Fasting-Mimic Diet: Key To Diabetes Remission

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Thank you, Dr. Hsu. It’s a pleasure to be with you today. We’re going to achieve many things, and we’re going to change many lives today with the information we’re going to share.

William Hsu, MD

Dr. Antoun, your name is followed by so many different credentials. I just want to introduce you and tell us a little bit about your journey. that you went to medical school, and now you’re driving one of the most innovative nutrition companies in the world today. What made that shift, maybe tell us a little bit about your journey.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

I started pretty much like you and many other doctors. We wanted to go to medical school to end up curing patients. But then, once you’re in, you figure out that the diseases of the past where we cure patients with infectious diseases are given antibiotics. These are not the challenges of today. Today’s challenges are diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease, what we call chronic diseases. We’re not finding cures for them in the medicinal community. But as doctors, at the end of the day, most of what we do is give pills, surgeries, and interventions. However, I started getting a little bit frustrated in the sense that a patient came out of the clinic or out of the hospital with a pill for blood pressure. 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. For every diabetic patient here, listening to us, or every cardiovascular patient you all suffer from, this is like, I have to refill my meds every month. I used to tease my attendees by asking them if this worked and why they had to refill it every month. Nobody had an answer. They told us that diabetes is a progressive disease. You start with metformin next year, one at a time, and then they end up with insulin, which is when the pancreas fails and, unfortunately, with complications. My microvascular system and the dialysis and death were the portrayals of the disease in our medical books. I was a rebel. I didn’t want that. I decided to leave. I did my MDA and my PhD, and I decided to go and pursue a track in health policy and public health to change the healthcare system. First, to do more prevention, but then to be curative, not just control active. And this is what I did: I did studies at Harvard and Hopkins and launched a career, I was on a track to find what could cure chronic diseases. Diabetes is probably obesity, and diabetes is probably one of the two biggest diseases in the world. and a lot of the diabetic Type 2 patients get here because of lifestyle changes and aging. I toured the world, finding an intervention that could inspire a better lifestyle change and, most importantly, treat aging, because that’s the essence of these chronic diseases. How can we support patients with remission and regression rather than progression?

William Hsu, MD

Joseph, if I may call you, by your name. I certainly can identify with that as a physician looking for an impact to make the world a better place. As an endocrinologist myself, I’ve taken care of patients for over 20 years. The frustration is that we only tell patients half-truths. If you will agree with me on this. We say that diabetes is a condition for which all you need to do is control your sugar. But with that mindset, we commit patients to a lifelong dependence on medications, and for Joseph, a person living with diabetes, on average, it takes about six months to take six different medications. now that you have done a lot of health policies. You pick diabetes because it is one of the most expensive chronic illnesses in the world. Around the globe, there are over 500 million people with diabetes. But what do you want to do differently? What is it that you want to bring to the world? Why is your solution, in other words?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

I was blessed to meet at a certain point with a person called Professor Valter Longo, whom many of you probably heard about today. He’s the founder of L-Nutra, the company that I now join him with, but more so, he’s behind this movement against aging in the bioage of the body. It’s a longevity movement. I never understood that aging is the mother of all diseases. For all of you guys here listening to us today, you probably had the same lifestyle when you were 25, when you were 27, but you got diabetes at age 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, or 65. It’s one of the symptoms of aging. We never thought about it this way, but we always thought about it. You’re eating a lot of carbs, and now you’ve picked up some weight, and now you’re diabetic, which is partially true, but your body knew how to burn those carbs when you were younger. Now that you’re older, it’s very difficult to get rid of that stubborn weight that gives you insulin resistance. You’ve lost muscle with aging. The engine of the body that burns the carb is not there and this balance and your cells of the pancreas are getting a little bit older. Your cells are less vibrant, and this is how you start developing the condition. It’s the crossroads on the way. Valter Longo, for those of you listening to us, you should read his book, The Longevity Diet. It’s one of Amazon’s bestsellers. Go and buy the longevity diet on Amazon in the convergence of two things that medicine never taught us, which are that I’m getting older, and my lifestyle is not ideal. This is when I developed diabetes. At L-Nutra, we said, “Okay if overeating is getting me diabetes and aging, can I find an intervention that reverses the aging and reverses the insulin resistance at the same time?” This is the technology that we have; we call it the fasting-mimicking nutrition technology. Studies over the past two decades have shown that if you fast the body as a reaction to cells surviving, they rejuvenate, they clean up, and they go to their optimal performance. This is what has made fasting very popular over the last seven to 10 years because of this phenomenon called autophagy or cellular rejuvenation. The body is shocked; there’s no food, and therefore the cells rejuvenate to survive. It’s because we get to be a better, younger body to survive fasting. That’s a secret. You’re rejuvenating the cells; the body is resetting metabolism. That only happens after three days of fasting. It’s very difficult to go fast. If every diabetic patient could fast, obviously you’d lose weight, you’d be younger, and you’d go out of diabetes, but it’s difficult to fast for three to five days. With the technology that we invented, we developed a food formulation—a very precise formulation that nourishes the body for five days—but the cells do not recognize the food. It’s a new scientific trick that took two decades, and it’s funded by the National Board of Health. It’s being tested now at 18 universities. University of Southern California, University of Heidelberg, Milan. Stanford is doing testing on it. 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 on the other side. When you make it better by fasting, you lose weight very fast, and you lose fat, mainly weight. This convergence of two phenomena: I’m younger biologically, I’m losing my insulin resistance, and I’m protecting my muscles. That’s important. One of the secrets of fasting is the stress on the muscles. Muscle rejuvenates, muscle is nourished, and muscle is protected. less fat and insulin resistance. Muscles are protected in my cells and are younger. The convergence of the three is pushing the body to diabetes remission, meaning the patient needs less medication and, after a while, no medication.

William Hsu, MD

That’s interesting too. What you’re saying is that L-Nutra is offering precision medicine or precision nutrition. To have food as medicine. But part of their suit is the medicine movement, which gives people many of the benefits of long fasts. Without actually exposing people to the inconvenience and the same safety issues associated with water, maybe I can turn around and ask the question: Why can’t you just do it with intermittent fasting, or does it have to be so many days? Because the movement is out there, I, or many of our listeners are probably doing some intermittent fasting. Data tells us that 10% of Americans are doing some intermittent fasting. Why? Why do our listeners need to go through this extensive period? Yes. It has to do with nutrition, but why so low?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

You said it. It’s a nutrition program. We send the patient a box; they open the box, and they have food for five days. Day one, day two, day three, day four, and day five. This food keeps the body fasting. Although it’s a food, it’s formulated, it’s all plant-based, and it’s all healthy. Over 15,000 doctors are recommending it today. There’s no soy; there’s no lack. It’s lactose-free; it’s gluten-free. It’s very healthy, premium ingredient-based nutrition. However, the studies show that this formulation mimics fasting. The secret is prolonged fasting. You need five days. Why intermittent fasting doesn’t respond to it. When you do intermittent fasting, when you fast for 16 hours, 18 hours, or 20 hours, yes, you’re a little bit depleting the energy and the reserves in the body. Glycogen first that if you go longer, you will gain 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, first-rate, and specifically, the glycogen in the muscle. You’re not going to protect muscle through 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. You’re not reversing your age; you’re not getting by by being illogically younger. That’s another important thing. Number three, intermittent fasting, shows that for some people who do it right, which is getting dinner early and then saying all the way the next day they do get breakfast or lunch versus the ones they do late. They eat late at night, and they say they go all day without food. Intermittent fasting does not show even weight loss or insulin resistance decrease. 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. Because of today’s medicine, the way you and I have been at Harvard, at a certain point, we both practiced the same theory: you go to decrease the carbs and put them on a diet for life, the nutritional change. This is where we fail because we tell it. You get to eat healthily every day. All the rest of your life and it’s difficult, or we’re going to put you on medication for the rest of your life. With medication that adds more fat and loses muscle, putting them on a diet every day, they’re getting them. For some, they’re going to lose muscle unless it’s a protein-based diet. But they’re also going to be defeated by the diet.  We all started a diet to stop it. This is why we feel the solution is this: five days per month only. 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. This is why we have over 93% compliance with it. People say, 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, and you’re asked to eat. By the way, the food, because it’s plant-based and healthy, inspires you to lead a better 25 days. Next, people don’t typically jump to pizza. it passed. I read after they said, Wow, I never knew I could eat healthy for five days. I never knew that I could feel so happy after doing it. It started inspiring them to live a better, healthier, and longer lifestyle. This follows the science 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 be inspired by this philosophy. You want to win a little bit, not overwhelm the patient, and then win a little bit and say, That’s my second win. Let me improve and win third, fourth, and fifth with this program the fasting-mimicking diet or mimicking nutrition is the five days. 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 building up success. Then they ended up dropping their medication. For many, we started seeing them go off medication in matters of months that had never been seen in diabetes before.

William Hsu, MD

Let me summarize it for our listeners here. Our listeners are awesome. They wanted to have the most knowledge. They want to take care of themselves. You’re saying that there’s no change in lifestyle. You don’t have to make lifestyle changes for life. That’s good news for our listeners. Number two, there is no drug, and there’s no drug cause. Number three, there’s no drug side effect. I wanted to hone in on that. You said that in your clinical trials, you’ve seen a lot of people reduce their medications. I said at the onset that, on average, people take about five or six different medicines. Maybe I can challenge you a little bit 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 background? You came from a policy background. 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 de-prescription. In your policy, do you have any idea why that is? 

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

The doctor, we’re never given the ammunition to de-escalate. The doctors are sitting in, and the patients are the same. They see it with the doctors, but they still have dilemmas. The dilemma is that I get to eat healthy and change my lifestyle every day to get out of that health condition. It’s very difficult for patients. A lot of us are stressed, we’re busy, we’re, or we cannot afford to always eat the best and healthiest, or we don’t have access to it, or we’re, or we love food, or genetically, we have a predisposition for it. Most people cannot eat healthily every day. They say if you cannot eat healthy every day, you cannot change your lifestyle. I’m going to put you on medication. The FDA’s definition of a drug to treat diabetes is just lowering blood sugar and improving A1C. How do I lower my blood sugar? We said we were bringing high blood sugar because we didn’t change our lifestyle. I’m consuming high blood sugar. I have insulin resistance, so my blood sugar is high. Most medications work by just removing the sugar. The sugar doesn’t disappear with medication. I just got off the blood and went into the cells. What the cells do with it is just load it into fat because this extra sugar—more fat—is more insulin resistant. I have more insulin resistance, meaning I need more medication. The issue starts with the definition of diabetes and treating diabetes. All these drugs that get FDA approval to treat diabetes—they’re not treating anything.

William Hsu, MD

They are just not treating the root cause. 

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

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 most of the pills that we have today do not reverse diabetes; they progress the disease because they’re moving sugar from the blood to the cells. The cells store them as fat, and fat increases insulin resistance. The system is built where a lot of sacrifices have to be made in lifestyle. It’s at least a learned helplessness of the patients, like just getting depressed because they cannot change that lifestyle. The farmer community did not come your way to make glucose just disappear. They just move it out of the blood. Together, you keep bringing sugar and carbs, and they keep getting stored with the medications, so the disease keeps moving forward. We find that perfect solution where we’re stimulating the opposite of overeating, which is stimulating fasting right in person. Sometimes, in the present, I show a simple story where a person with a hammer hits the head of another person. They say, Hey, I have a headache, and what’s the solution to just stop hitting me? and the person is bringing food and carbs to do for diabetics. They list the solution. They start bringing those, and that’s fasting. and we’ve been able to simulate a fasting state in the body with food again—natural plant-based food. all these problems. You don’t need to change your lifestyle. It’s only five days because fasting adds another layer to making you biologically younger and protecting your muscles. Now you don’t have to be on drugs for the rest of your life. Our studies show that within six months. Six months, meaning just five days a month for six months. 30 days and the total of the food, you’re already decreasing the dose of your medication or removing one pill out of the multiple milk pills that you mentioned in six months. We’re not taking six years. We’re very excited. We just launched the program, and diabetic Type 2 patients, especially those who have multiple pills that they’re taking, start thinking, I don’t want to progress and become dependent on insulin. This is the big thing that probably your doctor is sharing or is not sharing. But that’s a big problem. You want to go back now, stop dropping your pills, and hopefully, one day be diabetes-free.

William Hsu, MD

This is such an important message for our listeners. Just remember, if you assess yourself and you’re taking medications like insulin and sulfonylureas, there is a risk for hypoglycemia. We certainly don’t want you to listen to this. This educational seminar, go and do it on your data, and try to make sure that people go through it 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 the people going through your program will have a very safe and effective journey? They are medication-free.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

I agree with you, Dr. Hsu, that water fasting is risky. This is why the doctors will not put you down and say, Go, stay without food for five days. That’s a risky way of doing things. This is why we do it with nutrition. We would do water-fasting studies. Then, when we found the side effects, this is when we developed the food. This is why the U.S. government, through the National Institute of Health —most of you listening here—is using taxpayer dollars that go to the NIH and came to us to develop fasting-mimicking nutrition. It’s important to fast with food, especially when you have diabetes. We said we’re going to put together a full team to take care of you. We have the food, the fasting, and the nutrition. Again, five days of nutrition will be delivered to your house. You will open the box. There’s day one, day two, day three, day four, and day five. You eat the food, it’s very structured and guided. But we also have developed longevity, diabetes nutritionists. We trained the next generation of dieticians who specialize in diabetes and longevity. It’s very important for us to not just focus on diabetes but to help you, as a patient, live a healthy, long life. Being a diabetic patient is just a symptom of aging. They’re going to have twice the chance of getting cancer in the future, cardiovascular disease, accelerated aging, and therefore other chronic diseases. It’s important to focus on diabetes and the general health of the body. We have specialized dieticians who specialize in diabetes. They can help you and guide you through the program, but they’re also going to add another layer of care, which is longevity care. Also, if your doctor is excited about this program and wants to work with us, we would love that. Go tell your doctor; I want to work with this company or this team. It’s called the L-Nutra Health Program. L for Longevity, dash Nutra, NUTRA. It’s the L-Nutra Health. Look it up. It’s l-nutrahealth.com. In that program, you can take it to your doctor, and the doctor can supervise you with it. If your doctor says, “Look, I want to deal with your medications, let this company deal with your nutrition, lifestyle, and longevity.” We do have our doctors, our telehealth doctors, who will take care of you in that aspect. They don’t replace your doctor. They work with him or in parallel. But they will focus on our philosophy of helping you through nutrition to gain health and longevity.

William Hsu, MD

That’s amazing. Do you put together a doctor to medically supervise the same journey of medication de-escalation? You have longevity, and you are a diabetes dietitian. especially trained dietitian, you got this five-day fasting-mimicking nutrition all together in a package of a program. so that our listeners will want to know more about this. If they want to enroll in the program, what do they do?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Go to l-nutrahealth.com. L for Longevity, little L, dash Nutra, NUTRA. longevity through nutrition NUTRA.  The logo is right behind me at l-nutrahealth.com, and over there you have the chance to read the scientific articles and understand where the program is. But most important is that we do offer counseling. So, go in, pick either the counseling so that you learn about the program or talk to us. or if you’re already convinced, just pick the choice of where you get the food, the nutrition technology, the supervision from the dietitian, or the doctor, whether you have one or not. You have those choices; pick the ones that work for you, and we’ll take care of you.

William Hsu, MD

L-Nutra is offering a special discount right now if you register for the program. They will eliminate the activation fee, which is a very good savings.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

For those who are watching us today, we’re giving a special code DRTALKS. Since you took the effort to listen to this talk, you’re listening to many other thoughts on diabetes. If you put the code DRTALKS that comes upon checking out, it will take $99 off your cart there just to help you get onboarded and start the program.

William Hsu, MD

Dr. Antoun, thank you for this wonderful information for our listeners. It’s great to hear about the big ambition, to reverse Type 2 diabetes, but they want to know what they can expect when they enroll in the program. Speak to our listeners who want to know, if I am enrolled in this program, what can he or she expect out of the program?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

It’s diabetes as much as medicine looks at it in terms of sugar and complications, 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. There are a lot of people who have gone through our program, and when I talk to them, I see them in tears. 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 feeling freedom in front of me. Freedom from medication, freedom from fear, freedom from feeling down, freedom from feeling judged that I have diabetes. When you started the program after three or four months, you started feeling like you had lost a lot of weight. Remember, the cells are being rejuvenated. Your face is back. Is the fact that you recognized ten years ago a little bit slimmer and a little bit younger? I feel more energy. The muscle is protected, and it just keeps you going. then you drop the first medication. I love it because it’s very emotional when, when you go and are typically 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. then you’re looking; I still have two or three, and I’m going to go for another six months to get rid of the second one. 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. 

William Hsu, MD

Dr. Joseph Antoun, CEO of L-Nutra. 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 spent with us today.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Thank you. Dr. Hsu.