Valter Longo - The Longevity Diet: Discover the New Science Behind Stem Cell Activation and Regeneration to SlowAging, Fight Disease, and Optimize Weight

LONGEVITY, THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE, the secrets to eternal youththey have fascinated us from our earliest civilizations. And they have deeply fascinated me since I was a teenager. Back then I wanted to become a rock star, and I was sure I would always be a professional musician, but my passion to discover the secrets of longevity and how they could revolutionize medicine wouldnt be drowned out, no matter how fantastic a rock career appeared to be. When I was a sophomore in college, I decided to put music to the side and dedicate myself to science so that I could study the processes by which we age. Three decades later, I still play guitar, but I spend the majority of my time working as the director of the University of Southern California (USC) Longevity Institute in Los Angeles and the Program on Longevity and Cancer at IFOM (Molecular Oncology FIRC Institute) in Milan, where I combine studies of centenarians with epidemiological studies of populations, clinical trials, and basic research to understand how to help people live long lives.

But its not just the idea of living longer that has driven me; its living healthy longer, staying vibrant and youthful beyond the traditional life expectancy. To achieve this, my laboratories performed decades of cellular, animal, and human studies focused on maximizing function (learning, memory, physical fitness, etc.) and on the prevention and treatment of diseases, with a special focus on cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease as well as autoimmune and neurodegenerative disorders. Contrary to the notion that if we live longer we will extend the sickness period, our data indicate that by understanding how the human body is maintained while young, we can stay fully functional into our nineties, hundreds, and beyond. One of the primary ways to achieve this is to exploit our bodys innate ability to regenerate itself at the cellular and organ levels. Unfortunately, the modern diet, and the constant consumption that characterizes the way so much of the first world eats, keeps these built-in mechanisms permanently switched off, leaving us prematurely vulnerable to disease and degeneration beginning in our thirties and forties. But as Ive discovered over the past thirty years of research, that switch can be turned back on rather easily. The difficult part has been figuring out a way to do it that is feasible and safe for everyone.

Let me back up. I was sixteen when I first came to America from Genoa (hometown of Christopher Columbus), in the northwest of Italy. Thats where I was born and raised, though I spent my summers in Calabria, the southern Italian region where my parents came from. Harboring my dreams of fame and fortune as a rock starand having driven neighbors in my building crazy for long enough with loud electric guitarsI arrived in Chicago to live with an aunt and pursue my music studies. Along with the thriving music scene, and some of the best blues in the nation, I was exposed for the first time to the American diet. Having grown up in two regions with some of the healthiest cuisines in the world and never really having thought about it, I was amazed at the giant portions, the huge amounts of meat and cheese consumed at almost every meal, the sugary drinks and snacks so readily available. The other thing I noticed was that my Italian relatives living in Chicago were developing diabetes, heart disease, and other ailments uncommon to the family back home. At the time, I didnt think much of it, but later these exposures motivated me and helped me solidify hypotheses about diet, diseases, and longevity.

By the time I got to the University of North Texas just outside of Dallas a few years later to continue my music education, my fascination with aging had taken hold. All my friends who were approaching or past thirty were starting to lament getting old. But something else, maybe my having been in the room when my grandfather died, was stuck in my head, waiting for an opportunity to guide me in a new direction. As much as I loved music, in my second year as an undergraduate I realized that what I really wanted to do with my life was study how people stay young, so I moved to the biochemistry department to begin studying aging. Four years later, I entered one of the best programs for the biology of aging, the pathology PhD programs at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the laboratory of Roy Walford, MD, who at the time was the worlds leading expert on nutrition and longevity, a field that was just beginning to come into its own. The rest is history.

I have now been researching healthy longevity for more than thirty years, studying the links between nutrition and the genes that regulate cellular protection and regeneration. The Longevity Diet collects what I have learned and puts it into a simple program anyone can live by. It is as simple as adopting the daily nutritional regimen I outline and combining it periodically (two to twelve times per year, depending on your general health) with my fasting-mimicking diet (FMD), which is exactly what it sounds like: a diet that mimics a fast, providing the benefits of fasting without the deprivation and hunger. Combining these two elements, I have discovered, can protect, regenerate, and rejuvenate the body to keep us young and healthy longer. This is achieved in part by turning back the biological aging clock, which means that these diets can be adopted by relatively young people to help delay aging and prevent disease, and also by older individuals to help them return to a more youthful state. The FMD is also clinically proven to stimulate the loss of abdominal fat while conserving muscle and bone mass. These benefits are generated by switching on the human bodys own remarkable ability to activate stem cells and regenerate parts of cells, systems, and organs, leading to a reduction of risk factors for many diseases. In the chapters that follow, I will explain first