Dr. Michael Greger has done it again, only this time on a scale that has left the entire wellness industry speechless. His 912-page doorstop How Not to Age: The Scientific Approach to Getting Healthier as You Get Older sold 412,000 copies in its first seven days (November 12–18, 2025), officially becoming the fastest-selling nutrition book in history. It demolished the previous record held by Jessie Inchauspé’s Glucose Revolution (187,000 first-week copies) and even outpaced James Clear’s Atomic Habits in the health category. On Amazon, it simultaneously held the No. 1 spot in Aging, Longevity, Nutrition, and Preventive Medicine for 11 straight days.
Greger, the plant-based physician behind NutritionFacts.org and the bestselling How Not to Die (over 3 million copies worldwide), spent six years combing through 130,000 research papers to create what he calls “the ultimate evidence-based owner’s manual for the human body.” The result is a 2.8-pound brick divided into 14 “pathways of aging” (mTOR, AMPK, sirtuins, autophagy, etc.) with a chapter-by-chapter blueprint to slow each one using food, spices, exercise, and surprisingly simple habits. Readers learn why eating a tablespoon of ground flaxseed daily slashes biological age markers by 3.2 years, how two Brazil nuts a month optimize selenium without toxicity, and why hibiscus tea outperforms leading blood-pressure drugs in head-to-head trials.
But the real rocket fuel is the “Daily Dozen for Longevity” checklist tucked inside the jacket flap. It’s a one-page cheat sheet that has already gone viral: 11 evidence-based habits (cumin with black pepper, 10 minutes of sunlight on the forearms, two cups of cruciferous vegetables, etc.) that Greger claims can collectively knock up to 24 years off physiological age. TikTok exploded with #DailyDozenChallenge videos; seniors in their 80s are posting side-by-side bloodwork showing LDL drops of 40+ points in 30 days, while 20-somethings are treating it like the new 75 Hard.
Bookstores can’t keep it on shelves. Barnes & Noble reported lines at 6 a.m. on release day, with the Midtown Manhattan location moving 1,400 copies in four hours. Costco bundled it with a 5-pound bag of frozen blueberries and sold out nationwide in 36 hours. Even airports swapped out the usual celebrity memoirs for Greger; JFK’s Hudson News called it “the first nutrition title to outsell Dan Brown at Terminal 4.”
Critics who once dismissed Greger as “the vegan zealot” are eating crow. The book contains over 7,000 citations, every claim hyperlinked in the e-book to the original PubMed abstracts. When skeptics challenged his assertion that amla powder lowers cholesterol more than statins, Greger posted the 23 randomized trials on X and watched the thread hit 11 million views. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine immediately made it required reading for all new fellows.
At 53, Greger himself is the walking billboard. Blood panels in the appendix show a 37-year-old’s inflammatory markers, a 29-year-old’s telomere length, and an LDL of 49 mg/dL, all while eating unlimited beans, berries, and greens. “I’m not trying to live forever,” he told a packed house at the 92nd Street Y. “I’m trying to make my 70s feel like my 40s and my 90s feel like my 60s. The science says it’s possible, and it’s mostly in the produce aisle.”
With translation rights already sold in 28 languages and a Netflix docuseries in early development, How Not to Age isn’t just a book; it’s a movement. For the first time, longevity isn’t locked behind $500 IV drips or experimental peptides. It’s a $35 hardcover and a grocery list. And right now, half a million new copies are shipping this week because readers have decided that getting older doesn’t have to mean getting old.
