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Dr. Valter Longo is an Italian-American scientist and researcher—he’s currently a professor of gerontology and biological sciences and the director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California. The 56-year-old is also the director of the Oncology and Longevity Laboratory at the Institute of Molecular Oncology IFOM in Milan, so he splits his time between Los Angeles and Italy.
His 2018 book, “The Longevity Diet,” is a New York Times bestseller that recommends a plant-based diet that also includes fish, with only two meals per day plus one small snack, ideally within a 12-hour window. (Longo believes this method is superior to the more restrictive 16:8 intermittent fasting mode that’s gained popularity in recent years.)
As part of the Longevity Diet, Longo also advises that you “eat at the table of your ancestors,” focusing on foods that your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents ate, given they are compatible with the Longevity Diet. For Longo, whose ancestors are all Italian, this entails a diet “rich in tomatoes, green beans, garbanzo beans, and olive oil.”
The book also promotes a “fasting-mimicking diet,” (FMD) a 4-5 day period of consuming foods high in unsaturated fats but low in calories, proteins, and carbs. It’s meant to mirror the effects of a water-only fast while providing enough calories to be considered safe outside of clinical settings. In a randomized study conducted at USC’s medical center, people who deployed FMD for five days per month for three months showed improvements in muscle mass, cholesterol, blood pressure, and other areas.
As Longo writes in the book, there are many people who should not do FMD, such as pregnant women, people who are underweight, and people with liver or kidney diseases. For those who do opt to try FMD, Longo suggests that it’s “preferably under the supervision of a registered dietitian or physician.”
GQ caught up with Longo to hear more about his daily routine, his research, and why he advises getting all your meals in a 12-hour window.
For Real-Life Diet, GQ talks to athletes, celebrities, and other high performers about their diet, exercise routines, and pursuit of wellness. Keep in mind that what works for them might not necessarily be healthy for you.
Dr. Valter Longo: I came up with something called the Longevity Diet and and I follow it with some violations, but not too many. So it starts with: I have this old grain. It's called friselle. It's bread that I get from Southern Italy, from a place nearby called Alta Mura, where they make some of the best bread in the world. I combine that with something else from this area of the world, which is an almond spread. So it's the whole grain friselle with almond product that is very high in almond and cocoa and almost nothing else. And then I have an apple and tea. I mix green tea and black tea. So that's my breakfast.
Because I like the health benefits of green tea. I don't like the taste as much, and I like the black tea taste more. So that was the my way to to get both. I have been doing that for a long time.
I spend all my time thinking about how to make people live longer. Whole grains just provide a lot of nourishment and, at the same time, taste really good to me. We have a number of foundation clinics, and that's what we focus on: not just giving people something that is healthy, but something that is healthy and the people are going to enjoy for years, if not for the rest of their lives. That, to me, is the whole grain from the region of Italy, where I'm from, trying to pick the place where they make the best bread in Italy.
That's how I think: I look for the one place that is going to be is going to make the product so good that it's going to be hard to abandon it. And I think it was the right call. And almonds, So we get the almonds from Toritto, another area famous for the taste of the almonds and combining that with the cocoa. It's trying to combine longevity, health, origin, quality, and taste. All of those. I think it works. It works in the sense that I've been doing this for years, and I have no intention to change it. Even if it wasn't healthy for me—and it's extremely healthy—but even if it wasn't healthy for me, I think I would want to eat the same thing.
Monday through Friday, I don't eat lunch. I just have a coffee for lunch. Sometimes I may have a snack, like a 100-calorie type of snack. That's my lunch. Then Saturday and Sunday, I have all the meals, but then I usually have another snack around 5 p.m. again, with a different type of tea, usually, a fruit-flavored tea and and then I have a different type of frisella. Usually they have whole grain and the regular one. And then dinner.
To me, it's usually—I mean, I have lots of things for dinner—but one of the major one is maybe like 70 grams of pasta with lots of legumes, let's say chickpeas or black beans—they rotate on different days, and then lots of vegetables, green beans, carrots and peas, et cetera. Usually it's a it's a fairly big dish. Now, for health purposes, it would be better to have it earlier, as a lunch. I try to do that during the weekend, but I think to me, it works better later. It's a compromise. To me, dinner is very important, and so I have it. I have a bigger dinner than I should have, but that's my compromise. It's fine, it doesn't affect my sleep.
I usually keep the dinner about three or four hours away from sleep. I keep—and this is very important, it matches the science—everything within 12 hours. So if I started eating breakfast at 9 a.m. I’m done with eating dinner by 9 p.m. Everything stays within 12 hours.
Yeah. There are two types of fasting that I endorse. And one of them is the one I just said: 12 hours off, 12 hours on. And the second one is the fasting mimicking diet, which usually lasts about five days.
The first one is a daily routine, and you can call it fasting, you can call it time-restricted eating, but you could just call it a regular meal consumption period. Either way, it's fine. It doesn't matter what you call it. The important thing is that you keep it within 12 hours you have breakfast and you stop eating three hours before you go to sleep. And you keep it steady. You keep it always the same. So why not longer? So there's a lot of people, millions of people, by the way, they now do much longer.
For a long time, I've been saying there's a problem with that, because the breakfast skippers tend to have a higher risk for cardiovascular disease, a higher risk for mortality. And breakfast skippers usually fast for 16 hours. So a lot of my colleagues will say, “Well, it’s because the breakfast skipper has bad habits.” and my argument is, “well, if they have bad habits, if 16 hours is so beneficial, why doesn't it at least balance the bad habits? Why don't they come back and have a normal lifespan and a normal cardiovascular disease?”
When you see something like that in epidemiological data, you start suspecting there may be something bad about the 16 hours. So then definitely don’t skip breakfast—but now there's a new study suggesting that even skipping dinner could be a problem. I always say I've never found a doctor or or anybody that argued that 12 hours is bad for you, that you should somehow eat more. So I think 16 hours of fasting could be, clearly, it's going to have more benefits, you're going to lose weight, you're going to see changes more rapidly. But I think in the long run, it's probably gonna do damage or hurt you. And so I would say the 12 hours are very solid, and stick with the 12 hours.
The fasting mimicking diet, it's something that people should do maybe two to four times a year. And that's a very different thing. Because in 16 hours, in 12 hours, or even 16 hours of fasting, you're not really fasting. It's not even beginning. It's probably barely depleted the glycogen, the sugar reserves of the liver. From there, lots of things happen, and then you start breaking fat down and and then you generate ketone bodies.
To really get into a full fasting response, it probably takes four to five days where your body starts shrinking, your your cells begin the process of autophagy and other processes that have to do with regeneration. Most people in the world—they used to fast, but now they don't undergo this opportunity to start resetting things. In the mouse studies, we've shown a lot of stem cell activation, a lot of cellular reprogramming occurring in advanced stages of the fasting. So you're not going to see it after 16 hours, you're not going to see after 24 hours, you start to see it after 72 hours and later. That's why maybe two to four times a year, depending on the need, people should consider these fasting mimicking diets. In many hospitals, we have now tested this clinically on hundreds and hundreds of patients, so it's very safe and seems to be very effective. Now there is data on diabetes regression, pre-diabetes regression, and lots of other problems. I think people should consider this periodic fasting mimicking diet, periodic FMD.
Yeah, well, in fact, I'll go further. We published, a few months ago, four months of a Mediterranean diet against four cycles of the five-day FMD.
For the Mediterranean diet, there was fairly high nourishment, normal calories, and after four months and a three-month follow-up, the people that were in the Mediterranean diet lost an average five pounds of lean body mass. So they had lost in seven months five pounds of muscle. And that's a Mediterranean diet. Now imagine a calorie restricted diet that would have even a higher impact on muscle loss, and it might have an impact on, in fact, on slowing down. This has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine many years ago. Eventually, if you keep somebody calorie restricted for long enough, they turn into a slower metabolic mode, so they slow down metabolism, and that slower metabolic mode now could be kept there for years. So potentially, you restrict yourself chronically.
You think you're doing good to yourself but, in fact, your brain and your body is switching to “let me burn less energy and let me make you more hungry.’” So now I become hungry, and you're burning less energy. And so what's going to happen is you're going to go back to where you came from. You're going to start eating more, you're going to gain weight, and in potentially doing damage in this process, or losing and regain. The fasting mimicking diet is very different. It allows you to eat a normal calorie diet, and it just intervenes, let's say, once a month, to once every six months, for just five days. There is no evidence it's going to slow down your metabolism, and so it's enough to begin this autophagy and begin this process of shrinking and re-expansion now. And in fact, after four cycles of the fasting mimicking diet, the people in the trials had lost no lean body mass, and this has been pretty consistent in all the trials.
So, instead of improvising with ideas on calorie restriction, it's more like bringing all the science in and asking the question, what am I trying to achieve? How do I achieve it in a way that it doesn't solve a problem and cause another problem? So that's what I think the FMD cycles are doing now. There's over probably 20 clinical trials that have been completed, and another 20 to 30 trials that are going to be completed in the next two or three years. So I think we need to allow the universities to keep doing clinical work and and see what it is effective.
My favorite one is this minestrone-like dish, from where my parents are from in southern Italy, which is called pasta e vaianeia. I eat it very frequently at night. It's a lot of legumes and a lot of green beans. A lot of people were poor in this region of Italy, but they had green beans—that was the one thing they they grew very easily.
In Okinawa, it was purple potatoes. Mostly the Okinawans ate purple sweet potatoes, because that's what they could grow very easily in Okinawa. So, different places in the world, you see their equivalent. In Italy, it’s green beans. And so these dishes have lots of legumes, lots of green beans and pasta. Lots of other ingredients, like some potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables. It's a big dish, providing most of the nourishment, providing some proteins—but not too much—and contributing to a longevity state.
I enjoy the something called panettone. [laughs] Very unhealthy. A lot of fat, it’s a sweet thing that we do in Italy for Christmas, usually. If it was up to me, I would eat that every day. But unfortunately, I don't. I don't get to do that. It's full of butter. It's full of lots of other things. There's some versions made with olive oil, but it's full of sugar, full of butter, very tasty, and full of eggs.
One of them is the 12 hours [fasting.] It seems easy, but most people don't do it. That alone could make a big difference. Just stick to 12 hours every day. And the second one is the fasting mimicking diet. We see such an incredible range of effects. Of course, we're biased, because that comes out of my lab. But now a lot of labs, a lot of universities are testing it. We have made it available without really asking too many questions to any university that that wants to test it and and I think the surprising number of articles already showing very, very powerful benefits without lifestyle changes.
I always mention people smoking in the 70s and 80s. Even after we started writing on the box, “this kills you.” Only about 50 percent of people, maybe 60 percent quit, and the other ones kept smoking. So I think that a lot of people, as we are seeing like people don't realize the last 50 or 60, years, the percentage, the portion of people in the United States with obesity quadrupled? Which is crazy, right? To think about anything else quadrupling, and nobody doing anything about it? So I don't know why, but, but I think it's certainly we seem to be stuck with this, and unless, if we keep saying people should just completely change their lifestyle, it's never going to happen.
I shouldn't say it never, but basically, it’s very difficult. After 50 or 60 years, it keeps getting worse, then to say, all of a sudden, we're gonna say something, and everybody's gonna go back to being healthy and eating, right? It's extremely difficult. That's why the FMD may be done three or four times a year. So for people—is it feasible that people take, say, 10 to 20 days a year total, and eat this fast in mimicking diet and nothing else, just for those those days, and then the rest of the time they do what they can? I think that's very feasible. And now the data will suggest that it could have a tremendous impact on human's health.
I prioritize going back to the way the centenarians used to do it: do everything that you can. So the centenarians used to go and walk for hours. It doesn't mean the people in modern societies can walk for hours. But, for example, both in Milan, in Los Angeles, I walk at least an hour a day.
In Milan, I walk to work, and it's pretty far. That's an hour right there, just going back and forth. In Los Angeles, USC is in South Central Los Angeles, but I find a way to walk an hour every day. Every other day, I have stationary bicycles at home, and I do one hour of that. I use the kind that has the high resistance, so it's like going uphill for an hour.
So every other day I do this. No excuses. I have it at home, so I don't get to say, “well, it's raining outside,” or “it's cold.” It’'s there. Every other day, that's what I do. I do push ups, sit ups. I don't do as much as I should, but I do enough. I do the minimum to keep up. And then I try to just use everything. So, stairs. I never take the elevator. If I'm in an airport, I will go up the stairs instead of the escalator. Lots of things like that. They bring us back to having to do things with our own muscles, rather than than having a machine trying to help us for everything we're doing.
Well, I do an hour, but because it's like, going uphill, I have to sweat, because otherwise I just stop. So, so I did it in a way where it's impossible to not put the work in. So my heart rate is going to be up, not excessively, but it's going to be up because it is going uphill. Not steep, but slightly uphill. There's an hour going up, nothing crazy, but I got used to it.
Most people, when they get on it, they feel the resistance, but I once I got used to it, it was fairly standard, and I do my meetings well while I do that. I work while I'm doing that. That certainly helped me not having excuses to not do it.
Yeah. So Okinawa, for sure. Although Okinawa, I will say, in the modern world of people wanting to be more muscular and fairly bigger, it will be very difficult for people to to achieve that. So the Okinawan diet will probably make everybody very thin. So I would say Okinawa clearly has had the record longevity for a long time. So clearly there for longevity, but not necessarily matching the modern world. And I would say that Liguria, where I was born, which is mostly pescatarian diet, a pescatarian longevity diet. So that's the one that I mean, getting rid of some of the component, but it's usually small fish, like anchovies, sardines, orata; small fish. A variety of fish, maybe three, four times a week. And then lots of vegetables, lots of legumes, like something called farinata comes from Liguria. Something called panissa comes from Liguria they bought made with chickpeas, chickpeas flour.
So this is something that goes back thousands of years, probably, and so historically, by total coincidence, my region of the world—I mean, there's two regions there that I know of. One is where Ancel Keys came up with the Mediterranean diet, near Salerno, in southern Italy. There they used to be fishermen and did not necessarily have a lot of land, and so they had this pescetarian diet. And then Liguria: definitely very little land, and so not too much other availability to grow other animals and food. And so the fish became a central part, and then the whatever vegetable they could grow also became a central part. And then the flour that they got from other regions of Europe.
If you talk to experts, that really that's all we do. We pretty much agree. We pretty much agree with they say 90% of things, then there's a lot of people that have a voice that are not necessarily experts, and that's where the disagreement and the confusion comes in. No because people say, Well, I heard this. I heard it, but most of the time, it's not the people that have been doing it for for a living, running clinical trials and running animal experiments, et cetera. They don't need to be at odds, unless you really want to go in an excessive way.
If you want to be a bodybuilder, or maybe even a professional athlete, you start to take away, I think, from the ideal longevity diet. So I think you can be perfectly fit and athletic and have the right amount of proteins and amino acids and while you you're getting maybe not 100% but say 95% of the longevity effect. It takes some work. Because people think that by having excess—let's say two grams per kilogram of body weight or whatever—that's gonna make it better, but probably it's just gonna increase growth factors, and in the long run, accelerate your aging process and and give you lots of problems without giving you much of a benefit for muscle. There's a number of studies showing 30 grams of high, good quality proteins for each workout period are sufficient, and if you go above that, you don't really get much. You could have two of those a day, let's say 60 grams, and work out twice, and that's about all that you're gonna at least based on this clinical studies. Sixty grams a day of good quality proteins is going to optimize even muscle building. The rest of it is really technique in how you build the muscle, rather than having excess protein. Excess protein make it easier. Because, again, if you have too much and you work out, you you're gonna have more muscle. But that's not necessary.
I think for sure, it is idea that a few individuals came up with that you get a bunch of experts together, and you take 100 supplements every day, and then somehow they're all gonna come into place in a magic way and have an additive effect.
Let's say that you take 100 supplements and one helps you with cholesterol and one helps you [with something else]—that’s very dangerous. Because the human body is this beautiful machine that is the result of over 3 billion years of evolution. Now you have this beautiful machine that's\ almost perfect, and you come in with 100 supplements, or drugs plus 100 supplements.
Even some of the best drugs in existence are very unsophisticated. If you think about cholesterol drugs, they're just blocking the cholesterol biosynthesis pathway. It's very unsophisticated. It's not trying to look at the whole system and say, well, let's make sure that we change everything back to full function. This is what we're trying to do with the fasting mimicking diet. Trying to fix it so you don't make too much cholesterol. Why weren't you not making too much cholesterol when you were 20, and now suddenly you're 42 and you're making too much cholesterol. Can we bring you back to when you were 20? Of course, it's hard. But I'm saying, Yeah, can we bring you back, at least to a more functional state, instead of just going back, taking a drug, and blocking the cholesterol pattern.
In my first book, The Longevity Diet, I use an analogy with a symphony orchestra. And I basically say, can you imagine if you say, “Look, I'm gonna go and talk to the cello player, and I'm gonna tell the cello player to play louder. And that's how I'm gonna make the symphony better.” Well, it doesn't work like that. You’d have to be better than Mozart. You have to study like Mozart. Become better than Mozart, they rewrite it, and maybe, if you're extremely good and extremely lucky, could make it just a little bit better. You're not gonna go to the cello player, “So you play louder and you play louder,” and all of a sudden, like, oh, that's the way to make that [better.] This is a silly analogy, because the human body is so much more sophisticated than a symphony. But just to drive the concept of an extremely unsophisticated and dangerous approach to just an incredibly sophisticated system.