Eat Smart: The Science of Nutrition and Longevity

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Introduction

Food is where everything begins, and the old saying an apple a day keeps the doctor away is really quite true. A lot of folks here probably know exactly where I am coming from now. The saying let food be thy medicine hangs in my office. More than three decades ago, I realized the profound impact that nutrition has on health and health on nutrition. For the last 35 years, I have been practicing lifestyle medicine, in which nutrition plays a large role. After a little research on the Internet, I found that the adage let food be thy medicine stemmed from the 1550 B.C. Ebers Papyrus. By then, the ancient Egyptians realized that there were certain foods that could make them feel better. This has been an ongoing concept for thousands of years. We are now going to examine this concept more closely.

Eat Smart: The Science of Nutrition and Longevity is the fifth talk in a six-part lecture series from the Department of Neurology. This talk examines how foods relate to health, provides guidelines to eat smart for maximum health and longevity, and demonstrates easy food preparation techniques that make breaking the fast and eating five delicious, health-promoting meals a day a breeze. Research has shown that what we consume has a profound effect on our health. This is true from a broad perspective as well. The old adage you are what you eat is really quite true.

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The Basics of Nutrition

We do not, however, suggest that those are the only rules to guide daily eating. Nonetheless, they are apparent universal guides that we believe it would be good for many people to get to know about. And it is not only the common man who might be tempted to give them a fair go - the guidelines we discuss here are already found useful by a callant group of specialists in the field. Animal studies are probably much of the reason for this, and this is because they have great potential: they allow very large numbers of individuals to be treated, and they are relatively malleable in many ways. We will see how those peculiarities are put to use when these guidelines have been reformulated as the biology of specific macronutrients - in the main fatty acids, glucose, and amino acids - and their abode in a cardiac intervention named periodic fasting.

We are all different - every body is slightly unique - and our genetic profiles and life histories affect which nutrients make us feel good and on which foods we thrive. Yet, not only do we all share the same roughly 20,000 genes, but almost all of us also expect the same dietary rules to be good for us. This is a matter of perspective. It can be regarded as an example of a shared human body plan that