Fasting for a Longer Life? Dr. Joseph Antoun, MD, Reveals the Science of Aging in Reverse!

Introduction to the podcast and guest 0:00

It took me a while and a really long while to to to get to that, to that right place. Right. Because like you said, in your 20s, in your 30s, you just had a lot of ambitions and you go forward and you would be on top of technology and on top of. But then it took me a while to separate right? Stressing from going gambling and food right? Stressing me. Still take a break. Or if you're working hard, you know you should just remember the achievement that you've done rather than what do you still have to do and fully take a break and fully relax.

Go for a walk, a small prayer, or a small meditation. Just relax your entire body to go back and succeed again versus feeling always that was at the time. Or I need to do this, and then you go ahead and do the back to back behaviors. That and you mentioned something that we really point to, which is fasting. And you know, and religion by the fast is a common word, by the way, all the time religious, you know, Christianity is largely driven. Others they all have in common. And by the way, it was probably this epiphany.

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This is Doctor Talks, real talk from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most. Hello. Welcome back to the Integrative Health Podcast with Doctor Jen. Today we're going to be talking about longevity and fasting with Doctor Joseph Antoon. His passion is to enhance human longevity. He is the CEO and Chairman of Board on El Neutra Incorporated, a unique nutritional technological company leading the longevity and food as medicine markets. Before taking on these roles, Doctor and Tune was the CEO of Health Systems Reform, a boutique consulting aimed at elevating public health through reforming health systems, strengthening health care management, and improving health care delivery.

The co-director of the center for Health Policy at University of Chicago and adjunct professor of health policy at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and a fellow at the Department of Social Policy at London School of Economics and Political Science. Doctor and who completed his health policy studies at Harvard University. Public health at Johns Hopkins University.

From conventional medicine to prevention 2:51

Medicine and biological science at Saint Joseph University, and his PhD studies in the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern studies at King's College. Well, wow, that is a lot of school. You you really like it, right? And my parents for got me there and I waited for them to collect me. 15 years later. I just thought it was it was important though, because, you know, I started with med school. Right? And this is what you do to become a physician. But then I think this is what happened to you as well.

He get struck with, okay, wait a second. I just learned how to, you know, diagnose out of a symptom and just give it a pill and put my patients on multiple pills for the rest of their lives. And I thought early on this was sick and that health care is best. And there's no cure. There's just control in most cases. And I didn't want that. I didn't subscribe to become a doctor, to just meet people when it's late and just put them on five pills for the rest of their life. So it was necessary for me to progress into health policy, public health, to kind of understand how at mass level we can impact, social policy and public health and be more preventative.

And then from there, go more into technology and bring solutions. We're going to talk about one of them today. Like the fasting and the fasting mimicking nutrition. How can I bring true solutions that impact the root cause of health condition and or prevent health conditions? So we practice health care at a best. Oh, I love it. Yeah. And I feel like I get stuck sometimes because you go into medicine or health in general, the health care field, even nurses or physical therapists going in. And it's just not what you think it is.

And it is a lot of these layers of policies. And if you really want to help the masses, which most of us want to once when we go into medicine, and that's why we spend our 20s studying. But it's not it's not what we think it is. There are a lot of these roadblocks. So have you felt like you're studying in the health policies and getting the public health, you know, all of these is it really helping you now with your career, with helping more people? I mean, 100%, right, because it gets you to what needs to happen to change, to change our lifestyle.

And this is the birth of a discipline called lifestyle medicine. Right. People and I had a complete change of mind as I progressed. Right. So for us in medicine, we have diabetes. And you see on on the chronologies and on the collages will put you on pills and then on insulin. Right. Then you have cardiovascular. After you have a heart attack, you see your blood pressure, you go to see a doctor and he says, oh, this is cardiovascular. You take those pills for the rest of your life and there's there's a coordinate for that.

Definitely. People should take their medicine when they're sick, etc., but that should be 20% of medicine, right? 80% of medicine is how can we not have the heart attack? How can we not have diabetes? And by the way, of course, if you eat healthy and what health policy and public health should do to enhance access to healthy food, decrease the price, increase education around it. If you exercise, how can we change our in a social fabric to help people exercise and move and and increase education around that, etc.

so it helps you start thinking about the pillars of longevity, the pillars of healthspan of how to stay healthy long. Right? And those are nutrition, exercise, stress, sleep and social capital. You know, the purpose is to have a sense of purpose, the happiness, the serenity every day. How can we work on those five pillars so that, at least for most people, we're delaying the onset of their chronic disease? We're delaying the day they have a heart attack. And by the way, you know, in medicine, they tell you, oh, you're genetically predisposed.

And and this is why you get diabetes or cancer, etc.. But what I learned is that, you know, actually 90% of us will die out of one of the four big conditions, right? Diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's and cardiovascular, 90% of us. So most people listening to us today, you guys get a nugget of that from a plane crash or a car accident going to die from four health conditions. And guess what? They're all age related. They're all related to aging, right? You're not getting diabetes type two at age 23. You're not getting the first heart attack at age 24.

Longevity pillars and biological age 7:22

And even if you have the input gene, you're not getting Alzheimer's at age 21. You age and then you get those, right. So think about it in this way, because then the solution becomes obvious is how can I age slower? How can I delay my aging? How can I I always if if anyone listening to us today, if you want to take one sentence for me today is remember this day younger than your age, right? Biologically, from the inside you want, say, younger than your age. This should be the unit of measurement of health is how young are you?

From the inside, there's a lot of. Have you done a biological age? Yeah. Okay. Let's. Can you give us yours? Do you feel good? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm 40. I'm 46 today, and it gives me anywhere between 40 and 42. So I'm 46 years younger than my age. Okay. Yeah. Good. That's about you tell from a black hair up there. Oh my god. Well yeah I had a birthday on Sunday and I was joking with my kids and I'm like, well, like I'm just going to go by my biological age, you know, where I'm in my 30s and not not my chronological age.

I'm like, that's what we need to do. But it's a joke because my husband is aging like her year, like I'm aging slower in his aging career. And I'm like, so I'm like, really? You're married to a younger woman because I'm technically a year and a month older than him, but I'm like, no, not biological age, but all decide we need to focus on this longevity aspect. And it's so important. And like you said, and why you started getting into health policy and all of that is because medicine and seeing a conventional doctor does not focus on that longevity.

It focuses on the disease and treating the disease with a medication. It's basically like, what's the disease? What's the medication? Right. Like we're like little computers that are bringing in all the symptoms, ordering labs and then matching the medication with this. But that's not what we really want to do. We really want to give people the tools, which a lot of it is work. You can't just sit there and expect to age. Age well, by eating McDonald's every day and stuff. So let's let's go into your work at Al Neutra.

And if people haven't heard of fasting, mimicking diet or FMD, can you explain what that is? Yeah. So within the lay the same line of thoughts we talked about how can we stay younger from the inside. But we started putting researchers together and we gathered 18 universities USC, Harvard, Mayo Clinic, Stanford. We put a lot of universities together, and we started thinking about how can we help people because that's the first question we get, oh, how can I get, you know, younger from the inside.

Right. And and it turns out that fasting is one of the most important, tool to slow down and or to reverse aging. Right? So, so we were we were fascinated by that. We started testing. You know what I would have fasting two hours, ten hours, 15, 16, 21 day, two days, three days, four days. And what happens to animals and then humans? We have multiple animal data and data. And now 41 human clinical trials were one of the biggest. If you want nutrition technology. And when it comes to R&D in clinical trials, companies in the world and we started looking at what happens to the body.

So a lot of a lot of your listeners, a lot of us have heard about intermittent fasting. Right? So how can I eat less, eat within a compressed time zone per day? That's called intermittent fasting. And it may help slow down aging. So that's interesting. And we're we're very supportive of a 12 to 14 hours intermittent fasting to slow down the age, because every time you eat, you get a burst of growth factors. And the more you compress that and eat healthy within that window, the more you're matching your body with the circadian rhythm and with longevity.

Now, what became more interesting is the longer the fast we started seeing the body doing a deeper change, a deeper longevity related change, especially when you cross the three, when you cross the three or you get cross. Day two and you start day three of fasting. The body is basically tells the cells, hey, I burned the fat that I have, I burn the reserves, the glycogen is getting depleted. A lot of the fat has been burned. The liver is using all the extra, you know, calories and they look at you.

This is so basically the body is saying the my bank, my reserves are getting depleted and it tells the cells that they have to rejuvenate, they have to restructure, they have to burn anything that's, you know, not necessarily

How fasting changes the body 12:19

inside and function at the optimal level to survive. So this is when fasting becomes goes from a metabolic reset, burning fat, improving cholesterol blood through the intermittent fasting side, the metabolic. It goes into a cellular rejuvenation phase after they flip. It is very important this process of rejuvenation is called autophagy. A g a part of auto, a, g, y, and autophagy won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016. You know, one of the biggest myth is that a lot of people said saying, oh, do intermittent fasting, skip breakfast, and you get into autophagy.

You don't get into rejuvenation. If you just skip breakfast, you have to skip three days. And plus so that there's a deep stress on the cells so that the cells rejuvenate. So then we saw that autophagy spikes a day for etc.. Now who wants to go for four days of water fast or five days? It was so difficult that we started doing human trials and water fasting and people couldn't do that. Right. So this is when we said, okay, can we get you the same benefits of water fasting, the same rejuvenation, the same metabolic benefits, but while you're eating right, big oxymoron.

This is how it took us 13 years. We spent $48 million and research the National Ministry of Health. Multiple other donors were supportive, and they helped us figure out a very precise nutrition formulation that when you consume over five days, and we called it the fasting mimicking diet, it mimics the fast. And it's only five days. So the optimal balance of taking the body through the journey of weight and metabolic reset the first 1030 days and then salaries of the nation. You stop on day five because we want you to go back and eat your normal food, to re inject the calories into the new cells and push the body in the right direction.

So we invented the fasting mimicking diet. Again, it took me over a decade of research. Now we have 41 clinical trial. And the goal is to help you eat so that you comply so that you do fasting in a healthy, natural, compliant, easy way. And it actually enhances even the fast. In many ways, we're seeing that is superior to water fast because you're not bankrupting the body with water. You're feeding the body over five days. So the cells that are doing rejuvenation, they still need minerals, they still need vitamins, they still need macronutrients.

They're carbs, the proteins. And we provide that. And most importantly, the muscle, the muscle gets preserved over the five days with the fasting we're making diet. The product is called prolonged. The main product in the market, the main fast American. It's called proline for promoting longevity. And it's BRL and and and protein basically helps you go through a metabolic reset. People love the weight loss. It's only fat driven. So muscle is protected. This is very important because a lot of people have jumped on the JLP ones on those impacts, etc.

they're losing their muscle. They're losing a lot of their depleting their bones. This doesn't happen with proton. Then it helps you rejuvenate the cells. It helps you maintain healthy level of, you know, blood sugar, blood cholesterol, blood pressure, etc.. So a lot of metabolic ancillaries, radiation benefits the, the food is all plant based, natural, clean. There's no artificial. There's no artificial whatever. Play with it. It's just one of the healthiest foods you can put in your body during those five days.

Yeah. And for prolonged. So we've made the husband have done it. I've done it. My daughter is 16. She's she asked to do it. She really likes the soups. And gosh what else does she like? The kale kale chips anyway. So it's it's doable. And I tell patients when I recommend this for them I'm like, you just need to find five days, you know, and I want my husband to do it again. But he's like, what am I going to do when I'm eating out with clients? I'm like, you take your soup and you say, I'm doing have passed through.

This is what I do. Yeah, but but it's, it's it's cool to think about because, you know, it says what it is FMD, fasting, mimicking diet. So you're not fasting because a lot of people really struggle emotionally with not eating for five days or three days. And for me, I think, you know, for mothers or I guess fathers too, but we're running the kids around, we're cooking dinner. It's really hard to fast when you're not eating anything at dinner with your family, you know, and you're just like, oh, I got my electrolytes here, and you're smelling all the food.

So this is going to be a little bit more doable, but you get the benefits. So that's that's kind of what it's what it's like. I mean you're still you know it's it's a challenge. So so I think with any fasting even prolonged, you just have to be committed. You just have to do it. You know, being healthy is not just easy, right? Of course it's going to be a little challenge. But I remember funny story, my daughter, when she did it, she went to her favorite Indian buffet and sat there and watched her boyfriend eat while she was doing the pro on diet because it was like her last day on it.

And I'm like, wow, you have a lot of self-control. That's amazing. Yeah, I mean, definitely it's I mean, it's a five day commitment. It is a commitment as a five. They can women, right. And people I mean, you know, the the the closest if you want thing we do in life is close to pull on is you know a lot of the college students or grad students, right. They go through courses and, and sometimes they study every day, sometimes not. This is the healthy fit and versus not. But then five days before the exam, they you know, all the students are sitting there stressing that they're studying for 16 hours to go and get by that exam prolonged.

It's similar. It's a five day of commitment. You have to I mean, you know, it's it's 1100 calorie on day one.

Creating the fasting mimicking diet 18:38

So that's the easy day. And then 800 calories is it's like eating half of what you would typically eat. But it's only five days. There's a day one there's a day five. Statistics show that 89 to 91% of people would, you know, would finish the five days. And like Warren Buffett says, there's nothing any acid could be replaced or except, you know, except your body and your health and health should be priceless. I mean, sacrificing just five days. And by the way, we priced it equal to what people pay for food for five days.

So now is at 175. And after Covid and inflation and all of that, today an average American is spending 150 to 175 to eat for five days, plus their minerals and their supplements and their water. So that's equal to food. You just prepaying to your for your five days. And there's again, nothing like health, nothing worth more than your health and your body and people fail. And eating healthy every day and exercising every day. And you know, so this is kind of one true solution where you're getting those benefits actually, you're getting deeper benefits because nothing rejuvenates the cells that we know of.

I mean, I don't know if you know any other intervention, but I've asked this to we have now over 15,000 doctors prescribing prolonged in their clinics across the US. And they all will tell you the same thing. The science that we saw behind this product is superior to any science that anyone could do for five days, so it is definitely worth it in that sense. I don't know if you saw the article we published recently on if you do prolonged three times per year already. So speaking about commitment, 15 days right out of the year, you're reversing your biological age score by 2.5 biological years.

So, this is exactly why we started this podcast talking about the linkage between diseases that are going to kill us. Remember, cardiovascular diabetes, kids had Alzheimer's. They kill 90% of us. You go backwards. It's like, oh, that age related. So the older I am, the more prone I am of hitting those in one of the best ways. Now to reverse the bio age until a little bit stay, you know, put your body on the longevity track is the five day fasting mimicking died with prolonged. Yeah. No. It's amazing.

I mean, I couldn't imagine if if this was prescribed by conventional doctors and you know, and everyone did it. I had a patient that had really good results with prolong. He was a vegetarian for religious reasons, and we had to get his triglycerides down. And we talked about fasting and then he tried to prolong and it really help. So it's, it's great. I so can you geek out about, like, talk with our audience in case they want to know about that? Like what turns more on, what turns it off and why that's important when we talk about eating.

Yeah. So, so how are we? We make fasting and we go through the the pathways of food are the pathways also of aging and longevity. So you know, one one bad news I'm going to break to everyone every time you eat your age. Right. We know that this is why calorie section is is still today the number one driver of a long life. Right. If you go and meet centenarians, we study a lot. Centenarians. People say 100 and beyond to uncover all the secrets. Right. And parole underrepresented. Big secret of theirs.

And and there's no obese centenarian. There's no centenarian that used to eat and snack five times a day and eat before late night before sleeping. Right? There's none of that. So why every time we eat, we age. Because when you eat carbs, you're actually increasing insulin and insulin. People think insidious diabetes. Not just that insulin is a growth factor, right? Insulin is an anabolic. It turns the body into a pro aging, and and phase. Right. Because basically I put carbs in my body. My body's happy. Let's grow.

And we humans, we grow forward. We don't grow backward. We grow towards our end when we're pushed towards it the same way. And this is the second big, very important use is when you eat proteins, even you're increasing something called IGF. It's insulin like growth factor. It's another growth factor. Yes. Doctors would increase when it proteins all say IGF. And it's insulin like growth factors is the same impact as insulin. And you grow. You age when you increase IGF. How does that translate on the cellular level.

The cell has two pathways primarily for carbs the PTA and the rest pathway and has a big pathway for proteins. That's called the third pathway or the mTOR for the mammalian one. And the third pathway is a pathway for protein. So unfortunately, the marketing behind the protein industry keeps telling us, don't eat carbs, keep eating protein, high proteins, etc. and now we're seeing cancer increasing and still aging is increasing. We haven't solved anything moving to the protein, path because of the Tor pathway that you mentioned.

It's another growth factor pathway. It's another pathway that increases the age of the body and is very well linked to cancer. By the way, there's a perfect correlation between eating high protein diet and aging and cancer. On the short term, you'll look a little bit better. So there's a full industry trying to push people to eat super high protein. They look great on the short term and inject I, you know, growth factors

Protein, IGF-1, and aging balance 24:18

and which is literally killing people faster. And in one way, how prolong help you help you mimic fasting and puts you on the longevity pathway is it doesn't trigger the IGF pathway, and it does not trigger the peak of the rest pathway of the carbs. So one way we mimic fast is we designed the food to go around these sensors on the cell, around the growth pathways. So the cell things there's no nutrients, there's no growth. So the cell goes backward instead of growing. And aging actually goes into rejuvenation and fixing and healing.

Yeah. And I think that you brought up a good point. It's it's about balance. Right. So I see a lot of women, a lot of perimenopause, a women and I, I, I like them on higher protein and then also nutritious fats. And because it's a balance, because if you tell women to eat a lot of carbs, then they just might eat all carbs, right? And protein keeps you satisfied. So when we're talking about this, this aging thing, it is really hard. And I think that this is where it shouldn't be to extremes. Right.

Because bodybuilders that are eating tons of protein, that they're pushing that IGF one pathway really harder, like you said, maybe growth hormone secreted dogs like peptides, like they're getting growth factors. Yeah. That is aging in the body. Right. But also stress can age of the body. So it's like, you know, it's this balance. So there's and we could do a full session actually we we studied deeply and other if you saw our meta analysis on proteins as well, we studied deeply how much protein hundreds of articles how much protein a person should eat.

And actually it follows the life cycle as well. At which age. The biggest question is the age as well. Right. And so there's an age at let's talk women for example. Right. You have and you mentioned menopause which is a critical age for women. And pre menopause and post menopause. So definitely you want to increase protein post menopause because the absorption rate the decrease the muscle becomes a very important organ of longevity for women. Bone density becomes very important. So you increase and we have actually ratios what how much they increase at which age.

So we can do a full webinar on this. But before menopause right before menopause I agree with you. You should balance the protein. I wouldn't increase that much because there's also the cancer for the breast cancer formation period for women as well. And there's a great correlation between both. And also at the same time you want to go more plant based as which obviously you recommend as well, for that age so that you balance giving them enough protein at the perimenopause, that .0.7 to point eight.

And why not pushing, the body to age and or to be at the pre pre disease level. We actually and I agree with you are proponent of that balance. We even launched the longevity protein is called the L dash protein. It's 25g. And we spend doctors and you know millions of dollars and years of research on it. We actually created a subcategory in the plant based, so, so, you know, IGF increase the most with, with, with animal sources, meat that chicken a little bit less with fish then with plant based and increase even lower.

So we went we created a subcategory. We looked at amino acid sequences that spike even less the IGF. And we found that which sequences spike very little of the IGF. So you're nourishing the muscle, but you're not pushing biological age. And that balance between giving the women or the men enough 25g of protein per serving. We added 21 million minerals and vitamins, all plant based source and except virgin olive oil. That's the first protein that's a mini longevity meal. And why not spiking IGF so they don't pay the risk of cancer and aging.

And we call it the L protein. You can find it on the prolong life uh.com website. And it's the first patented even protein to full fully plant based, but also with minimally spike IGF versus the other proteins in the market. Yeah. And you're basing that on the the leucine amino acid base. So how you trigger that muscle to that muscle growth rate is that reducing is is only one, 1.2 other pillars that we can achieve. But it took us years and years. And research by leucine is one of the pillars. And the balance that we do, well I cannot reveal the path pillars, but yes, that's, that's one of the three pillars.

There's two others. Yeah. Got it, got it. Well, let's talk about the fifth pillar that you were talking about earlier, because I don't think we talk about it enough is how, you know, our society, how you know, our relationship with, you know, with me, with Jesus. You know, how how all of that is another pillar of longevity. You know, when we research, like those living past 100 and, you know, and which is like you've been deep into this, you know, political society with all of your, your studies, like, how do you think we'll be able to move that needle and really make those around us healthier?

Yeah. The so to remind everyone the five pillars nutrition, exercise, stress, sleep and social capital. So you're referring to the social Capital One, which by the way the two most impactful are nutrition and social capital nutrition because it's the only product you put in your body every day of your every day multiple times. Right. So this is why we focus on nutrition. But social capital, I call it the mother of all pillars. Because when you're when you're loved and you're giving love, when you feel purpose in life, when you're happy, when you're serving and guess what?

You eat healthy, you exercise, you stress less, you sleep better, right? So it's the mother of all pillars. And when you when we study centenarians, people again who cross the 100, you know, some of them didn't eat healthy. Some of them had a little bit of a stressful life.

Social capital, stress, and purpose 30:28

Some of them actually drink alcohol. Some of them are smoking during the interview at age 103. Right. But what they had in common, they had a smile. They were well, nested. They tell you the story about them being close to their family and saying in the same home they grew up with in and, and they talk about their faith and they talk about their happiness and they talk about their grandkids. So it's that social capital pillar where I define it by serenity, purposefulness, happiness. And part of getting there is actually, you know, what religious people call prayer, right?

And having faith in prayer. They're not religious or religious or not. They. It's yoga, I call it the more the mother equivalent of of, you know, yoga and being on purpose and meditation. So it's, it's that combination of taking moments within your day to think, to relax, to be happy and to, to to kind of stay positive because we complicated our life big time. Right. You wake up in the morning, it well, you sleep thinking about what you have to do the next day. You wake up the morning rushing to get things and you have a long To-Do list.

Then you go back. Instead of resting at home with family, you're sitting. You're doing some leftover work, or you're discussing work with your significant other. Then late night because you start thinking about tomorrow. You take another bite before you sleep of whatever food, whatever, and then you don't sleep well. And then. So it's a vicious circle that we created. And most people are expressing that. Right. If you look at the main reason for obesity, it's not you're not you should not be blaming this.

We should blame the society around them. When you give them love, when they feel encouraged and happy, they actually lose their weight, right? Cardiovascular same. That's the stress is the other factors. So building a society where we got to use technology not to stress us to use technology to help us relax. But I always used to talk about, well, you know, in the past it was barely one phone at the house. And you have and you don't call people after 5 or 6. Now then we created we have mobile phones that you call them, then you text them, and now it's bad if you don't check your email and you respond within a few minutes because you have a mobile and you have to respond with it.

So we're just using technology more and more to as a liability and as a stress, as a, as a intrusive element into our lives. So how can we go back to our humanity, to our purpose of existence, whether you're religious or not? And how can we create an environment where we're more becoming more human to human and loving to loving versus separated on our phones, just workaholics? That's not going to help us live long. And guess what? Anything we achieve on this planet, we're not taking anything with us.

We're only leaving the memories that we create in the minds of people, and the love and the support that we gave them. Yeah. And it's hard. One thing, you know, we're talking about fasting too. You can fast from TV, from the news, from social media. So for 2025, I have committed to every Sunday being off social media completely. And I have a big platform on social media. So but it's it's something that I, I'm doing and it's funny because I'll be bored or, you know, I was at a wrestling tournament when I did it a few months ago, and I just flip on my phone and it it just ended up on Instagram and I'm like, well, what just happened?

You don't even realize it. And these people creating these apps, they want you to be addicted to it and spend more time on it. So fasting and you know, there's fasting in the Bible, you know, is fasting is spiritual. And me, I've committed every Sunday to being off social media, spending time in the Bible with God, with my kids at church. And it's been great. And I wanted to break it. It was my birthday and it was on a Sunday and I'm like, oh, I need to be on social media so everyone knows what I'm doing on my birthday.

No, I, I you don't you don't need to, you know, your friends will text you you you want that person to person interaction. And I think it's when you fast and you take it away, you realize how much you're using it as a as a pacifier, and you're using it emotional as a crutch. Right? You, why you should be, like you said, connecting with other people, looking face to face, playing a board game with your kids. So, you know, we're talking. That's one of the five pillars. Well, are you doing it? Well, you know, so if you feel convicted, maybe do it fast, you know, don't watch the news.

I had a friend who's off social media for 21 days. Bless her heart, she felt very convicted. She didn't know about the fires in California for five days after. And then someone told her and she's like, okay, but you know, we're so yeah, like we're just so into this technology and it's great because like we're talking today, but also you just need to check and see if you feel convicted and maybe you should take a break. I don't know what you personally do. If you have any suggestions how to help that pillar in and by the way, it took me a while and a really long while to to to get to that to that right place.

Right. Because like you said, in your 20s or 30s, you just have a lot of ambitions and you go forward and you will be on top of technology and on top of. But then it took me a while to separate, right? Stressing from going nibbling and food. Right? Stressing me is going to take a break. Or if you're working hard, you know you should just remember the achievement that you've done rather than what do you still have to do and fully take a break and fully relax. Go for a walk, a small prayer, or a small meditation.

Just relax your entire body to go back and succeed again versus feeling always that I'm losing time or I need to do this. And then you go and you and you do the the bad behaviors from that. And, and you mentioned something really, really important which is fasting and you know, and religion. Right. Fasting is the only common word, by the way, to all divine religious, you know, Christianity, Islam, Judaism and others, they all have fasting in common. And by the way, it was probably misinterpreted.

And so Pope Benedict invited us. Actually, the previous pope invited us to discuss with him fasting because he believed science helped religion understand why God asks us to fast. Because when I grew up, we were taught to fast, to show God that, you know, you're you're not materially attached to food and you would do anything to be a good servant, etc. but that felt bad that almighty good God is asking us to starve just to show him that we're a good servant. Like it didn't click that

Faith, fasting, and healing 37:18

well with meat all the time until we saw the benefits of fasting. And I truly believe, and I have a saying, I say if it's prayers where the healing of the soul fasting was, the healing was meant to be the healing of the body and Almighty good God would only one good for us. And you're doing the right invitation. Are you saying you know, fast to heal? You know, pray, pray probably to heal the soul and fasting is is to heal the body. This is when science came in lately to to identify that and, and to figured out why why we were asked to fast.

Yeah. And it's there all long, right? It's ancient wisdom. But now the fact that we have all these studies showing that it's actually good for health, hopefully we can bring it back in. Now, this is kind of like a weird question, but do you think insurance will ever you know, I don't know I know you could use your HSA to pay for prolong, but do you think insurance will ever pop in and cover this? I'm sure the fasting mimicking diet, you know, there's a version of prolong that we tested on diabetes and there's one on cancer.

There's one on Alzheimer's. The one on diabetes is showing to be 700% better than the current medication in what we call disease regression, right, 700%. The program's called a neutral health. And or, you know, diabetes regression program. So for those who want to do the fasting mimicking diet for, for and support for their diabetes, you go to a neutral health com. So why I'm introducing this because we did show a so powerful right is decreasing medication. So saving money for insurance even within the first year of reimbursement and now with active discussions with multiple insurance, is they're looking at reimbursing the fasting mimicking attrition program.

So hopefully we're going to have positive surprises to, to on on reimbursing the fasting mimicking diet. We do have actually a lot of people ask us, well, a lot of people asked us five years ago to give them healthy food after prolonged. So we developed a company called nutrition for longevity. We send you your meals, your medically tailored meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So think about it as a bowl of fresh do or HelloFresh, a healthy one, though medical is called nutrition for longevity.

And so we developed medicated meals for people with 32 health conditions. And the government ended up reimbursing us. So our daily food called medical, it's called nutrition for longevity and for health, nutrition for longevity healthier and for member for all health.com. That part got reimbursed by CMS central for Medicare and Medicaid and now 134 insurances. So we already bridge the reimbursement. Our food as medicine, the fasting mimicking diet specifically is now under review with multiple insurances and hopefully you know, and we're very hopeful with this administration as well now that there's a lot of attention by, probably that Robert Kennedy will bring two to food and nutrition as medicine.

So hopefully, we'll, we'll partner to make this happen and, and get food as medicine reimbursed. Again. We already did that for and for ill health, for those who are interested in nutrition, for longevity, health and hopefully soon for L neutral Healthy Diabetes program. That is really exciting. And I also want the listeners to understand something that you said that's very important. So you said within one year it showed clinical benefits and why that's important for insurance companies. Because if you do something and you want the insurance companies pay for it, they want to see it within like 1 to 2 years.

If you if if the benefits are 5 or 10 years out, they don't, then even better. The benefits were in just six months. Now the financial savings for I mean yeah yeah yeah. It's this financial saving which I mean benefits benefits for the insurance companies financially. Because if it's 5 to 10 years out, so say there's something that helps. But it's it's going to be like ten years out like helping with dementia or diabetes then. But but because this is within a year the patients are taking less meds, which is less cost to the insurance company, less morbidity and mortality.

Do you know what I'm trying to get across to people? Because people always wonder like, well, why insurance isn't covering this good for me? Well, they need to see the dollar signs behind it. So this is really exciting. Yes, it's I 100% agree with you. Typically it's it's either a drug that the FDA then approves and then they get forced to reimburse it at the expense of, you know, or something like us where the the results are so striking

Insurance, reimbursement, and future programs 41:58

in such a short period of time, it makes in a no sense to not reimburse it. And this is where we're talking to multiple insurances and I think we're going to get it reimbursed. Yes. That's so that's really exciting and that's really going to change lives. So I just I love what your company is doing. Anything else you want to wrap up with about what's on the future for you personally? The company? Yeah. Well, you know, I've been I've been here at Alito for eight and a half years, so we'll see how long after.

But I believe this is the highlight of my career. We bought the first, two foods. Medicine. Right. Because we always say food is medicine, eat health, eat letters, eat it, eat plant based. This is healthy. Of course, but I think with the fasting nutrition, we brought it to medicine coming to reverse multiple conditions or support the remission or regression of those. I think we brought the first tool that is scientifically tested for longevity. I'm very proud to be behind the fasting went across the word 11 years ago.

We launched fasting. And then now or sorry, seven years ago with launch fasting. And now we're launching longevity. We're spearheading that that feel as well. I'm really proud to be one of the forces to enlighten people that it's about lifestyle medicine. It's about your bio inside age, inner age. It's not about waiting until you're old and start taking pills. And we know that. But we never had a solution. We never had enough science. We never had things to, to, to to prescribe. We're bringing this to the world.

So we're very excited about that. We we've launched successfully the fasting American diet for diabetes remission. That's huge, because it's the biggest disease after obesity and aging. If you want to think about aging almost as as a health condition, but, for everyone here who has blood sugar issues, go to our neutral health, our best neutral health outcome. You will have three programs supervised by dietitians and doctors. They actually had they had doctor. It was Harvard had a, vice president of Harvard diabetes.

So we would talk about it to people in the world. They're going to take care of you. They're going to help you get out of that condition. We're going to launch cancer, starting with breast cancer soon. So our founder, Professor Robert Longo, has launched is launching his book Fasting Cancer in February, actually. So look look out for that is going to be big on breast cancer. We're going to launch our hopefully breast cancer program at the end of the year. And Stanford just finished one of our trials on autoimmune disease.

And we haven't we out of confidentiality we don't see the results, but we're hoping that we're going to help a lot of patients with Crohn's all sort of colitis. We're doing studies on psoriasis on on mice, etc.. So we're truly on a first farm. Our food and bringing food is medicine to the world. Is is our big promise. With a lot of science and validation. Oh that's awesome. Well, thank you so much. We're going to link everything in the notes for you guys. So Doctor Anthony, thank you for your time and also your passion.

Thank you Doctor Jen, thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health. Each day is a new opportunity to make choices that empower your well-being. For more insights and strategies, subscribe to our podcast and visit our website. WW dei doctor Talksport.com. Stay connected, stay healthy and join us next time on Doctor Talks. Real talks from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most.