Can You Really EAT Yourself Young?
Anti-ageing discoveries in nutrition regularly make the front-page news, so seductive is the promise that ditching one type of food – or stocking up on another – could bag you a few extra birthdays (and the chance to blow out your candles unburdened by disease). But conflicting findings and overblown headlines common in nutritional science make how you do this far less clear cut. After all, what makes for a good story doesn’t always stack up when you read the small print. So, what of the news really passes muster? We combed the journals and called up leading experts across the field of nutrition – and longevity – for the answers you can trust.
THE MYTH
Follow the Mediterranea diet and you’ll live to 100
The story:
Scientists have been fascinated by the link between a Mediterranean diet and longevity since the ’90s. Despite poorer access to medical care than you’d find in much of western Europe at the time, people living in Crete, Greece and southern Italy had lower rates of chronic disease and a higher-than-average life expectancy, with more
