Jerry Bowyer | On October 8, 2019

There’s an old Latin saying, ‘nomen est omen’, roughly paraphrased as ‘your name is a sign of your destiny’. I don’t know from omens, but after I read the recent book by Dr. Valter Longo about diet and longevity, I was pretty sure that longevity research was this man’s calling.

Dr. Longo is one of the most prominent of a network of serious researchers looking at ways to materially elongate the healthy lifespan of the human race. He is very invested in this both intellectually and emotionally. He also happens to hail from one of those rare ‘blue zones,’ places where it is normal to live past a century, something that he was not consciously aware of until long after having become a longevity researcher in the United States.

Longo radiates a sense of hope when he describes the lives of the centenarians and super-centenarians who are counted among his personal friends and acquaintances. He wants this to be the normal story of human life, not just the exceptional human-interest story which pops up from time to time in the press. I want that too. I think a lot of us do.

Is that just a fantasy? Longo makes a convincing case that it is not, pointing not only to ‘blue zones’ but also to cellular and subcellular biology, epidemiological research, clinical studies, and an educated sense of how complex systems operate together. What is really impressive about this multi-focal approach (which Longo calls ‘the five pillars of longevity’) is that all the foci tend to converge on the same point: the benefits of activating certain processes associated with environmental adversity, particularly the adversity of caloric deprivation. Across the spectrum of complexity from yeasts, which don’t even fully qualify as members of the animal kingdom, to man, there seems to be an embedded genetic subroutine which is triggered by deprivation and which prolongs life. The routine is genetic, but the trigger is epigenetic, involving various forms of (largely) hormonal signaling.

We’ll leave the details of igf-1, mTor and AMPK to complexity junkies. They’re dealt with in the book, but can also be fairly easily skipped over for bottom-line folks in the crowd.

And what is the bottom line? Fasting extends life. Longo is careful to define different types of fasting in contradistinction to a general fasting fad, which blurs everything from ‘don’t eat tonight’ to ‘don’t eat this fortnight’ together into one undifferentiated primordial mass.

Intermittent fasting tends to refer to the overnight version. Longo likes that, but worries that going longer than 12 hours might have some negative effects. For a different view, I’d recommend reading Dr. Jason Fung. My personal experience is that fasting longer has not led to any negative consequences for me.

One of the challenges in all this is that some of the really great benefits of fasting don’t kick in during these 12 hours fasts, or even during 24 or 48-hour fasts. There is some really powerful and wonderful stuff which kicks in at the 3 to 4-day mark, notably the release and possible renewal of stem cells.

But who wants to go four days without eating? And there are some risks involved. Longo’s book outlines a viable alternative, the fast-mimicking diet. It keeps caloric intake low enough that your body treats it very like a fast. It focuses mainly on keeping sugar low (so you don’t trigger much insulin) and keeping protein low (so you don’t trigger mTor). By keeping these signals very low, you do trigger something wonderful – autophagy, ‘self-eating’. Your body needs proteins and if you don’t give it proteins through ingestions, it turns to the proteins contained in your body. And being a smartly designed system, it turns first to dysfunctional and counterproductive cellular structures. In other words, your body doesn’t start off by eating essential brain cells – it starts with old and damaged cells and organelles. It eats what’s ‘broken’ and not pulling its weight, metabolically speaking.  Pre-cancerous and even cancerous cells are good targets for autophagy.

Speaking of cancer, Longo’s research shows that fasting and fast-mimicking diets can be astonishingly powerful allies in that fight. I was floored by the story about rats with cancer who were fasted and given chemo compared to just chemo, with results so surprising that Longo checking in on the lab results from overseas was certain that his lab assistant had simply sent him the wrong data.

Longo did not convince me of everything. I am far more positive towards ketogenic dieting than he is, which created the occasion for a respectful and constructive debate in our discussion. I call it a debate because it makes it more likely that you will click on this article and/or the audio to listen, because everyone likes a fight. I might as well break it to you now – it’s not much of a fight and Longo makes some very good points, enough to nudge me towards lower protein eating (except for my weight-training recovery days – I don’t care what the studies say, I don’t recover at the recommended protein levels).

If all of this is new to you, I say it’s time to wake up. We know vastly more about how to delay aging than we did even ten years ago, and much of it can be done without genetic engineering and oxygen tanks and fabled Silicon Valley ‘blood boys’. A lot of it can be done in your life now, with a bit of self-discipline (not heroics) and a bit of guidance.

Here’s a link to listen to the not-really-a-debate-debate.

Here’s a link to Dr. Longo’s website.

Originally published on Townhall Finance.

Jerry Bowyer

Jerry Bowyer is a Forbes contributor, contributing editor of AffluentInvestor.com, and Senior Fellow in Business Economics at The Center for Cultural Leadership.

Jerry has compiled an impressive record as a leading thinker in finance and economics. He worked as an auditor and a tax consultant with Arthur Anderson, as Vice President of the Beechwood Company which is the family office associated with Federated Investors, and has consulted in various privatization efforts for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. He founded the influential economic think tank, the Allegheny Institute, and has lectured extensively at universities, businesses and civic groups.

Jerry has been a member of three investment committees, among which is Benchmark Financial, Pittsburgh’s largest financial services firm. Jerry had been a regular commentator on Fox Business News and Fox News. He was formerly a CNBC Contributor, has guest-hosted “The Kudlow Report”, and has written for CNBC.com, National Review Online, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as many other publications. He is the author of The Bush Boom and more recently The Free Market Capitalist’s Survival Guide, published by HarperCollins. Jerry is the President of Bowyer Research.

Jerry consulted extensively with the Bush White House on matters pertaining to the recent economic crisis. He has been quoted in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, The International Herald Tribune and various local newspapers. He has been a contributing editor of National Review Online, The New York Sun and Townhall Magazine. Jerry has hosted daily radio and TV programs and was one of the founding members of WQED’s On-Q Friday Roundtable. He has guest-hosted the Bill Bennett radio program as well as radio programs in Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles.

Jerry is the former host of WorldView, a nationally syndicated Sunday-morning political talk show created on the model of Meet The Press. On WorldView, Jerry interviewed distinguished guests including the Vice President, Treasury Secretary, HUD Secretary, former Secretary of Sate Condoleezza Rice, former Presidential Advisor Carl Rove, former Attorney General Edwin Meese and publisher Steve Forbes.

Jerry has taught social ethics at Ottawa Theological Hall, public policy at Saint Vincent’s College, and guest lectured at Carnegie Mellon’s graduate Heinz School of Public Policy. In 1997 Jerry gave the commencement address at his alma mater, Robert Morris University. He was the youngest speaker in the history of the school, and the school received more requests for transcripts of Jerry’s speech than at any other time in its 120-year history.

Jerry lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, Susan, and the youngest three of their seven children.