Seriously, can you believe it’s been a year since Try This launched?!
I want to take an opportunity to send a huge thank you to everyone who reads this newsletter for going on this journey with me and for trusting me to deliver safe and effective evidence-based protocols to your inbox every week.
In honor of our one-year anniversary week, I’m summarizing the top 10 most popular Try This newsletters based on community feedback.
I hope our breakdown today encourages you to revisit the newsletters that made a difference in your life or inspires you to read up on the ones you didn’t catch the first time around.
Alright, let’s get started with one of my personal favorites….
1. A Deep Dive into the Healing Power of Polyphenols
Polyphenols are getting a lot of attention these days—and for good reason! These phytochemicals give plants their unique colors and act as a defense mechanism, protecting them against predators and disease. But did you know polyphenols also help protect us from disease?
If you want to learn how to upregulate your anti-inflammatory, disease-fighting, anti-aging pathways using polyphenols, this newsletter is for you! In this newsletter, you’ll learn how polyphenol-rich foods can support gut health, which ones can be troublesome for certain individuals, and super practical ways to add more to your diet to protect against chronic disease.
⚡️Try This Quick Tip: One way you can increase your polyphenol intake is by drinking high-quality tea. Green tea, for example, contains catechins, a polyphenol that can help lower inflammation.
2. How to Kill Your Zombie Cells
Our bodies have housekeeping mechanisms that clean up damaged cells, but those systems start to wear out as we age from a lifetime of exposure to toxic insults. When dysfunctional cells aren’t cleared away, they are left in a half-alive, half-dead, zombie-like state that can leak inflammatory compounds and infect neighboring healthy cells. This newsletter provides strategies for how anyone—young or old—can kill their zombie cells using diet and lifestyle strategies.
⚡️Try This Quick Tip: Turning your water to cold for 30 seconds or longer at the end of your shower can help support targeting and killing your zombie cells.
My friend and business partner Dr. Mark Hyman and I are big advocates for personalized nutrition. But it can be tough to know if your diet is working, and I mean truly working, without getting routine lab work done.
Inside Tracker makes it easy to know where your critical nutrient and metabolic markers stand. With their Ultimate Plan, you can measure 43 different biomarkers, including HbA1c, glucose, triglycerides, and total cholesterol. They even test biomarkers that can be a challenge to ask your doctor for, like vitamin D, magnesium, cortisol, sex hormones, and so much more.
And if something isn’t working and needs to change, Inside Tracker will create a personalized science-backed nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle plan based on your labs, DNA, and personal preferences. That means you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from testing through Inside Tracker.
If you’ve made changes to your diet recently and haven’t gotten your lab work done, now is the time to do it!
Right now, InsideTracker is offering my Try This community 20% off. Just click this link and use the code DHRU20 at checkout.
3. Become 3 Years Younger in 8 Weeks
This newsletter was inspired by a clinical trial that was the first of its kind to show how diet and lifestyle changes promote optimal health AND reverse biological aging through the power of epigenetics. My Try This protocol features the diet, supplement, sleep, and stress-management prescriptions in the study so that everyone can experience the same health benefits. This newsletter is a no-brainer if you’re looking for practical ways to age in reverse!
⚡️Try This Quick Tip: Certain nutrients, like folate, play a huge role in DNA methylation and gene expression. Eating two cups of leafy green vegetables daily is a great source of dietary folate and can significantly impact your overall health.
4. Optimal Metabolic Health Labs and Optimal Lab Reference Ranges Cheat Sheet
Many people use their annual physical and lab draw with their doctor to make sure they are healthy, but did you know that the lab test reference ranges are based on the average population? Considering 88 percent of the population is metabolically unhealthy, the average population may not be the best measure of optimal health. I put these two newsletters together based on my conversations with metabolic health experts to give you optimal reference ranges for metabolic health labs, thyroid, sex hormones, inflammation, nutrient levels, and more.
If your goal is to work towards optimal health, aim toward lab results that fall into the optimal ranges listed in these newsletters. (Not in the optimal range? This newsletter will tell you how to get there, too!)
⚡️Try This Quick Tip: Fasting insulin is the best test for detecting insulin resistance. If you don’t see it on your lab report, calculating your triglyceride-to-HDL ratio is the next best thing. Aim for a ratio of less than 1—anything higher could be a sign of insulin resistance.
5. A Little Reminder
Try This is all about practical, actionable tips you can easily add to your daily life, but with all the health resources and information available today, sometimes the last thing we need is…well, another action item! This newsletter is all about slowing down, being patient with your journey, and trusting your gut when it tells you it’s time to take a break from adding something new into your life.
⚡️Try This Quick Tip: Reflect on how far you’ve come! We are constantly inundated with so much new health information and protocols, yet sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. Slow down, take a break, and celebrate what you’ve already done.
6. 5 Tips to Living Longer from the Abruzzo Region of Italy
Do you want to learn how some of the oldest people in the world eat and live? If so, this newsletter is for you. A study reported several longevity practices baked into their culture that could explain why the Abruzzo region of Italy is home to so many centenarians. This newsletter provides five takeaways researchers learned from this population that you can start doing right now.
⚡️Try This Quick Tip: Some of the longest-living populations have the highest intake of polyphenol-rich foods like rosemary, garlic, onion, and chili peppers. Incorporate these medicinal spices into your daily meals.
7. A Five-Minute Morning Routine That Anybody Can Do
In my personal experience, my morning routine is super critical for starting my day off grounded and on the right foot. That’s why I was excited to share my dear friend Dr. Rangan Chatterjee’s five-minute morning routine in a Try This newsletter. His morning routine framework is built on the three Ms: mindfulness, movement, and mindset. This newsletter tells you everything you need to know about why the three Ms work and how to start integrating them into your morning—even on your busiest days—to set yourself up for a successful day.
⚡️Try This Quick Tip: Start your day off on a positive note by reading something that’s either spiritual, uplifting, or philosophical; even one minute of reading can make a huge difference. This falls under the Mindset category of the three Ms and can help steer your day in an upbeat direction.
8. A Super Simple Hack to Optimize Your Blood Sugar
I’m always looking for easy hacks to stabilize my blood sugar. Believe it or not, vinegar (yes, vinegar!) can help combat blood sugar spikes when you eat a carb-rich meal or snack. I learned this hack from my interview with Jessie Inchauspé (aka the Glucose Goddess). In this newsletter you’ll learn how to use vinegar to balance your blood sugar, when to use it, how much you need, and different strategies for incorporating it into your meals. If you want to enjoy your carbs with less of a spike, you’ll want to try this hack.
⚡️Try This Quick Tip: Adding vinegar to a side salad or veggie starter before eating a carb-rich meal can help curb a blood glucose spike, but should not be used to overdo it on starchy foods. Make sure you’re loading your plate with non-starchy veggies, quality protein, and healthy fat most of the time, and then when you are hankering for a higher-carb meal, use this hack and enjoy!
9. Walk Your Way into Optimal Physical and Mental Health
Walking is linked to everything from better blood sugar control to living longer, and it can also help give you perspective, process difficult life events, and better handle stress. This newsletter dives deep into the science behind why walking is so good for you. It explains how long and fast to walk for the most benefit, the best time to walk, and how you can organize your own walking group with like-minded people who have similar goals. If you’ve heard the hype about walking but are not sure where to begin, this newsletter is the perfect jumping-off point.
⚡️Try This Quick Tip: Going for a short 10-minute walk after you eat can help curb a blood glucose spike from your meal.
10. Morning Hydration Challenge
This is one of our highest-rated newsletters to date! Drinking water before your morning coffee can make a world of difference in your brain function and overall energy throughout the day. It might sound simple, but you’ll be shocked at how much better your brain functions after you start doing it. In this newsletter, I share how I’ve made morning hydration a habit and how it significantly improved my focus and energy throughout the day!
⚡️Try This Quick Tip: Your cells can’t absorb water without the right balance of electrolytes. Add the juice of half a lemon (it contains potassium, calcium, and magnesium) and a pinch of sea salt (for sodium) to ensure proper hydration.
Concluding Thoughts
My mission behind Try This is to share easy, actionable health tips that literally anyone can try to make positive changes to their everyday life.
I hope that we’ve been doing a good job on this commitment, but we’re always looking for ways to improve.
We’ve been experimenting with different formats and styles for Try This based on your feedback. If there are any topics you would like us to cover, or if you have feedback on what’s working (or not working) for you, please let us know using the feature below!
And if you know anyone who could benefit from the content in Try This, it would mean the world if you could share this link with them to sign up.
By the way, if you ever want to revisit a Try This protocol that went missing in your inbox, I post all the newsletters on my blog so you can go always back and check them out there!
Here’s to another year of sharing the latest research and simple, evidence-based protocols!
Much love,
Dhru Purohit
P.S. I want to give a major shout-out to the team who helps me crank out these newsletters each week! My co-writer Taylor, my editors Kaya, Darci, Jon, and my head of sponsorship Farrell. Super appreciate all of you!