Most of the band members believed in the approach to life: live fast, die young. But after they were partaking within the drinking and medicines that characterised the ’90s grunge scene after gigs on the Whiskey a Go Go, the Roxy and other West Coast clubs, the band’s guitarist, Valter Longo, an Italian Ph.D. student obsessive about nutrition. student struggled with a lifelong addiction to longevity.
Now, a long time after Dr. Longo left his grunge-era band, DOT, for a profession in biochemistry, the Italian professor together with his flowing rock hair and lab coat stands on the intersection of Italy’s obsessions with food and aging.
“When it comes to the study of aging, Italy is just amazing,” said Dr. Longo, a young 56-year-old, within the laboratory he runs on the Milan oncology institute, where he’ll speak at a conference on aging later this month. Italy has one in every of the oldest populations on this planet, with large groups of centenarians tempting researchers searching for the fountain of youth. “It’s nirvana.”
Dr. Longo, who can also be a professor of gerontology and director of the USC Longevity Institute in California, has long advocated for longer and higher lives through Italian solid food, one in every of the worldwide explosions of the Road to Perpetual Wellville theory on the way to stay young in the sector , which itself continues to be within the maturing phase.
In addition to identifying genes that regulate aging, he created a plant- and nut-based weight loss plan, supplemented with supplements and kale crackers, that mimics fasting to, he says, allow cells to shed harmful baggage and rejuvenate themselves without the negative effects of starvation. He patented and sold his ProLon weight loss plan kits; published bestsellers (“The Longevity Diet”); and has been called influential “Evangelist of fasting” Time magazine.
He posted a new one last month test based on clinical studies conducted on hundreds of older people – including in the city of Calabria, where his family comes from – he believes that periodic cycles of his own approach to false fasting could lower biological age and prevent diseases associated with aging.
His private foundation, also based in Milan, adapts diets for cancer patients, but also advises Italian companies and schools, promoting the Mediterranean diet, which is foreign to most Italians today.
“Almost no one in Italy follows the Mediterranean diet,” said Dr. Longo, who has a relaxed Californian manner and an Italian accent. He added that many Italian children, especially in the south of the country, are obese, bloated by what he calls the poisonous five “Ps” – pizza, pasta, protein, potatoes and pan (or bread).
Recently, the foundation’s resident dietitian, Dr. Romina Cervigni, sat amid photos on the wall of Dr. Longo playing guitar with centenarians and shelves of his longevity diet books, translated into multiple languages and filled with recipes.
“It’s very much like the unique Mediterranean weight loss plan, not the present one,” she said, pointing to photos on the wall of a bowl containing ancient legumes similar to chickpeas and a pod of Calabrian green beans prized by Dr. Longo. “His favorite.”
Dr. Longo, who has split his time between California and Italy for the past decade, once had a niche field. But in recent years, Silicon Valley billionaires who hope to stay forever young have funded secret laboratories. Wellness articles cover newspaper front pages, and Fountains of Youth exercise and diet ads featuring incredibly fit middle-aged people appear on social media.
But even with concepts like longevity, intermittent fasting, and biological age, you’re only as old as your cells feel! — have gathered pace, governments such as Italy are concerned about a more uncertain future in which a growing elderly population will drain the resources of shrinking youth.
And yet many scientists, nutritionists and longevity fanatics around the world continue to look longingly to Italy, searching its deep pockets of centenarians for the secret ingredient to long life.
“They probably bred amongst cousins and relatives” Dr. Longo suggested, referring to the sometimes close relations in small Italian hill towns. “At some point we suspect that he kind of generated a super-longevity genome.”
He hypothesized that the genetic defects of incest were slowly disappearing because these mutations either killed the carriers before they could reproduce, or because the city noticed a terrible disease – such as early-onset Alzheimer’s disease – in a particular family line and stayed away. “You’re in a small town, you’ll probably get flagged.”
Dr. Longo wonders whether centenarians in Italy were protected from later disease by a period of famine and an old-fashioned Mediterranean diet early in life, during extreme poverty in rural Italy during the war. Then an injection of proteins and fats and modern medicine after the post-war economic miracle in Italy protected them from weakening as they aged and kept them alive.
It could be, he said, “a historic coincidence that you’re going to never see again.”
The mysteries of aging gripped Dr. Longo at an early age.
He grew up in the northwestern port of Genoa, but visited his grandparents in Molochio in Calabria, a city known for its centenarians, every summer. When he was 5 years old, he stood in the room as his grandfather, who was in his 70s, died.
“It’s probably something that’s very preventable,” Dr. Longo said.
At age 16, he moved to Chicago to live with relatives and couldn’t help but notice that his middle-aged aunts and uncles, who ate a “Chicago weight loss plan” of sausages and sugary drinks, suffered from diabetes and cardiovascular disease. neither do their relatives in Calabria.
“It was like the 80s.” – he said – “just like a terrible diet.”
While in Chicago, he often went downtown to plug in a guitar at any blues club that would let him play. He enrolled in the renowned jazz guitar program at the University of North Texas.
“Even worse,” he said. “Tex-Mex”.
He eventually ran afoul of the music program when he refused to direct the marching band, so he focused on his other passion.
“Getting old,” he said, “was on my mind.”
He ultimately earned a PhD in biochemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the neurobiology of aging at the University of California, USC. He overcame his initial skepticism about publishing in top journals and became a zealous evangelizer of the aging-reversing effects of his diet. About 10 years ago, wanting to be closer to his aging parents in Genoa, he took a second job at the IFOM oncology institute in Milan.
He found a source of inspiration in the pescatarian diet around Genoa and in all the legumes in Calabria.
“Genes and nutrition,” he said of Italy as an aging laboratory, “it’s just unbelievable.”
But he also recognized that the modern Italian diet – the cold cuts, layers of lasagna and fried vegetables that the world craved – was terrible and a source of disease. And like other Italian aging researchers who look for inflammation to cause aging or hope to destroy senescent cells with targeted drugs, he said Italy’s lack of investment in research is a disgrace.
“Italy has an amazing history and a lot of information about aging,” he said. “But it spends virtually nothing.”
Returning to his lab, where his colleagues were preparing a fasting-mimicking diet for mice, he handed him a photo on a shelf showing a cracked wall with the words: “We are slowly falling apart.” He talked about how he and others identified an important regulator aging in yeastand how he tested whether the same pathway works in all organisms. He said his research benefited from his background in musical improvisation because it opened his mind to unexpected possibilities, including using diet to starve cells affected by cancer and other diseases.
Dr. Longo said he thinks of his mission as extending youth and health rather than simply extending lifespan, which he believes could lead to a “scary world” in which only the wealthy can afford to live for centuries, potentially imposing restrictions on having children.
A more likely short-term scenario, he said, is a split between the two populations. The former would live as we do today and would live to be around 80 years old or longer thanks to medical advances. But Italians would be burdened with long – and, given the decline in birth rates, potentially lonely – years burdened with terrible diseases. The remaining population would follow fasting diets and scientific discoveries and live to 100 or perhaps 110 years of age in relatively good health.
Dr. Longo, who practices what he preaches, fell into the latter category.
“I want to live to be 120, 130 years old. “Now I’m really paranoid because everyone’s like, ‘Yes, of course you have to at least live to 100,'” he said. “You don’t realize how hard it is to get to 100.”
