Dick Van Dyke, now 98 years old, says he can’t figure out his secret to longevity. Yet in a recent interview, he may have nailed it. He’s a natural person to ask about his secret: he’s famous, well known by every generation. He still appears energetic and youthful, and could pass for someone in his 70’s. He still works, though much less than before, and it’s obvious from interviews that he is mentally sharp. He is still very agile, recently doing a little dance routine at a celebration for Carol Burnett.
Is his secret exercise? Certainly in his younger days he was in fantastic shape, as is obvious from dance scenes in Mary Poppins and other movies. He says that he stays active, still going to the gym three days each week. Few have been as active as he has been across an entire lifetime, so activity and exercise certainly appear to be part of his secret.
Here’s the skinny…
As an offhanded comment, he mentioned that he “stayed skinny, that helps.” And for most of his life, except for a few years during his 70’s, he stayed quite trim, yet healthy. He never appeared muscular, despite his physical abilities. Skinny is the right word for his lifelong physique. If you are looking for a “secret” to longevity, would you consider being skinny as very important?
We are learning through research just how important it is. Exercise has many benefits, and is absolutely vital to health and longevity. But excess fat, over time, does damage that even exercise can’t overcome. Body fat is inflammatory.
We know how excess fat becomes a cardiovascular risk, wears down joints, and makes life generally harder. Few would argue that too many pounds are a problem. But fat is continually causing trouble for the immune system. As excess calories, in the form of triglycerides, are stored in white adipose tissue (WAT) cells, the cells swell with fat. At some point they are overworked and some die off, activating the immune system to do clean-up. Fat also is a convenient place for your body to store toxins, which is protective until those cells die off or otherwise release their contents.
Dieting can make this problem worse. As you attempt to reign in calories, your body will turn to fat stores to make up the deficit. In taking the fat, your body also gets hit with some of the stored toxins. Yo-yo dieting is particularly toxic, as it causes a number of cycles of fat build up and then fat/toxin dumping. But even without dieting, just having excess fat is a toxic and inflammatory drain on your body.
Published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise is a study where researchers explored the question of whether reducing fat or a good exercise program is more important in longevity. They were exploring the effect of both on the effective brain age relative to the chronological brain age, which they were able to do through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the study participants. What they found was surprising: the exercising group did not improve their effective brain age. What they did gain was significant: they were fitter, got better sleep, and even increased gray matter in their brains(1). Grey matter consists of neuronal cell bodies and their dendrites. The dendrites are short finger like protrusions that communicate with adjacent neurons. The white matter consists of the axons of neurons that transmit impulses to more distant regions of your brain and spinal cord. Increased intelligence is associated with increased gray matter. These are tremendous benefits from exercise but they could not roll back the clock on their brain age as effectively as the diet could. What causes the brain to age beyond the physical age? The answer is the same thing that causes accelerated aging across the body: inflammation. And inflammation is brought about by challenges to the immune system, which is exactly what WAT provides.
This is shown in multiple studies. Peer review and study consolidation is done by researchers in review studies. One such study is published in Metabolites. There, researchers from the Laboratory of Neuroimmuno-Metabolism, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil have consolidated results from major studies into the subject of fat-caused brain damage. Their primary conclusion: “During the progression of obesity, adipose tissue undergoes immune, metabolic, and functional changes that induce chronic low-grade inflammation.” In a cited study, this conclusion was made: “the authors concluded that Alzheimer’s disease risk increased by 36% for every 1.0 increase in BMI.” BMI refers to a Body Mass Index test, which indicates how much total body mass is fat. (2) This study also highlighted a more complex implication of excess fat that involves a reduction in mitochondria respiration and energy at the cellular level due to insulin resistance, and if you are carrying excess fat, you also likely have excessive insulin resistance as well, even if you don’t have diabetes. The mitochondria dysfunction is also found in some of the studies that were associated with neurotoxicity, which then causes damage and death to brain cells.
Above all, do no harm
One thing you really need to avoid the throughout life is permanent damage. Your body is a master rebuilder and healer, so long as the platform it is rebuilding upon is sound and not damaged in its core. Your brain is very sensitive to damage, which it is getting in small measure every day that you carry excess fat. That time adds up. The more time in your life you spend without much fat, the less brain damage you will accrue from this inflammatory load. Dick Van Dyke didn’t examine the evidence for his statement that being skinny helped, but there is little doubt that it did, especially since it was a hallmark of his life.
What this really says is that, no matter how vigorously you exercise or diet, you must deal with what you eat long term, because yo-yo diets, fad diets, and straight abstinence doesn’t deal well with inflammation. Getting and maintaining a proper weight will happen automatically if you eat right consistently, and it will be hard — perhaps even harmful — if you try to merely cut calories. Both dieting and exercise increase the oxidative load on your body. Your food can, through good antioxidant supply, counteract this load. Your food can reduce and stabilize your weight. If you eat the standard American diet, you have no chance of removing excess fat in a non-damaging way. If you attempt to remove excess fat via exercise, you will be stronger and may have a better physique, but you are still at risk of inflammation from your fat during the process.
The bottom line is this: excess fat is a threat that can’t be counteracted simply with exercise. Exercise does many things, including improving brain function, but fat is causing brain damage over time. Exercise can help somewhat to remove fat, but it’s slow: it can take days of significant exercise to burn the 3500 calories needed to lose one pound of fat. We underestimate just how efficient fat is in storing energy, and overestimate how fast exercise can take away that fat. No, the only effective way to lose those unwanted pounds is through diet — not dieting, but a consistent way of eating that becomes normal.
Dieting is defined as “restricting oneself to small amounts or special kinds of food in order to lose weight.” It’s a special temporary process which may be abnormal for long term. That may be helpful in kick-starting your new lifestyle, but should not be a temporary fix that gets reversed later. The best diet is something you can maintain for life. The good news is: such a diet will bring you to an appropriate weight and keep you there. The ideal diet is nutrient packed, low in calories, and — best of all — doesn’t require restricting the amount that you eat.
Feed on this
What is this magic diet? In a word: plants. Even plant fat is good, and in fact necessary to provide the sustained energy you need instead of the up-and-down energy of carb calories. You don’t need meat if you balance your plant diet foods — meat and other animal products carry too many toxins, cause acidity in your body, and all that excess protein can still add to your excess body fat. It is little known, but protein can be stored as fat. Not directly — protein can’t simply be transformed into fat, but through a process called gluconeogenesis, protein can become sugar, and excess sugar gets stored as fat. So to properly shed pounds, you are left with two types of food: low sugar carbohydrates and fat, and because of the numerous problems with animal products, they should be plant based — living green leafy vegetables, seeds, nuts, and avocados in particular.
To sum up: diet is supremely important because it leads to a proper body mass index. It does so automatically. As you shed those pounds, the antioxidants from a plant diet protect you from the oxidative damage when fat toxins are released. Each point added to your BMI over the ideal body mass is increasing your risk of brain damage and brain disease over time, so excess fat is your enemy. It doesn’t hurt to be a bit skinny. Exercise for all the benefits that it gives — they are powerful. But first avoid damage — that’s why the extra pounds have to come off.
Dick Van Dyke was not a perfect model of lifelong health pursuit: he struggled with alcohol and smoking addictions at points in his life. Yet he is still active at 98, quite agile, still working, and clearly has no signs of dementia. Balance and agility are as much a function of the brain as is thought, so he obviously kept his brain in very good shape. Now he’s reaping the benefits.
As he said, being skinny helped. Likely it helped a lot.
Dr. Nemec’s Review
So to sum up this research, overeating wrong foods produces and stores white adipose tissue which is inflammatory fat.
This white fat is highly inflammatory and very degenerative to cells exposed to its byproducts. What cells are most sensitive to inflammatory and toxic conditions in the body? Nerve cells and especially brain cells. So the more white inflammatory fat you have on your body, the more neurological and brain dysfunction and damage you will receive. This is a given: more fat equals less cognitive function, more brain damage and neurological damage.
Exercise is extremely critical for all aspects of your health, including your brain health — as the study showed, the more exercise, the more you increase gray matter, which is the part of your brain associated with increased memory and cognitive function. But the study showed that exercise did not have the same anti-aging affects as did eating a diet that produced no white fat.
Inflammation equals aging
White adipose tissue, which comes from eating excessive cooked carbohydrates and animal proteins, produces inflammatory molecules continually, and this inflammation leads to nervous system degeneration and death along with brain cell degeneration and death. This predisposes you not only to dementia, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson disease, but also all the neuron degenerative diseases, including multiple sclerosis, ALS, neuropathy, neuritis and pain syndromes. In America we take it for granted that it’s just the way things are because when they eat a standard American diet, standard Americans produce inflammatory fat and their weight goes up. That’s why most Americans are overweight or obese. It’s because of their diet primarily, and secondarily the lack of exercise. This is not the way it was meant to be in the beginning. We ate living raw plant food and we did not eat cooked, process, denatured, oxidized and glycated foods. We did not eat food that contained free radicals, toxins and added chemicals, preservatives, radiation, and genetically modified organisms.
Let’s get back to basics
Get back to the Seven Basic Steps to Total Health, to an anti-inflammatory life and anti-aging way of life. Of the seven basic steps, diet and exercise are critical, but as the studies have shown when it comes to inflammation and aging, diet rules supreme. So where exercise will increase your memory, increase your overall health and longevity, it will not decrease Inflammation out of your brain tissue as a efficiently as eating a plant-based diet low in high glycemic index vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, and avocados.
Is exercise anti-inflammatory for the brain? It is, but not to the extent that the proper diet is. So when it comes to brain and neurological system health, diet and exercise are the one-two punch. They are the knockout of the inflamers, but in this boxing analogy, the right-handed boxer is going to hit harder with the right hand than the left. So proper diet is the right punch, proper exercise is the left punch — and when you use both of them together, it is a knockout to inflammation.
We note the story of a statesman talking to another statesman, Winston Churchill, who was an obviously obese person. Churchill spoke first to the appearance of the very thin statesmen saying “sir, you look as if there’s a famine in the land.” The skinny statesman‘s response was, with quick wit right to the point, “sir, you look as if you caused the famine in the land!”
Let us all start working on our diet, exercise, and lifestyle today and we can produce a paradigm shift in America and the world where strong and thin is the new normal; not the exception, but the rule. If you want to thrive at 105 mentally, cognitively, and physically, then you want to master these basics and live the rest of your life lean and enjoying life to the full because your body, brain and mind all work optimally as they were meant to.
Here are the ways we can help you in your health journey:
- Outpatient Comprehensive Teaching and Treatment Program-has the most benefit of teaching, treatment, live classes and personalized coaching. This program has the most contact with Dr. Nemec with 3- 6 month programs that can be turned into a regular checking and support program for life. This is our core program that has helped so many restore their health and maintain that restoration for years.
- Inpatient Comprehensive Teaching and Treatment Program-is our four-week intensive inpatient program for those that are not in driving distance, usually over 4 hour drive. This is the program that is an intensive jumpstart with treatment, teaching, live classes and coaching designed for all our international patients along with those in the US that do not live in Illinois. This program is very effective especially when combined with our new membership program support.
- Stay at Home Program-is offered to continental US patients who cannot come to Revolution New Medicine but still want a more personal, customized plan to restore their health. This program also includes our Learn Membership Program.
- Membership Program is our newest program offered for those that want to work on their health at a high level and want access to the teaching at Revolution New Medicine along with the Forums: both Dr. Nemec’s posts and other members posting. And also, to have the chance to get personalized questions answered on the conference calls which are all archived in case you miss the call. The Membership Program has 3 levels to choose from: Learn, Overcome and Master. The difference is at the Overcome and Master levels you received one on one calls with Dr. Nemec personalizing your program for your areas of focus.
(1) Wing D, Eyler LT, Lenze EJ, Wetherell JL, Nichols JF, Meeusen R, Godino JG, Shimony JS, Snyder AZ, Nishino T, n GE, Nagels G, Roelands B. Fatness but Not Fitness Linked to BrainAge: Longitudinal Changes in Brain Aging during an Exercisea Intervention. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2024 Apr 1;56(4):655-662. doi: 10.1249/MSS.0000000000003337. Epub 2023 Nov 7. PMID: 38079309; PMCID: PMC10947938., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38079309/
(2) Schmitt, Luisa O, and Joana M Gaspar. “Obesity-Induced Brain Neuroinflammatory and Mitochondrial Changes.” Metabolites vol. 13,1 86. 5 Jan. 2023, doi:10.3390/metabo13010086, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9865135/
