 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Can limiting how much meat and dairy you eat help you live longer? Well, according to a growing amount of research, it actually can. In fact, the less animal protein you eat, probably the better off you are. But if you want to live the longest, healthiest life possible and don't like the idea of adopting a completely vegan diet, don't worry. Because today I'm going to share some alternative ways to limit your animal protein intake without having to give it up. On this episode of the Dr. Gundry podcast, I'll be sharing details about my five-day modified vegan fast in both the plant paradox and the longevity paradox books. I'll also share my tips and instructions for fasting mimicking and intermittent fasting. Both of these things can help you live a longer, healthier life. So stay tuned to hear more. Okay, so let's start first with why limiting animal protein helps your health. Well, I've written about this in the plant paradox and the longevity paradox. And let me start with the Adventus community of Loma Linda, California, where I was a professor for a great part of my career. As you know, the Loma Lindens are one of the blue zones of the world and Loma Linda is the only blue zone in North America or South America. And I think that's important to know because the Adventus as a religion in general are promoting vegan or vegetarian belief and eating. And in fact, in our hospital there was only a vegetarian selection of food. There was no animal products except for cheese and eggs. But what's interesting in the long-term studies of some of the longest living people in the world, the Adventus of Loma Linda, it's actually the vegans that have the longest lifespan and best health span followed by the lacto-ovo vegetarians followed by the pescatarians, followed by the chicken eaters, followed by those who cheat and have other forms of animal protein. And this has been now studied for well over 20 years on an ongoing basis. And my colleagues at Loma Linda have published on this and I've documented in my books. And sadly for every amount of animal protein that's added to the Adventus diet, we see increases in heart disease, decreases in longevity and increases in cancer. And I've postulated on this in all of my books on why that might be. Now there's been some excellent studies out of St. Louis University looking at calorie restriction society members who as you may or may not know in general reduce their caloric intake by about 20-25% over normal because of the very strong experimental evidence that calorie restriction extends health span number one and in all animals studied except for resus monkeys extend lifespan. And as I wrote about in the longevity paradox, there are two competing resus monkey studies. Both showed improved health span. These animals lived better lives for as long as they live. One study showed that they lived longer lives than comparable resus monkeys. The other did not show a benefit in lifespan. These studies are different believe it or not in the amount of protein that was in these two diets. And lo and behold the protein in the resus monkeys that lived longer was less than the protein in the group that did not live as long. And this is actually confirmed in the St. Louis studies of the calorie restriction society. They looked at a hormone that I measure in all my patients called insulin like growth factor. It's abbreviated IGF-1 if you're looking for it. And you can ask your doctor to measure it. And insulin growth factor is probably our best way of looking at how a receptor called mTOR, and I've talked about this before, is turned on. Now quite frankly we have fairly high levels of insulin like growth factor. We're young because quite frankly we're growing. But as we age and kind of cross 40 years of age, we actually see that insulin like growth factor one levels IGF-1 should start falling. Why? Because if you look at people who have extreme longevity and are doing great in their late 90s, early 100s, they have very low IGF-1s. If you look at instead cancer patients who develop cancer, they remarkably have high insulin like growth factors, unfortunately. I'll give you an example later on of a recent patient. So at St. Louis University they took calorie restriction members and quite frankly the calorie restriction society does not bar eating animal products. In fact they do. So they asked some of the calorie restriction society members to keep calorie restricted, but changed to a vegan diet rather than having animal protein in their diet. And lo and behold their IGF-1 levels plummeted when they took down animal protein. Now why is that? Well simplistically mTOR, the mammalian target of rapamycin, we now know that tor exists in all creatures including yeast, is an energy sensor and it senses simplistically amino acids from protein and sugars and that's what it is interested in. It turns out that there are certain amino acids in animal protein that are far more abundant than there are in corresponding plant proteins and experiments have shown that if you lessened those specific amino acids in animal protein then you correspondingly decrease the activation of mTOR. And believe me we in the longevity community do every trick possible to trick mTOR from being turned on. And if one of the easiest ways to do that is dropping off animal protein so much the better. Now so many of you including me having been raised in Omaha, Nebraska think that animal protein eating meat, animal protein of any kind whether that's chicken or fish or eggs or cheeses is essential for health. I got news for you there's absolutely no evidence that any of these are essential to health and or to build muscle for that matter. I again like to remind my patients that gorilla does not eat animal protein and he has more muscle than you will ever have in your life. A horse only eats grass and I got news for you more muscle than you have. In fact the largest animals on earth are actually plant eaters. So the idea that we can't grow and develop normally just eating plants is one of the great myths and that myth of course has been perpetrated by our industries of in agriculture of meat consumption and dairy consumption. And myths are really easy to do as long as you got advertising dollars. Okay now as you know I wrote in the plant paradox and longevity paradox that beef, lamb, and pork in their tissue in their muscles if you will have a sugar molecule called Nu5GC that we actually make a antibody to. We have a different sugar molecule that we share with fish and chicken called Nu5AC and while that distinction is only one molecule difference when we see Nu5GC and we make an antibody to it by mistake we often attack this sugar molecule on our blood vessels and there's several papers that suggest that one of the reasons meat eating is associated with more coronary artery disease is an autoimmune attack on our blood vessels and I think we should be aware of that. The other thing is that cancer cells use Nu5GC to shield themselves from detection by our immune system and so that may account for the very strong epidemiology linked correspondence between for instance colon cancer development or even breast cancer development and meat eating. Now those associations are actually fairly strong but it could just be that the sugar molecule and beef, lamb, and pork may be part of the consequence not just the fact that you're eating animal muscle. Now I understand that going vegan or nearly vegan isn't something everybody wants to do in fact I don't do that. As most of you know I am a self-described veg aquarium in that most of the food I eat are plants or vegetables and I supplement my diet usually on the weekends with shellfish and occasional wild fish but that doesn't mean that I don't eat meat and in fact believe it or not probably every three months I will have a grass-fed, grass-finished piece of steak and you can you can visit me at Lucky's and Montecito where I eat that grass-fed, grass-finished steak every now and then. Do I do it every day? No. Do I do it once a week? No. It is a rare occasion. Hey I'm from Omaha okay I gotta do it occasionally. So if you're in the group that says you know there's no way I'm gonna go vegan there's no way I'm even gonna go vegetarian. I like my meat, I like my chicken, I like my fish. That's okay. Here's the exciting part. So I've become I think good friends with Dr. Walter Longo who's the head of longevity research at USC Medical Center and I think Dr. Longo is rightfully one of the greatest researchers in longevity and how to achieve the benefits of calorie restriction or the benefits of fasting without actually doing either one. I want to just talk about fasting for a moment I know I've talked about this before but fasting has certainly come a vogue again and for the average American listening to this fasting a water fast a prolonged water fast unless you're properly prepared and taking protection with certain supplements like activated charcoal like chlorella like liver enzyme detoxification supplements then you probably don't want to do a prolonged water fast because unfortunately heavy metals and pollutants are stored in our fat and when you and me go on a prolonged water fast and I'm talking three days or more you start using up the fat in your fat cells well duh but as you use up that fat outcome those heavy metals and pollutants now the problem is the liver does a horrible job of detoxifying these guys and even getting rid of them and I've talked about this before you actually excrete your heavy metals in bile back into your intestines and then your body reabsorbs them and I see so many people who have been doing fast and they have incredibly high levels of mercury and lead and cadmium in their blood while they're doing this without realizing they've actually released this from their fat cells that tuna that swordfish that has toxic levels of mercury in their flesh are big strong animals because the fat is in the sorry the pollutants are in the fat where they can't do any harm so in our modern society fasting prolonged water fasting should be done with caution should be done under medical supervision and you've got to use the right supplements to help you with that fast okay so what can you do instead well thanks to Dr. Longo's work which I cite in all of my books what he did was say well wait a minute we know that eliminating animal protein for a period of time changes how him tore is turned on and he actually designed experiments first in mice and now replicated in humans that show that a five-day period consecutively of a modified vegan fast where you're only eating about six hundred eight hundred calories of basically vegetables you can certainly have fats from plants but you eliminate all animal protein you eliminate dairy you eliminate eggs and so you have dramatically dropped the amount of animal-based amino acids in your diet and what he found was all you need is five days in a row of doing this consecutively and you will act in terms of activating stem cells activating your immune system activating anti-cancer genes as if you had been on a fast a calorie restricting diet for the entire month I mean think about that it's as if you're going to take your mitochondria the energy producing organelles and all your cells that I'm going to deal with in the energy paradox boy are you going to love your mitochondria you take them on a retreat you take them and kind of take their work away from them for five days in a row and that's the key again you got to do it five days in a row you can't say well I'm going to do it once a week for the next five weeks Dr. Longo's work is shown sorry that's not going to do it but the exciting thing is you only have to do it for five days so for instance this week I've done that exact thing I've done a modified vegan fast so I started on Sunday and I finished last night and all I had was vegan food now as you know I do it even weirder I don't eat breakfast I don't eat lunch during that time so I'm eating my calories in the evening from six to eight o'clock at night so I'm I'm done I've done with my modified vegan fast was I hungry absolutely not was I stuffed absolutely not but I enjoyed myself and guess what for four of those meals shocker I had pressure cooked beans and mushrooms and olive oil that was my meal and a bunch of herbs in there and it was easy and quite frankly beans as long as their pressure cooked are one of the better foods that you can eat so there now what can you eat not eat during the fast well like I said no animal protein that's the key the other thing is you can't have 3,000 calories of pasta and tomato sauce you can't have a lot of calories that's the other piece why because whatever calories you're eating whether they're carbohydrates whether they're fat whether they're proteins and proteins from plants your mitochondria have to use one or the other or all three to make energy and what's really exciting that you're going to learn about in the energy paradox is that if you number one limit your mitochondrial choices to one or two of the fuels it needs and then limit the amount of work that they have to do they get to relax I talked a lot about this in the plant paradox thinking about your mitochondria as workers on an assembly line and doing three shifts a day to try and keep up with your eating imagine the benefit to them of really reducing the amount of time you're eating and we'll talk about that in a second and remote reducing the amount that you're eating they go oh man this is great I am on vacation I don't have to work I can you know watch binge watch Netflix instead of make energy for you question can you drink coffee yeah you can drink coffee in fact I really strongly recommend if you do not react to coffee you should have coffee as a part of your program but don't put any cream in it it's going to have some animal product how about alcohol I've written before that I did a six-day alcohol red wine fast now no I didn't drink alcohol all day but I stayed in ketosis having a glass of red wine every night during a six-day fast and there have been other documentations that red wine will not put you out of ketosis but do you go on an alcohol binge no is there any preferred time of month to do this so this is the beautiful thing about it you can do it whenever you want I think it's easiest to do during the week because what the heck hopefully a lot of us are back at work now and we're back on a schedule right now with COVID if you're still locked down you can do it anytime you want because one day is exactly the same as the next I feel like Bill Murray some days on in Groundhog Day where every day is exactly the same can I spread these days out over a month no you can Dr. Longo's work is says sorry and I certainly agree with him you've got to reduce your time to five days in a row and it's really not hard particularly if you do it in a work week next question can you tweak the schedule if you're going on vacation or something sure in fact quite frankly when I used to go over to Europe and sampling with chefs I would find the best time to do this was when I arrived back in the United States I was usually carrying a few pounds that I didn't want and so I could reset the clock immediately by going on a five-day modified vegan fast how do you do this well in both the plant paradox and the longevity paradox I actually give you the recipes and how to do this it's actually really quite easy just eat vegetables if you want to make beans a part of this please please please pressure cook your beans I use Eden brand beans which have been great they're already pressure-cooked but the modern Instapot which I profile in you know my new book the plant paradox family cookbook the Instapot makes this so easy you can use soups you can use mushrooms you can just eat salads I have done this just eating salads for five days you can put in avocados you can put in anything you want in those salads just go easy on the olive oil during this time because remember olive oil has about a hundred and fifty calories in a tablespoon so you're going to use up your allotment of calories very quickly when you increase your oils and when you increase your nuts so just for this five days back off everybody asked during fasting or during this time period can you take them yes whenever I'm fasting I continue to take my supplements and know it doesn't break your fast now if this five-day fast sounds too extreme for you and you're saying there's no way I can make it five days eating 800 calories a day okay believe it or not you can but as I've written about particularly in the longevity paradox when you're going to hear a whole lot more in the energy paradox the more you can intermittent fast or time restrict feeding or both the better now there is a difference between intermittent fasting and time restricted feeding although in the webosphere those two terms get intermingled the original concept of intermittent fasting was a couple of days a week you would reduce the amount of calories you ate to about five to six hundred calories and the other days of the week you would eat normally and this was popularized sometimes called the five to diet sometimes called the eat fast eat diet the original research was actually done in mice and they found that you could take mice who are nighttime feeders and for 24 hours not give them anything to eat and then for the next 24 hours give them two days worth of food so that every 48 hours they ate exactly the same amount that they would have eaten every day and compare that to mice that were given their regular food every day and what was startling was that the mice who ate the same amount of calories but ate them every other day lived essentially twice as long as the mice who ate every day now this has been studied in humans and quite frankly the day off for humans in other words you get to eat for 24 hours and then you don't get to eat at all for the next 24 hours and then you get to eat again and the same benefits were found in terms of improvement in metabolism improvement in insulin resistance but quite frankly it was extremely hard for people to stick with people really got grouchy and angry on that 24-hour off cycle so at least in a clinical situation this doesn't work very well on the other hand if you know that two days out of the week and with my patients I use Monday and Thursday as the days of the week to do this you know that those days you're still going to get to eat but it's not very much it's about 600 calories but all the rest of the days you actually do get to eat now why Monday and Thursday well Monday you're coming off of a weekend and the odds are you probably overindulged Thursday is the day before the weekend and you're probably going to overindulge so that Thursday is a pretty easy day to cut back and my studies and other studies have shown that implementing this actually makes most people lose about a pound a week and as I've written about before a pound a week can't be beat in terms of weight loss okay so that's intermittent fasting now time restricted feeding is different time restricted feeding means we're going to limit the number of hours during the day that you're going to consume calories now there's actually several different ways of doing this as many of you know Dr. Dale Bredesen who wrote the end of all Alzheimer's and who has a new book coming out in August called the end of Alzheimer's program which I've had the pleasure of reading and reviewing and Dr. Bredesen and I have become good friends through the years he thinks that for best mental health you should absolutely have a 12 hour window of not eating every day so that 12 hours you're not eating and 12 hours you can eat what does that look like well let's suppose you let's suppose you start eating at six o'clock in the morning you get to eat all day and you stop at six o'clock at night that means if you start eating at eight o'clock in the morning you stop eating at eight o'clock at night so that's a 12 hour window of eating now he and I both agree that if you carry the Alzheimer's gene the ApoE4 gene that 30% of people carry that's about 90 million Americans carry this gene you should absolutely scrunch the time period that you're eating down to 10 hours eight hours maybe six hours and Dr. Massen from the National Institutes of Aging has shown in a brilliant paper recently that probably a six hour window of eating is the most effective way of maximizing your health span and your lifespan so what does that look like in other words let's you eat at six o'clock and you finish at noon you eat at noon you finish at six that's a six hour eating window now the important thing to realize is that's the time you get to consume food you don't get any snacks in those other times that you're eating window and as you'll see in the energy paradox there's incredibly good reasons why this is going to maximize your health reduce your chance of developing cancer reduce your chance of developing heart disease and maybe most importantly reduce your chance of dementia or Parkinson's or any of the other neurologic diseases and you're going to learn why that is in the energy paradox now one more way to do this which is done by millions and millions and millions of people around the world on a yearly basis is called the Ramadan fast and for those of you who are not familiar with this practice during Ramadan the 30 days of Ramadan you have to eat your first meal a day before sunrise and you can't eat or drink again until after sunset and there have been some beautifully designed papers that show when you do that when you go about a 12-hour window of not eating or drinking not drinking water imagine that that you actually activate tons of anti-cancer genes you become literally a anti-cancer patient by just not eating and drinking for 12 hours and that effect works during that time period by the way you can also lose some weight during that time period but interestingly most Ramadan fast don't lose weight and I have a number of patients who practice this fast and it's interesting almost none of them lose weight during Ramadan because quite frankly there's a lot of eating before sunrise and a whole lot of eating after sunset but it's very effective at turning off cancer causing genes and turning on cancer suppressing genes so keep that in mind that pretty much gives you the idea on how to do this what happens if you get hungry well first of all remember our ancestors were hungry embrace the hunger number one believe it or not you are not going to die from this most of us in this country about 80% of us are insulin resistant and so that when you really cut calories many of us are not able to make it our blood sugars drop because insulin is pulling sugar out of our system please don't go have a glass of orange juice have some nuts it's one of the easiest ways to get through this time period have a tablespoon of MCT oil medium chain triglycerides another easy way to get through this and those those steps are all in the book in fact in all my books does intermittent fasting make you lose weight yeah if you do it right you definitely will lose weight and people want to know do I do this well as you know I think this was my 18th year and I wrote about this back in 2007 I was actually as far as I know the the first person to describe time restricted feeding as a tool during January through June 1st during the week I don't eat any breakfast I don't eat any lunch and I eat all my calories from 6 to 8 o'clock at night so I have a 22 window hour window of not eating and during the weekends I don't eat breakfast but I do eat lunch and dinner usually so I've been doing this now I think this was my 18th year you're right it's now June and guess what I can break my fast if you will but I didn't eat breakfast today and I'm not eating lunch today so dog on it that's just a it's just a habit for me so it's doable okay I mentioned the energy paradox book and you'll notice when I posted about take your mitochondria on a spa treatment a five-day vegan fast absolutely gives your mitochondria the little energy producing organelles in all of your cells in your heart in your brain every part of you a much-deserved rest and the more you can rest your mitochondria the longer and better you are going to live and the stuff you're going to see in the energy paradox on why you want to do this and what we're actually doing to our mitochondria currently well number one blow your mind well number two scare you to death that you can't believe you that you're doing this and number three will hopefully really cut you back from snacking it's probably one of the worst things that you could do for your mitochondria that I'll show you why let me give you a recent example about insulin like growth factor from a couple of patients one patient with some autoimmune issues a young woman we through our testing determined that she was very sensitive to egg protein egg yolk and we took her eggs away from her and on her next set of blood work number one it was one of the big causes over autoimmune disease good news but number two her insulin like growth factor which was actually pretty doggone good dropped about 40 45 points which is a dramatic drop and she looked at it she said oh my gosh that was the eggs you know I love eggs I was having a couple eggs a day that was that was my breakfast and she said that did that and I said yeah and you know that's exactly the point recently actually this past week I saw a patient for the first time my PA had seen him before who was diagnosed with prostate cancer and he's 70 years old and he and his urologist elected to watch and wait and to monitor him and when he joined us about six months ago he was overweight he had some insulin resistance as do most Americans and he had an elevated insulin like growth factor is insulin group insulin like growth factor was about 200 and I saw him this week and over the six month period of time he's no longer insulin resistant he's lost some weight but perhaps most exciting he is insulin like growth factor went from about 200 to 104 it dropped in half in six months time and he had read my books and you could believe the excitement on his face because quite frankly an insulin like growth factor of a hundred is very unlikely to stimulate cancer cells to grow so then after we go through all this and he says well isn't that interesting because my PSA the way we measure how active his prostate cancer is is plummeting and his urologist goes what the heck you know look at that what what's that all about and so he got a big grin on his face he said look at that my insulin like growth factor is down I'm not feeding my cancer cells anymore so take that to the bank and as I tell my patients as we get older I guarantee you there is nothing in us that we want to grow so intermittently fast time-restrict feeding make your mitochondria go on a five-day vegan fast once a month and watch the exciting things that are going to happen to you your skin your mind your overall outlook on life and when it happens embrace the hunger your ancestor did it all the time and we can do okay that's it we've got a comment from e-welford on YouTube wrote I was wondering if you could recommend a brand of almond butter it's impossible to tell by reading labels if the blanching process extended long enough to remove the skins before grinding it turns out that all almonds are blanched with steam even natural raw ones before they are sold in the US okay let's dismiss that myth first of all blanching does not mean pasteurizing bylaw in the United States all almonds must be pasteurized even the raw ones guess what aren't raw they are pasteurized bylaw they have to be number two you'll notice that almonds aren't on the approved list of nuts in any of my lists they're also not on the not approved list of nuts and I did that on purpose because the peel of an almond quite frankly has a lectin that many of my patients particularly with rheumatoid arthritis do react to so you'll see a lot of almond flowers that are made from ground up almonds and usually they have a slightly brown color there are blanched almonds where the peel has been removed and for instance marcona almonds the peel has been soaked off and removed and those are okay but I can't tell you the number of patients with autoimmune diseases who go on a almond flour cook a kick they're making almond flour cookies they're baking almond flour bread they're having almond flour pasta and their markers start to go back up and we take that almond flour away from them and their markers start going back down now most people are not going to do this but that's why the almonds are not on the approved or the disapproved list quite frankly they're far better nuts to use particularly we should all realize that almonds are the most water intensive using crop that we grow we have planted so many almond trees particularly in California to keep up with demand please use a much more environmentally friendly nut in your cooking yes there are a couple of almond butters that are made from peeled almonds I have no relationship with these companies almondy is one of them Barney's is another so if you got to have your almond butter please get the peeled almonds but there's much better nuts that you can get macadamia nut butter is just marvellously sinful walnut butter is great there's better butters out there pistachio butter is phenomenal please back off on the almonds appreciate all right that's all we have time for today you know I hope I was able to answer some of your questions about animal protein fasting and how diet will affect your lifespan and most importantly your health span and I'll see you next week and I'm doing this because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you 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 podcast because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you