HEALTHY AT 100 (14 page)

We can with an order of probability bordering on certainty extend maximum human life span by means of a calorically restricted optimal nutrition diet.…There is now abundant hard evidence—not testimonial evidence, not clinical anecdote, not based on plausibility arguments, and not even correlational evidence, although all these exist in plenitude—but hard, well-controlled and steadfastly confirmed experimental evidence that a low calorie diet that provides optimum nutrition will greatly extend average and maximum life spans, postpone the onset and decrease the frequencies of most or all of the “diseases of aging,” maintain biomarkers at levels younger than chronological age, maintain sexual potency, general vitality, and ability to engage in sports into advanced age, and delay deterioration of the brain.
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It is true that in many underdeveloped countries where overall caloric consumption is low, life spans are often painfully short. But these underfed populations are also malnourished. Their diets are not only restricted in calories—they are also deficient in many vitamins, minerals, protein, and other essential nutrients.

Similarly, there is no medical benefit to anorexia nervosa—a psychological disorder in which people (usually young women) experience a compulsive urge to eat little or no food in a fixation on reducing their weight. They literally starve themselves slowly, sometimes even to death, as did the popular singer Karen Carpenter in late 1982.

The point is not that any low-calorie diet is helpful. The point is that a low-calorie diet that also provides optimal nutrition is most advantageous for health and longevity. There is no advantage—and there is real danger—to reducing calories below the body’s legitimate needs. This is particularly true for children and for pregnant women, whose caloric needs are especially high. But the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that for people at every stage of life the best diets are those in which every calorie comes packed with nutrients.

Prior to 2006, most calorie restriction studies had been done using rats and other small animals. When animals are fed spartan diets with optimal nutrition, they typically live 30 percent or more
longer than their amply fed littermates, and have far less heart disease and cancer. But such studies have been difficult to do with humans. In 2006, however, researchers published a remarkable study in the
Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
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The study of twenty-five members of the Calorie Restriction Society, a group of people who follow Dr. Walford’s ideas and who consume a nutrient-rich, low-calorie diet, found that people who eat low-calorie diets that are sound and well balanced have extraordinarily healthy hearts that retain youthful vigor for many years after they would have been expected to show signs of aging.

The twenty-five calorie-restricted participants had been voluntarily eating a nutritionally balanced diet providing at least 100 percent of the recommended daily intake for each nutrient, but averaging only 1,671 calories a day, for periods ranging from three to fifteen years. (People eating a typical Western diet consume between 2,000 and 3,000 calories a day.)

Luigi Fontana, M.D., Ph.D., of Washington University in St. Louis, the study’s principal investigator, said the members of the Calorie Restriction Society had hearts that seemed fifteen years younger than would have otherwise been expected. They had signficantly lower blood pressure, less inflammation, and less myocardial fibrosis. Their hearts were able to relax between beats in a way similar to hearts in much younger people. They had substantially lower levels of inflammatory markers, including C-reactive protein, tumor necrosis factor– alpha, and transforming growth factor–beta 1. And those in the calorie-restricted group had significantly more elastic ventricles than controls, and better diastolic function. “Diastolic function declines in most people as they get older,” said Fontana. “But in this study we found that diastolic function in calorie-restricted people resembled diastolic function in individuals about 15 years younger.”

And Fontana pointed out something else. The participants eating a calorie-restricted, optimal-nutrition diet had been doing so for an average of only six years, but their hearts appeared fifteen years younger. That could mean that the diet reverses aging.

According to John O. Holloszy, M.D., a co-author of the study, “It’s very clear that calorie restriction has a powerful, protective effect
against diseases associated with aging. We don’t know how long each individual will end up living, but they certainly have a longer life expectancy than average because they’re most likely not going to die from a heart attack, stroke or diabetes. And if, in fact [as the study indicates] their hearts are aging more slowly, it’s conceivable they’ll live for a very long time.”
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While this was the first study to look in medical depth at humans who have deliberately maintained a low-calorie, high-nutrient diet over the course of years, many other studies have shown that diets that provide optimal nutrition while remaining low in calories improve blood sugar control, produce younger-appearing and leaner bodies, and increase mental sharpness. As well, diets super-high in nutritive quality but relatively low in calories have been shown to retard the basic rate of aging in humans, to greatly extend the period of youth and middle age, to greatly reduce the risk for such late-life diseases as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, and even to lower the overall susceptibility to disease at any age.

I love food, and I doubt that I will ever deliberately adopt as restrictive a diet as that of the Calorie Restriction Society members. But I think it’s important to recognize that if you want to live a long and healthy life, this is one of the keys: Avoid processed foods and empty calories, and instead eat a diet low in calories and high in nutrients. Your susceptibility to cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, autoimmune disease, and many other ailments will be only a tiny fraction of what it would be otherwise. Plus, such a diet will give you, according to Dr. Walford (who hitchhiked and riverboated across Central America for his fifty-eighth birthday),

better eyesight and hearing at every age; a sharper, more alert problem-solving mind; an increased feeling of well-being; enhanced sexuality and fertility at a more advanced age.
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Roy Walford’s description of the kind of health that typically ensues from a low-calorie, highly nutritious diet may seem too good to be true, particularly when we are accustomed to seeing the examples of unhealthy aging that abound in the modern Western world. But he is not indulging in wishful thinking; he is engaged in clear-eyed and
dispassionate scientific observation and analysis. His description accurately depicts the healthy aging of the Okinawans, the Abkhasians, the Vilcabambans, and the Hunzans, all of them peoples whose diets have indeed been very low (by Western standards) in overall calories while abundant in nutrients. The marvelous health Dr. Walford predicts for those who follow a highly nutritive low-calorie diet is no pipe dream. It has consistently been shown to be the reality of the healthiest and longest lived peoples on earth.

It’s not just a matter of playing the genetic cards you’re dealt. We have the power to shape our own lives. The reality is a much more optimistic scenario than if it were just a matter of picking the right parents.

—John Rowe, M.D., Professor of Geriatrics at Harvard
Medical School and Chair, MacArthur Foundation
Research Network on Successful Aging

T
he question of the optimum diet for humans has been debated endlessly in recent years. Authors have sold millions of copies of books advocating all kinds of approaches. Some, including Dean Ornish, M.D., say the way to go is low-fat, high-carbohydrate; others, such as Robert Atkins, M.D., advocate lots of fat and protein and very low carbohydrates. Advocates of these and other approaches can, and no doubt will, continue to argue back and forth for years to come. But what, I ask, can we learn from our elders? What can we learn from those cultures where people have actually lived spectacularly long and healthy lives?

According to the authors of the Okinawan Centenarian Study, the elder Okinawans who have attained the most phenomenal health and longevity statistics ever fully documented eat an average of seven servings of vegetables a day, seven servings of whole grains per day,
and two servings of soy products per day. They eat fish two or three times a week. Their consumption of dairy products and meat is nearly nonexistent. And they eat very little sugar or added fats.
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If you look at the chart above, you’ll notice certain things right away. You’ll see that the Okinawan elders eat a great deal less meat, poultry, eggs, dairy products, and fruit than Americans. And that they eat far more vegetables, grains, soy foods, and fish. (The elder Okinawans may very well have the highest soy consumption of any people in the world.)

There are several things that the chart does not illustrate, however, which are also quite important. For one, the Okinawan elders do not eat margarines or any other hydrogenated oils or trans-fat foods. And although the chart reveals that the elder Okinawans eat far more grains, there are also crucial differences between the types of grains eaten. The Okinawan elders eat primarily whole, unrefined
grains. In the West, however, most of us have taken a different path.

White flour is what you get when you strip away the fiber-rich bran and the nutrient-rich germ from the wheat, leaving only the nutrient-depleted starch. Wheat is the primary grain consumed in the modern Western world, and most of it is eaten as white flour.
In the United States, 98 percent of the wheat eaten today is eaten in the form of white flour.

The reason wheat was originally refined and processed into white flour was to extend shelf life. This provided certain advantages to commerce, but the consequences to human health that have followed from the shift from whole wheat to white flour have been painful indeed.

Here is a table showing the percentage of nutrients lost when whole wheat flour is refined into white flour:

Many people think that when white flour is “enriched” with added vitamins, the nutritional value is restored. But this is far from true. Of the twenty-five nutrients that are removed when whole wheat flour is milled into white flour, only five nutrients are chemically replaced when the white flour is enriched.

The importance of whole grains in cancer prevention was vividly illustrated in a 2001 report published in the
Journal of the American Dietetic Association.
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The authors conducted a “meta-analysis,” reviewing the entire body of available scientific literature on whole grains and cancer risk. Here’s what they found: Of forty-five studies on whole grains and cancer, forty-three showed whole-grain intake to provide significant protection from several cancers. Specifically, a protective association was seen in 9 of 10 mentions of studies on colorectal cancers and polyps, 7 of 7 mentions of gastric cancer, 6 of 6 mentions of other digestive tract cancers, 7 of 7 mentions of hormone-related cancers (breast, prostate, ovarian, and uterine cancer), 4 of 4 mentions of pancreatic cancer, and 10 of 11 mentions of other cancers.