Dr Jenna Macciochi, PhD PGCHE

Dr Jenna Macciochi, PhD PGCHE





[email protected]

23/08/2026

Where is your attention?

This isn’t a checklist These are clues we might consider in context Sometimes a test helpsSometimes the most useful clue...
19/08/2026

This isn’t a checklist
These are clues we might consider in context
Sometimes a test helps
Sometimes the most useful clues are already in your life

When you think of safety, what do you picture?A locked door?Enough money?A relationship you can trust?A body that isn’t ...
18/08/2026

When you think of safety, what do you picture?

A locked door?
Enough money?
A relationship you can trust?
A body that isn’t in pain?
A life in which you’re allowed to exhale?

We tend to think of safety as simply the absence of immediate danger.

Safety can be material: food, shelter, money, time.

It can be relational: being believed, respected and able to set a boundary without fearing the consequences.

It can be physiological: enough sleep, nourishment and recovery.

It can be internal: trusting yourself enough, hear your own signals without every sensation becoming an emergency.

Psychoneuroimmunology explores the constant, bidirectional conversation between the brain, nervous system, endocrine system and immune system.

The immune system doesn’t operate in isolation from the life you are living. Persistent threat, uncertainty, loneliness and lack of control can become part of the biological context in which you sleep, digest, heal and respond.

Safety is not the absence of danger. It is having enough capacity to meet discomfort without automatically experiencing it as danger and enough trust that you can venture out and find your way back.

Perhaps some of what we keep calling a discipline problem is actually a safety problem.

Perhaps the body doesn’t always need another instruction.

Perhaps it needs better conditions.

What helps your body believe it is safe?

17/08/2026

We think of diet as food.

But the word comes from the Ancient Greek diaita — meaning something much closer to a way of life. How you ate, moved, slept, worked, rested. The conditions and practices that shaped how you lived.

Which got me thinking about the modern version.

Because increasingly, our sense of how to live is being shaped by what we repeatedly see online.

What a normal body looks like.
How much we should exercise.
What we should eat.
What success looks like.
How productive we should be.
What health is supposed to look and feel like.

And here’s the important bit: what we see isn’t necessarily representative of how most people live.

Online participation is highly unequal. A relatively small proportion of people create a disproportionate amount of the content the rest of us consume.

So we have a very human brain — exquisitely designed to learn from other humans and calibrate itself against the social world — taking its cues from a decidedly non-representative sample, selected again by an algorithm for what holds our attention.

We scrutinise what goes into our bodies.

Perhaps we should pay just as much attention to what goes into our idea of how to live.

16/08/2026

I’m loving the women-over-40-build-muscle memo.

Truly. Keep the memo. I’m pro-muscle but anti-reductionism

And I we love a bit of nuancemaxxing

Please don’t let muscle become another narrow definition of what women’s bodies need to be as we age.

Women over 40 need muscle is the new measure of whether we’re doing midlife “right”.

Muscle matters. A lot.

Skeletal muscle isn’t just machinery for movement. It’s metabolically active tissue with important roles in glucose disposal, metabolic health and signalling throughout the body. Maintaining muscle mass and strength becomes increasingly important as we age.

But muscle isn’t the whole story of physical capability.

We also need:

Power — can you produce force quickly?
Balance — can you stay upright and recover when you don’t?
Proprioception — do you know where your body is in space?
Coordination — can different parts of you work together?
Mobility — can you move through the ranges life requires?
Agility + reaction — can you respond when your environment suddenly changes?
Cardiorespiratory fitness — can your heart, lungs and circulation support what you’re asking your body to do?

And perhaps something harder to measure:

Adaptability.

Can your body solve new movement problems? Can it cope when the terrain changes, when you stumble, when you have to get off the floor, carry something awkward, learn a new skill or do something you haven’t rehearsed?

When I wrote my first book six years ago, after spending a lot of time immersed in exercise immunology, I came to a remarkably unsexy conclusion:

Move more. Move often. Move in lots of different ways.

I still stand by it.

Lift the weights. Build the muscle.

But climb things. Carry things. Balance. Rotate. Run. Hang. Play. Learn new movements. Occasionally be a bit s**t at something.

Because we’re not training a muscle.

We’re training a whole human for a life we hopefully get to keep participating in for a very long time.

Muscle matters.

It just isn’t the whole story of ageing well.

15/08/2026

If you enjoy this content and are here for the nuancemaxxing… I’m writing about this more on my substack 🔗 in bio

I’ll keep saying this: We don’t have a health information problem. But with the caveat that the information problem likely doesn’t affect all socioeconomic groups equally

We have a what-the-hell-do-I-do-with-all-this-information problem.

There has never been more health information available to us.

Podcasts. Books. Studies. Wearables. Experts. Algorithms. Social media. And now AI, capable of giving us an answer to almost any health question in seconds.

More access to information is, in many ways, an extraordinary thing.

But information ≠ transformation.

Knowing something does not necessarily mean we can translate it into something useful. And adding more information can sometimes add more noise rather than more clarity.

I think the skill we increasingly need is discernment.

The ability to take what we know about human biology in general and integrate it with what we know about ourselves in particular.

I’ve been thinking about this through three steps:

DETECT
What is actually happening?

Not just what your wearable says. What are you noticing? What signals is your body giving you? What is happening in your environment and your life?

DECODE
What does all of that mean in context?

This is where internal and external information meet.

Your symptoms aren’t infallible. Neither is your intuition. Neither is your wearable. And a finding from a scientific study can be completely valid without necessarily telling you what you should do today.

The skill is learning to interpret these different sources of information together.

DECIDE
Given what I know, what response makes sense?

Because ultimately information has to become a decision.

And perhaps that’s where agency lives.

Not in knowing everything.

Not in ignoring expertise and “just trusting your body”.

But in becoming better at integrating what is known out there with what you can know in here — and making a good enough decision about what comes next.

Science can tell us what is generally true.

The increasingly important skill may be knowing when, where and h

👀 Side note: if this immunology thing doesn’t work out, I’m considering a second career as an olive oil sommelier.But se...
10/06/2026

👀 Side note: if this immunology thing doesn’t work out, I’m considering a second career as an olive oil sommelier.

But seriously, I love olive oil… and science.. but sometimes I wonder if we’ve become so focused on identifying the active compounds that we’ve forgotten to appreciate the active context.

One of the most influential studies of the Mediterranean diet, PREDIMED, wasn’t really studying an olive oil shot, a supplement or a hack.
It was studying a way of life.
Meals.
Habits.
Culture.
Connection.
The molecules matter.

So perhaps the reason these traditions survived for 6,000 years wasn’t because people knew about polyphenols. And did shots of the stuff

Perhaps it was because they understood something equally important: that nourishment was never just nutritional.

Off to fill my life with more moments worth lingering over… the kind that make you stay for dessert 😋

09/06/2026

No joke, my friends and I refer to our school as “the place where ambition went to die.”

Teachers told my parents that I shouldn’t aim too high because I’d only be disappointed. The message was clear: people like me don’t go on to do the things they dream of doing.

As a farm girl from rural Scotland, I believed that story for a long time.

This weekend, being asked to speak at Cheltenham Science Festival alongside Professor Dan Davis whose work has shaped not only the field of immunology but my own thinking, I found myself reflecting on just how much of life can be directed by the stories we’re handed when we’re young.

The biggest lesson wasn’t that my teachers were wrong. I was a pretty average student if I’m honest. But I can see now it was a lot to do with not fitting the mould of the conventional school system. And that some of the things we believe about ourselves were never ours to begin with.

It took me decades to realise that I wasn’t lacking potential. I was being measured by a system that couldn’t fully see me or put constrains on the way my brain likes to work.

The older I get, the more I wonder how many people are carrying around old stories about who they are, what they’re capable of, and what they deserve.

Stories written by teachers, parents, exam results, or passing comments from people who couldn’t possibly know how their lives would unfold.

Some minds don’t fit the mould.

That doesn’t make them less capable.

Sometimes it means they’re here to carve a different path.

And sometimes the most important thing we learn isn’t what to believe about ourselves.

It’s what to unlearn. And it might be scary to take an uncharted path, but it might just be the most exciting and rewarding thing we can do.

Yesterday I had the privilege of sharing a stage with Professor Dan Davis .davis101 at the Cheltenham Science Festival ...
08/06/2026

Yesterday I had the privilege of sharing a stage with Professor Dan Davis .davis101 at the Cheltenham Science Festival

I’ve admired Dan’s work for years. Not only because he’s an exceptional immunologist, but because he embodies something I think science needs more of: intellectual humility.

Before our talk, I came across a quote that perfectly captured the spirit of the day:

“The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.”

The longer I work in science, the more I realise that certainty is often overrated. The most interesting discoveries emerge when we’re willing to challenge assumptions, stay curious and remain open to being wrong.

Our conversation explored immunity, ageing and why biological diversity is one of humanity’s greatest strengths. If every immune system were identical, our species would be far more vulnerable. Difference isn’t a flaw in the system. It’s part of the design.

What struck me most wasn’t being on stage. It was seeing a packed theatre full of people willing to engage with nuance. People who wanted to ask better questions rather than simply search for quick answers.

In a world increasingly obsessed with hacks, certainty and optimisation, there is something deeply hopeful about that.

I left feeling grateful.

Grateful for thoughtful conversations.
Grateful for curious minds.
And grateful for the reminder that science and wonder belong together.

If you haven’t read Dan’s books, I highly recommend them.

And if you’ve picked up a copy of Immune to Age, thank you for joining me in exploring a different conversation about ageing—one that sees the immune system not simply as a defence mechanism, but as one of the great architects of how we experience every season of life.

The longer I study the human body, the less I am interested in mastering it.

The more I am in awe of it.

A very full week.A week of output and input.Movement. Work. Conversations. Deadlines. Ideas.Some chaos. Some beauty.A fe...
24/05/2026

A very full week.

A week of output and input.

Movement. Work. Conversations. Deadlines. Ideas.
Some chaos. Some beauty.

A few moments where I remembered to slow down long enough to actually feel my life while I was living it.

Trying not to rush past the little moments or the big ones.

So much more to share in fill, but need to catch my breath first

Here’s a glimpse of the week.
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