1970s nurses

Conclusions from a 50-plus year study that they agreed to be a part of.

In the 1970s, a Harvard researcher named Frank Speizer was trying to understand the long-term effects of oral contraceptives. So, he did what a health researcher would do in those days. He asked male doctors to have their wives answer questions about their health.

Immediate problem: many doctors just filled out the forms on their wives’ behalf.

So Speizer and his team tried to think of how they could find a massive audience of women who were medically literate, conscientious, and willing to participate.

Um, hello? replied the entire U.S. nursing profession, metaphorically speaking.

The result: Speizer’s team sent letters to more than 170,000 women nurses in 1976, and 121,700 of them — more than 70% — agreed to answer questions about their health every two years for the rest of their lives.

The result has been one of the most important and productive research programs in the history of public health.

The study that keeps giving

The study is now run by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, with continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health.

A companion study enrolling more than 51,000 men was added in 1986, and some of the findings below draw on that combined dataset.

But the nurses came first. Without their participation, none of it exists. Here’s part of what their 50 years of data tells us: seven simple habits for a longer life.

1. Don’t smoke.

This one has never changed. A 2018 analysis of the combined dataset found that non-smokers lived significantly longer across every demographic studied. Other research has put the average cost of smoking at roughly seven years of life.

2. Maintain a healthy weight.

The same 2018 analysis found that maintaining a body mass index in the healthy range was consistently associated with longer life. Excess weight is tied to inflammation, cardiovascular strain, and metabolic disruption, all of which compound over decades.

3. Exercise at least 30 minutes a day.

Moderate daily physical activity was flagged one as well. Regular movement keeps your cardiovascular system efficient, your muscles functional, and your metabolic health in check. Separate research using the same dataset has found that consistent exercisers function biologically younger than their chronological age.

4. Drink alcohol only moderately, if at all.

The research consistently found moderate drinking — loosely defined as up to one drink per day for women, two for men — to be neutral to mildly beneficial compared to heavy drinking. This finding carries ongoing debate in the broader scientific literature, so maybe treat it as a general signal rather than a prescription.

5. Maintain a healthy diet.

The 2018 analysis defined this as scoring in the upper 40% on a diet quality index — which in practice means prioritizing vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean proteins, and limiting processed foods and added sugar.

6. Vary your exercise, not just the volume.

A more recent analysis of the same dataset, published in BMJ Medicine in January found that people who engaged in the broadest variety of physical activities — walking some days, lifting weights on others, gardening, cycling, playing tennis — had a 19% lower risk of premature death compared to those who exercised the same total amount but stuck to the same routines.

7. Drink two to three cups of caffeinated coffee a day.

Another study published earlier this year in JAMA, also drawing on the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, found that people who drank two to three cups of caffeinated coffee daily had an 18% lower risk of developing dementia compared to those who drank little or none. Tea showed similar patterns. Decaf did not.

The honest caveat

None of these findings prove causation. People who exercise in varied ways, drink moderate coffee, and eat well may share other traits — stronger social connections, better sleep, lower chronic stress — that also contribute to longer lives.

But after 50 years and more than 100,000 participants, they establish patterns that are very hard to dismiss.

The nurses who answered Frank Speizer’s letter in 1976 are mostly in their 80s and 90s now — or gone.

But they gave the world a cleaner picture of what a longer life tends to look like.

---

Other things worth knowing …

• Daily Mail: President Trump’s Justice Department beat the clock and struck a deal to settle his lawsuit against the IRS by funneling $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to his political allies, in a settlement that Democrats are calling the most corrupt act in presidential history. Settling the legal case likely short-circuited a scheduled judicial review.

• CNN: Sen. Bill Cassidy, one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump after January 6th, has lost his Louisiana primary — the first GOP senator Trump has helped oust. Cassidy: "When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn't turn out the way you want it to. But you don't pout, you don't whine, you don't claim the election was stolen."

• CNBC: New federal disclosures show President Trump made more than 3,600 individual stock trades in the first three months of 2026 — including buying between $500,000 and $1 million worth of Nvidia stock one week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nvidia chips to China.

• AP: Commuters navigated a gauntlet of car, bus, and subway routes to get to work Monday after a strike on the Long Island Rail Road — North America’s largest commuter rail system, carrying 250,000 riders a day — entered its third day. Five unions representing more than 3,500 workers walked off over wages and healthcare costs; talks wrapped past 1 a.m. with no resolution.

• CNBC: NextEra Energy will buy Dominion Energy in an all-stock deal valued at nearly $67 billion, creating the world’s largest regulated electric utility. Dominion is the utility responsible for powering the world’s largest data center market in northern Virginia — meaning the deal is essentially a bet that AI’s electricity appetite is only getting started.

• ScienceDaily: Scientists in South Korea have discovered that a probiotic bacterium found in kimchi may help the body flush out tiny plastic particles before they build up in organs. In lab tests, the kimchi-derived microbe clung tightly to nanoplastics even in conditions mimicking the human intestine — and mice given the probiotic excreted more than twice as many nanoplastics as those that didn't receive it.

• EW: Shakira is celebrating a major legal victory. Spain's national court acquitted the Colombian pop star of tax fraud and overturned the $64 million fine imposed by the Spanish tax agency in 2021, ordering the country's tax authorities to repay her tens of millions of dollars.

---

Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.