Most of the band members espoused a live-and-die lifestyle. But after shows at the Whiskey A Go Go, the Roxy and other West Coast clubs, as they partook in the drinking and drug addiction endemic to the 1990s grunge scene, the band's guitarist, Valter Longo was an Italian doctor and student obsessed with nutrition who struggled with a lifelong addiction to longevity.
Decades after Dr. Longo left the grunge-era band DOT for a career in biochemistry, the Italian professor, with his scruffy rocker hair and lab coat, is now showing off the Italian diet and aging. Standing at the point of attachment to.
“Italy is really great when it comes to aging research,” said Dr. Longo, a youthful 56-year-old from the lab he runs at the Cancer Institute in Milan. He is scheduled to speak at a conference on aging later this month. Italy has one of the world's oldest populations, including many centenarians, which intrigues researchers looking for the fountain of youth. “It's Nirvana.”
Dr. Longo, a professor of gerontology and director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California in California, has long advocated living longer and living better by eating Light Italian. This is part of a global explosion of “path to permanent well-being” theories about how to stay young. The field itself is still in its adolescence.
In addition to identifying the genes that regulate aging, he created a plant- and nut-based diet with supplements and kale crackers to mimic fasting, which helps cells rid themselves of harmful cargo and actually It claims to be able to rejuvenate your body without the downside of starvation. He patented and sells his ProLon diet kit. He published a best-selling book (“The Longevity Diet''). He has been called an influential “fasting evangelist” by Time magazine.
Last month, he published a new study based on a clinical trial involving hundreds of elderly people, including those in his family's hometown of Calabria, and said that by regularly repeating his own pseudo-fasting approach, he He said this suggests that it is possible to lower biological age and halt aging. Diseases associated with aging.
His private foundation, also based in Milan, not only provides meals for cancer patients, but also consults with Italian companies and schools, and is actually familiar to most Italians today. It promotes a Mediterranean diet.
“Very few people in Italy eat a Mediterranean diet,” says Dr. Longo, who has a crisp Californian demeanor and an Italian accent. He added that many Italian children, especially in the south, are obese and bloated from eating what he calls the toxic five P's: pizza, pasta, protein, potatoes and pane (or bread). Ta.
At the foundation, resident nutritionist Dr. Romina Cervini recently unveiled a wall photo depicting Dr. Longo playing the guitar with centenarians, and a photo filled with recipes translated into many languages. It sat surrounded by shelves of his longevity diet books.
“This is not the modern Mediterranean diet, but very similar to the original Mediterranean diet,” she says, with a photo posted on the wall of a bowl of an ancient legume similar to chickpeas, and a photo of Dr. Longo's prized he said, pointing to a photo of green bean pods from Calabria. “That guy's big favorite (manga).”
Dr. Longo, who has split his time between California and Italy for the past decade, once worked in a niche field. But in recent years, Silicon Valley billionaires who want to stay young forever have been funding secret labs. Articles about health dominate the front pages of newspapers, and ads for Fountains of Youth workouts and diets featuring very healthy middle-aged people flood the social media feeds of not-so-healthy middle-aged people. There is.
But even with concepts like longevity, intermittent fasting, and biological age, our age is only how old our cells feel. – While momentum is building, governments like Italy's are worried about an even harsher future, with a burgeoning elderly population siphoning resources from a dwindling youth population.
But many scientists, nutritionists and longevity enthusiasts around the world continue to yearn for Italy, looking to the deep pockets of centenarians for the secret to longevity.
“It probably continued to breed among cousins and relatives.,” Dr. Longo said this, noting the sometimes close relationships that are forged in small towns in the Italian hills. “At some point, we think it may have generated a superlong-lived genome.”
He hypothesizes that incest's genetic flaws could mean that those mutations killed carriers before they could reproduce, or that the town discovered a monstrous disease like early-onset Alzheimer's disease in certain families. It is said that they avoided it and it slowly disappeared. “You're in a small town, so you'll probably get tagged.”
Dr. Longo wondered whether periods of starvation and an old-fashioned Mediterranean diet might have protected Italy's centenarians from later illnesses in the dire poverty of rural Italy during the war. ing. Later, thanks to the increase in protein and fat after Italy's post-war economic miracle, and modern medicine, people were able to survive into old age without becoming frail.
It could be a “historical coincidence that we will never see again,” he says.
When Dr. Longo was young, he was troubled by the mysteries of aging.
He grew up in the northwest port of Genoa, but every summer he would visit his grandparents in Morocchio, Calabria, a town known for its centenarians. When he was five years old, he stood in the room where his septuagenarian grandfather had died.
“It's probably quite preventable,” Dr. Longo says.
At age 16, he moved to Chicago to live with relatives, but his middle-aged uncles and aunts, who ate the “Chicago Diet” of sausages and sugary drinks, were diagnosed with diabetes, just like their relatives in Calabria. I couldn't help but notice that he was suffering from cardiovascular disease. do not have.
“This was like the '80s,” he said. “It was a diet nightmare.”
While in Chicago, he frequently went downtown and hooked up his guitar to blues clubs that would let him play. He enrolled in the prestigious jazz guitar program at the University of Texas.
“Worse,” he said. “Tex-Mex”.
His refusal to conduct marching bands ultimately led to a conflict with music programs, and he shifted his focus to other passions.
“Aging was on my mind,” he said.
He eventually earned a PhD in biochemistry at UCLA and did postdoctoral training in the neurobiology of aging at USC. He overcame his early skepticism about the field to publish his papers in top journals and became an avid propagator of the age-reversing effects of diet. About 10 years ago, to be closer to his elderly parents in Genoa, he took a new job at the IFOM Institute of Oncology in Milan.
He found inspiration in the pescatarian-centered diet around Genoa and all the legumes in Calabria.
“Genes and Nutrition'' He said of Italy's dilapidated lab: “It's incredible.''
But he also realized that the modern Italian diet of cured meats, lasagna layers, and fried vegetables that the world craved was terrifying and a source of disease. And it is shameful that Italy is not investing in research like other Italian aging researchers who are pursuing the cause of aging through inflammation or hoping to destroy senescent cells with targeted drugs. he said.
“Italy has a great history and a wealth of information about aging,” he says. “But it costs very little.”
Back at the lab, my colleagues are preparing a fasting-mimicking “soup mix” for mice – on a broken wall and a shelf with the words “We are slowly falling apart.” I handed over the photo. He talked about how he and others identified key regulators of aging in yeast, and how they investigated whether the same pathway operates in all organisms. He said his research benefited from his past life as a musical improviser, which led to his research, including using food to starve cells suffering from cancer and other diseases. He said this was because it opened the door to unexpected possibilities.
Dr. Longo said he believes his mission is not just to extend lifespans, but to extend youth and health, a goal that could lead to a “terrible world” where only the rich can survive for centuries. He said there is. Enforcing a cap on having children.
The more likely short-term scenario is a split between the two groups, he said. The former will continue to live as they do now, and due to medical advances will be around 80 years old or older. But Italians could potentially be forced into isolation, given years of suffering from a terrible disease and declining birth rates. Others will follow fasting diets and scientific advances and live to 100, perhaps even 110, in relative health.
Dr. Longo, who practices what he preaches, considered himself to be in the latter category.
“I want to live until I'm 120 or 130. I'm getting really paranoid right now because everyone's saying, 'Of course you have to live to at least 100.' ” he said. “You don't realize how difficult it is to reach 100 points.”
audio creator Tully Abekasis.