Category Archives: Longevity

…and high-carb diets might be just as harmful. In the research at hand, low-carb was defined as under 40% of calories from carbohydrate, and high-carb was over 70% of calories.

Garlic Naan, a type of flat bread

The longevity sweet spot was 50-55% of calories from carbs. Guess what? That’s the typical carb percentage in the traditional Mediterranean diet.

If you want to eat low-carb, read further to identify the possibly healthier substitutions for carbs. Tl;dr version: Eat plant-derived protein and fats.

From a 2018 study in The Lancet Public Health:

Background

Low carbohydrate diets, which restrict carbohydrate in favour of increased protein or fat intake, or both, are a popular weight-loss strategy. However, the long-term effect of carbohydrate restriction on mortality is controversial and could depend on whether dietary carbohydrate is replaced by plant-based or animal-based fat and protein. We aimed to investigate the association between carbohydrate intake and mortality.

Methods

We studied 15 428 adults aged 45–64 years, in four US communities, who completed a dietary questionnaire at enrolment in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study (between 1987 and 1989), and who did not report extreme caloric intake (4200 kcal per day for men and 3600 kcal per day for women). The primary outcome was all-cause mortality. We investigated the association between the percentage of energy from carbohydrate intake and all-cause mortality, accounting for possible non-linear relationships in this cohort. We further examined this association, combining ARIC data with data for carbohydrate intake reported from seven multinational prospective studies in a meta-analysis. Finally, we assessed whether the substitution of animal or plant sources of fat and protein for carbohydrate affected mortality.

Findings

During a median follow-up of 25 years there were 6283 deaths in the ARIC cohort, and there were 40 181 deaths across all cohort studies. In the ARIC cohort, after multivariable adjustment, there was a U-shaped association between the percentage of energy consumed from carbohydrate (mean 48·9%, SD 9·4) and mortality: a percentage of 50–55% energy from carbohydrate was associated with the lowest risk of mortality. In the meta-analysis of all cohorts (432 179 participants), both low carbohydrate consumption (70%) conferred greater mortality risk than did moderate intake, which was consistent with a U-shaped association (pooled hazard ratio 1·20, 95% CI 1·09–1·32 for low carbohydrate consumption; 1·23, 1·11–1·36 for high carbohydrate consumption). However, results varied by the source of macronutrients: mortality increased when carbohydrates were exchanged for animal-derived fat or protein (1·18, 1·08–1·29) and mortality decreased when the substitutions were plant-based (0·82, 0·78–0·87).

Interpretation

Both high and low percentages of carbohydrate diets were associated with increased mortality, with minimal risk observed at 50–55% carbohydrate intake. Low carbohydrate dietary patterns favouring animal-derived protein and fat sources, from sources such as lamb, beef, pork, and chicken, were associated with higher mortality, whereas those that favoured plant-derived protein and fat intake, from sources such as vegetables, nuts, peanut butter, and whole-grain breads, were associated with lower mortality, suggesting that the source of food notably modifies the association between carbohydrate intake and mortality.

Source: Dietary carbohydrate intake and mortality: a prospective cohort study and meta-analysis – The Lancet Public Health

Steve Parker, M.D.

PS: These types of studies are often unreliable.

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“Darling, think about upping your NMN dose.”

David Sinclair is a PhD professor and researcher at Harvard. Harriet Hall, M.D., reviewed his 2019 anti-aging book at Science-Based Medicine. Here’s his current anti-aging regimen as outlined by Dr Hall:

He makes no recommendations for others except “Eat fewer calories”, “Don’t sweat the small stuff”, and “Exercise”.

But he argues that if he does nothing, he will age and die, so he has nothing to lose by trying unproven treatments, and he has personally chosen to do these things:

• • He takes a gram each of NMN [nicotinamide mononucleotide] resveratrol, and metformin daily.
  • He takes vitamin D, vitamin K2, and 83 mg. aspirin.
  • He limits sugar, bread, and pasta intake, doesn’t eat desserts, and avoids eating meat from animals.
  • He skips one meal a day.
  • He gets frequent blood tests to monitor biomarkers; if not optimal, he tries to moderate them with food and exercise.
  • He stays active, goes to the gym, jogs, lifts weights, uses the sauna and then dunks in an ice-cold pool.
  • He doesn’t smoke.
  • He avoids microwaved plastic, excessive UV exposure, X-rays, and CT scans.
  • He tries to keep environmental temperatures on the cool side.
  • He maintains a BMI of 23-25 [click to calculate your BMI].

He plans to fine-tune his regimen as research evolves. He acknowledges “It’s impossible to say if my regimen is working…but it doesn’t seem to be hurting.” He says he feels the same at 50 as he did at 30.

Source: Aging: Is It a Preventable Disease? – Science-Based Medicine

Steve Parker, M.D.

PS: P.D. Mangan posted an interview it Alan S. Green, M.D., who’s using rapamycin to slow aging.

PPS: The Mediterranean diet has an anti-aging effect if you consider improved longevity to be anti-aging.

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“The 21st century is a great time to be alive”

From Market Watch:

Better living conditions, easier work, and better health care are all helping shave years off our effective ages, researchers have said. The progress is steady and consistent, they have found. A typical American woman of 67 today is about as healthy as her mom was at age 60, and at 89 she’s likely to be as healthy as her mom was at 75, the report released this week said.

Health-wise, older people are 10 years younger than their grandparents. “A 70-year-old born in 1960 is predicted to be about as healthy as a 60-year-old born in 1910,” the authors wrote. The authors, Ana-Lucia Abeliansky, Devil Erel and Holger Strulik, economists and statisticians at the University of Goettingen in Germany, crunched medical data on thousands of Americans.

Elderly African-Americans didn’t see the youthfulness gain.

Furthermore:

From 1950 to 2000, average life expectancy has risen more in Western Europe than in the U.S. Europeans have gained 11.3 years, on average, compared with 8.6 years for Americans.

Source: Good news for older Americans: 70 is the new 60 (but not for everyone) – MarketWatch

“Sweat Pea, let’s schedule a check-up with Dr. Gupta.”

From UPI:

Married men in 2017 had an age-adjusted death rate of 943 per 100,000, compared to 2,239 for widowers. The death rate was 1,735 per 100,000 for lifelong bachelors and 1,773 for divorced men.

Married women had a death rate of 569 per 100,000, two-and-a-half times lower than the 1,482 rate for widows. The death rate was 1,096 for divorcees and 1,166 for never-married women.

*  *  *

While the death rate for married men and women declined by the same 7 percent, women’s overall death rate was much lower.

But the death rates among men in all other marital categories remained essentially the same between 2010 and 2017, researchers found.

On the other hand, the death rate for widowed women rose 5 percent, while the rate for never-married women declined by 3 percent and remained stable for divorced women.

Source: Marriage linked to longer lifespan, new data shows – UPI.com

Steve Parker, M.D.

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A healthy diet has room for grapes

In The Blue Zones book, Dan Buettner discusses geographic regions where people live significantly longer than average. Sardinia, for example.

From Vox:

We’ve long been obsessed with the super-elderly. How do some people make it to 100 or even 110 years old? Why do some regions — say, Sardinia, Italy, or Okinawa, Japan — produce dozens of these “supercentenarians” while other regions produce none? Is it genetics? Diet? Environmental factors? Long walks at dawn?

A new working paper released on bioRxiv, the open access site for prepublication biology papers, appears to have cleared up the mystery once and for all: It’s none of the above.

Instead, it looks like the majority of the supercentenarians (people who’ve reached the age of 110) in the United States are engaged in — intentional or unintentional — exaggeration.

Source: Study: many of the “oldest” people in the world may not be as old as we think – Vox

Steve Parker, M.D.

PS: The Mediterranean diet has long been linked to longevity.

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