Journalist Christie Aschwanden wrote a book about how athletes should recover from training so that they can perform at their best. “Spoiler alert,” she told an audience at Aspen Ideas. “The number one thing athletes can do for recovery is sleep.” Aschwanden, a former cycling champion and elite nordic skier, says nothing else comes close to the power of a good night’s rest.

Good sleep isn’t just for athletes, Aschwanden says, it’s important for any kind of performance including political debates. She recalls a piece in The New York Times that explains how much sleep the democratic presidential candidates receive. “So many of them were saying they got four or five hours of sleep, which is just terrible...It shows a lack of priorities.”

Sure, stretching feels good and it’s a nice ritual before or after exercise but science shows it doesn’t reduce the risk of injury. In fact, research on runners shows stretching before an athletic event may reduce performance slightly, says Christie Aschwanden. “So many people are stretching in hopes that they will be less sore or reduce their chance of injury and it turns out that that doesn’t hold up.” Stretching will help your flexibility, she says. “So if you are stretching to be able to touch your toes better, continue to do so.”

The doctors at Guisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pennsylvania are seeing their patients become healthier thanks to food. Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine, says the hospital created a program to address high levels of food insecurity in its region. Food insecurity — a lack of nutritious food — can lead to diabetes and obesity. Guisinger’s “Fresh Food Farmacy” doles out prescriptions for healthy, diabetes-appropriate food to patients with type 2 diabetes. “[The patients] had a remarkable improvement of glucose regulation and a big reduction in their need for emergency room visits and hospitalizations...You wonder why we don’t do this more,” says Topol.

In the summer of 2000, President Clinton announced that the Human Genome Project had assembled a working draft of the sequence of the human genome. Eric Topol says after that, the expectations for the genome to improve health were high, but “we didn’t understand how important the gut microbiome was.” Now, new findings are emerging about how the microbiome impacts drug effectiveness, for example. Christie Aschwanden, though, urges caution.