I am sitting on a sunny terrace with a black coffee, 14 hours into a fast, watching people walk past. I find myself wondering why so many older people seem to expect poor health.
Aging is inevitable. Obesity, muscle loss and diabetes need not be treated as its inevitable companions.
The first step to get out of this mindset is to ignore mainstream nutrition advice and start reasoning from an evolutionary perspective.
For me, healthy aging is about how I feel and function now as well as later.
Problem 1: Excess body fat
I question the idea that dietary saturated fat should be judged solely by its effect on cholesterol.
The body needs cholesterol, which makes me skeptical of treating the number alone as the whole story. If it would have been bad, it would have been removed a long time ago by natural selection.
I think this premise influences nutrition advice in ways that can create problems:
- They tell you to eat less animal foods and more plant foods, e.g. to replace meat with grains. But the nutrient density of plant foods is way lower than that of animal foods, which makes you overeat automatically, resulting in a higher body fat percentage. And excess body fat accelerates aging.
- They tell you to limit your saturated fat intake, and instead eat vegetable oils, e.g. to replace butter with margarine. But vegetable oils are highly processed sludge and the worse thing on the planet you can eat, as they provoke instant inflammation in the body and disturb hormone regulation, gene expression and metabolism.
I think that advice misses important parts of the picture.
Cholesterol only starts getting bad for you when there is inflammation in the body. Inflammation is provoked by vegetable oils causing oxidation and sugar and other carbs causing constant blood sugar spikes.
So, it doesn't make sense to cut out the good guy so the bad guys can keep doing their work because there is money to be made by Big Food and Big Pharma.
I look first at the environment we have created. The agricultural and industrial revolution have been wreaking havoc on our bodies ever since they started, simply because the human evolution can't keep up with the technological progress.
Problem 2: Muscle loss
Sarcopenia is the age-related loss of muscle mass and strength. As you age, starting at about age 30, you'll be losing about 5% of your muscle mass every 10 years. This compounds quickly.
Having less muscle means you expend less energy each day so it's easier to eat in a calorie surplus and gain fat. Because all energy you take in that's not being used by the body to burn for energy will be stored as fat.
With less muscle and more fat daily life becomes harder. You move less as a result, and gain more fat as you continue to lose muscle. So it's really a vicious circle.
That cycle can reduce quality of life and increase health risks. I see strength training as a valuable way to resist muscle loss. The older you get, the more important strength training is.
Result: Insulin resistance
Together, excess body fat and muscle loss can contribute to insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. I want to address those risks through habits I can change.
In short, insulin resistance means that your fat cells are getting full because you are getting overfat, making the pancreas produce more and more insulin because it wants to store the energy you eat in those fat cells. This is a trigger for a cascade of problems in your body.
https://twitter.com/Mangan150/status/1283399975037095936
Feeling different at 65 than at 25 is natural, but I do not want to assume every decline is unavoidable. We have come to a point where everyone is in bad shape nowadays, so you think it's normal to be like that.
If you do what everyone else does, you will be like everyone else. But I'm not like that and refuse to fall for this societal trap. I want to feel my best and to look my best and am obsessed with it.
As long as you are overfat, you have no business having your cake and eating it too. Body composition is all you should really care about. That means learning about nutrition and lifting weights instead of drinking wine and watching TV.
It's important to define overfat here. Overfat means your body fat percentage is too high. You can't see this from the outside in most people with clothes on. This is called "skinny fat" and very important to understand.
A good body fat percentage is 10-14% for men and 20-24% for women. If yours is higher than that, it's in your very best interest to improve your body composition before everything else.
Excess body fat is common, which is one reason I think body composition deserves attention.
I suggest that anyone interested in this topic read the work of @mangan150. At the time, this microbiologist was 65 and shared research and practical ideas about fitness and aging.
I learned a lot from him and this article is greatly based on his content.
I find the usual advice to “eat less and move more” too limited on its own. I would rather focus on habits that support health before problems become severe.
Instead, the premise should be "eat densely, move intensely". That is, eat nutrient dense foods, do not eat all day (intermittent fasting) and practice strength training.