The Grandfather(mother) Diet

The big question of course is 'what can I eat that will make me live forever or at least longer than a turtle?' Calorie-restrictive diet proponents will tell you 'not much at all' but it turns out that making mice live longer by cutting their caloric intake may not have as pronounced an effect in humans. The current trend of anti-oxidant gulping is also under a lot of scrutiny as merely isolating and synthesizing compounds believed to ward off disease not only doesn't have the same benefit as the isolates do in whole food, they may even have a contrary effect. The New York Times* has an excellent article on our current dietary fads and basically sums it up with the idea that we should eat food, not too much, and mostly plants. The second two are self-explanatory but what the author meant by 'eat food' was that we should only eat foods that our great-great-grandparents would recognize as food, and not the processed garbage that litters the aisles of our grocery stores. The promising field of nutrigenomics is looking to build diets based on our individual genetic predispositions to disease. This could be perhaps the most significant revolution in dieting when it becomes cost effective to map an individuals DNA. Until then, I propose 'The Grandfather Diet' which would entail eating similar foods to your long living grandparents or conversely, avoiding the gustatory habits that took out your relatives at an early age. On that note, I've got a plate of bacon I need to wash down with a pint of vodka just like Grandpa Brown did to the ripe old age of 85.


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