The True Best Diet for Longevity has Been Discovered (and it’s not a blue zone)

Transcript

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If you've been ignoring the people telling you to eat less protein for longevity, good. Because the diet with the strongest aging research behind it works even better when you do the one thing a lot of the longevity purists keep warning you against, which is eat more protein. For years, the message was that the Mediterranean diet wins for a long life. Now, with that, they thought that protein should be kept low to avoid kind of stoking mTOR and the growth pathways. Now, the first half of that is right. The Mediterranean diet genuinely has staggering data behind it. But the low protein part and the carbohydrate part, and even some of the nuances, is where things kind of got worse. Losing the muscle that actually keeps you alive as you age is probably the worst thing you could do for longevity in many ways. So, what I want to lay out is a newer approach that has been investigated, more of a hybrid. So, the Mediterranean foundation that hits almost every mechanism of aging that we know about, called the hallmarks of aging, upgraded with specific kinds of protein that your body's essentially asking for. But when it comes down to like visceral fat, when it comes down to insulin resistance, when it comes down to blood sugar, there's some other things that we should kind of weave into the mix. There's real data on this exact combination. There's actually like specific Spanish Mediterranean approaches that produced some of the most impressive metabolic results on visceral fat and fatty liver that have literally ever come across. We're going to go mechanism by mechanism. We're also going to talk about specific foods to eat for each of those things. So, here's what we'll cover. First, we're going to talk about why the Mediterranean diet is still

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why the Mediterranean diet is still really the most proven anti-aging diet in theory, like why it actually works. We're going to walk through how it actually hits the hallmarks of aging, how it hits your DNA, your telomeres, your mitochondria. And we're going to talk about exact foods within that. Then I want to get specifically into the visceral fat stuff, cuz this is where like we've seen some really interesting results that kind of outpace weight loss with specific dietary interventions. Then there's a couple different upgrades I want to talk about that we can add into the mix for metabolic health. And then finally, we're going to talk about how to eat carbs in like a Mediterranean fashion without the downsides. So, something that's actually livable, so you can do a Mediterranean diet, maybe even enjoy some of those carbs, but do some things that will protect you from them. So, let's start with the Mediterranean diet here really quick, okay? Cuz this is some real science here. Like researchers describe aging through these things that are called hallmarks. They're specific cellular breakdowns that pile up over a lifetime, okay? So, like they're called the hallmarks of aging. And there was a major review in the European Journal Clinical Nutrition that laid out how the Mediterranean diet does touch nearly all of them. Because most diets tend to help one thing, right? You can see a diet that impacts insulin resistance, but maybe it's not so good over here, right? This is pulling multiple levers. Like let's take our DNA first, for example. Like as you age, your DNA takes more damage on, okay? Largely from just oxidative stress, and your repair systems are slowing down, okay? So, we've seen in studies that put people on a Mediterranean diet for like 3 months, they saw protection against like very clear markers with oxidative DNA damage,

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clear markers with oxidative DNA damage, okay? They also saw increases in antioxidant capacity. So, for this example, like the standout ingredient is olive oil. Like we don't need to like eat a perfect Mediterranean diet. What we can do here is we can look at what the standout ingredients are and craft our own diet. So, when we see the literature behind olive oil in this particular case, it makes sense. So, the single most powerful move that you can implement here is make real extra virgin olive oil like your main fat. Look for one with like that strong like the bitter, the peppery bite, okay? That is the polyphenol content. That is what we want, all right? So, if you're getting like smooth buttery olive oil, you're not getting the polyphenols. Like one that tastes super like soft is not what you're after. Then from the telomere side, we covered like the hallmarks of aging. Telomeres is another piece. These are the protective caps on the ends of the chromosomes that shorten as we age. We've all heard about you want to lengthen your telomeres. If you look at the PLOS One research, they found that older adults with higher adherence to a Mediterranean diet had longer telomeres in their immune cells. They also had a higher activity of telomerase, which is the enzyme that rebuilds telomeres. So, the Mediterranean diet protects telomeres from both directions. Less damage coming in, but also more active repair. And we're going to get into this a little deeper because right now it sounds like, "Okay, this guy's just talking about the Mediterranean diet and why it's beneficial." We got to make tweaks to the Mediterranean diet because if we look at the new research where we kind of understand protein, we understand some other things, well, we can see the Mediterranean diet is good, but we have new data we need to add to

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but we have new data we need to add to it. When you're looking at the telomere foods, however, the foods that you'd want to focus on here are in the same antioxidant-rich kind of category, right? So, if this you're looking at things like berries, you'd be looking at things like walnuts, you'd be looking at potentially even colorful vegetables. Like, you're not looking for necessarily just salads and regular vegetables. You're looking for vibrancy. You're looking for polyphenols. You're looking for flavonols. That's like literally when you look at what you would think is the classic Mediterranean diet, it's not a bunch of pasta. It's actually colorful, right? You're getting polyphenols, you're getting carotenoids, a little handful of walnuts, a little handful of like, you know, maybe some sweet potatoes, things like that. These are easy like telomere-friendly foods, right? Now, when we get down to an epigenetic level from a longevity perspective, which is sort of the system that controls which genes are on and off and like what kind of goes away as we age or what gets worse as we age, we've seen that higher adherence to a Mediterranean diet is linked to healthier methylation. We see better methylation on inflammation genes. That literally a year on a Mediterranean diet reversed epigenetic age in one part of the study group. So, it's doing a lot and then it's also driving up cellular cleanup and autophagy. So, again, if we come back to like oleuropein from olive oil, this is triggering autophagy through the same AMPK pathway that fasting activates. So, your cells are sort of recycling faster, right? Also protecting the mitochondria. And then we have the omega-3s that are kind of in like a lot of the fishes that they're consuming in the Mediterranean diet. You have protection of the mitochondrial membrane. So, you look at things like olive oil and hydroxytyrosol, like shielding

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hydroxytyrosol, like shielding mitochondria from the oxidative stress. Then you have like omega-3s actually making the membrane more fluid, so it can communicate with other cells. So, the obvious foods here, right? The salmon, the sardines, things like that. Now, we need to get to the visceral fat part, because this is something that you can change in literally a matter of weeks. There was a study where researchers took obese and overweight people with metabolic syndrome and confirmed fatty liver, which is, by the way, really just visceral fat showing up in the liver. They put them on what was called a Spanish ketogenic Mediterranean diet. So, it was lower carb, but it was built on olive oil, fish oil, good quality meat, okay? So, not like bacon and cheese like a traditional ketogenic diet. 12 weeks living completely normal lives, just eating this kind of diet. Their triglycerides cut more than half, 232 to 111. Their fasting glucose dropped from 118 to 90. Their fatty liver, like, again, which is just visceral fat of the liver, right? Improved nearly 93% of the people. And it fully reversed fatty liver in over a fifth of them. So, talk about a huge impact on visceral fat. And the most telling result is that by the end, every single participant was free of metabolic syndrome, even though they were all still technically overweight. They were still trying to lose weight. So, the metabolic healing actually ran ahead of the weight loss, which tells us that this is hitting the root, which is insulin and inflammation, and not just shrinking the number on the scale. We're targeting visceral fat specifically, which is great. So, you're taking a Mediterranean diet, and you're essentially just lowering the carbs, which is dropping your insulin. So, low

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which is dropping your insulin. So, low insulin is unlocking this fat burning. So, all the stored fat can actually get liberated, but then you're combining with the benefits of the healthy fats and the polyphenols. And at the same time, like when you have high levels of visceral fat, you now have olive oil and omega-3s combating the inflammation that visceral fat is constantly pumping out. Because remember, visceral fat is active and inflammatory. So, you cut off its fuel and you calm the inflammation at the same time. So again, we're just at this point building the plate on everything that's Mediterranean. We're just subbing out the carbs for more protein, which is not conventional Mediterranean. Okay? That ordering alone is going to change the entire insulin curve and stop the visceral fat production. Now, from the omega-3 perspective, this is really interesting because there's a second job outside of like the heart, the cardiovascular, brain stuff that omega-3s do that doesn't get talked about. They absolutely and directly help you build and keep muscle. The EPA and the DHA that's in omega-3s get incorporated into your muscle cell membranes and they make the muscle more responsive to the signals that tell it to grow. This is like very strong research. This isn't like speculative connect the dots. We've seen in controlled studies that supplementing omega-3s raises the rate of muscle protein synthesis by enhancing muscles' anabolic response to protein and exercise. So, it's working through the same pathway that protein itself activates. Now, omega-3s are absolutely not replacing the protein. They're enhancing how the protein builds muscle. This is why on a Mediterranean diet, when you're

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on a Mediterranean diet, when you're already eating high omega-3, already eating high antioxidant, it would be a shame to not eat more protein, right? So, a high protein Mediterranean diet, like this whole omega-3 thing is going to make the protein that you eat work better. Okay? This is going to help you immensely as you age because the older that muscle becomes, the more resistant it is to the anabolic signal for for growth, right? So, omega-3s are fighting that resistance to anabolism on top of cooling the inflammation that drives both visceral fat and muscle loss. This is amazing stuff. So, what you want to do is you actually want to time your omega-3s somewhat around your workouts because it is tied to the timeline. The higher your muscle protein synthesis is at a specific point, the higher the omega-3s are going to benefit, right? So, even just a good quality omega-3 supplement, obviously eating good quality omega-3 rich fish is a good one. I put a link down below for 32% off when you start a subscription for the fish oil that I recommend. It's called Purity. Purity also makes really tremendous protein powders that I've talked about, like single ingredient and ones that are third-party tested for contaminants, but their fish oil is really, really clean. It's one of the only ones that is third-party tested and where they publish their results. Cuz most fish oil is contaminated. That's the bottom line. Okay? So, like I've actually chosen this one because every batch is tested. They test for over 200 different contaminants, and you can scan the QR code on the label itself and see that particular batch and its specific label, like its specific reading in

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protecting muscle is protecting your life. So the old recommendation of like 0. 8 g of protein per kilo is like ridiculously low. Like 0. 8 g per pound is still low if you ask me in many cases. So a lot of people have kind of moved over to this 1 g per pound of lean mass. That's kind of the standard, right? Or 1 g per pound of lean mass you want to weigh if you're trying to build. Obviously people that are trying to build muscle usually push that higher because as you age, you develop that anabolic resistance. So you literally need more protein to get the same muscle building signal that a younger person would get from less. That's where again the omega-3s come in, right? Because the omega-3s can make it so that you're able to kind of get that anabolic signal a little bit harder. And if we look at higher protein intake overall, it is consistently tied to better muscle preservation and lower mortality. So the instinct that you need more protein is pretty spot-on, and the validation is very real. So here's how you would kind of fold it into like a Mediterranean base without losing the longevity benefit. Because the Mediterranean diet we are learning is not beneficial for longevity because it's low protein, or because it's higher carb. It's additive. It's what it's adding. It's adding omega-3s. It's adding the fiber. It's adding the polyphenols. It's adding the good quality just spectrum of fats, like the olive oils. So you don't just add protein by like just adding a bunch of ribeyes to this, right? Try to lean into the Mediterranean friendly proteins in this case. So, you probably have a hierarchy of like leaner proteins first. That's what makes the Mediterranean diet so unique is that you're leaning on

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so unique is that you're leaning on proteins and you're adding fats from almost these exogenous sources. Now, they are obviously still going to eat fattier cuts of meat now and then. They're still going to eat eggs. But, if you had to put it in an order, it would almost be like poultry, fish, lean beef, eggs. Okay, then you're kind of moving into dairy. You're eating Greek yogurt, you're getting into the cheeses and the cottage cheeses. And then you might occasionally have these like super high-fat cuts, right? You might have these ribeyes, things like that. But, anyone that's spent time in Europe knows that generally the meat is relatively on the leaner side and skews a little bit more towards poultry and fish. It's not to say that red meat's problematic, but it is to say that the fats are coming in predominantly from different food sources, not just from the meat itself. So, it's a wider variety of poly and mono and saturated fats. I don't even think they eat a ton of nuts like people think they do. I think it's coming in mainly from olive oil. Every anti-aging mechanism stays as far as the entire Mediterranean diet. You're just adding the muscle protection on top. Now, I'm also not telling you to go zero carb like the Spanish Mediterranean diet, either. The Mediterranean diet was never truly lower carb. They eat a fair bit of carbs. They eat legumes, they eat vegetables, they eat fruit, they eat grains, they eat sourdough bread, but maybe they're not eating the amount that we think they're eating. Like we think Europe and you think they eat a ton of carbs. Reality is we probably eat more in the US because we're getting more from sugar, more from processed carbs and this. They're eating whole carbs. The goal overall is the carbs without the spike because the spike is what's driving visceral fat and accelerates

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driving visceral fat and accelerates aging through glycation. There's a few different things that you can do to do a lot of work if you are going to have the Mediterranean carbs. First, eat your protein and your vegetables before the starch, period. Like that sequence alone lowers glucose. Favor the more intact like high-fiber carbs. Okay, so if you're going with the Mediterranean carbs, like the lentils, the beans, the things like that, right? You can also literally just add psyllium husk into that. That's going to make a big difference in slowing things down. A little bit of like olive oil and a squeeze of lemon like into starch slows how fast the carbs actually hit your bloodstream. One thing you'll notice with like a Mediterranean diet is they're not mixing high glycemic carbs with high amounts of fat generally. You might have some sourdough bread and some olive oil, but you're not usually having like refined starch with ridiculous amounts of fat. They're using fats in a small amount to where it can actually control glycemic load or glycemic index. So, you're not feeling carbs, you're essentially disarming them. And the Mediterranean cultures do this naturally, right? So, kind of the old rule of thumb is to never eat a naked carb, right? Always put clothes on your carbohydrates, so we would say. Like always maybe a little bit of fat, a little bit of protein, a little bit of fiber. And again, you look at a Mediterranean spectrum, it's covering that. So, you take the Mediterranean diet with all the proven literature behind it. You build off of olive oil, you build off of poultry, you build off of fish, you build off of fruit, and you lower the refined carbs. You let the omega-3s do the job, and you essentially double the protein of what a normal Mediterranean diet is. And then you do all these things to disarm the carbohydrates that we've learned about.

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carbohydrates that we've learned about. Even walking after meals, even retrograded starch where you cook your rice and then you cool it or you cook your pasta and then you cool it and reheat it. So, it's a true longevity diet when we start looking at all these different things we've learned about metabolic health and we combine it with sort of the hallmarks of aging benefit that we've learned from the Mediterranean diet. Now, I did a video that talks about some of the early signs of a fatty liver. Things that you might not notice when you first look in the mirror, but if you're paying attention, they could be warning signs that you might need to change your diet. And remember, fatty liver is really just an indicator that you have higher visceral fat. So, check that video out right here. That's a great next one to watch. And as always, I'll see you tomorrow.