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Dr. Greger’s Anti-Aging Eight
Plus: neuroscience hacks to block pain signals
The 10almonds Team
December 13, 2023
Today’s almonds have been activated by:
Your health will never stand still! Many decisions about what to do, eat, drink, etc will are a choice between making your health better or making it worse. Choose wisely!
⏰ IN A RUSH?
Today’s 30-Second Summary
If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:
Dr. Michael Greger, the “celebrity physician” and nutritional health scientist, has eight top-tier interventions for us to slow aging.
They are: nuts, greens, berries, xenohormesis & microRNA manipulation, prebiotics & postbiotics, caloric restriction / IF, protein (or more specifically: methionine) restriction, and NAD+
Not everyone wants to quit alcohol. So, if you're going to drink, you might as well enjoy your drinks mindfully!
Today’s sponsor, Sunnyside, is an app that helps you change your relationship with alcohol, so that your choice is really your choice—not a mindless habit that you don’t even truly take joy in.
Read on to learn about these things and more…
👀 WATCH AND LEARN
TED | Dr. Amy Baxter | How to Hack Your Brain When You're in Pain (16:15)
Researcher and physician Dr. Amy Baxter unravels the connections that send pain from your body to your brain, explaining practical neuroscience hacks to quickly block those signals:
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖
🥗 MAIN FEATURE
Dr. Greger’s Anti-Aging Eight
This is Dr. Michael Greger. We’ve featured him before: Brain Food? The Eyes Have It!
This time, we’re working from his latest book, the excellent “How Not To Age”, which we reviewed all so recently. It is very information-dense, but we’re going to be focussing on one part, his “anti-aging eight”, that is to say, eight interventions he rates the most highly to slow aging in general (other parts of the book pertained to slowing eleven specific pathways of aging, or preserving specific bodily functions against aging, for example).
Without further ado, his “anti-aging eight” are…
Nuts
Greens
Berries
Xenohormesis & microRNA manipulation
Prebiotics & postbiotics
Caloric restriction / IF
Protein restriction
NAD+
As you may have noticed, some of these are things might appear already on your grocery shopping list; others don’t seem so “household”. Let’s break them down:
Nuts, greens, berries
These are amongst the most nutrient-dense and phytochemical-useful parts of the diet that Dr. Greger advocates for in his already-famous “Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen”.
For brevity, we’ll not go into the science of these here, but will advise you: eat a daily portion of nuts, a daily portion of berries, and a couple of daily portions of greens.
Xenohormesis & microRNA manipulation
You might, actually, have these on your grocery shopping list too!
Hormesis, you may recall from previous editions of 10almonds, is about engaging in a small amount of eustress to trigger the body’s self-strengthening response, for example:
Xenohormesis is about getting similar benefits, second-hand.
For example, plants that have been grown to “organic” standards (i.e. without artificial pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers) have had to adapt to their relatively harsher environment by upping their levels of protective polyphenols and other phytochemicals that, as it turns out, are as beneficial to us as they are to the plants:
Additionally, the flip side of xenohormesis is that some plant compounds can themselves act as a source of hormetic stress that end up bolstering us. For example:
In essence, it’s not just that it has anti-oxidant effect; it also provides a tiny oxidative-stress immunization against serious sources of oxidative stress—and thus, aging.
MicroRNA manipulation is, alas, too complex to truly summarize an entire chapter in a line or two, but it has to do with genetic information from the food that we eat having a beneficial or deleterious effect to our own health:
A couple of quick takeaways (out of very many) from Dr. Greger’s chapter on this is to spring for the better quality olive oil, and skip the cow’s milk:
Prebiotics & Postbiotics
We’re short on space, so we’ll link you to a previous article, and tell you that it’s important against aging too:
An example of how one of Dr. Greger’s most-recommended postbiotics helps against aging, by the way:
(Urolithin can be found in many plants, and especially those containing tannins)
Caloric restriction / Intermittent fasting
This is about lowering metabolic load and promoting cellular apoptosis (programmed cell death; sounds bad; is good) and autophagy (self-consumption; again, sounds bad; is good).
For example, he cites the intermittent fasters’ 46% lower risk of dying in the subsequent years of follow-up in this longitudinal study:
For brevity we’ll link to our previous IF article, but we’ll revisit caloric restriction in a main feature on of these days:
Dr. Greger favours caloric restriction over intermittent fasting, arguing that it is easier to adhere to and harder to get wrong if one has some confounding factor (e.g. diabetes, or a medication that requires food at certain times, etc). If adhered to healthily, the benefits appear to be comparable for each, though.
Protein restriction
In contrast to our recent main feature Protein vs Sarcopenia, in which that week’s featured expert argued for high protein consumption levels, protein restriction can, on the other hand, have anti-aging effects. A reminder that our body is a complex organism, and sometimes what’s good for one thing is bad for another!
Dr. Greger offers protein restriction as a way to get many of the benefits of caloric restriction, without caloric restriction. He further notes that caloric restriction without protein restriction doesn’t decrease IGF-1 levels (a marker of aging).
However, for FGF21 levels (these are good and we want them higher to stay younger), what matters more than lowering proteins in general is lowering levels of the amino acid methionine—found mostly in animal products, not plants—so the source of the protein matters:
For example, legumes deliver only 5–10% of the methionine that meat does, for the same amount of protein, so that’s a factor to bear in mind.
NAD+
This is about nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD+ to its friends.
NAD+ levels decline with age, and that decline is a causal factor in aging, and boosting the levels can slow aging:
Can we get NAD+ from food? We can, but not in useful quantities or with sufficient bioavailability.
Supplements, then? Dr. Greger finds the evidence for their usefulness lacking, in interventional trials.
How to boost NAD+, then? Dr. Greger prescribes…
Exercise! It boosts levels by 127% (i.e., it more than doubles the levels), based on a modest three-week exercise bike regimen:
Another study on resistance training found the same 127% boost:
Take care!
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🌎 AROUND THE WEB
What’s happening in the health world…
Immersive VR goggles for mice unlock new potential for brain science
Diet and exercise improved cognitive function in patients with obesity
Engaging heterosexual men more effectively could slash HIV infections
Chronic fatigue syndrome is not rare, says new CDC survey. It affects 3.3 million U.S. adults
The holidays and your brain: a neuroscientist explains how to identify and manage your emotions
Virtual avatars want you to tell them about your pain. Is that the future of health care?
Wasabi shows memory-boosting powers in study
More to come tomorrow!
📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW
The Green Roasting Tin: Vegan and Vegetarian One Dish Dinners – by Rukmini Iyer
You may be wondering: "do I really need a book to tell me to put some vegetables in a roasting tin and roast them?" and maybe not, but the book offers a lot more than that.
Indeed, the author notes "this book was slightly in danger of becoming the gratin and tart book, because I love both", but don't worry, most of the recipes are—as you might expect—very healthy.
As for formatting: the 75 recipes are divided first into vegan or vegetarian, and then into quick/medium/slow, in terms of how long they take.
However, even the "slow" recipes don't actually take more effort, just, more time in the oven.
One of the greatest strengths of this book is that not only does it offer a wide selection of wholesome mains, but also, if you're putting on a big spread, these can easily double up as high-class low-effort sides.
Bottom line: if you'd like to eat more vegetables in 2024 but want to make it delicious and with little effort, put this book on your Christmas list!
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May your health go always from strength to strength,
The 10almonds Team