Is There Such a Thing as an Anti-Aging Diet?

You get to that point in your life where you start looking in the mirror and noticing the wrinkles. They creep onto your face, steadily and insidiously. That day will come to us all, if it hasn’t already. While time waits for no man, there are steps you can take to distract it along the way. If botox isn’t your thing, or you’re looking for something a bit more natural to take a few years off your face, you might want to consider tweaking your diet. A diet which we at Food Crowd luckily can help you organize.

            Now, there’s no one-stop-fix for maintaining a youthful gaze, not when it comes to make-up, as legions of Instagram influencers have shown us, and not when it comes to food. There’s no one blue or red pill you can take that will reverse the sands of time. The chemistry and biology of our diet is complicated and the layperson is hard put to make heads or tails of it. Am I supposed to eat blueberries all day or what? Or was it no blueberries? Is chocolate good for me or not?

            To be honest, a lot of the anti-aging diet stuff is just fluff. I mean, we are all inexorably aging, that’s just the truth of the matter. There are, however, real studies showing real improvements to the outward signs of aging. They’re linked, wouldn’t ya know it, to the world-famous Mediterranean diet. The science has to do with these things on our DNA strands called telomeres and how they shorten as you age and how that’s due to inflammation and stress and that makes them a biomarker of aging and yadda yadda yadda. Let’s not get lost in the weeds with all the technical talk. The point is sticking to a Mediterranean diet has been shown to lengthen those telomeres and by doing so, reduce the outward signs of time passing.

            People started to notice more than a half a century that people in the Mediterranean had less heart disease and they quickly linked that back to their diet. Sure enough, the diet prevents heart disease and strokes. But now we know it also helps you look younger! Sorry, Scandinavia, but the Mediterranean seems to be winning out, and not just in terms of sunshine.

            This diet isn’t a terribly hard one to follow and you might already be doing it. Here are the basic tenets: olive oil should be your main go-to fat when you’re cooking; fish should be on the menu a couple times a week; your main ingredients should be vegetables, whole grains, and legumes; and fresh fruit is a great alternative to ice cream for dessert.

            You don’t have to have your own private orchard (although wouldn’t that be nice); Food Crowd has fresh online vegetables and fresh fruit for your weekly shopping basket. We also can keep you well stocked in fish, legumes, and whole grains. If you want to look 15 years younger and like you just got back from a week on a Grecian isle, the easiest thing to do is just eat like a Greek!