Rhonda: So, you were eluding a little bit to some of the studies on dietary restriction and I think it's important a lot... In science, dietary restriction doesn't refer to the extreme type of restriction that you just underwent.

Ray: Yeah. Can I make...real quick... Let me explain how I tell people about this because before I started doing this research, the way I saw it was overnutrition, too much, normal diet, deficient, undernutrition. That's what was in my head. As I began to read, a lot of that dietary restriction without malnutrition work and I'm now always at the end, what I realize is probably, what's more a thing is there's overnutrition, which is actually a small bar because in nature, it's really hard to do that.

Rhonda: But how do you separate overnutrition from giving people getting too much of your amino acids, too much of fatty acids, too much glucose without getting the micronutrients.

Ray: Right, but let me talk the big... At the big block level first, overnutrition is a sort of a small little thing because in nature you don't really have it. Normal nutrition is what we would normally, in a normal healthy person would eat there. But then there's this all diet restricted without malnourishment, which I would say is a big block because that's human survival. We have to be able to survive periods of this up and down with nutrition. And that's a big block.

And interestingly, the things you and I are most interested in, the micronutrients, which are all coming from these leafy green plants, are actually abundant. You don't get much calories from them, but you can find them all the time. And then when they're stressed, xenohormesis, they may be actually given us even more. So, you got that... And there's undernutrition.

When I added this extra block and said, "You know, I call it the survival block." That block is a place where we likely lived and we likely survived, not optimally we don't have parasites. We don't have infectious disease. We don't have the things they we're battling. So, we can, maybe, leverage that to live longer.

So, now, back to what you were saying. I think we that we don't know. I don't know that we know where that upper limit is. But I know that, from a calorie perspective, and I hate to use that word too, because it's misused a lot... And then there's people that even question and we can talk about that in a minute. But we certainly are overnourished from just the calorie-density perspective. You know, we are.

And this is disease of affluence. We have so much disease of affluence. You can go to countries that don't have access and they don't get the same disease. They get the wealth in China, India, and then, they come with it.

Rhonda: What's so interesting is that, and ironic, is that at the same time that we're overnourished, we are, according to a lot these NHANES studies coming out, we are getting inadequate levels of many of these micronutrients. Think, if you're over nourishing yourself that you would then would have adequate levels of these micronutrients. But the thing is, people are eating the wrong food. They're eating the wrong foods and so they're not getting all their folates, vitamin K, selenium. They're not getting all these important micronutrients and yet, they're getting, a lot of fatty acids, amino acids. They're getting a lot of the macronutrients that people like to call them.

Ray: Macro, that's right. yeah.

Rhonda: And it is a big problem, you know...

Ray: Yeah. And what we try to do to address it and we've got a series of papers coming out, but the metabolic winter hypothesis is already there. And the food triangle, one of the reasons we do it... Because first of all, ideology aside, this sort of eat meat, don't eat meat debate is boring to me and I never even go there. You know, we've talked about it that night, it's just gets to be old. So, this isn't a...it's not that.

But it turns out, animals are biologically very similar from a...that's why we use them for models. They've everything. And plants, are very fundamentally simple. And it just so happens, mostly, the energy that you get from animals is mostly fat. And the energy you get from plants is mostly dietary carbohydrate, and I won't say carbohydrate again, except for nuts, and seeds, and avocados, and things like that, that have significant amount fats.

But when we look at it and draw this food triangle, what we put at the top were the leafy greens, the cruciferous vegetables, stems like celery and asparagus, mushrooms, and bulbs, which is what? The vast majority of what you eat every day should come from the top of this thing. If you eat the majority of this food, the volume of food, if you just eat the volume of food...

Now, you have a choice. If you eat on the left side, which will be kind of a Paleo Diet, you can maintain your weight but you won't get as much fiber, you won't get the extra phytonutrients, the extra things that are over here because you end up calorie displacing, energy displacing. If you start adding all these stuff, because as soon as you start adding this part over there, you start going over your energy limit and now you still haven't gotten to where you and I want to get, which is enough of the micronutrients.

On the other hand, when you add on the plant side, what's interesting is, you get great things in fruits and berries, nuts and seeds, I mean, every single issue of "American Journal of Clinical Nutrition" just about has a study on nuts and seeds, and the flavonoids, the carotenoids, all the those that are in nuts and seeds. You get...

Rhonda: Legumes.

Ray: ...legumes and big one I mean, that's a huge life of...you look at the, what is it, the book? "The Blue Zones"

Rhonda: "The Blue Zones"

Ray: You know, legumes are big part of that.

Rhonda: So, this part of it, is it the right side of your...

Ray: The right side of...

Rhonda: ...of your triangle? So, it's a lot of plants, nuts and legumes, right?

Ray: Yeah. Basically, the bottom of that side is cereals, pulses, which are legumes, starchy vegetables, fruits, and then to a small thing, which is nuts and seeds, which we separate just to distinguish the fat content.

Rhonda: From an aging perspective, so a lot of people have different goals. My goal is to have a healthy and extend my healthspan. You mentioned healthspan. And what that really means is to...you're not necessarily going to live to be 200, but you when you are 90 years old, you're going to be physically active, fit. You're going to be biologically 20, 30 years younger, 40, 50 years younger. You have a brain...

Ray: Most people don't guess me at 51.

Rhonda: Right. So, the thing is that there's a chronological age and there's a biological age. And you want to be biologically younger, like, who cares what your chronological age is? And the thing, to bring it back to the legumes and plants and the nuts and seeds is that if you...

Recent study has been published by this Japanese group where they looked at a variety of different biomarkers that are age-related. So, these scientists looked at telomere length markers of senescence. They looked at hematopoiesis. They looked at glycated hemoglobin, blood glucose levels, insulin sensitivity. They looked at inflammatory cytokines biomarkers of inflammation, biomarkers of all the inflammatory pathways.

And they looked at it in three different populations of people: the elderly, which are about 85 to 90 years old; centenarians, which were 100 years old; and then, semi-supercentenarians, which are like 105; and then supercentenarians, which are 110 up to 115. And to me, if you look at the average lifespan in the U.S., it's 79. So, it's close to 80. Well, if we know right now that humans are physically capable of living to be 115 years old, that's almost, you can round up, 40 years longer lifespan. That's like a 50% increase in lifespan. That is huge that we're doing... Right now, no science fiction, no nanobots involved, no CRISPR, nothing. It's already designed in our biology. That's possible, right?

Ray: And in some of those populations, some of them just are sort of outliers, where they just live long. Some of them are fully functional.

Rhonda: Exactly, healthspan, yes.

Ray: Yes, they're fully functional.

Rhonda: Fully functional with cognitive...I mean, they're... So, my point is that the only biomarker that was identified to drive the aging process in all three categories, the elderly, the centenarians, semi...or all four, was inflammation. Inflammation was inversely related to age. It's the longevity. And when you think about the human body and biology and physiology, the number one driver of inflammation in humans, in our bodies, is the gut. The gut is where we have the highest concentration of immune cells, it's where we have the highest concentration of bacteria. And when those two combine, you get war firing away of cytokines. And that's the major source of all inflammation in our body right there.

And what has been shown in countless studies, particularly over the last five years is that the gut likes fiber. These it...

Ray: And not only that, but the gram-negative bacteria, the fat-loving ones, those are the ones that are usually the most inflammatory. And I did a post on this a couple of years ago. And I think there are two really big things that are going to end up coming out of it. First of all, fecal transplants, in our lifetime, will actually, I think, be a part of aging. I think we would end up that just basically, that microbiome, keeping it ripe because of antibiotics, because of the things that we do in life that destruct.

You know, I usually tell people, "You know, you send 12 Amish men to a rock concert, they can have a great message, get up on stage. But the environment is not conducive." And in that microbiome, they are what we eat. Their waste products go in our absorption organ. And this is critical.

And it's not just because we've seen all the transplant studies we've done in mice. It's not just eating the food, but it's also having the right distribution down there. And all it takes is a little bit of wrong things and then you get an explosion of something. And so, again, what's socially extreme may not be biologically extreme. The kinds of solutions we need to have for that and the kind of fiber in the food. And what we need to do, on the right side of the food triangle, I guess, I should just say right, for the audience. On the right side of the food triangle, all of those food we're going higher and higher in fiber.

Rhonda: Right and it's interesting that these different types of fiber, like with different types of beans and nuts, they're fueling different types of bacteria. And they make these byproducts that are literally regulating our immune system, they're regulating hematopoiesis, they're increasing the amount of t-regulatory cells to regulate autoimmunity. They're decreasing all these immune cells that are firing away... So, they're regulatory the inflammatory process. And gut, that's point on...

Ray: And all these, well, oligosaccharides...

Rhonda: All those, exactly...

Ray: ...that you feed them. And that's just crazy, all the things that are going on there and yet, if you think about what we're doing is we're, first of all, we're deluging that from the time we wake up in the morning until the time we go to bed, we're just always in the chronically fed state. We weren't in the chronologically fed state.

And in our next paper, one of the next papers that we're having, it will talk about the implications of the chronically fed state.