Fasting-Mimic Diet: Key To Diabetes Remission

Introduction and guest welcome 0:00

Welcome to another episode of Reversing Your Type 2 Diabetes Summit 2.0. This is your co-host. Dr. Will Hsu. For many of you who are listening right now, living with diabetes is is a lifelong dependance on multiple medications and there is no end in sight. Now, we live in 21st century. There is a new way. And today I'm really glad to have a respected colleague, Dr. Joseph Antoun, who is the CEO of L-Nutra. And today to talk to us, to talk to us about a new way of treating type 2 diabetes. Dr. Antoun, Welcome.

Thank you, Dr. Hsu. And it's a pleasure to be with you today. I think we're going achieve many we're going to change many lives today with with the information we're going to share. And Dr. Antoun. Your name is followed by so many different credentials. So so I think I want to just as introducing you, tell us a little bit about your journey. I know that you went to medical school and then now you're really driving one of the most innovative nutrition company in the world today. What made that shift and maybe tell us a little bit of your journey.

Well, you know, I started pretty much probably like you and many doctors. We wanted to go to med school to end up curing patients. But then once you're in, you figure out that the diseases of the past were required. Patients like in infectious diseases, you give antibiotics. These are not the challenges today. Today would challenge with diabetes, with cardiovascular, with cancer, with Alzheimer's, what we call chronic diseases. And we're not finding cures for them, the medicinal community. But we as doctors, at the end of the day, most of what we do is

Dr. Antoun's medical journey and shift to chronic disease prevention 1:58

we give pills at the end of the day or surgeries, obviously, and interventions. But but I got I started getting a little bit frustrated in a sense that a patient comes out of the clinic or out of the hospital with a pill for blood pressure. And by the way, there's no expiration on their prescription. It's to be refilled every month, a pill for blood glucose control that they have to refill every month. And for every diabetic patient here, listening to us or every cardiovascular patients you all suffer from, this is like, I have to refill my meds every every month.

And I used to tease my attendings to ask them if this works, why they have to refill it every month. And nobody had an answer. And they told us that diabetes is a progressive disease. Right? You start with metformin next year at one at one, and then they end up with insulin and is when the pancreas fails and then unfortunately with complications. My microvascular microvascular and the dialysis and death that was the portray of the disease in our medical books. And I was a rebel. I didn't want that.

And I decided to leave. You know, I did my MD, I did my Ph.D. and I decided to go and pursue a track and health policy and public health in order to change the health care system. First, to do more prevention, but then to be curative, not just control active. And and this is what I did did studies at Harvard and Hopkins and in Lancet career where I was on a track to find what could cure chronic diseases, diabetes is probably obesity, and diabetes are probably the two biggest diseases in the world.

And and a lot of their a lot of the diabetic type 2 patients get here because of lifestyle changes and aging. And so I toured the world finding an intervention that can inspire a better lifestyle change and most importantly, treat aging, because that's the essence of these chronic diseases. And how can we support the patients with the remission and regression rather than progression? Joseph, if I may call you by your name. I certainly can identify with that sort of a physician looking for impact to make the world literally a better place.

As an endocrinologist myself, I've taken care of patients for over 20 years. The frustration is that we we only tell patients half truths. Right? So if you will agree with me on this, right. We say that diabetes is a condition that all you need to do is control your sugar. But by that kind of mindset, we actually commit patients to a lifelong dependance on medications and Joseph, you know, a person living with diabetes, on average, it takes about six months, six different medications. Right now I know that you you have done a lot of health policies.

You pick diabetes because it is one of the most expensive chronic illnesses around the world, around the globe, over 500 million people with diabetes around the globe. But what do you want to do differently? I mean, what what is it that you want to bring to the world? Why is your solution that other words? Well, I was blessed to meet at a certain point with a person called Professor Valter Longo, who many of you probably hear today heard about him. He's the founder of L-Nutra, the company that I now join him with, but more so he's behind this movement to against aging in the bio age of the body.

And it's a longevity movement. And I never understood that aging is the mother of all diseases. Right?

Aging, insulin resistance, and the fasting-mimicking approach 5:49

For all of you guys here listening to us today, you know, probably had the same lifestyle when you were 25, when you were 27, but you got diabetes at age 40 or 45 or 50 or 55 or 60 or 65. So it's actually one of the symptoms of aging. We never thought about it this way, but we always thought about it, Oh, you're eating a lot of carbs and now you've picked up some weight and now you're diabetic, which is partially true, actually. But your body knows how to burn those carbs when you were younger. And now when you're older, it's very difficult to get rid of that stubborn weight that gives you the insulin resistance.

You're you lost muscle with aging. So the engine of the body that burns the carb is not there. And that this balance and your cells of pancreatic, the pancreas is getting a little bit, you know, a little bit older. Your cells are less vibrant and this is how you start developing the condition. So it's the crossroad the way. Valter Longo And for those of you listening to us, you should read his book, The Longevity Diet. It's it's one of Amazon's bestseller, actually go and buy The Longevity Diet on Amazon in the the the conversions of two things that medicine never taught us which is I'm getting I'm getting older and my lifestyle is not ideal is when I need to evolve diabetes.

So at L-Nutra we actually said okay if over eating is getting me diabetes and aging, can I find an intervention that reverses the bio age and reverses the insulin resistance at the same time? And this is the technology that we have, we call it the fasting mimicking nutrition technology. So the the studies over two decades have shown that if you fast the body as a reaction to cells to survive, they rejuvenate, they they clean up, they go to their optimal performance. And this is what made fasting very, very popular over the last 7 to 10 years because of this phenomenon called autophagy or cellular rejuvenation.

And it's basically the body is shocked, there's no food and therefore the cells rejuvenate to survive. It's we get to be a better younger body to survive fasting. So that's a secret. You're rejuvenating the cells, the body is resetting metabolism. That only happens after three days of fasting. And it's very difficult to fast. Right. If every diabetic patient could fast, obviously you'd lose the weight, you'd be younger and you'd go out of diabetes, but it's difficult to fast 3 to 5 days. So the technology that we invented, we developed a food formulation, a very precise formulation that actually nourishes the body for five days, but the cells do not recognize the food.

So it's it's a new scientific trick that took two decades and it's funded by the National Board of Health. It's tested now at 18 universities. University of Southern California, University of Heidelberg, Milan. Stanford is doing testing on it. So all the big universities, or most of them are now very charming in studying this fast mimicking nutrition, which on one side is helping the body rejuvenate the cells and the other side. When you make it better fasting, you lose weight very fast and you lose fat mainly weight.

So this convergence of two phenomenon I'm younger biologically, I am losing my insulin resistance and I'm protecting my muscle. That's really important. One of the secrets of fasting is this stress on the muscle. Muscle rejuvenates, muscle is nourished and muscle is protected. So less fat insulin resistance. Muscle is protected in my cells are younger. The convergence of the three is pushing the body to diabetes remission, meaning the patient needing less medication and after a while no medication.

That that's really interesting too. So what you're saying is that the L-Nutra is offering a precision medicine or precision nutrition. Right. To to have food as medicine. But part of their suit is medicine movement that gives people many of the benefits of of a long fasts. Right. Without the actual exposing people to the inconvenience and sort of the same safety issues associated with water only fast. And so maybe I can turn turn around and ask the question, why can't you just do it with intermittent fasting or why does it have to be so many days?

I mean, right. So because the movement is out there, I'll or many of our listeners probably have, are doing some sort of intermittent fasting, in fact. Right. Data tells us that 10% of Americans are doing some sort of intermittent fasting. Why? Why do our listeners need to go through this extensive period? Yes. Yes. Is with nutrition, but why so low? Yeah, so so you said it right? It's a nutrition program. We send the patient a box, they open the box, they have food for five days. They one day, two, they three, they four and they five.

And this food keeps the body fasting. Although it's a food, it's formulated, it's all plant based, it's all healthy. There's over 15,000 doctors recommending it today. And there's no soy, There's no lack. It's lactose free, it's gluten free. So it's a very healthy premium ingredient based nutrition. But the studies are showing that this formulation mimics fasting. And in the secret is the prolonged fasting. You need five days. Why and why? Intermittent fasting doesn't respond to it. When you do intermittent fasting, when you fast for 16 hours or 18 hours or 20 hours, yes, you're a little bit depleting the energy and the reserves in the body.

So glycogen infers first if you go longer, a little bit of fat, but intermittent fasting is going to lack three things. Number one, you're not going to protect lean body mass because the body likes to go to muscle for reserve,

Why intermittent fasting falls short 11:46

you know, first rate and specifically initially the glycogen in the muscle. So so you're not going to protect muscle in intermittent fasting. You're not going to stress the cells. As we said, it takes three days to stress the cells. They're not stressed to rejuvenate. So you're not reversing your by your age, you're not getting by by illogically younger. And that's another important thing. And number three, intermittent fasting is showing that for some people who do it right, which is they get dinner early and then they say all the way next day they do actually get breakfast or lunch versus the ones they do with late.

They eat late at night and they say all day without food. That kind of intermittent fasting is not showing even the weight loss and insulin resistance decrease. So symptomatic fasting helps a little bit with the weight with insulin resistance and they're going to rejuvenate the cells and they're going to protect the muscle, as we said, rejuvenating the cells, getting younger and protecting the muscle, the engine that burns the carbs. Right. Because today's medicine, the way you and I and we both have been at Harvard, at a certain point, we both practice the same theory where you go to decrease the carb, put them on a life long, the nutritional change.

Right. And this is where we fail because we tell it. Basically, you get to eat healthy every day. All the rest of the rest of your life, and it's difficult or we're going to put you on medication the rest of your life. And with medication that actually adding more fat and losing muscle, putting them on a diet every day, they're getting them. For some, they're going to lose muscle as well, unless it's a protein based diet. But also they're going to be defeated by the diet one. You know, we all started diet to stop it.

This is why we feel the solution is this five days per month only. And this is let me be clear here, just five days per month. They have 25 days in all the clinical trials that we did. We don't ask the patient to change their lifestyle in 25 days. And this is why we have over 93% compliance on it. You know, people say, okay, give me the box of food for five days. They do it every cycle. Their cells are a little bit getting a little bit biologically younger. The muscle is being preserved. There's a sharp decrease in insulin resistance.

Then you go back 25 days, you're asked to eat. And by the way, the food, because it's plant based and healthy, it inspires you to lead a better 25 days. Next, people don't typically jump to pizza. And it passed. I read after they like, Wow, I never knew I could eat healthy for five days. I never knew that I can feel so happy in after with with it. So it started inspiring them to a better, healthier long lifestyle. And this this follows the science of at Stanford. There's a prominent professor called B.J.

Fogg who talks about tiny wins is very important for medicine and chronic disease remission to to to be inspired by this philosophy. You want to win a little bit, not overwhelm the patient and then win a little bit and say, you know what, That's the my second win. Let me improve and third win and fourth and fifth with and this is how this program, the same thing mimicking diet or mimicking nutrition is the five day I can do it. 93% of people can eat healthy for five days. Then they see the benefits.

Next month, another tiny one, another five days, another five days and builds up success. And then they ended up dropping their medication. And for many we started seeing them going off medication in matters of month that has never been seen in diabetes before. So let me summarize it for for our listeners here. Our listeners are awesome. Very they wanted to have kind of the forefront knowledge. They want to take care of themselves. You're saying that there's no change to lifestyle, right? You don't have to make lifestyle changes for life.

So that's good news to our listeners. Number two, there is no drug right in there's no drug cause. And number three, there's no drug side effect. So I wanted to hone in on that. So you said in your clinical trials, you've seen a lot of people reducing their medications. And I said at the onset that on average people take about five or six different medicine up in the doctor. And maybe I challenge you a little bit, I think, to to to give us an assessment. Why is it that the medical field does not talk about diabetes, remission or reduction of medication all that much?

What's your you came from a policy background. So think about when a patient goes to the doctor. The doctor just keeps on adding more medicine. But rarely is the doctor practicing de-escalation of medicine or what we call the prescription in your own sort of a policy and go do do you have any idea why that is? Yeah. I mean, the doctor, we're never given the ammunition to de-escalate. Right? So so the doctors are sitting,

Diabetes remission, medication reduction, and policy barriers 16:48

you know, into and the patients are the same see it with the doctors they still dilemma when dilemma is I get to eat healthy, I get to change my lifestyle every day to get out of that health condition. And it's very difficult for patients. A lot of us are stressed, we're busy, we're, you know, or we cannot afford always eating the best and the healthiest or we don't have access to it or we're, you know, or we love food or genetically we have a predisposition for it. So most people cannot eat healthy everyday.

They say, okay, you can eat healthy every day. You cannot change your lifestyle. I'm going to put you on medication now, the FDA definition of a drug to treat diabetes is just lowering blood sugar and improving HB one. C Okay, how to lower blood sugar? We said we're we're bringing high blood sugar because we didn't change our lifestyle. So I'm consuming high blood sugar. I have insulin resistance, so my blood sugar is high. Most medication work by just removing the sugar. The sugar doesn't disappear with medication.

Just got off the blood and goes into the cells. What the cells do with it, they just loaded into fat because this extra sugar, more fat is more insulin resistance. More insulin resistance, meaning I need more medication. So the the the the issue starts with the definition of diabetes and treating diabetes. You know, all these drugs that get FDA approval to treat diabetes, they're not treating anything. They just are not treating the root cause. Right. So they're not treating because they're just moving diabetes from one compartment, moving blood sugar from the bloodstream to the cells where, by the way, it advances the disease so that only the most of the pills that we have today, that only they do not reverse diabetes, they actually progress the disease because they're moving sugar from the blood to the cells.

And the cells store them as fat and fat increases insulin resistance. So is the system is built where a lot of sacrifices have to be made in lifestyle. And it's at least a learned helplessness of the patients, like just get depressed because they cannot change that lifestyle. The farmer community did not bring your way to make make glucose just disappear. They just move it as out of the blood. So both together you keep bringing sugar and carbs and it keeps getting stored with the meds and therefore the disease keep moving forward.

We find that perfect solution where we're stimulating the opposite of bringing of of overeating, which is stimulating fasting right in person. I sometimes in a present, I show a simple story where a person with a hammer hitting on the head of another person, they say, Hey, I have a headache and what's the solution to just stop hitting me? Right? And and the person is bringing, you know, food and carbs to do for diabetics. They list the solution. They start bringing those and that's fasting. Right.

And and we've been able to simulate a fasting state in the body with food again, natural plant based food. So all these problems got. So you don't need to change your lifestyle. It's only five days because fasting adds another layer of making you biologically younger and protecting your muscle. And now you don't have to be on drugs for the rest of your life. Actually, our studies are showing that within six months, six months, meaning just five days a month for six months. So 30 days, 30 days and total of the food, you're already decreasing the dose of your medication or you removing one pill out of the multiple milk pills that you mentioned in six months.

We're not taking six years. And so we're very, very excited. We just launched the program and I think diabetic type two patients, especially those who have, you know, multiple pills that they're taking and they start thinking, hey, I don't want to progress and become dependent on insulin. And this is the big thing that probably your doctor is sharing or is not sharing. But that's a big problem. And you want to go back now and stop dropping your pills and hopefully one day be diabetes free. Well, this is such an important message here for our listeners.

Just remember, if you assess on your own and you're taking medications like insulin and sulfonylureas, there is a risk for hypoglycemia, right? So we we certainly don't want you to listen to this. This educational seminar and go and do it on your own data and trying to to make sure that that people go through this very safely. You've put together a very comprehensive program for diabetes remission. Can you tell us what safeguards you place in there so that that the people going through your program will have very safe journey, this active journey?

Yeah, they are totally medication free. No, I agree with you, Dr. Shu, that water fasting is risky. This is why the doctors will not put you and say, Hey, go, go, stay without food for five days. That's that's a risky way of doing things. So this is why we do it with nutrition. We would actually water fasting studies. And then when we found the side effects, this is when we developed the food. And this is why the U.S. government, through the national sort of health, most of you listening here is your taxpayer dollars that goes to the NIH and came to us to develop the fasting mimicking nutrition.

So it's important to fast with food, especially when you have diabetes. So we said, okay, we're going to put a full team to take care of you. We have the food, the fasting, mimicking nutrition. Again, five days of nutrition that will come to your house delivered. You will open the box. There's day one day to day three, therefore in five and you eat from the food. And yet it's very well structured and guided. But we also have developed longevity, diabetes, nutritionists. We trained, we train the food generation actually of of of dieticians that specializes the specialize in diabetes and longevity.

Safety, clinical support, and how to enroll 22:48

It's very important for us to not just focus on diabetes, but actually helping you as a patient live a healthy, long life and diabetic patient is just it's a symptom of aging. They're going to get they have twice the chance of getting cancer in the future and or cardiovascular and or accelerated aging and therefore the other chronic diseases. So it's important to focus on diabetes and on the general health of the body. So we have specialized dieticians who specialize in diabetes. They can help you and guide you through the program, but also they're going to add another layer of care, which is a longevity care.

And also if your doctor is excited about this program and wants to work with us, we would love that. Go tell your doctor, I don't know, work with this company or this team. And it's called the L-Nutra Health Program L for Longevity. Dash Nutra, N U T R A is the L-Nutra Health. Look it up. It's l-nutrahealth.com. So that program, you can take it to your doctor and doctor can supervise you with it. And if your doctor says, look, I want to deal with your meds, let this company deal with your nutrition and lifestyle and longevity.

We do have our own doctors, our own telehealth doctors that will actually take care of you from that aspect. They don't replace your doctor. They work with him or in parallel. But but they will focus on our philosophy of helping you through nutrition and gain health and longevity. Oh, that's amazing. So do you put together a doctor to a medically supervised the same journey of of medication de escalation? You have a longevity and in dietician a diabetes dietitian. Right. So especially trained dietitian you got this five day fasting mimicking nutrition and all together in in sort of a package of a program.

And so I believe that our our listeners must be they they want to know more about this. Right. So if they want to enroll in the program, what do they go do? So go to l-nutrahealth.com L for Longevity dash Nutra, N U T R A Longevity through nutrition N U T R A. Actually the logo is right behind me and l-nutrahealth.com and over there you have the chance to read read the science the scientific articles understand where the program is at. But I think most important is we do offer the counsel counseling as well.

So go in, pick either the counseling so that you learn about the program or talk to us. And or if you're convinced already, just pick the choice where you get to the food, the nutrition technology, the supervision from the dietitian and or the doctor, you know, if you have one or not. And so you have those choices, pick the ones that work for you and we'll take care of you. And I believe L- Nutra is offering a special discount right now if you registered on the program. And they will eliminate the activation fee, which is really a very good savings there. Yeah.

For those who are watching us today, we're giving a special code, DrTalks. Since you took the effort to listen to this talk and you're listening to many other thoughts on diabetes. So if you put the code DrTalks that come upon checking out, it will take $99 of your cart there just to help you get onboarded and start the program. So, Dr. Antoun, thank you for this wonderful information for our listeners. It's great to hear sort of the big ambition, right, to Reverse Type 2 Diabetes, but they want to know what they can expect when they enroll in the program for them.

So speak to our listeners who are who really want to know if I enrolled in this program, what can he or she expect out of the program?

Patient outcomes and the promise of freedom from diabetes 26:48

I mean, it's it's diabetes as much as medicine looks at it from sugar and and complication and and it's emotional it's an emotional journey for a lot of patients. We want to be free of medication. We want to be free of multiple visits. We want to be free of the fear of death and complications. And a lot of people who have gone through our program and when I talk to them, I see them in tears, like the first time I talk to patients after three, four or five months, they're just crying. They're saying, I'm free.

I'm I feel freedom is in front of me. Freedom from medication, freedom from fear, freedom from feeling down, freedom for feeling judged that I have diabetes. And when you start the program after three or four months, you started feeling I lost a lot of weight. And remember the cells are being rejuvenated. So your face is back. Is the face that you recognized ten years ago a little bit slimmer, a little bit younger. I feel more energy. The muscle is protected and it just keeps you going. And then you drop the first medication.

And I and I love it because it's very emotional when when when you go and you typically are treated with multiple drugs, you don't feel any change. You just feel a more overwhelming program in here, like this one drug thing just off the window. And then you're looking I still have two or three and in you know what? I'm going to go for another six month to get rid of the second one. So you feel the patients are empowered, they feel energetic. They feel like I can defeat the disease once and for all.

And we love this. Dr. Joseph Antoun, CEO of L-Nutra. And he's over time, over and over again, he's emphasized this theme of freedom from the life sentence of Type 2 Diabetes. Dr. Antoun, thank you so much for your time for spending time with us today. Thank you. Dr. Hsu.