A massive wave of information is gathering strength and credibility with regard to nutrition as related to healthy aging. It shows that eating prudent amounts of the right foods leads to disease-free, optimal aging. Eating too much, of the wrong foods, too frequently, leads to a disease-ridden, pain-filled, old age with early disability. Every day we see more studies piling up that point to the root of this nation’s obesity problem, which leads to metabolic syndrome and type-2 diabetes in middle age, as simply consuming too much of the wrong foods. Look around – see all those fat rolls bulging from under tent-like clothing of those you see on the streets! Well, that is a picture of future disability, just as surely as a train follows its tracks toward the horizon. Even the medical community is beginning to get the message, after telling us for decades that nutrition and nutritional supplements are unimportant next to genetic disposition, and that drugs are needed to 'manage' everything that goes wrong.
The key understanding coming to light from all these studies is this: what we consume, how much we consume, and when we consume it profoundly controls gene expression, and consequently our susceptibility or resistance to the disease states now associated with aging. Eating food high in antioxidants reduces damage to the working parts of our cells, keeping them functioning healthily longer. Eating food low in sugar, or starch that turns to sugar, reduces glycation of our our cellular and structural parts, reducing autoimmune inflammation later in life. Eating foods that lower inflammation likewise keeps our immune system from attacking our own tissues as in arthritis, lupus, MS and coronary artery disease, preventing a great deal of the pain associated with 'old age'. Eating modestly, of real foods, pushes cellular senescence out in time, giving us the most out of our potential human lifespan, and without pain, life is far more enjoyable.
What are the right foods to consume for lasting health? The ones our great grandparents ate before the advent of industrial food production! These basic foods are still found around the walls or outer isles of supermarkets, but for the most part, are not in the same state that our grandparents could buy them 100 years ago.
For example; livestock is fed grain in the last months of their lives, not grass, their natural diet, and its fat profile is drastically altered making it pro-inflammatory. They are crowded into feedlots, pumped up with growth hormone and antibiotics; the meat tastes great, but is far from the nutritional content of 100 years ago. Fish are farmed, fed an unnatural diet of strange proteins, altered fats, and grains instead of its natural wild-caught diet, reducing its omega-3 fat content, requiring it to be dyed pink in the case of salmon so we will buy it. Vegetables are grown in Roundup-laced, mineral-depleted soils, doused with pesticides and washed in chlorine before we get them. Poultry is jammed into factory housing, fed an unnatural mash with the wrong fats, loaded with antibiotics to prevent transmission of crowding diseases, so that their meat and eggs are nutritionally nothing like a that of a free-range bird.
Add to this that distribution of these foods, for a large part of our population, is in the form of "fast foods" that come with French fries as the 'vegetable' and a 22-oz sugar-loaded, or artificially sweetened drink instead of healthy water, the only true health drink. This is a primary source of our current medical dilemma: we live longer, but we are sick from middle-age on, being treated with numerous very expensive drugs that cure nothing in most cases.
The other part of the problem is that we consume a vast assortment of manufactured pseudo-foods and unnatural sugar-loaded or artificially sweetened drinks, and have been brainwashed to think we need them. We think we need them so badly that we go to vending machines several times a day to get this not-real food at the first twinge of hunger or thirst. The only real foods there are nuts and water, and the nuts are too salty and the water tainted with bisphenol-A from the plastic bottles. Most of these pseudo-foods are high in empty calories, but low in nutrients – lots of sugars and modified fats, but low in the myriad of components found in real foods that promote cellular health.
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