Dick Van Dyke: I'm 100 but I Feel 60. I Eat These Same 5 Foods Every Single Day

Dick Van Dyke is 100 years old. He says he feels about 60, and he eats more or less the same 5 things every single day. 100 is the number I keep turning over, and not for the reason you would think. 100, in December, with the candles and the photographers and the fuss. Then you go looking for the plate that carried him there, expecting something exotic, and inside about 9 seconds you are looking at butter. There is jam on it. There is a coffee next to it that has been sweetened If the name is only half familiar, he was the chimney sweep in Mary Poppins, and before that he fell over the same footstool every week on American television, on purpose, for 5 years. Born in 1925. A grown man with a job before the supermarket most of you shop in existed. What matters here is that his diet is not a rumor, rarer than you would expect. Usually, when a magazine tells you what a famous person eats, somebody assembled it out of 2 old quotes and a press release. This one you can watch. His wife films the breakfast. He has said the rest out loud, in the same words, over several years, which is the closest thing to a receipt this subject offers. But I want to plant something first, because it is going to sit under everything that follows. There is a sixth thing on that plate. Every night. Not a food any channel like this one would put on a list, and I am not touching it yet. Keep it in your pocket. It will end up explaining the other 5 better than they explain themselves. One fact about him almost nobody mentions, and it changes what you are looking at. He eats meat about once a week. Sit with the generation for a second. A man born in the 20s, raised in Illinois, a career built through the era of the steakhouse and the three martini lunch, and somewhere along the way he ended up on a plate that is mostly not meat, 6 days out of 7. He has never, as far as I can find, called that a diet. No name for it, no book. He did not go plant based in a documentary. It drifted that way and stayed, and the drift has lasted about 40 years longer than any diet in the history of publishing has lasted with anybody. Hold that next to the way you have been sold this. Every eating plan you have been offered arrives with a start date, a name, a hardback, and an implied ending. His has none of the 4. 5 things, no name, no start date, and a very old man still walking into a gym 3 days a week. 5 foods he eats every day. What is on the other side of the plate, which is the honest part. What the record shows, and what it does not. And one thing you can put The blueberries are not optional, and he has never once been vague about them. Food 1. Blueberries. Every morning. Not a handful when he remembers, not seasonally, not a treat on top of something else. He has been asked about his food enough times to be bored of the question, and the blueberries come up every time, in the flat way you would mention putting your shoes on. Here is what that color actually is. The blue in a blueberry is not decoration. It is a family of pigments the plant builds to survive its own weather sun, cold, being eaten and they are concentrated in the skin, which is why the small wild ones, the ones that look like they have been undersold, are worth more per spoonful than the big glossy ones bred for the shelf. When you eat them, those pigments do not settle anywhere permanently, they pass through, and on the way through they behave like a mild, repeated nudge to the lining of your blood vessels, particularly the small ones. Not the big plumbing. The narrow, unglamorous vessels at the far end of the system, the ones feeding the back of the eye, the inner ear, the fingertips, the parts of the brain that go quiet first. That distinction matters for a man of a hundred. The dramatic failures happen in the big vessels, and get a name and an ambulance. The slow ones happen out at the edges, over about 30 years, and never get named at all. They get called getting old, which brings up the part I would want to know standing in the shop. Frozen counts. Properly counts picked ripe and frozen within hours, which is more than can be said for a good deal of what sits in the fresh aisle, looking beautiful under a light. A bag of frozen wild blueberries is one of the few things in a supermarket where the cheap version is the better one, and it will wait in your freezer until you get round to it. What does count is the word blueberry printed on a box. The muffin, the cereal with the purple flecks, the yogurt with the picture. Those flecks are frequently apple, dyed. Nobody tells you that on the front of the packet, and the front of the packet is where the argument is won. For a hundred-year-old man who still wants to read a script and recognize a face across a room, the pigment is the point. And he eats them the way you take a bus. Same time, no ceremony, no opinion about it. He does not always eat them alone, and the thing he puts with them is the least fashionable item in this entire video. Food 2. Bran. Not a smoothie ingredient with a name. The brown, dusty, faintly disappointing scrapings off the outside of a grain, which the milling industry has been removing on purpose for a century, because the bit that keeps a loaf soft on a shelf, is the bit with nothing in it. Nobody is ever going to make a viral video about bran. There is no photograph of bran that has ever made anybody click on anything. And yet, of the five things on this plate, if you made me put money on which one is doing the most quiet, structural work in a very old body, it would not be a close decision. Here is what it is doing. Physically. Fiber does not get absorbed, that is the definition of it. It arrives in your gut intact, and it does two entirely different jobs depending on which kind it is. The coarse, insoluble kind, which is what bran mostly is, holds water and gives the gut something to push against the difference between a body that runs and a body that stalls. That sounds like a small dignity. Ask anyone past 80 whether it is a small dignity. The finer soluble kind turns into a soft gel and feeds the bacteria further down, and those bacteria, fed properly, produce compounds that settle the lining of the gut wall itself. You are not feeding yourself with the second kind. You are feeding the tenants, and the tenants pay rent. Which is where I owe you the receipt, because this is the one number in the video worth writing down. In Australia there is a long-running study out of the Blue Mountains. West of Sydney it started as an eye study, which is why almost nobody in nutrition has heard of it. Bhamini Gopinath and her colleagues took more than 1600 adults over the age of 49 and followed them for 10 years. And rather than who died, they asked something better. They asked who arrived at the far end, still free of disease and disability. Still, in the plain sense, all right. Then they went back through what those people had been eating. Of everything they measured sugars, starches, glycaemic load, the measure that lined up most strongly with arriving in one piece was fiber. And now the honest half, which you always get here. Observational. Those people were watched, not assigned. Nobody was handed a bowl of bran and made to eat it for a decade. The kind of person who eats a lot of fiber tends to be doing four other sensible things at the same time, and no study of that shape can pull them apart. Gopinath said as much herself at the time that it was too early to turn into advice. I would rather hand you her caution than pretend it away. But it is a real finding, from real people, over real time, and it is Turn the box around next time you are in there. Look for the fiber line, not the front of the packet. Before the next one, I want you to do something, and it takes 10 seconds. Pick up whatever is nearest you, with small writing on it. A jar. A packet. The back of a remote control. Hold it where you naturally would, in the light you already have, and read the smallest line. Then move it slowly towards you and away again, and find the exact distance where it goes soft. Get the distance. Nothing else. Not a diagnosis. I am not a doctor, and if the answer is that it does not sharpen anywhere, take that to an optician this month rather than to a video. But most people have never once measured the thing they complain about weekly, and the ones who do are usually surprised by how much it has moved in three years. Get the number now, get it again at Christmas. I ask because of what is in the next food, and because the losses that end up mattering most are the ones nobody schedules an appointment for. There is a reason the yolk is that color, and it connects directly to what you just did. Food 3. 2 eggs, over medium. Not me rounding. 2, over medium. Alongside toast his wife filmed it and put it out into the world, which is how a small domestic fact ended up on the record at all. The yolk is orange because of a pair of pigments the hen ate and stored, and they are the same two pigments your body sends to one specific place, the small patch at the back of the eye that does your detailed vision. Reading. Faces. The step at the bottom of the stairs. Your body cannot manufacture them. It can only collect them from food and post them there. Now, the useful part, and it is a genuinely underrated piece of kitchen physics. Those pigments are fat-soluble. They do not travel in water. Which means the form you eat them in decides how much actually arrives, and an egg yolk is essentially a small package of exactly the right fat wrapped around exactly the right pigment. Gram for gram, there is more of it in a plate of spinach. But the spinach version needs a fat escort to get anywhere, and the yolk brings its own. Which is also why a plain undressed salad is a slightly sad transaction. You chew the leaves, and the useful part drives past the exit. The other half of the egg matters more at 100 than it ever did at 50. Muscle. An old body is worse at building it from the same meal, the same plate that would have been plenty at 40 now, sits below the line where the machinery even switches on. Which is why two eggs at breakfast is quietly better arithmetic than none at breakfast and a mountain of protein at dinner. The body does not save it up. There is no account. And on the cholesterol panic, which somebody is already typing, that argument was settled some time ago, and eggs came out of it in reasonable shape for most people. Not everyone. If you have been told specifically, by someone who has seen your own numbers, to be careful with them, that instruction wins over anything said on the internet, including by me. His plate is not only breakfast, and the second half of it is the part he mentions least. Food 4. Leafy greens, spinach and kale. The record here is thinner than the blueberries, and I will say so. Reported rather than filmed. But it comes up consistently, and it fits the way this man eats, which is to say, not as an event. I gave the eye pigment to the egg deliberately, so let me give the greens something else, because they are carrying something the egg cannot. Vitamin K. Not the famous vitamins this is the one nobody has ever made an advert for, and it does something very specific. Your body builds a protein whose whole job is to grab hold of calcium, and lock it into the bone. That protein is manufactured useless. It comes off the line inert, and it needs vitamin K to switch it on. Without the K, you can drink all the milk you like, and the calcium wanders around your bloodstream looking for somewhere to be. Green leaves are where that vitamin lives. Not in a jar. In leaves. And this is where I stop being polite about what is at stake. For a man of a hundred who still climbs onto gym equipment three mornings a week, the ending is not a disease. It is a fall. A hip. On a Tuesday, on a floor he has walked across ten thousand times, and then the six months afterwards, which are the part nobody describes to you. Bone is not scenery. It stands between an independent life and a completely different one. And it is being quietly rebuilt, or quietly not rebuilt every week of your life, including this one. Cook them in something. Butter, oil, whatever you have a leaf, collapsing slowly in a pan with a lid on beats two bowls of raw leaves eaten dutifully, because the fat carries out what the water leaves behind. And a bag of them costs about a pound, which is an insulting price for the job. He does one more thing to his tea and to his smoothie, and it is the item on the list with the most nonsense attached to it. Food 5. Turmeric. He puts it in his tea. He puts it in the smoothie after the gym. I want to handle this one honestly, because turmeric is where a lot of channels go to make claims they cannot support, and I would rather lose you here than join them. The active part of turmeric is a yellow compound that has been studied intensively for about 30 years, mostly for what it appears to do to inflammation. The trouble, and this is the part the supplement aisle sells hardest around is that on its own, swallowed dry, very little of it gets into you. Most of it goes straight through. That is not a conspiracy. Chemistry, and the reason the capsule shelf is full of proprietary this and enhanced that, at 40 times the price of the spice. Two things change the arithmetic. Fat, because the compound dissolves in it, and black pepper, which contains something that slows the liver's disposal of it dramatically. Now look at where he puts it. In a smoothie, which has fat in it. In hot tea, with milk, which has fat in it. He is not doing that because he read a paper. Half the world has been cooking that spice into fat, with pepper, for 2000 years, and worked it out without a single study, which is roughly how most of the useful things in this field were worked out. Would I call turmeric a medicine? No. It is a spice, with real science attached, and an enormous amount of rubbish sold on top of it. And the jar version, stirred into something with fat in it, is closer to the studied thing, than the bottle with a lightning bolt on the label. That is the five. Blueberries, bran, eggs, greens, turmeric. And now the part of this video that matters more than the list, because if I stopped here I would have handed you the same tidy fiction everyone else hands you. That is not all he eats. The coffee that goes with those two eggs has five lumps of sugar in it. Five. On camera, the toast is white potato bread, it has butter on it, and then it has strawberry jam on top of the butter. Not the artisanal jam with the handwriting on the label. Jam. I have watched a lot of people talk about very old people, and this is where they always tidy up. They edit out the sugar, they put the greens first and quietly lose the jam, because the jam breaks the story they came to tell. In doing it, they hand you something no human being has ever lived a plate, with nothing on it that anybody enjoys. So let me say the useful thing instead. There are two entirely different mistakes available here, and only one of them is the common one. The first mistake is looking at those five sugars and concluding that none of it matters, that the man is a hundred and the jam is proof the whole field is nonsense. Proof of nothing. One man. The second mistake is the one that actually costs people their 60s and 70s. It is deciding that, because you cannot do the perfect version, you will do none of it. That the are pointless if the coffee is sweet. That there is no score worth having unless it is a clean sheet. I have watched people abandon an entirely decent decade of eating over one item they could not give up, and the item was never the problem. The abandoning was. What is on that plate is the ordinary human arrangement. Most of it fine, some of it purely for pleasure, none of it agonized The five sugars are not the secret. They are the evidence that he is not performing. A man performing for a camera does not take five. There is something else about those five foods, though, and I only noticed it writing this. Every single one of them arrives without a decision. The blueberries are in the fridge because they are always in the fridge. The eggs are made by his wife. The toast comes with them. The turmeric goes into the tea somebody hands him. Not one item requires him, at a hundred, to summon anything. There is no willpower anywhere in it, because it was built years ago and now just runs, the way a house runs. That is the difference between a diet and a household, and the reason one lasts forty years and the other until about the second Thursday. A diet is a series of decisions you keep having to make. A household is a decision somebody made once, that now simply happens to you. I have talked before on this channel about Kane Tanaka, the Japanese woman who reached 119, who liked chocolate, and fizzy drinks, and board games she flatly refused to lose. Nobody has ever been able to fit her into a wellness poster either. What she had was not a regime. It was a life with a shape to it, and the shape held, which is where the money is, incidentally. The five things on Van Dyck's plate have a combined advertising budget of nothing. There is no brand commercial. Nobody has ever bought television time for a leaf. The only item in that entire kitchen with a marketing department behind it is the one waiting in the freezer, and we are nearly at it. A small thing about my own kitchen, since I have been telling you about somebody else's, I keep the garlic in a paper bag, in a drawer, not in one of those ceramic pots with the holes, not in a bowl on the counter where you can see it, in a drawer, in a bag, in the dark. I do that because my mother did it, and for most of my adult life that was the entire reason. If you had pushed me on it, I would have shrugged. Then some years ago I read, entirely by accident, in the middle of something else, that garlic in the light and the warmth sprouts and goes bitter and loses the sulfur compounds anybody eats it for in the first place, and that the correct place for it is somewhere dark, dry, and ventilated. A paper bag in a drawer. She did not know why. She had it from her mother, who also did not know why. And the three of us have been getting it right for about a century on the strength of nobody knowing anything. Most of what a hundred-year-old plate turns out to be is not knowledge. It is inheritance that happened to be correct. I got one thing badly wrong for years, and it is adjacent enough that I should say it here. I was convinced, for a long time, that the wine was the mechanism in the Mediterranean story, the glass of red with dinner. I could tell you what was in it and why. What took me an embarrassing amount of time to accept is that the wine was almost never the variable. The variable was who it was poured for, that it took an hour, that there were other people at the table, that nobody in that room ate standing up over a sink. I had picked the part of the picture that came in a bottle, because the part that came in a bottle was the part I could buy. If you want all of this laid out properly, the plate, the shape of a week, 90 days written down rather than carried around in your head, that is, the blue zone body reset. It organizes what is already free. It does not contain a secret, because there is not one to contain, and if I ever tell you otherwise, you should stop watching me. Link below, code on the screen if you are on a television. That is the last of it. Back to the freezer. Every night, before bed, Dick Van Dyke eats a pint of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup on it. A pint, not a bowl, not a small dish of something. The full carton, nightly, at a hundred years old, from a man who does a circuit at the gym three mornings a week, and then goes home and does that. I am not going to stand here and tell you a pint of ice cream is good for you, no, and you would be right to stop trusting me if I tried. But I have been sitting with it for two days now, and I think it is the most instructive item in this entire video, and here is why, every plan you have been sold was built to be complied with. Perfect adherence. From Monday, forever and everyone has an exit door that opens the first time you fail. You have walked through it. Everybody has. You had the biscuit, and the having of the biscuit ended the project far more completely than the biscuit deserved. His plate cannot break like that, because the pint is already inside it. There is nothing to fall off. The blueberries do not stop being blueberries because there is ice cream at 11 o'clock, and the greens do not resign in protest. A hundred years of a plate with the pleasure built in, and therefore a hundred years of never having to start again on a Monday. So there is the sixth thing. Never a food at all, a design, and the pleasure is not incidental to it either. Ask any very old person what they still have, and it is a fairly short list, and a bowl of something sweet in a quiet house at the end of a day is genuinely on it. I am not prepared to be the man who takes that off the table in exchange for a statistical improvement he cannot even promise. On the luck, before somebody types it. Yes, obviously. He has outlived nearly everyone he started with, and there is no plate on earth that guarantees anybody a hundred. What I will say is that reaching a hundred and reaching a hundred, still able to get onto a piece of gym equipment, are two entirely different outcomes, and the second one has much more to do with what a man did with his seventies and eighties than the first does. The genes may decide whether you arrive. What you ate for forty years has a great deal to say about the condition you arrive in. So here is his day, assembled, which is the only way any of this is ever real. Morning, blueberries in a bowl, frozen ones, half thawed, most likely, dark and faintly collapsed the way they go. The bran either shaken over the top or not, depending on the day. Then two eggs, over medium, the whites just set. Toast, butter, jam. The coffee arriving in somebody else's hand, which he has said out loud, is one of the great pleasures of his life at this age, and I believe him with five lumps in it. Later, tea, with the turmeric stirred through it, gone slightly orange at the edges. Somewhere in the day, greens. Meet about once in every seven days, and no announcement made about the other six, then a pint of vanilla with chocolate syrup on it, at night, in a chair, at a hundred years old. If you take one thing out of here, do not take the whole day. Nobody adopts a day. Take one bowl, blueberries and a spoon of bran, tomorrow morning, before you have had a chance to form an opinion about it, frozen ones, in the freezer tonight, so that tomorrow requires nothing from you at all. That is the entire instruction, and it is deliberately smaller than you expected, because a plan requires a decision every morning, and a bag in the freezer, only ever required one. Then leave it alone, do not tidy the rest of the plate this week, do not make a project of it. Look at what he has, one more time, assembled. He has the blueberries, every morning, for longer than most people watching this have been alive. He has the bran nobody would ever photograph. He has two eggs, over medium, made by his wife. He has the leaves, he has the turmeric going into the tea, and he has the pint of vanilla, at eleven o'clock at night, which is the item that keeps the other five from ever needing to be started again. Somewhere in Southern California tonight, a freezer door will open, and a hundred year old man will take out something he has been eating since long before anybody thought to ask. Tell me in the comments which of the five you could genuinely put in your trolley this week, and the harder question, the one I actually want the answer to, what is your pint? The thing you would keep, whatever anybody said about it, I read all of them, and if this is your sort of thing, the subscribe button is down there. There is always another very old person eating something nobody would put on a poster, and the next will find you when it lands.