Stay Young with Dr. Valter Longo

DR. MIKE MORENO: Welcome back to Wellness, Inc. I’m Dr. Mike Moreno taking a deep dive into all things wellness after over 25 years of practicing medicine. I’m fascinated with anything and everything that can help you feel better, live healthier and become the best you possible. I’ll be interviewing the most cutting-edge experts in the field of wellness and exploring new innovative technologies to help you live your best life. At the end of each episode, I’ll give you my weekly RX. My top tips for you to use right away. Remember to subscribe for free, rate and review my podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

So, we’re going to talk today about something that I think everybody wants to have the answer to. The Fountain of youth, as we say. One of the things I’ve always told my patients and I say it multiple times a day, there’s a difference between aging and getting older, and I say this repeatedly. We all want to get older because the day you stop getting older, you’ve got a bigger problem on your hands. But it’s how we get older. I think that’s where the term aging comes in.

So, I’m really excited to bring on a giant in the field. And when I say giant, this guy’s big deal. In 2018 was one of Time Magazine’s most influential scientists.

Dr. Valter Longo is the Edna M. Jones, professor of gerontology and biological sciences and director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. It’s in Los Angeles, one of the leading Centers for Research on aging and age-related disease. Dr. Longo is also the director of the Longevity and Cancer Program at the Institute of Molecular Oncology in Milan, Italy. This guy’s the real deal. Dr. Longo, Welcome.

DR. VALTER LONGO: Thank you, thank you for having me.

DR. MIKE MORENO: Very, very excited. Now I’ve been saying that what I said at the top of the show, I say this to my patients all the time. Aging. My mother always taught me this when I was a little kid. She used to always say, Well, it’s nice to age gracefully, right? And of course, I was like 6 years old. I didn’t know what that meant, but as I got older, I realized that as we get older, we want to get older, right? Put another candle on the birthday cake. That’s important, but aging and getting older, I’ve always felt, were two separate processes. I’m interested to see what you think about that whole thought.

DR. VALTER LONGO: Yes, obviously, we want to live as long as possible, and we want to age as little as possible, right? Organisms seem to have multiple programs, right? Some of these programs are standby programs, what we call maintenance programs. So, it is possible to actually getting older, get older and at the same time being a standby as far as aging is concerned. If you think about it, we’re we’re always stuck in a reproductive mode. Our body is, with all the food we eat, is always trying to reproduce and grow yet we almost never reproduce. So, then what we’ve been saying for decades is, can you sort of get off that track and get on the maintenance track and then get back on that track of growth only when you need to do it?

DR. MIKE MORENO: Ok, so now I got to ask you. We have very parallel philosophies, so I’m interested because I use this five-pillar approach for health and wellness, and I know you talk about five pillars of longevity. I’d love for you to take us through those five pillars of longevity because I mean, everybody’s thinking, OK, I want to know what this guy has to say. Because as you said, we all want to live long, but we don’t want to necessarily age at the same rate. We want to slow that process or do it, as my mother always said, and in a graceful way. So, let’s talk about those 5 pillars of longevity.

DR. VALTER LONGO: Yeah, so 5 pillars. I do a lot of basic work. I also do a lot of clinical trials. Now we open a clinic for my foundation in Los Angeles. I always thought, how important is it to have all these pillars, not just a clinical, but I also say epidemiology and basic research, et cetera. That’s where the 5 pillars came from.

One of the pillars is basic research focus on longevity. So how do you make a mouse, a rat, or monkey live longer? Is there something conserved that we keep seeing making this organism a longer live? And the other one is clinical trials. Randomized clinical trials. That’s an important pillar. So, if you try to make a decision about should you eat more protein, less protein, well, let’s go see what happens to people who eat a lot of protein vs the people who eat low. What changes occur in the body shorter? But then that’s limited timing. So, then you say, what about long term? What happens to somebody who has many proteins all the time versus somebody has low protein all the time? Well, then you go to epidemiological studies, right? Then this will tell you what is the association between mortality, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and protein intake? Then I think these are very scientific, very important pillars, but then I thought, what about centenarians?

To me, it’s the 4th pillar because they represent success stories, so you could make it very difficult to make it 100-110 if you made a lot of mistakes in your life. I think that the common denominator between these 4 pillars is really important. What matches all of it? So, what doesn’t it violate? What is a diet or anything else that matches all the data? That’s what I look for.

The 5 one is complex system. I also wanted to bring in something from sort of like the physics world where you look at planes and in cars, how do they age? For example, if you think about an athlete in the wear and tear, if somebody asked you, what is it good for me to be running 3 hours a day? It’s a difficult question, right? It may be good for a while, but I imagine if you do this for 40 years, your knees, your hips are going to suffer, right? If you think about a car, well, is it if we’re selling somebody a car and you say, I parked it in my garage, never took it out. It’s not such a good idea.

DR. MIKE MORENO: Exactly right.

DR. VALTER LONGO: What would you do if there was a car that had 300,000 miles on it? Somebody will say, I don’t want this car either. People will want a car that has maybe 30,000 miles, being driven the right amount of time. Anyways, this is pillar number 5, which I think is also very important because it is we build cars, we build planes. So, we know why are they damaged in the long run? Why do they rust know? Why do they break down? It is an important pillar.

DR. MIKE MORENO: Well, one of the things I do a lot of analogies with my patients, I try to kind of draw very basic conclusions to get a point across to them. Thousands of times. I’ve told patients, let’s say you and I go down to the car dealership, we both buy the same year, the same make, the same model of car brand new and I take care of mine. I change the oil, I rotate the tires, I take it in for servicing and you just drive the heck out of yours and whose car is going to last longer, who’s just going to look better and last longer. That’s exactly what you’re bringing up. So, I feel good that I’ve been telling people the right thing at least, so I’m happy about that. Let’s dive a little bit because I’m fascinated with this and I want to know I want to hear it from you. Can you tell us about the fasting mimicking diet?

DR. VALTER LONGO: It’s really the result of decades of work, starting with me working for Roy Walford. Roy was this MD at UCLA, who was my boss back in the early 90s. He was really the world leading person for nutrition and longevity. Walford was focusing on something called calorie restriction, which was a very simple idea. Well, what if you just take the same identical diet that you’re already eating, and you cut it by 25%? What happens? It’s called calorie restriction. What happens is lots of good and lots of bad, right? So, and they even out right at the end, you get a little bit of a benefit, but not much. So, then the fasting mimicking diet was trying to say calorie restriction can have remarkable effects on diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and eventually, thanks to another student of Walford, [UNINTELLIGIBLE], this was shown for monkeys. The lifelong studies of monkeys showing, really revolution of these age-related diseases. But then the lifespan was not increased very much. So, then what if you can intervene with fasting first and then fasting later for just a few days every, say, three or four months? What if you could just expose the person to five days of a fasting diet every four months and then say, That’s it? Well, I’m not going to ask you to do anything else, much more like a medicine that you would be prescribed.

DR. MIKE MORENO: So, I just want to be clear, every 4 months you go through this process?

DR. VALTER LONGO: Yeah, so every 4 months you get this box essentially, right? I cannot discuss too much about the commercial part or anything about the commercial part, but I have to say the reason that there is a commercial part is because of the standardization of the diet, right? So, what was tested in clinical trials needs to be brought to the to the people. I have to say I donate everything to charity, so I don’t make a penny out of anything that is commercial. That said, the fasting world is getting a little bit out of control, right? So, everybody goes home, and they think no matter what they do is going to be good for you. That’s absolutely wrong.

To make it into mainstream medicine, it has to be standardized, has to have the FDA like… it doesn’t necessarily have to have FDA approval, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, but it will have to have FDA like standards. So, if the FDA says, look, you get a waiver here, I do not think it is necessary for an approval. I think that some of those can be standardized and given to people in that format. Otherwise, they need to be FDA approved.

So, the first thing we can do it, then why it came out, it came out thanks to the government, U.S. government and the National Cancer Institute because we tried a clinical trial of water only fasting with cancer patient and we realize it was a disaster. Nobody, the patient did not want to do it. The oncologist did not want them to do it. So, we went to the National Cancer Institute and said, can we.. because we understand so much about amino acids, proteins and certain amino acids, carbohydrate and specific carbohydrate fats and specific fats, how they regulate different processes in how fasting relates to the levels of different ingredients. So, we use all of that sort of knowledge to make the fasting. The idea was the patients get to eat not normally, but they get to eat 3 meals a day and get the benefits of fasting at the same time.

DR. MIKE MORENO: So, what do you say to people because I hear this all the time, patients that come in and say, well, it’s genetic, it’s in my genes, so no matter what I do, I’m doomed. My brothers and my dad, they all had heart attacks at 50, so it doesn’t make a difference. Obviously, I disagree. I point out there are things in our health we have control over and things that we don’t. But how do you feel and what would you say to an individual out there listening, thinking, Well, I’m a genetic nightmare as far as cardiovascular disease? So why put the effort into something like this?

DR. VALTER LONGO: The opposite, right? If you’re a genetic disaster that’s absolutely why you need to follow all the all the possible interventions. So, for example, if you take p53, this tumor suppressor. In mice, if you take away this tumor suppressor, they get a lot more cancer. If you take these mice, which are like the quintessential disease genetic nightmare for cancer. They all get cancer very rapidly. If you put them in a calorie restriction diet, you have a tremendous effect on their ability to live longer, so they live much longer thanks to the diet. So, and this is about as bad as it gets. So, most people are not born with p53 homozygous mutation, meaning they don’t have a single copy of the p53. So, most likely nutrition can make a big difference. So of course, all of us are doomed, right? Genetically, meaning that there is not a single person I’ve ever met. I followed a lot of people with record longevity. One of them made it 117. But that’s it, right? So, we’re programmed to die.

Let’s put it this way, maybe we’re programmed to die, but let’s say for sure we’re programmed to live so long and then we’re on our own. Then the nutrition and the lifestyle and all the things can make a lot of difference. Whether that program that you’re born with, let’s say somebody has a heart attack in the family in their 50s all the time, that person may benefit more than anybody else.

DR. MIKE MORENO: Exactly.

DR. VALTER LONGO: Right. So then that person needs to decide, am I going to go with the [UNINTELLIGIBLE] type of thing? Or am I going to go with more like what I’ve been preaching, which is higher fats? There’s a lot of similarities, but in my case, I’m proposing a low protein, higher fats, but a very specific pescatarian diet. Which I think is by far the more realistic and also as effective potentially as the very low-fat diet.

DR. MIKE MORENO: Well, that’s the key, realistic. You know, I’ve told my patients for years, there’s a certain what I feel is an ideal diet is it has to be likeable. It has to be affordable. It has to be doable and sustainable. I was talking to a friend of mine last week and I was like, “how are you doing with all this stuff going on”? He said, Yeah, I’m feeling good. I’m dropping some weight. I’m just eating nothing but cabbage for a month. I’m like, what? I said, so you hear these stories about people that do all these things, and I’m like, Yeah, I guess good luck with that, but why can’t you just be reasonable about your approach?

I think when you look at the Mediterranean diet pescatarian diet, it’s a solid diet. It’s a doable diet. It’s enjoyable. You can enjoy live like that. You can go to the extreme of a whole food plant-based diet. Clearly, there’s research there. Clearly it’s a great way to go. I am suspect as to how many people can honestly live that way all the time. I feel like if you truly are truly plant based, I really think it’s maybe 5% of the population that can sustain that. So, it has to be a sustainable thing. What are your thoughts on those sorts of points?

DR. VALTER LONGO: Yeah and not only that, but as suspected and we suspected that from the beginning, there are problems with the vegan diet, right? So, the new one is fractures. Right fractures are now 250% of those of people in the in the vegans compared to people on an animal-based diet. Right? So now you’re starting to see the negatives are also about 20% or so, if not 30 or 40%, but for sure, 20% are malnourished among the vegan population, so as anticipated you can be vegan and healthy, but that’s a job. It’s a difficult job and it’s an uncertain job. What will happen after 30 or 40 years? Even if you did everything perfectly? We don’t know in this two-and-a-half-fold increase in fractures is a reminder of how our bad and improvisation can be and that’s what veganism can be looked at especially if not done correctly.

DR. MIKE MORENO: There is no doubt that diet is a huge part of everything. I have a couple of very close friends that went to med school with me. One of them had a tremendous amount of cardiovascular disease in his family, both his mother and father. Really high risk. To the point we were speaking of earlier, he recognized this and rather than say, Oh I’m genetically doomed, I’m just going to live my life. He’s said my genes aren’t the greatest cards in the world, so I’m going to play my cards the best I can. He doesn’t do a lot of exercise, and I told him, it’s great that you’re eating, he’s thin. I said, it’s great that you’re eating well and your whole food plant based. But you need cardio, you need that other element to it.

When I talk to patients, I really feel like when you talk about weight, pure weight, obesity, I think it’s 90%, 85% food related and maybe 10 or 15% related to activity. It’s about choosing the right foods. It’s about portion control and really what time of the day you eat and when you eat. What are your thoughts in terms of that sort of association with food and exercise? What do you think about that? I want people to kind of get an idea of what your thoughts are.

DR. VALTER LONGO: Well, my thought again is 5 pillars based. In my book, I talk about 150 minutes of exercise a week seems to be ideal. When you go to 300 minutes, you really don’t see much of a difference in mortality, and we’re talking about millions of people follow for decades. I also like the fact that this meta-analysis studies of all studies were repeated confirmed by multiple studies in multiple publications.

About 150 minutes a week of exercise, with about maybe 10% of that being more strenuous exercise, pushing yourself a little bit more. So, 15 minutes a week, essentially when you push yourself in 150 minutes where you do exercise.

Then on top of that, I think if you learn again from the centenarians about an hour or 2 a day of just being active. I always say pick a restaurant or a coffee shop that is 15 minutes away. I do this every day. So instead of picking the closest one, pick the farthest one and go there a couple of times a day, that’s an hour walk right there… just to get coffee. Come back 30 minutes, get lunch. I come back another 30 minutes, and you don’t even realize after a while that you do this. You don’t even realize it. So simple changes that can make a tremendous difference.

DR. MIKE MORENO: So, let’s talk about this when I think of common diseases that consume us, consume this country every year. Obviously, cardiovascular claims 3 quarters, 650,000 to 700,000 lives a year. You think of cancers, obviously. One of the big things we think about is dementia. I think when you look at dementia and the process that sort of neurological studies, what would you say to people out there about food and diet as it applies to neurodegenerative disease or dementia? What would you say your advice would be in terms of food and thought thoughts around that?

DR. VALTER LONGO: Yeah, my advice about food are fairly complex. It doesn’t mean doing it is complex. It means that it’s got an age specific component. I usually tell people to eat more. And that last part of a very particular in a very particular way. I tell people don’t fast every day, but only for 12 hours or 12 on and 12 off. I tell people that are overweight, skip a meal.

It’s going to be probably lunch because most people are not going to skip dinner. I do this for weight control all the time. It’ll be 4 months now I haven’t eaten lunch because I go to Italy every year. I gain weight and that’s the way I control it, right? With breakfast and dinner. Then I just have coffee for lunch. It’s more complex. I don’t want people to think, Oh, I’m just going to go and eat. Because just like fasting, if you say pescatarian or vegan, it’s just words you know. And this is why the doctors and the dietician and the nutritionist in a clinic here in Santa Monica, we put together a molecular biologist, an internal medicine doctor, a dietitian, and I think it’s a team. You don’t have to see them all the time. But if you saw them a couple of times a year, they could change your life because they look at what age you are, where you are, and they come up with something for you.

So, with all that said I think it’s really about aging more than anything else. All these diseases are really about aging. Once you intervene for example, if you look at these little mice and then we have people who have the same mutation, a growth hormone receptor deficient, right? So, you take this growth hormone receptor deficient mice, and I’ll tell you in a second about the people and they live 40 percent longer and this is being confirmed by lots of laboratory.

But the beauty of this, the health of them will never get any disease right. So now these mice get about 40% and normally less than 10% of the mice don’t get any diseases, and this goes 5-fold higher. So, that’s what we’d be trying to preach through to the medical community, which is adding largely ignored is if you intervene and age, how many 20-year-olds or 25-year-olds have any of these diseases, right? Diabetes and cancer, almost nobody, right?

Why is that? Well, the longevity program is so powerful, and it’s the same thing how many 20-year-olds have Alzheimer’s or any cognitive decline?

DR. MIKE MORENO: Correct.

DR. VALTER LONGO: Non-existent, right? So, then the focus, of course, you can think about prevention of single diseases, but it’s really pointless. The focus has to be on the longevity program. How do I make you age as slowly as possible and the Alzheimer, hopefully then you get like Emma Morano, 117 cognitively or Salvatore Caruso 110, cognitively in perfect shape because the aging process is being slowed down as much as possible. So now we have people in Ecuador, they have the same mutation as these little mice and not surprisingly, they rarely get cancer. We’ve seen one single cancer case in about 40 years of direct observation by either myself or Guevara’s the endocrinologist. Diabetes, they are obese, and they rarely get diabetes. Cognitively, we actually brought them to Los Angeles, we did FMRIs, they have a cognitive performance that is of people that are 10, 15, 20 years younger than they are.

Never seen a case of Alzheimer disease in them, right? And they have terrible diet. They drink, they smoke. They don’t exercise. So, this is the power of the aging programs. So, if the aging program is set in the maintenance model like it is in that case, then I think lots of, it doesn’t mean that you’re protected from everything, you can still get cancer. In mice, they still get cancer, but they get a lot less and same for other diseases. So, the point being, use nutrition to control the genes that control aging and then lots of the diseases will go along with it.

DR. MIKE MORENO: A lot of us out there, as you get older, I talk to my patients all the time, there is an incidence of disease that starts to occur for certain disease processes at certain ages, and you get this sort of bell-shaped curve. You start to see a certain disease at this age. It peaks around this age and then once you get past a certain age, you rarely see it anymore.

Let’s say you and I can produce the perfect human right. A lot of us are thinking of our kids. Maybe a lot of my listeners right now are thinking, oh gosh, I have an 18-year-old at home and they’re trying to get them on a good habit just to live the longest and healthiest life possible. What are you going to tell this parent of this 18-year-old? What are you going to say? Here’s what I would recommend, and this is how I would recommend from a nutritional standpoint. You talked a little bit about the 150 minutes a week and then 15 minutes a week of heavier exercise. What would you say from a nutritional standpoint? How can this person live the longest, best life ever?

DR. VALTER LONGO: Well, I mean if you start 18, I would say give them another 7 years of a Mediterranean diet because the Mediterranean diet is much more permissive, white meat, red meat and so on. Let them grow, let them develop fully. Then at 25, I would go to Pescatarian and I would go to 12 hours fasting. I would be less restrictive. Not many rules until 25. They’re not going to have any problems, but Mediterranean is perfect.

Then at 25, I would go to Pescatarian. So now I remove the red meat. I would remove the white meat. I would just go a fish a couple of times a week, maybe eggs a couple of times a week and then a vegan diet. Eat within 12 hours a day and if you start gaining weight, skip the lunch or the dinner, whichever one or replace it with something very low calorie, or very healthy. So those would be the main advisers until they get to about 65 or 70.

Now at 65-70, most people start losing weight. Then 65, 70, at that point, I think you want to slowly go back to the Mediterranean diet and having more of a variety because now the system, I think we see this very clearly with animals in animal studies becomes less redundant, meaning that it needs everything it can get right. So, the vegan diet, for example, legumes are very low in methane and lots of other amino acids, and the system can. It’s OK if you’re 35 years old. Probably no problem if you have lots of legumes, but if you’re 75 years old, you could be really accelerating your frailty program, so now you become weaker and weaker very rapidly and the immune system could be susceptible to these problems. So, the bones, the muscle, the immune system, potentially the cognitive system.

So, then it’s better to go to a higher nourishment and slowly the nourishment becomes more important, then the pro aging effect. So, for example, Carlos, who was a physician of Emma Morano, who made it to 117 at about 100 years of age, start giving her 100 grams a day of raw meat, which of course, would be crazy to say. I’m going to give you a 40-year-old the same, right? But when she made it to 100 and she was anemic, Carlos said, I think this is the way to go.

DR. MIKE MORENO: I know when I went to med school 30 years ago, we weren’t really taught about nutrition and now I work with dietitians and nutritionists all the time. Like you were saying earlier, it is a team effort. It’s a collaboration of knowledge. Thankfully it’s changed now because in medical school nutrition is at the forefront. It is a big part of it. We recognize all of these things. I think the basic elements are there. You have to stay active mentally and physically. You have to hydrate your body, right? You have to make sure you’re hydrated throughout the day. But to your point, it’s about a doable, practical diet. There are so many diets out there, so depriving and deprivation, in my opinion, when you’re talking about food deprivation, leads to failure when someone is struggling, working so hard to maintain a certain diet that that they think is the right thing for them, that’s hard to maintain for a lifetime.

So, what I love about what you’re saying is there’s a shift, and I think at certain times of your life, certain eating habits are appropriate, and others aren’t. I think if you can give people that sort of practical approach and then you’ve got to take into account cultural thing, right? So, I’m Mexican. I grew up in a Mexican family. We ate the same kind of stuff and it’s like there’s that cultural aspect and economics and everything. I think the take home point that I hear from you is that diet is, and food is a tremendous impact on how we live, how healthy we live and how long we live. Is that a fair thing to say?

DR. VALTER LONGO: Yeah, if you look at 100 years, that’s probably like a statement that is worth more than my opinion. If you look at it 100 years of research on aging and you asked 100 of the top scientists to work on aging physicians all the way to very basic molecular biology, and you say, what’s the one thing that is more successful in history in in affecting the aging process? I would say the majority will say, has been dietary restriction, right? It’s been nutritional intervention. It could be dietary restriction or some type of nutritional intervention. So, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, nutrition is by far the main controller of genes in the human body. It would be hard to think of something if you if you take a person or a group of people and you starve it. I always gave this challenge to anybody that I talked to and say, I challenge you to find me any other intervention that will cause more gene expression changes in the human body. Then 5 days of a fasting diet, right? So that tells you the body, brain, liver, everything is completely reprogrammed.

DR. MIKE MORENO: Everything, right?

DR. VALTER LONGO: Yeah. Imagine even a cocktail of drugs, you wouldn’t even get anywhere near that that kind of reprogramming of the human body.

DR. MIKE MORENO: Not to mention, when you look at all of these people they are still looking for that quick answer, right? What’s the pill that’s going to make me- it drives me nuts to watch TV and you watch these commercials with all this big pharma and it shows we combine this pill and this pill and this pill. Now these people are like laughing and singing and having a good ole time. I’m like, just eat right for crying out loud. Just eat properly, you know. I have to thank you, Dr. Longo. I love your philosophy. I love everything about what you say, and I love the do ability. I think some really interesting takeaways, and I’m going to kind of talk about those in a second. Where do we find you?

DR. VALTER LONGO: Yeah, so the best thing if they’re interested in what we preach is the clinic, it’s a foundation clinic, is a non-profit. It’s called Create Cures Milestone Foundation Clinic in Los Angeles and easily find www.createcures.org. People can make an appointment. A lot of it can be done online. We have a team of physicians as well as molecular biologist and dietitians there.

I also have Facebook professor Valter Longo page, where we put up all the sort of news from our side of the world. Then the book “The Longevity Diet” is again, all of it belongs to the foundation is a non-profit. So, all the revenue from my part, the list go to the foundation. It was my book that I wrote a couple of years ago, and that’s probably the easiest way to learn the things that we recommend.

DR. MIKE MORENO: Great. Listen, thank you so much, I appreciate it. Wealth of knowledge, great stuff. Really appreciate you taking time to spend with us and educate us, all of us. So, thank you.

DR. VALTER LONGO: Thank you. Great questions. Thank you.

DR. MIKE MORENO: So that’s it for today. Good stuff. Gosh, you know, if food is the answer, how we eat and I’ll tell you, for me, the biggest thing that Dr. Longo made a point of was using nutrition to control our genes.

You’re not done just because you’re of a genetic makeup. Use nutrition to control your genes. We have more control over our destiny than we think.

And secondly, movement. And he talked about moving one hundred and fifty minutes a week. That’s doable, guys. 30 minutes, 5 days a week, we can do that. And then 15 minutes of a little bit of heavier stuff, right? Strengthen the bones, develop muscle mass. A lot of great stuff we could go on and on, but listen, nutrition is your friend. Learn about it, follow it, and you can live a longer, healthier life.

So that’s it for today. Don’t forget to subscribe for free, download and listen to Wellness, Inc. with me, Dr. Mike Moreno on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and follow me on social at the 17-day diet. Thanks so much, guys.

About This Episode:

In this episode Dr. Mike and Dr. Longo discuss the five pillars of longevity, the latest research on how fasting-mimicking diets (FMD) effect living longer, the need for FDA approved fasting standards, how to determine one’s ideal weight, how to stave off dementia and other neurological problems, and how diet relates to cancer prevention.

About Dr. Valter Longo:

Dr. Valter Longo is the Edna M. Jones Professor of Gerontology and Biological Sciences and Director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California –Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, Los Angeles, one of the leading centers for research on aging and age-related disease. Dr. Longo is also the Director of the Longevity and Cancer Program at the IFOM Institute of Molecular Oncology in Milan, Italy.

Professor Longo donates all profits from his books to research programs, some of which are named above. His books are made possible by his two foundations: Fondazione Valter Longo in Milano and Create Cures Foundation in Los Angeles.

Connect with Dr. Valter Longo:

https://www.valterlongo.com/
https://www.facebook.com/profvalterlongo/
https://www.instagram.com/prof_valterlongo/