Stairs, Superbug, Coffee: Your Body Knows
The TikTok framing is clumsy, as it usually is, but the underlying physiology is not.
Stairs, Superbug, Coffee: Your Body Knows
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Dinner at Six: Your Sleep Depended on It
There is a woman I know in Valletta — sharp, efficient, the kind of person who has read the science before you've finished your sentence — who started eating dinner at half past six and reported, three weeks later, that she was sleeping better than she had in years. She attributed it to the wine, which she'd also cut back on. The research suggests she was only half right.
The TikTok framing is clumsy, as it usually is, but the underlying physiology is not. Eating four to five hours before bed gives your digestive system time to settle before your core body temperature drops — and that temperature drop is one of the primary signals your brain uses to initiate deep sleep. Eat late, and you delay it. The mechanism is not complicated. The execution, in a Mediterranean culture where dinner at nine is practically constitutionalised, is another matter entirely.
This connects to something worth holding alongside it: belly fat — not the number on your scale, not your BMI — appears to be a significantly better predictor of cardiovascular risk than either of those more commonly tracked measures. A study comparing abdominal adiposity against body mass index found that the fat carried around the midsection, particularly the visceral kind that wraps around the organs, tells a more accurate story about what your heart is doing than a height-to-weight ratio ever could. BMI was always a rough tool. The research is finally saying so plainly.
And then there is coffee, which deserves better than the anxiety it usually attracts. The American Heart Association has now published a formal statement: up to five cups of black coffee per day is safe for most people's heart health. Five. Not the guilty single espresso you've been rationing since someone told you caffeine was bad for your blood pressure. The evidence continues to shift in coffee's favour, which will surprise no one who has ever watched a Maltese grandmother outlive everyone's expectations on a diet of strong coffee and unscheduled walking.
Speaking of walking — stairs count. A major study found that choosing stairs over lifts correlates with meaningfully reduced cardiovascular disease risk and lower all-cause mortality. Not a gym programme. Not a structured protocol. Just the decision, repeated, to take the longer way up.
There is also a harder story running underneath all of this: Candida auris, a drug-resistant fungal infection, has now been reported in more than 3,000 cases across 23 American states. It spreads in healthcare settings, resists most antifungals, and the CDC is watching it carefully. It is not a reason for alarm if you are healthy. It is a reason to pay attention.
One thing to do: Eat dinner before seven tonight and notice, tomorrow morning, how you slept.
