Gum bacteria has been found in people's arterial plaque — and in their brains. Let that sink in. What's living in your mouth doesn't stay in your mouth.

Gum disease raises your risk for heart disease, diabetes, and dementia. The mechanism is inflammation, and inflammation drives aging at the cellular level. It also turns out that people with 20 or more teeth at age 70 are significantly more likely to live longer. Your teeth are a scoreboard for how well your body's been maintained.

Here's the part that surprised me most: antiseptic mouthwash can cut your body's nitric oxide production by up to 90%. Nitric oxide relaxes your blood vessels and protects your heart — so the “healthy” habit may be working against you. I switched to a fluoride-free, nitric oxide boosting toothpaste instead, and I floss or waterpik every single day.

At 71, I'm treating my mouth as longevity infrastructure, not vanity. You can find the toothpaste I use at GaryLeland.com/toothpaste.

At 71, I test my grip strength regularly — and it might be telling me more about how long I'll live than almost anything else I track.

Grip strength is one of the simplest, most powerful predictors of healthy aging there is. It's not about looking strong; it's a proxy for your whole neuromuscular system, and it correlates with mortality risk better than most people realize. The tool I use to measure and train it costs about $10.

I'm a Boomer running a long-term experiment on myself, documenting every intervention out in the open. Here's why your hands might be the most honest messenger you have about your own longevity.

A year ago, I thought the Asian squat — feet flat, heels down, hips below the knees — was the easiest position I'd ever seen. I lasted less than 20 seconds before I had to stop.

It's how humans rested for thousands of years before chairs existed, and if you can't hold it, that's usually a sign your ankles, hips, and knees have quietly lost mobility — which raises your risk of falling as you age. So I started doing it every day, adding a little time. Twenty seconds became five minutes, and now it's a non-negotiable part of my daily longevity protocol.

Try it yourself right now and see how long you last. Your joints are keeping score. I'm Gary Leland, and this is The 200 Year Life Project.

I'm 71, and I'm dead serious about being the first person to live to 200.

Today I want to talk about something I just started doing myself — and it's not what you think. I'm taking a GLP-1. But not for weight loss.

Yeah, I know. When you hear GLP-1, you think Ozempic. You think weight loss. You think Hollywood. But here's what the longevity community is starting to figure out: these drugs may be some of the most powerful anti-aging tools we have right now. And I just started microdosing one.

I'm 71, and I just did something most people never will: I sent my full genome off to be sequenced — all 3 billion letters of it. Not a 23andMe-style ancestry kit. A complete read of the code that built me.

This one test can flag disease risk, show how I metabolize drugs and supplements, and reveal whether I'm carrying variants linked to Alzheimer's or heart disease. If something's hiding in there, I want years of runway to act on it — through diet, training, screening, or supplementation. Knowledge is the first intervention.

I'm documenting everything as the results come in, and what they mean for how I'm approaching health and longevity. I'm Gary Leland, and this is The 200 Year Life Project.

Everyone thinks I'm crazy for saying I'll live to 200. But here's the part they're missing — I was never planning to get there alone.

All I actually need is to survive long enough to reach longevity escape velocity, or LEV: the tipping point where science starts adding back a full year of life — or more — for every year that passes. Once you hit LEV, you stop aging toward death. You stay even. Then you start pulling ahead. It's like outrunning a wave that never catches you — you just have to stay standing when it arrives.

That's my real strategy: stay healthy long enough to be standing when the wave hits. Every workout, every blood test, every night of sleep is buying me time until the science catches up. I don't have to reach 200 myself. I just have to reach the moment the math flips. I'm Gary Leland, and this is The 200 Year Life Project.