Valter Longo is used to getting strange looks at the airport when he walks up the stairs with his luggage instead of taking the escalator. He always skips elevators, too, heading to the stairway even if the building is several stories high.
It’s part of Longo’s plan to live an extraordinarily long life — just like the hundreds of centenarians he’s interviewed as a longevity researcher.
Most 100-year-olds he’s met told him they spent decades being very active physically for hours every day, so he’s doing the same — with a modern twist, like carrying his luggage.
“At the airport, I do it for five minutes and people look at me like I’m crazy,” Longo, Ph.D., professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California and director of the USC Longevity Institute in Los Angeles, tells TODAY.com.
“Carrying things is what we were made to do. Eventually, if you’re not used to carrying things, your muscles get weaker and weaker, you get frail and then you have problems.”
Asked if he wants to live to 100, Longo has a more ambitious goal in mind.
“I’d like to live to more than that. I wouldn’t mind 120,” says Longo, who is 55 and author of “The Longevity Diet.”
Exercise is important, but he calls diet the No. 1 factor in boosting healthy longevity.
When Longo moved from Italy to the U.S. at 16, he noticed that even though his relatives in Chicago were basically the same genetically as his family back home, many of them had cardiovascular disease or Type 2 diabetes. The difference was the American diet full of meat, sugary drinks and sweets, he notes.
Longo follows a healthy lifestyle to avoid such dangers. Here are his daily habits in the quest to live to 120:
Eat a pescatarian diet
The researcher eats a plant-rich diet that includes seafood three times a week. Fish is one source of protein, though his main source comes from legumes, including chickpeas or lentils or black beans.
He also recommends lots of whole grains, vegetables and generous amounts of olive oil — 3 tablespoons per day. Nuts are also on the menu, about 1 ounce per day.
Nutritionists call olive oil one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet.
Beans, greens, whole grains and nuts are the main staples in the Blue Zones, places around the world where people live long, disability-free lives.
For dessert, Longo eats dark chocolate that contains 85% cacao, which he calls “like a religious practice for me every night.” Cacao beans are rich in powerful antioxidants, help reduce inflammation and support heart health, nutritionists say.
He drinks one or two glasses of wine a week.
Longo also takes a multivitamin a couple of times a week just to make sure he has all the nutrients he needs.
Keep protein intake low
This may shock fans of the high-protein diet, but studies of people who live the longest show they have something in common: a high-carb diet, Longo notes.
The traditional daily menu of residents of Okinawa, Japan, one of the Blue Zones, contains about 80% carbs, for example, mostly from the local purple sweet potatoes.
Longo’s eating style also focuses on complex carbohydrates found in vegetables and whole grains.
“The nice thing about eating lots of legumes is it’s very difficult to have too much protein,” he says. Longo eats red meat maybe once a month.
Skip lunch, but not breakfast
During the week, Longo eats breakfast, skips lunch, has a snack such as a few almonds, then eats dinner. He eats all of his meals within a 12-hour window.
The benefit of skipping lunch is that you eat about 500 calories less without feeling much hunger or slowing down your metabolism, he says. Skipping breakfast, on the other hand, has been linked in studies with harmful health effects such as reduced lifespan, he notes.
Go easy on the fruit
While Longo recommends high quantities of vegetables such as tomatoes, broccoli, carrots and legumes, he cautions about eating too much fruit because it contains a lot of sugar. Fruit has been called nature’s candy.
“This idea of fruits and vegetables, it’s not a good idea. It should be vegetables and some fruit,” he says.
Consider all your sources of sugar
Speaking of sugar, the human body is fueled by it, so it has a role, but most people consume too much, leading to insulin resistance, Longo cautions.
"Absolutely keep the sugar low," he advises. But he notices people will fret about adding a bit of sugar to their coffee, but then eat starchy foods like potatoes that spike blood sugar without a second thought.
“Bread, potatoes and rice — (there’s) very little difference whether you have that or you have straight sugar,” he says. “Unfortunately, most people don’t understand this and they just demonize the sugar. But then they go eat a big bowl of rice.”
Challenge your heart
Longo lives in both the U.S. and Italy, dividing his time between Los Angeles, Milan and Genoa. He keeps a stationary bike in all three places to ensure he gets a cardio workout three times a week.
“I cloned the environment because I realized that if I don’t have it at home… I would not do exercise,” he says.
“So every other day, no excuses. I have a stationary bike and I do one hour.”
The goal is to get the heart pumping and start sweating, so the stationary bike is set to mimic going up a hill.
Walk every day
In addition to the cardio workouts, Longo also walks for an hour every day. When he’s in Milan, he simply walks to work and back. That’s much harder in Los Angeles, so he walks to coffee shops or restaurants. He’s been doing that for decades to emulate the typical lifestyle reported by centenarians, which is rarely sedentary.
It’s important to do what the body is made to do like walking, which activates all kinds of muscles and burns calories, he notes.
“To make it all the way, you need to do it all,” Longo says. “You can’t say, ‘Well, I have a perfect diet. I (can) just sit at home and do nothing.’ That doesn’t seem to be very frequently observed.”
