Fasting But With Food: The 5-Day Protocol For A Younger Body And Healthier Heart

Introduction and guest background 0:00

Well. Hello, everybody. Please sit down or stand up. Grab a legal pad with a pen and take some notes. Because I have the pleasure of interviewing both a world leader in health and wellness and a friend, Joseph Antoon, MD, PhD. He is so smart. He didn't just stop at the medical degree when he got an advanced, research program degree. And he is a CEO of Al Neutra and hopefully, you know, that's the parent company for both the prolonged five day fasting mimicking diet program that I love so much, as well as the new diabetes remission program and even ties to a food company called nutrition for longevity, as well as a supplement line.

So, Al Neutra is not sitting around getting dust there, active and moving. Joseph is very often in Los Angeles, but we're catching him, at this moment in an office in Las Vegas. Welcome. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Doctor, I mean, this is, it's a blessing always to to to share what we have done and to and to bring knowledge and solutions to your patients. I hope, we're going to change somebody's life today. Yeah, I agree, because people are looking for solutions. This is a reversing heart disease naturally summit.

And we're talking about people that are hoping to reduce their, need for medication, for blood pressure, for issues of weight. People are listening to this and they're injecting once a week one of the medications that GLP one agonists, people are hoping they can lower their cholesterol. And maybe there's some really healthy people listening that just want to stay youthful. Yeah, we'd like to actually attack in a safe and scientifically proven way. Maybe they don't want to go on rapamycin once a week, which we have to agree is a promising but completely unproven approach.

And they want to, you know, work to maintain their youthful body. I think what Doctor Longo calls juvenile AG, their juvenile younger attitude.

Why food is first-line medicine 2:12

And that's a matter of both mindset. And it is also your physical body. So tell us, how many years now are we on this journey of the science that allows you to ship to people all over a five day fasting mimicking program? How long is it since it became commercially available? I mean, we, we started the research 23 years ago, and now we have 18 universities doing the research with us. The fasting mimicking diet probably is the first to develop as medicine, as the true drug. So we put together 18 universities University of Southern California, Stanford University versus Miami, Mayo Clinic, USC, UCLA and multiple European universities as well.

We put them together. We're all under one mission. We believe food is the true medicine or is the first medicine. You know, I started using that. One is the first medicine and then it when if people need pills after that, you know, we should do it, but it should be a first line at first indication. And why is that so? I mean, it's it's the only product we put in our body every day of life where there's the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. These are the three things that we put in our body every day of life.

So it's one of the most impactful, intervention on the body. So how come we spend billions and billions on developing drugs and, and you look at nutrition, there's really very few, maybe none other nutrition program that can say, I can reverse diabetes, I can help with remission in autoimmune and cardiovascular, etc.. So we decided to be this first integrated network of universities, all under one mission, bring food as the first line medicine, and then do science first. We do mice like drugs. We develop in mice. We make sure that's safe and efficacious.

Then we take it to humans and then we do the trials in humans. Phase one, phase two, and whenever it's successful, we take it to market under a special precision formulation that people can eat at their house and and reap the the health benefit. Yeah. And just in case a viewer, has by some chance not heard of parole on a five day fasting mimicking diet plan that you're referring to as really the focus of all this research. And the parent company, al-Nusra, we are talking about a box of food that satisfies you for five days in a row, five continuous days.

You open it up. It's a gorgeous box, but there's five little boxes inside. Day one, day two, day three, day 4 or 5. And people commit to, using that to be their source of nutrition for five days. And day six is not in the box, but there's instructions about carefully repeating yourself. And then day seven through the rest of the month. It's your healthiest diet. And of course, we both teach Doctor Longo's longevity. Diet is perhaps, you know, the healthiest choice. And everybody should read, Doctor Longo's, book The Longevity Diet.

Although I know any day now, we'll, also be talking about his new cancer book and nutrition. So that's what we're talking about. So in that box, the prolonged fasting mimicking diet box, different than all other food programs on the planet.

Breakfast, circadian rhythm, and intermittent fasting 5:29

There are three meals a day contained. And I wanted to ask you talk for two minutes. You know, when I talk to patients, 40% of them, their first meal of the day is noon or 1:00, and they are absolutely certain they're making an excellent choice for their overall health and for their heart health. But you include a small breakfast in the five day fasting, mimicking prolonged diet. And you also make a fast bar for days you're not doing the five day box. So why breakfast? What's the data? This is one of the biggest, discussion today in nutrition world whether people should skip breakfast or do breakfast.

Right. For, and when you skip it with all the intermittent fasting or time restricted eating and and now we have so much science on this. Right. And I'll clear the dust because there's a lot of confusions where people say skip breakfast, intermittent fasting, you lose weight is good for cardiovascular, for diabetes, other folks saying the data shows when you skip breakfast, actually it's not promoting longevity. So why we're doing all this if it's not going to help us at the end. And and the secret is if you believe that this is that what's it's important to do front end intimate fasting, it's important that it's more important to eat your dinner early and create space front.

And then where you're not eating versus skipping breakfast, eating late at night and skipping breakfast. And, and it's important to nourish in the morning the body. When we wake up, we wake up. The brain needs calories and energy with the muscle. These calorie energy. Some people go to the gym or in the mornings, and not just for walking and for, you know, functioning and going to work, but also for, for, for gym. So in the morning, all the essential organs brain, heart, muscle, kidney, they're functioning at their highest level.

They need nutrition in the morning. So the signs of longevity show us that we should eat in the morning. Now, if we keep eating the way we're eating wheat late at night, we eat also in the morning, then we're going to be obese. And this is where the contradiction comes. So combine intermittent fasting, front end it, have your dinner at six seven and then don't eat the all the way to the morning 7 to 8. You already practice 1213, 14 hours of intermittent fasting and still have your breakfast. So 7 p.m.

stop eating seven eight, 9 a.m. get your breakfast. You went on both sides. You practice intermittent fasting. You control your weight. You nourish your brain and your heart and your essential organs in the morning. And this is where all the positive articles on the benefits of intermittent fasting plus breakfast, match the short term metabolic benefits and the longevity benefits. All right. So as a very, very highly regarded scientific company, al-Nusra, you typically teach eat breakfast, which is what I teach people to.

And then what is that recommended window? I had dinner and maybe a piece of fruit for dessert. How many hours till that morning meal is optimal? People talk about 18. People talk about 16. What are you recommending? Whether you're doing the five day fasting, mimicking diet, prolonged or not? Well, we we're big believers in three, four, matching three, four pillars. There's there's this. The sun going down starts, the circadian rhythm starts, changes even in the body. The Nobel Prize in medicine in 2017 was on the biological clock of the organs as well.

So it's not just about the space of hours, but it's when. So the sun is down five, six, 7 p.m. depending if we're winter hours or summer. This is when you stop this, when you have your last meal and then go all the way 12 to 14 hours. We think 16 hours or 18 is a stretch. You can do it and you can do it, especially if you're pre-diabetic. If you're diabetic, you're obese. So you have an urgency to on the short term, right? The short term, the longer you go, the more that you lose the weight unless you binge eat, after which we don't want.

But if you go longer to go, you go. You lose more weight because you started early in the night before you didn't eat late. So do longer. If you have imminent short term weight, you need to get rid of. But if you want to balance short term and long term longevity, 12 to 14 hours and matching circadian rhythm, it's not like eat at 10 p.m. and then say all the way to noon the next day, because then your organs stayed up at night. If you eat 10 p.m., although you're practicing intermittent fasting and you ate the next day, say at noon, you actually the you dismantle so many systems, your body did not sleep at night because it was digesting food late at night.

You skip breakfast in the morning, so you're under nourishing and underperforming. You're going to binge eat afternoon, you're going to read late at night. And this is where some people come and say, I tried intermittent fasting. It didn't work for me because you're a late night either, and that is worse than anything else. You can compensate the next day with skipping food or skipping time. So 12 to 14 hours maybe stretched to 16 on the short term if you really have a reason. But the most important thing is start at 7 p.m.

and then you can eat next day at seven eight, nine or whatever it is the morning. Yeah, I actually have a phenomenal number of people that their only meal of the day might be about 6 p.m., and some of them are doing it by design. More of them they're not hungry or their schedule is rush, rush, rush. You know, people call that the omad. The one meal is diet. It remains somewhat popular. And as they say, some of them are doing it, without thought and just by it and some are doing it again, you would you would say that generally that would not be the number one recommended longevity approach to eating.

Yeah. If again, short term, if you do omad one meal a day and you don't binge eat it, you just do it like say fairly say I say I'm a very disciplined person. I can do one meal, balanced calories 6 p.m.. Of course I get to lose weight when you do one meal a day, so they benefit on the short term. Again, if it's not a binge, you know that at the same time you're losing muscle. The longer you go, you lose some bone density as well, which we see a lot now with those mpix and the and the ones that serve.

Right. And so there is other longevity, very long term side effects from this. And when you lose muscle, it's one of the worst thing you can do. Because once you go back and you eat again or you increase the calorie intakes, you the the engine of the body that burns the carbs is gone and therefore you get to pick everything back into fat, create insulin resistance, create

Optimal fasting windows and OMAD concerns 12:04

inflammation, and then shortening your lifespan. So it's very important. Again, the excitement of the short term. The less you eat of course the better on the short term if you want to lose weight, if you and etc., but you might be compromising the long term in order to put it both together and intermittent fasting or time restricted. You know, of 12 to 14 hours max, right? Plus, starting early at 7 p.m., you will lose the weight without losing the muscle. And you will have you will emerge both circadian sleeping.

Yeah. The stress less. You add the sleep, you decrease the stress on the body. You're happy, energetic the next day. This is all all impacted by food. The five pillars of longevity are all determined actually by the stress and the sleep and the food and the exercise. And if you eat wrong late at night or one meal a day, etc. sometimes that affects everything your sleep quality, your muscle and performance, your your body weight, etc. and the stress and activity and energy. So it's important to win on the short end and long term together.

Okay, so I think these have been some practical points for people listening to the summit. And the one that I keep coming across is, you know, big research studies that say skipping breakfast can increase heart events. There was one that made headlines, in 2024, there was like a 90% higher risk of heart events by skipping breakfast. And, you know, people always have, issues with various studies, but it wasn't the only study. It's one of at least half a dozen or more. So everybody listening, you know, breakfast like a king is an old statement.

Lunch like a prince and dinner fairly early, like a proper old statement that the science largely supports. So let's come back to that box. The people listening are reversal summit. And, you know, we all have this dream of staying as youthful as possible. So our joints and our brain and our function is optimal as we age. Tell us what we learned in the last year or two, actually published research about biological age, not the age and your driver's license, but the your organs, with using the fasting mimicking diet.

Yeah. So what's what makes the fascinating begin night and the product you mentioned proline really unique is it merges two benefits that are for longevity metabolic changes and cellular rejuvenation. And this is where there's nothing we know today in whether it's a drug or food that can rejuvenate cells like we do it with the fasting mimicking diet. So what is what is the science? But what is the premise of what drives all these benefits? We uncovered some two decades ago, I again we mentioned the research study 23 years ago.

We uncovered that if you fast for a longer period, if you go day one, day two, okay, you lose weight. It's good metabolically. But then when you cross day three, there's a crisis on the body is the same way. If the company has no revenues after the period of time, the stress is so high and the employees and they have to restructure the entire company, they have to change function. They have to save money, they have to, invest more in technology, be more cost effective. So the body after day two or day three is telling the cells, I'm going to go bankrupt.

I'm using my fat, I'm using my reserves to compensate. I used it on day one and day two. Now where they three we're going to go bankrupt. So the body tells every cell to practice autophagy, cellular rejuvenation. If you have to rejuvenate, you have to detox, you have to fix. You have to be operationally at your best so that we survive. And this only happens after day three of fasting. For everyone who does intermittent fasting is skip breakfast or does omad because there have been a lot of people pushing.

Marketing wise, I'll eat one meal a day. You have autophagy, and cell rejuvenation does not happen the first day because we all have enough reserve glycogen in fat and deliver also can dump with me will look at you. This is more calories into the body. So first day skipping for a few hours or 18 or 24 is not going to help with autophagy. You have to cross the three. So you cross the A3. You're losing a lot of weight. You're fasting on top of that, the cells are rejuvenating. So for the first time the metabolism is getting reset and the cells are fixing going younger.

They're fixing themselves. It's a younger state. So you emerge an ideal scenario where I'm resetting my metabolism, I'm rejuvenating myself. This is why you get biologically younger. Now we just talked about it. It's not healthy to just to water fasting. So what what we have done with the support of the NIH, by the way, the first $20 million came from the National Board of Health. Again, we put 18 universities together and we developed a fasting mimicking night. It is what it is five days, a food that actually trick the cells, the cells.

They don't know you're eating, although you're eating for five days. This is why it's is such a precise nutrition formulation for all on. And the first thing that we that it's a very, very, very precise formulation. It took us $48 million to develop it. It took us over 12 years to develop it and tested. And it's food that you eat,

Biological age and fasting mimicking research 17:28

but it's designed in a way, and it's all plant based, natural. I mean, you know, I know you're you're a freak of health ingredients and we are and that and this gluten free, soy free, lactose free, all blend base, super healthy ingredient wise that the formulation is designed to not have the body recognize that you're eating so you're nourishing all the benefits. So we talked about food and nourishment and on a daily basis. But the cells are rejuvenating. The metabolism is resetting. And we've published a major, paper in in nature, Nature Communications.

And the nature of nature is the number one engine of the word. This is one of our 27 big scientific papers, but the one you referred to is showing that if you do three times roll on per year, only 15 days within 365 days, you're going to reverse your biological age by 2.5. Biological age score. This is this is prevention at the best. This is, an integration and easy integration of a five day only again, 15 days all what we ask you to do is 15 days within the year. And the secret why it's so effective to remind everyone it's not only resetting your metabolism.

You can you can exercise. You can eat healthy. It will help reset your metabolism. But resetting your cells, rejuvenating your cells. We haven't seen any product by on do that to that extent. All right. Fascinating. So you can people listening can buy a kid that you either use saliva or blood measure what's called your biologic age. Then at least in your published study, you did five days of prolonged for three months in a row. So 15 of the 90 days you were eating this special neutral formulation called prolong, and you repeated the biologic age test at the end of the year.

And it came down 2.5 years. So lot is an organ. You can't specifically isolate the heart from the rest of the body. But, you know, that is profound and powerful data. What about, And I want to add something, doctor Khan, we showed also that if you do it between age 50 and 70 consistently every year. So if you do three times age 53, those age 51, etc., for 20 years, that same article, and again, for those who want to read the article is in nature communication. Just Google fasting, mimicking diet, biological age and you'll find the article and it shows that it's a simulation.

We didn't do a clinical trial for 20 years, but it's a it's a econometric simulation. It shows that you can reduce your biological age by 11.5 years, a biological age years. So this is this is so important. And then why we're trying to why we're trying to reduce your biology. Why why the goal of making your cells younger. There's two goals. There is the fixing the healing. Right. What the beauty about fasting, mimicking that and why it's so effective is every cell lives on calories. So when the cells are thinking that you're there's no food, the cells are rejuvenating.

So it's a very across the body, we have 37 trillion cells in the body. Across the body. There's rejuvenation happening in cells, the heart, the cardiovascular system. We actually I just submitted a paper showing that we decrease the fat around the heart, will decrease the fat within the liver. These are very important central fat within the body. So and we're rejuvenating the cells. So it's very critical to get the cells to heal, to fix and to go a little bit biologically younger. This is what gives you that.

Across the body we call it awakening the doctor from within a self-healing, process that as you mentioned, cardiovascular system, but across the entire body. And why we want you younger. If you think about the four killers, they're going to kill 90% of us, 90% of us in America. So everyone listening here, 90% of Europe going to die from four diseases. It's not a car accident. It's not a plane. Most probably is going to be diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular and Alzheimer's. What's common to all these four diseases that age related?

You don't get Alzheimer's at age 22. You're not getting the first heart attack at age 23, you're not getting diabetes type two at 24 unless you're super eat at a young age and you get developed early. But it's age related disease. With aging, your cells start being prone to mistakes and they don't rejuvenate. Once we lose, we always say in science, once you lose the ability to have younger cells or cells that can rejuvenate, now you're old and they you're going to be prone to diseases because the body can fix itself.

When it gets older, it loses fixing the brain loses the healing powers, becomes Alzheimer's, dementia, cardiovascular system, you know, statuses and heart attacks. Cancer. A cell that's old, keeps replicating, doesn't stop, becomes cancer. So age is the most important factor of what's going to kill us. So getting us younger biologically, right. You want to be 55 from the inside when you're 65 from the outset to be 45 from the inside, when you're 55 from the outside. So you gain an extra ten years again, more time before you hit one of these four diseases, which is going to, you know, kill.

Cardiometabolic results and muscle protection 22:48

Unfortunately, 90% of us. Wow. And I just want to touch on one more topic, again, reminding people we're not talking science theory, we're talking you can hang up. Go on. The Prolong life.com website and purchase, these five day fasting mimicking diet kits. There's a few different flavors of the soups. You'll figure it out. I like Gen three if you want to take my recommendation. As somebody who's done the five day diet about 20 times over the last seven years, there has been people might wonder, well, is there a definitive study that you can shrink heart artery plaque using prolong?

And we have to admit that study has not been done yet. But you did do a cardio metabolic, randomized study that is published where people, either for 90 days ate a real high quality Mediterranean diet, the most popular one. Hundred and 20 days, 100. 20 apologize four months, or they weren't forced to do that for 120 days. They were just asked to do prolonged five days a month for four months, and they were given liberty for their diet. The other, majority of the days, and there were comparable improvements.

So just touch on that for a minute because there were measures of well, we mean, yeah, cardio metabolic health. Yeah. So you know, the number one diet by the American Heart Association is Mediterranean diet. Right. So we were like okay if our theory that we did you need the cells. Could we be better than Mediterranean diet. So we went head to head, as you mentioned 120 days, somebody on a healthy Mediterranean diet every day for 120 days for a month, versus just doing four boxes of provolone. As you can mention, anyone can go by April 1st.

You go to prolong life. Dot com. Now we have we just crossed 15,000 doctors recommending proline over a million users. So this is something, as you said, happening and growing big. So we were we looked at comparing everyday Mediterranean diet to the fasting mimicking diet. And they were very comparable. So only 20 days after all, on 220 days, same weight loss, similar cardiovascular benefits, same fat loss. But there was one thing where the fasting mimicking diet was superior, which was the, muscle protection.

People lost 1.2 pounds on the Mediterranean diet with the fasting. We're making that with Pro, we have two other trials showing that it protects muscle. We're just we're about to submit a third trial on muscle protection now, showing that even for diabetic patients. So now we have data for healthy people. You protect your muscle with the fasting with which you lose muscle with water. Fasting, you lose muscle a little bit. With intermittent fasting, it is possible to ozempic it was muscle. When you diet, you do not lose muscle when you do the fasting mimicking diet because the cell rejuvenation, as I mentioned, every cell, including muscle.

So you have muscle rejuvenating. And remember it's a nutritional diet. You're not fasting, you're eating. So we're feeding the muscle. The muscle cell is rejuvenating. And then you have, you have muscle protection. There's this program was a secret for many of the professional athletes. I don't want to mention these, but NBA, MLB, NFL athletes, sometimes they do pro and actually to go and jacked up the muscle. What we're saying, it protects muscle. Meaning after you finish it, your muscle performance and mass is the same.

But if you eat proteins afterwards and you exercise, you have rejuvenated muscle and then you perform even better. So we have a lot of fitness and fitness instructor that actually put their patients or their consumers. They put them on the pro line and they do some healthy vegan protein after that, even for increasing muscle, not just for maintaining muscle so that there's a very for them. This is this is what a lot of hiding happening today. Right. Is like the the digital ones, the diets. It's a they don't they want to hide the fact that losing muscle is so critical for your longevity and for your future, because then you can not burn carbs in your future and then you get a stored fat.

You can increase inflammation, can increase cancer, can increase diabetes. Even Alzheimer's is a type three diabetes that is going to be impacted by that. Okay. Well, you and I could talk for hours and hours and hours as I continue to sip on this again, is my green tea. And black tea, as I learned from Doctor Valter Longo is and really powerful and the accident drink. We talked about that a couple weeks ago, but I'm going to let you go back to your wonderful day. You shared so much with an audience on reversing heart disease, naturally reversing metabolic disease, naturally reversing aging processes naturally.

So I thank you so much as a leader in this field, such an important feel. Thank you, Doctor Khan.