The Longevity Diet: Slow Aging, Fight Disease, Optimize Weight

I have been an avid follower of Professor Valter Longos’s work and studies since first seeing a BBC Documentary in 2012 - Eat, Fast & Live Longer. This man is nothing short of a genius. Having gone through my own health problems: Bulimia, then a massive benign tumour in my head which lead me to an operation and then into intensive radiation treatment I found his studies fascinating, insightful & inspiring to me personally & I wanted to know & learn more. Over the past 2 decades I have either been, bulimic, vegan, vegetarian, or now for the last 15 years pescatarian at which time I had no idea that such a name even existed. When I found out that Professor Longo had written a book on Longevity I couldn’t wait for it to be published in English. I have a Kindle copy and a book. His book has given me so much knowledge that I didn’t previously have and the information is easy enough to process if you take the trouble. For me, where his book stands out from many other books is that most of the information in this book is based on his own studies and research from throughout his 30 something years of study & research on Longevity. There are no gimmicks just straightforward facts on longevity & how to proceed with his longevity diet with the everyday fruits, vegetables, legumes etc. that we find in our supermarkets or farmers markets. He clearly explains why & which fruits, veg etc are better for you. How simple can it be to follow a mostly plant-based diet - but the truth be known for most of us is that we will continue to eat bad & fast food until the heart attack hits or our cholesterol is through the roof, or like so many people in the Western World we develop diabetes. He clearly explains how we can avoid or correct these problems by using his longevity diet. The book is entertaining as well as full of necessary, important information for living a longer & disease- free life. Prevention is always better than cure. I am a writer and in my own research I have read many, many articles with misinformed information, on many different subjects & I only want facts & proven studies as in this book. Lastly, 100% of all the royalties from Professor Longo’s books go back into his research, another great reason to purchase the book. I promise you, you will not be disappointed.

I bought this book about 4 months ago - before the world changed as we knew it. Loved it from the start especially the story behind it, wonderful tales of the authors childhood in Italy, how the people lived and ate in his villiage and the incredible longevity of his people (all the more terribly shocking given what is happening at the moment re. Coronavirus and the toll it has taken on this great country and especially its elders). The engaging manner makes this book so different to others of its kind - this is not just a book which tells you that intermittent fasting is good for you, this goes so much deeper and the recepies Dr Valter Longo gives for this "Fast" are so delicious I find myself cooking many of them without any thought of fasting. One of my favourites is Pasta e Vaianeia. I cook this dish at least once a week , it is so satisfying and filling it gives you good energy and you feel so much better after eating this. I reccommend this to everyone to wants to start eating healthy food, never mind fasting. I did the "fast" for 2 months and when I reached my desired weight I had got so used to eating the recepies in this book i just continued using them . This is the Real way to eat. 9 months later........... This book has changed my life. I could never understand the Italian pride in their food and their cooking but I must admit I am a confirmed advocate of eating this way. Never would I have believed that a pot full of boiled veggies could taste good. Growing up in Ireland in the 1960s, our staple diet was meat, spuds and 1 veg. I hated dinner time and was a problem child when it came to eating. If only I had eaten the recipes in Dr Longo's book back then......... Between childhood and adulthood I developed an addiction to sugar, something I have been able to quit 5 years ago. These recipies are wonderful for satisfying a sweet tooth and since eating like this, sugar cravings are behind me.

This book is quite easily readable. The beginning to me seemed to be autobiography, which is fine and usefully informative. Then the tail end seemed to be explaining the same things again to show how fasting for five days at a go might be helpful to various conditions, with seemingly less and less evidence for the actual efficacy (difficulty getting people to run medical trials). The fast mimicking is interesting, but not really to me, as I find it far easier to stop eating than to do a load of faffing about with strange and expensive foods. There are recipe suggestions and diet suggestions for how to run a period of fast mimicking, but this was not of interest to me. I found it quite difficult on flicking through the book to identify any diet, but there is actual information in there. There is also a lot of suggestion about what to eat or not eat to generally prolong healthy life, which after all is the premise of the book. and much of that comes back to what is refered to as "Mediteranean diet" (which by now should probably be called "Mediteranean poor village diet from 50 - 100 years ago") I have been primarily trying to lose weight to remedy T2 diabetes. Fasting has proved a valuable tool in acheiving that, and I am still using periods of fasting with the 5 days suggested here, and in other places being a big player. I can do extreme, it is moderation that I find difficult. Over five days I can watch my blood sugar drop from around 6 to around 3. I have no idea what it looks like for a normal person as there seems to be a complete lack of such information on the internet or in books such as this. The book is of course plastered with the dire warnings and self protection, advising that any diet to be done under medical supervision (as though anyone in the UK can get to see a doctor, let alone a nutritionist or dietician with any idea), so - "Dont do this at home children ! " Periods of fasting can be useful and this book goes a long way to explaining how. It is well worth reading if you want to try improving your health, and most of it is based on sound research.

Not many books that are so eye opening and easy to read. As someone who is health conscious this has given me a great understanding of foods as a whole, what to look out for/avoid and how fasting really does make you live longer (or is shown across multiple studies which I went on to discover post read) biomarkers are closer to optimal after the fasting mimicking diet and I am even fasting right now as the previous one I did (fasting mimicking diet) after reading this book made me look noticeably younger/youthful as well as feeling ‘cleaner’ and healthier overall. I have gifted this to family as it’s so easy to understand. Thank you Dr. Valter Longo

Not amazingly written but worth persevering with as the content is astonishing. Skip to the results table of metabolic changes after following this diet and you’ll see what I mean. I had a go at the diet and will probably repeat it - next time, would eat 200 calories of chopped nuts and seeds with nut milk for breakfast followed by 3 x 200 cal soups each day - those supermarket fresh pots including a few chickpeas or beans would work and calculate the calories for you so you can see how much of a pot to have. I cooked vegan dishes and it took a while to calculate through the recipes, dividing into calories from nuts or oils, and calories from vegetables. I used this to kick-start my stalling carb-swap diet so it wasn’t too much of a shift from that but I was hungry (though not unmanageably) until day 4. I lost 1.5lbs but was mainly doing it for the body rejuvenating effects esp immune system reboot (the diet can cure auto immune disorders). I do feel I’m looking younger!

I'm no scientist, researcher or expert, so maybe my opinion doesn't matter or is just plain wrong, but when I looked at the recipes and thought about the changes I would need to make to follow the recommendations in this book, I simply couldn't bring myself to do it or agree with what the author was suggesting. In my opinion (which is quite probably wrong, I admit), most types of carbohydrate, but particularly the refined and starchy carbohydrates, will end up as glucose in the blood. Admittedly Longo is not advocating ingestion of refined carbs, but I was surprised by the amount of starchy carbs that he recommended within the diet. I believe that carbohydrates that will end up being absorbed and end up as glucose in the blood (even if it is a slow process from the more unrefined carbohydrate foods) will result in glycosylation of lipids and dysfunction of lipid metabolism. I also believe it is this process that causes so many problems, not ingestion of fats alone. And yet there is mention in the book of "bad fats" and "good fats", which time will show, I believe, to be erroneous. I understand saturated fat, taken in the context of a low calorie diet, is showing some evidence that it is cardio-protective. I believe all types of fat should be eaten, variety being more important than restriction of one (saturated) type. So I didn't agree with the advice. I also believe that carbohydrates should be restricted to 50-100g per day and so again, I didn't agree with the recommendations given. I do, however, agree that up to about 70 years of age, protein ingestion should be limited to about 50-60g per day for an average build male and less than this for a female. Is fasting (fasting mimicking anyway) required for 5 days? He seems to think so, but how many of us would look forward to this? He criticises the 5:2 to some extent, but although I'm not doing it now (see below for reasons), I maintained it for about 18 months a few years ago after "Eat, Fast and Live Longer" appeared on Horizon. Mosley is convincing and, of course, he has since written "the Fast Diet" and also "The Blood Sugar diet". I agree more with the recommendations contained in these than I do in Longo's book and also I am far more likely to maintain Mosley's recommendations than Longo's. I'm not so sure Mosley advocates protein restriction as much as Longo does and in this regard I think Longo is right, but Mosley does advocate carbohydrate restriction, which I think fits the science better and can be done. I still think more will come out about fats - the "fat phobia" nonsense is still very much trotted out by everyone, but in the months and years ahead, I personally believe we will find that fats of all types will be critical to the healthy functioning of virtually all of our cells and that high carb, low fat diets are damaging (to say noting of statin use!). Fats have had bad press for too long, but we will find, I believe, that fat-with-sugar is the problem, not fat on its own, or rather fat with restricted amounts of sugar in our diets. (Glycosylation of LDL prevents uptake of many fat-based substances by healthy cells, which become progressively "starved"). So, the last recommendation - to fast periodically for 5 days? I don't necessarily agree, because I believe future research will show (bearing in mind Mosley's recommendations about shorter periods of fasting benefiting health) that depletion of liver glycogen stores from a low carbohydrate diet and then a "natural fast" overnight from, say 6pm to 8 or 9am the next morning, will confer similar benefits to a more prolonged and (for many) unsustainable fast. I personally believe that gene activation in calorie restriction happens more rapidly than we think. We are geared to survive and efficient and rapid gene activation will have been the result of thousands/millions of years of evolution. We have been continually "refined" and are extremely complex and efficient life forms, but I really don't think major genome change occurs quickly and so we still have a genome that responds most favourably to a diet that is very low in carbohydrates. We are "new" to farming, particularly to grains production and processing. I don't think we have adapted to this environmental change yet. So why have these people lived so long in these areas, where clearly they are taking carbohydrates? Well, they appear to have had active lives, moving a lot, but at low intensity. A purpose to live also. Not so much stress, pollutants, or adverse environmental factors experienced in (shorter) lives that are common elsewhere. They haven't moved from their ancestral environment, where there will have been at least some adaptation and genome moulding to optimise longevity. Few changes occurred to their diets and lifestyles over a long period of history. Low calorie intake overall, with low sugars ingestion (GL low and GI very low), with liver glycogen stores probably never "full-to overflowing", so very little LDL glycosylation. When they ingested fats and oils, their LDLs got to where they were needed and "nourished" just about every cell in the body. This is in contrast to the lipid dysfunction that is quite probably occurring in almost every other human on the planet resulting from increasing industrialisation of farming methods and processing of our foods! Happy eating!

The book is very well written. I found a lot of very interesting information. Most importantly, the recommendations are supported by peer reviewed research. The author seems to be very careful in the analysis.

There are a lot of positives in this book. The starting point is that the author is an actual university professor, who has carried out many published and peer-validated studies on longevity, so the book is written by someone who has a good understanding of nutrition and its impact on health, rather than a self-styled "nutritionist". The core message is eat a largely vegan diet, with occasional (and small!) portions of fish. I already try and aim for this.The author is also a great believer in 5 day fasting periods throughout the year. What stops me giving it a full five stars is that the book was originally written in Italian, I believe, and it occasionally shows. Some parts are not as clear as they might be. For example, Professor Longo stresses the importance of minimising protein. A detailed explanation of why, and whether it is really all protein, or just animal derived protein, is lacking. Appendix A contains two-weeks worth of sample meals. Some parts of these sample meals are surprising - the daily snack is usually a glass of some nut milk with a "nut and whole grain chocolate bar containing 150 calories". Really? Can you really not suggest a healthier choice?