A free health newsletter written by Jacob Katz. I buy every protein bar in the store, wear three trackers at once, read labels for a year, and report back honestly, including the parts that did nothing.
About 18,000 readers. 47 issues published. Every one of them free.
Good health information is worth the most to the people who can least afford to buy it. Charging for it puts it behind exactly the wall it should be getting over. So The Renewal has no subscription tier, and it has never run an ad.
That has a practical consequence worth knowing about as a reader. Nobody pays me to recommend anything, so when I tell you a protein bar is soy isolate and three artificial sweeteners in a nice wrapper, there is no sponsor on the other end of that sentence to keep happy.
Every issue starts with something I actually tried or actually dug into, and it ends with the number or the change that made the trying worth it. Three that readers still write in about:
Every bar on the shelf, compared on what is actually in it rather than the number printed largest on the front.
The finding: when researchers tested commercial protein bars, the protein your body could actually use came out at 33 to 62 percent of the label. Ultra-processing damages the protein structure on the way in.
One month tracking every distinct plant I ate. Week one was embarrassing, at eleven.
The finding: people eating 30 different plants a week have measurably different gut bacteria than people eating ten or fewer. That bacteria weighs about two kilograms and makes roughly 95 percent of your body's serotonin.
Apple Watch, Whoop and Oura, all at once, for a year. As ridiculous as it sounds and worth doing once.
The finding: which tracker you pick matters less than people argue about. Nike found across 1.2 million runners that the number to beat is five. Log five runs and you almost never stop.
Roughly half of it is about sleep, which is how a newsletter turned into a pillow company. Filter by what you care about.
Showing all 47 issues
Every issue is here in full, all 47 of them, free to read with nothing in the way. Subscribe and the next one arrives the normal way.
The Renewal began as a record of my own health, mostly because I was tired and wanted to know why. It kept coming back to sleep. Light in the morning, the wrong bulbs at night, an alarm clock that dumps cortisol into you at 6am, what your head is actually resting on for a third of your life.
One issue carried a line asking readers to reply if they wanted a pillow made properly. Three hundred people did, and that became Circadian, which is now my job. The newsletter stays separate and stays free. I write it as a person who reads studies too late at night, and not as a brand.
One issue at a time, whenever there is something worth the send. You can leave in one click and I will not chase you about it.