A nice giant minestrone for dinner, made up of eighty grams of pasta drowned in half a kilo of vegetables and legumes, is among the secrets that Valter Longo puts on the plate when asked how one can live longer. No small portions, much less an obsessive counting of calories, in fact, the opposite: in a long interview with Corriere della Sera the researcher overturns the cliché and claims that to lose weight, it is often better to eat more.
Who is Valter Longo
Born in Genoa in 1967, Longo is among the most cited Italian scientists in the world on the topic of aging. He directs the Longevity Institute of the University of Southern California and laid the foundations of his Foundation and numerous clinical studies in Milan in 2017. He was responsible for the formalization of the fasting-mimicking diet (we also talked about it at the time), a protocol to be repeated every three or four months which activates the biological processes of fasting while maintaining an intake of calories, vitamins, minerals and essential nutrients. He left Italy at 16 to pursue his passion for music in the United States, a dream he never completely set aside. The topic is also at the center of his latest book, The burden of longevity (Piemme), dedicated to the relationship between obesity and diabetes.
Eat more, not less
The paradox has a precise logic. Longo tells Corriere what he brings to the table: for breakfast wholemeal friselle from Altamura with Apulian almond cream and cocoa, an apple or melon, mixed green and black tea. Lunch only on weekends, usually vegetables and fish. In the evening, in fact, minestrone with pasta, abundant vegetables and legumes. High volume, low caloric density: it fills the stomach without weighing down the energy balance. His formula summarizes it like this: don’t eat less, but more, focusing on the minestrone “that all regions have” and lots of healthy food instead of the aperitif followed by the plate of pasta with the basket of bread next to it. As for pizza, he doesn’t give up, he eats it often, but without cheese. Then there is the rule of time: all meals must be eaten within a twelve-hour window, which means twelve hours of overnight fasting. Just have an early dinner and breakfast the next morning, nothing complicated.
The aperitif, a habit to be revisited
On the Milanese rite par excellence Longo does not use half measures: the 7pm aperitif is a terrible habit. The reason is twofold. On the one hand, it replaces a balanced dinner with a load of fats and starches, precisely in the hours in which the body needs them least, on the other, the researcher claims, behind the trend there is a commercial interest, a mechanism that he compares to that of cigarettes: who would refuse a Spritz with chips, especially since everyone takes it? If Milan wants to be a healthy city, he says, priorities must be reversed. It’s not a moral prohibition, it’s a question of budgets, because what is added to the aperitif is difficult to take away elsewhere. And the problem is not just Milanese, in fact Longo recalls that Italy is second in Europe for childhood obesity, behind Cyprus, a fact that belies the image that would see Italy, the Mediterranean country by definition, as a virtuoso of the table.
Semaglutide? “An absurdity” for those who have a few kilos to lose
Longo remains cautious regarding drugs that are agonists of the GLP-1 receptor, with semaglutide from the famous Ozempic in the lead. For those who just want to lose a few kilos, the use of the drug is, in his opinion, “absurdity”. The situation is different for obesity associated with diabetes: there the drug can be taken into consideration, but only after two years of a Mediterranean diet followed by a nutritionist and without results. Even then, however, the math doesn’t always add up. According to the data he cites, 92% of patients stop treatment within two years, and recover fat mass, not muscle mass, in the following six to twelve months. For those who continue, semaglutide can reduce cardiovascular mortality by 10%. The Mediterranean diet, claims Longo, reaches 20%.
What the research says
The idea that the Mediterranean model protects the heart is not based only on Longo’s clinical experience. The PREDIMED study (an acronym for Prevención con Dieta Mediterránea) published in the New England Journal of Medicine followed 7,447 people at high cardiovascular risk in Spain, randomly assigning them to a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra virgin olive oil, one with dried fruit or a low-fat control diet. After almost five years, the two Mediterranean groups showed a 30% reduction in major cardiovascular events, including heart attack, stroke and death from cardiac causes, compared to the control group. A fact that places this diet among the best documented prevention strategies, and which gives substance to Dr. Longo’s words.
