Aging is the root. Nutrition is the lever.

Founded 2009 · Los Angeles

Nutrition technology for healthspan, studied across age-related disease

Medicine divides chronic disease into specialties: oncology for cancer, endocrinology for diabetes, cardiology for heart disease, neurology for Alzheimer’s. Yet the risk of each rises steeply with age. Geroscience approaches that shared risk as a target in its own right: slow the biology of aging, and many diseases may be delayed at once.

Dr. Valter Longo approaches the problem from the other side, in a framework he calls juventology: rather than asking why we age, it asks what keeps us young—and how nutrients can switch on the body’s own longevity programs. His research at USC identified nutrient-sensing pathways that regulate aging, first in yeast. Later work in mice showed that periodic fasting could activate programs for protection and cellular renewal.

The challenge was translation. Water-only fasting is difficult to sustain and isn't right for everyone. Building on research funded by the National Institutes of Health, and with SBA funding for its development, Dr. Longo and L-Nutra developed the Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD): a patented, plant-based program designed to reproduce key metabolic effects of fasting while you still eat. Fasting, with food.

Since then, the FMD has been the subject of 41 clinical trials, completed and ongoing, with academic medical centers including Leiden University Medical Centre and Cedars-Sinai. It now reaches people through two pathways: Prolon for consumer longevity products, and L-Nutra Health for clinical healthcare.

The name holds the thesis: L-Nutra, longevity through nutrition. Food is the one intervention nearly everyone uses several times a day. Our work is to make it a precise one.