This document contains a summary of a presentation by Fabio Piccini MD PhD on longevity. It includes: - Fabio Piccini's credentials in medicine, nutrition, and eating disorders. - Key facts about what diets and lifestyles are correlated with increased longevity and reduced rates of chronic diseases. Populations eating traditional diets, even if high in certain macronutrients, have lower rates than those eating a Western diet. - The five "Blue Zones" areas of the world where people live the longest - Sardinia, Okinawa, Loma Linda, Icaria, and Nicoya - and common traits of diets and lifestyles in those places

1. Fabio Piccini MD PhD

2. DECLARATION OF INTEREST
The author reports no conflict of interest with respect to the content of this presentation

3. • Doctor in Medicine
• Licensed Jungian analyst
(IAAP)
• Eating Disorders specialist
• Master in Sport and Exercise
Nutrition
• PhD in Food Nutrition and
Health

4. Imagine you're celebrating your 100th birthday.What does that look like? What do you
look like? How do you feel? Now, imagine your celebrating your 100th birthday and
you're on water skis. You feel the wind in your face, the water skidding under your skis.
You approach the dock, you wave to your kids, your grandkids, your great-grandkids.
You turn wide and splash them all

5. Centenarian Sikh runner Fauja Singh was the first person to officially enter for
2011 Edinburgh Marathon. A world record holder, aged 100, Fajua Singh has
run seven marathons, all after his 89th birthday

7.  Most of us have come to rely on experts (of one kind or another) to tell us how to eat.
Doctors and diet books, media accounts of latest findings in nutritional science,
government advisories and food pyramids and the proliferating health claims on food
packages
 We don’t see foods anymore but instead we look right through them to the nutrients
(good and bad) they contain and of course to the calories
 For all the scientific or pseudoscientific food baggage we’ve taken on in recent years,
we still don’t know what we should be eating
 The truth is that science knows a lot less about nutrition than you would expect, that in
fact nutrition science is a very young science

8. FACT #1
 Populations that eat a Western Diet
(lots of processed foods and meat, lots
of added fat sugar and salt, lots of
added chemicals) invariably suffer
from high rates of Western Diseases
(obesity, type 2 diabetes,
cardiovascular disease and cancer).
This diet for whatever reason is the
problem and the main culprit for
reduced longevity in our countries
FACT #2
 Populations eating a remarkably wide
range of traditional diets generally
don’t suffer from these chronic
diseases. These diets run the gamut
from ones very high in fat, to ones very
high in carbs, to ones very high in
proteins and the same holds true for
more mixed traditional diets

9. Something called the DANISH TWIN
STUDY established that only about 15-
25 percent of how long the average
person lives (within certain biological
limits) is dictated by our genes. The
other 75-85 percent is dictated by our
lifestyle. This means: if we can find the
optimal lifestyle of longevity we can
come up with a de facto formula for
longevity

10. The ten biggest obstacles to getting to the age of 100 in the Western Countries are the top ten killers:
 Heart disease
 Cancer
 Lung disease
 Stroke
 Accidents
 Alzheimer's
 Diabetes
 Kidney disease
 Lung infections
 Suicide

12.  If you ask the average european what the optimal formula for longevity is they
probably couldn’t tell you
 The fact of the matter is there’s a lot of confusion around what really helps us live
longer better
 Should you be running marathons or doing yoga? Should you eat organic meats or
should you be eating tofu?
 When it comes to supplements, should you be taking them? How about these
hormones or resveratrol?
 Does purpose play into it? Spirituality? And what about how we socialize?

13.  If you try very hard you can live to be 100 (FALSE: we are programmed for procreative
success, not for longevity. Only about one out of 4800 people in Europe live to be 100)
 There are treatments that can help slow, reverse or even stop aging (FALSE: there
are too many things that can age us, too many things to go wrong; our bodies have 35
Trillion cells that turn themselves over once every 8 yrs and every times they turn
themselves over there is some damage, and the damage builds up, and it builds up
exponentially)

14.  The best science tells us that the capacity of the human body is about 90 years (a little
bit more for women)
 Life expectancy in this country is currently only 78 years (somewhere along the line
we are leaving about 12 good years on the table)
 The best way to get these missing years is to look at the cultures around the world
that are actually experiencing them, areas where people are living to age 100 at rates
up to 10 times grater than we are

15.  The Blue Zones is a term dubbed by demographers for certain parts of the world
which have an unusually high number of people who lived to 90 and 100 plus years of
age. In these longevity hot spots, people suffer only a fraction of the diseases that
commonly kill people in other parts of the developed world.
 There are 5 well known Blue Zones located in Sardinia (Italy), Okinawa (Japan), Loma
Linda (California), Icaria (Greece) and Nicoyia (Costa Rica).

18.  Aren’t rich in material sense
 Have an amazing strong purpose and sense of belonging in life
 Are regularly active (but take adeguate rest)
 Eat really simple whole foods (but not too much)
 Fast intermittently or restrict food choices on certain days of the week (or on some
periods of the year)
 Enjoy convivality and surround themselves with people who share the same values
 Live in places where elderly people are respected
 Live a life close to their traditions

19.  They are largely sheperds which
occasions regular, low intensity
physical activity
 Their diet is mostly plan based (plus
some whole wheat bread, some
cheese made from grass fed sheep
and a wine that has 3 times the level of
polyphenols than any known wine in
the world)
 They have organized their society in a
way that the older you get, the more
equity you have, the more wisdom you
are celebrated for

22.  Dietary guidelines have been
considered responsible for the current
obesity epidemic
 Human beings ate well and kept
themselves healthy for millennia
before nutritional science came along
to tell us how to do it
 It is entirely possible to eat healthily
without knowing what a carbohydrate
is

23. Avoid highly processed concoctions designed by food scientists consisting
mostly of ingredients derived from corn and soy that no normal person keeps
in the pantry. They contain chemical additives with which the human body has
not been long acquainted

24. Fructose-containing sugars cause obesity not by calories but by means of their
ability to raise uric acid levels thus turning on the so-called fat-switch which is
responsible for weight gain

25. Brewer’s yeasts has the higher RNA content of almost all foods. RNA is a
nucleotide which is metabolized to uric acid in the liver. Uric acid is responsible
for insulin and leptin resistance at a cellular level thus turning on the fat-switch

26. The more ingredients in a packaged food, the more highly processed it
probably is. If a third-grader cannot pronounce it, it’s probably chemistry, not
food

27. Read the ingredients on a package of Pringles or Twinkies and imagine what
those ingredients actually look like raw or in the places where they grow. You
can’t do it

28. There are scores of studies demonstrating that a diet rich in vegetables and
fruits reduces the risk of dying from all the Western Dieseases. In countries
where the people eat a pound or more of vegetables and fruits a day, the rate
of cancer is half what is in Western Countries

29. The diet of the animals we eat strongly influences the nutritional quality and
healthfullness of the food we get from them, whether it is meat, milk, or eggs. This
should be self-evident, yet it is a truth routinely overlooked by the industrial food
chain in its quest to produce vast quantities of cheap animal protein

30. Many traditional cultures swear by the health benefits of fermented foods,
foods that have been transformed by live micro-organisms (bacteria or fungi)
such as yogurth, sauerkraut, kimchi, sourdough bread

31. When grindstones were the only way to refine flour and oil, flour and oil were generally more
nutritious. The nutritional benfits of whole grains are impressive. And the newer oils that are
extracted by modern chemicals means tend to have less favorable fatty acids profile and
more additives than oils that have been obtained the old-fashioned way

32. There is nothing wrong with eating sweets, fried foods, pastries, etc. but food manufacturers
have made eating these formerly expensive and hard-to-make treats so cheap and easy that
we’re eating them every day. If you made all the french fries you ate, you would eat them
much less often, if only because they’re so much work. The same holds true for fried
chicken, chips, cakes, pies and ice cream

33. Wine may not be the magic bullet in the Mediterranean Diet but it does seem to be an
integral part of this dietary pattern (remember the Cannonau?). There is now considerably
scientific evidence for the health benefits of red wine to go with a few centuries of traditional
belief and anedoctal evidence. The polyphenols in red wine (resveratrol in particular) may
have unique protective qualities

35. A new group of diets called “5:2 diets” makes a compelling promise that with
regular fasting (two days out of every seven) you will quickly lose weight, while
on non-fast days you can continue to eat (and drink) whatever you like. This is
just a quick-fix which can’t be regarded as healthy eating at all

36. Keep active but take it easy. Remember that occasional all-out sprints trigger
optimal gene expression and beneficial hormone flow, while playing balance
the stress of modern life with some unstructured physical fun

38. f.piccini@univpm.it