At Anamaya, eating gluten-free was never meant to feel like being on a restrictive diet. It’s simply one part of a larger philosophy about food, health, and longevity.
Our approach starts with a simple question:
If our goal is Maximum Health, what would we choose to eat?
For us, the answer isn’t a diet built around processed substitutes or foods engineered to imitate something else. It’s fresh vegetables, tropical fruit, beans, rice, locally grown corn, roots, plantains, herbs, eggs, fish, chicken, seeds, healthy fats, and meals prepared from ingredients that still look like food.
This fits naturally into what we call the Longevity Lifestyle at Anamaya. Longevity isn’t only about adding years to life. It’s about creating the conditions for more energy, resilience, mobility, strength, happiness, and health throughout those years.
Food is one of the most important inputs we have.
For us, leaving wheat out has turned out to be surprisingly easy.
Learning From the Nicoya Blue Zone
Anamaya sits on Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula, a region internationally associated with exceptional longevity.
Traditional food in this part of Costa Rica didn’t revolve around bread, pasta, pastries, and wheat flour. The classic rural diet grew from ingredients that could be produced locally, including corn, beans, squash, rice, fruit, vegetables, and other simple foods.
Corn has been especially important.
Traditional Mesoamerican preparation often involves nixtamalization, in which corn is treated with an alkaline solution before being ground into masa. A scientific review of maize processing found that nixtamalization can improve the bioavailability of nutrients including niacin and certain minerals.
Source: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Long before anyone used the word biohacking, people here had developed sophisticated ways of making simple foods more useful to the body.
Sometimes the newest health idea looks remarkably similar to the oldest one.
The Extraordinary Story of José Flores
Costa Rica’s longevity story became even more remarkable in 2026 with the case of José Flores Flores, a Guanacaste farmer whose national identity records list his birth on July 11, 1907.
That would make him 119 years old.
His family and Costa Rican longevity advocates are working to have his age formally verified internationally. If that documentation is accepted, his recorded lifespan would exceed that of the oldest man currently verified in history.
Flores grew up in rural Guanacaste and spent much of his life working in agriculture. Reporting on his life describes rice and beans, tortillas, vegetables, cheese, and milk among the staples of his traditional diet. At age 105, according to his granddaughter, he was still dancing, carrying a machete, and doing chores.
Source: ticotimes.net
No single diet can explain a human life of extraordinary length.
But Flores represents something worth paying attention to: a traditional culture built around movement, work, family, local food, community, and a much less industrialized food environment.
Those ideas fit naturally with the kind of longevity lifestyle we want to explore at Anamaya.
Why We Prefer Alternatives to Wheat
Removing wheat creates space for an enormous variety of foods.
Instead of automatically placing bread beside every meal, we can use corn tortillas, black beans and other legumes, rice, plantains, sweet potatoes, yuca, squash, vegetables, fruit, nuts, and seeds.
These foods don’t merely replace wheat. They broaden the diet.
Beans are especially interesting in the Costa Rican longevity story. A 2024 prospective study followed 2,827 older Costa Ricans and found that a traditional rural dietary pattern was associated with lower all-cause mortality. Greater bean intake was also independently associated with lower mortality.
Source: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
That doesn’t make beans a miracle food.
It suggests something more useful: traditional dietary patterns deserve respect.
Modern Wheat Belongs to a Different Agricultural World
There’s another reason many health-conscious people are becoming more selective about wheat.
The agricultural system around wheat continues to change.
Genetically engineered wheat has now cleared major U.S. regulatory barriers. USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service determined that Bioceres’ HB4 wheat, engineered for drought tolerance and herbicide resistance, isn’t subject to regulation under its plant pest framework and may be grown and bred in the United States from that perspective.
Source: aphis.usda.gov
FDA has also completed its biotechnology consultation for HB4 wheat.
Source: hfpappexternal.fda.gov
For people who prefer traditional foods and want to minimize genetically engineered ingredients, that changing landscape offers another reason to explore other staple foods.
There’s also growing consumer awareness around herbicide use in modern grain production, including pre-harvest applications under certain agricultural conditions.
For us, the point isn’t to become afraid of every modern food.
It’s to recognize that we have choices.
Here in Costa Rica, surrounded by corn, rice, beans, roots, plantains, vegetables, fruit, fish, eggs, and other simple foods, wheat doesn’t need to be the foundation of the diet.
Gluten-Free Without the Cardboard
Unfortunately, “gluten-free” has sometimes become synonymous with processed substitutes.
Take wheat flour out, replace it with a collection of refined starches and gums, add sugar, put “GF” on the package, and somehow the product becomes a health food.
That isn’t our philosophy.
Our chefs don’t begin with, “How do we reproduce wheat?”
They begin with, “How do we make something delicious?”
A beautiful piece of fresh fish doesn’t need gluten. Neither does coconut curry, rice and beans, roasted vegetables, tropical salads, eggs, plantains, soups, ceviche, fresh fruit, or most of the foods humans have eaten traditionally in tropical climates.
Even our soy sauce is gluten-free.
The food happens to be gluten-free because wheat is simply not required to make it good.
Gluten-Free as a Simple Biohack
Biohacking can sound futuristic.
Sensors, red light, sauna, cold plunges, oxygen, HRV measurements, supplements, and other technologies all have their place.
At Anamaya, guests can explore several wellness and biohacking modalities alongside yoga, spa treatments, nature, movement, and rest.
Explore: spa and massage.
But one of the simplest biohacks requires no technology at all.
Change an input and observe what happens.
Spend a week eating fresh whole foods without wheat. Notice your digestion, energy, appetite, sleep, and how you feel after meals.
Different people will notice different things.
That’s the point.
Biohacking at its best isn’t blindly following somebody else’s protocol. It’s learning to pay attention to your own body.
Maximum Health Is Bigger Than Gluten
We don’t believe removing one ingredient magically creates health.
A Longevity Lifestyle is broader.
It includes movement, strength, meaningful social relationships, sleep, sunlight, time outside, stress reduction, purpose, play, food quality, and a relationship with nature.
That’s why the Anamaya experience combines healthy food with yoga, ocean air, jungle, friendship, adventure, rest, spa treatments, surfing, and opportunities to experiment with different wellness practices.
Our location in the Nicoya region gives those ideas an unusual context.
We aren’t trying to reproduce a longevity laboratory.
We’re living inside a place where traditional longevity practices developed organically.
Explore more:
Explore: longevity guide.
Explore: Nicoya Blue Zone.
Healthy Eating Should Still Be a Pleasure
If health requires eating miserable food forever, most people will eventually choose pleasure.
We think that’s the wrong trade.
The better challenge is to make healthier food pleasurable enough that there’s no battle.
A plate filled with tropical produce, fresh herbs, beautiful vegetables, fish, avocado, plantains, rice, beans, roots, fruit, coconut, and other real foods can be both healthy and deeply satisfying.
That’s the Longevity Lifestyle we’re interested in.
Not fear. Not deprivation. Not obsessing over a single ingredient.
Just making better choices often enough that those choices become the way you actually want to live.
At Anamaya, leaving wheat out is one of those choices.
