10 Vegetables with the Most Scientific Promise for Longevity and Reversing Aging

It would be way too easy to say that the best veggies for longevity are just veggies that have a lot of fiber, but it's not just about fiber. We need to get down to the granular. So, I have 10 vegetables that are the best for lifespan and healthspan by factoring in multiple different things. So, without really wasting your time, let's just jump right into it. The first one is artichokes. Now, the reason that artichokes take the cake, not necessarily the best one, but definitely high on the list, is because of their total antioxidant capacity. We are talking one of the highest, 4.7 millimoles per 100 gram serving. Now, what does that mean? It simply means that when you eat a small amount of artichokes, it has a massive, massive ability to neutralize free radicals that can potentially cause DNA damage that can absolutely affect our lifespan and our healthspan. So, what I want to do with this video is look at not just lifespan, but I want to look at quality of life. How do you stave off illness? How do you stave off just things that would degrade your quality of life as you get into your 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s? The interesting thing about artichokes is they contain something that's called chlorogenic acid. This is also something that you'll find in coffee, but you'll find it in higher amounts in artichokes. And if you look at a paper that was really interesting, it analyzed 94 different studies. And out of these 94 different studies, it found that chlorogenic acid had a tremendous impact on glucose and lipid metabolism. Okay, what this means is that it's going to potentially improve your ability to stave off insulin resistance as you get older. That may affect lifespan, but it's certainly going to affect healthspan, not to mention very long chain inulin, which is in artichoke. So, you don't need much of it. And people don't think of it as a typical like salad-like vegetable. I mean, you can dip it in some horseradish. You can dip it in stuff. It's delicious and you don't need much of it. Anyhow, moving into the next one, which is a more classic vegetable, and that's going to be kale. Now, hear me out on this. I'm not going to start munching kale like a total weirdo. What I really would suggest you do is cook it. Okay, steam it. Kale is bitter. Kale is hard to digest. Maybe it's telling us something, but when you cook it, it does make it more palatable and digestible. But it's also one of the highest antioxidant vegetables that there is, plain and simple. 2.7 millimoles per 100 grams, a bunch of vitamin A, a bunch of vitamin C, and a bunch of vitamin K, and one of the only vegetables that's also high in calcium. So, we have a lot of benefits, but it goes on beyond that. What's interesting about kale is it's unusually high in sirtuins. Now, if you follow Dr. David Sinclair's work, you know he talks about sirtuins pathway. Now, if you look at rodent models, when they do not have sirtuins or low sirtuins, they don't live as long. We also see in human model data that exercise and fasting, which are notorious for being good for longevity, those also increase sirtuin activity. So, we don't know if ingesting sirtuins via eating kale is going to actually have an impact, but it's worth a shot, especially considering there's a bunch of other benefits, too. So, steam it, have a tiny bit of it a couple times per week. It doesn't need to be every day. This next one is specifically good for cardiovascular disease, and that is beetroot. Now, the beet greens are great, too, but this is the straight-up beetroot. Again, not a conventional vegetable. People almost think of it as a fruit. Now, there is something in beets that is called betalain. That is a specific antioxidant that has huge properties on our cardiovascular system. There was a study published in Food Chemistry that actually found betalain in animal models directly increased lifespan. Now, that's not the same thing as in humans, but what makes this particularly interesting is that it was compared to a bunch of other antioxidants. So, when we look at the antioxidants in beets compared to antioxidants in other vegetables, they are the only ones that seem to have an impact on lifespan directly, or at least the highest, the best impact. Now, why is this? It seems to be oxidative stress as far as the vascular system is concerned. So, it seems to help protect our vascular system, our vessels, right? Now, the other side of the equation with this is that beets are high in nitric oxide, which is also something that takes some stress off of the heart by allowing vasodilation, allowing blood to pump better. So, we have something very positive going on here with beets. Then, we move into spinach, another one that gets rained on a lot. Just cook it if you're worried about oxalates, but even still, the amount of lutein and the amount of other antioxidants are really, really high. Now, what's wild is lutein is great for your eyes, but there's also another thing that lutein seems to be good for. There was a study published in the journal Neurology that took a look at 960 people over five years. They found that the more lutein they took in and the more leafy greens that they took in, the less cognitive decline that they experienced, not to mention better eyesight because of the lutein. So, this is a perfect example of healthspan versus lifespan. If your eyesight is good and you're keeping your marbles, that's going to make for a better life, right? So, that's healthspan. You improve your quality of life as you get older. This next one is wild. It's red and purple cabbage. Now, what's interesting, red and purple cabbage have four times the amount of antioxidants as regular cabbage does. Now, predominantly anthocyanins, which are very, very good for the brain, but also seem to be one of the powerful yet also penetrating antioxidants. They can get through the blood-brain barrier, they can get into a lot of nooks and crannies that other antioxidants cannot. There was a study published in Antioxidants that found that these specific antioxidants have impacts on obesity, diabetes, cognition, cardiovascular disease, our neurobiology, like neurodegenerative conditions, and even directly have an impact on our microbiome. So, we think that fiber is all that impacts our microbiome. But in reality, antioxidants actually protect the microbiome and some of the polyphenols that are in things like cabbage can actually feed the microbiome as well. So, we don't know anything about the microbiome other than the fact that having more microbiome and having more bacteria seems to be better. That's about all we can safely say because it is such a wild world down there in our gut. But when we have benefits to increasing diversity of it, we have a powerful impact on our potential health, right? I also put a link down below. If you are adding vegetables into your diet, it might be a good time to also add a good probiotic, which I do not recommend probiotics too much on this channel, but I do like one in particular. It's called Seed. Okay, they are a symbiotic, which is a prebiotic and a probiotic. So, the link I put down below is a 25% off discount link, which gets you 25% off their prebiotic-probiotic combination. So, it has a capsule inside of a capsule. Really, really, really cool technology. You're not going to see anything else like it. So, what happens is when you consume it, you have potential like multi-stage delivery. Prebiotic, probiotic going into the proper places as it digests, which is really unique to them. Plus, they fund a lot of microbiome research. A lot of the proceeds help the microbiome research. So, that link down below saves you 25%. Definitely recommend you add in a probiotic if you're starting to increase your vegetable and fiber intake as well. Then we get to my favorite, broccoli. This is such an interesting one. There was a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that took a look at 134,000 subjects over 4.6 years. 4.6 years, so a long time. And what they found is that cruciferous vegetable intake directly correlated with a decrease in cardiovascular disease-related death. Very strong correlation with a lot, a lot, a lot of data over a long time. Why is this the potential case? Because sulforaphane, which is in broccoli and a lot of cruciferous vegetables, what's unique about sulforaphane is that it activates our endogenous pathways for antioxidants. It's not an external antioxidant. You could take antioxidants until you're blue in the face, but it's not going to be as powerful as driving up your body's natural antioxidant pathways because your body knows what to deal with. We've also seen in other research that sulforaphane activates the NRF2 pathway and other endogenous antioxidant pathways. So, we know that it has an impact. NRF2 is directly related to stress and increasing these anti-inflammatory and antioxidant systems as a result of stress. So, when we activate that pathway, it means our body is quote-unquote sort of stress combating. So, with broccoli, that would be one. If you can have a cruciferous vegetable once per day, I personally feel like you will be much better off. Then we have tomato. This is technically a fruit, but it's still quite interesting. And it all comes down to our friend lycopene, which we used to talk about in the 90s all the time, but it hasn't been surfacing as much recently. So, with lycopene, there was a study that was published in the European Journal of Public Health that took a look at over a thousand subjects for 11 and a half years. What they found is that almost 200 of them ended up having heart attacks over that 11 and a half year period, myocardial infarction. What they found is that all of those people were low in serum lycopene and beta carotene. So, we have a direct correlation there. We can't say why, but we can speculate. It seems as though both lycopene and beta carotene once again protect our blood vessels. And we think of blood vessels as just a system, like a sewage system for our blood, right? But it is an organ system, and it has cells. It has life. We need to take care of it. And if we have vascular damage, then the heart has to work harder. So, that seems to be the equation here. Lycopene supports the vessels, which supports the heart. But we see this in strong, strong data. I hope you've been sticking through to this one because this is one of my personal favorites. And it's the world of sweet potatoes. Now, with sweet potatoes, we have to look at a few different things. Obviously, we look at the fiber intake. That's great. There's a lot of fiber with sweet potatoes. But there's other pieces too. So, sweet potatoes have beta carotene, they have anthocyanins, and they have chlorogenic acid. So, three of the antioxidants we've already talked about in different vegetables, they have them all in one. There was a study that was published in the journal Food Chemistry that took a look at sweet potatoes with various flesh colors and deepness of color. And they found that the deeper the color of the sweet potato, the higher the antioxidant capacity. So, like the orange sweet potatoes were decent in beta carotene. But then when you start getting into the dark purple ones, like the Hawaiian ones, the Hawaiian purple ones that are purple on the outside and purple on the inside, those are the ones that have the richest antioxidant profile. There was also a study that demonstrated looking at high dose sweet potato intake versus low dose versus placebo. They found dose dependent, the higher the sweet potato intake, the better the improvement insulin sensitivity. So, sweet potatoes might very well just be the literal best out of all of these. If I had to choose two, it would be sweet potatoes and broccoli. But there's other combos that we should be looking at. Now, let's move into the next one, which is going to be Swiss chard. The interesting thing about Swiss chard is it has a tremendously high antioxidant score, but it also has 475% of your vitamin K in just a simple serving. But let's be real. What we're interested in is the interesting nooks and crannies stuff. And there is something called Campferal, which again was talked about in like the early 2000s a lot because there was some really cool in vitro research. But then it's, I don't know, life goes on. We don't talk about it as much. Campferal shows really strong promise in in vitro research in inhibiting the growth of cancer. So, we actually see promise in terms of stopping the spreading of cancer, at least in in vitro. Now, to me, that seems like something that might be worth cooking up some Swiss chard. If there's a potential anti-cancer effect, why would we not consume a little bit of it? Just cook it because again, it's pretty bitter and it might have high phytates and oxalic acid if you don't cook it. And last but not least, I have a real twist to throw at you. A while back, I did a video saying that eggplant might be the most worthless vegetable. And you know what? The flesh of an eggplant really has like nothing. There's practically no nutritional value other than a little bit of fiber and some cellulose. There's just not much going on there. But there's relatively recent research that demonstrates that the skin, which a lot of people don't eat the skin, the skin has a high, high, high amount of anthocyanins. Explains why it's almost black in color. It's so rich in anthocyanins. So, the skin is where you get the benefit. But there's also another antioxidant in it that's similar to anthocyanins that's called nasonin. Now, nasonin seems to be very, very interesting when it comes down to DNA protection. So, our DNA gets damaged with age. Oxidative stress damages our DNA, which then sends a cascade of all kinds of different issues with our skin, our cells, our hair, our organs, whatever. So, if you can kind of cast a little force field around it, you have some potential DNA protection. But that's not exactly like concrete stuff yet. The bottom line is that we know anthocyanins are strong and we know this nasonin seems to be promising. So, if you're going to have some eggplant, it's certainly not negative. Although, some people will say the nightshade effect is really bad. However, I think you end up getting a more strong benefit from the anthocyanins than you do negative aspect from the nightshades. As always, keep it locked in here on my channel. See you tomorrow.