1-Sentence-Summary: The Longevity Paradox explores ways to live a longer, healthier life and “die young” as a senior, instead of having to go through illnesses, all by focusing on the microbiome and improving our lifestyle as heart surgeon Steven Grundy suggests.
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Everybody wants to live a long, happy life and reach old age without compromising their quality of life. Essentially, that’s what all of us aim for when we start becoming more conscious about our health levels and exercise intake. The Longevity Paradox by Steven R. Gundry delves deep into these concepts and shares a series of must-know secrets of a long life.
It all starts with the microbiome. Although genes play an important role, there are plentiful things that fall into the responsibility of humans to calibrate within their bodies. Fasting, eating the right foods, and implicitly, not eating certain foods, all play an even bigger role in our healthy development.
Therefore, let’s explore the top three lessons from this book to learn even more about the secrets of longevity:
- Too much cardio and too much animal protein are detrimental to our health.
- During deep sleep, the glymphatic system is most active in clearing out the brain from toxins.
- Your gut is deeply connected to your brain, almost as if you had two brains registering information.
Living a long life and maintaining great health levels can be achieved if you know the right way to do things, which is why we’ll explore each lesson one by one.
Lesson 1: To live a good, long life, you’ll have to regulate your cardio and animal protein intake.
With so many diets out there, it can be challenging to find the right formula for living healthy. However, simply taking a look at the populations who live longest, such as the Okinawans, can give us the answer. It seems that a plant-based diet is one good approach to dieting.
While animal protein is good and nutritious, the author recommends avoiding intaking more than three ounces a day. When it comes to carbs, aim for the complex ones that come from purple potatoes, yams, and other resistant starches. In contrast to these, rice, corn, and grains don’t keep you full for too long. They also increase your blood sugar drastically.
When it comes to cardio, it seems that too much of it can cause unnecessary stress in your body. While it’s great to exercise, forcing your body to practice too much sport can weaken it and stress it. In other words, don’t overtrain! Do your regular exercises, but hear your body out when it wants to rest. In the end, it’ll also help you achieve better results.
Lesson 2: When we reach the stage of deep sleep, our system clears itself.
First thing first, let’s explain the concept of deep sleep. The usual sleep cycle lasts about seven to nine hours. During this period, we enter deep sleep, which refreshes us the next morning. During this stage, our eyes move rapidly, our breath increases, and we experience dreaming.
Deep sleep is particularly important when it comes to living a longer, better life because it’s during this stage that our brain gets cleared from all toxins. The lymphatic system is responsible for washing out the debris from your brain during deep sleep.
When this process occurs, your brain cells shrink in size. This allows a particular fluid to enter your brain and clear it up. To enter this phase of sleep, you have to prepare your brain to slow down. Therefore, allow your body to go into resting mode by eating your last meal four hours before you go to sleep.
While avoiding blue light from screens before sleep is also important, having your body spend all its energy on clearing itself instead of digesting food is essential for deep sleep. Meat and heavy foods take longer to digest, but you’ll want to avoid any meals whatsoever as you get closer to hitting the bed.
Lesson 3: Listen to your body when it sends you signals, as it’s probably your gut trying to connect with your brain.
Modern medicine recently stumbled upon a breakthrough discovery: the human gut sends messages to the brain, which then get intercepted and synthesized for us to understand. In other words, your brain and your gut are interconnected. And it is the latter who sends the messages, not the other way around.
The means of communication between the two is the vagus nerve, which is the longest nerve of the autonomic system. This nerve is able to signal your brain regarding your digestion, heart rate, any respiratory issues, and so on.
Moreover, there’s approximately nine times as much communication coming from your gut to your brain than the other way around. For this reason, it’s particularly important to listen to your body when it’s trying to communicate with you, as it carries important messages about your health.
More interesting than this, your gut has neurons, just like your brain does, and the approximate count is around 100 million, which are being used to send those signals up to your brain receptors. Moreover, the gut is responsible for 80-90% of our serotonin levels. It looks like our happiness lies in the stomach, after all!
The Longevity Paradox Review
The Longevity Paradox offers a hands-on approach to becoming a healthy version of yourself and adopting a lifestyle that’ll serve you well till you reach old age. The author has done his research for this book, who is a well-renowned heart surgeon that carried out much of his studies based on the healthiest nations in the world. He compiled all the valuable data he found under this study. Reading this book will reveal the secrets behind living a high-quality life and reaching old age by simply changing your eating habits, ditching certain foods, and working on your sports intake.
Who would I recommend The Longevity Paradox summary to?
The 30-year-old who wants to ditch the poor living habits they’ve developed in their twenties, the 45-year-old who is slowly becoming more health-conscious as they age and want to improve their life quality or the 25-year-old health addict who is looking to develop a long-lasting routine in their life so as to prolong their youth and age slowly.
Last Updated on October 6, 2022
