DIANE KOCHILAS: Fasting is deeply rooted in Greek culture and religion, but today can refer as much to a dietary discipline as to a spiritual one.

[Upbeat Mediterranean music] In this episode, I'll explore some of the plant-based foods of delicious abstention that make up part of the fasting diet in Greece.

And I'll be speaking with Professor Valter Longo, whose groundbreaking research on the benefits of fasting for longevity and wellness have catapulted him to global renown.

DR.

VALTER LONGO: I mean, we think of drugs as being sophisticated, but evolution is billions of years old and is much more sophisticated than drugs.

You just have to learn how to, how do it correctly.

DIANE: Join me on My Greek Table as I explore various facets of fasting and cook up a delicious menu of braised cauliflower with olives and cinnamon, lemony artichoke and fava bean stew, and a black-eyed pea casserole with greens and herbs.

♪♪ ANNOUNCER: My Greek Table with Diane Kochilas is made possible in part by... The Fillo Factory.

Grecian Delight Kronos, A family committed to better eating.

The National Hellenic Society.

And by the following... [Upbeat Greek music] DIANE: The practice of fasting in Greece traces back to the philosophers of antiquity.

Thinkers like Pythagoras and Hippocrates praised the virtues of abstaining from food, believing it sharpened the mind and purified the body.

In ancient literature, fasting was often seen as a path to clarity, discipline, and even spiritual elevation.

[Upbeat Greek guitar music] This tradition evolved within the Greek Orthodox faith, where fasting is woven into the fabric of religious life.

Throughout the year, the faithful observe numerous fasts, abstaining from meat, fish, dairy, and sometimes even olive oil.

These periods, 180 to 200 days in all, are not just about restriction, they're about reflection, community, and a return to the essentials of the Greek diet: fresh vegetables, legumes, olives, grains, and fruits.

Today, fasting has found new meaning beyond religion.

Intermittent fasting and other forms of dietary abstention are now celebrated for their health benefits, from supporting metabolic health to promoting longevity.

Research links these practices to many of the world's longest living populations, including those in Greece, where the Mediterranean diet and periodic abstention go hand in hand.

Fasting, whether rooted in tradition or science, continues to be redefined in our pursuit of wellness.

Fasting in Greece is less about deprivation and more about celebrating the flavors and richness of the land, reminding us that sometimes less is truly more.

I'm really excited to be talking to Professor Valter Longo today.

He is a professor of uh biogerontology at USC, an expert uh, in the area of fasting and longevity, and also the author of the book of The Longevity Diet.

Can you in simple terms just explain the benefits of fasting?

Why is fasting good for us?

DR.

LONGO: We see effects on cholesterol.

We see effects on blood pressure.

There are um, metabolic effects.

Positive effects on sleep, but also an average to have about two and a half years uh... improvement in biological age, right?

So we become a... little bit younger.

And that's uh, I think that that's the big advantage over drugs, um most of which um, you know can have lots of effects but they can also have lots of side effects.

DIANE: You're very well known for something called the fasting mimicking diet.

And can you explain that a little bit?

DR.

LONGO: So the fasting mimicking diet is a- is a plant-based three-five-day cycles uh, per year that has the job of mimicking fasting and helping people that don't necessarily adapt to fasting.

But it's done in a way that it tricks the body into responding as if it was fasting.

[Tumbling of peas] [Water dribbling] [Guitar music] DIANE: Before I begin this recipe, I've got to prep the black-eyed peas.

And that basically means rinsing them in a colander and then bringing them to a boil.

As soon as they come to a boil, I'm going to take them off and drain them.

And that basically helps retain their color.

I am making one of the great combinations that we eat during fasting periods in Greece.

It's one of the dishes we call ladera, which basically means based on olive oil.

And this is a dish of beans and greens.

There are a lot of different versions of this all over Greece.

Different beans are used, different greens are used.

Today I'm doing black-eyed peas with Swiss chard and spinach.

And I'm just getting some of my basic first steps ready here, which is the fennel.

And you want to chop that into rather large pieces.

One of the things that's manifested in a lot of these recipes is how to get complete protein out of plant-based ingredients.

So when you combine beans and greens, that's one way to do it.

And this is a really good example of that.

[Chopping] And you want to use any sort of sweet green in this.

So nothing like bitter dandelion or uh mustard greens or anything too pungent.

You want to use greens that are subtle.

I've saved the fronds because they're also really flavorful.

And they have a nice intense flavor and a very nice soft texture.

[Slicing] So I'm getting my fennel in here first because they're a little bit bigger than the onion in terms of size.

And I like to have different textures in this dish.

So that's one of the reasons I kept these a little bit larger.

[Sizzling] I'm just adding a pinch, a little pinch of salt to this because that helps draw out the moisture in things like fennel and onion when you're sauteing them.

And they cook a little faster that way.

I'm going to get my onions in here next.

[Sizzling] I've just got a little bit of chopped garlic here, a couple of cloves.

[Sizzling] Getting the rest of the fennel in here.

So I've got the black-eyed peas uh that are blanched.

You can use almost any bean in this.

Cannellini beans, kidney beans.

You can do it with canned beans if you don't want to go through the trouble of blanching.

So this is really flexible food.

Very easy.

Ready for the water.

Just to get the beans boiling up a little bit.

I want to get the Swiss chard ready next.

And we can use the stems.

I'm going to cut sort of the toughest part of them off.

[Chopping] And we can get those into big pieces.

Let me get the tough stems aside and chop them up a little bit more.

[More chopping] We try to use everything in the Mediterranean and in the Greek kitchen as well.

So the next thing to go in here are the tomatoes.

And I'm using chopped canned tomatoes in this dish.

I'm just gonna get that right in there.

We wanna let them cook for about 15 minutes or so.

[Lid clanking] Let's see what's going on with these black-eyed peas.

Oh, that's a beautiful sight.

These look just about ready, for their greens.

Getting the Swiss chard in the pot.

We can do this in increments because this will wilt, and stir that in a bit.

I've got beautiful, coarsely chopped, super fresh, tender spinach here.

And I would really recommend using fresh greens in this.

The greens are going to disappear.

They're going to lose so much volume in just a minute or two.

All of these ladera dishes are served as main courses in the Greek kitchen that sets Greek cuisine apart from other Mediterranean traditions, um other vegetarian or vegetable cooking, uh traditions throughout the Mediterranean.

So I'm going to put a cover on this and let that cook down until everything is beautifully blended, nice and tender, very comforting.

And then I'm going to add the finishing touches.

It's been around 25 minutes or so.

Oh, that's looking really good.

The greens still have their beautiful color.

I'm just going to get this stirred up and you can see it's still nice and juicy.

I haven't added any additional liquid to this.

Everything in here just looks like it belongs together.

Almost anything you add lemon zest to, tastes better.

And a little bit of lemon juice.

You can just squeeze it right into the palm of your hand, the way Greek grandmothers used to do.

I grew up with this kind of food as a kid in New York City.

My dad was the family cook and he was the one who would make dishes like this.

But of course as a kid in the 1960s in New York, I don't want to eat this kind of food.

I want a colorful cereal and other things that aren't very good for you.

But we all become our parents in the end and go back to our traditions.

There's no better evidence of that than in the things that we like to cook as adults.

And this is really good.

I can't wait to taste it.

[Upbeat drum music] You see the black-eyed peas are nice and bright.

They retain their color.

That's what we get when we blanch them and put them back with fresh water.

Mmmm.

This doesn't scream healthy.

It whispers healthy.

I think the most important thing about all this food is that it's very hardy.

You're not left feeling wanting for something.

It's very filling.

It's very satisfying.

It has all the ingredients of you know, a perfect Mediterranean diet in a dish.

Olive oil, plant-based protein like black-eyed peas or any beans, vegetables or greens, tomatoes, onions, fennel, spinach and chard.

It's a combination of everything that we know is good for us and everything that defines the Mediterranean diet.

So when- when the body goes into this fasting, mimicking diet, what happens to it?

DR.

LONGO: A loss of fat, but no loss of lean body mass.

Right?

There's a big distinction between that and drugs that are out there that are becoming very popular.

A lot of these drugs that target GLP-1, for example, will cause uh weight loss, but a good portion of that is muscle and bone uh mass, potentially.

And we don't see that with the- with the fasting mimicking diet cycles.

DIANE: So what sorts of foods would they be eating?

DR.

LONGO: It's a lot of vegetables, lots of nuts.

And it has between 800 and 1100 kilo calories.

We think of drugs as being sophisticated, but evolution is billions of years old and it's much more sophisticated than drugs.

You just have to learn how to- how to do it correctly.

DIANE: I'm cleaning one of the oldest legumes in the Mediterranean.

Koukia, as we call them in Greek, or fava beans, fresh fava beans.

And this dish, artichokes and fava beans with a lemony sauce, is one of the great vegetarian main courses of the Greek kitchen.

And it's something that we eat quite often uh during periods of fasting.

It's delicious, it's elegant, and it's very, very Greek.

I'm going to show you how to clean an artichoke the Greek way.

We want to cut the stem off.

This is very tough, so there's really no use for this.

[Snapping] Artichokes have been part of the Greek diet forever.

We have wild artichokes in certain parts of Greece, in places like Tinos and Crete.

They tend to be a little smaller with and very thorny.

These are typical globe artichokes, what we find in most markets.

What we want to do is get all the leaves off.

We want to end up with an artichoke heart and stem that looks a little bit like an inverted champagne glass.

You want to trim the stems.

The stems can be a little bit woody, so you want to be careful.

And then you want to trim around a little bit.

Kinda get the tough part off.

And this is the tricky part.

We want to get the choke out and you do that by scraping it clean with a spoon.

And you want to do that very well because it's a little bit unpleasant to get kind of a mouthful of fuzzy artichoke fibers if you don't clean them well enough.

And this is very important.

The next thing we want to do is keep these from discoloring so you can see that the artichoke is quick to oxidize.

So I'm going to dip it in this acidulated water which is basically lemon juice and cold water.

The other ingredients that go into this dish are spring onions or scallions, leek and fennel.

We can go pretty much uh, all the way up on the scallion.

They're nice and tender.

[Chopping] Set that aside.

I'm going to clean the leek next.

[More chopping] We want to get the leek about the same size as the scallion and there's kind of an old belief among a certain generation of Greek cooks older than I am.

They believe that the finer the chop the more elegant the food.

So I want to get everything to at least the same size so that when this cooks up it all looks very pretty together.

[Chopping] You want to make sure your leeks are uh clean, free of sand and dirt, so make sure you wash them really well.

The next thing we're putting in here is a fennel bulb.

[Chopping] Something that I love to cook with.

You want to get the root end off, because it's very tough.

The fennel I like to keep in slightly bigger pieces because I love the flavor of it and I love to bite into it in this particular dish.

It's something that we cook a lot with in Greece.

[Chopping] We're ready to assemble the dish and start to cook it.

The first thing I'm adding to the olive oil is the chopped fennel, because these are larger pieces, so they'll take a little bit more time to soften up.

[Sizzling] What goes in next are the leeks and scallions.

[Sizzling] As soon as this cooks down a little bit, I'll stir in the garlic.

[More sizzling] It calls for quite a bit of it, a few cloves.

And soon enough the artichokes.

So these are going straight in the pan and again they look a little bit like inverted champagne glasses.

We want the stems up because that's kind of how we serve them and they look very beautiful that way.

[Greek guitar music] A little bit of water.

And these are basically going to be steamed.

And a little salt and pepper.

These need around 25 minutes until they're nice and tender.

And then we're gonna add our cleaned fava beans or broad beans as they're also known, which won't take very long to cook at all.

Let's see if these are ready.

They look ready, but here's a little test.

We wanna pierce it with a fork.

Oh, you see that?

It's al dente but tender enough to pierce.

Now that's exactly what we're looking for.

Right now is the perfect time, to add our fava beans.

Just sprinkling them all over the pot.

They don't take very long at all to cook.

You just wanna get that stirred in here.

It's the perfect moment to make the lemon flour liaison, which will give it, this beautiful, creamy, lemony flavor.

Just wanna cut the lemon and juice it.

Just strain it through your fingers and catch all the pits.

And we wanna whisk this together, the flour and lemon juice.

I'll also add some of the pan juices from the artichokes.

That's really all we need.

It's not, I don't need to temper it.

It's not an egg.

It's really just for the texture.

There's just enough liquid in here so that when we serve it, it'll be nice and juicy.

Just enough to dip some great bread into without being too soupy or too liquid.

This is one of the great dishes of Greek cuisine.

[Chopping] We want to get the dill in here next.

This is the last thing to go in.

See how creamy this is now.

It's exactly what it should be.

I'm gonna get this served up right away.

Oh that is a beautiful sight.

[Loud cutting] Mm.

Lemon, springtime, freshness, ancient, modern, elegant, it's all in this dish.

And so simple, just a few ingredients.

Lenten fare fasting food, but also something that you can serve um at a really special dinner party.

Make on a Sunday afternoon for your family.

It's very delicious and very healthy.

DIANE: Is there any way to compare the effects of fasting for cultural and religious reasons versus the fasting mimicking diet?

I fast before Easter.

I go off all animal products.

I definitely feel lighter.

You know, I feel better.

DR.

LONGO: If somebody does it for a religious reason, I think it's okay.

But I think if somebody is looking for something that they can do to live longer, you have to add all the science, epidemiology, clinical trials, basic research.

Then you bring it all together.

You're respectful of what you learn from religions.

And then you come up with a method.

And that's where the fasting mimicking diet comes in.

Every ingredient is selected for being very much associated with longevity in a healthy uh, lifespan.

DIANE: For anyone out there like me who grew up in a Greek home, this humble vegetable was a childhood nightmare.

It was the stuff that your grandmother would cook until it was totally dead on arrival.

And inedible.

But this dish takes this super humble, very delicious and very nutritious cauliflower and turns it into a luscious stew with a lot of complex flavors like cinnamon and bay leaf and parsley and turmeric and some other good things.

So let's get started.

It calls for sun-dried tomatoes.

It calls for three different kinds of tomatoes, actually.

Sun-dried, tomato paste, and chopped tomatoes.

And I just want to soften up the sun-dried tomatoes a little bit.

I'm just going to leave those aside.

I'm going to start by getting my cauliflower ready.

And I'm going to use the greens because, A, they look really pretty.

Um they're totally edible, and they will add uh some color and a little bit of different texture to the dish.

I want to cut the cauliflower into florets.

[Chopping] And I like to just cut around the inner core here.

The florets come off pretty easily that way.

We want to keep them on the- on the large side because this is like many of the vegetarian and vegan and plant-based dishes in the Greek kitchen.

This could also be a main course.

And that's, I'm cooking it with that in mind today.

It should be a main course.

You want them to be the same size more or less.

[Chopping] They're going to look really pretty.

And I'm going to chop up the greens a little bit.

[More chopping] The olive oil.

Red onion goes in here next.

I love this recipe because it takes a very pedestrian vegetable and it elevates it.

Cauliflower is a bit of a challenge in the kitchen, which is maybe one of the reasons why Greek grandmothers boil it to death, but now you see all sorts of recipes for it as a risotto or used as pizza crust.

So now my onions and garlic are nice and soft.

And the turmeric goes in next.

Turmeric's been around for a long time in Greece.

We call it kurkuma.

It was known to the ancients.

And it's one of the healthiest spices we can use in the kitchen.

It's filled with anti-inflammatory properties.

It's really good for us.

The tomato paste goes in next.

One of the things that I like to talk about when I teach cooking and something that I I found that a lot of my guests um, are surprised by is how hardy all of this vegetable fare is in the Greek kitchen.

The cauliflower florets go in next.

And you can sort of see the start of this dish.

It's already really beautiful.

So I'm going to get the leaves in here next.

There's kind of a traditional inspiration for this recipe, which is, the technique that we use for a lot of these vegetable stews called yiahni, which basically means starting with onion or onion and garlic and tomato.

So that's kind of what we're doing here, except the spice palette is very different.

Regular old chopped canned tomatoes go in next.

[Tapping of bowl] I just love the colors in this dish.

And there's a little bit of also contrast in the flavors, which I find interesting.

That's the use of sweetness like cinnamon, but also the brininess of the olives, which will go in at the very end.

This is just dry Greek red wine to give it this beautiful, deeper red color and also a little bit of acidity.

You can use any dry red wine.

Coarse sea salt and some black pepper.

A cinnamon stick, which is something that we marry, uh very often.

We pair very often with tomato-based vegetable dishes and tomato-based sauces in general.

A couple of bay leaves.

The sun-dried tomatoes go in next.

And they're pretty tender and they're going to get even softer once they cook.

And their juice, which is nice and flavorful.

And one last thing, one of my favorite seasonings.

I use in all sorts of recipes, especially with olives.

A little bit of orange zest, just a strip or two.

Cover.

[Lid clanking] It's going to take about 25 to 30 minutes, and it's going to be really delicious, very hearty, and super healthy.

And vegan!

Ooh, that looks really good.

The green olives go in next.

And my julienned, or chiffonade parsley, or just plain old chopped parsley.

You don't have to be so chef-y about it.

And I'm stirring everything together.

And you can see that there's not that much juice left in here.

The cauliflower, the beautiful colors, the contrast and the flavors.

I think this is going to be a real winner.

[Upbeat music] This is main course Greek vegetable cooking at its absolute best.

Mmm.

The first ingredient that hit my palate was the crunchy olive.

The cauliflower is very tender, which is what we want.

There's this beautiful underlying orange perfume going on in this dish and the cinnamon is very subtle.

This, my dear friends, is elevated cauliflower.

It's very multifaceted, it's complex.

In every way, there's a lot going on here.

Textures, flavors, different ingredients, these beautiful colors.

Just look at this dish, it's gorgeous.

DIANE: For recipe links and information about My Greek Table , visit my website, DianeKochilas.com.

ANNOUNCER: Diane's cookbooks, "The Ikaria Way" and "Athens: Food, Stories, Love" are available to purchase online at DianeKochilas.com or call the phone number on the screen.

My Greek Table with Diane Kochilas is made possible in part by... The Fillo Factory.

Grecian Delight Kronos, A family committed to better eating.

The National Hellenic Society.

And by the following... DR.

VONGO: I start working with microorganisms, so bacteria and yeast, I used to starve them.

And then I was observing if I starve bacteria, they live a lot longer.

So I started thinking, there's something, bacteria and yeast are both living longer by completely starving them.

There's got to be something very powerful about this starvation.

When I started working on fasting, everyone thought it was the dumbest thing that anybody, including my own colleagues, right?

They thought, why would you possibly starve yeast and bacteria?

Who cares, right?