- Dr. Eric Verdin, 63, studies the biology of aging and how to get and stay healthy.
- He believes lifestyle factors such as diet play the biggest role in how long we live.
- He follows a Mediterranean-style diet and rarely drinks alcohol.
A healthy aging doctor and researcher who claims to have reversed his biological age by up to 15 years said he follows a Mediterranean-style diet — but avoids things like alcohol.
Dr. Eric Verdin, the CEO and president of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, studies how we can extend our “healthspan,” or quality of life, by maintaining faculties that tend to decline with age, such as cognition, and preventing chronic diseases like cancer and type 2 diabetes.
For the last decade, Verdin has used wearable devices, such as smartwatches, as well as quarterly blood tests, to track his own health and makes tweaks according to the results. Currently, he’s working on eating an earlier dinner to extend his intermittent fasting window.
According to tests that measure biomarkers such as inflammation, blood pressure, and cholesterol, while his chronological age is 68, Verdin’s biological age is between 48 and 53. There is no consensus on the definition of biological age or how to measure it, so it differs according to the tests he refers to.
In general, Verdin believes lifestyle factors, including diet, exercise, sleep, stress management, and social connections, play a larger role in determining how long we will live in good health than genes.
Verdin shared the diet he swears by for longevity, and the three foods he limits as much as possible.
Swears by: eating a Mediterranean-style diet
Verdin said that there’s strong evidence to suggest eating a good balance of complex carbohydrates — such as sweet potatoes — fats, and proteins is essential for health.
He follows the principles of the Mediterranean diet, which is based on the traditional eating habits of people in countries such as Greece, Italy, and Turkey, and has been ranked the healthiest way to eat by the US News & World Report for eight years running.
“When you look at populations that are on this type of diet, they really are the healthy ones,” Verdin said.
The eating plan emphasizes fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, and lean sources of protein such as fish.
Avoids: ultra-processed foods
Verdin follows the food writer Michael Pollan’s advice of never eating anything you could order from a window or your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food — or what would be considered ultra-professed foods.
There isn’t an agreed definition of ultra-processed foods, but they’re typically considered to be made using ingredients and processes that you wouldn’t have in a home kitchen. They tend to be highly marketed, low in fiber, and contain large amounts of fat, sugar, and salt: a combination which makes them “hyper-palatable,” which studies suggest leads to overeating.
Scientists are still trying to understand how they affect our health, but eating a diet high in UPFs was linked to 32 health problems, including obesity, cancer, and depression in a recent study.
Avoids: fruit juice
While Verdin advocates eating plenty of fruit, he doesn’t recommend drinking it, as juice tends to be high in sugar.
Juicing removes the fiber from fruit. So you can drink several pieces of fruit in seconds, which you wouldn’t be able to do if you ate them.
When we consume sugary foods or beverages, our blood sugar spikes and the pancreas needs to release more insulin to balance it. With repeated spikes, after a period of time the pancreas may not be able to keep up with production needed, which can lead to insulin resistance, prediabetes, and type 2 diabetes.
Fiber, which is great for gut health, also delays the absorption of the sugar therefore preventing blood sugar spikes, he said.
“When you eat an orange, the sugar comes in at a much slower rate. So your body is actually able to cope with it,” Verdin said.
Avoids: alcohol
Verdin used to have a glass of wine with his wife most evenings, but after trying Dry January during the COVID pandemic, he realized that he had more energy and slept better without it. “So I never went back,” he said.
He’ll still have the odd glass of wine on a special occasion but he rarely drinks these days.
In January 2023, the World Health Organization said that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe when it comes to human health,” and the US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy published an advisory bringing awareness to alcohol’s links to cancer in January.
The advisory said alcohol consumption was the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the US, after tobacco and obesity and recommended advocated for warning labels on alcoholic drinks.
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