The Longevity Diet by Valter Longo EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Valter Longo
- ISBN: 0525534075
- Language: English
- Genre: Biochemistry Science
- Format: PDF/ePub
- Size: 8 MB
- Page: 320
- Price: Free
Caruso’s Fountain
Back to Molochio
Drive an hour and a half north from the southernmost tip of Italy and
you’ll reach a little town called Molochio in the region of Calabria. Its
name is probably derived from the Greek word molokhē, meaning
“mallow,” which is a medicinal plant with a bright purple flower. In the
central piazza, there’s a fountain you can safely drink from, its cold
water flowing via underground springs directly from the Aspromonte
mountains.
In 1972, when I was five years old, I spent six months in Molochio
with my mother, who had gone there to stay with my ailing
grandfather. For many years, my nonno Alfonso had neglected a
hernia, a simple condition that could have been treated with the right
care. The day he died, everyone was calling his name to wake him. I
walked in the room and said, “Can’t you see that he has died already?”
I was very close to my grandfather, and his death caused me great
sadness; but even as a child, I felt that dealing with aging and death
was something that I was supposed to do, that I had to take charge of
the situation somehow.
Our neighbor in Molochio, Salvatore Caruso, was about the same
age as my grandfather. In 2012, forty years after my grandfather’s
death, Salvatore and I would appear in the same issue of the scientific
journal Cell Metabolism for my group’s discovery that a low-protein
diet, based on the eating habits of Molochio’s elders, is associated with
low cancer and overall mortality rates in the US population. The cover
image of 108-year-old Salvatore standing among the Calabrian olive
trees made the pages of The Washington Post and media around the
globe. Two years after that, Salvatore was the oldest man in Italy, and
one of four centenarians living in Molochio. Since there were only
around two thousand people living there at the time, this meant
Molochio had one of the highest proportions of centenarians in the
world (four times that of Okinawa, Japan, which is believed to have the
highest rate of centenarians for a large region).
Salvatore, who died in 2015 at the age of 110, started drinking from
Molochio’s fountain soon after he was born in 1905; given the
exceptional longevity of so many of the town elders, it’s tempting to
think it might be the closest thing we have to a real fountain of youth.
But while that’s an interesting thought, I’ve spent most of my life
studying the science of living long, and the truth is nothing so
enchanted. You don’t need to travel to Molochio to drink from its
fountain of youth—but if you did, you would learn many of the secrets
of longevity from its centenarians.
1.1. The fountain in the piazza of Molochio
From Tradition to Science
Whether by luck or destiny, my life took a path that has given me a
unique and invaluable perspective on different diets and cultures.
From the Calabrian diet of Molochio, where I spent childhood
summers, to the pescetarian Ligurian diet of Genoa, where I was
raised, to the heavy American diets of Chicago and Texas, to the
health-obsessed diet of that mecca of youthfulness, Los Angeles—I’ve
lived the full range of good, bad, and excellent nutrition, which has
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