The foods you eat can have an enormous influence on how long you live and your likelihood and risk of contracting diseases.

But what is the optimal ratio of foods that you should be eating.

Hi, this is Dr. Mercola helping you take control of your health and today I am joined by Dr.

Walter Longo who is a professor of gerontology and biological sciences at the University of Southern California.

He's also director of the Longevity Institute.

So welcome and thank you for joining us today, Dr Longo.

Well, thank you.

So you have a long history.

You're a researcher, your PhD, not a medical doctor,

but you're doing extensive research in one of my areas of passion

which is optimizing mitochondrial metabolism with the use of

dietary interventions.

So perhaps you have an interesting history too and that you come through this through an area of calorie restriction.

And perhaps you can describe your process of how you evolved and eventually focused on your current area of research?

Yes, so actually I was a student of Roy Wall for many years ago and Roy was one of the pioneers of

Cal jurisdiction. He was a medical doctor and he was very interested in basically using diet to prevent and even treat their diseases and so that started back in the

early 90s and but then I went on to turn to more molecular understanding of what connects each ingredient, what connects each amino acid,

the sugars, the fats, the type of fats to the pathways that we were studying, particularly the pro-agee pathways.

And two of them, we discovered one called the PKA pathway,

one called Torres cis kinase,

both having now been shown to be central in the aging process, not just in

simple organisms, but possibly as so in mammals. So is it true that your lab is

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