SNP28: How To Eat for Longevity

[Music] Hello and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio. My name is Danny Lennon. You're very welcome to the podcast. And this episode is a premium exclusive episode, meaning that if you want to listen to the episode in its entirety, you need to be a Sigma Nutrition Premium subscriber and listen over on the premium feed of the podcast on whatever app you usually listen on. For those of you who are premium subscribers, you can listen to the entire episode on the premium feed in addition to getting a transcript to this episode as well, which is all linked up in the description box. If you're listening to the preview and you are interested in becoming a Sigma Nutrition Premium subscriber or just hearing more about what exactly the premium subscription is and how you can get more out of your podcast listening, then you can check out the details in the description box. But today I wanted to discuss a few things related to eating for long-term health, tying in areas related to longevity because over this past weekend, I had the privilege of presenting at the Sports Nutrition Association conference. And my presentation was essentially to take this concept, which has become popularized certain on the internet and in social media about diet, as well as other types of strategies that can increase longevity or that can make us live longer, or that you see these biohackers using. And that's a range of different interventions in the field of nutrition. Fasting has become one of those, as well as certain compounds and supplements can help you increase your lifespan beyond what we thought was normal. These are some of the claims or these some of very surface level, we'll get into more specifics in a bit. But seen as that, there's a quite a lot of buzz around that on social media, and many nutrition professionals may have people coming to them that have seen these things online or are interested or who maybe even wanted to discuss these in a more evidence-based way. That was the initial opening of the idea of this lecture, was what types of claims are we seeing? Really are those types of claims number one accurate, but more so are they even asking the right question? And beyond that, what is a better way for us to conceptualize the idea of what we should do with our diets if we are concerned with leading a long healthy life? And so that was the essential thrust of the idea. Now there's no shortage of various claims. And again, if you just go typing any of this into Google or YouTube, you see those with the biggest number of views on YouTube clips or social media posts are referring to biohackers that are spending literally millions of dollars on all sorts of protocols that they've come up with literally hundreds of pills a day. Some of them are promoting really long fasts either extended fasts or every day having like an 18 hour window or some of them claiming that they are going to be extending their lifespan not only beyond what is normal, but what is even being seen in humans to this point that some of the more outlandish claims you see. On a less outlandish side, you also see people talking about various types of dietary protocols, supplementation, etc. That has an ability to extend life so to get us as an individual to move beyond the typical median, let's say the average age or life expectancy through doing these things or certainly prevent us succumbing to death before this point. So really, there's a number of different claims that we could think about, but if we broadly think of different buckets in relation to diet at least, there can be ones that are specific on a type of eating that's going to leave to longer life through certain mechanisms that have been described. So for example, in this book, I would place something like fasting and there's something like a chain of events where through fasting, you ramp up this process of autophagy and through that, that's going to lead you to live longer. So we can look at that. So let's say a degree of dietary restriction that will transfer into increased longevity is that claim. Then there are others that talk maybe about specific compounds that we can find in certain foods. I think one of the most popular at least that was from the 90s to 2000s and so on, where there was initial buzz about it at least media wise was something like Resveratrol, which we'd find in Red Wine, and talking about how certain compounds have been demonstrated to have an effect on a particular pathway in the body. And so if you consume these compounds either in a pharmacological dose or through foods or drinks, that can have some sort of aging reversal effect for lack of better term. And then there's another bucket where people will be really afraid of certain compounds that are in foods. And this usually ties in with, ah, these compounds are found within foods that you've been told are healthy for you, but in fact, they're slowly killing you. So what you need to do is follow a special very restrictive diet. And again, these are a narrow band of claims, but it might be that there's these certain compounds in vegetables, for example, or in legumes that are slowly killing you. So if you switch over to something like a carnivore diet through this, then you are not going to succumb to death early, and you can live a longer healthier life. But beyond that, some of them even get into more things of how that could increase your lifespan beyond what what is typical. Now, it's probably worth noting that there are a few different terms that get used differently, but when we're thinking about some of the language that is used, it's worth having maybe some definitions in mind, at least how I've categorized them. And we also have a nice sigma statement looking at some of the aspects of fasting, where we give a more precise description of some of these terms. We can have within the field of longevity this term, we can think of longevity on both an individual level, and then a species level. So on the species level, this is just the period of time that a member of that species would be expected to live under typical conditions, let's say. And so when we're talking about the longevity of a certain type of animal, or if we're talking about even humans, we would say at the species level, there's a typical life expectancy under normal conditions. But most often, what is being referred to in some of these claims that we're talking about is maybe on an individual level. So for an individual's longevity relates to that individual's ability to survive past the average age of death. So if we take the median age of death in that particular species, so let's take humans, and we would also take based on their demographics, we would have a typical average age of death within this particular type of population. And then we can look at what is an individual's capability or possibility of going beyond that average age. This would describe some degree of longevity. And so one of those terms that sometimes crops up in literature is exceptional longevity, which is typically defined as surviving and living independently at an age of 95 and older. And when you see this type of longevity, this exceptional longevity of living independently beyond the age of 95, for example, this is strongly genetic, which we will return back to, but typically that is going to be the, at least the primary explanation in many of these situations. Now another important part is that it's worth when we're having these conversations of long-term health of considering. Thanks for listening in to this preview of one of our premium exclusive episodes that you can listen to in their entirety over on the Sigmunditrition premium feed. And if you want to become a Sigmunditition premium subscriber, which gives you a number of benefits including not only these premium exclusive episodes, but also access to ask questions, which we answer on our Ask Me Anything episodes. 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