What is Longevity Nutrition Counseling? - How Specializing in Healthy Aging Can Help Ensure Career Longevity

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Part One of Our Series on Longevity Nutrition Counseling

 

The importance of a healthy and balanced diet to life expectancy can’t be overstated. At the root of all nutritional and dietetics counseling is the idea that what you eat and how matters for your long-term health and well-being. It’s obvious that all the body has to work with is what you put into it.

But recently, some scientists are going even further. A pile of scientific evidence has been accumulating showing the ways in which nutrients and diet impact longevity from the molecular level on up. Longitudinal studies are beginning to offer solid, actionable diet plans that tie-in to longer life.

This is an exciting development for dietitians and nutritionists… even more so because much of it mirrors what they have been teaching all along.

But with the weight of science behind longevity diets, and that eternal human urge to live longer, demand for this new class of specialized nutritional consulting may be about to explode.

The following bachelors and Master’s programs offer career-focused instruction delivered by trained nutritionists with experience in the field. Find out more what each individual course of study offers through the locations below.

Featured Nutritionist Programs

Ideas Tying Ingestion to Immortality Are as Old as Humanity

reaching for water coming from pipesLiving longer is an obsession humans have had through the ages. The Fountain of Youth appears in the writings of the Greeks as an elixir that would restore youth to anyone drinking from or bathing in it. Such stories drove exploration around the globe, such as Juan Ponce de León’s expedition to Florida.

Other tales eliminated the need for travel, such as the Elixir of Youth, described in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Alchemists through the ages stayed home in dark and smoky laboratories attempting to find the magic ingredient, with no success.

Let food be thy medicine and let thy medicine be food.

~ Hippocrates

In many other cases, though, the key to eternal youth was thought by the ancients to lie in what they ate. The Greeks were constantly on the lookout for ambrosia, the food of the gods. The Bible speaks of the fruit of the Tree of Life, the oft-forgotten companion of the Tree of Knowledge, and the real reason Adam and Eve were evicted. Even today, ginseng is considered in Chinese culture to be a rejuvenating substance, and finds favor in both traditional medicine and popular dishes.

In modern times, tech entrepreneurs from Jeff Bezos to Peter Thiel have started throwing money at bids for immortality, while others, like Bryan Johnson, have started infusing themselves with the blood of younger relatives.

But it turns out such extravagance may be as silly now as it has ever been. And nutritionists may have had the secret all along.

Health and Wellness Are as Important as Lifespan for Longevity Nutrition Counselors

natural agingLiving longer isn’t always a complete blessing, though. Even as medical science has extended the human lifespan with new treatments, better access to food, and healthier living conditions, great debate has emerged over the quality of those extra years.

It’s been widely known that the prevalence of serious disease increases with age. Cancer, heart disease, organ failure… all the numbers go up as you get to the upper end of that curve. And sometimes that means the people who live the longest simply end up experiencing the most misery.

Longevity and healthy aging nutrition plans have to take into account more than just living longer… they also have to optimize the extra life that people live. And it turns out that diet can have a lot to do with quality of life as well as the length of it.

Growing Evidence Highlights Strong Connections Between Nutrition and Diet and Longevity

What nutrition and health sciences researchers are coming to find is a kind of common pattern in populations and individuals with extra-long, active, and enjoyable lifespans.

Unsurprisingly, there’s no Fountain of Youth or single magical ingredient. Instead, the data supports a multi-pillar approach resting on several supports:

  • Macronutrient composition – Many key aging-related genes are regulated by nutrient levels and composition. Finding the key foods to slow aging is a work in progress, but so far, a diet focused on whole grains, legumes, and healthy fats is thought to be important.
  • Caloric intake – While outright obesity has long been known to increase disease risks and reduce lifespan in a number of ways, it’s less intuitive that reducing calorie intake overall would slow aging. But studies in mice and primates appear to show that’s the case—and so far, human studies seem to replicate a decrease in the pace of aging through key biomarkers.
  • Feeding patterns – Time-restricted feeding is maybe the least understood factor, but intermittent fasting patterns may show some promise in inducing metabolic activity thought to reduce aging at the cellular level.

These are clearly all diet-related factors. But proper nutrition is even more important than this suggests. That’s because aging itself is only one cause of mortality. A healthy diet is also important in preventing chronic diseases that also reduce life expectancy and quality of life.

Longevity Science Goes Beyond Diet and Exercise

mri scanThe right nutritional and exercise patterns may be the foundation of longevity, but modern science has a lot more to offer in lifespan extension than just moving around and eating right.

So typically, healthy aging programs combine those basic first steps with even more advanced interventions and techniques to reduce mortality and improve long-term quality of life.

Healthcare generally, and particularly preventive medicine, is a core part of that. Many longevity programs involve proactive whole-body MRI scans and regular bloodwork analysis to find and diagnose any abnormalities that could reveal developing disease.

Genetic testing goes hand in hand with that, giving clinicians a window into what kinds of diseases to which any particular individual may be susceptible. Tailored biomarker and metabolic analysis exposes risks to monitor or mitigate.

Other programs may include generic anti-inflammatory strategies like cold plunges or adding omega-3 fatty acids and polyphenols to the diet.

Although nutrition is a cornerstone of the process, nutritionists are only a piece of the healthy aging puzzle. One of the key realizations of longevity medicine in general is that personalized, holistic wellness planning has to integrate all those pieces to truly extend the useful lifespan.

Importantly for nutritionists, the right balance of macronutrients has to take in considerations of individual metabolic response. Put more plainly, that means that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to longevity diets. Every individual will need their own consultation, diet, and fine-tuning.

That means a lot of work for nutritionists in this field.

A Look at the Expanding Professional Role for Nutritionists in Longevity and Healthy Aging

Still, most therapists don’t sit down and draw up their nutrition plans with the express goal of achieving longevity. It’s often an important, but unstated, long-term objective that goes along with managing diabetes or building muscle or avoiding food allergies, but people don’t walk in the door with cheating death marked on their referral sheet.

That may be changing, though. As more and more people become aware of the role that diet can play in their mortality, many of them will start to seek out professional nutritional advice on the subject.

That’s creating a whole new specialization in longevity nutritional counseling for dietitians with the right expertise.

Specialized Areas of Expertise Are Involved in Longevity Diet Counseling

What sort of areas of expertise is longevity nutrition focused on?

It’s nothing the typical dietitian or certified nutritionist isn’t already familiar with. The essence of the concept is to optimize dietary strategies to support lifestyle paths proven to extend lifespans.

Longevity nutritional counseling leans away from focusing on specific health risks in favor of delaying the physiological consequences of aging in general.

This happens through the same fundamental process as drawing up any nutrition plan. However, these personalized plans require an understanding of the importance of:

  • Lifestyle integration
  • Knowing foodstuffs and supplements tied to the most current evidence of longevity benefits
  • Genetic and environmental roles in longevity
  • Addressing specific risk factors or deficits for individual clients

older runners in the park

Most nutritionists are well-versed in all those topics through nutritionist degree programs available at almost every level of college. However, specializing in nutritional longevity means keeping more focus on the latest breakthroughs and developments in the field, as well as closely related topics like:

  • Advanced preventative diagnostic imaging
  • Genetic screening
  • Epigenetic activation
  • Stress management and hormone balancing
  • Medical longevity therapies

Since this is a field that is changing all the time, a background in research and interpreting scientific data is also a benefit. That can make a master’s degree in nutrition the best preparation for this field. At that advanced level of study, research projects and experimentation are part of the curriculum. That’s valuable preparation for working on the cutting edge.

Longevity Nutritional Counselors Are Going Beyond the Frontiers of Established Science

As you get toward the sharpest parts of that edge, though, there’s a lot of room for further specialization and optimization. While basic diet and exercise patterns are well-established, some longevity nutritional counselors incorporate other theoretical protocols including:

  • Bio-hacking
  • Mitochondrial optimization
  • Sleep hygiene
  • Anti-inflammatory nutrition
  • Cold exposure
  • Detoxification processes

While there is often compelling biological or animal research to back these theories up, most of them are too new to have accumulated strong experimental evidence. But both longevity clinics and individual counselors are building plans that incorporate many of those features today. Opportunities to further specialize within the field of healthy aging can take you in many directions.

Where Can You Find Nutritional Longevity Counseling?

The open secret in the industry is that really most general nutrition counseling is longevity counseling… you’ll live longer and feel better with even just the basics of a healthy diet in place.

Finding a specialist in the field of nutritional longevity is the best way to get a real focus on applying and optimizing the latest techniques for lifespan extension.

Most nutritional longevity counseling happens either through individual consulting dietitians or at highly focused longevity clinics that are popping up around the country.

These clinics usually integrate medical, nutritional, and mental approaches for the best results. They offer individualized plans that involve assessments and treatments from experts in each of those areas. They can conduct testing and bloodwork, provide personalized diet plans, and even offer hormone replacement and IV therapy treatments.

Compared to traditional nutrition and even healthcare services, longevity centers are proactive. They recognize that many of the steps that need to be taken to lengthen life and improve health are not possible under traditional medical models. Their clients need to come in sooner and start earlier for truly life-changing dietary choices.

Independent Nutritionists Have Opportunities To Expand the Longevity Counseling Circle

Although true healthy aging takes more than just a nutritional consult, looking for a healthy diet may be the gateway many people take to start the process.

This means that independent nutritionist who are initially seeing clients for other purposes may also offer services for longevity nutrition counseling.

This works because one of the main reasons that people seek out and consult dietitians on their own is to lose weight. Since that’s a practical side effect of the healthy food choices and caloric restriction of a longevity diet, it’s not much of a stretch to get people hooked into a new goal: a longer and healthier life.

Approaching a career in longevity nutritional counseling through a more conventional, general nutritionist role is a natural progression. While honing your healthy aging specialty skills, you will continue to keep one foot in the world of more typical nutrition work. Many independent nutritionists simply expand their existing practice by offering programs revolving around low-inflammation diets or exercise and wellness packages.

Nutritionists building an independent career in longevity and healthy aging may need to expand their skillset outside of dietary science to cover all the bases.

This path can also blend well with fitness-oriented nutritionists. It does not, as part of the typical package, offer the other kinds of advanced longevity treatments that can be found in full-service clinics, however. On the other hand, it can be offered more affordably and offer many patients most of the benefits they would get at a clinic anyway.

There’s a bright future for longevity nutrition counseling specialists, and the best part is that it’s self-sustaining: the longer your clients live and the happier they are, the longer they will continue to be your clients!

The Diet That Started It All

healthy food on tableA lot of the discussion of longevity diets comes from the original: a set of guidelines developed by biochemist Dr. Valter Longo at the USC Longevity Institute.

Longo was inspired by early work in caloric restriction by his mentor, Roy Walford.

While the dietary prescription Longo offers is recognizable to pretty much any nutritionist as a riff on the Mediterranean diet, with food preparation guidelines tending toward low-fat cooking methods, the most novel recommendation is intermittent fasting.

Participants may only ingest foods during a 10 to 12 hour timeframe, not to include the 3 or 4 hours immediately before sleeping. Further, they will from time to time further restrict their caloric intake for five days at a time… down into the 800 to 1100 calorie range. This is believed to put stress on cells to put them in a younger, more resilient state.

The jury remains out on intermittent fasting; although a number of studies show that it has apparent benefits in heart health, others find that time-restricted eating alone doesn’t result in weight loss or overall health increases versus just managing caloric intake.

Even so, the Longevity Diet has become immensely popular and is a lot of the reason that longevity nutritional counseling is becoming big today.

Questions People Also Ask About Longevity Nutrition Consulting and Specializing in Healthy Aging as a Dietitian

This is a new area of nutrition and health science, so it’s only natural that people tend to have a lot of questions about nutrition counseling for healthy aging. It’s an area where there is a lot of curiosity and not a lot of answers.

That’s why we’re going the extra mile and giving you some of the hard and honest truths about longevity nutrition counseling, and about how dietitians are turning it into a lucrative career path.

Are There Any Official Certifications for Longevity Nutritionists?

So far, there are no official certifications offered to nutritionists who specialize in longevity counseling from any of the major organizations in the nutritional health field.

However, you can find a number of smaller, independent groups that offer certifications in longevity nutrition or related areas. Credentials like a Longevity Coach Certification or Certified Longevity Nutrition Specialist can offer clients some assurance that you are putting in the work to build special skills in this field. These typically come with some specific classes you will take from the certificate issuer, and sometimes a test to pass to prove you’ve absorbed the lessons.

There are also options that aren’t specific to nutritional counseling, such as a Longevity Wellness Coaching Specialist in fitness, or the Functional Aging Specialist certification from ISSA.

Does Longevity Nutritional Counseling Really Work?

Like all kinds of nutritional counseling, longevity-based guidance works however much clients are able to follow it. The scientific evidence for life extension and health improvement from proper nutrition are not in dispute. The largest factor is often the ability to people to stick with the plan.

For that reason, longevity nutritional counseling actually relies on the ability of registered dietitians to bake in motivation and tasty alternatives as much as simply recommending healthier foods. Working with each individual client to find the right combination of taste and inspiration can often be the key.

What Is the Recommended Diet for a Longer and Healthier Life?

There are many individual variations depending on genetic predisposition, current age, and medical conditions that can influence the best diet for living longer and feeling better.

The basic outlines are clear, however:

  • Whole grains and vegetables form the core intake
  • High-fiber and fresh fruits
  • Nuts
  • Small amounts of low-mercury seafoods such as shrimp and salmon
  • Low-fat food preparation with a largely olive-oil base

Just as important as what is on the list to eat is what to avoid:

  • Limited protein intake, including very limited amounts of animal protein
  • Processed foods, especially sugars
  • Foods high in dairy or saturated fats

Can You Lose Weight Following a Longevity Diet?

Yes, like any primarily plant-based, calorically-restricted diet, almost everyone will tend to lose weight by following a longevity diet plan. In fact, it’s almost a requirement. With nearly half of Americans fitting the clinical definition of obesity, and obesity itself being a big risk factor for increased mortality, dropping to a healthier BMI is a practical necessity if you want to live a longer and happier life.