way you need them to. What This Looks Like in Practice It doesn't have to be complicated. A protein-forward breakfast instead of skipping it. A clean snack between meetings instead of waiting until you're ravenous. A dinner built around vegetables and quality protein instead of whatever's fastest. Small, consistent choices. Made with awareness. Applied over time. That's it. That's intentional eating. It's not perfection. It's not restriction. It's just choosing — deliberately — to give your body what it actually needs to perform, recover, and age well. Where Five Plus Protein Fits We built Five Plus Protein because intentional eating is hardest in the gaps. The moments between meals. The long workdays. The travel days. The times when a good choice isn't obvious and a bad one is right in front of you. A clean, plant-based protein bar that digests easily, doesn't spike your blood sugar, and doesn't contain ingredients you have to look up — that's not a supplement. That's a tool. A practical, portable way to stay intentional when life makes it difficult. This is how we fuel our lives. Not perfectly. But consistently. With awareness and quality. If you're ready to make clean protein a non-negotiable part of your routine — not a one-time purchase — a subscription is the simplest way to do it. It's always there when you need it. No second-guessing. No running out. ► Subscribe and make intentional nutrition part of your daily routine. Final Thought Food is not the enemy. It's not a reward system, a punishment, or a moral statement about who you are. It's fuel. For the body you're living in. For the life you're trying to build. As we age, the relationship between what we eat and how we feel becomes harder to ignore. That's not a burden — it's an opportunity. An invitation to be more intentional about something that was always important, even when we could get away with not thinking about it. Eat with awareness. Choose with intention. Fuel the life you actually want. This post is part of the No Excuses Series. Read the full series: Part 1: Start Where You Are · Part 2: Stop Negotiating With Yourself · Part 3: The Identity Shift · Part 4: Consistency Builds Strength · Part 5: Focus on What You Can Do · Part 6: Do What You Enjoy · Part 7: Why Movement Matters More Than You Think · Part 8: How We Fuel Our Lives · Part 9: Is Eating Healthy Worth the Cost?· Part 10: One Day at a Time · Part 11: You Don't Have to Do This Alone Here's to aging well… Cheers! Joel J. Montesano Founder, Five Plus Protein Sources: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health — Nutrition and Healthy Aging (hsph.harvard.edu, 2024) Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle — Sarcopenia and Protein Intake in Aging Adults (2023) American Journal of Clinical Nutrition — Protein Requirements for Active Aging Adults (2024) Nature Medicine — Gut Microbiome Diversity and Aging (nature.com, 2024) Funky Fat Foods — Blood Sugar and Longevity (funkyfatfoods.com, 2023)

Why sugar alcohols have a bad reputation Sugar alcohols are a category of sweeteners commonly used to reduce added sugar. Some of the most common ones include: Maltitol Sorbitol Xylitol Erythritol These are often used in large amounts to make products taste sweet without sugar. The issue? Many of these are poorly absorbed in the gut, especially when consumed in higher doses. Research shows that sugar alcohols like maltitol and sorbitol can pull water into the intestines and ferment in the colon, which is why they’re linked to bloating, gas, and digestive distress — particularly for people with sensitive digestion. That’s the experience many people remember. And it’s valid. But here’s where things get misleading.

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