I’m going to talk about the most
well-established scientific keys to
longevity to achieving longevity and I’m
going to start by talking about what’s
in your genome and key controllable
potent factors in the real world and
this this red background is an Asian
longevity symbol and to me it’s a little
bit reminiscent to the brain and it’s
it’ll pop up from time to time during my
talk and it’s a visual reminder of the
single most important goal in preventive
health care and that is maximizing
longevity of both body and mind
so in this goal in pursuing this gold
diet is key dozens of studies over many
decades have shown that diet is probably
the single most important and
controllable factor in our overall
longevity and here’s sort of a
big-picture overview of the reason that
diet is so important in a single year
over 95% of you of the material in your
body the atoms in your body won’t be
there anymore but you don’t just sort of
vanish or fade off into nothingness
there’s this gradual process of
replacement that happens over time where
food replaces the the material in your
body and if you eat junk food if you eat
bad food well enough said it destroys
your health and this process is under G
under the control of genes and under the
control of the specific variants that
each of you have but not all of the
genes that control this process or yours
are are even human some of these genes
are in your gut there they’re part of
the gut microbiome that controls not
only what goes on inside of your gut but
inside of your body
for example they help you to to regulate
your levels of blood sugar I go into a
much more detail about a lot of these
things there’s a lot of scientific
references
my book the mind span diet but a lot of
people wonder what this word means what
does mine span mean well a lot of people
talk about an ultimate measure of health
as being life span but life span isn’t
really the perfect measure of health
because if we live the final years of
our lives
in severe and eventually a permanent
cognitive decline where we’re not aware
of our lives then we effectively have to
subtract that time off of our lives mind
span is the lifespan of the
high-performance mind and here’s how I
began to pinpoint the genetic and the
dietary factors that most influenced
mind span I looked around the world for
people who have the longest lives and
the best cognitive performance later in
their lives and I compared those people
to people who have much shorter lives
and have much higher levels of cognitive
decline later in life the people circled
in red the areas and people circled in
red I call the mind span elite and the
areas circled in black I call the mind
span risk and unsurprisingly the people
with the best longevity and and mental
performance later in life or
mediterraneans and the Japanese and
Japanese women hold longevity records in
virtually every category they outlive
Japanese men by several years and that
holds worldwide women outlive men by a
few years worldwide the big difference
between Japanese women and men though
about half the difference is due to much
heavier smoking by Japanese men so when
I’m introduced to people as a longevity
scientist and and the author of the mind
span diet people want to impress me with
their knowledge of diet they want to
tell me about all the incredible stuff
that they’re doing and it’s right on the
cutting edge of diet so they they tell
me all these things they say I’m healthy
I exercise and I I eat low carb with
some whole grains like quinoa mostly
Paleo ancestral and part of that
very high protein you know lots of
grass-fed beef
I avoid refined grains the starches you
know like white rice pasta and bread I
don’t drink alcohol I don’t drink coffee
or tea I have you know fairly high HDL
or lel but but my HDL is very high so I
think that balance is out right I’m okay
well I take vitamins and I take mineral
supplements so you know I know that you
know probably doesn’t do any harm I just
want to make sure that I’m you know I’m
sufficient on all my key nutrients so
let’s look at some of the key evidence
though that has to do with these claims
these beliefs to determine whether or
not people are doing the right thing
because this isn’t just a few people who
come up with me with anecdotal stories
this is actually these are pervasive
messages that you’ll see in a lot of
places popular books and media feature
these kinds of messages so when you
compare the diets of the mind span elite
to the mind span risk there are a few
things that pop out immediately and this
is one of them the mind span elite
traditional diets feature a lot less red
meat than the mind span risk diets a lot
of people think that that might be
saturated fat that saturated fat might
undermine people’s health but before you
jump to the conclusion that a saturated
fat there it’s actually stronger
evidence about some other ingredient and
that’s iron if you look at the diets the
overall patterns of the diets of the
mind span elite versus the mind span
risk and if you look at the blood iron
markers of the mind span elite they have
much lower iron not only in their foods
but also in their bodies of course iron
is a really key ingredient it’s a it’s a
really it’s an essential nutrient but
when you get above sufficiency you don’t
get any benefits from that extra iron
and you actually increase the risk of
many serious diseases like heart disease
cancer and dementia and you shortened
life so my number one recommendation to
people who want to eat more healthful
is to keep your iron in the low but
sufficient range and you’re probably
going to have to undergo some specific
blood tests to find out whether or not
you’re in that range so getting deeper
into genes and genomes um when we look
at the genetic variants that are
involved in overall longevity and
extreme longevity we see again the
importance of iron in determining
longevity these are two well known genes
HFE and apoE they’re involved in iron
transport in the body and about half of
people have harmful or pathogenic
variants in these two genes and they can
also form a very synergistic negative
effect on your overall health and
longevity and here’s how they work so hf
e is the primary determinant of how much
iron gets taken up out of your food and
transported into your body out of your
gut and the normal HFE or the the the
the common variant it it senses how much
iron is in your body and there’s a
regulation of how much iron is imported
into your body you can still have too
much iron with a normal HIV variant but
there are certain variants that undergo
unregulated transport of iron into your
body and you can get very very high and
dangerous levels of iron accumulating a
new body with these other variants and
about a quarter of the population has
these variants April II is probably even
more infamous
among people and the e4 variant is the
single most common and harmful variant
in the human genome it’s the variant
that that provides a an almost complete
barrier to making it to centenarian hood
so it’s very similar to hf v and that it
transports iron to but instead of
transporting iron to the brain into the
body it transports iron into the central
nervous system and into the brain and
these two genes and the
harmful variants in these genes can act
synergistically because HFE harmful
variants transport too much iron into
the body where there are event where
that irons available for transport into
the central nervous system in the brain
I love food we all love food but this
isn’t my declaration of love for food
I’m getting it at a slightly different
point here and and that is how much does
our food love us and is there a food
good for our hearts and that’s a really
really important question because
cardiovascular disease is one of the
biggest killer diseases and most
cardiovascular disease is determined by
lifestyle and diet and when I wrote my
book the mind span diet Japanese women
as they do and many other categories
have had the healthiest hearts ever
measured but earlier this year healthier
hearts were discovered just barely
because the Japanese women have
incredibly healthy hearts and these
incredibly healthy hearts and
cardiovascular systems belong to people
who live in the Amazon rainforest of
Bolivia that Romani people and that
Romani people are they’re farmers
hunter-gatherers and they live a true
paleo existence
unlike the mythical or fictional paleo
existences that we often hear about and
if you compare their heart disease risks
to the heart disease risk in the u.s.
it’s very very different in the moderate
or high risk category 50% of people in
the US have a moderate or high risk of
heart disease whereas only 3% of the
Jomon I do in essentially no risk for
heart disease category 84% of Tremonti
people have essentially no risk for
heart disease whereas only 14% the u.s.
do now the Chum on a diet is extremely
different from the u.s. diet but it’s
very very similar in some key respects
to the traditional Japanese diet so in
compare
these two healthiest hearts in the world
we see that carbohydrates make up the
vast majority of the diets of these
healthiest hearts traditionally Japanese
people have had closer to eighty percent
of their food energy comes from
carbohydrates primarily white rice and
the Tremonti today still get over 70% of
their dietary energy from carbohydrates
primarily white rice and plantains but
the the really striking thing about that
jimana is not just that they have
dietary similarities but the health
outcomes that they have in addition to
their incredibly healthy hearts are very
very unlike what we associated with high
carbohydrate intake they have very
little levels of obesity Japanese women
have the lowest levels of obesity in the
developed world they have very low
levels of type 2 diabetes
both of them have increasing amounts of
obesity and type 2 diabetes as they move
toward a more Western dietary pattern
but here’s one of the things that really
surprises people
the Tremonti and Japanese women are
extremely iron deficient people think
that you know you need a lot of iron to
be healthy but probably one of the keys
to their healthy hearts and
cardiovascular systems is their very
very low levels of iron about 50% of
Japanese women are iron deficient over
50% of Chaumont a middle-aged and older
are not only iron deficient there are
even more iron deficient their iron
deficient anemic they’re actually
clinically iron deficient and here are
some Tremonti in a family group enjoying
their staple food plantains about half
of the chamalla diet plantains and you
can see that most of the plantains they
have on the ground what they’re eating
and that they’re storing are actually
yellow plantains that’s the state that
they eat them in slightly green or a
little bit yellow
and one of the reasons that they eat so
many plantains is because they’re so
easy to cook and eat and they’re so
flavorful this is how they prepare them
just put them in the fire with the peel
on and when they’re cooked they just
peel them and eat them couldn’t be
easier and this is over two-thirds of
the Chu Mon I diet plantains and white
rice about half of the diet has
plantains about another 20% is white
rice and when you have a carbohydrate
rich diet like that it profoundly
changes your physiology profoundly
changes your microbiome and one of the
things that we find in the mind span
elite microbiomes is that they’re
enriched with a greater diversity and
quantity of carbohydrate loving micro
microbes and the the really important
thing to know about carbohydrate diets
is that that’s the only way you can feed
your microbiome they don’t really eat
anything else but then we consider well
I mean we very similarly we have a lot
of the same foods minds family to eat a
lot of white rice did Japanese eat a lot
of white rice sweet right white rice
wheat pasta wheat bread the problem is
that our white rice and our bread and
our pasta are not the same as the mine
span elite white rice bread and pasta
the difference is that the mine span
risk like in the US and the other mine
span risk areas of the world enrich
their rice and their wheat bread pasta
with iron the mine span elites have
never enriched any of their
carbohydrates with iron so when we go
back to these beliefs about what people
are doing for their overall health and
longevity is this is an anti longevity
diet I don’t know but it certainly is
diametrically opposed to the proven
longevity diets for the world the
Mediterraneans and Japanese eat very
high
I’d read Ives very little whole grains
mostly refined grains like white rice
they very low protein very low animal
protein in particular they drink a
moderate to fairer amount of alcohol
they drink coffee tea coffee and tear on
the there’s a part of the mind span
formula everywhere and this LDL HDL
thing is kind of confusing but every
attempt to artificially raise HDL in
genetic variants with dietary
supplements with drugs does not reduce
cardiovascular risk
you can successfully raise HDL many
different ways but all of these
artificial ways of rich raising HDL does
not help you not only that recently it
was shown by a couple of different
really good publications that the
highest level of HDL actually increases
your risk of cardiovascular disease just
like increased LDL does many different
studies on vitamin and mineral
supplementation show that increasing
supplementation increases the risk of
disease and the ones I want to warn you
in particular about our calcium
supplementation because it severely
increases the risk of cardiovascular
disease and iron iron increases the risk
of many different kinds of diseases
including cardiovascular diseases cancer
and dementia so these are the key
longevity lessons that we learn from
looking at these mind span elite diets
low but sufficient iron is the most
important thing that you can do today
for your overall longevity you’re
probably going to have to have a
specific set of blood tests to know
whether or not you have the right level
of iron because it’s different for
everybody especially since you each
carry different genetic variants that
will determine your overall
iron levels for very active people like
the chamalla are the Japanese
traditionally you want a very very high
carb diet and I don’t this graphic is a
little bit misleading you don’t have to
be a runner or lift weights to to have
this kind of beneficial diet the
Tremonti and the Japanese just move a
lot they just they’re just very active
they’re just not very sedentary they
don’t stand around or sit around and
watch TV a lot they just do a lot of
things but if you’re more sedentary if
you can’t help but being sedentary you
might want to ratchet down the carbs a
little bit and more importantly if
you’re pre-diabetic or diabetic you
definitely want to get the carb level
down but you don’t want to replace it
with just any other kind of food higher
monounsaturated fat like you get an
olive oil is probably the best way to
replace those carbohydrates but the
really important thing about getting
some carbohydrates is that you’re
feeding you good microbiome you can’t
really maintain good blood sugar levels
and other beneficial aspects of your
physiology without these microbiome
without the benefits of the microbiome
and again low but sufficient protein is
really important high protein is
associated with many different increased
disease risks and so there’s a lot more
information about all these things in
the mind span diet lots of scientific
references to help you achieve the
greatest longevity that’s possible for
you thanks a lot for your time and your
attention
[Applause]
well-established scientific keys to
longevity to achieving longevity and I’m
going to start by talking about what’s
in your genome and key controllable
potent factors in the real world and
this this red background is an Asian
longevity symbol and to me it’s a little
bit reminiscent to the brain and it’s
it’ll pop up from time to time during my
talk and it’s a visual reminder of the
single most important goal in preventive
health care and that is maximizing
longevity of both body and mind
so in this goal in pursuing this gold
diet is key dozens of studies over many
decades have shown that diet is probably
the single most important and
controllable factor in our overall
longevity and here’s sort of a
big-picture overview of the reason that
diet is so important in a single year
over 95% of you of the material in your
body the atoms in your body won’t be
there anymore but you don’t just sort of
vanish or fade off into nothingness
there’s this gradual process of
replacement that happens over time where
food replaces the the material in your
body and if you eat junk food if you eat
bad food well enough said it destroys
your health and this process is under G
under the control of genes and under the
control of the specific variants that
each of you have but not all of the
genes that control this process or yours
are are even human some of these genes
are in your gut there they’re part of
the gut microbiome that controls not
only what goes on inside of your gut but
inside of your body
for example they help you to to regulate
your levels of blood sugar I go into a
much more detail about a lot of these
things there’s a lot of scientific
references
my book the mind span diet but a lot of
people wonder what this word means what
does mine span mean well a lot of people
talk about an ultimate measure of health
as being life span but life span isn’t
really the perfect measure of health
because if we live the final years of
our lives
in severe and eventually a permanent
cognitive decline where we’re not aware
of our lives then we effectively have to
subtract that time off of our lives mind
span is the lifespan of the
high-performance mind and here’s how I
began to pinpoint the genetic and the
dietary factors that most influenced
mind span I looked around the world for
people who have the longest lives and
the best cognitive performance later in
their lives and I compared those people
to people who have much shorter lives
and have much higher levels of cognitive
decline later in life the people circled
in red the areas and people circled in
red I call the mind span elite and the
areas circled in black I call the mind
span risk and unsurprisingly the people
with the best longevity and and mental
performance later in life or
mediterraneans and the Japanese and
Japanese women hold longevity records in
virtually every category they outlive
Japanese men by several years and that
holds worldwide women outlive men by a
few years worldwide the big difference
between Japanese women and men though
about half the difference is due to much
heavier smoking by Japanese men so when
I’m introduced to people as a longevity
scientist and and the author of the mind
span diet people want to impress me with
their knowledge of diet they want to
tell me about all the incredible stuff
that they’re doing and it’s right on the
cutting edge of diet so they they tell
me all these things they say I’m healthy
I exercise and I I eat low carb with
some whole grains like quinoa mostly
Paleo ancestral and part of that
very high protein you know lots of
grass-fed beef
I avoid refined grains the starches you
know like white rice pasta and bread I
don’t drink alcohol I don’t drink coffee
or tea I have you know fairly high HDL
or lel but but my HDL is very high so I
think that balance is out right I’m okay
well I take vitamins and I take mineral
supplements so you know I know that you
know probably doesn’t do any harm I just
want to make sure that I’m you know I’m
sufficient on all my key nutrients so
let’s look at some of the key evidence
though that has to do with these claims
these beliefs to determine whether or
not people are doing the right thing
because this isn’t just a few people who
come up with me with anecdotal stories
this is actually these are pervasive
messages that you’ll see in a lot of
places popular books and media feature
these kinds of messages so when you
compare the diets of the mind span elite
to the mind span risk there are a few
things that pop out immediately and this
is one of them the mind span elite
traditional diets feature a lot less red
meat than the mind span risk diets a lot
of people think that that might be
saturated fat that saturated fat might
undermine people’s health but before you
jump to the conclusion that a saturated
fat there it’s actually stronger
evidence about some other ingredient and
that’s iron if you look at the diets the
overall patterns of the diets of the
mind span elite versus the mind span
risk and if you look at the blood iron
markers of the mind span elite they have
much lower iron not only in their foods
but also in their bodies of course iron
is a really key ingredient it’s a it’s a
really it’s an essential nutrient but
when you get above sufficiency you don’t
get any benefits from that extra iron
and you actually increase the risk of
many serious diseases like heart disease
cancer and dementia and you shortened
life so my number one recommendation to
people who want to eat more healthful
is to keep your iron in the low but
sufficient range and you’re probably
going to have to undergo some specific
blood tests to find out whether or not
you’re in that range so getting deeper
into genes and genomes um when we look
at the genetic variants that are
involved in overall longevity and
extreme longevity we see again the
importance of iron in determining
longevity these are two well known genes
HFE and apoE they’re involved in iron
transport in the body and about half of
people have harmful or pathogenic
variants in these two genes and they can
also form a very synergistic negative
effect on your overall health and
longevity and here’s how they work so hf
e is the primary determinant of how much
iron gets taken up out of your food and
transported into your body out of your
gut and the normal HFE or the the the
the common variant it it senses how much
iron is in your body and there’s a
regulation of how much iron is imported
into your body you can still have too
much iron with a normal HIV variant but
there are certain variants that undergo
unregulated transport of iron into your
body and you can get very very high and
dangerous levels of iron accumulating a
new body with these other variants and
about a quarter of the population has
these variants April II is probably even
more infamous
among people and the e4 variant is the
single most common and harmful variant
in the human genome it’s the variant
that that provides a an almost complete
barrier to making it to centenarian hood
so it’s very similar to hf v and that it
transports iron to but instead of
transporting iron to the brain into the
body it transports iron into the central
nervous system and into the brain and
these two genes and the
harmful variants in these genes can act
synergistically because HFE harmful
variants transport too much iron into
the body where there are event where
that irons available for transport into
the central nervous system in the brain
I love food we all love food but this
isn’t my declaration of love for food
I’m getting it at a slightly different
point here and and that is how much does
our food love us and is there a food
good for our hearts and that’s a really
really important question because
cardiovascular disease is one of the
biggest killer diseases and most
cardiovascular disease is determined by
lifestyle and diet and when I wrote my
book the mind span diet Japanese women
as they do and many other categories
have had the healthiest hearts ever
measured but earlier this year healthier
hearts were discovered just barely
because the Japanese women have
incredibly healthy hearts and these
incredibly healthy hearts and
cardiovascular systems belong to people
who live in the Amazon rainforest of
Bolivia that Romani people and that
Romani people are they’re farmers
hunter-gatherers and they live a true
paleo existence
unlike the mythical or fictional paleo
existences that we often hear about and
if you compare their heart disease risks
to the heart disease risk in the u.s.
it’s very very different in the moderate
or high risk category 50% of people in
the US have a moderate or high risk of
heart disease whereas only 3% of the
Jomon I do in essentially no risk for
heart disease category 84% of Tremonti
people have essentially no risk for
heart disease whereas only 14% the u.s.
do now the Chum on a diet is extremely
different from the u.s. diet but it’s
very very similar in some key respects
to the traditional Japanese diet so in
compare
these two healthiest hearts in the world
we see that carbohydrates make up the
vast majority of the diets of these
healthiest hearts traditionally Japanese
people have had closer to eighty percent
of their food energy comes from
carbohydrates primarily white rice and
the Tremonti today still get over 70% of
their dietary energy from carbohydrates
primarily white rice and plantains but
the the really striking thing about that
jimana is not just that they have
dietary similarities but the health
outcomes that they have in addition to
their incredibly healthy hearts are very
very unlike what we associated with high
carbohydrate intake they have very
little levels of obesity Japanese women
have the lowest levels of obesity in the
developed world they have very low
levels of type 2 diabetes
both of them have increasing amounts of
obesity and type 2 diabetes as they move
toward a more Western dietary pattern
but here’s one of the things that really
surprises people
the Tremonti and Japanese women are
extremely iron deficient people think
that you know you need a lot of iron to
be healthy but probably one of the keys
to their healthy hearts and
cardiovascular systems is their very
very low levels of iron about 50% of
Japanese women are iron deficient over
50% of Chaumont a middle-aged and older
are not only iron deficient there are
even more iron deficient their iron
deficient anemic they’re actually
clinically iron deficient and here are
some Tremonti in a family group enjoying
their staple food plantains about half
of the chamalla diet plantains and you
can see that most of the plantains they
have on the ground what they’re eating
and that they’re storing are actually
yellow plantains that’s the state that
they eat them in slightly green or a
little bit yellow
and one of the reasons that they eat so
many plantains is because they’re so
easy to cook and eat and they’re so
flavorful this is how they prepare them
just put them in the fire with the peel
on and when they’re cooked they just
peel them and eat them couldn’t be
easier and this is over two-thirds of
the Chu Mon I diet plantains and white
rice about half of the diet has
plantains about another 20% is white
rice and when you have a carbohydrate
rich diet like that it profoundly
changes your physiology profoundly
changes your microbiome and one of the
things that we find in the mind span
elite microbiomes is that they’re
enriched with a greater diversity and
quantity of carbohydrate loving micro
microbes and the the really important
thing to know about carbohydrate diets
is that that’s the only way you can feed
your microbiome they don’t really eat
anything else but then we consider well
I mean we very similarly we have a lot
of the same foods minds family to eat a
lot of white rice did Japanese eat a lot
of white rice sweet right white rice
wheat pasta wheat bread the problem is
that our white rice and our bread and
our pasta are not the same as the mine
span elite white rice bread and pasta
the difference is that the mine span
risk like in the US and the other mine
span risk areas of the world enrich
their rice and their wheat bread pasta
with iron the mine span elites have
never enriched any of their
carbohydrates with iron so when we go
back to these beliefs about what people
are doing for their overall health and
longevity is this is an anti longevity
diet I don’t know but it certainly is
diametrically opposed to the proven
longevity diets for the world the
Mediterraneans and Japanese eat very
high
I’d read Ives very little whole grains
mostly refined grains like white rice
they very low protein very low animal
protein in particular they drink a
moderate to fairer amount of alcohol
they drink coffee tea coffee and tear on
the there’s a part of the mind span
formula everywhere and this LDL HDL
thing is kind of confusing but every
attempt to artificially raise HDL in
genetic variants with dietary
supplements with drugs does not reduce
cardiovascular risk
you can successfully raise HDL many
different ways but all of these
artificial ways of rich raising HDL does
not help you not only that recently it
was shown by a couple of different
really good publications that the
highest level of HDL actually increases
your risk of cardiovascular disease just
like increased LDL does many different
studies on vitamin and mineral
supplementation show that increasing
supplementation increases the risk of
disease and the ones I want to warn you
in particular about our calcium
supplementation because it severely
increases the risk of cardiovascular
disease and iron iron increases the risk
of many different kinds of diseases
including cardiovascular diseases cancer
and dementia so these are the key
longevity lessons that we learn from
looking at these mind span elite diets
low but sufficient iron is the most
important thing that you can do today
for your overall longevity you’re
probably going to have to have a
specific set of blood tests to know
whether or not you have the right level
of iron because it’s different for
everybody especially since you each
carry different genetic variants that
will determine your overall
iron levels for very active people like
the chamalla are the Japanese
traditionally you want a very very high
carb diet and I don’t this graphic is a
little bit misleading you don’t have to
be a runner or lift weights to to have
this kind of beneficial diet the
Tremonti and the Japanese just move a
lot they just they’re just very active
they’re just not very sedentary they
don’t stand around or sit around and
watch TV a lot they just do a lot of
things but if you’re more sedentary if
you can’t help but being sedentary you
might want to ratchet down the carbs a
little bit and more importantly if
you’re pre-diabetic or diabetic you
definitely want to get the carb level
down but you don’t want to replace it
with just any other kind of food higher
monounsaturated fat like you get an
olive oil is probably the best way to
replace those carbohydrates but the
really important thing about getting
some carbohydrates is that you’re
feeding you good microbiome you can’t
really maintain good blood sugar levels
and other beneficial aspects of your
physiology without these microbiome
without the benefits of the microbiome
and again low but sufficient protein is
really important high protein is
associated with many different increased
disease risks and so there’s a lot more
information about all these things in
the mind span diet lots of scientific
references to help you achieve the
greatest longevity that’s possible for
you thanks a lot for your time and your
attention
[Applause]
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