Neurosurgeon Hernández Poveda: Ultra-processed foods drive accelerated aging

José Hernández Poveda is a neurosurgeon, which is unusual in the field of longevity medicine. Most experts in aging come from physiology, biochemistry, genetics, or plastic surgery. He founded Age Reversal, a clinic dedicated entirely to anti-aging medicine, and has just published a book called "Aging Is Optional." His path to this work began in his operating room.

For years, Hernández Poveda treated brain aneurysms—a condition that often leads to devastating strokes. What troubled him was not the complexity of the surgery, but the preventability of the crisis. "I kept being surprised that strokes were happening every day, when we have the ability to diagnose aneurysms and treat them preventively," he explains. That observation opened a door. If prevention could work for aneurysms, why not for heart attacks, cancer, Alzheimer's, and the other diseases that shorten life or degrade its quality? The insight led him to propose what he calls "Medicine 3.0"—a paradigm shift centered on one principle: act before disease appears. Use every tool available to study the human body deeply and intervene before problems take root.

"We have to become obsessed with prevention," Hernández Poveda argues. "This won't make us immortal, but it will give us a better chance of recovering from certain diseases or delaying their onset." The approach requires measuring a person's biology in detail—not generic advice about exercise and diet, but personalized protocols based on what an individual's body actually needs. "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it," he says. Many people spend years trying to improve their health without this foundation, and they plateau.

The obvious question is access. Preventive medicine of this depth is not available through public health systems. No government or private system can afford to run comprehensive diagnostic panels on entire populations. Hernández Poveda acknowledges this frankly. "The people who really want to take control of their health and future have to pay for it themselves." But he pushes back against the idea that this is only for the wealthy. Much of the benefit comes from relatively simple tests, and he invokes the 80-20 rule: eighty percent of the gain comes from twenty percent of the testing. Still, he recognizes that systemic change is necessary. He points to Singapore, a smaller nation with higher per-capita income, already offering these services to the general population. Prevention, he argues, is ultimately cheaper than treating masses of sick people. "I believe all systems will eventually have to evolve toward this, because people will demand it."

When asked what five things people should do to age better, Hernández Poveda prioritizes strength training as having the greatest long-term impact. Sleep comes second—and he notes it receives far less attention than it deserves. On nutrition, he emphasizes two points: most people consume too little protein for optimal function, and ultra-processed and sugary foods are major drivers of inflammation, accelerated aging, and disease. His fifth pillar is social connection. In an era of isolation and rising mental health problems, he sees relationships as essential to living longer and living better.

The title of his book—"Aging Is Optional"—reflects a deliberate reframing. Aging is not simply the passage of time. It is the deterioration of the body at molecular, muscular, joint, and cognitive levels. All of these markers can be measured and influenced. "We have control over all of them," he says. "We can act effectively to slow, or even repair, much of the damage." The book's title also gestures toward emerging research in molecular biology aimed at reversing aging itself—treatments not yet available but likely to arrive within years. His ultimate vision is not immortality, but a future where the biological limits we currently accept simply disappear. That future remains distant, he admits. The science is still in its infancy. But the direction is clear.