How to Live Longer by Changing When and What You Eat

Are you interested in learning about an easy, inexpensive way to add many healthy years to your life? Something that is grounded in ancient wisdom and growing scientific research and is accessible to almost everyone.

In this episode, I’m talking about diet, one of the foundational pillars of health and longevity. And I’m exploring not just what we should eat but also when we should eat and how getting these two things right can have such a positive impact on our health and how long we live.

 

Full Episode Transcript

 

00:00:45

So here’s a question for you. Are you interested in learning about an easy, inexpensive way  to add many healthy, active years to your life? Potentially decades!

I'm not talking about some expensive new supplement or the latest fad diet. I'm talking about something that is grounded in ancient wisdom and growing scientific research.

In this episode, I’m talking about food, the second foundational pillar of health and longevity — the first pillar being sleep, which I covered in the last episode and the third being movement and exercise, and I find it helpful to remember these three pillars as SLEEP, EAT AND FEET.

But today is about food and I’m exploring not just what we eat but also when we eat and how getting these two things right can have such a massively beneficial effect on our health and can slow down and possibly even reverse the ageing process.

00:01:47

1. CAN EATING LESS OFTEN HELP YOU LIVE LONGER?

So, I want to kick this episode off by focusing first on not what we should eat but when we should eat. And let's start with a fundamental principle of longevity that might surprise you: eating less often might help you live longer. Yes, you heard me right. One of the most consistent findings in longevity research in recent years, is that giving your body regular breaks from food can trigger powerful rejuvenation processes.

Throughout human evolution, our bodies didn't evolve with the expectation of constant food availability. Three meals a day plus snacks is actually a very recent development in human history. Our ancestors experienced regular periods without food—sometimes by necessity, sometimes by design.

Research now shows that these fasting periods are far from harmful—they actually trigger a cascade of repair and rejuvenation processes in the body.

When we're constantly fed, our bodies are stuck in growth and reproduction mode. Our cells are like, yeah, life is good we’ve got plenty of readily available nutrients, let’s just kick back and relax guys. But in this euphoric state our cells can fail to spot things that are going wrong in the background – like the build up of toxins and the formation of cancerous cells. Things that, left unchecked are going to start damaging our bodies and cut our lives short. Basically, constant eating causes our cells to get a bit complacent.

But when we starve our bodies of nutrients for a while we shift into repair mode. And our cells are like, hang on a minute guys, we aren’t being fed! We need to batton down the hatches and go into survival mode. And in this state, they effectively go on guard and actively hunt down any bad stuff that’s hanging around and dispose of it.

Now clearly, it is a far more scientific process than this and I’ll go into some of the more nerdy stuff in a minute but this is my laymans explanation and it helps me to easily get my head around it.

And this isn't just a theory. Studies across multiple species, from yeast to primates, show that controlling food intake patterns can