 which means that the next day, after you've done your fast, you are just energized, you're ready to kill it, and you can do an unbelievable workout. So what started you down this path towards the keto diet and intermittent fasting? What piqued your interest? Well, let me give you an example of how I changed my views. Many years ago, I thought it was foolish, and that's being kind for people who were fasting. I thought clearly the evidence is obvious that you need to eat all the time. And in fact, 90% of the population, according to Sachin Ponda, eats more than 12 hours a day. More than 12 hours a day. I know that's not you. I mean, you have a one to two hour window frequently. But so, you know, most all of us are doing the same thing, believing the same. And I changed that. And I recognized that, especially as keto started coming on board and experimenting with it, and Marxism taught me about metabolic flexibility. I tried it for myself and was just amazed at what it did. Then I started to finally appreciate some of the subtle molecular biological components, which we'll talk about further today, like autophagy and stem cell activation. And the cycling, which is so important. I'll share more of how I changed my views as we go on, but you've got to learn and adapt and really modify things as you acquire new information. So, your latest book, Keto Fast, there's a lot of books out there on the keto diet. That's the new buzz thing. So, you know, and I've read your book and I thought, you know, it's fabulous folks listening and watching. It gave you a nice blurb that's on your back cover. So, you're preaching to the choir, but I want you to preach to our listeners and our viewers. Sure. What new approaches are you taking in the book, which I think are just great? Yeah. Well, thank you. The basic strategy is to first become metabolically flexible, which I discussed in my previous book about perfuel. That is the primary issue. And you do that with a simple step that doesn't cost anything, saves you money and radically improves your health. What is that? Compress your eating window. When I give a lecture, I feel I succeeded if I can get that one single message to the audience. Compress your eating window and you're a big fan of that and have been actually much before I understood that fact. So, what's a compressed eating window? 12 hours, which 90% people aren't doing, is not enough, I think. 14 hours probably starts to get the benefit. And I think a sweet spot of 16 to 18, I think most of us don't have to go to year level. I remember I only do that six months out of the year. Yeah. I was at two hours and then you go to four hours? Yeah. So, the rest of the year, I go to about 16 hours. Yeah. Okay, 16 hours. That's fine. Then that's not a big deal. I'm glad because to do that long term, I think you're going to run into some complications because really one of the basic tenets of the book is to go into these cycles, which you were designed to, because the human species was never designed to have access to food 24-7. That wasn't the case. So, we have to replicate that pattern if we want to maximize our biological benefits and what our genetic are designed for. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. As you know, my new book, The Longevity Paradox, also stresses exactly what you're saying. We should be eating in circadian rhythms. There is just utmost evidence, even in looking at modern hunter gatherers, that there is cyclically feeding periods and there are extended periods of time where we do not eat or we eat very minimally. So, this cycle that you so eloquently talk about in keto-fast is really important. So, give me an example. What does that mean for the average person? How do you in keto-fast structure this? Well, after I wrote Fat for Fuel, I was very excited and was pretty firmly convinced, this is an example of me changing my views, that the strongest, the most powerful metabolic intervention I've ever seen in nearly four decades of clinical practice was multiple-day water fasting. I mean, this profound benefit, we could talk a bit about that if you haven't discussed that previously. So, I decided to write a book which was keto-fast and as I started to research a book and discuss a network with some of the experts in the field, I realized that that was an incorrect observation. It is a powerful intervention. There's no question. It's been done for thousands of years. It's an integral part of virtually every major religion on the planet and it wouldn't persist for so long if there wasn't some value to it. Clearly, there's value. But what I learned is that it was useful historically, but we've evolved into the 21st century and not as a species, but more of our technology. And as a result of the technology, we've accumulated not thousands, but tens of thousands of these chemicals, industrial chemicals that we're all exposed to. It's virtually impossible not to be. I mean, it is. Virtually everyone watching this is. I mean, you'd have to be in a remote rural isolated part of the planet and that's no one watching this. So anyway, most of these chemicals are fat soluble and they get stored. They typically immediately metabolize. They're stored for safety in your fat cells. And when you do multi-day water fasting, you're using your fat for energy and then the fat soluble toxins are released, go into your bloodstream, and they cause side effects for a number of reasons. One, because they're toxic, but primarily because the people don't have ramped up enough detoxification to address that. So I thought that was a massive flaw. And I developed strategies to accommodate for this and essentially develop the 21st century fasting, which has multiple other benefits, side effects and benefits like in SCOS. Yeah, I think that's so important. Actually, when I wrote my first book years ago, I was very impressed with Dr. Ray Wolford's observations in Biosphere 2, where those folks, he was a pathologist at UCLA, as you know, and he actually looked at the biospherian's heavy metals in their blood when they lost literally 35% of their body weight in the first six months because they were literally starving to death. Yes. And he was really excited about it actually, but when he looked, he thought it was a wonderful thing. But when he looked at their heavy metals and their toxins, they went massively high, and it actually took them a year to return down to normal. And I write about that in the longevity paradox as well. And I think your observation, and Dr. Wolford's and certainly mine, that we've got to be very careful with everybody going on these six, seven day water fasts because we do not have a system to handle these heavy metals. And again, Dr. Wolford proved this 20 years ago. And so I think if we take nothing away else from keto fasts, I think your observation that, wow, I was really into water fasting and now, wait a minute, let's put the brakes on here because we now have some data that we ought to be cautious about this. Here's the other benefit of doing this keto fasting, which is a partial fast. And I'll explain in great detail what that consists of. But essentially, you can do it because it's so easy to do. You can do it twice a week, which means you can do it 100 more than 100 times a year and get all the magnificent benefits I described earlier. And I'm sure that you describe in your book 100 times a year, rather than doing it in five, 10, 15 times a year. So collectively, you're just radically improving the metabolic benefits by this type of intervention strategy. And in addition, when you do only a partial fast, which is essentially a two-day fast, it's a little bit less than a two-day fast instead of a five-day fast, or a fasting mimicking diet, which in Walter Longo's case is 1,000 calories the first day and 750 less the next four, is still not enough. And you're still pretty beat up by the fifth day. And it's really hard to get into the scoop of things because another benefit that I did not mention earlier of fasting, and I don't see it on your hand. I was looking, but I don't see your oar ring. You're not wearing an hour. Oh, it's there. Okay. I have to use a backup computer, and my monitor resolution is pretty poor, so it was hard to see your finger. But yeah, so there you go. So you would know this, and you have done the fasting, and I'm sure you can confirm that on the day you are fasting, your recovery rate of recovery index, as aura turns, it goes through the roof. Typically, it goes up 10 or 20 points, which means that the next day after you've done your fast, you are just energized. You're ready to kill it, and you can do an unbelievable workout and really challenge your body and activate the switches to turn on muscle growth, something that we call anabolism, which you don't want to do when you're fasting. And the cool thing is, is that when you are fasting, your growth hormone goes up by 300%. Now, you might say, well, growth hormone increases IGF1. Doesn't that suppress autophagy? And normally it does, but when you're fasting, the receptors in the liver become relatively resistant, so your growth hormone can behind your IGF1 is still low. So what does that mean when you have high growth hormone? It means when you work out and you have high growth hormone? My gosh, it's like taking steroid shots. So you get all this benefit. So it gives you the opportunity to really add an exercise program on top of the autophagy, because you want to exercise when you're fasting. And then right after you're fasting, you feast. You have loads of branch chain amino acids, loads of healthy carbohydrates, and you're just having a party. It's great. So in other words, this is not all about deprivation a lot of times. Oh, heck no, heck no. And the beautiful thing about it, and you know this, once you're fasting, the other side benefit of this into the mental clarity is that the hunger disappears. So someone like you, it's like, you're not even doing it because you normally, if you're eating one meal, that's it. You just lower the calorie rate. So then basically you eat your next meal and you're off to the races. So it's, you don't even think about it once you have that restricted window of six to eight hours. It becomes as easy as can be. You know, it's interesting. My research in Yale was on evolutionary human biology. And one of the interesting things is, and this has been confirmed, and you know that actually when you are fasting, when you're literally starving, your performance actually increases. And the reason evolutionary wise, if we were starving, we had to catch that animal. And if we didn't catch that animal, that, you know, that was curtains. Yeah, that was it. And so it's fascinating that, you know, we have a built-in evolutionary advantage to perform well while fasting. It makes incredible sense just to bring it down to what people can understand. And then of course, when we caught that animal or we found the fruit tree or the honey tree, you know, we didn't sit there, oh, I'm only going to eat a little bit. 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 a 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, you know, 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 mix the grain 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 they're 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 US. 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? We're instead of having the several times fried oil and some kinds of trans fat is 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, a 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, doesn't run fast, doesn't see us, 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 in 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 a 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 U.S. 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 U.S. is one of the kinds of fasting which we're going to explain today. And I'm going to 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 a few hours up to two days. And then prolonged fasting is when you cross 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 you know 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 as a for neoglyceum genesis. When you cross that the stress is so big that now there's cellular action we're going to talk about that with prolonged fasting. But just for people to keep in mind is when you cross the second day there's something called autophagy and the cells tries to rejuvenate to survive and we're going to 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 a little bit the period 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 you know we used to eat you know so the family would sit eat at 6 7 p.m. 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 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 it's a light growth factor so you're in more an anabolic state you're always grow 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 same the fat same 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 again 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 the day and night cycle which you know in 2017 the Nobel prize of 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 may most of them treat diabetes or or obesity or you know primary care they're proponents of a little bit extending the overnight fast all the way to 16 hours what we call the 16 8 intermittent fasting and they do it because their patients need to lose weight fast and you to correct the metabolic you know 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 8 16 hours fasting at hours of time restricted eating and it's becoming very very popular there's a little bit of caution here that I would I would tell people about is that 16 8 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 you know 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 buddy tells you that you start feeling a headache you start feeling weak and actually you do lose the weight when you when you extend the fast because your buddy needs calories and your brain first and foremost is is is is operating at peak in the morning your your cardiovascular you know the heart needs to 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 in and if you need to extend 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 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 what do you think about the Ramadan fast as a as a healthy well we want to clarify the Ramadan fast is follows the 12 hours which what we're talking about but is is it concept coming from meaning practice 12 with with the old type of religion the orthodox type the the the recent days were feasting in the 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 a is another big article I recommend people read it in Gemma oncology it talks about breast cancer even not just prevention but also women with the breast cancer though I think they were looking at the nurse health study and they 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 of the cancer which which makes sense you know 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 you're less pushing your extra calories to go to into fat and therefore insulin resistance which is one of the mothers of many diseases we traditionally people think carb is 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 this that's the that's the fast thing the timer 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 fine financially you want it to increase but in the health wise you don't want the fat to increase your reserves to increase and this is leading to diseases in multiple multiple directions not just diabetes but cancer Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease that there was intermittent fasting if you want if you know the we clarified that intermittent fasting and time restriction 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 and if I need some credit I'll take it from the liver but I'm okay two days you know 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 day and a half or people two and a 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 you can help you know 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 going to have to come back to your company and restructure you're going to have to be more cost-effective in the way they 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 some damage that you can fix what we call cellular rejuvenation or and the more scientifically 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 its operation it's we call it restructuring in a in a financial in the 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 etc 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 the excess weight you're impacting your metabolic markers cholesterol triglyceride hb1c etc 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 a big theory a big thing to observe in the last three four years and a big topic talked about i want to add one thing which is it is a natural thing it's important because every decade we have a craze about a diet you know one day it's the atkins the other day it's the keto the third is the paleo and these are human made diets which they have certain value but certain disadvantages actually the best thing you can do for your life and and 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 fast in order to improve the cells and and rejuvenate the cells and i think rematching our body with what we were meant to eat is the diet is not going to be a fat but it's going to 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 going to not eat anything for for three days come on i gotta go to work i gotta get the kids to school they're driving me crazy uh and you you hear this and you know this so take me to you know how do you guys get this crazy idea of designing a plant-based diet that mimics fasting yes so um you're right and you know we um we as a neutral the company that i'm currently the CEO of we're a spin-off from University of Southern California and USC has a longevity institute which is probably the the leading institute in the world looking into fasting and like you said initially we're just doing water fasting and when we prove the value of water fast in flea and and and 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 in a human trial they don't want to fast for three or four or five days right and and we like a little bit more than four to five days because you want to at least a couple of days of cellular rejuvenation so people get in fast in from four to five days and the National Institute of Health and the National Cancer Institute were you know 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 you know we talk a lot about the positives about fasting there are negatives about fasting you know when you stay for four days without food you literally or water or minerals or vitamins it's not a it's not a joke it's 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 they were 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 okay 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 that the sensors are not triggered so to simplify it is you know if you're the CEO of a company you need a million dollars to operate the company if if we give you 200,000 you're gonna feel fully satisfied that you're gonna just not restructure no you're gonna still feel that stress and it's a little bit more complicated the 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 macadamia and and other nuts again which historically nutrition companies didn't want to sell they're the most expensive and then it's made of fiber-rich you know source of carbs and 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 is food and it was an amazing discovery to me it's probably the biggest discovery nutrition for the last you know years and years and now we're in 18 clinical trials trying to see what are the benefits of a fasting mimicking diet on different 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 we actually have out of the 18 trials probably we have eight on cancer we have two two trials on diabetes few on cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases we cannot today without really getting the results really you know mention or position the diet for any of those but in 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 is you know 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 cancer is a cell that lost its inhibition keeps replicating without without stopping is why it grows fast and then could spreads around you know 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 and 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 it cannot grow as fast as I would like to to grow what we've observed in mice with the fasting when we can diet is because we're going on a solid you know three four days of fasting and in humans we do four days and then we add one day of refeeding but now you're really really starved 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 and I'm I'm not against any medicine actually I just I'm against the concept that medicine 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 going to solve your disease again just going to keep you sick and even there is you're not going to have longer you're going to have shorter so now it's like it's not the worst case because we're losing a little bit of under longevity I'm 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 sick early in your life you know why why where 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 uh just a pill if you think about it you know today most of us either don't take anything at 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 it's the same it's the one thing that would 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 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 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 going to impact the outcome of of a health condition and and healthy aging so speaking of healthy aging and even longevity since longevity is kind of in your title of l-nutra as you and i know calorie restriction has been the 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 study 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 want to be happy and i do have some cr patients and i would not describe them as generally happy people um is that that's being kind i guess um yeah so but your program um tell us tell us about pro long and tell us about the food company that you guys now have how does that fit fit in into having us have a great lifespan yeah so you know the the the research that i talked about on the fasting mimicking diet before is in the clinical trial now you mentioned the the the name of our first product which is not positioned for disease but it's positioned for healthy aging as you mentioned in the prolon is the first to market fasting mimicking diet it's a five days box of food you receive it you can order to get it at home either uh you know we have 11 500 clinics now registered to to recommend prolon to their to their patients and uh 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 uh and enhance cellular cleaning um we 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 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 we 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 in 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 percent of the students they don't study every day they uh you know they they try to balance a little bit of study with a little bit of uh with a little bit of school fun and there's a good 10 percent of the class that really is very studious and studies every day and these are the fit people in society now the 85 90 percent they cannot study every day they want to enjoy life but what happens is five days before the exam they do stress themselves they stood they study you know 18 hours 20 hours a day and they go and they pass the exam the fasting mimicking light 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 two stress because fasting is the biggest stress you can impose on the 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 back 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 you know did this five days before the exam and you know got by with an a minus sometimes a few times an a and most times a d plus and 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 light to clean the cells adjust their weight and maintain healthy level of metabolism what i did agree with our kind of or md was that okay so my ancestral mothers and fathers the broon hilda and bay wolves uh of thousands of years ago uh so during the summer you know broon hilda was out there getting plants and we were having a lot of uh non-poisonous leaves and some tubers and a lot of dirt and some small animals that she was catching in the nets bay wolf was out there getting the bigger game and bringing that back and then during the winter i wasn't eating many plant materials and i was either not eating or i was eating uh carnivore so i was willing to admit that certainly uh several months out of every year i was either fasting or being a carnivore and at least you know seven months to nine months out of the year i was clearly an omnivore that is what we have the most historical precedent with as a homo sapiens are being omnivores just very occasionally carnivores and fairly occasionally having to fast hey let me on that same subject let let me give you another question um so my wife and i you know will eat you know our meal at dinner because that's quite frankly when we're both home we both work and same here and so what what say you that really if we were going to do this correctly we should eat our meal at breakfast and then start our fast at that point well um again let's sort of think about bay wolf and broon hilda back there about a hundred thousand years ago you know bay wolf was out there hunting and so he's going to come back in the afternoon with his brothers and cousins etc and they'll probably be showing up around one o'clock then i'm making i'm cooking that stuff so maybe at best i'm eating two or three o'clock so i bet we have probably a longer history of the feast mid afternoon and that's when we ate and we probably had one meal a day i mean the the concept of three meals a day was a newly introduced european dictum to separate themselves from the savages and my guess is historically we probably had one meal a day when we are farmers and became farmers uh 10 000 years ago we might have had a meal before going out and doing the farm work you've slaved all day in the fields working your tail off and you come back in and you have another meal in the evening so it might have had two meals a day but when we were hunting and gathering it was one meal okay and it was probably uh late afternoon uh mid afternoon at the earliest yes i tell my patients we didn't crawl out of our cave and say what's for breakfast yes we're going to go catch it yeah and breakfast means break fast and yeah that's when we found it the other thing that interests me is as you know our cortisol levels rise early in the morning uh around starting around four o'clock in the morning and that actually kicks up our blood sugar and my argument to people saying breakfast is the most important meal of the day would be that we seemingly have an evolutionary fix for the fact that we weren't going to have food early in the day because cortisol you know makes us insulin resistant and it kicks up our blood sugar and we're actually off and running so i all my diabetic patients i actually say haven't you noticed that your blood sugar goes up early in the morning and they go yeah and i said well believe it or not that's on purpose and you were you were designed for this so the idea that we've got to get that meal in first thing that we wake up just it doesn't make any physiologic sense no no i don't i don't think there's any need for that all right um so like i say you you change your ideas bless your heart what have you learned about the microbiome that you didn't know five years ago um that my colleagues are really getting excited about uh our microbiome that uh they admit we don't really know what species we should have in a microbiome uh even my microbiome scientist admits that he doesn't know what species are the right species to have that probably it's what these species can do and that you know microbes are are gene swapping all of the time and so even though we may have these probiotics because they're being cultured in these big steel vats they're gene swapping all the time we don't know what processes that microbe can do and it's the processes that i need not the name of the species uh so the research that is really the most interesting is the research that looks at the metabolites the metabolome um then we've got that frozen so so so we're going to be analyzing that metabolism looks at about 20 000 different compounds that are in your urine your blood your poop your spinal fluid and sees how that changes so it's going to we're writing grants now so hopefully there'll be a time but i'm going to be able to analyze the changes in our blood urine and stool as people adopt the wall's diet or as they adopt any of the other diets that we study and because you see that is what i think the change in the diet that you advocate in that i advocate that are our gut then you know digest that foods into smaller compounds that get into our bloodstream that help us run the chemistry of life and it's it's the microbiome making these metabolites that influence our health so that's very exciting i i talked about that in the book we are writing grants hopefully in the next couple years we will you know get funded be able to analyze that stuff and so you know hopefully uh in 20 21 or 2022 i can begin to much more specifically address that fantastic uh you're famous for advising people to eat nine cups of vegetables a day now yeah yeah now most people equate because of dietary advice fruits and vegetables as equally healthy and because fruits take good and vegetables don't they tend to head for the fruits uh in your new book you uh aren't particularly wild about fruit and as you know i have told people to give fruit the boot so what say you so our fruit is very very different it's been cultivated to have a lot more starch i have a lot higher fructose content and so that's very different than the type of fruits that would have been our ancestors would have consumed for them berries would have been like this huge treat a very seasonal treat you could have that and it probably does not have nearly the amount of lectins because the plants want us to eat the fruit so they aren't going to be as noxious towards it true the fruits that we have cultivated and created again have so much more fructose so many more carbs and frankly so do a lot of the starchy vegetables so what i've discovered in my clinics and our clinical trials is that people ramped up on the fruit and did not have near the amount of vegetables that i wanted them to have so i've made it much more explicit that we're dialing down the fruit and my preference is that what we're talking about ideally are berries i think berries are the most beneficial of the fruit it's so much more important to get the greens to get the sulfur and a small amount of fruit if you have a belly that's bigger than your butt then i'd rather you not have any fruit and that's that's most americans unfortunately unfortunately that is most americans and unfortunately most children now too i hope you enjoyed this 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