Foods That Help You Live Longer

[thalassa]

You should eat your ancestral foods. The bacteria in your gut has evolved to process those foods better than others. Go back five generations and see what they ate. It is likely that at least some of the foods are missing from your diet. In the USA we eat more protein than most other cultures and as a result we are, on the average taller than most other national average. On the down side we eat more trans-fats than most cultures and as a result have more obesity and heart health issues.

Actually, your gut bacteria is mostly a function of things like whether you were born via csection or breastfed and what region you grew up in, if your water came from a well, etc. Your own genetics though, can help or hurt how you process foods...but that is way more complicated than saying you should eat ancestral foods because those same genetics have other functions. As an example, people have melanin to protect folate (it breaks down in sunlight), but because melanin also inhibits vitamin D production, the body came up with ways to conserve vitamin D and manufacture it more efficiently...higher blood cholesterol (a gene that shows up in people's that live very far north as well). Some of these people were forcibly removed from their native homeland...millions upon millions of them, in which a significant number of them died from the journey. The Middle Passage was quite frankly terrible...genocide, anyway you look at it. Because of the number of people being transported and the manner in which they were carried and the resources on board by which to feed them and the ease with which illnesses spread, a significant proportion of them died. It's controversial, but some of the people that do genetic epidemiology think that some genes for salt (electrolyte) conservation helped a number of them survive and that those genes were conserved at a higher rate among African Americans than Africans. Add that to the modern salt and fatty food diet, and it makes sense why African Americans have a higher incidence of salt-related hypertension and premature heart disease than white Americans or Africans. At this point, it's a hypothesis with some support (if you wade through the articles, it's explained and supported and countered and some of the countering is done poorly and then the countered arguments are refuted, and in the end it's hard to say if it's causation or correlation...and either way, because of the political implications, the research has a lot of bias to wade through) , but there are plenty of other food-gene connections....lactose digestion, alcohol metabolization, supertasters, fast metabolizers of medications, etc.

Genetics solve the immediate problem, and leave you with a problem that will kill you (or save you) 500 years later...