Live to 100: Valter Longo, PhD | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] dr. it's a pleasure to meet you thank you for making the trip out here I'm excited to talk to you well great to talk to yuge I had our mutual friend Joel Kahn on the show a couple months ago he was out here and he was singing your praises I was familiar with your work but he just went on and on and on and that created quite an impact with the audience so there's been a lot of anticipation and excitement about you sharing your wisdom with excellent doctor yeah he's very cool so so many things to talk about I think probably the best way to approach this is sort of to bifurcate it between a discussion about longevity and then we can get into the fasting mimicking diet protocol that you talked about but to kind of contextualise this it would probably be good to hear a little bit about your background and what got you interested in aging and longevity to begin with yeah so I started actually very early I was music major back in college so my second year I think I always wanted to do aging do research on Aging because as soon as I had an opportunity to change I was immediately sure I wanted to study Aging and so I switched the biochemistry department and it's all I've ever done since then and there was 30 years ago yeah that's something to do with having to lead lead the band like the marching band just crushed the rock star dream yeah so they asked me to direct a marching band and I say there's no way I'm going to do that and they say well you know this is the program if you don't do that you gotta find something else and so yeah within a couple days I was in biochemistry and I think it was a good switch and yes but what was the impotent rest' in longevity come from is that from growing up where you grew up in Italy yeah you know I'm not sure I speculate that maybe I was five years old when I my father my grandfather died but I was in the room when he died you know you you keep five-year-olds away from from the actual moment where somebody dies and it may be you know I acted very grown-up at the time but maybe that's that's stuck in my head that people die and you know and and so there was very early in my life that I had to face that and yeah maybe I always wanted to look for the opportunity to start studying aging right now why how could I prevent this from happening yes yes and no of course then I started probably thinking about me and my parents and and all of that and and so yeah I suspect maybe maybe had nothing to do with it but the fact that I was so sure that I had to study aging and I suspect it had more to do than just a topic in college yeah that's interesting because most people might find themselves attracted to science or biochemistry or becoming a doctor but you were very specific and what it is that you wanted to explore yes specific and also I picked biochemistry because at the time 19 years old I just taught biology in chemistry that's probably gonna be good to to know both to address the problem of aging and but also I think that I mean it's hard to to remember what I thought at that time but certainly the the potential for medicine to me was also pretty obvious I just had spent a few years in Chicago with my relatives there I came from Italy but then in Chicago I started seeing all these cardiovascular disease and diabetes in my relatives which are 100% genetically from southern Italy mm-hmm and I never saw that in in southern Italy I mean I saw it but not like that it was very obvious very early in the 50s and 60s and so that I think also was a factor in my head and and so in Texas the diet was also very poor you know this tex-mex right so I guess it went from bad to worse Chicago and Dallas and then you know then eventually LA with Roy Walford was one of the guru of nutrition and longevity I had the opportunity to go back to this I deal at least I'd understanding of what diet what which diet is good and which is bad and he certainly was the his lab was certainly the place to was was your intention and going from it was North Texas University as where you did your undergrad coming out to UCLA were you intentional about seeking out Walford as a mentor like did you know about him and that's what attracted you to come to UCLA oh absolutely so there were two people in in Los Angeles they were essentially I think at least in my view at the time and the view of many Delta leading people in the world for aging research la always had this for some reason I'm not sure if it's Hollywood or what it is everyone wants to be permanently yes and so interestingly the this scientist they were attracted to LA we're also attracted to be leaders in this field and so Roy Walford was one and the other one was Callie Finch at USC so I visited both I applied to both programs and eventually I chose to go to UCLA but and you know a USC that's what I'm I still am already four decades had a comprehensive aging Center which is unbelievable if you think about that that this building called the Andrews gerontology Center was built in the 70s and the center was actually established in the 60s hmm and yeah that's quite traumatic because you know what people probably don't know I mean there's so much interest around what you do now but there were many years where you struggle to get your work published and just people were not keen on on hearing what you had to say so you know what was the status of you know academia with respect to aging research longevity research then like what was Walford doing versus like what's happening now yes so when I talked about what for now everybody all the journalists and everybody says oh he's a hero and back then people make fun of waffle he was like a you're like a whack job he was it was viewed by his own colleagues that you la is out there I remember when I was in the biochemistry department at the comment when I said I'm gonna go to pathology and work with Wofford and they said we don't even know what they do out there out there doing the experiments on himself - that's always a red flag yeah waffle was doing the experiment on himself and and in fact that experiment on himself my accustomed is life because he he went for two years in this place in Arizona called biosphere to him in order seven people that's when I joined his lab that's where he was he was locked up in this sealed environment in the middle of the desert and and many of us suspect that you know and in in that place he started the first human color restriction experiment and himself and disorder seven people and we suspect that that might have cost him his life he developed Lou Gehrig's disease and which is a modern neuron disease and I mean nobody knows for sure he may have developed for some other reason but there was some harsh conditions in that in that by co2 between diet and oxygen being law it is very possible those those conditions led to his modern or indeed yes like all pioneers they have to test the outer limits right they got a they got to push that envelope to see what's possible absolutely and and well for I think I didn't when he came out he was in bad shape but and he he was having doubts because at the time even that operation was not really viewed as is this a good idea was a stupid idea and now I think most people view that view as a you know pioneering operation or event and and so I think if I think by the time he died he was proud of what he had done I'm not sure that it was that sure when he came out in 92 so before we kind of get into what you've discovered through all of your research into into this field perhaps we should define our terms a little bit like what what is agent what causes it what exacerbates it and what have you discovered can perhaps slow it down yes so aging is actually and I started the book by talking about that aging is actually not a bad thing right I mean violins age age and they get better right and marathon runners they get better at least for a while as they age and then you know maybe the peak performance the from marathon runner Peaks around 32 to 35 which is very different from other athletes senescence is really the word that deals with changes that are detrimental so accumulation of damage and order this regulation that leads to this function right so that's that there were senescence usually we use aging because people everybody understands that word better so it's fine to use aging but yeah so as time goes by systems become accumulate damage and they start becoming dysfunctional why does the body suddenly become less than less adept at repairing that damage well I mean there are a lot of theories of aging and a lot of people most people have focused on the aging part itself I come up with a term which I call juvenility or you've ontology and the difference is that I focus on what is the program that keeps you young versus or what is the process that makes you all right so it's very different right so imagine atala g vs juventus g is sort of like the study and science of health versus the study in science of disease which is really the model the model of Western medicine yes yes in a sense I think so because if you studying things going wrong aging right then you focus on the deterioration so for example if you think of a car and that's one of the pillars that I talked about in the book you can study the tires and you can say okay I'm gonna learn everything about the rubber how the rubber gets older and older and now to make it not get older northern but I can come around with ontology and say why you worry about that just change the tires doing 50,000 miles and put a new set of tires and now all of a sudden all their research you can see how it's pointless right you just have to find out right so you got to figure out how the body can produce new tires right which gets into this stem cell regeneration exactly you do super interesting put it woody before we even get into that and the next thing I want to talk about what just occurred to me like what what do you think of this trend amongst the new kind of billionaire elite to like try to live forever and you know the things that Peter Thiel is looking into and funding you know whether it's cryotherapy type science or or other yes I mean I don't know for sure but I've been told that Walford was on the list to be cryopreserved Wow and and I was also told that eventually he removed himself from the list right so I think it's very meaningful this this decision and I mean I think all of us went through a period of of thinking about immortality I think you know when I was 20 I was probably thinking the same way and then eventually you start realizing that that's probably not why we're here and there is something fundamental you know just impossible about it right you just it's not consistent with life on earth right and so and I'm not sure that and I think that's probably what Walter thought that woody want to wake up you know in 20,000 years or 2,000 years and find himself in the middle of God knows what do you think about the implications of your work as it sort of exponentially develops that that could be a possibility for human life yes but I think you know first of all we really be focusing even though you know we did extend the lifespan of a yeast by tenfold so certainly we could move in that direction or much more and continue and say well if we were able with a microorganism to extend the lifespan by tenfold couldn't we do humans but we I decided a long time ago that I didn't want to do that anymore that I was much more interested in getting everybody to be 110 healthy you know like this Salvatore Caruso who's from the same town as my grandfather was this little town in southern Italy that has record longevity they usually have been between two and four centenarians out of 2,000 peoples as one of the highest in the world and Salvatore Caruso made it 110 healthy and then I also followed the EMA Murano in northern Italy up to a few months ago Emma was the oldest person in the world and the oldest in the history of Italy and she was under 17 and still eating on their own and you know she wasn't completely independent but mostly independent or mostly you know able to operate and do almost everything within the house so I think that that's really what we're what we're studying now that's I think there would be much greater achievement and then try to make people live ten times longer mm-hmm so your your research begins with yeast cells it moves on to mice and then ultimately to humans what is your approach and what do you begin to learn yeah so we Walford we were doing a lot of comparative biology so you take a mouse you starve and I mean you color restrict and one that you don't want all one young and then after a while I thought I'm never gonna get anywhere with this we just gonna have a lot of differences but we don't know what they mean we don't know what to do with it so that's when I went to it back to the genetics and me and maybe a group of 10 scientists in the unit mostly in the United States a few in Europe they decided let's go to fruit flies yeast worms and they're so simple that we're bound to figure out the age fairly quickly identify genes that regulate their aging quickly and then if we're lucky we move back to to mice and humans and and people thought it was a joke right people thought is this stupid I mean some famous scientists in the field thought it was a stupidest idea they've ever heard you know that you could work in a yeast unicellular organism and that would somehow tell you our human age right in fact a lot of people still think it's a joke but that most people think that though because it's a fundamental question that we all would like the answer to it's a fundamental question but also you think about yeast as some kind of ancient organism but these organisms have evolved for as many billions of years as we have right I mean you know we are the results of the same evolution process and and their ancestors are our ancestors so they're quite sophisticated and they obey the same rules as human being I mean like the force of natural selection so this process that keeps an organism young for a certain period of time it's very is the same it acts in a different way in a with a different period and ie so in a yeast you just in six days if in six days you basically can reproduce enough time to get out of the way and for us it's more like 50 years and but the rules are the same and in fact it turned out that the genes that we and others identified in these simple organisms were the ones the same ones that control aging in mice or very very similar and we now have you know from our own work evidence from genetic mutations in humans suggesting that right now the humans have certain similar genes to the ones that we identified in yeast deleted they they're protected from aging right so what is the structure that you set up to try to determine what keeps the cell young or what can sort of increase its longevity yes so the the beginning it was used as simple organism and use genetic tools there at the time were only available for yeast for baker's yeast right so for example one of our first studies that we publish in science in the science journal was let's delete every single gene in the genome which is about 6,000 genes and see which one is becomes most protected against toxins right multiple toxins and then the the hypothesis was is something super protected against damage it's gonna be protected against aging and that worked out very well and that led to the identification or was probably now recognized as the most important Pro aging path which the Tor assist kinase pathway and and and so there was one strategy use the tools genetic tools that we had and the other one was because I was in a well for lab and we have some people lots of people working on and and the molecular biology of aging and the molecular biology of East not aging nobody cared about aging at a time but for example upstairs I had somebody called Fujita monoi and he was working on undress and we the field that described our wrasse reacted or was activated by sugar right so then I started out of the wall for lab I said sugar activate wrasse and color restriction extends the lifespan of all these organisms they must be that if I delete wrasse the East are going to live longer so this is a biased approach versus what I said earlier which is completely unbiased and sure enough you know now they live a lot longer they live two or three times longer just by deleting with this sugar gene so now the Tauruses kinase is the protein pathway and the peak raspy K is the sugar pathway right you delete both of them you get tenfold that's been extension Wow and then you then step it up and and apply this to a rat population yeah then then you apply it to an inner cow case a mouse population also knowing that the data from from Cynthia Kenyon Gary African and others in worms and flies right which was matching so everything starting to make sense there was all aligned so tor was causing Aging in all these organisms activate it and if you did protein restriction the organism live longer right so just protein restriction so yes so then you do the working in mice and then of course you do the work with nutrition and say well if having if deleting the protein gene and the sugar gene makes the organism live longer what if I just remove sugar and proteins and then you go in protein you say well do I need to remove all proteins maybe not maybe just certain amino acids that are contained in protein so we remove serine threonine and valine three amino acids and show that those were the ones the major ones in control the toward gene right so yeah so then we started really having a much more sophisticated understanding of all the network the controls aging in yeast and mice but also understanding of the nutrients within food they control the genes that control aging right and then so then with this population of mice these studies that you were conducting how much longer were they living so the the mouse work was originally done by under a barky and john captrick and these mice remarkably lived up to twice as long okay so it's pretty remarkable for two-and-a-half year mouse to live five years now right and but I don't the equivalent in a human of how much longer well this would be equivalent to humans living an average of 165 years ago and and so this was obtained by a combination of mutation and nutrition so restriction of protein restitution of sugars and the mutation in the growth hormone in this master gene the control both Porto and PKA right right right and and so then eventually we we knew about the yeast tenfold longer the mouse twice as long lived twice as long and then we eventually start studying this population in Ecuador that was lacking the same gene the growth hormone receptor that the mice made the mice having this record longevity and and sure enough you know they had a terrible diet by the way where did you figure out that they had that same genealogy well there was a endocrinologist Jaime Guevara down in Ecuador they had been following them because they were they have a small stature phenotype they're small they're about three and a half feet tall and and so he was studying them because of that right the karate was trying to get him to be taller right and so it was falling a hundred of em and and to me was just an incredible opportunity so I remember when when Hussey Kohana you see a light on me you get a call this Jaime evaru because he's following a hundred of this subject and needy noses each one of them by name so I immediately invited him at USC to give a talk and then I went down there and then eventually it took us five years and he always complains that it took us too long but it took us five years to publish the first paper in Science Translational Medicine showing protection from diabetes and cancer and his formulation but they were eating a terrible diet and then he went down and like what was the protocol at you that you applied to that population yeah we didn't apply any protocol the the the task was to in a way without affecting anything that they do randomized them in a sense right so having relatives against them right they live in the same houses eat the same food what are the relatives dying off and a what age and what are the this group they are it's called gh Rd growth hormone receptor deficient what do they die off in a wall age and so it looked like at least in 2011 there wasn't a single cancer that that we could find either in these hundred subjects in in in the ecuador nor in the 250 subjects that has villa Ronn had been following Europe and the Middle East so I loved 350 people in 50 years of observation not a single cancer that now that happened later probably due to this terrible diet you know a certain point these genes are not right able to create immunity against cancer but in thus far there's been three cases of diabetes again out of the 350 or so subjects which is another extremely low prevalence of diabetes considering that they have a terrible diet a lot of em are obese and overweight so yeah so then then this mutation in humans seems to be very much behaving like the the mouse mutation which makes them protector from diabetes protected from cancer the mice and also a very long live now the longevity we don't see a big effect on longevity there's probably a small effect on longevity but we suspect as we know for mice that by having a terrible diet this may be not removing the protection against diseases but removing this record on diabetes right right right so you deduce from that what and how does that inform like the next chapter well from that we we deduced that it works right it's not a mouse or a yeast finding these this is this is going after cellular protection or multi-system cellular protection across the board so so then these mice that could get to 50% longer life by have health of the cancers and protection of diabetes from pressure for inflammation protection from cognitive decline their brain work better and longer and we also showed that for the humans so now all of this is possible you just started to say well we don't have to be this you know Western world of living long very sick now you know you used to live a little bit shorter or healthier now we live longer sicker and we can live longer healthier so the opposite of what we obtained in now so now we're keeping people alive with lots of drugs lots of intervention yeah the idea that extending longevity will only extend the period of time in which you're sick is the paradigm you're trying to upend yeah we want to turn it completely around so not only we don't go to a higher because of course as soon as you start saying we want to make people live 20 years longer then they say 30 years longer than now right people are gonna say no absolutely not because they think of all the people that they know right you're just all sick old folks home the whole time you know unable to walk yeah so but if you look at mi Murano ooh 112 could still live in in our house alone right I mean she didn't live alone but she could have if she wanted to meet she had people that came but I think into 100 506 she was alone leaving a lot and yeah and also if you saw some other Caruso 110 you think that's pretty good right yeah I won't that mean Salvatore area you know in the in the latest years that you know television used to come National Geographic came and they did a cover story on him and not just him but uh centenarians and he loved it you know he was so happy that getting so much attention is getting attention but he was healthy you know yeah you could come out and and walk and walk with the television crews and so yeah he was healthy enough to really enjoy all this attention so Dan Buettner is a friend of mine he's been in here a couple times so we've talked extensively on the podcast about the work that he's done on the Blue Zones and and your work really intersects with his work you know in a very beautiful way you're looking at the same or similar populations of people evaluating what is contributing to their health and their longevity and you know when you talk to Dan it's a it's a it's calm it's confounding factors it's its diet it's lifestyle it's community it's making the Healthy Choice the convenient the easy choice it's you know continual sort of movement throughout the day but nothing too crazy nobody's on treadmills or going to the gym they're just active throughout their day they're engaged with their relatives and you know they're they're sort of neighbors in a way that we're not the way that we live here a lot of these communities you know have a strong faith component to them so you kind of surveying all of this and thinking about what you're doing in the lab where do you start to look at alright well I can I can sort of deconstruct all of these factors but it's really the nutrition piece that you zero in on and you can kind of extrapolate from the essentially Mediterranean diet that most of these people are eating very low protein not very much meat lots of legumes and nuts and seeds and vegetables and the like what does that like where does that where does Dan's work intersect with yours and like where do you then kind of take it further yes so then it's a friend of mine now so I think he's done great work and and we see the Blue Zones and other areas of the world that are they have record longevity as one of the major pillars so in the book I talk about five pillars and that's one of them right so the centenares are one but there are all four pillars and and and why is this important for example one of the other pillars is epidemiology why is it important well epidemiology is really looking at large population and saying okay what if you had low protein versus high protein low fat versus life at who does better right so a few years ago we published a paper they got a lot of attention where we said we'll win against the idea of high protein diet but we win against it and we went for it at the same time right and this is where the sophistication of the multi pillar strategy comes in meaning that up to age 65 the low protein in plant-based diet seemed to be ideal after age 65 that was not the case anymore and so people protein needs become more important yeah and we also show why because we had mouse and human data in the same paper and if you took a mouse a young mouse and you give a stream in low protein take four percent of the calories coming from protein the young mice did perfectly well then you took all mice and you give four percent protein and they started dropping weight very rapidly right that's where the the science and this is just one of the four or four extra pillars of science that we use this is why it's so important now if you look at sent an e you know for example Colin Campbell it's always talked about low protein diet right but he's always talked about two problems you know and I really think it's been a pioneer in the low protein but you cannot have and this also happened with the colorization field them back you give something that is good and it's bad at the same time if the end and neutralizes can neutral effect so what's the problem with saying it low-protein go with the only population studies the problem is that you don't see for example that you can make somebody so weak that their immune system shuts off when they're 82 because they thought the proteins always bad another thing that is not bad for example and there is different phases of life is weight if you are overweight when you're 50 is clearly bad right or obese if you're overweight when you're 82 it's actually protective right so a slightly now obese but certainly in the 25 26 BMI that's actually a good thing right so low protein hype moderate protein or low pro down to a 65 moderate protein vegan let's say up to age 65 or pescetarian fish plus vegan plus vegetable up to age 65 and they maybe expand a little bit these are all tricks that come from really putting all these pillars together you may not see by just going to Italy for example Italy very few people in Italy am assuming Greece are very frail populations when they're alright very few people know this so these Italians they live so long in Sardinia and Calabria and other areas are actually very free off later than the people in Northern Europe right and that comes probably from this continuing this low protein diet and continuing this narrower diet that is so helpful when you're younger and now it becomes detrimental it makes you weak when you're all the right so it gets yeah I got you I got you yeah I mean basically like like everything it's more nuanced and complicated than we want to believe you know we want to reduce it down to one core principle that's applicable to everybody no matter what age or how they where they find themselves in life is there a difference between so on this on this idea that when you hit 65 and as you start to you know move in that direction where your protein needs become more important has there been any work done on the differences between animal protein and plant protein I mean you certainly don't want to be taking in a lot of igf-1 when you're older right you're gonna be more susceptible to cancer not necessarily because now and that's what shown in the paper the igf-1 is so low because of age that eating high protein or Lowepro that made no difference in a gf1 so the people they had over 20 percent of the calories from protein and the people that had learned less than 10 percent at the same levels of igf-1 so so yeah so I think that it gets much trickier than then we won't appreciate another issue for example that I under discuss in my book but I think it should be much more discussed is outer immunities and immunities and allergies right so you can have a vegetable based diet but then whether it's gluten or it's like tins or it is some pro-inflammatory vegetables to a percentage which could be a significant percentage if you think about how to immunities are increasing at a rate of 17% in the world every year right it's a huge increase so this is exposure to a lot of this potentially or apparently healthy foods to some people and it could be quite a big number can be detrimental right so this is why in the book I stopped talking about gluten and talking about lactose but I said really gotta pay attention because you may think something is super healthy for you and that something may be killing you so you you you need to find out are you out to immune allergic intolerant to something and and that's something maybe 20 different foods which are all vegetable by the way right so so if you don't remove it you're gonna have a problem and you're gonna suffer in a clear case I always talk about Italy and in the lactose years I used to go to Italy and I said this is really incredible and because 90% of the Sicilians are lactose intolerant uh-huh and yet for until 5 years ago I never seen a coffee shop in Sicily that serves a soy milk or almond milk they had the regular milk so I said you know everybody that is drinking this must be suffering and so you have a whole you had the whole country they was getting the macchiato the last Asia and all cow milk and they must this is must contributed to an epidemic of gastrointestinal disorders they were very obviously some people we knew that they were lactose intolerant and yet nobody nothing was done funny alright so on this idea of the five pillars you know let's talk about what we can extract from the research that you've done and what you've learned you know into some principles that can kind of guide us in the direction of promoting longevity in our own lives like what's most important I'm asking you to be reductionist after my my my speech about how we shouldn't be reductionist yeah yeah so I mean so you're asking about the most important well yeah I just want to kind of move into this area of you know what people should be aware of and some habits and some practices that they can adopt and also things to avoid so that people can be more mindful of you know how to practice you know these principles that you speak about for their own well yes yes so then number one I think is a pescetarian diet why is that well if you are vegan lots of times you hear people saying oh I thirty grams or garbanzo beans or chickpeas there should be enough proteins it's not right you need about ten times as much as that I've been vegan for eleven years no I'm not sure you can be vegan and do very well but most people out there are not you that's right that's my point right but he always tells me I'm an outlier I'm not convinced about that voltar don't know and now I'm saying vegan is perfectly fine I'm just saying that being vegan and healthy is much harder than people think right because for example it takes about four hundred great grams of chickpeas to have enough proteins right and not a lot of times forget you let's say we pick ten vegans out there right at random we pick the first time we can find and we start asking question I do this all the time and you'd be surprised how many times you say what you haven't had b12 in a while and and you have another proteins in three or four days and a you no problem at surprising the price so I'm just saying if you're going be vegan great but you gotta pay attention yeah I don't know I I mean I I think look I take a b12 supplement like I don't know once a week at most I have my blood work done it's fine I go out and I do these crazy ultra endurance races I'm able to compete on 51 I feel good I've never had any problems building lean muscle mass or recovering in between workouts so I think there's a lot of misconception out there about protein and I think one thing we can agree on is that most people are eating too much protein there's plenty of plant foods that meet my amino acid needs I'm not eating buckets full of garbanzo beans but you know it mindful about it I think I would concede to you that that it's easier and easier to eat a very nutrient poor vegan diet especially with all the analog products that are coming out and people moving further and further away from you know sort of nutrient-dense whole whole plant foods yeah I mean you know we're in the under Swain same choir right so so absolutely I you know I published on that and I got attacked for talking about low protein diet mostly vegan but then again the when you allow people to have a so fish in the diet to the big population it makes it much much less likely that they're gonna lose a lot of lean body mass that they're gonna struggle and also makes it less likely that they're gonna switch back right so if you say I'm gonna allow you to have fish plus a vegan diet a lot so people are fine with that if you remove everything then then then it's just harder for people now if somebody can be vegan for ethical reason or whatever great I mean I think it's absolutely doable there are no no reason not to be vegan it just says that you have to pay attention I think that we would also agree that that that this protein obsession that we find ourselves in the midst of is is really a red herring I mean most people people are walking around worried about their protein intake where when in truth they're probably taking in two to five times more protein than they need and what every product at the grocery store you know is emblazoned with a message about how much protein it is you know with the implication like oh we must be not getting enough or we need more and what I like about your work is you you stand in you know contra position to that idea yeah absolutely and and I'm the first one they will say we're gonna have an epidemic of over protein or eating too much protein and we're gonna find out the consequence is very soon I mean in our paper we show three to four for the increase in cancer incidence right and seventy five percent increase in overall mortality in the following 20 years for people that were 65 and below and even for the 65 and above it was the moderate protein intake it was not the high didn't need to have high protein intake moderate was sufficient the meaning that in fact in my book I talk about maybe increased the protein intake by 20 percent when you get to age 65 70 below the minimum recommended right so yeah absolutely but then again if you look at fish and I have to go with the science and if you look at more studies fish is always on the positive side beside the mercury fish you know there's four fish and the tuna XL problem you know but most studies are showing beneficial effects right that's why I have to say even though some people could argue well Attica Lee you know may or may not be the best idea but if you look at the science the fish plus vegan seems to but it would be the way to go and what is it I think when you you haven't sort of said it explicitly but this relationship between meat intake and the incidence of cancer like what is going on there cuz I think when you say that to somebody like basically saying meat causes cancer is that what you're saying and if it's not if it is if it isn't like I want to kind of clarify that yeah I mean I don't say that now the World Health Organization says that so does every other major Association I think the National Cancer Institute you no doubt this is USDA I think is also now reduced recommendation and protein because of that so red meat particularly is now recognized by almost every major Association specialize in cancer to be a risk factor or certainly something that you want to avoid in it I quantities in our case you know we had multiple papers we and and Harvard School of Public Health there published a series of papers all of them come in agreement with this idea particularly for red meat but just also for prod high-protein so after our paper we publish one with a java neutral Harvard and also confirming the de plant-based diet was protective compared to a variety of diets and included a high protein from from animal sources and what is the the active component in meat or red meat that's causing these problems is that the high density of protein is it the the hormonal breakdown in it like what can that be drill down to nobody knows for sure I mean there's a lot of speculations that some of it having to do with him content and I've heard different stories and and different hypotheses it could be are they fed steroid hormones are they fed antibiotics Uno's right what what is in that meat and so probably the combination of high proteins but also other molecules that make it into the meat out there are probably contributing to to make it very clear that particularly the red meat seems to be detrimental but in our paper we showed that all the animal high protein diet from from all animal sources were the tremendo and in high plant-based diet was no longer detrimental high protein from plant-based sources was no longer detrimental for overall mortality so there's no effect but it still was was detrimental for cancer so he still showed up if somebody had lots of proteins from from vegetable sources that still was associated with an increased risk for cancer but that was was in most cases a combination of animal and and plant-based right I got you what about what about saturated fat yeah so I think one of the point that I make in the in the book is that this demonization of ingredients or macromolecules has been very micronutrients as being very bad so we should start making distinctions between types of micronutrients or fats are actually very good for you number of studies now looking at the nuts and looking at the olive oil and looking at Salman etc they're all positive but when you look at you know the high saturated fats diet then you see you see problems now what will happen if you have a low sugar low protein high saturated fat diet nobody knows is it possible that that would be okay possible I wouldn't go in that direction because we don't have the studies yet and it's potentially I mean if you want to kill a mouse earlier you give them a hive saturated fat diet right right and so yeah I think there's there's there's a lot of confusion out there right now I mean on the one hand you have people like Colin Campbell even you know Joel Khan and the others who are you know cautioning people against their saturated fat intake and you know indicating that the studies seem to point to a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease with the intake of these things and then on the other side of the fence you have a whole group of people and it's some emerging excitement about this notion that everything you ever heard about saturated fat is wrong that you should be putting butter in your coffee and you should be in ketosis and pricking your finger and you know like taking exogenous ketones so where do you come down on the ketogenic diet where do you come down on on this this kind of dissension amongst health professionals of this subject yeah I call it the 0.5 pillar strategies right so you come up with a cup of studies showing acute effects let's say you eat a lot lots of butter and after 3 months you can look at a bunch of 20 people and they show like lower cholesterol and this zero point five pillars approach is very dangerous right and why is it very dangerous now for example if you take mice and you give it a low high protein diet right and and relatively high fat they actually lose weight and you know if you stop the study right there you say this is a good diet you know if you continue eventually they develop metabolic diseases and they die early but if you give them a low protein diet high carbohydrate diet they actually gain a little weight if you stop there you will say a bad bad idea if you continue they have less metabolic diseases and they live a lot longer so why is a problematic then to have zero point five health a pillar well because you're gonna get surprised and and so if you look at Oh many many many studies many of which I list in my book you see that the the law of fat avoiding the saturated fats over and over and over is a good idea avoiding the unsaturated the olive oil nuts etc it's a bad idea so for example the the a stroke study in Spain thousands of people randomised trial you put health of them and lots of olive oil or lots of nuts every day they had to stop the study because it was unethical for the control group not to have the same right but if you look at as hosting work and you look at the dean ornish and not just them but lots lots of data you see that you know having high saturated fat diet is associated with a lot of cardiovascular problems now if you look go around the world you look at the centenarian piller none of them have high saturated fat Nadia Okinawa's nada Loma Linda not this old Indians that the Calabrian not the Costa Ricans and not the people in in Greece in in Korea so yeah so then you have to say the animal data doesn't support it epidemiological data doesn't support the centenarian data doesn't support it you know the basis the basic research doesn't support there is really in the in the clinical randomized clinical study doesn't support it so you have to say well in 30 years when you have you know 200 more studies all supporting this which will be almost impossible because there's already so much negative data annum mm-hmm so now worth it now were to go in that direction you can do as well by being on a low sugar low starch high carbohydrate diet it is there anything people they like to say bad cop good car right it's not about again same as fat it's about sugars and starches pasta bread it's not about carbs carbs contained in legumes and the Cubs contains in vegetables are excellent carbs and even the ones for starches if you have if you maintain a relatively low it's fine you know it makes your your diet more enjoyable and so if you have 50 grams of pasta or rice that's perfectly fine if you have a hundred and twenty grams so that then you starting to get into the problem so right so so I think that that this we really must start applying this five pillar or not five pillar people can have seven pillars you know whatever they want but certainly multidisciplinary approaches to determine whether a high butter diet is good or not versus somebody's opinion based on 20 people studying right I understand where you're coming from I mean the the the you know the starch thing makes a lot of sense may not echoes the work of John McDougall if you talk to Esselstyn though he's gonna take a very hard line on fats and oils altogether like he's advocating for an extremely low fat diet no oils granted he's dealing with cardiovascular patients that for the most part are in you know dire need of having to reverse some pretty progressed arterial damage it's a little bit different but he takes a very hard line on that like what is your perspective the book you know and so I say well that line though is one pillar line right so the line to go with the law such ready fat is a five pillar line the line to go with no fats of any kind is a one pillar line nobody nothing else supports that so if you look at at the Sardinians they always had lots of olive oil so there are the Greeks and I think also the the people in Costa Rica and the Loma Linda people so none of them and then if you look at the clinical data the other pillar the a stroke study are showing that they had to stop the study against a low-fat diet so the randomization was olive oil and nuts versus low fat tie so three thousand people also went on a low-fat diet and what was the low-fat diet we just suggested to eat less fat right so now the high fat from olive oil and nut diet was so superior to the low fat diet that they had to stop the study so yeah then that's when you have to say any and if you give a high fat diet and now they're I'm not sure if they also had saturated fats in there but I said certainly you know the mouse studies are I think they haven't really been done I say good fats bad fats low carb low protein all right but just to be like totally kick clear and like drill down on this nutrition piece essentially what you're advocating is a plant-based whole food diet with some fish in terms of like the best protocol for long-term lifestyle management and longevity it's that fair yes avoiding the paying attention to autoimmunity Xin tolerances and so yeah making sure you're not allergic to certain things yeah and essentially and then you know once you get to 65 then I I think that things change and they'll say god you're good maybe some goat cheese and and some of these ingredients that may be high nourishment eggs for example may be a good idea to start introducing them back just because you know of what we see this we've seen his frailty in later life that you know if your diet is too restrictive you're probably gonna suffer from from this malnourishment so as I've mentioned I've been you know playerbase for 11 years and and when I began this journey I promised to myself that I would be objective and transparent about my experience with it that if I started to not feel good or if my blood work was reflective of something gone awry that I would be honest about that and make adjustments that hasn't happened yet but you know 65 no I'm 51 I know I'm not there yet but I feel great so perhaps because there's a lot of plant-based vegan people that listen to this who are thinking wait now I got to start eating that like what should I be mindful about if I want to remain on this plant-based path yeah well mindful of for example that 30 grams of chickpeas and a salad gives you about 3 to 5 grams of products right and even if you take the lowest level of protein that you can consider you know the World Health Organization in their studies to maintain normal nitrogen balance they talked about 0.66 per kilogram right so about 0.32 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day right this is official based on studies right so if you go much lower than that you're gonna start losing muscle mass it's just a matter of time so now of course if you if you say eh well how much carbon Sabine's did I have today let's say you're a hundred and twenty pound women and there is vegan you know you're gonna need about 40 grams of protein 35 40 grams of protein minimum right now in the book I said I talked about the fact that you know if you have 35 40 grams of plant-based protein and you do some weight training there should be plenty there should be planning to to keep a good muscle mass but you have to do it every day right this is something that the something that you have to continue doing otherwise you might not see it but year after year of the year you can start losing lean body mass and then you know and but the problem is also are you gonna start losing sa immune function again it's an age dependent of fact so you might not see until you see 62 63 64 you might see it in 55 you know you may be there it may be that you get cancer when you're 55 and that was due to the fact that your immune system is not working as well as the cool hat because your protein deficient or you b12 deficient or your vitamin D deficient or your folic acid efficient so it's very important to to say let me avoid the malnourishment without interfering or with the with beneficial effects so yeah without needing to go into an area that where the the protein becomes detriment mm-hmm yeah my protein needs on that equation of you know 0.32 comes out to about between 60 and 70 grams a day it's just it's not that hard like I some almond butter I you know rice and beans I eat lentils and quinoa and things like that as long as I'm just eating those foods like I've done the math and it seems to it it almost takes care of itself like if I'm just eating clean plant-based foods close to the retro state so it's not about going out of my way to make sure I'm eating you know tons of carbons of beans or anything no no no I mean I do that fight that fight is a weak mind so my diet is plant-based fight this week there's no problem but I do pay attention I know yeah then a certain amount of certain vegetable contains so much product or so and so once you get used to that you know to check anything so it's very straightforward I'm just saying that I suspect when they compare I say the vegans against the non vegans and they show that the vegans are not doing better in those studies I suspect that's because so many people in the vegan group are malnourished and that's why you see this otherwise III think the vegans should've been doing much much better than the non vegans if it wasn't for my nourishment so if we could turn the vegans into well nourished vegan then I think we'll see the superiority that we already see in the blue zones and in Malinda etc yeah I think that's astute I mean I think my fear and I think it's a very real fear is that as we continue to produce all of these processed versions of meat and dairy products that are tasting better and better and better that people that are entering into you know becoming vegan can easily just be eating all sorts of refined grains all the time and cookies and snacks and things like that and they're you know they're like hey I'm vegan it's healthy when in fact it perhaps might even be worse than whatever they were doing before yes absolutely so I think that this is why I talk about you know once you figure out what the science and all these pillars are saying go back to your grandparents table and among the healthy things pick the ones that were coming at their table you know and so if you do that then I think you're guaranteed especially if you go with the grandparents or great-grandparents that you're gonna eliminate a lot of these these new processed foods that you're talking about so I mean I don't think there are many - too many grandparents that ate you know processed food you know in the past so right there's been much much ado lately about the relationship between chronic inflammation and the onset of so many of these lifestyle illnesses that we're seeing I'm interested in your perspective on that and what the relationship is between inflammation and aging yes that's a little tricky I think it's clearly there there is no doubt there in the brain and and lots of people in the Western countries or have high inflammation inflammatory markers to me is more of a consequence of dysfunction than the cause of dysfunction so I think that the body the liver is not working well and so you start making c-reactive protein as a as a way to respond to a dysfunctional state and this is why we developed the fasting mimicking diet and the idea was to you know we can't change everybody's habits but can we for example go after the inflammation not just during the diet but in the couple of month two or three months after the diet so is it possible to hit some somebody with a five-day diet they will have long term consequences and the inflammatory State but not just the inflammatory state but certainly that is one way to I think assess functionality of the entire system right okay so let's let's get into this world of fast I mean when does it first become evident to you that this relationship between Cal caloric restriction and the impact you know biochemically positive impacts biochemically starts to percolate into your awareness and and where do you go with that yes so first of all a caloric restriction which is what Walford was doing which refers to eating as a 25% to 30% less all the time it doesn't work right it doesn't work for some reason we know some reason we don't know but even in mice you know the original observation were made 100 years ago and then it turns out that about 1/3 of the genetic backgrounds benefited from calorie restriction a third were had neutral effects and a third had negative effects but so I think the periodic fasting mimicking died build on this success and failure why it's a success affair success because if you look at colors to the people or monkeys it's obvious that the positive effects are remarkable for example in the monkeys they were calorie restricted the the control monkey 60% of them developed diabetes in the colours of the monkey zero in the cardiovascular disease and cancer reduction by 50% phi0 which is in what kind of caloric restriction this was just 25 percent monkeys right now if you look at the lifespan not change very much right so then what does it tell you it tells you that obviously you could probably cure many many diseases by doing the right intervention but color restriction is not the way to do it because it gives you as many problems as Solutions this is the Inhumans and any any monkeys humans we don't know for sure yet but if you look at people that are cut restricted you know man the records they should have BMI of nineteen eighteen point five nineteen they look like the really borderline anorexic and you know and you have to wonder is this sustainable - is it compatible with a lifespan of 110 probably not as it wasn't for the monkeys so that's where then you know back in the days I made the observation if I completely starve bacteria or I completely starved yeast they live longer and they live stronger right so longer stronger meaning that you you hit them with toxins nothing they're very strong and and both of them and you know if you look at bacteria and yeast bees that you carry it so they're being separated by hundreds of millions of years so I started thinking is it possible that you could do this for every organism and it's gonna make a stronger and protected for a long period and that's where a lot of this comes from and so jumping I had twenty years then is the mouse studies that we first did which were you know what if you take a mouse and you give it this fast in making that why is it a fast American diet is a you know what I was talking earlier about the nutrient determine what genes are activated or not sighs so if you have a certain composition low protein low levels of certain amino acids and then I have lost sugar high carbohydrate but lost sugar and high fat but good fats right all that you put it together then the response of the system is just like if you giving it water only fasting you just give water and you heal for for four days and then you put them back on a bad diet a relatively bad diet this is a vegan so for vegan days for the mice and then you know ten days of animal-based diet and then you keep doing this twice a month now we show the the mice live longer about 11 percent longer but the remarkable part is the cancers were reduced by almost 50% Wow and in the inflammatory diseases were reduced by 50% and this mice just their cognitive abilities was was much improved right they just look younger healthier so they live longer younger and healthier then we did the human clinical trial with this proton fast imaging diet and we did three cycles once a month five days again vegan five vegan days of this low protein Lord Sugar hide good fat diet and and then we give them 25 days of no recommendation go back and do whatever it is that you always done no exercise recommendation or food no nutrition recommendation and then we measure the effects after a week and three months after the last cycle and you know I think the results were remarkable saw a lower cholesterol blood pressure lower triglyceride lower fasting glucose lower inflammation systemic inflammation is measured by CRP and lower igf-1 which we believe is that one of the key markers risk factors were both aging in cancer but the interesting thing this happened much more power it was much more powerful in people that had the problem to begin with so if somebody started from an ideal situation there were a lot less changes then somebody that started with high levels of this yeah of course of course that's absolutely fascinating was there any were you able to sort of quantify when you said okay go back and eat whatever you were eating were you aware of you know the differences in how people were returning to their lifestyles and was there any differentiation amongst that population based upon their just sort of preset lifestyle I mean we knew that again the the people that for example had igf-1 levels of 300 they probably had a very high animal protein that is right and they responded very very very well we didn't follow their diet after but what we heard from lots of people and now you know the proton FMD has been done by over 30,000 people so we're starting to collect a lot of data from from people and a lot of people are basically saying it's a slow process but every time I do a cycle I come back and I don't feel like I have to go back to as much meat I don't have to go back to as much sugar or as many coffees well they've done something for themselves and so then they you know they're more enthusiastic about taking care of themselves I would imagine I think so I may also be something about you know the brain realizing it that you can handle I always think about I say running a 10k run the first time you do it you you it's very difficult yeah and after that you could probably do it multiple times a year and it doesn't seem that hard I think is you know realizing that it's okay it's not that hard most people haven't have never gone and you know 24 hours in their entire life without eating solid food and just the idea of that seems so daunting we you know we have this notion that we'll just perish if we do that and to kind of undertake a protocol like that and go to the other side of it and realize like oh that was I did that that was fine makes you rethink the human body's capabilities yeah absolutely and if you think about for example the brain around a five or so or the FMD about fifty percent of the fuel comes from ketone bodies right from fat and and in most people that pathway in the brain has probably never been activated right so somebody could be 55 years of age and never once has activated this use of ketone bodies in the brain mmm so then what's wrong with with exploring the ketogenic diet all the time the pillars so you know II if you look around the world a population that are long-lived using a ketogenic diet all the time which in most cases to be doable that to be a high-protein diet you know I mean you could come up with it but it'd be almost impossible to do like a high-fat only you know low-carb it'd be almost impossible so this will end up being a high protein high fat diet and there is really no data out there and so then you're taking a big risk right so I got you all right so the genesis of this is this idea that when you fast a cell something gets triggered in that cell to make it protective and stronger against disease and decline that correct so what is going on cellularly yeah so that's one that was the initial observation protection then we started realizing it wasn't just about protection as I was talking about the tires earlier it's about also repair and replacement right both inside of a cell whether the cell if the cell doesn't die and in inside of an organ where the cells are actually killed and replaced right so now the body and I I used the analogy with a wood burning train and I say imagine you have a wood burning train is running out of fuel it cannot make it to the next train station so it starts burning its own components to get there right but of course the the engineer there is burning the wood will first call to the ruined chairs that are made of wood in the room world you know the damaged ones right so you take the damaged component and burn those right that would make sense first then you go to everything else but the end result is you get to the next station and then you rebuild and now you put new chairs new walls inside now you have a newer train and you made it there and that's exactly what the body does you get rid of a lot of junk inside of the cell and also inside of an organ and it seemed like we publish a people for example a few years ago on multiple sclerosis there Mouse and humans and it seemed like the this fasting mimicking diet was able to first get rid of auto immune cells and it makes sense right it's like like the machinist or the engineer and the train you go picked damage one way I mean it would be surprising that after billions of years of Oulu evolution the body was dumb enough to go pick first the good cells and kill them when it knows that some cancer some cells are precancerous some cells are autoimmune some cells are not metabolically you know it may be insulin resistant and that's why we think we see in the human trial this rejuvenation effect the body seems to be working like when people were much younger so yes so essentially you know on first glimpse it's sort of like oh the body is cannibalizing itself that can't be good but in truth what's happening is it's purging itself of these cells that are in decline and in so doing stimulating stem cell regeneration for these organs and these systems to rebuild themselves with brand new healthy cells yeah not just stem cells now we are now our new work is looking at inside of the cell right so you like a neuron or a cardio myocyte may not be may not be killed but it's now gonna regenerate into salary right so is this me out of goog apoptosis no this is the killing of the cell that we've already shown what we're now looking at is what happens inside of the cell without killing the cell can you regenerate the intracellular components I see I see and so in other words like take the liver for example I think you know I've read and seen were you've spoken about how you undergo this protocol and your organs your liver will literally shrink right because it's because it's regenerating itself and getting rid of the old and in the early processes of building the new and then you go back to your life where you're eating and it regenerates itself and it's actually for all intents and purposes it's a younger organ is that correct yes so I mean obviously for example we're showing that the white blood cell number the clients and then and then returns to normal right so it's not like the clients with 20% right so you're not reducing something by 80% you might be reducing about 15% but now 15% of the white blood but let's say even 10% so 10% and then you rebuild it now if we do this 10 times a year and especially speculating that what we seen in mice is also true for humans meaning that the body can this is a damaged cell there's nothing right of 10% which might represent 70% of the bad cells right I mean I don't know we've never demonstrated that but certainly we demonstrated that we could take out two immune mice and and within so many cycles of the FASTA mimicking diet we can eliminate completely the autoimmunity in 20% of these mice and we can reduce it dramatically in 50% of device right so I mean it's working you know in a memo very well and we've shown it with the pancreas we can destroy the pancreas make it not generating insulin anymore and then we start with the cycle of the fasting minion diet these embryonic genes are turned on and the only time you see this gene turn on in this manner is only when we when the mouse is first born right and so they've turned on and they start rebuilding the pancreas you know and the insulin producing sauce it's really remarkable process now you know in humans we're starting the trial so we you know there's a lot of work to be done and people have to be careful not to think about oh okay now I'm gonna I have diabetes like one I'm gonna go do it it's you know it's still dangerous to do it but looks very promising and now we're gonna start clinical trials and Crohn's and Colitis Alzheimer diabetes cancer of course we'd be doing trials for years now we're done with a few of them and we're doing more you know multiple sclerosis etc what do you think is the the number one study like what would be the first study that needs to be conducted to answer some of the lingering questions that you have that you would like answers to well the first one we're gonna do where I think it's gonna work as they already work with a hundred patient clinical trial that we did is metabolic syndrome and pre-diabetes and pre cardiovascular state right so all the people which is half of the you knows people American yeah but a third of Americans are either pre-diabetic or diabetic about 100 million people so yeah so we think because we already done it and we saw very clear results now we're gonna do that we're gonna start very soon about 400 patients randomized at USC and yeah so that I have high hopes that that's the way to go you know maybe three times a year do this you know in the trial we're gonna do three cycles monthly but we envisioned because in the past trial we saw that three months after the last the third cycle we still still so about 60% of the changes remaining Wow so they incur 60% and they were lower but still significant and so we suspect that you know it takes about three or four months to to get rid of the effects of three cycles so you know I think we envision that this be a an option for you know for doctors eventually to say yeah give you drugs or maybe I could let the body fix itself right and and see how far you can go with this and then you know if nothing nothing works then maybe we can we can go to the drugs versus you know gonna go into the drugs first and yeah get to the root cause of what's generating this in the first place as opposed to putting a bandaid on it yeah so this fasting monic mimicking diet protocol that you've developed it entails you know protocol in which you have you know these foods and you're on a very strict schedule and the idea is that it allows you to eat rather than just doing a water only fast but yet you still garner the same benefits that you would that you would experience if you were just doing water so we it generated out of looking at water fasts originally that correct yes and no and you know we suspect and we have data that we're about to publish that is not just about the lack it's also about what we have in the FASTA making that right so unfortunate I cannot talk about that but it looks like there are multiple components that we have selected that I have actually positive effects I'll give you one for example we have glycerol in the end in the fast American diet in glycerol turns out to be a byproduct of fat but also is what's using gluconeogenesis to make sugar when the to feed the brain now if you don't have glycerol the body breaks down muscle right and so one of the observation in the clinical trial there was no or minimal loss of lean body mass after three cycle the FMD and we suspected for example grizzle is playing that part I mean this is just one of the 66 components that we have in there and then and this is just I can talk about that because we already published that back but I think it's gonna be a lot more than that and always tall never trying to hack anything right always sort of thinking in like in this case what does the body make during fasting glycerol okay then glycerin is right so we're not trying to come up with on the art version of so we now have somebody in a fascist state that has got glycerol but people in a fasted state already have glycerin we just make that higher right right I saw so that is our thinking so it is what we call new tree technology but it's a new technology in tune with evolution a new tree technology that really respects where this is coming from understands and respects it you know because for example if you try to give and this is silicon come out of Silicon Valley if you try to give ketone bodies to somebody this has a normal diet now you could have a problem and I say this is not in it they're not attempting to get into a ketogenic state other than taking exogenously eat oh yeah so now a lots of people are doing that now so you think about like a hybrid car that is now you tweak it to work both on electricity and on gasoline at the same time right well as confusing it's gonna break down unless you have an engineer reprogramming it could do that but it but the body is not meant to do that it's be either fasting or it's not right so now you have the sugar you put the ketone bodies in there what's gonna happen after five six seven years of that I would strongly discourage people from from doing ketone bodies during a standard nutrition I mean nourishment state right and why five days how did you come up with five days as the window well you need to break down right you need to bleed glycogen and then you have about three days where you you benefit from break from now consuming only and as we've shown in the clinical trial this off fat right so the body now it goes exclusive doesn't touch the subcutaneous fat it goes after the abdominal fat as its only a major source of energy so now you suffer less for the last three days you break down the stem cells and are starting to get activated and you have enough of a window that you can start rebuilding if you go much shorter it's never any destruction there is never any cleaning up and therefore there's gonna be minimal rebuilding right and so and as you get longer well if you go longer you got now getting the danger zone right you get in the compliance low compliance on and danger zone right so now you need to go to a clinic so five days after over 30,000 people have done the prolong diet we've seen very little side effects there are there are there should be reported and and so people can do it you know they don't there's some people of course struggle with it but most people don't and yeah so I think compliance is very important if people hate it and if people feel it was too difficult they're never gonna do it again and then you know then it's drugs right so yeah that's that's also in addition to the specific nutrients that you spoke to just by actually providing people with a little bit of food enhances the the compliance dramatically I would imagine not just food but also the the selection of food so we pick foods that for example we have these nut bars and they were designed to really fill you up so it's a kind of fact that after a while you're thinking okay that's it you know I'm not hungry anymore it's not very much but it's made in a way that it really makes I mean people again it's a a ton of food but it's it is doable and and it's designed to try to make you as full as possible mm-hmm what about people that do do these extended water fast like my friend ray Crowe nice who's been in here I think he does he's crazy like I think he's gone like 45 days and I think there's something powerful about that in that he can sit here and and and share his experience of that that helps people like we were speaking about earlier snap out of this idea that we have to eat three meals a day because somebody decided that at some point but you know I don't I don't know how healthy or unhealthy that is it sounds like you would be somebody who would say well he's well into this danger zone or has he acclimated to it because he's done it a number of times and built up to that or what's your perspective on that well my perspective is that I mean he's getting into the wall for its own right so basically pushing the limits and and there are reasons for not doing that that we know of now for example Friday there was a paper published on 15% calorie restriction long term and what happens it happens that your metabolism now in people slaw past their loss of weight so now their metabolism even adjusted per weight per weight was lower than it was before so now after 45 days and it doesn't come back up for a may not come back up for years right so now if he does 45 days of fasting all right now the body may have no choice but to reduce the metabolism to be as thrifty as possible now you know this is why lots of people that go to these clinics and do very long fast usually the year after they come back with the same weight that they had before right so now you get into this yo-yo and the question is and the evidence seems to suggest that when you go back now your metabolism is slower so now you have a probably gonna have to eat less then you used to eat before you started this right all the time otherwise you can I gain weight right so that's another reason Emperor M and of course the uncertainty what's gonna happen after you do these 20 times we don't know right more studies more studies but roll group of food how many people are gonna do that I know the the booking allowed me clinic in Germany they're starting to follow people they do like three weeks you know so they're trying to get as much information as possible how many times if they done it they have any problems so they'll be interesting and I know there TrueNorth clinic up in Northern California I remember talking to them and they were saying they were trying to collect data on you know people that have done it many times and and they've had great results up there and I know a bunch of those doctors they've they've turned people's health around in dramatic ways I don't know exactly what their protocol is but water almost oh it is water oh yeah in a clinic those fine clinic you can do what supervisor yeah it's medically supervised you've nurses yeah in the same same in Germany then then it's different you know especially if you try to address some some problem they know how to solve mm-hmm I think it's important to point out that what you're you're advocating and suggesting is very different from something else that's very popular right now which is intermittent fasting this idea of going I don't know 12 or 15 hours either every day or once a week or I don't know how it breaks down for four people but I would imagine that your perspective on that would be that yeah it's fine but in in maybe there's some benefits to that but you're not doing it long enough to really create this effect that you're looking to produce cellularly yeah well first of all I'm just emailed the session panda the other day because it's one of the guards and NSA it's watch in 12 hours is really intermedia you know it's done in community this is what we've always done right so I look how we call in that inter minute facet that's crazy yeah so but yeah people are doing that and the problem with that is that we're starting to use these words like carbohydrate you know it's the same thing you know they don't mean anything because if you eat 12 hours and that's what I point out in the book if you eat for 12 hours that's very good you know it's supported by the five pillars stick stick to 12 hours don't eat for 13 14 15 hours a day and if you're overweight or obese eat twice a day plus a snack and keep it 12 hours that's the normal eating pattern is not intermittent fasting right now sixteen hours well no doubt that as it's been shown you're gonna have benefits on lost Excel Excel nobody talks about the problem stuff problem number one ghost 'information studies are showing that if you're you're fast every day for more than 12 hours you now have an increased chance that you're gonna need your gallbladder removed not the worst thing it can happen to you but not so not a nice thing to happen to you and it gets to about twofold increase in the risk of all gallbladder operation number two several studies showing if you skip breakfast which most people will do if you have 16 hours because most people have dinner now you have increased chance of cardiovascular disease cancer and overall mortality is that well I I skip breakfast all the time maybe is the people to skip breakfast have a terrible day center yeah we don't know I mean it's not necessarily bad to skip breakfast but it's certainly associated with bad outcomes right people die earlier not later earlier so then you have to say yeah do you want to recommend something that multiple pillars are now are indicating to be problematic right and and yeah so that's why I mean first do no harm is a very good advice right and this is what you know people learn in the first year of medical school so I think that we should always start with that so first tune arm is this associated with any problems and if it is try to come up with something else you know so twelve hours is great timer City feeling such in it's worked on that I've shown to be very beneficial so if you think people that used to eat for 14 hours a day 15 hours you reduce it to 12 great because that's what the centenarians do that's what every piece of data is suggesting to be very good 16 hours not supported potentially entering the the problem zone right that's that's that's good to know I think that's important information there's a lot of people just launching into this world of intermittent fasting without really knowing what they're doing and I've dipped my toe in it so you know it's instructive to hear you say that one of the things that I thought was fascinating in reading your book in your work was this idea that that the fasting mimicking diet will have a well we'll make healthy cells more resistant to like if you have cancer right it will make those cancer cells more susceptible to the cancer treatments to the chemotherapy and the healthier cells strong so that they will be able to withstand those treatments I didn't say that very eloquently so yeah then they like we had observed for bacteria and yeast you take a normal cell at least in a mouse and in the early data from clinical studies is suggesting the same we've shown already for white blood cells for example from humans so if you give them chemo the good cells know what to do during starvation they become protected they stop dividing or they reduce growth rate and they enter a protect amount the cancer cells by definition by the way rebelled against this they cannot they otherwise they wouldn't be defined as a cancer cell so one of the the all marks of cancer cells is the ability to grow independently of growth factor and to refuse anti-growth signals so to rebel against theta crossing so fasting is an anti growth signal and the fasting and the cancer cell rebound now you got a problem with that and I use the analogy of imagine in somebody running and desired in the desert with a shade right and without water now if you were running in the desert like cancer cells do you know you have shade and water you may make and so if you have in the case of cancer cell lots of growth factors lots of proteins amino acids and sugar fine that's what they've evolved in that unit literal as soon as you start removing glucose and removing growth factors and like igf-1 etc and adding anti growth factors now the cancer cells are gonna have a problem and that's what we see that's why we see the fasting fasting that had been as effective as chemo but particularly with is working together and that's where the Sun comes in right the Sun is the chemo and so you know you know no water and you have the Sun hitting you you're gonna be dead it's just a matter of time right it's amazing how that's worked out that it has the desired effect on the cancer cells which is to hopefully make them go away and at the same time strengthening the healthy cells it may I have now worked out and maybe evolved right so we're starting to suspect that think about sleep right so you you sleep in and sleep is now there by by mistake right it's forcing you to rest for however many hours so we're starting to think is it possible that because all these organisms mostly state yeast bacteria mostly they stay in a starvation mode once in a while they start eating right humans were not in that situation but fasting was probably so common that you didn't have to force anybody to do it because they were forced by the condition right so then what if fasting was the moment where the precancerous cells were getting killed and and the and now you use it to protect your cells in the moment of starvation from the Sun from whatever other you know problems and toxins you might be exposed to so it may very well be an adapted process where you're starving protect your good cells protect your genes and then get rid of cells that are you know not functional anymore also to eat him yeah yeah in the same way that that exercise is good for you right it's just something that we evolved that we that we sort of experienced in our evolution that allowed us to you know weather hard times and get stronger but we've moved away from these things we're in a culture in which we're just eating all day long and we're sitting in chairs so we we've moved away from these evolutionary sort of mandates that that keep us healthy yeah but yeah exercise could be a little bit different exercise is not really removing anything is more damaging so exercise may have similar effects for different reasoning that when you let's say you have to run excessively 20,000 years ago that cause muscle damage and the response to that maybe build Numa so because now that tells you that you didn't have enough right so it's a different concept probably also leave there's sort of a sort of a catabolic anabolic analogy and that there's a breakdown and then there's a rebuilding that makes you stronger yeah yeah so it's a similar idea but but the other mechanisms are quite different because in exercise you do damage and then you repair it right rather than you get rid of it yourself essentially but yeah the exercise I think also uses some of the probably in some cases the rebuilding my use as we are seeing similar mechanisms right so is it the rebuilding for exercise probably doesn't quite go as extreme is the rebuilding after prolonged fasting but it may be using similar techniques for example we know stem cells are activated satellite stem cells muscle stem cells are activated in response to exercise mm-hmm what is the impact on cognition of FMD yes so the in the mouse there are very clear impact meaning that they are cognitively sharper they remember better they learn better particularly when they're old and but also when they're young but you see this particularly when they're all now we're doing we've done some special FM these with mice on and off and Alzheimer's but now we're doing the the human FMD we're testing and now in my steeple Alzheimer models and the idea is can we protect the can we protect the brain against Alzheimer even when we impose the human mutation they cause Alzheimer's in a hundred percent of the mice right so we have some Mouse is called triple transgenic and that's all these human mutations they cause problems you know this beta amyloid accumulation and tau phosphorylated tau so yeah so then hopefully within a year we'll have the data on there and we're starting a clinical trial we just got funded by the Italian Ministry of Health for a randomized clinical trial Alzheimer's patients Wow the fasting making diet so that would be very interesting but particularly because there is really nothing for dementia right now and and so this would be something that could be rapidly moved into the into clinical use are you familiar with Dean and I show shows a at Loma Linda with their I forget I think it's called the brain health unit they they created a department there and they're having some pretty tremendous success working with early onset Alzheimer's patients I had them on the podcast they're doing really cool work you know I'm collaborating with trans Wong and and a few others that Melinda but now with the brain people you should meet these guys I'll connect you is there anybody who who for whom the fasting mimicking diet would not be appropriate yes oh you know pregnant woman wait below I think BMI 18.5 or something like that people with diseases they're gonna need the doctor or people are taking drugs especially metabolic drugs insulin particularly very dangerous combination you can actually die if you combine insulin and fasting or fasting making diet yeah so I think in general if somebody's healthy they can talk to the nutritionist and there is an expert in FMVs and they will take him through but if somebody has a disease they they need to run it by the doctor and then the nutritionist and the doctor can can work with them to to see if it's doable right and the the preferred the preferred protocol is to do this five day program three times a year like once a quarter four times a year well depends right so if you somebody who's at 32 year old athlete that is Ana basket Aryan or a vegan diet and it's you know everything is perfect let's say you probably want to do it twice a year and in somebody who's obese it was got high cholesterol high blood pressure maybe once a month until they move to the lower category and then it goes you know maybe once every four months and then and then every yeah so I say an average people should probably do a 1 once every 4 months and then depending on where they stand between the 32 year old athlete and the OBE right right I got ya I got you all right well we got a we have to wind this down but I have two questions but I can't let you go without asking the first is if somebody's listening to this or they're watching this and they're health-conscious they're interested in taking care of themselves but this is brand-new information they never heard anything like this before you know what's the what's the thing that you want people to bear in mind that they might that might not be self-evident to the average consumer about how they approach their their day their diet their lifestyle habits well I'm I mean you know I I have a list at the end of the chapter for heading in the book and and there's ten things that I think people all should do they're not very hard and and of course you know different people will get to different levels of it you know so for example what we talked about early the 12 hour limit you know you do 15 hours and I say twelve and you can get to 13 well you know at least you're close you know and and that's that's the idea try to get as close as possible to all these recommendations because they're really based on five pillars I mean my opinion is in there but not very much I mean it's more like a systematic way of looking at this including our history you know where do we come from not just systematic in Silicon Valley a way of you know trying to hack everything but more like you know let's combine that hacking with with our history and where we come from you know to make sure that we stay in tune with the right that's a great answer and if you were to wake up and find yourself to be the Surgeon General the United States what would be your primary first policy initiative like what needs to change in our health care system yeah so I get fired within it somebody tell me that everybody you ask every doctor that comes on the show the same question they I mean every one of them will get fired but it's funny because I believe that the Surgeon General went they when 50 years ago say smoking is bad for you and he was fired for the same yeah so I think we were sure these five meals a day is a bad idea it's it's a company this obesity epidemic in the United States and around the world you know when you have seven 70% of people in the US that are either obese or overweight and you still recommend eating five times a day it's entertaining to me that they don't understand that what could work in a clinic you know so if you brought somebody into a clinic as we do when you keep him there then they could it could actually work but if you tell somebody eat five times a day then what happens is that you start eating more and they eat for fifteen sixteen hours a day they're not eating a banana and some almonds they're going to Cheesecake Factory yeah so they're they're eating the bad food and they're eating four more meals longer time so the combination of these two I think is the bad food more minos longer time the three things are really detrimental so I would say if you can go to either a vegan or vegan pescetarian diet and keep it within 12 hours and keep it to if you're overweight if you one of the seven out of ten Americans are overweight keep it at two meals a day plus a snack so let's say you have breakfast lunch and a snack for dinner or breakfast a snack for lunch and dinner mmm I mean this thing could be a hundred calorie low sugar you know like a salad or something like it it's a pleasure talking to you dr. long ago like I think your your work is groundbreaking the work you're doing is inspirational I think we're going to be seeing and hearing from you quite a bit more your book the longevity diet is groundbreaking and I wish you only the best as you continue to do more research and it's an honor and a privilege to help you get your message out into the world so thank you for your time today if you're interested in vaulter and his work pick up his book the longevity diet if you're interested in learning more about the fasting mimicking diet you can go to pro lawn FMD calm and they have all the information there you have these kits that you can order I think it's important to say that vaulter himself does not profit individually off of this whatsoever all the money that he earns from this goes directly into funding research with what's the organization called via cures that are and what and what is create you're still okay Akira is a foundation that I started with the idea you know I had like every day I have ten cancer patient or people without two immunities and whatever or disease and they're like desperate and you know I realized that doesn't matter who you are whether you're poor or rich there is really very little out there that helps you with in a you know in a serious way and say okay you have cancer I mean there's a lot of quackery out there but it's not to too many people order than the oncology that tells you here the drugs we're gonna give you then people were faced with internet good luck to you you know and so Creek here is really about what can somebody do today not twenty years from now but today that is gonna make their therapy more effective it's gonna make the side-effects lower so it's gonna help them and in on some cases we lap down the clinical studies in some cases we haven't but the patient cannot wait and so we sort of have to act now and that we felt as important we're doing it all over the world now with many many different hospitals and we're starting to see you know the doctors slowly being you know converted into understanding this this difficult situation where you can now wait you cannot tell somebody who stage four breast cancer for whom you know therapy's not working oh you know these guys in ten years are gonna have something for you you know right exactly fantastic thank you all right thing and your your you're not on Twitter right welp Roland's on Twitter promo on FMD no I have a Facebook profile too long ago Facebook page where we put just articles about you know anybody that we feel we sort of have a couple nutritionists and dietitian screening papers and if we feel something is good you know then we'll pull out there and and and we're usually associated with like article from a newspaper that describes what it is cool so I'll link that up in the show notes and are you did you ever like get up in front of public audiences to talk yes yes I do that from time to time and yeah so is there any where where do we now so Facebook we do a Facebook live maybe once every couple months off just so people can you know ask question right and and login and ex questions all right thanks [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 249,352

Keywords: rich roll, vegan, health, fitness, diet, nutrition, athlete, podcast, plantpower, plant-based, wellness, self-help, valter longo, fasting, intermittent fasting, keto, ketosis, ketogenic, longevity, centenarian, science, weight loss, prolon, fasting mimicking diet, FMD, aging, disease, alzheimer's, heart disease, diabetes, blue zones, self-improvement, cancer, healing, stem cell, apoptosis, autophagy, jole kahn, genetics, biology, gerontolgy, usc longevity institute

Id: Odpt9afBlYY

Length: 105min 28sec (6328 seconds)

Published: Sun May 20 2018