Unexplainable - New year, new diet, live forever?

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

It’s that time of year again. If you’re changing things up, there’s a lot of diets out there that claim to help you live longer. Our friends at Today, Explained ask: How much of this is real and how much of it is nonsense? Guests: Anahad O’Connor, health columnist at the Washington Post; Saul Justin Newman, researcher at the University College London Centre for Longitudinal Studies For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable And please email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by becoming a Vox Member today: vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, I'm Matt Bouchelle, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYP. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, don't swipe away. It's called, That Sounds Like a Lot. You know that feeling when you check your phone, read a few headlines and think, that sounds like a lot. I can't do this. Well, I can, and I'm going to get into it every Friday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world. And then I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or, honestly, anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to get the news.

but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it. That sounds like a lot. Coming May 1st, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. All right, happy new year. New year, new you, right? Maybe you're planning to start working out. Maybe you're doing dry January. Or maybe you're going to totally change up your diet.

And if that's the case, the next question is, which diet is actually best for you? A lot of people will tell you that if you eat just the right things, you might actually be able to live longer, like a lot longer. There's the vegetables for breakfast diet, which one millionaire claims has slowed down his aging. This is freshly made with broccoli, cauliflower, black lentils, garlic, ginger, hemp seeds, and one tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil. There's the fruit peel diet, which this 101-year-old billionaire says is going to help him live to 125.

I eat the skins of bananas, the skins of oranges, the skins of pineapple. There's the Blue Zone diet, which is based on places around the world where people are said to routinely live to 100 years old. The five pillars of every longevity diet in the world are whole grains, greens, greens, tubers like sweet potatoes, nuts and beans. Our friends at Today Explain did a great episode on this question. so we thought New Year's would be a great time to share it with you. They asked the question, is there a diet that can actually help you live longer? Or is a lot of this just a bunch of nonsense? Anahad O'Connor is a nutrition reporter for the Washington Post's Well-Being Desk.

He's been writing about food and health for more than two decades. Anahad, for maybe 10 or 15 years now, we've heard about these tech guys in Silicon Valley trying to hack their health and live forever. when did people start thinking diet equals health and health equals longevity? So I think this probably goes back to the dawn of our species. Throughout the centuries, there have always been diet and health gurus and doctors who promoted different foods. So human beings have always known instinctively that there's some connection between what we eat

and how we feel and how healthy we are. That goes back at least thousands of years. years, if not longer. At least thousands of years. So it is not 10 to 15 years. And in the Bay Area, I was wrong about that. Tell me about some of the kind of luminaries or the people that we've chosen to follow over the years when they tell us what we should eat. We know in the United States that certainly throughout the past century, there have been diet gurus who promoted things like the low-carb diet and the paleo diet and the South Beach diet, the low-fat diet. These often start with People, sometimes doctors, sometimes just, you know, everyday people who decide that they know, you know, the foods or the diet that are going to help us live a longer, healthier life.

And the interesting thing is that I started researching this years ago. And I noticed that a lot of these diet grooves actually tend to die prematurely. So you look, for example, there was a famous guy named Jerome Rodale, and you might recognize that last name. He helped to pioneer. the organic food movement in the United States in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and promoted the idea that organic foods were going to make you healthier, help you live longer. He famously went on the Dick Cavett show in the early 70s and was bragging about how healthy he was because of his diet and told Dick Cavett he was going to live to be 100 and was saying that he had just fallen down a flight of stairs and he laughed all the way down as he was falling down the steps. He was 72 at the time and he said, I'm going to live to be 100 unless I'm quote unquote,

run down by some sugar-crazed taxi driver. And Cabot was really enamored of this, and then they go to break. And then they heard Jerome Rodale, who's sitting on the couch next to him, make a sort of snoring sound. It turns out he had had a heart attack right there on the couch moments after bragging about how he was going to live to 100 and died, sadly. But that show never aired for obvious reasons. Let's talk about some of the other diets that we hear a lot about these days that we're told we'll help us live longer, if not forever. What springs to the top of your mind? So there are so many nowadays, and I think there's something special about this idea that your diet can improve your health,

because people find it very empowering. And we know there's this connection between food and your health, and if you just make the right choices, then you will hit the longevity lottery. And so the popular diets today would be certainly the keto diet, which is the diet that Atkins famously promoted. It's been around actually a long time. The medical version of keto has actually been around for 100 years. It's very low carb, tends to be very high in fat and also protein. Breakfast, for example, is like eggs, avocado, bacon, or sausage, things like that.

There's the vegan diet, which of course, is no animal-based foods. It's all plant-based foods. There is the paleo diet, which supposedly is the diet that our ancestors ate. And so people who follow this diet think, well, these are the foods that we evolve to eat. So if you just eat these foods and avoid the processed foods and the packaged foods that there are today, then you'll be healthier. Get in touch with the caveman inside. A Paleolithic diet seriously reduces your risk for diabetes. Intermitt fasting has been a very big diet trend, very buzzy, something that

a lot of people here in the tech community in the Bay Area love to follow. Now some experts say that this helps consumers take in fewer calories, lowers your blood pressure, improves glucose levels, and even slows down The aging process. There's also low-calorie diets. Make delicious recipes that are lighter in calories and added sugar. Weight Watch is easy one, two, three, success is a different story. Eat any food you crave, every food has a points bandit.

The Slim Fast Plan can live up to its pledge because each shake is a delicious, nutritious, low-calorie meal. A big buzzword in the diet space today is ultra-processed foods, and these are the packaged foods with lots of additives and, you know, sugar and fat and artificial. are colors and flavorings and a lot of nutrition researchers think if we just avoid these foods will all be much healthier these are the foods that are actually killing us one mechanism of how ultra processed food can be associated with colorexial cancer is again through leading to increasing weight increasing risk of diabetes and other metabolic syndrome factors closely tied to colorectal

cancer in the last decade the evidence has been slowly growing that ultra processed food is harmful for us in ways we hadn't thought. So there's lots of different diets and approaches to this. Our listeners will know that about a year ago, I got really obsessed with ultra-processed foods. We did an episode. I was refusing to buy bread from the supermarket. I was insisting that I didn't get at home.

It's really hard to do. It went on for maybe three months, four months, five months. I gave it up. This morning, I was in a crappy mood and I ate a Snickers bar. literally 6 a.m. So which diet are you on? I tend to follow a diet where I get a lot of whole foods. I try to avoid ultra-processed foods, but not always. I also have two little kids, so they tend to dictate our shopping and purchasing patterns. But I try to eat foods that are high in protein because I know that promotes satiety. Also helps to promote weight loss. Generally good for your

health, avoid the ultra-process foods with lots of additives and high in sugar and fat and salt, and try to eat sort of a Mediterranean kind of diet, a diet that has a lot of unsaturated fats, so things like olive oil, nuts, seeds, seafood. I like fermented foods like yogurt and kimchi and sourcrap because these foods have probiotics, which are the friendly bacteria that help your gut microbiome and that also plays a role in promoting good health. Have you heard of blue zones? Absolutely. Blue zones have been very influential in the nutrition and lifestyle medicine space. So the idea behind blue zones is that these are sort of pockets around the world where people

have an unusually long lifespan compared to others. And it's thought that this is because of the different lifestyle habits they follow. People in Blue Zones are living a long time because they're socializing, because they know their purpose and they live their purpose. They live near nature. They keep their families close by. And we can map all of these to higher life expectancy. The diets they follow, which are supposedly plant-based with lots of fiber, lots of unsaturated

fats, very little red meat, supposedly, according to the Blue Zones book. But this idea has become really controversial lately. and there's some accusations that it's basically a mirage. We're going to talk about those accusations later in the show, but what seems to be at the heart of the skepticism about any of these diets is that diet research does not seem that trustworthy. We hear that something is really bad for us, and then we hear, no, it's fine for us. Remember the, I guess this has been playing out over the last year or so, but remember we were all told that, like, a glass of wine is great for you. And then we learned, no, actually we don't think it is.

Why is the research into what we eat and drink and how it affects our health? Why is it so dicey? Gosh, it's because nutrition science is so hard to do. Because if you want to do a study, for example, to answer this question, what is the diet that is going to help people live the longest? To do that study, you would have to recruit a large group of people, probably at least 1,000, 2,000 people, split them into groups. ideally from a very young age and have them strictly follow different diets, a vegan diet,

a Mediterranean diet, a low-carb diet, and just make sure they're eating all those specific foods, but we eat several times a day and we get cravings and we live in a world where there's so much food marketing and advertising and we go to grocery stores where there are literally thousands and thousands of different food items we can buy. And so to do this study rigorously, you'd have to, you know, ideally actually give people the meals they're supposed to eat. You have to follow these people closely, make sure they're eating the foods. You have to look at their medical records. You have to follow them for years, if not decades, and see how these diets are impacting, you know, their lifespan.

And that's just almost impossible. All right. So you've been covering food and health for 20 years. I've been reading articles like yours for 20 years. surely I would guess there is a new diet trend coming. Do you agree and have you any idea what it is? It's really hard to predict what's going to be next. There's always something new and people are so tantalized by these diet gurus and health gurus

who say, aha, I have found the secret. I know the magic sauce. You know, if you just eat these foods, you'll be healthier, you'll live a longer life. I think people like having access to that special knowledge. It's very empowering. And oftentimes they will go on these new diets and feel better and think, aha, you know, they start writing about it on Twitter and on social media and putting out TikTok videos, oh, I'm just eating this food and look, I've lost weight.

It's been amazing. But part of the reality is that almost any diet is going to be better than the standard American diet. So diet gurus are always pointing to say, look, these things, found that people lost this much weight on a vegan diet. These studies show that low-carb diet was better, or these studies show that a paleo diet was so great for diabetes. Well, yeah, that's oftentimes because they're comparing this particular diet to the standard American diet that people are eating,

which we know is terrible for you because we can see what's happened to obesity and chronic disease rates in the past, you know, four or five decades. So almost any diet you follow that's not the standard American diet is going to be better for you. That was Anahad O'Connor of The Washington Post. Coming up, the man who blew up the blue zones. It's all about you.

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I'm a Sted Hearnden, and this is America, actually. We're all talking to each other to see. What did we do wrong? What did we not see? I'm in Washington, D.C. this week, to interview Ruben Gallego. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona, and he's been thinking openly about running for higher office. but he's recently run into some hot water because of his connection to Congressman Eric Swalwell. I have to learn from this and I will learn from this.

But for me, it's not a 2028 question. It's about what it means to be a better first boss in my office and also a better senator to my constituents. This week on America, actually, we asked Gallego about predatory behavior in Washington, his plans for immigration reform and more. It's today explained. I'm Noel King. Dr. Saul Justin Newman is a researcher at the Oxford Institute for Population Aging at University College London. He's currently writing a book on Eap Fraud and Wishful Thinking in Aging Research, and he says he found both of those things in the Blue Zones. What is a blue zone?

Well, the Blue Zone was originally claimed to be a region where people reached a remarkable age at a remarkable rate. And the usual cut-off that they provide is age 100. So the general idea is that somewhere in the world, there are these remarkable regions where people reach age 100 at extraordinary rates. What if we could reverse engineer longevity? Well, I've spent the last 20 years trying to do just that. But instead of looking for answers in petri dishes or test tubes, I've found five places around the world where people are getting the outcomes we want.

And where are they? Well, they were claimed to be originally five. There was one in Costa Rica, one in Japan, one in Greece, one in America, and one in Sardinia. Why are they said to reach the age of 100 in these places? Well, there are nine claims for lifestyle that go along with the blue zones. And they sort of called the Power Nine. There's the idea that people move naturally, that they have a sort of life purpose, that they eat a lot of plants, that they drink, that they have a sense of belonging, that they put loved ones first

and that they have a sort of what's called a right tribe, which is a bit of a vague definition, but the general idea is that they have a social circle. Who found them? Who popularized the idea of the Blue Zones? So Dan Butner is a person who became famous for effectively riding their bicycle,

lots of interesting places, and founding a company, a marketing company off the back of that, and he decided, while he was cycling places for the National Geographic, that he wanted to know about the secrets of longevity. I never set out to be a longevity guru or fix America's health care system. I got here in a very unexpected way.

He read this paper about the blue zones in Sardinia, and he went around applying that concept to a large number of places. He effectively had pitched this to National Geographic as a story, and the story was wildly successful. And it makes sense, right? You open up your National Geographic. There's a story about these places. in the world where people seem to live forever. You can see why it's popular. You're a researcher

on aging. When did you start looking into blue zones? I started looking into blue zones when I had published a theoretical paper that effectively says most of our old age data in the world should be statistical junk. And then when I started to look at individual cases, I instantly found out that the way that extreme age cases are validated is terrible. The world's oldest man was one of the first cases I investigated and it turned out that he had three birthdays and no birth certificate. Huh? Yeah, it's remarkable. And he's still on the record books.

Now, when I started digging deeper and deeper, I, of course, came across the blue zones. And at the time, I had mapped more than 80% of the world's 110-year-olds. And what was striking is that those 110-year-olds were not falling in regions with good health. They were falling in regions that had terrible health. And surprisingly, that were. is the shared characteristic of most blue zones. I found that centenarians in the blue zones were missing or dead when the study was conducted. A centenarian is someone who is 100 years old or older. I found that the health in the blue zones was poor before, during and after they were

established. I found that none of the supposed lifestyle patterns that were happening in the blue zones were actually happening. And I found that pension fraud was absolutely rife throughout many of the blue zones, so that many of these people were collecting the pension from the graveyard in effect, where they were getting older on paper, but they were already dead. When you discovered that the places in the world that were said to be blue zones had some pretty shoddy record keeping and may even have had some fraudulent record keeping, where did your mind go? What did you think? Well, I mean, I was shocked at the depth of this.

I was expecting that there were going to be errors. there were going to be problems. But this is like discovering that 82% of data from the Hubble Space Telescope is just dust on the lens. And this got even worse when I started looking at these Power 9 claims for lifestyle that was supposed to support this remarkable attainment of Blue Zone longevity. What did you find? First case I investigated was Okinawa,

because Okinawa has, it's Japanese, and have beautiful surveys, and none of the Power 9 claims stood up to independent scrutiny. The central claim that people in Okinawa eat a lot of plants was nonsense. We have an extraordinary detail of people's diets in Okinawa going back to 1975, and they are dead last for root vegetable consumption, leafy vegetable consumption, pickled vegetable consumption. On the front page of the Netflix documentary is some purple sweet potatoes. Okinawa eats the least. O'Kanauer eats the these purple sweet potato or any sweet potato in all of Japan out of 47 prefectures, and they always have. So it's completely at odds with the characterization that's occurred in these

cookbooks. The diet looks absolutely nothing like what's in the cookbooks. We do hear in a lot of news stories about Japanese people tending to live longer than other people. Is that wrong? On average, no. But the reason is much more simple. And that's that Japanese people are rich. They have universal health care, and they have a generally, generally healthy lifestyle. But in the details, this all falls apart because Okinawa is the least healthy province. It has twice the poverty rate of any other region. They eat huge amounts of meat. Most of it is highly processed.

Even the simple claims do not match the claims made by the Blue Zones people. So Okinawa not looking good. any of the other blue zones leap out at you as places where, oh, boy, this is just not great. It's all not great. The American blue zone, Loma Linda, Dan Butner, has said to the New York Times that the way he found Loma Linda, it was that his editor at the magazine has said, you need to find an American blue zone. And so he's gone out and found Loma Linda. I should add, the CDC measures Loma Linder for life expectancy.

And it's pretty average. at least a quarter of America lives longer than Lama Linda. We learned in the first half of the show that there are some things you can do, there are some ways in which you can eat, that seem to extend your life. And they fall in line with what the blue zones seem to endorse. Limit your stress, eat whole foods, eat oatmeal, eat organic if you can. Are you taking issue with the fundamental idea that if people in Okinawa did eat, the way the Blue Zone cookbook claims that they eat.

What is going on here is that none of these recommendations bear any connection to the region's actual behaviours. Are they healthy? In some cases, of course. Sure, exercise is good for you. That's fine, but that's not because it looks like anything like what people do in these regions. So I think the takeaway there is that, yes, there are healthy behaviours, but this is not the person you should listen to it for advice. If you want to be healthy, go and talk to your GP. Don't listen to someone who's selling you a cookbook. All right. So if living in Okinawa or Loma Linda is not the key to living to 100, what is the key to a longer life? What do you think and what do you know? Well, I know that the CDC estimates this, right? They estimate the life expectancy cost of different behaviors.

And they're very simple. If you don't smoke, you'll gain seven years. of life expectancy. And if you exercise more is better, but generally four to six years. And those are the biggest, most important things you can do. Don't smoke exercise. You did not say anything about food. Food is a mess. We can't even decide if eggs are good for us after 50 years. I can't make any judgment on this because it's a mess. One striking thing about this is that Ansel Keys, who came over the Mediterranean diet, he based the Mediterranean diet off the concept that people in southern Italy lived past 100 at remarkable rates. Now that that's not true, you know, you have to ask some questions.

So, yeah, when you ask me about diet, I don't know. I don't know. I talk to your GP. That's really what it comes in. Because your GDP is not selling you anything. I hope to God. You know. That was Dr. Saul Justin Newman of the Oxford Institute for Population Aging at University

College London. We did reach out to Blue Zone's LLC for comment about Dr. Newman's claims, and we didn't hear back. In other publications and on the Blue Zone's website, Dan Butner disputes the claims that Dr. Newman makes. Today's episode was produced by Zachary Mack and Hadi-Muagdi. It was edited by Miranda Kennedy. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and it was engineered by Andrea Kristen's daughter and Patrick Boyd. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explain.