 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. You know people are always asking me for recommendations on how to live longer, healthier lives. One thing that can dramatically boost your health span and even your life span, because one thing that can dramatically boost your health span and even your life span is something called a five-day vegan fast. In fact, this simple technique is like taking your mitochondria on a five-day spa retreat. And my guest today is one of the biggest proponents of this type of fasting, mimicking diets, Dr. Joseph Antoon. He's the CEO of El Nutra and works hand in hand closely with my good friend Dr. Paul DerLongo, who many of you have read about in my books and we've even had him on our podcast. This focuses on providing people with the knowledge and products to live to, oh, 110 and beyond. So on today's episode, Dr. Antoon and I are going to talk about shifting away from sick care, how a fasting mimicking diet can help you live your longest, fullest life, and why most of the foods we're eating these days are actually less nutritious than they used to be. Dr. Antoon, it's good to see you again. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for hosting me and I look forward for a great session. I think the audience will learn a lot today about fasting and improving their healthy aging. Yeah, I'm really excited about this. As you know, I've been a big fan of your guys' work from the beginning. So yeah, you've got a big fan here. So let's start with your background. So when did you first realize that our health care system in the United States was actually a sick care system? You know, I'm a physician by training. That was my first degree before I went and specialized in health policy and public health and exactly the reason why you're learning about the sick care system. So actually, during my rotations, you know, I started seeing patients and as a medical student trying to learn about how to practice medicine and I was starting to be fascinated is how come the first time I interact with an individual is when the individual has already a symptom or is already sick. I was like, we did even better for our cars, you know, we did insurance for every car. We checked them once a year. We have a dashboard that tells us, you know, the temperature is increasing or not before the smoke is getting out of the engine. So I was fascinated that we were just the starting point of our action was a symptom and a disease. And then number two, the other fascinating thing is like I thought we're not solving the biggest diseases. So if a patient presents with diabetes or cardiovascular issues, say blood pressure, et cetera, would sit next to the attending or the, you know, the primary doctor and just witness a five, four, five pill prescription that each will just balance what the patient has in his blood, but it doesn't solve the main issue. It's just so you give a pill for blood sugar, you move the sugar from the blood to the cells and then they get transformed into fat and then more insulin resistance and then you advance in diabetes instead of going backwards. Same thing for blood pressure, et cetera. And I felt we're not solving the issue. This patient sitting next to us, he gained weight fast. He was stressed. He's not exercising any longer. He's probably a little bit older and not sleeping well and maybe going through financial issues or stress at home or just change the lifestyle, eating less nutritious food. That's the solution. It was lifestyle medicine probably is the solution for many of the chronic diseases we're trying to treat. So I felt we're not touching on those and definitely getting the patient out with five pills that will not get him to the solution. I would have been fine if we are reversing the diseases with that, but it wasn't even a solution. It was a prescription for life. And I didn't want to subscribe for that. I went to medical school to help patients and help them find solutions and mostly wanted to help people not to get sick. So once I graduated, I didn't do residency. I decided to change health care systems around the world. So I went and I did my studies in health policy in Harvard and I did public health at Hopkins and launched a career looking to achieve my passion, which was moving the sick care system to a health care system. There's always a place for sick care. We ultimately will get sick, but it should be 10, 20% of the health care system and most of the health care system should work on keeping us healthier longer rather than sick long. And that's the golden goose. And today, if you ask most people, do you want to long? Most people will tell you no because they remember the sick grandma who's suffering longer. Now you turn the question a little bit. Do you want to live healthier longer? And then everyone says yes. And I think that's the most important thing that we haven't figured out today. Unfortunately, we crossed $2.3 trillion expenditure in health care in the US and we just lost 0.4 years on our longevity in the US. People don't realize that. Spending more, doing more, and the result is actually getting less. We just lost 0.4 years on our longevity as Americans. Yeah, and it's three years in a row. We've decreased our longevity. So why? OK, so you and I know this. You've spent your career fighting against this. What sort of incentives keep our health care system from changing to this model? Well, there are multiple, right? I mean, what we're saying makes sense. And you would wonder always why the health care system does not focus more on prevention. And there are actually four or five major factors. Number one is people, we as humans, we like the short term results. So when you look at policy making and what we pay for every year, paying for longevity is waiting for an unknown results in the next multiple years. So the entire health care system, it has to first take care of the sick people and is reactive to that. And then you go from policy to all the way to elections as well, because you don't want to put most of your budget in prevention and helping people not get sick, which they will never feel what the benefit was because they just it's not tangible. So it starts with a system that has to take care of the short term and focus on supporting sick care first. Second is no true market in prevention. The prevention today is a set of advisers, not a set of products. And this is why I ended up joining a Neutra and working on the Fasting Mimiki Night. I felt it was an anchor product for the prevention, but we'll go back to this afterwards. It's just, and I've consulted with many ministers of health around the world and they know they need to put more money in prevention, but what does that mean? People know they should not smoke and some people opt to do that. Some people know that they should eat healthy. Some people do something. So it was never created in a market like we've done with sick care, where you have a hospital, a location, where you deliver care. You have pills to solve as a product to consume. You have regulations, you have investments, et cetera. When you look at prevention, there's no clinics that are specialized just in prevention. I mean, functional medicine is evolving there, which is a good thing, but it's not still a fully established, you know, a full establishment. We don't have products that I can give to you today so that you stay healthier longer. There are theories about what to eat, et cetera. So that is the other angle to it. Number three, which is as important probably, you know, we as humans, we respond a lot to financial incentives. And as long as we're not incentivized to do healthy things every day and made that easy for us, we're not going to adopt it. So, and this is for every day. If it's difficult to access a running track, if it's difficult to get to the gym, if it's always much cheaper to buy a burger meal for my kids versus, you know, buying a healthy organic salad from a, you know, hire and store. So we build a society where it's difficult every day to be healthy and it's cheaper to be unhealthy. And that's very important. And we did try to advocate for, you know, some taxes on healthy food so that we at least cross subsidize healthy food to make it cheaper for the poor especially. And unfortunately, there's a reverse correlation between being poor and healthy. And this is if you want to move really the healthcare system you need to support people with means and financial incentives to be able to access healthy lifestyles. So I think that's a very important reason as well. So I took it upon me and a few around me with a lot of passion and you're one of those to go and create a market, create a strong evidence-based, science-based market for prevention and trying to make it healthier and easier and penetrate medicine also with this concept of health care and prevention. So the doctors don't just start seeing people after their sick but actually they start taking care of us on a longitudinal basis. Yeah, no, I agree with you completely about we've got it all wrong. A number of years ago I was approached by some manufacturers in a major Midwestern city that had a medical school in that town and a very good healthcare system. And they wanted me to come in and design a program for their employees to teach their employees how to eat. And I said, well, look, you've got a great medical school, you've got a lot of Nobel Prize winners there, you've got a great hospital system, why don't you start there? You don't need me. And they said, oh, we did. We met with all these guys and they said, are you crazy? We may say we're a healthcare system, we're a sick care system and if we made your employees healthy, we'd be out of business. And I mean, this is this true story. And I went, yeah, there is no there's no incentive for health. I agree. And if you think about it, nobody makes money if we're healthy. A physician doesn't make money and a hospital doesn't make money. You know, a company selling a device or a pill. So in the US with a system that we build starting from the private sector, a for-profit private sector, the incentive is really to consume rather than to not consume. But the advantage of it is that you would optimize delivery of care. That's why we're the number one in the word on delivery of care. We're not we're very far behind on prevention. And it also stimulates innovation, which is the backbone of why the US is the leading force in innovation. It's just driven by really great for-profit opportunity and dream. If you discover something in health care, at the same time, that system makes money and thrives when people are sick, not when they're healthy. So why haven't health insurance companies or even the government? You see these commercials on TV that you've got a safe driver app on your on your car. And look, I'm saving money, you know, shut up or safe drivers, save 40 percent and these get memes on TV. So why wouldn't insurers and the government pay for safe eating practices? Because, you know, they were up until recently, they were able to transfer this accrued extra expenses to the as premiums to the consumer and to the policy holder. Up until the last 10 years, 15 years, the policy holder is saying it's outrageous how much I'm paying for health care. They're putting the financial pressure back on the insurance. And now, for the first time, the insurance are really looking into how can I save money the most? The first in the 70s, 80s and 90s, they were saving money by revising cases, by still trying to do the best out of sick people. How can I revise my cases? How can I optimize my codes, my billing, but it was never prevention? And now, because of the pressures on not just the private insurance, but on Medicare and Medicaid, we see this in the last decade, the big wave of, OK, we need to do more. Let's look at lifestyle medicine. Again, lifestyle medicine wasn't fully ready as well. What they're going to insurance, what they're going to pay for, pay for telling you to eat healthy, you know that, telling you not to smoke, you know that. And it all goes back to give us a prevention market where there are products, regulations, investment adoption from FDA, from the government's reimbursement, then they will come into it. And this is what we're trying to build for insurance. And actually, they're talking to us on multiple levels, and I think that's going to be the future, is if you have enough evidence-based proof behind something you're putting as a solution for prevention, I think that's going to be the future of medicine. So I mentioned in the introduction that many of the foods that we eat are less nutritious than they used to be. Can you explain what's going on with that? Again, nutrition has been mainly a business rather than a medicine, right? We are pushing for food as medicine. Unfortunately, for the last decades, it was mostly food was a business. And in business, you try to give, you try to increase your margin, so you want to give a little bit cheaper food. And cheaper food means starches, means glucose, means less nutritious food versus the more nutritious food. And also means collect the fruits and the vegetables when they're still green, store them in the refrigerator, they mature just without being on the mother tree, and then spray them with pesticides and herbicides and a little bit play with the, mix the grains so that you get a higher gluten and a faster yield. And this is what business has meant versus what we should eat, which is definitely a lower gluten and more a fruit and a vegetable that has, that are grown without pesticides and that are grown on the tree and the grass up until they mature. And this is why we lost the smell and the taste of fruits actually in the U.S. And what we should do is consume more colorful. We say eat the rainbow fruits and vegetables and go for more of the nutrients, the vitamins, the minerals, and less for the sugar, less for the artificial changes with impose on food. And definitely even, there's a bigger story on fat as well, right? Where instead of having the several times fried oil and some kinds of trans fat, it's really to focus on olive oil and fish oil and everything that has high omegas and even the nuts, again, going back business versus not the healthy oil sources are expensive. So you don't see a lot of food based on macadamia and caches. You see them based on peanuts and french fries, source of oil, et cetera. So that's unfortunately a big change that happened to us. As humans, most of our life we grew, we needed water. It was the most vital thing that we needed. So we grew around rivers. And this is where I just needed water to drink it, but also this is where there's green grass. There were fruits, there were trees and there was food. And we were eating a plant-based diet mainly and because fish doesn't fly, it doesn't run fast, doesn't see as it was easy to fish. So we were mainly vegan with eating fish from time to time. What we call a pescetarian diet with time we evolved to hunt a little bit more. So adding a little bit of meat to it, but this is what I would qualify more as Mediterranean diet. And this is what we should go back to rather than the fast deliveries at home today that's given us a lot more of the carbs and unhealthy fats versus the nutrient-dense fruits and vegetables. So I got to know you guys because of your research and the fasting-mimicking diet. So there's a lot of different types of fasting and calorie restriction and everybody's confused. So take us through what's the difference between oh, water fasting, intermittent fasting, time-restricted eating and a fasting-mimicking diet. Holy cow, I'm even confused now. Yeah, so we started publishing about fasting some four or five years ago and the field picked up so big and it's now actually the number one diet in the US two years in a row. This year, clean eating kind of trumped it a little bit, but the diet that's being observed the most today in the US is one of the kinds of fasting which we're gonna explain today. And I'm gonna start with on the first topology you have what we call intermittent fasting versus prolonged fasting. So this is the first thing people need to know. Intermittent fasting is fasting from few hours up to two days and then prolonged fasting is when you go a little bit beyond two days. There used to be a tiny category called short-term fast two to three days, but now we're trying to simplify it and just say zero to two days you're doing intermittent fasting two days and beyond you're doing a prolonged fast. And the main separation is really once you cross two days the stress of fasting to the body is now superior and therefore the body reacts differently. On the first two days, you can survive off burning your fat and using the liver as credit for neoglyceum genesis. When you cross that the stress is so big that now there's cellular action we're gonna talk about that for a long fasting, but just for people to keep in mind is when you cross the second day there's something called autophagy and the cell strives to rejuvenate to survive and we're gonna talk about that. So let's start with intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting a few hours to two days. Most people fast within one day they try to prolong little bit the period of overnight fast. So when we sleep we're fasting, right? We're not eating. I hope so. Actually, a lot of us do eat overnight but when you're sleeping you're fasting and a lot of people are trying to stay for 12 hours without food or extended to 16 hours. So within the same day what you call intermittent fasting is the same concept as the flip side of time-restricted eating. A lot of people hear that word and Sachin Panda actually is one of the main researchers there is the more you extend the overnight fast the more you're restricting the period of food intakes we call the time-restricted eating. So if you're fasting for 16 hours then your time that you restrict your food is for eight hours and vice versa. If you're fasting say for 12 hours that means you're doing a time-restricted eating of 12 hours. So within the same, when you talk within the same day intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating I'll just the flip side of the same coin. Now why it's becoming very popular to do intermittent fasting is part of what we're talking about is us as human changing our lifestyle and behavior. Historically, we used to eat so the family would sit at six, seven PM the sun would be down and then we would sleep. There was no refrigeration, there's no TV there's no Netflix at home. And then we wake up the second day and we eat again in the morning and this is your 12 hour of fast which turns out to be very critical for our healthy aging. Because if you eat more frequently if you eat over 18 hours say what's happening is most of the part of the day your body is ingesting food and when you eat carbs and protein you have the growth factor increase insulin and insulin growth factor. So you're in more an anabolic state you're always biologically you're pushed to age faster and you're stocking the extra calories in fat. So you're in fat building it's like putting money in your account all the time your bank account will grow. So it's same the fat, same as fat. What you want to do, you want to balance how much you put in the bank and then allow time to spend it before you put the money again. And I think that's key is to do at least 12 hours of fast what we call the circadian fasting meaning following the day and night cycle which in 2017 the Nobel Prize in medicine was on the biological clock of the organs. Even the organs we discovered they actually need that rhythm they need to work for a certain period and then rest for other periods the same way we sleep to rest our brain every organ was functioning and we have that biological clock again won the Nobel prize in 2017. So we are big proponents of what we call the circadian fasting or the 12 hours of fast. Now, a lot of physicians in practice which most of them treat diabetes or obesity or primary care they're proponents of a little bit extending the overnight fast all the way to 16 hours what we call the 16 eight intermittent fasting and they do it because their patients need to lose weight fast and need to correct the metabolic issue and this is when it's worth going up to 16 hours without the food to just accelerate a little bit this weight loss and reverse the metabolic issue. And this is called 16 eight, 16 hours fasting eight hours of time restricted eating and it's becoming very, very popular. There's a little bit of caution here that I would tell people about is that 16 eight or some people go to 18 hours or 20 hours went from the clinics all the way to the general public but most people if they're not really overweight or they have a short term a health condition that they're trying to fast for they don't need to go all the way to 16 and 18 and 20 hours and your body tells you that you start feeling a headache you start feeling weak and actually you do lose the weight when you extend the fast because your body needs calories and your brain first and foremost is operating at peak in the morning your cardiovascular, you know they're heart beats to pump your muscles you're going to work you're the most active in the morning so this is why you lose the weight if you skip that breakfast but at the same time you're stressing your vital organs so we're more of a proponent of do 12 hours only if you're healthy and fit and then if you need to extend it a little bit for short term reasons probably that's a good thing to do on a short term. Now there's been a number of publications some of them recent about the Ramadan fast so there's a 12 hour window of not eating you eat before the sun comes up you don't even drink during the day and then you eat again when the sun goes down and there's some actually dramatic health changes including as you probably know turning off oncogenes with that method so what do you think about the Ramadan fast as a health? Well we want to clarify the Ramadan fast is follows the 12 hours which what we're talking about but is it concept coming from meaning practice 12 with the old type of religion the orthodox type the recent days were feasting in the 12 remaining hours so within the context of the true meaning of fasting for 12 hours this is something exactly what we're talking about and it does actually there's another big article I recommend people read it in Gemma oncology and it talks about breast cancer even not just prevention but also women with the breast cancer I think they were looking at the nurse health study and they looked at women with breast cancer who fasted less than 13 hours versus more than 13 hours there was even a difference in recurrence of the cancer which makes sense the less you eat the less you're pushing your body to grow and when the body biologically ages it gets more prone to diseases and also your last pushing your extra calories to go into fat and therefore insulin resistance which is one of the mothers of many diseases we traditionally people think carb is diabetes it's not just carb it's food and general proteins and carb both push in both direction cancer and diabetes so definitely we are meant to eat then absorb then spend then eat again what happened to us today and that's the fasting or the time we stick to eating what's happening to us today most Americans eat within the 18 hours time frame so we eat, eat, eat and rest a little bit so we're always adding to the bank account the bank account is increasing unfortunately this is not financially you want it to increase but in a health wise you don't want the fat to increase your reserves to increase and this is leading to diseases in multiple directions not just diabetes but cancer Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease that was intermittent fasting if you want if we clarified that intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating are the same within one day intermittent fasting is up to two days and it's the period of where your buddy says you know what I have enough fat and if I need some credit I'll take it from the liver but I'm okay two days I'll lose a little bit of weight that's fine and it becomes a little bit more stressful when you cross the second day again it's not prescriptive for some people the n-half or people two n-half days but just for the sake of topology we talk about second day now you're going where I did spend my bank account right so say you're the CEO of the company and suddenly you don't have revenues you can hold it for a month or two and you can tap into your bank account and apply for credit but then when the bank account is going down you're gonna have to come back to your company and restructure it you're gonna have to be more cost-effective in the way you do things and the buddy does the same thing after day two it comes to the cells and say hey I cannot nourish you any longer from the outside you have to look inside for sources of calories organelles, debris, you know some damage that you can fix what we call cellular rejuvenation or in a more scientific way we call it autophagy or self-eat what autophagy means self-eat so the cell tries to live on its interest cellular calories and optimize its operation it's we call it restructuring in a financial world of the corporate world which is hey let's try to do the best out of what we have that's important because now you're talking biologically so intermittent fasting works on weight and certain little bit metabolic improvement just because it's two days now when you cross two days you're talking more weight loss you're talking more metabolic changes in cholesterol, triglyceride, inflammation, et cetera but you're adding now the cellular improvement as well so once you touch prolonged fasting you're impacting all these three big important healthy aging metrics your weight which you would lose really fast the excess weight you're impacting your metabolic markers cholesterol, triglyceride, HB1C, et cetera and then you're impacting as well a cellular or a biological change within the cell and all of those contributing to healthy aging and this is what made fasting if you want a big theory a big thing to observe in the last three, four years and a big topic talked about I wanna add one thing which is it is a natural thing it's important because every decade we have a craze about a diet one day it's the Atkins, the other day it's the keto the third day it's the paleo and these are human made diets which they have certain value but certain disadvantages I think the best thing you can do for your life and you mentioned this in your book is to rematch us with what we're supposed to eat which is a plant based mainly solution with some intermittent fasting and two to three times per year do the prolonged fasting in order to improve the cells and regimen in the cells and I think rematching our body with what we were meant to eat is the diet is not gonna be a fat but it's gonna be here to stay and part of it is fasting. All right, so people are listening to this and they're going, oh come on now there's no way I'm gonna not eat anything for three days, come on I gotta go to work I gotta get the kids to school they're driving me crazy and you hear this and you know this so take me to, how'd you guys get this crazy idea of designing a plant based diet that mimics fasting? Yes, so you're right and we as a neutral the company that I'm currently the CEO of were a spin-off from University of Southern California and USC has a longevity institute which is probably the leading institute and the word looking into fasting and like you said initially we're just doing water fasting and when we proved the value of water fast in flee and worms and they went to mice and then we went to human trial and this is where we got the surprise obviously like you're saying most people in a clinical trial and a human trial they don't wanna fast for three or four or five days and we like a little bit more than four to five days because you wanna at least couple of days of cellular rejuvenation. So people get in fast from four to five days and the National Institute of Health and the National Cancer Institute were very generous into supporting USC and developing the fasting mimicking diet meaning they're saying we're seeing really great mice data we want you to do the human data and we understand it's not safe or compliant here we talk a lot about the positives about fasting there are negatives about fasting when you stay for four days without food you're literally or water or minerals or vitamin it's not a joke it's spending four or five days without very important nutrients whether it's macro or micro nutrients for the body so there's some risk doing that and people obviously will not comply they'll feel hungry and they get headaches and fatigues so the NIH was kind enough to sponsor the research to develop what we call the fasting mimicking diet meaning can we nourish this body with ingredients while keeping at the cellular level the stress at the cells so can we keep the stress of fasting on the cells so that the cell rejuvenates and can we not increase the blood sugar and increase therefore insulin can we not increase proteins and increase the signal of insulin like growth factors so that the body is not realizing it's eating it is being nourished but it doesn't realize it the sensors are not triggered so to simplify it is if you're the CEO of a company you need a million dollars to operate the company if we give you 200,000 you're gonna feel fully satisfied and you're gonna just not restructure no you're gonna still feel that stress and it's a little bit more complicated the fasting mimicking diet actually we were able to not mimic fasting by starvation and this is what took 12 years of research and over 36 million dollars in funding we were able to mimic fasting by nourishment and that was very important so we started looking at the cell how the cell digest this protein how the cell digest this carbs what are the pathways and how much can we give up every ingredient now we're beyond 75 ingredients it's a nutrient rich diet and we're beyond 75 ingredients that the body and the cells get each one at the level that the cell does not feel it's satisfied enough and this is how we created the fasting mimicking diet it's a plant-based diet it has very healthy good fats coming mainly from academia and other nuts again which historically nutrition company they didn't want to sell they're the most expensive and then it's made of fiber rich source of carbs and has plant-based proteins and every sequence is studied to actually get into your body nourishes the cell without convincing the cell that there's food and it was an amazing discovery to me it's probably the biggest discovery nutrition for the last years and years and now we're in 18 clinical trials trying to see what are the benefits of a fasting when we can diet on different conditions and we're excited to see some of the early results starting to get out there Are you able to give us a taste of what those clinical trials are showing? So we actually have out of the 18 trials probably we have eight on cancer we have two trials on diabetes few on cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases we cannot today without really getting the results really mention or position the diet for any of those but in mice there was a lot of promising data on showing for example if you and this is an important concept I think moving forward part of we're talking about changing healthcare cancer patients historically we gave them chemotherapy or hormone therapy and more recently immune therapy and CAR T etc but we've never looked at their diet in a serious way and that's very important because cancer is a cell that lost its inhibition keeps replicating without stopping that's why it grows fast and then spreads around the body so how come we never thought about slowing the growth of cancer not just by chemo but by food right if a cell has to grow fast it needs food and without food is going to grow slower and probably this is how we talked about the Gem oncology paper of overnight fasting probably what's happening when every night you're fasting and you're prolonging it a little bit is you're underfeeding your breast cancer and therefore it cannot grow as fast and would like to grow what we've observed in mice with a fasting and making diet is because we're going on a solid three, four days of fasting and in humans we do four days and then we add one day of refeeding but now you really, really starve this cancer over four days and we do it right before chemotherapy so chemotherapy comes on day five, on day four so you got a good three days of fast day four is fasting as well and chemo comes on day four the cancer is so much sensitized to the chemotherapy that in mice we showed tremendous data on significant data on slowing down the growth of the tumor and in humans we're about to publish on the same topic as well and the concept is as I said you want to starve the cancer and you want to then have the chemo coming on a very weakened cancer and hopefully kill more cells. So I think this is an important point you're not anti-chemotherapy you're saying here's an additional way to maximize the effect of chemotherapy. Yeah and I'm not against any medicine actually I just am against the concept that medicines that pills are the only solution and I'm against the concept of the best thing we as brilliant minds have provided is hey we'll wait for you to be sick and they will give you something that's not gonna solve your disease again it's just gonna keep you sick and even there is you're not gonna have longer you're gonna have shorter so now it's like it's not the worst case because we're losing a little bit of under longevity and with the concept of okay if you get sick and most of us if not all of us will have a chronic disease and how can we first not have you get sick early in your life? You know why we should get the first cancer at age 50 or the first diabetes diagnosis at age 50 why not push those at 70 and 80 and then when you get sick it should be we should do something a little bit more than just a pill if you think about it you know today most of us either don't take anything per day or say one or two pills food you take it three or four times per day so it could be the biggest pill or the biggest poison that you put in your body we're made of food that we eat and we eat every day so it's the same it's the one thing that we put in our body multiple times how come we have never thought about it as being one of the most powerful intervention for our prevention but also when we're sick and this is where we come we're called a nutra nutrition for longevity and we focus on how nutrition can impact our health span and healthy aging when we're healthy and how can we tailor nutrition for different health conditions so to support the patient with better management we're not here to be against the pills and actually we're here to empower the existing ways of the standard way of doing medicine which is very valid and has gone through a lot of evidence-based validation we're here to empower it we're here to tell the healthcare system it's about medicines but it's about food it's about exercise it's about stress it's about sleep it's about feeling happy and giving and receiving love all these factors gonna impact the outcome of a health condition and healthy aging so speaking of healthy aging and even longevity since longevity is kinda in your title of El Nutra as you and I know calorie restriction has been the only way to extend good life span and there's some debate in primates so one of the primate studies showed it did the other primate studies showed it didn't you and I I think both agree why those two studies are different and I think it was the selection of foods in those two studies but calorie restriction legitimately will never get adapted by the vast majority of human beings because like you say people wanna be happy and I do have some CR patients and I would not describe them as generally happy people is that that's being kind I guess but your program tell us about ProLong and tell us about the food company that you guys now have how does that fit into having us have a great lifespan yeah so the research that I talked about on the fasting week night before is in the clinical trial now you mentioned the name of our first product which is not positioned for disease but it's positioned for healthy aging as you mentioned in the ProLong is the first two market fasting mimicking diet it's a five days box of food you receive it you can order it you get it at home either you know we have 11,500 clinics now registered to recommend ProLong to their patients and if you're healthy you can take it three to four times a year to again optimize your weight maintain healthy level of metabolic balance and enhance cellular cleaning we have studied fasting and aging for the last 20 years and the fasting mimicking diet is the culmination of what can we do today in society to help people like you said not be on an everyday change on the lifestyle not impose a new lifestyle on them and nutrition tried that multiple times and whether it's low calorie whether it's the Atkins people want to enjoy their food and so how can we help them first enjoy healthy food that's the first solution number two is intermittently can we do some corrections to help them and the fasting mimicking diet is like the story of every college if you go to any college and you go into a class you have 85 to 90% of the students they don't study every day they try to balance a little bit of study with a little bit of school fun and there's a good 10% of the class that really is very studious in studies every day and these are the fit people in society now the 85, 90% they cannot study every day they want to enjoy life but what happens is five days before the exam they do stress themselves they study 18 hours, 20 hours a day and they go and they pass the exam the fasting mimicking diet is kind of that it's a superior level of stress it's not a calorie restriction level of hey I lose weight with time it's a true stress because fasting is the biggest stress you can impose on a cell every cell in your body needs calories and when every cell feels a fasting mode there's a transformation with the cells so it's a higher level of stress this is what the success of fasting is the soup the secret soup is the stress chronic calorie restriction is a little bit of drowning your bank account when you stop giving money is when your CFO will call you and say hey like zero money is coming let's do something about it and fasting is that higher stress which we when we're in college a lot of people did this five days before the exam and got by with an A minus sometimes a few times an A and most times a D plus and I think this is one of the most practical solution for society today is we definitely recommend people eat healthier during the 25 days but for five days a month they can do the fasting mimicking diet to clean the cells, adjust their weight and maintain healthy level of metabolism and you now rather than telling everybody to the rest of those days have pizza and ice cream and spare ribs and hot dogs you now have a food delivery company where does that fit in all this? So when we launched Prolon a lot of people, you know seeing how much time we put in the science and evidence behind it and trusted the company when we delivered and by the way for people eating us today this is not a project that's full for profit actually we donate back 60% our founder Professor Walter Longo and I do recommend you guys read a little bit more about him Walter founded the concept of fasting and fasting periodic fasting and fasting mimicking and he donates all his shares back to foundation so I do speak today about a product and what we have in a lot of pride because most of it is gets back donated so a lot of people believing in Prolon and doing it for five days it changes there one of the biggest advantages they say it changes my relationship with food and I feel after this five days I don't want to go back to my pizza and my pasta what can I do to eat healthier or to eat healthy and we used to recommend you know a plant base or a vegetarian or a pescatarian with you know couple of times three times a week fish, pescatarian diet and for some who really want to have some red meat and Mediterranean diet would be a recommendation a lot of people's feedback to us was you know I don't understand the ratios macros, macros what to buy how much to buy and I don't trust any grocery or place to go to and make sure that my food has not been sprayed with pesticides that the soil doesn't contain herbicides that the grains are not mixed doesn't have gluten I don't know if you saw the study but 37% of restaurants that they say they have gluten free food actually had gluten oh yeah so we decided to be the first company in history to go and own the entire supply chain of food meaning we went and longevity food specifically so we went around the world we brought seeds and grains from longevity zones where centenarian lives or people reaching 100 and beyond and we got that grain old grains hundreds and sometimes thousands years old so not genetically modified not mixed we brought it to the US we took a first big land in Westside Jersey in Long Valley specifically speaking about longevity and then we see them we grow them we harvest them and we package them into what we call the longevity diet vegetarian or pescatarian and then we ship them anywhere in the US within a second day delivery so what we achieved is bringing the true grains and seeds we are growing them with a guarantee why we wanted to grow them because we wanted to guarantee that there's no chemicals added to them we even have fish in the soil so we feed them the plants and we get the excretion back to the soil so that we're not bringing artificial fertilization we practice regenerative farming so it's one of kind of it's like a thousand year old piece of plant earth that came back that came back to today's time very pure, very clean and we package them in longevity packages and send them to any house around the US within the second day delivery so that completes a circle of eat healthy 25 days do your problem 5 days to rejuvenate and I think it's a full nutritional solution for people as they say you've got a covered soup to nuts yeah that project is you know it's been great it's called Nutrition for Longevity yeah it's been great seeing you again having you on the program okay so how do people find out about you and Dr. Longo's work where we go the best way to find about our mission in general is through the L-Nutra site L-Nutra this longevity through nutrition and then if you want to learn more specific about Prolon go to the Prolon site P-R-O-L-O-N and the food every day's healthy food is called Nutrition for Longevity it's actually nutritionforlongevity.com Dr. Walter Longo he's all over the internet and he has his book The Longevity Diet which talks about what we talked about today and he has been in a time magazine named him about the top 50 most influential people in health so anytime you Google his name you're going to see a lot about that then one of the purest gentlemen who I think one of the leaders in what we call this NutriTech space bringing technology and bringing science to nutrition spending decades of research to really proving something before it goes out to the market and I think this is what makes this a really exciting journey alright well as my listeners and my readers know I definitely give a shout out to Dr. Longo whenever I can and really appreciate both of your work and what you guys are doing and thanks so much for coming on the podcast now more than ever it's really important yeah thank you very very much and we'll see you soon hopefully yeah hopefully we'll see in person again soon one of these days yeah alright take care thanks again bye bye thanks thanks bye bye okay time for the audience question Neda Bachel on Instagram asks what should I eat to reduce arthritis pain in my knees and neck well I got news for you eat the plant paradox way and you will be amazed how your arthritis will lessen or go away I used to have such bad arthritis in my knees I wore braces to run and I don't have any arthritis anymore and I have so many patients that's one of the things they notice almost immediately when starting the program is their arthritis pain dramatically goes away great question okay now it's time for the review of the week karma by Kim on iTunes writes you make complex issues so easy to understand and you explain how we can apply them to our lives it's refreshing and inspirational and I no longer feel helpless in my own body well thanks a lot karma by Kim that's actually why we do this I hope I have a great way of making this easy to understand and you've just told me I do and I'm gonna keep doing it and thanks for giving us that feedback so we'll see you next week and please keep those comments coming in we read them I love them and we'll hopefully read yours on the air soon bye bye before you go I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes Google Play Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you