Is this the best diet for living longer?

Is there such a thing as a longevity diet?  If there is, it could be a modified Mediterranean diet, with an emphasis on fish and less protein.

It works, say researchers from the University of Southern California—at least on mice, who lived healthier lives, and had less body fat and were less frail.

Another study, that ran alongside the tests on mice, found that eating less meat reduces the rate of type 2 diabetes and obesity, which suggests the longevity diet might just work on us, too, the researchers surmise.

The diet is mainly made up of vegetables and fish, along with small amounts of eggs, meat and dairy for important amino acids that aren’t in vegan and vegetarian diets.  Longevity expert Valter Longo, who led the study, says the diet provides low but adequate amounts of methionine and other essential amino acids.

Although he advocates a vegetarian version of the Mediterranean diet for longevity, he has noted that those who follow it suffer frailty and unsteadiness when they’re old.  As a result, he has modified it to include small amounts of amino-rich foods.

Longo and his team tested four diets on the mice: a standard diet; a high-sugar, high-fats Western diet; a low-carb keto diet, and his low protein, methionine supplemented longevity diet (LDMM).

The LDMM mice fared best: they lived longer, healthier lives, had less body fat and showed fewer signs of frailty.

There was one unexpected result: the LDMM mice ate more than the other groups and took in as many calories as the other diets.  However, they needed to keep their methionine levels low, but sufficient.

“This challenges the dogma that calorie reduction is necessary to lose weight, but it also tells us that we need to have clear understanding of the mechanisms.  Too little methionine caused frailty, but too much methionine abolished the benefits of this diet, which was otherwise based on the diet of long-lived populations like the traditional Italian and Okinawa diets.  These results indicate that overall protein intake may be less important than specific amino acid intake,” Longo said.

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