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On biological attraction, synthetic disruption, community as medicine, and what the longevity research actually shows
If you have spent any time in wellness spaces — and I am guessing you have — you have absorbed a very particular hierarchy of health variables. Diet at the top. Exercise. Sleep. Supplements. Stress management. And then, somewhere toward the bottom of the list, often treated as a soft extra rather than a clinical necessity: relationships.
I want to make a case today that this hierarchy is wrong.
Not that diet, movement, and sleep do not matter — they do, enormously. But the research on what actually predicts longevity and wellbeing points, consistently and insistently, to something that most wellness conversations systematically underweight: the quality of your social connection and your sense of belonging.
And before we even get there, I want to start with something that has been quietly disrupted in our bodies: a biological intelligence most of us did not know we had, and that we have been unknowingly suppressing for decades.
In Post 1 of this series, we explored how the major histocompatibility complex (MHC, a large group of genes central to immune function) also plays a significant role in mate attraction. Specifically: we are biologically wired to be drawn toward people whose MHC genes are dissimilar from our own. The more different your immune gene profile is from a potential partner’s, the more resilient and immunologically diverse your shared offspring will be.¹
This preference is mediated through scent. In a now-landmark 1995 study, biologist Claus Wedekind gave 44 men plain cotton T-shirts to wear for two days, then asked 49 women to rate the shirts for pleasantness and attractiveness. Women who were not using oral contraceptives consistently rated the shirts of MHC-dissimilar men as more appealing, and reported that the scent more often reminded them of their own current or former partners. Their preference was reversed, however, in women who were taking the pill.²
The body knows who we are looking for. We evolved a sophisticated biological compass to find them. And we have been chemically overriding it.
The finding that the pill reverses MHC scent preference has been replicated. In a 2008 longitudinal study, S. Craig Roberts and colleagues at the University of Liverpool tested women’s MHC odor preferences before and after they began taking oral contraceptives, using a control group of normally cycling women. Women who started the pill showed a significant preference shift toward MHC-similar partners compared to their own pre-pill preferences — a shift not seen in the control group.³
To be clear about what this means biologically: the pill creates a hormonal environment that mimics pregnancy, and one theory holds that during pregnancy, attraction toward genetically similar individuals may have served an evolutionary function of increasing kin support. But outside of pregnancy, this preference reversal works against optimal mate selection.
The potential downstream consequences are significant: MHC similarity between partners has been associated in some research with increased rates of recurrent spontaneous abortion and fertility challenges, reduced sexual satisfaction and responsiveness, and a higher likelihood of seeking extra-pair partners. These patterns may only become apparent after a woman stops the pill and her body’s original preferences re-emerge.³
If you are navigating reproductive health concerns — whether related to hormonal contraception, cycle irregularities, or fertility — you may find my post on Holistic Approaches to Female Reproductive Health a useful companion read.
Oral contraceptives are one piece of a larger picture. The Endocrine Society’s first scientific statement on endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), published in 2009, documented that synthetic substances are found throughout our environment — in food packaging, personal care products, pesticides, and industrial chemicals. EDCs interfere with hormone biosynthesis, metabolism, and action, disrupting male and female reproduction, thyroid function, metabolism, and neurological development.⁴
Synthetic fragrances are a particular concern in this context. Most commercial perfumes and scented personal care products contain phthalates (chemical compounds used to make fragrance last longer), which are classified as endocrine disruptors. When we mask our natural body scent with synthetic fragrance, we are not only covering up the chemical signals that our immune system broadcasts to potential partners. We are adding a layer of hormonally active compounds that further interfere with the delicate olfactory and endocrine communication our biology depends on for mate recognition.⁴
This is not a small or trivial disruption. The ability to read a partner’s MHC profile through scent is one of the oldest and most precise biological intelligences we have. It predates conscious thought and language. And it is systematically being overridden by synthetic hormones, synthetic fragrance, and a chemical environment our bodies did not evolve to navigate.
This is intuition suppressed at the hormonal level. The body’s oldest knowing, chemically silenced.
I want to be clear that this is not a condemnation of anyone who uses hormonal contraception or wears perfume. It is an invitation to know what is happening in your body first and foremost, and to make informed, sovereign choices from there. That is what this entire series is about.
(On the topic of the body’s invisible intelligences — if you have not read my piece on how piercings interact with acupuncture meridians, it is a quietly fascinating look at how physical interventions we rarely think twice about can alter the body’s energetic terrain.)
Let’s say we navigate all of the above. Let’s say we find a partner whose presence genuinely resonates, whose scent we recognize, whose nervous system our body responds to with something like relief. The question then becomes: what are we doing with that relationship, and with the broader web of connection in our lives?
Because the research on what that web of connection actually does for our health is stark.
A 2015 meta-analytic review by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues at Brigham Young University analyzed 70 studies covering over 3.4 million participants and found that social isolation was associated with a 29% increased likelihood of mortality, loneliness with a 26% increase, and living alone with a 32% increase. These results were comparable in magnitude to well-established risk factors like smoking and obesity.⁵
An earlier landmark meta-analysis by the same research team, published in PLOS Medicine in 2010, found that people with stronger social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival compared to those with poor or insufficient social relationships.⁶
These findings suggest that social connection belongs in any serious conversation about longevity and disease prevention — not as a nice-to-have, but as a primary determinant of health outcomes.
Blue Zones are the regions of the world with the highest concentrations of centenarians: people living past 100 in good health. Researcher Dan Buettner and colleagues, publishing in PLOS Medicine, identified nine shared lifestyle factors across five Blue Zone populations: natural movement woven into daily life, a plant-predominant diet, practicing hara hachi bu (eating to 80% fullness), moderate alcohol consumption, a sense of purpose (ikigai), stress-reduction practices, belonging to a faith community, prioritizing family, and belonging to social networks that support healthy behaviors.⁷
Notice what is on that list. Diet is important, but it shares the list with purpose, community, faith, family, and social belonging. The centenarians of Okinawa, Sardinia, and Loma Linda do not share a single dietary protocol. What they share is embeddedness in community, a reason to get up in the morning, and relationships that hold them.
The people who live the longest well lives on earth are not the ones with the best supplement stacks. They are the ones who belong to something.
The Framingham Heart Study, one of the longest-running cardiovascular research projects in history, has generated findings that consistently point to the social determinants of health outcomes. Data from this study revealed that health behaviors — including smoking, obesity, exercise, and emotional wellbeing — spread through social networks in ways that suggest direct influence rather than simply shared environment.⁸
In other words: who you spend your time with, and the collective health behaviors and emotional states of your community, is not just background context to your health. It is an active input. The social network is not a passive container for individual health choices; it is itself a health variable.
I want to bring these two threads together, because they are more related than they appear.
The MHC attraction research is not just a curiosity about mate selection. It is evidence that our bodies have a sophisticated biological intelligence for finding the people whose immune systems complement our own — a system designed to optimize the health of the next generation and the resilience of the community. This process is being disrupted, at a population level, by synthetic hormones and synthetic fragrance.
The Blue Zones and social isolation research are not just encouraging us to spend more time with friends. They are showing us that social belonging, purpose, and community are primary inputs into the biological systems that govern longevity — as powerful, if not more powerful, than diet.
Together, they point toward something that I think is one of the most important and underappreciated truths in health: we were not designed to optimize in isolation. We were designed to belong. To find our people biologically, chemically, evolutionarily — and to live in relationship with them. That is the original ecological niche of the human organism.
Connection is not the reward we get after we have taken care of our health. It is one of the primary ways we take care of our health.
So what does this look like in practice? It means that a treatment plan that does not include an honest assessment of a person’s social life, their sense of purpose, and the quality of their closest relationships is incomplete. It means that the loneliness epidemic is a public health crisis that deserves the same urgency we give to diet and medication adherence. It means that building community is not a luxury; it is a clinical intervention.
And beyond that, it is showing the way to a true holistic approach — one that involves seeing ourselves both as a byproduct of our environment and as an integral part of the greater ecosystem. The way we relate to each other, to other living beings, and to the Earth itself mirrors our relationship to ourselves, and the Divine. No amount of biohacking or supplementation will give us a sense of purpose and belonging, which is at the core of human spirituality and health.
This is also why I keep returning, in my practice and in my writing, to the question of what “natural medicine” actually means — and what it can and cannot do. If that question interests you, Can Natural Medicine Cure? A Pharmacist’s Perspective is a good place to start.
Everything in this post is offered in the spirit of expanding your awareness, not prescribing a course of action. The decisions of whether to use hormonal contraception, whether to wear fragrance, how to structure your social life — they are yours to make, with full information, in the context of your own body, values, and circumstances.
What I am inviting is this: know what is happening in your biology. Understand the systems at play. Make choices from that knowing, rather than from the assumptions of a culture that has largely treated synthetic convenience as neutral and connection as optional.
Neither is true.
Ready to explore what connection as medicine looks like for you?
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This is Post 2 of the Born of the Earth series. Next: we turn outward from the social body to the ecological one — and ask what happened when we declared war on the other living kingdoms we share this planet with. That post will touch on the gut microbiome as its own living ecosystem — a thread I explore more practically in Herbal Bitters to the Rescue, if you want a preview.
Roots and reverence, Marina
Marina Buksov, PharmD | Holistic Health Coach | Clinical Herbalist | marinabuksov.com
Works Cited
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