Tai Lopez is back with another book of the day. This one’s called The Art of Living Long by Luigi Cornaro. Apparently, the author lived to be a hundred and two; not bad considering he died in 1566, long before modern medicine. So what did the guy believe? Was he Team Carnivore? Team Keto? Vegan? Paleo? Raw food? None of the above? Let’s find out. “The crazy thing,” Tai says, “was this dude was ahead of his time in terms of science.” Read on for the full book review.
“Because, what has science found in, let’s say lab rats, there’s all these scientific studies,” Tai continues. “Not eating a lot. So, now you hear buzzwords like intermittent fasting, you hear things about restricted caloric diets. Well this guy was ahead of his time. He said, here’s principle number one to live a longer life: ‘Always leaving the table well able to take more. In this act, according to the proverb, not to satiate oneself with food is the science of health.’”
“There, that’s it,” Tai says. “Basically, what’s interesting is in Okinawa, which currently is the country that has the most centenarians, people living to one hundred. They say the same thing. They call it eating to eighty percent full. It’s exactly what he said in the fourteen-, fifteen-hundreds. Leave full. Now, you look at modern bodybuilders, what’s one of the things they say? Lots of meals. Tom Platz, he’s a legendary bodybuilder, he mentored me, he said eat more, but smaller meals.”
“Don’t get full ’cause it pushes the belly out. Now he was talking about more from the aesthetic side, but still. In Europe, they already know this. I’m in Europe right now. But if you go to Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, nobody’s big. When you go to a restaurant, there ain’t no all you can eat. There’s nothing like that. Now, if you’re trying to build muscle, it’s tough to do on a caloric restriction. So it’s a delicate balance depending on your goals. Probably a hybrid approach would work best.”
But here’s the punchline: the art of living long is temperance per meal. Throw in intermittent fasting if you like. Experiment with how long you fast for. Some people are gonna respond better to it than others. It’ll depend on who you are, your age, genetics, et cetera. But yeah, that’s number one. Don’t satiate yourself. What else helped this Luigi guy live to more than a hundred years old, despite everyone around him dying early from things like the bubonic plague?
In the book, Luigi said he was also careful to guard against intense heat and cold. Who knows if that carries any weight because today you got people like Wim Hof saying ice baths are the fountain of youth. Luigi would avoid extreme fatigue and poor ventilation as well. “But there you have it,” Tai says. “Four simple principles. Eat till you’re eighty percent full. Avoid extreme weather. Never get too tired. And breathe good, clean air. Here we are, hundreds of years later, science is saying the same thing.”
You gotta overcome that primitive drive where you feel like every meal’s your last, and you just go crazy and pig out. America would look a lot different if everyone could somehow start doing that. On the other hand, Tai warns, don’t go overboard with it. Thomas Edison supposedly, at the end of his life, would only drink like a glass of milk a day, and the dude wasted away. So use common sense, find a happy medium, but aim for about eighty percent full every time you eat.
