A leading longevity researcher claims that making simple dietary tweaks could slow down your ageing by more than a decade. WH reports on the recipe for extending your expiry date
Spare a thought for the billionaires of Silicon Valley. While the rest of us have been coming to terms with a weekly food shop that’s inflating quicker than the ego of an Apprentice contestant, they’ve been engaged in a cost of living crisis of their own. From having the blood of teenagers transfused as part of your £1.7m annual anti-ageing spend (tech mogul Bryan Johnson) to parting with up to £170,000 to have their bodies cryogenically frozen in liquid nitrogen (Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal), it seems the race to live forever is alive and well – but only if you can afford to compete. And while billionaires were rewriting cheques and logic (anyone know how to defrost a body?), researchers were cooking up a more accessible solution. In a paper published by the journal Cell, biologist Valter Longo examined a century of research on the influence of nutrition on ageing. As director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California and professor of gerontology (the study of ageing), Longo has spent his career unpicking the mechanics of what was once deemed pot luck – your end point. Now he’s built a blueprint, dubbed the ‘longevity diet’. He claims that by making subtle tweaks to both what and when you eat, you can increase your lifespan by up to 13 years. But will you be ordering from his menu?
Plate expectations
Adjusting your nutrition to optimise your health – how groundbreaking. It’s true that much of this research confirms what we already know about diets that are rich in fruit, vegetables, nuts, cereals, fish and unsaturated fats. ‘Diets that contain antioxidants, potassium and omega-3 support a reduction in cardiovascular disease and obesity risk, as well as protecting the brain from ageing,’ says Charlotte May, a lead nutritional therapist and health coach at Wellgevity, a longevityfocused health clinic. A Norwegian meta-analysis in 2022 quantified this: a woman’s lifespan could increase by just over a decade with a diet high in whole grains, legumes, fish, fruit, vegetables and nuts, and low in red and processed meats, sugary drinks and refined grains.
So if none of this is news, why has Dr Longo turned the data into a diet? Well, despite awareness of the link between nutrition and longevity, it’s difficult to avoid the unhealthy trappings of a typical Western diet. For starters (and probably mains), red meat and ultra-processed foods are very accessible – the overconsumption of which has two major effects on health, says Pankaj Kapahi, a professor of gerontology at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Processed foods are less satiating t
