The Secret Power of Fasting for Longevity and Healing

[Music] welcome to the doctors pharmacy I'm dr. Mark Hyman and that's pharmacy with an F F AR ma CY a place for conversations that matter and this conversation today with dr. Valter Longo will matter to all of you because many of you probably are thinking how do I live a healthy long life and not get sick and this man has spent his life trying to answer that question and he is an internationally recognized leader in the field of aging and related diseases his discoveries have looked at some of the major genetic pathways that relate to aging regulating aging and life-threatening diseases he's identified a genetic mutation that protects men from many common diseases and he's been cited by Time magazine as the Guru of longevity he's quite a guy he's a professor of Biogen ecology and biological sciences at the director and the director of the institute of longevity of the School of gerontology at the University of Southern California in LA and he also works at the as the director of oncology and longevity program at AI fom in Milan and he's a scientific director of create cures Foundation and the Valter Longo Foundation where he takes all the proceeds from his books and all the proceeds from the products that are designed to create healthy aging and puts it back into research he's an extraordinary guy his book the longevity diet is the culmination of 25 years of research on aging nutrition and disease across the globe it's easy to understand it's accessible it's easy to implement and is a road map to living well longer through improved nutrition and I for one am all about it in fact I'm going to try the program now that I've read the book and you're gonna hear why as we listen to dr. Longo so welcome well thanks thanks there was a longer interval I know you've done a lot you're the guy and you're happen to be the guy who everybody's talking about in terms of Aging and your program has been studied extensively across a wide spectrum of diseases you've gotten funding from the NIH and everybody's talking about how we can use the innovations around aging that you've discovered to basically slow or even kind of reverse the process by using something that you've termed Juve ontology which is the science of healthy aging and something called the fasting mimicking diet so you you're Italian you grew up in Italy and you grew up in a town that had a lot of old people but then you every summer you went to this town in a little small town in Italy where some of the longest lived people in the world are and it just so happened that that's where you hung out and there were people who are a hundred and ten and a hundred and seventeen will talk about them what was it like growing up there and how did you then go from wanting to be a jazz and rock star to being a scientist looking at all this good it's quite a different framework yeah yeah so I actually I was at a new University of North Texas and I was studying music was one of the best programs in jazz performance that's that was my major studying guitar and then they told me that I had to direct a marching band and I said there's no way I really want to be a back there's no way I'm those funny costumes or look at them for that matter but yeah so I said I'm not gonna do that and but of course there was an excuse I wanted to I think I really my instinct told me that I was interested in aging I was interested in in medicine and and I just I always thought what an incredible combination of something that scientifically is a super challenge but as high as it gets and then medically I I ready that time I thought this is this could have effects on many different diseases and I just want so yeah that was the switch to biochemistry and then and then the rest of it I mean from the very beginning all I wanted to do was study aging yeah and so I never went into it to be a biologist or or or anything else I just went into it to understand how we age and now we keep people younger and healthier longer yeah so you you actually write about this in your book which is that the studies that we've shown longevity and animals are calorie restriction studies meaning you eat 1/3 less calories you live 1/3 longer and there was an example of a group that did this in the biosphere Roy Wofford you talked about and they actually did reverse a lot of the biomarkers of chronic aging but they also felt crappy and were tired and had lower immune systems and you know we're hangry all the time right so you kind of came up with a new way of thinking about this that achieves some of the same benefits and maybe even more without necessarily having to starve yourself all the time and you call it the fasting mimicking diet so take us through how you came to discover that this is something we should be thinking about the animal models and then the human trials that you're doing yeah so so when I was in Walters lab many years ago the idea it was almost like nobody was thinking about the origin of things it's a 30% 30% less and that's it and I always thought it's gotta come from something much more deep and a meaningful than just in in 30% less so I was observing I went back to the biochemistry department from the pathology department where welfare was and I started I studied starvation in bacteria and yeast and I saw that you could starve completely a bacteria or a yeast and they'd live a lot longer and this is permanent so it's not like you starving for a little bit you starve them and you keep him under starvation and they live very long and so I started thinking it must be the other way around it must be the color restriction foundation is in starvation and so it all comes from starvation there is no magical restriction effect but the starvation for a human being or even for a mouse must be periodic once in a while you starve and then if in the rest of the year you find enough food to eat and and that's what I start thinking that's historically what humans did right that's the scarcity you know you can't go to the grocery store you gotta go hunt and gather and find whatever you can exactly and sometimes of course that period it could be months long and not much longer than that because then died but but let's say potentially it was very long you go through periods of not eating for for one or two months so yeah there was the idea so what if you just take somebody at first we study fasting what if you take water only fasting and then expose people mice or whatever to do it and then back to the normal diet could reprogram the system into having long lasting effects and so that's that's we started with water only fasting particularly for cancer and then we move in water only fasting at the beginning was just water only fast we took mice we switched to water and we were we were very interested in chemotherapy protection differential chemotherapy protection so the idea was can you protect a normal cell with starvation with fasting but not a cancer cell and it turns out to be a really powerful way to kill cancer cells and protect normal cells and now we're you know we have a number of clinical trials finished and many more ongoing but it seems to be working very well so there was the original idea and then we move to fasting mimicking diets in part because nobody wanted to fast and an oncologist we made nothing yeah the oncologists were very much resistant to that impatient surprisingly were more resistant to it than the oncologist and now having any any food and there was part at the psychological aspect the the page lots of patients felt cheated they felt like other possible that my doctor tells me that the the treatment here is to do nothing and but also is very tough psychologically it's a moment when you're when you're sick that it's very difficult to be without this or comfort yeah right and this is not just cancer patient then we learned that most people like that and this is where the fast American diet idea comes from you know to worry about also the safety of the fasting and the compliance and you know of walk testing of long-term fast you know yeah yeah so what what this seems to do is activate the body's healing system which is pretty interesting so most physicians we're trying to treat diseases with drugs that suppress symptoms or target a specific pathway or mechanism but your work has shown that you're really not doing that you're focusing on the inherent repair systems the regeneration and healing mechanisms in the body the programs as you call them that can get activated by specific interventions which then can be applied across all sorts of diseases so it seems almost incredulous that you could say that eating this way which is short periods of restricted calories for five days could help treat Alzheimer's and cancer and diabetes and colitis and MS and all kinds of other stuff how does that make sense given our current paradigm yeah so think about cancer right so we we've been fighting the war on cancer with Nixon Nixon came up with the war on cancer and in it 50 years later we now have the most effective and most in most promising intervention in cancer is immunotherapy and what is immuno therapy immunotherapy now for which Nobel Prize was given in 2018 in Maryland Nobel Prize in medicine is basically making the immune system attack the cells that don't belong right so allowing the immune system to attack the cancer cells that have now figured out by a couple of different mechanisms I will tell the immune system cells stop don't attack me right so the the immunotherapy is removing two molecules or inhibiting two molecules PD one PDL one and city r4 right in allowing the immune cell to do its job and so that's a great example of yeah you know and and some of the people that I've been talking to they were saying 10-15 years ago they were attacking this immunotherapy scientist and saying come on this is a old idea is never gonna work you know we have all these sophisticated targeted technologies and they kept saying no let the immune system find its way let it find the wrong cell because now you have a real cure it's gonna go everywhere in the body it's gonna attack you just have to figure out how what with fasting fasting is probably the most powerful natural intervention - we believe we're starting to believe because it's working with so many different things we're starting to believe that it was the moment kind of like sleep if you think of sleep it's the moment where you rest right but not just rested the the general level but probably having all kinds of systems like DNA repair etc do their job and so it is a moment of rejuvenation if you will right so we believe that maybe fasting was the moment where the body went to the body shop and the end the mechanic and everything got fixed right and something was not working correctly you remove it replace it so so that's what we think it it could explain all these very different effects for example I can go on one side after the inflammation reduce inflammation but at the same time promote inflammation depending attack of cancer cells it's just the opposite two opposite things and then you know kill the cancer cell and then regenerate the pancreas when when it's damaged and promote the regeneration of the liver eh etc Excel exactly so yeah so I think that maybe that's what was always there for identified things that are dysfunctional old and replaces way with cleaning up house cleaning up in in a very sophisticated manner and we already know that the body can do that I always say if you cut yourself after a couple weeks is gone perfect repair and yet the skin keeps getting old and so as a possible that you just can a so sophisticated rapid repair and it never does that so yeah so thing potentially is is one of the most powerful we I mean I really see no evidence of anything beating it that I've ever or even getting close to it it's just radical what you're saying is you know we've got century of medical innovation and drug development and technology innovating care and what you're talking about is that food is more powerful than all of those things in fact you coined this term nutracheck nutri technology which is about treating the molecules in food as drugs yeah but now let let me go back to cancer right so we almost never see cancer-free survival when we only use fasting mimicking diets we always see with the drugs right and so to me it was always like for example if you're talking about diabetes and lots of other things the drugs don't seem to be necessary but when you get to cancer we have not been we cured lots of mice with combination of chemotherapy and and fasting mimicking diet we've never been able to do it with just for sure without the with the chemo lon and but also with the fast timing that long so the chemo and the fasting making that work about as well but you combine them and they're very powerful so yeah you were presenting at a conference this morning and we had a fantastic slide up there showing that the effect of fasting effective chemo and the combined effect was multiples yeah synergistic for sure and so the point is that we're not about for drugs against drugs we're about patients how do you get somebody to get 110 to 110 healthy and if you have cancer what about 120 yeah maybe but but if you if you prevent cancer absolutely no drugs are needed to prevent cancer and to just act on the aging program and on the longevity program but if you have cancer we really think that whether it's immunotherapy kinase inhibitor chemotherapy radiotherapy surgery they're really going to be very very important together together with the fast imaging diet and we'll see you know the kid is also emerging as a potential core treatment you know Luke aenthul is done really great work combining ketogenic diet with with pi3 kinase inhibitors for example lots of potential there and so I think that it's not just about the fast timing in diet but certain the FMV seem to be because you just do it for four days five days with the treatment and then you let the patient return to their normal diet we think that that's that's God let me just back up a little help people understand what the fasting mimicking diet is before we go into more detail about it because it's fascinating essentially it's very short periods of calorie restriction 800 to 1100 calories 5 days done a few times a year 2 or 3 times more if you're treating something serious like an autoimmune disease or maybe cancer but it's not that much time out of the space of a year to do this and this product this program has the ability to treat so many different things and one of the things you said this morning it was really powerful was that it takes many drugs to do what a fasting mimicking diet does yeah and this is like I don't even do the same exact and this is AG fact if you just look at cancer and if I had somebody who came to me recently and said you know what when we use these cancer drugs we got a problem because we can lower insulin and we can lower glucose we have nothing yet taking lower insulin and glucose at the same time and he was saying that your diet is about it's right so this is just two other things that does also lowers igf-1 and Laura slept in it revolutionizes the the the growth factor an inflammatory accelerator environment yeah so it would take many many drugs to get the effects of fasting and nobody argues with this it is not an opinion anymore now you could argue that all those changes may or may not affect cancer you know we have to still see but we have lots of clinical trials now and certainly mouse data indicating that did it does and does vary in a very powerful way so there's there's a bunch of things you threw in there like ketogenic diet and in fasting there's this whole field out there that's moving in the direction of some type of fasting mimicking approach right not your fasting diet but ketogenic diet is sort of a way mimics fasting it may activate a lot of the same yes and all right so let's say good opportunity talking about that I think people are confused and ketogenic is the latest hot thing what you're saying is that necessary necessary yeah the ketogenic diet first of all it can be high protein there could be a lot of protein right so so that's already the distinction why because we can see that if you add back proteins to the fasting mimicking diet you can cut out half of the effect right and if you had sugar you cannot but the other health so if you're the sugar and proteins you now eliminate the effect pretty much of the fast American diet so so you know the ketogenic diet if it was a high fat and that's what they fasted making that is right the eye fat but we also have relatively and this is the pro lon FSM ignite we also have relatively high carbohydrate all from vegetables right and no legumes all from edge because we want to keep the proteins lock right so as a as vegetables nuts and those are the major ingredients in there and the reason for that is that we're we're thinking now what happens after you do three cycles of this we're thinking what if you were to do 300 cycles of this right and I don't want even though I could get more benefits from a lower more ketogenic diet a lower carbohydrate diet I don't want to do that why I don't want to do that because I don't want people to go back and forth in this yo-yo manner to very low carb very high carb they look at because I'm worried that in the long run that's gonna stimulate too many variation in the programs and some of them are gonna have detrimental effects so we're not used to do is back and forth and so I don't want to introduce already have a a very important effect but not as potent as I could because we always get a score why don't you reduce the carbohydrate in the FMD and that's some purpose we want to keep it so we don't push you to the edges but it's not starch right it's it's not start all that is and do not switch but it turns out to be 45% carbohydrate of that kind right so in the distinction because when you say carbohydrates you're playing a pasta and bread and bagels and sugar well you're talking about plant rich carbohydrates that are low and glycemic index oh yeah these are lower very low I mean you have some some Tomatoes you have broccoli you have all kinds of vegetables and but they do contain lots of carbohydrates yeah and and so at the end it's about 45% carbohydrates 45% fat and about 10% protein yeah well I mean yeah I mean you take 21 cups of broccoli that's the same amount of calories as one big gulp soda right they both have some calories are both carbohydrates they're both really different absolutely yeah so we're not trying to say that the it's about having carbohydrate we're trying to say that it's about to have very specific carbohydrate and in a paper that we are about to publish that looks at if water only fasting and the fasting mimicking diet and we're showing that the prebiotic ingredients in the fasting vegan diet which are vegetable base all vegetables are feeding the good bacteria lactobacillus bifidobacteria etc etc and now you have this big increase in this protective anti-inflammatory bacteria which you don't get it with the water only fasting right so now the content of the of the diet together with the fasting so is the combination of the fasting and the candida diet driving the repopulation of the gut of the mouse to the point that are reverses IBD right so it reverses colitis reverses Crohn's it's a mouse model so you know what are the what are the fibers and prebiotic that are in there is it just vegetables yeah we don't know which one are responsible for this growth but there is a a number of the vegetables they have there are known to promote lactobacillus bifidobacteria etc grow so we suspect that the high content and it's just we actually have high content on one of the days and then we lower it so it seems to be about content it seems to be about timing and and it seems to be also about refeeding right so you have the big switch doesn't really occur while you're in the FMD mode it occurs after the mice return to the normal diet right so it's a really complex re modulation or modulation of the bacterial or microbe population in the gut there seems to be then communicating with the immune system and communicating with multiple systems and you know it's not the whole effect because we see much more than that but certainly when we do fecal transfer so we just take the the FMD the the the bacteria from the fasting making infested mice first in millions I'll expose mice and we transfer into recipe mice they have some of the effects they show some of the effects but not all of the effects right so that means that them micro that microbe population is important but it's not a whole deal as we expect because we also see for example gut regeneration and we see a general anti-inflammatory effect so the even systemically the inflammation comes down right so it's affecting microbiota is affecting inflammation is affecting regeneration and again you have to think is going back to the body detects something wrong and it does all that it's needed to so essentially you're challenging the body with a stress which is a low calorie diet but it's highly nutrient dense for a short period of time and the body is like oh danger danger I gotta put in and get all the repair mechanisms going so that I can fix this problem yeah but you know a really interesting thing that was just pointed out by my students there that if you take water only fasting and you give it this toxin and so this is very nice because this is very recapitulating of the expert how we make it disease and colitis you know a lot of toxins from the outside right and so you give this toxin and you doing water only fasting guess what happens they have more leakage they have more blood in the stools right so the fact the water only fasting is making the gut leaky and worse if you do the the FMD instead it seems to maybe because is telling the gut I'm not fully fasting their stuff food coming through don't break down so because one of the things that are really very well established with the fasting is the breakdown of the lining of the gut right because you don't need it it's not as important in that moment because you're not feeding right so this is a good probably way to save energy and so potentially this is how tricky it gets you and we we never I would never in a million years have expected that water only fasting will make the gut more leaky but only in combination with this toxin right so probably if the toxin is not there you're okay when the toxin is there now the the the blood is starting to get in in the in the stool so yes so then I think this is the food that is giving the signal don't break down completely yet do it partially and we see high levels of regeneration a stem cell the the intestinal stem cells again activated you know very importantly and then during the reef eating they give rise to rebuilding the inflammation is moved out and the call on you actually shorten the call on and then you start the FMD cycles and it goes back to its regular size but it's really remarkable exactly amazing so we know a lot about aging in terms of what are the mechanisms that are driving and it's inflammation so now they call it in form aging oxidative stress and activation of various pathways like mTOR which is basically a pathway that's activated by protein and various other things that can when it's over activated can cause aging mitochondrial injury we have to activate stem cells in order to heal and it seems like this one approach of a nutrient-dense short-term calorie restricted diet seems to take care of all these things is that true well I mean I don't know about all of these things but it seems the majority and I think for example with inflammation in aging I think people get it wrong right people think that inflammation causes aging but it's the other way around is aging that causes inflammation very clear inflammation in fact one of the criticism in the paper what's causing the inflammation the dysfunction the you're starting to have accumulated junk in the cells you starting to have DNA mutations you have you know damaged mitochondria you have just general damage as you move forward any system is going to accumulate protein aggregation right in the brain phosphorylated tau beta amyloid all the illegal marek amyloid right every systems got its junk that it gets accumulated and of course what happens in the brain if you start accumulating beta amyloid the microglia start attacking the system of the brain the microglia the immune system of the brain or part of the immune system of the brain is starting to recognize them as foreign they start attacking you begin the process of inflammation right so so yeah get rid of junk and waste and yes in any fact you know one of the things happen in this paper that we just published interleukin I think it was a TNF alpha and several other employing flama Tory marker we're way high in the fast imaging diet really and we and all the reviewers were saying oh this is bad and we said no go read the papers if you look at these two markers they're central in what's called inflammatory regeneration so the inflammation may actually have always been good for you if coordinated what is the body was trying to do with the inflammation is fix the problem yeah so but it cannot do that because the system is so damaged and there is not the conditions to repair so I keep spinning the wheels so this tnf-alpha and other inflammatory marker interleukins are trying to fix it and this is not am la escena is a very well established the these are central in the repair process so then after you finish the maybe now you'd assume that the markers will come down as the body repairs yeah is that what you see yeah well we haven't looked long enough but of course they're gonna come back down so once you repair it once the the autoimmune problem has gone away now they're gonna come back down in fact we look this in the paper we have human inflammation body inflammation so what you see is that in people they have high C reactive protein it's a step marker of inflammation are inflammation we looked in this new paper and we see their white blood cell count goes up right so then you start doing the FMD and the CRP comes down and the white blood cell count comes back to normal right and it does during the FF MD but more also after we look a week later now the web Lusa the white blood cell count is a restore to the normal levels so you sort of treating all these different conditions we talked about whether it's autoimmune whether it's gut issues whether it's the aging process itself whether it's Alzheimer's but also it seems that just these short periods of fasting leads to reversal metabolic diseases like weight and obesity and diabetes how does that work because if you're only stopping the calorie and flux for five days how does that carry over to sustain change I don't understand that I think many people are wondering how in fact does just restricting your college for five days a few times a year have all these long-term lasting benefits simply too good to be true well yes or no for sure is going after the visceral fat right so we know that the visceral fairly fat yeah we sure we know from many other papers that these this belly fat is so central in insulin resistance and all kinds of other problems and so of course after two or three days of fasting mimicking diet we have shown in the paper that everything turns into belly fat consumption so the body is going after I mean that's it that the reservoir that's a food reservoir journey the ab roller you just see the prolonged diet you you don't interesting I didn't take it from subcutaneous fat yeah it only took it from visceral and we showed ISM eyes with with the scans and in people with the taxes so that's for sure one way one of the major ways I got a pause there because that what you said was pretty profound when you do this approach of short-term calorie restriction you target the fat that causes all the chronic diseases which is the belly fat or abdominal fat or visceral fat and not the regular fat around under your skin or the subcutaneous fat that is a profound important discovery because that is the fat that we all need the target yeah your interesting thing is the lean body mass differential effects right so it's targeting the fat and it temporarily you see the lean body mass as measured by daksa go down and then we lose muscle you lose muscle but only temporarily right so usually in all kinds of diets you lose the fat and the muscle here you lose the fat you lose a little bit of mass so when you refeed within a week all the muscle is back right so now you have an increased relative lean body mass so you now again muscle mass you you can go back to the absolute normal level of muscle but now compared to your body weight you've gained muscle mass so you have more are exercising without exercise no no intervention so that's one way the other way we think that makes a big difference is almost everybody will say the following when after I got through one to three cycles of the FMD I started looking at food differently so yeah what's more so after I went to one two three cycles of the aventine I start looking for differently and so for example if somebody had lots of sweets and lots of candy lots of starches exericse era they don't feel like eating like that as much so they all say their cravings go away their tastes change yeah I think maybe because the microbiota maybe because the brain now gets seized the Association lots of people I have never done five DS of a vegan diets so often right completely 100% vegan so it is possible that the brain now recognizes the wellness that is associated with it and and then out without anybody telling them anything they begin to say I felt bad yeah when I did that I'm not sure so for example some of these people they said I used to eat pizza all the time and I could finish you know two entire pizzas and now they say I may have a few slices and I just don't feel like continuing to eat so it's really I think a conversion of the behavior based on instinct and not based on you know rationale or thinking about it so we were talking earlier for about the ketogenic diet combined with fast mimicking diets for cancer and other things talk more about that because I think people are confused about the variations between fasting mimicking diets and ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting and and when you should do what or if you should do any like what what is the experts opinion here because yeah probably what it is most about this yeah so first of all I always said I hate the word intermittent fasting because it doesn't mean anything I mean intermittent fasting goes from I haven't eaten for two hours to I haven't eaten for two months it goes from I haven't eaten anything at all or I had lots of food in a fasting mimicking meal so yeah it doesn't mean anything so we need to move to what exactly did you do or what exactly should you do and I think Michael are referring to like time restricted eating will you eat with an eight hour period yeah so if you if you look at a timer still eating and the work by Sachin Panda but if you look at all the data you would say that say 12 13 hours of fasting per day are very good very safe what's normal but nobody does it anymore if you look at such ins data will show the averages by 15 hours and I think these average of 15 hours it comes with this idea that you should eat 5 or 6 times a day so now you know to to eat 5 times a day you stretching the amount of hours and so when he did his study and they just asked people you just marked down when you eat it was 15 hours it was not 12 so now I think if you went in fact when they went back to 12 people start doing a lot better now the argument is what if you go down to 6 could you do even better or 8 say hours where you eat and the rest of it you fast well then you start seeing a not too many people in history did that and be your Stein's seeing the problems you know and the problems include gallstone formation and the problem include many including our own trial that we run study epidemiological study people skip breakfast they usually do worse and and understandably you can argue that there is all reasons for that but that's not a good start right so I would say if you keep it 12 to 13 hours seems to me like it's a good way to go and it's very safe there is really no negative association with even at 13 hours that I've seen maybe a little bit slightly slight increase in gallstone formation but it's very slight when you get to 1618 hours then you start seeing twice as much risk oh yeah go blood the removal not the nicest thing it could happen to you so so that's that's the thing so yes so there is all kinds of fasting ketogenic yeah so ketogenic diet again what does it mean you know doesn't mean that you're gonna do it for a month does it mean that it's gonna be low protein high protein animal based on so again we're ketogenic we gotta go move away in my opinion to the world and move into what do you mean right just like medicine any drug that you take and say oh it's a drug that generally blocks the cholesterol pathway now it doesn't work like that it's like well exactly what does it do and show me the data and thousands of patient Excel Excel so here I think we need to say in my opinion a little bit higher fat you know keep ketogenic na ketogenic but certainly I think the 60/30 10 is an ideal diet if you for all time so 60% carbs mostly from vegetables and legumes 30% fats mostly from olive oil nuts and a fatty fish yeah and 10% protein mostly from legumes and fatty fish that that seems to be ideal not based on my opinion but really going around the world looking at the basic research looking at the clinical trials etc except now for you specific uses I think that the ketogenic diet can be modified be more extreme right so if you have somebody that has you know overweight obese all kinds of other problems yeah that's where I see that you know say a much higher fat level a much lower carbohydrate level being very useful to get the person to where they need nothing over 2 billion people on this country it's 50 to 70 percent yeah so the question is is that reasonable and is this safe for and now should you do it let's say let's say an 80 10 10 right that that could be a possibility so 80% fats 10% proteins 10% carbs but how long can somebody stay on that and what would you know how long can they stay on it and how long do you want to keep in my data without risking them getting into the epidemiological data clearly showing that low-carb diets if they're animal-based they could be detrimental I know we disagree and this but but I mean you know that I'm just thinking I think it'd be good to come up with things that we know it as well try to do with the book come up with things that we know there is no way it is bad for you yeah I mean you know that I came up with this denominator with like there is no way don't care what they need to 200 years of publications to to say that this is why because the centenarian is one of the pillars these guys have been doing this for you know over 100 years and in different parts of the world and and eat real food they don't use real food and that's a recommendation right so if you do that you're you then you're for sure in good shape now they argument could be who's gonna be able to do that ok then we say what's the second best that people can can reasonably do I think it's reasonable to eat a 60% you know vegetable and fish and legume diet I think it's reasonable to have 30% fats you know and if somebody cannot do it only from vegetable sources you know whatever you can add some animal sources that's ok in 10% project 10% protein is you know to most people is 50 60 70 grams of protein a day so it's not that law and I think even in your own work and your paper and somewhat tabs when we talked about how there's a benefit when you're younger but as you get older you need more protein for building muscle and you need you know significant amounts of like for example you know more protein that you talked about would be the 2 cups of yogurt or 5 ounces and nuts or you know yeah so more more protein and and more variety I think we were talking earlier about Emma Morano and the fact that the dr. carla bhava a woman who lived to be a hundred and seventeen years old in Italy that's right so she was already eating three eggs a day from earlier in her life and then when she turned 95 to 100 Carla pure and 100 to 150 grams of raw meat per day but lots of times people journalists talked about that and they forgot to mention that she started when she was around a hundred doing this right so so at a hundred that which is very bad if you were 45 it becomes I think a not a bad idea at all and I I never thought when when Carla told me that that - her doctor told me that I never talk are you crazy and it's a funny story actually she went to him one day and you knew her you hung out what I used to go two or three times a year and there's a funny story she went to Carlo one day and she said you know Carlo I think I need to stop eating meat and anyway why and she said my journalist came to me and he said oh you eat meat every day he's gonna give you cancer I thought it was very entertaining right because it also very telling of the very naive approach in nutrition right this guy is telling a hundred and seven year old to worry about eating less meat he's a journalist because she's gonna get cancer he's that thinking no she's a cancer she's gonna die in pneumonia she's gonna die because she breaks her hip and she falls down the stairs yeah or maybe the flu she might die of the flu I just pass it you're getting cancer and heart disease well she might get cancer but I mean that's okay you you really need to worry about lots of things in addition to cancer is the frailty is an issue the frail is an issue and the frailty of the immune system is an issue right so immuno suppression if the immune system is weak then you're gonna have all kinds of problems this is why I think you know you and I are now and a few others are now moving into the you know syrup generating this field of complexity and I think historically it was ignored because people say it's food yeah what the hell could it possibly do do right and now it's the most powerful drug on the planet it's the most project but it's very complicated and the response is very complicated so now it's probably them one of the most complicated fields in medicine right because the food is a thousands and thousands of components and the body's got thousands and thousands of genes and now that all these joint you know get together this where nutria technology word comes from it's like what the hell happens when all this happens and you think about it you've got 20,000 genes but five million variations in those genes all affected by food you've got you know the microbiome which is a hundred times as many genes as our own genes which is another two million genes that get affected and you've got the chemical reactions in the body that happen every second that most people don't know that there's 37 billion billion that's 2100 reactions in the body every second all which interact with food so that that just mind-boggling how do you even do the math on those numbers yeah of what's actually happening instead of a single pathway a single drug and that's the beauty of food and why it's so effective and I want to dig into this complexity a little bit because the the protein issue in the protein stories fascinating in in your models there's a gene that gets activate or pathway that gets activated call em tour and this pathway seems to be activated through a protein and it seems to accelerate aging when you're older you need more protein but like Amaranto she had 150 grams of raw meat why didn't that make her age faster if the protein activates mTOR yeah so it's actually what we call axis and the axis is multiple pathways joined together so I starts with growth hormone releasing hormone growth hormone igf-1 a kitty tour or possibly tour without a kitty so there is a whole series of genes that are involved and and what happens is during aging they go down naturally so if you're 25 years old igf-1 is gonna be very high if you're 90 years old igf-1 is gonna be naturally very long so we'll be shot in the paper a few years ago is that if you put a young an adult younger than 50 and a high protein mid protein low protein diet igf-1 and as a consequence tor are gonna be associated with the level of proteins okay so high protein high igf-1 height or low protein or GF one low so if you look at a 65 and older person you no longer saw any significant difference we saw either higher low there was no change in the mTOR brand but no significant difference I mean in the overall you can now say that there is a change no matter how much protein you eat right so stay away from a lot of meat when you're younger but once you hit 65 you can have the grass-fed steak is that it that's what a journalist will say and that's what journalists exactly what journalists said at least some of them know you know so so the the idea would be that as you get older and older you can measure your igf-1 and it's let's say that you're 72 and you're a GF one is 280 you should lower your product that's a measure growth hormone yes insulin-like growth factor-1 right so the one day they're circulating is pretty stable right so it stays stable in the blood so it's better than measuring growth hormone because we've got the monies pressure dial and it's very hard to follow but igf-1 our most clinics can cheaply measure it and so if somebody is 72 and it's got 280 igf-1 they're eating too much product yeah and and so you can still knock it down and these these people are at risk for multiple cancer prostate where should you be you should be we see the ideal level one forty one forty seems that the idea whether you're young or old now it could be very old that you know may not be that easy to keep 140 but in the adult population 140 seems to be ideal but exercise increases that right I know I have a big effect on igf-1 either way either up or down hmm fascinating so in in the in the research you you're really talking about some really interesting things like Alzheimer's so how would this approach benefit Alzheimer's yes so a few years ago we published on the first paper and our just the essential amino acid so if we took mice they had they had mutation humor mutation to develop Alzheimer so all these mice develop Alzheimer's like symptoms they become cognitive impaired they they they don't learn anymore and they do very poorly so their mice they can't find the cheese and so if we alternated these if we affected igf-1 this growth factor and we make it go up and down by controlling just the essential amino acids so these are the ones that you need to have to have a normal function right the ones that people draw building blocks yeah protein let's say we just simplify by saying let's say we have the high protein low protein diet alternating high protein no protein high-protein and we saw that this was sufficient to reduce their cognitive impairment and to keep them protected for longer as they were getting old so now we're doing both multiple mouth studies and a human clinical trial in Europe a u.s. see multiple mouth studies with two different Alzheimer model ones called triple transgenic model has three different mutations that promote Alzheimer early Alzheimer in in humans and then we're doing another mouse model a buii mouse model for Alzheimer and yeah so we'll see but our hope is that because the FASTA mimicking diet revolution and by the way the Alzheimer one is a very special one where we do only once every two months because we worried about frailty and we worried about muscle loss so we do it every two months and we give them for 55 days actually for all the days of the month we give them a key - genic supplement so we're pushing the ketogenic state and we want to ensure that they don't lose weight but we also want to give them the benefit of the extra ketogenic a chronic push yeah so it's important because you know when brains are damaged with Alzheimer's that basically it's like type 3 diabetes in the brain and it can't utilize glucose or sugar as well but it can utilize fat or ketones yes why you see patients in the study showed I've had my own personal patients significantly improved when they have cognitive decline when you put them on a ketogenic diet yeah yeah we saw in the early approaches was the the frailty so if you take an 85 year old and you put them on a ketogenic diet you mind up seeing him pass out the day after right so enough fluid and salt yeah so yeah so it's tricky so we're thinking about as you get it out there as a treatment for everybody I mean not everybody has Mark Hyman following them right so so yeah in that case I think you can experiment much more and things that are more extreme and I'm not saying I mean I think eventually I mean there's already studies they're being published on ketogenic diet and Alzheimer and I think eventually it's gonna be ways that are to do it there are safe the question is how long can you keep a patient on that diet and how afraid are they're gonna be after you know 2 3 months on their diet so those are those diets increase muscle mass to increase body fat all right they activate yeah yeah the question is you know if you took say two hundred eighty-five year olds and this is gonna be really what you're looking at or 80 year olds and then you put them under on this ketogenic diet how many problems are you gonna see and is it possible that if you just do a much lower ketogenic and maybe alternative with the FMV every two months you get the same effects I don't know maybe now maybe you need to put them on a 90 percent fat diet and so so I mean those are the things that they need to be determined I was always very afraid and I know the neurologists in Europe and in the u.s. see were very afraid to take people with close monitoring and putting and putting them and say 90 percent fat diet revolutionized their diet because they're all were saying not with my patients so you know there's the same war that we have by the time someone's got Alzheimer's they're going downhill it's a desperate time and doing desperate interventions sometimes you can have amazing results yes we are in the same choir right we had the same quiet but I mean when we first did this with cancer patient it was a war I'm talking screaming wars we're done cause they tell them oh it study tons of ice cream and have cake we just published in nature really we just published in Nature Reviews cancer and immediately after the publication the complaint from the nutritionist in cancer center and the complaint was official and said well in the standards in the European Association of nutritionists and dietitian says this at least one point two grams of protein per day should be between one point two and two Allen Anna and we responded and we said look if you look at the days where chemotherapy was first approved chemotherapy did tremendous damage forget the restriction of protein and restriction of fact it did incredible damage and even killed a lot of people you know doxorubicin for example a severe cardio toxicity and we approved that why because you know everybody agreed that it was worth to have some side effects even they could be deadly potentially deadly which is not the case for the diet and and everybody agreed and nobody you don't hear any oncologist complaining about chemotherapy and say why are you now saying that we're not allowed to even test and we the the words we had used was potentially promising they attacked the potentially promising officially with a letter to Nature Reviews potentially promising intervention what we were trying to do is stimulate clinical trials and they managed to go after it and so this is the the world living yeah it's called you know there's there's a great book called the structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas Kuhn where he talks about the idea of normal science the normal conceptions and views and theories are very hard to overturn because people are stuck on their old way of thinking and when someone comes out with a radical idea like you are I'm sure you get a lot of attacks yeah and so I'm saying for the neurologist exactly the same right but we already knew we all learned from the oncologist so we came in very careful say we don't want to get in worse let's try to get in there we real data mouse tale human let's collect preliminary and then say look they're fine so now with the ketogenic let's push this 400 calories a day I think it is and see what happens if they're fine that we maybe we push it to 800 calories a day and and combine it with the FMD so but and then we'll see the results of other trials that are being done and Alzheimer lots of groups are doing that and then we decide I think it's a it's a good way this is a radical change in our thinking about medicine which is that we can treat the underlying mechanisms of diseases that are all linked together through a simple common pathway which is food and certain types of eating that actually activate all these healing pathways the one thing I want to come back to though is the idea that carbohydrates are good or bad and I think this is a debate out there now that's really on fire whether it's ketogenic or you know a high carb vegan community and there's just complete polar opposite views you know I all the work of a guy named David Ludwig who's a professor at Harvard who's done a lot of work on insulin and the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis and of course has been attacked for it but he did a fascinating study looking at it was a twelve million dollar study was a feeding study where they gave everybody the food for a period of time and they looked at what happened their metabolism and they found that they gave them a 60% fat diet it wasn't a high protein out of 60% fat 6-0 6-0 or 60% carbs and then the protein was like 20% and the rest was you know they're switching over carbs and fat and they found that the the ones who had the high fat diet had much faster metabolisms in other words they burned an extra 250 calories a day and if they were insulin resistant they'd burn an extra 400 calories or four and fifty calories a day and that would lead me to believe that the carbohydrates that were eating are stimulating insulin which is really I think one of the main drivers of aging is activating insulin and activating all the inflammatory pathways that go with it and the insulin resistance in the brain and cancer and in some resistance and heart disease and insulin resistance how do you kind of explain that because it's just the data that comes all over the place and oh no it's not isn't that the data seems all over the place until you look all the pillars right in the pillars again epidemiology clinical studies basic research studies of centenarians and so for example if you look at the work by Simpson in Australia take mice and you give it exactly what you said a high fat or a high carb diet and if you give it a high fat diet they start losing weight they look great for a little bit and then they die earlier than the other mice right so so you look good but you die on you look good look good and then you die X percent body fat yeah yeah no no no it's not to do with but I don't have some pasta tonight the body fat you're gonna have lower with high fat diet there yeah why guess yeah that's your point yeah my muscle mass has increased my body fats down that seems like a good thing when it comes to aging well you know it is an is not right so no so I think that there probably for example fat stores a lot of the stem cells right and to the point that that a lot of the stem cells for treatment are taken from fat so what don't we know about this organ fat also protects organs from stress and from movement and so there is all kinds of things that could happen none in somebody your age but I say you know 70 75 80 right so what about that fat what is it is it hurting them or is album even in the mice you know the mice they'll respond the worse to calorie restriction earlier you mentioned calorie restriction and the extension lifespan actually it turns out that a third of the mice live longer than calorie restriction a third of mice have neutral effects and a third of the mice live shorter really and guess which one lived the shortest the one they have the lowest fat storage capability so so it's it's tricky right on one side you can have central adiposity the fat the visceral fat driving in the liver fat driving a lot of diseases and the other side potentially subcutaneous fat and others forms of fat this could be helping an individual in a mouse and live longer that's true but the the carbohydrate load particularly starts in sugar not vegetable carbohydrates which I agree are good those drive visceral fat or belly yeah so there is no doubt there is no doubt they win the carbohydrate the starches in the sugars right let's say or the carbon-hydrogen Jam but you know because also the fruits right through to people talk about fruit this is like some great food but if fruit is packed with sugar and some of them packed with fructose and so there is no doubt that that eventually are gonna cause a problem right it's no doubt so the question is when is that eventually so for the centenarians of Okinawa they used to eat 70% of the calories from sweet potatoes purple potatoes they never reach that eventually because they were fairly active they didn't overeat you know these Okinawa's are pretty behaved the start yes exactly get up on your say in the Italians you know lots of is this little villages they have super longevity including malocchio you in the old days lots of the centenarians they're not obese you know there may be a little bit overweight now there are sons and grandsons and granddaughters you're starting to see much bigger obesity problem so now they went from a great use of the carbohydrate to a poor use of the carbohydrate and absolutely once you make that switch and you have lots of pasta bread pizza Excel etc rice then I think you're now generating a much bigger problem that's when I think the ketogenic diet the low-carb now becomes beneficial the question is how long should you keep it keep that it may be there and so you you reset and then you learn how to behave and you don't do your you're either right because that seems to be bad too back and forth so you just maybe a one or two shots right use the ketogenic diet to go to get to the longevity diet right use the ketogenic get there because it's probably and I'm becoming convinced that for people that have real problems maybe that's the only way but move to a more long-term longevity diet which is fairly high carb of the good kind only of the as much as possible the good cats I saw you know tons of vegetable and legumes and am much little say in the the ideal dish is to me 50 grams of pasta and 500 grams of legumes and vegetables I mean nobody eats like this anymore but everybody used to eat like that 6070 years ago right so I'm just saying if everybody could do it we can go back to it and ladies not have insulin resistance no they did not have they had these people in Okinawa and and so Italian towns zero cardiovascular disease food and they were exposed they were not exposed to they weren't had the chronic stress we have yeah exactly but but I don't think that I think going back to their diet is not gonna so I don't think that by being low-carb you're gonna counterbalance more the other problems that we have now right so I think they they you know whether it's low carb or high carb you know we have to see but certainly if it's a vegan pescetarian diet in its high carb of the legume and vegetable kind seems to be very very good now the question is what if it was low carb vegan pescetarian some data suggest could even be better right but some data suggest could be worse so it's really really yeah so in in your work you also are showing that stem cells get activated through this process which is what everybody's excited about wants to go get it cost tens of thousands of dollars it's painful to suck out your bone marrow and fat and you're saying just by changing your diet you can activate your stem cells yes so in my C is very very clear to the point that not only you activate the stem cells but a more and much more important part is this very coordinated regeneration rejuvenation program but when inside of the cell and at the organ levels the point is stop you just said there's a rejuvenation program embedded in our biology that we can turn on and that's what your program does now my Prague I mean yeah this is what we discovered it scientifically but I don't want to make it my program yeah but but but yes so these the fasting mimicking diet is designed to push the body to start breaking components down turn on the stem cells and the stem cells you see him there standing by for example when we damage the the pancreas of mice you'd ever expect as much they stopped making insulin and and then you start only then you start the fasting making diet and you see that the the pancreas is now turning this embryonic developmental program and and in all these genes there are only turned down when the pancreas is first generated when the mouse is born starting getting turned on the mini genes right so it's very clear it's a program it's not just simply a few genes around all of them are and of course you want to do that when you repair your skin after you cut yourself that's a problem right you don't things are not just regain repaired by by chance everything every cytokine every stem cell it goes in knows exactly where to go it gets recruited it binds to something else and slowly it just rebuilds everything right remarkable and I always said you really think we have a program so sophisticated for the outside of the body and we got nothing for the inside there's no way so the inside understands that and I think fasting but more safely so fasting mimicking diets can trigger that program in the liver in the pancreas in the motto periodic system in the brain Excel Excel now so stressing the body a little bit with the fast American diet actually activates all this program I don't think is stressing I don't like I don't like this or misses idea you don't know I I don't I think it's much more in a very strongly evolved program if you don't have any food you got a breakdown components because you're not gonna make it right so more in the old days whether you were a monkey or a mouse or a human it could go lots of people must have starved to death right so that the program had to be very sophisticated to get you potentially there's some people that are faster for a year six months to a year so no food no food no bees of course but but but so the program you have a lot of storage yeah and we used in the summer we used to eat a lot of fruit and gain a lot of fat right so that there was the the our program so gain fat like the Penguins like the emperor penguins in the South Pole gain fat and then make it try to make it through the winter by you know eating as little while eating as well as possible so that's what the Bears do they gave 500 pounds in the summer and then they hibernate all winter lose it all right and that's what we used and not everybody uses that but certainly in very long periods of our history that's what we used to do so yeah so I think that in the period you're really breaking down almost everything to the point let's say that before that you might be BMI 1314 so BMI 1314 you're about to die alone yes it's very low this is a harsh with the prisoners when they come out the things they had about 14 BMI so a BMI you are at the limit between life and death let's body medicine yes so imagine now this person that is there is mercy Airy re-expanding as they happen after Auschwitz - and some people die because they start eating too quickly but other than that you imagine this person that is starting to reexpansion all the organs and systems back to normal so some of the organs may have tripled in size right so that imagine the program that is responsible for that yeah rebuilding right extremely sophisticated and it has to be the only explanation it has to be the same program that it was used when we were first born yeah and so the stem cells get regenerated helps the stem cells realize that the liver is now very small and and there you have a liver size that is now compatible with all the food is coming in and so you slowly start expanding expand spending and and same thing for the muscle I mean their BMI 14 you have almost no muscle left so now you might I don't think it is is two or three fault I mean I'm just speculating wildly here but it might be ten fault right it may be that you now 90 percent of your muscle within six months post this anorexic state is now new muscle yeah so are you go from there from point A to point B and the only way is to have satellite cells coordinating in a chord in a way beginning to rebuild this is the same cells are part of this process right yes stem cells are central in this process some of it is gonna be cellular so the cell gets smaller and smaller and smaller so it could be the very small muscle cells and then they reexpansion right or very small liver cells and they're reexpansion is one a discussion we had recently at a conference that i organized is is it how much of the cell that and a much is size i think both are involved yeah so this is just fascinating lee the other thing that comes to mind is as a scientist looking at all this change in the biology that happens when you do fasting mimicking diet it's a lot of its laboratory research some of its clinical research what biomarkers are available to us today what tests can we do the average person say you made money wasn't an issue what could you do to find out the things that you want to track as you get older that change when you do this because you must be following these things and i'm curious like I want to go get the ten things I want to know about myself that are gonna show me whether my approach is working or not because does that exist yes no no we're we're about to do an app and I think the company a Lutra that I found it it's gonna have an app soon in something that Morgan Levine a Yale came up with and there's ten different markers and there I think this is I really like that maybe even more than the sort of epigenetic clocks that the stuff they offered at UCLA and others came up with I like that because it's also it's sort of mixing health and longevity but he's shown that is a very a very good predictor of mortality and what are we looking at well things like I think cholesterol c-reactive protein I don't know if I gf1 is part of it but there is many markers there are there are included this I think nine or ten markers and and now they're gonna generate an app that way you could just go to the app and put in the markers that you can get done in any clinic hmm and and they will tell you your biological age but aren't there things that are newer that people can check like telomeres for example can you measure mTOR activity or can you measure activity of FOXO or jeans or sirtuin genes or whatever the things are that you're looking at that are a little more esoteric are those things that we're gonna be clinically looking at in the future yes I mean in the future yes but right now you know whether it's telomere length or is senescence cells or I mean it there is not really a system yet to say let's say that you take something there in three weeks makes you three years younger I think the best oh the blood so the blood for example part of the inflammation right the consequence you say dysfunction inflammation well I should go back to normal if if whatever intervention you use is working whether your insulin resistant dysfunctional marker or you have CRP that is high or you have interleukin 6 that is high exact Sarah they should be moving back to normal so I think that that's a much much more powerful way right now and for the next few years I know doesn't sound as cool as saying I'm gonna measure the telomere length but you can talk to any telomere expert and even senescent expert and they say unless you say no lytx they change that all of a sudden in one week or two weeks or three weeks you're gonna have the telomeres getting longer about maybe six months I mean I check my telomeres recently I'm 39 I'm 59 years old but I'm biologically 39 according to that is that a valid metric I think it's a good it's a good thing to show right would you say for example I would rather see I will see already see my white blood cell count and then my my life lymphoid my alliteration I think there will be more telling you as the ratio of myeloid cells and lymphocytes in your body and how strong is the immune system right our responsive are you to a vaccine for example lots of these things can be measured now that to me is a very functional measure of aging and age-related dysfunction igf-1 levels but you know insulin resistance yes cognitive performance my fMRI get an MRI I mean if you can perform well in an fMRI younger it's a functional assessment it means that your brain is working better and you know so now you covered your your muscle cells your adipocytes your brain cells you know maybe your liver how quickly can you liver get rid of certain molecules they're not toxic so yeah functional functional performance to me like like response to an antigen and you can look at the titer of the antibody right so so these things I think soon enough are gonna be much more useful than how long is the telomere because yes like processes in the body and how they're working or not yeah and then look at the functioning of these systems and it'll tell you a lot about what's going on whether you're aging or whether you're actually reversing aging I can't wait I mean it's it's an exciting time to be alive because you're seeing all these advances happening accelerate away and your work has been really such a breakthrough in terms of our thinking about aging and you've created not just this great body of research but you've also said look this stuff works I want people to be able to access this I don't want it just to be an academic ivory tower and you cratons company called el nutria which created this product called pro lawn which is a five day fasting mimicking dyeing kit that you can basically go online and get and do this intermittently and see how you feel and what happens to you it's it's accessible now and what's amazing is you've taken all the profits from this and from your book the longevity no big mistake but it's your doing something good for the world and then you're taking the money from that and plowing that back and what we're doing is I create started this foundation called create cures and we're hoping you know as I talk to to lots of doctors out there that are like in the trenches they say well it's very difficult to get money to do research and so I hope at some point very soon and it's already happening we now have enough funds that we can go back and and look at the Alzheimer look at the parking so look at all these different things and really in in a foundation way say you know I always say or you started the company you you must be telling people to do this all the time I say no you only need to do this three times a year and you know in the old days the sea yoga upset and now I think I don't know it's a it's about you know getting people to 110 healthy Islam about making money for the company and I think if we do the right thing the company is gonna grow in the company sixty percent is owned now it's gonna be owned by the foundation now i will donate 100% of my shares to it so that means that the foundation is gonna get lots of funds the more this company grow the more the foundation grows and the more we're gonna do all these things that you know you everywhere in the world people are saying you know the pharmaceutical companies we they have lots of money everybody's working on drugs and there is no money for food for food research well you know now there is right and it is soon enough you know I'm talking one or two years I'm not talking about 20 years we might have billions of dollars really billions of dollars to devote to my borrow some for research of course I would apply for a grant we're trying to do food is medicine research of course right so the people we already have a grant program and you you're welcome to apply already now and so but I think you know in a couple years we're gonna have a Nora level of grant programs for scholarships fellowships occurring rather prolong because of the growth of Pro loan and the growth of the company yes absolutely that's so exciting and that is brilliant because it's one of the big challenges in this field is it no one wants to study food and health and aging even though like we said it's the most powerful drug out there yes and I mean if you just look at what you say earlier the effect of color restriction in completely eliminating diabetes in monkeys monkeys not mice reducing cancer by 50% and reducing cardiovascular disease by 50% I always say how is it possible that we don't have incredible investment into this I can imagine like decreasing wiping out diabetes sorry number one I don't know what it is but but this crazy that the NIH invests such a minuscule amount of money compared to the money that goes into everything else yeah to say find me a way that you can achieve what's already achieved by calorie restriction without the side effects of carrot stick right you figure that should be half of the budget of the NIH Esther and and all the government agencies that are looking at health and say fine we'll keep funding everybody else but if we can reach this incredible goal of wiping out diabetes and reducing cancer and cardiovascular disease by 50% that's deserving a health of our funds and I'm gonna is it didn't happen it's not gonna happen and the only way to do it I think is with the people that realize a this is a good cause it's a good product are the people that basically can now fund what they want right the next generation of things whether it's you mark do it or or somebody else I mean you know we spent sixty billion of funds from the government on pharma research we spend a billion on nutrition research yeah and that has to change that has to change so we or that billion we're lucky if 50 million go into healthy longevity right nutrition and a healthy longevity right so lots of the nutrition research is going to acute specific effects but it should really be I will get to 110 healthy everything else comes with it right so in a sense you're you're not studying disease you're studying the science of health look how long-term health how do you turn on healing mechanisms the body and repair mechanisms and that is a very big difference from trying to treat diseases and symptoms yes that is the future in on top of it that is design of youth right so you'd spend first you've ontology yeah you do been told you and you'd spend first then once you of course you get to 70 or 75 then he'll spend right so then you do switch to okay and now I kept you young until 70 now I'm going to keep you healthy until 110 I mean you know we we do what we can is there gonna be any miracle there but I think we can really least achieve water was already achieved in monkeys no way that we're not gonna get there and that's a pretty remarkable achievement and people are not gonna be old and sick they're gonna be old and healthy and contributing to our society right and they're not going to be anorexic like in the calorie restriction study and miserable you know so so that's what we have with the technology we have to say clearly if they got it with such a simple intervention 30 percent less calories but cause a lot of problems how long is it gonna take us to end I think you know proton FMD is one of the ways maybe ketogenic diet maybe some forms of ketogenic I let's get there but I think let's not get there in 30 years let's begin to get there in the last two or three years and and get you know as many people as possible involved and then I think within the next 10 15 years we can be there fully with anybody that wants to listen I mean not everybody's gonna listen some people are just gonna keep doing whatever it is they're taking five drugs I was you know the other day I looked up how many people 18 to 34 take drugs and I could not believe it 53% surge I mean I heard from one of the physicians at Cleveland Clinic and I hadn't verified this but he said that 40 percent of the patients at Cleveland Clinic take 10 or more drugs this is a completely crazy yeah and you use food it's one drug but it's so complex that it does all these amazing things it's so great so if last question if you were going to to blow up or sort of demystify one thing that people come and think about nutrition what would it be like why was a one-element culprit high this load that right much more complicated than that you know and I think there is time now to find the trusted sources and just say yeah I this guy or this woman I trust them they've been doing this for a long time I make them accountable and so you tell me what the complexities in a following forget low-protein hi Prague I carved low carb high fat love I mean that's all meaningless it's gonna be a specific person specific but also personalized but um personalized at the same time yeah and already people saying how in principle we scare people say because every time I talk they start laughing or worrying to complicate what exactly it is too complicated but we are making it very simple because now once you find the trusted source the companies and the in the expert then in books is very easy to follow you know your book my book true I think you know people can just say I love this I think one week to figure out people don't even want to put one single week in changing their their health for the rest of the life then I'm sorry we're not for you you know then then we don't have a solution for you you know if you want to take pain drugs or if you want to be 19 years old and be on a drug or you want to be 65 and being attain drugs be our guest but but I think yeah the cause a beautiful thing about the longevity diet is that anything you said this before which I'd never heard before ever it makes total sense you wrote on all the things about eating principles that are known to be great and no one can argue with and that are basically beyond question which is eat real food good fish eat lots and see is he good fast have lots of vegetables it's but the devil is in either detail for example low protein not 20% 10% what's the source vegan plus fish you know so all of a sudden if you look at Campbell says vegan and I'm saying big mistake why because most people that are vegan it could be great I mean some people can be vegan and be great I'm not arguing with that term but it's extremely difficult and then when you get old you got a double problem now yeah you know yeah of course you're gonna lose math so you're gonna you're gonna need more nourishment from simple sources like the cheese's that the milk etcetera can help you when you're 93 years old right so this is this is I think is what really important to begin to look at the detail it's not just about yes the ingredients lots of us of course lots of us agree lots of us disagree now our people say eat lots of meat and eat lots of animal fat and that's good for you so you know yeah in one sense we're moving a lot of people agree with a lot of the things I picked but lots of people now disagree you know so all the things that you say I don't think anybody disagrees with because nobody says fish is bad nobody says olive oils bad nobody says they might say oh you could eat animal protein oh maybe saturated fats aren't so bad but the principles that you laid out nobody's gonna disagree with that as a healthy oh you'd be surprised yeah you'd be sorry I actually you know kind of came up with a similar concept now all the pig and Diet which was a joke because there were so many extremes of vegan and paleo and I said it's just if you look at the principles of common sense combined with science and look at all the data it's not that hard right eat a lot of plants don't need a ton of me for example for example I give you another simple example the Okinawan thing yeah you mentioned earlier get up when you're 80 percent for it's a big mistake right I say eat more not eat less everybody every time I'd be like every time I present you know so the devil is in the detail when you say it more but of course it more why because you have to think about your clientele your clientele is not an okinawan they was born with my parents my grandparents everybody eating getting up when they're 80 percent for your clientele the Americans with a European daddy up on their 120 percent fall well there is signals in your stomach both at the nourishment level and at the mechanical level that are telling your brain now and for if you're getting up when you're 80 percent for your your the message to Americans European is going to be I'm hungry all day and guess what's gonna happen within a year you're gonna start over eating again if you get up when you're full because you're full of fibres vegetables nourishment minerals are there the the micro molecules are there the macro mode everything is there the signals to your brain is like okay I got everything I need the signal to your stomach is I got everything I need the signal to your microbiota is I got overeating isn't good no no I don't mean every knee I mean eaten to eat the right things until you know it's for 20 minutes you have to it's slow because it takes 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain that your fault and most of us have experienced better if its fiber if it's what I described you know 300 grams of chickpeas and 20 grams of vegetables and in in 50 grams of pasta in between that's gonna be there for hours and hours and hours right so the message for a long time during the day is like the bariatric catheter right small stomach message the brain stopped right so it's it's the same thing and so I think you see that yeah the devil is in the detail little things and every time I present everybody says oh you're you're gonna tell us to eat less that's like I never say to eat less I never worked in two hours to five days well yes for five days three or four times a year yeah so that's the only I mean that's very little time compared to the rest of the year I'm definitely gonna try it and I thank you so much doctor long ago for being on the doctors pharmacy you're brilliant man contributing greatly to our understanding of Aging and health and food if you want to learn more about his work go to Valter Longo comments Valter with a VV alt er Longo ello and geo comm if you want to learn about prolong the fasting mimicking diet and try it you can go to prolong FMD calm as fasting maybe he died so prolong PRL onf md calm it's really amazing i got a box at home i can't wait to try it and i'm excited for it so i'll share the results with you when i do it and we'll see what happens I might get 230 from 39 so thank you dr. Longo for joining us and if you've loved this podcast please share with your friends and family on social media sign up if you liked it wherever you get your podcasts and iTunes Google Play or wherever and leave us a comment we'd love to hear from you and know what you think and we'll see you next time on the doctors pharmacy thanks mark [Music]

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 493,123

Rating: 4.844831 out of 5

Keywords: fasting, aging, longevity diet, valter longo, dr. mark hyman, the doctor’s farmacy, calories, diet, nutrition, health, inflammation

Id: zz4ZzNik1Y4

Length: 88min 28sec (5308 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2019