intermitent fasting

Why a Whole Food Plant Based Diet is a Longevity Diet in Disguise

/ Leo Garcia / Leave a comment

Want to live a long and healthy life? Enter mTOR. The mTOR (mechanistic target of rapamycin) pathway is a cellular signaling pathway that regulates growth, metabolism, and protein synthesis in response to nutrients, energy, and stress. Overactivation of mTOR is linked to aging and age-related diseases because it suppresses autophagy (cellular cleanup), leading to the accumulation of damaged cells and proteins.

Inhibiting the mTOR (mechanistic target of rapamycin) pathway through diet and lifestyle is a strategy often associated with longevity and reduced risk of diseases like cancer and diabetes. Though there are many ways to inhibit the mTOR pathway, diet modification is the simplest way to do it. Below are four tips that will lead to a healthier and longer life. If you follow a whole-food, plant-based diet, you are already implementing them.

1. Don’t Eat So Much

Reducing calorie intake without malnutrition lowers mTOR activity by decreasing nutrient and energy availability. This can enhance autophagy and promote longevity. A whole-food plant-based diet is naturally calorically sparse because fruits, vegetables​, whole grains, and legumes have two powerful components working for them: fiber and water. These two components lead to satiety at a reduced caloric consumption.

2. Spend Less Time Eating

Practices like time-restricted eating or alternate-day fasting inhibit mTOR during fasting periods by limiting amino acid and glucose levels. This encourages cellular repair processes. To put this into practice on a simple level, stop eating by 7 PM and time breakfast for 8 AM. Having a window of 12+ hours gives your body ample time to take advantage of some of the benefits of time-restricted eating without the feeling of deprivation one often feels when fasting.

3. Eliminate Animal Proteins

Animal proteins, especially those high in branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), activate mTOR. Shifting toward plant-based diets or moderating protein intake can mitigate this activation. Because a whole-food plant-based diet doesn’t include meat or animal products, protein intake declines to the level that is not cancer-promoting. Also, there is ample evidence that protein coming from plant foods (all foods have protein) is healthier than animal sources because animal sources have high levels of saturated fats, toxins, digestive byproducts that destroy your gut flora, and high levels of BCAAs like leucine, which is an mTOR activator.

4. Increase Dietary Polyphenols

Polyphenols in foods like green tea, turmeric, and berries suppress mTOR signaling and reduce inflammation. Polyphenols are natural compounds found in plants that act as antioxidants, reducing oxidative stress and inflammation, which helps protect against chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

5. Exercise

Physical activity, particularly aerobic exercise, can regulate mTOR signaling. While resistance training temporarily activates mTOR for muscle building, overall exercise contributes to metabolic balance and cellular health.

Though the ketogenic diet is cited as a good way to downregulate mTOR, it comes with too many risks. Severe nutrient deficiencies, increased heart disease risk, kidney strain, digestive issues, poor bone health, and muscle wasting are some of the risks that would seem to counter the argument for the health component in a long life.

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Why Intermittent Fasting Won’t Fix Your Metabolism, Instead Skip Meat and Dairy and Start Exercising

/ Leo Garcia / Leave a comment

In MedScapes Impact Factor, Dr. F. Perry Wilson from Yale School of Medicine discusses metabolic syndrome, a lifestyle-related condition affecting one-third of American adults, and a study on time-restricted eating as a means of treating it. According to discussion, you have metabolic syndrome if you have three of the following symptoms: elevated waist circumference, elevated fasting triglycerides, elevated blood pressure, low HDL cholesterol, and elevated fasting blood glucose. However, Dr. Perry’s interpretation of a study on time-restricted eating, which yielded underwhelming results, led him to conclude that lifestyle interventions may not be as effective as pharmaceutical treatments in managing metabolic syndrome.

It is essential to recognize that dietary choices play a crucial role in health outcomes. For instance, incorporating a whole-food plant-based diet can lead to significant improvements in health and even reverse lifestyle-induced chronic illnesses. A whole-food plant-based diet abundant in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds is probably the most effective lifestyle intervention, having the potential to bring about significant improvements and even reverse lifestyle-induced chronic illnesses. Dr. Dean Ornish’s Lifestyle Heart Trial, one of the most well-known large-scale studies conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrated the benefits of a whole-food, plant-based diet in reversing chronic lifestyle diseases. This study managed to not only slow coronary heart disease, which is at the root of metabolic syndrome, but showed a reversal in many patients.

Another study, The Broad Study (British Randomized Controlled Trial of Whole-Food Plant-Based Diet), published in Nutrition & Diabetes in 2017, demonstrated the benefits of a whole-food, plant-based diet on metabolic factors. This study is notable because it was one of the first large-scale trials to highlight the metabolic benefits of a whole-food, plant-based diet, offering significant evidence for its role in improving weight, cholesterol, and glycemic control without the need for calorie restriction.

Exercise, both aerobic and resistance training, works on different pathways to improve metabolic health, namely by improving aerobic capacity and muscle mass. A meta-analysis evaluated 10 randomized controlled trials involving over 1,200 participants. It found that aerobic exercise significantly improved key components of metabolic syndrome, including waist circumference, triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, blood pressure, and fasting glucose. Exercise reduced the incidence of metabolic syndrome by 20-30%. Another meta-analysis worked with a pool of 77,000 patients. Exercise, particularly aerobic exercise, led to improvements in body composition, cardiovascular, and metabolic outcomes in those with metabolic syndrome.

I could have told you that time-restricted eating might lead to minor weight loss because of the tendency to eat fewer calories (like the disappointing time-restricted eating study suggests), but if those calories come from the same foods that gave you metabolic syndrome in the first place (meals loaded with saturated fat like meat and dairy, foods loaded with highly processed oils, and processed carbohydrates like white flour and white sugar), you are simply becoming unhealthy at a slower rate. If you are sitting all day while eating a crappy diet, simply restricting your feeding time a bit is not likely to make a profound change. Selecting an appropriate lifestyle intervention matters.

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