Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - The Scientific Connection Between Diet and Longevity | Dr. Michael Greger - Nutrition Authority

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Lessons - The Scientific Connection Between Diet and Longevity | Dr. Michael Greger - Nutrition Authority · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, discover why whole plant foods are the foundation of both
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  long-term health and effective weight loss. Learn how real food supports sustainable habits
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  better than trendy diets, learn why legumes and whole grains are superior to low-carb alternatives,
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  and learn how a mostly plant-based approach can still allow for small amounts of lean meat
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  without harming your health.
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  So when you look at all the different diets that people take on because they'll take on,
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  like to lose weight, somebody's focused on on health and wellness, they want to go and lose weight,
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  and then obviously let's let's hope they add the gym or some sort of physical activity into
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  that mix. But then there's there's keto, there's paleo, there's I guess more of a traditional
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  food pyramid where you have lower fats, moderate proteins, moderate carbs. You have all these
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  different diets. I'm sure there's others that I have never tried or can't think of right now,
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  but you're saying that the best possible diet for overall health and I would assume there's a
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  way to combine that into weight loss as well because that is a huge contributor to health and
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  wellness if you're obese and you have to lose a little bit of weight. Would be whole foods,
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  you mentioned whole foods take priority over like even proteins which are meats, excuse me,
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  which is interesting. So if you could help somebody just understand not just why nutrient-dense foods
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  are good for longevity, but why nutrient-dense foods are a key piece of, for example, like a weight
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  lost diet or somebody trying to get back on track. How does that how does that play into it? Because I
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  think that the whole is epic rays and the thing that is the most urgent and important in people's
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  minds is how do I look better, a little bit better and how do I fit into a slightly smaller size of
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  clothing regardless of whether or not that should be their main priority because I think longevity
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  is a pretty damn good priority as well. That's the reality that people deal with that's why people
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  jump on these fat diets. He had diets don't work by definition because going on a diet implies
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  at some point you're going to be going off a diet, permanent weight loss requires permanent
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  dietary change. Healthier habits just have to become a way of life and so if they're going to be
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  life long you want them to lead it to a long life. The goal of weight loss is not to fit into a
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  skinnier casket. Thankfully, the good news is that the single best diet proven for weight loss
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  just so happens to be the safest cheapest waiting for the longest healthiest life in that is
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  a whole full-blown-based diet shown in the broad study to be the single most effective weight loss
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  diet ever published in a pair of your medical literature that didn't restrict portions ever. So the
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  most effective diet also happens to be the healthiest diet when it comes to longevity. This is the
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  diet that every single blue zone centers their diets on. There's been over 150 dietary surveys in
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  the world's longest living populations. I mean, they all center their diets around these whole
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  planned foods eating about 95% plant-based and centering the primary protein source as one of the
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  legumes, bean split piece, chickpeas, or lentils. And that's so when you look at all the different diets
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  out there, I know that you don't like low carb diets or no carb diets. I know that that's something
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  that you don't subscribe to. So if you look at the ratios of legumes, that's the majority of your
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  diet. How do you think about the other pieces? What are the healthier carbs or I mean,
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  carbs and other legumes as well? But the healthier carbs and the healthier proteins, like are you
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  including rice? Are you including potatoes? I guess sweet potato? Are you including any kind of meat
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  at all? And if so, what meat would be the best to fit into that perfect ideal diet?
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  Yeah, no, no, I'm so glad it really has to be like, you know, the food industry, the process
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  food industry, love talking about macros. Why? Because they can make you any kind of junk food you
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  want. You want low fat junk food? Boom, snack well cookies. You want low carb junk food. Boom,
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  we got that. You want ironically paleo junk food? Oh, we'll give you that too, right? The one
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  kind of junk that can't make is real food, right? They just can't make money on food. So they know
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  they don't want you to talk about foods. They want you to talk about macronutrients because,
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  oh, oh, they want you to talk about nutrients, right? That's why fruit loops has 13 vitamins
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  and minerals, right? Right on the cover, right? As if, you know, eating marshmallows for breakfast is
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  the way to get your, the only way to get your, you know, 13 vitamins and minerals. But okay,
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  so it's not so look, I mean, you know, you know, carbohydrates can mean kidney beans or jelly
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  beans, right? I mean, you know, you can't just talk about our carbs good or bad, right? Protein
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  could be, you know, pork rinds or, you know, could be, you know, fats could be, you know,
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  crisco, trans fats or walnuts or something, right? And so we have to talk about food, right? That's
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  what we, we don't need nutrients being food. Okay, so when we talk about foods, the healthiest
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  sources of protein are legumes, but also whole grains and other disease can contribute. We're
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  looking at point agroence, we're healthy, a little ground body weight, which is the official
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  recommendation, National Academies of Science. In terms of carbohydrates, the healthiest,
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  again, whole plant foods, the healthiest source of all three, classic macronutrients, where are we
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  going to get our fats? From ideally, most of them not disease, where are we going to get our
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  carbohydrates from? We are going to get them from, you know, from, you know, whole grain,
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  sweet potatoes, be great. White potatoes would not be a good source. No. As one of the few whole
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  plant foods actually associated with increased risk of of disease, including diabetes and stay
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  away from the refined grains like white rice, et cetera. And so that's, and now in terms of,
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  in terms of meat, right, we should really try to eat primarily plants, but not necessarily
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  exclusively plants, right? A plant-based diet is really just about maximizing the intake of
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  the healthiest foods, right? As a physician, you know, these labels like vegetarian or vegan,
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  that just tells me what you don't eat. I mean, do you actually eat vegetables, right?
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  And of course, it doesn't matter. We even brought these holiday special occasions, right?
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  The day-to-day stuff that adds up on a day-to-day basis really should try to be healthy,
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  centering our diets around natural foods. The best meats would be a wild, wild game.
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  So venison in Australia, kangaroo, so extraordinarily, right? Like, you know, moose elk,
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  like four percent calories from fat. And why we care about fat calories is because we care about
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  saturated animal fat. Reason for LDL cholesterol is primary risk factor for a number one killer of
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  men and women, heart disease. But four percent, in fact, chicken used to be only two percent fat,
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  a hundred years ago, according to the USDA. Now, it's over 20 percent fat. We've selectively
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  bred these animals to be extra juicy. And how do we make them, you know, we marble their flesh with
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  the saturated fat. That's why, sort of, for example, grass fed beef, a significantly less saturated fat
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  on the grain, a fed cattle. And so, so it would be kind of the leaner the better,
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  would be way to go. And there's just nothing even comes close to the leanness of
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  of of game. And of course, it would be caught with a lead-free ammunition if you're doing it on
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  your own. Wow. Okay. Amazing. And I think that that even is that's so telling that even chicken,
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  that everybody assumes is the healthiest. There's more calories from fat than protein in chicken
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  these days. I mean, it's just absolutely extraordinary. In fact, yeah, well, you can do studies now
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  where you can randomize people to eat beef versus chicken and see no difference in cholesterol.
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  Where their whole sentence, oh, get rid of red meat over to, you know, white meat. No, because you
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  can get a leaner cut of beef, then you can actually get, you know, eating, you know, eating a thigh
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  or something. So, so yeah, yeah. So, so yeah, if you can find it, you know, something like
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  a grass-fed beef, it's probably probably the easiest kind of, it's not, I mean, that's not
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  close as well, cut game, but in terms of, you know, what you can find out there. Not everybody's
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  going out with lead-free ammunition and hunting. They're all thinking they're trying to figure it out.
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  Oh, they're formed. There's farmed medicine. Yeah. I mean, so they actually, you know, I mean,
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  I don't know, you can probably buy it online. But the point is, the point is you have to, you have
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  to learn and you have to do your own research because the things that are marketed to us as healthy
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  are definitely not always healthy. I'm very curious because you've written both how not to die
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  and how to age. How not, sorry, how not to die and how not to age, excuse me, not how to age,
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  how not to age. When you compare those two ideas, what to you is the difference between not dying
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  and not aging. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. So if you do autopsies of centenarians, those
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  are delivered to over 100. This is a survey of 13,000 autopsies. In every single case, death was
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  from disease. Even though they pair perfectly healthy before dying, their doctors were like,
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  oh, clean bill of health, if you actually cut them open, every single one died from disease. And
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  most commonly hard disease, which is number one killer of those younger than that. And so if death
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  is from disease, then why wasn't my book, how not to die? All you need as an anti-aging book,
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  because it was just first half of the book, just 15 chapters, east of the 15 leading cause of death,
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  talking about the world dying and playing, preventing, worsening, reversing each of the top 15
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  killers. And so it's like, well, then if you check off the boxes, what's the problem? Well, it turns out
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  that I mean, the single greatest risk factor for many of these diseases is actually aging,
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  such that even if all cancer were cured overnight, we would only increase average lifespan by
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  about three years. Why? Because if one age related disease doesn't kill you, another one will.
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  The only reason you died from cancer, you didn't die from heart attack is because you died from cancer
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  first, but you were going to die in our next month from heart attack anyway. And so, yes, having
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  high cholesterol can increase your risk of having heart attack as much as 20 fold, but in an
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  80 year old has 500 times the risk as an 18 year old in terms of heart disease. And because aging
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  affects so many different diseases, if we slow down the aging process, then you can instead of
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  playing whack them all, which each individual disease, you can reduce your risk of kind of age
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  related disease across the board, which are many relating colors. So when you see when you
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  sort of all of your work and all the teachings really just like you're eating whole foods,
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  you're trying to slow down your aging, you shouldn't have the food contributing to you dying
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  quick or got for a bit. But when you look at people like, for example, Brian Johnson, who's doing
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  everything under the sun to reverse aging, aging, what percentage of all the stuff that he does
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  actually slows down aging versus if you just ate a whole food diet?
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  Well, so one thing he does is eat a point-based diet. And so I mean, that's one of the things
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  is actually evidence-based. I mean, then he just tries all sorts of crazy crap that doesn't have
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  any evidence-based and look good for him, right? I mean, you know, I mean, it's kind of interesting
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  experimental data kind of as a guinea pig. I certainly wouldn't do have the things.
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  So it just told me he just did plasma for races. We basically like remove all the liquid
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  portion of your blood and like, we're placed with like, you know, out of the water or something.
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  That's just like, that is like naughty. I mean, that's what you do when people are like
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  dying from some like horrible, you know, boys. I think I saw that on his Instagram. It was
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  absolutely like, absolutely amazing. I mean, yeah, that's how we would do that voluntarily,
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  but it's like, you know, he's like doing it for science. God damn it. And okay, I just know
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  people to go out there and necessarily follow in those footsteps until we can actually prove
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  something is useful. But no, he is doing some things that are just, you know, that really
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  are consistent with a lunch every lunch, or he just kind of takes it an extra step too far.
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  Kind of be on. Beyond the evidence base, but that's how we learn new things. As we kind of go
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  beyond the evidence base and kind of try things out. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable,
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  don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive
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  deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode.
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  See you in the next one.