For the Mediterranean diet, there was fairly high nourishment, normal calories, and after four months and a three-month follow-up, the people that were in the Mediterranean diet lost an average five pounds of lean body mass. So they had lost in seven months five pounds of muscle. And that’s a Mediterranean diet. Now imagine a calorie restricted diet that would have even a higher impact on muscle loss, and it might have an impact on, in fact, on slowing down. This has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine many years ago. Eventually, if you keep somebody calorie restricted for long enough, they turn into a slower metabolic mode, so they slow down metabolism, and that slower metabolic mode now could be kept there for years. So potentially, you restrict yourself chronically.
You think you’re doing good to yourself but, in fact, your brain and your body is switching to “let me burn less energy and let me make you more hungry.’” So now I become hungry, and you’re burning less energy. And so what’s going to happen is you’re going to go back to where you came from. You’re going to start eating more, you’re going to gain weight, and in potentially doing damage in this process, or losing and regain. The fasting mimicking diet is very different. It allows you to eat a normal calorie diet, and it just intervenes, let’s say, once a month, to once every six months, for just five days. There is no evidence it’s going to slow down your metabolism, and so it’s enough to begin this autophagy and begin this process of shrinking and re-expansion now. And in fact, after four cycles of the fasting mimicking diet, the people in the trials had lost no lean body mass, and this has been pretty consistent in all the trials.
So, instead of improvising with ideas on calorie restriction, it’s more like bringing all the science in and asking the question, what am I trying to achieve? How do I achieve it in a way that it doesn’t solve a problem and cause another problem? So that’s what I think the FMD cycles are doing now. There’s over probably 20 clinical trials that have been completed, and another 20 to 30 trials that are going to be completed in the next two or three years. So I think we need to allow the universities to keep doing clinical work and and see what it is effective.
Within the parameters of what’s prescribed for a longevity diet, what’s your favorite thing to eat?
My favorite one is this minestrone-like dish, from where my parents are from in southern Italy, which is called pasta e vaianeia. I eat it very frequently at night. It’s a lot of legumes and a lot of green beans. A lot of people were poor in this region of Italy, but they had green beans—that was the one thing they they grew very easily.
In Okinawa, it was purple potatoes. Mostly the Okinawans ate purple sweet potatoes, because that’s what they could grow very easily in Okinawa. So, different places in the world, you see their equivalent. In Italy, it’s green beans. And so these dishes have lots of legumes, lots of green beans and pasta. Lots of other ingredients, like some potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables. It’s a big dish, providing most of the nourishment, providing some proteins—but not too much—and contributing to a longevity state.
Is there anything in particular that you love to eat that does not fit within the longevity diet parameters?
I enjoy the something called panettone. [laughs] Very unhealthy. A lot of fat, it’s a sweet thing that we do in Italy for Christmas, usually. If it was up to me, I would eat that every day. But unfortunately, I don’t. I don’t get to do that. It’s full of butter. It’s full of lots of other things. There’s some versions made with olive oil, but it’s full of sugar, full of butter, very tasty, and full of eggs.
I’ve only see those at the Italian coffee shops here in New York, in the boxes. In the last five years, what do you see to be the most promising developments in longevity, in terms of fitness and nutrition?
One of them is the 12 hours [fasting.] It seems easy, but most people don’t do it. That alone could make a big difference. Just stick to 12 hours every day. And the second one is the fasting mimicking diet. We see such an incredible range of effects. Of course, we’re biased, because that comes out of my lab. But now a lot of labs, a lot of universities are testing it. We have made it available without really asking too many questions to any university that that wants to test it and and I think the surprising number of articles already showing very, very powerful benefits without lifestyle changes.