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Secret Diet of Myanmar MONKS!!! Live to 100!!

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A YouTube host swaps restaurant reviews for monk’s robes to chase Myanmar’s secret to a long life.

Sonny Side has built the Best Ever Food Review Show on eating street food across dozens of countries, but on March 25, 2020, the American host put down the fork for a different kind of assignment. In an 18-minute, 54-second episode titled “Secret Diet of Myanmar MONKS!!! Live to 100!!,” Sonny travels to a monastery in Myanmar and spends roughly 24 hours living inside the daily rhythm of Theravada Buddhist monastic life — robes, alms bowl, and all. The goal isn’t a restaurant recommendation; it’s an answer to why monks following this centuries-old routine are so often cited as long-lived.

• Sonny Side dresses in monastic robes and follows the monastery’s schedule for close to 24 hours to document the routine firsthand.
• The Vinaya rule at the heart of the episode requires monks to eat their final solid meal of the day before noon, then fast until the following sunrise.
• The food itself is entirely community-supplied — curries, regional vegetables, rice, perilla seeds, and tea donated by monastery volunteers and lay supporters rather than bought or prepared to the monks’ own taste.

Trading the Camera Crew for a Begging Bowl

The episode opens with Sonny joining the monastery’s morning alms round, the practice by which monks walk through the surrounding community collecting food offered directly by lay supporters. It’s the mechanism that funds the entire monastic diet — there’s no kitchen budget, no grocery run, just whatever the neighborhood chooses to give that morning. For a host whose whole channel is built on tracking down the best plate of food in a given city, handing over control of what he eats — and when — is the actual story here.

The Noon Deadline

The rule that structures everything else in the episode is simple and unforgiving: solid food stops at noon. Under the Vinaya, the monastic code governing conduct for ordained monks, any meal eaten after midday is off-limits, and the fast holds until sunrise the next morning. Sonny frames this as the routine’s central discipline — not a diet plan in the Western sense of macros and portion control, but a hard cutoff that dictates the entire day around it.

The Composition of the Plate

The meals themselves, shown being prepared by monastery volunteers, lean on Burmese staples: rice, regional vegetables, curries donated that morning, perilla seeds, and tea. None of it is chosen by the monks eating it — it’s whatever the community brings, which is part of the point. Viewers of Sonny’s usual format, including his stop at a luxury buffet in an earlier episode, will notice the contrast immediately: no menu, no choice, no seconds after noon.

There’s no ordering off a menu here — you eat what’s donated, and you eat it before noon or you don’t eat again until sunrise.

Eating With Intention

Sonny highlights how the monks approach the meal itself — eating with attention rather than appetite, and directing loving-kindness, or metta, toward the people who donated the food rather than focusing on whether they enjoyed it. It’s a mindset that lines up with the kind of pared-down, deliberate living Sonny has touched on in other episodes exploring simple lifestyles, and it’s presented as inseparable from the diet itself — the how mattering as much as the what.

By the time the fast kicks back in at noon, the episode has made its real point: the “secret” isn’t a superfood or a supplement, it’s a system — alms in the morning, one cutoff at midday, and a community that keeps the whole thing running. Sonny closes out the day back in his own clothes, having gotten through roughly 24 hours on a monk’s schedule, curry and rice included.