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…
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