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Category Archives: Longevity Medicine

The Future of Longevity is Now: How to Live and Lead to 100 – Thrive Global

For many (albeit not all) the future of longevity is now; we are already living longer. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of Americans living into their nineties is expected to quadruple by 2050. Demographers predict that as many as half of todays 5-year-olds can expect to live to the age of 100 in the United States. A century-long life will be a reality for more and more of us, so Id argue that anyone who equates increasing age with decreasing quality of life (and contribution!) read on and discover how to activate your potential leadership and impact. No generation before us has had the potential to experience the benefits of increased longevity, sustained vitality and the capacity to consciously curate decades of a meaningful life.

The Stanford Center for Longevity (SCL) has done extensive and exciting work in this very area. With breadth of cross-disciplinary research and ongoing data collection, SCL addresses the how question at the meta-level looking globally and structurally at policy and infrastructure changes necessary to support our longer lifespans in equitable ways. SCLs recently published The New Map of Life navigates us toward new models of all the nitty-gritty things that will need to be updated and radically shifted: education and lifelong learning; redesigning how we work; developing new policies for health care, housing, the environment, and financial security. Im proud to support the big picture shifts that need to happen through my involvement on the SCL Advisory Council. All of us are stakeholders and leaders, from wherever we are, in the seismic shifts outlined by The New Map of Life.

Both the New Map of Life and my formula for a life well-lived share an understanding that longevity is not simply a measure of the quantity of years or Lifespan, but it is about the quality or Healthspan of those years. A burgeoning medical specialization known as Lifestyle Medicine is the systematic practice of assisting individuals and families in adopting and sustaining behaviors that can improve health and quality of life. Were all familiar with the idea of preventative care, so why is it significant that our tradition-bound medical system has developed this new area of study and practice? Its not only because five of the seven leading causes of death in the US can be attributed to chronic, lifestyle-related conditions. Lifestyle medicine recognizes that your physical health, emotional wellbeing, and the accumulated effect of your daily lifestyle choices are inextricably linked.

Health and wellness has become a multi-trillion-dollar industry, with estimates reaching over 8 trillion in just a few years. With everything from Pelotons, FitBits, supplements, fad diets, and far too many other options to mention, embracing responsibility for your health while sifting through the massive information available can feel daunting and is often unnecessarily expensive. However, cultivating your health and wellness doesnt require expensive participation in that behemoth industry. Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Your health and wellness journey can start today, and Im here to simplify it. In the Five to Thrive process, I unpack the building blocks that ancient traditions and modern research agree bolster your health and wellness. Take the free assessment from which you can create your own micro-ambitious plan.

As our recent Facebook quiz taught us, what makes a 100-year life worth living is when it is imbued with an ability to remain independent, with a sense of community, meaning, purpose and joy. To me, the discussion of longevity boils down to this: a life well-lived is not only measured by the number of healthy years you live but by whether or not you thrived in those years. And as social scientists from Victor Frankl to Brene Brown have proven time and again, without a sense of purpose and a capacity to love and be loved, we fail to thrive as humans.

Purpose and the deeply catalyzing force of love ground and propel every single one of us. Purpose, love and connection are central to my work as a leadership coach and a consistent element of what separates the good from the great. So, if we consider any formula for longevity seriously, a sense of purpose and love that bring meaning to this thing called life are required ingredients. You can cheat on a diet, you can get away (for a while at least) without daily exercise, but you cant shortchange your spiritual and emotional health for long without serious consequences.

Resilience is the bounce-back factor, the capacity to prevail in the face of stressors outside your control. Resilience means aiming for a sense of realistic, holistic alignment that is not contingent on your body being perfect or pain-free, unmarred by time, but extends beyond the physical and mental, and into spiritual wellbeing as well. Its so challenging to cultivate resilience in light of the diet of success stories and routes to that success which weve been fed since our childhood. It goes like this: study hard, work harder, make the right connections, prove yourself, do it again. The underlying expectation has been that this recipe will cook up a smoothie of success for life. Yet, life is not a linear path towards ever-ascending destinations. Its a journey that unavoidably hits detours through mountains and valleys. Those of us who understand and regularly practice strengthening our physical and psychological resilience are those with the right ingredients for a life well-lived. So yes, if were talking about living toward 100, resilience will be required. Lots of it!

I love the way the Stanford Center for Longevity frames aging as a longevity buffet with servings of time. This begs for the question: what are you hungry for? Ignore the ageist memes and other cultural tropes that result in our missing out on the wisdom of our elders and suffering for that loss. You are needed now, perhaps more than ever. What the world needs now is not only love, sweet love, but wisdom, courage, experience, and a spirit of wanting to do the right thing for the sake of simply doing the right thing.

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The Future of Longevity is Now: How to Live and Lead to 100 - Thrive Global

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The lowdown on longevity – Health Report – ABC News

Norman Swan: Hello, Norman Swan here with this week's Health Report. Life expectancy has been rising about three months a year since the mid 19th century. We do well in Australia and are usually in the top five or six most long-lived nations. When we personalise this to the individual although, life expectancy, which is a national average, becomes irrelevant. What many of us really want to know is how long we are going to live and how much of that will be in good health. Living longer is an obsession and there are pills galore being offered to slow ageing and maybe even reverse it. Even so, the increase in longevity may be stalling, and you've heard a lot about that on the Health Report over the last two or three years because our metabolic health is declining and our abdominal girth is increasing.

So what works in slowing ageing? Well, that's been the life work, at least so far, of Luigi Fontana, an international authority on the biology of ageing and the dietary interventions, especially calorie restriction, which in fact is what many of the anti-ageing pills seek to emulate without having to cut back on what you eat. Luigi Fontana is Professor of Medicine and Nutrition and has a chair in translational metabolic health at the University of Sydney, and I spoke to him recently at length.

Luigi Fontana: When I was a medical student we had a professor in geriatrics who gave a very interesting lecture about the effects of dietary restriction in mice being the most powerful intervention to extend lifespan and health span. And so I was fascinated. I said, ah, so there is something in mammals that is able to extend lifespan up to 50%. It is like for human beings instead of living 80 years, to live 130, 140 years. The data back then, so we're talking about 25 years ago, were showing also a huge increase in health span with the prevention of cancer, cardiovascular disease and kidney disease, autoimmune diseases

Norman Swan: And before you go on we should just define our terms here. So, lifespan, just crudely, is how long you live, it's not life expectancy, it's just the absolute number of years you have on the planet, and health span is how many healthy years you've got before disability and other diseases start to encroach on your life.

Luigi Fontana: Absolutely. I wasn't happy with being a practitioner where you go to the emergency room because there is a patient with a myocardial infarction, a stroke, and you try to minimise the damage. I said, is it possible to understand if humans, like animals on calorie restrictions, they live at least healthier and possibly longer if we can slow down ageing and accumulation of damage? And so I started to search and there was nothing in humans

Norman Swan: And the important caveat here isit's bloody obvious when you think about it, but mice are not humans, although dietary restriction does spanthey've shown it in fruit fly, in yeast, in other animal species.

Luigi Fontana: In monkeys now, rhesus monkeys.

Norman Swan: But the holy grail is humans because humans are a lot more complicated.

Luigi Fontana: Just to give you an example, mice or rats, they live on average 2.5 years, human beings live on average for 80 years. Rhesus monkeys, they are primates, they live on average 26, 27 years. So even if they are primates, they live a third of what a human being nowadays lives. And so basically I decided to search and I discovered that there was a Professor John Holloszy in the US at Washington University who was starting a program on calorie restriction in humans, and he replied to me and said, come on, come to the US. So I took my luggage and then I fell in love with what I was studying. John, he just died a couple of years ago, was one of the guys who discovered that exercise increases mitochondrial biogenesis, is improving insulin sensitivity, preventing diabetes. So he was a brilliant mind, a pioneer.

Norman Swan: And we will come back to mitochondrial biogenesis in a minute because these are the energy sources in the cells, possibly the source of ageing, and regenerating, revivifying these mitochondria might be one of the answers for delaying ageing.

Luigi Fontana: Exactly. And I spent the next 17 years working on humans, research on calorie restriction. So we studied people who were practising calorie restriction, so what is called technically a cross-sectional study, you compare these people with people who are master athletes or sedentary men and women consuming Western diets. And then we did two big randomised clinical trials, the calorie where we randomised people on calorie restriction. The first one, the step one calorie randomised clinical trial was comparing people randomised to 25% calorie restriction without malnutrition, so with all the vitamins and minerals.

Norman Swan: So what with the outcomes you were looking for, because you can't hang around for 90 years to see whether or not they live longer.

Luigi Fontana: Exactly, so lifespan is impossible. Even in monkeys, the monkeys study now we have finished 20 years to get data on survival, and so it's feasible but for humans it's impossible. In terms of longevity what we are trying to do is to develop biomarkers of ageing, what is called biological ageing, can we measure biological age and with some biomarkers. Right now the most common one, the most trendy one is epigenetic ageing. So you measure DNA methylation, and there are some DNA methylation clocks that are

Norman Swan: So, just to explain, epigenetic changes are not mutations in the actual DNA, they are chemical reactions around the side of the spiral, the helix, which changes its shape and changes its function. And this DNA methylation that you are talking about is one of these chemical reactions that changes the shape, for better or for worse.

Luigi Fontana: Yes, exactly, and so basically these epigenetic changes is basically the regulation of which part of the DNA is translating into proteins. And what we have discovered is that what you do in your life, what you eat, if you exercise, if you smoke, if you are stressed, is changing the transcription of DNA. And new data is suggesting that as you age, basically there are changes in this transcription

Norman Swan: Which may well measure your clock as opposed to how many days or months you've been on the Earth, it's really how many days or months it affects your biology.

Luigi Fontana: Exactly, you can compare basically your chronological age, how many months and years you've been living, compared to the biological age. So you can be biologically younger. Let's say you are 50 years old, biologically you are 40, or biologically you are 60. And so these are experimental tools that we are training, that we are working on, and it looks like they are good. And so ideally we hope that in the next few years we are going to refine these biomarkers of biological age and then we can do an intervention, it can be exercise, it can be diet, it can be a supplement, it can be a drug, and we can say, okay, your body has rejuvenated. Or if you are smoking or if you have other unhealthy lifestyles, you have been getting older than your chronological age.

Norman Swan: And what about the telomeres? We've spoken about that a lot on the Health Reportby the way, you are listening to the Health Report on RN with me, Norman Swan, and I'm speaking to Professor Luigi Fontana, world authority on ageing, slowing ageing, the biology of ageing. So we've spoken about the telomeres, these bits on the ends of the chromosomes, almost like the plastic bits on your shoelaces, to protect the chromosomes which get shorter as you age, as each cell goes, and also if you seem to have less damage of ageing they seem to be longer. Are they good as markers for ageing?

Luigi Fontana: Look, we don't use them in our research. In the past there was a lot of hope that good biomarkersbut Elizabeth Blackburn who got the Nobel prize for telomere and telomerases, she is a friend, and I sent her some samples of these people doing calorie restriction, and we don't see changes. And even in animals on calorie restriction we are not able to use those as a biomarker. It doesn't mean that what you just said, that as you age, every time the cells are dividing or replicating the telomere gets shorter. So, no doubt about it, it's real. I'm just saying that

Norman Swan: It's not a good clock.

Luigi Fontana: Exactly.

Norman Swan: So, come back to the trials now; what do the trials show?

Luigi Fontana: So the first one we compared people who were doing 25% calorie restrictions without malnutrition, or people who were exercising to increase their energy expenditure by 25%, and then we had the control sedentary group. And we found that of course they were leaner, they had less visceral fat. Interestingly, both the CR and exercisers lost around 9% of their body weight, and 40% on average of their visceral fat.

Norman Swan: The dangerous fat in your tummy.

Luigi Fontana: Yes, the dangerous abdominal fat. And then we found improvements in inflammation, reduction of inflammation, we found improvement in insulin sensitivity.

Norman Swan: And just again, so inflammation, which is really an overactive immune system which causes thickening and damage to your internal vessels, is probably part of the ageing process.

Luigi Fontana: Yes, inflammation now we know is a key factor in the development of cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke and many other diseases, including ageing. So it's one of the major players in ageing and many chronic diseases. So we saw an improvement in insulin sensitivity. Insulin is very important, based on many animal models of longevity. So nowadays we can play with genes and we can knock down one gene or we can over-express one gene in rodents, and then we can look at what are the physiological or lifespan effects of these genetic manipulations. And so I will say that 80% of the animal models of longevity, meaning mice that are living longer than the wild type, they have a mutation in the insulin IGF-1 pathway, so they have less insulin biding, less insulin transduction. And what we know is that as you get older, especially as you accumulate belly fat, visceral fat because you are in a positive chronic energy balance, you are becoming insulin resistant. So there are a number of hormones produced by the adipose tissue called adipokines that are making the skeletal muscle but also the adipose tissue and other cells resistant to the effects of insulin.

Norman Swan: And you get growth hormones that can stimulate cancer, so a lot of focus is on insulin, it's much more than diabetes in terms of how it affects the body.

Luigi Fontana: Yes, a lot of people think about insulin when they talk about diabetes. In reality, before you become diabetic you have many years of insulin resistance and hyperinsulinaemia. So the beta cells of the pancreas that are the cells that are producing insulin, they are trying to over-produce insulin to overcome the peripheral insulin resistance, and this hyperinsulinaemia is driving cancer and ageing.

Norman Swan: So, high levels of insulin.

Luigi Fontana: Yes.

Norman Swan: So you've got a signal that reducing calories by 25% seem to be doing similar stuff to

Luigi Fontana: Exactly, so if we have to summarise what we did find, many of the metabolic hormonal adaptations that we have described in long-lived dietary restricted animals are also occurring in humans. So humans are adapting to calorie restriction similarly to animals. Another important one, we found a major reduction in oxidative stress markers, biomarkers like F2-isoprostanes.

Norman Swan: This is biological rusting, which goes along with inflammation and drives those mitochondria that we were talking about as well.

Luigi Fontana: We also saw an increase in autophagy proteins in genes. Autophagy is another important mechanism.

Norman Swan: So again, to explain, your cells get old and they should die but some cells don't die and they just sit there causing havoc and you want the body to get rid of them

Luigi Fontana: But that's senescence. Autophagy is different. So as we get older, we have accumulation of garbage in our cells because our cells are becoming less efficient to remove misfolded proteins, old mitochondria, so mitochondria that get oxidised, they become dysfunctional, and so if you are in energy restriction, the cells, they are trying to say, okay, now where do I get the material to create energy for cell functioning, and they start to digest the garbage, and so that's called autophagy.

The other factor we found in humans as well is what you are saying before, cell senescence. As we get older, we have an accumulation of DNA damage, and when you have accumulation of DNA damage that can be stimulated by smoking or radiation and many other stuff, you have two different options. One is this DNA damage ends up in oncogenes, you have cancer. Otherwise, this DNA damage can cause cell senescence. And what other colleagues have found is that these senescent cells, these old cells, these zombie cells, they are producing pro-inflammatory cytokines. So this is a major source of inflammation itself. They are also secreting pro-cancer factors, and we found that in humans and in animals on calorie restriction, there is a reduction in senescent cells.

Norman Swan: So, popular books out there being sold as the solution to ageing, and I'll declare a conflict of interest here as I've got one coming out in August, but hopefully reasonably scientificlet's just take fasting. So, fasting has been touted as the answer here, and what they do is they say, look, if you look at fasting in animals it prolongs their lifespan, it emulates dietary restrictions. So if you look at the chemical pathways, I'll just use some technical terms like SIRT1, they recapitulate that and work in the same way. So what's your view on fasting as a surrogate for dietary restriction?

Luigi Fontana: The story of fasting, really at least the commercial part, started with the Michael Mosley documentary Eat, Fast and Live Longer, I was one of the two characters on the documentary, and he came and interviewed me in St Louis and then he interviewed Valter Longo in Los Angeles. And back then he put together a nice story, but without scientific data because there were no human studies. And even right now, the data on the effects of fasting, intermittent fasting or time restricted feeding in humans, the data are very, very slim. I'm talking about humans. In animals, yes, the data are overwhelming that intermittent fasting is extending lifespan and health span.

Norman Swan: But isn't there evidence in humans and larger animals that it increases ageing, speeds it up?

Luigi Fontana: No, but we have dataI shouldn't talk about it but I'll give you justwe have a paper submitted now in a major journal for publication, and we were able to do intermittent fasting for six months plus six months, and we see a beautiful reduction in body fat, in body weight and body fat, 8% weight loss, so it's very good for the standards of calorie restriction, but we don't see improvements in inflammation, no improvement in inflammation, a very tiny improvement in insulin sensitivity in many factors. So despite the fact they lose the same amount of body weight that we achieve with classical calorie restriction or with exercise, metabolically we don't see the same responses. Why? Well, what we are finding is that a calorie is not a calorie, that the quality of the food you are eating influences the metabolic response to weight loss, okay? So the shortcut that many think, okay, you know

Norman Swan: So if you're having bacon and eggs, it's not the same as a Mediterranean diet.

Luigi Fontana: Exactly. It's a balance between exercise, the amount of calories you are burning and the metabolic adaptations that you are triggering with exercise, the quantity of calories and the quality of those calories, they are three pillars. Before we were discussing about these easy-fix types of books or solutions that are very, very trendy, it's like if you go to the director of a symphony orchestra and you say, 'Tell me, what is the most important instrument in the symphony?' I don't know, he likes violin or cello. Okay, now I create an orchestra only with violin

Norman Swan: It's funny you should say that, actually one of my chapters in my book says anti-ageing is orchestral.

Luigi Fontana: Exactly, we agree. So to have a beautiful symphony, I don't know if you like Shostakovich, whatever symphony, or Mahler or Beethoven, you need a balance of all the instruments. If you have an overwhelming violin section, then you kill the beauty.

Norman Swan: So then this translates to the individual substances that people say can influence the pathway like resveratrol or NAD boosters, Fisetin and so on, they should work but they don't when you actually study them.

Luigi Fontana: That's what is coming up, that basically in experimental animals some of these molecules, not the ones you mentioned but, for example, rapamycin and others, they are extending lifespan, but we know, for example, that rapamycin in humans is causing type 2 diabetes, is causing immune depression. So if you are mice who are living in a pathogen-free facility, well controlled, in an environment where you are not exposed to viruses, to bacteria, then it may work. But if you are living in an environment like we do, where there is Covid and influenza and bacteria, then you know some of these molecules are dangerous.

Norman Swan: One of the things I'm interested in is the concept of homeostasis. So homeostasis, just to explain to the audience, is this balance. You talk about the balance in the orchestra and you talk about rapamycin, which is a fascinating substance discovered on Easter Island and taken back and having all these effects and used in people with kidney transplants to stop rejection and so on, is that when you look at ageing, some people would argue that ageing is a disruption of homeostasis, so we have a balance, and the balancesay we don't eat well, we don't get much exercise, we put on weight, the balance just tips towards ageing. So it's like the leaning Tower of Pisa, to use an Italian metaphor. So you have this leaning Tower of Pisa, and then what happensso I'm putting a hypothesis to you, is that when you try and correct the leaning Tower of Pisa to vertical, the whole body wants to push it back to a leaning situation because the body knows it needs a balance. If you are laying down protein and making substances, you've also got to break it down. If you put down fat, you've got to be able to lift it up and use it for energy. And so it's very hard to shift that balance. Does dietary restriction restore the disrupted homeostasis of ageing, so, in other words, the leaning Tower of Pisa?

Luigi Fontana: It looks so, even if the sooner you start calorie restrictionso the classic experiments shows that if you start dietary restriction without malnutrition, and let me reinforce that, 'without malnutrition', so going back to the day of fasting where people say, okay, I fast a couple of days per week and five days a week I eat whatever I want. That is dietary restriction with malnutrition. But in the experimental models we found that if you start 30% dietary restriction in a very young animal, typically we were starting in post-weaning mice, you have an extension up to 50% of lifespan. If you start the same 30% dietary restriction in a 12-month-old mouse that is equivalent probably to a 40-, 50-year-old human being, you have a 15%, 20% increase in lifespan because in those 12 months that is like 40 years for a human being, you have accumulated damage. And yes, you can undo some of the damage but not all of it.

So the message is that at any age you can improve your health by exercising, changing your diet, counting your calories, controlling your calories, the quality of what you eat, but you cannot go back totally to the same effects of when you started calorie restriction when you were younger. So the message is that the sooner you start to counteract the damaging effect of ageingbecause, as you said, ageing is a mechanism where the repair mechanisms are getting old. When you were young you have a bone fracture and you're going to repair very quickly, when you are 70 years old you have a bone fracture, you are not repairingif you have a scar when you are young, you are able to repair very quickly the scar, and when you get older, less, because all these mechanisms, this autophagy, DNA repair mechanisms, the antioxidant mechanisms, the removal of senescent cells, they get old and less efficient to keep homeostasis.

Norman Swan: But there is still an effect.

Luigi Fontana: There is still an effect. What I'm saying is that your trajectory of ageing is the deterioration of 20% of these mechanisms per year. If you eat unhealthy, if you have excess belly fat, if you are not exercising, if you are smoking, if you are over-drinking, you are accelerating the accumulation of damage and the deterioration of these mechanisms instead of if you are exercising, you are eating well, you are eating good quality, you are eating the right amount of calories, you don't gain too much belly fat as you get older, you are decelerating these mechanisms and in some cases you are rejuvenating cells.

Norman Swan: So do you live in a monastic lifestyle then?

Luigi Fontana: No, I think it's noteverything dependsfor example, I exercise I would say one hour, probably 5 to 6 times a week, and here in Sydney it's beautiful because the weather is so nice all year long, that even in the winter, even at 6pm I take my bike and I go for an hour and for me it's refreshing. After one day using my brain, going on a bike, it's beautiful. So, one hour a day out of 24-hours is not a lot.

And then I eat a very healthy Mediterranean diet, so very colourful, very tasty, with a lot of fresh fish and here in Sydney we are blessed, lots of different types of vegetables, whole grains and beans, so I have a range ofI think my diet is more diverse than many Australians and Americans because I have a lot of different recipes, very tasty. So I control my calories in two or three ways. One is to eat a lot of unrefined food, so whole grains and beans and vegetables and fish, and in this way you are already controlling your calories. We did a study in the USagain, we haven't published it but I'll give you the results, we are writing the manuscript right now, where we fed people in a randomised clinical trial for two months a Mediterranean diet comprising basically whole grains and vegetables and beans and fish, poultry once a week only, for two months. But I asked my dietician to clamp the body weight. So if the participant was, let's say, 80 kilos at baseline at the beginning of the study, I wanted the same person to be 80 kilos at the end of two months on this Mediterranean diet, you know, we provided the food.

Norman Swan: So they could see the pure effect of the diet rather than weight loss.

Luigi Fontana: Exactly, the results are going to be striking. But just to tell you the results, we had to over-feed people 250 calories to keep their body weight constant.

Norman Swan: You're kidding!

Luigi Fontana: Yes, and it was designed to be iso-caloric

Norman Swan: So it's hard work to maintain the weight.

Luigi Fontana: It was hard work, they were losing weight like crazy because the high-fibre diet compared to their typical American super-refined ultra-processed food, it was already able to make them lose weight like crazy. So this is a simple trick. You think about calorie restriction like, you know, having these tiny portions, an empty plateno. I'm eating huge amounts ofif you look at my plates, huge and big salads, very colourful, tasty, I do my dressing with orange juice or lemon juice with pepper and this and that, a lot of spices, so you can be very creative. It's science-based, it's not just fiction. So that's number one.

And then the other one is stop eating when you are 80% full. How do you do that? Typically we prepare these big portions and we have this plate full of food, and typically you try to finish everything because otherwise you feel guilty

Norman Swan: As you are told by your grandmother, you had to do it.

Luigi Fontana: Yes, you feel guilty to leave something on the plate, instead of one trick is to do small portions on your plate, you do a small portion, then you know you are still very hungry, you need another small portion, until you reach a point where you say, maybe I would eat another three or four tablespoons but I'll stop, I'm satisfied enough, I have a tiny bit of hunger but I'm satisfied, and that's a way to restrict your calories, the second one. Then, if you are overweight and you are trying to lose weight, then you can use a third trick which is basically fasting, vegetable fasting once or twice a week where you eat only

Norman Swan: Which is what the Greeks do.

Luigi Fontana: Yes, only raw or cooked vegetables, a wide variety, non-starchy vegetables, with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil per day because one tablespoon is 120 calories, and then you can use orange or vinegar, whatever you want. And the fourth one is eating everything in a window of six, eight hours.

So in this way if you put together high-quality plus fasting or this 80% filling, you don't have to be a monk orit's very easy, especially if you exercise, because we have clearly shown in these randomised clinical trials I was telling you about in the beginning, that if you lose weight, let's say 8% reduction in body weight with exercise or with calorie restriction, if you lose weight with calorie restriction you have a reduction in T3, triiodothyronine, it's one of the major active thyroid hormones. Therefore, you are lowering your resting metabolic rate. Whenever you are lowering your thyroid hormones

Norman Swan: So you are burning less calories, fewer calories at rest.

Luigi Fontana: Yes. Instead of if you lose the same amount of body weight and body fat by exercise you have no reduction in T3.

Norman Swan: So you balance the two.

Luigi Fontana: Exactly, so basically your metabolism is still very high, and therefore it's mandatory to always couple exercise with diet, otherwise you are lowering your resting metabolic rate, and then you are going to regainsooner or later you are going to regain all your body weight and body fat with the interests.

Norman Swan: Luigi, thank you, it's been fascinating.

Luigi Fontana: You're welcome, thank you for having me.

Norman Swan: We'll get you back when these results are published. Thank you very much.

Luigi Fontana is Professor of Medicine and Nutrition and has a chair in translational metabolic health at the University of Sydney. He has a book which came out in 2020, it's called The Path to Longevity: The Secrets to Living a Long, Happy, Healthy Life. This has been the Health Report, I'm Norman Swan.

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The lowdown on longevity - Health Report - ABC News

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The Dog Aging Project digs deeper than ever to help our best friends live better longer – The Union Leader

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5 Eating Habits You Should Know from the World’s Longest Living People Eat This Not That – Eat This, Not That

There is a breadth of knowledge currently available about nutrition and health, but we can all agree on one very fundamental truth: what you put in your body matters. After pouring through a variety of studies and articles and opinions, that much is clear. Food is medicine, and as with any medicine, it can power your body to do incredible things.

For example, food can even help you live to be 100 years old. As of 2021, over 70,000 Americans have celebrated their 100th birthdayand it turns out, what they eat matters more than almost anything else. The Blue Zone project has done research on just how centenarians do it, focusing on five "blue zone" communities where people have the most incredible longevity in the world.

From the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica to Okinawa, Japan, the people in these communities all share a variety of behaviors that increase their lifespan. Community, mindset, and movement are important. But there is no match for the power of the food they nourish themselves with. We dug in deep and rounded up the top five eating habits that centenarians share.

We've heard of the 80% kitchen, 20% gym rule before, but this is a different 80% guidelineone that dates back 2,500 years. Apparently, it is tied to a Confucian mantra that is called "hara hachi bu" in Okinawa, and it is a reminder to stop eating when you feel like you are 80% full. As the Blue Zone project puts it, "the 20% gap between not being hungry and feeling full could be the difference between losing weight or gaining it."6254a4d1642c605c54bf1cab17d50f1e

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Depending on your eating hours, intermittent fasting may be a version of this tactic. The idea here is that as it gets later in the day, the human body should consume fewer calories. In the Blue Zones, people tend to eat their smallest meal lastand not very late at nightand then don't eat for the rest of the day. Great news for those of us who like big breakfasts!

Beans, beans, the magical fruit. Apparently, their magic extends all the way into life expectancya bean-rich diet is the core of most centenarian lifestyles. This can mean fava beans, black beans, and even soybeans and lentils. For more on just how healthy beans really are, check out our research on the Secret Side Effects of Eating Beans.

Perhaps this is less surprising, given the increasing societal shift away from meat towards plant-based diets. On average, people in blue zones eat meat only five times per month. The detail that might shock you, though, here? The primary kind of meat consumed is pork.

Here is another hack that has been widely promoted across many health channels, but the centenarians confirmed it: serving size is, in fact, key. According to the Blue Zone Project, serving sizes are typically kept between 3 to 4-ounces, which is about the size of a deck of cards. To get a handle on serving sizes, here are 18 Easy Ways to Control Your Portion Sizes.

Kaley Roberts

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Life Lessons From the Second-Oldest Human Being to Ever Live – InsideHook

Kane Tanaka, a Japanese woman who shared a birth year with the likes of George Orwell, Lou Gehrig and Bing Crosby, passed away last week at the age of 119, as CNN reported. According to longevity researchers she was the second-oldest verified human being to ever live, and the oldest ever from a country thats famous for producing centenarians.

Tanaka had been in the news a bit in recent years she was poised to play a part in the Olympic torch ceremony ahead of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, but her family and Games officials scrapped the plan once the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. (Many publications pointed out at the time that Tanaka was one of the few people on the planet to live through both the 1918 influenza pandemic which started when she was 15 and the coronavirus pandemic.)

She lived through quite a bit, in fact: two world wars, five Japanese imperial reigns, 21 American presidencies, a dramatic industrialization of her home country and unthinkable global population growth. At the time of Tanakas birth, there were fewer than two billion people living on the planet. That number is now up to nearly eight billion.

Tanakas life was local, quiet and remarkably consistent. She married at the age of 19 and worked in a family shop that sold udon noodles into the age of 103. (Her husband passed away at the age of 90, after 71 years of marriage.) Her last few years were spent in a nursing home, and according to her family, she was frequently sick over the last few months. She falls a little over eight months short of her recent goal to live to 120.

Its remarkable that Tanaka lived as long as she did, though, considering she suffered from a variety of serious ailments and illnesses over the decades, including paratyphoid fever, pancreatic cancer and colorectal cancer. Her life along with those of other so-called supercentenarians lends credence to latter-day scientific thinking that the human lifespan does not have a ceiling, but is actually heavily influenced by lifestyle and behaviors.

(Some scientists have suggested that ages 40 years above todays average life expectancy as attainable for future generations. And with future medicine, which will lean heavily on cellular reprogramming, theres no telling how long a human being could live. Is 200 years within reach? Many geneticists now say Why not?)

For her part, Tanaka appeared to casually observe two of the most important tenets of longterm health: curiosity and community. She kept her brain curious and agile, solving mathematics problems as a hobby; and she played an integral role in the world around her, engaging every day with family, customers and other members of her faith. (Tanaka was a devout Christian. Whatever your views on faith, engagement in religious communities has long been linked to longevity in Blue Zones throughout the planet.)

She reportedly made sure to eat and sleep well, too, which are essential to longterm health, but not in a manner that so many in the Western world have adopted, treating personal nutrition as some sort of punitive contest. Tanaka allowed herself treats, and retained her mirth. Years ago, she posed for her birthday photo while holding up a bottle of her beloved Coca-Cola.

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Why Intermittent Fasting May Not Help When You’re Already Cutting Calories – Everyday Health

When it comes to weight loss, two diets may not be better than one. In a new study of people who cut calories to shed excess pounds, participants got similar results when they limited meals to certain hours of the day and when they ate anytime they wanted.

For the study, researchers randomly assigned 118 people with obesity to limit how much they ate for one year 1,500 to 1,800 calories for men and 1,200 to 1,500 calories for women. Half the participants were also asked to eat only between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., while the rest of them could eat whenever they liked.

People who ate only during certain hours, a practice known as intermittent fasting, lost an average of 8.0 kilograms (17.6 pounds) after one year, compared with 6.3 kilograms (13.9 pounds) for people who only cut calories, the researchers reported April 21 in the New England Journal of Medicine. But that difference was too small to rule out the possibility that it was due to chance.

While weight loss was the main goal of the experiment, researchers also looked at several other outcomes that can be indicators of health problems for people with obesity, including waist circumference, BMI, proportions of body fat and lean body mass, blood pressure, and metabolic risk factors like blood sugar levels. Outcomes for all these indicators were similar with and without intermittent fasting, the study found.

The two weight loss regimens had similar results, says the senior study author,Huijie Zhang, MD, PhD, a chief physician, professor, and deputy director at Nanfang Hospital of Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China. People can choose the most suitable weight loss approach according to their own preference and needs, Dr. Zhang says.

There are several caveats to these findings, however.

For one thing, the participants were generally healthy, making it harder to see dramatic changes in outcomes like blood pressure or metabolic risk factors after one year of new eating habits, says Blandine Laferrre, MD, PhD, the coauthor of an editorialaccompanying the study and a professor of medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City.

Beyond this, the participants already tended to eat over a fairly narrow window of about 10 hours and 23 minutes per day at the start of the study. This may have made it hard to see dramatic changes in weight loss when they were put on an intermittent fasting plan because it reduced their food intake period by only about two hours, Dr. Laferrre says. People who eat during more hours of the day at baseline are more likely to benefit from intermittent fasting.

In addition, the study participants got unusually good results from cutting calories, losing an average of 9 percent of their body weight. This may have blunted any effect from intermittent fasting, Laferrre notes.

The studyshows that the main driver of the weight loss was the calorie restricted diet, and not the time-restricted eating diet, says Krista Varady, PhD, a professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois in Chicago who wasnt involved in the study.

But this doesnt necessarily mean intermittent fasting is a bad approach to weight loss, particularly for people who struggle with typical means of cutting calories, such as by tracking everything they eat.

The main benefit of time-restricted eating is that you don't need to count calories in order tolose weight," Dr. Varady says. "Just by limiting the eating window to eight hours per day, people naturally cut out 300 to 500 calories per day.

And not all calories are created equal, says Lon Ben-Asher, RD, a nutritionist at Pritikin Longevity Center who wasnt involved in the study.

We should aim our focus on the quality of the food we consume by following our hunger and satiety cues, not the time of the day when we eat, Ben-Asher advises. In addition, we should concentrate our efforts on consuming more foods that create greater satiety per calorie, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains and unrefined carbohydrates, beans, lentils, and other legumes which contain a high level of dietary fiber and water content.

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