How To Live To 100!?

i have been interested in human longevity for a few years now and my interested was peaked once again when i came across this ted talk how to live to be 100+ by Dan Buettner

but why would anyone want to live that long anyway well if you live in the uk like me to get a letter from the queen of course (just kidding)

so how do we live longer is there some secret to longevity some pill diet or exercise routine perhaps a combination of these things

maybe meditation yoga fasting or psychedelic mushrooms is the key

well in this three part series im going to take on the three keys to a longer life starting with food

in 2017 the top 10 causes of death were the following

- heart disease
- cancer
- accidents
- chronic lower respiratory diseases
- stroke
- alzheimers
- diabetes
- influenza and pneumonia
- kidney disease
- suicide

as we can see from this list Dan Buettner was correct as most of the things on this list can be directly prevented by lifestyle.

but what lifestyle and more specifically diet is most conducive to longevity

to find out lets take a look at dan buettners so called blue zones the areas that break the mould of life expectancy

and lets see how they eat.

okinawa, japan

this archipelago has the oldest living female population in the world

and five times the amount of centenarians compared to america.

so what do they eat well it’s mainly plant based with lots of fresh colourful vegetables

also lots of tofu and although mainly plant based they do eat small amount of pork and fish

but a vital factor in the diet is not what but how they eat.

they eat from smaller plates and even have a saying *Hara hachi bu*

which means eat until your 80% full.

sardinia italy

if we hop over to another island but this time off the coast of italy

specifically in the highlands of the island where the oldest male population calls home.

but this time with 10x the amount of centenarians

were we start to see a diet theme with a mainly plant based diet

as well as homemade high omega 3 grass fed cheese and unleavened whole-wheat bread

made of vitamin d, iron, copper, zinc and antioxidant rich durum wheat

in fact the plant based theme carries on through all 5 of the so called blue zones

from nicoya, costa rica who eat lots of black beans with rice and bananas

icaria, greece with lots of legumes, wild green, raw goat milk, honey and fruit

and finally the 7th day adventist of loma lima who because of religion are the only ones on this list who are purely vegetarian

so we can see potential diet themes lots of leafy greens high in vitamins and mineral high omega 3 cheeses and fish,

with no processed foods everything is homemade homegrow and the milk is raw

not really ground breaking news thought i know but clearly in western society the message hasnt quite got through

but what about not eating at all

fasting

fasting seems to have some application for living longer as biologist david sinclair says “its far more important when you eat than what you eat”

david sinclair promotes eating one meal a day and not just because of the usually lower amount of calories consumed

he explains that fasting for almost all of the day creates a stress response

this stress response at the cellular level is much like exercise as in it the stress creates adaptation and actually helps us

this paper from the

National Institute on Aging Intramural Research Program, explains


so intermittent fasting is good but what if you were to take it further say a whole day without eating or 2 or 3 what about a whole week

would the stress response be greater and therefore lead to more anti aging effects

i have experiemented myself with prolonged fast the most i ever did was three days and while it was challenging especially the first day i found huge benefit from increased alertness to better focus but thats a topic for another video

for now we need to look at the main benefit of a longer fast *autophagy*

to understand what autophagy is we can simple split the word up so “Auto” means self and “phagy” means eat. So the literal meaning of autophagy is “self-eating.”

its the body way of cleaning out old damaged cells.

autophagy has huge application for two of the disease on the top 10 causes of death list cancer and alzheimers

autophagy removes toxic proteins from the cells that are attributed to neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s

autophagy is already always happening when the body has defective cells it wants to remove them before they turn cancerous

so if we increase the rate of autophagy we may lower the risk of cancer as the body is more able to turn over the potentially cancerous cells.