Boost Your Brain Health Through Fasting

Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

Hi, everyone. This is Dr. Joseph Antoun. It's a big pleasure today to have Dr. Joel Fuhrman. Many of you might know Dr. Joel. He's been behind fasting and longevity movements all the way back since the seventies and had a lot of experiences in nutrition and fasting. This is why we called this session the pillars in fasting and longevity. We're going to have an amazing discussion today, a lot of information to share about how to do fasting right, and how to do nutrition right, which is important for our daily longevity lifestyle.

So make sure you listen to this one. Dr. Fuhrman, very, thank you very much for being with us today. My pleasure. Looking forward to this fun talk. Yes. And would you mind doing a personal introduction here a little bit? I know you have decades of experience in nutrition and fasting. Would you would you mind a bit talking about your background and and what led you to this to focus on longevity and fasting? Yes, it was my study of nutritional science and fasting that led me to desire to go to medical school and become a doctor specializing in nutritional medicine.

I actually was on the United States world figure skating team in the early 1970s, and after an injury or I couldn't walk for almost a year, I did an extended water fast to help shrink the calcified deposits in my heel that weren't healing properly. But as I became a physician, I've utilized fasting as a therapeutic tool in my arsenal for the thousands of people that I've facilitated the recovery of people with lupus, with kidney failure, people with chronic headaches, and on I.V. experimental therapies, people who had, you know, extreme psoriasis, and many, many people with asthma addicted to inhalers that couldn't get well until, you know, the diet change.

And then when you actually slowly wean off the inhalers to prevent a re-exacerbation of their asthma, then we start fasting them. So it's a it's a little bit the mechanisms are a little bit in depth. But we're saying here that the body has its own healing tendencies built in innately built into the system. And some of those healing tendencies create inflammation because inflammation is the means at which the body can remove metabolic wastes, both endogenous wastes that build up in the body's tissues and exogenous wastes, which are toxins from the external environment.

So sometimes the exacerbation of an asthma attack or inflamed gut or inflamed joint or inflamed skin could be the efforts of the body to remove waste from the body, and medical care suppresses those waste back inside steroids and immunosuppressive drugs. So they make the body accepting or tolerant to waste. And when you improve the health weaned off the drugs, it could exacerbate a new healing crisis or detoxification event, which is which is usually a an exacerbation of their underlying disease, like an asthma attack or, you know, a break out of their psoriasis or a flare up of the rheumatoid arthritis of the joint And it's that point once they've been eating healthfully for a long period of time, let's say 3 to 6 months, and then we've slowly weaned them off medications.

It's that's when you can intercede, as with therapeutic fasting. And I'm talking about water extended water fasting here as a means to curtail inflammation, shut down the overactive immune response and allow the body to detoxify at a slower pace without using these extraordinary means of elimination that could trigger a crisis. So I've used fasting as a therapeutic tool for more than 35 years. I've written 12 books, including a book on fasting called Fasting and Eating for Health, published in 1996.

And I think and

Fasting, Healing, and Therapeutic Use 4:05

I've had an extreme experience with all types of fasting but and also the precautions and dangers of fasting and who should not fast. Right now I operate and but and you know I've I've had five television shows on public television in addition to my 12 books and seven New York Times bestselling books. So my my bestselling book of all time that sold multiple millions of copies was Eat to Live, which was well known by lots of people. But my most current updated book is called Eat for Life. But I have the end of heart disease, the end of diabetes, the end of dieting, super immunity, fast food genocide.

I have a lot of other books that many people have read. So, I've been very lucky and blessed to have a lot of television exposure and thousands of people. And the real blessing for me is being able to impact the lives of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in a positive way by having my message reach so many people through public television. So that's been really exciting for me. Yeah. And with what you're mentioning is, again, we're talking fasting in the last few decades and for some people is like, is this a new fad or is this a new thing?

And for a lot of us, experts in fasting, is this scientific discovery of what you call the doctor from within. And, you know, for everyone listening in here, you know, thousands of years ago, there was no medicine, there was no and a lot of diseases. What they induce is we lose appetite. And this was one of the ways for our body to go into fasting to awaken the cellular rejuvenation, the cellular detox that Dr. Fuhrman is talking about, to be able better to deal with the disease. I always, always been fascinating with, you know, when you have cancer, sometimes when you have cardiovascular or you have an infection, you have the body expresses itself with loss of appetite.

And we always, you know, know we want to shove the patient with food because we think this is a bad expression of disease. But actually, this could have been one of the evolutionary development with us to help our body fast, rejuvenate, clean, if it's asthma or infection, clean the post acute phase and detoxing. And as you mentioned, it's an intracellular and extracellular. So there is an indigenous and exogenous detoxing that the body does with fasting. So it's it's for everyone listening here.

We're not coming up now with a new theory theory or a new dietary regimen. It's science in the last two or three decades understood focusing on longevity and on nutrition understood the value of fasting, which we have lost in the last 50 years. And this is why we became obese, was why we came chronically inflammated this is why we accelerated our aging rate. And this is why we're hitting Alzheimer's sooner cancer, sooner cardiovascular and diabetes. And now we have we're using fasting both as a prevention for longevity, but also as a medical fact, as Dr. Fuhrman will talk more about to awaken the doctor from the within to enable this power of rejuvenation and detoxing within the body to deal with these conditions.

Right. So, Dr. Fuhrman, I, I want to start with you because you study fasting and also and also longevity. And I'm interested, if you can explain to us a little bit the use of fasting. For one, what are the pillars of longevity, study, fasting and nutrition? What are the pillars of longevity? And how do you use fasting both for longevity and or as a clinical fasting or medical fasting as well? Well, first thing is, it's critically important that people recognize that the primary foundational principle of longevity, the most proven methodology to extend human lifespan, has to do with these five words that people can write down and memorize.

And those five words are moderate caloric restriction in the context of micronutrient excellence. So the five words, again, moderate caloric restriction with micronutrient excellence and what you do daily day in and day and night, I mean, you know, months, to years of your life, how you live your life every day is the primary controller of how fast you age and whether you fast episodically is not the primary controller of your longevity. It's what you eat and that you don't overeat and you eat nutrient rich foods like vegetables and a nutritarian diet.

that I recommend is a vegetable based diet. And let me say to start out right, right now that there's no such thing as a healthy, overweight person that maximal longevity occurs for a female with a BMI between 18 and 21 and for a male between 19 and 22 and the U.S. And that defines and by the way, 89% of Americans have a BMI above 23. So that means 90% of Americans are overweight in an unfavorable category. And only 2.4% of Americans have a favorable have a BMI below 23 because they exercise regularly and they eat healthily.

So that the problem with fasting and the mistake people learning about fasting most often make is they think that they can fast to then undo the damage from their overeating behavior or their unhealthy eating, and they can fast to get back and pay repentance and lose back weight again. And they wind up eating unhealthily and then fasting to make up for it, and then bingeing and overeating and then fasting again. And that is not the formula for longevity. I don't even recommend overweight people with food addictions fast at all because when you have an overweight person who's a food addict, even even intermittent fasting when they're having days where they cut their calories too low, it could binge there.

It makes them emotionally binge and go back to overeating again on the off on the non fasting days and people who do extended water fasting or juice fasting, they often wind up a year, six months to a year later at a heavier weight than they were before they started the fast because the fasting slowed the metabolic rate down so much, that's total fasting, juice fasting or high or heavy intermittent fasting. It's slowed the metabolic rate down so much that now with the same amount of calories they're chronically adapted to, they're going to put on more weight, but they're going up very often because of their stubborn rid themselves of the food addiction.

They binge eat and overeat because we have most people in America eating double the amount of calories humans need, the nutrition Korean diet I recommend, which has a lot, you know, salads and vegetable bean soups and cooked vegetable works and raw vegetables with a dip, you know, in fresh fruits and beans and nuts. In other words, the G bombs, the G bombs, g, b, o mbes represent the six foods with the most scientific evidence for their anticancer and longevity promoting effects. And we want people to eat these too, to structure their diet, to get these foods in every day.

They're not the only foods people eat, but there's really a large portion of the diets, and they are greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries and seeds like flax seeds, chia seeds, sunflower seed, you know, sesame seeds, hemp seeds. But the point I'm making is that the at the foundation of your longevity is consistency in eating healthfully every day and not overeating in moderately undershooting your caloric needs to slow your metabolic rate down because your metabolic furnace is governing the speed of the aging process.

And when you overeat calories, it speeds up your body, it raises your body temperature, it revs up your thyroid function and it revs up the respiratory quotient, the calories burned through breathing as a means to try to burn off the extra calories you eat, all the extra calories you eat over and above your basal metabolic rate does not go into fat storage. Some goes to fat storage and the other part of it, the body's trying to rev up its metabolism to burn it off. So when you overeat, you speed up your metabolism, which then is making this pact with the devil, because the speeding up of the metabolism is not favorable.

It's aging you faster, shortening your telomeres and and and aging your stem cells. Things that you need to extend human longevity. You're burning out with a revved up metabolism when you undershoot your calories by a hair. So you mean your ideal weight, which is a male's full body fat below 15% of the female body fat below 25%.

Core Longevity Principles and Caloric Restriction 12:40

And that means a BMI between, you know, we want females, BMI below 21 and a male's BMI below 22, because as you go above those levels of BMI, the fat storage goes up. And all of those levels, fat cells produce make you insulin resistant, which then produces higher levels of insulin. The fat cells are properly perfused with oxygen, so they spew out pro-inflammatory compounds, they excite aromatase production, raising estrogen. The insulin promotes angiogenesis, the fat cells, you know, we can go on suppress the immune system to be to be defensive.

It shuts down gene silencing of abnormal genes and it shuts down the ability of immuno surveillance to be able to look for abnormal cells and and get them rid of them before they can become cancerous. So fat is a negative for you longevity and when people are overweight, like most Americans are, they are they're addicted to unhealthy foods and they're addicted to this what I call the caloric rush. The caloric mush means that when you're having oil and flour and animal fats and, you know, they have these high calorie foods, it puts a huge amount of calories on the budget at one time.

And the rush of calories in the blood to such high levels has an effect on as a dopamine stimulant and other neuropeptides, which make you feel empty and waste and unsatisfied. Unless you continually overeat and overstimulate yourself with calories, you gradually become dopamine, insensitive and desirous of more caloric stimulation. So most Americans are addicted to too many calories and the wrong foods and trying to fast those people just excites the addictions and has them want to binge and gain the weight back and is not a successful avenue for long term success.

I even have a retreat in San Diego where people with food addictions come here a month or two or three, learn how to eat properly, learn how to control their, learn how to make the food taste great, learn the right amount of calories for them. They're no longer craving extra calories over time because they're eating a diet with so much fiber and so much bulk and so many nutrients in it. And they're all using a form of fasting, called that some people call intermittent fasting, which I consider more accurately called time restricted eating, because we know one of the primary factors that govern longevity is that that you're living longer when you're not digesting food and most healing occurs in that when you're sleeping and not digesting food.

So you're the most anti-aging phenomenon, including fat loss occurs during sleep and you get the full anti-aging effects of sleep when you're not digesting while you're sleeping. You want to be fasting while you're sleeping or have digestion have ceased, which means eating an earlier and a lighter dinner at least 4 to 5 hours before you go to sleep at night, you know, and if you eat a heavy dinner till you're full and you go to sleep 5 hours later, you're still going to have food in your stomach, you're still gonna be digesting.

It has to be low enough in calories so you don't distend your stomach. Because if you if you're already too many calories, particularly more than like 400 calories for a woman, more than 500 calories per meal, you go with a 400 or 500 calories at night and you're going to be still feeling food in your stomach when you go to bed 11:00 at night, you still need adjusting food. You have to finish that, adjust the process. So when you lie down flat and go to sleep at night, you even adjust your caloric intake.

So it's okay to even feel a little touch of hunger when you go to bed at night and have a little water and go to bed. So we're talking here about chronically and consistently utilizing the right amount of calories each day where you're not overeating late at night, you're eating earlier, you're going to bed and you have that extended 14 hour window at night between the end of dinner and the start of breakfast, at least a 14 hour window. That's improvement. This is I'm very, very passionate about the last few minutes, what you just said, because I think this is probably the core issue in America now and now across the world is our lifestyle change in a way that we're working longer hours, we're or we're taking work home.

And if not so we're staying longer. We're having an extra snack late at night. And if not, we're sitting and we're watching. First of all, we're delivering food late at night. So easy now to press the bottom and have a new burrito or have another delivery happening. And then we're watching the wait time and that's flicks that movie something. And then we get a popcorn or get a chips or get something else, that extra snack. And I think, you know, we talk a lot about dieting. We talk about in America every day is a diet.

And in this seminar, we don't even mention that. We're like, what Dr. Forman is saying. It's not about starvation, it's not about eat this or that. It's literally about going back because part of the solution is timing. Earlier dinner and then eating the traditional good nutritional income. And and I bet in your retreat in your clinics, you're not just starving them, you're giving them a nutrient dense, okay, calorie intake, but it's the right as the g bomb that you mentioned. And so very important here for people that we're talking about changing lifestyle and dieting.

And one of the most important factors that this science came and confused, intermittent fasting versus intermittent fasting was right. Then we find intermittent fasting with not a lot of great benefits. And this has helped us uncover the right way to intermittent fasting, the right age to do time restricted eating, which is I call the frontloaded one eat earlier dinner and still have your breakfast the next day. Do your 1214 hour circadian fasting. What Dr. Freedman is mentioning the overnight fast we call it I'm using more section pandas term here a circadian fast which is the overnight fast.

We are humans that interact with our environment in this and the cycles of day and night. The Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2017 was on the biological clock of the organs. And what Dr. Foreman is saying, the resignation of it's not just the muscle and the brain that relax when you sleep, it's actually the entire body in cells originating. This is like insulin and IGF even. They go a little bit high so that the body is more fixing and rejuvenating at night. It's very important that we don't load the calories before we're sleeping.

It's very important that we load them a little bit during the day when we're walking afterwards. And we need first of all, you need the calories in the morning. So eat early the dinner, eat a light dinner, wake up and it's okay to have your breakfast. That's a better time. Restricted eating versus eating late at night, skipping the breakfast, feeling very hungry and fatigue in the afternoon and binge eating then and this is what Dr. Freeman is saying is you'd rather not do that because it's just going to put you in a lower metabolic rate and you're going to stop it at some point and regain all the all the weight.

I wanted to clarify this, Dr. Flynn, because a lot of people tell us we're we're what confuses intermittent fasting, right or wrong, is some studies show positive effects. So study shows negative effect and we're here to clarify it frontloaded intermittent fasting, eating your dinner early and still having your breakfast. That's your 12. 14 hours is much better than eating late at night and staying 14 hours and just binge eating in the afternoon. Yes. And it doesn't matter what the studies show, really, because on an individual basis, you have this person who's an overweight food addict.

And if they restrict calories too much, they're going to start binging and and becoming. And so we have to first get them to follow a diet consistently over time and to be steadily losing. And it helps tell people that you're on new territory. And if you're eating the high nutrient optimal plant rich diet and you're at your ideal weight or you're moving in the direction of your ideal weight by at least £2 a week, if you're not losing at least £2 a week and you're overweight, moving in that direction, then you're not on the program because you're not lowering your insulin resistance.

You're not stopping the hyper clogging ability of the blood. You're not lowering your inflammatory response. You're not in other words, you have to be if you're overweight, you want to stop the damage and start to heal. You've got to be dropping your weight steadily. And if a person comes here and loses £50 and they go to Las Vegas, to the buffets or on a cruise and gains about ten, they're now worse off, even though the £40 less because of the rat, because they gain back ten, because direction of travel, all of you of your body, that shows the way the information and that you put out more vulnerable plaque, you know, more juvenile plaque is more saturated, more cholesterol weighted, more likely to throw a clot or it was a heart attack.

Most heart attacks occur after Christmas and New Year's when people binge or come back from vacations where they binge on food and pig out. We're talking about being consistent with your diet. And I could fast I could skip eating for a couple of days or I could do some lower calorie days because I'm because I'm not a food addict and I'm not going to go into a binge where I overeat after the fast. I'm going to go back to eating less and gradually. So what would be safe for me to fast and even be lifespan enhancing for me to cut my calories down here and there once in a while?

But for a food addict who's overweight and goes into a binge after the fast and gains weight that that could be the fast could actually have hurt them could make them more of a so regardless of what the studies show we have to do what's right for each individual person. And even though fasting and I even though I utilize fasting in my practice as a tool to help people heal judicious in where I apply it to make sure I'm not using it for the inappropriate candidate because I want people to be. And I'm telling them that if they eat this diet with a big salad every day and a bowl of vegetable bean soup every day, and they're having and don't and they're having, of course, at least an ounce and a half of nuts and seeds a day, because one of the major factors that makes a neutral terrine different from a standard diet is a standard diet

Time-Restricted Eating and Meal Timing 22:45

gets its fats from animal fats and oils, and a neutral terrine gets the fats from whole foods like nuts and seeds and avocado. And they and there's two biological different effects because I'm saying oil and animal fats are appetite, stimulants and salt and sugar or appetite stimulants. So we say S.O.S., free sugar, oil and salt free because then people so it makes that because these highly you could say addictive parts of food that flood the body with a lot of calories all at once make people unable to control their caloric drive, their instinctual drives.

And I had a similar discussion with Dr. Alan Goldhammer about so I said an interesting I would agree with it, except it's interesting to look at the evil olive oil and which category to put it in. Is it in the category of a pro longevity and, and in coupling that with the macadamias and the pecans and almonds and the other healthy fats or you think should not have that part of the non SS diet? Well, we're pretty clear here that most Americans are eating too many calories and too many calories shorten their life span.

So when and what I'm saying right now is that when you compare eating walnut oil to a walnut or sesame oil to sesame seeds or olive oil to an olive on the oil, it floods the body instantaneously with calories. And the caloric concentration in the blood stimulates the opiate centers of the brain, the same areas the brains are stimulated by opiates and they turn up the apple stat and they make you into a calorie consuming monster. Oil is an appetite stimulant and giving oil to overweight people is increasing the risk of cancer.

So I could say with sight, with a degree of scientific integrity that olive oil promotes breast cancer because it's promoting people remaining overweight and being overweight promotes breast cancer. When you start to. So if you were working 9 hours a day behind an ox in a heavy plow or you were a professional athlete like some like LeBron James or a or Roger Federer playing tennis all day, then you can have a little oil in your food because your body fats low. But if your body fat is elevated and your palm oil and your food and you're eating, you know, most America, most women should be eating between like 1200 to 1400 calories a day and most men between like 1400 calories a day.

I always say half of what we eat meets our needs and the other half meets the needs of our doctors. And so when you're pouring 300, by the way, when you pouring 300 calories of 400 calories, oil in your food, then you've just cut out 30 grams up. You've just got to eat 20 grams of protein out of your diet because if you had a nut, if you had the walnut and the flax seed and the sesame seed in the sunflower seed in the hemp seeds instead of the oil from those things, you would have had a you would have had your fat in a protein in a package with adequate plant protein at the same time.

And all the phytosterols that lower cholesterol sucker oxidized LDL and because the fat from nuts and seeds are fed into the bloodstream very slowly over hours, the body can preferentially burn them for energy. When you flood the body with a huge with an excess amount of calories from oil, the body has to store it as fat because they can't burn it because coming in to rapidly. So I'm saying a little bit of olive oil could be okay for a very physically fit and thin person who's doing a lot of exercise because they're still not overshooting their caloric needs and they can accommodate a little olive oil plus the nuts like you're saying.

Yeah, that's okay for Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic and other other top athletes in the world who are very physical do need, you know, 3000, 4000 calories a day. But most people are overweight and they have a pile of fat around their waist and they should be getting the oil out of their diet because they're looking to eliminate calories. And you want to take out the calories that that that are at the empty calories, leaving the more protective calories. And nuts and seeds have fascinating studies on them showing they reduce cardiovascular death by 40% across the board in like 20 different studies from major research centers all around the world show the same thing.

And it's about a 40% reduction in cardiovascular death and about 30% reduction in all cause mortality from utilizing nuts and seeds as your source of fat instead of using oil and butter and other things like that. Even the prevalence study which showed olive oil was better than butter and other. Even when people were given more extra virgin olive oil, cardiovascular deaths went down by 15%. Showing olive oil was a favorable fat for the cardiovascular system compared to other fats people were it.

However, the longest lived people with the lowest degree of cardiovascular death were the people using nuts and seeds as a source of their fat who were randomized to use nuts. And seeds continue with nuts and seeds not randomized to use olive oil. There was a 60% reduction or almost a 60% reduction in cardiovascular death and comparatively to the group that were eating nuts and seeds at baseline and randomized to continue on nuts and seeds. What I'm saying right now is that oil is not a favorable food if you're overweight or unless and you shouldn't even be using olive oil if you're trying to lose weight because it's going to interfere with your ability to lose weight effectively.

In just for people listening. You know, some of the studies about supplements talking about is were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I call them I call them nuts that you mentioned almonds specifically and the studies on hazelnut as well, a little bit less and less on cashew and macadamia because they're less popular and they're more expensive. But in the same category. And there's even a new measure of medicine, the number one medical journal, where there's a big, beautiful article they're talking about nuts being longevity nutrients and longevity ingredients.

We actually I don't know, Dr. Freeman, if you're aware of that. We developed the first chocolate spread actually to help, which is 74%. Almonds from a bullion amount is which is where the highest concentration of centenarians live in Europe. And we wanted to flip the paradigm of chocolate. We're typically at butter and sugar and everything in which lipid we call it the longevity spread. And it's 74% almonds and a little bit of cocoa. And that's this is what it is. It's it's following the nutritious principle.

But that also you're referring. To we know also that the alpha from nuts and seeds, the sterols and staples and nuts and seeds attract fat. And all the fat is not biologically available to pull out of the toilet bowl, but it causes a fat exchange system which actually pulling fat out of the bloodstream, particularly oxidized LDL. So it lowers cholesterol, particularly oxidized, the most dangerous actor

Fats, Nuts, Seeds, and Oil Debate 29:25

by sucking it into the toilet. So you have movement of fat from the bloodstream into just the track. Plus the alpha in walnuts and seeds stabilize the heart against cardiac arrhythmias, reducing the chance of sudden cardiac death, atrial fibrillation, other cardiac irregular heart, other irregular heartbeats. So moving the diet to moving a diet to to low in fat by excluding oil plus walnuts and seeds, creates more irritability for the heart and is not. And we've seen in another major study we talk about is the Adventist Adventist Health study, too.

And the reason we talk about that study, because the population of Adventists don't smoke. They're not heavy drinkers. They eat relatively healthfully. Lots of vegans and plant based eaters and with all cohorts black, Asian, elderly, white, male, female vegans, non vegans in every cohort, the inclusion of nuts and seeds was a predictor of longevity and reduction of all cause mortality and the highest quintile of nothing. And that's why we strive for about a half an ounce of nuts and seeds a day.

Well, I don't know. So I said that. Well, a half analysis of nuts and seeds with every meal for a total of an ounce and a half a day in people striving to lose weight. But people like myself, the body fat is around 10% or more athletic. We go up in higher amounts of nuts to like an ounce with each meal, not a half an ounce with each meal. So we modulate the nuts to modulate the calories, more athletic activity, higher caloric needs. We put more nuts in the diet. And if you're overweight with less physical capacity and less core burn, you have to modulate them down.

But we don't modulate them below half an ounce of nuts with each meal because that's the minimum necessary to maximize absorption of the anti-cancer phytochemicals and to get the effect that the beneficial effects on the cardiovascular system. For those for those who wonder or wondering what kind of nuts you recommend and what kind of seeds you recommend the most. Well, if you want to know specifically, I'm trying to shoot for half the seed intake to be the high omega three nuts and the other half to be the assortment of almonds, pistachio, pecans and cashews that you mentioned, and sunflower seeds.

The other at the first half of the nut and seed intake is the high ala nuts, which include the walnut plus the high the three high alpha omega three containing seeds which reflects chia and hemp walnut is flax, chia and hemp. And then the other half could be all those other we're talking about. So if I'm going to make, let's say, a salad dressing, we're going to blend, let's say, cashews and toasted sesame seeds with an orange and some blood orange vinegar and lemon. I'm going to take a garlicky tomato sauce and mix it with almonds and and roasted garlic and black stick vinegar to make a delicious dressing for the salad.

Then I'm going to take the recipe and take out a portion of the almonds or a portion of the cashews out and put some hemp seeds in to give it a bit more omega three omega six balance. I'm trying to. So I am going for a variety and all foods because I'm have a variety of beans, lentils, peas and beans. I have a variety of green vegetables, a variety of fruits, including berries, you know. So we're trying to increase the variety and getting and including all these different types of food and variety of mushrooms as well.

Mushrooms are a very powerful longevity promoting food. And because I'm taking care of a lot of overweight people who have diabetes and had cardiovascular disease, we're feeding them eggplants, cauliflower, roasted pepper, asparagus, zucchini and a lot of mushrooms and onions because these foods are tasty. They're low in calories. They can eat a robust portion of it and still keep their calories around that 400 and what, about 400 calories a meal for the four women and 504, 50 to 500 calories a day for overweight males.

So we're almost getting them to learn how to regulate and understand the dietary skeleton. So the £15 a month that they're losing here, they can go home and replicate this and continue the process long term for the rest of their life. They're continually moderately calorically restricted. And if they get rid of their if they no longer overweight and if they do this long enough, they lose their food addiction and they no longer desire unhealthy food, no longer want to binge, then they can start incorporating more fasting if they choose, because then the fasting is not going to result in an emotional binge.

They're going to go back from the fasting state back to their baseline dietary practices of moderate caloric restriction and at overshooting calories after will do it fast. It's the overshooting calories after the fast and the bingeing on junk food after the fast that destroys the benefits of the fast. Fasting is good as long as it over overshoot calories after the fast and don't binge and gain too much weight back but you go back to your baseline so if my baseline because I have I'm going to be 70 years old in a month and my body fats runs between 10 and 11% body fat.

So I'm still pretty fit and able to do a lot of, you know, a lot of exercise, a lot of fit. And I'm still in good shape. So I know my body fat and I know my weight. So if I fast and drop my weight from 146 down to 140, that's okay because I'm going to carefully build back and eat carefully to go back slowly eating under eating to 144 to 146. I'm not going to keep I'm going to so because I know how to fast and I know how to eat. So that fasting would have been okay for me and good for me. But if I was going too fast and dropped my weight from 145 to if I was 155 to 165, I would drop my weight down.

I'm going to go back and past the spot where I was and gained back way too quickly and overshoot it. Then fasting was not the right thing for you to do. And this is where the some of the studies are showing the downside on longevity with fasting what Dr. Fuhrman is explaining not only you not only you go back worse than you started, but the going back increases inflammation in the blood. It increases the excitability of new plaques, which is what causes the acute cardiovascular conditions that we see after that.

So you have a double negative impact. If you eat unhealthily after the fast. This we go back. To unhealthy eating and so many people do that they use fasting as part of their diet, this diet mentality where they eat unhealthy, they binge, they gain weight and then they go to a fasting center, they go and they fast, they drop some weight and then they start to be healthy after the fast. But then their addictions step back and they start binging overeating, gaining too much weight now in a big cycle all over again.

We have to so we so for people who are overweight and not healthy, I have to get fasting out of their vernacular for now. We have to just get consistency and then how the living do perfect it right and and not to make if you just if you restrict calories too far that's what we say moderate caloric restriction. If I cut the calories back to 800, 900, a couple days of 500 to 600 calories, that could trigger this person with food addiction into a subsequent binge attack because their brain gets emotional, get so emotionally revolved around food, the foods they're missing.

Practical Diet Guidance and Closing Advice 36:35

So we have to not just use the studies, but use the experience of dealing with real people in the real world and know what's the what's going to be the best likelihood of success with this individual. You know. I agree with most of what you said. I would still say the true truthfully done studies will uncover exactly what you experience in your clinic. The problem is a lot of bias studies, a lot of theoretical ones, but a lot of the ethical ones are dealing with true people and are seeing true outcome.

This was an unbelievable discussion. Before we conclude, do you want to or if you want people to get out of and you dumped in this short period of time a lot of wisdom in here. If you want people to leave here with three or four points around nutrition, fasting and longevity, what would those be? It would be that the same diet style that prevents cancer the most and maximizes human longevity can or is also therapeutically effective to reverse disease like high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, psoriasis.

It can be therapeutically affected, effective to to allow people to get well from conditions. So it's the same and it's not one diet for heart disease and one diet for cancer the same overall parameter of this diet revolve with a lot of both raw and cooked vegetables. It's a vegetable. A nutritarian diet is vegetable based, includes a wide variety of foods and both oils and salt and animal products and sweeteners are minimized or eliminated to either very low levels or not at all. So we want to get the diet right first, then we can put the other.

Then we have to do sleep, exercise, fasting, and of course, having the modulating in calories and the timing of your meals. So you become the best version of yourself. You've got to become an expert in you to get to your perfect weight that has you significantly which has you strong and fit but lean with low body fat and maintain that weight long term and steadily for the rest of your life with not allowing to fluctuate up and down, maintaining a healthy diet long term, for months and years ahead with no deficiencies, and making sure your Omega three index is adequate to facilitate brain size and brain function in later life.

If you're going to live a long time. So all of these things we consider and I know this is a big it's a quick review, but of course, we're giving people the excitement and basic information that they could learn more if they choose to, because this really is the way to be happy and healthy and live a long, happy life. Appreciate it very much. This was a wealth of great information. Thank you very much. I'm pretty sure we're going to talk again and we're going to do more of this. But I appreciate you very much for the day.

Thank you, Dr. Fuhrman My pleasure. Best of health and longevity to all of you.