Fasting Without Starving: The Revolutionary Diet That Reverses Aging

Opening on fasting and dinner timing 0:00

When you group all the studies on intermittent fasting, you see negative results and you see positive results. When you look at all the negative results, you see one common denominator. It was an observational trial. People were eating late at night and they were staying all the way till 4 p.m. and they were binge eating at 4 p.m. after work the next day. The randomized clinical trials, they were designed for people to eat at 7 p.m. and then stay with no food to the next day. and still eat that delayed breakfast, early lunch, they were positive results, right?

But so what all this means that dinner is the worst big meal or snacking after dinner, and even fasting cannot compensate for that, even if you do the 16 hours the next day. This is Doctor Talks, real talk from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most. Welcome to Radcast, where we explore the science, technology, and lifestyle shifts driving human longevity. Today, we are tackling one of the most critical components of longevity, nutrition, and fasting, with one of the foremost experts in the field.

Our guest today, I'm so honored that he is here joining us, is Dr. Joseph Anton. He's the CEO and Chairman of Alnutra. Now, they're a company at the cutting edge of the food as medicine movement.

Guest introduction and show setup 1:24

Dr. Anton is dedicated to revolutionizing healthcare by promoting nutrition as a longevity tool, really helping people not just to live longer, but to truly thrive longer. So under his leadership, Alnutra has developed the fasting-mimicking diet, which we're going to dive into today. It's a scientifically backed nutrition protocol that provides the benefit of fasting while allowing people to actually eat. There's a fun concept, right? Today, we're going to dive into the everyday lifestyle choices that can make a massive difference in healthspan and lifespan.

Dr. Anton, welcome to the show. Thank you Dr. Melissa and I always like to start by saying hopefully we're going to change somebody's life today. We are going to change somebody's life today so let's set that as the intention to each and every listener joining us thank you for taking the time and may you stay open to really with curiosity with interest to lean in because you're about to have a master class from such an incredible mastermind. So Dr. Joseph, let's talk for a moment. You know, it's interesting.

I think that the longevity field was one of the first to adopt fasting and yet fasting in and of itself can be confusing, can be misunderstood. So why don't we drop right into Help explain fasting, and then we'll expand out to how it's affected your work and your contributions. You're 100% right. A lot of people are fasting or hearing about it, but everyone's confused. Is it beneficial? How many types of fasting? What should I do? How can I start? So I'm going to just distill it in an easy way. you know in general there are two types of fasting there's intermittent fasting and there's prolonged or periodic fasting okay so intermittent fasting is any hours number of hours of no food that is between zero and two days okay most people do the 16 hour which is they're basically skipping breakfast

Intermittent vs prolonged fasting 3:24

and then just you know getting into lunch which basically they would have fasted for 16 hours but anything between zero and two days is still called intermittent fasting. And after two days, we call it prolonged fasting. Why? Why we picked the two days? Because when we started studying hour by hour, what happens in the body when you fast, we discovered that the first two days, the body response is a metabolic response, meaning I do have reserves. There's no food coming. I do have some reserves. I can tap into the reserves.

And then after day two, I'm going bankrupt as a buddy. And then I'll tell the cells to start rejuvenating to survive the stress of fasting. So after day two, starting day three, meaning fasting becomes a cellular intervention, a cellular rejuvenation intervention. the body tells the cells, hey, I'm going bankrupt. The first few hours of day one, you can lean on what we call glycogen. I always like to compare the body to a company, right? If you're running a company and you don't have any revenues, right?

You say, okay, I do have some money in my checking accounts. That's the first thing you tap into. That's glycogen. First few hours of fasting, right? Then end of day one, you start tapping into fat, you break down your fat into ketones. So the same way, a company says, well, I've consumed my checking account, I have to tap into my savings accounts, right? And then the second day, you're saying, well, as a company, I burned my checking, I burned my saving, I have to lean on my credit card or get a loan from the bank.

The buddy tells the liver on day two, can you do some neo-glucogens? Can you add a little bit more calories? Because we're breaking down our fat. We're done with our glycogen. We're touching end of day two. Can you help us? And then when that all is consumed, and if you're the head of a company and you consumed your money in the bank and you've got your loans, now there's no more credit. What you're going to do is you're going to restructure the company. You can say, you know what, guys? We cannot spend as much on travel.

We cannot spend on this. Let's re-steal budget between here and there. So the buddy tells the sales, like, hey, I cannot fund you any longer. You've got to rejuvenate. You've got to use your debris, the organelles, the intracellular sources of calories. And you've got to optimize your performance so that we survive together, like a company with a structure to survive. That process called autophagy starts after day two or three. depends on people and their weight, their reserve, their metabolic rate, but end of day two, day three for most.

And that process of cellular rejuvenation is so important for longevity because you're fixing this up, right? You're saying, hey, same for a company. A company was spending money left and right, it was growing, and then suddenly you put it under audit when you fast the company because now the management team is re-steering funds into what is most cost effective, right? And so that process of autophagy or cellular rejuvenation won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016. And this is the connector between fasting and longevity.

Why fasting blossomed so big as of 2016? Because that connection between fasting and longevity through the cells, and by the way, you're losing weight, right? 73% of us in the US and in most countries would benefit from that. And when you lose weight, you improve your cholesterol, your triglycerides, your blood pressure, et cetera. So it's the first time in history where we have a metabolic correction happening with a cellular connection together. And this is why fasting has become at the cornerstone of longevity.

Now, just to close one, find a concept with Fasting. When you go further, now you're taking the company close to bankruptcy, that management team, after, again, more and more days, is going to have to let some people go, is going to have to take deeper, deeper, you know, and is going to say, look, top employees I have to keep you a little bit less cost-effective or expensive top but expensive I cannot handle paying you etc so the body after day five now we're going deeper we did the rejuvenation we're going deeper is going to tell the old cells and the cells that are sick and doing mistakes and not properly functioning is going to triage them is going to send them to apoptosis is going to kill them and it's going to only keep the younger, cost-effective cells.

And that's the final triage. That's the regeneration part of fasting happens around day five to six, which is then the body saying, look, cells creating inflammation, that's scattered expenditure, old cells that just are there, hanging around, not producing. We start seeing a little bit of a triage and the body getting rid of old cells and pushing young stem cells to replace those. And that's the regenerative part of fasting that happens on day five. And this is why at our company we focus on five days of fasting.

We know no company wants to go through that stress. Nobody wants to go to five days of water fast. This is why we develop the fasting mimicking nutrition. And I'll tell you all about that, but I'll pause here for your question. Okay. I love how you just metaphorically describe that. I think you just made it so accessible to every single person to appreciate what's really going on. And you kind of just answered, so it's helping people to understand that window. One of the things I say to our clinicians at Human Longevity Institute, and I say to our clients that go into any program,

Autophagy, regeneration, and fasting duration 9:00

when they want to broach this topic of fasting, and or they've been doing some degree of fasting i'm like back up and answer the question for what reason and you just kind of highlighted the fact that at different amounts of time different things are occurring in the human system and so ultimately what's the reason that we're doing it what are we trying to drive what are we trying to achieve and so i appreciate how you really kind of highlighted within really those first 48 hours it's pretty metabolically driven Then we move into more of a cellular anti-inflammatory, if you will, type of state and autophagy, where it's that internal house cleaning.

And then the magic number, and this was really what I wanted to highlight to people. So then we go from cleaning up. And of course, some of the original studies all the way back in 2013 were showing the benefits of that autophagy element happening at day three specifically for cancer. Right. And so I want to get your thoughts on that as well. Really kind of the benefits in cancer, how you can do extended fast and there's benefit with that. So you're telling us by day five, is where we start to see rejuvenation effects and the stem cells are activated in a way to help to carry to different areas for regeneration rejuvenation is day three with autophagy you rejuvenate the cell you regenerate cells regenerate by day five so rejuvenation day three regeneration by day five yeah That's really fantastic.

So okay, so then, and you guys have created a way that we can do it. So fasting, typically we're going without food. five days gets really complicated. Now I want to cover the basics and this is going to build a bridge into what you've created because you know there's there's a lot of benefits to fasting but there's also a downside to fasting and one of the things even if we're taking it from a metabolic window even if we're just doing intermittent doing a 16-8 Depending on the health of the current system, we could be getting results, but we could also potentially be setting ourselves up for greater dysfunction or imbalance.

I'm curious first and foremost, Doc, and I know this is a bit of, I'm kind of teeing you up because I know this is a bit of when and behind your design. When we realize the fact that currently in the US, about 90 percent of the population has at least one micronutrient deficiency, And one metabolic disorder as well. Exactly. Yes, it's pretty significant. And so the question becomes like when all of a sudden we fast without food and we go into these extended windows, even if it's a 16 eight type of scenario, depending on the state of the system, we can be creating greater and greater deficiencies, which ultimately can actually accelerate the rate and pace of aging.

So talk to me for a minute about the role and the importance from your perspective of proper micro and macronutrients and how does that has that informed what you have then gone on to create which will take us into the fasting mimicking diet. Yeah. Well, all great questions. And you're right, if you fast on water only, beyond the nutrients or the micro, the body is made to eat, not to fast, right? Or have cyclicity, meaning, and this takes us to the Nobel Prize in Medicine 2017, it was on the circadian age and biological clock of the organs, right?

So the body is made to be active and eat during the day and then fast and and reset over the night because you do need periods where the body rejuvenate the body and If you skip food for 12 hours overnight, you're not in any deficiency You have enough that you ate at dinner and you're gonna eat back on breakfast, right? So there's that's the perfect a lot of matching, and this is a work of Sachin Panda, you know, on the West Coast and a lot of the Nobel Prize on the organs have to sleep at night and sleep is a corner store of longevity.

You should not be eating at night because you're anabolic, right? At night growth hormone is high, in the morning insulin is high, so you're absorbing and storing mode at night. You don't want to feed absorption, you want to feed expenditure during the day. So the science of fasting, the science of sleep, the science of longevity, they all tell us the most important thing to do is have your 12 hours of no food at night. Now the question becomes, if we extend, are we in deficiency or not? And the answer is, it depends.

We believe that. Well, there's two things. Water fast only, extended water fast. You know, our organs needs to be nourished, right? And I'll go back to the same example, like the company example.

Circadian rhythm and why timing matters 14:00

If the company has no funds, guess what? The best employees will leave first. They're like, you know what? I don't want to be in delayed payment and dysfunctional organization. I'll go. I have an offer and I'll go, right? And then you can order supplies to sell the next month as well. So there are repercussions. And this is what the buddy tells us, right? If you keep going 16 hours, 18 hours, a lot of people doing this today, And the brain is in pain, right? It's saying, hey, I have a headache in the afternoon, and I feel fatigued in the afternoon.

So the body is telling us, I wasn't built to do 16, 18, 20 hours every day. And I know a lot of people love that, and we call it the omad, the one meal a day. one meal a day in a practice and it works for some it's not ideal why it works but it's not ideal it works because it's better than eating all the time and being obese but it's actually not ideal we have better systems to offer those people so that instead of going from c to b we can take you to a and and help you live a healthier longer life and what is ideal with the science of longevity showing that ideally you want to fast 12 to 14 hours You want to eat in the morning.

So the big secret for all of those who do intermittent fasting is not to skip breakfast, but to eat lunch, to eat dinner early the day before. OK, that's the biggest secret, actually. And we see that when you group all the studies on intermittent fasting. You see negative results and you see positive results. When you look at all the negative results, you see one common denominator. It was an observational trial. People were eating late at night and they were staying all the way till 4 p.m. and they were binge eating at 4 p.m.

after work the next day. The randomized clinical trials, they were designed for people to eat at 7 p.m. and then stay with no food till the next day and still eat that delayed breakfast, early lunch. They were positive results, right? but so the what all this means that dinner is the worst big meal or snacking after dinner and even fasting cannot compensate for that even if you do the 16 hours the next day you're not able to compensate because the body is the body at night absorbs and stores so you will increase fat increase inflammation all of that whereas what you feed the body in the morning is why we believe in breakfast we believe in fasting early in the day eat at seven Stay till the next day at 7, 8 and then eat your breakfast between the 12th to 14th hour.

Because in the morning is where your essential organs need the calories the most. Your brain is thinking in the morning when you go to work. Your body when you go to the gym or you walk to work. In the morning is where you have the highest demand for calories from the essential organs. You don't want to starve them. and you are catabolic, meaning everything you eat in the morning is going for expenditure. So follow your body, eat in the morning, eat at lunch, you're going to sleep, oh, eat light, because you don't want to store.

That's the mirroring. So intermittent fasting, circadian fasting, 12 hours overnight. early dinner it's okay to have your breakfast you mimic now losing weight intermittent fasting the proper way and longevity three times per year three to four times we do the five days same way in a company you operate the company and then you audit it You drive a Formula One car race, you go to a pit stop two or three times in the race. So you got to audit the system, you got to fix it, and then you launch it back better than it was.

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Meet the people you want to make forever with. RadFest 2025. Take advantage of lower advanced pricing now at RadFest.com. Okay, seriously, I love all of your metaphors. I'm like, this is so freaking fun. You're breaking it down in such a great way. And I want to just tell you, you are such a wonderful person after my own heart because at the core, Of what we teach it again it to our docs and everything is really around circadian principles and while circadian biology and circadian rhythms is being more.

talked about again, hence since 2017 there's still such a lack of information and I try to break it down very caught to very common sense like you and I I've kind of come up with a simple little best practices rise with the Sun eat with the Sun move with the Sun Rest with the dark fast with the dark and recover with the dark. It's just like such common sense but one of the points that you made And I think it bears giving a little additional insight to is what we know scientifically is again even around the circadian rhythms this light dark cycle is signaling.

these processes and they activate many hormonal pathways, especially metabolic hormonal pathways that are driving and contributing one way or another to the rate and pace of aging when we really break it down. And what we know is hormonally, the body naturally wants to eat. The hormone ghrelin, grr, I'm hungry, comes online typically around 8 a.m. and then around 1 p.m. around 6 p.m and and to your point insulin starts coming online by around 2 p.m in the afternoon so it's kind of and it moves with the cycle of the light you know think about it like as we're moving to the to the darker phase of the day it is time to rest it's time to put the forks down to put the glasses down to turn things off to to come in and to start to just unwind from the day.

So I love that there is this principle of going, let's keep the daily rhythms in sync and aligned with efficiency. When we track with those rhythms, our body is much more metabolically efficient. We're working with it versus against it.

How the fasting-mimicking diet works 20:30

And so I like the idea of an audit. So now you're helping to give us good daily practices. You're helping us to realize the benefits of fasting. You're helping us to understand also like, hey, when we go a little too long, We're actually sending in some compromise to those organs and to just, again, metabolic efficiency, helping things work smarter versus harder. But now, every quarter or so, we need a little tune-up. So help us talk about that tune-up and that fasting, mimicking process that you guys have really developed and how that kind of stacks up to if we were to have five days to get those benefits on just water without food versus a way to mimic that maybe in a healthier way.

Yeah. You know, we were, we were behind a lot of the water fasting studies, right? So, so we're not, we didn't come up with the nutrition just to take advantage of that system. We actually came with a solution to the problem that we discovered, which is, you know, when we first started the company and the research before the company, we were just doing water. And you, you mentioned the 2013 article on fasting. That was actually us in collaboration with Leydon. And if we fast before cancer for three years, Walter Longo and, and, and, and, and.

the team with Judith Scrope and everyone there. So we were like pure water research company, right? And we figured out that, and we'll talk about the benefits of a prolonged fast, but we figured out that when we go to clinical trials, when we go to people and you ask them to fast for three or four or five, because there was a big misconception and it was a big marketing lie actually. People thought they'd been told, oh, if you fast for 16 hours or eat one meal a day, you're doing autophagy. That was the biggest, this is why intermittent fasting blew up.

Big time after the 2016, it was a misconception that I'm going to rejuvenate my cells if I skip breakfast, which is completely not true. You got to go through a couple of days at least before the stress is deep and the cells are rejuvenating. In mice, when we did the water fasting in mice, we were showing tremendous results on obesity, on diabetes, on cancer. I mean, certain cancer rates, we were taking those from 36% cure to 93% cure when we combined fasting with chemo. on dementia, right? So there were so many benefits in mice.

When we went to humans, the first human trial we trialed, we went with Mayo Clinic and it was so difficult for patients to water fast, right? It was so difficult. So we then had to develop the fasting. This is important. We did not just come up with an idea or let us take advantage. We had to because we wanted people to get the benefits, the metabolic reset benefits and the cellular benefits. without the downside of fasting, which is two major downsides. One is obviously symptoms like the headaches, the hunger, the pain, and then another one is a true health compromise.

You lose muscle, you're deprived of nutrients, etc. Sometimes your blood pressure drops, sometimes your blood sugar drops when you water fast for a period. So we wanted to compensate for both, give you a very positive experience, no hunger, no pains, knowing a little bit of pain or a little bit of hunger, but not extreme. And then not a big health compromise. The opposite is to turn fasting into all positive benefits. So we started working on the fasting mimicking diet. It took us 13 years. It took us $48 million into research to get to the fasting mimicking diet.

Yes. And now we have 42 clinical trials on it. We partnered with 18 global universities, big Stanford, which is doing autoimmune trials, USC, which does the longevity and the cancer trials, University of Indiana, University of Miami, Leiden in Holland. Charité in Berlin and in Germany, universe of Genoa. And I thank all of them, 18 universities, 42 human trials to be able to develop and test the fasting. I mean, it's now the most tested nutrition and clinical trial formulation you can have and how we were able to do that.

So. we started looking into how the body records nutrition when it eats, right? We're like, okay, if we want to mimic fasting, let's see how the body senses food. And if we can go around that, then we can mimic fasting. So the first on the systemic level, when you eat carbs, the body spikes insulin and it's a growth factor. So the body says, okay, I'm recording carbs, so we're good, we're not fasting. And if you eat proteins, IGF increases, right? Everyone uses the acronym IGF. It's incident-like growth factor, right?

It describes everything in it. It's an incident-like incident. It's a growth factor, right? So it's an aging factor as well. This is why, going back to why the fasting immunite is an inter-aging or a longevity, is it doesn't spike insulin and IGF the way normal food does. So we devised a formulation. It's all plant-based. So everything we're talking here, the fasting-mimicking diet, the product is called Prolond for those who want to look it up. Prolond is all plant-based, non-GMO, gluten-free, lactose-free, so it's super high-end, healthy nutrition.

There's no chemical. We're not mimicking fasting with whatever, you know, biologic or chemical. This is all plant-based, high-end, high-quality, clean nutrition. And the formulation doesn't spike insulin, doesn't spike IGF. So on the systemic level, the body is not recording the proteins and the carbs. Now, when you go on a cellular level, this is what took a long time. At the cellular level, there are three major, what we call them, nutrient-sensing pathways, NSPs. They sense food, they sense nutrients.

It's the TOR pathway, the PKA pathway, and the RAS pathway. And so we devised a formulation and a dosing and different types of the day so that we go either around those receptors or we don't hit the switch on when some molecules goes through those receptors. We looked at where is that, what is that minimum quantity we can have without the receptors recording or switching on. And this is on a cellular level how the fasting mimicking diet nourishes the cells, but they don't record, the cells do not register the food.

So you're getting all the benefits of fasting while you're eating a super healthy plant-based nutrition. You're getting your carbs, you're getting your proteins, you're getting your minerals, you're getting your vitamins, you're getting your supplements, you're getting everything for the five days. Full vitamins, by the way, for the micronutrients. and so it gives you all that nutrition that you need while now you're experiencing the positive health benefits of fasting. Are you ready to redefine aging and unlock your full potential as a longevity leader?

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Why the five-day protocol matters 27:30

If you're ready to join the Longevity Revolution, visit humanlongevityinstitute.com to enroll and become a practitioner today. So you guys have done your homework and you've brought something pretty powerful to market that has been changing lives. So why should we really care about doing this? I know it seems like an obvious question, but like, You know, okay, for what reason? I do it, I do it once a quarter, what am I really? Sounds cool, but why should I even care about it if I'm already doing some intermittent fasting, if I already feel pretty good or, you know, why?

Great question, great question. So today, in order to optimize our longevity, right, I always say the best way to do that is to stay younger than your age. What does that mean, right? When my passport is showing I'm 70, I want to be 55. And why the purpose, why optimize longevity should start by being younger than your age? Because 90% of us will die of age-related diseases, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular, and Alzheimer's. These four diseases, we're not going to die, most of us, you and I are not going to die, hopefully, from a plane crash or from a car accident.

We're going to die from cancer, Alzheimer's, cardiovascular, and diabetes, right? One of the four. they're all age-related right we never looked at it this way in medicine we never said oh we kind of assumed it right my my father is is 76 now he he had a heart surgery right my my grandma is a little bit older now and she started having dementia so we never though linked it then when you go to the doctor he says his genetics is whatever she's old right so it's aging the biological age of the body defines the time we have left before we hit a chronic disease or death.

So if you want to live longer, you want to stay younger than your age. And today, this is the biggest question, longevity, right? People tried the AD, the MNM, and there are some indications, but there's no definite outcome that they come at no cost or they extend life. One of the very proven way today to rejuvenate the age of the body is the five-day fasting-mimicking diet. So the biggest positioning of the Prolon today is that over five days I'm helping you metabolically reset but most importantly I'm rejuvenating your cells so they're actually getting younger so the same way I gave the example if you're driving a car race you're a formula one car driver you know your your your wheels are getting you know worked like us with age Your engine is overheating, inflammation, and things will fall down.

But if I go and take a full pit stop, I can slow down. Intermittent fasting, I can slow down my car. Intermittently, I can hit the brake. And then I won't win the race, I'll slow down, but I cannot fix the engine. What was damaged is damaged. I cannot rebuild the wheels if I slow down. I just decrease the wear and tear, but I cannot rejuvenate and I cannot correct. So what I do, I go to a pit stop. And then the engineers come and they look and they screen everything and they're like, okay, change this wheel.

Okay. Add oil, add gas, change this, change that. And that's the parole on five-day fasting. It helps you reduce your biological age score so that hopefully you're younger than your age, so that hopefully you're not, or you decrease your chances of heading early a chronic disease and heading a shorter lifespan. Yeah, I love it. Again, thank you for that. So the question becomes alright. I want to rejuvenate I love the way this sounds and I can get the benefits of fasting without starving myself The average person will do these things they'll go out They'll do a thing for five days go take their pit stop and then they're like, okay I did the thing now back to the other now back to whatever I want So let's really talk about the ideal rhythm we want to be thinking about because food is personal.

Food is also information. Quality of the input determines the quality of the output of how the cells and literally the DNA is responding. And yet a lot of people Don't want to have to make radical changes. They know that they should so they get to a place of chronic disease. They'll make they'll adopt some changes out of fear. They start to have a little shift and they're kind of like I'm feeling better. So now I can go back to doing what I was doing. And again, I'm not making a judgment on it. Just kind of giving more of a yeah it's kind of human nature you know and and and there are certain things that we like or we're social and we've got family and there's events and there's gatherings so what become best practices if we look at this cyclically and we help people to really create a not just sustainable roadmap but a rejuvenation roadmap to come in and do the pit stops and to start appreciating food as medicine food as information that we can kind of upgrade our system over time and it doesn't have to feel like these really big, drastic type of shifts that almost take us away from a living a life because food is a big thing that we love and we celebrate when we are living life.

This is one of the best questions actually, right? Because the word doesn't need a diet, another diet. We have so many diets and diets are like a day one to start and a day of failure at some point, right? And we all got like this learned helplessness, right? I try and I try and it's so imposing on my lifestyle and I'm busy and I was stressed at night and I had to eat.

Lifestyle change, biological age, and outcomes 33:00

And this is exactly why Prolon or the fasting-mimicking diet is very successful. It integrates. it doesn't change your lifestyle. All the 42 clinical trials that I mentioned to you, and we haven't talked about benefits on diabetes and on other, but all the benefits and weight loss, people love the weight loss that comes with it, but they happen in five days. And the 25 days, so all the clinical trials done at all these universities had no lifestyle change you only do your five days and then we ask you to go back to your normal life in the 25 days or if you're doing only four times a year you're basically doing five days and you're doing two and a half months of whatever you want and and the number one benefit people mention when we survey them is they say it's it inspired me to change my relationship with food So I always say it's the diet is, and it's not a diet because it's just five days, the nutrition, but it's, it's long enough to inspire you to do changes.

It's like, Hey, I just spent five days on a plant based. I didn't have my, you know, my coke every day, my diet coke every day. I did not have to eat large portions. I wasn't snacking late at night. I lost a lot of weight. I feel high energy. it starts recording, it's a tiny win. And I don't know if you follow from Stanford, there's an expert there called BJ Fogg, and he talks about the concept of how to change people's behavior. And the most successful changes are called the tiny wins. You win five days, you're like, okay, I went back, I felt bad eating that burger.

And then you go back south again, right? And then you go to the second cycle and it's like, wait a second, that's another success and another success. So in our studies, we're showing that people naturally exercise six hours more per week after a few cycles of the fasting-mimicking diet versus the control group. They start changing their lifestyle. They're starting going a little bit more pescetarian and plant-based, right? This is what we love about it. It integrates first. It doesn't impose anyone can do five days on any nutrition rates.

There's a day one, there's a day five, and then you see benefits fast. That's the secret. Nothing else can give you this fast cycle of benefits, but the fast, the fasting signal to the body are so powerful, so correct. If you lose a lot of weight fast, you rejuvenate yourself. So you feel all pumped. There's changes in the skin visual. We even have shown that it changes in the energy, the mood, So the results are the emotional and physical results are so strong and they happen so fast that it's an inspiration to start doing self change, not impose change.

I love it. That's that's so great. And I'm just curious because I know again with all the research that you guys have behind your work, have you tracked biological age? So for those that have done this on kind of a quarterly basis and they get to do their five days and they go back to do whatever they want, Where do you find people kind of 12 months later after four cycles of this? So that's last year, 2024, we published probably our biggest landmark. Well, Reversing Diabetes was one of the biggest publications, but last year we had a publication in Nature, the number one science journal of the world, Reversing the Biological Age with the Prolon Fasting Mimicking Diet.

We submitted that paper in 2021. And typically it gets few months and it gets published. It took three years to get it done because it's the first paper showing a product reversing the biological age score on the body in the number one journal of the world. So you can imagine the scientific weight there and they send it to so many review authors, et cetera. And so it shows that when you do three times the Fast Sigma Baking Diet, you reverse your biological age by 2.5 bio age score years. Okay. and if you do it which is here this is the most important so everyone between age 50 and 70 this is the most important age 50 to 70 right because this is the pre-disease age and this is where actions taken then have a lot of longevity benefits.

So if you do it between age 50 and 70, now this is a simulation, obviously we didn't do it 20 years, you know, but based on the short-term data, you can extrapolate. So that's a simulation. But if you do it three times per year between age 50 and 70, so remember that three times per year pro along age 50 and 70, you reduce your biological age score by 11.5 years, okay? And we have a table in that article You can look at the article Nature, if you type Nature on Google, fasting, mimicking diet, biological age, you will see it.

And there's a table there in the supplement, in the graphs, there's a table that shows you a calculated, simulated risk reduction on every one of the four age-related disease, cancer, diabetes, neurodegenerative and cardiovascular. Okay. So this is, this is, this is prevention and lifestyle medicine in the number one size of the world, 42 clinical trials, the first NutriTech that can go neck to neck with pharma. And we'd love that. And, and say, look, we are the first food is medicine company in here.

And there's a couple of things that are so significant about what you just said. So literally and truly, you know, just leveraging this tool, anybody that is truly interested in reducing rate and risk of all-cause mortality and chronic disease, the rate and pace of biological aging directly correlates. So the more we can slow that down, the more we reduce that pace, that rate, that risk of the unwanted stuff. Okay, so that's just kind of making it super, super simple that way. We also know, to the extent that we slow that pace of biological aging, that directly correlates with increased health span, the numbers of years that we're living in health versus sickness and disease.

And then the third part to this, obviously we know that Aubrey de Grey, you know, for years has been talking about longevity escape velocity and He'll of course be at RADFest this year. RADFest has teamed up with the Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation. And so the 10-year anniversary will be out in Las Vegas. Hope that you guys can join us at the time you're listening. Hopefully you can attend. It's going to be phenomenal. Yet here's what's really important. You know, the idea of this Longevity Escape Velocity is how do we have this net-net kind of positive gain of age reversal Versus a gene, and when I mean age reversal, we're really talking about if our biological age is going backwards while our chronological number of years on the birthday cake candles go forward, right?

The escape velocity is for one year you age, you reduce your bio age by more than one year. That's the escape. So you're escaping the. Which is a big, big, big ambition, right? That's the moonshot for aging. Can we age backwards? That's a big moonshot. And, and, you know, we, we, there's a lot, there's billions. I just, Longevity.Tech, I don't know if you're familiar with them, Longevity.Tech is the bigger publication on longevity in the world out of London. And they just released the 2024 report on longevity.

You know, we actually had the pleasure to write the forward. But they're showing that 60 billion went into aging and longevity research last year, 60 billion. So every, a lot of, let's say a lot of high net worth individuals and VCs and money is coming into finding potentially a drug or understanding how we age,

Longevity escape velocity and future vision 40:30

what are the combination of genes? It's not as simple. There's no one gene or one. What is that combination? What's in our gene that tells us to age and can we rework that so that we age backwards, which again is a big statement, is a big moonshot. What we're coming from as a nutrition company, we're saying, well, okay, until we get there. Yeah. We actually, nutrition is the only product we consume every day of life. We have 100% compliance on nutrition, 100%. Everyone, the seven trillion people, they all consume one thing, which is food, every day, multiple times.

Why don't we turn that food as an asset of longevity? Why don't we help the body not age when the body eats? And we focus on the Pro-Olon fasting-mimicking diet, but we have the longevity protein called the L-protein. We have the longevity bars. So how can we replace your food with another food that does not age, that doesn't spike the same concept we talked about, doesn't spike insulin or IGF the same way? How can we give you 25 grams of protein with our L-protein without super spiking IGF? So we're nourishing your muscle, but you're not aging, right?

You know, the big bodybuilders, they die younger than others because they're so aged internally. They look great externally because the muscle is elastic, but they're aging so fast because of the multiple spikes of IGF throughout the day with the protein consumption. So how can we help humanity eat food that doesn't spike insulin IGF, so slow down aging, and three to four times per year, reverse that bio-age on the cell, audit the cells, and go, this is why we're so, such a big pillar of nutrition is in aging and longevity, and we'd love to be, we audit the cornerstone of it.

Yes you are and and you did say something so so important protein is so important especially as we chronologically age and the rub is unfortunately the higher amounts as it does spike that pathway does bring that up and so you've really kind of found the way to modulate it so it's not as extreme and it's kind of a gentler approach the body's able to utilize those nutrients in in a really great way without kind of the downside of that active We reviewed all the literature on aging and proteins, right?

And people think protein is positive. Oh, protein increases IGF, insulin-like growth factor. So we love the growth of the muscle, but we're aging. Growth is aging for humans, right? So we did a meta-analysis, and we published it. And you can look it up, you know, correlation between IGF and longevity. And we saw that there was a U-shaped curve. And when IGF is between 130 and 160 is the ideal optimization of I'm nourishing my muscle and I'm not over spiking my growth, accelerating my aging. If you go below 130, you're under, this is where a lot of vegans are, you're undernourishing your muscle.

Yes, you're slowing down more your age, but you're undernourishing your muscle and your bone, et cetera. If you go beyond 160, the other extreme, you're over accelerating aging without over getting a lot of benefits on the muscle because you're already Outside of the IGF with this IGF between 130 and 160. I hope one day IGF becomes like cholesterol like glucose glucose insulin Protein IGF. They should both be measured so people understand the rate of aging Wow, so I could sit here and talk to you for hours and I I'm sure that everybody listening is fascinated as well.

This has been really fantastic. Let's wrap up with this. Tell us your future vision. So you guys you have something that's truly making a difference and has been for quite some time. It is completely researched back. There's just it is walking the walk and talking the talk. There's no hype. There's no claims. It just is actually doing what it's intended to do. And so where does that leave you guys as a company with the ability like could this product set actually be put into hospitals and be put into, you know, health care systems and insurance systems and to be able to be widely adopted in a way that it really can move the needle on that rate and pace of aging and already offsetting that increased rate and risk of these main chronic diseases.

That's exactly where we're heading to. We put enough, we put a lot of science over 26 years because we wanted to be, to gain the credibility and the trust. Today we have 15,400 clinics prescribing ProLon across the U.S. and that trust is taking us now to employers, self-insured employers, who want to do the best for their employees. It's taking us to health plans and insurances that are talking to us to bid on, and a lot of them, by the way, are stopping the GLP-1 and replacing with the Prolon Fasting and Baking Diet, or at least putting us as a first-line therapy, right?

Yes. If you have diabetes, if you have obesity, I understand you cannot change your lifestyle and be on diets every day, but why you don't try this five days only box? Do it. And then before we start putting biologics and injectable in your body. And we're about to start discussions with CMS on Medicare, Medicaid reimbursement as well. There are international countries talking to us about reimbursing us as well. So a lot of what you and I talked about is fresh data from 2014 and early 2015, sorry, 2024, 2025. So now we're taking all this data and going talking to payers for reimbursement as well.

What's probably going to help us is with RFK Jr. as well today. And we see that nutrition is big on his agenda. So hopefully in the next few years, we push that agenda. He started by cleaning out unhealthy ingredients in food. But I think, and because people don't know about us, they don't like, we say food is medicine, meaning eat healthy. But with us, food is medicine is really go and fix and rejuvenate and induce remission.

Closing remarks and show outro 46:30

Hopefully, we'll meet soon with the administration and try to do something on reimbursing our portfolio as well. Yeah, you absolutely will. There's great things ahead. We will keep our eyes on all things over at El Neutra. Is that the main website you want people to learn more about? Where can we direct them? If you want to read about the general science of the company, El-Neutra. El is for longevity. dash neutral and UTRA longevity through nutrition and neutral.com. If you want to read specifically about the products that we talked about Prolon, the five day fasting and making diet, Prolon is P-R-O-L-O-N and follow us on social.

If you want to follow me personally, I'm on all social with the same handle, Dr. Joseph Anton or whatever handle that is. Yeah. All the goodies, we'll have it in the show notes below everybody. Dr. Anton, thank you so much. This has absolutely been truly a masterclass, so wonderful. Much success, continue to go out and make such a profound impact on humanity. I'm just, I love what you guys are up to. Thank you for your time today. Thank you, doctor. Yes, and to each and every one of you, wow, wow.

I hope you can join us at the 10-year anniversary of RadFest out in Vegas. We will have amazing minds just like Dr. Anton. Now, he won't be able to be at that one. That's why you got a special dose today, but we are going to have this caliber, you know, just to infuse all the beautiful knowledge, the information, and the implementation strategies to help you truly live better today for longer tomorrows until our next episode. Continue to stay bold, be curious, and go out and flourish forward. Take care.

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