Stairs, Sugar, Blood: Your Body Keeps Score
There is a staircase in my Valletta building that I have climbed, at various points in my life, cursing it.
Stairs, Sugar, Blood: Your Body Keeps Score
There is a staircase in my Valletta building that I have climbed, at various points in my life, cursing it. Six floors of pale stone, no lift, the smell of someone's cooking drifting down from the third floor on certain evenings. I used to think of it as the tax I paid for a good address. A study published this year reframed it for me entirely: people who habitually choose stairs over elevators show measurably lower rates of cardiovascular mortality. Not gym sessions, not structured cardio. Just the unremarkable decision, made repeatedly, to take the harder door.
This is the thing about longevity research that keeps quietly rearranging my priors. The gains aren't hiding inside expensive interventions. They're hiding inside Tuesday.
The same logic runs through two other findings worth holding together. The first is about sugary drinks — and I say this without any intention of lecturing, because I spent two years in Singapore drinking bubble tea the way other people drink water. A large new study found that consuming at least one sugar-sweetened beverage daily more than doubles the risk of stomach cancer. Not a modest uptick. More than double. The mechanism likely involves how fructose disrupts the stomach lining and creates the kind of chronic inflammation that, over years, becomes something harder to name. The body keeps score quietly, and then all at once.
The second finding is more hopeful, which matters. An experimental blood test — not a colonoscopy, not a procedure that requires preparation and a day off work and a certain threshold of medical courage — has shown real promise in detecting precancerous polyps and early-stage colorectal cancer. Colorectal cancer remains one of the most preventable cancers we have, and yet detection rates stay stubbornly low because the barrier to screening is high. A blood draw changes that equation. It's not approved yet, not standard practice yet — but it is the direction things are moving, and it is worth knowing.
What these three things share is something I find myself returning to often: the body responds to accumulation. The stairs, taken daily. The sugary drink, skipped daily. The screening, done once. None of these are dramatic. All of them compound.
Malta's summer is long and its pavements are unforgiving, and I understand the lift and the cold drink and the postponed appointment. I understand all of it. But the evidence keeps pointing toward the same quiet argument — that health is less about discipline and more about small, consistent defections from convenience.
One thing to do: Walk up one flight of stairs you would normally take a lift for. Just one. Tomorrow. Then the next day.
