# Valter Longo

Valter D. Longo (born 1967) is an Italian-American biogerontologist and cell biologist known for his studies on the role of fasting and nutrient response genes on cellular protection aging and diseases and for proposing that longevity is regulated by similar genes and mechanisms in many eukaryotes. He is currently a professor at the USC Davis School of Gerontology with a joint appointment in the department of Biological Sciences as well as serving as the director of the USC Longevity Institute.

## Early life and education

Valter Longo was born into a Calabrian family in the northern Italian city of Genoa in 1967. As a child, he spent much of his time imitating Jimi Hendrix's guitar-playing style. At the age of 16, he moved to Chicago to study jazz guitar, and lived with extended relatives. While there, he observed that his relatives in the United States were genetically similar to his family back home, but many of them were suffering from diabetes and cardiovascular disease due to diets rich in fat, meat, and sugar. Three years later, he transferred to the University of North Texas College of Music to study jazz under Jack Petersen. To pay for his tuition, he worked at a gas station, repaired roofs, sold water filtration equipment, and joined the army as a reserve tank driver, narrowly avoiding deployment to combat during the 1991 Gulf War. During his second year of music, Longo was selected to direct the university's marching band—an assignment he considered humiliating for someone aspiring to be a rock star. Consequently, he decided to shift his focus to studying nutrition and longevity. He graduated from the University of North Texas in 1992.
In 1992 he joined the laboratory of calorie restriction pioneer Roy Walford at UCLA where he studied calorie restriction and aging of the immune system. While Longo sees Walford as a pioneer, he describes the extreme diet Walford advocated as a "little crazy," as it severely restricted food intake during Walford’s time in the experimental habitat of Biosphere 2. "When they exited Biosphere, they looked liked hell," Longo said. "Walford looked like a skeleton." He completed his PhD work in Biochemistry studying antioxidant enzymes and anti-aging genes under Joan Valentine at University of California, Los Angeles in 1997, and his postdoctoral training under Caleb Finch at the University of Southern California.

## Career

Valter Longo is the Edna M. Jones Professor of Gerontology and Biological Sciences, as well as the director of the Longevity Institute at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California, and the Longevity and Cancer Program at the IFOM Institute of Molecular Oncology in Milan, Italy. In 2018, Longo led a team of researchers from the University of Southern California and Harvard University, focusing on interventions to protect against aging and disease. The team received a new $10 million grant from the National Institute on Aging.

## Personal life and diet

Valter Longo is not married and has no children, he said: "I'm dedicated to what I do and involved in many clinical trials."
With regard to longevity, Longo promotes a mostly plant-based diet and eats fish no more than two or three times per week. In addition, he suggests implementing time-restricted eating, with daily eating windows of 11–12 hours. His research is focused on the fasting-mimicking diet (FMD). The FMD is a low-calorie, low-protein, moderate-carbohydrate, moderate-fat plant-based diet program, that he argues mimics the effects of periodic fasting or water fasting. The course lasts five days, while still aiming to provide the body with nutrition, and is considered a periodic fast. Longo stated that the purpose of creating FMD was not to promote weight loss but to help end the global medical culture centered on pill consumption. He described this system as "prehistoric, it’s expensive, and it’s making us all broke." Longo founded the biotechnology company L-Nutra and developed the ProLon fasting-mimicking diet. MIT Technology Review reported that while ProLon was a commercial success, Longo was concerned about its potential impact on his scientific reputation. In 2017, after a series of articles about the product—one of which described him as sounding like a "snake oil salesman"—he announced that he would no longer accept consulting fees and would donate his company shares to charity.

## Related media

In 2011, Longo was profiled on Through the Wormhole for his longevity-related research. A year later, he discussed his fasting research with Michael Mosley in an episode of the BBC documentary series, Horizon called, Eat, Fast, and Live Longer.
His appearances and interviews in documentaries and TV series include the 2012 movie Science of Fasting, the 2020 series The Goop Lab, and Down to Earth with Zac Efron. Longo's studies on fasting inspired the documentary Fasting and The Longevity Revolution, narrated by Edward Norton and directed by Academy Award-nominated Barry Alexander Brown.