The Best Diet for Healthy Aging

Aging–that’s the subject of my book, How Not to Age. This video will give you just a taste of the vast body of evidence I’m covering in the book. Check it out.

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Based on a study of more than 400,000 people, replacing just 3 percent of calories of animal protein with plant protein was associated with a 10 percent reduction in overall mortality risk. That comes out to be about an extra year of life, swapping out just 3 percent of any animal protein with plant protein, and egg protein was the worst, meaning egg whites. Swapping 3 percent of calories of egg whites for plant protein was associated with more than a 20 percent reduction in overall mortality, worse than red meat. But it’s not just about adding years to your life, but life to your years. What about changes in dietary intake of animal vs. vegetable protein and unhealthy aging?

Healthy aging is defined as “the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables wellbeing in older age.” No one wants to be just a vegetable, and you may be able to avoid that by eating more vegetables. A higher intake of vegetable protein was associated with less accumulation of deficits, based on functional impairments, self-reported health and vitality, mental health and diseases, and the use of health services.

Swapping in just 1 percent of vegetable protein calories for animal protein led to significantly less deficit accumulation. Now, you may be thinking duh, animal protein and animal fat travel alongside each other in the same foods, so maybe this is just is all just a saturated fat effect. But no, even after accounting for fat, there still seemed to be something about the animal versus plant protein sources, though it’s still not clear if the beneficial health effects are because of an avoidance of deleterious effects associated with animal foods, or the beneficial effects of plants––though it may be a bit of both.

A recent review in a dermatology journal on the role of a whole food, plant-based diet in preventing and reversing skin aging emphasized this point. A whole food, plant-based diet is not the same thing as just a vegan diet. You can have a terribly unhealthy vegan diet. As a physician, “vegan” just tells me what you don’t eat; but you actually have to like eat your vegetables, too. But when you do, a whole food, plant-based diet can aid in the prevention, and in some cases reversal, of some of the leading chronic diseases in the United States, as well as the potential for younger-looking skin, due to telomere lengthening, maximizing the antioxidant potential of our cells, and also eliminating harmful carcinogens and aging toxins, known as gerontotoxins, from entering our bloodstream.

No wonder the highest life expectancy of any formally described population in the world may be the Adventist vegetarians in Loma Linda, California, one of the five original “blue zones” in the world. The average life expectancy of Adventist

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