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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Valter Longo
Natural selection, the process Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace described to explain evolution, has resulted in mechanisms that protect an organism, such as DNA repair, until it can generate healthy offspring. Over millions of years of evolution, the lifespan of an organism will tend to get longer if its ability to generate healthy offspring also increases. Both Wallace and Darwin also hypothesized that aging and death may be programmed so that organisms could age on purpose and die prematurely if it were advantageous to the species—to avoid overcrowding, for example.
If aging is the central risk factor for all major diseases, it’s much smarter to intervene on aging itself than to try to prevent and treat diseases one by one. Even great success against one disease may be minimal or rendered irrelevant if accompanied by an increased incidence of another—few people know, for example, that curing cancer or cardiac disease today would increase the average lifespan by only a little over three years.
For example, by starving a mouse receiving chemotherapy or other targeted therapies, we protect normal cells and organs while making the therapy more toxic to cancer cells (see chapter 7); and by applying cycles of a fasting-mimicking diet to a mouse with an autoimmune disease, we reduce the number of autoimmune cells while also activating regeneration of the damaged tissues (see chapter 11). Preliminary results indicate that these strategies may also be effective in humans.
my recommendation, based on the opinion of both supporters and opponents of supplement use, is to take a multivitamin, made by a reputable company, that contains at least vitamin D, E, magnesium, vitamin A, calcium, potassium, or vitamin K, every two to three days.
In support of a diet high in complex carbohydrates and good fats being the best even for weight management, when a diet very low in carbohydrates (less than 10 percent of calories) and high in protein (more than 20 percent of calories) and fats was compared with a moderate carbohydrate regimen similar to the Okinawan diet, fat loss was similar in both cases.27 However, the low-carbohydrate diet caused a much higher loss of water and proteins, indicating that the seemingly large effect of very low-carb diets on weight loss actually represents loss of water and muscle in addition to fat.
Because the younger generation has adopted a more modern diet, we speculated that transitioning to a higher-protein diet with more animal-based ingredients—which many of the centenarians did in their eighties and nineties—may contribute to their extreme longevity. In other words, maintaining a high-vegetable, low-protein diet for the first seventy or eighty years of life, and later switching to a diet richer in proteins but also animal-based foods like eggs, chicken, milk, and certain cheeses, may have slowed down aging and optimized the health of the Molochio centenarians.
