Live Longer with This Diet

This  article by         http://www.drcolbert.com/

A recent study by Brigham and Women's Hospital associate professory Immaculata De Vivo suggests that eating a Mediterranean diet could be the beneficial in prolonging your life. While history has already shown the diet to be good for lowering your weight and your risk for cardiovascular disease, this new information boosts the idea of increased lifespan.

Healthiest Diet

The Mediterranean Diet
The Mediterranean Diet is high in fruits, vegetables, peas, beans, nuts, and unrefined grains. It also has fish and olive oil. Meat, dairy and saturated fats are kept as low as possible. Red wine is allowed with a dinner meal. Many Mediterranean diet meals are seasoned well and provide delicious meat-free alternatives to be incorporated into any family setting.
Allowed:
Fruits and Dried Fruits
(apples, bananas, berries, figs, oranges, peaches, plums, pomegranate, strawberries)
Vegetables
(acorn squash, alfalfa sprouts, arugula, asparagus, bell peppers, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, celery, cucumber, eggplant, endive, fennel, garlic, peas, potatoes, pumpkin, romaine, shallots, spinach, Swiss chard, tomatoes, turnips, zucchini)
Grains
( barley, oats, quinoa, rice, wild rice, cornmeal, polenta, whole wheat pasta and noodles, whole wheat pitas, tortillas, and breads)
Legumes
(fava beans, chickpeas, lima beans, white beans)
Lentils
Nuts, Nut Butters, Seeds
Oils
(Olive oil, peanut oil)
Herbs and spices
Fish, Shellfish (not recommended), Seafood
( anchovies, cod, flounder, halibut, salmon, sea bass, tuna, shrimp, clams)
Shellfish e.g. clams, mussels, shrimp

Further Insight Into the Study
The study took data from women from the Nurses' Health Study, 4,676 of them, and looking at their diets. The women who ate a Mediterranean diet were shown to have longer telomeres, which are thread-like parts of the chromosomes that protect the strand. Telomeres help protect the genetic components of DNA. Over time, people's telomeres shorten. As they shorten, there is a higher chance of age-related disease and a lower life expectancy. Keeping telomeres longer and reducing the rate at which they shorten, could be the key to advancing life expectancy.

Risk Factors for Telomere Shortening
These include:
Stress
Inflammation
Smoking
Obesity
Sugar-high food and drinks
Eating antioxidant rich foods such as those on the Mediterranean Diet can help reduce inflammation and tress on the body.

Test Calculations
The study took the women and had them do blood testing and food diaries to address the link between telomere length and the Mediterranean Diet. They calculated a diet score between 0 and 9, with 0 being a diet that did not relate to the Mediterranean Diet and 9 being strictly the diet. With each single point, there was an average of 1.5 years of telomere aging. While you can't regrow telomere length, you can stop its progression. Another finding was that not a single food item was a superfood, rather the whole diet was the important factor in telomere length.

Living Food vs. Dead Food

Living Food vs. Dead Food

by Dr. Don Colbert

All foods are not created equal. In fact, some foods should not be labeled "food" but rather "consumable product" or "edible, but void of nourishment."

Living foods were created for our consumption. They exist in a raw or close-to-raw state. Living foods include fruits, vegetables, grains, seeds, and nuts. They are beautifully packaged in divinely created wrappers called skins and peels. Living food looks robust, healthy, and alive. No chemicals have been added. It has not been bleached or chemically altered. Living foods are plucked, harvested, and squeezed, not processed, packaged, and put on a shelf. Living foods are recognizable as food.
   Dead foods are the opposite. They are living foods that have fallen into human hands and have been altered in every imaginable way, making them last as long as possible at room temperature and to be as addictive as possible to the consumer. That usually means the manufacturer adds considerable amounts of sugar, which is called "dextrose," "corn syrup", "fructose," "glucose," and generally any other food ending in "ose." It also means they add man-made fats that involve taking various oils and heating them to dangerously High temperatures so that the nutrients die and become reborn as some-thing completely different - a deadly, sludgy substance that is toxic to our bodies. That sludgy substance - which is called "hydrogenated" or "partially hydrogenated" oil - is a common ingredient in the American diet and is present in most processed foods from crackers and pastries to hamburger buns. Life breeds life. Death breeds death. When you eat living foods, the enzymes in their pristine state interact with your digestive enzymes. The other natural ingredients God put in them - vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, antioxidants, fiber, and more - flow into your system in their natural state. These living foods were created for our digestive systems, bloodstream, and organs.
   Dead foods hit our bodies like a foreign intruder. Chemicals, including preservatives, food additives, bleaching agents, and so on, place a strain on the liver. Toxic man-made fats begin to form in our cell membranes and become incorporated in our bodies or stored as fats. They begin to form plaque in our arteries. Fat also contains compounds called leptins. When the small intestine detects leptins, it sends a message to the brain saying, "I'm satisfied, I'm full, stop eating." However, it takes about twenty minutes from the time we start eating for the food to reach our small intestine and leptin is able to signal the brain to stop eating, and most Americans can eat a tremendous amount of food in twenty minutes. Your brain, sending that it still doesn't have the nutrition it needs, sends our hunger signals. You eat again - more of the same dead food. Your body does its best to harvest the tiny traces of good from the food, but in the end you are undernourished, overfed the wrong foods, and overweight. You are, in other words, caught in the trap of the standard American diet, which is a "SAD" and toxic situation.

   If you say, "Everyone around me eats 'bad' food, and they all look fine," consider that maybe everyone around is unhealthy, in the process of becoming overweight, and disease-prone. If you want to be a healthy, vibrant, energetic person rather than someone bouncing between all-you-can-eat buggets and fast-food restraunts, take your diet seriously. Now is the time to build the rest of your life on this wonderful pillar of health - living food.