How Fasting Can Enhance Cancer Treatment

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Appreciate it very much. We are going to bring a lot of information today on nutrition for nutrition and fasting for cancer.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I love it. Dr. Joseph Antoun’s passion is to enhance human longevity. He’s the CEO and chairman of the board of L. Nutra Inc. a unique nutrition technology company leading the longevity and food-as-medicine markets. Before taking on these roles, Dr. Antoun was the CEO of Health System Reform, a boutique consultancy aimed at elevating public health through reforming health systems, strengthening healthcare management, and improving healthcare delivery. He is the co-director of the Center for Health Policy at the University of Chicago and an adjunct professor of health policy at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. I am a fellow at the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Dr. Antoun founded and served as the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Health Systems and Reform. He served as the chairman of the board at the Global Healthspan Policy Institute, as a member of Forbes Business Development, and as head of business development for emerging markets at Eli Lilly and Company. Dr. Antoun has dedicated his professional experience to launching two novel markets: the first is the longevity market, whereby he launched the first tested and patented healthy aging product called Prolon. The second: is the food-as-medicine market, where he launched Nutrition for Longevity, which is among the first foods ever to be reimbursed by CMS in insurance. Dr. Antoun completed his health policy and studied at Harvard University Public Health at Johns Hopkins University Medicine and Biological Sciences at St. John’s University. He has a Ph.D. in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Studies from King’s College. He is married to the loveliest. Corryn has three amazing boys and stays healthy by consuming Prolon and walking daily for hours while on his phone. You are an educated gentleman, and you have done a lot. That is quite a history.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Try to have luck. I went to medical school first, and like many doctors, we go there to try to help people stay healthy and cure diseases. I figured out I wasn’t able to do that for the biggest four diseases, like cancer, Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. We do not have, in many or most cases, full cures. I was frustrated with that system. I started my journey, and it is like a combination of medicine, health system reform, and health policy, and then coming back to products and technology. It is my journey to try to find something to end chronic diseases. We landed on a few good things here.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Well, you work directly with a doctor, Professor Valter Longo, and you’ve done a heavy amount of research in this area of fasting.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yes. Valter Longo, for those listening to us today, goes to ChatGPT or any other source. He’s the number-one fasting expert in the world and the number-one longevity nutrition expert in the world. He heads the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California and has done over two decades of research on nutrition for longevity. If you are healthy, how can I formulate foods that help you stay healthy for a long time? He started looking at the conditions. If you have diabetes, what should you eat to induce remission? If you have cancer, what should you eat to induce remission? If you have Alzheimer’s or autoimmune diseases, it is food as medicine and food for longevity, he started fasting in food because fasting is as important as food. We are going to talk about this today, but all this is summarized in his book, The Longevity Diet. I strongly advise people listening to us today to buy that book on Amazon or anywhere else. It is called The Longevity Diet by Valter Longo and will change your life.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

I had the pleasure of chatting with him on my radio show some years ago, and the research is just tremendous. As a cancer patient, what you are thinking and what you are told by your oncologist is: eat, eat, eat. It doesn’t matter where the calories come from. You just need to keep that weight on. Yet here you are, saying almost the opposite.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Cancer patients have a dilemma because once you have cancer, cancer is a cell that loses inhibition of replication. It starts going fast, keeps growing, and then goes everywhere in the body after getting squeezed locally. At the end of the day, it is eating the body’s calories. Cancer loves any growth factor and loves any nutrients because they just feed it. It feeds its growth. This is a dilemma because then you see the body getting frail. After all, cancer is eating a lot of those sources, and then traditionally we said, “Okay, let’s feed this body right, like give it high protein, let’s take care of it.” But the more you feed it, the more you are feeding cancer. Then cancer grows, and this is why we do not get a cure. What we specialize in is: how can we create what we call differential stress resistance. How can we feed the body without causing cancer? How can we starve cancer before chemo? We sensitize cancer to chemotherapy, and we try to apply all our science to cancer. Trying to a little bit separate what benefits cancer from what benefits the body in fasting was one of the major interventions that we saw in mice that had tremendous cure rates. In humans, we are doing a lot of trials, around eight clinical trials, trying to look at short-term health outcomes and health benefits and then longer-term potential remission. We are seeing a lot of benefits. I am happy to explain why and how to healthily and safely way.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, I love that. I had it on my podcast, Integrative Cancer Solution. I was talking to a gentleman who had colon cancer, and he fasted for 21 days, which was able to shrink his tumor by 50%. That does not happen with everybody, but it just kind of shows the power of fasting when you bring that in as a tool.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

There are a lot of anecdotes and stories, and it will work for many. It won’t work for others. I would agree with the other side effects on another organ. What I would report today is randomized clinical trials on cancer and what they are showing. We benefit as many people as possible and give them solutions they can adopt. The issue, just as a disclaimer to start, is that cancers are different. What we are going to talk about today would apply to many cancers, and I’ll specify, but there are many other cancers that we haven’t tested or that we do not know what applies. Forgive me if I am going to generalize. I am going to give general concepts, but with a disclaimer that every cancer is different and every cancer responds differently.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

That is the thing when you are dealing with cancer,  it is a serious disease. You need to be under the care of a professional medical professional to support you through that journey. This is just to arm individuals with information so that they know where to look and how to do things on their journey.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Bring it to your doctor to discuss with them what we will discuss today and see if it is going to help you. Nothing we are going to talk about is here to promise a cure or full remission, although there’s a lot of hope about a lot of benefits that we are studying, I’ll give you an update on the science of fasting for cancer. First of all, why did we study fasting and cancer? The number one is cancer. Cancer is the fastest-growing organ. Once you have it, it just wants to replicate the cancer cells. It needs food, and it needs growth factors. What decreases growth factors in the body and what decreases food is fasting. “Okay, can you fast every day?” Because if you fast every day now, you are also shrinking the other organs, and the brain needs to eat and the heart needs to pump. It wasn’t practical to fast all the time. Then we started studying. “Okay, what is the ideal time to fast?” We discover that the ideal time to fast is before the treatment, before chemo or immunotherapy, four to five days before. First of all, why before, and why four to five days? As a disclaimer, we started doing it with water. It is still too difficult for people to fast on water for four or five days. Doctors do not like it. It puts their patients in an extreme situation. The national health system gave us funds to go and discover fast-mimicking nutrition. You are feeding the body for four days while the body thinks you are fasting. This is the core of what we have discovered, if you want, for the last two decades. This is the core of what made our founder and USC very famous: nutrition for cancer. It is discovering this fast, mimicking nutrition. Anything I am going to talk about moving forward is not going to be like water fasts. When I say fast for four days, it is a nutrition program that you would eat, and it is formulated with precision nutrition to keep the fasting signals on the cells. Why fast for four days before chemotherapy, immunotherapy, or the therapies you are doing? There are four benefits.

Bring it to your doctor to discuss with them what we will discuss today and see if it is going to help you. Nothing we are going to talk about is here to promise a cure or a full remission, although there’s a lot of hope about a lot of benefits that we are studying, so I’ll give you an update on the science of fasting for cancer. First of all, why did we study fasting and cancer? The number one is cancer. Cancer is the fastest-growing organ. Once you have it, it just wants to replicate the cancer cells. It needs food, and it needs growth factors. What decreases growth factors in the body and what decreases food is fasting. “Okay, can you fast every day?” If you fast every day now, you are also shrinking the other organs, and the brain needs to eat and the heart needs to pump. It wasn’t practical to fast all the time. Then we started studying. “Okay, what is the ideal time to fast?” We discover that the ideal time to fast is before the treatment, before chemo or immunotherapy, four to five days before. First of all, why before, and why four to five days? As a disclaimer, we started doing it with water. It is still too difficult for people to fast on water for four or five days. Doctors do not like it. It puts their patients in an extreme situation. The national health system gave us funds to go and discover fast-mimicking nutrition. You are feeding the body for four days while the body thinks you are fasting. This is the core of what we have discovered, if you want, for the last two decades. This is the core of what made our founder and USC very famous: nutrition for cancer. It is discovering this fast, mimicking nutrition. Anything I am going to talk about moving forward is not going to be like water fasts. When I say fast for four days, it is a nutrition program that you would eat, and it is formulated with precision nutrition to keep the fasting signals on the cells. Why fast for four days before chemotherapy, immunotherapy, or the therapies you are doing? There are four benefits.

That does its work in attacking cancer. Number three is what we call differential stress resistance. When you fast normal cells in the body, they say, “Okay, there’s no calories; there’s no push to replicate, so we’ll hibernate and stay in a non-replicative format.” Cancer does not know how to do that. By definition, cancer wants to grow, and cancer cells want to replicate. You have normal cells that are hibernating in the body, and the cancer keeps replicating when chemo comes in, and many interventions impact kill cells in replication. This is how they work. You are protecting the normal cells of the body from the side effects of chemotherapy, and you are sensitizing cancer to chemo, then making chemo more selective to create damage at the cancer versus creating damage across the body. These were the concepts that we studied. We said, “Okay, can we sensitize cancer to the treatment? Can we rejuvenate ME to better attack cancer? Can we protect the cells of the body?” By the way, when you protect the cells, the patient tolerates more of the chemotherapy and can stay at a higher dose or do more cycles. We know this is a very important factor in getting rid of cancer and increasing the chances of remission. A lot of people end up quitting or decreasing the dose. The doctor has to decrease the dose because of the side effects. That was the concept behind fasting before treatment. What we test is something called fasting, mimicking nutrition. You do it four days before chemotherapy. Now we have started testing what a cancer patient should eat afterwards. It is different with breast cancer; you gain weight. You have a lot more leeway than going more restrictive afterward. In other cancers, you lose weight. It is not as easy to be restrictive. But according to general concepts, especially in breast and prostate cancer, you end up dying more of cardiovascular long-term complications than the cancer itself. In the breast, you gain weight. 

It has those side effects. These two very popular cancers could benefit from what we studied, which is that just before us, some people started looking at intermittent fasting and ketogenic diets for those cancers. There is one observational trial that was published in 2016 in JAMA Oncology, one of the top medical journals. It was just an observation. It was looking at women with breast cancer who typically stay 13 hours without food. They are doing intermittent fasting for 13 hours, not on purpose. It was observational. It was enough to decrease the rate of recurrence. It didn’t change the outcome of the lifespan, but it was just 13 hours. It was not 14, 15, or 16. It’ll be very interesting to look into trials on a 16-hour or 17-hour intermittent fast and see if it makes sense if every day you underfeed cancer, cancer is not going to, and if you still have some remaining cells that are being well-fed and well-pushed every day. That is the concept. There are a lot of theories about being more ketogenic with cancer. Cancer does not appreciate carbs, proteins, or carbs. They push insulin and IGF; which are growth factors. You are getting the nutrients and the push to grow. If you go a little bit more on fat, you have less push to nourish cancer and fewer growth factors in the body, which creates a better nutrition environment for the body to still gain weight with the healthy fats, which are very important to be unhealthy fats without over-pushing the cancer and equipping it for growth.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes. What you mention is hugely important. We have the issue that when we do oxidative therapy, which is chemo or radiation, we want the cancer to be as weak as possible. If we do not feed it the nutrients it needs, then when we bring in those therapies, we are going to have a stronger kill. What you are talking about, and regarding just kind of autophagy and something that is called immunosenescence, where we kind of kill off some of the immune system components that are not very helpful to allow space to replenish more healthy immune cells, is so crucial when you deal with cancer, and then, like you are talking about, these are huge factors. You mentioned that there are three. Did I miss the fourth one as well?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

The fourth one is decreasing growth factors that push the cancer to grow, so number one was starving cancer, number two was rejuvenating immunity, and number three was protecting the healthy cells versus the cancer. Slice cancer and decrease the growth factor of the body as a response to food. When you eat carbs, insulin spikes. This is a growth factor that cancer loves when you eat protein, especially proteins. That is a big dilemma because proteins have a positive connotation in society. I see a lot of oncologists; they do not hesitate to tell patients to eat as much protein, and I want to mention brand names but drink high-protein drinks as well. They have their roles. If you are taking or if you are frail, but go plant-based, definitely go into low-leucine so that you have the proteins that would not spike IGF, I would not over-boost cancer. The more you eat carbs and proteins, the more you increase postprandial growth factors, which the cancer loves and will help it strive for, which will help the cancer thrive before the chemo or the intervention. To continue that, doctors and patients need to start these interventions at the beginning and from the first cycle because it is a vicious circle. Once you do not protect this, the normal cells in your side effects of cancer are resistant. You need more. You start getting into this vicious circle of the body, getting more fully frail or damaging the cancer to survive. This is where the patient is getting into this hopeless phase rather than, from the beginning, protecting the cells and weakening the cancer. The body is still strong and ready to take more. Keep the patient on chemo for longer to increase the chances of remission.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Let’s say you have a cancer patient who is receiving chemotherapy every three weeks. That is kind of a regular cycle. In the fasting-mimicking diet, they mentioned they can’t just water fast because that makes it very difficult. To bring in something like Prolon, what is a good pattern that an individual should use, knowing that I am going to do chemo every three weeks? Do you start them to Prolong them for days prior to, and how long do you continue?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

You mentioned the brand name, and this is the fact that the way we launched it was called Prolon. We have proactively tested Prolon for cancer in multiple clinical trials, but we do not proactively sell it for cancer or push it for cancer. We are developing a full program because what you mentioned at the beginning is important: you need to have your doctor involved. You need to know that I do not want to generalize things because every cancer and every patient is different. If you are a 45-year-old woman with breast cancer doing your chemo every three years, hormone therapy, etc., we studied fasting-mimicking. They did. It can be more assertive if you are a 75-year-old frail person with multiple comorbidities; then maybe your doctor should not put you on fasting. I do not want to generalize here today, but I’ll say that what we tested the most on the fasting-mimicking nutrition was a little bit of that profile of 40 to 65 years old. The people whose bodies are still able to take a fasting regimen indicate that they are not frail, do not have a low BMI, or are not in the end stage. We have studied to do the four days or the five days right before the chemo, the tyrosine kinase, or the hormone therapy. These are the three that we have tested for breast cancer. We have tested them also in prostate cancer, because when you fast, you are also improving the cardiometabolic profile in men with prostate cancer, especially after taking the hormone replacement and therapy there. He ended up living a long time, but they ended up accelerating. The cardiometabolic side effects and fasting outside of the impact could potentially impact nutrition and help improve the nutrition environment to give better chances to the current standard of care. Nothing we are doing here is to replace the standard of care. Just to help the standard of care end up also helping cardiovascular health, blood pressure, blood cholesterol, and blood sugar, which receive beneficial prostate and long-term benefits as well, is also a risk for patients with prostate cancer.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Kind of going back to that, in that group that you studied, did you do that five days, four, or five days prior to continuing? These are generalized statements; I get that. But it is just nice for people to kind of have a feeling as to where to go. Do they do it on the day of chemotherapy? Is that where studies have been as well? Or do they stop on the day of chemo, or when do they stop, and do they just do it around the chemo, or do they do it maybe a few days every week?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

The design of the study was three days before and the day of the chemo, because the day of the chemo is where you get a lot of toxicity as well. You want the body’s normal cells to be hibernating rather than replicating. This is one of the concepts of benefit number three: potentially protecting the normal cells of the body. We tested a few days before and on the day of the chemo. We have only tested it with a standard of care, not just as a stand-alone product in between cycles. What I can say is the potential benefits; we are not promising a cure or remission here, but the potential to enhance the body’s nutrients. Being good hosts for the standard of care is what we are trying to catalyze. This is the reason that we studied it. Now, if a person finishes their treatment, they are done with it, and they just want to say, “Okay, I want to.” This is what we have shown: fasting for four or five days induces autophagy and rejuvenation, and part of that could detoxify the body out of the side effects of the damage that has been done by the chemicals that they’ve had to take for the treatment. 

Some physicians recommend you stay on Prolon after your cancer treatment is done, not for cancer treatment but more so for the general cells of the body. This takes us to why we are a company of longevity into this medicine because, at the end of the day, you got cancer because you were aging, unhealthy, or had a genetic predisposition, but also because the same person is at a higher risk factor, potentially having diabetes or having cardiovascular disease. With the damage and the stress of going through chemotherapy and going through that entire treatment, you probably have pushed your aging even further. From a general body and longevity standpoint, this is way more. I would be more encouraged to say yes, Prolon, for helping that body rejuvenate, helping the cells to try to detox and try to go into a little bit younger, better-performing cells with autophagy. Maybe then you can do Prolon once every three months just to help the body after the treatment is done from a holistic and longevity standpoint to detox, rejuvenate, enhance the cell’s performance, and build mental clarity and energy that we know are correlated with doing four or five days of fasting.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

To prevent cancer, if you support longevity and optimum health, then you minimize the risk of developing things like cancer, but also, as you mentioned, cardiovascular disease and diabetes are some of the major killers that we are dealing with. You talk about autophagy; you talk about priming the immune system. Every three months, you want to do something like a four- or five-day cleanse or fasting mimicking. Is that kind of what?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yes, once every quarter, once all the cancer treatment is done. This is not for cancer; this is more for the body. You get to talk to your doctor. If you are not frail or too old to do it, there is a negative line of thought. We haven’t tested what happens if you do it every quarter. But we have over a million now. We use Prolon’s five-day fasting nutrition for longevity and healthy aging. This is not related to the cancer treatment, but because you went through stress during the cancer treatment because you had cancer, this is old age-related and a symptom of how the body ages, and if you were prone to cancer, you could be prone to other health conditions as well, whether age-related or not. It makes sense at that stage to try to, especially if you are in remission if your BMI is healthy and your doctor is supportive. Everything we are doing here has to be consulted with the doctor. There are some doctors who recommend fasting nutrition as a recovery and rejuvenation phase. Helping the body age gracefully after the treatment is done.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

As patients are going through the chemotherapy and fasting and mimicking it, they are not feeling the same side effects. You have to kind of take an average and see that fewer people are feeling the side effects. Is that what’s happening? Because they are in a better state of protecting their healthy cells and their immune systems are as active, you are able to have a greater impact on the cancer cells than the healthy cells.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yes, the theory is that when you fast, the cancer does not know how to stop replication, but the healthy cells know how to do that, and when they stop replication, their chemo head cells are in the replication phase. That is how it works. The fewer healthy cells in replication, the less damage the chemo is doing to healthy cells. That is why we studied in mice and in humans, and that factor is why there are a lot of trials ongoing now. We will report maybe next time, with even more and more results. There are a lot of benefits, but they are specific to what we studied in different cancers and different stages in different patients, and because we are mentioning here one intervention, one product, I have to be very truthful to the science and very specific and not generalize. I am trying to give hints, but stay compliant and stay within the lines of what we can say and whatnot. It is very beneficial to go to the doctor, and what I recommend is to go to the L-nutra website. Our company, L-nutra longevity through nutrition. Read the concepts we have in the published clinical trials. Take those to your doctor and discuss with him whether this applies to you or your cancer and whether he or she feels confident doing any of them. It is not just fasting mimicking nutrition. We have studied a lot about what proteins to eat throughout cancer nutrition to be a little bit more on intermittent fasting and ketogenic versus not. But again, it depends on the patient, the type of cancer, the type of stage, how the body reacts, and which stage that patient is at. It is up to the doctor to do that. But if anything out of this webinar is to solicit your doctor and push for nutrition, when we did surveys with oncologists, nutrition was like that for them. Yes, we do recommend people exercise and eat healthy, and I tell them to eat wholesome food, and they’ll eat a lot of sugar, but go on proteins that this very general cancer deserves much better-tailored nutrition. We are working with our founder, Professor Longo, who has three clinics. Maybe this is another conclusion from today. We have three clinics where you can find doctors and nutritionists who specialize in fasting and nutrition for cancer. One of them is in Los Angeles, at the Create Cures Foundation Clinic, and two others are in Italy. They are increasing the demand because demand is so high, and they are increasing the number of clinics, but you can also call them to see if they can take care of you. They will work very closely with your doctor, and they will tailor the treatment. They will support the treatment with nutritional assets that can increase the chances of going through a better journey, have the body better prepared for the treatment, and potentially impact outcomes.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, because there’s so much more than that. Sugar feeds cancer. There are so many different things that cancer utilizes for its own survival and growth. You have glutamine, which is a common one, but you also have certain amino acids that support the production of glutathione that the cancer cell has as well. To know then which amino acids you should try to minimize while you are trying to go after it with an oxidative therapy like chemotherapy, you want to minimize the antioxidant defense that the cancer cell has, and people do not recognize that cancer cells are how they survive. It is through antioxidants. That is how they protect themselves. Throwing a bunch of antioxidants willy-nilly may not be the way to do it. You have to be strategic about it.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yes. 100% agree. When you are doing the chemo cycles, the state of the body and the state of the cancer on that day, before, and right after are so important. We cannot just neglect that. It is not about just eating healthy, and this has been long-term, a little bit disrespectful to nutrition as medicine within, and I am, I say it openly, an M.D. Ph.D., and I’ve come from that side. I had to learn a lot. I only had one hour of nutrition training in my entire studies, which is pretty shameful today, especially when it comes to diseases like diabetes, which is 80% a food-borne disease. How come we do not focus on the solution within nutrition before we start giving pills and polypills and then injections into the brain? We are talking about Alzheimer’s being type 3 diabetes as well. It is nutrition, aging, and lifestyle that are the biggest determinants of when and how we are getting these age-related health conditions, followed by environmental factors, genetic factors, and other factors. But a lot of that is accelerated, decelerated, or protected against with the years of lifestyles that you have and the type of nutrition that you take.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, as Americans. But that is becoming true for the majority of the world, where we are overfed and undernourished. To utilize diet as a strategy to deal with these major chronic illnesses. In addition to the studies we have talked about about cancer, I assume that since the focus is on longevity, you’ve done some studies on other diseases as well, along with the fasting-mimicking diet.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yes. We will launch a full integrative cancer nutrition program next year. The diabetes program was already launched last month. This is why we are also very excited. Again, 80% of type 2 diabetes is lifestyle-related, and nutrition is at the core of that. Imagine a disease that says, “Okay, you overeat, you get more fat, it gives you insulin resistance, and you become diabetic.” If you give signals of fasting, which is the opposite of overheating, it could be one of the fastest ways to get into regression in remission. It is amazing that we have accepted for decades that we just give pills. A lot of these pills just sensitize insulin, then increase fat storage, and then push you forward in the disease. Whereas now, with fasting-mimicking nutrition, we have put a full program around it for anyone interested. Go to l-nutrahealth.com. You will see a full program on diabetes regression, called regression, meaning you need less medication, and remission, meaning you can go without medication. We are seeing results in a month; we are not talking in five years; we are talking in a few months. 

We have shown that in six months, only two-thirds of the patients would start dropping their medications. We are seeing 10% of them at that time already not needing medication. This is amazing. In America, we spent $600 billion on this disease. This is when most people, upon diagnosis, feel they are doomed for the rest of their lives. This is where we doctors have agreed to just give them pills and let them add another pill the next year, and then insulin. Suddenly nutrition comes in and says, Well, it is a nutrition-based disease. Let’s fix it with nutrition. Guess what? The fastest way to do that is to fake it fast on the body with our fasting mimicking nutrition, and as the body pulls back from storing fat, it starts breaking fat fast, reversing insulin resistance. But at the same time, what’s critical is that you can’t do any diet to drop fat, though those are critical, as the five days of fasting make nutrition the rejuvenation of the cells, which helps the entire body, including the pancreas, to age better and process better. That and if your body protects the muscles.

This is something very important. We haven’t talked about muscle today. It is critical because after four or five days of fasting-mimicking nutrition, whether with cancer patients and when they train or with diabetic patients, we have shown that we protect lean body mass, and it is critical. It is critical because a lot of therapies will help you lose weight, but you will also lose muscle. A lot of people are obese, and we go on weight-loss therapies or diets. But the muscle loss puts you, as we talked about with cancer, in that vicious circle where the day you stop, you pick up back fat fast because the engine that burns carbs, which is muscle, is weakening. The metabolic rate is lower in your insufficient circles. With Prolon, we have now shown in three clinical trials, and we have two patterns: we are protecting lean body mass, and why is that? It is not the calorie deficit as much as the stress that happens on day three of the cell; on day three, the body says I am depleting my reserve, but no, you have to rejuvenate, which is what the Nobel Prize in 2016 was about. When you have rejuvenation happening across the body, the stress of a lack of nutrients induces stress hormones, one of which is growth factor growth hormones. Growth hormone is telling the muscle to rejuvenate, and water fast is one. When you mentioned that they fast and a water fast, the muscle does not have nutrients to grow, so you are basically not growing the muscle. You are losing muscle. But with the Prolon fasting-mimicking nutrition, the growth factor, the growth hormone, is increasing the stress hormone response, and the muscle is doing rejuvenation. You have the proteins in the club to feed the muscle and maintain it. This is very critical. Diabetes is very important for cancer as well. But this is the secret to unlocking diabetes for us. We figured out a way to cut fat without compromising muscle. This is how, in cancer, we figure out ways to focus the therapy on the cancer without impacting the rest of the body.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Yes, most diseases, and we are seeing that cancer is one of them, are considered metabolic diseases. If we can then utilize strategies that ramp up the metabolic activity within the cells, and you mentioned fasting, you are absolutely right. A lot of people reset their metabolic status by fasting. Even though they are losing weight, they are also losing their metabolic activity. When they start eating, the percentage between fat and muscle increases. To be able to do something where you are continually increasing metabolic activity, keeping that muscle, and just losing the fat is huge.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

We see that a lot in breast cancer. Then fat uptake happens frequently in most patients, and they end up having metabolic disorders afterward. This is where we have studied fasting mimicking nutrition as well, describing the potential benefits that it creates from a nutritional standpoint to help the patient have better management.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Anything else that you feel is important to discuss prior to us ending this? I know you’ve already brought a tremendous amount of information, and fasting-mimicking diet is something that people recognize the value of, but to have tools like Prolon to be able to do it right and to do it in a way that scientifically has been proven is tremendous. Is there anything else that you’d like to add before we wrap up?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yes, two things: if you have a condition today, if anything, read the Longevity Diet book because it is so important to understand the concepts of nutrition and everything involved in nutrition whenever you have a condition. Number two is to have an in-depth discussion with your doctor about tailoring, nutrition, and order, and therefore either go to functional medicine support clinics like the Great Cures Foundation clinics or read the articles and start a little bit by adopting some of these recommendations. At the end of the day, we are not talking about chemicals; we are talking about plant-based healthy interventions, and humans have lived on eating and not eating for hundreds of thousands of years. What we do today—eat every three to four hours and rush for food—is a fad. This is why we are paying the price for increased cancer and diabetes. We are not bringing here anything artificial; we are just matching the body with what the body is supposed to eat and not eat. I strongly recommend that you read and understand. I am surprised by the resistance of the medical community to better understand nutrition and science. GM oncology is the second or third-highest impact factor in cancer. It was published in 2016. This is already seven or eight years ago, an article showed that it is just 13 hours of fasting, natural, no products, nothing for just those; maybe they just wake up late as a breast cancer patient, and they are not eating in the morning. 13 hours was enough to induce a statistically significant difference in rates of remission, not survival, but just because it was just that, that was an extra step above the 12 hours, and so I wonder how doctors think about that, and in that, I invite all the funders here to fund trials that show what happened at 14 hours, 15 hours, and 16 hours, and I’d be very interested in doing these trials. 

We have a product called the Fast Bar and a product called the Fasting Shake that we can do in the morning. They are tested to mimic fasting in the morning, meaning if instead of doing 12 hours, you went to 16 hours, just eat the bar or eat the fasting shake. They’ll keep your body in a fasting mode for those extra 4 hours. But I’d be very interested in testing water fast extension and fasting mimicking extension. What does it do to cancer? If people do them every day, it just underfeeds the cancer on a daily basis. Give the body the calories from healthy fats and, a little bit, some careful amino acid sequence; we also studied the spike of IGF and low carbs, and let the body go whenever you have a condition. We do not want to generalize, but that could be one simple outcome that can help a lot of patients.

I know most people come in with their patients, and some are physicians, so I invite everyone listening to us here and the physicians as well to reach for that about tailoring nutrition for care for cancer.

Michael Karlfeldt, ND, PhD

Well, Dr. Joseph Antoun, thank you so much for all this information and for moving this science forward for people to have tools in the battle against cancer and just the battle against aging. Thank you so much for joining me.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

I appreciate it very much.