What does “aging well” mean to you?
Does it include being independent, healthy, active, and strong well into your 90s? Maybe even beyond?
In our Longevity series’ introductory blog, I invited you to envision yourself in your later years and broadly reviewed the four pillars of good health necessary to put you on a path to your healthiest long life:
- Diet and Nutrition
- Exercise and Movement
- Sleep
- Emotional Health
Do you wonder what’s the best diet for longevity? This second Longevity blog focuses on longevity through diet and nutrition.
What Does Good Diet and Nutrition Mean?
By good diet and nutrition, I don’t mean occasionally dialing back your food intake to drop a few pounds. I mean eating responsibly on a daily basis, starting early in life.
It’s a lifestyle commitment to manage the quality and quantity of what you consume — not just the meals on your plate but your beverages, supplements, medications, and anything you ingest.
The quest for the ideal longevity diet isn’t a fad. For centuries, individuals have tried to determine the food choices that might add extra years to their lives. However, doing this for the general population requires complex research across generations, so it’s a universally underfunded, understudied area of health and medicine.
Best Diet for Longevity: Core Dietary Principles
Physicians agree on these core dietary principles that contribute to increased longevity:
Variety in Your Menu
Your plate should reflect a healthy balance of nutrition. Plan your meals to include a breadth and variety of protein and vitamin sources.
Load your plate with as many colors of food as possible. You must have three colors besides brown, beige, and white carbohydrates. The more diverse your choices, the healthier you’ll be.
Calorie Intake
You need only enough food to fuel the day’s activity and meet your nutritional needs. Your body will store any extra calories.
It’s a question of balancing your macronutrients. A common ratio you may see is 40% carbohydrates, 30% protein, and 30% fat. But your ideal ratio varies depending on your personal goals and needs. For example, you may require more protein if you want to gain muscle.
Food Source and Quality
Like a plant that must grow toward the sun, your body can only respond to nutrition in one way, with a chemical reaction. It responds a certain way to process proteins, another for carbs, and so on. And the quality of what you put in dictates how your body reacts.
Patients often ask about supplements. “Which are effective and safe to use?” Or “Is brand X better than brand Y?” I typically ask them their reason for using a supplement and if they feel the cost justifies the result. If a patient has a particular vitamin deficiency, I encourage them to get that vitamin through food sources rather than supplements.
About Calories
Humans are designed to carry a certain amount of weight. Excess pounds stress the body and place it in an inflammatory state. Maintaining a healthy body weight cuts down your risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, orthopedic injuries, and metabolic disorders like diabetes.
In concierge medicine, we can dig deeper into each patient’s unique nutritional needs. We get an estimate of their basal metabolic rate — the baseline calories needed to be awake and alert.
Then, we factor in the calories needed for their typical daily activities: running errands, going to work, exercising, and so on. (For example, a patient who wants to increase muscle mass may need more protein in their diet.)
Here are a few caveats about approaches to weight loss:
Calorie Restriction
Everyone who wants to diet or lose weight says, “No problem, I’ll just restrict my calories.” But pure calorie restriction can cause yo-yo dieting. If you’ve stuck to a diet for a while and your body’s nutritionally starved, it activates your hunger response. In that case, you may suddenly “reward yourself” with a food binge.
On the other hand, people who exercise strenuously while restricting calories set the stage for potential injury if their bodies aren’t properly fueled for the effort.
Calorie trackers can help. As a general rule, all of us tend to overestimate how many calories we burn during exercise or underestimate how many we take in. That’s human nature.
A tracker keeps you aware of the calories you consume and helps you effectively estimate the number of calories you burn. At the end of the week, your results are either “in the black” or “in the red” based on the calorie restriction.
Time Restriction
Time restriction is intermittent fasting — limiting the hours of the day in which you take in calories. As a group, men often fare better than women with intermittent fasting because men are often inconsistent about well-balanced nutrition or sticking to typical mealtimes.
But an important caution: It’s still overeating if an intermittent faster packs excess calories into their daily six- or eight-hour eating window.
The Patient’s Plate
The ratio of macronutrients you consume — proteins, fats, and carbs — affects healthy aging.
Remember the federal government’s original food pyramid? Carbohydrates occupied the big portion at the base; tapered upward were meats and other proteins, vegetables, and finally, certain healthy fats. However, the food pyramid needs to be flipped. Your base should be protein, not carbohydrates.
Medical science now knows there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Today’s My Plate program reshuffles the pyramid into a sectioned dinner plate, with ratios of proteins and other foods more personalized to a person’s age, sex, height, weight, and physical activity.
When I work with a patient on a baseline for their daily diet, we fully discuss their typical intake:
- I ask them to walk me through a typical breakfast, lunch, and dinner, creating a detailed meal diary.
- I also ask:
- What do you snack on?
- What’s in your pantry?
- What beverages do you drink? How often?
- How much caffeine do you get from coffee, tea, or energy drinks?
- How much alcohol do you use?
- Where do you get your food (grocery store, fast food delivery, etc.), and how often?
Then, holistically, I try to understand the emotions involved in what, why, and how a patient eats. Based on their input, we work together to determine what’s negotiable: What are they willing to improve in their diet?
I extend grace to patients when it comes to birthdays, holidays, and vacations. The emotional or psychological joy of breaking bread with friends and family on a special occasion takes precedence over day-to-day dietary restrictions. We need some of that happiness for longevity. Without it, it’s not worth living a long time.
I had a patient whose recent bypass surgery called for him to reduce his sodium intake. But he enjoyed dining out, a habit that can be high in sodium. He worked with our nutritionist. But at the end of the day, he didn’t feel it was worth it. It’s great to be perfect, but don’t let it be the enemy of good.
The Importance of Protein
The nutrition plan I devise for a patient depends on their individual goals. Still, the best diet for longevity invariably includes some form of protein:
- For patients 60+, protein is critical: At that age, we lose one to one and a half percent of our muscle mass every year. Resistance exercise helps build healthy muscle mass, but you must fuel the workout!
- A basic daily goal for a 180-pound male is to consume one-half to one gram of protein per pound of body weight — 90–180 grams of protein, or the equivalent of three or four chicken breasts per day. This delivers enough energy for vigorous activity or to support muscles.
- Some protein advocates — like Peter Attia, M.D., the author of the best-selling book Outlive — call for even higher daily dietary amounts.
An advantage of protein is that it’s filling, so you don’t crave as many carbohydrates. Consume carbs and fats in moderation.
The Importance of Good Gut Health
Our gastrointestinal (GI) system has its own blood supply, separate from our other systems. It can react to environmental factors by shifting blood flow from one area to another. It speeds or slows nutrients through our system, so we get the most benefit from them.
Treating your gut well fosters a long, healthy life:
- Foods high in antioxidants are essential to prepare your gastrointestinal tract for your later years. Antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables — particularly dark green, leafy vegetables like spinach or kale — have beneficial anti-inflammatory properties.As we age, the gut lining starts to break down, and its blood supply decreases. Consuming processed foods creates inflammation and can decrease immune-system strength. As the GI tract fights to defend itself, you get less energy from the foods you eat and may have a tougher time recovering from exercise and other activity.
- Your gastrointestinal system is also the body’s largest reservoir of serotonin. While anxiety and depression medications treat the nervous system, they can also affect the gut, causing common side effects like stomach upset or loose stools.
- Your gut muscle is your body’s largest sugar reservoir. The GI system converts carbs to sugar and releases it into the bloodstream, powering your exercise and muscle-resistance activities.
Deep Dive Into Longevity
Longevity — living not just long but healthily — is an emerging specialty among doctors and includes careful attention to balancing the best diet for longevity and nutrition for energy and strength.
As you take a proactive approach to your healthcare, forge a partnership with a physician who can guide you.
Your Priority Physicians doctor has the time to get to know your dietary patterns and your vision for your later years. We continually assess what’s working or what’s not and adjust as needed.
Look for our complete blog series on Longevity to take a deeper dive into each core pillar of a long, healthy life, or reach out to your Priority Physicians doctor and start extending your health span now!
