Is There a Longevity Diet?

‘Longevity diet’ may help people live longer by fasting for half the day, banning red meat
April 28, 2022
by StudyFinds

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Fad diets are a dime a dozen these days, but researchers at USC say they’ve finally put one together that has everything you need to live a long and healthy life. Their “longevity diet” favors fish and plant-based proteins, and even welcomes a good amount of carbs, while avoiding red and processed meats.
This diet also requires people to eat their meals within a certain time frame and allow time for periods of fasting. Dieters looking to follow a healthy diet have no shortage of options these days, with most of these plans focusing on cutting carbs and calories. However, it’s been unclear if these diets help people actually stay healthy and live longer.
Now, the USC team has found that it’s not only about what people eat, but also when they eat it.

“We explored the link between nutrients, fasting, genes and longevity in short-lived species, and connected these links to clinical and epidemiological studies in primates and humans – including centenarians,” says Professor Valter Longo in a university release.
“By adopting an approach based on over a century of research, we can begin to define a longevity diet that represents a solid foundation for nutritional recommendations and for future research.”

Taking the best parts of popular diets
The researchers reviewed hundreds of studies on nutrition, diseases, and long life, involving both animals and humans, and combined them with their own research. Their analysis included a wide range of calorie-cutting diets such as the popular keto diet, as well as vegetarian, vegan, and Mediterranean diets. It also looked at various forms of fasting, including cutting out food intermittently or over longer periods of time — sometimes for two or more days several times a month.
The team found several factors linked to living longer and certain illnesses, such as insulin, cholesterol, and certain protein levels. Overall, study authors believe the secret to living longer is eating a moderate to high amount of carbohydrates from unrefined sources.
Also, getting the right amount of protein and enough fats from plant-based sources can provide about 30 percent of a person’s energy needs. Ideally, a person’s meals would take place within an 11 or 12-hour window, allowing for a daily period of fasting. A five-day cycle of fasting or fasting-mimicking diet every three to four months could also maintain healthy insulin levels and blood pressure, the study finds.
So, what’s in the longevity diet?
“Lots of legumes, whole grains, and vegetables; some fish; no red meat or processed meat and very low white meat; low sugar and refined grains; good levels of nuts and olive oil, and some dark chocolate,” Prof. Longo says while describing the longevity diet.
Their new menu resembles Mediterranean diets, found in so-called “Blue Zones” like Sardinia in Italy, Okinawa in Japan, and Loma Linda in California. These diets are usually plant-based with some seafood and relatively low in protein.
The researchers’ diet adds to this by also providing time frames for meals and fasting periods which people can adapt to fit their sex, age, health status, and genetics. For example, people over age 65 benefited from more protein to counter the loss of lean body mass and frailty. Next, the researchers are planning on carrying out a 500-person study using the longevity diet in southern Italy.

Study authors suggest anyone looking to follow the longevity diet should work with a healthcare provider to come up with a plan which focuses on making small changes. This is because making drastic changes can be harmful, causing major loss of body fat and lean mass. Moreover, people often put the weight back on once they abandon a highly restrictive diet.
The findings are published in the journal Cell.

South West News Service writer Tom Campbell contributed to this report.
Tags: healthy eating, intermittent fasting, longevity, meat, Mediterranean diet, red meat

Edited for Food, Facts, and Fads by Sally J Feltner, MS, Ph.D

World Health Organization (WHO)

Switching to a healthier diet linked to improved longevity

Source:

Republished by Food, Facts, and Fads. Eatwell Guide, 2016 United Kingdom

More emerging evidence suggests that improving one’s diet could help prolong a person’s life.

Poor diet and lack of physical activity are “leading global risks to health,” according to the World Health Organization (WHO)Trusted Source.

In order to improve diet globally, the WHO is working with countries to commit to a number of initiatives, including the elimination of trans fatsTrusted Source, reducing salt intakeTrusted Source and developing guidelines around food labellingTrusted Source and the use of artificial sweetenersTrusted Source.

The United Kingdom Government published its Eatwell Guide in 2016 to help people follow a healthy, balanced diet. It outlines the importance of eating at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, reducing salt and saturated fat intake, and promotes the consumption of whole grains and pulses, alongside suggestions for portion size and caloric intake.

Despite this guide being published to ensure policy in the U.K. is developed in line with these dietary aims, research published in BMJ Open suggests that less than 0.1% of the country’s population follows a diet that adheres to the guide’s recommendations.

How healthy diets impact longevity

The U.K. Biobank is a database set up in 2006 that tracks the health of half a million people, aged between 40 and 69 years, and living in the U.K. The Biobank collects data on the diets of participants, as well as on their overall health.

A recent study by a team of researchers based at the University of Bergen, Norway analysed U.K. Biobank data from over 465,000 participants to determine the impact of adherence to the diet outlined in the Eatwell Guide on their life expectancy. Its results appear in Nature Food.

Dietary patterns of participants were assessed, with intake of all food groups split into five quin tiles, from lowest to highest. Dietary patterns associated with longevity were the quin-tiles for each food group with the lowest mortality risk.

Unhealthy dietary patterns were characterized by limited amounts of whole grains, vegetables and fruits, fish, and white meat, but a high intake of red and processed meats, eggs, refined grains and sugary drinks. Outcomes were also reported based on adherence to the dietary pattern recommended by the Eatwell Guide.

Researchers adjusted the data for factors including age, sex, area-based sociodemographic deprivation, smoking, alcohol consumption and physical activity level, and body mass index (BMI).

Their analysis indicated that a 40-year-old man changing his diet from an unhealthy diet to one following the Eatwell Guide dietary recommendations would add 8.9 years onto his life expectancy. For a woman of the same age, this change led to an 8.6-year increase in life expectancy.

For a 70-year-old man the change would correspond to a 4-year increase in life expectancy, and a 4.4-year increase for a woman of this age.

When these results were adjusted for BMI and energy consumption, the overall increase in life expectancy that could be attributed to improvements in diet dropped somewhat.

Meat consumption linked to higher death risk

Lead author Prof. Lars Fadnes of the University of Bergen, research group leader at Haukeland University Hospital, told Medical News Today:

“Our analyses and other research indicate that what we eat is linked to the risk of obesity, which again is a contributing risk factor to premature deaths. Our analyses could indicate that the risk for premature deaths related to overweight/obesity was about a quarter of the dietary increased risk from unhealthy eating and mortality.”

Researchers also looked at which foods had the greatest impact on decreasing the overall mortality risk.

They found that consuming more whole grains and nuts and less red meat and sugary drinks was associated with the biggest improvements in life expectancy.

Is eating fast food a Dementia Risk?

The health risks of eating ultra-processed foods _________ including sausages and burgers as well as pizza and ice cream ____________ are well documented. They have been shown to raise the risk of obesity, diabetes, and cancer among other ailments. (CNN.com )

In a new study, researchers followed more than 10,000 Brazilians with an average age of 51 for more than 10 years. They found that people who consumed more than 20% of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods had a 28% faster cognitive decline compared to those with less than 20%. Unfortunately, that 20% is not a high threshold; just 400 calories out of the 2000 calorie diet. And most Americans are well over that, getting on average a whopping 58% of their calories from ultra-processed foods.

“The sample size is substantial and the follow-up extensive, Dr. David Katz, a nutrition specialist who was not involved in the study. While short of proof, this is robust enough that we should conclude ultra-processed foods are probably bad for our brains.”

Source: The Week. December 23, 2022, Volume 22, Issue 110.

Nutrition and lifestyle in healthy aging: the telomerase challenge

Aging is defined as the progressive decline in physiological functions which leads to increased vulnerability to diseases and death [1]. This is a universal process underlying by many mechanisms and different pathways, whose burden rises to three different phenotypes: normal aging, accelerated aging and successful aging [2]. Despite variability among definitions, “successful aging” is as a multidimensional process encompassing major chronic diseases, major impairments in cognitive, in physical function and sustained engagement in social and productive activities [2,3]. However, reaching old age in good health is not just a “fate effect” but the result of a complex interweaving between environmental and genetic factors [4]. Studies conducted in twins have estimated that approximately 20-30% of an individual’s lifespan is related to genetics, while the rest is due to individual behaviors and environmental factors [5,6]. In this contest, nutrition and lifestyle are the most important contributors to longevity and healthy aging [7–11]. Follow a diet rich in vegetables, fruits, nuts, olive oil, fish, a small amount of red wine and exercise at least 20 minutes a day three times a week, avoiding obesity, smoke and alcohol, represents the working recipe for long and healthy life. Many mechanisms and pathways underlie nutrition, lifestyle and longevity including telomere length modulation [12–15].

Telomeres are long sequences of nucleotides at the end of our chromosomes, forming with specific proteins complex, an “end caps” which preserve genome stability and lead a cell to correctly divide [16–18]. Telomeres have been compared with the plastic tips on shoelaces, since they are able to keep chromosome ends from fraying and fusion to each other, which would destroy or interfere genetic information. At each cell division or replication event, telomeres lose some of their length and when they get too short, the cell is no longer able to divide becoming “senescent” [19]. This shortening process triggers a sustaining damage response scrambling with cell health leading to disease risk and cell death [20]. In 1962, Leonard Hayflick revolutionized cell biology when he developed a telomere theory known as the “Hayflick limit”, which places the maximum potential lifespan of humans at 120 years, the time at which too many cells with extremely short telomeres can no longer replicate and divide [21,22]. Fifty years later, new science came out opening the door to maximizing our genetic potential. In fact, published data suggested that extremely short or dysfunctional telomeres can be repaired by the enzyme “telomerase”, which working as a reverse transcriptase, adds nucleotides at the end of each chromosome promoting its stability [22,23]. In 2009, Blackburn, Greider and Szostak received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of “how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase”. These discoveries had a great impact within the scientific community, supporting that aging can be potentially delayed by telomerase activation and telomere erosion rate reduction.

In contrast to stem cells which constitutively express low levels of telomerase, normal somatic human cells repress its expression immediately after birth [24–27]. Thus, for a long time, telomere length has been considered as an indicator of cellular senescence, and a potential biomarker of human aging, but studies supporting this role are still contradictory and inconclusive [22,28,29]. More recent genetic studies in animal models have demonstrated that short telomeres rather than average telomere length are associated with age-related diseases and, their rescue by telomerase is sufficient to restore cell and organismal viability [30,31]. In humans, circulating telomerase activity rather than telomeres length is inversely associated with the major cardiovascular disease risk factors [32]. Thus, another concept is coming up, the “telomere stability”, a quite different concept from telomere length. For example, patients with Alzheimer’s disease do not invariably have shorter telomeres, but their telomeres have significant signs of dysfunction [33–38]. Improving the activity of telomerase enzyme -that can add length back to shorter telomeres, and, in the meantime, protect longer telomeres to ensure stability- seems a way to actually turn back the biological clock. Telomerase has also extra-telomeric functions influencing various essential cellular processes, such as gene expression, signaling pathways, mitochondrial function as well as cell survival and stress resistance [40,41]. Therefore, the presence of active telomerase in stem cells, and potentially in all cells, may be helpful for longevity and good health.

Lifestyle factors known to modulate aging and age-related diseases might also affect telomerase activity. Obesity [42], insulin resistance [43,44], and cardio-vascular disease processes [45,46], which are related to oxidative stress and inflammation, have all been linked to shorter telomeres. Smoking, exposure to pollution, lower physical activity, psychological stress, and unhealthy diet significantly increase the oxidative burden and the rate of telomere shortening [47–53]. So, what a better way to counteract the “biological clock” by reactivating telomerase trough diet and lifestyle interventions? There is a recent paper showing that with intensive lifestyle modification, with a low fat diet, regular physical activity, and mental stress reduction (by yoga and meditation), telomerase activity increases significantly in peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) [54]. Again, people living in the Mediterranean countries have longer and healthier life as compared with people living in other industrialized countries, and we previously demonstrated that they have also claim longer telomeres and higher telomerase activity in PBMC [55]. It is still unclear if there is a single nutrient or a factor responsible of Mediterranean diet anti-aging properties or the whole, single ingredient foods and lifestyle are the key to “healthspan”.

Today, researchers are struggling to find a compound or an “elixir” for long life, while common people are taking dietary supplements with the intent to preserve mental, physical, and emotional health into old age. Most dietary supplement programs include combinations of vitamins, antioxidants, and other constituents, some of which have been shown to have significant health benefits in controlled clinical studies. Specific nutrients provide all the necessary building blocks to support telomere health and extend lifespan. This is the case of folate [56,57], vitamins (B, D, E, C) [58] zinc [59] and polyphenol compounds such as resveratrol [60], grape seed extract and curcumin [61]. Several foods -such as tuna, salmon, herring, mackerel, halibut, anchovies, cat-fish, grouper, flounder, flax seeds, sesame seeds, kiwi, black raspberries, green tea, broccoli, sprouts, red grapes, tomatoes, olive fruit- are a good source of antioxidants. These, combined with a Mediterranean type of diet containing fruits, vegetables and whole grains would help protect our chromosome ends [62–70].

In conclusion, what we eat, how we eat and how much we eat, together with lifestyle significantly, can affect our telomerase/telomere system with a great impact on healthspan. “Similes cum similibus curantur” and in nature is still hidden the secret of healthy and long life whereas telomerase could represent the distinctive target.

Nutrition and Lifestyle in healthy aging: the telomerase challenge

Virginia Boccardi, Gluseppe Paolisso, and Patricia Mecocci. Aging, January 2016, Vol.8 No 1

How to Add Phyto – Chemicals for a Better diet:

I was looking through some old textbooks the other day and found these helpful tips (circa 2013) keys to better health for all of us – not just kids. And guess what – it still remains – most we have learned was that most of them are free radical antioxidants. Anyway here they are.

Focus on Phytochemicals

Phytochemicals are substances found in plant foods (phyto means plant) that are not essential nutrients but may have health-promoting properties.

Phytochemicals include hundreds, perhaps thousands of biologically active nonnutritive functions found in plants. For example, compounds found in onions and garlic are natural pesticides that protect them from insect infestation. Most plant chemicals have no effect on human health, but many promote health and a few can be toxic. For example, many are antioxidants that decrease the adverse effects of reactive molecules on normal physiological function. However, the phytos found in soy and teas have been shown to inhibit tumor growth.

Cruciferous vegetables are named for the cross shape of their four petal flowers. They include broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and kale among others and their consumption is linked with lower rates of cancer. The red pigment (color) in tomatoes is called lycopene which is a potent antioxidant and associated with a reduced risk of macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in older adults.

How to Choose Phytochemicals
Choose five different colors of fruits and vegetables
for each day.
Choose a new fruit or vegetable for each week.
Herbs and spices are great sources of phytochemicals.
Add vegetables to your favorite spaghetti sauces and casseroles.
Try baked or dried fruit for dessert.
Double your typical serving of vegetables.
Add pesto, spinach, artichokes or asparagus to pizza.
Buy small jars of chopped garlic, ginger and basil to make it easy to add to your cooking
Snack on whole-grain crackers.
Switch to whole wheat bread, brown rice, and whole-wheat pasta.
Add fruit to your cereal and vegetables to your eggs.
Dice up some tofu and add it to stir fry.
Include nuts to baked breads and salads (especially walnuts).
Sprinkle flaxseed in your oatmeal.

The Blue Zones

What Are the Blue Zones? Why are they called “blue”?
An epidemiologist, Pes began to study centenarians, he denoted those areas that appeared to be long-lived on a map with a blue marker. thus the Blue Zones. He used dietary surveys from the last century and noted that from the late 20th century, certain areas in the world had diets and similar social patterns that consisted primarily minimally processed plant foods-i mostly whole grains, greens, nuts, tubers and beans. Most people ate meat on average only five times a month They drank mostly water, herbal teas, coffee, and some wine. They drank little or no cow’s milk; sweetened sodas and fast foods. were largely unknown.

Processed foods began to penetrate these areas as well as animal products and fast foods began to invade the cultures. Not surprisingly, chronic diseases began to appear on their menus.

Sardinia, Italy: Home to the World’s Highest Concentration of Male Centenarians.
In the Years after WW2, 38 people in the village of Arzana in Sardinia’s Gennargentu mountains – one out of every 100 of their peers- have reached a century at last birthday.

The following are short bios or vignettes that describe how several members of the Blue Zones have lived and practiced the ways of the centenarians they have become. Each glimpse of them is reflected in the habits they swear have contributed and shown us the way that their lifestyles may contribute to their longevity. The purpose of this is to show how they lived in their culture with a hope that we as Americans can learn how to adapt to or adopt some of the components of this way of living and show us how to adopt them to the “American” way of life. It is also important to realize that” it’s not always what we eat, but how to eat”. As we said, the information is based on a real life experiment called The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World’s Healthiest People by Dan Buettner. The book is very interesting.

“”Carbohydrates from Sardinian sourdough bread enter the bloodstream at a slower rate than those from plain white bread.”

“ Traditonal diets with whole grains, greens, nuts and beans offer the promise of eluding disease and staying healthy.”

In the kitchen, ninety-year old Assunta Podda flashes a toothy smile while she viigourously stirs an earthen pot of the melange of beans, carrots, onions, garlic, tomatoes, fennel, kohlrabi, and various herbs – all of which had been doused with olive oil. On table next to her sits the staples of the evening meal: some sourdough loaves, forage greens, and a carafe of garnet red wine. With the steady hand of a younger woman, she pours wine into stout glasses and ladles the steaming soup into dishes. “Now eat”, she says with a grin.”

Bread making in Sardinia is a community affair. Women can be seen making the traditional bread served at most meals. In one village bakery. The octogenarian senior baker named Regina Boi had provided the starter dough that her family had cultivated for generations. The starter contains yeast and native Lactobacilus bacteria. From these ingredients carbon dioxide leavens the bread and the lactobacilli also break down the carbohydrates to produce lactic acid that provides the traditional sour taste of sour dough bread.

As Podda’s family dinner ends, a spirited exchange ensues with the local village gossip, Pes, one of the guests raises his glass in a sense of revelry and expresses the signature toast of the island, “a kent annos”. May you live to 100”. The remaining guests respond, “And may you be here to count the years”.

Nicoya, Costa Rica: Adults Here have the Longest Life Expectancy in the Americas.

Excess access to fruits such as pineapple and papayas from home gardens extends this plant-based diet year around.
Costa Rica’s blue zone is a roughly 30-mile long strip that runs along the spine of the Nicoya Peninsula; it doesn’t include the tourist resorts on the coast.

“A healthy diet is part of the practice that can support longevity, e.g. having a circle of friends, and a strong sense of purpose. Every morning, Maria Elena Jimenez, Rojaz in Santa Cruz gathers to make the perfect tortilla. Three women mix black beans with onions, red peppers, and herbs. The beans will cook until tender and then be nixed with rice and sauteed peppers, onions and garlic to produce a uniquely Costa Rican version of gallo pinto.

The region’s Chorotega people have influenced the food supply by simply eating the same food for a millennia. This may be partly the reason adults there have the longest life expectancy for Americans and men older than 60 have the lowest reliably measured rate of mortality for their age group in the world.

Corn tortillas might affect longevity. The wood ash the women add when they soak the corn breaks down the cell walls of the kernels and releases niacin which helps to control cholesterol. Black beans contain the same pigment-based antioxidants found in blueberries. They are also rich in colon-cleansing fiber. The secret is pairing corn with beans is that then they can contribute all nine essential amino acids to make muscle in addition to less cholesterol and saturated fat. as meats.

By the way, Paulina serves this breakfast so typical in the Nicoya region to her 102 – year old father, Pachito and her nephew, Sixto every day. The meal includes coffee, eggs, rice and beans, and those famous tortillas cooked on a traditional wood-fired stove known as a fogon.

How is Longevity Studied?
Telomeres are protective “caps”on the ends of DNA strands, which wear down over time. This effect becomes a marker of biological age. Research has shown us Nicoyans have longer telomeres (a good thing) on average than Costa Ricans overall.

Fifties Foods We Still Eat

The 1950’s saw an explosion of processed foods, many of which are still very much embraced by the buying public today. Boxed cake mixes have been around since the 1930’s but fell out of favor in the 50’s, until manufacturers began to make ready-made frosting and packaged decorations. Kraft Foods introduced the ubiquitous individual slices of mild, long lasting processed yellow American cheese, which is still the classic cheese of choice of cheesburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches.

Diet soda, originally developed for and marketed to diabetics, was repurposed as “diet” soda, and it became increasingly popular with health and weight-conscious consumers, particulaly women

And in 1958, marketing instant ramen noodles became popular in Japan and U.S. college dorm rooms. In 2019, the U.S. consumed 4.6 billion servings of instant noodles.

New Information on having a stable weight.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“The compression of morbidity in public health is a hypothesis put forth by James Fries, professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. The hypothesis was supported by a 1998 study of 1700 University of Pennsylvania alumni over a period of 20 years.^[2]“The compression of morbidity in public health is a hypothesis put forth by James Fries, professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. The hypothesis was supported by a 1998 study of 1700 University of Pennsylvania alumni over a period of 20 years.

Fries’ hypothesis is that the burden of lifetime illness may be compressed into a shorter period before the time of death, if the age of onset of the first chronic infirmity can be postponed. This hypothesis contrasts to the view that as the age of countries’ populations tends to increase over time, they will become increasingly infirm and consume an ever-larger proportion of the national budget in healthcare costs.

Fries posited that if the hypothesis is confirmed, healthcare costs and patient health overall will be improved. In order to confirm this hypothesis, the evidence must show that it is possible to delay the onset of infirmity, and that corresponding increases in longevity will at least be modest. The evidence is at best mixed. Vincent Mor’s “The Compression of Morbidity Hypothesis: A Review of Research and Prospects for the Future” argues that “Cross-national evidence for the validity of the compression of morbidity hypothesis originally proposed by Fries is generally accepted. Generational improvements in education and the increased availability of adaptive technologies and even medical treatments that enhance quality of life have facilitated continued independence of older persons in the industrialized world. Whether this trend continues may depend upon the effect of the obesity epidemic on the next generation of older people. See also “Mortality and Morbidity Trends: Is There Compression of Morbidity?” for recent evidence against the hypothesis.”

Just find this interesting and a great reason to maintain or stay at a healthy (weight) for a longer length of time.

How Did We Get this old?

Concept Check: How DID We Get this OLD?

Although life span has not changed, life expectancy has increased dramatically over the past century.

With rare exceptions, life expectancy has been on the rise in the U.S. It was 47 years in 1900, 68 years in 195v0, and by 2019i it had risen to nearly 79 years. But it fell to 77 in 2020 and dropped further to just over 76 in 2021. (can you think Covid?) Harvard Health.

The causes of aging are still a mystery.Most likely, aging results from an interaction of genetic and the changes listed in the table below: The science of epigenetics also can offer lifestyle factors to further influence the changes that normally occur with “normal aging”.

Aging occurs due when:
Errors occur in copying the genetic blueprint (DNA)
Connective tissue stiffens. Parallel muscle proteins cross link.
Electron – seeking compounds (free radicals) damage cell.
Hormone functions change.
Blood glucose attaches to various blood and body proteins. Occurs in poorly controlled diabetes
The immune system loses some efficiency and fails to recognize foreign substances.
Autoimmunity develops. Immune function cells destroy “self”.
Death is programmed into the cell, e.g. each cell can only divide about 50 times; after that the cell dies and succumbs.
Excess energy intake speeds body breakdown and may even cause premature death. In research, underfed animals live longer by calorie restriction. Diet can slow down some of these processes?
Source: Gordon M. Wardlaw. Contemporary Nutrition: Issues and Insights. Page 518-520.
Edited for Food, Facts and Fads by: Sally J. Feltner, MS, PhD

WOW!!! What else could go wrong?

Healthy lifestyles may be found to alleviate some or all of these body processes.

How Did We Get this Old?

Concept Check: How DID We Get this OLD?

Although life span has not changed, life expectancy has increased dramatically over the past century,

The causes of aging are still a mystery.Most likely, aging results from an interaction of genetic and the changes listed in the table below: The science of epigenetics also can offer lifestyle factors to further influnce the changes that normally occur with “normal aging”.

Aging occurs when:
Errors occur in copying the genetic blueprint (DNA)
Connective tissue stiffens. Parallel muscle proteins cross link.
Electron – seeking compounds (free radicals) damage cell.
Hormone functions change.
Blood glucose attaches to various blood and body proteins. Occurs in poorly controllled diabetes
The immune system loses some efficiency and fails to recognize foreign substances.
Autoimmunity develops. Immune function cells destroy “self”.
Death is programmed into the cell, e.g. each cell can only divide about 50 times; after that the cell dies and succumbs.
Excess energy intake speeds body breakdown and may even cause premature death. In research, underfed animals live longer by calorie restriction. Diet can slow down some of these processes?
Source: Gordon M. Wardlaw. Contemporary Nutrition: Issues and Insights. Page 518-520.
Edited for Food, Facts and Fads by: Sally J. Feltner, MS, PhD

WOW!!! What else could go wrong?

Healthy lifestyles may be found to alleviate some or all of these body processes.