Optimising Fasting & Longevity with Dr Joseph Antoun (1)

11:18AM Sep 27, 2022

Speakers:

Angela Foster

Intro

Dr Joseph Antoun

Keywords:

fasting

autophagy

people

fast

cells

cancer

eat

angela

days

body

reserves

glycogen

nutrition

muscle

prolonged

exercise

mimicking

calories

fat

called

called fat as your savings accounts, right? Fat is like, oh, okay, I have money saved on the site. Glycogen is your checking account, you can quickly jump and get glycogen. And delivered is your credit is when you ask the bank for credit. And the bank is saying, Okay, I'm gonna give you a little bit of a loan.

Welcome to the high performance health podcast with your host, Angela Foster, the show where we talk about everything you need to break through limits and achieve a high performance, mind, body and lifestyle.

Hi, friends, the swing getting a little bit dark recently hasn't been I've noticed that the sun is rising later, and it's starting to set earlier. But we are going to see those beautiful leaves turn their colours quite soon. And one of the other benefits is I've really appreciated some beautiful sunrises this week. We've been very lucky in the UK with a pretty sunny week. And on my way back from the gym in the morning, I have walked out of the gym just as the sun has been rising. And it's been absolutely beautiful. There's actually a park opposite been a really nice opportunity to just watch the sunrise something amazing if if even if you're not doing this, it is just a really great time to watch the sunrise. And actually that early morning light features a unique composition of frequencies, that actually helps set our body's circadian rhythm accurately for the day. So there are studies that show that the wavelengths at sunrise and sunset actually have the biggest impact on brain centres that helped to regulate not just our circadian clock, but our alertness and our mood. So if you can catch a sunrise, maybe on your way back from the gym like me, then all the better. Now, if you're looking at getting light through the window, it's not quite the same. So even if you're in your office, for example, opening the window is actually much much better. And because of the way the light bends, it will come through. Whereas if you've got the window clue closed, you're actually filtering out about 50 times as much of that blue light, which is really going to help again early in the morning to help regulate your circadian rhythms. So you can try that. And this is all part of my shift protocol optimising things like that. My shift protocol for optimising your health for higher performance. And if you want to see where you are on each aspect of shift, which is sleep hormones, insights, food, or flow, which is food and light oxygen and water, and then where you are on your training in terms of both your mind and body, then you can take a free health check that we offer and we will send you a personalised report, just head over to your total health check.com. It takes about two to three minutes to fill out and we'll send you a free personalised report that's over at your total health check.com. And so moving on to today's podcast guest I have with me today Dr. Joseph anten, who is the CEO and Chairman of the Board of Al neutre. And also a member of the Forbes Business Development Council. He's the former CEO of health systems reform which is a boutique consultancy aimed at improving public health by reforming health systems. And prior to that he was director of Health Policy at the University of Chicago, Editor in Chief of the Journal of Health Systems and reform and also head of business development for Eli Lilly and Company. And he is an expert in longevity, and health through fasting and nutrition, a topic that I know many of your listeners will be very interested in, and specifically around how to enhance autophagy and how to enhance your longevity, we talk in depth around fasting periods, what works, what doesn't. And we'll also talk about the impact on women's health and hormones and also how you can use molecular fasting, which is a protocol that's been developed by Dr. Valter Longo, the founder of pro lOn. And how that actually allows you to eat a certain amount of calories, interestingly over five days, but without, without stimulating mTOR and actually putting you in a state of full cellular autophagy. And we talk about how long that takes to happen depending on where you are in terms of your metabolism at that stage. But how everyone can benefit from this a few times a year, including the clinical trials that they've done on Prolon with some amazing results. So we're going to have a deep dive on fasting and I think by the end of this episode, you will understand what intermittent fasting is how you should be doing it, what longer fast, what the benefits are of longer fasting periods and really, when you're stimulating full cellular autophagy and when you're not and how to do it. So let's get started. Without further delay, let me introduce you to Dr. Joseph Phantom. So I'm absolutely delighted to be joined today by Joseph Antoon, who is the CEO of Al neutre. He is a physician He has a PhD. And his passion really is to bring fasting to the world and improve not just lifespan, but healthspan at the same time. So firstly, a very warm welcome to the show, Joseph.

Thank you, Angela. And hopefully today we're going to change a person's life.

Definitely, that's always my hope when, when releasing a podcast episode, even if it changes one person's life is worth doing, and hopefully many more. So let's start from because I know that your company has a very specifically designed, fasting mimicking protocol, which I want to dive into with you. But let's just start and kind of helicopter out a little bit. Lots of people are hearing on social media about fasting, it's definitely gathering momentum. I think we're going to talk we were talking before the show about the sex differences between men and women, the stage of life, how you might even use it for treatment for things like cancer. But first of all, can you briefly explain what the importance of fasting is? And what happens at each stage in terms of the hours that go by and how we're optimising our bodies?

Yeah, that's, that's a fantastic question. And probably the question I get asked the most, because there's a big confusion into how many hours should I do? What happens if I do 12? The 16? If I do? So let's let's best answer the question. Let's go back and say, Hey, what are the types of fasting and what happens to the buddy when you fast and reclassify? Fasting is two categories. Today, there's a category called intermittent fasting, which is any fast below two days. And there's a category called prolonged or periodic fasting, which is any fast that goes above two days. And why the cutoff of two days that most people by the second day, or between the first hour fast to two days to 48 hours, we lose weight, I mean, the fastest candidate deficit, and you have reserves in your body fat, you have glycogen, and you have the liver that can practice what we call the gluconeogenesis. So you have three defence line, when you don't, when you're not eating, you have enough reserves, again, the liver, glycogen and fat to compensate for the calorie deficit. In the first 48 hours, a typical person has enough reserves to cover for that period, when you cross the second day, the body's telling the cells, hey, I'm not eating and fasting, I had some reserves, they're depleting fast. Therefore, you should start eating what's inside of you and use and start rejuvenating, and start enhancing the way you operate. This is the process called autophagy, or self eat, it won the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology in 2016. And again, it happens for most people, there's no fat clock, some people get into it. And the first day if they're exercising, creating extra calorie deficit, or if they're thin, they don't have a lot of reserves, but on average, and some people go through it on day three, because they have a lot of reserves, they have low metabolic rate, etc. But that day two is where most people would start getting into from what we call the metabolic stage of fasting to the cellular stage of fasting. And then your practice he rejuvenating cells of your body, which is a very important process for longevity, because you're biologically when you tell the cells, hey, eating your waste, detox, fix what's inside, you're asking, asking itself to be biologically healthier or biologically younger. And therefore, it's an important healthy ageing practice. And if you have certain health conditions that can benefit from such rejuvenation, we can talk about that later that it could be good intervention for for these for this purposes. The intermittent fasting phase, which is less than two days is mainly a metabolic intervention, you're you lose weight, you're spending, you know, calories, you're not ingesting calories, you're spending those and therefore you lose, you lose wages and calories, which is great for many of the diseases we're facing today, or the health conditions we're facing today. Whether it's a blood pressure induced by overweight, whether it's blood sugar, and diabetes induced by overweight, etc, etc.

Interesting, well, thank you for clearing that up. Because I think a lot of people do get confused. But what you're saying is autophagy begins for some people at around 24 hours, particularly if they're doing other things, but they're complemented like exercising. But other people it will be around two days. So a 48 hour fast. And

that's that's big news. Because if you listen to most podcasts and YouTubers, they'll tell you, you get an artificial and 16 hours of fast. This is why most people practice 16 hours of intermittent fasting, thinking that they're gonna get autophagy very, very, very rarely. You get to autophagy in our 16 I mean, imagine that Every day you eat your sleep, you go to work and you have your breakfast. And if you skip breakfast, suddenly in four hours, the stress is so big, then the cells have to eat themselves. It doesn't happen this way. Now, if you run the marathon in the morning, and our eight to 10, you rent for, you know, a 1015 kilometres marathon, and you're thin, you don't have a lot of reserves, maybe at our 16th, you practice a little bit of accelerated audit phase you may be, but But most people above 90% of people will require at least one or two days, but to deplete that initial defence line, which is fat, glycogen and liver. And then it's such a big crisis that the cells have to practice autophagy. So hopefully, that's clarified. Yeah. Let us switch ON switch off. Again, we're different people different different metabolic rate, different way different acceleration. And, and but I'm just giving, like a sense to say that most people will shut off is that after 15 hours, you're not fasting, you're not, you're not depleting their their you're not depleted enough to practice autophagy. So as

you know, you don't want to be fasting too long, and putting your body in a state of stress, particularly if you're exercising alongside on a daily basis, as that can really interfere with female Hormonal Health. And so one of the ways that I track that and figure out how long I can be fasting for in the morning, without putting too much stress on my body is by using my lumen device. And lumen basically measures your respiratory exchange ratio to tell you whether you're in fat burn, or car burn, or a combination of the two. And if you wake up in fat burning mode, and you continue to extend your fast, and then as you start taking a breath test every sort of hour or so, you see yourself moving more into carbon, that is a sign that you've now pushed the envelope a little bit too far. And that's when you want to break your fast is also a fabulous way to find out whether you should be pre fueling before that intense hit workout if you really want to bring it. And so I absolutely love doing this stuff with them. As you know, I'm big into tracking data. And and using that really for optimal health and optimal performance. And lumen can really help you do that. And they are offering listeners of this podcast $50 or 50 pounds off depending where you are in the world. Off the lumen device and package, you just need to head over to Angela foster.me, forward slash lumen. And enter code Angela at checkout. That's Angela foster.me, forward slash lumen and enter code Angela at checkout. So what you're saying is we need to completely deplete liver glycogen during this phase, and then we would be depleting muscle glycogen, presumably as well.

Yeah, I mean, you don't need to deplete it all as much as the acceleration if it's if your body is losing those very fast. There's when they tell the cells Hey, you got to start participating, you got to start chipping in and eating what's inside of the cell. You don't need to deplete all of it. The buddy goes to glycogen glycogen is very fast. Waiting for I was I called fat as your savings accounts, right? Fat is like oh, okay, I have money saved on the site. Glycogen is your checking account, you can quickly jump and get glycogen and deliver is your credit is when you ask the bank for credit. And the bank is saying okay, I'm gonna give you a little bit of a loan. And it's exactly the same. So you tap into your savings checking account first, and then the savings account. So glycogen first, then you go start tapping into fat, why delivers is the renewable energy and SSN supporting, adding more credit,

because when I was speaking to I don't know if you've come across the device lumen speaking to them, I've used that and measured like am I burning carbs and my burning fats. And what their research was indicating was that once you get to a score and the carbohydrate, the carbon dioxide ratio, respiratory ratio is putting you at a level one, you are at 8% Plus in fat burning mode. So now they say we know that liver glycogen has now been depleted. And you can utilise that to look at how you might feel around workouts. So at this point, my understanding was liver glycogen has gone down. And if I was to work out in that state like and try and lift heavy weights, I may be in a pro catabolic state rather than an anabolic state if I want to create muscle mass because now when my body has depleted glycogen from the liver, the next thing it's going to do is try and take it from the muscles, but it will at the same time draw some amino acids, and therefore for the purposes of that workout. Actually pre fueling may be the answer. But I also understand that for longevity, it might be better to do that so long as the tooth took to work out in the fasted state so long as that the workout is kept quite short. And that I then load up again quite quickly afterwards with some protein and carbohydrate.

You So so glycogen is is is, you know in different organs of the body, including your right muscle and liver, what I was talking about Neil gluconeogenesis, producing glucagon. Talking about the glycogen of liver, glycogen is the first line we're exactly agreeing. Firstly, as glycogen, the liver ships in faster but to form new new to deliver to practice new book of Genesis, the buddy taps into glycogen first before before adding the credit which

got it. So then the and this process of gluconeogenesis is, I understand is partly why some people may struggle to sleep, because actually it invokes a degree of cortisol, which has this sort of inverse relationship with melatonin. So if you're if your cortisol is going up, you may struggle a little bit to sleep because your melatonin production isn't quite where it should be. And

partially how fasting work, it's the stress people think gas is a calorie deficit, there's only one angle, probably the most important angle of how fasting works is a stress is by stressing the body, I always give the example of if you're a CEO of a company, you need a million dollars to operate. Any low calorie diet will give you say, $800,000, you can cope with that state, you have enough money in the bank, exactly the fat and the glucagon, and you can adjust to it. But if I give you $0 Instead of a million dollar, not only you're, you're in the big deficit, but it's such a big stress, that that CEO of the company has to restructure the company and this is autophagy. So the stress induced restructuring is exactly what happens to the body. And stress elevates cortisol is what you're bringing the cortisol up within fasting there and growth hormone by the way as well. This is why fasting helps the muscle the fasting is yes, you're tapping into glycogen in the muscle, but actually fasting increase growth hormone as well and the muscle tone is high is why one of the ways that our athletes are incorporating fasting into their training is to play on this duality of let's cut fat, protect the muscle, eat protein after fasting and train the muscle and you get it cycles of rejuvenation and cycles of muscle. It has been

interesting, but cut the fat out. So you're saying focus on healing protein and carbs but not fat.

If your goal is to build up muscle, you have to focus on the belief if that's the goal, and let's talk about longevity. So, so we've we've just published a trial and prolonged you mentioned, we have a fasting mimicking nutrition. So we did prolong that we did two trials and prolonged with with muscle being a purpose, one against Mediterranean diet. And it shows that we protect lean body mass. And then we went to athletes, male athletes, you know, these are big guys. And they train intensively and they did five days a prolonged with no too low exercise during the five days. And we show that they actually protected lean body mass. And that's the duality of fasting fasting, taps into fat as a reserve tries to protect the muscle with the growth hormone. And especially when you deal with problem because we have already plant based protein and parola we do have carbs. So you're actually even have nutrients in the body to feed the muscle. And as a result, we see that muscle function is protected when you did the fasting mimicking diet.

Interesting. Yeah. And I want to get into what's in that actually, because I think it's important for people in a moment. So if we just staying with the principles, because I think it will be you know, new to a lot of people that 16 hours is not enough to stimulate autophagy. I had always thought it was longer. I think the sixth DNA, as you say works well for kind of managing metabolic flexibility to a degree with the What about exercise itself being a tall autophagy? Because there's a lot of research now saying well, hang on, let us see how many stresses we need to put the body through particularly I know we're going to talk about women's sex hormones in a moment. But if we are stimulating autophagy through exercise, and you're a regular exercise and a vigorous exercise, do you think that that is doing autophagy? Or do we still need to be fasting on top?

So is no sci fi when we talk to the body and the body is a continuum is so so basically if if autophagy is a cell self eating, right, so it's a cell that had to go and eat and use inside calories because there's outside depletion, and that happens either with intensive exercise or prolonged less intensive exercise. But if you're if you're stopping every five minutes to eat a burger is not going to happen. But if you do it, if you do it long enough, and it's unbalanced, right, it's either low food with mild exercise or high exercise with a little bit more food or no food and no exercise. So you get it. It's the balance and the duration of which you need depends on the body. If you're very thin, you don't have a lot of reserves you have high metabolic rate, ie then you need less decides to get into autophagy. And you need less period of fasting, you might get into autophagy, you know, by hour 20, or by the end of the first day, very rarely, right. But again, if you're very, very thin, very high metabolic rate, and you exercise once a week faster, you get into artificial a bit sooner than the two days, if you're a little bit overweight, you have low metabolic rate, you don't burn fast, your calories in your body is used to go in that slow mode, and you don't exercise is going to take you three days to get into autophagy. So it's not sci fi, it's literally the speed of the crisis, the intensity of the crisis and how much reserves I have to compensate for it.

Yeah, that's really interesting. Thanks for clearing that up. Because I guess that it makes a lot of sense, because actually, if the body recognises that you're very low fat anyway, it's kind of a little bit more scattered, right? Almost. So it's under or should we say under more stress? Because if there's some kind of famine, when how are we going to feed?

Exactly. So go back to the example of that CEO who needs a million dollars to operate? If he has $100 million in the bank and you tell him you don't have that million dollars? today? He's like, Okay, I'll be at $99 million in the bank. That's not a huge deal. But if he only has 2 million in the bank, and half of it is wiped out, he's gonna rush faster to restructure the company to cut costs and to take the right corrective measures.

Yeah. Okay. So I spent a long time trying to find years, in fact, a greens powder that I actually liked the taste of, and finally found one that basically tastes amazing on its own, or actually mixed into shakes, which is pretty unusual, because some of them taste kind of really minty, and that overpowers everything else, whereas this one just tastes really, really nice. And it mixes well with banana and protein powder. It also mixes really well with a strawberry protein I've been using, and it just works super well just on its own on an empty stomach. And that is athletic greens. It has prebiotics, probiotics, and naturally occurring enzymes that boost digestion, has your daily dose of vitamin C and zinc, healing mushrooms, magnesium to help you regulate all day energy and support energy production in our cells. And it's packed with superfoods, adaptogens and antioxidants, and I absolutely love it. And the cool thing is, you can get one year supply of vitamin D plus five free travel packs. When you get your order of athletic greens, all you need to do is go to this special link athletic greens.com forward slash Angela foster that's athletic greens.com. Forward slash Angela foster to buy yourself a year's supply of vitamin D plus five free travel packs. Now let's get back to the show. So could you then by sort of waking up in a fasted state where you can see on some sort of device for example, that you're that you're in a more of a fat burning state go and exercise? And would that then be enough if you came home and we filled in a lean individual athletic individual to have stimulated autophagy for the purposes of longevity?

Again, if How long did you exercise? How long were you didn't eat and how much reserves you have. So you get a measure each person is different. Will you touch I mean, artificial happens every day, every moment in the body. It's part of the cycle of cells. But we're talking about accelerating autophagy across all cells. Yes, if you're in a fat burning, if you're saying in already in mild ketogenesis and you exercise intensively and you delayed your food intake and you're thin and you have high metabolic rate you will touch on artificially, again, we're talking autophagy it's not like a minute process, it happens yes or no autophagy goes from super mild to more and more, the more the deficit, the longer deficit, the longer it goes. So you don't want to also just touch at it. It's like we're bargaining, whether it's 16 or 18 hours, even if it happens that hour succeeded barely barely started, right? If you want to benefit from it, you want to put yourselves into it. You got to allow time to go and do a masterful autophagy and around the body and push for more rejuvenation regeneration. So even if you touch on it a little bit every morning. That's touching artificial accelerating limit the rate of artificial cluster, but it's not going into a deep dive in rejuvenative cycle within the body.

And is it helping in that situation to stimulate NAD?

Yeah, well, that's, that's a big question. NAD, obviously and spirit him by the way, another way to accelerate that and get the NAD. Do we have human randomised clinical trials showing that though? Do we have a lot of mice while indicating that? Yes. So I'm a man of science. I'm an MD PhD. I will only give you that answer. So maybe yes. But do we have randomised clinical trials showing that in different ages and different genders? Not yet?

Not Yeah, we don't have that information. Okay, so last talk then about I think what's interesting for people is because my understanding of proton is it's been very specifically formulated to make this a manageable process for people where they're still eating. But the calories are low enough to stimulate autophagy, while still giving the body the nutrients. And there's a lot of science behind this that you guys have gone into and tested right and multiple ways, is very exciting. Can you explain a little bit of how that works, and then we can talk about different individuals, like, you know, someone like myself who's into longevity might do it versus someone who's treating cancer, for example, but less virus. So if you can explain the mechanics of

Yeah, the proline piatto LLN, what you're referring to is five days nutrition that is specifically designed to nourish your body, while keeping the cells and a fasting mode. And so the entire existence of our company and technology, why you want to fast with food, is basically to allow you to go beyond that day to where really start a deeper autophagy and go through the benefits of rejuvenation regeneration. So the entire existence of why I want to fast with food is to go on a longer, safer, faster, because very few people can last two days with their food. And actually, it's not healthy for many. And even if you do two days, you're barely getting into autophagy. For many people, 73% of Americans in the UK probably a little bit lower, but still above 50% of us carry some extra weight. So we're not going to get an autophagy and 16 hours or 20 hours or one day or in the science is showing that if you do five days, four to five days a fast you're, for most people, they're getting at least one or two or three or four days of autophagy, which is exactly, you know, so this is why Parolin is five days, a lot of people ask us well, if I'm high BMI and low BMI, or I'm a female versus male, this is why we went for five days to ensure that everyone gets at least one or plus more days of autophagy. And in and so that's number one is fasting with food has been designed to prolong the fast in a safe and compliant way. Number two is is your nourishing while you're fasting and people will ask how come that's that's complete. It's that's an oxymoron. And here, let me let me define fasting, there are three definitions for fasting. The common definition is I eat no food. And some people do it without water. I mean, when I guess that you should drink what fasting it's very important. But let's say the common definition is no food. The second definition is a physiological fasting, meaning you're already started to having ketones, you're breaking down fat, because every time I've meaning now you're fasting and fasting, even if I had lunch an hour ago, I'm fasting, right I didn't eat but by the by the first definition. But I'm not fasting by the Second Division. I'm not like staying for long hours. And I don't have my buddies not tapping into my reserves. Actually, my buddy is now happy is digesting and is absorbing and but I'm fasting I'm not eating physically now. So that's the second more relevant definition is you get multiple hours of fast to get to tap into the reserves. One of them is breaking down the fat into ketones, and therefore you're in ketosis, and that's the physiological fast. The third definition is a molecular fast is a cellular fast, meaning even though you're eating, your cells are not satisfied. The nutrient sensing pathways the cell, the cell realises there's food through three main pathways, the pKa, the RAS and the Tor pathway. And if these intracellular pathways, they're not triggered enough by nutrition, they sell things, it's not eating. And that's the entire concept behind our fasting mimicking diet is how can I feed unit nutrients that are very carefully and so plant based and natural, there's nothing artificially, it's actually a super high end premium. You know, there's a lot of macadamia nuts, there's a lot of pecans, there's a lot of plant based source of ingredients by itself is very healthy and very clean. But it's carefully designed to do two things in the body to not spike insulin and IGF IGFs, insulin like growth factor. So when you eat carbs, insulin spike, when insulin spike, it tells the body, hey, there's nutrients, I have enough carbs, I'm a sign of carbs. So we're good. We're not fasting so we don't spike enough insulin to for the for the body to on a systematic level to recognise the food. When you eat protein is another hormone of food recognition called IGF insulin like growth factor. Also, we don't spike that. So basically, at the systemic level, there's food coming into your body but there's no Spike is a barely in small increase with insulin. It goes very long, is a very small increase in IGF and goes very long so the body is not realising that I just ate. The second secret we apply is by the time that our nutrients get into the cell. They don't overdo simulate the nutrient sensing pathway. So the cell radars are not detecting high food, and therefore the cell stays in a fast thing. And so it's like, I'll give you back the example of the CEO who needs a million dollar. In our case, we give you $500,000. But we're going to tell you use those only to pay for HR to keep your best employees and use those to buy your supplies so that you keep selling. So you, you actually have money, you have 500k, but you can only use it for two things, not for sales that for monitoring, not for other things. So you're fasting on other levels. And you're gonna go and restructured and still do the autophagy if you wanted that

sense. Yeah, that makes sense. That's very interesting. And I like your analogy there. I think a lot of people can relate to that. And also, this sounds like a very manageable way of people doing it. It's powdered, right? My understanding is and then you mix it up like this, some soups and things like that.

Yeah, the soups are just out there. But you have the bar, we made it. We made it like food as user friendly. So you have the bar in the morning, the longevity L bar, you have crackers, you have all this you have soups, you have your drink, you have your supplements, it's fully it's all what you need to eat and drink and have your supplements for that day. It's not powdered or officious actually presented as soup and bars and drinks and crackers. Yep.

And what can people expect to feel like when they're doing it? Would they expect to feel a little bit hungry? I mean, this depends fastened, right, and this is how much they normally.

Yeah. So people, there's three, three groups of consumers and I've crossed like a million a million use. There's the ones that said the one that said it was easy for me. And these are mainly the folks who are metabolically flexible. They played a bit with fasting before they've gone into ketosis before. It's like going to the gym, right? If you haven't gone to the gym for a while, and then suddenly you go and you do two hours of Jimmy come back your muscle is aching. So that's if if you've if you go frequently the gym or you've been in gym in the last month or two, it's it's easier for you to do. So a third would say it was easy. A third would say it was moderately difficult, but I went through it. And the third set, it was really difficult for me. These are mainly people who are not used to be metabolic flexible, they're a little bit the first time their body goes into their calorie deficit. And it's the first time maybe for many people in their life, that their body is switching from just living on carbs to living on ketones. Some people never in their life fasted. Never in their life, the brain had to switch from carb consumption to ketone consumptions. So a third would find it difficult, a third, moderate and a third, we'll find it pretty easy to do. The

other ketosis, will they? Oh, sorry.

Continue. Yeah, that's why it's five days, right? So it was if it was a three minute a lot of people say why and it's not three days with, and some people do two days or three days, and then you many people would get to fasting, some would not. But even if you get into fasting By day three, you're barely getting into it, right? This is the most unspoken thing in here. The question is that you get into autophagy by our 16 or 20. Or when there is you want to stay in artificially for a while to help the cells do that, Hey, should I touch it? Should I touch and come back? It doesn't help if you touch and come back. So this is why it's five days. The other feeling asking about feeling is a feeling that most people talk about actually they do feel on day two and crossing today. Three, something's happening to their body. A lot of people tell you that they do three transition, they feel that something is going something is happening. It's 3d the body switching to ketones, the cells practically practising autophagy. And, and that crisis mode is kind of coming in. And then on day four, and five, they tell you I feel euphoric. I feel like I don't need sleep. I'm rarely like strong and powerful. And cell phone and this is this is the brain is living on ketones. This is cells are being rejuvenated, and they have a completely different feeling and coming out of it. A lot of people talk about mental clarity about the performance, about the sense of achievements. You know, what, what? What's, what's probably unique little bit of a proline is that it's not a diet, you don't have to do it every day. It's short enough to be five days, and therefore most people can do it. 91% of people, you know, finish the day there's nobody finishes. Yes, really? Yeah. Because it's as it's extra enough as five days but long enough of five days to get you into ketosis and get you into autophagy.

And what about how often would you would you recommend that people do this?

So I'll group if you want realistic three different types of people. Let's say it's you Angela. And let's say you're 40 and then you have your your fit, and you're eat healthy, and you just want to fast for rejuvenation, and for autophagy and and and increasing your health spend through improving your biological age. then you only need to do it three times a year. And it takes it takes a CEO to tell somebody only eat three times a year for from me and because this is what the science show we studied the three years, we actually are showing that if you do roll on three times a year for 20 years between age 50 and 70, this study is going to be published soon is showing an improvement by multiple years, I cannot give details because not out yet. But multiple years of on average people Yeah, multiple biological age. So now if you say look, I am I have some extra weight that I want to shed and and therefore you can do proline for Max five times because you're not only doing it for cellular rejuvenation artifice you're doing it because it's a low calorie as well. I didn't get to lose weight when you do prolong. We just finished actually a trial with at University of Heidelberg. And it was published two weeks ago, showing that you can lose up to 22 pounds, this is 10 kilos, and prolong than six months when you say six months, just five days a month. So basically five days times 630 days, and you're losing 10 kilos, while protecting lean body mass. So So So yeah, if you need to shed some weight, maybe instead of doing three times you do four or five. Now we're testing. We're testing the fasting mimicking nutrition for multiple health conditions as well. And when we do it for health conditions, we tend to deal with a little bit more frequently. So this is when you step into six times a year when you're, you know, for patients that we studied, if the food for say diabetes, and or for other health conditions,

what kind of health conditions like Would it work for kind of general like metabolic syndrome, presumably where people have got, you know, our tissues combined with maybe insulin resistance? Would you recommend it in those sorts of patients?

So so I'm going to answer the I have to answer here with a complaint way, because when you talk about a product in nutrition, and you're mentioning disease, you have to be careful about what to claim. So so the fasting mimicking nutrition if you want to admit fascinating technology, we've tested it, we've tested on people with insulin resistance in and we actually just published, showing that we decrease the Homer score ratio when you do six cycles of prolong. We've also studied for four cycles of prolonged and showed showed the same. So yes, we are about to launch. And of this year, in q4, we're going to launch a programme, a fasting mimicking nutrition programme, where the festival we're going to choose is being used with with a dietitian and an app in order to help people with pre diabetes remission and aggression and with diabetes, permission and regression as well.

Exciting. And what about whether you mentioned with people, for example, who are being treated for cancer? Could they do this while they're having treatment like chemotherapy? Or what do you recommend? No, no, you can't like obviously everyone has a doctor. But I'm just curious what you've studied in relation to those patients.

So so the entire company, our company, l nutria, was born out of actually the studies in in cancer, and we used to be a water fasting company. So this is important for audience. We're not here to push products, and then we were water fasting company. And we were studying waterfalls before chemotherapy and hormone therapy, and so that the goal was to fast cancer before hormone therapy or chemotherapy comes in and hits cancer and what why why we were testing that cancer the moment is cells becomes cancerous. What is a cancer cell, it's a cell that lost inhibition to stop replicating. So if cell loses that inhibition starts growing and growing, growing is why cancer grows so fast. And then it goes everywhere in the body because cannot stop growing. So going into the blood, it goes everywhere. And for cell like cancer cell or for the organ that's called cancer to grow at these calories. And for it to be resistant to chemo. That's the biggest problem we're facing today. We do have cancer drugs, but they don't kill 100% of cancer, cancer escapes them. And in for that escape mechanism. Cancer likes to have nutrients to kind of change course and feed the cells that survive and grow. So cancer lives on nutrition. It's the fastest growing here's why cancer patient ended up catching cachectic and losing in the frail why because the cancer is eating everything for them. So what we have come up with 15 years ago and Professor Valter Longo, who's our founder and he just actually released his book fasting cancer in Italy, if you have anyone that reads Italian language, and then it's going to be I think, launched across Europe in the next few months. And then in the US next year is called fasting cancer is how we were how we started as a company, you do fasting, your cancer is so weak because cancer cannot live without food. And then you hit cancer with hormone therapy or chemotherapy after that. Now when we went to human trials People cannot stay three or four or five days without food. And this is why the National Institute of Health gave us funds to develop the fasting mimicking diet is how we were born, is can you feed cancer patients for four days with nutrition that keeps them healthy that helps keeps them in autophagy but helps them do the fast before, before their body goes through keyboard hormone therapy or tyrosine kinase etc. So last year, we published four articles on cancer. Breast Cancer definitely is our biggest publication. We had two articles on the fasting mimicking nutrition and breast cancer. And then were published another article on multiple cancers colorectal and others. We're not here to say you do it to cure your cancer, we're here to say it puts your body into a good metabolic state to optimise nutrition around the treatment. And definitely talk to your doctor before you do this. But we hope next year we're going to launch also a cancer nutrition programme, where you have a dietician you have an app and you have our products to help people go through the right nutrition environment around cancer because one of the biggest mistakes I think is done today is people with cancer. The doctors tell them you should eat and you drink this high protein and you're drinking. And again cancer is the organ that needs the most calories. So you feedings in certain ways cancer when you're doing the high protein, high carb, I mean if you're connected if you're super frail and your end stage of course you need to nourish, but the early stage when your body is still can take it. This is when you want to practice fasting in order to fasting mimicking nutrition before and in between the treatment do intermittent fasting to keep the cancer in check to not overfeed cancer. There's a lead but article is a landmark article that was published in JAMA oncology, the Journal of American Medical Association oncology in 2016. And very few oncologists and cancer patients pay attention to it. It showed that if you do intermittent fasting of 13 hours, it delayed the reoccurrence of breast cancer. I mean, it's huge. It's as simple as 13 hours and it wasn't intermittent fasting article, they just they just weren't looking at and it was 1000s and 1000s of breast cancer just looked at a posteriori if if the ones who stay 13 hours without food, and it was 13 not 16 or 18 the ones who stay just 13 hours and beyond and they found a statistically significant difference in the in cancer reoccurrence with folks who did just that, you know, it was a fight so it all goes back at Yeah, it all goes back to the same concept of if you have cancer, you want to under nourish the cancer rather than go and feed the cancer to grow. And then you couple that timing wise is what we do is like okay, let's undernourished cancer right before chemo so that the cancer is at its weakest point. And then you hit it with chemo with hormone therapy. And this is the premise of all our trials and the fasting mimicking trician coupled with chemo or hormone or immunotherapy or the other therapies,

because these cancer cells are so hungry, right? They're different than normal cells. And they

they electrically like protein, healthy cells,

but you're weakening the cancer cells. Yeah,

because the normal cells hybrid because this the defence around fasting literally autophagy cancer cells cannot survive a fasting mode because they need calories, they don't know how to stop, they don't have to stop replicating by design that last that we call that effect the differential stress resistant DSR meaning you protect normal cells, you sensitise cancer cells to the hormone therapy or the chemotherapy. And it's a great way to build the right environment for the cancer patient to two if you want better manage the nutrients around chemotherapy and chemotherapy.

So amazing, absolutely fascinating. So I have one last question for you. What about women who are cycling? And how can how are those because you're giving the nutrients during that fast? Is this something that women who still have a set menstrual cycle can do comfortably three times a year?

Yeah, so we studied with whey protein has gone through almost now 18 clinical trials we've never had to adjust the protein intake to to this to the cycles because again, well we know that fasting if you want to do water fast we do recommend you do it after the 14 day so that you don't interfere with ovulation. So what again water fasting is a pure stress right if you're not getting any nutrients when we do prolonged we try pulling in all parts and all different stages age etc. And we never we've never seen a major difference into response or intervention or we never had reports of issues happening with menstruation cycle when you probably because it's an orange fast that's part of making fasting safe in it go back to that CEO who needs a million dollars if you give him zero, not the 500k which is what we do if you give him zero that car or give her this CEO cannot even buy supplies For next month, they cannot they will lose their best employees because they're going to not be paid and they're going to go to another company. So fasting, pure water fasting has some costs, it's not all benefits. And this is why we were water fasting company, the National Institute of Health, which is the most credible grantor in the US, gave us funds to go and develop the fasting mimicking diet to make fasting safe, compliant, accurate in a product that always does what is what is promised to do. And then do it in a healthy way. So pure water fast maybe can intervene in menstruation cycle I've heard some gynaecologist say do it. If you just wanted to water fast do it after the 14 day, withdrawal on you've tested different age different different parts and we haven't seen major difference.

That's interesting because also I because I think I've seen it as well the other way around, where if you're going to do like stress on the body, so like, for example, with HIIT workouts and things when I talk about optimising that around the menstrual cycle, as she would do that in the earliest stage in the high hollow phase as oestrogen is rising, because when you start really stressing the body when you want that follicle that's been released and ovulation has taken place to produce that progesterone it can limit it if cortisol is too high. So

again, these are anecdotal. These, what I started saying is I've heard this from some gynaecologist. There is no studies exactly on fasting for before and after. There are studies on prolonged that you can do but there are no studies on pure water fast. I've heard some gynaecologist, one of them, I trust big time in saying that, it would be safer not to intervene into the follicular phase and do it after but again, this is a doctor recommendation.

Yeah, yeah. And then presumably, as well as it's very helpful for women going through menopause when they're already like, Oh, sure. Resistance and things are Yeah, increasing to help reset.

Sure. You know, menopause changes cardiovascular risk for women, they start losing muscle, they start losing bone. And what we've shown with Polen is there's muscle maintenance, there's, you know, improvement and in multiple blood metrics. So definitely at that period, it's important to keep the rejuvenation ongoing in the body.

Well, I'm certainly going to be doing this you've got me very, very excited about it. I'm sure you have a lot of the listeners to where people go and find out more about you your work obviously, I actually have I think I've got two copies of Dr. Valter. Longo his book actually, I don't know why I ended up with two but I do I've read it it's a brilliant book. But where can people find more about you as well Joseph and the company and how to do this

me personally I'm on LinkedIn, Joseph Anton, and Twitter and Facebook and if they want to follow prolong the Instagram of proline and the Facebook page for proline and if they want to buy prolonged prolonged fast.com in the US and Europe, we're actually across Europe as well. The problem that that UK that CO and or add problem that EU to buy it across Europe, we do have a headquarter in Italy and we ship across Europe as well. Very easy. When you Google that you'll you'll you'll get to the right country websites where you're calling from or you want to buy from.

Amazing, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about it and sharing all this is absolutely fascinating. And I definitely look forward to seeing more in this. You've got me excited when you said if you do this three times a year, and sort of 20 years between the ages of 50 and 70. And

we had done two trials and we've simulated the data I cannot reveal exactly before the articles are just gonna be out. So that the number one side of the word actually, and we're pretty excited about that.

Amazing. Well, thank

you. Thank you very much, Angela. Have a good one. Yeah, you too. Thanks.

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. As always, the show notes will be over on my website, Angela Foster performance.com forward slash podcast. And you can download the transcript there together with the show notes and all of the other resources that I have on my website, Angela Foster performance.com. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening. Remember to review and subscribe, you can grab the show notes, the resources and highlights of everything Angela mentioned over at Angela Foster performance.com You can also snatch up plenty of other goodies including the highly helpful Angela recommends page which is a list of everything she personally recommend to optimise your mind, body and lifestyle.