New Frontiers In Functional Medicine

Wow! What a great conversation with Dr. Valter Longo, director of USC’s Longevity Institute. It’s always exciting to talk to someone in the trenches of bench and clinical research, especially a rock-star like Valter Longo! You can hear my nerves as we begin ☺, yet there’s much to learn about Dr. Longo’s journey from a Blue Zone upbringing in Italy to music major to biochemisty major to leading expert in articulating the biochemical and genetic underpinnings of the aging process. Dr. Longo was a post-doc under Dr. Roy Walford – famous for his research on caloric restriction and longevity. While Walford’s work – famously the 2-year Biosphere study conducted on humans – yielded remarkable improvements in chronic diseases, there were many side effects. The limitations of the human Biosphere study prompted Dr. Longo to turn his attention to longevity in single-celled organisms (S. Cervascie, specifically), then animal studies, and most recently humans. Longo designed his short term fasting mimicking diet (FMD), wh