Speaker 1: Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast, the weekly podcast, where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.
Dr. Gundry: Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. People are always asking me for recommendations on how to live longer, healthier lives. Well, if you read my most recent book, The Longevity Paradox, you might already know my answer. [00:00:30] Because one thing that can dramatically boost your health span and even your lifespan 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 Antoun. He’s the CEO of L-Nutra, [00:01:00] and works hand in hand, closely with my good friend, Dr. Valter Longo, who many of you have read about in my books, and we’ve even had him on our podcast. His focus is on providing people with the knowledge and products to live to 110 and beyond.
So, on today’s episode, Dr. Antoun and I are going to talk about shifting away from sick care, how a fasting mimicking diet can help you live your longest [00:01:30] fullest life, and why most of the foods we’re eating these days are actually less nutritious than they used to be. We’ve got a lot of exciting things in store for you today on today’s episode. So, stay tuned, will be right back.
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Dr. Antoun, it’s good to see you again. It’s a pleasure to have you on the show.
Dr. Joseph Anto…: Thank you for hosting me. And I look forward for a [00:04:30] great session. I think the audience will learn a lot today about fasting and improving the healthy aging.
Dr. Gundry: Yeah, I’m really excited about this. We met back in Portugal last fall for the first time, but as you know, I’ve been a big fan of you 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 healthcare system in [00:05:00] the United States was actually a sick care system?
Dr. Joseph Anto…: 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, I started seeing patients, and as a medical student, trying to learn about how to practice medicine. And I was starting to be fascinated with is, how come the first time I interact [00:05:30] 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. We did insurance for every car. We checked them once a year. We have a dashboard that it tells us the temperature is increasing or not before, this 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, as doctors we’re not solving the biggest [00:06:00] diseases. So, if a patient presents with diabetes or cardiovascular issue, say blood pressure, et cetera, would sit next to the attending or 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. So, you give a pill for blood sugar, you move the sugar from the blood to the cells, and then they [00:06:30] get transformed to 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 [00:07:00] 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 into a 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, [00:07:30] I didn’t do residency. I decided to change healthcare systems around the word. 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 healthcare system. There’s always a place for sick care. We ultimately will get sick, but it should be 10%, 20% of the healthcare system. And most of the healthcare system should work on keeping us healthier longer [00:08:00] rather than sick long. And that’s the golden goose.
And today, if you ask most people, “Do you want to live long?” Most people will tell you no, because they remember their 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 today.
Unfortunately, we crossed 2.3 trillion expenditure in healthcare in the US, and we just lost 0.4 years on our longevity in the US. People don’t [00:08:30] realize that, spending more, doing more, and the result is actually getting less. We just lost 0.4 years on our longevity as Americans.
Dr. Gundry: Yeah. And three years in a row we’ve decreased our longevity. Okay. So, you and I know this, you’ve spent your career fighting against this. What sort of incentives keep our healthcare system from changing to this model?
Dr. Joseph Anto…: [00:09:00] Well, there are multiple, right? I mean, what we’re saying makes sense. And you would wonder always why the healthcare 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 [00:09:30] healthcare 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 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, there’s no true market in prevention. The prevention today is [00:10:00] a set of advisors, not a set of products. And this is why I ended up joining L-Nutra and working on the fast mimicking diet. I felt it was an anchor product for the prevention, but we’ll go back to this afterwards.
And I’ve consulted with many minute 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 not. People know that they should eat healthy. Some people do.
[00:10:30] 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 full establishment. We don’t have products that I can give to you today, so that you stay [00:11:00] healthy 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, 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 make that easy for us, we’re not going to adopt it. And this is for every, if it’s difficult to access a running track, if it’s difficult to get to the gym, if it’s [00:11:30] always much cheaper to buy a burger meal for my kids versus buying a healthy, organic salad led from a higher end store.
So, we build a society where it’s difficult every day to be healthy, and it’s cheaper to be unhealthy. And it’s very important. And we did try to advocate for some taxes on unhealthy foods, 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 [00:12:00] 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 are one of those, to go and create a market, create a strong evidence-based, science-based market [00:12:30] for prevention, and trying to make it healthier and easier, and penetrate medicine also with this concept of healthcare and prevention, so the doctors don’t just start seeing people after they’re sick, but actually they start taking care of us on a longitudinal basis.
Dr. Gundry: 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 [00:13:00] school in that town and 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 and 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 [00:13:30] 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.”
Dr. Joseph Anto…: Yes.
Dr. Gundry: And I mean, this is true story. And I went, there’s no incentive for health.
Dr. Joseph Anto…: 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, a company selling [00:14:00] a device or a pill. So, in the US with a system that we built, starting from the private sector, 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. This is why we’re the number one in the world on delivery of care. 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 [00:14:30] really great for profit opportunity and dream, if you discover something in healthcare, at the same time, that system makes money and thrives when people are sick, not when they’re healthy.
Dr. Gundry: 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 car. “And look, I’m saving money, shut up.” [00:15:00] Or safe drivers save 40%. And these get memes on TV. So, why wouldn’t insurers in the government pay for safe eating practices?
Dr. Joseph Anto…: Because they were up until recently, they were able to transfer this accrued extra expenses as premiums to the consumer, and to the policy holder up until the last 10 years, 15 years. [00:15:30] The policy holder thing is outrageous, how much I’m paying for healthcare. 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? They first in the seventies, eighties and nineties, 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 [00:16:00] private insurance, but on Medicare and Medicaid, we see this in the last decade, a big wave of, “Okay, we need to do more. Let’s look at lifestyle medicine.”
Again, lifestyle medicine, wasn’t fully ready as well. The insurance, what they’re going to pay for, they’ll pay for telling you to eat healthy, 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 governments for reimbursement. Then they will come into it. And this is [00:16:30] what we’re trying to build for insurers. And actually they’re talking to us on multiple level, 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.
Dr. Gundry: 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?
Dr. Joseph Anto…: [00:17:00] 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 increase your margin. So, you want to give a little bit the cheaper food. And cheaper food means starches, means glucose, means less nutritious food versus the more nutritious food. And also means [00:17:30] collect the fruits and the vegetables when they’re still green, store them in the refrigerator, or they mature just without being on the mother tree, and then spray them with pesticides and herbicides. And a little bit play with, 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 are grown without pesticides, and that are grown [00:18:00] on the tree and it grows 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? Where instead of having [00:18:30] several times white 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 cashews. You see them based on peanuts and [00:19:00] French fries source of oil, et cetera.
So, that’s unfortunately a big change that happened to us. We as humans, most of our life, we needed water. It was the most vital thing that we needed. So, we grew around rivers. And this is where, not just needed water to drink it, but also this is where there’s green grass. There were foods. There were trees. And there was food. And we were eating a plant-based diet mainly. And because fish doesn’t doesn’t [00:19:30] fly, it 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 pescatarian 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 up more of the carbs and unhealthy fats versus the nutrient dense [00:20:00] fruits and vegetables.
Dr. Gundry: 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 is confused.
Dr. Joseph Anto…: Yes.
Dr. Gundry: So, take us through, what’s [00:20:30] the different between, water fasting, intermittent fasting, time restricted eating, and a fasting mimicking diet? Holy cow, I’m even confused now.
Dr. Joseph Anto…: 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 trumped it a little bit. But the diet that’s being [00:21:00] observed the most today in the US 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 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 [00:21:30] 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 two days you can survive off burning your fat and using the liver as credit for gluconeogenesis. When you cross that, distress is so big that now there’s cellular action. We’re going to talk about that with prolonged [00:22:00] 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, few hours to two days. Most people fast within one day. They try to prolong little bit the period, the 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 [00:22:30] a lot of people are trying to stay for 12 hours without food or extend it to 16 hours.
So, within the same day, what you call intermittent fasting is the same concept is the flip side of time restricted eating. A lot of people hear that word. And Satchin Panda, actually is one of the main researchers there. The more you extend overnight fast, the more you’re restricting the period of food intakes. We call it time restricted eating. So, if you’re fasting for 16 hours, then [00:23:00] your time that you restrict your food is for eight hours and vice versa. If you’re fasting say for 12 hours, it means you’re doing a time restricted eating of 12 of hours. So, when you talk within the same day, intermittent fasting, and time restricted eating, are 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 us as human changing our lifestyle and behavior. Historically, we used to [00:23:30] eat, so the family would sit, eat at 6:00, 7:00 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 [00:24:00] eat carbs and protein, you have the growth factor increase insulin and it’s a light growth factor. So, you’re in more in anabolic state. Biologically, you’re pushed to age faster and you’re stocking the extra calories in fat. So, you’re in fat bending.
It’s like putting money in your account all the time. Your bank account will grow, so it’s the same as fat. What you want to do, you want to balance how much you put in the bank and then allow of 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, [00:24:30] what we call the circadian fasting, meaning following the day and night cycle, which, 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 price in 2017.
So, we are big proponents [00:25:00] 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 their metabolic issue. And this is when it’s worth going [00:25:30] up to 16 hours without the food to just accelerate a little bit this weight loss and reverse their metabolic issue. And this is called 16, 8, 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 health condition [00:26:00] that they 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 feeding 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, the heart needs 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 [00:26:30] at the same time, you’re stressing your vital organ.
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 a little bit for short term reasons, probably that’s a good thing to do on the short term.
Dr. Gundry: 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 [00:27:00] 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?
Dr. Joseph Anto…: Well, we want to clarify, the Ramadan fast follows the 12 hours, which what we’re talking at the out, but is it concept coming from meaning practice 12 with [00:27:30] the old type of religion, the orthodox type. In the recent days, we’re 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.
There’s another big article, I recommend people to read it in GEM 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 [00:28:00] 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, 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.
Traditionally, people think carb is diabetes. It’s not just carb, it’s food in [00:28:30] 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 restricted eating. What’s how happening to us today, most Americans eat within the 18 hours timeframe. 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 on [00:29:00] 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. 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 body says, “You know what? I have enough fat, and if I need some credit, [00:29:30] 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, day and a half or other people, two and a half days, but just for the sake of technology, 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 [00:30:00] of credit.
But then when the bank account is going down, you’re going to have to come back to your company and restructure it. You’re going to have to be more cost effective in the way that you do things. And the body does the same thing after day two, it comes to the cells and say, “Hey, I can’t nourish any longer from the outside. You have to look inside for sources of calories, organelles, debris. Some damage that you can fix.” What we call cellular rejuvenation, or in a more scientific way, we call it autophagy or self eat. Autophagy means [00:30:30] self eat. So, the cell tries to live on its intracellular calories and optimize its operation. We call it restructuring in the financial world, or the corporate word, 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 a 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, [00:31:00] 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 marker cholesterol, glyceride, HbA1c, 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 [00:31:30] is what made fasting, if you want a big theory and 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. One day it’s the Atkins. The other day, it’s the keto. The third day is 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 [00:32:00] 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, the prolonged fast in order to improve the cells and rejuvenate the cells. And I think rematching our body with what we were meant to eat in the diet is not going to be a fad, but is going to be here to stay. And part of it is fasting.
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[00:36:30] 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 three days. Come on. I got to go to work. I got to get the kids to school. They’re driving me crazy.” And you hear this and you know this. So, take me to how did you guys get this crazy idea of designing [00:37:00] a plant-based diet that mimics fasting.
Dr. Joseph Anto…: Yes. So, you’re right. And you know, we as L-Nutra, the company that I’m currently the CEO of, we’re a spinoff from University of Southern California. And USC has a longevity Institute, which is probably the leading Institute in the world, looking into fasting. And like you said, initially, we’re just doing water fasting. And when we proved the value of water fast and flee, and [00:37:30] 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 the clinical trial and the human trial, they don’t want fast for three or four, or five days. Right? And we like a little bit more than four to five days, because you want to at least couple of days of cell rejuvenation.
So, people couldn’t fast from four to five days. And the National Institute of Health and the National Cancer Institute were very [00:38:00] generous into supporting USC in 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.” We talk a lot about the positives about fasting. There are negatives about fasting. When you stay for four days without food, you literally, our water or minerals, or vitamin, it’s not joke, it’s spending four or five days without very important nutrients, whether it’s macro or micronutrients for the [00:38:30] 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 cellar level, the stress at the cell? So, can we keep the stress of fasting on the cell, so that the cell rejuvenates? And can we not increase the blood sugar [00:39:00] 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, if you’re the CEO of a company, you need a million dollar to operate the company. If we give you 200,000, are you’re going to feel fully satisfied that you’re going to just not restructure? No, you’re going to still feel that stress. And it’s a little bit more complicated. The fasting mimicking diet, actually, we were able to not [00:39:30] mimic fasting by starvation. And this is what took 12 years of research and over $36 million in funding. We were able to make fasting by nourishment. And that was very important.
So, we started looking at the cell, how the cell digests its protein, how the cell digests its carbs, what are the pathways and how much can we give of 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 [00:40:00] does not feel it’s satisfied enough. And this is how we created the fasting mimicking diet. It’s a plant-based diet and has very healthy, good fats, coming mainly from macadamia and other nuts. Again, which historically nutrition company 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 [00:40:30] the cell that there is food.
And it was an amazing discovery to me. It’s probably the biggest discovery at nutrition for the last years and years. And we’re in 18 clinical trials trying to see what are the benefits of fasting when we can diet on different conditions. And we’re excited to see some of the early results starting to get out there.
Dr. Gundry: Are you able to give us a taste of what those clinical trials are showing?
Dr. Joseph Anto…: So, [00:41:00] 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, and this is an important concept, I think moving forward, part of we’re talking about changing healthcare [00:41:30] is, cancer patients, historically, we gave them chemotherapy or hormone therapy, and more recently immune therapy and CAR-T, et cetera, 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, is 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, [00:42:00] but by food, right? If a cell has to grow fast, it needs food. And without food, it’s 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 are underfeeding your breast cancer. And therefore it cannot grow as fast as it would like to grow.
What we’ve observed in mice with a fasting mimicking diet is because we’re going on a solid, three, four days of fasting. And [00:42:30] in humans, we do four days, and then we add one day of free feeding. 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 [00:43:00] 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.
Dr. Gundry: So, I think this is an important point. You’re not anti-chemotherapy. You are saying here’s an additional way to maximize the effect of [00:43:30] chemotherapy.
Dr. Joseph Anto…: Yeah. And I’m not against any medicine, actually. I just I’m against the concept that pills are the only solution. And am 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, it’s just going to keep you sick. And even there, you’re not going to live longer. You’re going to live 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, [00:44:00] 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? 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 we get sick, we should do something a little bit more than just a pill.
If you think about it, today, most of us either don’t take anything [00:44:30] 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 eat our food that we eat and we eat every day. So, 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 L-Nutra, Nutrition for Longevity, and we focus on how nutrition can impact [00:45:00] our health spend and healthy aging when we’re healthy, and how can we tailor nutrition for different health conditions to support the patient with better management. We’re not here to be against the pills. And actually we’re here to empower power 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 [00:45:30] 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 are going to impact the outcome of a health condition and healthy aging.
Dr. Gundry: So, speaking of healthy aging and even longevity, since longevity is in your title of L-Nutra. As you and I know, calorie restriction has been the only way to extend [00:46:00] good lifespan. 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. 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 [00:46:30] CR patients, and I would not describe them as generally happy people. That’s being kind, I guess.
Dr. Joseph Anto…: Yes.
Dr. Gundry: But your program, tell us about ProLon and tell us about the food company that you guys now have. How does that fit into having us have a great lifespan?
Dr. Joseph Anto…: Yeah. So, the research that I talked [00:47:00] about on the fasting mimicking diet, before is in a clinical trial. Now, you mentioned the name of our first product, which is not positioned for disease but its position for healthy aging as you mentioned.
The ProLon is the first to 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. We have 11,500 clinics now registered to recommend ProLon to their patients. [00:47:30] 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 [00:48:00] change on their 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 them first enjoy healthy food? That’s the first solution. Number two is intermittently, can we do some corrections to help them?
And the fast 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, [00:48:30] 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, the students 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 [00:49:00] 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 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 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, zero money is coming. Let’s do something about it.” [00:49:30] And fasting is that higher stress, which we, when we were in college, a lot of people did this five days before the exam and got by with an A minus, 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 to eat healthier during the 25 days, but for five days a month, they can do the fasting when we’d like to clean the cells, adjust their weight and maintain healthy level of metabolism.
Dr. Gundry: [00:50:00] 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?
Dr. Joseph Anto…: So, when we launched ProLon, a lot of people, seeing how much time we put in the science and evidence behind it, and trusted the company, what we deliver. And by the way, for people [00:50:30] hearing us today, this is not a project that’s full for profit. Actually, we donate back 60%. Our founder, Professor Valter Longo, and I do recommend that you guys read a little bit more about him, Valter founded the concept of fasting and periodic fasting and fasting mimicking. And he donates all his shares back to foundation. So, I do speak today about the product and what we have, and a lot of pride because most of it gets back donated.
So, a lot of people believing in ProLon and doing it for [00:51:00] five days, 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 peas and in my pasta. What can I do to eat healthier or to eat healthy?” And we used to recommend a plant based or a vegetarian, or a pescatarian with couple of times, three times a week, fish, pescatarian diet. And for some who really want to have some red meat, a Mediterranean diet would would be a recommendation. A lot of people’s [00:51:30] feedback to us was, “I don’t understand the ratios, macros of what to buy, how much to buy. And I don’t trust any grocery or place I 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.
Dr. Gundry: Oh yeah.
Dr. Joseph Anto…: So, we decided to be the first company in [00:52:00] history to go and own the entire supply chain of food 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 West Side Jersey in Long Valley, specifically, speaking about longevity. [00:52:30] And then we see them, we grow them, we harvest them, and we package them into what we call the longevity diet, vegetarian pescatarian. And then we ship them anywhere in the US within 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 there’s no chemicals added to them.
We even have fish in the soil. So, we feed them the plants, and we get their excretion back to the soil, [00:53:00] so that we’re not bringing artificial fertilization. We practice originative farming. So, it’s like a thousand year old piece of plant earth 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 the circle of eat healthy, 25 days, do your ProLon five days to rejuvenate. And I think it’s a full [00:53:30] nutritional solution for people.
Dr. Gundry: As they say, you’ve got a covered soup to nuts. Right?
Dr. Joseph Anto…: Yeah. So, that project, it’s called Nutrition for Longevity. Yeah.
Dr. Gundry: 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 do we go?
Dr. Joseph Anto…: The best way to find about our mission in general is through the L-Nutra site, L- [00:54:00] Nutra, this longevity through nutrition. And then if you want to learn more specific about ProLon, you go to the ProLon site, P-R-O-L-O-N. And the food, every day is healthy food is called Nutrition for Longevity. It’s actually nutritionforlongevity.com.
Dr. Valter 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, Time Magazine named him among the top 50 most influential people in health. So, anytime you [00:54:30] 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 nutri tech space, bringing technology and bringing science to nutrition, spending decades of research to really proving something before it goes out the market. And I think this is what makes this a really exciting journey.
Dr. Gundry: All right. Well, as my listeners and my readers know, I definitely give a shout out to Dr. Longo, whenever I can. And I really appreciate both [00:55:00] of your work and what you guys are doing. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, now more than ever, it’s really important.
Dr. Joseph Anto…: Yeah. Thank you very, very much. And we’ll see you soon, hopefully.
Dr. Gundry: Yeah. Hopefully, we’ll see in person again soon, one of these days.
Dr. Joseph Anto…: Yeah.
Dr. Gundry: All right. Take care. Thanks again.
Dr. Joseph Anto…: Hey, bye, bye.
Dr. Gundry: Bye.
Dr. Joseph Anto…: Thanks. Thanks. Bye, bye.
Dr. Gundry: Okay. Time for the audience question. Nita Beecher on Instagram asked, “What should I eat to reduce arthritis pain [00:55:30] 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. I have so many patients. That’s one of the things they notice almost immediately when starting the program, is their arthritis pain [00:56:00] dramatically goes away. Great question. Okay. Now, it’s time for the review of the week.
Kimberly Snyder: Welcome to the Feel Good Podcast with Kimberly Snyder. My goal is to help you develop a holistic lifestyle based on our four cornerstone philosophy, food, body, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual growth. This holistic approach will help you feel good, which I define as being connected to your most authentic, highest self. And this is the place [00:56:30] from which your energy, confidence, creativity, true power and true beauty will start to explode.
Every week, we provide you with interviews from top experts in their field, or a solo cast from yours truly, to support you in living your most beautiful, healthy, and joyful life. I’m your host, Kimberly Snyder, founder of Solluna, New York Times bestselling author and holistic wellness, nutrition and meditation teacher. Let’s get started.
Dr. Gundry: [00:57:00] 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 [00:57:30] this easy to understand. And you’ve just told me I do. And I’m going to 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.
Disclaimer, on the Dr. Gundry Podcast, we provide a venue for discussion. And the views expressed [00:58:00] by my guests do not necessarily reflect my own.
Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. 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. And if you want to watch each episode of the Dr Gundry Podcast, you could always find me on YouTube at youtube.com/drgundry, because I’m Dr. Gundry, and I’m always looking out [00:58:30] for you.
