There are few areas more contentious in health than diet.
Let’s instead make sense of eating well for longevity by focusing on ‘nutrition’
Longevity Nutrition
It seems no matter where you turn, there are impressive claims made about the benefits or even miraculous healing of individuals who have switched their eating habits to follow a particular diet.
The space is equally ‘tribal’, with arguments flying all directions between the ‘thought leaders’ who advocate for their particular dietary strategy. Social media has further complicated this greatly, with influencers and amateur “arm-chair experts” spouting their opinions and cherry-picked scientific studies to back what they have to say.
Nutrition, not diet
But when it comes to your longevity strategy, you’ll once again hear us pushing for you to take ownership of your nutrition in a personalized way. Backing it with solid fundamentals, your personal preferences and the relevant data you choose to collect to guide your choices.
Ultimately, the best ‘diet’ for longevity, will be the healthiest one that you can stick to.
This means you must bring a significant degree of self-knowledge to the decisions you are making. Only you can know how much you can afford to spend, what your ‘weaknesses’ are (Nick doesn’t keep any potato chips in the house!) and even the cultural background you bring to the decision making process.
To guide you, we propose that you shift your thinking away from the term ‘diet’ altogether, and begin to ignore any guidance that tries to pigeon-hole you into a certain way of eating.
Instead, we want you to emphasize the word nutrition in your decision making process - meaning fueling your body with what it needs to perform, recover and thrive.
Your Longevity Nutrition Plan
We believe that focusing on the following three basic concepts will help you lay a strong foundation:
How much do you need to eat?
What do you love to eat?
What does the data have to say?
The answer to this question is highly personal, and will change for you according to many factors. The most important of which is your activity level, but accompanied by factors such as stress, age, family arrangements and more.
To keep this simple, we can look to two key facts from the science of nutrition that have clear consensus with respect to their importance:
caloric balance
protein requirements.
Caloric balance is about getting the right amount of energy from your food. And the starting point for this begins with body composition analysis. If you are overweight or obese, you start with developing strategies for eating less energy until you correct this. If you are underweight or too lean (too little muscle mass), you need to increase your caloric intake.
How much do you need to eat?
Protein intake has emerged as a pivotal element of your longevity strategy. For example, we now understand that protein requirements increase significantly as you age as the body comes under increasing stresses for repair and maintenance. There remains some debate around whether more or less protein is better for longevity - Nick believes in the ‘more protein is better for longevity’ argument.
In the ‘Basics’ articles below, you can find out how to get started on body composition and calculating your caloric and protein requirements.
In the near future, we’ll explore the caveats to ‘how much do you need to eat?’ in the ‘Advanced” article section, as there are other very important factors to consider, such as insulin resistance.
Forget what everyone else is telling you that you should eat (remember, drop the word ‘diet’ altogether!) - start instead with what do you love to eat?
The answer to this question will be heavily influenced by your upbringing, your cultural background and where you live. It is also shaped by who you live with and those with whom you spend most of your time.
What do you love to eat?
There is of course an important distinction to be made here between what you love to eat and what you know is or is not healthy for you. For example, our emerging understanding of the gut microbiome reveals that the microbes in our gut can heavily influence what we want to eat. If you have an unhealthy relationship with junk food, you may indeed love to eat it.
However, it is quite clear to you, and you don’t need our input to know, that these foods have no place in your longevity strategy.
Instead, you’ll need to emphasize what you love to eat and eliminating what you know is unhealthy for you. In doing so, you’ll shift your microbiome and along with it your cravings for the healthier choices.
From there, you build on this momentum. We’ll share more details about how to advance yourself along this journey in the supporting articles below.
Once again, with the emphasis on nutrition (and not “diet”), you then progress to reviewing the data you can gather about how your body is responding to the food you are eating.
There are many, many ways to approach this - but at its essence, you’ll want to tailor your testing toward the outcomes of your longevity strategy, particularly with respect to your unique risk factors.
For example, if your family history includes cardiovascular disease, you will want to pay particular attention to your blood lipids (LDL-Cholesterol, Apolipoprotein B, Lp(a)). You may need to decrease the amount of saturated fat you consume to get these values into an acceptable range.
What does the data have to say?
You’ll also want to consider tracking your nutrition with a free tool like cronometer, to ensure you are getting all of the necessary micronutrients.
Using the data, you’ll make adjustments to your nutrition plan based on what you need to reduce, maintain or increase. A great example is Nick’s experience with micronutrient testing, where he discovered low levels of chromium, the amino acid glutamine and vitamin K1.
We’ll be adding resources in the articles below to support you in this journey of exploring the data of your personalized nutrition requirements.