Dr. Steven Gundry:
Let’s dive into your new book, Fasting Cancer. I think the book topic is interesting because in my practice, it’s the same way, it flies in the face of mainstream medical advice, meaning that when a patient has cancer, most doctors tell them to eat a lot of calories. Can you talk about this? Why is that the wrong advice?
Dr. Valter Longo:
Yeah, so I think that most doctors do that because there are data where if you overfeed the patient, there are some benefits. So there may be some benefits against the cachexia and loss of muscle loss, et cetera. So I think there are silos, so the doctor, the oncologist is thinking about cancer, and then other doctors say, “Well, I’m just worried about the patient not losing muscle mass,” or whatever else, or maybe not have weakness of the immune system. There is a point about that. So I think that the feeding has to be, first of all, has to keep in mind the cancer first, but also has to keep in mind the patient’s weight status and lean body mass status and strength, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, so I think it’s just trying to solve one problem without looking at the bigger problem, which is the, “Hey, this person is going to be killed by the cancer.”
And so I think most of the oncologists that we talk to, they’re very happy to see us and see what we’re doing. They’re just saying, “Okay, do more trials, give us more evidence so that we can fight the cancer better, and so that we can be justified when somebody, another doctor may say, ‘Well, this patient, his weight or her weight is too low. I’m not comfortable with any low calorie diet.'”
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yeah, let’s start there. A lot of people when they hear the word fasting, they think of literally not eating like a water fast, like a 24-hour water fast, a three-day water fast, a five-day water fast. There, in fact are, as you and I know, some cancer clinics that will do seven-day water fasts as a part of their treatment. I don’t think, knowing you, that’s not what you’re talking about, but can you explain what fasting means in your terminology?
Dr. Valter Longo:
I always say, as you probably know, that fasting means everything and nothing. It’s kind of like eating. So what does eating mean? Well, you eat but it could be good, bad, or neutral. So fasting is the same way. And I think that we made the mistake for many years now to use it as a word that actually does mean something. But in fact, we need to move from that, like eating to, what are we talking about? What kind of fasting? How do you use it? When do you use it? And so for example, in cancer, I give an example, we’ve been talking about this for 20 years now, but now it’s emerging as a real problem.
So if you fast, we’ve done many trials where we’ve fasted patients with the fasting-mimicking diet, and we can talk about it in a second, but we fasted them for four days, and the chemotherapy or other immunotherapy, et cetera, et cetera, is given on day three. Or we fast them for five days with a fasting=mimicking diet, and the chemotherapy, immunotherapy, et cetera, is given on day four. And so in mice, and people, when you do that, so long fast, let the IGF-1, glucose, et cetera, go down, and then you allow the chemotherapy treatment, that seems to be protective or very protective. In mice it’s extremely protective. But it’s making it worse for the cancer, and we can talk about it.
But we always say, “Don’t do alternate day fasting.” Why? Because if you combine the refeeding, so if you do alternate day, one day, you’re on, one day off. So if you combine the refeeding with the chemo high dose, that’s a problem. That’s a big problem. We’ve been saying this for 20 years. Sure enough, a group, I think in England, now show the mice, the same mice that are protected from cardiotoxicity. If you fast them for three days or four days, cardiotoxicity caused by doxorubicin. The same, mice, now, they show increased cardiotoxicity of the chemotherapy if you do alternate day fasting. Exactly, based on the prediction, based on the science.
So yeah, so this is just an example of how we have to be careful about fasting and what it means. We have used first, 15 years ago, water-only fasting. We started a trial, we did it in mice, and it worked pretty well. And then we started a trial at USC Norris Cancer Center. And it was a disaster. It was a disaster because nobody wanted to do the water-only fasting, people felt cheated. The oncologists were worried because, of course, people were saying, “What are you telling me, that I have to go home and stop eating?” And yeah, so then we went to the NIH. And then NIH, National Institute of Health funded the research, the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute on Aging funded research on the fasting-mimicking diet.
Then we worked very hard at, can we come up with something that achieves the same changes that water-only fasting causes, but allows patients to eat regularly, maybe a low-calorie diet, but still they can eat. And so yeah, exclusively, that’s what we use now, and that’s what a lot of cancer centers around the world use, the fasting-mimicking diet and not the water-only fasting. So I would say water-only fasting, probably dangerous, potential hypoglycemia, hypotension. You’re not going to get this in all patients, but you’re going to get it in a percentage of patients, and no salts. So that’s another issue that you probably want to avoid in the clinic. So the fasting-mimicking diet has the right level of mineral salts. And it’s been tested now in thousands of patients in formal clinical trials, so we know that it’s very safe even with chemotherapy.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
So let’s take a second and back up. People who’ve read my books, I write about the fasting-mimicking diet, your invention and good for you. But what is that? Can you give us simply, yeah, you’re mimicking fasting, but you’re allowing people to eat three to five days of a low-calorie-
Dr. Valter Longo:
Low-protein, low-sugar, high-fat, a hundred percent plant-based.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
But you’re allowing them to eat.
Dr. Valter Longo:
Yes.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
And one of the things that I completely agree with you, why have it plant-based, if you’re going to use this for, well, for everybody, but specifically for treating cancer patients? What’s the logic?
Dr. Valter Longo:
The logic was looking around the world, and we have two versions. One of them also inspired in part by your work. We have two versions. One is for everybody, and one is for people with inflammatory issues. So the inflammatory one is very different from the, so the autoimmunity ones are very different from the other one. But the idea for everybody was to go and look around the longevity areas of the world, Southern Italy and Okinawa and Loma Linda, and just using ingredients that are very widely used in those areas. So reach the fasting-mimicking properties, but do it with extremely healthy food that most people would not argue with. And it was a good idea.
So for example, in one study in mice with inflammatory bowel disease, we saw that if we use the fasting-mimicking diet versus water-only fasting, the prebiotic ingredients were feeding the lactobacillus and bifidobacteria, so you see a growth of the good bacteria in the gut of the mice. And that worked better than the water-only fasting. So I think in general, that was the rationale. Now, for the non-inflammatory, we’re about to publish the first 15 cases of autoimmunities using the non-inflammatory. And the non-inflammatory one, it’s missing a lot of vegetables. It has no nightshades and no tomatoes. And so all of those are gone and much more than that. So we’ve been practicing that both with the everyday diet and with the fasting-mimicking diet.
So there’s a special fasting-mimicking diet, which you would call LINA, low-inflammatory, non-allergenic. So those are the two major categories. Now, there are different FMDs like Alzheimer’s, much higher calories with a ketogenic supplement in between. That’s where we just finished a trial in Italy, a multicenter trial on that. So there are a few different versions, but there’s one for diabetes that it’s a little less starches, and allowing the physicians to have a more aggressive intervention as far as starches in the diet. But, yeah, let’s say those are the four main ones that we’re using.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Interesting. So now, you’ve written, and you have written in the book that the fasting-mimicking diet makes these tumor cells more vulnerable to therapy while protecting the healthy cells. Can you explain how that works?
Dr. Valter Longo:
Yes. Yeah. So if you think of a tumor cell, it’s probably in most cases, been evolving for years in the body. And it’s been evolving in the presence of lots of food. So if you think about US or Europe, lots of food all the time. So it just likes to see a lot of sugar, a lot of amino acids, a lot of everything, a lot of fats. And the normal cells in a coordinated way, they come from 3 billion years of ability to starve almost all the time, if they want. People can go two months with no food, then you die. But for say, almost two months, you could go with no food. So five days with no food, no problem. It’s just nothing for a human being. It is some dangers, but nothing.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
But not much.
Dr. Valter Longo:
But not much. But the cancer cells, all of a sudden, they forgot the 3 billion years. They’ve rebelled against 3 billion years of evolution. They’re just focusing in two years, “I’ve always seen a lot of sugar. Where is it?” So all of a sudden, a lot of things are gone. And so now what the cancer cell does, it tries to rewire, but the mitochondria is not working very well. Now, lots of different biosynthetic pathways are not working very well. It’s in trouble. So it desperately looks for a way to survive. And so in the original version of the fasting-mimicking diet, we just did that and chemo or whatever, and immunotherapy and kinase inhibitor and lots of things, and it works beautifully.
By the way, one cycle of fasting-mimicking diet in mice in multiple system, melanoma, breast cancer, lung cancer is better than immunotherapy, and as good as chemotherapy, in mice. I’m not making claims about humans, but in mice, one cycle of FMD is as good as chemo and better than immunotherapy. But cancer cells steal from everybody else, and they survive, even with the fasting. So it slows it down like chemotherapy, but they survive. So now, in the last four or five years, we’ve been publishing on starvation escape pathways. So now we can use what’s called RNA-Seq, and using RNA-Seq, we look at how the cancer cell has rewired, and we can very quickly tell exactly how it’s escaping. How is it escaping? So is it using, let’s say PI3 Kinase and all these different genetic pathways in the cell.
And then once we know what it is, then we use an FDA-approved drug to block it, and it just works really, really well. And so we’ve shown with multiple cancer, we could just completely reverse the course with very low toxicity. So very exciting time. And so now, we’re starting the trials. Lots of different hospitals are starting the trials, and so hopefully we’ll see what happens with immunotherapy. So lots of trials, hundreds of trials, and it’s not going to work for everything. Most people don’t understand that even for melanomas, immunotherapy, the first trial was a failure, right?
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yeah, that’s right.
Dr. Valter Longo:
Until the oncologist say, “Wait a minute, I think it’s working for a portion of the patient.” It’s not working for all patients. And so he was brave, and he was able to then say, let’s think about that 20%, 30%, I forget what it was, but it was something like 20%. So luckily he was able to fight the fight and say, “Hey, I know the trial may seem like a failure, but let’s look at the 20% of people that are responding.” So I see the same for, if not better, but maybe I’m delusional. But in mice it would suggest even better. So we’ll see. We’ll see. The initial trials are looking very good. Vernieri’s group has published another paper on a complete pathological response in triple negative breast cancer. So for metastatic triple negative breast cancer, one of the worst nightmare cancers in existence, now, multiple trials are suggesting positive short-term and long-term results. But I think we need a bigger trial, like a 5, 600 patient trial to have a more conclusive evidence here.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yeah, I mean, let’s be clear. You and I like mouse studies, and we can learn a lot from them. But a lot of times, the translation from a mouse study to a human study doesn’t do as well as we would anticipate. But what you’re saying is there are actual human trials going on with fasting-mimicking diet and chemotherapy or immunotherapy that number one, are seeing results. But there’s so much good evidence that this is worth trying, that there are a lot of clinical trials in progress right now.
Dr. Valter Longo:
In the book, I talk about, I think there are 20 completed, 20 trials completed all over the world. But I think the standard for the medical community, for the oncology community is either FDA approval or big randomized trials, multicenter trials. So those are not there yet. And so what we’ve been saying is if you’re a stage one cancer patient or a stage two, and you’re told by the oncologist, “Look, there’s a 98% chance that this is it, we’re going to treat it with surgery and then we’re going to do chemo or whatever, and you’re done.” Our recommendation, we have foundation clinics, our recommendation has been don’t do anything. Just eat what we call, I call the longevity diet and that’s it. And maybe do the time-restricted eating. We like the about 12 to 14 hours of fasting per day, and that’s it.
But if you are a metastatic, you have metastatic cancer, and the oncologist just told you, “We tried the standard of care, it’s not working,” that’s a different story. Then I would go to the oncologist and say, “I would like to try,” because we see it working. By we, I don’t mean my lab only. Now it’s many labs. So colorectal cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, triple negative, ER negative, ER positive. So it just keeps on working, liver cancer, it keeps on working. And no matter who does it, and no matter what in combination. And by the way, it keeps on working in combination with the standard of care. So it’s always like whatever the best treatment is for that particular cancer, in mice I’m talking about, then if you combine it with that particular chemotherapy or that particular immunotherapy, then you add the fasting-mimicking diet and it makes it so much better.
Sometimes, like in mice, lung cancer, breast cancer, immunotherapy does nothing. Then you add the fasting-mimicking diet, and now immunotherapy plus the fasting-mimicking diet do better than the fasting-mimicking diet alone. Yeah. So that looks very promising. But yeah, we need the big trials to be convincing about the early stage. But the late stage, if you’re at the late stage, talk to your oncologist, use the standard of care, and then ask, “Hey, should we try the fasting-mimicking diet? Maybe it’ll make my whatever therapy work better for my cancer.” And now for triple negative breast cancer, that’s already preliminarily demonstrated by the Vernieri group, the overall survival was nearly double in the FMD plus chemo versus chemo alone. It’s a small group of patients, but I think when you see nearly double, that’s a good first early trial, right?
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yeah. Let’s suppose one of our listeners or our listeners have a metastatic cancer, and they’re on a protocol from an oncologist. Is there any harm in adding the fasting-mimicking diet to their regimen?
Dr. Valter Longo:
Yeah, I would say being respectful of the oncologist and of the FDA, they need to talk to the oncologist and just ask that question. Is there a reason? Because maybe that patient has got BMI 16, and yes, there is somewhere. Maybe that patient has kidney damage, maybe the patient has liver damage. Now, we’ve shown that FMD can help against kidney damage and liver damage, but if somebody’s liver or kidney are so damaged, they might not make it through five days of the fasting-mimicking diet. So this is why I think, yeah, that’s a question for the oncologist and for the team of physicians.
And now, I mean, I think the patients should expect the oncologist to say, “Let me look into it. Let me read the papers, and let me get back to you.” If they say no, say, “Okay, I’ve reviewed the literature, I looked at the book, and I am not convinced.” Okay, fine. What I don’t like is when the oncologist says, “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know. It’s all BS. Don’t do it.” Then we tell patient, maybe you should look into another cancer center, another somebody, a group that is more prepared to say, “Hey, I’m aware of it. I’ve studied it, and I’m not convinced,” versus “No.” Why? Well, because of overwhelming animal data, 20 trials, and just the power of, the undeniable power of the fasting and fasting-mimicking diet in revolutionizing metabolic factors in the body. I mean, nobody doubts that. That’s established. That’s very clear.
So it’s going to change almost everything from ketone bodies to IGF-1, to glucose, insulin, insulin sensitivity. Everything is revolutionized in a differential way. You cannot argue with that. You can argue with, “Yes, but it may still not working with my patient.” Fine. So then I understand that. So if somebody is advanced stage, I would demand knowledge. I would demand knowledge from the oncologist, and I would demand look into it, understand it. And then, of course, as a foundation, we follow thousands of patients every year. So we are happy to even, I mean, it’s adjusted to cost based on what people can afford. So it’s in Santa Monica here, and people can be followed all over the nation by telemedicine, of course, in collaboration with their oncologists, wherever they are.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Right. That’s a good segue. I hear you’re working on a new documentary, Fasting and the Longevity Revolution. Tell me all about that.
Dr. Valter Longo:
Yes. So this is, I think it’s based largely on this book and on my longevity diet book and lots of other things. So it has some of the, many of the top experts in the world for fasting and calorie restriction, and Dr. Ragusa, Dr. Panda, and many, many more. And so this was, I helped the production company. I wanted to have, I mean, I was hoping that they would do a documentary that is truly based on lots of science, lots of clinical work, lots of pillars, and not just another view, journalistic view of what the science is, because it’s just hard to get it right.
It’s narrated by Edward Norton and Barry Alexander Brown is the director, two-time academy nominated director. And so yeah, it’s a stellar group of actors and experts that helped us and helped the production company get this done. And I think the idea is to take you through, like I did in my book, this journey. And the first is the problem. It starts with why are 75% of Americans and 60% of Europeans overweight and obese? And they call it unconspired conspiracy. So you don’t go from nearly zero in the twenties to 75% just because people eat more and they’re just having fun eating more. No. It’s the entire system, just like cigarettes. So it starts with that Marion Nestle and others saying, “Hey, this is an unconspired conspiracy.” Nobody’s sitting around. There is no big pharma and big food companies sitting around saying, “How can we make people fat?”
They’re not doing that. They’re just saying, “I sell sugary beverages,” or whatever they sell, “and you should eat more of it.” Buy as much as you can. But then, that affected everybody. So slowly, that got into even the universities and the consultants and the pharma, and everybody’s going along with this. So now, you cannot have a meeting for human health where all they talk about is GLP-1 and drugs. And to me, it’s shocking because I’m thinking, “This is not the way to make people healthy, and this is not the way to not make the country broke with 20% of GDP going to healthcare.” If you have the 40th best healthcare in the world, and you’re spending by far the most and more than anybody else in the world, think number two is Switzerland, you got a problem, big problem, and you have to fix it.
And you’re not going to fix it with GLP-1. You’re just going to be more broke with GLP-1 agonist and not healthy. Yes, I’m saying for some people, GLP-1 is probably good. You tried everything. You have the dietitian, you have the team following you, and it doesn’t work. So, okay, all we got is bariatric surgery or GLP-1, but that’s not the way we’re viewing it. It’s not the way the televisions are viewing it and the podcasters and everybody else. So that’s scary. To me, if I was somebody in America, I would say, “This is not a good deal. You got to replace it.” So that’s what the first part of the documentary is.
Then, it goes into everyday diet, but it explains why. It explains why you should eat a pescatarian diet. And then, we also mentioned the inflammatory. We’re saying, for some people, you’re going to have to avoid lots of foods. You just got to find an expert that tells you which one are the ones you got to avoid. So that’s second part. Then the third part goes into fasting-mimicking diet, and basically says, “Okay, some people are going to change everything they do, and they’re changing their diet, and they’re following all of our recommendations.” Some people, which is at least half, are going to say, “I’m not changing anything long-term. Forget it. I’m not even going from four coffees a day to three coffees a day.” So then we say, well, for those, maybe think about fasting-mimicking diet once a month to once every four months.
So in Italy now, people don’t realize Southern Europe is about as bad as America in overweight and obesity, especially overweight. For children, overweight is matching the United States now. So we went to Southern Italy, and we’re almost done with a 500 people randomized clinical trial, a beautiful trial. It was very difficult to do because it should have been extremely expensive, and we did it with almost nothing. So in collaboration with the University of Palermo, University of Calabria. But so we went to the worst place of Europe, and we are testing the longevity diet together with the fasting-mimicking diet or the fasting-mimicking diet alone, and only every three months. So we’re saying, “Could you give us just 20 days a year of fasting-mimicking, vegan diet, and let us show what we can do with you with minimal intervention, no hospitals, nothing?” So we’ll see, but I’m very optimistic. Yeah.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
How will this documentary differ from, say, the Blue Zone documentary series?
Dr. Valter Longo:
Very far, right, very far from the Blue Zone. I mean, I know Dan is a friend, so it’s great, I think, to go and look at areas that are doing well. But for example, most people don’t realize that Southern Europeans are some of the most frail people in Europe. Not some, are the most frail in Europe. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Okinawans are, at least the historical Okinawans are in the same category.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yes, the historical ones. Yeah.
Dr. Valter Longo:
So then, of course, we take a much more comprehensive approach looking at, starting with the science saying, “What is it about the Mediterranean diet that works, or the Okinawan diet that works? And what is it that is bad for you?” Okinawans had 9% protein intake, mostly from vegetable sources. So let’s say that you have a 9% vegetable intake and it’s all from legumes, you’re going to be in trouble. There’s no doubt about it. It’s just a matter of time. You’re going to be in trouble. So that’s the approach. And every time we show, we make a statement or the documentary makes a statement. And then we look at the stories like let’s say a doctor that did it or whatever, and then we look at the clinical trials, the randomized trials, the epidemiological stuff.
So I help the producers put it together in a way that is very difficult to say, “No, I don’t believe it.” So we talked to Frazier, and we looked at Sardinia, and we look at Calabria, and we look at Okinawa, and we look at Loma Linda for the everyday diet, and we looked at your books. So we looked at everything and we said, “Okay, this is the recommendation that people should get.” And it’s not ideas about, oh, people in this place eat like that. Of course, the world shouldn’t eat like the Mediterranean people. Mediterranean people are Mediterranean people. They knew what to avoid and what to eat and what to avoid, and there’s seasonality, and there is all kinds of rules that they had that are completely abandoned then.
So now you go to the UK or to the US or to Australia or wherever, and you say, “Eat like an Italian.” Well, that’s not a good idea. You need to have rules, and then you have to apply your own food from your own. So I always use the example of Norwegians versus Japanese. So a Norwegian is almost guaranteed to be lactose tolerant, and a Japanese is almost guaranteed to be lactose intolerant, as is a Sicilian. A Sicilian is almost guaranteed to be somewhat lactose intolerant. So you just give them the same diet and one of them-
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Is not going to do well.
Dr. Valter Longo:
… is going to have a problem. So I like what Dan did and what the Blue Zone did. But I think this is a lot of science, and it’s short, one and a half hours, but it really makes it very simple. And at the end of each section it’s like, “Okay, here’s what you do, and here’s how you do it, and here’s why we are telling you this.”
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Particularly about this book, if there’s one thing that people could do today to prevent cancer, what would you say, one thing? Not to put you on the spot.
Dr. Valter Longo:
I would say, yeah, either the longevity diet or the fasting-mimicking diet, so those are… And people think that somehow I stumbled on that, but no, I didn’t stumble on the longevity diet. I didn’t stumble on the fasting-mimicking diet. It was 30 years of searching for what’s best for you. And so I started with Roy Walford.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
I was going to say, you had a great mentor.
Dr. Valter Longo:
I had a great mentor, and there was a beginning. My year one in my PhD at UCLA, Roy Walford is in Biosphere 2 doing the first human calorie restriction study. So I think that that’s where I started, and I thought, “This is great. It teaches us a lot, but it’s not what people are going to ever do.” Because it was obvious. Yeah. So then there was 30 years of like, what are people actually willing to do? So for example, a few years ago, we published a paper in Nature Metabolism, that was something we always wanted to do. And this is also answering your question, because most people have a bad diet. That’s just a reality. For whatever reason, they have a bad diet.
So we say, “Okay, why don’t we start with mice? They have the worst diet that we can think of.” So we give them high fat, high sugar, high calorie. Sure enough, these mice become huge, like most people in Europe and the United States. And then it’s just incredible how many problems, human problems, they develop, very high cholesterol, heart problems. And then they died way earlier than people on the normal diet, not like a great diet, a normal diet, a controlled diet. And it was just unbelievable how much earlier they died, how rapidly they died.
Then, we just give them FMD, fasting-mimicking diet, once a month. It just reversed everything. The cholesterol problem, the heart problems, the lifespan problems, remarkable, the insulin sensitivity problems. So just five days a month, together with a terrible, the worst diet that you can imagine, it fixed all the problems. Now, I’m not saying, of course, we work very hard at getting everybody to eat the longevity diet. But it’s just not realistic for the majority and possibly the great majority of people. This is why in Italy now, FMD, what about every three months? It’s a big gamble, because it’s like, is it possible now? In mice, you had at least once a month, now you want to go once every three months? Is this a miracle? But we’ll see. We’ll see what it can do, to the worst health profile population in Europe.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
That’d be great. All right, we got an audience question for both of us. And we’re going to have fun with this from Jeff Thompson 5543. Hi, Doctors-
Dr. Valter Longo:
Hit me.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
… you seem to be suggesting that for longevity, the less animal protein, the better for everyone. I thought Valter Longo recommends increasing animal protein in older adults after a certain age to prevent frailty. Could you please help clarify? Thanks. You want to start, or you want me to give my thoughts?
Dr. Valter Longo:
I’ll start.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Okay.
Dr. Valter Longo:
Yeah. So the idea is not to have more animal proteins. The idea is to have sufficient amino acids to take care of… If you look at the, and I just looked at the Lancet Paper that just came out, and same thing that we had shown 10 years ago in our paper on protein intake and longevity and diseases. So after age 65, the US population started losing weight, rapidly. So something is happening, and this happens also in mice. Mice and people after a certain age, you start to have a rapid drop of weight.
And so then, we had done a study also in mice years ago, and we gave a very low protein diet to young mice, 4%, extremely low, but the young mice are perfectly fine. Then we take the same extremely, very low protein diet and we give it to old mice, and they lose weight very rapidly. Yeah. So then what does that mean? It means that the ability of an older, over 65 person to deal with a low amino acid level is not good. So as you get to 70, 80, if the amino acid intake is too low, then you’re going to have a problem, leucine, methionine, et cetera, et cetera. So you want to have sufficient, and you want to have sufficient so you’re minimizing frailty and lean body mass loss.
So you could do it with nuts and seeds. You don’t need to go to animal protein. We also have always focused for many years, especially with the foundation clinics, in what do we say? Yes. But what do people do with what we say? And it’s very different. So people improvise, and people come up with their own idea. So if I say, “Don’t worry about it, the vegan diet is perfectly fine,” which it is, even if you’re older, a lot of people are going to be malnourished. If I instead look at Europe, and almost every country that has got record, I mean Italy, and almost every country has got record longevity. If I say, “Also incorporate some animal proteins,” that just makes it easier for people, and it makes it more likely that they’re going to do it. And so we solve the problem. So yeah, so the summary is you could do it without animal proteins, but you need more amino acid, sufficient, not high amino acid, but moderate protein intake, sufficient amino acid so that your muscle mass is maintained, of course, together also with physical training.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
So one of the things that I found very early on was most of the people I operated on as a heart surgeon would come in, quite frankly, with low albumins. And low serum albumin is a really good predictor of bad things happening to you. I think you and I both agree. And what I postulated was that as we get older, our gut surface area is at least a tennis court, probably two tennis courts in surface area.
And I postulated that the damage that we were doing to the absorptive surface area of the gut was taking, I joke, a tennis court and turning it into a ping pong table. And so that the perceived, the real need for more protein, which you and many others have shown as we get older, I felt, was because of damage to the intestinal wall.
Dr. Valter Longo:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:37:19].
Dr. Steven Gundry:
And what I did was, and I use a low protein diet relatively, and I don’t ban animal products. I prefer a pescatarian or a poultry-based, but what I did was lower my patient’s protein in later life, but take away inflammatory foods like lectins and nightshades. And lo and behold, these people, their albumins actually went up.
Dr. Valter Longo:
Yeah, very interesting.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
So I think we’re saying the same thing. I think quite frankly, most people have a very damaged absorptive surface as they get older. And I think that can be repaired, and that’s what I do in my clinics. The other thing I think you and I both know is that one way of lowering IGF-1 levels is limiting animal protein. There are other great ways, intermittent fasting, time-restricted feeding, to me and my patients is the most powerful way to lower IGF-1. And I kind of like low IGF-1s as I age, not when we’re 30, and removing sugars or lessening sugars, or even things that turn into sugar. And in some people it’s starches that are the problem. So I think there’s a lot of ways to get around this. I think you and I get a lot of flak for saying we’re over-proteinized in this country and in Europe now.
Dr. Valter Longo:
There is no doubt. This may very well be, if not responsible, certainly contributing to this, I mean, we haven’t figured it out yet, but the breast cancer, the colorectal cancer occurring earlier. I mean, we looked at Italian children, and Italian children had two to three times more proteins per day than recommended by most pediatric association in the world. So two to three times in different age ranges. Yeah, so this is a problem. And there is no evidence whatsoever that excess protein is good for you. Zero, right?
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Yeah.
Dr. Valter Longo:
I mean, enough proteins but not excess protein. And now, we’re going to all this advertisement and all this, and even podcasters and everybody else talking about very high protein diet. It’s scary because it could get a lot of people into early mortality, early disease situation.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
More amazing episodes just like this one, watch now. When we stop eating anything for a continued period of time, we release not only fat from our fat cells, but those heavy metals and organopesticides.
