EPI 231: How To LIVE LONGER With Dr. Valter Longo. The Optimal Diet For Longevity, Fasting Done The Wrong & The Right Way, And How The "Fasting Mimicking Diet" Works

Welcome back to another episode of the Peak Performance Life podcast. Today we have a very special guest. He is really a pioneer in the industry. His name is Dr. Walter Longo and he is the Edna M. Jane professor of gerontology and biological sciences and director of the longevity Institute at the University of Southern California. And he's written many books and he's really a pioneer in the industry. His recent books are titled Fasting Cancer. He also has one called the longevity diet and he's famous for his fasting mimicking diet, which can help people get a lot of the longevity benefits of fasting, but without having to completely starve yourself throughout the entire time. He is really a legend in the industry and it's such an honor to have you on. Dr. Walter Longo, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, great. Thank you, Delar. Happy to be here. All right. Well, why don't we start with a little background of how did you get interested in doing the work that you're so famous for today? I've always, I mean, I was actually a music student in Texas in my first year. And then I decided that I wanted to study aging and so starting my sophomore year, that's all I've ever done. I look for aging researchers in Texas that were working on aging and then that's all I've ever done since I was my second year in college. Then luckily I moved to UCLA in Los Angeles and worked with Roy Walford, one of the world. At the time he was the leading figure in the planet for nutrition and longevity. So, yeah, I had great teachers and collaborators. And since very, you know, 1988, right? So, yeah. Amazing. Amazing. And what, and so over the years, I know you've done a lot of studies like on mice and other things. Can you tell us what are some of the most interesting things that you found in your studies in this field? Yeah, so I actually started with people and Roy Walford. He was a medical doctor at UCLA. And then I moved back to bacteria and yeast, right? And the reasoning was that I wanted to know how do you reprogram an organism to live a lot longer, right? So then in yeast, we were able to genetically modify the yeast in a combination of two mutations, one in the protein pathway, one in the sugar pathway, and then fasting made them live 10 times longer, right? So then, yeah, that was very important because they sat very early in the early nineties has set the stage for me to understand this is real, right? So we can make an organism live 10 times longer by a combination of fasting and genetic mutation in nutrition response pathways. So, yeah, so that was very important. And then, you know, of course, then eventually we moved to mice and back to mice and back to humans. And now I think we've done. I helped many universities carry over, I think, 40 clinical trials. Many more are ongoing. So, so, yeah, great that I think that it worked out. And I also think that it was good to start a company that, you know, I donate everything to charity, but I did start a company. And the company's been really fundamental in supporting the universities doing the clinical trials. You know, without the company, I think not supporting in the sense that they give them money, but they give them the product and so and all the logistical support so that that made it possible. Interesting. Yeah, tell us more about that. How what does the company provide? Yeah, the company is a nutra and and the company, it makes the the fasting mimicking diet, the the kit. And so, yeah, so the company has been there since 2009, believe it or not. And, you know, one of one of its, at least from my side, I mean, I'm speaking as a professor, not as a founder, but from my side is, you know, without the company being able to not only send the the fasting making that the hospitals and send it on time and support them with all of that, but also develop in many cases, develop new fasting making that. So for example, for now, we have groups asking us for variation on the cancer fasting making diet. We're thinking we're helping hospitals do a kidney disease fasting making diet. So in each case, there are changes or big changes. We did one for Alzheimer and they had big changes. Because, you know, people have Alzheimer's or malcognitive impairment are much older. So there was like a daily supplement that would be given to people together with the fasting making diet. And so, yeah, so the again, I get criticized because of the company, but with the company, I think a lot of the, you know, great work that many universities have done would never have been done. Yeah. Yeah, I think I think it's great to have a company alongside as well. So I want to get into the fasting mimicking diet and what fasting mimicking actual diet actually means for those that are listening that may not know. But when you first saw this research that fasting can increase lifespan, potentially 10x, it was that was in mice, I assume, right? No, no, there was in yeast right there. In yeast, in yeast. Got you. Got you. I wish, you know, I, yeah. So if you can make a mouse live 10 times longer, that would be a good one. Yeah. But yeah, that would be really good, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that was in yeast. Okay. Good clarification there. And when you saw that then you said, oh, must be the same for mice or humans. Did you start fasting yourself? What, what kind of, when you first started discovering this, before you created the fasting mimicking diet, what were you, what was your mindset like and what were you doing then? Yeah. So, I mean, Walford was the, the world leading figure in calorie restriction, right? So he was fasting himself. In fact, when I joined his lab, he was not in the lab at UCLA. He was in biosphere two in Arizona. So he had locked himself up with other seven people and they did the first human calorie restriction study. And so calorie restriction refers to a severe restriction below the normal calorie intake, right? So if you take somebody that has a normal weight, normal calorie intake, and then you cut it by 20, 25, 30%, that's calorie restriction. And so he started the first human study in 1991 on calorie restriction. And yeah. So I think that that was the, so I was exposed to that. And then I was starving bacteria and bacteria were living a lot longer. And then I was starving yeast and yeast were living a lot longer. And then, you know, this 10x lifespan extension. Yeah. So I think that that from all kinds of direction, it came the idea that this is got something so powerful that it's difficult to match with anything that I've seen. I mean, I could have done anything. I mean, I really, we, it was back in the early nineties, aging was not, I mean, it was in our field, right? People were making fun of us. I remember one time I was talking to a molecular biologist. It was probably like early 2000 and he's laughing. And so there was a journal that I'm part of that I was an editor of. It's called Aging Cell. It was a really good journal and he was making fun of the, he didn't know that I was one of the editors, right? The section editors. And he's making fun of, this early 2000, people still making fun of the aging field, right? So not anymore, right? So things have changed. But just to tell you that, you know, back in those days, aging was not, was not a popular thing. But yeah, yeah, I could have picked anything in the aging field. And, and I think to me, this restriction, but especially fasting, I mean, the observation we wall for and with people that were already doing the color station studies was that, okay, so this is very, can be very effective in mice, can be very effective in rats and can be very effective in a lot of organisms if you keep starving, you know, chronically, right? But then I thought, who's going to do this? This is like not possible, right? And then of course, Wolf or when he was doing that on himself, he lost a lot of muscle, he lost a lot of weight. So it just seemed like something that brought a lot of positive and a lot of negative. So, so I started thinking since then, since the early 90s, like, is it possible to intervene just once in a while? And is it possible that once in a while intervention is as good or better than the continuous, very difficult color restriction intervention, right? So, yeah, so I think that's where it all came from. Putting all this together, seeing the power, but then finding a way that, you know, if you look at the monkey color restriction study, this is something that went on for 30 years. Another student, the Wolf, Richard Weindruck, carried it out. And if you look at the results, it's just unbelievable, right? Cancer is cut by 50%. Lifespan is extended in the monkeys. Cancer is cut by 50%. Cardiovascular disease by 20 to 30%. And insulin resistance or diabetes goes from 60% to 5%. Right? So this would be, if you could bring that to medicine, right? You will have revolutionized medicine more than anything in history, right? Yeah. So, but hey, nobody wants to do or can do color restriction. And so how do you get all these effects, all these remarkable effects of color restriction without having to make people color, and without bringing the problems of color restriction? So that's always been my focus. Yeah, that's fascinating. With the monkey study that you just spoke about, how many, like, what was it? 50% of their normal calories the monkeys were doing? Were they fasting completely for days at a time? No, they weren't fasting. This was like a chronic lifelong 25% color restriction, right? So the controls were eating, like at least at the University of Wisconsin, the control were eating a normal calorie Western diet, Western-like diet. And the colors were eating the same Western diet, 25% calories, 25% calorie restricted. Just alone, not changing any of the food, just 25% less calories and seeing huge benefits. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, of course, Walford and Wendrook and Rose Anderson and others that are doing this, the idea is not that Western diet is good for you. Of course, Walford was preaching a vegan and very different diet plus color restriction. But the monkey was just, the study was just focused on what, if you remove everything else, if you just restrict calories, what happens here? Yeah, interesting, interesting. And so then now we think about like, okay, how does that translate to humans? And it's actually quite interesting because we've had actually many guests on here that talk about, you know, it could be dangerous to drastically cut calories for an extended period of time. I'm not talking about maybe for just a few, you know, one week or a few days, but some people say, well, you know, if you start cutting calories too long, you can mess up your metabolism, you can lose muscle, you can do all these other sorts of problems, things like that. Then we've also had previous guests who, one of them I think had some clinic where he's helped thousands of people do, you know, five day fasts or three day full fasts, things like that. So just kind of curious, where do you, I've heard you kind of mentioned sometimes, even when people were talking about intermittent fasting, I think I remember hearing you saying something like 12 hours or something like that. But yeah, so a lot of questions there, but kind of like, where, what do you think, as this translate to humans? Is it, do you like the long fasting? Is it should, is it, is a calorie restriction the better way to go? What are your thoughts? My thoughts is that, you know, there's gotta be multi-pillar science, right? And not just epidemiology or clinical trials or mouse studies, you know, you got to put it all together. So we've always, I always in my book started like that saying five pillars, like what about the centenaries? How do people get to a hundred years of age? Right? What about clinical trials? If you look at all the clinical trial, what about mouse studies? How do you make a mouse or a rat live longer? And then epidemiology, very important, right? Well, if you look at the big numbers of population, people eat a lot of this and a lot less of that. What happens to them? Yeah. So if you use that system, I came up with three or four things probably that, that, you know, people, everybody should do. And one of them is 12 hours time to the eating, right? So, so, you know, such in Panda and others will say, you know, maybe 13 hours or more. But now if you go 13 hour, I mean, so the compromise is like 12 to 13. And I think Sachin and I would say, okay, yeah, fine. You know, that's a compromise. But a lot of people will say 16 or 18 or 20. Well, that's where you start seeing a lot of the problems, right? You start seeing a lot of the, beside the goldstone formation and all that, you start to see the breakfast keeper living shorter with more cardiovascular disease. You also know that as you fast for long periods, cholesterol levels in the blood go up, right? And so it's possible that this continuous, you know, after 12 hours, you start seeing a rise in blood cholesterol. So if you do it for thousands and thousands and thousands of days, right? So could it be the reason why I mean, we don't know, but could it be the reason why there's more cardiovascular disease in the breakfast keepers? And now, you know, one new study that was recently published suggests that doesn't matter if it's breakfast keeping or dinner skipping. If you go 16 hours, you are worse off and not better off. Yeah. So then if you look at the science, and that's one, right? So if you look at the science of longer fasting, well, you know, this idea of doing two or three weeks or one month of fasting, and people feel better, you know, a, okay, you know, it's been down for a long time. But the science is very limited. And it's also the biggest problem with this very long fasting is that it's looking at acutely, right? You can't do that. Right? I mean, I've been saying that for a long time, but I'm sorry, you can't do that, right? You have to say what happens. So you could cure something or you can improve something in the clinic. But then if somebody, you know, goes away and that comes back. So for example, if somebody comes to a clinic, spends a month of fasting and then, you know, loses 50 pounds in the year later, 95% of those that lost 50 pounds come back and have gained that all back. It was much better that that person never did that. Right? So this is this is actually being published. I did this yo yo. So yeah, I'm saying, let's bring the science to it and say, well, what happens when you go home? Right? Then yeah. So this is where the fasting and making that comes from. Say, okay, you know, lots of trials, some of them long term, six months, 12 months long. And and looking not only what happens after, but looking only sometimes that what happens after we don't even care what happens after five days, right? I mean, yeah, it's nice. It's nice for science, but it's not important for the patient. We always say seven to 10 days later, or three months later, where are you now? Yeah, if if you know, one week later and three months later, you're doing better or much better than a successful. And yeah, so so I think that fasting, I always say doesn't mean anything. It's a pointless word. It's probably done more damage than good in general, because of misuse of it. But but there are ways to use it in in, for example, the 12 hours, or maybe 13 hours. I mean, you're not going to get many doctors arguing that that's good for you, right? So if you fast, say from 8, 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. Go find a doctor that says, you know, hey, this is bad for you. And let me tell you why. It'd be very difficult. So good, right? That's a good addition to somebody's toolkit. And then then the FMD, they say done three times a year on average. You know, so if you're diabetic, you may do it 12 times and and under year one and six times a year, two. But in general, I would say, you know, three cycles of the FMD, it's a vegan diet. It's a very healthy composition of the diet. And then it has this fasting mimicking properties and, you know, at least 750 or so calories. So I would say, yeah, maybe there'd be more doctors arguing against it. But in general, doctors say if you only do it three times a year, so 15 days out of the year, that seems to be also, you know, very safe and difficult to argue that a vegan diet for 15 days a year is going to harm someone. Yeah, yeah, interesting. Yeah, I think it's a very good distinction you made. And it was, you know, a couple of years ago, maybe two, three years ago, there was a big craze of this intermittent fasting where people were only eating in an eight hour window and fasting for 16 hours. And I think now people are starting to wake up and realize maybe that's that's not the best. And I remember when I heard you, I think on some podcasts or something, and you said, well, 12 hours is kind of what's clinically proven and going above we don't we don't really know, or, or, you know, it's maybe maybe could be detrimental. And so when when, you know, kind of the Godfather of fasting says, says 12 hours, it helped maybe reset the industry a little bit, I think. So I think that was a good thing for women. Do you see any difference? I think I've heard sometimes it could be even 10 hours for women. What do you think? No, we haven't seen it, you know, and I don't, this is a circadian clock, right? And so it really goes with the dark and light cycles. And that's why I think 12 hours is probably it's got some fundamental properties that are very deep. And, and, and, you know, they're not going to change between men and women. But I think, you know, hey, we are, we're just finished a large 500 people trial, we're starting another one, 330 people trial in Naples on adolescence. So yeah, we'll keep looking at it. We're now we used to just do fast and making diet. Now we do the laundry, what I call the longevity diet, plus the fasting making that or longevity diet alone, which includes the 12 hours of time received the eating. Yeah, so I think that doesn't look like it's going to change between men and women. But, but, you know, as we are having these big numbers now, I think we can go and do a lot of sub analysis and, and see right, a somebody and also, you know, epidemiology and all the five pillars that we're going to keep checking. And is there any evidence that, you know, people should women should leave for 14 hours a day. Now, if you look at the cancer recent couple years ago, a large cancer study on survival of women with breast cancer doing 13 hours or more of fasting per night was associated with a improved survival, right? So, so yeah, so, you know, this is in fact the only time we recommend 13, 14 hours of fasting per day. But otherwise the 12 is good. And I wouldn't, you know, clearly a lot of work by such imponder showing that if you eat for 14, 15 hours a day, that's problematic. Uh huh. Uh huh. So yeah, so this is good. So we discussed. So now we go, we discussed intermittent fasting. What is your, and I want to talk about the longevity diet and, and fasting cancer as well. Those are both fascinating. But first, let's kind of summarize for people what is exactly the fasting mimicking diet. You mentioned 750 calories a day. How many days does that, how long is that? And you provide through your company, what are, what are like the foods or the calories? Where are they coming from? Yeah, so the decision that I made many years ago was to make it a very healthy. So let's pick every ingredient from the healthiest zones in the world that longevity, you know, like Mediterranean, Okinawa, Loma Linda. Yeah. So that was the, the, the reasoning and it was a very good reason, right? Because, uh, uh, you know, these ingredients, uh, have properties that they go beyond, you know, just micronutrient, uh, and, you know, the caloric, uh, um, you know, properties. So, um, yeah. So I think it was good. For example, in one study where we look at in, in mice at inflammatory bowel disease, uh, the, um, the high prebiotic content of the diet provided, you know, build, uh, allow the mice to build microbiota and the microbiota building beef, beefy the bacteria, lactobacillus, et cetera, was very important in protecting the mice from these models of inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's colitis, et cetera. Uh, yeah. So, so, so it's a lot of vegetables, a lot of oil, you know, olive oil, a lot of nuts and, you know, a lot of foods that are, uh, uh, uh, frequently or consistently associated with living long and healthy. And then there's also tricks, right? Glissarol, for example. So we put glycerol in there to make sure that patients have reserved, uh, fasting associated, uh, energy sources, right? So, so if the system is running out of glucose, it takes either from muscle, amino acids, or it can take from glycerol. So we give glycerol to support the system, but we give it the right dose, uh, because, you know, people can develop gastrointestinal issues, uh, if glycerol is too high, right? So yeah, it is a lot of, it's a lot of science that people, you know, people look at and say, well, it's food, but to us, it's not just food. We're thinking about every metabolic pathway and every process. And how do we, how do we fold the system and at the same time be respectful of the fasting response? Yeah. I like that. I like that a lot. And so, uh, how many days long is it? And what are the kind of common results or within the studies you've done on it? What are kind of the results that you're typically seeing with people who, who do that? Yeah. So, uh, there's different versions. The major one are the five day, then there's a four day version that we've used a lot for cancer trials. And then there's a seven day version that we use in several trials for auto immunities. And, um, yeah. So it's usually 1100 kilocalories on day one and then goes down to say 750 and day two, three, four, five. And, uh, and so, um, I think that the, the most conclusive data, you know, very strong is diabetes, pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obesity. So it just has GLP one like effects without allowed the GLP one problem. Now, given GLP one is a pill or is an injection has been tested a lot more. But now it like we're on trial number five, very consistent effects in, in reducing, um, fat, but unlike GLP one without lean body mass loss, right? So we keep seeing that the lean mass is protected. And then it makes sense, right? Because GLP one is, is, is a drug that is going after a receptor, the GLP one receptor. And, um, it is not really a coordinated fat loss that is part of a evolved process. It's just, you know, interfering or activating, keep activating something that, yeah, does make you eat less and it does have very powerful effects. Yeah. So then the diabetes, pre-diabetes, obesity, uh, that seems to be, uh, very, very strong effects in diabetes. We see you not, and they say also the difference with the, with the drugs. We see the patients are much more likely to reduce drug use if they're on the FMD, that in, if they're only taking drugs, right? So in a certain sense, the drug, you know, and by definition, right? It's a lot of these drugs. You got to keep taking them. Uh, there is not much of a promise or take it for six months and then you're going to be cured. Now, the idea is like, Oh, you're going to keep taking them. Maybe you stop, then you start again. Uh, in our case, we're saying, no, we, um, we're getting the patient, but the laden trial, for example, I mean, the Eidelberg trial, 70% of patients reduce drug use. And in, in the laden trial, eight fall, there was a eight fall difference, I believe, um, between metformin user and metformin plus FMD in reducing metformin. Right? So, so the idea of the FMD is, is, is making you healthier in a multi-systemic way so that you can reduce or eliminate drugs. And, and that's what we want. Now, yeah, for some people cannot do that. And, you know, so there's drugs there that are, you know, it is a, a backup plan, but it should be a backup plan. It should not be the primary plan. And why we are very enthusiastic about the FMD and obesity is because, you know, usually you have the drugs or you have the lifestyle change, right? Either you change your life or you take drugs. And we're saying, okay, maybe not, right? Maybe you could just do, in the trial that we just finished in Calabria is every three months, right? You do the five days fasting, eating diet every three months. So what about that? Right? Is it possible that you can just do it every three or four months and, and, and then the rest of the time we don't tell you what to do. So, I mean, in mice, we published that, you know, in 2022, I think, or 21. So we, we give mice the worst diet, like Western high fat, high sugar, high calorie, and the mice become huge, right? But if to the same mice in the same diet, five days a month, you switch into the FMD, it just eliminates basically all the problems from cholesterol to heart damage to the obesity, you know, so to the, the, the insulin resistance. So really remarkable. We did not expect that. We thought, well, we're going to get halfway. Right? So we give mice a terrible diet for 25 days a month and you give them a, you know, FMD for five days a month. If you're going to see something in between, how can five days counterbalance 25 days? Right? But no, it just all went away. Right? So, and we're not advertising that people should have a terrible diet, but, but say, great, we preach the longevity diet, you know, super healthy. But reality is a lot of people cannot do that. And so you can't keep saying, oh, but okay, either you do the exactly what I tell you every day, or you get, you know, inject yourself with lots of drugs. Yeah. So I think it's, it's, it's in between alternative. That's amazing. So yeah, before we move on to the longevity diet and fasting cancer, why don't you tell people where can they get that fasting mimicking diet? And so the average kind of somewhat healthy person or average person, you would recommend doing the five day fasting mimicking diet, like maybe once a quarter, four times a year, something like that. Yeah, I would say three times a year, right? And, and you can easily find it. I cannot talk about names or advertise anything. But I say, yeah, three times a year for the average person that is healthy. And then, you know, diabetic, call to your doctor, or, you know, some doctors may say, I know, take drugs, you know, say, okay, no, I would say, yeah, if you fail with the FMD, yeah, then take drugs, but try the FMD first. And, and, and the hope is that makes you healthier. In fact, we know that now it lowers cholesterol, lowers blood pressure, you know, lowers inflammation, you know, so a systemic effect and making you and we publish actually two and a half years reduced biological age after three cycles of the FMD, right? So, so I think that and none of these, by the way, were paid by the company, right? All of these studies were independent university studies, most of them I didn't run. And so, so I think that it's real, it's real effects and it's very powerful. And yeah, so now, of course, University of Miami had a very nice study on colitis. Stanford is going to publish soon one on Crohn's. So, lots of trials on autoimmunities, very, very promising. And there's going to be more, maybe two or three more publications in the next 12 months on this. So yeah, so we're excited about also the autoimmunity. Cancer is looking very good, right? Many trials that being carried out and particularly triple negative metastatic breast cancer. The trials look very, very promising, particularly the one by Vernieri in the National Cancer Institute in Milan, Italy. So yeah, so cancer is another good one. And yeah, so we'll see we'll see for other uses, but it's definitely been a good start. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. And I mean, part of me wonders, is it just kind of like removing all the garbage that people normally eat in their diet and then just replacing it with something healthy there as well. But let's talk about your longevity diet. So what is now that's one that's not just for fasting, it includes you set a 12 hour kind of a window where you are kind of fasting, maybe every night from 7pm to 7am or 8pm to 8am. But what's included in the longevity diet? What have you found there that's, that's, you know, help people? Yeah, sorry, before I go to longevity diet, because we didn't mention it, I wanted to mention mechanisms, right? So, you know, we've done, you know, many years of mechanisms in mice and rats. And so make this seems to be three mechanisms, you know, one stem cell activation, right? So we see in multiple organs and system, like in the gut, in the blood, stem cells are elevated. And, you know, and then they can give rise to younger or young cells, differentiated cells. The other one is cellular reprogramming, right? So these Yamanaka factors, these cellular reprogramming factors are turned on differently in different cells. So we've looked at the pancreas, we look at the muscle, we looked at the kidney, the brain. So we see in lots of different systems induction or increase in this embryonic developmental gene set. And the third one is autophagy, you know, so, so these three are really all acting, you know, by the end of by the time you get the effesting making diet, all three are acting. And that's why we all we see all these effects. I just wanted to mention that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, the stem cell activation and the things like that. And that's why it's having kind of more long term benefits. It's almost like you're doing a detox for your organs, your brain, almost every part of your body guy is getting a kind of a detox and a refresh. And that is going to help you longevity long term. Yeah, detox, but also truly true regeneration. Because you know, if you look at our latest paper, which was rats and people in the kidney, it's really remarkable. We we take a toxin and we we damage the the the rat kidney, you know, in a very long term. And you see that the our kid, the landscape, that the transcription was called transcription landscape completely disrupted, right, meaning that everything is messed up now in the kidney, right? So so then we start the effesting making diet and you see that this what we call special transcriptomics, you see this transcription landscape going back to its original state. It's like, it's really remarkable. And and together with that, right, this I guess it just knows exactly so it just became young again, right. And or certainly it took back and went from this complete disruption to back to exactly where it should be and functional, right. And with that, when you look at the cells and what's happening, you see these embryonic developmental genes, right, the same genes that are turned down when the rat is first born. So so it's not cleansing, right, it's really resetting the restarting the developmental program and using the developmental program to fix problems, right, all kinds of problems. We saw in the pancreas when beta cell, we disrupt the beta cell production, we see in the kidney. So we keep seeing it everywhere. So it's probably like a program that connect the multiple systems in by detecting issues and intervening by, of course, it has the genetic power to re establish, bring the organ back to its original state. But in an adult, and that never happens, you know, what if it happens only when you do this fasting, refeeding cycles, you know, amazing, amazing. Okay, let's talk a little bit about what is your so you were asked. Yeah, yeah. So the diet is basically, you know, again, looking at all kinds of pillars and looking at epidemiology and mouse studies and monkey studies, etc. And say, you know, what is it, you know, so we talk about Mediterranean diet and the Okinawa diet. I mean, there's a lot of diets out there and diet in the in the scientific sense, not in the weight loss sense, right? So what do you eat all day that could make you live a long time? And so, yeah, so I think that the longevity diet learns from all of these and comes up with a common denominator. So what is it that everybody, all these different diets agrees, agree is is beneficial for you, right? So, so yeah, it's a it's a high legume, high vegetable, a high nut, high olive oil. You know, so it's got a lot of similarities with the Mediterranean diet, but it's got a lot of difference, right? You know, it's an high fruit. It pays attention to inflammatory fruits and vegetables. And, you know, and it pays attention to levels and pays attention to what I call the five peas, you know, in Italian is five peas pasta, pasta, pizza, bread, pasta, pizza, potatoes, and proteins, right? So, so, yeah, so the longevity diet looks at the Mediterranean diet, but again, looks also Okinawan, why are Okinawans so long lived? Why are Japanese being number one in life expectancy? And why did Italians lose a lot of slots in the in the life expectancy ranking, right? So it's looking at all that say probably these are, you know, kind of like the 12 hours in the 16 hours. Yeah, 16 hours of fasting is going to be more effective. But why, you know, do we see these problems? And maybe could we have a compromise and do 12 hours? Yeah, so, so the longevity is the same way it says, okay, yeah, maybe having a high protein diet that can make you more muscular a little bit. But it's clearly associated with lots of problems, right? So we are going to bring it back down to what's reasonable for people and make it, you know, maybe two to one like it used to be plant, plant protein versus animal protein. And, you know, and so an optimized level of IGF one and not to my level of insulin, etc. So there's somebody can be strong or relatively strong. And it's a compromise, right? But, you know, living long and healthy, right? So that the most people don't realize, for example, Southern Europeans are relatively frail compared to Northern Europeans and Central Europeans. But they live longer and they live healthier, right? And so then the question is, and that's where the longevity that I just trying to address, how do you get it all? Maybe you're not going to get it all perfect, you know, I'm going to have somebody very muscular and long lived and no diseases. But, you know, let's make him first long live and no disease. And then as muscular as possible, right? And as strong as possible, right? That's, that's what longevity diet is addressing. Amazing. Yeah, it's very interesting. I will say there's two parts of the, I guess, the longevity diet that might differ from many of the guests that we've had on this podcast. And me personally, I had an experience was about 12 years ago now where I had massive pain and inflammation. And I kind of eliminated that really in my fingers, arms, wrist or, you know, everything. But I was at the time experimenting with a vegan diet, but I was doing it all wrong. I was, you know, going to Subway and ordering a foot long sandwich with a little bit of vegetables, but I'm really just eating a whole loaf of bread, you know, and I was getting very inflamed. And so when I went paleo, and went kind of lower carb and was kind of aware of things that might cause inflammation in my body and went kind of like higher protein, higher healthy fat with like olive oils and things like that, you know, I'd like nuts and things like that I do fine with, but definitely eliminating a lot of the grains I felt helped me personally. So I would say two things that I would say the common, many of our guests would probably differ with, or maybe, maybe debate you about one would be the legumes, as some people say, legumes can cause gut issues or the lectins or these kind of things. And the other would be the low protein because the assumption I think would be that if you're eating lower protein, you're going to have to eat more carbs to kind of get the same caloric intake. What are your thoughts about those kind of two points there? Yeah, so the legumes, I will say that obviously, it's not that important, the issues that you have temporary important is if those issues should continue, right? So the microbiota has to change. So anybody that has never had legumes, as you get exposed, you're going to have problems, but do the problems go away in two or three months? And then are you healthier? Yeah, so I will say that's a good way to start. And then, yeah, if the problems continue, then yeah, that's not for you, right? The legumes are not for you. And it's not just legumes, it could be tomatoes, it could be eggplant, it could be, it's a long list of ingredients, of foods that are problematic to a lot of people. So yeah, and then the protein level, I mean, again, we can use one pillar of science, yeah. So if you look around the world for people that live along, like the Okinawans, right, used to have 39 grams per day of vegan proteins, 39 grams, that's it, you know. And did they need a lot of fish? In Japan, do they eat a lot of fish over there though? No, they not historically, even Japanese in that eat a lot of fish, right? And Okinawans ate no fish, almost at all, right? Very little part of their diet came from fish. And same for southern Italians, you know, there was not a lot of fish, we saw some exception, like, you know, people in Salerno were Ansel Keys first to define the Mediterranean diet. So, yeah, so the issue is like, if you look around the world, whether it's a traditional Japanese diet, and, you know, traditional Okinawan diet, traditional Mediterranean diet, you know, all the ones, forget the blue zones, like, let's say, we don't even talk about small zones, let's just talk about the country of Japan or the country of Italy, right? So the ones that have consistently have, you know, top life expectancy in the world had low protein diets, right? And so, and the mice, if you want to make a mouse live longer, low protein diet. And if you want to make a rat live longer, low protein or low metine diet, or the same thing to the mouse, right? If you want to make a yeast live longer, low amino acid and low, so, so if you look at epidemiology, the low protein is consistently, you know, doing better. I mean, there's some epidemiological studies showing, you know, high protein is okay. But I mean, overall, because in epidemiology, you can pick and choose the groups that you select. But if you put it all together, you get a pretty consistent, you have to have enough proteins, right? There's no doubt you have to have in a protein is an irrelevant word anyways, it shouldn't be about protein, it should be a amino acids, because you can have, you know, a legume protein is completely different from a fish protein, right? And so in its content of essential amino acid, lucine, metine, and etc. So as you, as you look at the science, you know, you need to have enough amino acids of the right amino acids, right? And once you have enough, and you can build your muscle, this is what we tell people, right? Just get enough so you can be very happy with how much muscle, bone density, and all that stuff, right? And usually 0.8 per kilogram is enough, right? Now, some people is not enough because they're athletes and they do all kinds of things. For most people and most medical association around the world to say, this is enough. Now, as far as calorie, that's not really an issue because, you know, the 80% of people in the United States have the opposite problem, right? So they have too many calories. And so the last, the least problematic issue is calorie intake. So if you reduce your protein, you, you know, if anything, it's going to be a benefit to your calorie intake and an issue, right? So, but that doesn't mean, you know, I understand what you're saying. You're saying, in your case, you were eating, let's say grains, and that's a problem. Absolutely. You know, if you forget the celiac, but even if you're just sensitive to gluten, and you're eating a lot of bread and pasta, you're gonna have a problem, right? And like I was saying, if you're sensitive to tomato skin or seeds, you're gonna have a problem. It could be a devastating problem. So I think you solve that problem. Now, the, and, you know, it may be that the paleo diet, you know, 30, 40 years from now, we'll find out that's the best of all, right? Yeah. And it's very, paleo is very similar to Mediterranean just maybe minus the grains, right? It's very similar. Yeah, exactly. Right. So maybe, but right now, we just don't have enough data. Whereas for the, for the Mediterranean, the longevity diet, there's a lot of data because we take from all this, you know, epidemiological studies that we don't have as much for the paleo. So it's more of a, if anything, it's just more of a gamble, right? You're saying, okay, I feel good, great. You temporarily feel good. The question is, is this gonna, you know, slow down your aging process also, right? In addition to making you acutely feel good or not? I mean, we don't know. But I mean, I think the paleo diet, if it's not excess proteins, you know, probably is okay. Yeah, yeah, really great points there. I want to be respectful of your time, but I do want to just really quickly touch on the fasting cancer. You wrote a book about it. I know I've heard a lot about how sugars and things of that nature really feed the cancer. So I think it would make sense. And we've heard of people doing more kind of extreme fasting. Tell us about what you found with fasting cancer and what you recommend in that book. Yes, you know, I mean, Otto Warburg got the Nobel Prize for, for, you know, understanding the rewiring of cancer cells into a more glycolytic, you know, using sugar, lots of sugar, right? But, you know, it's 100 years ago and that hasn't done anything. And the reason for that is that cancer are very good at stealing from everything else, right? So even if you reduce glucose, they're okay. I mean, the cancer cells will find ways to stay alive, right? So yeah, so I think that fasting cancer, the book is really about using fasting and fasting mimicking diet is a tool to get, understand the molecular mechanisms of cancer survival and then kill them all, right? So that's the idea, right? Is that there? I mean, with the exception of a few tumors where like some lymphomas and some tumors and leukemias, we see the fasting alone being very effective in keeping, at least in keeping the markers in check. So we follow lots of patients that, you know, never had to get chemo because they use the longevity diet and the fasting mimicking diet to keep the leukemia cells in check. Yeah, but with a few exceptions, I think most of the times, it's a combination like standard of care therapy plus fasting. So fasting in mice, in rats and lots of systems is clearly making the therapy work better, right? And so whether it's immunotherapy or chemotherapy or radiotherapy or can is inhibitor hormone therapy. So yeah, so I think that that's what a lot of clinics are doing now in the hospitals that are combining the FMD fasting mimicking diet with the standard of care. And it looks very promising, as I was saying earlier, right? And now they say chemo plus FMD, four years survival or so is almost doubled in women with triple negative breast cancer, small trial, you know, early trials, we need the bigger trials. And, you know, unfortunately, it's not easy in this world of drugs, it's not easy to get funding for big, it's okay, you get your funding for small trials. Well, the conclusive trials, you know, we've tried, in fact, we tried several times with some of the best hospitals in the United States in the world, MD Anderson, Mayo Clinic, UCSF, Cleveland Clinic, I put everybody together, we apply together for fasting mimicking that plus hormone therapy, we never got funded, you know. So people should really complain about that because, you know, by now we will have been done with that trial, you know, and, and, you know, who knows, it could be that it will have made, you know, the standard care therapy better. Yeah. Yeah, well, thank you so much for the work you're doing. It's been an honor to have you on this show, Dr. Longo. If people want to learn more from you find you follow you, where can they do that? I think it's Professor Walter Longo on Instagram, I forget, you know, yeah, so it should be easy to find Professor Walter Longo Instagram or Facebook. Yeah, so those are the two. Also, the foundation website, I think is Walter Longo.com or something like that. Amazing. Yeah, we'll link to all that in the show notes. This has been amazing. Thank you so much for all the work you're doing and pushing to get more funding for these important studies and trials that can really save a lot of lives. So thank you for everything you're doing and I hope we can do it again sometime. Yeah, sounds good. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, it would really mean a lot to me if you would forward this episode along to any friends, family members, anyone that you think that would get value out of it and learn something important. The mission at Peak Performance is to help people prioritize and transform their health. And so if you think someone will get value, please, please, please do forward this episode along to them. Also, if you could please rate and review and subscribe on whatever podcast player you are listening to this on, we would greatly appreciate that as well. It means a lot. And I want to tell you about a couple of new products that we just released, you can get 20% off your first order at buypeakperformance.com. That's B U Y peakperformance.com. We just released a brand new grass fed beef protein isolate. 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