Dr. Rick's Insights

By Rick Cohen, M.D. After more than 40 years working in nutrition, performance, and regenerative health, I have arrived at a conclusion that is both simple and easy to resist: Food can remove friction and supply material. It cannot, by itself, create a capable organism. This is the boundary almost every dietary movement eventually crosses. Someone removes a food and feels better. Someone adds protein and becomes stronger. Someone changes meal timing and loses weight. A useful intervention becomes a successful intervention—and then gradually becomes the explanation for everything. Eventually, food is expected to solve fatigue, anxiety, muscle loss, poor...

Brain fog is usually treated like a stimulation, or sometimes a motivation problem. People reach for coffee.Energy drinks.Nootropics.Adaptogens.Electrolytes.Mushroom blends.Theanine.Tyrosine.GABA.Another focus supplement. Or just "try" harder. Sometimes those tools and strategies help. But sometimes they miss the deeper question. What if the brain is not asking for more stimulation? What if it is asking for better substrate? The brain is not separate from nutrition. It depends on glucose stability, oxygen delivery, sleep, circulation, micronutrients, hormones, neurotransmitter chemistry, and protein metabolism. And neurotransmitter chemistry depends, in part, on amino acids. That does not mean low amino acid intake causes brain fog. It...

Smoking and Drinking Your Way to 100? You’ve heard the stories. The 104-year-old who smoked a cigar every night.The 101-year-old who drank whiskey before bed for 70 years.The grandmother who lived on coffee, bacon, and stubbornness.The old farmer who never meditated, never counted macros, and somehow outlived everyone who followed the rules. Modern health culture usually explains this away with one word: Genetics. Or maybe survivorship bias. Or luck. Or “don’t copy the outlier.” And yes — that is partly true. But it may not be the whole story. There is another possibility. What if some of these “bad habits”...

GLP-1 medications have changed the weight-loss conversation. For many people, they reduce appetite, lower food noise, and make it easier to eat less. That can be a powerful shift. But it also creates a problem that is easy to miss: when appetite goes down, protein intake often goes down with it. That matters. Weight loss is not just about losing pounds. The body can lose both fat and lean tissue during weight loss, especially when food intake drops sharply, protein intake becomes inconsistent, and strength-focused movement is not maintained. This is why many clinicians now emphasize protein, resistance training, and...