Michael Mosley and Mayo: the way to good health

IT takes work to stay on top of your game. You could try the hard way, but there are some short cuts.

Side View of a Barefoot, Young Businessman Sitting in the Lotus Position on Top of a Table

AS you get older, male and female sexual organs shrink, your feet and nose get bigger, your eyes and ears don’t work as well and your teeth fall out. Gee, hardly worth the trouble, is it?

With 70 being the new 40 and 40 being the start of the downhill trip, today we reveal how to live longer and better. First up, all the science tells that the most powerful thing you can do to extend your life is eat less. Basically eating anything at all is bad for you. Of course, if you follow this to its logical conclusion you would be dead pretty quickly. So the answer is intermittent fasting or what the BBC’s Michael Mosley calls the five-day, two-day diet.

Not only does limiting your food to about 600 calories a day for two days seem to cut your risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and possibly smaller sex organs, it probably helps stave off Alzheimer’s, dementia and memory loss in front of ICAC. Mike’s book, The Fast Diet, is $20 at the bookshop or $8 as a Kindle download.

On the five other days you can eat a lot, get stuck into the Mediterranean diet. The Mayo Clinic says an analysis of more than 1.5 million healthy adults demonstrated that following a Mediterranean diet was associated with a reduced risk of death from heart disease and cancer, as well as a reduced incidence of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. The diet helps reduce chronic inflammation, which speeds up ageing and causes every disease known to lab rats.

So if you want to look like Fabio, Giorgio Armani, Leonardo da Vinci, Isabella Rossellini or Monica Belluci, then you have to eat things such as fruit and vegetables, wholegrains, nuts and fish, and cut out salt, red meat and butter. But the good doctors at Mayo say drinking red wine in moderation, as southern Europeans do, is good for you. On that basis alone I should live to be a 150. Read about it at mayo.org.

Finally you have to exercise, preferably with other people. Even moderate exercise makes you a better cardiovascular person, and it helps you sleep better and enhances arousal for women and helps men have less erectile dysfunction. Best of all, it is a sensational antidepressant. So, given you will look better, be less grumpy and feel sexier, you have no excuse for not exercising with others. Friendships have a significant effect on both your health and quality of life.

If you don’t have enough time to exercise, Jamie Timmons, professor of systems biology at Loughborough University in England, says that three 20-second bursts of high-intensity exercise a week will not only get you as fit as hours of road running or sweating buckets in a gym, it will also help you lose kilos of fat. Naturally, Mosley has written a book on this. It’s unsurprisingly called Fast Exercise and promises “to get you fitter, stronger and better toned in 10 minutes a day, three times a week”.

If all else fails, then go with testosterone, Viagra, Botox and red wine. As that fount of science, winefolly.com, says: “your red wine habit might just be the key to staying young longer”.

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