Adapted from episode 112 of The Perfect Stool podcast and edited for readability, with Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, CEO and Chairman of the Board of L-Nutra .
Lindsey:
I’m excited to have you on the podcast. I’d heard about ProLon and the fasting mimicking diet at least a couple years ago. And then when it fell into my sphere of potential podcast guests, I was really excited. So anyway, can you tell us about what a fasting mimicking diet is? And how it’s used currently, clinically, in terms of a general overview of conditions and the duration and frequency?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Yeah. So as you know, fasting became very popular in the last seven, eight years. And a lot of what was coming from our research – I lead a company called L-Nutra, that produces the ProLon, but we’re a spinoff from University of Southern California where a lot of the research on fasting started. So there’s now 18 universities doing research on fasting. And what they discovered some 10-12 years ago is that intermittent fasting, doing that for a few hours, or extra hours, or 16, or 18, you know, can help people lose some weight. And there’s a lot of clarifications to do there and how to do it the right way. But the biggest discovery was that if you go longer, you know, how about one day, two days, three days, four days, five days, what happens to the body. And one major discovery, which ended up winning the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016, was that when you cross the third day, when you go on a third day of fasting, there’s another layer of benefits that happens in the body, which is cellular rejuvenation. So basically, the first two days of fasting, your buddy has enough glycogen in the muscle, I call those then, the checking account and the bank, when you need money, you go first to them, and then you have enough fat, which is the savings account. And then if you need a little bit more on your credit card, the liver can also some can do some neoglucogenesis.
So the first two days, you go to glycogen and fat and to the liver, and they can help the body sustain. And they when you cross day two, and you’re getting into day three, the body is declaring crisis. It’s saying, well, I’m using my bank account, I’m getting depleted. So it tells the cells that you’re on your own. Now you have to consume the debris, the organelles. You’re going to detox, you’re going to improve how you operate, how you function, otherwise, we’re going to die. So on day two and three, we call this the cellular rejuvenation, and the body is rejuvenating the cells. And if you go long enough, you get to day four and day five, the cells tell the body, hey, I’m using the debris, the organelles, I’m trying to fix and now what’s next. What’s next is there’s some old cells that the body doesn’t need and it kills them, and pushes the new young cells to replace those. So there’s a third layer: the first two days is a metabolic fast, the second, day three, day four, we called it rejuvenation and then as of day four onwards, there’s a regeneration. The body kills the old cells, the senescent cells, which are behind a lot of inflammation and aging in the body, and pushes the young cells to replace them.
Lindsey:
And that’s called autophagy. Right?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Autophagy is a second one, the rejuvenation. The regeneration one, which very few people talk about, is all coming from the science of USC and Valter Longo, which he very well described in his Longevity Diet book. If you get anything out of this podcast for those listening to us, go and read The Longevity Diet book, it was an international bestseller. It explains why to go a little bit longer. And what we’re going to talk about it, because we do it to close the question with nutrition. We’re not here recommending that people go and water fast for five days, because it’s so difficult. It’s sometimes risky, and it’s very difficult to comply with. But I’m explaining why we got to the nutritional phase. So the biggest discovery was that two days of fasting, the first two days, is good for your metabolism. Second, day three and day four, cellular rejuvenation and autophagy, Nobel Prize in Medicine. Day four onwards, the way actually that the benefit stays is the body starts killing the old cells, making more structural more deep change and pushing the stem cells, the younger cells to replace the older cells, which is a full regeneration of the body. So it’s a big body detox clean up. And cellular rejuvination makes the body a little bit younger.
That is what made fasting actually very popular is when those cellular changes were discovered. People were like wow, fasting can be a preventative or intervention for many chronic diseases. It can reverse aging, and it can be a very good medical intervention. Medical fasting for people who suffer with from overweight and diabetes, for people with cancer because you starve the cancer, for people with other chronic conditions. And then USC, University of California and the other universities, they went to market trying to tell people to fast for five days and they were trying that with certain conditions, including autoimmune disease and cancer and it was very difficult, nobody was able to do that. But the trials in mice were unbelievable. The cure rate from many chronic conditions. And improving mouse health was very beneficial. So they took the mice data, and they talked to the National Institutes of Health. The NIH funds a lot of research across the US. And they asked for a big grant to develop the fasting mimicking diet, basically, how can we help people eat something during the five days, but mimicking the benefits of fasting on the cells.
So that was the big endeavor, and it took $36 million, actually, of the grants and donations, it took 12 years for those researchers to sit and say, okay, how much of every macro and micro-nutrient can I give you and at what time of the day and combined with which other micronutrients, what we call the nutrient sensing pathways, the cells have receptors to food so that we don’t trigger the receptors of the cell so that the cells do not recognize their eating so that the cells stay in the fasting mode. So it took 12 years, a very precise precision nutrition formula that gives you all plant-based, healthy ingredients, no chemicals, no extra processing, it’s just literally high-end, premium, clean food that is made of ingredients tested to not trigger the satiety of the cell and therefore keeping your body in the fasting mode. Although you’re eating for five days, and this is why they call it the fasting mimicking diet, probably the biggest oxymoron you’ll hear in nutrition, it’s a fasting food basically, much better than fast food, by the way.
Lindsey:
So can you give me some examples of the types of food that are in the ProLon Fasting Mimicking Diet?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Yeah, the way the consumer would see it, and ProLon is the brand name of the fasting mimicking diet. So if you consume ProLon, you’re having a fasting bar in the morning. You can actually buy by the bar separate, it’s called the fasting bar. So you get a bar for breakfast, then you get a soup, and some olives and then supplements for lunch. You have a small snack, that chocolate crisp, in the afternoon. And for dinner, you will have another soup and crackers. And you have a drink that you take throughout the day and your supplements, minerals and an algal oil as well. And it’s all vegan. And this is the presentation level. But the ingredients themselves, the macro ingredients, a lot of them are coming from high end nuts. So you have macadamia, you have almonds, pecans, because they have the right proportions of healthy fats for the brain when you’re fasting. They have the complex carbs; you don’t want to have short carbs, because they spike insulin, they spike the detection of the cells. And they have plant-based sources of proteins, which is very effective for actually maintaining lean body mass.
This is one of the biggest surprises with ProLon is when you do fast and you do it a little bit longer term, you lose a little bit of muscle here and there. But when you do ProLon and there’s two clinical trials on ProLon and patents filed, you protect lean body mass. So what happens is the cells of the muscles are rejuvenating and then what makes fasting different than all other diets, it’s a stress reaction that is induced in the body, it’s why the cells rejuvenate. Whereas any other diet is a calorie deficit. So the body adjusts by losing fat and losing a little bit of muscle. But with fasting it’s a stress, and stress increases stress hormones, one of which is growth hormone. So when you’re doing ProLon, growth hormone is high in the body. And now because you’re doing a fasting mimicking nutrition, you’re getting proteins to the muscle, and we have a secret in it, where we spike the carbs a little bit in the soups, which spikes insulin little bit, without going off fasting. And now the muscle is seeing a mini spike of insulin, it’s seeing a spike in growth hormone because of the stress and it’s getting fed because it’s a nourished fast. So the muscle gets maintained and in many cases, actually increases. So it’s one of the most important features of doing fasting with nutrition versus not. And it’s helping a lot of people when they get off of ProLon to still have high metabolic rate, to still be vibrant, to still exercise, to not pick up the weight right away.
A lot of the metabolic benefits with ProLon last three to four months, so 90 to 100 days after just doing that five days of fasting mimicking nutrition. We’ve tested it against the Mediterranean Diet, against a lot of pills for diabetes, including the Ozempic’s and Wegovy’s and the insulin and the effect is by hundreds of percentages better, mainly because cell rejuvenation, when you’re getting younger, a lot of the chronic diseases we suffer from today are due to aging. So you want to hit on two things. You want to get your body a little bit biologically younger. There is nothing today that you can take that is proven to get you get your cells younger and fixed, except fasting. Right so that’s one of the biggest impacts and people need to understand that 90% of us are dying from four conditions today, right? Cardiovascular, diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s. These are not independent diseases. These are not genetically driven. To a certain extent, yes. But these are mainly diseases of aging. Even if you have the APOE gene, if you’re not 70, you’re not going to get Alzheimer’s. You know, most people have diabetes at age 60, they were still a little bit overweight at age 40, and 30. But they did not get diabetes, because they had younger cells, they had better muscle, they were able to deal with excess carbs.
So reversing biological age is key to escaping or preventing or better dealing with these chronic conditions. And this is why we’re seeing the fasting mimicking diet and the clinical trials, we now have over 32 clinical trials and 18 top universities globally, we’re showing major health benefits in chronic conditions because this is the only intervention that is rejuvenating the cells, getting you a little bit younger. A younger you has a much better body and biology and metabolism to deal with conditions. And the second biggest secret is protecting the muscle, the muscle is very important for viability, for burning carbs, for decreasing insulin resistance. And as you know, 73% of us have a certain level of overweight and now the latest statistics are showing that 90% of us have certain metabolic issues. So getting the body younger, protecting the muscle, turns out to be way superior to the Wegovy’s and the Ozempic’s and the chronic dieting. And this is what’s behind the success of ProLon and fasting today.
Lindsey:
That sounds amazing. One big question that hits my mind because when I think of fasting, my biggest fear is hunger pangs. So do you still get the hunger pangs with ProLon?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Different people have different experiences. So if we take 100 people, the statistics show that a third will say it was very easy, and I’m used to it. And these are typically people who are metabolically flexible, they exercise or they try to keto, meaning their body easily switches to ketones, easily breaks down fat, easily calls for liver for executing. They flex, they do exercise, they are in general healthy, and sometimes they’ve done some ketogenic diet. So they find it very easy. There is a good 40% that find it, okay, it was challenging, and especially on day three, when now the pressure’s on the cells to rejuvenate, but then they go through it. And there’s a good 20% that say it was very difficult. And these are typically people who are not metabolically flexible. They’ve addicted their body to carbs or others and they find it difficult to jump and do it.
But then every cycle you do it, we show that it becomes easier and easier, because your body now, it’s like exactly when you go to the gym, right? If you’re used to going to the gym, it’ll be easy. If you’re not used to it, the first time, you’re going to have a little bit of muscle ache, and you’re going to feel tired the next day. And we see the same. Fasting is actually like intensive training; it is the same mechanism. It’s the same way they tell you to do intensive training now, and then it opens new vessels for the heart, it takes your body to the next level. It’s just a stress imposed on the body. When you impose a stress, the body elevates its defense mechanism. And a lot of those are great mechanisms for aging, the same way fasting does the same for the cells. At a much more advanced level. Obviously, we talked about rejuvenating yourself. Because you’re going five days, it’s not few hours of stress, it’s a five day process. But over a million boxes now consumed. It’s only five days. Statistics show that 91 to 93% of people would be able to complete it. But again, some people find it difficult the first cycle.
Lindsey:
And so I’m thinking about the fact that obviously somebody who is a bigger man versus a small woman typically consumes a lot different number of calories. Is it in any way calibrated to weight?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
It’s not and I get this question very frequently. And we tested it on different BMIs. We tested it on different body weights, on different muscle mass, and why we don’t calibrate it is because it actually auto corrects, meaning if you’re a bigger weight, you have a lot more reserves, you will get into autophagy towards day 4 not day 3. Because you have more reserves, you can cope more. And your metabolism is not probably as active as a person who’s skinnier and who has less reserves and has a lot of muscle. And so what happens is, if you’re bigger, you get autophagy on day four. And if you have a higher metabolic rate and you have less fat and your BMI is lower, you get into autophagy towards day 2, but why we don’t want to autocorrect because for the person who has a lot of reserves is you’re going to give him even lower calories to get him into autophagy sooner and the lower calories becomes a risk to that person. Because that person is addicted to the carbs a little bit more and has a bigger volume intake, so it self corrects. And the same way you don’t want to rush an already skinny person who already has a high metabolic rate into autophagy. So what happens? It self corrects and it works for each one, balancing compliance, safety and efficacy together.
Lindsey:
Okay. So let’s talk about the research on the fasting mimicking diet and inflammatory bowel disease or Crohn’s and Colitis.
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Well, yeah, this is a very current topic. Stanford University is doing a trial on Crohn’s and University of Miami is doing a trial on ulcerative colitis. And we don’t have yet the results published. But what we have studied extensively is in mice first, we studied fasting, water fasting. We studied the fasting mimicking diet, ProLon and we looked at the benefits and in at least in mice, again, I cannot confirm it, in humans until we have the results of the clinical trials, and with compliance we don’t want to over . . . although we have a lot of cases reported to us of a lot of benefits. But I’ll stick to the results in mice. And in mice, what we showed is that water fast doesn’t actually . . . so inflammatory bowel disease, or autoimmunity, and you also mentioned ulcerative colitis, the common factor is inflammation. And some of it is an immune reaction to the gut lining. Some of it is also leaky gut, and we can talk about it; there’s so many root causes to each.
But what fasting is showing, water fasting is helping decrease inflammation across the body. We see that all the time. And why is that so? When you do a water fast, the body cannot spend calories right? So the body tells all the white cells, hey, do not . . . inflammation is replication of white blood cells and secretion of cytokines which increases inflammation, it’s like getting the engine of your heart a little bit heated. And when you fast, if you don’t have gas in the tank, you don’t want to to accelerate and hit the engine, because you’re spending it. The same way every time you fast, we see the body dropping inflammation. Now with water fasting, we haven’t seen a lot of benefits on leaky gut. We did see microbiome changes and we saw some stem cell healing in the gut with the fasting mimicking diet and we’ve published that.
We showed it superior to water fasting; this was one of our biggest surprises. Initially, we thought the fasting mimicking diet will give you a portion of water fasting benefits, but it is actually giving more benefits in many cases because it’s funding the rejuvenation. So it’s something to tell a cell do autophagy and I’m going to going to give you minerals and vitamins, you just go and figure it. And it’s something to tell a stem cell or young cell go replicate, fill in the gap for an older cell, but I’m not going to give you any minerals or any macros, versus with a fasting mimicking diet or ProLon, you’re giving them macronutrients and micronutrients. So you’re funding the correction, it’s the same thing.
So we saw a better closure with leaky gut, we saw better stem cell regeneration, or younger cell replication when you do the fasting mimicking diet in mice with IBD, which was a big surprise to us, actually. And we filed a patent on it and we published an article on it. So in general, if we zoom out, why fasting, if you read all books, for autoimmune disease, including IBD: ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s, even the old old book of medicine had fasting. And why is that, it’s very interesting. So we talked about decreasing the immune attack, because when you fast the body doesn’t want to fund any replication of white blood cells, it doesn’t want to secrete cytokines and increase temperature, but also actually, we see the body killing the active T cells and regenerating new naïve, we call them naive new cells, because they’re not going to do that attack. So it’s part of the body’s human evolution and natural selection of hey, if by mistake I have white blood cells, T cells doing a lot of attacking, let me just wash them out and bring new T cells.
So we see this all the time, immunity and limit drops, and limit increases, showing the regeneration, so very interesting to swap active cells with naive new cells that will not do the attack, but also on the heat on the damaged organ. You know, whether it’s psoriasis, whether it’s rheumatoid arthritis, whether it’s all sort of colitis, we talked about autophagy and cellular regeneration, so we see healing happening at the damaged organ, and this is why fasting has been so effective in autoimmune diseases. It decreases the attack and it helps the damaged organ to heal. And I was just fascinated. I’m a physician myself, but we never learned that. But when I went back and one night I was looking at the old interventions in autoimmunity and fasting was core to those. So now with the fasting mimicking nutrition, we are testing in humans whether we can get the same benefits or maybe it could be better could be not, before we announce officially announce and launch our autoimmune programs.
Lindsey:
You have studied MS though, correct?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
We have studied MS. In same concept what we’ve seen in MS. We studied in humans and we studied in mice. And in humans, we studied one cycle, followed by the Mediterranean diet. One cycle of fasting mimicking diet, followed by the Mediterranean diet. In MS, the same as other autoimmune systems, you see the immune attack goes down pretty fast in mice, actually 20% of the mice reverse all the immune attack in the first cycle of the fasting mimicking diet, which is striking. And then when you go and we’ve shown on MRIs, the damage, you know myelin around the axons also gets rejuvenated and gets healed. So, again, I cannot confirm all this in humans, were a science company. So we have to do clinical trials. This is why we have 32 clinical trials, we take every condition and we go with it.
Lindsey:
Okay, so only so far you have mice results?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
We have mice results showing, because this is you know, invasive, we’re showing the rejuvenation in the myelin of course. In humans, we do have an early human trial. It shows symptomatic improvements, but we haven’t done an invasive, big trial on humans to show full rejuvenation happening.
Lindsey:
Okay, and that was with one cycle. There were symptomatic improvements.
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
It was a feasibility study. So typically, when you do mice trials, and you go to human trial, you start with a small trial in humans just to show safety and feasibility. So we’ve done a quick one, we show it’s safe for people with MS to do the fasting mimicking diet, it was ProLon that time. And then we show it’s feasible; at least it’s not making them worse or putting them at risk. Then you go to phase two, phase three, which are the bigger, bigger interventional, bigger volume of fuel. We haven’t done that.
Lindsey:
Okay. So I know that the most recent paper published or at least when we originally spoke was on diabetic nephropathy, and the fasting mimicking diet. Can you tell me about that study?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Yeah, and now we just published another one, two days ago. So this is diabetes, we have launched what we call the L-Nutra Health for Diabetes Program or fasting mimicking diet for diabetes program. We’ve done two clinical trials on diabetes. And diabetes, we’re most excited about, number one, because it’s the one of the biggest diseases, so we can help so many people, and hopefully millions of people.
Lindsey:
Type two diabetes?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Type two diabetes. We’ve study type one in mice, we’ll talk about that. But yes, type two, and then what we’re excited about also is that diabetes is a actually a combination of four things. And again, I am an MD PhD, but I’ve never been taught these four things behind diabetes. I’ve been taught that blood sugar increases, you give them pills, they’ll take them for the rest of their life, right? I’ve never been taught the true root causes of diabetes and how we can reverse those. So diabetes is, for people listening to us, a pillar of four things. Number one, aging. Again, when you were diagnosed at age 50 with diabetes, you were also eating the same at age 40 and at age 30 and you were a little bit overweight. I’m generalizing, right, most people, or a little bit less weight, but you were younger, your metabolism was higher, and you wouldn’t amass insulin resistance as much as you want to at age 50 or 60 or 70.
Number two, it’s a disease related to muscles. So protecting muscle, and keeping the metabolic rate is very important. It’s a disease of lifestyle, right? And then number four, yes, it is genetic predisposition, but it’s mainly lifestyle as well, and how you eat and how you exercise and stress and sleep. And so the the fasting mimicking nutrition, we’re so excited about it, because it hits on three out of the four pillars. You cannot change genetics yet. But what you can do is you’re helping with the cells getting younger, you’re protecting lean body mass, you lose preferential fat. This is so critical, and I’m repeating myself, but it’s so important, you lose a lot of fat with the fasting mimicking diet. With ProLon you don’t lose muscle, or a tiny bit because glycogen is in the muscle.
And then number three, you’re inspiring the person. A lot of people when you ask about the number one benefit when they finished ProLon or the fasting mimicking diet, they say it changed my relationship with food. And this is a big unlock, because we know that diet and exercise can reverse diabetes if you sustain them for the long term, but it’s very difficult to sustain. And you lose muscle as well when you go on a low calorie diet. But when you do ProLon or the fasting mimicking diet, it’s five days, right? So five days, 90% of people can do anything for five days, right? And then and I always say it’s short enough for people to complete, but it’s long enough to inspire you now to say, wait, is it because when you start ProLon day one you’re like okay, if I’m going to feel hungry on day six, I’m going to have a party. I’m going to eat all the pizzas and burgers. And here comes day four and day five, and he’s like, I just I cannot even see a pizza or a burger. I just want to eat healthy on day six. So that changes the relationship with food, understanding he can go more plant-based, understanding he can eat lower portions, understanding that I don’t have to snack big at night. And I can wait till tomorrow to have my food are very big inspirational steps.
And I’m a big believer in the science coming from Stanford and BJ Fogg about tiny wins, right? So, every time a patient or a person feels like I did something for five days, I think I’ve succeeded, because typically we fail on diets, so they’re chronic. This is a very short diet, right, it’s just five days. I succeeded, I felt that I can go five days on healthy food, why not continue a little bit and then the next cycles reminds you, and then the next cycle reminds you. So it’s very important to inspire people with diabetes to become healthy, rather than just scare them. When they leave the clinic, put them on a very hard diet, and then they just fail, and they learn helplessness, they get acquired helplessness, and they just keep needing more medication and swaping every time muscle with fat. And this is what Ozempic and Wegovy are now doing, accelerating muscle loss and, and we’re waking up now to say, okay, if you stop them, you’re picking up all the fat faster, and you’re not developing the muscle. And this is creating a big issue that we’re facing with these drugs.
So we’re very excited with the fasting mimicking diet for diabetes, because you lose the weight, you protect the muscle, you reverse the bio age, all three big pillars for diabetes remission, we’re seeing a lot of patients in the first clinical trial, two thirds of the patients, reduce medication on month six, meaning they just done it six times, five days, 30 days. So once a month, it’s once a month for six months. And then you maintain just once every three or four months. So very high degree of compliance, that 12 month compliance rate was 83%. Very high chance of reducing medication. This is huge for diabetic patients, because the story for diabetic patients, we start you with metformin, and then we only add, and then you have to inject and then you have to go on insulin, and then you die. This is how diabetes was taught in medical school. And here’s how it’s practiced today versus somebody telling the patient, let’s take you off medication. And so we’re seeing a very high chance of what we call regression, reversing the disease and needing less medication. And a double digit chance of actually remission, which is getting off medication.
Lindsey:
And I assume you’re also tracking hemoglobin A1C and insulin and that kind of thing. What results are you seeing there?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Yeah,so within six months, as we mentioned already, a decrease of 1.4 points in HBA1C. And this includes, you know, doctors typically see their patients every three to six months to measure HBA1C, so not only reducing HBA1C, reducing HBA1C on top of taking medication off, because you have to adjust to that effect as well. And so within six months, people on average are dropping 1.4 points of HBA1C, they’re losing 22 pounds on average. 67% are needing less medication at that level.
Lindsey:
And this is with no specific diet in between the five day fasting periods?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Zero request to change the diet, zero requests to exercise more. Zero requests to do any changes. We just do the five-days fasting mimicking diet. It’s how we do it with all our trials, otherwise you bias the results and you would not be published in a high-ranking journal or getting any patents on those right?
Lindsey:
Now, I originally asked about diabetic nephropathy and that obviously is different than neuropathy. Can you tell me the difference? And then what you showed in your paper?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Nephropathy is the kidneys, neuropathy is nerves, right? And so in that article, we were showing that it’s not only metabolism that you’re improving: blood sugar and HBA1C. But actually transitionally, it wasn’t permanent, but transitionally for patients who tried the fasting mimicking diet that already have diabetes, already have damaged the kidney, because the kidney is the biggest, one of the biggest side effects of diabetes, right. There’s a lot of side effects that happen from diabetes, microvascular. But part of the microvascular is the kidneys start getting damaged. And as you know, a lot of diabetic patients end up with kidney failure and dialysis. We’re trying to see if we can help them temporarily. And we started measuring proteins. Part of the measurement of damaging the kidneys with diabetes is they start leaking albumin. So what we showed is that actually we improve kidney function transitionally in that arc. It was a short term, it was a very short-term intervention. But we saw that after every cycle, we’re showing an improvement in kidney function, which gives us hope to do a longer one.
Lindsey:
Like the eGFR?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Yes, and the albumin in the urine, right. So one of the biggest symptoms of damage that diabetes can do.
Lindsey:
Cool. And what is the mechanism of action that the fasting mimicking diet has on diabetes remission and nephropathy?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
This is what we detail, there’s actually three mechanisms of action right? You lose fat significantly versus protecting lean body mass, number two. Number three is you are rejuvenating the cells, which is very important for metabolism, and then vibrancy of the body to deal with diabetes. And it’s feasible. It’s not a long term diet so people can complete it, patients successfully complete it, and it inspires them to leave a healthier and a better life. All these combined are showing this high effectiveness on the condition.
Lindsey:
Alright, well, let’s talk about type one diabetes, because that is an autoimmune disease. And I do definitely have listeners who are interested in autoimmune disease and have one client who has type one diabetes.
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
And in type one it’s tricky because they are dependent on insulin and you’re fasting them. So it’s always tricky on hypoglycemia. And this is why we haven’t done a human trial yet. And, again, we have stories, but I don’t want to report you successes, because then it will be like as if I’m claiming, and again, we’re a company of science, if anything. If anything, people also want to take from ProLon today, it’s a nutrition product based on science, on NIH money and universities and double blinded, randomized clinical trials, published in top journals. So, I behave the same, we have to be compliant. So I’m not going to recommend anyone with type one diabetes do it today.
But we have seen in mice, because we wanted to test the concept before we go and do it in humans. We’re talking with Harvard University to do the human trial. But we haven’t gotten, we need the funding for it. So we haven’t been able to move forward yet. We’re funding 14 other clinical trials at the same time. But in type one, the theory is the same way we explained it for IBD and Crohn’s and other autoimmune diseases, right. If the premise is that immunity is excited, is attacking the pancreas and the beta cells are not producing insulin, if you fast, are you taking the aggressor, rejuvenating the white blood cells so that you taking the temper and you slow down the aggression, and you give time off for the pancreas to heal and rejuvenate for autophagy and reproducing insulin. So what we’ve done with mice, with a major article in Cell. Cell is the number two science journal in the world after Nature. We have multiple Nature articles, but in Cell, we have seven or eight articles there, we published an article talking about the regeneration of the beta cells of the pancreas, which is the cells that produce insulin. And what we did, we destroyed the pancreas of the mice. And then we put them on cycles of the fasting mimicking diet. And we saw them regenerating beta cells and reproducing insulin and normalizing their blood sugar. It was a huge article for us; it was a big, big achievement. For the first time something describing rebuilding the pancreas and reproducing insulin, it’s amazing. And we’re going to work with the patent on treating diabetes because of that.
But in humans, you have to go and test and maybe in humans, we can reproduce it, maybe not. Or maybe you produce a fraction of it. We have over 15,000 clinics in the US that recommend the fasting mimicking diet. So we have stories, but we cannot base any claim on stories. We have to wait to hopefully find some funding and fund it well, and maybe then be able to help patients either do it or not do it? It’s a tricky one just because these patients are very dependent on insulin and therefore the risk of hypoglycemia with fasting. You’re going to have to do the clinical trial under supervision.
Lindsey:
So back to autoimmunity and IBD. Is there any advice at this point? I know you’re still underway in the human clinical trial. But any advice at this point of how best to implement the fasting mimicking diet in IBD? Like once a month or . . .
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Yeah, unfortunately, I cannot claim if I don’t have the results. But what I see with some physicians, they do ask these patients to do it once a month. But again, up until I don’t know ‘til when, I don’t know efficacy yet.
Lindsey:
Like when people are flaring or not flaring?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Again, this is a tricky question, what answer to help people, but I cannot answer because we sell the product. What I’m going to say is my sister has one, and she does it initially every month and now every three to four months as a maintenance.
Lindsey:
And she has IBD?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
No, a different autoimmune disease. Again, I don’t want to mention it because I’ll look like I’m claiming . . .
Lindsey:
Right, right, of course . . .
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Unfortunately. But I can invite you guys listening here to go to your doctor, give him the science. You can go to prolonlife.com (go to https://prolonfmd.com/HighDesertHealth to buy ProLon with Lindsey’s discount). There’s a science section and you can take the articles and then you talk to your doctor. At the end of the day, this is not a chemical, it’s not biotech, it’s vegan five days of healthy food. We’ll have the doctor look at the science and if he decides to supervise you and do it, then it’s his decision but we could not today push that direction.
Lindsey:
Okay, fair enough. So I know that a lot of biohackers use fasting for longevity and such. Has the fasting mimicking diet been compared to water fasting for this application?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
We talked a little bit about it. Well there’s no randomized clinical trial on water fasting versus the fasting mimicking diet. Nobody has done that. But the goal is again, intermittent fasting is more tested than water fasting. Because there’s no trials where people fast for five days. It’s too difficult. This is why we exist, we actually were a water fasting company, right? And remember, I told you the story and we started at USC, we went into human trials to try it and nobody wanted to fast for 5 days.
Lindsey:
Hard to do you sell that one, though? You can’t make a lot of money off of water fasting, can you?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
No and it wasn’t a money project at all actually. The founders of ProLon are USC and Professor Valter Longo, again, the author of The Longevity Diet Book, and he donates 100% of his shares to the Create Cures Foundation. I’m happy you mentioned that because this is exactly the opposite of people who found large companies, even in nutrition, and always this device of making money and why our story is always science. And you hear me talking about science and trials, because the founders, they don’t care about the revenues, they actually predonated their shares to the Create Cures Foundation to help patients access new novel innovations.
So we’re sitting on a company that is funded with science, and we have to give back the profits. Yeah, it was a pure need. Actually, this is why the National Institutes of Health stepped in and said, okay, I’m going to give you the funds to create the fasting mimicking diet, because there was no way to get people to water fast for five days. So this is why it exists, right? It exists to help you do a longer fast to reach cellular rejuvenation on day three, we talked about that, versus people can do intermittent fasting on their own 12 hours, and 14 and 16. And you don’t need to always do that with nutrition. Actually, we do have a fasting bar and a fasting shake to do that, because we don’t believe you should starve your body for 18 hours on water, especially when you skip breakfast, because you’re just starving your brain, your heart and your kidneys, the essential organs at their peak performance, which is in the morning.
We’d rather you starve yourself at night rather than you starve yourself in the morning. So we have developed the fasting bar and the fasting shake, just to help people in the morning, consume those as breakfast and then stay in a fasting mode. But we’re less interested in intermittent fasting, it just it helps you with losing weight, it helps if you do it right. With your metabolism, we’re more interested in the longer fast. Again, we don’t recommend anyone do water fasting for a long period. We do it with the prolonged or the fasting mimicking diet. This is why we exist, it was out of the need. And it was to make fasting safe and compliant for most people.
Lindsey:
So this is just a hair off topic, but I have heard people make different claims about when autophagy starts once you start fasting, you know, like how many hours at night to not eat? What is the official word on that? And obviously, it sounds like it differs by body weight.
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
They’re wrong. I used to be politically correct; they’re all wrong. Because it was speculation, right? You know, and I’ll tell you why they’re wrong. Number one is we’re 100% sure they’re wrong. The NIH just deployed eight machines to measure autophagy. So why there’s different theories when autophagy starts, because there was no way to measure it in humans. And now there are eight machines that the National Institutes of Health funded to measure autophagy. One of them is at University of Texas, San Antonio and ProLon was the first product to be tested by the way. And we’re now showing that day one, there’s no autophagy, day two, there’s no autophagy, it’s day three that happens to most people. And so now we have proof and a randomized clinical trial, randomizing people and showing that it happens as on day three. So I can 100% say yes, we got the data last week, so it’s fresh.
But we always knew that. Why because again, the cell rejuvenates. When the when the body tells us, I cannot feed you, you’ve got to go and eat your inside and rejuvenate. And if you skip breakfast in the morning, you still have a lot of fat, you have a lot of glycogen, your liver has a lot of extra reserve, why the cell going to rejuvenate? When you’re not stressed, right? It’s the same way like going into company and telling the CEO, okay, you need a million dollars. I’m going to give you a million dollars but wait for me six hours, he’s just going to wait. He’s not going to go restructure the company. Now if he if you tell him I’m going to come in two weeks, he’s going to be in deep trouble. And he’s going to go and restructure the company and try to fix it and try to save and try to cut. So there’s always a basal rate of autophagy. Every minute of the day, stem cells are rejuvenating just out of normal function and vibrance of the body. But to spike autophagy is definitely not skipping breakfast, not even skipping lunch, not even skipping dinner, you would barely start touching it because it makes sense. You know, you’re not in a stressful mode to go and do it.
Lindsey:
Yeah, so it doesn’t really matter then other than the fact that you’re simply not consuming as many calories that you fast for say 13 hours at night versus 16. Because I know there are some trials on that on intermittent fasting and its impact on blood sugar and all that.
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Yeah, of course so again, go back to the CEO example. If he needs a million dollars per month, and you’re delaying now for hours, then he has to go and take some money from the banks, the same way, to cover these few hours. Same way the body goes into the fat and breaks a little bit of fat every time you do it. Now, we can talk two hours about that because some people binge eat. So whatever they try to use, they can overabuse after. And it’s very important which time of the day again, we can do a full session on just fasting, a lot of people are doing it wrong, because a lot of the early influencers, told everyone skip breakfast, skip lunch, do OMAD (one meal a day) or do 18 hours. And this is not a longevity practice because you’re basically starving your body in the morning when it needs the calories. And a lot of longevity trials are showing that risk of cardiovascular disease increases if you skip food for a long period during the day and then you binge eat after that. This is what happened.
So why intermittent fasting grew in that sense, because of two wrong pieces of information. They told people they’ll have autophagy if you skip breakfast, which is wrong, and number two, they told them you can lose weight, which is also not always true. And it depends on if you’re eating dinner late. And then you’re skipping breakfast, lunch, and then you’re eating at 4 or 5 pm. What you have just done is you’re stuffing your body and food in the evening time and you go sleep. When you sleep, your insulin and your growth hormone are high at night actually. So you’re in anabolic so you’re storing everything you took in to fat versus and then you go you starve yourself during the day when you need to use these calories for your essential organs. This is a big mismatch. What you want to do, the right intermittent fasting, is you eat your dinner early, and then you stay overnight fasting and then your breakfast, you should get breakfast or get a fast bar or fasting shake. Eat something in the morning because this is when your body needs it. So the right intermittent fasting is 12 to 14 hours max front loaded, sleep on an empty stomach and get your breakfast or delay breakfast. That’s the one that helps longevity. When we study centenarians, people living 100 and beyond, no centenarians do one meal a day or do the crazy starvation stuff. They actually, most of them though, say we eat early, you know, we go to bed early as well.
Lindsey:
Early like five or early like three?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Three is an afternoon snack. And honestly, I mean, you can go all the way, the extreme cases. Brian Johnson, he only eats between 8 and 11 in the morning, right. And, you know, we don’t want to go extreme in any way. We believe the best longevity, you get it from harmonization, from harmony, from matching your body with your environment, with the circadian rhythm. This is why intermittent fasting 12 hours overnight works very well, right. So, so what you should do, don’t eat late at night, eat your dinner early, as early as you can wait, and then go to bed on an empty stomach. This is when your body will rejuvenate at night without storing fat. And then the next day you wake up, I always say if you’re sleeping hungry, and you wake up hungry, this is a great longevity practice, and then get your breakfast in the morning. Your brain will be happy because you’re going to work or you have your kids and you need to function. Your muscle is happy because you’re walking, your kidneys are happy, your heart is happy because your heart rate increases when you’re moving. They’re fed on time. And then you go in the afternoon, you eat a little bit or at night and then you sleep and that’s the right practice versus people snacking late at night and then trying to stay 16-18 hours the next day to eat in the afternoon. Your body tells you that you feel weak. You feel the headache, and then you binge eat and then you say I’m not losing a lot of weight and it’s difficult to practice.
Lindsey:
Yeah. It’s a lot more in tune with the European or at least the French way of eating, where the biggest meal of the day is lunch and then dinner is usually just more of a snack.
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Well, I can give you an advanced trick. How about you do breakfast and dinner and a light lunch like this you would have done two 12 hour fasts. You would have gone overnight to breakfast. And then from breakfast to dinner. That’s another almost intermittent fasting with 12 hours. This is what our founder Professor Valter Longo and again, the Time Top 50 Most Influential People in health care. He’s the number one longevity expert and fasting expert. This is what he does, he eats breakfast, very light snack in the middle of the day to get his body going. And then he eats dinner. Dinner is social. It’s difficult to skip. And so he’s is genius in that sense. He does double twelves in a healthy way rather than staying 18 hours.
Lindsey:
So is he up at five in the morning, I’m just curious, to have an early dinner?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
No, because you can have your breakfast at eight and then have your dinner at seven. Okay. It’s difficult with work now to eat dinner at five. You’ve got to stay a little bit at work, we’re all really busy. You’re got to be practical. And then you go eat at seven.
Lindsey:
So that’s actually a relatively late dinner.
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Depends on when you sleep again. But yes seven, in the summer seven, the sun is not down. Early and late depends on circadian rhythm at the end of the day. Because the body follows, I mean, we talked about the Nobel Prize in Medicine 2016 was on autophagy, right? In 2017, it was on the biological clock of the organs. And it follows circadian rhythm. So when the sun is down is the time for dinner. That’s how I say it. And this is why seven is not that late. I mean, winter is 5-6 pm. And in the summer, it’s 7-8 pm.
Lindsey:
But that’s because of daylight savings time and spending time. Right? We altered the clock.
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
No, not the clock.
Lindsey:
Well, okay, that’s true. The sun does naturally . . .
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Yeah, naturally the position of earth versus the sun.
Lindsey:
But we exaggerated it by adding in daylight savings.
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
One hour in biology is not the end of the day. It’s one hour plus or minus, I’m just saying around that time. You know, having dinner at 5 pm for many people is impossible. They’re still at work. But it should not be at 10 is what we’re trying to say so anywhere from six to seven and eight.
Lindsey:
So you’re telling me my 10 o’clock ice cream snack is not good for me? I at least eat the Keto ice cream or the sugar-free.
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
Yeah, but the calories are being stored. Right. And this is one of the next biggest lies in super, super low carb or low carb, your body lives on carbs. And this keto thing is another podcast that we can talk about. But your body lives on carbs. And if you get the calories from fat and you’re sleeping and you’re in an anabolic state, you’re going to store those. So yeah, definitely don’t go high carb. But you didn’t change much when you eat late at night. It’s the biggest, if you asked me like, and we can talk a lot about what to do to live healthy, long life. But one of the things I always recommend is sleep a little bit hungry. And then everything gets fixed. You’re going to feel like even if you’re eating big breakfast and eating a big lunch, you feel it’s getting burned and you feel you’re going to gain the weight. Sometimes most of us, oh, I don’t eat breakfast. And I’d stay all the way and I only have one meal at night. And I’m not losing that stubborn weight, because you’re eating the calories at the wrong timing. What fasting brought to us is the importance of not just calorie counting, but the timing. During the day you’re catabolic, you’re spending, right, your muscle is moving. During the night you’re storing. Don’t feel the storage, fuel expenditure.
Lindsey:
Right. Okay, well, I think that was a lot of good information that people can use both about the fasting mimicking diet and about just what time of day to eat. So thank you for that. Any final thoughts before we go?
Dr. Joseph Antoun:
No. I appreciate you, Lindsey. I think for those listening here and wanting to enhance the chances of living a healthy, long life, I recommend you do the overnight fast 12 hours, max 14, but just do it in a natural way. Every day there are a lot of people living 100 and beyond who do that. When we study them, eat your dinner a little bit early and stay hungry overnight. You don’t eat overnight, you do two or three times per year the fasting mimicking diet, it’s part of human evolution. This is not our artificial request here. Our ancestors migrated during the winter, they didn’t have food all the time. And they used this time to rejuvenate right? It’s like spring, even in nature. ProLon is like spring; it is when you go and you rejuvenate and then make sure you stress less and sleep better. And then improve your happiness and serenity and social capital. These are the pillars of longevity.
Lindsey:
Awesome. I’ve got links to the various papers in the show notes and to the website to purchase the ProLon, so thank you so much for being with us.
If you are struggling with bloating, gas, burping, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, soft stool, acid reflux, IBS, IBD, SIBO, candida overgrowth, fatigue or migraines and want to get to the bottom of it, that’s what I help my clients with. You’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session with me. We’ll talk about what you’ve been going through and I’ll tell you about my 3- and 5- appointment health coaching programs in which I recommend lab tests, educate you on what the results mean and the protocols used by doctors to fix the problems revealed. Or if you’re ready to jump in right away or can just afford one appointment at a time, you can set up an 1-hour consultation with me.
