There is no cure for aging, but there are ways to slow it down, and one of the best is through nutrition. As the science of aging becomes clearer, and the impact of diet is better understood, more and more scientists are starting to see the food we eat as the key to aging well.
Dr. Luigi Ferrucci of the National Institute on Aging says scientists “are barely scratching the surface” when it comes to the causes of aging. But he is convinced that even after whatever discoveries lie ahead, and whatever drugs are created as a result of those discoveries, the ultimate conclusion will remain quite simple. “Nutrition is going to be one of the most important aspects to modulate aging—more than the interventions we have,” he says.
Yet far too few Americans know that such an easy solution can keep many of the symptoms of aging at bay. People know that eating better will make them healthier, or thinner, but few people equate eating with aging.
Science, however, is proving how inextricably linked they are. Eating too much and eating the wrong things doesn’t just lead to overt health problems, such as obesity, dementia, diabetes, and heart disease. It also affects us at the cellular level, impacting all those aging factors discussed in the previous chapter, such as oxidative stress, the length of your telomeres, and the signals of your epigenome.
Yet what most Americans eat suggests they don’t really understand what a big difference their diet makes to their health today and in the future. It affects how they feel, how they’ll age, and even their risk for developing diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the typical American woman age 31 to 50 consumes just 14 grams fiber a day, when the recommended adequate intake is 25 grams. She eats 230 grams carbohydrates a day—a whopping 100 more than is recommended. And she gets about 70 grams protein daily, when she only needs 46.
Clock-Cheater Tip
A great first step to improving your diet is to find out what you should be eating in terms of nutrients. Go to the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Information Center website at fnic.nal.usda.gov/dietary-guidance for excellent resources.
The typical man in the same age group is no better: he eats a little more than 100 grams protein a day, but needs only 56. He eats well more than twice the 130 grams carbohydrates he should in a day, but he falls far short on fiber, eating only 18 grams when 38 grams is considered adequate.
The result of such careless consumption is that nearly 36 percent of the U.S. population is obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And only 25 percent eats the recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Together, these statistics point to a coming tidal wave of illness, disease, premature aging, and early death.
But who wants to end up that way? No one. So why the disconnect?
Based on my reporting, and after watching my husband’s transformation, I believe there are three main problems keeping Americans from eating in a way that will help them live a longer, healthier life. They are all related, and they can all be overcome simply by taking a different approach:
Problem 1: It’s hard for people to change what they eat.
Solution: Let’s face it, no one wants to give up the tasty foods they love, even if those foods are unhealthy. Plus, your body gets used to eating a certain way, making it even harder to change your habits. The way around this is to make changes to your diet very slowly, even so slowly they’re almost unnoticeable. If you let good habits develop over time—even years—you eventually won’t want to eat any (or as many) unhealthy foods.
Problem 2: People don’t think small changes make a difference.
Solution: Small changes don’t show results in a week or two, so people don’t feel motivated to stick with them. But by understanding the science of aging, and how those small changes are working at the cellular level, they become more meaningful and easier to stick with.
Problem 3: People don’t want to take months or years to improve their health and looks.
Solution: When it comes to self-improvement, people want immediate results. They want to look better now, or at least next week or next month. But healthy aging should be a separate goal; if you also want to live longer and stay in better health for years to come, decide to make small changes for that reason. You will end up looking and feeling better, but it will take a while.
Just as there are many factors that cause aging, there are many things you can do to turn it back. But nutrition is the key—the low-hanging fruit, if you will. All it takes is a slight attitude adjustment: you must accept that it doesn’t matter if it takes months or years to look and feel better, as long as you get there, one way or another. The only sure thing is that if you do nothing, you definitely won’t get anywhere!
“Nutrition is the key—the low-hanging fruit.”
Small Changes, Big Difference
If you approach aging the right way, you’ll feel good about it right away. By starting with minor changes now, you immediately put yourself on the path to a healthier you for years to come. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can eat one less Snickers bar a week and call it a day.
The reward is proportional, so the healthier your diet is today, the greater the benefit will be in future years. The beauty of eating for aging is that any healthy changes you make, if you stick with them, become magnified over the years. And once you’ve made one healthy lifestyle change, however small, it tends to lead to others—and it gets easier.
My husband’s experience has borne out the effectiveness of that strategy. This is a man who coined the term “travel hungry,” for eating whatever looked good when you’re on vacation, hungry or not. But without actively trying to lose weight or change his diet, the small tweaks Jim began to make years ago eventually added up to real change, and everything else followed. Today he looks better and feels better than he ever could have imagined at age 64—and now I would have to sedate him to get him to eat a Cinnabon in an airport terminal.
The success of Jim’s approach was in not focusing on his weight next week or next month, but on his health next year and next decade. Because he had children late in life—we had our first child when he was 50!—he had to think this way. He wants to be there to see them grow up and to provide for them.
This difference in perspective is not only critical, it’s revolutionary.
Think of it like this: if you are planning at all for your financial future, whether it’s retirement or college tuition or anything else, think about saving for your future health the same way by improving your nutrition, bit by bit. If you don’t manage to “save” for 1 week or 1 month, it doesn’t matter in the long term, as long as you start up again. It’s the cumulative effect of saving—saving your health—that makes a difference.
Clock-Cheater Tip
Make a plan for retirement—a health plan. If you’ve thought about how much money you’ll need when you retire, do the same for your health: set goals for how healthy you want to be. Is your goal to be able to play golf? Then you want to be sure you stay physically fit. Do you want to travel? Then you want to do everything you can to keep your brain sharp. Now work backward: what will you need to do between now and then to reach those goals? This exercise helps you view your health as a long-term effort—just like bank savings.
For this approach to work for you, you need to do two things:
Forget about your history with food, your weight, or your poor choices, and try something new. Shift your focus from how you feel about yourself today, and think instead about how you want to feel in the future. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t worry about what’s going on now. It simply means that the things you do toward the goal of aging well may have no impact on how you look and feel now. They will eventually, but it will take time.
Learn the science about what affects aging. This is fundamental, because if you make a small change to your diet or lifestyle and you barely notice the change to your weight or skin or energy level, you’re likely to say what anyone in your situation would: “Okaaaay, this isn’t working.” But if you know the science, you’ll know it is working, whether you see the difference today or not. You won’t see it like money accumulating in a bank account, but you’ll know that what you’re doing is doing good. That’s the best way to make yourself stick with it. (So if you haven’t read the previous chapter about the science of aging, you should go back and read it now!)
Mind the Message
Our bodies were designed over tens of thousands of years to be the perfect digestion machines for the foods available to us at that time. For millennia, that meant a largely plant-based diet with the occasional, much-appreciated influx of animal protein from a hunt. Thousands of years ago, of course, the average humans didn’t live very long, for other reasons. But our bodies are still built to need the same vital kinds of nutrition that we have consumed over thousands of years.
Clock-Cheater Tip
Don’t just think about whether your food is caloric or fatty or nutritious. Think about whether it’s the kind of food ancient humans would have had available. That’s the kind of food your body was designed to eat—fresh, even raw, and unprocessed. The more food you eat that doesn’t pass that simple test, the more your body ages on the inside.
By eating the foods our bodies were designed to eat, it’s like putting the right gasoline in your car—which most people do. Who wants to invest in a car and then have it start knocking and rattling?
Eating the right food sounds simple enough. I always considered myself a relatively healthy eater, so when I started investigating this subject, I wasn’t expecting any surprises. But the more I learned about the factors that influence aging, the more I realized that the healthiest part of my eating habits was that I didn’t overeat. That’s important, for sure, but I never knew how clueless I was about what to eat until I started looking at my husband’s habits.
Although the health and fitness industry touts good-for-you foods, and the government has done a good job of simplifying its nutrition recommendations so they’re easier to understand, it’s still hard to get the right messages about food. Take the recent $1 summer drink promotion at McDonald’s: a 32-ounce Coca-Cola, with its 350 calories and 86 grams of sugar (20 teaspoons!), for just $1—less than the cost of a simple bottle of water. A drink with 20 teaspoons sugar and no nutrition clearly is not the right fuel for your body.
“I never knew how clueless I was about what to eat until I started looking at my husband’s habits.”
When we make bad choices, we can justify our decisions by hiding behind the stories of people who took great care of themselves but were struck down young—like Jim Fixx, the famous running and fitness enthusiast who dropped dead of a heart attack in 1984 at age 52. Or we can hope to be one of the lucky ones who breeze through life despite horrifying habits, like my Great Aunt Eppie.
When I was growing up, Eppie smoked a pack of unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes a day, fried her (white) bread in sausage grease, and always kept a bottle of Kentucky Gentleman bourbon on the floor next to her chair at the kitchen table. She sat there for much of the day, nattering and bickering with her sister (my grandmother) and obsessively reading the stock tables of the Winston-Salem Courier-Journal with a magnifying glass. For these vices, she died at age 92 after a brief illness.
But in studying the Eppies and Jim Fixxes of the world—whose genetics undoubtedly played a crucial role in their unusually long and short lifespans, respectively—here’s what scientists have figured out: the vast majority of Americans live and grow old in the large middle ground between these two extremes. And it’s this group of “everyone else” who can actually make a difference in how they age by eating a healthier diet.
Nothing is a guarantee, and science is not about promises. There are always going to be some people who simply have an unlucky set of genes and will get sick when they’re far too young no matter what they do. But science can usually tell us what works most of the time for most of the people. And the vast majority of healthy people can greatly influence how much energy they will have, how healthy they will be, and how youthful they will remain in the years to come.
Save Your Cells
Your health in the second half of your life is partly determined by your genes, whether you ate well as a child, and even by whether your mother ate well as a child (the epigenetic effect). But the overwhelming evidence is that your diet and lifestyle have the biggest influence on you from middle age and beyond. If you’ve always eaten poorly and finally decide to eat better starting at age 40 or 50—good milestones to make changes!—you can make a big difference, almost right away, in your health, your looks, and your vitality.
One of my favorite studies to show this effect was done by researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina and published in 2007 in The American Journal of Medicine. It followed more than 15,000 subjects ages 45 to 64 for 10 years. At the outset, few of the participants lived what the study authors called a “healthy lifestyle,” which they defined as eating at least five daily servings of fruits and vegetables, not smoking, not being obese, and getting regular exercise. Six years later, another small portion of the group (slightly less than 10 percent) had adopted those healthy habits. The study followed them for another 4 years and found these new adopters showed significant improvements in health, including halving their rate of cardiovascular events and overall mortality than the subjects who did not change their habits.
The study’s conclusion? “People who newly adopt a healthy lifestyle in middle age experience a prompt benefit of lower rates of cardiovascular disease and mortality.”
What I love about this study is that it tracked participants who had made healthy changes at any point over those 6 years! They started out in the unhealthy category, but 6 years later, they were living a healthier lifestyle. That time frame seems impossibly long in the quick-fix, weight-loss-focused world we live in. What self-respecting diet would come with the promise to “look slimmer in 6 years”? No one would go on a diet like that! But what if you knew the payoff after 6 years was that you get to live longer? The message of this study is clear: even if you take 6 years to slowly change your habits into healthier ones, the benefits rack up quickly.
The study published in 2011 in the journal Age, that looked at the impact of the Mediterranean diet on aging, is another great example. In this study out of Spain, elderly subjects were divided into three groups and fed three different diets for 4 weeks. One group received a diet high in saturated fats; one group ate a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet; and the third ate a classic Mediterranean diet, including fruits, vegetables, fish, and healthy fats such as olive oil. After just a month, the researchers studied cells from the subject’s vascular system. Compared with the other two groups and to the baseline measurements at the start of the study, the group that ate a Mediterranean diet showed a lower level of cellular senescence and cell death and fewer cells with shortening telomeres. In other words, what they ate had slowed down the aging process.
“What self-respecting diet would come with the promise to ‘look slimmer in 6 years?’ No one would go on a diet like that! But what if you knew the payoff after 6 years was that you get to live longer?”
Clock-Cheater Tip
Easily eat more Mediterranean by using olive oil, a healthy fat, in place of butter for cooking. You can use a pastry brush to spread it on sandwich bread instead of using mayonnaise.
In a recent study, Spanish researchers divided more than 7,000 individuals age 55 to 80 into three groups: one following a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra-virgin olive oil, one following a Mediterranean diet supplemented with mixed nuts, and one group eating a traditional low-fat diet. None of the participants were restricted in calories and none had cardiovascular disease at the outset. Over the six years of the study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2013, the subjects in the two Mediterranean diet groups experienced 30 percent fewer major cardiovascular events, such as heart attacks, than those in the low-fat diet group.
How could the Mediterranean diet make such a difference so quickly? The short answer is that it provided excellent nutrition in all the areas the human body needs, which allowed the subjects’ cells to function better and, therefore, age less. The diet also did not include the kinds of dietary indulgences, such as saturated fats and refined sugars, that make cells perform poorly or overtax them.
Scientists are learning more all the time about how your diet affects your health based on what different foods do to your cells. To make small changes that will have the biggest impact on your health, you need to know where to start, which means you need to know how bad food choices harm you and good food choices help you. Once you do, you can try to replace one or two not-so-healthy elements of your diet with something that will allow your cells to age more slowly.
In the following chapter, you’ll find a rundown of the foods that cause the biggest problems in the typical American diet, with an explanation of how those foods age you, followed by descriptions of foods that will reduce oxidative stress, protect your telomeres, help suppress cancer genes, and so on. Use this information to become more mindful about what you decide to eat so you can make better choices that will make you feel and look younger, no matter what your age.