Professor Valter Longo - The Longevity Diet: How to live to 100 . . . Longevity has become the new wellness watchword . . . nutrition is the key VOGUE

8.1. Diabetes onset risk increases with higher body mass index

Another study indicates the best way to assess risk for diabetes is by measuring abdominal fat via waist circumference. Men with a waist measurement above forty inches and women with a waist measurement above thirty-four inches are at the highest risk.

Maintaining an ideal weight will minimize the chance of developing diabetes. We know from both human and monkey studies that a severely calorie-restricted diet can either completely prevent diabetes, as in monkeys, or, as in humans, cause such a dramatic reduction in fasting glucose levels and abdominal fat that it would be highly unlikely that these individuals would develop diabetes.

However, the great majority of people cannot maintain a 30 percent calorie-restricted diet, and dont want to give up most of the foods they enjoy; nor should they want to lose large quantities of muscle mass or become too thin, which would be unavoidable after prolonged calorie restriction. Also, several studies indicate calorie restriction does not reduce fasting glucose among obese people the same way it does among people starting from a normal weight. To prevent diabetes, then, it is important to identify strategies better suited to a majority of people.

In the following section, I present both the everyday dietary changes and the periodic fasting-mimicking diets that can be adopted to prevent and help reverse diabetes.

Adopting the Longevity Diet described in can help prevent and has the potential to reverse diabetes in some subjects. Not only will it help you maintain or reach a healthy weight and abdominal fat levelespecially when combined with the exercise guidelines in chapter 5but also it may reduce diabetes incidence independently of weight. Here are specific dietary interventions that can help prevent and treat diabetes:

1. Eat within twelve hours or fewer per day.

In

This technique can be adjusted to further regulate weight. For example, if limiting food intake to eleven to twelve hours per day isnt sufficient, it can be limited to ten or even eight hours per day (8 a.m. to 6 p.m., or 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.), although limiting the food intake period to less than eleven to twelve hours could have side effects including gallstones. However, restricting food intake to an eleven- to twelve-hour window every day is often observed in very long-lived populations, so this more permissive time frame is probably a safer choice until further studies become available.

2. Be nourished: eat more, not less, but better.

As discussed in , if you ate 5.3 ounces of pasta or pizza with 5.3 ounces of cheese, you could be consuming 1,100 calories in a relatively small portion that is deficient in important vitamins and minerals. If you instead ate 1.4 ounces of pasta (about 140 calories) and an additional 14 ounces of garbanzo beans (about 330 calories) plus 11 ounces of mixed vegetables (about 210 calories) and 0.5 ounce of olive oil (about 120 calories), you would reach only 800 calories, while eating a large portion rich in proteins, healthy fats, complex carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals.