very interesting story. That explains why these pros as of today age so rapidly, shooting tons of insulin while slamming down 100 grams of high glycemic carbohydrates and simple sugars makes the body age rapidly. I eat less than 100 grams of carbs a day, and will probably do so for the rest of my life. I do go overboard on the fruit at times though especially a nice sweet watermelon.
Actually, I think that her extreme youth was caused by her eating a very low calorie diet and not because she ate little carbs or saturated fats. If you at an extremely vegetarian diet where your only source of calories are low glycemic fruits like berries, then you are likely getting less than 1,000 calories per day. Most fruits are mostly fiber and water with little sugar,the exceptions being few like bananas and mangoes, so even if you eat pounds of berries a day you will be getting few calories. It also is probably not the antioxidants since studies have shown that the antioxidants in fruits and vegetables have extremely low bioavailability and are not absorbed anyway. Most of the benefits of eating fruits and vegetables seems to be related to their causing a sharp increase in alkalinity which buffers poisons from the bloodstream and neutralizes and thus stops free radicals from being formed. But they don't seem to have antioxidant effects at all. If you put free radicals into the body, the antioxidants in fruits and vegetables will do nothing to stop them since they are not absorbed into the body. The same is true for water-soluble antioxidants like vitamin C, which are not effective at all at stopping reactive Oxygen species. Now, fat-soluble antioxidants like vitamin E and alpha-lipoic acid are a different story: they penetrte in cells and significantly reduce protein oxidation and lipid peroxidation of cell membranes. But that woman would probably look just as young if she ate 500 calories of ice cream a day.
Also question for you. It is well known that large amounts of fructose cause glycation and higher levels of AGE's in the body. Is fruit something to be concerned about? Obviously high fructose corn syrup and fruit juice is alot worse but even if I eat a ton of fruit, I never actually consume over 40 grams of fructose. I know you said chimps show very little signs of wrinkles and basicly live off of bananas...
Physiology is a lot more complicted than that. There is no evidence that fructose causes increase glycation under normal circumstances. Most of the studies that show that fructose increases glycation 20 times more than glucose are cell cultures studies where fructose was infused directly to cell mitochondria. Also, glycation is a lot more related to protein intake rather than simple sugar intake. Most of the studies suggest that a diet that contains a lot of protein and fructose might increase glycation, but even that is pure speculation. Human physiology is superb at metabolizing simple sugars since we evolved from a fruitarian ancestor. Most of our digestive, enzymatic and cellular metabolic processes utilize glucose most effectively as fuel. As for fructose, it is broken down in the liver into ketones and thus do not enter our cells as such. There is no fructose being directly utilized by your cells, except with minor exceptions like sperm cells and some specialized cells in the intestines. So there is likely no increased glycation since there is no fructose being used by your body's cells as all the studies that show that fructose increase glycation involved infusing the cells's mitochondria directly with fructose.
We can also utilize amino acids and fats as we evolved this capacity in the last 250,000 years after eating meat-based diets, but simple carbs are still our cells prefered fuel. A lion's cells can directly split the amines of amino acids into sugar; we can only do that in the liver. Our cells prefer that we get our carbs directly from food. Chimps eat tons of fructose and show none of the age-related diseases that Human do. I never heard of a chimp suffering from artherosclerosis or diabetes from eating a diet that is 95% fruit and only 5% meat despite the fact that glucose raises blood sugar levels and fructose raises plasma triglyceride levels. Physiology is a lot more complicated than that.
SUCKMYMUSCLE