Experts share 6 ways you can change your cooking to live longer

Whether it’s cancer, heart disease or dementia, the number one risk factor for getting any of these diseases is simply getting old. But it’s not just your birth age that matters — a growing amount of science is showing that both your short- and long-term risk of various diseases is linked to your biological age, or how much wear and tear your body has accumulated through daily living.

It turns out that one of the more surprising drivers of this age-related damage, and our body’s capacity to handle it, is linked to how we cook. As a neuroscientist and health journalist, I’ve spent much of the last three years investigating this for my new book, The Age Code. Through interviews with dozens of ageing scientists around the globe, I discovered that by making a few simple tweaks to our culinary habits, we can limit some of the age-related damage we’re accruing and boost our body’s ability to repair itself.

Ageing experts now believe this can both stave off disease, and give us many more years in good health. Here are a few key takeaways from the book about what you can do:

1. Slower cooking and spices

From frying bacon to barbecuing and Sunday roasts, many of our favourite ways of preparing food involve exposing meat to high heat. What most people don’t realise is that these cooking methods generate a class of supertoxins known as AGEs. They can be formed in food through a chemical reaction called glycation, which occurs when proteins and fats or sugars react together at high temperatures. Basically, whenever we consume blackened or charred meat, we’re ingesting these toxins.

“Dry heat leads to more AGEs,” Professor Pankaj Kapahi, of the California-based Buck Institute for Research on Ageing, told me. The problem is that ingesting more AGEs quite literally accelerates the ageing process.

Their presence in our bodies is thought to activate a switch in our bodies which generates inflammation and a DNA-damaging process known as oxidative stress. Studies have even suggested that AGEs can make cancers more aggressive and more likely to spread. But there’s an alternative. If we consume more meals where our food is cooked slowly, and with more moisture — think soups, stews and slow cooking — the numbers of AGEs that we’re ingesting drop exponentially.

As a result, Prof Kapahi and other experts in this field told me that their number one recommendation for healthier ageing is to either add water or to prepare your food for slightly longer, over lower heat. Scrambled eggs cooked over medium-low heat, for example, contain more than 50% fewer AGEs than eggs that have been scrambled over high heat.

“I recommend to people that essentially if you boil or steam, that’s a much healthier way to cook,” says Prof Kapahi. “Whenever you’re using dry heat, it’s much more of a disaster.”

2. Add more dried herbs and spices

In recent years, ageing scientists have begun to realise that the health of your kidneys plays an underrated role in how long you’re likely to live. People with accelerated kidney ageing are more likely to develop heart disease, type 2 diabetes, liver disease and frailty. But research is also beginning to reveal a key driver of kidney ageing — the amounts of acids you’re consuming in your diet.

Protein, added salt, and the preservative phosphoric acid (commonly found in ultra-processed foods) are all broken down in our bodies into various acidic substances. Over time, this can place growing amounts of strain on the kidneys, organs which are working at double speed to safely remove acids from the body in urine.

However, we can all provide our kidneys with some relief by consuming more minerals in our diet — vital micronutrients which they can use to neutralise these acids.

It turns out that one of the best sources of minerals is various herbs and spices, such as parsley, ginger, and chilli powder. However, rather than buying them fresh, it’s best to use dried herbs and spices. This is because the drying process actually concentrates minerals within food in far higher quantities.

3. Bake cakes with allulose

While home-baked cakes are one of life’s great pleasures, consuming too much added sugar over weeks, months, and years can have a number of damaging effects on the body, stiffening arteries and driving spikes of the hormone insulin, something which can ultimately lead to type 2 diabetes.

But there may be a better solution to appease our sweet tooths. Nutrition scientists have discovered that a different form of sugar called allulose which is naturally found in figs and raisins, may cause far less problems to the body than traditional table sugar (sucrose).

When I spoke about this with Californian endocrinologist Dr Robert Lustig, an expert in sugar replacements, he said that allulose contains far fewer calories than sucrose and has much less of an effect on insulin production. Some studies, which monitored the health of volunteers for three months after feeding them foods where sucrose had been replaced with allulose, have also found that this led to a reduction in LDL or ‘bad’ cholesterol.

“With LDL cholesterol being a major biomarker for heart disease, that would be a very good thing if it held up over time,” Dr Lustig told me. While allulose may be currently more expensive than table sugar, using it in your baking could offer significant health benefits over time.

4. Don’t peel potatoes

We’re just starting to figure out the properties of the vast array of so-called phytochemicals in various fruits and vegetables which are produced by plant immune systems. Researchers have long known that the majority of these phytochemicals are present in the outer layers of plants, and a new study has highlighted that so-called phenolic amines, phytochemicals present in potato skins, can help us burn fat.

This is because when we consume these phytochemicals, they can activate a “fat switch” known as hepatocyte nuclear factor 4-alpha, which is present in our gut, liver, pancreas and kidneys which nudges the body to burn through its fat reserves with greater speed.

Scientists told me that they now believe that people who consume more of these phenolic amines in their diet on a regular basis, for example through consuming potatoes without removing the skins, have a greater ability to control their weight through midlife and beyond.

Because visceral or internal fat plays a key role in the ageing process through driving low level inflammation throughout the body, being able to burn off body fat more efficiently can make a key difference to long-term health.

5. Add less salt or use Lite salt

Because sodium chloride or table salt is broken down into acidic substances, regularly adding extra salt to your cooking can also increase the strain on your kidneys over time. At the same time, salt is such a key flavour enhancer that it isn’t necessarily easy to completely cut it out. A good alternative, however, is to buy Lite salt instead of table salt, and to use that in your cooking and for seasoning meals.

Lite salt readjusts the balance between sodium and potassium — it contains 55% potassium — with the latter being a very useful mineral which can not only assist the kidneys in managing acids, but is also used for numerous beneficial biological processes throughout the body.

6. Marinate your meat

While scientists tout the benefits of slow-cooked dinners for limiting AGEs in your food, there are times in life where we will want to cook a piece of meat or fish at high heat.

In such cases, there’s a simple trick which we can all use. According to Professor Miguel Ruiz-Canela, an expert in preventive medicine at the University of Navarra in Spain, AGE formation can be limited by first marinating meat and fish in a mixture of lemon juice, olive oil and antioxidant-rich aromatic herbs and spices, such as rosemary, thyme, cumin, cloves or paprika.

This acts as a natural barrier during frying or roasting against the chemical processes which drive the formation of AGEs.

“Marinating is actually part of the culture of the traditional Mediterranean diet,” says Prof Ruiz-Canela. “It could be one of the reasons why it’s linked with health benefits over time in so many studies.”

• The Age Code: The New Science of Food and How it can Save Us, By David Cox (HarperCollins, £22) is out now and available from Amazon, Waterstones, Foyles and all major bookshops