LS 104 - The Longevity Diet with Brian M Delaney

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Welcome to the Longevity Show, Informing listeners on the important aspects of health, wealth and happiness to ensure you live life to its fullest. With fascinating interviews with top authors and gurus in the field, along with the latest news in the science and technology of longevity, we're going to reveal expert advice and amazing secrets of living a longer, happier life. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman.

It's my pleasure to welcome Brian Delaney to the show. He is the author of the Longevity Diet, the only proven way to slow the aging process and maintain peak vitality through calorie restriction. And he's coming to us today, I believe, from Stockholm. Brian, welcome. How are you?

I am coming from Stockholm and I'm doing fine. How are you?

Good. Good to have you from such a long distance. Tell us a little bit about this. You know, I've read over the years studies where animals have lived quite a bit longer by just reducing calorie intake.

It's really astonishing. It's the effect that's been known for nearly a century. There was an initial tentative study done in the nineteen teens, and then the research really took off in the 30s at Cornell with this guy, Clive McKay, who did these famous experiments trying to reduce cancer rates. And then he actually noticed that another effect of this reduced diet was that these animals lived not simply because they didn't get cancer, they didn't get any diseases of aging, they lived much, much longer. And the research went in ways where people thought, well, this is just a funny effect you can never really implement in humans because no one would want to eat less. And then a few people starting the 70s, above all, this guy Roy Walford, who was at UCLA, said, Listen, some people might be willing to be a bit hungry to try a milder version of this in order to postpone some of the ravages of aging by maybe 15 or 20 years. We're not talking about living to be 180. We're just talking about pushing back Alzheimer's and heart disease and other diseases of aging by, if you're relatively careful about it and strict, maybe a couple decades. So he's the one who really got this movement of people who are willing to try this, not just lab animals, but actually human beings willing to try this. He. He's the one who got this going. And since then, the research has really taken off. There's been much more done in lab animals. Literally over a thousand studies showing that it slows aging and really cuts the rate of diseases of aging dramatically. And now there have also been some studies in humans.

Why do people think this happens? I mean, what is it about having more calories that makes us die sooner? And we're not talking about obesity. We're just talking about higher intake versus lower intake of calories. Why would that make us live longer to have less calories, fewer calories?

Well, it's a great question. And there are different levels at which one can answer it. One can answer it at the biomolecular level, and one can answer it from the level of evolutionary theory. From the level of evolutionary theory. The idea is that during a time of famine, it would not be a good choice to have a lot of kids and to run around a lot and burn up energy, because then you'd have to eat a lot and there isn't a lot to eat, and you can't feed your kids. So from an evolutionary standpoint, the idea is that this effect evolved so that beings, we can't say humans, I mean, it's insects, rodents, humans, everything, basically will be able to live through the famine and still be young enough after the famine to be able to have children and to be able to propagate. So that's the explanation from the evolutionary theory standpoint. From the standpoint of the actual biology of it, no one really knows. There are lots of mechanisms that have been proposed, and most of them seem correct. It's not clear which one is fundamental. So, for example, average levels of glucose, of sugar in the blood tend to be lower when you're on this diet, and that is shown to be. And insulin is lower. There are all kinds of changes connected with our. Our glucose metabolism system that change. And these have all been correlated with greater survival because basically glucose is lower. Glucose is in some ways a very dangerous molecule because it has a lot of energy. It's like if you had too much gasoline in your car and it was being spilled around, it would corrode things. That's a very rough way of saying that there is some advantage to having lower glucose levels. And then there are theories at the level of signaling that involve mitochondria, for example, that the mitochondria, which is a part of cells that produce energy, end up being maintained longer. And that that seems to be a critical factor in maintaining us in the state of youth. So we don't really know which of these. And there are lots of other theories. I've just named a couple of them. The hunger hormones may matter. This hormone Ghrelin that you have more of when you're hungry may be very beneficial. And leptin that you have in the opposite state, maybe. Maybe bad. And those change in a positive direction when you're on calorie restriction. So we don't really know, to answer your question at the biological level, but every theory that's been tested seems to be part of the picture.

So glucose, that molecule has a lot of energy. And it's been said by many that I've heard saying that glucose is a. As oxygen is to a fire, glucose is to cancer. It really fuels cancer, from what I understand. And I love sugar. Okay, this is not good.

So do I. I grew up. Literally, this is going to disgust some of the people who are. Who are listening, but. And it's going to delight a few. But literally, I would take a handful of confectioner's sugar when I was five years old.

Okay, I wasn't this bad.

I mean, I was addicted to sugar. That was really. That was.

It's a very addictive substance. Yeah, really.

It's incredible. And it makes sense from the evolutionary standpoint. If there are sweet things that pack tons of energy, then we're not talking about food here. We're talking about the pure sugar itself. It makes sense that we're going to be designed to really, really want it. Some people more than others. So, yeah, so it's energetic.

Let's assume and agree that glucose is bad. Okay, why does eating more, you know, if you have 500 or 600 extra calories per day, why does that increase your glucose level?

It increases in a direct way, because when you eat anything, it doesn't have to contain glucose. It will, at least partly, if it has any molecules that contain energy, that can be used as energy sources like protein and fat, they will end up in one way or another, directly or indirectly, leading to increased energy reserves in the body, which will take the form of glucose somewhere down the road.

Okay, When I work out and I exercise a lot, I mean, naturally my appetite increases and I just become ravenous and Lana. Eat everything. When I'm really working out, my body just needs that. Fuel is the way I perceive it.

That's bad.

I mean, exercise is good for you, Right?

Exactly. And this is one of the questions that the Calorie Restriction Society that I'm the president is trying to resolve through a new research project, which is, let's say that you're on calorie restriction and you're an active man, and before you went on it, you were eating let's say 3,000 calories a day, which is typical for a very active man. And you wanted to decrease that to 2,400. You could do that and still be active, but it might be going too far. So the question, the theoretical question here is, is the decrease by 600 calories to 2,400 calories? Could you do that if it weren't going too far by just exercising more? So in other words, don't change what you're eating. Keep eating 3,000 calories, but exercise an additional 600 calories. This is a lot, actually a lot of exercise. But would you still get the same benefits in other. Is it the net energy equation that matters? And it seems like it isn't. It seems like you get more benefit from not exercising too much and eating less. But to answer your question, the absolute number of calories you will have to consume to be on some version of calorie restriction if you're active is naturally going to have to be higher than your twin who isn't active. Otherwise you would be too hungry and you wouldn't be able to, and it would actually be bad for your health. Let me just take a moment to point out this is important. Anyone thinking about making any change to their health regimen, not just going on this diet, but even taking new supplements, check with a healthcare professional. Very important.

Unfortunately, healthcare professionals, if you mean doctors in the west, they don't know anything about nutrition, it seems. I know, I know, it's frustrating. It's just tragic. I mean, the concept that we've confused doctors who can save lives in the emergency room or, you know, fix your broken arm with people who are optimal health experts is tragic. They really are two different things and have little, if anything to do with each other, in my opinion. I mean, some doctors, of course, are very aware and, you know, they get it. But it's certainly not by training. Okay. It's certainly not by medical school education.

Exactly. There are a lot of great doctors out there. And I said healthcare professional because I wanted to include. Include nurse practitioners and various other people who might not.

But even, you know, then it's still Western, still the Western concept of medicine. I know, which is cover up your symptoms with a drug to make a pharmaceutical company billions of dollars. It's absurdity. Let me ask you a strange question that I bet you never get. Okay. And it's one that my mom bugs me about. Jason, you look too skinny. You need to gain some weight.

You know, it's funny. I mean, I'm a trim, lean, Guy. But I'm in good shape, okay? I mean, I exercise. I do yoga all the time. I look great for my age, if you ask me. Just my personal opinion. But, you know, people that haven't seen me in years, they'll say things like derogatory. You know, I know there's a derogatory tone. Have you lost weight? And I'm thinking, no, I look good. You look sick. You're the typical American who's too gluttonous. Okay. But people that are really into this, and I'm looking at your picture, by the way, they look kind of gaunt.

Yeah.

You know, and that doesn't look good. It doesn't look healthy, you know, and.

Right. I have gotten this question before, and I will answer very honestly, and I will tell you that of all the downsides that people talk about with calorie restriction, feeling cold because your metabolism is becoming so efficient. There are lots of downsides. Of course, that's a plus if you're in Florida in July. But the one that people don't talk about so much, but that is the biggest problem for me is I look in the mirror and I see a skinny dude. Like, not lean, skinny, scrawny. And I've always been lean. I probably before I went on calorie restriction, I probably. When you described yourself, I don't have a picture of your face here. And you are very handsome, but it's only your face. I probably looked the way you do now in terms of my body type. This is a lean, athletic guy. Going on calorie restriction meant that I had to lose weight, so I became skinnier than a lean, athletic guy.

I mean, certainly if you were a caveman, that's the way you looked. And that was the natural thing, you know, I mean, being thin and lean was. Was.

Was.

Was a good. But it was probably a good thing to be nimble, and, you know, it was a good survival skill. But, you know, when your face is a little fatter, it looks better, you know, and my God, the clothing is ridiculous in the usa, I mean, I swear to you, they used to do it with just women's sizes, but now, I kid you not, I know they're doing it with men's sizes, too, because a medium is now a large and a small is medium. And, you know, I'm a 30 waist in my pants, and it's hard to find clothes. I mean, it's like everything starts at 32, 33 and all. There's tons of 38 and 42 waist sizes. I mean, that's ridiculous.

It's amazing. I have to get my clothes in Europe or I go to secondhand places in the U.S. it's really incredible. But I think I want to acknowledge the mother and grandmotherly questions that, you know, people like me and I guess like you, even though you're not on calorie restriction in any sort of extreme way get. I want to acknowledge the wisdom behind them and the wisdom is the wisdom of evolution. Because what evolution is saying, this thing with the beauty of anorectic.

My mom even says it out loud. She says, what if there's a famine?

Really? We have the opposite problem.

Exactly. Yeah, we have sort of really anti famines all around us. But it's not just that. I mean, this idea of women being beautiful when they look like pre pubescent 11 year olds who haven't eaten in a week, that's a very new thing. That's a weird aberration. Typically sexual attractiveness involves a certain degree of plumpness throughout history for men and women and that there's an obvious reason. And this goes back, this goes back before history. This is obviously because that is someone who was able to find food and is going to be able to support the children that I have with her or with him. And so that's in our genes and it makes sense to be in our genes, but that's about the survival of the species. So when someone looks at me and says, you look too skinny, what they're saying is they don't know it, but what they're saying is because I'm eating well, I'm not skinny because I'm eating 100 calories of Fritos a day, eating very, very well, but just less. What they're saying is you might not be as reproductively fit as someone who weighs 40 or 50 pounds more. And that's not good for the species. That's what their genes are forced them to say. But it is good for me as an individual and the science now supports this. And I look a little gaunt. I'm not really extreme with this diet. And it's mainly because I just don't want to look more gaunt. It's not because I don't think it would be beneficial for me, but I'm going to. On average, I have an expectation of living much longer because of this diet.

And I tell you feel much better. I mean, I feel great. You know, if I, if I were to gain weight, I would not feel this good. You know, I just know it.

You know, we all have little health problems like I sleep badly and this diet has not helped my sleep problem. That's alas, it's solved lots of other problems that didn't solve.

Tell me about that. What's the sleep thing?

That's just in my family, it's just, I just, it's not like a tense. I just. The little GABA receptors or something just don't work that well. And I just lie there and I fall asleep. Okay. But then I wake up after four or five hours.

Does calorie restriction impact your sleep in one way or another?

It has improved it slightly. Now it's four to five hours a night at least, sometimes more.

And it used to be, I mean, if you're engaging in calorie restriction, you're probably not wasting a bunch of sleep time with digestion that's interrupting your sleep. So your sleep is probably much more efficient.

That's what a lot of people report. I mention that not because it has anything to do with calorie restriction. That's just a Delaney thing that we just don't. We just don't sleep well. So I'm just saying, just admitting go on this diet, it won't solve all your problems. It didn't solve all of mine, but solved most of them. My health problems. If it weren't for this guy looking back at me from the mirror who doesn't quite look like me, I would take this more extreme degree. Not really extreme, but I'm very careful about it. I go to the doctor, I get my fasting blood glucose measured, insulin levels wherever I can, and make sure that the signs of having gone too far haven't appeared. And they haven't. So I know that I can take it a little bit further if I wanted to, but I just don't want to look like an outreach by survivor. It's just that is not me, you know.

Okay, so what else do we need to know about this as we're kind of wrapping up here?

Well, I would say the most important thing is, as I said, see some kind of healthcare professional and as you noted, be prepared for them to say, what is this? And you can bring a copy of my book or go online and get some scientific studies and say, look, this has been studied in people, it's safe. We don't know if I'm going to live to 150, but it's safe. That's one thing I would emphasize. The other thing I would say is for everyone doing this, it's really important for your own to be able to track your own progress. And if you later want to participate in one of these trials that are springing up all over the place, it's important to just get whatever you can tested before you go on the diet. Just simple things like blood pressure and your resting pulse. You could probably do at home your weight and tell your doctor or nurse, therapy practitioner, whoever it is, that you'd like to get a couple of, you know, depending on what you can afford, some basic tests done so that you can track your progress. And you can see it's really quite dramatic. There are people who go in with a fasting glucose level of I don't know, 95 or something, which is, which is actually a little bit too high. If you're, unless you're really old and they go on this diet and a month later it's 75. And when you see that and you read the research about how beneficial that is, it just helps keep you motivated.

Very interesting. Give out your website, tell people where they can find out more.

It's crsociety.org what's the number?

Give us a metric before you go as to is it by body weight the amount of calories we should consume and then what would be the realistic healthy reduction kind of number?

You know, that's a great question and I'm going to be honest with you and say that I can't give one number because it's really depends on what your set point is. This notion of the weight that your body would naturally defend in your mid to late 20s, that's your set point. And if you know, if you're that age or if you knew, or if you can remember approximately what you ate, then if your weight was fairly what you want it to be, that's your set point. And then you subtract certain percentage, 10 or 15% less than that would be a very mild kind of calorie restriction that most people could sustain. 20 to 30% would be harder for a lot of people. But according to the studies that have been done for someone who isn't pregnant or has some other condition where you wouldn't want to be in this diet, it tends to be safe beyond 30. Could be safe if you're starting out relatively young. 30%, 30% down from what you were consuming when you were at your set.

I mean, is someone gonna feel hungry all the time, kind of wondering if this is a myth or. I mean this is just an anecdotal observation and maybe a wives tale, I don't know but it seems to work for me. I notice that when I eat a lot. I'm hungry a lot. My theory is my stomach's just expanding and contracting. And when you get in the habit of eating less, the stomach shrinks a little and you don't really feel hungry. You get used to it. Is that true?

That's what a lot of people report. I had more problems than most with the hunger, but I solved it largely by just eliminating lunch. It doesn't entirely solve. It's not that I'm not hungry, but that the hunger is compressed to the late afternoon. So I eat breakfast, about the size breakfast that I always ate.

I love big breakfast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I wake up, I'm hungry, I just have to eat breakfast like a king. And then I skip lunch. And then by 3 or 4 in the afternoon I start getting hungry and by 5 or 5:30, I'm hungry, but you know, I'm so busy and I love what I do, so I'm just sort of. I note it occasionally when I get a phone call and I take a break from my work, it's oh yeah, it's late afternoon and I'm really looking forward to dinner. And then I have a dinner that's about the size that I would normally have. So that's what I solved it. But there's another new fascinating theory about hunger, which is that I'm sure you've heard about the, the gut microbiota. Gut micro fora. Everyone's talking about that now. These bacteria that live all over our bodies, but the ones in the gut outnumber us by number of cell 10 to 1. So it's this huge sort of organism of foreign bacteria in our gut. And it turns out that according to a recent study, when you start eating in a different way, this has more to do with what you eat than how much you eat. But when you go on calorie restriction, you. You generally end up eating better foods. You have to, otherwise you're not going to get enough vitamins. It turns out that the gut microbiota change and they become healthier and they send signals to the brain. We have all kinds of via serotonin receptors in the gut that actually change our hunger so that we actually become accustomed to that. And it's not so much that we're less hungry, but we crave healthier foods. Which means that instead of, you know, when I was five and I was hungry, I wanted to eat some confectioner's sugar, I would want some broccoli or something. And I might eat the broccoli.

Yeah.

And it would be much less calorically rich.

I would totally agree with you on that. Just anecdotally in my own life, I found that you definitely crave healthier foods because your body knows what it needs. Except for sugar. Sugar is the big, the addictive scam for your body. They figured out a way to, you know, it's like a drug, you know, I mean, your body doesn't need heroin, but I'm sure if you took it, you'd want more, unfortunately than the scary, scariest can be. Yeah, so sugar is the one that it doesn't apply. Your body does not need the sugar, even though it craves it. But other stuff, you know, your body kind of knows what it needs and it gives you the commensurate craving for it. So. Yeah, makes sense. Good stuff. Well, this has been an interesting discussion. Any closing thought you want to leave people with?

I just, I hope everyone considers trying this and people who don't want to be healthy in other ways. Exercise especially is important. There have been tons of new studies talking about exercise, even just a little bit. Five minutes. They call them exercise snacks. It's a snack of exercise, not a snack of food. Five minutes. Intense interval training before you eat will lower postprandial glucose levels after you eat. So if you don't want to go on any crazy diet like this, just a little bit of exercise, just little bursts of exercise. If you don't have time to do a, you know, run 10, 10 kilometers, I would agree.

I think too much exercise is bad. I think exercise increases oxidization and that, you know, that's deadly. Of course. So these people that do too much exercise, I think they're hurting themselves. But I have a great Little iPhone app, 7 Minute Workout. It's by Lolo and there's some other ones like that and I just love it. I go in there and I crank out seven minutes plus I'll do, you know, four. A whopping four minutes on the treadmill.

Woo. And yeah, but you know what? That's awesome. Might be you need you just do that, do it a few times a day. Maybe, you know, that's what I'm doing now. I do a little burst of exercise before I have breakfast and then a little bit in the afternoon. Sometimes I'll go with for a long run, but that's okay. It's fine.

Yeah. Well, interval training has been proven as a very, very effective methodology. So. Good, good stuff. Brian, thank you for coming on and telling us about this and give out the book title one more time.

It's the Longevity Diet and then there's a long subtitle, but that's all you have to remember. Longevity Diet by me, Brian M. Delaney and my co author Lisa Walford.

Excellent Brian Delaney. Thank you.

You bet. Thank you Jason.

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