Tips for healthy aging Lessons in Lifespan Health

Dr. Roberto Vicinanza MD and PhD and instructional associate professor of gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School, and a specialist in geriatric medicine, joins us for a conversation about healthy aging, including tips on how to keep the body and mind functioning for as long as possible.
Quotes from this episode On the importance of setting small goals
"People may have all the good intentions, but they might set up goals that are too ambitious and then when they don't reach that goal, they feel frustrated, and they quit… We have to let them understand that goals must be small…So, an apple a day. We have to eat the apple a day and be happy and recognize when we reach three or four days in a row that we are eating the apple, right? So celebrate the success even of small, very small goals."
On keeping your diet simple
"Diets cannot be too restrictive for a long period of time. The majority of people will give up.  It is important that diet needs to be easy to follow, but at the same time needs to be healthy. When we talk about a simple diet, we are now referring on something that needs to be easy to follow, but also simple in terms of the way we make food. So we have to eat in a very simple way. So, avoiding ingredients that are maybe tasty, but not that healthy. And sometimes they also cover the, the real flavor of, of food.  We have this tendency to add always sauces and creams and other things on food that actually cover the real flavor of food and also contain a lot of saturated fatty acids, heat and sodium, sometimes sugar. So, we increase these calories by adding something that we don't really need. Diet must be simple in terms of the type of diet that we have, but also in the way we cook and prepare dishes."
On the benefits of the Mediterranean diet
"So, the results that, that we have referred to the traditional Mediterranean diet, which is characterized by high consumptions of fruits and vegetables, cereals, legumes, extra virgin olive oil, nuts, and a moderate intake of fish, and a low intake of dairy products and meat products. So, we do have robust evidence suggesting that high adherence to these dietary patterns is linked to positive health outcomes, in particular for cardiovascular diseases, dyslipidemia and diabetes.
But another important result was that the adherence to Mediterranean diet was inversely associated with a number of medications. So, patient who were more adherent to Mediterranean diet, they also used less medication. 
Another interesting observation that we found was related to depressive symptoms and comorbidity. When we analyze our data, we found out that the relationship between comorbidity and depressive symptom was high in older adults…In patients with higher adherence with Mediterranean diet, this correlation was weaker. When Mediterranean diet adherence declines, this relationship was stronger. So Mediterranean diet played seems to play a crucial role in mediating the relationship between the presence of comorbidity and depressive symptoms."
On the importance of physical activity
"Although we don't have big clinical trials on physical activity, we have small, randomized control trials showing that certain level of physical activity, may have some benefits in terms of improving the cardiovascular health and, utilization of glucose in the muscle in modulating inflammation, improved cognitive function and physical performance. Some of the benefits that we have from being active and also exercise regularly include an improvement in the cardiac output improving the health of the heart by improving cardiac contractility, oxygen uptake. And we know that we don't have to do long sessions of exercise or being extreme physically active. Already, if we walk between 45 to 75, 85 minutes a week, we can already see some benefits. Of course, the more we exercise, the more benefits we see, but at some point we reach a plateau."
On sarcopenia
"With the aging process, there is a decl