This is turning into one of my favourite things about the last few weeks. Since asking what you’d like to see in the next issue of the magazine, I’ve heard from so many of you, and I’m glad to say I’ve now made my way through every single reply. If you wrote in, you should have heard back from me by now.
Two replies in particular have stayed with me, for very different reasons. One reframed something I hadn’t thought about in quite the same way before. The other asked a question I suspect a lot of you have wondered about too, and one I can finally answer properly.
We spend a great deal of time in this newsletter on the practical side of healthy ageing, what to eat, how to move, which nutrients matter. But the first reply reminded me of something just as important that rarely gets talked about: our actual relationship with our own bodies, and whether we treat them as something to fix, or something to appreciate.
Jenny, who is 83, wrote in to tell me she is exceptionally healthy. She follows a largely Mediterranean, vegetarian diet, meditates daily, and takes the occasional magnesium or vitamin tablet, nothing more elaborate than that. Her muscular strength, she said, “isn’t quite what it was ten years ago, but it’s more than adequate,” which might be one of the best healthy-ageing goals I’ve heard in a while.
But something else in her message struck me just as much. Each morning, she goes through her body appreciating every part of it, thanking it for working so well. If she feels a stab of pain somewhere, she has found she can ease it simply through appreciating that part of her body rather than resenting it. She made a point I think is genuinely true: most of us take our bodies for granted, noticing them only when something goes wrong, rarely stopping to appreciate everything working quietly in the background – hormone regulation, the lymphatic system, immune defences, and so much more we never think about. Jenny’s approach is a good reminder that gratitude might be doing quiet work of its own, alongside everything else we’re trying to get right.
The second reply came from Lucinda, who asked about statins, sarcopenia and whether there’s a real difference between natural and ascorbic acid vitamin C. Sarcopenia we’ve already covered, and statins deserve a fuller conversation of their own another time. But the vitamin C question I can answer properly now, and it feels timely too, with autumn approaching and vitamin C on a lot of minds for immune support.
The honest answer is there’s a place for both, depending on what you’re after. Ascorbic acid is vitamin C in its most direct, concentrated form, useful for a substantial, reliable amount. Whole food sources, like camu camu, a fruit naturally exceptionally high in vitamin C, provide less per serving, but come with the other plant compounds that occur alongside it naturally, which some people prefer.
Neither is objectively better, they’re simply different tools for different purposes. If you want a substantial daily amount in a practical form, PureC+, which uses ascorbic acid with a liposomal delivery system for better absorption, is a helpful option. If you’d rather take a whole-food approach, Camu Camu is a good place to look.
There’s a wider myth worth naming too: that a nutrient isn’t “real” unless it comes from nature. Vitamin C is chemically identical whether it is naturally present in fruit or produced industrially through fermentation and chemical processing, usually starting, ironically, with plant-derived glucose. The choice really comes down to convenience, dose, and preference, not one being inherently superior.
Between Jenny’s gratitude and Lucinda’s practical question, this week is a good example of what these replies keep giving me: some make me think differently, others give me something concrete to answer. Please keep them coming – questions, stories, anything at all. I read every one, and they genuinely make this better.
