65. Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD: Increasing Longevity with the Fasting Mimicking Diet & How Much Protein Do You Really Need?

Hello everyone, I'm Dr. Darsha, and I'm Dr. Altamash Raja, and welcome to Medicine Redefined. A podcast where we will explore the often overlooked but necessary components of health, what we consider to be the fundamentals. We will investigate topics and practices that can give you and your patients the best chance to optimize a healthy lifestyle. It's time to move the needle forward and put the health back in healthcare. Our guest today is Dr. Joseph Anton. Dr. Anton is the CEO and chairman of the Board of El Nuta, a unique NutriTech company leading the foodiest medicine movement by applying cutting-edge science to nutrition research. Dr. Anton completed his health policy studies at Harvard University, public health at Johns Hopkins University, medicine and biological sciences at St. Joseph's University and his PhD studies in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern studies at King's College. Prior to his current role, he served as the chairman of the Board at the Global Health Spend Policy Institute and as a member of Forbes Business Development Council. He was also the CEO of Health Systems Reform, a consultancy aimed at elevating public health through reforming health systems, strengthening healthcare management and improving healthcare delivery. He was the co-director of the Center for Health Policy at the University of Chicago, an adjunct professor of health policy at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and a fellow at the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Sands. He has dedicated his professional experience to reforming health systems toward preventative care and to create a market for healthy aging. So it's safe to say that it was a privilege to have him as a guest. Now in this episode we discussed in detail the topic of longevity. There's a great chance you've heard this word by now and certainly if you're a listener on this show, but it means different things to different people. So Dr. Anton starts by defining what it even means to him and how he has devoted his career to the practices of longevity and healthy aging. Now the first part of the episode explores that goal of longevity from a perspective of achieving health versus avoiding disease. We then dovetail into the various ways to promote longevity with a heavy emphasis on nutrition and specifically fasting. That term fasting or more popular term, interim and fasting is being talked about more and more frequently, but what you may not have heard is the fasting mimicking diet. Dr. Anton has worked closely with the pioneer who coined that term. So we also discuss in detail what that means and how it may be even more beneficial. Depending on your viewpoint, this can be a polarizing topic much like anything nutrition. As a matter of fact, you might note that even we disagree on some important points regarding specific macronutrious consumption for performance and healthy aging. But ultimately, I hope you'll leave this interview a bit more informed, like Darshan I did. And lastly, I want to highlight and apologize advance for the ping noise you may hear. That was clearly an oversight for an appeared to be an internal sound within one of our systems and wasn't picked up until after the fact and as you can guess, it was too late at that point. Nevertheless, it shouldn't disrupt the discussion too much. Now with that further delay, please enjoy this episode with Dr. Joseph Anton. All right, Dr. Anton, welcome to the show. Hey, how are you today? So how are you doing? Excellent, excellent. Look forward to hopefully changing somebody's life or somebody's career today. We'll see. Right on. You know, this is an interesting topic, a topic that's near and dear to my heart, particularly as of later in the last couple of years, you know, as many folks here know that sports medicine is kind of my passion and has been my calling for a long time. But this is something that's taken a deep interest of mine and something that I've wished to learn more about. And it's also something that I think a lot of folks now who follow closely just the health and wellness space are learning more about and talking more about it. And that's, of course, the topic of longevity. And so I want to jump right into it. And I want to ask you, because this is something that you've devoted much of your career to is what does that word longevity mean to you? Longevity for me is probably when I hear it, I hear more health span rather than longevity. I mean, I want to live healthy long, I don't want to live, I remember I was in a junk professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging that was back in 2000, probably 13-14. And we did a survey. We asked people, do you want to increase your longevity? And 60% said no. That was so close. And when we asked them the second question, why no? Because they're like, I don't want to be in pain like my grandma, right? I don't want to die like my grandpa. So they directly remember the suffering in a, especially today, with chronic diseases, why this is one of the main reason why I transitioned from medicine to what I do today is like, they remember somebody sicked long, they don't remember somebody healthy long and in sudden death, which is what I hear from with longevity, I want to live healthy long and then die fast. And if my wife doesn't kill me either before that. Yeah, so I mean, I love that. It's much more of like adding life to years rather than adding, or I should say, adding life to you, adding years to your life, right? So now, you talked a little bit about kind of the inception of this idea that creeped into your mind, but tell us a little bit about your background. You know, I know you've had extensive amounts of schooling, as you mentioned, you're right off the, before we got online here, you were talking about starting a medical school as well, what brought you to your journey and what you're studying now? So yeah, I started, you know, my passion was literally to help patients, you know, cure them and help them become healthy again, and this is why I went to med school. And then I went to big cardiologist, and that was my passion, and I was doing, I remember my rotations at my general hospital, and it was so excited to kind of, you know, the residency at MGH and get a career in cardiology after that. But at the same time, I was sitting in, in, in, in feeling that I'm being taught how to prescribe a pill. So first, how to meet a person after they're sick. Number two, so we're practicing sick care rather than healthcare. Number two, I'd never had a solution to get them back to normal. So if they have a blood pressure, it was the blood pressure pill for the rest of their life, and then the blood sugar pill for the rest of their life, and then the cholesterol pill for the rest of their life, and then probably we're going to add two, three pills every six to 12 months that we see them or every two years. And there was no plan to getting them off any of those pills. So I felt that as a cardiologist, I would be, of course, there's a great value, you know, supporting a lot of people, especially in acute setting and, and, and, and, and, and, and heart failure and, and in fact, and all of that. But besides that, the chronic, the, the kind of, the everyday routine was about literally putting them on, on, on pills and, and not having it planned for them to, to go off a blood pressure, a blood glucose pill. And then I was very passionate about diabetes, and the more I learned what we do with diabetes, it was shocking. Basically, the diabetes pills that we give are taking the blood glucose, if you don't change your lifestyle, blood, the blood sugar doesn't disappear. It just, it just, you're either supporting the secretion or, or the sensitization of getting the blood out of the vessel to the tissue. And when it goes into the cell, the excess sugar goes into fat to increase insulin resistance. And therefore, the need, meaning it was, it's a disease where every time we give a pill for, we're accelerating the patient's form, right? You're just, instead of, instead of telling the bed, teaching the patient how not to, to eat carbs or how to live a healthy life, or to burn carbs with exercise or to stress less or to sleep better or whatever, all the lifestyle medicine you can practice, which didn't exist in Med School. And when I went to Med School, we were giving them a pill and the, the, the, everyone is shying from saying the truth or, or talking about the truth, which is a sensitizer of getting the glucose from the blood to the tissue. If you, if you have excess glucose, you're turning that into excess fat and therefore more insulin resistance. And therefore, more diabetes and this is why the plan you start with metform and yet another or another, and you start with injected blood, and another, and insulin is the worst of the worst, whereby then you're just accelerating weight gain and, and, and adding, adding one, one form of insulin to the other. So I was like shocked with how we accept the ability system that does sick care and it's okay to do sick care. I mean, people get sick, you gotta help them, but they help wasn't enough in my opinion. And this is what I start leading more and more about disease etiologies and figuring out that actually a lot of the diseases we were looking at are lifestyle related, whether it's, you know, prediabetes, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, PCOS. And then the more I read, the more cancer goes back to also lifestyle and now Alzheimer's we call it diabetes type three. So I found out that it's the way we age and the way we actually rate aging with unhealthy lifestyle that's leading to those diseases, right? And, and a lot of the books we study in, they tell us, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's genetics, right? And then when you look into it, like it's not genetics. I mean, and even if you have the APOE gene, you're not going to get Alzheimer's age 20. You're not going to get, if you have cancer in your family, you're not going to get your first cancer, most cases at age 17, and you're not going to get diabetic type two at age 23. Now you can get diabetes type two at age 23, if you over, over, over, eat and you get an accelerated aging and accelerated, they may get it. So they got that wait a second. We're all living this, this, the consequences of, of, of heavy dollars getting into randomized finger trials behind pills, therefore they get into their medical books and therefore we get taught in a way to diagnose and give the pill for everyone. And again, I'm not against that system. I think that system is, is wonderful, but, but has to be, has to has its own timing rather than being all medicine. And I felt that we need lifestyle medicine to be added to medicine. And so, so after my graduation, I didn't go into residency. I went and did health policy. I said that at the Kennedy School, Harvard Kennedy School and the public health at Hopkins. And my passion became, how can we build systems that are more preventative, that are, they look more into lifestyle? And how can I help ministries of health around the world to embrace these practices? And I spent a good number of years traveling around the world, meeting a lot of ministries of health and policy makers and trying to do that. And I hit a roadblock because these are recommendations, the problem with prevention and white prevention doesn't take off pretty fast because you're telling people to eat healthy. They know that. And every athlete who on the street knows that, you're telling them you should exercise everyone knows that, you're telling them stop smoking everyone knows that. The problem is that you know what you should do, but in the micro moment where you're hungry and there's a burger in front of you, or when you're tired and you have to go to the gym, but you don't want to go to the gym, or when you're in a mood for a cigarette because you're a little bit stressed and you need a cigarette, this is how, this is where the product called food, called, say, lazy on the couch or called smoking is winning over the recommendation. So my solution was we've got to get a product, the same way farmer has products in prevention. So how can I product ties prevention so that people consume health rather than consume bad behavior or think about health? And this is what took me to the biotech industry, I was a physician with health policy and public health skills and didn't have business skills, I didn't know how to discover any product. So when I joined the biotech industry, I learned how to discover products, Christ, reimbursement, and launching marketing sales and I started after that, resigning and started looking for a what is the product that can be consumed and keep people healthy or longer. And this is how I met the company, the founder of the company that I'm at today, and we can talk more about that, but how I met the notion of nutrition and fasting and the fasting mimicking the nutrition and I found a product that can help us with prevention and nutrition. And this is what I spend a lot of my life, I can deeply relate to what you talk about right in terms of sick care versus health care. And of course there's always going to be a time for sick care, I mean that's what hospitals are primarily there for right, you patient comes into the emergency room, maybe they're very sick, they get admitted to, you know, internal medicine or surgery team. And then from there, I think that's where that transition can at least happen to looking more towards lifestyle prevention and teaching. But you alluded to the fact that we need to consume health and the reason why prevention doesn't necessarily take off is because it's nothing new to us, we already understand that we need to eat healthy and stop smoking right. So we do currently live in this dopamine crazed world or this world where we need to find something new. And so tell us about El Nutra right because that's something you're doing and you know in the last decade fasting is that one thing that a lot of people have clinked on to right and now said, oh, wait loss or wow, there's so many benefits to that. So tell us about El Nutra, tell us about fasting and really your concept of it and what what you think fasting is doing at this current state. So to bridge the first question to this one, in between leaving the biotech and looking at finding this, the company that I'm at today, I learned something that was life changing and it's going to link it to fasting. What I learned is that and it was sea of the aging institute and who told me you all got it wrong in medicine. And I was like, what do you mean? And it was offended. And I'm like, MD, PhD, have policy, Harvard, Hoppe, what do you mean I got it all wrong? And he was like, you think Alzheimer's is different than cancer is different than diabetes is different than cardiovascular disease? Like of course they're different. One is in the brain, one is in the heart, one is like, no, it's like saying, he said, if they were independent, if they were sorry, if they were dependent, in each one is, if sorry, if they were independent, each one had a different genetics and different system and different, why you don't get Alzheimer's age 20? Why you don't get a heart attack at age 27? They all happen at later stage of life. They happen because your body has been used and if you use it in a healthy way, you would delay the onset of these chronic diseases and if you use your body and abuse your body in an unhealthy way, they're going to happen at the younger age. But they're all the expression of aging. And the example is like, if you drive a car, if you buy a new car and you drive it for 600,000 miles, and suddenly you press on the window bottom and it doesn't go down, you don't say, oh, there's a mountain, the manufacturer did a mistake on my window, right? But this is what we're doing medicine. They say, oh, you have a genetic predisposition and now you get a blood clot and now you have a heart attack. And even if you help them with a heart attack, the brain is going to come next because he's overweight, he's stressed, he's accelerating his aging and this guy biologically, although he's 65 prologically, biologically he's like 75 and he's going to develop the second incident soon. And this is why now we see all these correlations. We look at them as aha moment is, oh, diabetics have two exorysic of cancer. Of course, it's the same thing as exoreration of aging that will lead to one of each. And now we call Alzheimer's, diabetes type three, of course. And even diabetes is not a diabetes disease, it's an exoreration of aging disease and plus the weight, of course, and the metabolic. So the biggest aha moment I got is if you want to practice health care, you want to focus on biological age. And the unit of measurement and today in health, we don't have a unit of measure. And to me, it's biological age. If you are, because that's the biggest predictor of one of these four prologues disease, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular, autoimmune and Alzheimer's or degenerative, neurodegenerative. And this is what's going to kill 90% of us. 90% of us will die out of one of these four diseases and they're all correlated with aging. They all happen at a later stage in life. So what's the solution to prevention is to decelerate the aging, the pace of aging. And therefore, even if you're 70 or 75, a biological year, 60 or 65, you just gain 10 extra years of healthy life. That's the best way to practice health spend, to reconnect to your first question about longevity. And even if otherwise we go back to the pill system where you take a statin, you block one receptor only, you solve one portion only or today people, you know, taking, you know, a zimpyc for a way, these solve one pathway, one fraction. But the body is aging and when the body is aging, if you're going to solve my cholesterol thing today a little bit, I'm going to have the cancer, I'm going to have the Alzheimer's, I'm going to have the neurodegenerative, I'm going to have, you know, heart attack regardless because it's, if I don't change my lifestyle, I'm still eating bad. And if you save me on one pathway, there's many other parts of my body that are getting accelerated aging. So my passion, my big aha moment became, how can I find a product that can slow down aging or reverse aging because now you're talking about creating a delta between chronological agent, biological agent, therefore giving people a two years of health spend. And then I met this, I, I've, when I left the biotech industry, I literally wasn't the plane traveling to every aging, I was like, it's a fantasy to slow down aging or reverse it. And I start visiting every aging researchers, you know, whether it's the David Sinclair at Harvard, whether it's the Somalagic people in, in Boulder, whether it's the, the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, San Francisco, in most of them in Europe and in Singapore, even the National University of Singapore. And then most of them were pointing at Walter Longo, Professor Walter Longo, who's the head of the Longevity Institute at University of Southern California. And they were like, look, we're all working on pills, again, which means one pathway, which means it might work with my nut, which means it might have side effects, which means if there's one tiny side effects, people will not take it for the next four years to, to, to gain one extra year. The only guy that has a natural phenomenon for reversing aging is Walter Longo at USC because he discovered fasting, the, the, the biological benefits are fasting. We're not talking about fasting for 16 hours, we'll talk about intermittent fasting, we're talking about fasting for multiple days. So what basically the big discovery that Walter had and USC had is that if you fast this body for two or three or more days, it's a crisis. So the first two days, we all have a little bit of extra fat, we all have a little bit of glycogen, we all have delivery can do some neoglucutrinuses, right? So the first couple of days, we have, we have some money in the bank, we have some credit card, a little bit, and we can borrow from the bank, this is liver, glycogen, in fact, and we can get by the first two days. This is why intermittent fasting 16 hours, 20 hours, one meal a day, they're great for weight, right? It's a weight intervention. And I know a lot of bloggers, a lot of recent book publishers say you're going to have auto-phagy with 16 hours, and that's not going to happen. It's the big second big I have for all of you guys, 16 hours of a fiscate breakfast, you're not rejuvenating your body, it's like telling a CEO who needs two million dollars to operate a company, well, I'll give you in five hours your money, he's going to just wait for it five hours, and his money in the bank will drop a fraction of five hours divided by 30 days, multiply by two billion, so you're going to lose a little bit of weight, but there's no crisis, there's no depletion of the reserves. And auto-phagy is the second line of defense of the body that happens after you complete your reserve. If you watch Guido Chroma, who is the biggest expert on auto-phagy, it tells you three to four days of fasting. If you listen to the Austrian experts on auto-phagy, and it's permitting, and if you listen to Walter Longo, one, two, three days, so Walter thinks two days plus, and of course there's no absolute answer. If you're thin, high metabolic rate, you're exercising, you're going to get into it after one, one and a half day to two days, if you have a lot of reserves and you have still metabolism, it's going to take you three days to get into it. But we know it's not 16 hours, so most people, unless you run the marathon at the same time, within 16 hours, you create a big deficit. I want to start an interjection. I want to jump in on that point right there, because I think that's a buzzword that people use a lot, and that's one of those words that sounds sciencey, and maybe as you're suggesting the science doesn't necessarily support it in the short term. My understanding from, again, basic chemistry learning and microbiology and undergrad and what not is autophagy or autophagy is kind of happening even in the times of nutrient excess. There are several different types. You have mitophagy, you have shaper and media to autophagy, and then maybe just macro autophagy. Is there, are there certain types of autophagy that we're specifically addressing at this point, like are there times where there's, it's quality control that's happening at all times? Yeah, it's part of the physiology and the correction in the body, body getting sinister damage and fixing. Well, here we're specifically talking about a full body at the same time synchronous autophagy as a defense of fasting. We're not talking in the fluctuation. It's the same thing. Even stem cells, every time, every moment of every minute of your body, you're producing a little bit of stem cells, you're killing some of the cells with aptosis, that's the balance of rejuvenation. But what I'm talking about here is a total body suffering from fasting and therefore a total body rejuvenation and autophagy. That's not going to happen in 10 hours or 12 or 14 or 16. So basically, Walter Wongo, who has in mice for the last 20 years, have been studying all different phases of fasting in one hour, all the way to multiple days, has a remark, has noticed two important things. Number one is fasting can help you with rejuvenation and therefore potentially slowing on your age or reversing your biological clock. This is a few healthy. It's a very important thing to get younger, right? And this is how we can create, how we can add more life to life. Let me use the same words you guys used. Number two, that's our mission. If you look at our website, El Neutra, it says add life to life. And then, number two is the biggest, even more important from a medical standpoint in what brought me to El Neutra is he discovered that if you put your body into this fasting slash, autophagy slash rejuvenation crisis, the body is trying to survive and therefore does not allow this function. If you have cancer, if you have diabetes, if you have cardiovascular, does the body try to fix? Now that metabolically you're losing the weight and you're optimizing all the metabolic health, similarly you're optimizing cellular function, would that combination be the magic of biology that can repair, remit, regress from a chronic disease? And when I met him six, seven and a half, six and a half years ago, he had my data showing that he can take mice cured from cancer from 36% to 93%. He was showing a reversible diabetes at mice and he got a patents on all of this. He was showing that if you destroy the pancreas of a mice to know insulin production and you fast the mice, the stem cells reactivate the pancreas and reheal and reproduce insulin. So it was literally magical at mice. And my assumption was the fraction of that happens in humans. We got the first dietary intervention that can really become medicine or an addition to medicine. And now six years after and 18 clinical trials after, we have a lot of fascinating data on what prolonged fasting can do to the body. So when USC and Baltimore were transitioning from mice data, you can fast mice and water, but they went to human and the first trial was on cancer. It was basically trying to start cancer before you hit it with chemo. And Mayo Clinic and USC were doing the trial and it took them one and a half years to recruit six people because nobody wanted to fast for five days or four days. It was too difficult. And this is where they wrote to the NIH, they showed the mice data which was, I believe again, beyond anything medicine has seen from a cure rate of many chronic disease and mice. And they asked the FDA to support to develop the fasting mimicking diet, meaning let's feed this body a formulation that does not get recognized by the undercrime and the cellular system of food recognition. So it's a formulation of food that you can eat that the patient would eat over four or five days. And the body is not recognizing the food, but for the body is fasting. And I'm pretty sure that it does want to know how and how it works. So it's two ways you recognize two ways, two major pathways where or ways that the body recognizes food. When you eat, fat doesn't spike anything in the blood but mainly carbs spike insulin. It's a growth factor and it's, you bring a source of calories and instant rice to take it to the cell until the cell you can grow. And you eat protein and you increase IGF, insulin-like growth factor. These are two undercrime ways to tell the body from a systemic standpoint that hey, there's one of the two, you know, nutrient elements in the body, therefore we're good, we're not fasting, we're, we're, so one of the major determinants of the fasting mimicking nutrition is the, the level of proteins, it's a plant-based sequence of proteins that does not and the sequence of amino acid that do not spike IGF and complex carbs. And again, there's a lot of secrets into combination that do not spike insulin. So when you consume the fasting mimicking diet, you barely have a mild, long plateau of IGF and insulin, therefore the body does not feel that spike and from an undercrime system there's no recognition on the food. And when you get to the cells, the cell recognizes nutrients through PKA, RAS and the TOR pathways. If you remember the TOR pathway response to the protein, mainly PKA and RAS to the carbs, but they inter, inter, intermingle within the cell. So how can you go through these pathways but not hyperactivate them so that they're like, the cell is, is being nourished but not enough to be satisfied. And to put this into, to, to, in a non-scientific way is, is, I always give the example of this CEO that has a company and he needs two million dollars per month, like a buddy needing 2,000 calories say to, to operate, wait. Any locality diet will give you less than 2,000 or 2 million dollars, so say 1,600 or you give that CEO a million point six. The bank drops a little bit, it's a weight loss normal diets, weight loss, the bank drops and, and you know, this is how you move forward. Fasting you come and you give that CEO zero dollars. And you can see you have a CEO with zero dollars, the bank account drops by 2 million, which you lose fast, fast, fast. It's great, right? 73% of Americans are overweight, they could benefit. We could benefit from that. But you can see how the deficit is so big that that CEO is not going to just wait for the bank account to drop every month by 2 million, he's going to go and fix the company. He's going to go cut any unnecessary expenditure, he's going to, maybe let go some people are not working well, he's going to optimize, this is, he's not going to tolerate something going wrong as a survival vote, and that's exactly what out of Asia in the body is and what happens. So the fasting in the weekend diet basically comes to that CEO, but you can understand if you give zero dollars to the CEO, he's also going to make, there are some decisions that are going to be negative, meaning if you're a super starting employee and you see the company has no money, you're going to leave that company. If the CEO doesn't have money to order supplies for next month, he's not going to be able to sell and get revenues next month. So pure water fast for many days has positives and negatives, and all the fasting bloggers, they talk about positive, they don't talk about negatives, there's a lot of negatives when you have zero calories to do, but we lived on food, people, our body needs mineral macro and micro nutrients, and to survive and to thrive, and so when you do water fast, you do a lot of good and you do some damage as well. Same way that CEO next month is not going to have supplies, not going to have his best employee, cannot fund his IT, etc. The fasting mimicking light is ideal here, because you come to that CEO, he'd need two million dollars, I'm going to give you 800,000 dollars. So he can at least cover his basics, but he still has a stress of 1.2 million, that's enough of a stress for him also to jump and fix. So what we do with the fasting unit, we give enough nutrition to maintain, sustain, and even to fund the regime nation while at the same time keeping the high stress of the restructure and the autophagy. And that has been like a perfect balance of putting stress without the damage if you want, which is better than water fast, and of course, you know, better than keeping the overweight and or the health conditions that we're trying to study on. So that's truly awesome, I really appreciate and of course appreciate the finance analogies, I think that that kind of helps keep it together a little bit. Still follow up questions I want to ask you, just so I'm going to restate just so for the listener, if they didn't keep, you know, follow along there. The purpose of the FMD here was really to what won from an effectiveness standpoint, again, no food for five days is tremendously intimidating and that's not something they could get somebody to sign up for, but the idea is to one, keep those responses mimic, you know, the response we're fasting, but they're had to this key point that there's a special sequence of amino acids. So we're trying to keep that IS, you know, insulin IGF growth factor or insulin like growth factor, trying to keep that low that is that my understanding that correctly? Yeah, it's it's a full macron microtrans for five days, so basically in order to get it delivered to your house, we eat day one, day two, day three, day four, day five. And the entire nutrition is based on sequences of protein that would not spike your IGF, complex carbs that get absorbed slowly and by the time they get to the blood and into the cell, they don't spike insulin nor pk or wrath pathways. And there's high healthy fat because fats are, they don't spike any of the food recognition pathway. When you eat fat health, especially healthy fat, this is like just, you know, it's food, it's a brain like keto like, you know, food for the brain, but nothing gets spiked from fat. So the secret is you get high healthy fat, you get controlled low protein, but plan based with specific sequence of amino acid that doesn't spike IGF and you get control carbs plus the minerals and vitamins and everything else you need for the day. You eat over five days and your body thinks you're fasting for five days, although you're eating for five days. Now why five days, can we do four, can we do six? That's a great question. That's my second podcast after they have the same question, so maybe it's not such a good question. No, it's a great question. People always think about it. So if you go below five days and let's say you do two or three days, then you barely touching on autophage. You remember to hear the goal is to, and the product is called prolon if people are asking like what is the product, it's called P-R-O-L-O, and so if prolon was only two days, then most people wouldn't even touch autophagy, right? And three days or four days, you barely get one day, and many people get an autophagy on day four because they have enough reserves in their body, they have enough, they can sustain the three days, they have a low metabolic rate. So five days ensures that most people doing prolon actually would get to certain level of autophagy while, of course, they lose a lot of weight doing the, on average, you lose, if you're a woman, you lose around five point two pounds, if you're a male, you lose close to that seven, eight pounds within just five days. So in, there's one of the secrets here, our reveal is it protects lean body mass. So the biggest challenge, another issue, another passion of mine, besides diabetes controversy that of accelerating diabetes with the pills, is the dieting cycles. And I'm against, you know, on and off dieting because the problem is every time you diet, you lose weight, which is great, but you lose muscle at the same time because the first thing the body goes to is liver and muscle before fat, right? So we lose muscle and then guess what, we go off diet because the diet industry wants us to diet every day, and then one day you're undiet, one day you're off diet, and when you're off diet, you gain back your weight. Now the locality diets, they slow your metabolism and you lose muscle, then guess what happens, you pick up fat faster. So you're swapping every cycle of on and off diet and you're swapping muscle with fat. And that's the, that's the dangerous prescription to get closer to an overweight in a prediabetes setting. What's unique about fasting is that you don't lose the body mass because fasting, you remember, works by stress, not by calorie deficit. The stress of the CEO, if you give that CEO 1.8 million, he's not going to fix it. If you give him that 800,000 or zero, this is what you're going to, the stress of fixing out-of-age is a response to an acute stress of calorie deficit, not a prolonged stress. This is why ketogenic diet, if you do it every day, you don't hear much about out-of-age or rejuvenation with the ketogenic diet because it's soft. It's a soft level of fasting and there's enough proteins in the ketogenic diet. So the body is just bouncing in and out of ketosis like, okay, I'm super low on carb. That's a big deficit. I'm one of my sources of calories, but I have enough proteins. I should not be fasting because the tour pathway is triggered and IGF is high, what to do. The chronic ketogenic diet is a confusing setting for the body. But again, any diet you do today, unless you exercise, is your potentially losing muscle and decreasing metabolic rate to swap it, unless you do high protein diet and you're at the gym all the time. In what I like about fasting in the fasting mimicking diet, and we have a patent filed in a full trial on athletes on the fasting mimicking diet showing that it protects your limb body mass. You have stress, stress increased cortisol and growth hormone. So therefore, you have a pro muscle and muscle tone. So the muscle rejuvenating, you have out of IG happening and you have a growth hormone making sure that the muscle tone and the muscle function is protected. This is not sci-fi, this is exactly what the body has learned to do for hundreds of thousands of years. But there's no food, the body wants to turn fat into ketos to keep the brain up because if you faint, it will be exterminated. And growth hormone has a stress to keep the muscle tone up because if you don't walk, you're not going to find the next food. So we're just harvesting what nature has built into us with fasting. And this is, again, the third element I like about fasting, it just comes from nature, from human evolution. It's not a new artificial imposition, there's 600 diets out there and each one of them takes you away from your homestatic human evolution pathway. Fast interjecting back, fasting into our life is actually rematching our body with human evolution. And the body knew what to do is to store when there's food and then you use the storage and you rejuvenate when there was no food. And when we lost that practice of rejuvenate when there was no food 40, 50 years ago and we had abundance of food, we started accelerating our aging, becoming overweight, diabetes increase, cardiovascular increase, cancer increase, Alzheimer's increase, despite spending four trillion dollars, all of them are increasing in our life span. We just lost 0.4 years of lifespan in the U.S., so nothing is working to us in general. Dr. Anton, I do want to specify a point. You mentioned for preservation of lean body mass that fasting doesn't tend to affect that. I do remember reading a meta analysis maybe a couple of months ago, I think it was like in 2019 in one of the international obesity journal, I think, and London or something. And in that study that they had showed, they had compared for obese individuals both intermittent energy restriction and continuous energy restriction and ultimately it was looking at weight loss. I think this was a meta analysis. But I remember specifically the IER group, they did not hold on to lean body mass as much. So when you say that, are you specifically referring to fasting and making that pro long time? Yeah. Yeah. There's a big buzz around, oh, it's autophagy. It is not. It's just skipping one meal. And by the way, it is why the recent data on the rich fasting doesn't even show a lot of weight loss because people binge eat after it's it's it's right. If you practice it right and the way to practice intermittent fasting right is not to skip in the morning as much as to skip the night before, meaning eat early, eat your dinner early, spend your 12 hours and then eat something in the morning, all the all the skipping breakfast trials. They don't show you longevity from doing that. This is why you accompany a fasting with food, not fasting with absolute because food is important. You know why you lose weight if you skip breakfast because in the morning you have a high demand on calorie, you're thinking versus sleeping, you're moving. If you go to the gym and you're at work and you're so you need calories, but guess what for the essential organs, your brain, your heart, your kidneys and you need to nourish it. So this is why we do it with food with same example at that CEO that I gave you. You've got to finance the operation of your body while hey, if you can keep some positive stress, like you said, autophagy happens all the time in the body if you can skew a bit more of this autophagy and make it happen and rejuvenate your body while you're eating best the optimists. Yeah, absolutely. One of our one of our previous guests episode 31, Dr. Amy Shaw talks about it in terms of circadian fasting, right? So exactly what you mentioned, eating in the morning, it's more respective to our biology and then cutting it at night, right? So we study centenarians, people living under and beyond and one of the most common factors, no one of them does 16 hours of water fast or 18 hours of water per day. But all of them they sleep early, they wake up, you know, and they eat something in the morning, but they do that circadian 12 years circadian, again, we go back. I'm a bit proponent of rematching your body with what your body has evolved to do and until we discovered, you know, electricity and Uber eats and Netflix and late nights thing, we were sleeping early and sleep is important. We say, oh, sleep is important for your brain. Sleep is important for every for the for the clock of every organ. And that was the, we talked about the Nobel Prize in Medicine on autophagy 2016, 2017 was the Nobel Prize on the biological clock of every organ. So you should not be eating late at night because then your entire GI system is up and your entire brain is up and every part of your body is now in anabolic state and you can see that a lot of people when they eat and sleep, they even dream, they have bad dreams and so and reflux and all of that. So if you really want your entire body to sleep, you have to eat early and then sleep after a few hours and then try to have something in the morning, that's a better circadian for our fast, then to go back to the muscle, yeah, it's a prolonged fast, it's a fasting mimicking diet that preserve lean money mass and we do have a trick there for lean body mass by the way, some people say, how come you have in your soups a little bit high carbs at night and this is one of our secrets is when you give a little bit of a small spike of insulin at night before you sleep, you actually and the growth hormone is high from the stress of fasting, that combination protects the muscle and this is a big difference that we have between, and we have a full article where in the months we've tried to publish on that for athletes, we went all the way not just to normal people, normal people, we showed that it went male athletes doing the pro and fasting mimicking diet to preserve. Dr. Antiet, I also want to ask, what's the optimal frequency for FMD per year? So the FMD you guys are familiar with here is an acronym but it's a fasting mimicking diet or roll-on, the answer is, again, it depends, we don't want to generalize, but I'll give you like three or four profiles, if you're saying you're 30s or low 40s, relatively young, you're not kind of a pre-disease or like, you know, or indicators to burn fat faster with how it's not that slow, and you want to do it mainly for rejuvenation. What I'm trying to say is you don't have a health call in mind and you're not overweight at that, you know, if you're active, you can do just two to three times a year, and this is a very, there are a few CEOs that will tell you, you can only do my diet two or three times a year rather than every day, right? And this is where people, so I have a movement that trusts us and follows us. And you just need to do it two or three times a year if you're resident at a hospital, if you're a doctor, young doctor, or in your cell active, just two to three times per year. And by the way, we have 14,000 clinicians registered with us, they provide parole on and their clinics. And the number one consumer is that most people have done over 20 cycles of parole are actually physicians and nurses and in dietitians. So now if you say, hey, I'm between 40 and 65, this is the pre-disease state, I started feeling aging, I'm not taking easily off the weight that I'm carrying, and this is the pre-cancerous, pre-diabetes, pre-acute heart attack, acute cardiovascular event. This is where maybe you want to do it four times a year, and if you have more weight to shed, or your pre-condition, then you can do it a little bit more frequent. But this is where we touched the four times. Now we just finished two trials on diabetes, one on diabetic kidney that we just published, it was done at Hyde and Burick University in Germany, and we published it actually three years ago, three days ago, at Journal of Clinical On the Chronology, we're showing that if you do, if you have early damage on the kidney, and you're showing microalbumrea, if you do six cycles, so when you get to health condition, we touch the six cycles per year. And if you're starting a diabetic kidney, six cycles is where we want to do. We just finished another trial, randomized retotrial in Holland and late in one of the biggest hospital systems there, showing that if you do roll on six times per year, you're increasing your risk of or chance of remission and regression from the disease by 700% versus current medicine. So a few diabetic, the protocol was once a month, most people did it six to eight months, but it was once a month, diabetes patients randomized it on metformin, they were randomized into two arms, and they were seen by their doctors up to one year. So at 12 months, we look at who needed more medicine, who would just stay on metformin and who were reversed. And the chance of needing less medicine was 700% more for the folks who did five days only per month of fasting and making diet versus the ones who just had the normal diabetes education or health education. What's the age group for that cohort that you mentioned? It was variable. I don't remember exact, but it wasn't it wasn't a 90-year-old, yeah, I see, okay. That's pretty profound. You said that one's already published or that's still under way under way, one of these were published wasn't diabetic kidney. Gotcha. The other question I wanted to come back to your point about, you know, you mentioned lean mass preservation, depending on the type of carbohydrates that they're taking with the prolonged diet. And it begs the question of whether or not that acute period of five days affects performance at all, you know, because in my world, I take care of a lot of athletes in sports medicine and I know that's something that they're not going to tolerate. I know we've been spending a lot of time talking about just healthy aging and just, you know, looking 30, 40 years down the road, but in the acute phase, you're mentioning even within a year, we're seeing tremendous events or effects for health. So is that something that you guys have looked at internally or there are studies in that five day period, if that affects performance at all? Yeah, actually, I told you the muscle protection was done on the main athlete male. So that was interesting. And I'll give you some secrets, I mean, you know, God protect his soul, but Kobe Bryant used to do it and he used to take peptides after. So a lot of the big athletes that do parole on, they basically do it either during the resting phase or when they have an injury or the off season or the preseason and they follow with peptides. They do hybrid because the cells are primed, they're rejuvenated, they're primed, you give them protein right after on day six onwards. And a lot of them report that they're doing bench press that they've never reached before or they're running fast or the sky team, the Olympic winners of the UK team, the cyclists, they do parole on to protect the muscle and, you know, these guys, they have to cut the last fat so that the weight on the bicycle is not impacting their speed. There's a lot of, there's a, the NFL Hall of Fame was wanted to endorse for a lot of Hall of Famers to parole on so, so actually when you come to an athlete and say, hey, you should fast, they're like, no, I just, I just should eat protein six times a day, I should never fast. And it's actually the opposite, by the way, because two things needs to happen. These people instead of growing muscle by tearing and accelerating their aging by eating six times proteins every day, they should compensate for that high IGF state by doing cycles of fasting. In the cycles of fasting, they should do, again, if you do intermittent, you're just cutting your muscle and losing it metabolically. The fasting mimicking diet keeps that stress high and keeps feeding minimal their muscle in their body. So they actually protect them by the mass and they only cut fat. And, and that's very important. This is a concept that we're launching very soon. We call it balancing long and strong. You want to be strong as an athlete, but the problem you're, you're curbing if you're hyperproteinisated, I personally call it diabetes of protein, where all have been bombarded by eat protein high. As many times per day, this is all good. The number one reason for acceleration of cancer risk is the IGF spike, there are many articles showing that it's this protein intake that spike cancer, because when you spike IGF, you're pushing yourselves to replicate. And once, once you're between that age 40 and 60 enough, it sells to respond to IGF. They still are young enough to replicate, but then all enough to do a mistake is where the cancer risk spikes. And this is why you see cancer more between that age than at 85. You don't diet 85, 90 from cancer, but you diet 60 and 50 from cancer. Is that balance of all enough for a cell to do a mistake and become cancerous, but it's still young enough to respond to an IGF spike and replicate that triggers cancer. And these things, you were not here at any medical, but these are things that we learned by doing the right, you know, the right study on what happens and why, why cancer spikes happen. And we just, our father wrote a long, just published an article, a meta-analysis on IGF. You will be interested in this, if your sports medicine, aficionado, three months ago, we published a meta-analysis on IGF. What is the ideal IGF number so that you balance strong and long? You want, the theory of eating protein, high protein every day, if that works, we will all be like Roni Coleman, like, because we eat a lot of protein, we train, and then we barely increase every six months a little bit, right? So you're paying the price, but you're accelerating aging every day. Every day you're boosting your IGF insulin, and every day you're accelerating aging for a slight gain in muscle mass. And so what we're trying to say is, first, you don't need to accelerate, there's a diminishing marginal return on having a high state of IGF for a muscle standpoint. So what is that healthy, incremental increase that is good for your muscle, without overexceeding that, because otherwise you're just pushing aging for no return on your muscle, and that's not the zone that's going to be at. So you mentioned high protein. If you could put some numbers on it, like, what do you mean by high when you say that, or? Again, it goes back to the BMI and the person in the colon objective. But the WHO would say, you know, 0.7, 0.8 is what you want to be. If you're an active person, you want to go touch to 1, 1.1, but these levels of two and three and four, unless you're like going for misted Olympia, we believe these are just super high acceleration of aging with super low margin return on muscle. Otherwise you'll be... So if you're a trans per kg or a trans per pound, with those numbers, per pound, okay. Per pound. The kg would be 0.35, 0.35, yeah, go. So now we're recommending the protein industry who wants you to drink the protein and diet on protein every day, wants you to go for these high numbers. But again, we're saying, look in front of you, are people getting buff every month? No, they need time, they need to exercise. So therefore there's a decreased margin return. And by the way, the ones who are getting very buff are dying young, right, Roni Coleman will ask them at age 55. It's very well known if you think about acromicol, for example, these people naturally have high growth hormone and IGF and it's well-published that they lose 10 years of their life, right? Acromicol, if folks, and even if you create models and mice with high IGF, they die out of cancer. So it's clear that high protein, high carb, meaning insulin, it's a leg growth factor. They're both growth factors. We grow forward with aging and therefore if you have high insulin, high IGF, they're both as bad as good when they're always high in terms of accelerating aging and getting the onset of growth. So I've read the longevity diet by Walter Longo, right? He makes a point in terms of the, I believe it's the U-shaped curve with protein, right? So when you're younger, you kind of want to hire intake, and I think you can correct me when I found Ron here in terms of the ages, but about up to 50 years old, but you're at me. Yeah. When you're younger, after 65, you want to go back on high protein, why? Because again, your cells are too old to respond with an application in the risk of cancer decrease. But you're having absorption issues, muscle becomes an organ of flungeria that age you need to move, you need to keep active. So after age 65, the body responds to protein in terms of IGF is anyhow low. The risk of cancer gets a little bit lower and you have more, you know, you want to preserve muscle as much as possible that age. So the ratio of risk return starts flipping after that age 65, and we recommend, like you said, if you're young, you can have high protein, you need to grow physically and muscle and all that. And you have low risk of cancer and diabetes and heart attack at that age. And you're 65, same thing, between that 40 to 65 age is when it's tricky, you're pre-acute onset of cancer and cardiovascular events. And this is where it's important for us to balance, again, long and strong, rather than being high protein. Yeah. Absolutely. And we're not, I think, just saying too much protein is like too much carb. And I call it a diabetes approach. Right. Would you would you change your opinion for those who are weightlifting at least or are you still saying that number should hold true regardless of who it is? Again, I always say it depends on if you grow as to weightlif and build muscle, of course you're going to be at a higher level. But this is what I say, then do cycles of fasting and making so that you counterbalance. You're not cutting on your muscle, you're not losing on your muscle, but you're counterbalancing the IGF state so that at least you give yourself a rejuvenation chest instead of, if you're eating six needs a day and you're weightlifting, right, you're not, you're probably doing less out of it than you need because you just pro-growth, pro-growth, pro-growth, pro-growth all day and your body is not correcting and you're growing muscle out of tears rather than of rejuvenation or rejuvenation. And you want to make sure that this person stays strong and build muscle, but at the same time, that's how you look. Yeah. I mean, that makes tremendous amount of sense to me, Dr. Anton. I am going to push back a little bit though. I think that a lot of what we've been talking about is thriving versus surviving, right? And so when we look at the World Health Organization or the RDA, I mean, I think RDA is maybe 0.7 or maybe now 0.8 grams per kilogram and World Health Organization, I just looked it up as 0.8 grams per kilogram. We also know that protein is not very efficient for at least for our body to mobilize it. But certainly less efficient than carbohydrates, right, in terms of quick mobilization of resources. What we also know is that when we're looking at in your latter years, right, we're talking 50, 60, almost every adult in that age group is dealing with some forms of sarcopenia, right? Even younger than that. And Darshan and I were both physiatrist and what we often see as individuals, medicine is very, very good in prolonging life, but not necessarily prolonging health, hence your whole passion about this whole conversation, really. And so when we see adults in their later years, they cannot afford to lose muscle, right? And so obviously that you ship currently, you guys talking about the more muscle you can hold on to as you get later in your, the less frail you're going to be, the less likely you're going to bounce back from injury and falls and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, those like 0.83 grams per kilogram recommendation, I think my understanding is essentially for survival. And when we're talking about keeping as much muscle or maximizing muscle protein synthesis, so we can actually build muscle, which tends to be a metabolic sink later in our years to help with diabetes, all the things that you mentioned, why not try to maximize that, right? And so for me, that number would be probably closer to that one point, depending on how, again, depends on how active you are and that one point, sorry, go ahead. No, and what you're saying, you know, makes sense, but again, we're all brainwashed that, oh, you want to build muscle, you need more protein. Well, I would tell you, let the person at age 50 exercise with 0.8 to 1, and you'll see that he's going to keep his muscle and he's not going to be suffering at age 50. So, yeah. Absolutely. Okay. And again, 50, 55, we're touching to that 60, 65, but what the difference is that I don't think you need much more protein, hey, one gram maybe, but I'm not, what I'm trying to say, you don't need that person to be 1.52 or 2.5 to gain muscle or to preserve their muscle. He needs to exercise with the health condition, with the healthy, with the healthy diet that, hey, at getting close 50, 55, 60, yeah, maybe 1, 1, put this, what I said, after 65, you have to be a little bit higher. Absolutely. Yeah, I know there's, there's probably no single intervention that a person can take. I mean, obviously, it depends on background and what they're doing. Then if you have a complete center to individual, and if Darshan, I talk about this, when there's a pillar of health that we look at, exercise implementing that regimen in terms of both morbidity and mortality, there's no other thing that they can do as much as we can talk about the different types of protocols here. So I certainly agree with you, and that's a passion of mine for sure. You brought up the other points of, of course, I think when you get to that physiological rate, upper end of and beyond physiological ranges of 2.53, and we brought up some of these bodybuilders who we should highlight that a lot of them have publicly declared that they're using, you know, other substances, which allows their body to process all these differently than the average individual who is not using drugs of any sort to do that. And of course, that's going to completely change the physiology of how the body interprets. So that's also something to keep in the back of our minds. Yeah, and also the source of the protein, right? So we talk about the sequence of iron acid, and this is what defines the difference between meat and plant-based source of protein. I don't know if you guys watch the game changer, and I think one of the smartest bodybuilders with the Arnold Schwarzenegger, they learn all these things that is like thinking more about his longevity today, while not compromising his muscle mass. So I think, and this is always, this discussion we're having now always happens between longevity. Where is that borderline between longevity and strong muscle weight? We all want a strong muscle in and I think, I think, I think this is the limit is the point eight, sorry, per kilo, because every pound is 2.2, something's still so per kilo, all the way to one, say 1.2, if you want to push it forward, what we, let's agree on something that you don't need two or three to stay strong, you probably need to exercise more on another one to 1.2, rather than getting 2.3 and H faster for another lot of more gains in the muscle. And then it depends on the person, if you want to look really strong at age 50, then you got to go a little bit more on a protein, if you just want to look clean and fit in one of the cries, your risk of cancer at that age and because your parents both have cancer. The answer is always it depends, is what we're trying to say, no one in my family that have cancer and I want to still build muscle at age 55, then I agree with you, you got to leave a little bit more on the protein. Yeah, absolutely, anecdotally here speaking, I'm Jane, so I picked the right parents and I'm sure you know, David Sinclair is studying the James of India in terms of longevity and so my one gram will live to 109 and the other is 91. But being Jane, being vegetarian, very low protein diet, I mean, I even look my parents now and I'm like, hey, let's at least get you to that 0.5.6 and such a struggle for them. But how much of that is actually just James playing a role? I mean, my 91 year old grandma can probably walk a mile or two and I think it also comes back to just that idea of exercising and being functional, right? Not necessarily just weightlifting, but throughout the day walking instead of just sitting all day, increasing your need. And so those things I'm starting to realize is also a huge factor here. So again, this is anecdotally speaking, but a low protein diet at least from my end, from being Jane doesn't seem to at least affect that much. But again, is that optimal? Is the question, I always think what if they, you know, increase their protein a little bit with their function have gotten better? And I know something that Walter Longer talks about in the longevity diet is eating what your grandparents ate, right? Eating those types of foods. Can you speak to that at all? Yeah, and it's mainly rematching, you know, why we have a pancreas of size X, why we have, you know, we're tailored with evolution. We're tailored with how we interacted with, with, with nature. And the more you deviate from this, the more you're going to see something going wrong, right? And, and so humanity lived around rivers. I know this crazy theories were cavemen, I mean, there's no water, no food in a cave. We slept in a cave just to protect ourselves at night, but we lived around rivers. In not around oceans, the ocean water, you cannot drink it. The water you can drink, which was essential to life as rivers, in around rivers where the highest density of trees, of grass, of fruits, of vegetables, of legumes, of, of things you can eat. And this is why we, as humans, lived most of our existence and, and plant earth where the plant-based diet and fish was the only animal that couldn't fly or run or, you know, it was easy to fish. So it was plant-based plus fish, and that's the pescatarian diet. And then with time, we, we evolved and we learned how to hunt and we started evolving meat, we started evolving meat in our, in our food. So, so somewhere between that pescatarian slash flexitarian is probably what would rematch our body with, with the longevity aspect. Now, again, if you want to go a little bit more flexitarian and, or my training add a little bit more meat for, you know, muscle reasons, you can go there, but if you, if you ask me, what is probably the most matched diet with longevity, pure longevity, I would say the flexitarian slash pescatarian one, which is rematching our body with, with, with our body has optimized to consume and live with. Faxitarian, I love that. I'm going to be still in that, by the way, of course, you know, give the appropriate credit. Is that, is that something you came up with or? No, I think, I think it was a cornered first of Harvard flexitarian, meaning your pescatarian, but you add a little bit of meat now, if you add more meat, then you're Mediterranean. So, if you're a little bit more flexible, that you're a pescatarian, but flexible, which is what I am actually? Love it. Yeah. So, you know, I think that just the discussion over the last hour, and hopefully people have gotten a sense of the nuance that it takes to communicate, you know, these different types of diets and discussion, and I'll tell you what, you know, I've been doing this for quite some time, although I'm probably in my infancy when it comes to medicine, but I think that I did have a life before that. And so, the aspect of nutrition and fasting, you know, again, intermittent fasting really got big in the fitness realm a lot sooner than it did in the medical realm. And so, this is something that I've had a pulse on for quite some time. But the same respect, you know, I found, I find this discussion of nutrition, and I think we could probably agree, it's the most polarizing and the most complex discussion to have at an individual level, but also when we're talking about public health, right? I mean, just a new study comes out, the media will take a catchy message and put it up there, and then people will gravitate towards that. And so, every week or two weeks, or I'll get something somebody sending me, what do you think about this? What are your thoughts about this? And to me, the answer is very much, well, it depends. It's a strategy. It could work. I don't know. And so, you have spent a great deal of time, of course, doing the research, but also the public health messaging, studying as some particular institutions. How do you approach this? You know, having conversation with the masses, but also at an individual level, really communicating the nuance behind nutrition? First and foremost, nutrition is the only product we put in our body every day of our life since they were born to the day we die. And so, for me, I left medicine for nutrition because I felt it must be a bigger medicine than medicine, or a bigger signal, right? It's going to impact our epigenetics, and it's going to impact every cell of our body. There's nothing, there's no pill I can take today that can impact literally everything as much as nutrition does. So, first and foremost, it's very important to do nutritional education at early stage of life. And, not what we currently do, which is eat healthy and lose weight, it's much more than that. It's literally medicine. It's literally going to define your longevity. The biggest signal, the two biggest signals after all my career looking at longevity, two biggest signals of longevity is nutrition and social capital, or the love, the purpose, purposefulness and life, the meditation, the family, the values. All this is probably equal to nutrition because a lot of the sentinaries we study, they don't eat healthy. A lot of them, they smoked for until 800, a lot of them ate the animal fat, but a lot of them, but most of them were happy, they were living in their village with their family. And that serenity, that happiness, that purposefulness is a key as well. So, going back to nutrition, it's important to look at nutrition as one of the biggest determines of how healthy and long we're going to live. It's very important to teach nutrition beyond, you know, just lose weight or gain weight. It's very important to make the nutrition clean, which is a better nutrition, whether it's from good and perspective, from a car perspective, from a sourcing perspective, from a regenerative farming perspective, but it's very important to go beyond now, just clean and healthy inputs to how can we use nutrition as medicine and nutrition as a tool for longevity. This is where we come as a neutral, the longevity through nutrition is what we call a neutral. And this is where we're saying, well, it's beyond just a better ingredient or a better sourcing is how can we send specific nutritional signals to our muscles, our brain, our longevity, our epigenetics, and guide nutrition to help us rematch our body with its potential and live a healthy, a longer life. And on top of that, if you're sick, how can we use truly food as medicine? And once we uncover the power of fasting and the stress it's put, it puts on the body as a survivor to fix itself, this is what allowed us to kind of lead that food as medicine phenomenon. So, to answer your question, this is all the five angles we have to come back to society and teach nutrition literally from early stages of school. And if I'm a policymaker, I'll put much more money into randomized control. The problem with nutrition is that in medicine, you do have the aides, rals, there's clear labels, clear claims. In nutrition, every day, everybody wants to send you a book and an idea and they come in. And it's a disrespect. This is why we in medicine also, the alopathic medicine crowd. It's not like where this regarding nutrition has medicine, but it's just, it's a mess, right? And where it's a mess, it's just, he's stay away from it. So, it's important to gain, to put more regulations around what you can say in nutrition and who says what, in, in not like every guy every day, if he has a million followers and he consumed them on fitness, now he's going to jump on nutrition and give theories in nutrition and tie them towards something. You know, all of you guys, you should eat meat today, you know, and so, so how can we put more regulations and how can we fund more clinical trials, which is the NIH is doing that. I mean, we're, we're one of the most funded company by the NIH or projects, we have over 20 million dollars in our trials from the NIH and we're not a pill or a biotech, we're just in the nutrition, we're more in the nutrition than the biotech, and so how can we do more, how can we elevate the role of nutrition, put more regulations around what can be said and, and put more money in our domestic trials to figure out the truth because like you said, there's no clear truth in here, you know, about what's level of proteins we need to who, to which person, if they're sick or not, if they're 40, if they're 20, if they're 70, and we've got to figure out those. What I can tell you is everything I told you was based on clinical trials that we do in or trials that I've read. I don't give a lot of attention to theories coming up every day, it's just, just for being theories and I always follow common sense of rematching my buddy with my buddy, it was evolved to do, and I try to add more science to that rather than go with deviations and things can always work, especially with longevity, deviations have, help you with short term, you know, if you have diabetes, you have neurogym, you have seizures, you do ketogenic diet, yeah, you do, you want ketones to your brain if you have, you know, issues on the short term, and you want to drop carbs on the ketogenic life, you're diabetic, but it's not a longevity diet. So you deviate and same like pill, pill destabilize the body with accentuating a receptor on statins or tour, or it's a destabilization for a special, special service, and this is where we should deviate from nutrition, but otherwise for homestatic longevity, you want to go back to your longevity potential, rematch your body with how it, it was tailored to deal with food. Yeah, I think to your point about how messy nutritional science could be, I mean, that can really appreciate that, and it's messy for just scientists and physicians and really anybody in this space who've been trained to do with that. So I really feel for the quote unquote lay population who aren't routinely involved as, or haven't gotten the exposure. You take that and compound it with the fact that again, as you mentioned, there's very little education provided to the people who are at the forefront, who are the perceived experts, right, when patients go see their physician, even if it's for a well-care visit or preventative care, and they're really isn't much of that conversation other than just eat healthier. I think about, sorry, this is a little tangent, but I think about a recent survey, I shout out to precision nutrition, which is a tremendous company, online nutritional company, one of the largest ones, and recently they put a survey out talking about, you know, majority of the individuals, their struggle isn't about, you know, what to eat. Most people know that, and you mentioned this at the outset, it's really about emotional eating or cravings and that kind of stuff, that burger that you said immediately when you're seeing when you have this hunger pain coming and, you know, behavior aspects, much of what you started with. And I guess the optimistic part about this whole situation is, you know, you're mentioning that because of these conversations, more attention is being paid to this, and therefore a lot of these NIH and bigger institutions are going to fund it, and that's where maybe we can iron out the data a little bit and make that messaging clear. I also want to ask you, I mean, just because of the holistic approach that you've taken to this conversation, and I'd be remiss not to ask you about some of the other signals of longevity. I mean, we touched on exercise a little bit, we've talked a lot about nutrition. What are other things that, when you think about, aside from things that we discussed, you know, healthy aging, 60, 70s, 80s, 90s, maybe even in the hundreds, things that people should be cognizant above, or levers that we can pull to promote that longevity aspect, vitality aspect, if you will? Well, I always talk about the five pillars, you know, nutrition being number one, exercise number two, stress number three, sleep number four, and then again, that social capital that received the happiness, the receiving giving love, the family, the stability, the safety, the, and I always think it's nutrition and that fifth factor compete for number one. Because we've seen a lot of centimeters not eating healthy, we've seen a lot of people healthy at age 90, but they don't eat healthy, but they happen, and I think that level of serenity of purposefulness, of happiness, and you see that in the monks, you see that in religious people that, you know, on average, actually longer than on religious people, you see that serenity probably is calming all the hormones of the body and a lot of the distressing, and it's actually the pillar, maybe of all the other four pillars, meaning you eat healthier when you're happier, you sleep better, you stress less, and you have energy to exercise, right? So maybe that's actually foundational aspect of the other four pillars as well, but these are the five pillars that have to commend people focus on to live a healthy, long life. Awesome. Well, Dr. Anton, I mean, this has been tremendously educational for me, and I think, you know, I really want to thank you for coming on here and for educating us, but also really, again, using the nuance that we talked about to kind of communicate this clearly, I think that that's well needed, and I'm also excited about all the research that you guys are doing. Before we let you go, we want to know where people can find you. If they want to connect with you, what's the best way, how do they get in touch? So, I'm mostly active on LinkedIn, Joseph Anton, and I do have a presence on Instant Facebook, but mainly LinkedIn. If you want to track us through our company and our mission, what we do, lneutra.com, l-neutra, and utra.com, and if you want to try Prolon the five days fasting, we can try it. This is what I really recommend is giving it a try. It's only five days, and you can go to ProlonFast.com or ProlonFMD.com, FMD for fasting mimicking diet, or follow us on social there. If you love fasting and you want to talk fasting, there's a Facebook group called Fasting Nation. Fasting Nation is a fasting nation. There's over 25,000 people there talking about fasting about fasting mimicking diet and a lot of Prolon herself. Very cool. And then, Anton Anton, what is next for you? What is next for l-neutra, anything in the near future? Yeah, I'm very passionate about what we're going to do in Q4. I did give you a little bit of snippet on diabetes, so we're going to launch a program for patients with diabetes in Q4 of this year, and then hopefully in Q2 of next year, we're going to launch the first average nutrition for cancer program. So, if you have a few diabetic, what you should eat, if you have cancer next year, what you should eat, and after that, autoimmune disease, and Alzheimer's. We are shocked how there are companies in nutrition with tens of billions of loss of revenue that have not put randomized clinical trials behind food to tell people what they should eat. They have a certain health condition. And a group of experts recently came together and put a position paper they call it disease remission and regression. And it's very important. It opened the door for a lot of credible companies like ours to come and talk about us. Because before, if you say have a program, an nutrition program to reverse a disease, then you're talking medicine, then it's a drug label, and you cannot launch that program. And more recently, they started talking about the potential for companies like ours and programs like ours to talk remission and regression. Meaning, you're not saying I'm reversing disease, you're not saying I'm treating that disease. I'm saying that I'm going to help you to regress from it, or you're going to at least need less. This is regression. Remission meaning you need less medicine, or you're fully out of medicine. So instead of saying I treat the disease which is a drug claim, and all the nutrition companies are bidding from going there, we're saying okay, I'm going to help you need less medication or no medication. And that disease regression and remissions can be a big title for us coming into launching the diabetes program and launching cancer. Well, it looks like we're going to have to get you back on here once those results start coming out with everything on the horizon. So cool. So Dr. Yeah, Dr. And I just want to thank you as well. I mean, everything we talked about can be very complex, right, especially for the audience. But I think you explained everything very beautifully in a very systematic fashion. And so can't thank you enough for everything you're doing, what you're bringing to the field of longevity, health care science itself. So thank you. And then the last question I have for you that we ask everyone is, how do we put the health back in health care? For me, it's this longevity medicine or longevity science that you put back in health and removes sick. I mean, sick, we need, we need the sick part of health care. We need definitely the surgical and the medical and the pill industry. But they should be 20, 30% of health care and 70% of health care should be lifestyle health care. Absolutely. Can you agree more? Dr. Anton, thank you. And engaging the biological age is the unit should be the unit of measurement of health care. We don't have a unit of measurement of health to me. It's biological age because the older you get the higher the chance, so you get a dying soon of one of the four biggest. For sure. And hopefully in the next feature we have a, we have a systematic or a set point where we can actually use a biological clock. So that'd be awesome to see. Thanks, Anton. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, Anton. Thank you. Well, guys, that was an awesome discussion. And I hope it was as informative and stimulating for you as it was for us. Now, if you want to check out more cool things that Dr. Joseph Anton is doing, please be sure to check them out at El Nutra and you can find the links in the show notes. Now, before we sign off, please remember the important disclaimer that everything in this podcast is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute the practice of medicine nor should it be construed as medical advice. No physician patient relationship is informed that anything discussed in this podcast does not represent the views of our employers. We highly recommend that you seek the guidance of your personal physician regarding any specific health related issues. However, if you enjoy the show, please be sure to subscribe, review, and share with anyone who you think will gain value from this as well. Until next time, thank you for listening.