EAT WELL AND LIVE LONG The Longevity Diet is a recent tome by Dr Valter Longo, an esteemed Italian-American biochemist and professor, and the director of the Longevity Institute at Southern California University. The doctor knows a thing or two about the effects of lifestyle on the body— among his many accolades is the Rising Star Award for Research on Aging from the American Federation for Aging Research. The premise of the book is that there are eight simple dietary steps to leading not just a longer and healthier life, but one that shows less signs of ageing. There are some obvious instructions such as swapping bad fats and sugars for good fats and complex carbs like salmon, almonds and olive oil, and to ditch the red meat for a pescatarian diet that limits fish consumption to two to three servings per week, and preferably replace cow dairy with goat. Longo also recommends a limit of two meals per day plus a snack as opposed to the traditional three squares or the evermore popular fad of eating five or six small meals. He insists that we should consume all of our calories within a 12-hour window, not eating for at least two hours before going to bed. For those trying to lose weight, “the best nutritional advice is to eat breakfast daily”. Fasting is another trend that’s gained momentum in recent years, and it’s one that the doctor supports—so long as you’re under-65 and healthy. Longo’s ‘fastingmimicking diet’ should be observed three or four times a year for five-day intervals, during which time just 8001,1000 calories are consumed per day, mainly through
the consumption of nuts and vegetables. “The method makes the body think it’s in a completely fasted state when it’s not,” says Longo. Lab studies revealed fastingmimicking diets can “activate stem cells and promote regeneration and rejuvenation in multiple organs to reduce the risk for diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s and heart disease”. One of Longo’s most interesting offerings is that we should consume a variety of foods from our specific ancestry. The doctor reveals that although we are the product of billions of years of evolution, “the last one thousand years have helped filter out people not fit for a particular environment” as well as “foods not appropriate for a particular genotype”. He uses the example of high rates of lactose intolerance in much of Asia where, historically, dairy has not been consumed in great quantities. Longo believes as wells as intolerances, consuming the ‘wrong’ kinds of foods could potentially stimulate autoimmune disorders such as celiac disease and type 1 diabetes—“although clear links have not yet been proved”. National Geographic explorer and author Dan Buettner has previously released a similar series of books and founded community projects inspired by five regions in Europe, Latin America, Asia and the USA that have the world’s highest concentrations of centenarians. He calls them ‘Blue Zones’. Populations here are generally free of heart disease, cancer, obesity, and diabetes. One such
