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We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com. Back to Healio Key takeaways: Together, the periodic fasting-mimicking and longevity dietary patterns create a \u201cscientific diet\u201d working for patients on a cellular level. An expert explained how the combination creates an opportunity. ORLANDO \u2014 A scientific diet joining two popular patterns could be helpful for longevity, according to a speaker at the American College of Lifestyle Medicine annual meeting. Valter Longo, PhD, the Edna Jones Professor of Gerontology and a professor of biological science at the University of Southern California Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, offered a presentation on the interconnected issues of diet, longevity and disease.
Healio spoke with Longo, who is also the director of the USC Longevity Institute, to learn more about the two diets he focused on, who benefits the most from them and more. Healio: Why did you decide to present on this topic? Why is it important for healthcare providers to know about? Longo: We\u2019ve been working on this topic for 30 years, and we\u2019re trying to convince everybody \u2014 me and many others in the field of aging and longevity \u2014 that medicine should focus on longevity first. This idea is now something that is slowly getting out there. I\u2019m trying to also present interventions that are feasible and clinically proven to be effective, or on their way to being proven to be effective. Healio: You discussed the periodic fasting–mimicking diet and the everyday low–protein plus moderate methionine-supplemented longevity diet. What does the research say on these dietary patterns? Longo: The periodic fasting-mimicking diet is a diet tested in over 45 clinical trials, mostly by independent universities, and the idea is: can you mimic water-only fasting while providing a very healthy, vegan-based diet? It is a low-calorie, low-protein, low-sugar, high-fat, 100% plant-based. So, the idea there \u2014 it goes back 20 years \u2014 is that the most powerful intervention in history against aging is called calorie restriction. Calorie restriction really is something very simple: What happens if you take a person who eats normally and you reduce their calories by 25%? This has been tested in lots of clinical trials. There are very powerful effects, but also very powerful side effects. So, the fasting-mimicking diet is there to try to get the effects of the calorie restriction without the burden and the side effects. Our question has been: What if you act for only 5 days once a month or less? Let\u2019s say once every 3 months or once every 4 months, do you get effects that are long lasting? Many of the trials are showing exactly that. You get long-lasting effects that have much less to do with fat loss or weight loss; and more with these periods of fasting mimicking that created a reset: A metabolic reset, a stem cell reset, a cellular reprogramming reset, autophagy and microbiota \u2014 those are the ones we\u2019ve clearly seen in animal models, but we are also observing effects in humans clinical trials consistent with those in rodents. The everyday longevity diet is something completely different \u2014 learning from Okinawa, Japan; Loma Linda [California]; Italy, and combining it with mouse data and rat data and monkey data but also clinical trials and epidemiological analyses we have been studying the characteristics of the ideal everyday diet and the molecular mechanisms that make it effective? First of all, let\u2019s understand what it is about the Mediterranean diet or the Okinawa diet that has been so successful in making lots of people live to 100 and past \u2014 and very healthy, by the way \u2014 and then transform it into a mouse diet, and then go back to the human epidemiological data and test the hypothesis built by the mouse data. That\u2019s what we did in the recent paper, showing that a low-protein, low-amino acid, low-methionine diet is great \u2014 just like calorie restriction \u2014 but it causes a lot of problems. But if you just keep it like that \u2014 like the old Okinawa diet or the old Japanese diet or the old Mediterranean diet \u2014 mice get frail. If you instead introduce modern levels of methionine, the frailty goes away, but all the beneficial effects don\u2019t go away. We see effects on GLP-1s in mice. We see effects on a factor called [fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF21)]. We see effects on growth hormone, which reaches very high levels, but we can keep a growth factor that is associated with aging, cancer and cancer metastasis called [insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1)], lower. The longevity diet that we described is now trying to transform the popular diets into a scientific diet that understands how each component \u2014 and even each component of the component; proteins and then methionine within proteins, protects against aging and disease. Is it simply that you need to eat plant proteins? It doesn\u2019t look like it. It looks like you have to have the right range of methionine but a low-protein diet to get the effects. Healio: What are the potential benefits to these diets? Longo: The fasting mimicking diet\u2019s most powerful effects have to do with shrinking systems, organs and cells, and re-expanding them. It takes 5 days to strongly activate autophagy, the self-feeding process within the cell, in different system and to get the activation of stem cell and of cellular reprogramming, etc. The fasting-mimicking diet has a more rejuvenating effect, whereas the longevity diet has a more continuous delay effect on lowering biological aging and delaying the diseases associated with it. 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