I cannot stress this enough: a good diet won't add much time to your life. Exercising and eating clean might add, on average, a couple of months to your life span. However, what it can do for you is something of an unparalleled importance. It might add life to your years by extending your health span. This in itself is a great achievement. Who wouldn't want to be in tip-top shape and enjoy life's offerings for as long as possible? Also, by maintaining your body as young as you can or, at least, by not prematurely aging it, you're giving yourself higher chances to benefit from the rejuvenation therapies that are bound to exist in the near future.
An optimal longevity-promoting diet is certainly a very personalized diet, which takes into account a lot of individual factors, like one's most recent blood tests and medical check-ups, personal and family medical history, the output of genome and microbiome sequencing. In spite of being very self-contradictory when it comes to human nutrition, research does point to a certain general direction which might lead to an overall boost in the quality of our diets. Apart from eating vegetables, there is little consensus on what else we should be consuming. Nonetheless, there is much more agreement when it comes to the bad guys, to those compounds that we should either eliminate or reduce. Here is a small list focused on the things that we should cut back on in order to enhance our chances for exceptional longevity.
Calories
There are many studies related to the effects of calorie restriction (CR) on the aging process. Some of them dismiss CR as capable of slowing down aging. Most opinions, however, converge around the idea that CR is probably the most powerful tool that we have right now in the fight against senesence. The evidence in this latter direction is also quite compelling.
Calorie restriction (CR), which entails reduced calorie consumption without malnutrition, is the only natural regimen shown to extend maximum and mean lifespan, as well as healthspan in a wide range of organisms. Although the knowledge about the biological mechanisms underlying CR is still incipient, various approaches in biogerontology research suggest that CR can ameliorate hallmarks of aging at the cellular level including telomere erosion, epigenetic alterations, stem cells depletion, cellular senescence, mitochondrial dysfunction, genomic instability, proteostasis imbalance, impaired nutrient sensing and abnormal intercellular communication. Currently, the NAD + /sirtuin pathway is one of the few mechanisms described to mediate CR effects and sirtuin-activating compounds (STACs) mimic many effects of CR. (S. Michan, 'Calorie restriction and NAD+/sirtuin counteract the hallmarks of aging', Front Biosci, 2014)
In order to embark on a CR regimen, you'd have to first calculate your daily caloric requirements and then reduce your actual caloric intake by 20% or even 30% from this previous figure. You can use a calorie counter to estimate your caloric needs, as well as your daily caloric intake. My favorite one is My Fitness Pal. You can learn more about CR regimens from the CR Society website and materials.
Glycemic index and glycemic load
The glycemic index (GI) is a measurement of the rise in circulating blood sugar triggered by a carbohydrate. Basically, a GI value tells one how rapidly a particular carbohydrate turns into sugar, without taking into account how much of that carbohydrate is in a serving of a particular food. Here is where the glycemic load (GL) comes into play and it is meant to fill this gap. Thus, GL accounts for both the carbohydrate content of the food, as well as for how much each gram of carbohydrate in the food raises blood glucose levels.
High-glycemic load diets and, to a certain extent, high-glycemic-index diets are associated with a host of chronic diseases, ranging from diabetes and cardiovascular disease to obesity and are conducive towards inflammation, oxidative stress and other markers of aging. Thus, a longevity-promoting diet should aim at eliminating as much as possible high GI and GL foods and at consuming medium GI and GL foods in moderation.
Here is a rating chart for both GI and GL values.
Source: http://www.mendosa.com/gilists.htm
You can find at this link a chart that offers the GI and GL values for more than 100 foods.
Stay tuned for part two of this post, where I'm going to write about two other nutritional problem-makers: AGEs and methionine.
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