Welcome to The Rise – your weekly dose of circadian sunshine, decentralised health wisdom, and actionable tips to help you live healthier, stronger, and more empowered.
This week: why your “healthy” cholesterol levels might actually be killing you, what extinct mice can teach us about life, and the food pyramid that finally admits it was backwards all along. Spoiler: real food wins.
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Much love and sunshine, ☀️
Sandy xx
P.S. If 2026 is the year you stop outsourcing your wellbeing and start leading it — the Unstoppables membership is open. Think practical, science-backed protocols, grounded in biology and nature, without the noise or overwhelm. Your decentralised health coach, in your pocket.
Issue #103 • 18 January, 2026
🌅 Rise Report
The Cholesterol Myth Debunked
Here’s a cholesterol chart your doctor probably doesn’t want you to see…
A massive Korean study tracking 12.8 million adults for over a decade flipped everything you’ve been told about cholesterol on its head.
People with cholesterol levels between 200-240 mg/dL, the range currently labelled “borderline high” to “high”, had the lowest risk of death. Meanwhile, those with “desirable” levels below 150 mg/dL? Their mortality risk nearly doubled.
The data revealed a clear U-shaped curve. Too low was dangerous. Too high was risky. But that sweet spot around 200-240 mg/dL? That’s where people lived longest.
Here’s what makes this both fascinating and important: cholesterol isn’t just some artery-clogging villain. It’s essential for hormone production (testosterone, oestrogen, cortisol), vitamin D synthesis, cell membrane integrity, and brain health. Your body literally can’t function without it.
Yet mainstream medicine has spent decades pushing a single narrative: lower is always better. Take your statins. Hit those targets. But this massive study—along with multiple others showing similar results—suggests we’ve been treating cholesterol like the enemy when it’s actually a crucial molecule doing important work.
The real culprits? Processed foods, inactivity, insulin resistance, chronic stress, and poor sleep. These are what drive metabolic dysfunction—not the cholesterol trying to keep your body running.
The Mouse Paradise Experiment
In the late 1960s, American scientist Dr. John B. Calhoun built what he called “Mouse Paradise“—a perfectly controlled habitat with unlimited food, water, shelter, and zero predators. Eight mice moved in. Within five years, the entire population had collapsed to extinction.
Here’s what happened: the population initially thrived, doubling every 55 days. But once numbers hit around 600 mice, something shifted. The strong claimed the best territories. Weaker males withdrew completely. Mothers stopped caring for their young—some even turned against them. Violence erupted. Mating ceased.
A group Calhoun called “the beautiful ones” emerged—mice that never fought, never mated, just ate, slept, and groomed endlessly in narcissistic isolation. By day 600, no new pups survived. The last mouse died in 1973, surrounded by everything it could ever need.
Calhoun repeated this experiment 25 times. Every single time, the outcome was identical: when a population loses purpose, meaning, and social bonds, it dies long before its body does.
Whilst we humans are obviously not mice, there are some lessons to be had here. With the rise of AI, the threat of jobs being lost and everything being automated and done for us – groceries landing on your doorstep, robo-cleaners taking away the jobs most of us probably don’t enjoy, what will give us purpose in the future?
Abundance and comfort may sound awfully appealing, but without purpose or challenges they become a recipe for a empty existence and paradise starts looking like hell.
Source: A picture of Calhoun in a mouse utopia in 1970, Wikimedia Commons
Early exposure lowers peanut allergy risk, 10-year study finds
For decades, doctors told anxious parents to keep peanuts away from babies—sometimes until age three—believing avoidance would protect them from life-threatening allergies. Turns out, we had it completely backwards.
Dr Gideon Lack at King’s College London noticed something peculiar: Israeli children ate peanuts freely from infancy and barely had allergies, whilst UK kids who avoided them had rates 10 times higher. His landmark 2015 LEAP trial proved what seemed counterintuitive—introducing peanuts to babies as early as 4-6 months slashed allergy risk by a whopping 81%.
Fast-forward to 2025, and new research published in Paediatrics shows the real-world impact: approximately 60,000 American children have avoided peanut allergies since guidelines changed. Peanut allergy rates in children under three dropped by 43%—not through medications or fancy treatments, but simply by letting babies eat what humans have been eating for thousands of years.
I don’t have food allergies, so I won’t pretend to understand the daily fear and vigilance required. But what strikes me about this research is how spectacularly we misunderstood our own biology. We thought avoidance meant safety, when actually we were preventing our immune systems from doing what they’re brilliantly designed to do: learn.
What if our immune systems can be taught to turn foes into friends? This gives me hope that we’re just scratching the surface of understanding how to work with our immune system’s natural learning process, rather than against it.
❤️ What’s Hot:
Fix Your Light Diet in 2026
We all know how important it is to eat a healthy diet, but what about the light diet your cells are feeding off 24/7? Light is food too.
Standard LED lights are feeding your cells “light Cheetos”. Stripped of beneficial wavelengths, heavy on sleep-disrupting blue light – it’s alien light your biology doesn’t recognise.
BlockBlueLight’s lamps are healthy lights without the circadian chaos. I use these every day, once the sun has gone down, and never travel without them – they’re always on my holiday packing list.
You wouldn’t eat processed rubbish all day so don’t feed your cells processed light either.
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🤓 Smarty Pants
Cholesterol
Cholesterol is one of your body’s most essential molecules. Demonised for decades, it’s actually the building block for every single cell membrane in your body, giving cells their structure and flexibility. It’s also the raw material your body uses to make vitamin D (when your skin meets sunlight), all your steroid hormones (including cortisol, oestrogen, testosterone, and progesterone), and bile acids that help you digest and absorb fats and fat-soluble vitamins.
Here’s the fascinating part: Your brain is only about 2% of your body weight, but it contains roughly 25% of all the cholesterol in your body. That’s because cholesterol is absolutely critical for brain function—it insulates nerve fibres, helps form synapses (the connections between brain cells), and is essential for memory and learning.
When we started demonising cholesterol in the 1970s and 80s, we created one of the biggest misunderstandings in modern health. The real issue isn’t cholesterol itself—it’s oxidative damage and inflammation that can make certain cholesterol particles problematic. It’s always about redox capacity before we worry about the cholesterol numbers.
The decentralised health wisdom: Your body isn’t making cholesterol to sabotage you. Before you accept the “cholesterol is dangerous” narrative at face value, ask yourself: Am I supporting my mitochondria with morning sunlight and natural movement? Am I eating quality fats that my cells actually need? What’s driving inflammation in my system? As the CEO of your own health, you get to dig deeper than a single number on a pathology report. Your body needs cholesterol to produce the hormones that power your energy, mood, and metabolic health—optimising your redox capacity and reducing chronic inflammation will do more for your wellbeing than simply trying to lower a number.
☀️ Sandy’s Sunshine
The Food Pyramid Just Flipped. And It’s About Time
After decades of being told that bread, grains and cereals should be the foundation of every meal, that fat would kill us, and protein was something to fear, the US has just released their 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines. And the narrative is finally shifting.
Here’s What’s Changed:
The old pyramid had us loading up on 6-11 servings of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta daily. At the same time, we were told to use fats “sparingly” and treat protein like a supporting actor rather than the star of the show. That advice didn’t make us healthier. It made us sicker, heavier, and metabolically broken.
The new guidelines are finally course-correcting with five major shifts:
- Protein is back at the centre – Meat, eggs, seafood, and dairy are recognised as nutrient-dense powerhouses, not dietary villains
- Fat quality over fat avoidance – Whole-food fats from grass-fed animals, wild fish, and avocados matter more than chasing “low-fat” labels on processed rubbish
- Ultra-processed foods are finally named as the metabolic wrecking balls they are
- Grains have lost their throne – No longer the unquestioned foundation of every plate
- Human biology quietly returns – Metabolism, ageing, and real-world health outcomes actually matter again
The Meat, Eggs & Dairy Panic
Now, some people are really upset over certain foods being promoted more. I get it. For some people this goes against their values and what they’ve been told a healthy diet looks like. I used to feel the same way and was more of a “vego” for a number of years, but here’s what changed my mind.
When you actually dig into the research criticising red meat, most studies are methodologically weak. They rely on food frequency questionnaires (asking people to recall what they ate months ago—notoriously inaccurate), fail to separate grass-fed steak from processed sausages laden with nitrates and seed oils, and don’t control for the real culprits: sugar, refined carbs, smoking, and alcohol.
But more than that, my own experience has shown me that I feel healthier, happier and stronger eating a diet that looks much more like the new pyramid than the old.
The Context Nobody’s Talking About
The Dietary Guidelines contain several genuinely reasonable principles: encouraging whole foods (not whole grains—there’s a difference), limiting ultra-processed products, moderating alcohol, prioritising hydration. These are sensible starting points.
Similarly, the persistent focus on grains ignores the reality of modern metabolic dysfunction. Given widespread insulin resistance, circadian disruption, and mitochondrial dysfunction, carbohydrate-dense foods, including grains, I believe should not form the dietary base for most people. This doesn’t mean never eating carbs. It means recognising that biology matters, and a one-size-fits-all pyramid never could.
The Real Win Here
The fact that REAL FOOD now makes up the majority of the pyramid is a major win. We’re finally acknowledging that humans thrive on nutrient-dense animal proteins, healthy fats, and vegetables—not industrial seed oils, refined grains, and foods that need ingredient labels longer than your arm.
This isn’t radical. This is a return to what humans have eaten for millennia. Real food was never the problem. Ignoring human biology and replacing traditional foods with processed alternatives was.
Your Action Plan
Look at your plate today. Is it built on real, whole foods your great-grandmother would recognise? Or is it following outdated guidelines that put processed grains at the foundation?
Here’s your challenge: For the next week, flip or create your own pyramid. Make protein and healthy fats your foundation. Fill the rest with vegetables. Keep grains and processed foods minimal. Notice how you feel—your energy levels, hunger patterns, and mental clarity.
We all have different nutritional needs, and no one diet or pyramid could possibly suit everyone, during every stage of life. It will be interesting to see what Australia’s Food Pyramid looks like which is due to be updated and released this year. Stay tuned!
There was a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope. – Bernard Williams
The information in this newsletter is for educational purposes only and not intended as medical advice. Always consult with a healthcare professional for personal health decisions. This post may contain affiliate links, and I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.
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