7 Proven Anti-Aging Secrets

for a Long and Healthy Life

P. D. Mangan
Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................. 4
1: Too Much Food Ages You Faster.......................................................................... 6
2: The Worst Pro-Aging Habits................................................................................ 9
3: The Importance of Insulin ................................................................................. 13
4: Stress Is Good for You .........................................................................................17
5: Body Composition Can Make or Break You ...................................................... 20
6: Fat, Carbohydrates, and Protein ........................................................................ 23
7: Geroprotectors.................................................................................................... 27
Further Reading ..................................................................................................... 29
 Introduction

Since time immemorial, humans have sought the secrets to aging. But it’s
only been relatively recently that science has made genuine strides in the march
to understand and control the aging process.
In the 16th century, the Italian merchant Alvise Cornaro radially changed
his diet based on the advice of a physician. He had been suffering from multiple
illnesses and, in the decade of his thirties, believed that he was near death.
Nothing that his doctors told him worked, until one told him that he should eat
much less food. Cornaro followed this doctor’s advice, limiting himself to one
moderate meal a day, and returned to health, eventually living to the age of 102.
Cornaro was using the principle of calorie restriction and long life. It’s
fascinating to think that his physician, unless he had made a wild guess, had
heard of calorie restriction elsewhere, and that this method of healing was known
to many throughout the ages. Indeed, as long as 2500 years ago, Hippocrates, the
father of medicine, commended fasting as a healing process.
In the 20th century, scientists rediscovered calorie restriction. They found
that giving laboratory animals less food made them live longer.
This rediscovery was only the beginning of what became a massive amount
of research on aging. We are now at the point where we can put many of these
discoveries to use on ourselves, and prevent or even reverse the aging process.

What is aging?

Non-scientists often look at aging as akin to the breakdown of machinery,

such as a car.
While this analogy holds true in some aspects, it misses a key point.
That key point is that while humans, and indeed almost all animals of any
kind, break down and figuratively rust as they age, we also have the capacity to
repair ourselves. We have this capacity at full strength in our youth, but as we age
we gradually lose it, until in old age we have all but lost the ability to repair
damage to our bodies.
Aging is the increasing likelihood of illness and breakdown with time.
Aging is a risk factor for many chronic diseases, such as coronary heart
disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes. In our youth, our bodies are able to prevent
these diseases from occurring, but in older age we lose some or all of that ability.
 Preventing or reversing aging means that we also decrease the likelihood
that we will get one of these diseases.
It also means that we retain the strength, energy, and vitality of youth.
Fighting aging isn’t necessarily about merely living a very long life.
It is most definitely not about spending a bunch of extra years in a nursing
home.
When we fight aging, we increase not only our lifespan, but our
healthspan, which is that fraction of our lives when we are free of illness, frailty,
and disease.
Seen in that light, fighting aging should be something everyone who cares
about their health should strive for.
But there are many mistaken ideas about what fights aging. Much of what
mainstream health advice promotes is either of little importance, lacking in
scientific rigor, or just plain wrong.
Hence this book.
I’ll present to you a number of ways to fight aging, ways that you may not
have ever considered.
The interventions that I present here are not meant to be comprehensive,
and in any case, science constantly makes new discoveries in aging and
rejuvenation.
I’ll present these anti-aging secrets as simply and clearly as I can. The
science behind them is complex, but that shouldn’t stop us from understanding
why they are important and how to make use of them.
 1: Too Much Food Ages You Faster

It’s been known for ages that fasting, that is, going without food for some
period of time, promotes health and can treat illnesses.
But it was only recently that scientists discovered how it does that.
In the 1930s, Clive McCay discovered that when he gave laboratory rats
much less food, they lived longer.
Since then, scientists found out that giving animals less food, known as
calorie restriction, works on almost every species of animal in which it’s been
tested, from yeast to worms to rodents to primates.
Why does calorie restriction (CR) extend lifespan?
Scientists have developed many theories to account for it:
• CR retards growth and therefore aging
• CR means lower body fat
• CR reduces metabolic rate
• CR reduces free radical damage
• CR reduces insulin and glucose
• CR lowers growth hormone
• CR is a stress that makes organisms stronger.
The life-extension mechanism of CR is still debated, and its causes and
consequences are being explored.
But in simple terms, what can we take away from the example of CR?
The big lesson is that food can age you faster.
This lesson is counterintuitive. On its face, we might think that food makes
you healthier and stronger – and indeed, the right kind of food does. We must eat
in order to live, so it seems strange that less food would make organisms live
longer.
Does CR work for humans? There have been no long-term studies of CR
and lifespan on humans. Such an experiment would be difficult to perform, since
humans live so long. It would take decades and many millions of dollars to
discover whether CR extended human lifespan, and scientists have neither the
time nor the money to do that. Recruiting people into such an experiment and
have them adhere to its guidelines over a long stretch of time would also be
exceedingly difficult.
But there is reason to believe that CR will work on humans. Some people
follow a CR regimen, and they have been studied, albeit over a short time period.
Humans who practice CR have excellent health markers, such as blood
pressure, blood lipids, and insulin sensitivity.
Another reason to think that CR will extend human lifespan is because of
what scientists refer to as evolutionarily conserved mechanisms.
What this means is that humans retain much of the same physiology as the
animals that we evolved from. That can be seen by the straightforward example
that other animals also have hearts and lungs, four limbs, and so on.
And we also share great similarities at the cellular level, which is where the
aging process takes place. Therefore, if some intervention, such as CR, affects the
cells of some animal, we have every reason to think that the same thing will take
place in human cells. The comparison is never perfect, of course, which is why we
must take care in comparing the results of animal experiments to humans.
Would CR cause the same lifespan increase in humans as is seen in other
animals? Here, our expected results are more debatable. Some scientists contend
that humans would get much less life extension, mainly due to our size and
current lifespan. Evolution has already ensured that humans live a lot longer than
most animals, and therefore, the thinking goes, extending it even further will be
difficult.
Other scientists contend that humans would get the same lifespan
extension as other animals. For instance, if CR can extend the lifespan of a mouse
by 50%, there’s no reason humans could see a similar increase.
Yet whatever the answer, we know that food can make or break lifespan
extension and is a powerful force in aging.
CR is not without its problems.
For one thing, people don’t like eating less food. Hunger is a powerful
force, for good reason, since it drives to eat in order to survive and reproduce.
Humans who undertake CR must carefully measure their food and they can’t just
give in to hunger when they feel like it. Animals on a CR regimen are constantly
hungry and when fed, eat all their food at once.
Even if a person can withstand hunger, CR has other disadvantages.
People who do CR often report feeling cold all the time, low energy, and low
libido. Those don’t seem too pleasant, and most people will reject the idea of CR
because of them.
 CR may also have adverse effects in older people. It may lead to frailty and
weakness and impaired immune function.
Clearly, despite the fact that CR can extend lifespan, many factors argue
against its practicality and widespread adoption.
Fortunately, there’s an alternative.
That alternative is intermittent fasting.
Intermittent fasting may offer better health and longer life without the
drawbacks of CR. Because it turns out that when you eat may be as important as
how much you eat.
Intermittent fasting does not induce weakness or frailty, does not cause
low energy or sex drive, and could be one of the most important things you can
do for your health and lifespan.
 2: The Worst Pro-Aging Habits

How long can a human live?

The all-time world record for long life is held by Jeanne Calment of
France, who died in 1997 at the age of 122.

Yes, Jeanne Calment was a smoker.

Since the time of her death, no one has even come close to beating her
record, the next longest-lived person having died at 117.
Some scientists have speculated that humans have an upper limit to their
lifespan, and that it’s very difficult to live past the age of about 115.
Whether that’s true or not, the fact is that most people do not live nearly
that long.
In the U.S., the average life expectancy for a man as of 2018 is 76 years,
and for a woman 81 years.
Not even close to beating Jeanne Calment.
And keep in mind that those life expectancy figures are averages. Many
people die a lot younger than the average, and not just from accidents or similar
causes. Many die of aging – that is, of age-related diseases, like cancer, coronary
heart disease, and diabetes.
Those people who live less than the average life expectancy were either
doing something (or things) that were unhealthy or were victims of bad luck.
Since we can’t do anything about bad luck, we need to concentrate on
factors within our control to have a long, healthy life. To live at least as long as
the average and hopefully much longer.
Many lifestyle factors are risky for health. Smoking cigarettes, for instance.
We’ll go into that in a moment.
For now, consider that when we discuss preventing or reversing aging, we
normally mean getting to a ripe old age, like Jeanne Calment.
And in order to get to that ripe old age, we must beat the averages.
Now, the average life expectancy in the U.S. is, to my mind, not very
impressive. The life expectancy number is composed largely of average people
living an average life.
If you want only the average life expectancy, then be average.
It’s apparent that a good deal of the American population does not
particularly care about their health. Although in their defense I would add that
many of them have been given terrible information on how to be healthy.
What can we do to beat the averages?
Look at what average people do, and then don’t do those things.
Jeanne Calment, while she did smoke cigarettes, and also undoubtedly hit
the genetic lottery, did a number of things that might have helped her live a very
long time.
For example, she usually only had coffee for breakfast, and then had no
solid food until her mid-day meal. Contrast that to the average American having a
bowl of sugar-frosted corn flakes washed down with orange juice, who then stops
for a coffee-flavored milkshake on the way to work, and whose blood sugar
crashes at 10 A.M so they grab a donut.
Having only coffee for breakfast qualifies as a form of intermittent fasting,
which we know extends lifespan. Eating the average American way, i.e. ultra-
processed foods loaded with sugar, is a guaranteed way to put you on the wrong
side of the average life expectancy.
And just so you know, orange juice – yes, even fresh-squeezed – is an
ultra-processed food that is bad for health.
 Coffee, on the other hand, so long as it contains no sugar (or lord knows
what other nefarious substances a coffee shop will put into it, but cream is
acceptable) is associated with longer life. People who drink coffee have lower
rates of diabetes and liver disease. Caffeine increases lifespan in some lab
animals.
So, Jeanne Calment accomplished several things by having only coffee for
breakfast: she drank a healthy drink, she fasted from solid food from the previous
evening meal until noon the next day, and she refrained from eating the ultra-
processed, sugar-laden junk that passes for food in the U.S. today.
Those three items alone may have got her past the average life expectancy.
Reportedly, her favorite mid-day meal was beef. Beef is low in
carbohydrates, and is an unprocessed, whole food. It provides plenty of protein,
which many older people don’t get enough of. Lack of adequate protein in older
age leads to loss of muscle with subsequent weakness and frailty.
What else did she do?
She enjoyed a glass of red wine on occasion.
Red wine has proven health benefits.
Alcohol, drunk in moderation, is associated with less cardiovascular
disease and longer life. (“Moderation” must be emphasized, since heavy and/or
binge drinking are still definite killers.)
Why light to moderate drinking is associated with longer life and better
health may have many answers. It may cause a beneficial stress response
(“hormesis”); it increases insulin sensitivity, a proven and very important factor
in the prevention of aging and chronic disease; it may improve cardiovascular
risk markers such as HDL cholesterol; and it even inhibits mTOR, a cellular
mechanism that promotes aging.
Red wine imparts greater health benefits than other types of alcohol.
Red wine contains polyphenols, which are plant chemicals that have
health benefits. These are the same types of chemicals found in healthy fruits and
vegetables. And in coffee.
While red wine has become more popular among Americans, the average
American still thinks its OK to drink a soda. Which it isn’t, if you strive for health
and long life.
Jeanne Calment also prayed every morning.
I can hear the skeptics asking why that would matter.
 But it’s a fact that being religious and attending worship services is
associated with living longer. It works for Mormons, who live longer than average
– although good clean living is surely responsible for much of their longevity.
Why being religious is associated with longer life is a subject of debate but
may have to do with increased social connection. Loneliness is a killer.
Jeanne Calment also ate a good deal of chocolate and used olive oil
liberally.
Both chocolate and olive oil are healthy foods.
So, you see that Jeanne Calment, without knowing or really trying, had a
number of healthy lifestyle factors that could have contributed to her long and
healthy life.
Those lifestyle factors got her well beyond the average.
Following some quite simple rules can help someone live a long life.
In essence, following these rules gives someone a much higher average life
expectancy.
One of those rules is not smoking cigarettes. That may seem obvious, but
in fact cigarette smokers are included in life expectancy calculations.
That means that if you don’t smoke, your expectation of how long you will
live should be higher than the 76 years for men and 81 for women.
Smoking takes years off of life.
But other, lesser known factors also contribute to average lifespan.
They are what I call the Big 5 of Longer Life.
If someone follows the Big 5 of Longer Life, his or her average life
expectancy is much higher.
Research has shown that people a man who follows the Big 5 can expect to
live, on average, until the age of 89, and a woman to 91.
Sounds a lot better than everyone else’s average.
If we tweak the system by adding a few more anti-aging interventions, we
might expect to live much longer than about the age of 90.
That the average age of someone living a very basic, healthy lifestyle – no
smoking, for instance – is around 90 gives us more confidence that other anti-
aging interventions could get us well beyond 90.
So, what are the worst pro-aging habits? Besides smoking, they are those
other habits that contribute to a lifespan less than about 90 years of age.
 3: The Importance of Insulin

Scientists who were researching the causes of aging, using the tiny worm
C. elegans, were surprised to discover that a mutation in one gene could radically
extend its lifespan.
That gene mutation led to lower insulin signaling.
Let’s back up a bit.
Insulin is a hormone that’s closely involved in the way that we (and other
animals) handle food.
One of its main functions is to allow cells in the body to take up glucose.
Glucose is a sugar, a small molecule that comes from the breakdown by digestion
of carbohydrates and sugars.
When we eat food that contains carbohydrates, such as bread or rice or
pasta, glucose appears in our bloodstream. This is one way we obtain energy from
food.
If glucose isn’t burned for energy right away, it must be stored. That’s
where insulin comes into play.
The level of insulin rises and falls according to whether we’ve recently
eaten, as well as what we ate. If we’re healthy and fit, insulin levels are generally
low when we’re fasting, rise after eating, then drop again when glucose is cleared
from the bloodstream.
But in our modern environment, many people, in fact the vast majority of
Americans, develop some degree of insulin resistance.
In insulin resistance, cells become resistant to the effects of insulin. More
and more insulin must be secreted to have the desired effect of glucose uptake on
cells.
What is it about our modern environment that does this?
A couple of things, at least.
One is that the advent of processed food means that we have food available
24/7.
Many people take advantage of this, eating every couple of hours,
snacking, and so on, so that their insulin system never gets a rest. Their insulin
levels never fall back to a normal, low level.
Because they are always in a “fed” state and are never fasting.
 A second reason also concerns processed foods. Most contain added sugar,
as well as refined grains and seed (vegetable) oils.
These processed foods are toxic garbage, and I’m not exaggerating.
The sugar in these foods sends insulin skyrocketing, as do refined
carbohydrates.
The seed oils create a condition known as oxidative stress, which further
damages insulin sensitivity.
Obesity is one of the results. Obese people are almost all insulin resistant.
The American physician Joseph Kraft did a series of studies which found
that over 80% of his patients had abnormal insulin responses.
This people aren’t necessarily exempt from insulin resistance. So-[called
“skinny fat” people, those with a normal body weight but excess body fat, are also
usually insulin resistant and have a high risk for chronic diseases like heart
disease and cancer.
The importance of insulin in life extension shows the power of food to
extend our lives or shorten them.
By eating the wrong foods, and by eating them more than three times a
day, we promote insulin resistance with resulting higher levels of insulin.
And that shortens lives by making us vulnerable to chronic disease.
Exercise is also important to this equation.
Exercise allows us to decrease our stores of glycogen.
Glycogen is a storage form of carbohydrate. We carry much less of it in
absolute amounts than we do of fat, but it’s nevertheless important.
If we are always adding to our glycogen stores, then we are never able to
burn fat.
Exercise, especially high-intensity strength training and high-intensity
interval training, allow us to deplete our glycogen stores and to restore insulin
sensitivity.
But food takes pride of place here. We can exercise almost without limit,
but if we quickly replenish our glycogen with sugar and carbohydrates, we won’t
be doing a very good job of restoring insulin sensitivity.
It’s all very good that worms live longer with low insulin signaling, you
might say, but what about humans? Will keeping ourselves insulin sensitive help
us?
 Consider that gene polymorphisms related to insulin likely contribute to
human longevity. That means that disturbances in the insulin pathway help
centenarians get to old age.
Healthy centenarians also have better insulin sensitivity.
In lab animals, such as mice, lower insulin means longer lifespan.
Clearly, insulin is of major importance to lifespan extension.
What can you do to remain insulin sensitive?
For starters, throw out the “healthy diet” rules that the mainstream tells
you.
Conventional wisdom says you should eat a low-fat diet and avoid animal
foods with a high level of saturated fat. It says you should replace animal foods,
with “health whole grains” which are in reality anything but healthy. They
increase glucose and insulin in your bloodstream.
Conventional health wisdom says that sugar may be “empty calories”, but
as long as you don’t overdo it, sugar isn’t all that bad.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Fruit juice, for example, is not healthy – it spikes glucose and insulin and
may contribute to a fatty liver, or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).
Bread, pasta, rice, fruit juice and smoothies, breakfast cereal, all foods that
the establishment deems healthy, all spike insulin and can lead to insulin
resistance and obesity – so they are definitely not healthy.
Meat, eggs, cheese, and other animal foods do not spike insulin and do not
lead to insulin resistance – for this and other reasons, such as being highly
nutritious and high in protein, they are healthy.
The health establishment got it bass ackwards.
Insulin is a growth factor.
In addition to or as part of its job, insulin also promotes growth. This
could be the key reason that it promotes aging.
Growth and longevity are antagonistic.
When you are growing from infancy to adulthood, you are not aging,
despite the classic witticism that you begin to die the day you’re born.
No aging takes place during the growth to maturity.
But after an organism, whether a mouse or a human, reaches maturity,
aging begins.
 Scientists hotly debate the reason for this. But one scientist, Mikhail
Blagosklonny, a physician and cancer researcher, believes that a cellular growth
mechanism called mTOR is the most important factor in aging.
Essentially, after maturity, the growth engine remains on. The process of
aging has been compared to driving a car with one foot on the accelerator, the
other on the brakes.
The growth mechanism mTOR is intimately connected to insulin.
Generally, what activates one activates the other.
As with insulin, mTOR activation on its own is fine; chronic overactivation
is not and contributes to aging.
Control insulin, and you control mTOR and aging.
Thus, we see that food is extremely important to aging.
Eat the wrong kind of food and you age faster.
Eat too frequently, and you age faster.
Eat the right kind of food, at the right intervals, and you age slowly.
 4: Stress Is Good for You

We’re told that stress is bad for us. That it causes health problems, ages us
more quickly, and may even give us a heart attack.
And that’s true.
So why do I say that stress is good for you?
Stress is as necessary to good health and long life as anything.
Chronic stress is bad. That’s the kind of grinding, uneasy stress whose
causes range from being caught in traffic to surviving a war.
Chronic stress leads to illness and definitely not to a long life.
But intermittent stress is good.
If you do not stress your body periodically, it will fall apart.
Consider a particular form of having no physical stress at all: bed rest.
People who are forced to stay in bed for days or weeks on end lose a large
amount of muscle tissue. That holds whether they are healthy or ill. Their insulin
sensitivity plummets.
Muscle must be stressed regularly or it will atrophy.
Astronauts who spend a long period of time in space lose bone tissue,
because the stress of gravity is absent.
Being sedentary is associated with increased death rates, while exercise – a
stress – means much better health and longer life.
Even some kinds of radiation, for example solar radiation, can cause a
stress response and lead to better health.
These stress responses are examples of hormesis.
Hormesis is a beneficial health effect in response to low-dose toxins or
stress.
In effect, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. (An exaggeration, but
the phrase expresses the spirit of hormesis.)
You may know another expression, “The dose makes the poison.”
Paracelsus, a Renaissance physician, said it.
Virtually anything can be toxic in high enough doses. Too much water
could kill you, for example.
 But low doses of the same toxin can have beneficial effects.

The concept can be illustrated by the above chart, which shows health
risks as a function of the number of daily alcoholic drinks.
At a low dose, one to two drinks daily, health risk is lower than for zero
drinks daily.
With more daily drinks, risk rises into the toxic zone, and health risks are
higher than zero drinks.
The J-curve of hormesis holds for many phenomena.
Exercise, for example. Light to moderate exercise leads to lower health risk
than no exercise at all. Heavy exercise can tip you into the toxic zone. Daily high-
mileage running might do this.
All stress and no relaxation lead to poor health.
But intermittent stress, followed by recovery and relaxation, leads to better
health.
Of more relevance to the modern world, all relaxation and no stress lead to
poor health.
The couch potato life can kill you.
Humans, like other animals, must have intermittent stress to thrive and be
healthy. In fact, it appears that all organisms, not just animals, must have it.
 The trees in Biosphere 2 collapsed because there was no wind, which
stresses trees and makes them strong.
When you exercise, you push your body and its component cells to a point
in which it is stressed, unable to handle the load you place on it.
As a result, it upgrades its systems in order to be able to withstand the
stress the next time it appears.
When you are sedentary for a period of time, and that period is not even
that long, perhaps days to a week or two, your body’s systems begin to degrade.
Muscles begin to weaken and atrophy. Cellular systems that deal with
insulin sensitivity and defense against free radicals start to decline.
The lesson for better health and longer life is that all comfort and no stress
lead to poor health.
And in this day and age, we have plenty of comfort.
We don’t need to walk, we drive.
We don’t need to farm or hunt, we buy food at the supermarket.
We live in heated and air-conditioned houses, and we don’t get exposed to
temperatures outside our comfort zone.
To be healthy and live long, we must seek out intermittent stress.
 5: Body Composition Can Make or Break You

Body composition refers to the relative amounts of muscle and fat that
compose your body.
These days, everyone knows about the obesity epidemic. Some 70% of the
American population is overweight or obese (really overweight). Add in another
10% of those with normal body weight but excess body fat, the so-called skinny-
fat phenotype, and fully 80% of us have poor body composition.
In fact, you can probably add another fraction, let’s call it 10%, who don’t
have enough muscle, and the numbers reach staggering proportions.
Excess body fat leads to a number of poor health outcomes, such as
cardiovascular disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes.
What may be less known is that excess body fat leads to accelerated aging.
Obesity is an archetype of aging.
The same harmful physiological changes seen in aging are also seen in
obesity.
Increased insulin resistance, increased blood pressure, worse lipid
markers in the blood, decreased antioxidant capacity, poor mitochondrial
function, all these occur both in aging and obesity.
Scientists – and lay people – used to think of fat tissue as a more or less
inert storage medium. Your body put calories into fat tissue for later use.
But it’s now known that fat tissue is very active, and produces hormones
such as leptin, and chemical messengers called cytokines.
Fat tissue emits these molecules and they affect the entire body.
They can affect the brain too.
The leading cause of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, has been termed “type
3 diabetes”. Insulin resistance in the brain leads to changes in brain tissue which
in turn ultimately lead to dementia.
Visceral fat, which is fat that surrounds internal organs, is the worst form
of excess body fat. Visceral fat may be the cause of the metabolic syndrome, that
state of insulin resistance and poor health that leads to diabetes.
Visceral fat may be the cause of insulin resistance in aging.
So, getting or staying lean is important in fighting aging.
 The lowest health risks are seen at a body mass index (BMI) that is quite
low, around 21 or 22. People with a BMI that low are lean.
If you stay lean as you get older, you stand a much better chance of
avoiding the diseases of aging.
You could be among the 10% of people at age 70 who have no chronic
disease and have good physical function.
Or you could be among the 90% whose poor health makes their old age
less than happy.
While no one wants to be overweight, and while the health risks of obesity
are widely known, what most people don’t appreciate is the importance of muscle
in aging.
Building and maintaining muscle can make the difference to having a
healthy older age, or an unhealthy one.
As we get older, we lose muscle. This muscle loss is detectable by the time
a man or woman is in their thirties. So, it starts at a much younger age than
normally thought. We might say that aging starts young, because it does.
Muscle loss proceeds and then accelerates.
Muscle loss is so bad that by the time a man is 80 years old, he typically
loses around half of his muscle mass. For some it’s even greater.
Loss of muscle in older age leads to frailty and dependence on others,
because someone who loses a lot of muscle has difficulty performing the tasks of
daily life.
A less-appreciated aspect of muscle is that it’s a very metabolically active
tissue. It burns a lot of energy and keeps the entire body metabolically healthy.
Loss of muscle therefore also contributes to insulin resistance and the
other metabolic abnormalities of old age.
A greater amount of muscle is also associated with less cancer and heart
disease, the two greatest causes of death in the U.S.
The importance of muscle to health and long life is so underappreciated
that it might as well be a secret.
Health authorities almost never tell people that they should build muscle
for better health.
They recommend that we do aerobic exercise.
 While aerobic exercise is indeed good for health, it does next to nothing to
build muscle, and in fact in some cases may accelerate its loss. Take a look at a
marathon runner to see that.
Strength training is actually seen in some quarters as a freakish activity.
But both men and women of all ages should train for muscle strength.
The modern diet doesn’t help much either.
Since the 1970s, health authorities have demonized meat, due to its
saturated fat content.
As we now know, saturated fat doesn’t cause cardiovascular disease, but
that fact is slow in becoming better known.
In any case, people have been eating less meat and other animal foods. As
a result, their protein consumption has declined, replaced with carbohydrates
and sugar.
Protein is the building block of muscle.
Older people are particularly likely to eat less protein, and that leads to a
greater loss of muscle.
Older people are more likely than younger people to have both more body
fat and less muscle, in other words, poor body composition.
As you age, you can either retain – or attain, if you didn’t already have it –
good body composition, or by going with the flow, gain fat and lose muscle.
That requires a bit of work and discipline.
Work because training for strength isn’t easy – although it must be said,
most people enjoy it.
Discipline because you must stick to your routine. You can’t just eat
whatever everyone else is eating, and you must exercise regularly, even if you
don’t feel like it.
Most people aren’t cut out for discipline, at least of this kind, and therefore
they will age at the same rate as everyone else.
 6: Fat, Carbohydrates, and Protein

The calories, or energy, that food contains is made up of three distinct

types of molecules: fat, carbohydrates, and protein. (There’s actually a fourth,
alcohol, distinct from the rest, but we’ll leave that to one side.)
These molecules are known as macronutrients.
Each of these macronutrients has different uses in the body, and the body
handles each nutrient in different ways, for example by prioritizing one over
another, or by secreting different hormones in response to each one.
Everyone has heard about saturated fat, which is the type of fat found in
meat as well as many other foods. For several decades now, health authorities
have recommended that we decrease our intake of saturated fat in order to avoid
cardiovascular disease. Unfortunately for these recommendations – and our
health authorities – more recent research has found that intake of saturated fat is
not associated with increased risk of heart disease or stroke.
Furthermore, the advice to use vegetable oils to replace saturated fat now
looks like a very bad idea.
Health authorities have also told us to eat more carbohydrates. Dietitians
and others still tell us that we need to eat “healthy whole grains” and to drink
fruit juice. Bad advice.
Some of the evidence used to convict saturated fat of health crimes comes
from epidemiology. That means that researchers would look at a bunch of people,
determine the composition of their diets (as best they could), and then see how
many people came down with diseases and/or died.
Epidemiological studies have many flaws, among them a concept known as
confounding.
Confounding means that other factors, not directly studied, can influence
the result.
For example, genes greatly influence health, as do other lifestyle factors
besides diet.
Because health authorities have told us to eat less meat, many people have
done so. And those people may be different from people who have not done so, in
ways other than their diet.
For example, on average people who ate less meat are likely to be more
health conscious, because they followed health advice.
 People who ate more meat are likely to be less health conscious, because
they ignored the advice.
And people who are less health conscious also ignore other health advice.
They are likely to smoke more, drink to excess, and exercise less, for example.
Therefore, epidemiological studies must be carefully scrutinized.
That being said, newer epidemiological studies are showing the opposite of
what health authorities told us about saturated fat.
The most recent study that helps to overturn conventional dietary wisdom
is called the PURE study.
The PURE study followed over 135,000 individuals in 18 different
countries. The study correlated their diets to how many of them got
cardiovascular disease and/or died.
The conclusion to the study is worth quoting:
“High carbohydrate intake was associated with higher risk of total
mortality, whereas total fat and individual types of fat were related to lower total
mortality. Total fat and types of fat were not associated with cardiovascular
disease, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease mortality, whereas
saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke. Global dietary guidelines
should be reconsidered in light of these findings.”
Those who ate more carbohydrates had a higher risk of death.
Those who ate more saturated fat did not have a higher risk of
cardiovascular disease.
The result turns conventional dietary wisdom on its head.
The PURE study is not the only recent one to find similar results.
Another study, called “Food consumption and the actual statistics of
cardiovascular diseases: an epidemiological comparison of 42 European
countries”, found that the “most significant dietary correlate of low CVD
[cardiovascular disease] risk was high total fat and animal protein consumption…
The major correlate of high CVD risk was the proportion of energy from
carbohydrates and alcohol, or from potato and cereal carbohydrates.”
What does all this mean for extending your lifespan and fighting aging?
For one thing, it means the panacea of low-fat or vegetarian diets does not
exist. The advice we’ve been given to avoid meat will do nothing to increase your
lifespan or slow aging, and in fact may very well decrease lifespan and increase
aging.
 Carbohydrates found in refined grains and in sugar increase blood sugar
and insulin, and there’s a strong relation between high blood glucose and worse
health.
So, if you decreased eating meat and ate more carbohydrates to make up
for it, you might shorten your lifespan. And there doesn’t seem to be any reason
to eat less meat in the first place.
By eating less meat and other animal foods like eggs and dairy products,
you may deprive yourself of adequate protein and speed the loss of muscle.
You should avoid sugar in particular.
Sugar has been long suspected of major involvement in cardiovascular
disease. People who have a high sugar intake have a much higher risk of CVD.
Unfortunately, the health establishment has long downplayed the risks of
sugar, characterizing it as something benign, or at worst, a source of “empty
calories”.
Sugar is not benign, however, and take in enough of it, and you can harm
you heart, your liver, and become obese.
Carbohydrates generally may be harmful or safe depending on the type.
Refined carbohydrates and sugar, at least in large amounts, are harmful. Some
forms of carbohydrates may be safe, for example those found in fruits and
vegetables, or in sweet potatoes. (People who live on the South Pacific island of
Kitava consume massive amounts of sweet potatoes and are by all accounts in
nearly perfect health.)
The omission of all carbohydrates (and sugar) in all but trivial amounts
leads to a so-called ketogenic diet.
Ketogenic diets extend lifespan in laboratory animals.
Ketogenic diets cause the production of ketones, small molecules that the
body uses for energy when insufficient glucose is available.
Ketones may be one of the reasons calorie restriction increases lifespan,
because calorie restriction also results in the production of ketones.
There may be no need to restrict calories to get the benefits of calorie
restriction. Just omitting carbohydrates form the diet might confer the same
longevity benefit.
Ketogenic diets are, as mentioned, very low in carbohydrates, typically less
than 50 grams daily.
They are also typically high in fat, which may amount to 75% or more of
daily calories.
 A ketogenic diet omits all sources of large amounts of carbohydrates.
Therefore, it contains no bread, pasta, rice, pizza, breakfast cereal, fruit juice,
sweetened drinks, bagels, pastries, etc.
A ketogenic diet emphasizes meat, fish, eggs, fermented dairy products
like cheese and plain yogurt (but not milk, which contains lactose, a sugar), non-
starchy vegetables (e.g. salads, broccoli), low-sugar fruit (berries, avocados), and
nuts.
Whether you decide to eat a ketogenic diet or not, the big distinction
between foods is between whole, minimally processed food, and ultra-processed
food.
The biggest mistake of modern nutritional science was to blame meat and
saturated fat for what ultra-processed foods did.
Ultra-processed foods are packaged, industrial foods, and they usually
contain the unholy trinity of sugar, seed oils, and refined grains.
The rise of ultra-processed foods, particularly seed oils and the shortening
made from them, and sugar, bear a good deal of the responsibility for the
epidemic of coronary heart disease that peaked in the mid-20th century.
Humans have been eating meat and animal foods for a very long time, and
it did not cause chronic disease, obesity, or short lifespans.
Americans consume as much as 60% of their calories in the form of ultra-
processed food, so it’s no wonder that so many are so fat and so sick.
 7: Geroprotectors

Earlier in this book, we mentioned calorie restriction and its ability to

prolong the lifespans of animals.
But calorie restriction is a difficult undertaking. Animals in cages have no
choice but to submit to it when scientists force it on them, but few humans will do
it willingly.
Even if they’re willing, most people find it incredibly difficult.
Therefore, the fact that calorie restriction extends lifespan as well as vastly
improves health, yet is difficult to implement, has made scientists look for
chemical substitutes.
These substitutes are known as calorie restriction mimetics.
Essentially, they lead to the same beneficial changes in the body as calorie
restriction.
They can increase insulin sensitivity, improve function of mitochondria
(the powerhouses of the cell), and activate cellular stress defense mechanisms.
One of the CR mimetics best known to the public is resveratrol, a chemical
compound found in grapes.
Resveratrol came to prominence because of the so-called French paradox,
which states that wine protects the French from heart disease despite a diet high
in saturated fat.
While red wine is a healthy drink, the French paradox isn’t real because
saturated fat doesn’t cause heart disease.
In any case, scientists found that resveratrol inhibits cancer and that it
extends the lifespan of simple animals, such as worms.
But it was disappointing, ultimately, because it failed to extend the
lifespan of mice, although it protected them from a bad diet. In obese people,
resveratrol produced a number of changes similar to calorie restriction, such as
AMPK activation, lower glucose and triglycerides, and lower blood pressure.
Whether it would help lean people isn’t known.
One of the most important geroprotectors is the drug metformin, which is
a first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes.
Doctors have prescribed metformin to diabetics for several decades, and it
appears quite safe, with few adverse effects.
Metformin extends the lifespans of both rats and mice.
 Diabetics who take metformin have lower rates of cancer, and lower death
rates, than non-diabetics who don’t take it.
When you think about it, that’s remarkable. Metformin looks like a true
anti-aging, life-extending drug.
However, there are some grounds for skepticism.
As noted earlier, some 80% of the American population is overweight,
obese, or otherwise has abnormal metabolism with some degree of insulin
resistance.
That means that non-users of metformin, the comparison group, are not
all or even a majority metabolically normal. The comparison group could
probably have benefited from metformin also.
So, would metformin improve the health and increase the lifespan of
someone who is already lean, healthy, and metabolically normal?
We don’t know the answer.
Nevertheless, a group of scientists are quite interested in performing a
clinical trial of metformin in humans to see whether it retards aging. They are
currently trying to get funding for it, although that’s difficult, since the
government does not classify aging as a disease.
Metformin may retard aging in normal humans because aging is
associated with increased insulin resistance, which contributes to the pathology
of aging. If that pathology can be diminished, then older people would be
healthier and thus have a lower death rate.
Metformin is one of the cheapest drugs available, costing pennies a dose;
perhaps the only cheaper drug is aspirin. Metformin’s cheapness means that it
has few advocates, since drug companies can’t make much money from it.
Metformin has the hallmarks of a calorie restriction mimetic. It activates
AMPK, a cellular energy sensor which is also activated by fasting and exercise. It
lowers blood glucose and insulin.
A few doctors have begun to prescribe metformin for anti-aging purposes,
but a doctor who will do that may be difficult to find.
Meanwhile, there are many other geroprotectors, both potential and
proven, and scientists are avidly researching them.
 Further Reading

Introduction

López-Otín, Carlos, et al. "The hallmarks of aging." Cell 153.6 (2013): 1194-1217.

Calorie Restriction

Most, Jasper, et al. "Calorie restriction in humans: an update." Ageing Research

Reviews 39 (2017): 36-45.
Heilbronn, Leonie K., and Eric Ravussin. "Calorie restriction and aging: review of
the literature and implications for studies in humans." The American Journal of
Clinical Nutrition 78.3 (2003): 361-369.

The Worst Pro-Aging Habits

Sabia, Séverine, et al. "Influence of individual and combined healthy behaviours

on successful aging." Canadian Medical Association Journal (2012): cmaj-
121080.
“Percent of U.S. Adults 55 and Over with Chronic Conditions”. CDC
Halaschek-Wiener, Julius, et al. "The Super-Seniors Study: Phenotypic
characterization of a healthy 85+ population." PloS one 13.5 (2018): e0197578.

The Importance of Insulin

Templeman, Nicole M., and Coleen T. Murphy. "Regulation of reproduction and

longevity by nutrient-sensing pathways." J Cell Biol (2017): jcb-201707168.
Templeman, Nicole M., et al. "Reduced circulating insulin enhances insulin
sensitivity in old mice and extends lifespan." Cell Reports 20.2 (2017): 451-463.
Pan, Haihui, and Toren Finkel. "Key proteins and pathways that regulate
lifespan." Journal of Biological Chemistry 292.16 (2017): 6452-6460.
 Stress Is Good for You

Biswas, Aviroop, et al. "Sedentary time and its association with risk for disease
incidence, mortality, and hospitalization in adults: a systematic review and meta-
analysis." Annals of Internal Medicine 162.2 (2015): 123-132.
Calabrese, Edward J., and Linda A. Baldwin. "Hormesis: the dose-response
revolution." Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology 43.1 (2003): 175-
197.

Body Composition

Tchkonia, Tamara, et al. "Fat tissue, aging, and cellular senescence." Aging
Cell 9.5 (2010): 667-684.
Gabriely, Ilan, et al. "Removal of visceral fat prevents insulin resistance and
glucose intolerance of aging: an adipokine-mediated process?." Diabetes 51.10
(2002): 2951-2958.
Wolfe, Robert R. "The underappreciated role of muscle in health and disease–
." The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition84.3 (2006): 475-482.

Fat, Carbohydrates, and Protein

Siri-Tarino, Patty W., et al. "Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies

evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease." The
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 91.3 (2010): 535-546.
Dehghan, Mahshid, et al. "Associations of fats and carbohydrate intake
with cardiovascular disease and mortality in 18 countries from five continents
(PURE): a prospective cohort study." The Lancet 390.10107 (2017): 2050-2062.
Grasgruber, Pavel, et al. "Food consumption and the actual statistics of
cardiovascular diseases: an epidemiological comparison of 42 European
countries." Food & nutrition research 60.1 (2016): 31694.

Geroprotectors
 Timmers, Silvie, et al. "Calorie restriction-like effects of 30 days of
resveratrol supplementation on energy metabolism and metabolic profile in
obese humans." Cell metabolism 14.5 (2011): 612-622.
Martin-Montalvo, Alejandro, et al. "Metformin improves healthspan and
lifespan in mice." Nature communications 4 (2013): 2192.