The Longevity Diet

Chapter 3

Dear Rookie

What's your reason to adopt a diet?

1. Lose weight
2. Be healthier
3. Get more energy
4. Look better
5. Live to a very old age and ‘die healthy’

Number 5 logically includes the others. It will affect your life the most!

Science reveals that the later years of life, even when life is extended, need not necessarily be associated with poor health and disease.

In chapter 3 of The Longevity Diet Professor Valter Longo writes about numerous studies with rats and mice treated in the lab with different longevity diets that live up to 40% longer and have far fewer diseases despite their longer lifespan – compared with rodents on standard diets.

Does this apply to humans?

We can’t lock down people and totally control their diet for decades then compare them with the people outside!

But it’s reasonable to guess that the results could apply to humans.

So how can we be sure?

Valter Longo nominates 5 ‘pillars’ of longevity. He and his teams have undertaken studies for each pillar.

1. Basic juventology / research (how to stay younger longer)

This is about what happens with diet at the cellular level, from yeast to humans. And what happens with molecules and the pathways they follow through the body. For example fasting mimicking diets have been tested successfully with people undergoing chemotherapy.

2. Epidemiology

Causes and risk factors can be studied at the population level. From this come hypotheses (e.g. the effect of sugar) that can be tested in…

3. Clinical studies

These are randomised studies comparing an intervention (e.g. reducing sugar intake) with a control group.

4. Centenarian studies

Do the findings from the above stack up with studies of real people who are over the age of 100 and in good health?

5. Studies of complex systems

Again sugar is a good example. It’s essential to the body. But not too much of it! Using a maths and engineering approach to understand this complexity can lead to powerful insights.

Examining a diet with the five pillars in mind can help you make key decisions. For example, a high-protein, high-saturated-fat diet might have good results for some people in the short term. But epidemiological, centenarian and complex systems studies indicate that this sort of diet is associated with premature ageing and disease.

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Sounds complicated?

In chapter 4, Valter Longo begins to make it as simple as possible.

I look forward to sending you a summary of chapter 4 next week.

Till then, I trust you can keep in good health…

Peter Jerrim
LifeX Australia