By Robert Heller, MD — Co-Founder and Medical Director, Juvelixir
I have outlived a great many diets.
I began practicing when fat was the villain and margarine was the responsible choice. I watched eggs be condemned, quietly rehabilitated, and condemned again. I have seen carbohydrates play both hero and villain twice. I have watched patients weigh their food, fast for sixteen hours a day, eliminate whole categories of perfectly ordinary things, and buy powders whose names I could not pronounce.
Through all of it I was doing the same unglamorous thing: seeing the same people every year or two for decades, and noticing who was doing well.
What follows is what kept showing up. Not a diet — I am not going to give you one, and I would be a little suspicious of me if I did. Six patterns, which appeared in combination, in people whose eating otherwise looked nothing alike.
1. They mostly ate food they could name
Not organic, not expensive, not local — recognizable. An apple. A piece of fish. Beans. Bread from a bakery. Things that had one ingredient, or a short list of them, or came out of a pot in their own kitchen.
This was the single most consistent thing I saw, and it cut across income in a way that surprised me early and stopped surprising me later. Some of the best-eating patients I had were not wealthy. They were cooking rice and vegetables and a little meat, the way their mother had, and had never given the matter a name.
2. Vegetables were the volume, not the decoration
The plates that impressed me were not the ones with a virtuous garnish beside a large portion of something else. Vegetables occupied real estate. They were the thing there was the most of, and they were prepared in a way the person actually liked — roasted in oil, cooked with garlic, in a soup, not steamed into penance.
I mention the preparation because it is the part that determines whether the pattern survives past March. Nobody sustains an eating habit they are enduring.
3. They ate at roughly the same times
Not a fashionable window. Just regularity — meals that happened at approximately the hours they happened yesterday, most days, with the largest one not landing an hour before bed.
I never had a sophisticated theory about why this mattered. What I could observe was that people with regular meals were less likely to be eating in the unstructured, standing-up, half-attended way that accounts for a good deal of what people eat and almost none of what they remember eating.
4. They ate with other people
More often than not, and this one I did not expect.
A meal with someone else in the room takes longer. It gets sat down for. It requires a plate. It tends to be cooked, because cooking for two is a reason and cooking for one frequently is not. And it gives a person an hour of the day in which their shoulders come down — which is a subject for another entry, except that it kept turning out to be the same subject.
The patients who lived alone and did well had usually built something in its place: a standing lunch, a neighbor, a Sunday. It did not have to be family. It had to be somebody.
5. They stopped when the meal was over
Not when the container was empty. Not when the plate was clean as a matter of principle. There was a moment, and they had some relationship with it.
I never taught this successfully, which I want to be honest about. I could describe it. I could not install it. What I could do was remove the obstacles to it: eating slowly enough to notice, off a plate rather than out of a bag, without a screen carrying the attention elsewhere. Those three made the moment easier to detect in people who could not detect it.
6. They drank less than they had at forty
Alcohol came down over the years in most of the patients who aged well, usually without a dramatic decision. A glass with dinner instead of three. Weekends only. Nothing after nine.
They generally told me they had made the change because of how they felt the next morning — that the arithmetic had simply stopped working in their favor. I bring it up because it is the pattern people most often leave out when they list what they have changed, and it is rarely the least important one.
What did not predict much
The exact ratio of protein to fat to carbohydrate, within any sane range. The precise hour of the first meal. Whether a food was labeled with any particular term of approval. Whether the person could tell me the name of the diet they were on — if anything, the ones who could were slightly more likely to be in their third year of a new one.
And supplements. Not because they cannot be useful, but because I never once saw them reorder this list. The patients doing well on six of these patterns and no supplements were doing better than the patients doing well on two of them and eleven bottles. That was not close.
What this evidence is, and what it is not
I want to be precise, because the rest of this column asks companies to be.
What I have described is clinical observation. It is sixty years of it, across a great many patients, which makes it worth something — but it is not a controlled trial, and it cannot tell you what caused what. The people who cooked and ate with others and drank less had other things in common too, and some of those things I could see and some I could not. A physician who watches carefully for six decades develops well-founded impressions. He does not thereby generate evidence in the technical sense, and I have known too many colleagues who forgot the difference.
So take the list as what it is: the honest testimony of one observer, offered without a trademark, a program, or anything to buy attached to it.
Where a supplement fits into all of this
Last, and on top. Juvelixir is a dietary supplement — nutritional support for adults who are already doing the work described above. It is not food, and it does not replace any part of this list. I take it daily, at ninety, alongside every one of these six patterns, in that order.
If you are going to change one thing this week, do not make it the bottle. Make it a dinner you cooked, eaten sitting down, with somebody.
And bring any real change in appetite, weight, or how you are able to eat to your own physician rather than to an article. I spent sixty years wishing more people would.
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These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This article is for general educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Individual experiences vary. Talk with your doctor or pharmacist before starting any new supplement or making changes to your diet, exercise, or sleep routine, especially if you take medication, have a health condition, or are pregnant or nursing.