Choosing carefully the foods we eat is a health strategy against age-related diseases and tumors. Professor Valter Longo, specialized in the longevity diet, explains to us that scientific evidence promotes a mainly vegan diet, with the addition of fish 2 or 3 times a week and with plenty of seasonal vegetables, whole grains, legumes and good fats, starting with extra virgin olive oil.

Romina Cervigniscientific director of the Valter Longo Onlus Foundation, suggests some precautions to be able to adhere to the key nutritional principles of Longevity Diet even in summer.

Valter Longo’s Longevity Diet for Summer

1. Seasonality

It is important to always respect the seasonality of products, especially fruit, vegetables and fish. Always eating seasonal foods means ensuring a diet that varies from month to month and that respect the territory and the rhythms of nature.

2. The fruit

The Longevity Diet recommends a daily intake of 150 grams of fruitor about one medium-sized fruit per day. It is important that it is well cleaned and that it is seasonal, to ensure the optimal content of vitamins, mineral salts and other nutrients. In summer the variety of fruit is very rich: apricots, melon, watermelon, peaches, plums, medlars, cherries, strawberries, prunes, figs, raspberries and blueberries.

3. The fish

The Longevity Diet recommends consuming it 2 or 3 times a week. The best choice that the consumer can make, from the point of view of nutritional composition, is certainly blue fish small size such as anchovies, mackerel, sardines, pilchards and anchovies: thanks to their small size, these types of fish tend to accumulate lower levels of methylmercury than larger ones.

4. Fats

For the Longevity Diet, the quality of the fats introduced is very important: it is best to favour quality mono and polyunsaturated fats, such as those contained in fatty fish (e.g. salmon or sardines) or in the nuts and in theextra virgin olive oilto the detriment of saturated fats and especially hydrogenated and trans fats.

5. Night fasting

Respecting a 12-hour night fast – useful for synchronizing the circadian rhythm, improving metabolism, having more mental energy and triggering autophagy, a mechanism that allows you to eliminate diseased cells and regenerate healthy ones -, even in summer is not an impossible mission. It is true that the days are getting longer and dinners out or parties increasebut in these cases, in order to reconcile the end of dinner with the time of breakfast the next day, it is possible, for example, postpone breakfastdrinking two glasses of water in the morning, as soon as you wake up, with a coffee or a sugar-free herbal tea, and then, later, 12 hours after the previous meal, introduce the solid food source.

The fasting mimicking diet (in the warm months)

Professor Valter Longo also developed the fasting mimicking diet. This is a 5-day low-calorie nutritional protocoldesigned to be carefully balanced in all its macro and micronutrients, which are appropriately distributed to constitute a strong caloric restriction, necessary to induce the body into a state of ketosis, useful for cellular regeneration and cleansing. Since it is a clinically tested protocol, it is necessary to consume, in order and without additions, all the foods present in the protocol. Since the fasting mimicking diet provides a caloric intake of 1150 kcal on the first day and indicatively of 800 kcal from the second to the fifthAnd It is also not recommended to practice strengthening physical activities and/or do it during the warmer months, otherwise you may experience some side effects, such as a feeling of tiredness and exhaustion, a slight headache, especially in the eye area, sometimes accompanied by a slight feeling of nausea, or a drop in blood pressure.