How to Turn Back the Clock with Dr. Valter Longo

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Welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show with celebrity nutrition expert, Fitness hall of Famer and four time New York Times best selling author JJ Virginia. JJ is a warrior mom whose knowledge and expertise have helped change hundreds of thousands of lives. With over 3.5 million podcast downloads and appearances on Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, the Today Show, Rachael Ray, Larry King Love Whoa, whoa, whoa.

This show is about you, not about me. I want to help you find practical, real world ways to dial in your health and mindset so you can finally lose that weight and feel strong and energized. Stop settling for less than your personal best. It's time to find out how to look and feel better than ever. And I'll be right here with you the whole way. All right, if you want to turn back the clock. I don't know about you, but I'm always looking for how to be 10 years younger or more. I have got an amazing guest for you today. I feel super honored that I met up with Dr. Valter Longo. He is like the world's expert in longevity and I started talking to him a couple weeks ago and I'm like, all right, I gotta get you on my podcast. Turns out we have the same alma maters. He was at UCLA and then now he is a professor at USC in bioger gerontology and he's also the director of the Longevity Institute in the School of Gerontology at usc. And I actually was studying in this gerontology school. I was studying exercise science there so many years ago. So his whole focus is on genetics and nutrition and he has written some of the most wildly, widely, not wildly, but maybe wildly too cited papers in the biomedical longevity field. In fact, Dime magazine called him the guru of longevity. And his first book that now is in the US was published in Italy, has sold I think half a million copies over there. And now he's here in the States and you'll hear that he is definitely Italian and he is obsessed with anti aging, which is exciting because I don't know about you, but I am too. So he is going to give you his top 10 tips for living longer. You are going to want to grab those. And you can grab those@jjvirgin.com Dr. Longo. And so that is D R L O N G O Dr. Longo for his top 10 tips for living longer. You're going to want to grab those and we'll put some more cool resources in as we always do in those show notes. Alrighty. Dr. Valter Longo, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to talk with you today.

Thanks for having me.

Well, this is a topic everybody wants to know more about, especially my community, is what you can do to live longer, healthier. And I think that's a key takeaway. No one wants to live longer, unhealthy, right?

Yes, definitely. And there's been too much focus on just living longer, not enough on living longer, healthier, which is key.

I mean, to me it's frightening, the idea of being unhealthy and living a long, unhealthy life. Right. I don't want to do that. I want to go out like a light bulb, be super, super healthy and then, you know, live a long life and then one day it's, it's over and you went out like a light bulb. So what do you do? Because I know you've really studied this both from a diet perspective and I know we'll also be talking some about exercise, but let's dive into diet first because you've created both a diet and then you have your fasting mimicking diet, which we're going to talk about, but you've created a diet where you have like kind of an ideal composition every day to help people live longer, healthier. And how did you, like, how did you get into this and figure this all out?

Yeah. So this is all I've ever done, actually. So since I was an undergraduate in school, I've worked on aging and diet. Became clear when I started working at ucla that diet was the most powerful way to regulate aging, at least for the time being, and also regulate the healthy longevity. And we first started with genetics, identifying the genes that control aging and staying healthy. After we were able to do that, then we started looking at how do you regulate those genes with the diet? And now the book describes that the components of the diet can regulate the genes and not just regulate cellular protection, but also regeneration and rejuvenation. I can somebody actually become younger? And although you're not going to go back to 18 years of age, but certainly we're seeing now data that is consistent with making people younger.

This I know that you have all of this and for everybody listening, you're going to want to get the show notes. We're going to get your top 10 tips for living longer. And also a link to be able to grab the Longevity diet book. But what are a couple key things you can say about diet that can help turn back the clock that people could put into place right now.

The book is divided into one is every day, what do you eat every day? And the second part is about this periodic fasting making diet. Is there something that you can do once to 12 times a year or maybe twice to 12 times a year that can have long term effects and you can just do that for five days each time? And so every day it looks, by going around the world and looking at centenarians, by looking at the epidemiological studies, clinical data, looking at the mouse studies, if you put it all together, you get a pescetarian diet has been ideal. So vegan vegetables plus fish, with fish maybe consumed a couple of times a week. This seems to be over and over regardless of how you approach this. I mean, you're never going to get 100% agreement, but over and over you get this diet as being the best. If you look at all these different pillars and some of the other tricks that I talk about in the book, for example, is, and I don't know if you agree or not, but certainly not eat five times a day. But if you're overweight or. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's been a bad idea and that's really contributed to an epidemic of obesity and people overweight. And I think we should go back to what we see very commonly among centenarians around the world. They eat twice a day plus a snack or three times a day plus a snack if they're underweight or of normal weight.

I couldn't be more thrilled to hear this. I still remember I was at UCLA at the time I went to UCLA and usc. So I loved hearing your history. But I still remember when we moved into this whole idea of grazing and I was like, it just never made sense to me for what it would do to blood sugar and insulin. So I love hearing that. So besides the, the idea that the snacking or grazing isn't so good, what about a couple things or maybe one of the things that you really don't want to do that can maybe speed up the aging process, one for sure.

Is eating lots of hours, meaning eating for 15, 16 hours a day. And I think this is one of the consequences of eating five times a day. So people start eating at 7am and continue eating until midnight. This is very common and a number of clinical trials have shown that that's not a good idea. The other, of course, is based on my research, is proteins having lots of proteins. And I'm picking these two because they're so common. People do this so often thinking this is good for you. So people eat lots of proteins and, and there is no evidence, I mean most of the evidence suggests that, except enough protein is good. So 0.35 or so grams per pound of body weight, that's, that's good level of protein. So if you weigh 100 pounds, would be 35 grams a day of maybe like a filet or salmon or something like that. But going above that, there is really no very little benefit on muscle. And a lot of evidence supporting the fact that you will activate two of the major pathways of pro aging, meaning the genes that accelerate aging. One of them is called IGF1 and the other one is called Tor. And by doing so you're going to age more quickly and also develop diseases earlier.

So let's move into it because I'm thrilled to hear about eating, not eating for all those hours during the day. That's one of the big things we've been teaching here in the community is to eat less, less often. So make sure that you're not having multiple meals, you're having three meals and you're stopping eating three to four hours before bed. And then you have breakfast an hour or two after waking up. So you get that nice 12, 14, 16 hour overnight fast. But what about this idea of your fasting mimicking diet? You know, how did this come to be and what are some key takeaways from being able to do this? Because I love the idea of having a fasting mimicking diet where you get the impact of a fast without the pain of a fast.

Yeah. So first of all, the 12 hour fasting daily is good. When you go over 12 hours, you start seeing problems with gallbladder and gallbladder operations and removal and gallstones. Right. So because of gallstones and also another problem you see with the 16 hours is that a lot of people that do 16 hours may be skipping breakfast. And there are now multiple studies, including our own, which we haven't published yet, suggesting that people skip breakfast have higher mortality and higher cardiovascular disease. Right. So this is some of the warnings to. For people that go above the 12 hours.

That is fantastic too. I've seen, I love the fact, because big breakfast, you know, breakfast skipping has now been out For a while. And I just know for women they do worse if they, I mean I just watch, I'm like, they don't do well if they skip breakfast.

So yes, and multiple studies are now showing that they, they're, they're going to die earlier because of it or certainly get diseases. Now what the reason is, is not clear. Maybe there are other reasons, other things that are associated with skipping breakfast. But because of that and because of the gallstones, probably not a good idea to go much over 12 hours. Maybe 13 hours of fasting per day is a very good number.

Yeah, we tend to work 12 to 14 hours. I've seen studies for 14. I know that there's all that, the big diets that came out of the UK with the, what was it called? It was like the eight hour diet where they were all focusing on eating within only an eight hour time frame. And then, and this is going to just kill you, Valter is it was eat whatever you want. I'm like, come on.

I mean in those, in those you can show all kinds of effects short term with all kinds of bad diets. Right. And the problem is that all, all these diets don't focus on getting people to healthy to, you know, 100 years of age. And that's really what you want rather than say, well in three months it caused me to lose weight or some other short term effects. Right. So that's not really the point of, should not be really the major point of a diet. Of course you want that too. You want to lose weight if that's what you're trying to do, but you want more than that. And that's, I think what I've been focusing on.

So talk about the fasting mimicking diet and what it is and how it works.

Fasting mimicking diet came from addressing the success and failure of chronic calorie restriction. And so calorie restriction in the aging field is just a reduction of calories to a very low level, let's say about 30% of normal, not out of excess, but 30% of normal, 30% less than normal. And this has shown incredible effects on say diabetes and weight loss and cancer and cardiovascular disease. But these also causes people to be close to anorexic. And so together with the successor there were problems. And the fasting making diet is to address these problems and say, and basically by doing a diet that mimics fasting, meaning the body understands that you are fasting completely and doesn't really detect the food as food in some ways. And so a lot of the changes that normally occur during water only fasting, if you completely starve, occur during the fasting making diet. But of course you get to eat. And this, the major one we tested clinically thus far, last five days. So it's five days of between 800 and 1100 calories per day and then you return to the normal diet. And so this seems to have long term effects, meaning that after you finish these five days of this fasting making diet, the beneficial effects, whether they are on cholesterol, blood pressure, triglycerides, fasting glucose, inflammation, etc. They, they remain. And, and particularly after you do three cycles of the fasting making diet, three monthly cycles. So the idea is of course to, to remove the burden of having somebody always on a diet and allowing to eat, you know, as well as possible, but allowing to decide what that eating well is and then say, you know, if you're obese and you have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, you might have to do this fasting making diet once a month. If you're an athlete, you're 35 years old and you're in perfect shape and you eat very well, you have a pescetarian diet, you might only need to do this FMD twice a year for five days.

I like the concept too. It's something that I've been working on is this idea because I think, you know, everyone talks about the diets don't work, but the reality is they're not thinking about it correctly. Where you have your everyday diet, where you put in the basic principles that are going to be important for longevity and health and then you have, you know, it's kind of a booster that you do throughout the year as needed to get the health changes that you need. And I think that's just really a smart, cool concept that needs to be out there that we shouldn't be living our life on a diet per se, that these are used therapeutically.

Yes. And both of them are really, for both of them. We went back and looked at, you know, population like centenarians and made sure that these were not sort of crazy diet that we came up with, whether it was every day or even the periodic fasting. I mean, people had never done a fasting mimicking diet per se, but it was very, very common for, and almost unavoidable for humans to undergo periods of fasting throughout history. And not just humans, every organism had to undergo long periods of fasting. And for the first time in history, probably in the last hundred years, we started eliminating this, this very Common condition. And so I think this is not a diet at all in the sense that it's really about picking the things. Of course, if you look at the past, there's a lot of things that we did that are not necessarily going to help you live longer. So it's about going to the past and matching the past with the science and taking the common denominator, what's common between what we're finding in the lab and the clinical trials and, and what centenarians and people hundreds of years ago used to do. And I think if you put them together, you get a pretty good bet that you will have something that can help people live longer, healthier.

So what you don't know about me is that I was at USC as a doctoral student in the exercise science department because I wanted to study gerontology. And I know, and I was obsessed with the fact that we had 80 and 90 year old master athletes who were incredible like, and that they were actually showing people getting fitter, stronger at, in their 70s and 80s. And so I know that, that you also talk about exercise with this. So I'd love to also hear what you think of as the ultimate exercise regimen for someone, you know, who wants to be healthier, longer.

The exercise that I include a chapter in the book about exercise and what comes up, comes out of a number of studies, is 150 minutes a week seems to be ideal. If you go twice as much, 300 minutes, you do get an additional benefit, but not a big benefit. So, so then I say about 40 minutes every other day or so seems to be a very good level of exercise. And also in the book I talk about trying to stay active. And the rest of the time try to use your body as much as possible. So avoid the escalators, the elevators, and try to walk to places as much as possible. And so I think the combination of the two, and also for the 150 minutes, maybe you have 20 of these 150 minutes per week that are more strenuous. So where you push yourself, if not to the limit, close to the limit, that seems to be important as well as the doing the whole 150 minutes.

Perfect. That's what we teach over here too, is to do make sure you're doing some high intensity interval training for the growth hormone response and for what it does for your sympathetic nervous system. So I'm thrilled to hear everything we've been doing sounds like it's in line with what you've got in your book here.

Oh, great.

Yeah, yeah. Well I mean, I remember looking at these people and going, all right, that these people who are in their 70s and 80s are, you know, doing intense exercise and they look great and they're strong and they're healthy and they look 20 years younger. So.

Yes. And of course, you know, you can also, in the book I talk about overdoing it and you know, from talking to scientists that I follow people that are professional athletes, a lot of them were a little worried about the professional athletes. And so I think that is also, if you do it too much, like if you drive a car too much, you're probably going to have problems. So not a bad idea to not go much, much over the 300 minutes a week.

Yeah. What we like to think of here is, you know, you should do activities of daily living, move more, walk the dog, et cetera. But that's, we really focus on exercise is more of that intense, those intense workouts and they aren't long. You don't do them for long periods of time. So it sounds like we are. I'm absolutely against all of that long endurance training because it does age you, creates more oxidative stress, doesn't make sense, breaks down muscle. So and most people, they don't exercise because they don't have time. So they're absolutely thrilled to hear this. Right.

This is why I pointed out the 150 minutes, because people always think, oh, I must be more than that. The optimizes health. And it turns out that it's not.

You know, I think that that whole thing came up when I was, I was in some of the first gyms, running gyms, way back when, and we had people doing our workouts. And so you wanted to get them to do as many as possible because you had more clients. So I think that's where that all came from, you know, because you got to look back and go, why would we tell people to do that? Go work out five days a week for an hour. And I'm thinking because that's what the exercise classes were.

Right.

You know, you couldn't really charge them for a 20 minute workout, so you.

Had to keep them longer.

Yeah, so you had to keep them longer when really, you know, it's better for you to spend the 20 minutes and then you can go spend more time making good healthy dinners and have it that way.

And you could argue also the five meals a day could have some similar ideas behind it. Right. More food sold to people.

Right. Well, I remember when that all happened because I was actually working at the Pritikin center at the time. And it was when, it was when everything started to go super, super low fat. And then all the snack food came out, all these little snack wells, fat free processed things. And we were supposed to snack all throughout the day and that you were supposed to graze and eat, eat as we were supposed to eat 10 grams of fat a day. It was like, you know, it was ridiculous.

Yeah, I remember that. The demonization of fat followed by Demetrius of sugar or carbohydrate now. Right. Not sugar. Sugar is probably a good demonization, but. But you know, carbohydrate now is the new devil and we keep making the same mistakes over and over.

I know. It's not, it's, it's, it's not that you can't eat sugar. You got to know where it's coming from. It's like, don't make your wild rice a bad food. It's very different than a Snickers bar. You know, it's like people, people try to look at one food group and say, don't eat that. I'm like, no, no, no. It's, there's good and bad in every single thing. There's a big difference between again, like wild R potato chips or even potatoes. I just did a segment on Dr. Oz showing the difference between having a potato and having potato chips or french fries. One's produce, one's a product, you know.

Yeah, yeah, the produce.

So sounds like we're on the same page. And I'm just really a big fan of this work. I'm very excited about this book being out in America now. This is definitely one because, you know, you make an important point. I think a lot of people look short term of how can I lose weight? But really what you're really trying to do is to me, being overweight is just a symptom of other things not working well. This is really getting, fine tuning your body. So you burn off body fat, so you reduce inflammation, so you've, you know, hormones imbalance and you live a long healthy life. And that's what your diet is set up to do.

Yeah. And I think, you know, for the weight loss also the big difference between the periodic fasting, making diet and almost everything else out there is that it burns specifically where the most of the fat is. So the visceral fat, for example, the abdominal, the belly fat. And then when you refeed, the muscle returns, the muscle mass, as we shown in the clinical trial, returns to normal, but the fat does not. Right. So it's really one of the very Few ways that you can specifically go after the belly fat and maintain your.

Muscle mass, and that is huge because most people, when they go on a diet, they lose muscle and then they go back off the diet and they gain more fat and they shift their body composition and they slow down their metabolism and they get worse over time. And it's a devastating thing to do to your body. So being able to burn off that body fat, that visceral body fat, is huge. And while holding onto and sparing, losing muscle, so very big. Thank you so much for doing that and thank you so much for being with me today. I super appreciate it.

Oh, thank you. Thank you.

You know, after the break, I'm going to to be answering a listener's questions, so stay with me.

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Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question. And now you know that I try to pull ones that fit in with the topic at hand. So I've got a great one for today from Carl in Birmingham. And we pull these off, by the way, from my social media site. So either JJ Virgin Official at Facebook or JJ Virgin on Instagram. That's where we do a lot of scouring for comments and questions. So I got this one from Carl in Birmingham, says, all right, so you're anti snacking, but what do you do if you're hungry all day long? Okay, so this is why it's super critical to keep a food journal. Because you should not be hungry all day long. If you're hungry all day long, there's something wrong and we got to figure out what the heck it is. First of all, have you trained yourself to be hungry all day long? Because quite often I find that, you know, we were taught to graze and all of a sudden it's like Pavlov's dog. Oh, it's breakfast and then, oh, it's mid morning. I should have a snack then. It's lunch, then it's mid afternoon, I should have a snack. Then it's dinner, then it's after dinner, I should have a snack. So first thing I want to know is did you just train yourself to think that you need to eat all day long? Because guess what, as you heard from Dr. Longo, you don't, you should not be eating all day long. So that's the first one is maybe you trained yourself, exposure equals preference. Second of all, you might be thirsty. Quite often I find people are not hungry, they just need to drink. And when you drink water all throughout the day, you actually boost your metabolism as much as 30%. You can burn 300 more calories throughout the day by just drinking water or ice cream tea. So I want you to be drinking more and then look at the food that you ate and did you eat the right composition. So you want to make sure that you always have some clean protein. That would be things like wild fish, grass fed beef, pastured chicken, lots of slow low carb, so loads of non starchy vegetables, little bit of slow low carb, maybe something like some wild rice or squash and then some healthy fats because that is the perfect. That fat fiber protein trifecta is just beautiful for keeping your blood sugar balanced. And your insulin will come up when you eat, which is important, triggers satiety and then comes back down so that you're able to burn off stored fat for fuel. Right. And feel good. So you want to look back and this is why I have people carry it, do a food journal because if you're hungry a couple hours after a meal, I want to know what is going on that's making you hungry. Maybe you had a big workout that can make you hungry. Maybe you didn't eat the right composition at your last meal. Maybe you're not drinking enough water. Right? What is going on? One other thing that can make you hungry is having alcohol. If you have alcohol a day later you end up a little bit insulin resistant. You're actually going to be more hungry. So that can be a little rebound effect from drinking. If you are going to drink, shout out to my buddies at Dry Farm for the lower sugar wine. So if you are going to drink, drink a responsibly and stick with something that's not with added sugar in it. So either Dry Farm wines or tequila with or vodka without a sugary mixer. But you're not doing that every day because wine and weight loss do not go hand in hand. So sorry to break the news to you on that but you already knew it, right? You did. All right, now I want to do a shout out to Boy 11 from Canada who says, Amazing. Five stars. JJ's information will be life changing for you and just want to appreciate you. Love you. Up for the review? Those reviews help a ton. I know people go out and go, what podcast should I listen to? And if you see a bunch of reviews, you're more likely to dive in. So when you do that, when you jump on there and leave a review, yes, this is a shameless big ask for you to do that over on iTunes. JJ Virgin Lifestyle Show. But when you do that, you're not only helping me, you're actually helping a bunch of people because then you've got people listening to the show. And as you can see, I always try to give super actionable information that you can jump in and use that will change your life.

Alrighty.

Thanks again. See you next week.

That's all for this episode of the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show, which marks another step towards a healthier body and mind. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the show and we'll talk to you next week.

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