Dr. Valter Longo is the Edna M. Jones Professor of Gerontology and Biological Sciences at the USC Davis School of Gerontology, where he also directs the Longevity Institute. With a PhD in Biochemistry from UCLA, his research delves into the fundamental mechanisms of aging, focusing on dietary interventions like the Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD) to reduce disease risk and enhance longevity. His lab has developed strategies to protect normal cells and target cancer cells, with ongoing trials in the US and Europe.

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John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shigerian, and I’m so honored to have with us today, direct from Milan, Italy, Valter Longo. He’s a professor of gerontology and biological sciences at USC Davis School of Gerontology. He’s really known as Dr. Valter Longo, but welcome, Valter, to the Impact Podcast.

Valter Longo: Well, thank you. Thanks for having me.

John: Well, you know, you’re not only a very esteemed guest that we’re having on today, but I’m a huge fan of your products and what you offer. I am a subscriber to your prolonged service. I believe that it makes me feel better. I’ve turned on many of my colleagues that are accompanied to it, and they love it as well. So I’m excited to talk about that. But before we get into all that stuff, talk a little bit about how you got on this fascinating journey. You’re known now as one of the leading, if not the top fasting expert in the entire planet. How did you get on this journey growing up in Italy, which is known for food and all the wonderful delicacies that you have over there?

Valter: Yeah, so I think that probably I moved when I was 16 to Chicago. I have a big family in Chicago, even though I’m from Italy. I saw that a lot of members of my family were getting diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and some of them died from diabetes and cardiovascular disease. They were 100% Calabrians. They were full Italians, and my Italian family never got diabetes or cardiovascular disease. I was a musician back then, but I was 16. I was already impressed by or disturbed, if you will, by this observation. They were getting it early. My cousin, who I live with, she was in her maybe late 40s, and she already had diabetes, and she had lots of problems. I think then when I moved to Texas at the university, and when I had an opportunity, I stopped music school, and I started biochemistry, because I just thought it was such a big deal for my family and, of course, for me that I felt that I would have been happier going after aging and diseases. Right. Those are the two things that, to me, made me very enthusiastic. So when I left the music school, I knew immediately I want to study aging, and that’s where my passion is, but I also wanted to prevent disease with that approach.

John: Understood. And so now, you are the Edna Jones Professor of Gerontology and Biological Sciences at USC Davis School of Gerontology. You split your time between USC and Milan. Is that how your life goes?

Valter: Yes. I split the time between USC and now I’m at the CNR, which is a government center for research. It’s kind of like the NIH in the United States for Italy. So yeah, I split my time between that, USC, and this institute here. We’re able to do clinical trials that are less expensive, less competition for clinical trials, so it’s a lot easier to run this larger. We’re running, for example, one 500-patient clinical trial now in southern Italy, which will have been very, very expensive in the United States and very difficult to do.

John: With what you do in your area of specialty, you get to have the best of both worlds by splitting your time and also your studies and things of that such.

Valter: Yeah, I think so. There’s a lot of good people here and a lot of great people in the US, but different features and different benefits in the two countries. The US, the top science, but very expensive clinical trials. In Italy, it’s not as good the science, but there are really good scientists, but a lot of clinicians that are very eager to help and say, can we start a new trial? We have maybe 10 that we’re now discussing with different universities and hospitals right now.

John: Before we get talking about all this, you’re a well-known author. We’re going to talk about your latest book, Fasting Cancer, in a little bit. But first, I’m going to show you this book. I read this book a long time ago, so this helped change my life. I was a vegetarian since I was 17. I now include a little fish into my diet as well, but I’m mostly plant-based. Talk a little bit about the importance of food to health and aging. Of course, as we know, one of the blue zones is Sardinia, Italy. How did that influence your studies and your work as well?

Valter: Dan is a friend and has done great work. I have what I call a five-pillar system. One of the pillars is the centenarians, so Okinawa, Sardinia, Loma Linda, and lots of other places around the world. Also, Ecuador, where we were studying people that have particular mutations that make them very protected against diseases. There’s one pillar, but I use a five-pillar system. Then I look at clinical trials, randomized clinical trials, which I just mentioned, epidemiological data. What about the big studies of a million people or 200,000 people? They eat more high-protein, low-protein, what happens to them? What happens to these 100,000 people if you compare those that have different habits? Then also, how do you make a mouse or a rat live longer? You don’t get to do a clinical trial, a lifespan clinical trial with people, but you can do a lifespan trial with mice and rats. We use that. Of course, we understand it’s got limited power, but together with all these other pillars, it becomes, I think, very powerful. When you put the five pillars together, and the fifth one is a complex system, like how does a car age? How does an airplane or the space shuttle age? Because we also can learn from that, the wear and tear. The human body, to a certain extent, undergoes the same wear and tear as a car or as a plane. That’s an important teaching component.

John: Understood. Now, you wrote this book. This is how I first learned about you when you wrote The Longevity Diet, way before I ever started using your Prolon system. Talk a little. Was your five pillars what you focus on in this book mostly? Was that the beginning of where this really started?

Valter: I don’t remember, but I think it’s probably Chapter 1. Chapter 1 says, okay, everyone complains about nutrition and the advices. One day, you tell me this is good, the coffee is bad for me. Then two years later, you tell me coffee is good for me, and alcohol, we don’t know. Then I said, okay, well, there is a reason for that because, of course, you can get a lot of results if you just use one type of pillar, like epidemiology. For example, if you look at big population, it depends on what you pick, right? You can get different results based on what kind of population you’re comparing. The five pillars tend to get rid of most of it. They’re not going to be perfect, but I think they get rid of most of the noise and they make things… You might have now a recommendation based on 200 studies in five different disciplines. It’s not very likely that that’s just going to fall apart very soon. It might be modified in different direction, but it’s not going to fall apart anytime soon. If it took 30 years to build that, it’s going to take 30 or 40 years to break it down and probably is unlikely to happen.

John: Understood.

Valter: Especially when you have one of the pillars being the centenarians, right? That’s 100 years of history. You’ve been observing that type of, let’s say, people, for example, sometimes they criticize, they complain that we should have a high protein diet and a low protein diet. They say, look around the world, Okinawa, low protein diet, Sardinia, low protein diet, Loma Linda, relatively low protein, but plant-based, normal protein, plant-based. You don’t really see high protein diets in the centenarian populations. That’s 100 years of observation, which is not conclusive, but certainly helps you say, well, probably a high protein diet is not such a good idea. Especially from animal-based sources.

John: Yeah, but there’s so many people. I’m fascinated because I heard you debate this issue with Dr. Peter Diamandis. As we know, Dr. Peter and others are very much on the high protein side. Where do you come out when instead of taking… I weigh about 175 pounds, I try to eat 175 grams of protein a day. If it was you, how much protein do you eat compared to your body weight, doctor?

Valter: Well, based on your age and you’re so young, about half. Why is that? Well, when we publish on that, and it was clear that the people that before age 65, they had a high animal protein diet, they did poorly for cancer, but also for overall mortality. But also Harvard published a number of epidemiological studies showing that people that are on a low carbohydrate, but high protein, high animal protein, high animal fat diet, they tend to live shorter or a lot shorter, more cardiovascular disease, more cancer, more overall mortality. So that’s just epidemiology. Then if you look at mice and rats, I mean, this is famous, right? This is going back 60 years, over and over and over, low protein diet, right? That’s what makes a mouse and a rat live longer, right? Then I think if you look at clinical trials, if you randomize people and you put them on a high protein diet, what will happen to them? They’ll have a high IGF-1 and probably also high insulin if it’s a high calorie, high protein. So IGF-1 is the Insulin-like Growth Factor 1. It’s being associated with lots of cancers and lots of other problems, right? And it’s one of the major pro-aging pathway. I don’t say I say that, but I’m not the only one. The aging community will all agree, yes, growth hormone IGF-1 is one of the major pro-aging pathways. And sure enough, if you look at mice that are lacking growth hormone IGF-1, especially growth hormone, they live 40% longer, but they develop a lot less diseases, right? And so it’s like saying, you know, going from 80 on average to 120, and most of the people don’t get any diseases for those 120 years, right? So, I mean, I’ve just got started with the evidence, but I can go on for a long time, right? So this is why, you know, I don’t know why they… I mean, I can see that the temporary effect, right? So if you eat a high protein animal-based diet, you’re going to get a temporary beneficial effect of some kind, you know, you have an easier time building muscle, you might have some beneficial effects, but eventually those are going to go away, and what you’re going to be left with is a lot of problems. And so that’s why I would say, now, low protein does not mean protein deficiency, right? It means low but sufficient. And it’s not just proteins, it’s just amino acids. So if you eat legumes all day long, you’re not going to… then I will agree with the 170 grams, right?

John: Understood.

Valter: If all you had is legumes, then I will say, yeah, then you probably need 170 grams a day. But if you add mostly, let’s say, fish and other plant-based sources, and then maybe a fourth of it would be legume, then I will go back to half of that. So maybe 80 grams of proteins per day.

John: Understood. You know, so if I was in one of your classes at USC, whether the School of Gerontology or Longevity Institute, what am I studying underneath you? What are you teaching? Are you teaching everything that’s in your books, like these wonderful books, or how are you interrelating what’s going on today and what the future looks like in terms of longevity and regenerative medicine?

Valter: Yes. So what I teach in the class is pretty much what I wrote in the book. I mean, of course, it’s much more in-depth, right? So I teach a class called Nutrition, Genes, Longevity, and Disease, right? So it’s trying to put it all together and saying, well, the main risk factor for diseases is aging, right? So for example, if you compare obesity or smoking, even with 30 years of aging, the obesity and smoking almost disappear as risk factors, right? So aging, 30 years of aging are so much more powerful in determining whether you’re going to get cancer or Alzheimer’s or cardiovascular disease, then even smoking and obesity, which of course are a big problem. So that’s why the class is focused on treat aging. How do you slow down aging? And then in the last, I would say 15 years, we’ve been looking at how do you reverse aging, right? So we published two trials last year showing that the cycles of the FMD, three cycles of FMD reduce biological aging people by two and a half years or so. So we’re starting to see evidence of rejuvenation. And now in people, we can only do it from blood markers. In rats and mice, we do it by actually looking at the organs, right? Then we see, so for example, in a mouse, we damage irreparably the pancreas, right? Then the pancreas stops making insulin. And then we start with the Fasting-Mimicking Diet cycles. And the pancreas returns after so many cycles of the FMD, the Fasting-Mimicking Diet, it returns to it’s normal function and it’s normal insulin production. And the reason for that is reprogramming, you know, this Yamanaka factors and other reprogramming factors that are naturally turned down only during this fasting and refeeding cycles, right? You fast and then you refeed and that’s the order, is to fix the problem and do it in a very coordinated and sophisticated way. Then a couple of months ago, we published the same thing for kidneys, right? Now we use rats. And then we also did a small clinical trial at University of Rome. And so in the rats, same thing, you know, the damage, the toxin that damaged the kidney and the kidney becomes, you know, severely damaged and dysfunctional. Then we started with the Fasting-Mimicking Diet. This is in collaboration with Laura Perrin at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. And again, you see the kidney losing its architecture almost completely. And then the Fasting-Mimicking Diet cycle starts and the kidney goes back to its normal architecture, as if there was a template that told it exactly what to do. Okay, this is where you’re going to go back to, we know how to do that. We did that when you were first born and we’ll do it again now, right? So it’s really remarkable. And I always say, we think of pharmacology as very sophisticated, but when you look at these data that we showed for the kidney, for example, or the pancreas, you realize how unsophisticated pharmacology is, right? So you just have a drug that might block or activate one target, right? Versus this program now that has the job of rebuilding a functional kidney, right? After it’s been severely, and in some cases permanently damaged, right? So, I think that, you know, of course, we’re only beginning to understand it, but it’s extremely powerful, extremely powerful. And at some point may be able to, you know, not just rejuvenate by two and a half years, maybe more.

John: Where was your ‘aha’ moment, doctor, where you were one of the most published scientists in the world. You’re an esteemed professor. Where did you have then the ‘aha’ moment to become an entrepreneur and start your company Prolon? I have a little thing here. This is my subscription. I subscribe. I get one of these every quarter. This makes me not even have to think about it. Everything’s in one box and I can just, you know, follow your instructions. When did you have the great vision to come up with Prolon as something that could be very usable by people who really don’t know how to fast and have had no luck really water fasting, which is very difficult and very few people can really pull off a legitimate water fast. How did you come up with that?

Valter: Well, this was a university project, right? So at USC, we were doing a clinical trial in Norris Cancer Center with water only fasting and cancer patients and realized that even though we thought they were going to be motivated, but they did not like it, right. They did not like the water only fasting. The oncologists were worried because of lots of potential side effects, hypotension, hypoglycemia, and lots of other issues. And so, yeah, we went back as a university to the NIH and we asked for funds to develop a fasting mimicking diet. And, you know, that happened. They gave us funding for that. And then eventually, I think it was important to start the company because that was going to be the only way to really get it out there. I thought without the company, it’s just going to disappear. It’s just too many pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies. And it’s going to be hard to… if I don’t do it and it’s not me anymore, of course, Alnutra has got a big team of people. And I’m just speaking as a professor, not as a businessman. But yeah, Alnutra now, for example, whenever somebody approaches me for a clinical trial, Alnutra will be able to send them free of charge the fasting mimicking diet. And I help whoever, you know, so we had Stanford and Leyden and Heidelberg and University of Rome and USC. So a lot of universities, they contact me and they say, well, we like to run this trial. Can you help us? And without the company, I think most of these trials will never have been done, right? And with the company, you do the trial. And then of course, the company needs to get the product out there to people. And that’s another obstacle, right? Without the company, yeah, now you have the trial, but how are people going to do it, right? Well, you know, so I think it was the right thing to do. I get criticism because of conflict of interest. I assigned everything to charity. So I don’t take a penny from Alnutra for consulting and I have to say, sorry, this is a little boring, but I have to say, but 95% goes to charity and 5% I can invest in longevity company, but I have to give all the equity in charity, right? So that’s my full disclosure. So I don’t keep anything essentially.

John: You’re a good man, doctor. And I’ve heard you say that before, and I’m glad you said it again, because I want people to hear that, but this diet really works. This FMD really works. Compare that to when you’ve done… I know you’ve done studies on FMD versus water fasting. Aren’t the results like when it comes to irritable bowel syndrome and other types of maladies that we have or that we’re afflicted with, hasn’t FMD shown to be better than water fasting when it comes to some of these common maladies?

Valter: I mean, first of all, I think water fasting is not really feasible for the general population. So for water fasting, I think it’s probably for 1% of the population or something like that, maybe 2% or around that. So it’s not feasible. And then I think it made sense that when we did the inflammatory bowel disease models in mice, the water fasting worked, but not as well as the fasting-mimicking diet. And the fasting-mimicking diet, the idea from the beginning was I didn’t just want to make it a fasting-mimicking, so it has the same effect as water-only fasting. I wanted to make it better by using longevity zone ingredients, right? So what are the ingredients that the whole world will say, this is a great ingredient for health and for longevity. So New England Journal of Medicine for medicine, and then research on aging and research on centenarians. So I put it all together, and it was only those ingredients making into the fasting-mimicking diet. And that was a good idea because, for example, in this case, it turned out that these healthy vegetable ingredients and nuts-based ingredients, et cetera, were giving rise to microbiota. So the bacteria in the gut, they were like lactobacillus bifidobacteria that the water-only fasting couldn’t feed, right? So the fasting-mimicking diet is not only feeding the body in a very healthy way, it’s also feeding the good bacteria. So we saw a major increase in this protective anti-inflammatory bacteria population. And those turned out to be very important, at least in the mouse, to reverse inflammatory bowel disease, so Crohn’s, colitis type of models. So yeah, I think that it was definitely the right call. And some of it I didn’t predict, so I wasn’t thinking, oh, the prebiotic inside of the diet are going to feed the good bacteria. But it turned out to be, yeah, of course, right? Because we’ve known for 100 years these are good ingredients. It’s not surprising that the good ingredients of the Mediterranean, Okinawa, Loma Linda diet are going to give rise to good bacteria. Yeah.

John: And I have to tell you, I showed this to you before we started recording today, but even these fasting bars, which are sold separately, I keep them in the break room of our company so people could try them. They taste very good. They taste very good, and they burn very clean in the body. This is a great product, even if people aren’t using it just for fasting, just for healthy snacks, this is a great product. So I’ve had a lot of success with your Prolon system. Is it growing the way you thought it would grow? Is the business growing the way you thought it would grow?

Valter: The business is growing, it’s doing very well. And I think now with the fasting-mimicking diet, now we’re at trial number four or five on prediabetes and diabetes showing reversal or regression in all the trials. So I think that now at least the health of the company is going to be focused on healthcare and treatments that have the ability of surpassing or at least competing with the GLP-1s of the world. So, of course, it’s very small compared to the GLP-1 companies. But I think, for example, with GLP-1, you see optic nervous ischemia, you see muscle loss, you see evidence of bone density loss, and lots of other issues, like depression, for example, and loss of the appetite and the joy of eating food. So none of these you see with the FMD cycle. Right? And now I’m not saying it’s perfect, so people get headaches, but they’re temporary. And also it’s five days every maybe couple of months or two or three months. Maybe for the diabetes, it’s once a month in the first year, and then maybe once every three months in the second year. So I think there are a lot of advantages and a lot of safety issues also that people like me will view as a better choice than the injection or a pill that comes with a lot of side effects, but also comes a little bit too easy, meaning that, yeah, people want the… I always say, let’s say that I came up today with a pill for jogging, right? So I’ll give you the benefits of jogging and you don’t have to go anymore, right? Is that a good pill? I mean, I will argue it’s not a good pill, right? I will argue go jogging. I mean, I’m not telling you you got to jog a hundred miles a week, but if you do a couple of miles jogging three times a week, it’s going to be better than a pill, right? So that’s our point. You cannot say revolutionize your diet because most people are not going to do that. But I say, can you give me five days? In Italy, for example, we’re now testing five days of the FMD once every three months, right? So it’s a total of whatever, 20 days a year, right? Twenty days a year where you get something in a box and you have to do it. I don’t think that… I think it’s reasonable for the great majority of people. So we’re very far from the great majority of people, but I think, you know, we’re now starting to see this possibility of the majority of people that say maybe doing a few cycles per year.

John: Well, practically speaking, I’ve done water fast before compared to when I do the FMD, you know, I’m not hungry. I’m not in a bad mood. People say when I’m just on a water fast, I’m in a very bad mood. I’m not nice to be around, but when I’m on the FMD, it’s really very easy to do, practically speaking.

Valter: Yeah. And I did the water only fasting once and I still remember it every day. I remember how difficult for me… The most difficult thing was the loss of the routine, right? No breakfast. I would get up and say, oh, breakfast. No, there is no breakfast. And then there’s no lunch and there is no snack and there is no dinner. And to me, that was very difficult. You know, even past the first meal, I started being very stressed from it. Now, some people can do it, no problem, but it’s not very many people that I know that can do water only fasting. And then again, the safety issues, right? So how low is your blood pressure going to get? How low is your glucose levels going to get? And et cetera.

John: Got it. You know, in the wake of your great work with Prolon and everything else you’re doing, now you’ve written this book. Now, I just bought this book. I haven’t had the chance to read it. Talk a little bit about why did you write this new book, Fasting Cancer, and what can readers hope to expect to get out of this book?

Valter: Yeah. So first, we’ve been doing cancer research for over 20 years and lots of clinical trials, right? In the book, I list, I think, over 20 clinical trials that have been done on fasting mimicking diets. And I think it was the time after all of this to write a book that was specific for the cancer patients, all different types of cancer, not all of them, but many different types of cancers. And write it also with the help of lots of oncologists, right? So, for example, Devashish Tripathi, head of breast oncology at MD Anderson, Josef Lenz, the head of colorectal cancer at USC. So, you know, and this thing is 15 oncologists. And I wanted to give them the opportunity to tell me, Valter, back off, right? Or back down. Because, of course, as a scientist, you can get maybe overly enthusiastic about, oh, this work for the 10 patient is going to work for everybody. And yeah, so the job of the oncologist and the physicians was, okay, maybe not yet. Maybe let’s phrase it this way or that way. But I think that the message is still very powerful, right? You can see that this, for lots of cancer patients including those in clinical trial, has made tremendous differences. And in the mice, I always say the effects are, if you look at some of the most popular mouse models for cancer, the fasting-mimicking diet works better than immunotherapy, right? Now, it doesn’t mean that in people it’s going to work better than immunotherapy, but in mice models, multiple, melanoma, breast cancer, and some of the other ones, the fasting-mimicking diet works better than immunotherapy. So now, you know, we combine it with all kinds of things, and the mouse data is remarkable. And now, unfortunately, there’s many, many cancers, many, even more therapies, and it’s a slow process, but I wanted to make sure patients realize that, particularly those who are told, okay, things are not working very well, there’s nothing viable or very promising, that’s the time that I hope people contact our foundation, the Create Cures Foundation, and they are followed by their own oncologists, but also by our dieticians that can help them navigate this very complex fasting-mimicking diet, everyday nutrition, time-restricted eating, ketogenic diet. So we apply lots of different things that can make cancer much less comfortable, even in the presence of therapy, right? So chemotherapy or immunotherapy, they kill a lot of cancer cells, but a lot of cancer cells don’t respond, right? So we’re trying to make these therapies work better, and so far, it’s been working. So for example, the Vernier paper recently showed for triple-negative breast cancer in Italy, at the National Cancer Institute in Italy, women that did fasting-mimicking diet cycles plus chemotherapy, the overall survival was nearly twice as long. It is a very aggressive, very deadly type of treatment, and it was nearly twice as long if they added the fasting-mimicking diet to the chemotherapy. Now, it’s a small trial, but it looks very promising as a follow-up trial that they just published a couple of months ago, looking at the cancer cell killing in the combination therapy versus the chemotherapy alone. Again, almost a doubling of the ability of the FMD plus chemo to kill very aggressive breast cancer cells compared to the chemo alone.

John: As a scientist, does that signal you that you believe that that would probably have a similar effect on other types of aggressive cancer, pancreas and other types of cancer, if they follow the FMD diet while they were under treatment for their cancers?

Valter: I mean, we’ve tested lots of cancers, including pancreatic cancer, and there’s actually cases that have been published now on pancreatic cancer of patients using the FMD, and actually in some cases going into remission from some very aggressive cancers. So, I mean, we don’t know, right? I mean, this is what the oncologists talk. Okay, slow down because, yeah, just because it’s happening once, although happening in three people, it doesn’t mean… But I think that the idea of there is hope, it worked for this person, it could work for you. That’s a very good one. Then, of course, you know, we have lots of data from animal models. It works very well, including pancreatic cancer. So, yeah, so I think it’s a very, very good, you know, track or route. And I think, but now we’re moving to something much more technological, right? So, we call it starvation escape pathway blockade, right? So, basically, we used to do, like I said, you know, chemo plus FMD, immunotherapy plus hormone therapy [?]. And now we move to, okay, let’s do, apply the FMD plus whatever therapy, and then look at how the cancer cell rewire. And we can do this very quickly, at least in a mouse, but also in people by looking at something called RNA-seq, right? So, we look at how the metabolism, essentially, of the cell, of the cancer cell is changed. And then we can target this RNA-seq, this method, this technology will tell us what to target, right? And it tells us how the cancer cell stays alive, right? So, this is very promising to treat any type of cancer, right? Because now, you know, we can look at the rewiring, and then we can use all kinds of drugs that are already FDA approved to target, right? So, this is, you know, now we’re working on very hard, and it’s going to take a lot of funds, but I think that if we can get those funds in a few years, we could be in a different place.

John: You mentioned earlier the Create Cures Foundation. Explain what that is. I’m going to put it in the show notes for our listeners and viewers, so they can access it. But explain what is Create Cures, why you created that, and what’s its real importance?

Valter: Yeah. So, I created it because I always say you can have all kinds of methodology and diets that could be very beneficial. But I always say, imagine if you wanted to educate our children, but we say we don’t want to have trained teachers, and we don’t want to build schools, right? Almost impossible, right? So, yeah, we have… Yeah, you can watch TV and then be educated like that. Well, it’s not going to happen, right? So, right now, if you think about lifestyle, and especially these fairly complicated interventions, it takes a professional, right? It takes somebody to follow you psychologically, but also, you know, technically, they have to get you in the right place, and they have to personalize it, right? So, the Create Cures Foundation clinic in Los Angeles, we have a number in Europe, they have the job of implementing all the things that we’ve been talking about, but not just the fasting-mimicking diet, or they implement time-restricted eating, the everyday diet, and they personalize it. So, two different people may have an everyday longevity diet that’s quite different, right? So, that’s their job. And their job is also to slowly bring you back to full health, and as little, as few drugs as possible, right? And this is very important, right? And the governments now, if they want to not go broke with healthcare costs, they’re going to have to go in this direction, right? So, in the United States, almost 20% of GDP, with almost 20… and I’m an American now, so I’m speaking as an upset citizen. So, almost 20% of GDP for ranking between number 40 and 70 in the world, right? Twice as expensive as any other healthcare system, and ranking between 40 and 70, depending on different ranking systems, right? This is not good. This is not a good bang for the buck, right? So, I think that this is one of the ways that we should do in large scale, and implement this if we want to be healthier and pay less.

John: Speaking of that, like you said, there’s so much noise in the world, and we have a worldwide audience. We’ve been doing this show 16 and a half or so years. And so, actionable steps, what should people be eliminating from their diet? What’s the signal? What’s the noise? Is for sure sugar something we should be making sure we keep very limited in our diet, and red meat, and processed foods? How do you approach it now with so much science and history behind you, and so much success on these topics of longevity? What should we be eating today, and avoiding today?

Valter: Yeah. So, my recommendations are, number one, up to age 65, let’s say from 20 to 65, have what we call the longevity diet, which is a pescatarian diet, maybe three or four times a week, fish, and then plant-based sources of everything. So, legumes, cereals, and nuts, and almonds, and walnuts, and some fruit, not too much fruit. So, it’s different from the Mediterranean diet. It’s not fruits and vegetables. It’s lots of vegetables, lots of legumes, lots of cereals, some fruit, right? Yeah, so, and then after age 65, increase it. So low protein, low but sufficient protein. So, about 0.37 grams per pound, right? So, much less than what you said earlier, 0.37, but be good quality. So, at least three-fourths have to be from fish, and nuts, and seeds, and only maybe one-fourth from legumes. Otherwise, you need to go higher, right? I mean, it’s okay, you can have more legumes, but then you got to go to instead of 0.37, maybe 0.5 per pound. So, that’s the everyday diet. Now, it’s going to be personalized because people, for some reason, it’s taking us a very long time to clarify that somebody can eat tomatoes all day long, and somebody can eat one tomato and go through hell, right? And that person often gets pushed to this tomato because, oh, it’s a Mediterranean diet, it’s good for you. Well, maybe not, right? Maybe it’s terrible for you, you know? And gluten, you have the celiac people, but you also have the gluten-sensitive people. But a lot of people, including me, they can eat gluten, it’s okay, right? So, yeah, this personalization is very important inside of this longevity diet. And then, you know, we follow the time recipe, you need a lot of work that Sachin Pandey and others have done, but we like the 12 hours, you know? Why the 12 hours? Because there’s a lot of epidemiological data showing that people that fast for 16 hours, especially if they skip breakfast, they live shorter with more cardiovascular disease, et cetera, right? So, yeah, don’t take a chance. Also, gallbladder operations and gallbladder issues are much more prevalent in those that fast for more than 14 hours a day. So, I would say, take a longer time, go with 12 hours, much easier, much more feasible too, right? So, you know, 8 AM…

John: What do you do, Doc? What’s yours? What’s your typical routine? I know you like routines. Talk a little bit about how many hours a day do you fast and what are your feeding windows usually?

Valter: Yeah, so everything I’m telling you is what I do. So, my feeding window is 9:00 AM, 9:00 PM, right? So, and then I sleep at midnight, right, or so. So, three hours before, between ending the dinner and going to sleep. Yeah, so then 12 hours seems to work very well. It doesn’t work, of course, short term and doesn’t work as well as the 16 hours, right? But long term, there is no, I always say, I’ve never met a doctor who said, oh, that’s bad for you. These 12 hours is bad for you, right?

Never, right? So, I’ve never seen a study that says that 12 hours is bad for you, right? So, some people say this is not even fasting. Okay, call it whatever you want. But most people in the US, as Sachin Pandey has shown, eat for 15 hours a day or 16 hours, right? So, then nobody’s doing 12, 12 anymore, right? Maybe people used to do it, but they don’t anymore. And so, yeah, we need to go back to that. And then the fasting-mimicking diet, you know, so let’s say three, two to four cycles a year of the fasting-mimicking diet. Now, why is that? Well, as we discussed earlier, on one side, it’s got this multi-system rejuvenation reset, you know, stem cell activation, at least in the animal models, we see that. But we’re also starting to see this in people, right? We see progenitor and stem cell going up. So, for example, in the kidney paper, we saw the progenitor kidney cells triple in the blood of patients that did the fasting-mimicking diet. So, then you have the stem cell, you have the reprogramming, and then you also have the metabolic reset. So, the diabetic patients and the prediabetic patients that are insulin-resistant, then very consistently, we see that insulin-resistant being reversed, and they become insulin-sensitive again. So, this probably might not have to do necessarily with reprogramming and stem cells and autophagy, but it’s probably some process that reverses this. You go from a fat-accumulating mode, like a summer mode, you eat a lot of fruit and nuts, you accumulate fat, and you reserve the fat for the winter. And then, at some point, you have to make that switch, and what better than fasting to make you do the switch? Now, one trick that most people don’t know, including lots of doctors, is if you go too long, or you do it the wrong way, let’s say, potentially water-only fasting, you can enter a tricky mode. So, you enter a low-energy expenditure mode, and this is being shown in the New England Journal of Medicine paper by Columbia University many years ago. So, what does it mean? It means that now, because the system is afraid it’s going to run out of food, it starts burning less fuel, right? And very bad, right? Because you may feel lethargic, and now you’re going to feel hungry and lethargic, right? So, that’s a worse scenario.

John: It’s a bad combination.

Valter: Yeah, and this is probably why you hear a lot of people saying, I’m not eating anything, and I’m not losing any weight. They might very well have entered this thrifty mode, this energy-saving mode, and now exiting that, it could potentially take years, right? So, there’s some data suggesting that, in some cases, it could take a long, long time, because the body wants to make sure that you’re not running out of food, right? So, I’m protecting you for a couple years. Then, if for a couple years, we’re okay, maybe slowly, we can get out of it, right? So, not knowing these things that can get you in trouble, and they make you dependent on the GLP-1 type drugs.

John: How about, because you’re one of the top scientists in the world when it comes to fasting, fasting mimicking, and all these type of, you know, longevity. How are you interrelating your great work and your very important work when it comes to eating and fasting with what’s happening now with the rise of biologics and stem cells and all the great science that’s now coming around when it comes to stem cell and rejuvenation and longevity like that? Is there going to be a convergence of both sciences, which will lead to longer and healthier lives in the future?

Valter: I think so. Yeah, I think so. I think that what we’re doing is looking at evolutionary problems, right? So, the biohacking is great, but it’s very difficult to beat three billion years of evolution, right? So, these three billion years have gone by to make things almost perfect, right? So, this is why we live for 80 years and some people live to 110. So, it’s a very sophisticated system. Now, you can biohack your way through it, but likely, like we’re seeing with lots of drugs, yeah, you do benefit, but you cause a lot of problems, right? So, then I will argue that for the next 10, 20 years, this exploiting the evolutionary programs, like I damaged the kidney and the kidney now can regenerate itself. That’s going to win, right? That’s going to win. Eventually, I think we’re going to move to a hybrid situation, right? So, can we combine these things? Can we combine the biohacking with the natural? And that’s what we’re working in the lab right now, and other people are working as well on it, right? So, I think that is probably going to be the next level, you know, combining more powerful, but less sophisticated intervention, like stem cells. I mean, yeah, you can inject so many stem cells, but the stem cells don’t know where to go and it’s not their job to go repair something or rebuild something, right? So, they’re just going to get most of the cases lost in the bloodstream, right? So, how do you educate them? How do you tell them, hey, you need to go and fix the kidney, or like I just mentioned, you need to go and fix the pancreas? Well, it’s science fiction to do that with stem cells right now, but you know, there’s a lot of people working on it, right? So, then at some point, it may not be science fiction anymore, but it’s not science fiction to do it with the fasting-mimicking diet, because, you know, we clearly show that working very, very well in multiple systems and in the early data from clinical trials.

John: Give me a little hope here, Doc. I’m 62 years old. I know you’re younger than me. How long do you want to live? How long, with the knowledge that you have today, and you have much more knowledge than most of us, how long do you think it’s reasonable for you to live? And what numbers should we be thinking of when we think about aging and aging well, you in a healthy state?

Valter: Yes, so, I mean, of course, I could very well die tomorrow, and there’s no guarantees. It doesn’t matter what it is, but I think, you know, you want to play with the numbers, right? And the numbers will suggest that if you do everything right, and there’s a lot of things that we talk about, some of them we didn’t talk about, like exercise, et cetera, and make sure you get all the medical tests that you need, et cetera. Yeah, so, we know in Chicago, two different neighborhoods, there is a 30 years life expectancy difference, right?

John: What!?

Valter: Yeah, from two different neighborhoods, 30 year difference life expectancy. Of course, it’s not all lifestyle, but, you know, I’d say a good portion of it it is lifestyle. Now, some data from Norway and other places suggest 11, 13 years of life expectancy, just maybe a third of the things that we discussed today, right? One third, 11 to 13 years, if you start at age 20. So, I say it’s realistic to say that, you know, there could be a 20 to 30 years difference in, you know, if you do everything right, you have the potential, at least to go, on average, 20 to 30 years more than everybody else that doesn’t do everything right, that doesn’t care, right? So, now you have a lot of people that say, I don’t care, I’ll just do what I want. So, yeah, I think that the two groups, at some point, we’re probably going to get to 20 to 30 years separation. I mean, we already have it in Chicago, but there’s socioeconomic issues, et cetera. But I would say, at some point, we’re going to get to 20 or 30 years difference in life expectancy between those that do everything right and those that don’t care. And yeah, so, personally, I like to get to 120. No male has ever done that. So, you know, I always follow the Salvatore Caruso in Southern Italy. And I always remember, because he was 108, and he was still playing guitar and singing songs. And so then he turned 110. And I say, Salvatore, you know, there’s somebody in Sicily, he’s 112. And he said, “Oh, we got to beat him.” You know, so, he was worried about the competition of having to be there. So, you know, I like the competition. So, hopefully, I get lucky, and I get everything right. And, you know, it is one chance in maybe, I don’t know, 10 billion, that I will make it there. But you know what, it’s worth the shot.

John: You have to have a goal. Doc, you have to have a goal. And we need you here. You’re doing so much important work on these topics. Doc, I don’t want to take up any more of your time today. You’ve been more than amazing, all the way from Milan on the show. I want to tell our listeners and viewers, buy this book, Fasting Cancer. We’ll have it in the show notes, but you can buy it on Amazon and any other great bookstore close to you. We’ll also put the Create Cures Foundation and also your website, Valter Longo, and also Prolon in the show notes, so they’ll have access to all of the great things that you represent and that you’ve created along the way. Hey, Doc, thank you, not only for spending 50 minutes with us today, but more important, thank you for making the world a better and healthier place to live in. I really appreciate you. I eat the Prolon stuff myself, and it’s changed my life. And I just want to say thank you for the major impact you’ve made on this world.

Valter: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for your podcast.

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