This 75-Year-Old Vegan Chef Is Defying Age — The 3 Foods She Eats Almost Every Day (Chef Babette)

Babette Davis is 75 years old, and the very first thing she puts in her body every single morning, before coffee, before water, before one bite of food, is a tall glass of green juice she makes with her own two hands. That is the first of three foods this woman eats on almost any ordinary day. If the name is new to you, here is Babette in a line. For 18 years, she ran a small vegan restaurant in Los Angeles called Stuff I Eat. She can fold down into a full split cold, with no warm-up, and on the morning I keep picturing she was flat on a bare restaurant kitchen floor doing a hundred full push-ups, nose almost to the tile, counting them out loud in no particular hurry, the way you might count out change. 75, with the skin of a woman decades younger. So, I am going to give you all three foods, in the order she reaches for them, along with the one rule she swears, matters every bit as much as what is on the plate. And I am going to tell you about the stretch of days, several times a year, when she simply stops eating altogether. The one piece of her routine I am going to ask you not to copy, and I will tell you exactly why when we get there. Get a pen if you keep one near. And if you are somewhere past 60, and you have started to feel the tacks of it, the afternoon slump, the joints that argue with the stairs, the quiet worry about the years where you are still the one who has to take care of yourself, then stay with me, because this woman built the entire back half of her life out of subtraction, and almost none of it cost money. So, the glass. Into a juicer she puts a fat handful of cilantro, a whole green apple, a knuckle of fresh ginger she does not bother to measure, the juice of a lemon, sometimes a lime, and a pile of green leaves, kale or chard or whatever is crisp that week. Now and then, a little raw beet turns the whole thing the murky color of a pond. She drinks it down first thing, on an empty stomach, and she has done it so many mornings she no longer thinks of it as a health habit, the way you no longer think of brushing your teeth. It is simply the first thing that happens in her day. And here is the part worth slowing all the way down on. Those green leaves she pours in every single morning are, pound for pound, the most studied food on the entire longevity map. A researcher named Martha Clare Morris put nearly a thousand older people under the lens for years, and the ones eating a serving of leafy greens a day had brains that tested, on the memory tasks, around 11 years younger than the ones who skipped them. 11 years. Not out of a pill that isolates one green molecule and sells it back to you for $40. Out of the leaf. Babette never read that study. She just drank the leaf every morning for 35 years, and arrived exactly where the study is pointing. I made her juice myself one morning, at the window, over my own sink where the light comes in first. A fistful of cilantro, a green apple, the ginger, one lemon squeezed by hand. It foamed up pale green and it smelled like a cut lawn and a cough drop at the same time, and it tasted, if I am honest with you, like drinking a garden. I felt nothing the first week, nothing the second. Somewhere in the third week I noticed I had stopped reaching for the sweet thing I used to reach for at 11 in the and that, quiet as it was, turned out to be the whole trick of it. It is not a lightning bolt. It is a small green swap that slowly crowds the worst thing out of the day, one morning at a time. You would not have put a dollar on how she got here. For a long stretch of her life she was not a picture of anything anyone wanted to be. By her own telling, she was an addict, hooked on sugar first and then on harder things, crack among them, moving through her twenties and her thirties in a fog she has never once dressed up as prettier than it was. She has said the sugar came first, back in childhood, and that by the time the harder drugs turned up they were almost the same hunger wearing a different coat. She was heavy, she was sick in the low, grinding way that sugar makes a person sick, and she was, in her own flat word for it, lost. Then at 40, in 1990, she met a man named Ron. He was already living the plant-based life, and something about him, or maybe just about being 40, and finally tired of the fog, flipped a switch that most people spend a whole lifetime failing to flip. She did not taper. She did not ease into it over a careful year of half measures. She went vegan essentially overnight, threw the old way out in one motion, and never seriously walked back toward it. The enemy in this story is not a dealer on a corner, it is the white powder that was legal the entire time. Sugar was the first thing she was ever hooked on, and the first thing she ever put down, and every good thing that came afterward came after that one subtraction. From the glass we move to the bowl, which is the second thing she reaches for, and here I have to be careful and precise with you, because the internet keeps rounding her off into somebody she is not. Through the day, Babette grazes on a big bowl of mostly raw vegetables. Quinoa for the base, though notice, quinoa is cooked, so hold on to that. Spinach, shredded cabbage, grated carrot, sometimes soaked nuts, and a dressing she blends up out of cashews instead of pouring oil from a bottle. She picks at it through the day, a few bites at a time, rather than sitting to a plated meal. Now, the precise part, because it matters. Babette is vegan. Fully. No animal anything. And she has been for 35 years. And she eats what people call high raw, meaning most of what she eats is uncooked, but she is not one of the raw purists who would sooner go hungry than warm a grain, because the quinoa is cooked, and so is the rice when she has it. And she is not oil free either, whatever some clip online tells you, because the cashews in that dressing, and the avocado she loves, are pure plant fat. Vegan, high raw, not strict raw, not oil free. That distinction is not me being fussy. If you go home believing you have to eat cold food only, and never let a drop of fat past your lips, you have copied a woman who does not actually exist, and you will quit inside a week. Before we go one step further, do something for me, right now, wherever you happen to be sitting. Stand up, feet under your hips, let your arms hang loose, and slowly fold forward at the waist, knees soft, and just let your hands drift down toward the floor. Do not bounce, do not force it, only go to the first honest point, where your body says that is far enough, and notice where your fingertips end up. At your shins, at your ankles, flat on the floor, wherever they land, that is a real number about you, and it is one of the quietest predictors there is, of how the next 20 years are going to go. Because the people who can still fold up and reach the ground are, by and large, the people who can still get down onto it and back up off it without a fright. Babette can lay her palms flat on the floor at 75, and go from there into a full split. You are not chasing the split, you are chasing one inch lower than wherever your hand stopped a second ago, and here is the good news buried in that, the news that is not a scare. Unlike almost everything else about getting older, that inch answers you back fast when you ask it, a little more most weeks. If you ask it most days, here is where that green glass and that raw bowl went public. For 18 years, Babette ran a small vegan restaurant called Stuff I Eat. That was the name, plain as a spoon, because it was literally the food she ate, cooked and handed across a counter to strangers. People drove a long way for it. She fed a corner of the city the fresh food world had mostly stepped over, taught grown adults who had never met a vegetable they trusted, and she did it out of one modest kitchen for the better part of two decades. And then, this year, at 75, she closed it. The restaurant is gone now. The doors shut for the last time, in the spring. She did not frame the closing as a defeat, and I am not going to frame it as one either. This is not goodbye, she said. It is a transition. And she had already turned toward whatever the next thing is, the teaching and the writing and the videos of herself doing those push-ups for a phone. She has said she has no intention of ever becoming the woman with the alert button around her neck, waiting for something to happen to her. I believe her. But the restaurant belongs to the past tense now, and the routine plainly outlived the building it was cooked in. Now, I owe you some honesty about her methods. Because Babette believes a few things about food that the evidence simply does not back, and I am not going to sand those off to make her a tidier story. She will tell you the reason the food has to stay raw is that heating it past about 115 degrees kills the enzymes in it, and that those enzymes are then doing something vital once they are down inside you. That is a genuine article of faith in the raw food world, and it is mostly not how digestion actually works, because your own stomach acid takes most of those food enzymes apart the moment they arrive. She has a whole system of combining foods in certain orders, and older ideas she has taken on board about keeping the body, in the old-fashioned word, mucousless. So let me be square with you. The mechanisms she gives are not the mechanisms I would give. And here is where I have to correct myself in front of you. Because for years I made the opposite mistake, and was sure the respectful thing was to lead with the science, to walk in with the studies stacked up under my arm, and correct everybody's chemistry first. It was not respect. It was noise. The plain truth is that a woman with the wrong reason, and the right plate beats a man with the right reason, and a drive-thru dinner, every single time, and it is not even close. Her chemistry is shaky. Her plate is immaculate. And it was the plate, not the theory, that walked her to 75 looking like this. I will tell you how I finally learned to trust the plate over the theory, and it is not a flattering story about me. Years ago a man I had never met before, at a market stall, told me with total confidence that you must salt your beans right at the very start, the instant they hit the water. He said it the way you would recite scripture. So I did it. I salted a pot of cranberry beans the second the water went in, on a stranger's say-so, and they came out with skins like little tough leather purses, split down the side and mean, and I ate the whole plate anyway and sulked my way through every bite of it. I had taken a stranger's rule over the evidence of my own two eyes. That is the exact trap that waits for you with somebody as certain as Babette. You want to swallow the entire doctrine, enzymes and combining charts, and all. Do not do it. Take the plate, watch honestly what it does, and leave the theory sitting on the stall where you found it. Which brings me, at last, to the third food. And to that rule I promised you at the start, the one she swears counts as much as what you eat. The rule is about how she combines things, and the plainest place you can see it is in that third food. When Babette eats fruit, she eats it alone. Just the fruit, on an empty stomach, nothing else on the plate beside it, and then later, separately, a small handful of nuts. Not fruit tossed into a bowl with 10 other things, not nuts crushed over a sundae, but each thing on its own, simple and unmixed. Now, the reason she gives for eating this way is that food combining theory, and I have already told you I do not buy the mechanism under it. But look at what the rule actually does to her whole day. It means her snack is a peach, or it is a handful of almonds, and it is almost never a processed thing built out of 15 ingredients, because the rule flatly will not let her build that thing. The rule is wrong about digestion, and right about the groceries, and that plain handful of nuts is no small footnote. A Harvard team, led by a researcher named Ying Bao, followed people for decades, and published the result in the New England Journal of Medicine, and the ones who ate a handful of nuts on most days were dying at a measurably lower rate than the ones who never touched them. A handful, of the cheapest, most boring food in the whole store. So let me hand you the receipt on the biggest claim sitting under all of this. The claim that a plate like Babette's actually buys you years, because this is the kind of thing where you deserve the specific paper and not a wave of my hand. In 2013, a researcher named Michael Orlick, and his team published a study out of Loma Linda, that had tracked a little over 73,000 people for years, sorted by exactly how each of them ate. The vegetarians in that enormous group were dying at a lower rate over the course of the study than the meat-eaters were, and the effect was strongest of all in the men. 73,000 people, that is the receipt, name, and number, and all. And here is what the receipt does not say, because I promised you the honest version, and not the sales version. I cannot tell you it was the greens themselves, and not the plain fact, that the same people also tend to move more and smoke less. It is an association drawn across a huge crowd. It is not a private promise made to you. It points hard in one clear direction. It does not sign a contract with your name on it. And I would far rather hand you the number and its ragged edge together, than sell you the number all polished and alone. Now, I built something for exactly the person feeling the pull of all this with no idea where to start, and I will keep it to a single breath. My team and I took the five places on this planet, where people most reliably reach 90 and 100 still up on their own two feet, and we wrote the entire pattern down. The plate, the timing, the movement, the reasons to get up in the morning, as one 90-day plan you run at home. It is called the Blue Zone Body Reset. It is not a secret, and it is not an ingredient, because you already own the ingredients. They are the cheapest things on the shelf. What it hands you is the order, the shopping lists, the tracker, the 90 days laid out, so you are not standing in your kitchen guessing. The link is in the description below this video, and if you happen to be watching on your television, there is a small square on the screen your phone will read. No price here, no hard sell. Now, back to Babette, because the thing people say about a woman like her is also the thing they get most wrong. The first thing they say, when they see a woman of 75 rattle off 100 pushups, is that she must have been dealt the right cards. Good genes. And she will half agree with you. Her mother, she says, lived to 93 with barely a wrinkle on her, and Babette hands the family a good deal of the credit for how she has aged. Fine. I will give you that beat straight, because it is the top comment on every video like this one. Yes, her genes stacked her deck. So did yours. One way or the other. But the genes only load the shelf. And the fork is still in your own hand. And here is my proof of it. I keep thinking about another woman I have told you about before on this channel. Kane Tanaka. The Japanese woman who reached 119 and who looked well into her 90s, like she had skipped a decade or two. Kane did it nothing at all like Babette. She drank fizzy drinks, she loved her chocolate, she went about it entirely her own stubborn way. Two women. Opposite plates. The same flat refusal to be finished. Both of them younger than the calendar said they had any right to be. The gene is not the whole story. The gene is only the room. What you get up and do inside it is yours. And here is the scene I actually wanted you to see. The restaurant on one of its last days. The tables cleared out. The room mostly boxes and echo. And a 75-year-old woman in workout clothes down on the bare floor in the middle of all of it, doing her push-ups for a phone propped against the wall, laughing between the counts. A woman down on the floor by choice, on purpose, plainly stronger than the empty room around her. That is the image. I cannot shake loose. And now, the part I told you to hold onto with both hands. Several times a year, Babette stops eating. Not a skipped breakfast, a real fast, sometimes water only for a stretch of days, sometimes the old lemon and cayenne routine that people call the master cleanse, and at times a salt water flush of the whole gut that is exactly as pleasant as it sounds. She has done versions of this for decades, and she talks about it the way some people talk about spring cleaning. Here is where I stop being a storyteller for a minute and get very plain with you. Do not copy that part. I mean it flatly. Babette is a 75-year-old woman who has been doing this her entire adult life, under conditions she knows in her own body better than anyone. If you are past 60, and especially if you take anything for your blood pressure or your blood sugar, if you are diabetic, if your kidneys are anything less than perfect, a multi-day water fast is not a wellness trend for you. It is a trip to the hospital waiting to happen. The only version of this I will put in your hands is the gentle one, the one with real evidence under it and no real danger in it for most people. Close your kitchen earlier in the evening. Stop the grazing after supper. Let there be a longer stretch overnight where nothing at all goes in, 12 hours, maybe 13. So the body finally gets to spend some time not digesting and instead doing its own quiet repair. There is honest science under that gentle version, worth one clean sentence. When you leave a long enough gap between meals, the body finishes putting the last one away and flips over into a kind of housekeeping mode, tidying and mending instead of storing, and two researchers, DiCabo and Mattson, laid exactly that out in the New England Journal of Medicine a few years back. But notice the word gentle. That switch does not need a 5-day water fast to flip. An overnight stretch with the kitchen shut does plenty, and it will not land anybody in an emergency room. And before you touch even that much, if you manage any condition at all, run it past your own doctor, whose table this is and never mine. As for the supplements she takes, the sea moss, the blue-green algae, the rest of the shelf, I will just give you her own honesty on the matter. She has said, more or less, that she does not really know what they do for her, she only knows she feels good. That is a perfectly fine thing for her to say about her own body. It is not a claim, and I am not going to inflate it into one for her. So sit for a second with what this entire routine actually is. Underneath the green juice and the splits and the push-ups, because it is the exact opposite of what the industry that profits from women turning 70 will ever tell you it is. Everything that turned Babette's life around, she took away first. She subtracted the sugar. She subtracted the processed food, then the animal products, then the late-night eating, in that rough order. The adding came second, and the adding was cheap, a bunch of greens, a lemon, a knuckle of ginger, a handful of nuts, a bag of apples. Nobody has ever built a glass tower downtown by selling people subtraction. There is no serum, no 30-day powder, no glowing bathroom device on earth that does what she did, which was mostly to stop buying the thing that was hurting her and start buying the leaf. The anti-aging counter at the department store. The cleanse in the beautiful bottle. The algae capsule with the little sunrise printed on the label. Every bit of it exists for one reason and one only, which is that fear is easy to sell, and a head of kale is not. The thing that actually kept her young was never once the thing on sale. It was the thing she stopped paying for. And I have to say one loud part out loud, because the food gets all the credit here, and the food did not do all of the work. The hundred push-ups are not a party trick to end a video on. Babette moves. Hard. Every day of her life. She stretches until she folds flat to the ground. She does the push-ups. She has kept the raw strength most people quietly surrender in their 60s without a fight. If you stripped the green juice clean out of her life and kept only the moving, she would still be a remarkable 75 year old. If you kept the juice and took the moving away, she would not be lowering herself into a split. The plate feeds the muscle. The moving is the thing that keeps the muscle worth feeding. I cannot tell you the precise split between those two. And I have stopped pretending anyone honestly can, but I can tell you for certain that a routine built out of only the food half of it is a routine walking around in one shoe. I will give you one last honest thing. A small detour. Because it makes me laugh, and it also makes the whole point for me. That lemon and cayenne cleanse she runs, the one they call the master cleanse, is not some ancient secret carried down out of a mountain village. Somebody simply invented it. Wrote it up in a little book decades ago, and it has been repackaged and resold to a fresh crop of hopeful people every single January since. Under a dozen different names, by people who all noticed how beautifully a clean slate promise sells in the cold gray light of a new year. It stops working right on schedule, just in time for next year's version to launch. That is the whole game, start to finish. And here is the flat limit on everything I have told you tonight. The one thing I honestly cannot prove for you. I do not know for certain whether Babette is 75 and unbreakable because of the raw food, or because of 35 years without a grain of sugar, or because of the fasting, or because her mother handed her a genuinely good deck, or simply because she is a person who decided at 40 that she was not remotely done, and then behaved like it every day for 35 years running. It is almost certainly some braid of all of them that no study will ever fully untangle for you or for me. If you pushed me, I would put my money on the sugar mattering most. But I cannot hand you one clean single cause with a bow on it. And anyone who tries to is selling you the beautiful bottle, I will leave you where she is right now. An emptied out restaurant with the sign already down, boxes stacked where the tables used to sit, and the morning light coming in through the front glass onto a bare floor a woman just did a hundred pushups on. Somewhere back on the counter there is a glass with a thin green film drying in the bottom of it. The same glass, more or less, that has started every one her mornings for 35 years, and she is carrying that one habit out the door with her into whatever the next room turns out to be, because the habit was never the building. If you want the next one of these to come and find you on its own, the next quiet person who somehow got old without ever getting frail, then subscribe, and it will come. But the last picture is hers to keep. The bare floor, the low morning sun, the green glass drying on the counter, and a woman of 75 who has very plainly not yet decided that she is old.