Hello and welcome to Zoey Shorts, the Bite Size podcast where we discuss one topic around

science and nutrition. I'm Jonathan Wolf and as always I'm joined by Dr. Sarah Berry.

Today we're asking, can you reverse the damage from a bad diet?

To Jonathan everyone wants to live a long and healthy life and we know that a lifetime

of healthy food choices can increase your life expectancy but some researchers actually

attempted to assign set amount of time to certain foods that could help hack your diet

and prolong your life.

That sounds very cool so you're saying there is a definitive list of how to get rid of

all those terrible dietary choices in the past and I will be able to figure out exactly

how many years I would live longer as a result. It sounds a bit too good to be true.

It does and whilst I'm actually really skeptical of this kind of approach to defining the

healthfulness of our diet based on just single foods, you know given that our diet is so

much more complex than this. Some of the data produced could actually help people make smarter

choices when it comes to their diet.

Sounds brilliant, let's dive into it.

So first of all Sarah, this idea that some foods can extend your life expectancy actually

goes back millennia. We did a bit of research and apparently the ancient Greeks wrote about

the life extending power of Ambrosia which I've yet to try but I'm definitely up for.

Apparently explorers in the 16th century spent their lives searching for the fountains of

youth.

So we're no longer praying to the gods or searching the world for magical water sources

but we are still obsessed with finding foods with these mythical properties that would extend

...