The 5 Pillars To Increasing Your Lifespan & Aging in Reverse w/Dr. Valter Longo EP 1199

Today’s Guest is Dr. Valter Longo. He has thirty years of experience in the field of longevity and healthy eating. He is the Director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California and the Director of the Longevity and Cancer Program at the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research’s Institute of Molecular Oncology in Milan, Italy. In 2018, TIME Magazine named Professor Longo as one of the 50 most influential people in health care for his research on fasting-mimicking diets as a way to improve health and prevent disease. He’s also the best-selling author of The Longevity Diet. In this episode we discuss the main causes of people not having longevity, what the longevity diet is and why it works, the five pillars of longevity and so much more! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1199Get Dr. Longo's book - https://www.valterlongo.com/the-longevity-diet/Mel Robbins: The “Secret” Mindset Habit to Building Confidence and Overcoming Scarcity: https://link.chtbl.com/970-podDr. Joe Dispenza on Healing the Body and Transforming the Mind: https://link.chtbl.com/826-podMaster Your Mind and Defy the Odds with David Goggins: https://link.chtbl.com/715-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,199 with Dr. Walter Longo. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:29Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back, my friend. Today's guest is Dr. Walter Longo, and he has 30 years of experience in the field of longevity and healthy eating. He's the Director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, and the Director of Longevity and Cancer Program at the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research's Institute of Molecular Oncology in Milan, Italy. In 2018, Time Magazine named Professor Longo as one of the 50 Most Influential People in Healthcare for his research on fasting-mimicking diets as a way to improve health and prevent disease. He's also the bestselling author of The Longevity Diet.

• 1:10Lewis Howes?

  And in this episode, we dive in deep on the main causes of people not having longevity in their life, what the longevity diet is and why it works, the five pillars of longevity, and so much more. And I tried to question as many variables as possible around what helps and hurts our lifespan. So I know you're going to learn a lot in this interview. And if you're inspired at any moment or learning something new, then please spread the message of greatness to a friend, a family member, or post this over on your social media platforms. Make sure to tag me and Dr. Walter Longo as well, so we can stay up to date on what you're listening to and what you're liking about this episode. And I want to give a shout out to the fan of the week from Lighters,

• 1:53Lewis Howes?

  who says, "By far, my favorite podcast ever, and it's truly helped me to become more emotionally stable, positive, and have more belief in myself. The content is truly insightful and addresses the core of issues rather than just providing relief from the symptoms."

• 2:10Lewis Howes?

  would be a much better place if everyone listened. So lighters, thank you so much for being the fan of the week and leaving a review. And if you're listening right now and you want a chance to be shouted out on the podcast as a fan of the week, then just leave us a review over on Apple Podcast right now or at the end of this episode. And let us know which part you enjoyed the most. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Dr. Walter Longo.

• 2:36Lewis Howes?

  I read a stat recently that between 150,000 and 180,000 people in the world die every day. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but that's the stat.

• 2:46Valter Longo?

  Sounds about right.

• 2:47Lewis Howes?

  150 to 180,000 people a day die. What do you think is the main cause of people dying earlier than they should be dying?

• 2:58Valter Longo?

  Well, there are lots of causes, of course, you know, at different parts of the world. Very, very different. So lots of people die of malnourishment, you know, they don't have enough food, you know. And but lots of people, maybe now more people die of too much and too much food and

• 3:14Lewis Howes?

  obesity.

• 3:15Valter Longo?

  Too much food that is bad.

• 3:18Valter Longo?

  And so, yeah, so I think that that, you know, even China and the Middle East and regions that traditionally were doing very well, now you're starting to see obesity, obesity, overweight, diabetes, et cetera, et cetera. And and so that certainly is the center of

• 3:37Valter Longo?

  just too much food and and and the wrong kind is at the center of of almost every disease that you can think of.

• 3:45Lewis Howes?

  Really? Are are more people dying from too little food or too much food?

• 3:51Valter Longo?

  I don't know the stats on too little. I would say more or much more people are dying of too much food.

• 3:58Lewis Howes?

  An abundance of the wrong foods as well.

• 4:00Valter Longo?

  Yeah, yeah, but but the number of malnourished people is still high.

• 4:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 4:05Valter Longo?

  So so I think that that both are a big problem.

• 4:10Lewis Howes?

  What's been one of the biggest, I mean, you've been studying this for 30 years, almost 30 years. You're, you know, really obsessed with the data, the research and doing a lot of these tests and labs. What has been the biggest finding that you've found on extending lifespan and longevity in the last 30 years?

• 4:28Valter Longo?

  Well, I think one of the biggest findings was the Tor pathway, right? So there's genes that, because when I first started working with Roy Wolford here at UCLA, very close by, it was 1992, right?

• 4:46Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 4:46Valter Longo?

  And we were just doing comparative biology, you know? You take an old mouse, a young mouse, an old person, a young person, and at the end of it, you knew as much as before, right? I mean, you're just as confused as before. You knew there was difference, but you had no idea why. And so then I went back to the biochemistry department and I started, I went from humans and mice to microorganisms, you know? And that's where I think everything changed, because then we were able to identify the genes that control aging, to the point where we took this microorganism and we can make him live 10 times longer, just by two mutation plus fasting, right? So we fasted them and then we had two mutation, one in what's called the, what I call the

• 5:30Valter Longo?

  sugar pathway, one is the protein pathway, plus the fasting, and we completely reprogrammed life, right? So, yeah, so I think that was the initial central point, the discovery of the Tor assist kinase pathway in aging. And then, you know, we followed it up with nutrition and the finding that protein restriction, as long as you don't go too far, too low, that's also central for aging and diseases. And then after that, what at the same time, the fasting, the use of fasting and fasting making diets. And just, and there was a sort of response to what Wolford was doing.

• 6:12Valter Longo?

  So Roy Wolford, for those that don't know, was probably the most famous person in the world for nutrition and aging.

• 6:20Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 6:20Valter Longo?

  And he was a medical doctor at UCLA and a professor at UCLA, and he was working on something called calorie restriction. So, which, it's a sort of simple idea. What happens if you take a normal diet and you reduce by 25%? Just eat less, a quarter less of the, of the whatever diet.

• 6:40Lewis Howes?

  Instead of 3,000 calories a day, it's 2,500 or 2,000 or whatever?

• 6:44Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so I say 2,400 calories instead of, or 2,000 calories, 2,200 calories. So pretty restrictive. And actually, in most cases, it was more like 1,800, 1,900 calories, for the people that were involved in the trials. And so, and then one of his students was here at UCLA in Wolfers Lab right before me, Richard Weindrake, did a study in monkeys, right? So they took monkeys in Wisconsin and they did a lifelong, let's see what happens if you calorie restrict them. If you just give them 25% less food, same identical food, but 25% less. You know, if you look at that, it's remarkable because you would say, oh, just revolutionized medicine, right?

• 7:26Valter Longo?

  They have, they go from 60% diabetic or insulin resistant to 5%. Cancer is reduced by 50%. So cutting health and cardiovascular disease is reduced by 20, 30%. But then, if you look at these monkeys, they don't live that much longer. And so.

• 7:48Lewis Howes?

  So restrict the monkeys 25% of the food.

• 7:54Lewis Howes?

  They had less disease or less cancer, but they didn't live longer? Is that what you said?

• 7:58Valter Longo?

  Yeah, they had less of all these diseases, all the major diseases.

• 8:01Lewis Howes?

  But they didn't live longer than they.

• 8:02Valter Longo?

  But they lived, no, they lived a little bit longer, but not that much. You think, you know, eliminate diabetes, less health of the cancers and 30% less cardiovascular disease.

• 8:12Lewis Howes?

  Should live 10 more years.

• 8:13Valter Longo?

  They could live 20, 25 years longer. I mean, not the monkeys, but let's say, yeah, 20% longer.

• 8:19Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 8:21Valter Longo?

  And it didn't happen, right? So, so that tells you that, that there were good, good and bad about this diet. And so then what I spent the next 30 years doing was, how can I eliminate the bad? Because obviously the good is unbelievable, right? I mean, more than anybody could dream, more than the NIH has been able to do, the National Institute of Health has been able to do in all these years, right? I mean, cut, almost eliminate diabetes and cut cancer and cardiovascular disease by 30 to 50%. So, yeah, so then how do you do that? And I think that the fast, the periodic fasting mimicking diet is certainly has that, that potential.

• 9:02Valter Longo?

  To allow people, and we'll see, I mean, of course, we got lots of clinical trials. So it's not just my opinion anymore. So lots of clinical trials, but, but the idea is, can you intervene for just five days? And instead of starving people, give them some food, not, not all the food they, they would like, but some food. And could this, what if you do it only once every four months for five days? That's it, you know? Or maybe even once every six months? Could this change someone's health?

• 9:32Lewis Howes?

  So five days restricted diet, not restricted every day for the rest of your life, but for five days, couple of times a year?

• 9:39Valter Longo?

  Yeah.

• 9:39Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 9:40Valter Longo?

  So what if you do this fasting, this vegan fasting making diet with, you know, very specific content, two or three times a year? Could that change things the same way the calorie restriction change things? You know, I mean, it's starting to look like, yes. It's, it's getting to that level, right? So we'll see, but you know, is it getting to the abolishment of, of diabetes? I don't know. But certainly, you know, we have a clinical trial now going, which finished now in Holland, looking at diabetes and the, you know, 12, this is monthly cycle, right? So, so we'll see very soon the results of that.

• 10:23Valter Longo?

  But, you know, I think there's going to be a trial coming, coming out every couple of months now.

• 10:27Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 10:27Valter Longo?

  Using the FMD, so.

• 10:29Lewis Howes?

  Do you think it's possible to reverse diabetes or reverse cancer and disease from fasting and calorie restriction diets?

• 10:37Valter Longo?

  Yeah, not only is it possible, but we do it all the time, right?

• 10:41Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 10:41Valter Longo?

  I just did a Facebook Live, unfortunately it's in Italian, but we, we took a doctor, a physician in Italy, and he had diabetes and hypertension.

• 10:53Lewis Howes?

  This was a doctor?

• 10:54Valter Longo?

  A doctor, yeah. Diabetes and, we did that on purpose, right? I mean, so we follow a lot of people, we have two clinics, foundation clinics, right? So we follow a lot of people and, but we wanted to make this, talk about this case, right? So. So is hypertension, diabetes, taking four drugs a day.

• 11:10Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 11:10Valter Longo?

  So then we start with the, what I call the longevity diet. It's everyday longevity diet, it's pescatarian diet. And he's already improving with that. Then you, you look at the charts and you see, then we start with the, um, with the fasting mimicking diet. And he was doing pretty well with the hypertension. He was doing pretty well with the weight, but he wasn't quite doing very well with the glycemia. So the, the pre, the diabetic component of it. And as soon as he starts the fasting mimicking diet, you see that the, the fasting glucose and the, you know, A, A1C dropping down. And two years later, perfect. No drugs, no, no disease, uh, uh, yeah.

• 11:49Valter Longo?

  And, and I mean, I, again, I, I wouldn't talk like that if I didn't have clinical trials to back it up.

• 11:56Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 11:57Valter Longo?

  But I, I, I just thought that visualized so well.

• 12:00Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 12:00Valter Longo?

  You know, the, uh, the, the, the, what can be done.

• 12:04Lewis Howes?

  Did he, so, so what was his protocol for two years? Did he stay on the fasting mimicking every day? Was this once every six months?

• 12:11Valter Longo?

  Twice a year.

• 12:11Lewis Howes?

  Twice a year. And then he did the longevity diet.

• 12:14Valter Longo?

  Longevity diet, but you know, is, is, the, the idea at the clinics is work with the patient, you know? Don't revolutionize somebody's diet. Try to start with what do you like? What do you think you can handle for the rest of your life, you know? And, uh, and then work with that. So it's a longevity diet that is really adapted to, uh, the need of, in this case, a doctor. Uh, so yeah, he did lots of the things we told him and, and some of the others, uh, he didn't do.

• 12:44Lewis Howes?

  Right. Like what? What other things?

• 12:47Valter Longo?

  Well, I, I, I think that, um, for example, we, we asked them to also exercise and he didn't exercise, right? Uh, and, uh, we asked them to, uh, do 12 hours a day of time restricted eating. So eat 8:00 AM, 8:00, 8:00 PM. Yeah, most of the times he didn't do that. Um, so, yeah, so.

• 13:08Lewis Howes?

  And even without exercising, without doing the time restricted eating and just doing the longevity diet and the fasting mimicking process twice a year.

• 13:19Lewis Howes?

  He reverses diabetes, got off medication.

• 13:21Valter Longo?

  Hypertension and diabetes.

• 13:23Lewis Howes?

  What's hypertension? What is that?

• 13:24Valter Longo?

  Uh, high blood pressure.

• 13:25Lewis Howes?

  High blood pressure. Reverse that, diabetes and lost weight too, or?

• 13:30Valter Longo?

  Yeah, yeah, lost weight, yeah. Lost weight is back to, you know, I still a little bit overweight, but not that much. And it's perfect, you know, perfect uh, blood markers and.

• 13:41Lewis Howes?

  Now, now what is in the longevity diet? What are the pillars of that?

• 13:45Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so the longevity diet is a pescatarian, so maybe fish two or three times a week. Uh, and then it's a vegan diet, so lots of legumes, uh, lots of, you know, beans and, and chickpeas, et cetera. Um, and um, uh, it's a, you eat a lot, right? So the idea is to uh, eat a lot of food, more food than you would on a high calorie diet, yeah. So, you know, big dishes, but big dishes. So, for example, a, a, something that I eat, you know, five times a week is, um, you know, a little bit of pasta, maybe seventy grams, like two or three ounces. And then have lots of vegetables and maybe uh, lots of legumes, right?

• 14:30Valter Longo?

  Lots of chickpeas or lots of uh, black beans or, or, or green beans, yeah, so.

• 14:36Lewis Howes?

  You're pretty skinny.

• 14:38Valter Longo?

  And I'm.

• 14:39Lewis Howes?

  You're a pretty skinny guy.

• 14:40Valter Longo?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Lewis Howes?

  So you eat a lot, so you eat a lot of food.

• 14:42Valter Longo?

  I eat a lot of food, yeah.

• 14:43Lewis Howes?

  How do you stay skinny though? Is that a genetic thing or is that the process?

• 14:47Valter Longo?

  Well, you know, um, it's, it's a science, right? So the, um, the content of food uh, will regulate the metabolism, right?

• 14:58Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 14:58Valter Longo?

  Yeah.

• 14:59Lewis Howes?

  So not, not the quantity, but the content?

• 15:02Valter Longo?

  Not the quantity, well, first of all, the quantity, you can eat a lot of food that is calorie uh, low in calories, right? It's not dense in calories.

• 15:12Lewis Howes?

  A lot of lettuce.

• 15:13Valter Longo?

  That's already a, a, you know, one factor that you have a mechanical, so your intestine, you know, is filled with, with food and with fibers. Um, and so that already helps, um, you know, um, eating, start regulating the, the, the amount of food you eat. Uh, then there is also a nutrient base and the system detects how many, how much of the nutrients you have and, and what's missing. And if nothing is missing, then that's also an order to, uh, you don't need to eat anymore because you have everything you need. And then there is a a further uh uh order within the food about metabolic

• 15:53Valter Longo?

  regulation um and so there we haven't published about yet but uh but let's just say there are components of the food so and I cannot tell you what it is but I can tell you the experiment so you take mice and then um you you uh give them two type of foods that have in fact you have more calories or certainly a lot more food but a little bit more calorie in diet A right and uh and they overeat this diet uh and they lo- lose weight versus diet B uh they gain weight right so

• 16:27Lewis Howes?

  Wait, so there's more calories, more food in diet A, diet B, less calories, less food, and they lose weight in the first diet?

• 16:36Valter Longo?

  And they gain weight in the second day.

• 16:38Lewis Howes?

  How's that possible?

• 16:39Valter Longo?

  Well, because you know the the regulation of metabolic uh of fat breakdown, the regulation of metabolic rates, the regulation of heat production uh so the system you know, everybody knows somebody that eats all the time.

• 16:53Lewis Howes?

  And they're skinny and shredded and they're thin.

• 16:55Valter Longo?

  And even in their forties and fifties.

• 16:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you're like, how's this possible? Is this genetics or is this the the content and the context of the food they're eating?

• 17:02Valter Longo?

  Well, no, no, in their case, it's probably genetics.

• 17:04Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 17:04Valter Longo?

  Right, right, yes, yeah, some people are just born with the right genes and they can do that uh because most of the time you ask them what they eat and they eat anything.

• 17:13Lewis Howes?

  French fries and pizza, yeah, ice cream.

• 17:15Valter Longo?

  Yeah, but but that very few people have that, especially, I mean, everybody has that metabolism in their twenties, but as you get to forties, forties and in the forties and fifties, very few people have that. But when you find these people, it's really remarkable, you know, they they they eat twice as much as everybody else and they stay skinny.

• 17:33Lewis Howes?

  And they lose weight, yeah.

• 17:34Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so then um that that can be controlled by uh by genes, but it can also be controlled by uh what food you eat.

• 17:42Lewis Howes?

  So let's say you don't have the the shredded fat burning gene in your sixties and you weren't born with that. What is the the diet A that these mice had that helped them lose weight and eat more?

• 17:56Valter Longo?

  Yeah, that I cannot tell you. But I can tell you, you know, what I published in my book. And by the way, all the profits go to, or my part go to charity. And which is, you know, the Pescatarian Diet, so the longevity diet. The longevity diet is certainly the one diet that is close enough to to being able to cause these effects, right?

• 18:22Lewis Howes?

  Really? Longevity diet?

• 18:24Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so lots of vegetables, lots of legumes, lots of nourishment. And

• 18:30Lewis Howes?

  Fish a few times a week.

• 18:32Valter Longo?

  Couple of times a week, two or three times a week. And always, I think each person has to look at their own response, right? Like, as we just say, some people can burn more, some people can burn less. So it's really a matter of watching your abdominal circumference, watching your weight, watching your muscle mass, you know, so if you go too low, then maybe the protein is not enough. Maybe the protein quality is not sufficient, right? So, so these are all things that are personalized and different people may have to adjust to make sure that, you know, in the end, you're okay.

• 19:13Lewis Howes?

  Can you, can you eat too much or too little protein? How much does protein really affect the body? Whether you're more of an athlete, training hard every day, or just, you know, someone who's not working out as much? How does protein, eating protein, play into the body?

• 19:31Valter Longo?

  Yeah, protein is very, very important, so you can have too much. Most people have too much.

• 19:36Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 19:37Valter Longo?

  So we're about to publish a meta-analysis and, you know, people having too high levels of IGF-1, and this IGF-1 is then associated with mortality, early mortality.

• 19:45Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 19:46Valter Longo?

  But then we see the opposite. We see the people that have too low IGF-1 doing even worse than the ones that have very high.

• 19:53Lewis Howes?

  So it's better to have more protein than less?

• 19:56Valter Longo?

  Well, no, the best is to have that like low but sufficient level.

• 20:01Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 20:01Valter Longo?

  Those are the people that live the longest and um and those are the people that live the healthiest too, you know, apparently.

• 20:08Lewis Howes?

  What's what's the amount you should be having on a daily basis, I guess?

• 20:12Valter Longo?

  Well, we calculated that around, I think it was around sixty, sixty, seventy grams of protein per day seemed to be in that spot where uh it wasn't either too high or too low. I mean, it's an average of this was based on the N H A N S and the C D C database in the United States.

• 20:34Lewis Howes?

  And this is no matter how big or small you are, or is it kind of based on how, you know, if I'm a two hundred thirty pounds, do I eat a little bit more if I'm a hundred thirty, I eat a little less?

• 20:44Valter Longo?

  No, this is per kilogram, right?

• 20:46Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 20:46Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so there should be per um and and it should be really per kilogram of of muscle, of lean body mass, bones and muscle, right? It shouldn't be if somebody has a fifty percent fat, uh that gets counted by maybe half, right? So, so yeah, there's some calculation to be done there, but yeah. So if somebody is two hundred pounds and it's only like fifteen percent fat, uh that person needs a lot, lot more protein than somebody that that is a hundred and twenty pounds and forty percent fat.

• 21:17Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, okay.

• 21:18Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so.

• 21:20Lewis Howes?

  So sixty to seventy grams per day, based on your your muscle?

• 21:24Valter Longo?

  The number should be between zero point seven, zero point eight grams per kilogram.

• 21:30Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 21:30Valter Longo?

  Which I think it turns out to be about zero point thirty two to zero point thirty seven grams per pound. Per pound, yeah.

• 21:38Lewis Howes?

  Okay, so how much protein you should have for yourself per day?

• 21:41Valter Longo?

  Yeah, that's how much protein. With then adjustment based on this is not enough for me because I do too much training, too much exercise. So I'm just gonna increase it a little bit until I can. So for example, we just done a a clinical trial with cancer patients and um and we were trying to keep uh the make the the system very hostile to the to the cancer, right? And um and the and the physicians insist that that.

• 22:12Valter Longo?

  So we gave a little training to the, to the women that were with breast cancer. Uh, muscle train. So we wanted to make sure that they kept the muscle mass. And the interesting thing, they actually ended up gaining muscle, muscle mass, right? Uh, so we were just giving them too much proteins. Uh, and the mistake, I think it was to give them 1.5 grams per kilogram instead of 0.1. So almost twice as much. So, so anyways, yeah, so you can, you can, but by, we measure their grip strength. Then we measure their lean body mass, their muscle function. And you can see everything going up, right? Especially the muscle function and the muscle mass. So, and you know, it doesn't take that, that much.

• 22:54Valter Longo?

  So most people could, I think, come to the clinic here, the foundation clinic, create cures. Foundation clinic and, you know, they can test you and, and just make sure that you have the, the right amount based on your, on what you're trying to achieve.

• 23:11Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. So how, how much does gaining muscle mass and having strong muscles support in decreasing disease and also increasing longevity? Is it important to have more muscles or less?

• 23:25Valter Longo?

  Not really, no.

• 23:26Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 23:26Valter Longo?

  No.

• 23:27Lewis Howes?

  Based on longevity and disease?

• 23:29Valter Longo?

  If you look at the people that are the longest, I, I, one of my passion is to go around the world and visit all these living people. So for example, Emma Morano, I followed for the last five years of her life. She got to 117, right?

• 23:42Lewis Howes?

  117?

• 23:44Valter Longo?

  The third, the, the, the, the third oldest person who ever lived in this planet.

• 23:48Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 23:49Valter Longo?

  And, and most of them are really thin, you know, and really frail.

• 23:52Lewis Howes?

  Well, I guess at that age though, you're gonna be a lot thinner.

• 23:55Valter Longo?

  Yeah, but I think, you know, if you look at their, um, at the way they were, if you look at the pictures and if you look at their sons and daughters, you know.

• 24:03Lewis Howes?

  They were skinny.

• 24:03Valter Longo?

  In most cases, they're very skinny. The Okinawa ones, for example, it's another place in, in Japan where they have record longevity and they're very, very thin. Now, that doesn't mean it's necessarily good to be old and thin, you know? It's probably not good.

• 24:16Lewis Howes?

  You break your bones if you fall.

• 24:17Valter Longo?

  You're frail, but, um, I, and, and that's what we're trying to bring into this, right? This age specific nutrition. We're saying, for example, we published some years ago that those who were 70, 80 years old, I mean, whereas the people that had a low protein diet. We're doing much better up to age sixty five for cancer and overall mortality. After age sixty five. So when we asked the seventy, eighty, ninety year olds, how much protein do you eat per day? And they answered, very little. They were not doing well at all.

• 24:48Lewis Howes?

  They weren't doing well with low protein.

• 24:50Valter Longo?

  If we asked the sixty year old, the fifty year old, and they said, I have a low, very low protein diet, they were doing very well. So, so, yeah, so this is suggesting that eventually that muscle, that strength is gonna help you in your older years. But it doesn't really help you that much because it's probably that those growth factors and the food you eat that helps you keep the muscle is also working against you. When we're talking about diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc.

• 25:20Lewis Howes?

  If you had a magic wand and you could eliminate three foods, or three types of foods in the world that we would never be able to eat, what would those three foods be? That would support you in longevity, healthier body, less disease? What would you say are those?

• 25:38Valter Longo?

  I don't, I don't, I don't like to say that because people then think, oh, you know, I'm gonna remove red meat from the...

• 25:45Lewis Howes?

  Well, if you could minimize it, where you could only do it every once in a while.

• 25:48Valter Longo?

  Yeah, I would say, you know, certainly processed meats, you know. Yeah, so those are clearly in the bad category for cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc. Then I would say probably fried animal fats, you know, oils, etc. When they're fried, they're, they're, they're not good at all.

• 26:12Lewis Howes?

  What happens to the body when they're, they're fried?

• 26:15Valter Longo?

  Well, I mean, the fats change, and when they change, they can cause inflammation. They can contribute to, I mean, the number one that causes that in the United States is still cardiovascular disease.

• 26:25Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 26:26Valter Longo?

  So, yeah.

• 26:27Lewis Howes?

  And that's inflammation is causing that.

• 26:29Valter Longo?

  Inflammation and the fats, right? So the fats then are gonna help deposit in the, in the, inside walls of the arteries. And then when you have inflammation, plus the fats and these saturated fats, particularly, now you have a recipe for heart attack, stroke, etc., etc. Yeah, so those, those are...

• 26:49Lewis Howes?

  Processed meats, fried animal fats, and what would you say would be the third one?

• 26:52Valter Longo?

  The third one may be like processed sweets, right? So, so the, the, the type of stuff that you see in a package with lots of sugar in it.

• 27:02Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man, the good stuff.

• 27:05Valter Longo?

  Well, I mean, you know, yes and no. For example, every day I eat dark chocolate, you know, eighty-five percent dark chocolate. I think if you ask me, uh, you know, when I used to have candy.

• 27:16Lewis Howes?

  It doesn't taste as good.

• 27:17Valter Longo?

  Well, you know, I, I would have said, I'd rather have the candy. If you ask me now, I would say there is no way. I'm so much happier with the dark chocolate, you know?

• 27:26Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 27:28Valter Longo?

  Well, because I think there is a, um, more richness in, in the flavor. And it's kind of like, you know, when we're sixteen, we drink beer, right? And, and, and Coke. Uh, and then, um, and then eventually wine comes in and it takes a while, right? It takes a while to, to.

• 27:46Lewis Howes?

  Acquire the taste.

• 27:47Valter Longo?

  Yeah, but then, you know, for most people, if you say, uh, the people that are drinking wine or let's say high, high quality beer, you say, you wanna go back and, and have the, the, the sugary stuff. And I mean, yeah, some people say yes, but lots of people say no. I mean, I'd rather have this, you know? I'd rather have a high quality, um, you know, beer or, or wine rather than, uh, than cheap stuff or sugary drinks, right? So I think it's the same way with the sweets. Uh, uh, eventually you appreciate that, the, the just incredible taste of some of the very healthy sweets.

• 28:20Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 28:21Valter Longo?

  That, that are not necessarily, um, you know, viewed as, um, as very tasty.

• 28:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, right. But they're more acquired over time and they become very tasty to you over time.

• 28:32Valter Longo?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Lewis Howes?

  What, um, so fasting has become this massive, more mainstream, talked about thing. We're talking about this before. There's all these big fasting apps with millions of users. There's tons of fasting books. There's different types of fasting. There's water only fasting that you do for a few days. Uh, there's, you know, just calorie restricted fasting. There's the, uh, time restricted fasting. There's the fasting mimicking diet. There are all these different types of fasting. Can you, can you break down maybe the pros and cons of some of these that you've seen?

• 29:09Valter Longo?

  Yeah.

• 29:10Lewis Howes?

  And which one is most effective for us? Or is it something we just need to try and see what works for us?

• 29:18Valter Longo?

  I would definitely say um no to your your last question, right? So yeah, i- i- it's not about trying because um it uh it can do fasting is like eating, right?

• 29:33Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 29:33Valter Longo?

  It can do a lot of good for you or a lot of damage. And and um so I would say that you're starting to see lots of clinical studies and preclinical so animal studies. And and and at a certain point, you put it together and you get a good sense for what works and what doesn't work. It doesn't mean it's not by no means final, but you get a good sense. So I would say if you look at the daily type of fast, what clearly works and is not associated with any negative effects is 12 hours.

• 30:10Lewis Howes?

  12 hours.

• 30:10Valter Longo?

  12 hours of time or state of eating.

• 30:12Lewis Howes?

  A day.

• 30:12Valter Longo?

  Yeah.

• 30:12Lewis Howes?

  Don't eat for don't eat for 12 hours.

• 30:14Valter Longo?

  Yeah, don't. Yes, I say 8 a.m., 8 p.m., stop eating at 8 p.m. and no more food until next day 8 a.m. Okay?

• 30:21Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 30:22Valter Longo?

  So that I would say I've never seen a negative study about this.

• 30:26Lewis Howes?

  So if you eat, if you wake up, you eat between 8 and 8, you're good.

• 30:30Valter Longo?

  Yeah.

• 30:30Lewis Howes?

  Don't eat before 8 a.m., don't eat after 8 p.m.

• 30:33Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so that's already a a very good one. Um another one, now if you go to 16 hours, right? Say 16, 8, you're starting to see lots of benefit, but you start seeing lots of problems.

• 30:44Lewis Howes?

  What type of problems?

• 30:45Valter Longo?

  Well, uh first of all, gallstone formation, right? Gallbladder operation, gallstone uh formation, they double between the people that fast for 10 hours, the people that fast for 18 hours, right?

• 30:57Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 30:57Valter Longo?

  Yeah. So so just to give you one, another one, study after study after study, and we've done the same study, but um somebody has published it before we get a chance to um people skip breakfast. Most people that go 16 hours would skip breakfast. And the breakfast uh skippers tend to live less, have more cardiovascular disease, have more uh diseases.

• 31:19Lewis Howes?

  Okay, wait a minute, wait a minute, let me break this down. So for years, I was always eating breakfast because I love breakfast. Then I heard about intermittent fasting, where it's like skip the breakfast and eat at lunch and do the eight hour window, right? But you're telling me now that the studies are showing that those that skip breakfast Are living less and having more problems?

• 31:38Valter Longo?

  Yes.

• 31:39Lewis Howes?

  Than if you eat breakfast and eat within the 12 hour window?

• 31:43Valter Longo?

  No, if you just eat breakfast.

• 31:45Lewis Howes?

  Just eat breakfast?

• 31:45Valter Longo?

  Eat breakfast against not eating breakfast.

• 31:47Lewis Howes?

  Got you. So just eating breakfast, what are the studies showing now between not eating breakfast and eating breakfast?

• 31:53Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so the people that skip breakfast, they're living shorter with more diseases.

• 31:57Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 31:57Valter Longo?

  And it's study after study, it's not one, you know, it's very consistent.

• 32:01Lewis Howes?

  Is this for people, you know, over 60 years old or?

• 32:05Valter Longo?

  No, no, no. Yeah, this is just looking at people, did they have breakfast or not? Uh, and then follow, you know, let's say for 20 years, the mortality of those that historically never eat breakfast.

• 32:17Lewis Howes?

  Are there other conditions around that where they were overstressed or they were, you know, didn't have good relationships or?

• 32:24Valter Longo?

  They adjust for, for most of it. But it's possible, but my point to, to those that say, well, maybe it's something else. It's not the breakfast giving. Yeah, I say, but, but if it's so beneficial to go 16 hours a day of fasting, why doesn't it at least bring you back to normal life?

• 32:40Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. So why is breakfast so important?

• 32:44Valter Longo?

  Well, nobody knows, but it could be that it's setting up the metabolism, right? It's setting up the metabolism to be in a, you know, like we were discussing earlier. Right? So i- i- if it's affecting the way you burn fat, if it's affecting the way your insulin functions, et cetera, et cetera. Eventually you could be more prone to, you know, insulin resistance, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, et cetera. You don't eat very much. And also the heart, right? So it could be that the ketone bodies, this continuous high lab. So when you fast, these ketone bodies, this is what the word ketogenesis comes from. These break, these byproducts of fat are going up in the bloodstream, right? And, and, uh, and also fatty acids, right? The fat itself.

• 33:29Valter Longo?

  And this can, can alter the way your heart works and the way your, your brain works. Um, so we don't know, but it is possible that by having lots of that all the time. Now the, um, some of the systems now, uh, develop problems and not, and not.

• 33:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 33:47Valter Longo?

  Improving.

• 33:48Lewis Howes?

  So it's okay if you're doing like, um, a week long fast or a three day fast to obviously skip the food or have less food during breakfast, but you're saying skipping breakfast on a consistent basis has proven that it's not a good thing?

• 34:02Valter Longo?

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, nobody, nobody did an experiment where, where they say, well, let's randomize that ten thousand people and you skip breakfast and you don't and wait thirty years, right? They cannot be done. But it's epidemiological study. So, you know, you look at the, the databases and you say, the breakfast keepers, you know, are they doing better or worse than the non-breakfast keepers? And they're doing consistently worse.

• 34:24Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 34:25Valter Longo?

  And this is why you wanna say, okay, if you wanna do sixteen hours, talk to a doctor, fine, it could help you, you know, do it for a month or two, but then find something else. Yeah, find something else. Because, you know, it, it does have a, a beneficial effect. It can have lots of good, could do lots of good things. But then eventually, uh, you, you don't wanna keep it for twenty years.

• 34:47Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 34:48Valter Longo?

  Yeah. So that's, that's the sort of daily stuff. The, uh, once you get to alternate day fasting and all that, I think it's just crazy stuff, you know? Uh, it, it, it's just, you know, I always say, I have a difficult time at asking people to go from four coffees to three coffees a day, right? So when, when, if you go to someone and say, oh, no, from now on, beside the, the potential, you know, long-term problems that we just discussed, right? So if sixteen hours does that, what could happen if you don't eat every other day, right? Um, but beside that, just the feasibility, the fact that people are actually gonna do this, it's just extremely unlikely. You're looking at, you know, one person out of a hundred, maybe they can not eat every other day.

• 35:31Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. What about one, one day a month? For like, I'm gonna do a twenty-four hour fast, one day a month, is that show benefits?

• 35:36Valter Longo?

  Yeah, and nobody knows, right? Nobody knows. The problem with that, and this is why we, I, my lab and, and my group has always focused on this, developing this fasting-making diet, is that in, in the one day, you, you don't quite get into the ketogenic mode, right?

• 35:54Lewis Howes?

  In one day of fasting?

• 35:55Valter Longo?

  Yeah, in one day of fasting. So you, you struggle because most people, uh, will not do that positively. I mean, you know, tomorrow or next week, I, I'm not gonna have a day where I don't eat, right? So it's a struggle. And, uh, and also, you don't quite get, so you, you're hungry, uh, for that twenty-four hours, and you don't quite get into a fat, a starvation response mode, right?

• 36:22Lewis Howes?

  Uh-huh.

• 36:23Valter Longo?

  Yeah. That's why we're saying, um, probably, um, the system, i- if you look at our history, right?

• 36:31Valter Longo?

  Most likely, we don't have, we can't go back in time. But so most likely, in the summers, we were, we had the job to get fat, right?

• 36:41Lewis Howes?

  Fill up for winter.

• 36:42Valter Longo?

  Lots of fruit, honey, whatever you can get your hands on, eat as much as possible. And then the diabetes and prediabetes, you know, the insulin resistance that then leads to diabetes. So insulin doesn't work as well. It was probably part of that process of making you store fat. Put away as much fat as possible. So now, you know, this can be activated any time of the year, right? Because people overeat all year long. And so probably, not probably, what we see now clinically is that when you do, let's say, five days of a fasting mimicking diet, or it could even be water only fasting, you unlock that.

• 37:25Valter Longo?

  You seem to unlock that mode where, and this is why the doctor that I was telling you about, you see even, you see even using the longevity diet, but it's still not quite losing that insulin resistance until it does the fasting mimicking diet. That changes and you clearly see the slope of the glucose levels curve. And so, yeah, probably.

• 37:51Lewis Howes?

  And the fasting mimicking diet is around like three to 500 calories a day type of thing. Is that right or?

• 37:56Valter Longo?

  No, the fasting mimicking diet is the one for regular people is 1100 calories on day one and then it goes to 800 calories on day two, three, four, five.

• 38:05Lewis Howes?

  Okay, got you. So it's 800 calories for the last four days. Got you, okay.

• 38:10Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so then, then the possibility is considering that, you know, 70, over 70% of Americans are either overweight or obese. Now we're saying if you intervened a couple of times a year at least, and you remind the system, we are not in summer mode. Okay, let's go into winter mode. Let's go into, let's burn these fats because, you know, we're no longer having to store them. Yeah, so that, that could be the trick of the five days versus let's say one day a month.

• 38:44Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 38:45Valter Longo?

  Which, which may keep the system. Confused and not sure, did we reach another phase here? Is it, do we need to go now into a fat burning mode? Or can we stay in the fat accumulating mode?

• 38:57Lewis Howes?

  So what's the difference between having the fasting mimicking process of five days? Eight hundred to a thousand calories versus water only for five days?

• 39:07Valter Longo?

  I've done it, I can tell you the difference. I've done it one time.

• 39:10Lewis Howes?

  With water only for five days?

• 39:11Valter Longo?

  And I remember every day of it.

• 39:14Lewis Howes?

  The pain of it, you mean, or what?

• 39:16Valter Longo?

  Yeah, to me, it was near torture. And we knew that, that it was true when we did the, that I was telling you about the clinical trial, the first clinical trial in two thousand nine, I think it was here USC, on cancer patients, and we thought, somebody has cancer, they're not gonna argue with water only fasting. They're gonna do it, right?

• 39:35Lewis Howes?

  Right, yeah.

• 39:36Valter Longo?

  We were sure, the oncologists were sure, let's go, let's do it. Nobody wanted to do it, right? Uh, so this is why we went to the, the government and, and they said, uh, we would like to develop a fasting mimicking diet, you know, for, for cancer patients. That's, that's where it comes from, right? So it comes from, from the refusal of cancer patients to...

• 39:56Lewis Howes?

  Who are like, I'm gonna eat no matter what, well then...

• 39:58Valter Longo?

  To do, yeah. It, it, it's just, it's a safety issue. Uh, there's lots of things in food that, um, that are important to maintain high enough glucose level, high enough blood pressure, um, et cetera, et cetera. So once you remove it, uh, I think, you know, people can do water only fasting, but, uh, probably in a, in a specialized clinic, you know?

• 40:21Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 40:22Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so if you go to a place...

• 40:23Lewis Howes?

  It is effective?

• 40:25Valter Longo?

  It is effective.

• 40:26Lewis Howes?

  If you're in a specialized clinic and you have...

• 40:28Valter Longo?

  But watch out though, right? Because, uh, again, as we were saying earlier, um, the devil is in detail. And if you go long enough, right? Especially if you're extreme and long, then the body, uh, goes into another response, which is thrifty mode.

• 40:45Lewis Howes?

  Thrifty mode, so it stops burning?

• 40:48Valter Longo?

  Yeah.

• 40:48Lewis Howes?

  It keeps the fat?

• 40:50Valter Longo?

  Let's say you got a couple of weeks without, without food at all. The body now has to intervene and say, we're gonna be in trouble soon enough, right?

• 40:59Lewis Howes?

  So we're gonna keep that, we're not gonna burn this.

• 41:00Valter Longo?

  We're not gonna burn. And so now you could have, uh, and we know this from long-term caloristic studies. You could have probably, nobody's ever figured out what it is, but it's called epigenetic change. So there's a switch that turns on and say, okay, from now on, and maybe for years, I'm now in a saving mode. I'm gonna save energy. So now if you, and this is why the technology is so important, right? So you wanna do all the things that we just talked about and don't, you wanna avoid all the bad things, right? You don't wanna get into thrifty mode. You wanna get into the ketogenic mode. You wanna burn the, start burning the fat, keep that long term and avoid the side effects.

• 41:42Valter Longo?

  Uh, you know, yeah, so all of this, uh, even though people think it, oh yeah, it's an old thing. People used to do it. Um, you see how the, the purpose, it was not to get to a hundred and ten years of age, healthy. Back two thousand years ago. The purpose, if you were lucky, is make it to fifty years of age and have children. Uh, so now everything changed, right? So now we can't just fast the old ways.

• 42:10Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 42:11Valter Longo?

  Um, we have to know, we have to be respectful of the tradition and what we learned from all these, uh, old practices. But at the same time, we have to bring in the science, the clinical trials and say, okay, I don't we, where, where do they match? You know, what's the common denominator between all these things?

• 42:29Lewis Howes?

  So who was the woman you said is a hundred seventeen years old?

• 42:32Valter Longo?

  Emma Morano is her name.

• 42:33Lewis Howes?

  Emma Morano, she's Italian?

• 42:35Valter Longo?

  Italian, from Vrbania, Italy.

• 42:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow. What are the, uh, the main causes beyond diet of, of her living a long, healthy life?

• 42:47Valter Longo?

  In her case, it was genetics, right? So, so, and, and we knew, I mean, you're never a hundred percent sure, but you're pretty sure. Because when, when I asked her, tell me about all your brothers and sisters and your mom and father.

• 43:01Lewis Howes?

  They all lived old.

• 43:03Valter Longo?

  All, all of them, but one over the age of ninety.

• 43:06Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 43:06Valter Longo?

  And the chance of that is one in a billion, probably, right? So, uh, so extremely unlikely that by chance, a, a bunch of people in the same family, virtually everyone out of ten people will make it to a hundred, uh, ninety.

• 43:21Lewis Howes?

  So that's a, that's a genetic, that's a gene type of thing. What is the gene that she has or her family has? And is there a way that we can trigger those genes in ourselves?

• 43:32Valter Longo?

  Yes, with nutrition, with the longevity diet and the fasting making diet and a few other things. Yeah, so we've been following now for, uh, uh, fifteen years, the, this population in Ecuador. And they're little people, right? So they're about, uh, three feet tall.

• 43:46Lewis Howes?

  No way. Three feet?

• 43:48Valter Longo?

  Three feet tall, yes. And they're lacking what's called growth hormone receptor. But why are we studying these people? Because if you remember, uh, our first discovery of the, the genes that control aging in microorganisms, it was in the same, what's called pathway. So these, these, gee, these, uh, um, microorganisms that live ten times longer, they are little, right? Yeah. So, and, and then the work by John Kapchik and Andrei Barki, uh, here in the U.S., showing that the mice that have longevity, record longevity extension, they're little mice, right? With the same mutation in the same gene, the growth hormone receptor.

• 44:30Lewis Howes?

  Both of you, both you and I are kind of tall, though. Are we screwed?

• 44:33Valter Longo?

  No, no, not necessarily, because we know that we can intervene, um, you know, at different stages of life, right? So you, you, you can intervene, you can start a nutritional intervention or a pharmacological intervention on a, on a, you know, mouse at different stages. Of course, the earlier you start, the bigger the effect you see, but, um, um, but, but you can still get a lot of the effects, uh, later, later in life. Especially if you consider the deaths from diseases, right? So, so, uh, if you, if you switch your, your nutrition, um, even if somebody was sixty years old, they can still make a big difference.

• 45:12Lewis Howes?

  You could still extend your lifespan and reverse diseases at sixty potentially?

• 45:17Valter Longo?

  Yeah, almost for sure. I mean, I mean, if you consider that, yeah, if you consider cardiovascular diseases and diabetes alone, I mean, those, you can truly revolutionize, let's say, the chance of developing them or having them progress based on a clear and strong change in your, in your diet.

• 45:40Lewis Howes?

  Wow. What were the other factors beyond nutrition that you think are allowing her to live a longer life?

• 45:47Valter Longo?

  The big, big factor was Carlo Baba, her doctor, right? Big factor. Why? Because Carlo, the attention, and we saw that when I visited Monte Carlo and San Marino, you know, some of the places that have the highest longevity in the world, I realized that one of the major reason is that they have such a close attention to the old person, right?

• 46:11Lewis Howes?

  The doctors do?

• 46:12Valter Longo?

  The doctor, the medical system. So they, they, you know, for example, in Monte Carlo, if you're older, they can bring you the food at home. They have, you know, ambulances very close by. They, so they have, they have a safety system.

• 46:28Lewis Howes?

  For older people?

• 46:29Valter Longo?

  For older, for everybody but for older people that make sure that if you get a heart attack, they're gonna be there very quickly. Or they're gonna catch it early, or they're gonna give you the test, right? So, yes, that's how Carlo Baba was with Emma Morano. He made sure that, you know, she got checked, she got treated, she, he had to do some blood transfusion. I think he did them at her home because she didn't want to go to hospital. So this, so she would have probably made it to a hundred on her own, but to make it to a hundred and seventeen, I think it took, it took a very inspired physician.

• 47:07Lewis Howes?

  So it's, you know, regular checkups, it's prevention of things, it's not just going through life saying I'm fine, it's, you know, going to do a checkup once or twice a year and making sure blood levels are good and everything's good, is that right?

• 47:18Valter Longo?

  Yeah, I, I, I think that, um, you know, having somebody follow your nutrition and, uh, and have, have the right people follow your nutrition is key.

• 47:27Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 47:28Valter Longo?

  Uh, but, but at the same time, um, you know, are you gonna, um, you know, get a colonoscopy or not? Uh, are you, uh, gonna check your, um, fasting glucose level, HbA1C? Um, are you gonna, you know, have, if you have high blood pressure, are you gonna intervene strongly enough against it without, uh, resorting to, uh, drugs, right? So, so the idea is, uh, I mean, as you introduce drugs and the more drugs are in the system, the more the system now, uh, is gonna adapt, change, and now each drug can cause another problem, right?

• 48:10Valter Longo?

  So ideally, you wanna try to keep everything working without drugs, which is very difficult, difficult to do, and that's why, uh, you need a, uh, probably a team that, that, uh, helps you get there.

• 48:23Lewis Howes?

  Let's say you have unlimited resources, let's just hypothetical situation, you've got unlimited resources, or you've got a certain amount of money to dedicate towards a nutritional health doctoral team a year. Who would you wanna have on your team? Or what types of people should people be looking for on their team? Is it a nutritionist? Is it a specific type of doctor? Is it a, you know, trainer? What, what are those people that we should be looking for?

• 48:48Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so, yeah, so we're, we're trying to do that, both in Italy and, and here in, in Los Angeles, and so, um, the, uh, we have physicians that are in, in internal medicine, uh, internal medicine doctors, and, um, and they're, they are integrative type of doctors, so they understand, they appreciate the, the, um, integration with other interventions that could be, you know, nutrition, exercise, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, then we have, we like, we like to have, um, at the clinic, uh, dieticians that have higher degrees, right? The, the type of person that may have focused on nutrition, might got a PhD, right?

• 49:32Valter Longo?

  And then ideally, a psychologist, we don't have that yet because we're still small. But I think that that would be very helpful. And then the collaboration, which we have luckily with lots of hospitals all over the world. So in each case, we look for partners in, you know, usually we do clinical trials. But you know, our partners include MD Anderson Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, you know. And so as we develop protocols, clinical protocols, then we go to some of the leading hospitals. And we, and usually the leading hospitals are very open, you know.

• 50:15Valter Longo?

  They like things that are different and they're looking forward or forward looking. And yeah, so I think that that eventually it'd be nice that everybody had that, right? Everybody had the, so you, let's say you come to our clinic. And then based on the problem, the clinic says, I think you should be treated by this oncologist or this cardiologist or this immunologist.

• 50:47Valter Longo?

  Because they're probably the ones that are gonna work with the team in a way that, you know, minimizes maybe the drug interventions until you do need the drug intervention. For example, in a cancer trials, it's all drugs, right? So it's fasting making diet plus the drugs. We've never seen any evidence that doing it without the drugs is gonna be helpful.

• 51:08Lewis Howes?

  How, how much of a negative effect does taking drugs consistently in your life affect the longevity of your life? Even a little bit of drugs or medication or a lot of drugs?

• 51:22Valter Longo?

  Yeah, nobody knows, right? Because I don't know that there is any formal studies on this. But I think that the body is in a perfect equilibrium.

• 51:33Lewis Howes?

  Yes, harmony, yeah.

• 51:35Valter Longo?

  Everything is perfect, nearly perfect, they say, you know. And so. For example, if you think about cholesterol, right? So now you have a statin. So this drug is now gonna block cholesterol synthesis. Well.

• 51:50Lewis Howes?

  It's gonna cause a different problem, right?

• 51:51Valter Longo?

  Yeah, is that good? Well, yeah, it's good because it's lowering your blood cholesterol. But at the same time, you have to ask the question, why were you making all that cholesterol? You know, what are you trying to do with that, right? So the cholesterol is involved in making hormones, you know, in making, in building cells. So what happens when you block that, right? And, yeah, so then, then you have to consider lots of drugs are blocking things. And, and they're not necessarily blocking things in a sophisticated way, right? So they're not, let's say, go after the cholesterol synthesis. Oh, I'm gonna allow this type of cholesterol to be made, but I'm gonna, you know,

• 52:35Valter Longo?

  affect some other subtype, you know? Usually, they're pretty rough, right? Of course, you know, things are getting better. In some cases, there are more sophisticated drugs. For example, those that are targeting the immune system. You know, they try to, you know, let's say, somebody has an autoimmune. The drugs are trying to go after only a subset of immune function. So they don't, they don't take away your normal immune function. But most of the immune drugs will say, the chance of infections, infections is gonna go up and the risk of that from this and that. Yeah, so that means that when they were in the trial, they observed that the risk of certain

• 53:18Valter Longo?

  diseases or infections went up. And, and it's not surprising, now you're blocking something.

• 53:26Lewis Howes?

  Something else.

• 53:27Valter Longo?

  That is trying to help you, right? But that is also hurting you by, let's say, attacking your own cells. So, yeah, no matter what, what system you look at, what type of drug, you know, cancer drugs, right? Let's say immunotherapy, well, lots of good, right? Because, you know. It changed the survival in several types of cancers. But then again, now some people are gonna have the immune system attacking the normal cells and so there's lots of side effects caused by immunotherapy. So, yeah, so I think that.

• 54:04Lewis Howes?

  It's best to figure out what's the root cause of it. Try to get to the root first before using the drug is what I'm hearing you say.

• 54:10Valter Longo?

  Yeah, let's take diabetes, let's take the doctor that we were talking about earlier. So he's got diabetes, got hypertension.

• 54:15Lewis Howes?

  He had four medications he was on.

• 54:16Valter Longo?

  Four medications, right? So, and he was gonna be on his way within, I would say, two or three years of having to inject insulin with the pancreas being, you know, irreversibly damaged, right? So, so, you know, so right there, you see that what should have been done? He knew how to do it. Now you could say, oh, lots of people are not gonna be able to do it. Well, of course they're not if they don't have the team, right?

• 54:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 54:44Valter Longo?

  If they don't have the team, and we already see, for example, in Holland, we did a clinical trial, a multi-center clinical trial, where we did not have a centralized registered dietitian calling people up and knowing the system and the compliance. So the percentage of patients that did more than three or four cycles of the fasting making diet together with chemo went down to like thirty-five percent. When we do it with the dietitian calling you, then we're up seventy, eighty, ninety percent, right?

• 55:14Lewis Howes?

  So you mean just the dietitian calling you for accountability to check in once a week or once a month and saying, are you doing what you're supposed to do?

• 55:21Valter Longo?

  How are you feeling? Here's what you can expect from this, right? How are you feeling? Did you eat anything else? Can I help you, you know? Yeah, so that completely changes the ability and the willingness of a patient to do it. So, yeah, so I think it's one thing is to say to a patient, change your diet. And one thing is to say, don't worry about it. We got the team, we're gonna help you, you know? And at the beginning, you're gonna have lots of questions, lots of calls. And then, you know, after a couple of months, you're gonna say, I don't wanna talk to you anymore. I know.

• 55:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I got it, I'm doing it, I'll check in later.

• 55:54Valter Longo?

  I'm doing it and now you have, you know, continuous glucose monitors. We use that on this doctor, for example, right? So yeah, we were able to, you know, without him even seeing it, we were following his fasting glucose, adjusting to it. So we will call him and say, "Okay, what did you do? Did you eat something last night?" "Oh yeah, last night I had a big dinner." And yeah, so I think that the technology is a big help. So that, you know, just in also making it easier for the clinic to do the job.

• 56:25Lewis Howes?

  Did this doctor, was he obese as well? And did he lose a lot of weight in this process?

• 56:30Valter Longo?

  He was overweight. He lost, he lost weight. He didn't lose, it wasn't somebody lost forty pounds, you know?

• 56:37Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 56:37Valter Longo?

  He must have lost, I don't know, maybe around ten pounds or something like that.

• 56:41Lewis Howes?

  But he reversed a lot of the challenges internally in his body?

• 56:45Valter Longo?

  Well, that's a, that's a trick, right? That, you know, he was losing weight, but that wasn't, so, so there seems to be two, two factors, right? One is going after, let's say, blood pressure and other issues that he had. But that wasn't really changing his insulin resistance, right? So that was solved by the fasting making diet. And so, so there's probably that switch that keeps the body in, "Let's store fat," to "Let's use fat," and that's what needs to be unlocked.

• 57:26Valter Longo?

  And yeah, so that the combination of the correct everyday diet and that, a diet that forces that unlocking process is, seems to be key.

• 57:37Lewis Howes?

  If someone's just like, you know, they're, they don't, they don't need any medication for anything, they're pretty, they're pretty fine, except for they're overweight, or they've got forty pounds to lose. And they're just, they just care about fat loss and losing the weight. What would be the process you would suggest to them? Is it the fasting mimicking diet, once every four to six months? And the longevity diet? Is it something else included in that? What would you recommend there?

• 58:06Valter Longo?

  Yeah, no, I mean, in the book, the longevity diet, you know, I describe all of it. But I would say the longevity diet, pescatarian, you know, up to age sixty-five, seventy, let's say, the one we described earlier, the twelve hours.

• 58:24Lewis Howes?

  Twelve hours, yeah.

• 58:26Valter Longo?

  The hundred and fifty minutes a week of exercise. And I think, you know, for anybody that can do it, one hour a day of walking, you know. So find a restaurant that is fifteen minutes away or a coffee shop and go there twice, you know. That's one hour of walking.

• 58:46Lewis Howes?

  What was the exercise amount? How much a week?

• 58:48Valter Longo?

  Hundred and fifty minutes a week. So this is based on...

• 58:51Lewis Howes?

  Two and a half hours, just two and a half hours.

• 58:52Valter Longo?

  A week, yeah.

• 58:53Lewis Howes?

  That's it, of working out of some strenuous exercise?

• 58:55Valter Longo?

  Yeah, running, biking, swimming. It doesn't have to be strenuous. I think only about ten percent of that. So about fifteen minutes has to be strenuous, you know. So out of the hundred and fifty, push yourself for fifteen. So try to push the limits, you know, where your heartbeat goes high.

• 59:13Lewis Howes?

  So two and a half hours a week of that type of workout? And on top of that, an hour of walking every day?

• 59:19Valter Longo?

  Yeah, then on top of that, every day, you know, stairs, don't use elevators, you know. Just your body is not made for all this...

• 59:28Lewis Howes?

  Sitting around, standing around, yeah. So how important is the hour a day of walking?

• 59:33Valter Longo?

  I think it's very important. I think it's very important. And I think when I go around the world and talk to centenarians, you always get the ones that were shepherds, that were working in the field. I mean, the majority of them had some type of manual labor, you know. So I think it's very important, also psychologically, to just, you know, be out there and, you know, just walk and get used to that and get used to the stairs, you know. And I always show my students this escalator in the metro of Genova. And so you have the stairs and you have the escalator and you have like two hundred people on the escalator, not a single person on the stairs, you know.

• 1:00:18Valter Longo?

  And so we turn into, you know...

• 1:00:23Valter Longo?

  Systems that are continuously dependent on cars and and and you know and machines that do the job for us, you know.

• 1:00:34Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:00:35Valter Longo?

  So the elevator and

• 1:00:38Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:00:38Valter Longo?

  You know, so there there is really, even if you think about gardening and and some of the things that you you see maybe in the in Japan, in Okinawa. Eventually, even something like gardening can can mean a lot of a lot of physical exercise.

• 1:00:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you're on your knees, you're squatting, you're, you know, you're using your body in different ways to to get in there and stuff like that. You're not just sitting around the whole day.

• 1:01:06Valter Longo?

  Yeah, yeah, I think that that's very important. And then I will say I I do it myself and for all the people that tend to gain weight and and I'm one of them.

• 1:01:18Valter Longo?

  The I usually do breakfast and I do dinner and either no lunch. Like, you know, when I when I go to Italy, I I have a lunch also because it's it's hard for me not to have lunch there. But when I come back to the States, like Monday through Friday, I don't have lunch. I just have coffee for lunch, you know, like a tall coffee and that's it. And and that's helped me for the past, you know, twenty years.

• 1:01:44Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:01:44Valter Longo?

  Helped me and helped a lot of people that we follow in the clinics. Yeah, so that that's for not for everybody, but I would say for most people, that's like, that's a great way to control weight without adding any problems, you know, because again, you don't want to skip breakfast. Dinner, most people don't want to skip because of, you know, dinner is just friends and family and just, you know. So Monday through Friday, so even the lunch on the weekend is probably not a good idea, right? And

• 1:02:18Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:02:18Valter Longo?

  But Monday to Friday, I find it extremely easy and and usually I I still remember the when I first did it twenty years ago. Very difficult, right?

• 1:02:28Lewis Howes?

  To skip lunch?

• 1:02:29Valter Longo?

  Yeah, the first month and a half of skipping lunch was extremely difficult for me. And then now. Having lunch or not having lunch makes no difference. No difference. I would say that it's almost neutral effect, you know. If you take away my breakfast or my dinner, now I'm back to that behavior or when I first.

• 1:02:51Lewis Howes?

  It might take a few months, but it's not gonna have the benefits in your body and longevity.

• 1:02:56Valter Longo?

  Well, I mean, no, dinner could, right? If you skip dinner, it could, you know, lots of centenarians eat no dinner or very little dinner.

• 1:03:04Lewis Howes?

  They have breakfast, lunch, and then they stop at three o'clock and.

• 1:03:07Valter Longo?

  Yeah, that's very common. Nobody studied that, right? So, so I think it's a little bit less risky right now, knowing all we know. That you keep, you know, you have a snack, a little bit, you have breakfast and dinner and a little snack in between. That's a good way to control weight and not introduce any, any potential problems. If you skip dinner, it could turn out that, you know, ten years down the road, we find out the same. That was true for breakfast, skipping is true for, for. Now you're gonna have too many hours of fasting and, and now you're back to, to the good and the bad, right?

• 1:03:42Lewis Howes?

  So you think no more than twelve hours of fasting is, is key, right? Twelve hours only.

• 1:03:48Valter Longo?

  Well.

• 1:03:48Lewis Howes?

  On average.

• 1:03:49Valter Longo?

  We, we know that sixteen hours got problems associated with it. And, and so, you know, sixteen hours can be good for short periods.

• 1:04:00Lewis Howes?

  For a week or something.

• 1:04:02Valter Longo?

  Even for a couple of months, you know, if somebody had diabetes and the physician said, you know, we're gonna put you on, on this sixteen hour for two months, let's get you down. And then we, you know, we put you on the longevity diet or whatever, or diet. Yeah, I think that that's reasonable, you know, that just to unlock a little bit the person to, to get him, you know, lower, to get him to lose some weight and, and lose some of the abdominal fat that may be helping them. Also maybe psychologically get into a, you know, a modality where they, they're gonna change their diet.

• 1:04:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. So, no lunch, so a lunch fast.

• 1:04:41Lewis Howes?

  Is what we're looking to do. Wow, that's interesting. So you've been doing that for 20 years?

• 1:04:45Valter Longo?

  I've been doing that for 20.

• 1:04:46Lewis Howes?

  No, most of the time no lunch.

• 1:04:47Valter Longo?

  Yeah, and I mean, I.

• 1:04:49Lewis Howes?

  You have a big breakfast then, or is it like?

• 1:04:51Valter Longo?

  No, no.

• 1:04:51Lewis Howes?

  What do you usually eat for breakfast?

• 1:04:53Valter Longo?

  No, I have an apple and some, you know, almond spread.

• 1:04:58Lewis Howes?

  Almond butter.

• 1:04:59Valter Longo?

  Almond chocolate spread and then some, it's called frizzella. It's like dry bread from Italy, like from the south of Italy.

• 1:05:08Lewis Howes?

  That sounds good.

• 1:05:08Valter Longo?

  Very good.

• 1:05:09Lewis Howes?

  So you have an apple with some spread, some bread.

• 1:05:11Valter Longo?

  And tea, yeah.

• 1:05:12Lewis Howes?

  And tea. That's your breakfast?

• 1:05:13Valter Longo?

  That's my breakfast.

• 1:05:14Lewis Howes?

  No lunch. What time do you usually eat breakfast?

• 1:05:17Valter Longo?

  Let's say 9 o'clock.

• 1:05:18Lewis Howes?

  9 o'clock.

• 1:05:19Valter Longo?

  8, 30, 9 o'clock, yeah.

• 1:05:20Lewis Howes?

  And then no lunch. And then do you have an earlier dinner, later dinner? How's that?

• 1:05:23Valter Longo?

  Oh, then I have dinner about 8.

• 1:05:25Lewis Howes?

  8 o'clock?

• 1:05:25Valter Longo?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:26Lewis Howes?

  Is there a time we should stop eating dinner to help us with fat loss or with?

• 1:05:31Valter Longo?

  Yeah, I would say, you know, 3 hours from bedtime, you know, so.

• 1:05:34Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:05:34Valter Longo?

  So, yeah, and this is what I do, but people can be shifted to 7 a.m., say 7 a.m., 7 p.m.

• 1:05:39Lewis Howes?

  All right.

• 1:05:40Valter Longo?

  And then they go to bed, say, at 10, you know, I go to bed at maybe midnight. Um, and I stop eating at 9, so, yeah. So I pretty much follow all the things that I preach.

• 1:05:49Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's good. So the longevity diet, 12-hour fasting daily in that window. 1 hour daily of walking, 2 and 1/2 hours a week of working out. Eat breakfast and dinner, skip lunch, Monday through Friday, if you can do the weekend.

• 1:06:04Valter Longo?

  If you're a weight gainer, or you're overweight, or you're obese. If you have normal weight, then you can eat five times a day, you know.

• 1:06:12Lewis Howes?

  Right, okay.

• 1:06:12Valter Longo?

  Normal weight, the normal abdominal circumference, so you're not accumulating fat. You know, let's say somebody's got 12%, 13% fat.

• 1:06:20Lewis Howes?

  They don't need to skip lunch?

• 1:06:21Valter Longo?

  They don't need to skip anything. They might need to eat more, you know.

• 1:06:24Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha, okay. And you mentioned in this team, uh, you know, if we could have this, if everyone could have a team around them. You mentioned a psychologist. Why is a psychologist important for, uh, you know, healthy weight control and longevity?

• 1:06:43Valter Longo?

  I think that, you know, this, everything is about the mind and your ability to follow certain things and to do them. And that gets even worse for somebody that's got cancer or got a disease. But even somebody that has nothing, just, you know, let's say the seven out of 10 Americans that are overweight. You know, the psychologist can make a tremendous difference in allowing you to see the, maybe the problems that are behind the eating, overeating, or not being able to be disciplined, right? Because in the end, you have to have this discipline, some type of discipline, right?

• 1:07:27Valter Longo?

  So you have to have it for the exercise, you have to have it for the hour walk, you have to have it for the 12 hours. All of this takes some form of discipline.

• 1:07:35Lewis Howes?

  Structure, order, scheduling, discipline, yeah.

• 1:07:38Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so I think that a psychologist can probably help you get there. It might not get everybody there, but I would say that it's probably a large percentage of people that would benefit from having a professional understand why you're not able to make those changes. And then, you know, allow you to get there in a way that is easy enough. And also permanent, right? So the worst thing you could do is do a diet, you know, so change nutrition. And then go, lose a lot of weight and then go back, right? It's much better to never change. And I'm talking about it's much better for longevity. So this is being studied.

• 1:08:23Valter Longo?

  You do this yo-yo more than a couple of times in your life, you're gonna live shorter, right?

• 1:08:27Lewis Howes?

  Really? Why is that?

• 1:08:29Valter Longo?

  Well, nobody knows, right? But this is being shown by epidemiological studies. So people that have lost, I think it was more than 10% of their weight, at least twice in their life.

• 1:08:40Valter Longo?

  So they've done some type of

• 1:08:41Lewis Howes?

  Extreme, yeah.

• 1:08:42Valter Longo?

  Heavy nutritional change. And they live shorter than those that just kept the same weight, but never bothered to lose it.

• 1:08:53Lewis Howes?

  Interesting. And what do you think is the main cause for seven out of 10 Americans being overweight and obese? Is it lack of discipline, lack of knowledge, uh, just abundance of food available that they're just eating? Is it they don't care? They're not educated? What's the?

• 1:09:09Valter Longo?

  No, I think it's the system, yeah.

• 1:09:10Lewis Howes?

  System.

• 1:09:11Valter Longo?

  The, the whole system is structured. Uh, you know, the food companies.

• 1:09:15Lewis Howes?

  The food marketing.

• 1:09:16Valter Longo?

  The food company make a lot of money selling everything. And the food company, each individual can say, "Look, don't blame me. I'm just selling french fries, you know. Am I a bad person because I sell french fries?" No, you know, it's okay to have, allow people to eat some french fries. Um, but then you have the medical system that, that basically say, you know, we're not that interested in nutrition. Uh, we're interested in treating people. And then you have the hospital making a lot of money. Uh, you know.

• 1:09:43Lewis Howes?

  Because people are sick.

• 1:09:44Valter Longo?

  And the insurance company pay for it. So the entire system is, loves it like this, right? The funny thing is, of course, all the people that are working for these companies that sell food and hospitals are the, are the patients themselves, you know?

• 1:09:59Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:09:59Valter Longo?

  And that's the ironic part, right? That, uh, so yeah, so I think that, that you have to change all the way from the journalist, uh, to the TV commercials, to the, yeah, the, the entire system has to change. And so we, kind of like it happened for, for smoke, right? You have to sort of say, yeah, this is not good for you. And, uh, so at some point, then the system say, you know, smoking kills you. And, uh, and then that did not, um, change everything, but certainly it cut the smokers in health and maybe a little bit over health right now.

• 1:10:34Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:10:35Valter Longo?

  So that's.

• 1:10:36Lewis Howes?

  That's good.

• 1:10:36Valter Longo?

  That's a big victory, right? That, that's a big victory. So now, if we say, bad food kills you, a, a, and we put it in, in,

• 1:10:44Lewis Howes?

  All the labels like in smoking.

• 1:10:45Valter Longo?

  Yeah. And, and, you know, all the television sing this, this, uh, story. And, and the universities and the hospitals and, yeah, then you're not gonna see everybody. Uh, but out of the seventy-two percent or so, I think we'll go down to thirty-five.

• 1:11:00Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:11:01Valter Longo?

  Uh, or so.

• 1:11:02Lewis Howes?

  What's the obesity? And you grew up in Italy, right? What's, what's the obesity level there?

• 1:11:07Valter Longo?

  Is very getting very close to the children. I wrote a book last year in Italian and which I'll publish here soon. And it's called Longevity Starts in Childhood. And the overweight percentage in Italy surpassed the United States. Come on. In the children. Really? How's that possible? Obesity was higher for the US and overweight percentage was higher for Italy. And and if you could look at Southern Italy, it's much higher. Why? How's that possible? Same problem, same system, the system, lots of confusion, create lots of confusion. And so nobody knows what you're supposed to do anymore. Create lots of drugs, lots of commercials, you know, and all the magazines are just packed with commercial.

• 1:11:51Valter Longo?

  Really? Drugs and food, huh? Food and drugs. We're just surrounded by by advertisement of food and drugs. So get this sick, get sick. Eat this food and then have the drug. Have the drug and the hospital that the. To make you feel good again. You know, and then, of course, in the process, we go bankrupt because, you know, seventeen percent of GDP, right? So that's a that's a very expensive process, right? So. What's the healthiest country in the world?

• 1:12:23Valter Longo?

  And what are they doing differently? That's a good question. I would say that Japan is certainly still among those that don't have a big, big obesity and overweight problem. I'm sure there are, there is a percentage, but it's not. Yeah, no, there obviously there's a percentage, but I I think it's very far from the seventy percent of of the US. And I think fifty percent or so of Italy and most Europe, by the way, it's not Italy especially. Most of Europe is fifty percent now. Yeah, most Europe is around fifty percent. And so overweight and obesity.

• 1:13:01Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so I think that Japan is probably one of the examples of doing a better job, for sure, than than most of other countries. And so it can be done. I mean, it's it's just pretty straightforward if you think about it. But it just involves everybody, right? You cannot you cannot have people like me going around and saying, you know, eat like this, eat like that. If the doctors, the dieticians, the, you know, CNN and everybody else, if they don't get on board.

• 1:13:34Lewis Howes?

  It's hard. It's too much confusion.

• 1:13:36Valter Longo?

  It's not gonna happen.

• 1:13:37Lewis Howes?

  And then people are just exhausted or tired and then just eat whatever they want.

• 1:13:39Valter Longo?

  Yeah, then, you know, then, of course, low fat, right? For 20 years, low fat, low fat, and people are gaining weight, right? And then it's like, oh, no, no, it's not fat. It's gotta be carbs, low carb, low carb, and people are gaining weight, right? So so in both the low fat era and in the low carb era, Americans and Europeans have gained weight, right? So because why? Because we're eating too much, too many calories, and from both fat and and sugars and carbohydrates, right? So so so and proteins, right? So we have more of everything, right? And and that's a problem. So and and it's just easier for for the media to demonize, it used to be fat and now it's it's carbs.

• 1:14:22Valter Longo?

  And at some point, maybe it will contribute to demonizing proteins, which we're not trying to do because we're saying, A, you know, a healthy level of protein is essential for for making it to to, you know, 110 healthy. But but it just, I remember when we published in 2014 a paper on proteins, and we showed that it was two phases of life, right? As I mentioned earlier, up to 65, low protein, then after 65, go to a moderate protein intake. And maybe you can have a more of a variety of food, right? So a little bit more meats and yogurts and etc. And I remember one of the big national shows, the physician went on TV and looked at our

• 1:15:05Valter Longo?

  papers like, oh, well, low protein, and then it changes, too confusing. I mean, it was two things, right? It was very simple, right? But even just the fact that we had described two phases of life. To the physician on television was too confusing. And yeah, so that's a message that that we give people. It just gotta be one word, you know, high this, low that. Then, you know, people can understand that if it's more than that, it's too confusing. And yeah, so then, of course. Then, of course, people are gonna suffer the consequences of this.

• 1:15:43Lewis Howes?

  How much does your environment play into longevity? Like the the space you live in, the city, the weather, you know, how much does that play into? Your your beyond nutrition, your longevity?

• 1:15:59Valter Longo?

  Probably a little bit, but not a big, big effect, you know. So I think, you know, New York, I think it's got a lot of people that live long, long lives. New York City and.

• 1:16:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, so New York City does.

• 1:16:14Valter Longo?

  New York City does, yeah.

• 1:16:15Lewis Howes?

  Really? Why is that?

• 1:16:17Valter Longo?

  Probably because, you know, they're pretty wealthy and they have good doctors and they have good food, you know, and yeah, so.

• 1:16:23Lewis Howes?

  Community and they got people around.

• 1:16:25Valter Longo?

  I mean, you know, you get the checkups, you're really healthy. And and, you know, even though you're in a very stressful city full of people and and probably polluted, etc., etc. So I think, you know, you could do very well, no matter where you are. It might take a couple of years off your life, you know, if you if you're in a highly polluted area. But but I think, you know, if you look at, you know, the abdominal circumference and diabetes and you see that, you know, that your chances of of getting diabetes go up, you know, tenfold.

• 1:17:00Lewis Howes?

  If you have a bigger.

• 1:17:02Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so so then and then, you know, your chances of developing cardiovascular disease and and cancer, etc., etc. So it's very clear what's at the center of of. Diseases and longevity, you know, that doesn't mean that other things are not important. But also, if you look at the art field, you know, if you look at the animal research, after a hundred years, I would say the consensus is that nutritional interventions are by far the most powerful in making a mouse live longer, right? Or making a rat live longer, or any monkey live longer. I would say that, you know, there are some drugs and interventions that are emerging now.

• 1:17:46Valter Longo?

  But I would say if you took a hundred scientists working on aging, I would say ninety would say, yeah, probably some type of nutrition-based intervention is gonna be the one that I would pick to make any organism live longer.

• 1:18:00Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So this is really discovery from the last twenty years that you guys have been, you and a bunch of other people in your industry have been studying and researching, right? We found that this nutritional changes can really support the longevity.

• 1:18:13Valter Longo?

  You know, the dietary restriction work has started like a hundred years ago.

• 1:18:16Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:18:17Valter Longo?

  And just what happens if you lower? But then, as I was saying, what happens is that you have lots of good and lots of bad, right? So now, I think what we and a few others have contributed to the nutrition and the restriction field is can we remove the bad and keep the good?

• 1:18:38Valter Longo?

  And of course, that's a big factor, right? So can you, let's say that continuous calorie restriction is gonna make you lose muscle mass. We've shown in the clinical trial, and we are about to confirm that. No muscle mass loss with FMDs, right? With fasting mimicking diet.

• 1:18:57Lewis Howes?

  So no muscle loss?

• 1:18:58Valter Longo?

  No muscle loss.

• 1:18:59Lewis Howes?

  With five days? If it's longer, would it be some muscle loss, or?

• 1:19:05Valter Longo?

  Yeah, of course, you know, if it's longer, eventually you have no.

• 1:19:08Lewis Howes?

  You have no food.

• 1:19:09Valter Longo?

  It's impossible to keep your muscle. But even in the women, they did it for eight cycles, you know, once every month or two. If they did a little light training, muscle training exercise, they actually gained body mass, right? So, yeah, so.

• 1:19:26Valter Longo?

  That's one, immune system. Well, that's another issue about calorie restriction, where is your immune system going to be weakened by having this continuous restriction? Or by potentially also having continuous dietary interventions, say every day, sixteen hours, every day, every other day fasting. It's a very chronic intervention, right? So then there is suspicion that you could negatively affect the immune system. Well, again, we're seeing, if anything, the opposite, right? So with periodic fasting, making diet, we see, at least in mice, we show very clearly the blood stem cells are getting activated, the bone marrow, and now you're rejuvenating the immune system, right?

• 1:20:10Valter Longo?

  So, yeah, so I think that's the much more sophisticated type of intervention and less burdensome, right? That's both are necessary. You have to be more sophisticated, but you have to use that sophistication to make sure that it's very easy on people, right? So, you know, can you do five days of something that comes in a box twice a year? I would say ninety percent of people can do that.

• 1:20:37Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:20:37Valter Longo?

  You know, are they gonna, you know, like it? Are they, probably half of them are not gonna like it. The other half are probably gonna feel pretty good about it. I'm talking about not the sort of response we see. Some people say, "I do it because I have to do it." Some people say, "I love doing it because I feel better when I do it." But I think that's certainly, you know, a change compared to what we used to have. And I mean, you know, there's all the things, I think, the time we're sitting eating, what Sachin Panda is doing, I think, is great. And there are a few other things that, you know, the certain ketogenic diet,

• 1:21:20Valter Longo?

  I think, for brief periods, that's interesting, what I think Eric Burden and others are doing. I think there are some interesting aspects of that, you know, is there a for example, lots of data now are suggesting if you go low carb is fine if it's a vegan diet, right? So if it's low, if it's low carb, animal based, it's not good at all. You're gonna have a shorter life.

• 1:21:47Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:21:47Valter Longo?

  But if, yeah, this is meta analysis, like the studies of all studies. But if it's low carb and it's plant based, then it seems to be like the best diet, you know, say forty percent carbohydrate, plant based, that seems to be the best diet of all, right? So, uh, so interesting, um, so interesting thing that a few people are studying and we're starting to study.

• 1:22:09Lewis Howes?

  It seems like there's, there are a lot of people that, that have lean, you know, red meats that are, that are healthy, that look great, that have clear skin, that that seem to be aging well, is, is red meat something that we should be looking out for in the future? Or is a certain amount of it okay?

• 1:22:30Valter Longo?

  Uh, it depends what are, uh, what your goals are, let's say, right? So somebody, somebody could say, look, you know, I eat red meat once a week. I have the organic kind, you know, that is grass fed and is that gonna be really bad for me? Probably not, right? Probably not. But, um, you know, then most people say, oh, I have, uh, you know, I have the red meat, the steak once a week. Then I have the sausage once a week. Then, uh, you know, for breakfast, I have bacon. Yeah. Yeah. Then you put it all together and then you get into a Western diet, you know, and the Western diet is what we use to, um,

• 1:23:13Valter Longo?

  you know, uh, to let's say shorten the lifespan. We just published a paper in mice and we had this like Western, high fat, high calorie diet. And you know, you see the mice just dying much earlier. Yeah, they get big and they die very early, right? With lots of problems, high cholesterol, heart problems. So, yeah, so then, um, it's pretty clear that, um, you know, by having a Western diet full of animal proteins and animal fats, you're gonna have a problem, you know? We're gonna have many problems, not just one. And, you know, our point has been, you got one life, probably.

• 1:23:52Valter Longo?

  You know, it's relatively short, I would say, right? And, uh, and, and so, um, how do you optimize this life, right? And so, yeah, to optimize it, I would say, go with the longevity diet.

• 1:24:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:06Valter Longo?

  But then, you know, as, as many Americans will say, and many people in Europe, I can't do this, you know? Can I have one steak a week? Okay, you know, that, that, that's, uh, that's fine. It's probably not gonna, it may make no difference to you in your life. It may make some difference, uh, you know, who knows? But certainly, um, and by the way, this is what the centenarians, most of the centenarians used to do, you know? Let's say meat, red meat once a week. Uh, this was very common, you know? So, so it wouldn't, uh, it wouldn't be that far from, uh, I think the Okinawans probably not, but I would say that, that most, uh, you know, Southern European, uh, centenarians had the red meat, uh,

• 1:24:50Valter Longo?

  at least once a month, and maybe, maybe once a week.

• 1:24:53Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 1:24:54Valter Longo?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:55Lewis Howes?

  So very little, not as much, not every day, not a few times a week, but the less you can do, it seems to be the better for longevity.

• 1:25:01Valter Longo?

  Yeah, and, and, and again, it's not really about red meat. It's about lots of, you know, animal products, the milk products, you know, the, the, the white meats, the red meats, lots of them treated with antibiotics, lots of them having high levels of, uh, hormones, maybe steroid hormones and, and, yeah, so it's, um, it's probably, um, uh, you know, the combination of all these animal-based products that, uh, each contributing a little bit to the, to some, you know, inflammatory problems, to increasing the growth factors, to increasing, uh, glucose level in the blood. Uh, so you put it all together and you keep on going.

• 1:25:44Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:25:45Valter Longo?

  Um, and, um, and, and then you get a, you know, you, then you get, you know, the, the

• 1:25:51Lewis Howes?

  Problems.

• 1:25:51Valter Longo?

  Multiple diseases that most people in Europe and America have.

• 1:25:55Lewis Howes?

  What would you say, what do you think, based on your studies? It's almost thirty years you've been in this field. What do you think we're going to discover in the next thirty years? That we haven't discovered yet about? You know, longevity, optimizing our health. Is there anything you think maybe this could happen? Or we could discover this new thing? Or we're early stages, but there's not enough data and research yet? Is there anything you see in either changing the gene? Or nutrition or something? That could extend our lifespan even more?

• 1:26:27Valter Longo?

  Yeah, first of all, I think, you know, I call the nutri-technology, right? So the, you know, the nutrition field used to be sort of like a soft science, you know? Just a lot of ideas and observation. Now it's moving into a hard science.

• 1:26:40Lewis Howes?

  A science, yeah.

• 1:26:41Valter Longo?

  Exactly what kind of amino acids are in that? Composition and what is the frequency, et cetera, et cetera? So I think the nutri-technology is going to get better and better and better. And at some point also, we're going to combine it with artificial intelligence. And so, you know, it's going to revolutionize, I think, in the next ten, fifteen years. Yeah, so if somebody has a problem, let's say it could be an immune problem. It could be a gastrointestinal problem. It could be diabetes. And I think at some point we'll be able to pinpoint exactly. Let's say you have celiac disease, right? It's an autoimmune and it's caused by gluten.

• 1:27:25Valter Longo?

  You know, thirty years ago, nobody knew that, right? So you're eating pasta and bread and suffering like hell. And people had no idea. They just load you up with drugs, right? So now, no, no drugs, just avoid gluten. That's it, you know, and then you're cured. Yeah, so then imagine, so we know that it's very clear. Or lactose and lactose intolerant, right? If you're Japanese, most Japanese are going to be lactose intolerant genetically. So if you drink milk and you're not feeling so well, well, you know, you have a simple solution, right? And yeah, so imagine how many of those there are that we don't know about.

• 1:28:06Valter Longo?

  And with, you know, omics, so be able to look at the microbiota composition. But also look at the, there is, there was constantly called metabolomics. It looks at all the molecules in the blood that change. And eventually, very soon.

• 1:28:24Valter Longo?

  We'll be able to relate that to what you're eating, right? So, so then we'll be able to say you need to avoid these six foods and you need to have higher level of these another 10 foods and that's gonna solve the problem. So that's, that's, I think, a big, it's gonna have a lot of potential. And, and then I think, you know, we'll see a lot of bionics, you know, so

• 1:28:46Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 1:28:47Valter Longo?

  We'll see a lot of, you know, probably artificial, you know, organs and, and yeah, and people have been working on this for a long time and now this is, there's a lot of excitement, you know, can you make a pancreas that is, that is artificial, right? So, yeah, of course, they're working on that and can you make kidneys that are artificial and, and the heart, we already have it, you know? So, so, yeah, so I think that in the next 30 years, we're gonna see lots of this, this machine slash human, you know, combined. Of course, the longevity is a little bit trickier because you have to protect everything, right? Including the brain and the brain is a

• 1:29:30Lewis Howes?

  That's true.

• 1:29:30Valter Longo?

  Is a tough, is a tough organ to, to replace, right? So, and it's not gonna happen anytime soon, but, but I think that, you know, the people that have heart problems and, or type 1 diabetes or kidney problems and there's gonna be a lot of, a lot of these

• 1:29:49Lewis Howes?

  Solutions, yeah.

• 1:29:50Valter Longo?

  Artificial systems that are gonna be

• 1:29:51Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's crazy.

• 1:29:53Valter Longo?

  They're gonna make a big difference.

• 1:29:54Lewis Howes?

  Let's say you're born today. What do you think is the potential lifespan someone could have? And right now, what is the, the oldest age, 120 or something or what's the?

• 1:30:07Valter Longo?

  122, yeah.

• 1:30:07Lewis Howes?

  122, someone living today, 122?

• 1:30:10Valter Longo?

  No, no.

• 1:30:10Lewis Howes?

  That was the oldest?

• 1:30:11Valter Longo?

  Madame Calmont, she got

• 1:30:12Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy. What's the, who's the oldest person today?

• 1:30:15Valter Longo?

  I think right now, we're probably around 117, I think. Somebody must be around that.

• 1:30:22Lewis Howes?

  So if someone's born today with all you know that's coming, all you know we have right now, plus all that's coming in the next 20, 30 years, plus 70 years, what do you think is the potential in your, your, your hypothesis is potential for lifespan?

• 1:30:37Valter Longo?

  I think that

• 1:30:38Lewis Howes?

  If the brain is protected and everything's protected, obviously, but what is?

• 1:30:42Valter Longo?

  Yeah, certainly, I think that there's gonna be two groups, right? So the world is gonna be divided in two. And there's gonna be the ones that follow all the supported strategy, right? So this is why in the first book I talk about five pillars, right? So you talk about epidemiological studies, clinical studies, basic research, centenarian studies. You know, instead of saying, oh, Longo thinks this, it's more like Longo puts together all these data and then says, okay, it's just hard to imagine how this particular diet could not work, right? It's worked for this and this and this and this and this. Yeah, so I think there's gonna be a group that follows all the right, that does all the right things.

• 1:31:26Valter Longo?

  And then there are a group that continues on. And the group that continues on the way they've been doing it now, I think it's probably we're gonna see a lifespan about the same. But, you know, so it could be, I don't know, an average lifespan of ninety or ninety-five, you know, let's say. And, but then the other group, I think, is gonna, instead, we're gonna start seeing maybe the hundred and five average lifespan, right? And, you know, of course, the drugs are gonna be there and, you know, and the drugs can make a difference with their or their surgery, right? Can make a difference whether you die when you're twenty-two.

• 1:32:01Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:32:01Valter Longo?

  Or you make it to a hundred and five, right, or a hundred and ten. Yeah, so I think that all together, with the technology, plus nutrition, plus, plus, plus, I wouldn't be surprised then if you have a population that follows all this, that gets to a hundred and five years of age average lifespan, you know? So that means that half of them will live longer than that and half of them will live a bit shorter.

• 1:32:25Lewis Howes?

  It's inspiring.

• 1:32:26Valter Longo?

  With some people maybe making it to the one twenty-five, one thirty, you know, range. As you have a population, let's say, let's say a billion people follow all this for the next hundred and twenty years, it'd be surprising that one of them will not, let's say, get to one thirty.

• 1:32:47Lewis Howes?

  That'd be amazing. Hundred thirty years, that's crazy, right?

• 1:32:50Valter Longo?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:51Lewis Howes?

  It's inspiring.

• 1:32:52Valter Longo?

  It would be a long life.

• 1:32:53Lewis Howes?

  You mentioned the five pillars. What are the five pillars for increasing longevity you just mentioned?

• 1:32:59Valter Longo?

  Yeah, so the five pillars, you know, epidemiological studies were the studies of the numbers, right? The population, a hundred thousand people, they eat lots of cheese and people that don't. Then the clinical studies, you know, so once you identify, say, proteins are too much protein, it's bad for you. You can do a randomized trial where you see people that have high protein diet, people that have low protein diet. Look at the changes, maybe not for twenty years, maybe for one year, but you can already monitor that. Then the basic research, you know, okay, so you think a high protein diet is bad for you. Why don't you give a high protein diet to mice? Do they have, do they live shorter? They do, right? So, so, so, and do they have more diseases? They do.

• 1:33:41Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 1:33:42Valter Longo?

  So, yeah, so that's a third pillar. And then centenarians, you know, if you think a high protein diet is so bad for, for all of us.

• 1:33:52Valter Longo?

  Let's go around the centenarians. Do they, do any of them have a high protein diet? Nobody does, right? Not the Okinawas, not Lomalinda, not the Sardinians, not the, the, you know, so nobody does. You know, they might have a low protein, most of them low protein. Some of them may have a moderate protein diet, but you don't see a high protein. Famous population, I mean, population famous for making it to a hundred years of age. So, so that's a good sign, right? It's another pillar. And then complex systems, you know, it's, I think it's always good to have a reductionist approach and think of, of the human being as a, as a plane or a car, you know, something that is complicated,

• 1:34:36Valter Longo?

  sophisticated and complicated, you know. I always use it, for example, when people ask, you know, shall I go running, you know, twenty miles a day? Or shall I never run? Well, I always say, if you keep your car in the garage all the time, not good, right? If you drive your car all the time, not good either. Nobody wants, you know, a 10-year-old car that's got 180,000 miles, right?

• 1:35:01Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:35:01Valter Longo?

  Nobody wants to buy that. Why is that? It's like, boy, it's a car that's been used a lot. It's good, right? No. Why? Well, because the mechanic will say, it's just gonna break apart, you know, it's just a matter of time. Now, the body has self-repair mechanisms which the car doesn't have, but still, you know, if it's overused, it's gonna, it's gonna break down.

• 1:35:22Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. This is inspiring. Is there anything else we, we should know about longevity? Or is this, this feels pretty inspiring to me? This is inspiring to me. You've got an amazing book, The Longevity Diet, that people can get right now. It's inspiring. It's got a lot of this information, plus more details and examples on how to really implement this in your life. The fasting mimicking diet, which I did years ago, I want to redo again. It was just the five-day process of calorie restriction, plant-based, specific types of foods and soups, I think it was, and some vitamins in there. I'm not sure if it's changed from five years ago, or if it's pretty much the same, but...

• 1:36:04Valter Longo?

  Pretty close to the same because of clinical trials.

• 1:36:06Lewis Howes?

  Right, yeah. So you've got that. People can check out Walterlongo.com and they can learn more about that. The book is there. The fasting mimicking program is there as well, correct?

• 1:36:19Valter Longo?

  Well, the book, the book talks about the fasting mimicking program, yeah. And the foundations, right? Of course, the foundation here in Los Angeles, Create Cures. It's a nonprofit, a clinic, you know, and we try to take care of people. Those that cannot afford it, they're not charged, and those that can afford it, they, you know, they pay a pretty low price.

• 1:36:39Lewis Howes?

  Donation-based or something, yeah. So what is Create Cures? Is a clinic here in LA?

• 1:36:43Valter Longo?

  It's a foundation. It's the foundation that I started years ago with the idea of, like, bringing creativity into, into medicine. And, yeah, so it's here in Santa Monica, and the idea is to do what we discussed earlier, you know, to have the team, the nutritionists, the physician, et cetera, et cetera. Still, the Italian one is more advanced. The American one is in its early days, but I think it's getting there, yeah.

• 1:37:09Lewis Howes?

  Who is a good candidate for this foundation, to be a part of it?

• 1:37:15Valter Longo?

  You mean to be a patient?

• 1:37:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, to be a patient.

• 1:37:17Valter Longo?

  Anybody, I mean, so there's people that are healthy, there are people that are, you know, athletes and but there are people with cancer, you know, there are people with autoimmunities and yeah, so we try to, um, to, um, you know, uh, work with doctors at the big hospitals in town or small hospitals to, um, to try to help them.

• 1:37:41Lewis Howes?

  What's the process look like if someone like me wanted to go there and check it out? What would the process be like?

• 1:37:46Valter Longo?

  Well, just, you know, call the clinic or email them and createcures.org. And then, um, you know, set up an appointment and, um, you know, they can get you set up with blood tests. Uh, um, and then, or you can have your own blood test and then.

• 1:38:02Lewis Howes?

  And they analyze and they kind of put you on a game plan or a process?

• 1:38:06Valter Longo?

  Yeah, then, then they, uh, they implement, uh, the different approaches. Uh, you know, of course, very different from somebody who's healthy. Who might just get the longevity diet and, and then, you know, measures of let's say muscle function and muscle mass and, uh, versus somebody's cancer, in which case now we need to talk to the oncologist that is treating them and, you know, decide, uh, you know, can they do certain things? Can they not, uh, um, is the oncologist favorable or not?

• 1:38:36Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 1:38:36Valter Longo?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:37Lewis Howes?

  So your team assesses that and puts people on a plan and then supports them in that process? You're saying it's, it's free for people that can't afford it and then others you pay a certain amount?

• 1:38:47Valter Longo?

  Yeah, the others is pretty reasonable.

• 1:38:50Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 1:38:50Valter Longo?

  Charge. I think there is probably a discount plan for everybody, meaning like even people that don't make that much money.

• 1:38:57Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:38:57Valter Longo?

  Get a, get a pretty heavy discount, you know, so.

• 1:39:00Lewis Howes?

  That's cool, createcures.org.

• 1:39:02Valter Longo?

  Yes.

• 1:39:02Lewis Howes?

  So anyone can go to the website, check it out and see if it's the right fit for them?

• 1:39:06Valter Longo?

  Yes.

• 1:39:07Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. Okay. We got that. We got your book, Longevity Diet. How else can we be of support to you? I checked out your Instagram. You're not that consistent on there, but you've got some great stuff on there. Some of it's in Italian, so, uh, but if you want the English version, where should they go? To the main website?

• 1:39:23Valter Longo?

  Yeah, Facebook, we have, uh, we still have a page that is pretty active.

• 1:39:28Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:39:28Valter Longo?

  And I have people that post on it, uh, um, but, um, yeah, I think soon enough we'll, uh, we'll have to.

• 1:39:39Valter Longo?

  Maybe invest a little bit more time in the in the various social.

• 1:39:43Lewis Howes?

  Platforms, yeah, yeah, yeah. But great stuff with the book and the website and everything here. So how else can we support you and your mission?

• 1:39:50Valter Longo?

  I think that that's it with the send people to the create cures and and also, you know, donation, of course, it's a foundation that that takes donation and if anybody, we're trying now to do a an event next year, probably going to be a race in Los Angeles.

• 1:40:08Lewis Howes?

  Oh, really?

• 1:40:09Valter Longo?

  To raise funds, you know, so for for the for the foundation and, you know, so that we can follow more people.

• 1:40:17Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 1:40:18Valter Longo?

  And now we used to have doctors and now we realize that, you know, we need to wait until we have a California medical license. But that's a very expensive operation when physicians are are also part of it. So that's why it's important for us to to raise funds.

• 1:40:34Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. So a race, like a 5K or?

• 1:40:38Valter Longo?

  We'll see, we'll see. We're now we're thinking of the details, but it's probably going to be May and and and yes, so we're going to have people that that, you know, get other people involved.

• 1:40:50Lewis Howes?

  Nice. I'm in. If I'm in town, I'll be in the race. So I'm excited.

• 1:40:53Valter Longo?

  Thanks.

• 1:40:54Lewis Howes?

  Amazing. This is inspiring stuff. I've got a couple of final questions for you.

• 1:40:59Lewis Howes?

  This is called the three truths question. I ask everyone this question at the end of an interview. So I'd like you to imagine a hypothetical scenario that it is your last day on earth, many years away, you live to however you want, however old you want to live.

• 1:41:14Lewis Howes?

  You've followed your own plan, so you live over 100 and you you live a great life. But for whatever reason, it's the last day and you've got to take all of your content, your books, this interview, anything you've ever said, you've got to take it with you to the next place or it leaves the world.

• 1:41:29Valter Longo?

  Said, only said?

• 1:41:31Lewis Howes?

  Written, said, any content, all content you've ever created, it's gone. So we don't have access to your information anymore. But you have, you know, a piece of paper and a pen and you get to write down three lessons that you've learned in your life. And this is all we would have to remember the wisdom that you gained and you share with us. I call this the three truths. What would you say would be those three lessons or three truths for you?

• 1:41:58Valter Longo?

  Well, for sure, take care of your health. And that includes your mental health.

• 1:42:11Valter Longo?

  I would say for sure, keep what you need and donate rest. I would say that that's probably a very, a very important thing. And then I think that

• 1:42:30Valter Longo?

  the third would be, I don't know, maybe, you know, spend as much time as possible with the people that, that you care about.

• 1:42:43Lewis Howes?

  I love it. It's a good truths. It's good wisdom.

• 1:42:46Valter Longo?

  Mine, yeah.

• 1:42:48Lewis Howes?

  Well, I want to acknowledge you before I ask the final question.

• 1:42:52Lewis Howes?

  For your, your commitment and dedication to serving so many people who have struggled with their health and are confused. I think there's a lot of confusion in the world and your commitment to science, research, clinical studies, all the different things that you've done in the last 30 years in the education system to bringing this wisdom to the world has been extremely helpful for so many people who have no clue what they're doing. So I really acknowledge you for, for showing up consistently, for walking the talk, for, you know, continuing the research and putting this out there in a powerful way. It's really inspiring and you're, you're helping people live longer and healthier lives. So I appreciate that.

• 1:43:29Valter Longo?

  Well, thanks, thanks.

• 1:43:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's really inspiring. My last question is what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:43:38Valter Longo?

  Probably, I, I mentioned this in my first book, you know, change things in positive for as many people as possible.

• 1:43:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:48Valter Longo?

  You know, if you can, if you can make it better for a billion people, you just, you know, change a billion lives for, for the better. So, so yeah, so I think that's probably greatness.

• 1:44:01Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.