How To Die Young at a Ripe Old Age
Russell Gardner
Steven Gundry’s book title, The Longevity Paradox: How To Die Young
at a Ripe Old Age, caught my eye at a book store a few months ago
(2019, 373 pages in hardcover). The store had a sale so it entered
my library because I’m at an age where I wish to maintain as much
youth as I can for as long as I can, I began practicing its
extensive recommendations, now believe his assertions about “leaky
gut” (gut permeability), and also persuaded my wife and several
friends on its merits. Gundry assisted by Jody Lipper writes
colorfully, as seen with “gut buddies” versus “bad bugs—by which he
frequently refers to the gut biome, or bacteria inside the gut,
principally in the colon.
He asserts this is key to whether our tennis court sized intestinal
mucosa only one cell thick keeps its integrity. “… when the wrong
molecules or even bacteria cross the border the immune system kicks
into high gear … releasing inflammatory hormones called cytokines.
[if this happens too often], the result is chronic inflammation, the
ultimate cause of the common diseases of aging … Alzheimer’s,
cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases … chronic, low-grade
inflammation [of human aging] is a symptom, and not the root cause
of what really ages us. Instead, aging is the result of a lack of
the right bacterial population in your gut, along with a leaky gut
that allows bacteria and other particles to pass through the
intestinal border between you and them.” (p. 37-8).
The “How To” of the title hinges on what you eat, and my wife and I
have remarkably more limited diets compared to before. We no longer
allow sugar, grain products except for millet, legumes except for
lentils, and cow milk products that contain the A1 form of casein. A
new vocabulary term for us includes lectins, “a type of “sticky
protein” that plants produce … as part of their survival strategy.
[For example over evolutionary time], lectins paralyzed [insects]
that ate them…” (p.27). “… lectins bind with receptors … along the
gut lining and produce … zonulin, which breaks the tight junctures
that hold together your border wall…” (p38)
Gundry, a physician, backs up many of his assertions from the
research literature so that I became persuaded of his approach. I'm
glad to eat goat and sheep cheese not cow cheese, and can omit most
beans, rice, bread, and the like. But I expect that the frequent act
of putting substances in our mouths and swallowing has sufficient
importance that the Gundry thesis will cause many critical words to
emit from the same portals--through those same chewing and
swallowing mouths that engage with each other on the Union Terrace.