Everyone wants to live longer. The Longevity Diet by Brian M. Delaney and Lisa Walford talks about how to live a longer, healthier life.
The funny thing about this book is how simple the authors say it is to achieve a longer, healthier life. To me, it’s nothing new and basically common sense! The authors claim that by reducing your caloric intake (or what the book calls Calorie Reduction, CR) that you will live a longer, healthier life. Of course, they talk about good nutrition and all the essential vitamins you need along with eating ample fruits and vegetables with a reduction of carbohydrates, but the bottom line is the less you eat the healthier you will be!
Up until the beginning of the nineteeth century, if a person was overweight that was a sign of wealth. Interestingly, today it’s the reverse. People from lower socio-economic backgrounds tend to eat fast foods, which are are less expensive, but extremely high in calories.
The Longevity Diet focuses on the “Scientific Background” in the beginning with specific nutritional facts and data that everyone should know. Longevity testing was done on rats in a laboratory and was proven to increase effective. Testing has just begun on humans but as the book suggests, it could take more than 100 years.
Think about the meals we have when we go out to dinner. They are enormous. And what were we taught when we were young? Do you remember hearing,: “Eat everything on your plate and become a member of the clean plate club!?”
Authors, Delaney and Walford say that by practicing CR, you will losse weight, but that is ultimately not the goal. The goal is to live a longer, healthier life. They say that you should focus on vegetables and fruits and think of them as a “rainbow.” By eating the rainbow, you will get all of your essential nutrients.
For example:
• Blue for blueberries
• Purple for grapes, figs or eggplant
• Red for tomatoes, beets and apples
• Orange for carrots, sweet potatoes and oranges
• Yellow for corn, bananas and pineapple
• Green for lettuce, green peppers or kiwis
• White for cauliflower, white potatoes and mushrooms
What I liked about the book is that it provided sample menus and calorie counts to various foods. It also encouraged readers to write down everything they eat to see what they could cut out.
There is a full section on exercise, which includes an extensive information on yoga and yoga positions. The back of the book is also filled with healthy recipes.
What I also liked about the book was that it was lined with case studies. All the theoretical stuff was brought back to reality with these demonstrated through real-life case studies.
However, what I didn’t like was that it was quite technical in the beginning and I found it hard to understand for a layperson not knowing anything about healthy eating or good nutrition.
The bottom line: eat healthy, eat less, and exercise and you too can live a longer life!
This blog Review: The Longevity Diet by Brian M. Delaney and Lisa Walford was first published in Blogcritics.org.
