Eat, Fast & Live Longer BBC Documentary

I love life so I want to remain young energetic enjoy it for as long as I can I'm medically trained I know all the standard advice for staying healthy but in my case it doesn't seem to be working I've discovered that my body is not the lean long-lived machine I would like it to be third of your body's fat thank you Rebecca there poet emphatically I wanted to see if science can offer a different way to stop the rot slow the clock so I set off to find experts who are trying to combat the ravages of aging we are rewriting human physiology here oh yeah if you can find something else that you can do that it doesn't hurt you the benefits you and they causes these changes I like to know what I discovered was truly surprising it involves no pills no injections and no hidden cost it's all question of what you eat or rather what you don't eat those there I dreamt I ate a sandwich and then I felt fantastically guilty it's about fasting but fasting made easier if I were to go on to Joe's lifestyle in a year you work on arm you're gonna be cure the big thing is that this is the beginning of something which I think could be huge if it takes off and if it heads off in the direction that I imagine it will then this this could be genuinely revolutionary there are plenty of people who stay young and fit well beyond retirement age they mainly do it the traditional way through lots and lots of exercise today I've come to the London Marathon nearly 36 thousand bodies of all shapes and sizes are tackling the 26 mile course some are young many not so young it was an absolutely fantastic atmosphere here now Allah has never run the math and I have no plans to ever run the marathon but there are plenty of people running today who are far older than me there are seven thousand people in their 50s and incredibly enough there are seven people who are in their 80s or older I'm going to try and flag a few of them down to ask how they do it the whole b78 I'm holding a faithful wife plus the secret reading as you want just eating well anyone who can run a marathon in their 70s deserves my respect but I'm waiting for a man who makes septuagenarians look youthful Baljit Singh is amazing he has been active all his life but he only took up serious running in his 80s so what is it that keeps him so remarkably fit and energetic how their fellow one that's the fear what how old is her Chuck 101 Warner and first of April 1911 unfortunately he hasn't quite mastered the English language yet you might ask him how he's feeling but going to do so you came along you look on them keep calm down and he's all we have our macro music I mean he goes it's not easy yeah but the thing is it's copy the top probably dinosaur physics and do we give up oh yeah although he's a hundred and one voucher has never had surgery he shows no signs of heart disease and he takes no medication he believes that his long life and his incredible health is down to his diet so any particular diet he has no particular diet it's a simple congeries farmers divert just fresh food very secretive he has smaller portions rather in four countries people die starvation in rich countries people die overeating so how much does he eat say compared to you or I he would eat be considered half a portion almost a child so child portions probably about half the amount of calories your I would eat by restricting his food intake so dramatically fallujah has unknowingly been testing a theory that has been around nearly as long as he has a scientific theory which is only now really coming into its own I've taken the tube to the finish line I want to catch Foggia become hopefully the world's oldest marathon runner and after seven hours and 49 minutes he succeeds that is absolutely unbelievable he was a hundred and one years old and he has just covered 26 miles now I can't imagine that in 50 years time I'm going to be running down the mall but I want to be like him I want to be mentally active if they want to be physically active I want to stay younger for longer but decades teams of scientists around the world have been intensely studying aging now clearly genes play a significant part in how quickly and well we age but there's nothing much you can do about your genes there is however something you can do about what you eat and here in America they are starting to turn out some truly remarkable research linking food with longevity it seems it's not just about what we eat but how and when we eat it a story begins in the dust bowls of America during the 1930s there was a terrible drought food with scarce and the whole country was in the grips of the Great Depression now you would imagine in such difficult times that life expectancy would fall but in fact it rose during the darkest years of Great Depression 1929 to 1933 life expectancy increased by a remarkable six years now on the face of it that is really surprising and yet clues as to why could also be found from research done back in the 1930s nutritionists at Cornell University working with animals discovered that if you severely restrict the amount they eat they live longer much much longer so the next obvious question if you do the same with humans will it have the same effect well it's been eight decades since that observation and only now scientists really beginning to understand the link between calorie restriction and longevity in humans at long last it seems we are starting to get answers Washington University is at the heart of this new science we are rewriting human physiology here it's astonishing you know how a simple dietary intervention can really change how the human body works basically professor luigi fontana has spent the last 10 years studying a group of people who severely calorie restrict every single day and he is astonished by what he's found I mean these people they look like a different species that's quite a big state that just yeah we are finding out they are going to live longer than their parents and brothers on the typical American diet or Western diets luigi is clearly impressed so I wanted to meet one of this new species of human for myself lovey lovey has our the directions good bigger thank you Joe Kordell is a crony a calorie restrict err on optimal nutrition and that means a lot of fruit and veg I went ahead and kind of put everything out so I thought you might want to have some breakfast that that would be licious inky you see when only imagine a carrier restrictor I imagine somebody who live basically on a couple of you know carrot something like that I didn't think you're going for breakfast with anything Joe kicks off his day with a mountain of fruit some of which he then throws away and then what I like to do is add some apple to it but when you're in my position I kind of want to to get as much nutritional value as I can for the calorie and virtually all the nutritional value is in is in the pill okay so you're going to sit the pill in and throw away the rest of it you'll do the reverse of what place but you know it's great because you know that it literally is 95 percent of nutritional value here let in the skin is it's in the skin the rest of sugar and it's calories and this is this is generally what I'll have each morning the whole thing yeah it's not a big bowl do you ever think I don't what if I'm wrong what if he's all wrong the I've done this for 10 20 years and actually Newport and science comes out and says it's actually all nonsense I tell you my brother who weighs a hundred pounds more than I do he's about my age yeah okay he's all-time making the joke to me that that that he's going to end up out living me and and in his opinion I will have suffered for nothing but but you know the point is that I enjoy doing it I mean living a healthy lifestyle is fine there are an estimated hundred thousand cronies worldwide people living on a diet which is rich in nutrients but low in calories Joe looks fit but not impressively young perhaps Luigi has been exaggerating so what I'd love to do is take you off do a number of tests and see just how we compare okay I'm going over there so it is this a challenge this is a challenge indeed a challenge I suspect I may well lose but for a decade Joads been eating 1900 calories a day I've averaged around 2300 quite a few of them do nuts and burgers how much do you think you ate oh I think it's probably about a hundred eighty Oh more than a hundred is free then I should be around 134 135 136 got to move it down one notch 134 all right ah yeah we're both in our 50s and I really don't think we look like different generations let alone species so how different are we just need for you to relax in there sit still no talking some of the simplest ways of assessing aging don't need specialist equipment ours as curb balance is controlled by your inner ear okay as you age ear structures deteriorate and your balance gets worse one more you can test it by standing on your weaker leg with your eyes closed if how long have a six point five nine seconds that's not very good not good at all the average 55 year-old should manage eight seconds near down - yeah you doing well for the average 20 year-old over 30 seconds most 20 rolls can manage but it's one of those skills it drops off dramatically and I think you proved the point you stop just stop yet another good test is reaction time which drops off with age not good eh this one only needs a ruler at our age you should be able to catch it around the 5 inch mark by good that was for building pretty well on that's meant luigi's methods are rather more scientific we did a range of other medical tests including blood tests now he's about to give us our results feels fit by being the Headmaster's hope there's no waiting for the results will you give me a stir will I get a b-minus Luigi's face tells me that what I'm about to hear is not good news total body fat in Joseph is 11.5% this is typical of a super athlete you know this 11 percent body fat it's it's very low for a 50/50 for 55 years old man yours is 27.1% fat third of your body's fat thank you Rebecca died poet emphatically and he's still not done talking about my fat the abdominal fat is around 30% abdominal fat is really the bad guy the higher the abdominal fat the higher the risk of developing type 2 diabetes cardiovascular disease no doubt about it it is also risk factor for cancer so basically your cardio metabolic profile it's is not good for your age I mean you know I think you know you should do something to improve it what we can say is that Joseph is not going to develop cardiovascular disease is impossible to develop stroke myocardial infarction or heart failure these three diseases are responsible for 40% of the death now in US and UK no chance of the other I mean one in a million and if I were to go on to Joe's life stuff yep in a year you are gonna you're gonna be cured I now understand what Luigi means it is as if we were two different species Joe's diet seems to be keeping his organs in pristine condition my diet is undermining my health and fast well that was very sobering Luigi does not mince his words he talked a bit about abdominal fat in fact he talked quite a lot about my abdominal fat and I've never thought of myself as particularly fat but it was the sort of two visions he held out to me one where if I continue as I am at the moment I'm heading almost certainly for heart disease and possibly worse the other is if I embrace the CR way the calorie restriction way he said that I could be effectively cured in less than a year that my risk factors would move from being almost certainly a cardiac victim at some point to one in a million and when you put it quite as starkly as that it certainly gives me quite a lot think event see USA then everybody even though the evidence supporting the benefits of calorie restriction is getting stronger all the time I cannot in all honesty imagine myself doing what Joe does which creates something of a dilemma so what I really want to do is try to understand the ways in which calorie restriction works then hopefully I can get all the delicious benefits without actually having to do it I'm in Los Angeles a city that is notoriously addicted to youth in fact many people here seem to think that growing old and wrinkled is optional I'm not going to see anyone as superficial as a plastic surgeon I'm actually here to meet one of the world's foremost experts on Aging hi there Hey hello professor Valtor lungo studies the complex mechanisms which control aging he's honed in on a critical pathway that links what we eat with how we age he's taking me to see two mice they are both the same age same species same sex but there's one significant difference between them the little one is going to be living an awful lot longer than the big one these little mice Mouse right here holds the world record for longevity extension in a memo all right that is remarkable so how long would these subspecies of mice laws this is the big mice here about two years and the little mice about a 40% longer lifespan right yeah there aren't very different don't they oh yeah he's trying to bite there yes I could feel that what okay she left the double gloves not fully work yeah I learned the hard way the big mice already has a 50% chance of being dead okay insisting left me alive is likely to be alive that's right and the small one probably has another year to go we'll live on to the equivalent of 120 and human it Dell exactly yeah another another 30 to 40 years in human years when I pick up you know go ahead yeah by detail by the tail okay the little mouse I'm holding is actually a man-made creation the reason he's so small and so long-lived is because he's been genetically engineered he has incredibly low levels of a growth hormone called insulin-like growth factor-1 and it seems i GF one is a key factor linking calorie restriction and longevity close to the link come from this group of people who live in a remote region of Ecuador they have a very rare condition called laurent syndrome which affects less than 350 people worldwide whoa that's you is it does make you look like a giant yeah I'm the I'm the tall guy they're the shortest one is probably just a little bit over three and a half feet tall sort of up to my bellybutton like that is that right yeah yeah what impressed researchers like Volta is not their size but the fact they seem to be virtually immune to two of the West's biggest killers the big findings of course where they don't seem to get either diabetes or cancer they do the normal self central thing to go do like smoke drinking with the yes yes they did do the normal and more so they have very unhealthy lifestyle most of them are to some extent at least overweight and they seem to really not watch anything they do they smoke or eat a very high calorie diet and then they they look at me and they say it doesn't matter I'm immune but the incredible thing is that there's no evidence of another single one of them ever dying of cancer yet their normal height relatives they get cancer like everybody else people with laurent syndrome have a mutation which makes them small but which also seems to protect them against all these diseases it's incredible working with them it's a great group and of course for us is a group that in one mutation can tell us about diabetes cancer cardiovascular diseases in ageing the ecuadorian villages and the long leg mice have something in common their bodies produce exceptionally low levels of the growth hormone igf-1 this discovery helped voltar piece together the role the igf-1 plays in the complicated business of aging our bodies are normally in gogo mode cells constantly driven to divide by igf-1 but when igf-1 levels drop our cells shift into a completely different mode the body slows production of new cells and starts repairing existing ones instead DNA damage is more likely to get fixed and that's why the mice and the villagers are protected from age-related diseases but what's the link to calorie restriction in humans Valtor has lined up a very simple very Californian analogy it turns out there is something in the food we eat that affects how much igf-1 our bodies produce that something is protein when we eat a lot of protein our cells get locked in go-go mode basically like slamming your phone the accelerators and go go go right exactly it's a pushing this out to burn viewer in gogo mode the body is more susceptible to some cancers and diabetes because your cells are growing too fast for damage to be efficiently repaired it's like driving your car on the dime and never taking it to the mechanic right so that's the key basically is to somehow find a way to switch your body from going Brum Brum Brum into a sort of repair mode look after me make my DNA better exactly so how do you reduce your igf-1 well studies on calorie restrictors suggest the eating less helped but it's not enough as well as cutting calories you have to cut your protein intake not entirely that would be a very bad idea it's about sticking to recommended guidelines something most of us fail to do and you don't have to be a crony to learn igf-1 there is another way fasting in fasting is there is a much more dramatic a much quicker response and so within 24 hours you decrease your glucose levels and you decrease your main growth factor with E which is igf-1 I do find it hard to believe that just a few days of fasting is going to be enough to jolt my body into a more healthy state but I'm certainly intrigued and I want to find out more so I've had my IGF measured back in London and they tell me that it's 28 that good bad that's not very bad but that's high enough that based on a number of studies including our own it puts you in a higher risk category for several different cancers including prostate cancer valtor believes I should start to see some pretty impressive results after just three days and four nights of fasting but it's a daunting prospect I think it's quite tough fasting it's tough isn't it we've done it yourself I've done it myself yes I've fasted for four four days several times and to me it was very tough here and still if I look ahead at doing fasting I see it as a tough four days I'm not looking forward I mean some people do but I don't I'm Italian you know so I look forward to eating well to obey that image in mind the the gravy Italian stopping eating when I'm feeling weak about it there you go thank you prolonged fasting can be dangerous and Valtor thinks it should only be undertaken by people in good health and preferably under close supervision so he will be keeping an eye on me okay I decide they're good to try this fast which is going to be a three and a half day fast and all I'm going to have is that's water black tea and 150 calorie cut a super day no oh god I have never done things quite like this before so I imagine it's going to be really tough but I am interested I'm also I must have made quite concerned but some of the rather bad news health news I'm getting recently so it'll be a challenge but I'm sure I shall manage it reasonably sure and so my fast begins right if you have 10:30 at night and I am hungry it has been just about 25 hours since I last ate a meal and prospect of going to bed well hungry is not a great one I think it's getting to me because I had a dream and I dreamt I ate a sandwich and then I felt fantastically guilty so vivid I have a transitory crumbs in the bed that when I guess time to go to work simple type intervention and really change how the human body works it puts you in a higher risk category just as valtor warned me the first day was tough not really because I was that hungry but simply because I had never done anything like this before it was fear of the unknown by nightfall I'm beginning to think this is a very bad idea particularly when I had dinner with the crew or rather when they had their yeah Here I am in a nice old Korean restaurant with the rest of the crew and they are currently feeding in enjoying you guys beautiful yeah I really never mind like I do feel very hungry fortunately my dinner is waiting for me in my hotel room I believe I can bury my delicious means that sapien give it a stir with the hotel pen because there's no other category around hmm health 25 calories worth and I'm looking forward to it okay final full day of fasting delicious breakfast tea and black tea I'm feeling bit lightheaded but otherwise actually alright so just 24 hours to go and now I'm pretty confident I'll be able to do it I've learnt that hunger does not build and build becomes in waves that pass by now I have depleted my body store of glucose and will have switched to burning fat for fuel instead and if Valtor is right my liver should also have stopped producing so much igf-1 putting my cells into repair mode finally it's 7 a.m. day 4 I'm getting my blood tests done so after this I can go and have breakfast offices like that first food for three ninth days the first food for eighty six hours of blood counting and just hoping that this going to show some changes pickling my idea the device bed lost three and a half to four day is not eating in the results have been absolutely zero that would be very very depressing the fast is over well that is very good I can just sort of begin to feel the empty spaces I wasn't what makes you carry Henry when I woke up this morning but I start eating this area like what is that missing later that afternoon I'm beat up with Valtor to find out if it's all been worth while I broke my fast this morning and I had some porridge and I had some bacon and I feel better oh good good I'll still eat more terrific these results really good yeah yeah let's take a look at them yeah so your insulin-like growth factor-1 igf-1 this is the normal value in the bad news you're almost at the top of the normal range for American standards you're doing good yeah but not good fulfilled but now I get everything I mean average American oh boy that's that's right yeah yes and the good news is with your fasting diet you drop to almost half so now that's big isn't it yeah that's a big drop it's very dramatic drops you respond very well I have to say I'm fascinating I mean seeing that is very very surprising your bug surprising and a huge relief having my igf-1 should cut my risk of certain cancers like prostate cancer which my father had my blood sugar has also dropped to healthy levels which I'm really pleased about I challenge you in four days to get more extreme metabolic changes than these with anything you want I think this is quite extreme though yeah but you know if you can if you can find something else that you can do that it doesn't hurt you it benefits you and they causes these changes I'd like to know okay but Valtor says unless I switch to a lower protein more plant-based diet the effects won't last I'll also need to fast once every couple of months to maintain the benefits can I really see myself doing that you have to make a decision now in your case what do you want to do you know and there's a lot of drugs that you could be taking and is that what you want to do in and if you do so in a few years you're going to be the typical or in a number of years you're going to be the typical 65 year old in Europe that takes 8 drugs a day right and that's also that's the option and you know that's your call thank you okay that's quite a dipstick choice I mean that is really really impressive there in just three and a half days if this data is right and the animal data is right I have massively decreased my risk of a whole range of age-related diseases the big question in my mind at the moment is can I do fasting once a month for however long it takes or is there a better way a different way a more manageable way out there that can do much of what this does but perhaps with a little less pain why discovered about myself is that the biggest problem with prolonged fasting is me you have to make a decision now despite knowing all the wonderful benefits I just can't bring myself to do it but the great thing about science is there is always someone doing further work building on what others have achieved which is why I'm here in Chicago here they are doing studies not just on mice but also on human and they seem to have found a way of making fasting a lot more palatable bad jab Jesus I'm here to meet dr. Christopher addy who has been researching something that sounds easier they turn it day fasting hello hi there hi been asked me to meet you my name is Chris Tamara do you do I'm somebody got here then so this is some of the components that we'd use in an alternate day fasting diet it basically involves a day of pretty heavy calorie restrictions for women at about 4 to 500 calories a day and for men about 5 to 600 calories a day and that's actually just as one meal around lunchtime we call that the fast day so the first day isn't about total abstinence it's about meals that look like this what's great about alternate day fasting is what happens on the alternate days and then that's actually alternated with something we call the feed day which is where you can eat whatever you want absolutely whatever you want and so here's the patterns of the turnit day fasting fast day feed day fast day feed day it certainly sounds easier than either prolonged fasting or the daily calorie restriction I looked at earlier but is it as effective well Krista is currently doing a trial with overweight subjects which suggests it might be we saw is that alternate day fasting group actually lost a bit more weight so about five pounds more after the six month period and they actually saw some pretty nice decreases in LDL cholesterol as well as triglycerides so those are LDL cholesterol the bad cholesterol and triglycerides basically higher amount of that can lead to heart disease and age-related disease we also see really nice decreases in blood pressure over the course of the trials so again another key M heart disease risk factor in addition to so far rather limited human trials there's lots of evidence from animal studies that alternate day fasting ADF is safe and effective I'm convinced enough to try it yesterday I fasted today I feed we will make it back easily enough for magical mystery tour yeah yeah I think sizing and I think you will repeat the warning ever well in the country Carlene johnny people make the choice green stuff as soon as you have it so I'm man I am surprised to be here I can't imagine you'd be sticking me on less of those but you know a bitchy daughter towards more yeah a lot of salads or something on my feed dick no actually as long as you stick to your the the calorie goals on the fast stage you can literally eat whatever you like on the feed day so one of Krista's most recent studies compared two groups on ADF one eating clay fat the other low fat on there few days I'm concerned about my blood glucose I'm concerned about my cholesterol alone percent about a load of stuff yeah yeah and are those not sort of made worse by you can click that on me since so that's actually what we thought would happen and then surprisingly with same decreases in LDL cholesterol so that's the bad cholesterol and in triglycerides and also in blood pressure so in terms of cardiovascular disease risk it didn't matter if you're eating high fat or low fat diet another big surprise was after a day of fasting people rarely gorge themselves on their feet days so when we ask someone to consume 25% other energy needs on the fast day we I just thought that when I started running these trials that people would eat 175 percent the next day but right from the get-go no matter what they cannot people just can't eat that 175 percent the next day most people eat around 110 percent so just a little just slightly over what they usually eat actually in essence you appear to be kind of slowing down the aging process early some diseases 38 you're cutting risks of disease yeah and that's a good profound thing to do yeah absolutely Christa's research is still in the early stages but from what I've seen and experienced I am now starting to be won over by the idea that a simple pattern of feast and fast can be powerful it seems to have an impact which goes beyond simply eating less and I think it could work for someone like me my final stop is Baltimore I'm here because I need a final bit of motivation there's one aspect of Aging I find more terrifying than any other the effects of aging on my brain I'm trying to catch up with professor mark Matson mark is a leading expert on the aging brain his research suggests that fasting may help delay the onset of diseases like Alzheimer's dementia and memory loss very good how you doing hi there michael beasley at mark Matson you work here yeah hope I do work it there nor do I work out here okay Michael we need to put some booties on we're heading down into the basement of the National Institute on Aging yeah hidden away down here there's a special Mouse he's keen to show me radial arm maze this mouse is exploring a maze it's a memory test designed to see how well he remembers where he has found food before it's actually in there is it toads in here if the mice they study are destined to develop Alzheimer's disease normally they succumb within a relatively short time but when these mice are put on a diet of feast days and fast days what Mark calls intermittent energy restriction the results are incredible so that the animals on intermittent energy restriction they'll live much longer with normal at least as best we can test normal learning and memory before they start having problems so significantly longer yeah highly significantly we found in one study six months to a year but that's equivalent in a human of the difference between developing signs of Alzheimer's at say the age of 50 and age of a - on the other hand when the mice eat a fast-food diet they go downhill much earlier we give them lots of sugary drinks I've had diet exactly and we put fructose in their drinking water and that has a dramatic effect in the animals will have an earlier onset of the learning and memory problems and much sooner three to four months soon Wow so that is equivalent to them developing out summers in their sort of 30s and maybe early forties right so far they've only done studies in mice but they're about to carry out human trials how good is the evidence if someone like me were to start on intermittent fasting it would cut my risk of brain diseases portly I think from the human standpoint it's if we go on a scale from poor to good - very good excellent outstanding it's in a very good maximum range that's the way I would category so what's going on well when they examined the brains of the fasting mice they found something extraordinary these green objects are newborn brain cells themselves are they on the outside these three here are sort of brand sporadic bouts of hunger actually trigger new neurons to grow why should a brain start to generate new nerve cells when you stop feeding it well if you think about this in evolutionary terms it makes sense if if you're hungry you better increase your your cognitive ability that will give you a survival advantage if you can remember where the location of the food is and so on it seems that fasting stresses your gray matter the way the exercise stresses your muscles the hunger really does make you sharper yes okay we think so Marc's research is starting to point towards a simple conclusion alternate day fasting has better effects on the brain than does a lower amount of daily calorie restriction it's true of mice but he needs to do proper human trials to prove it's true in us I've come to the end of my search to find out how to eat fast and live longer the official advice is eat at least 2,000 calories a day and if you really want to fast even on an intermittent basis see your doctor first because there are people it could harm such as pregnant women all those who are ready under way I'm going to be cautious and have decided to go with a pattern that mark recommended not alternate day fasting but a less extreme 5:2 diet five days normal eating followed by two days fasting each week it's my last day in the States and it has been absolutely ironing I had no idea at all that there was so much research going on into fasting calorie restriction in all its forms and just sort of anti-aging research I decide now that I am definitely going to try the 5:2 diet that's five days normal eating and then two days of 600 calories a day I really really hope it makes a difference because I'm conscious now I am really at the foothills of what could be quite steep advanced into age and if there is something that could slow the aging process down and give me more years of healthy living then I would really embrace that I'm heading home to the UK I've decided to give myself five weeks to get used to my new diet and see if I get results this is going to be one of my fasting days and I've decided I'm going to eat breakfast as my main meal mark Matson told me he doesn't think it matters when you eat your calories on a fast day I've tried other things but it is really quite discouraging going into work when you're feeling hungry there's another reason I'm determined to try this regime when I arrived home I had another igf-1 test annoyingly my levels were higher than ever turns out the hard one affects of the four day fast only lasted a short while and she's kind of run with it remember so I hope this is something I can stick to good it's done it's xt-22 and I don't feel remotely hungry lunchtime so nothing else happening we go and prowl around I found that fasting when I'm busy at work was doable but the next big test is my holiday I'm walking with some friends we're doing what crystal TransPennine way had breakfast key this morning about two hours ago and I'm planning on eating next breakfast tomorrow so far I am quite good it's now about seven o'clock haven't eaten for better that is the others behind me in the pub eating so outside come outside for a bit big I'm not strong mind as I thought I was nice time to rumble a bit but it's alright it's been five weeks since I started the 5:2 diet hell yeah very good dog I managed to fit in to 600 calories fast days each week though they tended to be a bit scattered around but has it been enough to make a difference so today's results day I have lost I know some weight I'll find out at the moment just how much but I'm mainly interested in the blood because five six weeks ago they were pretty terrible I have behind blood glucose high cholesterol high i GF and I really really came to see them improved because frankly if they haven't improved then I am in trouble and I do want to say so young and healthy for my family for myself so I'm quite anxious because this matters an awful lot to me just to remind you this is what I look like at the start of this film and this is me today I've had to add a few new holes to my belt so I know that something has changed but by how much right the moment of twisting which I'll discover just how much weight I have lost these special type of scales which is going to measure my weight accurately but also apparently my body fat hey that is fantastic that is a hundred and seventy three point eight pounds which means I have lost well over a stone and my body fat when we did it before was 27% and now it's below 20 that is really really pleasing I feel good and my family say I look slimmer it really hasn't been that difficult and I'm delighted that I'm no longer in the overweight category but I really want to know is what's changed inside my body professor luigi fontana is about to call with my final results I'm Michael hi Luigi he'll you I'm finding you I'm a good so we got your results just by fasting two days a week you made a great impact on your own you're happy with the balling health and so I'm very proud of you but what's happened to my IG f1 is my body still in gogo mode I do one is a major risk factor for for cancer breast cancer prostate prostate cancer colon cancer both the three and a half day fasting and the five weeks intermittent fasting dropped your hydro Fuad by 50% which is enough to reduce my risk of certain cancers but what about my blood sugar which was borderline diabetic Yugos dropped to 90 Riley fantastic so you know your glucose became normal again my final result is cholesterol do you add any reduction in cholesterol cholesterol and an increase in the good cholesterol this shows how little it takes you know you know to to improve without drugs you know without taking medications it wasn't that little an effort but I have cut my risk of developing diseases which could shorten my life thank you so I should live happily ever after should I happier you have a lower risk of of you're looking diseases thank you very much Luigi really thank you now I'm very very pleased very pleased indeed that was far better than I was expecting cue I wanted my wife Claire who is a GP to share my results so this is my IGF which is kind of my cancers for ageing risk this one's come down to half yes on the two day good idea all of them yes I've shown the improvement the kind of hopeful yes that basically means you're not actually gonna have to take tablets at all at the moment no Zack you stick to it what you're looking good on it thank you so really amazingly good news the results have been absolutely fantastic for me but that doesn't mean that intermittent fasting will work for everyone it's really important that they do more trials on humans to find out if in the long term it is safe and effective but having experienced intermittent fasting I plan to go on doing it it seems to have undone some of the damage that I have done to my body down the years it is very poignant looking at the photographs of myself members of my family growing up and growing older but it doesn't make me want to hold back the hands of time I sort of think that we do grow old we should grow them there's very little we can do about it but fasting is somehow different fasting is not about trying to live to 140 it's about staying healthy for as long as you can and with the sort of time bomb we're facing as a nation where the best are going up diabetes going up we desperately need something which can make a difference fasting is the first thing I have come across that I genuinely believe that if people were to take it up it could radically transform the nation's health so I hope that we continue to see massive research going into this territory doing this fasting have been one of the most interesting now I say the most interesting sort of journey film whatever you call it I have been on and I've never said that for

Channel: Daily C

Views: 1,202,368

Rating: 4.868752 out of 5

Keywords: fasting, fast, 5 to 2, documentary

Id: Ihhj_VSKiTs

Length: 58min 51sec (3531 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2015

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[u/Joehsmash]

Blocked in Canada :-(

[u/[deleted]]

Great docu! Big motivator in my weekly 48 hour fasts and daily 18:6

[u/mshep93]

I thought I recognized a building in this, come to find out they did testing at my university.

[u/pillstand]

Does the 5:2 program they discuss have to be 2 consecutive days of fasting or would 2 non-consecutive 24 hours fasts per week be considered 5:2?