Gut health expert DR MEGAN ROSSI shows you how to add many more years to your

Every day people come to my central London clinic looking for answers. They want to feel less tired, boost their energy, lose or gain weight, strengthen their skin.

They want to think more clearly, improve their fertility or power up their immunity. But most of all, they want to know what to eat to live longer.

As a dietitian and research scientist I can tell you that yes, longevity really can be achieved through food — if you follow an approach based on facts, not fads.

Dr Megan Rossi, pictured, says: ‘The simple act of piling more plants onto your plate is enough to transform your health and energy levels’

I’ve long championed a science-backed way of eating that focuses on increasing your intake of what I call The Super Six: legumes, wholegrains, nuts and seeds, fruit, vegetables, herbs and spices.

All of them plants, all of them vital for our bodies’ proper functioning, and all of them lacking in many modern, convenience-food heavy Western diets.

It’s upsetting to see how many people are missing out on the magic of proper, plant-based eating. I know from years of study, plus experience, that the optimal diet, filled with a diverse range of these whole foods, helps your body work better from the inside out.

This doesn’t necessarily mean eating plants only either, as I’ll explain. The simple act of piling more plants onto your plate is enough to transform your health and energy levels.

It can also, more importantly, lengthen your lifespan, as shown by fascinating research from Norway, published this week.

This showed in the clearest terms possible that eating a more diverse plant-based diet can lengthen your life by as much as a decade!

In an attention-grabbing study, researchers at the University of Bergen found that, in particular, eating more legumes (such as lentils, chickpeas and kidney beans), more wholegrains (such as oats or wild rice), and more nuts (pecans, peanuts — take your pick!) held the answer to adding years to your life.

Dr Rossi adds: ‘Cutting out red and processed meat was seen to have a positive impact on lifespan, too, though not quite as impressive as adding more legumes, wholegrains and nuts’

Of course, we long ago realised that including a wide variety of plants in our diets was good for us, but this research has shown the effect in a measurable, quantifiable way. It’s not just that eating more of these food groups can help us avoid illness, it’s that eating them can actually keep us alive for longer.

For example, a young person going from eating no legumes at all to eating 200g per day — the equivalent of a large bowl of lentil soup or a good serving of mixed bean chilli — could expect to live two-and-a-half years longer than they would have done otherwise.

In the same way, going from eating 50g to 225g of wholegrains per day (as easy as swapping a portion of white rice to wild rice, and eating porridge for breakfast) could add another two years to your life. And eating 25g of nuts and seeds a day could add two more.

Cutting out red and processed meat was seen to have a positive impact on lifespan, too, though not quite as impressive as adding more legumes, wholegrains and nuts. I’m not here to tell you to stop eating meat. Eating way more plants is all I ask of you.

You may end up eating so many that most days the meat is crowded off your plate. But there’s no call to quit it.

One of the most important things about this research is that it shows that adding more ‘good stuff’ has a much greater effect than just cutting out the ‘bad’.

This concept of inclusion rather than exclusion is key to my food philosophy. It’s also key to a more enjoyable and sustainable diet, long-term.

So what is it that’s so wonderful about these three groups of plant foods, these life-lengthening legumes, age-defying wholegrains and energising nuts?

It’s not that they’re necessarily any ‘better’ than fruit and veg — it’s just that actually, the people in the study already ate a reasonable amount of fruit and vegetables, which is why the research discovered that eating yet more of the same only added around six months of life.

While we might no longer be too bad at eating our greens, we’re terribly guilty of neglecting the rest of The Super Six — those other plants that provide so much goodness because they feed our guts — and, as I’ll explain over the coming days, a healthy gut is the sound foundation on which our overall health is built.

That’s why adding these gut-loving whole foods back in to our diets and making them the building blocks of our nutrition can have such startlingly positive results on our health and longevity.

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