Inflammaging May Not Be Inevitable
A study across three continents found something unexpected about aging and inflammation.
For most of the last two decades, "inflammaging" has been treated as settled. The idea is straightforward: as you get older, low-grade inflammation slowly creeps upward, and that creep is part of why aging brings the aches, the stiffness, the slower recovery. It comes with the birthdays. Nothing to be done.
Then researchers went and checked whether it happens to everyone.
The study
A team at Columbia measured 19 inflammation markers across four populations on three continents. Two of those groups were what you'd expect in a study like this — people living in Italy and Singapore, in industrialized settings much like most of us.
In both, they found the familiar pattern. Inflammation climbing with each decade, exactly as the textbook describes.
Then they looked at two Indigenous communities, one in Bolivia and one in Malaysia. And the creep wasn't there. Not reduced. Not delayed. Substantially absent.
Inflammaging "may not be a direct product of aging, but rather a response to industrialized conditions."
That's the researchers' own framing, and it's worth sitting with, because it quietly reverses the premise. If inflammation tracked with age itself, you'd see it everywhere humans get older. You don't. It tracks with how people live — what they eat, how much they move, how much of the day they spend sitting.
You can read Columbia's write-up of the research here.
Why this is good news
Here's the part that matters, and it's genuinely encouraging rather than alarming.
You cannot change your age. Nobody has ever managed it. But if the slow burn is largely a response to modern conditions rather than an inevitability of getting older, then it sits in a category of things people actually have some say over. Ultra-processed food. Long stretches in a chair. What you drink four times a day without thinking about it.
That's a meaningfully different conversation than "this is what happens after fifty."
Two honest caveats, because we'd rather you trust us than be impressed by us. This is one study, and one study is a signal, not a verdict. And the Indigenous communities examined differ from industrialized populations in a great many ways at once — diet, activity, environment, infection exposure — so untangling which factors drive the difference is work that's still ahead. Nobody has proven that swapping one drink changes an inflammation marker. What the research does is point at a category of causes, and that category happens to be made of daily habits.
What a small swap looks like
Nobody is suggesting you take up foraging. The realistic version of acting on research like this is small, repeatable, and boring in the best way.
One processed drink a day, traded for something made of things your body recognizes. That's the whole idea behind what we put in a can: fresh-pressed whole fruit, crushed whole moringa leaf, turmeric and ginger.* Zero added sugar. Twenty to thirty-five calories. Nothing ultra about any of it.
We use crushed whole leaf rather than an extract, which is worth a sentence of explanation. Most moringa on the market is run through an extraction line and standardized to a single compound. What lands in the capsule is a fraction of the plant. We put the whole leaf in, so the fiber and the full range of compounds it grew alongside arrive together — the way people have consumed moringa for centuries.
If you want to start
Three flavors, and people tend to have a firm favorite rather than liking them all equally.
Lemon, Lime & Mango is our best-reviewed. Dragon Fruit & Mangosteen runs a very close second. Watermelon & Lime is the divisive one, and the people who love it really love it.
The Discovery Pack puts all three in one box so you can find yours, and there's a smaller six-can option if you'd prefer to start light. Everything we make is here.
And if the afternoon is where your day tends to fall apart, we wrote about why the 2pm crash probably isn't a caffeine problem.
*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.