How Not To Age: A Review

Robert L. Read
3 min readJan 29, 2024

Dr. Michael Greger has done the world a solid in his new book “How Not to Age” (https://nutritionfacts.org/book/how-not-to-age/).

Dr. Greger founded and runs NutritionFacts.org (https://nutritionfacts.org/), a non-profit that focuses on evidence-based nutrition advice. In a world of obfuscation, greed-driven profit, fraud and misdirection, his work is a paragon of clarity and honesty. “How Not to Age” cites over 13,000 papers that he and his staff have read and checked for relevance.

I read it cover to cover — it’s a good read, if you are interested in geeky details. It would be even better with more high-level explanations, but Dr. Greger is too scientific to draw unwarranted conclusions. Allow me then, to make an off-the-cuff summary: Eat plants.

The book continually discusses, but could perhaps benefit from a diagram explaining, the differences between theoretical pathways, in vitro extract trials, in vitro blood trials, experiments on worms and fruitflies, experiments on mice and rats, population studies, intervention studies, and double-blind placebo-controlled intervention studies. He explanations of this “pyramid of evidence” is spread throughout the book, but we would be better served by having it all in one place.

I believe that Dr. Greger has done a great job simplifying things in his “Daily Dozen” (things you should eat every day) and his “Anti-Aging Eight”. A clear picture of valuable anti-aging strategies emerges; but not a perfect prescription, because it is clear human knowledge does not yet permit such clarity. There is much we do not know; yet the “defense by complexity” which is often used to support ridiculous positions in the face of evidence, can be put to the rest. Nutrition is complex, but not so complex that we do not have overwhelming evidence for some very basic propositions. If you follow these, you are likely to have a longer lifespan, and, equally importantly, a longer span as a healthy, strong, intelligent human being:

  1. Eating animal products of any kind, including dairy, is not good for you and should be done sparingly if at all.
  2. Eating plants, including mushrooms/fungi, are good for you.
  3. You should eat a large variety of plants, of different colors.
  4. Fiber is very, very good for you, and most of us don’t get enough.
  5. Highly processed foods are bad for you.
  6. You don’t need as much protein as you probably think you do, and it is easy to get all you need from fruits and vegetables if you also eat beans and lentils.
  7. Nuts are surprisingly good for you, even though they contain a lot of fat, and you should eat a palmful every day.
  8. Our gut bacteria is surprisingly, even astonishingly important, and although science don’t fully understand this, healthy eating promotes healthy gut bacteria that help keep a human healthy.
  9. Eating healthy and exercising can make about 10–20 year difference in your expected healthspan, and some of that comes not from “decreased risk”, but from slowing the aging process itself.

We are all human. There are three sides to any story: yours, mine, and the cold hard truth. Dr. Greger focuses on the truth. Does he cherry-pick his data? Probably as little as humanly possible — but we are all only human. Although he cites some benefits of eating meat in some cases when the science says this, his attitude is no-doubt basically promoting a whole-food, plant-based diet. But this is not bias; it is a product of years or decades studying nutrition data. It is a hard-won, scientific learning, not an intrinsic bias. His attitude toward nut butters seems to have evolved with emerging science; for example, we now know eating whole nuts is better than eating ground nut butters, and eating intact grains is better than eating flour, even if you are eating the same substance.

When I was a boy, I avoided eating plants, because of science fiction books that mislead me into thinking that eating meat would make me strong and smart. I probably damaged myself in doing that. The evidence, and personal and positive experience, has turned me from a near-carnivore into a near-vegan plant-based eater. There are a lot of people suffering constipation, diabetes, frailty, cognitive decline, erectile dysfunction, heart failure, and even cancer, needlessly. Dr. Greger has given us a well-researched gift; it is now up to us to have the open-mindedness to accept this gift.

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Robert L. Read

Public Inventor. Founder of Public Invention. Co-founder of @18F. Presidential Innovation Fellow. Agilist. PhD Comp. Sci. Amateur mathematician.