Lessons - The Scientific Connection Between Diet and Longevity | Dr. Michael Greger - Nutrition Authority

In this lessons episode, discover why whole plant foods are the foundation of both long-term health and effective weight loss. Learn how real food supports sustainable habits better than trendy diets, learn why legumes and whole grains are superior to low-carb alternatives, and learn how a mostly plant-based approach can still allow for small amounts of lean meat without harming your health. So when you look at all the different diets that people take on because they'll take on, like to lose weight, somebody's focused on on health and wellness, they want to go and lose weight, and then obviously let's let's hope they add the gym or some sort of physical activity into that mix. But then there's there's keto, there's paleo, there's I guess more of a traditional food pyramid where you have lower fats, moderate proteins, moderate carbs. You have all these different diets. I'm sure there's others that I have never tried or can't think of right now, but you're saying that the best possible diet for overall health and I would assume there's a way to combine that into weight loss as well because that is a huge contributor to health and wellness if you're obese and you have to lose a little bit of weight. Would be whole foods, you mentioned whole foods take priority over like even proteins which are meats, excuse me, which is interesting. So if you could help somebody just understand not just why nutrient-dense foods are good for longevity, but why nutrient-dense foods are a key piece of, for example, like a weight lost diet or somebody trying to get back on track. How does that how does that play into it? Because I think that the whole is epic rays and the thing that is the most urgent and important in people's minds is how do I look better, a little bit better and how do I fit into a slightly smaller size of clothing regardless of whether or not that should be their main priority because I think longevity is a pretty damn good priority as well. That's the reality that people deal with that's why people jump on these fat diets. He had diets don't work by definition because going on a diet implies at some point you're going to be going off a diet, permanent weight loss requires permanent dietary change. Healthier habits just have to become a way of life and so if they're going to be life long you want them to lead it to a long life. The goal of weight loss is not to fit into a skinnier casket. Thankfully, the good news is that the single best diet proven for weight loss just so happens to be the safest cheapest waiting for the longest healthiest life in that is a whole full-blown-based diet shown in the broad study to be the single most effective weight loss diet ever published in a pair of your medical literature that didn't restrict portions ever. So the most effective diet also happens to be the healthiest diet when it comes to longevity. This is the diet that every single blue zone centers their diets on. There's been over 150 dietary surveys in the world's longest living populations. I mean, they all center their diets around these whole planned foods eating about 95% plant-based and centering the primary protein source as one of the legumes, bean split piece, chickpeas, or lentils. And that's so when you look at all the different diets out there, I know that you don't like low carb diets or no carb diets. I know that that's something that you don't subscribe to. So if you look at the ratios of legumes, that's the majority of your diet. How do you think about the other pieces? What are the healthier carbs or I mean, carbs and other legumes as well? But the healthier carbs and the healthier proteins, like are you including rice? Are you including potatoes? I guess sweet potato? Are you including any kind of meat at all? And if so, what meat would be the best to fit into that perfect ideal diet? Yeah, no, no, I'm so glad it really has to be like, you know, the food industry, the process food industry, love talking about macros. Why? Because they can make you any kind of junk food you want. You want low fat junk food? Boom, snack well cookies. You want low carb junk food. Boom, we got that. You want ironically paleo junk food? Oh, we'll give you that too, right? The one kind of junk that can't make is real food, right? They just can't make money on food. So they know they don't want you to talk about foods. They want you to talk about macronutrients because, oh, oh, they want you to talk about nutrients, right? That's why fruit loops has 13 vitamins and minerals, right? Right on the cover, right? As if, you know, eating marshmallows for breakfast is the way to get your, the only way to get your, you know, 13 vitamins and minerals. But okay, so it's not so look, I mean, you know, you know, carbohydrates can mean kidney beans or jelly beans, right? I mean, you know, you can't just talk about our carbs good or bad, right? Protein could be, you know, pork rinds or, you know, could be, you know, fats could be, you know, crisco, trans fats or walnuts or something, right? And so we have to talk about food, right? That's what we, we don't need nutrients being food. Okay, so when we talk about foods, the healthiest sources of protein are legumes, but also whole grains and other disease can contribute. We're looking at point agroence, we're healthy, a little ground body weight, which is the official recommendation, National Academies of Science. In terms of carbohydrates, the healthiest, again, whole plant foods, the healthiest source of all three, classic macronutrients, where are we going to get our fats? From ideally, most of them not disease, where are we going to get our carbohydrates from? We are going to get them from, you know, from, you know, whole grain, sweet potatoes, be great. White potatoes would not be a good source. No. As one of the few whole plant foods actually associated with increased risk of of disease, including diabetes and stay away from the refined grains like white rice, et cetera. And so that's, and now in terms of, in terms of meat, right, we should really try to eat primarily plants, but not necessarily exclusively plants, right? A plant-based diet is really just about maximizing the intake of the healthiest foods, right? As a physician, you know, these labels like vegetarian or vegan, that just tells me what you don't eat. I mean, do you actually eat vegetables, right? And of course, it doesn't matter. We even brought these holiday special occasions, right? The day-to-day stuff that adds up on a day-to-day basis really should try to be healthy, centering our diets around natural foods. The best meats would be a wild, wild game. So venison in Australia, kangaroo, so extraordinarily, right? Like, you know, moose elk, like four percent calories from fat. And why we care about fat calories is because we care about saturated animal fat. Reason for LDL cholesterol is primary risk factor for a number one killer of men and women, heart disease. But four percent, in fact, chicken used to be only two percent fat, a hundred years ago, according to the USDA. Now, it's over 20 percent fat. We've selectively bred these animals to be extra juicy. And how do we make them, you know, we marble their flesh with the saturated fat. That's why, sort of, for example, grass fed beef, a significantly less saturated fat on the grain, a fed cattle. And so, so it would be kind of the leaner the better, would be way to go. And there's just nothing even comes close to the leanness of of of game. And of course, it would be caught with a lead-free ammunition if you're doing it on your own. Wow. Okay. Amazing. And I think that that even is that's so telling that even chicken, that everybody assumes is the healthiest. There's more calories from fat than protein in chicken these days. I mean, it's just absolutely extraordinary. In fact, yeah, well, you can do studies now where you can randomize people to eat beef versus chicken and see no difference in cholesterol. Where their whole sentence, oh, get rid of red meat over to, you know, white meat. No, because you can get a leaner cut of beef, then you can actually get, you know, eating, you know, eating a thigh or something. So, so yeah, yeah. So, so yeah, if you can find it, you know, something like a grass-fed beef, it's probably probably the easiest kind of, it's not, I mean, that's not close as well, cut game, but in terms of, you know, what you can find out there. Not everybody's going out with lead-free ammunition and hunting. They're all thinking they're trying to figure it out. Oh, they're formed. There's farmed medicine. Yeah. I mean, so they actually, you know, I mean, I don't know, you can probably buy it online. But the point is, the point is you have to, you have to learn and you have to do your own research because the things that are marketed to us as healthy are definitely not always healthy. I'm very curious because you've written both how not to die and how to age. How not, sorry, how not to die and how not to age, excuse me, not how to age, how not to age. When you compare those two ideas, what to you is the difference between not dying and not aging. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. So if you do autopsies of centenarians, those are delivered to over 100. This is a survey of 13,000 autopsies. In every single case, death was from disease. Even though they pair perfectly healthy before dying, their doctors were like, oh, clean bill of health, if you actually cut them open, every single one died from disease. And most commonly hard disease, which is number one killer of those younger than that. And so if death is from disease, then why wasn't my book, how not to die? All you need as an anti-aging book, because it was just first half of the book, just 15 chapters, east of the 15 leading cause of death, talking about the world dying and playing, preventing, worsening, reversing each of the top 15 killers. And so it's like, well, then if you check off the boxes, what's the problem? Well, it turns out that I mean, the single greatest risk factor for many of these diseases is actually aging, such that even if all cancer were cured overnight, we would only increase average lifespan by about three years. Why? Because if one age related disease doesn't kill you, another one will. The only reason you died from cancer, you didn't die from heart attack is because you died from cancer first, but you were going to die in our next month from heart attack anyway. And so, yes, having high cholesterol can increase your risk of having heart attack as much as 20 fold, but in an 80 year old has 500 times the risk as an 18 year old in terms of heart disease. And because aging affects so many different diseases, if we slow down the aging process, then you can instead of playing whack them all, which each individual disease, you can reduce your risk of kind of age related disease across the board, which are many relating colors. So when you see when you sort of all of your work and all the teachings really just like you're eating whole foods, you're trying to slow down your aging, you shouldn't have the food contributing to you dying quick or got for a bit. But when you look at people like, for example, Brian Johnson, who's doing everything under the sun to reverse aging, aging, what percentage of all the stuff that he does actually slows down aging versus if you just ate a whole food diet? Well, so one thing he does is eat a point-based diet. And so I mean, that's one of the things is actually evidence-based. I mean, then he just tries all sorts of crazy crap that doesn't have any evidence-based and look good for him, right? I mean, you know, I mean, it's kind of interesting experimental data kind of as a guinea pig. I certainly wouldn't do have the things. So it just told me he just did plasma for races. We basically like remove all the liquid portion of your blood and like, we're placed with like, you know, out of the water or something. That's just like, that is like naughty. I mean, that's what you do when people are like dying from some like horrible, you know, boys. I think I saw that on his Instagram. It was absolutely like, absolutely amazing. I mean, yeah, that's how we would do that voluntarily, but it's like, you know, he's like doing it for science. God damn it. And okay, I just know people to go out there and necessarily follow in those footsteps until we can actually prove something is useful. But no, he is doing some things that are just, you know, that really are consistent with a lunch every lunch, or he just kind of takes it an extra step too far. Kind of be on. Beyond the evidence base, but that's how we learn new things. As we kind of go beyond the evidence base and kind of try things out. Thanks for tuning in. 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