Los Angeles, CA, January 3, 2018 - We all know the saying “You are what you eat.” For most people, that translates to “avoid junk food.” But this popular expression reflects a deeper truth. The food you eat can determine how you look and function, whether you sleep well at night, whether you will stay thin or gain weight, and whether your body shape is more like a pear or an apple. The type of food you eat determines whether your brain will use glucose or ketone bodies to obtain energy. It’s important to eat food you truly enjoy, but it’s also important to eliminate or minimize the consumption of food that will make your life shorter and sicker, and to increase the consumption of nutrients that will make your life longer and healthier.

Can what you eat determine how long, and how well, you live? The clinically proven answer is yes, and THE LONGEVITY DIET by Valter Longo, PhD (Avery, January 2, Hardcover & Ebook) is the program to help live a longer, healthier life. Among the longevity factors within your control, what you eat is the primary choice you can make that will affect whether you live to 60, 80, 100, or 110—and more important, whether you will get there in good health.The culmination of 25 years of research on aging, nutrition, and disease across the globe, this unique fasting-mimicking diet (FMD) lays out a simple solution to living long through nutrition. FMD does away with the misery and starvation most of us experience while fasting and helps you reap all the beneficial health effects of a restrictive diet while avoiding the negative stressors, like low energy and sleeplessness.

Valter Longo, director of the Longevity Institute at USC and the Program on Longevity and Cancer at IFOM in Milan, developed FMD after reviewing studies of mice who showed significantly reduced risk for diabetes, cancer, and heart disease while on a standard fasting plan. Longo developed a simple daily eating plan and periodic, fast-mimicking techniques that yield the same results - this time in people - as more rigorous, traditional fasting plans. Low in proteins and sugars and rich in healthy fats and plant-based foods, The Longevity Diet is clinically proven to help you:

• Lose weight and reduce abdominal fat
• Increase your lifespan
• Prevent age-related muscle and bone loss
• Build your resistance to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's Disease and cancer

Longo's healthy, life span-extending plan is based on an easy-to-adopt pescatarian plan along with the fast-mimicking diet, which is used no more than 4 times a year and for just 5 days at a time. Following the “Five Pillars of Longevity,” Dr. Longo’s method uses five research areas to determine whether a nutrient or combination of nutrients is good or bad for health and to identify the ideal combination of foods for optimal longevity.

The Five Pillars of Longevity create a strong foundation for dietary recommendations and a filtering system to evaluate thousands of studies related to aging and disease, while also minimizing the burden of dietary change. When dietary choices are based on all the Five Pillars, they are unlikely to be contradicted or undergo major alterations as a consequence of new findings.

Through research and clinical trials, Dr. Longo has proven that periodic fasting, done for several consecutive days, is a very powerful intervention that our body learned to naturally cope with by protecting and rejuvenating itself, both anti-aging measures. Including 30 easy recipes for an everyday diet and the FMD plan, THE LONGEVITY DIET is the key to living a longer, healthier, and fulfilled life.

About the Author:
Valter Longo is the director of the Longevity Institute at USC in Los Angeles, and of the Program on Longevity and Cancer at IFOM (Molecular Oncology FIRC Institute) in Milan. His studies focus on the fundamental mechanisms of aging in simple organisms and mice and on how they can be translated to humans. Dr. Longo received the 2010 Nathan Shock Lecture Award from the National Institute on Aging (NIA/NIH) and the 2013 Vincent Cristofalo "Rising Star" Award in Aging Research from the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR). Not coincidentally, Longo is from a town in Italy that is home to some of the longest-lived people in the world.