Eat For Longevity
Perhaps the most fundamental question in all of nutritional science is ‘How should I eat?
Since most of us are interested in weight loss and being fit, we tend to limit the scope of the question to “How should I eat to lose weight” or “How should I eat to get bigger”?
In this article you will see we are asking the wrong question. The problem is bigger than weight loss. As we age we have to exercise more and diet harder to get the same results we did when we were younger. Unfortunately, as we get older our physiology is less capable of recovering from more exercise and dieting becomes harder when you don’t see results like you once did. The root cause of this is age related weight gain due to physiological decline.
As you are about to learn, the environmental factor that most contributes to age related physiological decline is our modern food supply.
The modern food industry has created a surplus of food, but it has also created a surplus of toxins in our food.
Want to live longer? Simply eat less. The new frontier of longevity revolves around restriction of caloric intake to increase life span. There is a large body of research that confirms this. The simple reason is that the more food you eat, the more cellulcar injury and decay you experience from ingestion of free radicals. Eating less results in fewer free radicals in your body. I don’t advocate trying to reduce your calories below a maintenance level, but it does illustrate the point – there is an oxidative cost to your body to ingesting foreign material, i.e., food, into your body.
Now consider this, if ingesting food is the primary external factor wearing your physiology down, then we need to ask how much faster do we wear out our physiology when the food we eat is laced with metabolic poisons?
Here are a couple of dictionary definitions for the word “poison”.
“Any substance that causes injury or illness or death of a living organism”
“A substance with an inherent property that tends to destroy life or impair health”
So in summary, a poison is any SUBSTANCE that inherently impaires your health, causes injury, illness, even death.
Without realizing it, most of us consume SEVERAL substances that meet exactly this definition several times per day. Things like processed sugars which cause excess insulin which in turn kills cells, trans fats which destroy your circulation, hydrolyzed proteins that are toxic in the same way MSG is, and many many others.
The collective impact all of these poisons in our food is to prematurely wear out your physiology at an accelerated pace!
For example, new research shows that food patterns that induce greater free radical damage promote insulin resistance. Insulin resistance in turn promotes accelerated cell death and obesity due to excess insulin production.
Said another way, the modern food supply is full of things that promote accelerated cellular aging. The result are physiological conditions like hyperinsulemia, circulatory disease, and what we are now calling syndrome X – physiological conditions that impair your ability to get fit and lose weight in the first place!
What I am making clear with this is eating for weight loss doesn’t necessarily address the issue that food wears out your physiology, and keeping your physiological youth is the long term key to being fit and healthy. Clearly, the question of how you should eat rests in a bigger context than weight loss. The question becomes “How should I eat to preserve my physiological youth?”
While I can’t give you the whole plan in this short article, what I can do is give you one preventative strategy that is longevity based and prevents weight gain and accelerated aging. In my upcoming book I detail 8 areas that cause 80% of the aging and weight gain problem. Here is one of them…
Eating processed sugars and damaged fats in the same meal makes you instantly old, fat and tired.
Want to know what you will feel like in 20 years? Easy. Just eat some damaged fats and processed sugars together and wait about an hour.
One of the worst things you can ever do, EVER, is to eat some form of man made carb and man made fat together in the same meal.
By man made sugar I mean sugars that do not exist in nature, that have been stripped of their natural fiber. Think of the worst carbs you can imagine – soda, white bread, chocolate syrup.
The popular term for these are 'bad carbs' but it's a bad label. These are processed foods. Bad carbs and bad fats are made bad by processing. Processing of carbs removes fiber and creates a density of sugar relative to volume that is very rare in nature.
By damaged fats I mean fats that have been damaged by heat or frying, or fats that are made in a lab such as hydrogenated oils like margarine.
To understand the impact of eating these two things together you just have to think of what they do on their own. Processed sugars, stripped of natural fiber to slow digestion, with high energy density create massive insulin dumps. As you just read, excess insulin production promotes accelerated aging, cell death and fat storage. Damaged fats from frying or hydrogenation are implicated in every kind of circulatory disease known and cause massive amounts of free radical damage.
When you eat damaged fats and processed sugars together in the same meal you can count on three things
1. Almost all, if not all of what you eat will be stored as fat.
2. You will experience accelerated free radical damage and oxidative stress from excess insulin and damaged fat molecules.
3. You will age your physiology at an accelerated rate.
Ultimately, if you want a simple rule of thumb that will help you prevent adding many pounds over the coming years, it's to simply avoid eating damaged fats and processed sugars together.
If you are going to indulge, do one or the other, but never both together.
What are some examples of this?
Anything fried with any kind of soft drink.
A hamburger is not so bad. It's the soda and fries combined that does the real damage. Soda gives you processed sugar and fries give you damaged fats. Leave out the fries and have diet soda.
Anything fried with any kind of processed sugar.
Think of dinner with fried calarmari for an appetizer, and cake for a desert.
Any kind of margarine or hydrogenated oil with any kind of processed sugar
Oreo's
doughnuts
Chef spread and concentrated juice or jam
doughnuts
You get the idea. Over the long haul you are going to indulge in great tasting food. One of the tricks when eating for longevity is to control the damage from food by understanding which combos wreak the most havoc, such as damaged fats and processed sugars combined in the same meal.
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