Wine

Fruit juice

What if you just drink grape juice? Rats given juice from dark Concord grapes achieved better cognitive performance than those that drank sugar water or white grape juice. But what about in humans? For an overview of the available data, watch my video see.nf/grapejuice. It boils down to the evidence being modest, even though researchers funded by the Welch brand tried to make it seem otherwise.

Following my first instinct, I would have unreservedly recommended whole fruit rather than juice, because fruit is associated with a longer life expectancy, but fruit juice is not. However, the Kame Project study, which I discuss in the video see.nf/juicybrain, inspired me to take a closer look. It was a cohort study in which participants who drank fruit or vegetable juice at least three times a week developed Alzheimer’s significantly less often than those who consumed these juices less than once a week. It’s possible that industrial high-pressure juicing methods extract more brain-protective polyphenols from the pulp, skins, or seeds, but as I show in the video, the intervention studies that demonstrate at least short-term cognitive effects are, on the whole, disappointing.

In see.nf/juicyarteries I discuss studies on fruit juices and cardiovascular and metabolic health. The bottom line: If you want to drink fruit juice, cloudy apple juice is better than clear, blood orange juice is better than regular orange juice, and it’s better to drink the juice with meals than between them. Pomegranate juice has its own video because the results are so scant (see.nf/pomjuice). Unsalted tomato juice is probably the healthiest juice. Tomato juice can lower LDL cholesterol and improve artery function, which is why higher tomato juice consumption can be associated with a significantly lower risk of premature death, even after accounting for other dietary and lifestyle factors.

Fruit juices can contain about as much sugar as soft drinks, but unlike sodas they are not associated with a shorter lifespan. That may be due to the polyphenols in fruit, which are thought to provide a large share of the benefit associated with fruit consumption. If you want to live to an old age, fruit juice may be better than soda, but it is not as good as whole fruit. Eating whole fruit is associated with a significantly lower risk of premature death—even at one serving of fruit a day, the risk is 11 percent lower than if you eat no fruit.

What do centenarians eat?

To study the lifestyles of the oldest of the old, you first have to determine how old people really are. The science in this field was long hampered by wild exaggerations. According to an editor of the Guinness Book of Records, “no single subject is so obscured by vanity, deceit, falsehood, and deliberate fraud as the extremes of human longevity.” This story is as old as the world and goes back at least to biblical times, when it was proudly reported that the patriarch Methuselah lived to be 969 years old.

A cover story in National Geographic magazine in 1973 was one of the most famous setbacks for the credibility of studies of very old people. Readers were captivated by the extraordinarily large number of centenarians in the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union, in Pakistan’s Hunza Valley, and in the village of Vilcabamba in Ecuador. On closer inspection, however, it turned out that not only were the “centenarians” not 100 years old, but even the “90-year-olds” weren’t 90. Ages were exaggerated either to elevate one’s social status or to stimulate local tourism, but the average “centenarian,” it turned out, was 84 years old. Eventually the author, a physician, recognized and admitted the debacle, but by then a shadow had already been cast over the entire discipline.

Despite this unlucky start, more than a dozen major studies of genuine centenarians are now underway, offering us insight into extraordinary longevity.

Eating in the Blue Zones

Careful verification systematically debunked nearly all claims about the supposed longevity of certain populations and exposed them as inflated or undocumented. Today we have only five true “Blue Zones”—longevity hotspots named for the color a demographer used on a world “heat map” to depict mortality. The five generally recognized Blue Zones are the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica, the Italian island of Sardinia, the Greek island of Ikaria, the Japanese island of Okinawa, and the California city of Loma Linda in the United States. These are regions with a high density (up to ten times the US average) of healthy centenarians and other older adults who are still actively engaged in community life.

Their lifestyles share some common features, including low smoking rates, daily moderate physical activity, and social engagement, and when it comes to diet, whole plant foods are central. The founder of the Blue Zones organization, Daniel Buettner, and a team of researchers compiled findings from more than 150 observational studies on the diets of the longest-lived people in the world to create a list of ten dietary guidelines. The foundation of the Blue Zones dietary guidelines is: “Aim for 95 to 100 percent of your food to come from plants.” The emphasis is on vegetables (especially leafy greens), fruit, whole grains, and legumes. The list ends with “minimize meat,” noting that centenarians in the Blue Zones eat about 60 grams of meat or less only five times a month. Traditionally, people in the Blue Zones eat at least 90 percent plant-based. And the population with the highest life expectancy in the world, the vegetarian Seventh-day Adventists of Loma Linda, does not eat meat at all.

What do we learn from the Blue Zones?

If you want to follow in the footsteps of the people who live the longest and healthiest, you can follow the official Blue Zones dietary guidelines: