The video discusses the remarkable phenomenon of centenarians in particular regions known as Blue Zones, focusing on a small town with a high number of residents living over the age of 100. It introduces Salvatore Caruso, a supercentenarian who lived to 110, as an inspiration for longevity, highlighting the potential for individuals to embrace lifestyle changes that promote long and healthy lives. Valter Longo, a prominent researcher, is conducting a study in this Italian town to test the benefits of his longevity diet and fasting mimicking diet (FMD) on human health and lifespan.

The video further explores the concepts of intermittent fasting and the FMD, which are proposed as methods to promote regeneration, cognitive enhancement, and disease prevention. Longo's research elaborates on the biological processes triggered during fasting, such as autophagy and hormesis, which aid in cell renewal and stress response. While fasting shows potential for prolonging life and preventing diseases, the discussion acknowledges the challenges in its practice and the varying opinions within the scientific community.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. centenarians [ˌsɛn.təˈnɛər.i.ənz] - (noun) - People who live to or beyond the age of 100. - Synonyms: (elders, seniors, octogenarians)

Some years ago, this little town became famous for having five centenarians.

2. blue zone [bluː zoʊn] - (noun) - Regions of the world where people live longer and healthier than average. - Synonyms: (longevity hotspots, wellness regions)

Having five centenarians out of a couple of thousand people is at blue zone

3. supercentenarian [ˈsuːpərˌsɛn.təˈnɛər.i.ən] - (noun) - A person who has lived to the age of 110 or beyond. - Synonyms: (extreme elder, geriatric,)

The oldest person recorded here was Salvatore Caruso. He's what you'd call a supercentenarian, having made it to 110.

4. intermittent fasting [ˌɪn.tərˈmɪt.ənt ˈfæstɪŋ] - (noun) - An eating pattern that cycles between periods of fasting and eating. - Synonyms: (time-restricted eating, periodic fasting)

Yesterday I started this thing called intermittent fasting, which is everybody's doing it.

5. autophagy [ɔːˈtɒf.ə.dʒi] - (noun) - The natural process of cell destruction and recycling in the body. - Synonyms: (cellular regeneration, cell recycling)

One of the key mechanisms at play is a process known as autophagy, which literally means self eating.

6. hormesis [hɔːrˈmiː.sɪs] - (noun) - The beneficial effect from exposure to low doses of an agent that is otherwise toxic or lethal when given at higher doses. - Synonyms: (adaptive response, stress response)

hormesis is the adaptive response of cells and organisms when the body is put under moderate stress.

7. Fasting Mimicking Diet (Fmd) [ˈfæstɪŋ ˈmɪm.ɪ.kɪŋ ˈdaɪ.ət] - (noun) - A diet designed to mimic fasting's benefits while still eating small amounts of food. - Synonyms: (simulated fasting diet, fasting-like diet)

Longo created the fasting mimicking diet, or FMD, a meal plan that's formulated to stimulate a fasting state while providing nutrients.

8. regeneration [rɪˌdʒɛn.əˈreɪ.ʃən] - (noun) - The process of renewal, restoration, or growth. - Synonyms: (renewal, revival, restoration)

He found that cycles of fasting and refeeding cause multi system regeneration.

9. chronic diseases [ˈkɹɑːnɪk dɪˈziːzɪz] - (noun) - Long-term illnesses that are often manageable but not curable. - Synonyms: (long-term illnesses, persistent conditions)

It's increasingly being practiced as a measure to delay the aging process and stave off chronic diseases.

10. nutrient combinations [ˈnjuː.tri.ənt ˈkɒm.bɪˌneɪ.ʃənz] - (noun) - Mixtures of different nutrients to produce desired health effects. - Synonyms: (nutrient mixes, dietary blends)

Longo and his team spent years perfecting nutrient combinations that can be consumed without triggering the body's food sensing pathways.

Fasting Your Way To 100 Years Old

Some years ago, this little town became famous for having five centenarians and made it to the COVID of National Geographic. Having five centenarians out of a couple of thousand people is at blue zone. These are regions of the world where people live much longer and healthier than the average.

The oldest person recorded here was Salvatore Caruso. He's what you'd call a supercentenarian, having made it to 110. He passed away in 2015, but not before assisting those in search of eternal youth. I think Salvatore has been an inspiration to say, well, I followed this person for the last 50 years of his life or so, and he made it to 110 healthy. So I've seen 110 healthy. I've seen it with him. But it's not going to be doable for the entire world population. It's going to be doable, I think, for the people that listen and follow all the right moves.

Valter Longo has spent the past two decades identifying the optimum foods and fasting practices for living healthier and longer. Now he's preparing for his largest human study to date, here in a remote Italian town famous for centenarians. This clinical trial that was just funded by the European community is going to take 500 people, and it's going to split them into two, and it's going to allow half of them to sort of have the bad modern habits that are very different from those of the centenarians. So we take half of them, and we let them have this western like diet, and we take the other half, and we bring them back to the longevity diet.

Longo created the longevity diet by combining scientific research and lab work with the study of centenarians around the world. Longo will also be testing his fasting mimicking diet, which offers the benefits of prolonged fasting without having to actually fast. Fasting has been done for thousands of years, of course, but we now had to move away again from these ideas. Words like eating or fasting, they both mean very little and move into exactly what do we eat and how do we fast.

So it shouldn't be about, you know, now we're gonna turn everybody into a biohacker and use technology and distort everything. Instead, we should learn from the past and unite that with the science. I plan to discuss with you what I believe to be the most profoundly transformational concept and strategy as it pertains to health and aging.

So is this your first meal of the day? It's now almost 06:00. It will be, yeah. Because. Well, because it's clear, based on thousands of years of human existence that eating less is, if it's not starvation or malnutrition, it's good for you, because why? Yesterday I started this thing called intermittent fasting, which is everybody's doing it. Fasting is such an interesting part of the longevity conversation.

We've looked at cultures where fasting is a practice, right? Where there's ritual fasting, and ask the question of, well, why are these people living so long? So we know that fasting does kick off certain biological processes that seem to also have a connection to longevity. What we don't know at this point is how long do you have to fasten? Does it work for everyone, or are there just certain people of certain genetics for whom that works? So there's still a lot of questions, but at this point, it definitely does appear that restricting what you eat might have some impact on how long you live and how healthy you are.

intermittent fasting, time restricted feeding, and calorie restriction are just some of the popular methods being adopted. And while cutting down on meals has long been viewed as a weight loss hack, it's increasingly being practiced as a measure to delay the aging process and stave off chronic diseases that accompany it. Studies have shown it has the potential to protect against a range of age related diseases, diabetes, heart disease, and cognitive decline, to name a few. But one hurdle remains. Very few people want to do it. Have you done it yourself? I've done it myself, yes. I've fasted for four days several times, and to me, it was very tough.

Longo began his research in the early nineties, identifying the genes associated with aging and how nutrients affect them. Longo tested different fasting methods and their effect on longevity in organisms ranging from yeast to mice to humans. He found that cycles of fasting and refeeding cause multi system regeneration, enhanced cognitive performance, and the potential to prevent and treat disease.

It's hard to imagine something that will do more to a person than fasting if you look at gene expression. So if you look at how the genes are activated or not, one of the key mechanisms at play is a process known as autophagy, which literally means self eating. During autophagy, cells destroy viruses and bacteria and get rid of damaged structures in order to regenerate newer, healthier cells. Damaged cells can speed up aging and lead to cancer if they're not destroyed. So this process is vital to health and lifespan. The best known way to activate autophagy in humans is fasting.

We started with water only fasting, and we started with a cancer trial using water only fasting and we thought, of course, you know, somebody has cancer, they're going to be motivated to do this and they're not going to have a problem with five days of water only fasting. But we were wrong. So it was the US government that eventually, and the National Cancer Institute and eventually the National Institute on Aging, that funded research for the fasting mimicking diet.

Longo created the fasting mimicking diet, or FMD, a meal plan that's formulated to stimulate a fasting state while providing nutrients and calories through small amounts of food. The fasting mimicking diet is a high fat, low protein, low sugar, low calorie diet, and starts with 1100 kilocalories on day one. And it drops to about 800 kilocalories calories on day 2345, usually between 70% to 90% compliant. So most people don't have a problem doing this once a month or so for a number of cycles.

The FMD's calorie restriction mimics the body's physiological response to traditional fasting methods. But it's not as simple as just restricting calories. Longo and his team spent years perfecting nutrient combinations that can be consumed without triggering the body's food sensing pathways.

You place a system on a fasting mimicking diet and the system starts to shrink. And what we're seeing is that the damaged components are being removed first. And then we thought, well, if this fasting mimicking diet preferentially kills damaged components, rebellious components, is it possible that it'll go after the cancer cells, the autoimmune cells, the insulin resistant cells? For the past ten years, we've been focusing on that and finding that they do.

While Longo and his team see promising results among patients suffering from a variety of diseases, he stresses the FMD is not an alternative to drugs. Instead, it works most effectively in combination with them. I think that the doctor of the future is going to need to know a lot more about these, and especially now that in the United States, healthcare costs are probably about 20% of the GDP. So this is not sustainable and food obviously is the best way to go.

Having gone through 30 clinical trials, the FMD is in the process of getting FDA approval for cancer. Now, we have just gone to the FDA and filed what's called an INd sought to make food into a drug. Right, food we now use for cancer patients.

Longo has developed a meal delivery service called Prolon, which people can buy the meals for the FMD, and he recommends speaking to a medical professional before starting. He says he donates all his profits from Prolon to research. Well, first of all, I think Volta is wrong, but he and I have always disagreed on pretty much everything.

David Sinclair is another heavyweight in the field of longevity and represents the conflict that still exists within this scientific community. While the pair agree on the biological mechanisms at play during a fasting state, they disagree on which are most important and the best way to activate them. There's one thing I would recommend in midlife to do that could extend your lifespan. It's fasting. We find. My colleagues and I find that it's not so much how much you eat and what you eat, it's when you eat, and so you don't always be fed, don't always give in to those hunger pains.

I drink tea, and I actually don't eat, probably till late lunch or dinner every day as a way to get those body defenses going every day. On an average day, Sinclair fasts for 22 hours, eating just one large meal. He encourages long daily fasts to instigate a biological process called homasis.

hormesis is the adaptive response of cells and organisms when the body is put under moderate stress. Short bursts of stress, such as fasting, stimulate the body's mitochondria, which convert food and oxygen into energy for cells to use. The body's mitochondria play a crucial role in supporting major organs, but its functionality decreases with age. hormesis has been found to improve the mitochondrial performance, therefore improving life and health span.

These processes that we're studying, these basically enhancing our own innate defenses against disease, they exist within us, and we don't need medicines to turn them on. We can skip a meal, we can become exhausted from running, we can lift weights, we can eat the right foods, focus on plants, this kind of stuff. And we actually know, just like epidemiologists have figured out, that these are the things you can do to enhance those defenses.

While Longo acknowledges the role of hormesis, he suggests there may be downsides to this kind of fasting. For example, now, we know that if you fast every day for 16 hours and then involves skipping breakfast, that can actually be negative for you in the long run. And there is association with reduced lifespan. We also know that if you fast for too long, your metabolism could slow down, which may make it difficult for you to maintain a lower weight.

While experts in the field may disagree on specifics, they're all agreed on one thing. Disinformation around fasting is a major concern. It's unfortunate. 99% of what's out there is complete rubbish. And so what I'm trying to do as a service is to speak to the public and say, there is this group of scientists who are publishing the world's top journals that really are making progress in this area. And while we don't have anything to prescribe just yet, it is coming soon. And certainly there are things you can do in your lifestyle, with your lifestyle, that will get you ready for when those come.

Longo hopes his upcoming trial can move the conversation along. The 18 month study in Molokyo will split 501 participants aged 30 to 60 into three groups. One will be a control group, so keep their usual diet. One keeps their diet and has three cycles of FMD. The final will be following the daily longevity diet.

The longevity diet is more a lifestyle, so it's an everyday diet. And this is mainly vegan, but not only vegan, because you find also the fish, especially small fishes, so avoiding the accumulation of mercury, for example, which is neurotoxic. And there are also some fasting periods, for example, the overnight fasting, which is around 12 hours. And this is very important to improve metabolism and to connect with the cicardian rhythm.

All participants will be followed by new nutritionists like Cervigny, who will monitor and review their biomarkers. In order to define the best diet, it is important to put together a lot of information, both from scientific field but also from the population.

So in this way you can test the information that comes from science in the feasibility. So which of the informations that come from science can be applied in everyday life.

So I think that as we change our idea of what it means to be healthy and look instead at, you know, what are the biometric signals of health, what's your blood pressure, stuff like that. We're going to see more emphasis on getting people to eat foods that are good for you and to exercise than just, you know, asking people to lose weight so they can be healthier.

Huge discoveries have been made in the field of longevity and nutrition over the past two decades. But it's still early days. Most research has been done in cells and animals. And while this has provided early clues to how periods without food may affect the human body, it will be the clinical trials that offer the most insight into how we can reach 100 healthy.

Yesterday for me was the first time I methadore centenarian and I realized what longevity means. So living long, but being healthy and being present, be happy with your family. And I think if diet can help reaching longevity in this way, it's really worth it.

Science, Nutrition, Health, Longevity, Blue Zones, Fasting, Bloomberg Originals