Valter Longo was just 16 years old when he landed in the US, ready to rock. He loved the bold electric sound of Jimi Hendrix and had arrived in America to pour his heart and soul into the study of jazz guitar.
Food was an afterthought. Longo went with what was easiest, consuming the same things his American relatives and friends ate.
“I didn’t know any better,” he told Business Insider.
Coca-Cola and hamburgers were some of the highlights of his new Midwestern diet. Gone is the whole-grain Friselle crusty bread and Mediterranean vegetables he grew up with in the Italian port city of Genoa.
He didn’t really notice the silent but steady impact his dietary changes were having on his health. He couldn’t see how less fiber, fewer colorful vegetables, and more added sugar were ruining his heart health and expanding his waistline. As he grew up and went to Texas for college, studying biochemistry and music, he began to enjoy the delicious local Tex-Mex offerings. Again, whatever was convenient and most readily available worked well for him.
Walter Longo is a professor of gerontology and biology at the University of Southern California who studies how fasting affects human health. photo by Alan Weissman
“I guess that’s what happens to most people, right?” he said. “Because they’re not experts, and you’re surrounded by this world that’s full of food, and it’s just really hard not to fall into it.”
By the time he moved to Los Angeles for high school, about eight years into his American life, his visits to the doctor’s office weren’t producing the results he expected. He was surprised to discover he had developed high cholesterol and high blood pressure at a “very young” age, he said.
Coincidentally, Longo enrolled at UCLA to study the effects of fasting and calorie restriction on longevity. He reformulated his diet to include more key elements for longevity and fewer calories (in line with what his professors were already doing for their health), and the changes he saw were so rapid and inspiring that he ended up building a career and a very successful one. lunch box business, about it.
“After six months,” he said, “my markers were all back to normal.”
He’s now on a mission to teach people how to diet for healthy aging and combating chronic disease—with his clinical research and personal experience as evidence.
Adhering to his lifelong diet
The northwestern port city of Genoa, Italy, Longo’s birthplace in the Mediterranean. Photo by Feng Wei/Getty Images
Longo, once again, was just going with the local flow when he began adopting some of the dietary strategies of renowned nutrition expert and pro-vegetarian Roy Walford, one of his doctoral students. counselors at UCLA. He began choosing less meat and dairy, but more produce.
He soon experienced firsthand the health-enhancing effects of a minimally processed vegetable diet, which recent studies have shown can rapidly improve cholesterol and potentially even slow aging.
Longo recommends plenty of old-school Mediterranean staples, including nuts, olive oil, and whole grains. Monica Bertolazzi/Getty Images
Then came fasting. In addition to his research in the Walford lab, Longo had also been studying how to prolong the lifespan of bacteria and yeast by starving them to death. He wondered how people could harness the benefits of fasting for longevity, since he knew that the kinds of extreme calorie restriction his professor practiced would never be very popular.
Three decades later, Longo is director of the University of Southern California’s Longevity Institute, pioneering antiaging nutrition research and author of the international best-selling book, The Longevity Diet.
He’s starting to amass a good body of evidence, including multiple independent clinical trials conducted at leading universities around the world, that show some short periods of fasting—or, at least, tricking the body into thinking it’s fasting. fasting – can help slow down the aging process. Longo believes that fasting can also promote an important cellular cleaning process in the body, called autophagy.
In other words: “It can keep organs younger and more functional,” he said.
He has also launched an extremely successful business venture based on the same science. It’s a $200 5-day diet that mimics fasting that has become extremely popular for fat loss. He grimaces slightly as he acknowledges the diet’s reputation.
“This is not a weight loss diet,” he says.
He hopes the diet may one day be seen as less of a futile exercise, as recent research suggests it could become part of clinical care for health conditions including cancer, diabetes, autoimmune issues and dementia.
“I think we need to move much more into personalized, specific types of fasting,” he said.
How to eat healthy, no matter where you live: go frozen
Getty Images / Jewel Samad
For the average person interested in fasting, Longo recommends a more balanced approach than what biohackers and health influencers claim. Instead of cutting out solid food for days, or purging liquids, simply limit your meals to a 12-hour window (say, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.), skipping late-night snacks.
As for what you I DO eat, Longo is in line with other longevity experts. Beans, grains, vegetables, seeds, nuts – in short, all the foods you find in the “Blue Zones” and in the city of Longo, Genoa, Italy (like his favorite Italian crusty bread). Perhaps his most classic Italian recommendation? He suggests adults who want to try a longevity-focused diet aim for a “generous” amount of olive oil, at three teaspoons a day. (Recent research is beginning to suggest that this may be a great way to help prevent dementia.)
“Unless you end up in the lab of a world expert, it’s not that easy to know what to do,” Longo said. “Once you know, it’s very easy to get that food anywhere in the United States.”
And he says you don’t have to spend a fortune at organic fashion markets to make this diet work. Some of his favorite recipes focus on eating vegetables you can easily find frozen like broccoli and carrots, plus lots of beans, some fish and maybe some nuts for snacking.
“I always say that a lot of frozen foods are very healthy, organic, and you can get them anywhere in the U.S., even in small towns in the Midwest,” he said.