AnUser
#310
Scientist previously at Apple goes through a presentation he had at a low carb conference, the complete opposite of his bias, regarding what big data tells us is the best diet.
It’s great.
1 Like
Bicep
#311
Cool that he doesn’t consider people who have “different facts” to be the enemy. Or anyway if he does, he does a good job of hiding it.
More power to him and I hope it works for him.
A longevity scientist who says he’s reversed his age by 15 years shares the diet he follows — and 3 foods he avoids
Swears by: eating a Mediterranean-style diet
Verdin said that there’s strong evidence to suggest eating a good balance of complex carbohydrates — such as sweet potatoes — fats, and proteins is essential for health.
He follows the principles of the Mediterranean diet, which is based on the traditional eating habits of people in countries such as Greece, Italy, and Turkey, and has been ranked the healthiest way to eat by the US News & World Report for eight years running.
“When you look at populations that are on this type of diet, they really are the healthy ones,” Verdin said.
The eating plan emphasizes fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, and lean sources of protein such as fish.
Read the full story: A longevity scientist who says he’s reversed his age by 15 years shares the diet he follows — and 3 foods he avoids
5 Likes
mccoy
#313
Pls. note, that traditional is the keyword here. In Italy, It means, the farmers’ diet about 100 years ago, or at least, until the end of the 2nd WW, 1945.
After that, diet became unbalanced, too much refined starch (pasta and bread mainly), too much sugar and junk food (croissant and cookies and jam in the morning), too much meat.
5 Likes
LaraPo
#314
This is exactly what I’ve been eating for decades.
7 Likes
The leading healthy diet was the AHEI, which was developed to prevent chronic diseases. Participants in the highest quintile of the AHEI score had an 86% greater likelihood of healthy aging at 70 years and a 2.2-fold higher likelihood of healthy aging at 75 years compared to those in the lowest quintile of the AHEI score. The AHEI diet reflects a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, and healthy fats and low in red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, sodium, and refined grains. Another leading diet for healthy aging was the PHDI, which considers both human and environmental health by emphasizing plant-based foods and minimizing animal-based foods.
Higher intake of ultra-processed foods, especially processed meat and sugary and diet beverages, was associated with lower chances of healthy aging.
Open Access Paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-03570-5
7 Likes
I’d prefer if their chart was broken down by substitution. By definition, if my diet includes more meat, it must include less of something else. How do we know that the meat eaters aren’t just including less fruit, for example, and that the cause is “less fruit” not “more meat”. Perhaps there’s a minimum amount of fruit required to achieve a healthy eating pattern, and then the rest can be filled with meat without impacting the overall results.
Put another way, this chart suggests you should only eat from the green sections at the top for the optimal pattern, which may or may not be true.
Note that I have not read the paper so perhaps they did control for this somehow.
mccoy
#318
I love the colormap and the outcome seems to be coherent with the a priori knowledge, except the ‘fast and fried food’ line, that sounds crazy as rightly underlined by Mr. Topol and Mr. norwitz. An error? It should be clarified by the authors.
mccoy
#319
After having examined the figure in detail and after a quick reading of the article, the most reasonable explanation is that the rows ‘fish and seafood’ and ‘fast, fried foods’ have been erroneously swapped. This is especially so in the ‘fast food’ definition, where the components of these foods, refined starch, sugar, and so on, are marked red in lower rows.
This is a fascinating article based on big data, which deserves to be studied in depth, I’m going to do that in the spare time I have.
The suggestions are also pretty actionable. For example, fruits seem to be at the top of the list of favorable foods, whereas in some regimens, they are excluded because of their glycemic load.
So, here we might have an issue of eliminating a favourable food to alleviate an unfavourable situation of high blood sugar, but perhaps it would be better to keep the fruit and take some metformin or SGLT2-is? An issue of optimization.
6 Likes
vongehr
#320
I wondered about that, too. Maybe eat the least sweet fruits, but then, tomatoes are fruit, yet listed well below fruit, and so are all the vegetable entries, almost as if to suggest eating the most sugary of the bunch.
Some rows are similarly perplexing, being low yet very green apart from the first rectangle according to which the rows are ranked. Ranking according to a different column will give quite a different ranking, so there is a lot of “noise” in these data.
If we wanted to hype unsaturated and mono-, polyunsaturated, just sort according to the last column, surviving to 70.
1 Like
mccoy
#321
I understood your answer when I realized you are referring to the first colormap, that in figure 3, whereas I was alluding to the colormap in figure 4. I agree that the data in figure 3 can be counterintuitive and have no answer for some of’em. For example, in the redhyp column, related to hyperinsulinemia, fruit (nontrivial glycemic load) is green (GOOD) but tomatoes (lower glycemic load) is red (BAD). Also, in the same redhyp column, animal protein tends to be red/BAD, regardless of the type of protein, even lowfat dairy, whereas all starchy food, except french fries, is neutral.
This outcome would probably deserve a discussion on its own.
We should consider however that the results are not precise, far from it, whereas the overall picture constitutes a valid starting point for other consideration, since we are dealing with two high quality observational studies, with detailed questionnaires compiled by health professionals.
1 Like
mccoy
#322
As a counterpoint to this study and the new USDA dietary guidelines, marking animal protein as bad, here come the punctual observations from Peter Attia.
I find the observations sensible but not totally precise. For example, health-conscious individuals do not necessarily eschew meat, fish, or dairy. Most of them consume lean meat in moderate amounts and also consume fish and low-fat dairy. The second observation that the guidelines tend to privilege the amelioration of the people in worse health is true, but the studies also tend to underline maximum benefits for the general population of health professionals.
What I am discerning at this point is an objective situation where with the exception of moderate seafood consumption, plant-based foods, especially some healthy categories, tend to be better than others in providing healtspan and longevity, generally speaking, whereas individually speaking the adoption of meats or other animal-derived food, if of good quality, may be beneficial in the single context.
Bottom line, some general rules seem to apply to nutrition, whereas, as usual and as applicable ot other fields like exercise and lifestyle in general, individual variation governs in deviating from the general rules.
vongehr
#323
“health-conscious individuals do not necessarily eschew meat, fish, or dairy.”
Health-conscious individuals eat lots of fish and fermented dairy (yoghurt, cheese). My blaming of “noisy” data and P. Attia’s take are carefully politically correct as is the culture in forums like this one. But given the journal and authors, it is not surprising that everything animal and sat fat related is coming out badly now, fitting to the supposed relation to the global warming scare and the plan to make the peasants eat the bugs and become efiminate soy boys. But I don’t want to start the usual conspiracy theorists vax denier discussion. To those more red pilled: take this study with a big grain of salt.
Seventy-seven healthy men from Tanzania, both urban and rural residents, participated in the study. Some participants who traditionally ate an African diet switched to a Western diet for two weeks, while others who ate a Western diet adopted a traditional African diet. A third group consumed a fermented banana drink daily. As a control, ten participants maintained their usual diet. The researchers comprehensively analyzed the function of the immune system, blood inflammation markers, and metabolic processes at baseline, after the two-week intervention, and again four weeks later.
Participants who switched to a Western diet exhibited an increase in inflammatory proteins in their blood, alongside activation of biological processes linked to lifestyle diseases. Their immune cells also responded less effectively to pathogens. Meanwhile, those who switched to a traditional African diet or consumed the fermented drink showed a reduction in inflammatory markers. Some of these effects persisted even four weeks later, indicating that short-term dietary changes can have long-lasting effects.
Open Access Paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-03602-0
3 Likes
Wow, what a bunch of biased BS. All jam and ketchup is a Western Diet??? And no mentioning that even US blacks, who are by now on average 25% white admixed already, are much more prone to DM and HBP, just due to genetics? What is next? Going to some part in Asia that is still lactose intolerant and publishing a paper on how terrible a “Western Diet” is, starting with milk and cornflakes in the morning, then cafe latte, and so on?
2 Likes
mccoy
#326
I agree that anything, not just this study, should be taken with a grain of salt, reasoning about the conceptual framework, the methods, the conclusions.
What I understand is that this is a study from the Harvard T. Chen university, a structure that hosts some of the most eminent nutritionists of our times, included Walter Willet, maybe the top nutritionist presently living, although absent from the podcasts.
The ORs in the study are calculated by comparing the extreme quintiles in the first 3 figures, whereas in figure 4 (below partially attached) the ORs are calculated comparing the extreme deciles , the 1st and the 10th.
This means for example that those who are top 10% in fruit consumption age significantly better than those who belong in the bottom 10% of fruit consumption. This is a comparison almost between extremes, lots of fruit are, according to the authors, much better than little or very little fruit, and this taken as an independent variable, since I’ve not seen conditioned probabilities, that is, lots of fruit conditioned to the fact that also lots of nuts are eaten. The combined probabilities, as far as I’ve seen, can be estimated qualitatively following the colormap.
For example, figure 4 suggests according to the authors that total meats is detrimental to all the domains of healthy aging, but more exactly this means that lots of meats compared to little or no meats is detrimental. It tells us nothing about the middle ground, noderatly high versus moderately low consumption.
Also, it tells us nothing about consuming a lot of meat while consuming a lot of vegetables. Or consuming very little meat while consuming lots of vegetables. We have to do our own educated guesswork in the context of combinations.
Below is an excerpt of figure 4
Beth
#327
I was lucky enough to go to Kenya, and as a vegetarian at the time, I expected to starve. I even got in trouble at the airport for trying to smuggle in pbj 
I have no idea how what they serve to tourists compares to what the locals eat, but I was in veggie heaven. I could eat almost everything, and in fact, I gained a ton of weight on safari!!
All that is to say, in reading this, while my experience might not be the norm, I was not surprised.
2 Likes
amuser
#328
Excepting, of course, those held by rapamycin.news
1 Like
Excellent must-read.
“Because healthy people want to be healthy, they adopt certain habits, making those habits appear healthier than they actually are.1”
“People frequently promote diets that aren’t special in any way, because “it worked for me”. Great! If something works for n = 1, that doesn’t provide an indication that it’ll work for anyone else, or even that it worked for the individual in question”
'Regression to the mean is the norm, rather than something exceptional, so if you’re struggling with an achy back, a runny nose, some bloating, or a weird lump and it “goes away” right after you decide to start a new diet [or a new supplement] the most likely explanation isn’t cause-and-effect, it’s happenstance. Recommending others follow your derived advice is unlikely to net them any benefits, but you’re sure it worked, so why not offer away?"
