longevity diet

This new diet has been developed by  Dr Valter Longo, PhD, and presented in a book published in 2018.  It offers the reader ‘the New Science to Slow Ageing, Fight Disease and Manage Your Weight’.  It features the 5-day fasting-mimicking diet which gives you all the health benefits of fasting without the hunger.

From his own experience of growing up in Calabria which boasts the greatest number of centenarians in the world, and observing what the Calabrians ate, and then going to Chicago and observing the local diet there of meat, dairy foods, sugar and carbohydrates, and the effect on the Chicagoans, he has come to the realisation that to live long you need to eat well. His new science treats food as the base ingredients that can be put together in specific doses and combinations to have drug-like beneficial properties.  His idea is that these ‘drugs’ can be developed to affect the genes governing the body’s protective systems or make them work longer so that we delay the ageing process.

The actual diet is similar to the Mediterranean diet — lots of vegetables and legumes, a little fish (seafood generally) and the minimum of protein. Cut out the saturated fats and use olive oil. Reduce sugars (cut out pasta and bread). Eat within a 12-hour period and don’t eat within three to four hours of bedtime. Fast occasionally using the fasting-mimicking diet. The idea of this is that you can eat small amounts of healthy natural products, such as vegetable soups, nuts, olives, vegetable chips, etc.,  which satisfy your hunger but do not prevent your body from going into fasting mode.