Most of the band subscribed to a live-quick-die-young lifestyle. But as they partook in the booze and drugs endemic to the 1990s grunge scene after gigs at the Whiskey a Go Go, the Roxy and other West Coast clubs, the band’s guitarist, Valter Longo, an Italian Ph.D. student, battling a lifelong addiction to longevity.
Now, decades after Dr. Longo left the grunge-era band DOT for a career in biochemistry, the Italian professor stands in his floppy-rock hair and lab coat at the nexus of Italy’s ideas of nutrition and aging.
“For the study of aging, Italy is simply incredible,” said Dr. Longo, a young 56, in the lab he runs at a cancer institute in Milan, where he will speak at an aging conference later this month. Italy has one of the world’s oldest populations, including many pockets of centenarians that tempt researchers looking for the fountain of youth. “It’s nirvana.”
Dr. Longo, who is also a professor of gerontology and director of the USC Longevity Institute in California, has long advocated longer and better living through the consumption of Lite Italian, one of a global explosion of Road to Perpetual Wellville theories about how to stay young in a field still in its teens.
In addition to identifying genes that regulate aging, she has created a plant- and nut-based diet with supplements and kale crackers that mimic fasting, she claims, allowing cells to shed harmful baggage and rejuvenate, without the negative side of hunger. He has patented and sold his ProLon nutrition kits. published best-selling books (“The Longevity Diet”); and was named a major “Fasting Evangelist” by Time magazine.
Last month, he published a new study based on clinical trials of hundreds of elderly people — including the Calabrian town where his family hails from — that he said suggested that periodic cycles of his own mock-fasting approach could reduce biological age and prevent diseases associated with aging.
His private foundation, also based in Milan, tailors diets for cancer patients, but also advises Italian companies and schools, promoting a Mediterranean diet that is truly foreign to most Italians today.
“Almost nobody in Italy eats the Mediterranean diet,” said Dr. Longo, who has a cool Californian manner and Italian accent. He added that many Italian children, especially in the south of the country, are obese, bloated on what he calls the poisonous five Ps – pizza, pasta, protein, potatoes and breadcrumbs (or bread).
At the institution recently, nutritionist Dr. Romina Cervigni, sat among pictures on the wall of Dr. Longo playing guitar with centenarians, and shelves of his longevity diet books, translated into many languages and filled with recipes.
“It looks a lot like the original Mediterranean diet, not the present one,” he said, pointing to photos on the wall of a bowl of ancient chickpea-like legumes and a pod of Calabrian green beans prized by Dr. Longo. “His favorite.”
Dr. Longo, who has split his time between California and Italy for the past decade, once held a specialized field. But in recent years, Silicon Valley billionaires hoping to be forever young have funded secret labs. Wellness articles have taken over the front pages of newspapers, and Fountains-of-Youth workout and nutrition ads featuring fitness-crazy middle-aged people fill the social media feeds of insanely out-of-shape middle-aged people.
But even with concepts like longevity, intermittent fasting, and biological age — you’re only as old as your cells feel! — have gained momentum, governments like Italy worry about a crazier future in which growing elderly populations drain resources from dwindling young people.
And yet many scientists, nutritionists and longevity fanatics around the world continue to look longingly to Italy, searching the deep pockets of its centenarians for a secret ingredient to longevity.
“They probably continued to breed between cousins and relatives», Dr. Longo offered, referring to the sometimes close relationships in small Italian hill towns. “At some point, we suspect it created the super-longevity genome.”
The genetic disadvantages of inbreeding, he hypothesized, that they slowly died out because these mutations either killed their carriers before they could reproduce, or because the town noticed a monstrous disease—like early-onset Alzheimer’s—in a certain family line and avoided it. “You’re in a small town, you’ll probably get flagged.”
Dr. Longo wonders whether Italy’s centenarians were protected from later disease by a period of starvation and the old-fashioned Mediterranean diet early in life, during Italy’s abject poverty in wartime agriculture. Then a boost of protein and fat and modern medicine after Italy’s post-war economic miracle protected them from weakness as they grew older and kept them alive.
It could, he said, be a “historical coincidence that you will never see again.”
The mysteries of aging captured Dr. Longo at a young age.
He grew up in the northeastern port of Genoa, but visited his grandparents in Molocchio in Calabria, a town known for its centenarians, every summer. When he was 5, he stood in a room as his grandfather, in his 70s, died.
“Probably something preventable,” Dr. Longo said.
At the age of 16, he moved to Chicago to live with relatives and could not help but notice that his middle-aged aunts and uncles who were fed the “Chicago diet” of sausages and sugary drinks were suffering from diabetes and cardiovascular disease that the relatives did them in Calabria. not.
“It was like the ’80s,” she said, “just like the nightmare diet.”
While in Chicago, he often went downtown to plug his guitar into any blues club that would let him play. He enrolled in the renowned jazz guitar program at the University of North Texas.
“Even worse,” he said. “Tex-Mex.”
He eventually fell out with the music program when he refused to lead the marching band, so he turned his focus to his other passion.
“Aging,” he said, “was in my head.”
He eventually earned his PhD in biochemistry at UCLA and did his postdoctoral training in the neurobiology of aging at USC. He overcame early skepticism about the field to publish in top journals and became a zealous evangelist for the age-reversing effects of his diet. About 10 years ago, eager to be closer to his elderly parents in Genoa, he took a second job at the IFOM oncology institute in Milan.
He found inspiration in the fish-heavy diet around Genoa and all the legumes down in Calabria.
“Genes and diet,” he said of Italy as an aging laboratory, “is just incredible.”
But he also found the modern Italian diet—the cured meats, lasagna, and fried vegetables for which the world was hungry—horrific and a source of disease. And like other Italian aging researchers looking for the cause of aging in inflammation or hoping to wipe out senescent cells with targeted drugs, he said Italy’s lack of investment in research was a shame.
“Italy has such an incredible history and wealth of information about aging,” she said. “But he spends next to nothing.”
Back in his lab – where his colleagues prepared the fasting-mimicking “broth mix” diet for mice – he passed a photo on a shelf that depicted a broken wall and read: “Slowly we are collapsing.” He talked about how he and others had identified an important regulator of aging in yeast and how he investigated whether the same pathway worked in all organisms. He said his research benefited from his past life of musical improvisation because it opened his mind to unexpected possibilities, including using his diet to starve cells affected by cancer and other diseases.
Dr. Longo said he thinks of his mission as extending youth and health, not just putting more years on the clock, a goal he said could lead to a “scary world” in which only the wealthy could afford afford to live for centuries, possibly imposing limits on childbearing.
A more likely short-term scenario, he said, was a split between two populations. The first ones would live as we do now and reach about 80 or more through medical advances. But Italians would suffer long—and, given the falling birthrate, potentially lonely—years burdened by horrible diseases. The other population would follow fasting diets and scientific discoveries and live to 100 and maybe 110 in relatively good health.
A practitioner of what he preaches, Dr. Longo envisioned himself in the latter category.
“I want to live to 120, 130. It really makes you paranoid now because everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, of course you’ve got to at least get to 100,'” he said. “You don’t realize how hard it is to get to 100.”
