
Master The Fasting Mimicking Diet: Rejuvenate Your Cells

Founder at Women's Functional Health Institute

CEO and Chairman of the Board, L-Nutra Inc.
Master The Fasting Mimicking Diet: Rejuvenate Your Cells
Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP
Full Transcript
Introduction to fasting mimicking diet 0:00
Hello and welcome back to our Reversing Mast Cell Activation Syndrome and Histamine Intolerance Summit. I'm your host, Dr. Meg Mill. And today I am joined by my esteemed colleague, Dr. Joseph Antoun, who's passionate to enhance human longevity. He is the CEO of L-Nutra, a company that makes the product ProLon We know that fasting can modify our immune system response, and it also affects metabolic changes, including alterations in glucose, insulin and other hormones such as cortisol, which can affect mast cell stabilization.
So today we're going to talk about the fasting mimicking diet what it is and how it affects our immune system, muscle activation syndrome and histamine. Thank you so much for joining us today Dr. Antoun Dr. Meg. And you know, hopefully it's going to be a session with, a lot of innovative information and hopefully will change somebody's life today. Yes, that's my goal too I love that. That's a that's a great goal. So let's just start by jumping in to you know, I think at this point everyone's mostly heard of fasting.
And so we we have this idea of okay, we understand what fasting is in general, but I'm not sure that a lot of people really understand what the fasting mimicking diet is. So I'd love to just start there and kind of just give an explanation of what this looks like for people. Yeah. So, you know, some 20 years ago, the labs, the longevity labs, there's a longevity institute at the University of Southern California, and they were studying water fasting impact on the body. They were more interesting.
A lot of people are familiar with intermittent fasting, right. Skipping breakfast or intermittent fasting is fasting from zero hours all the way to two days. And but the researchers at the Longevity Institute at USC, they were interested in going further than two days. And why is that so? Because the first two days when you fast, you have enough reserves to compensate for the calorie deficit. You tap into your glycogen, you tap into your fat, you tap into the liver. Also helps with glucogenesis.
So there's a metabolic, compensation for fasting that happens within the first few days. And a lot of it is great. 73% of us can benefit from that, where 70% of us have some metabolic disorder, and we see that intermittent fasting can help with that done the right way. This is a long discussion. You don't want to do it by eating late at night and skipping food throughout the day. You want to do it by eating early in the evening, and then the next day eating your food as early as possible. So do it front and then.
But well, we got interested in what we saw after two days is the body
How fasting mimicking works in the body 2:56
is telling the cells, hey, I'm burning fat fast, I'm depleting my reserves. You gotta search for intracellular sources of calories, and you got to rejuvenate so that we survive, so that we together, as 37 trillion cells forming their body, we come together with optimize the way we perform, rejuvenate. We do a better job to survive the prolonged fast. And and this is this is, you know, when doctor calls it the the awakening the doctor from within or the miracle of biology. But basically it's a process whereby cells are rejuvenating to survive.
And that's exactly what you will do a few times per year, but not all the time, but 2 to 3 times per year. You want to put your cells into check. You want them to rejuvenate. this process called Autophagy, or Cells Rejuvenation. And it won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2016. This is what made fasting famous, actually. But unfortunately, a lot of people think by skipping breakfast they are getting cell rejuvenation. That doesn't happen. It only happens when you're in crisis after day three and the and the cells starting to rejuvenate.
So now you're taking a lot of not just metabolic benefits but cellular benefits forward. And you can see how a lot of chronic health conditions. We'll talk a little bit about the mast cell here. But you know diabetes and prediabetes cancer and pre-cancer and Alzheimer's and Alzheimer's. Once the body goes young, once the body loses the weight metabolically decreases inflammatory markers. It's fixing limited blood pressure, blood cholesterol, everything that comes with that metabolic syndrome or overweight can have, syndrome.
It's now crossing day three and, fasting and not rejuvenating the cells. So both physiology is improving cells are rejuvenating. This is what makes us much healthier. Then, then they're not doing that. It's it's the cycle of winter and spring in nature that we're mimicking now with prolonged fasting. the other side. Who wants to fast for three, 4 or 5 days? So difficult. the research is showing that five days is the best equilibrium. If you go shorter, you're not getting a lot of cellular benefits because it's the cellular benefit starts at day three.
If you go very long, you're bankrupting the body, right? So five days was the right number of days to fast. But still water fasting for five days comes at a big cost. You know, risk of hypoglycemia, weakness, you lose muscle, all of that. So the National Institute of Health when when it's it's, you know, the NIH uses our taxpayers money to invest into projects and science that is, you know, potentially really life changing for humanity. And they saw the benefits of water fasting and but the difficulty of doing it, they actually gave us the first $10 million to, to to the research and now another 10 million. So $20 million is big.
Thank you for the NIH to develop a fasting mimicking nutrition to help people go through five days of fasting without the pain, without the hunger, the headache, the weakness, the hypoglycemia. yeah. The muscle loss. When you fast with food, you actually protect your muscle. That's very important. So how can we get the benefits of fasting without the side effects and the downside? And how can we take fasting from 21% of people can do a five day water fasts, and that 91% of people can do the fasting mimicking diet.
And so to test that, that's a good 12 years to develop the fasting mimicking diet and test it. Now it's been tested by 18 universities. There's over 32 clinical trials on the fasting. And you can buy probably the most tested nutrition in history. And we tested it first to mimic fasting. And we'll we'll talk more about how is it possible to mimic fasting while you're eating. And then we started testing its benefits on aging and reversing the bio age of the body is that if it's on people with some metabolic syndrome, inflammation, diabetes and other health conditions, happy to talk about any or all of it.
but the big question I always get is how can we make fasting food? So the, the product we're talking about is called ProLon We are online. It's a box of food that we send to your house. It has five boxes in it for day one, day two, the three day four and a five hour fasting. That's an oxymoron at how am I eating while Fasting. You open it. It's all plant based. For everyone here listening to us. It's so important for mast cells syndrome, right, to have, a plant based. It's low carb, right? Low. And it's amazing what it is.
What it's fermented, triggering nutrients. it has 77 ingredients. That all again, plant based, non-GMO, soy free, lactose free. So it's a very high quality, plant based, easy to use nutrition. And what it does, how it mimics fasting. We started by studying how the body recognizes food and goes off fasting. So when you eat carbs, insulin increases. It tells the body those carbs. So when not fasting and when you eat proteins, insulin like growth factor IGF increases and tells the body that you're not fasting.
So when we develop the nutrition, the diet, it has 77 ingredients. We tested those to not over spike insulin and over spike IGF so that at a systemic level, the blood circulating is not telling all these organs and cells that there's carbs and proteins. So we go under under that spike that is needed for for recognition. Now at the cellular level, there's something called the nutrient sensing pathways. There are pathways that the cell recognizes the food and they're triggered. They're called nutrient sensing pathways.
They're radars for food.
ProLon product overview and safety 9:13
And we studied the nutrition to go around the pathways and or not over triggering them so that the cell is like I'm sensing I'm getting nutrients, but I'm not convinced that I'm not fasting. And this is how the fasting became that at a systemic level. And the cellular level gets you the benefits of fasting while eating food. It's a big, it's a big discovery. It has over 134 patents should behind it. And as I mentioned, 18 universities did the research to to prove it, to test it, to show the benefits.
We're talking about Stanford. We're talking about USC. You were talking about Miami, internationally in Holland, the biggest health system in the rest of Genoa and verse of Milano and in the entire purpose was to help people go through a full five days a fast and the metabolic benefits, including the inflammatory ones, and then the histamine ones, and get and rejuvenate the cells. They get a younger age, younger bio age, so that the body is actually better dealing with these chronic health conditions.
Yeah. It's fascinating. It's really fascinating that you're able to find a way to mimic the fat, you know, because I agree, the health benefits are there for the long fast. But it's really hard to do. And so it just sounds intimidating even to try it. But to feel like, okay, I have a safe way where I'm not going to starve. And and do people you. The feedback is that people do feel satisfied with the food with a level of food. No hypoglycemia, things like that. Yeah. So, we, I think now there's over 1.2 million users of the fasting American diet.
So it's a huge, the products called promote. And so over 1,200,000 global use of proline, no major reported side effects of the 84 side effects, no major. And, you know, we took the right steps. We did the trial. We did the science. A lot of people trust us because we're the probably the first nutrition company based on true preclinical and clinical trials. Right. And and, our company is for mainly by MDS and PhDs, rather than, you know, business marketing and sales, folks. And once we finished the clinical trials, we went we only launched with doctors for the first three years.
So everyone who did pull the first 2 to 3 years was under the supervision of the doctor. We did market testing and and collected feedback and was shown safe in most cases. Now, if you're above aged 70 or 80 and you're frail, we don't recommend you do it right. If you're pregnant and lactating, you have to grow. a baby and or lactate. You don't want to be at that time. And if you have allergies to some of the ingredients, you don't want to be doing it. But besides those three markers, you know, and if you have a disease, you do it with the supervision of your doctor for sure.
So outside of that, we started seeing that the the that is safe to use and we went and we launched the website Rule on life.com and people can go and get it there. It did seem it on their own. if they want any dietitian support we do offer that. but most people do it on their own. Is food plant based food easy to use? you open the box and they eat the food. It's a bar in the morning, a fasting mimicking bar, and then it's a lunch as a soup was, plus some snacks. And then dinner is also soup, plus other products.
You get your pills, your supplements in it, everything you need to eat and bring. A lot of people love it because it helps them to get disciplined over five days. And and the number one benefit we see from it is, is eat it. It changes relationship with food. People say, I used to be addicted to eating late at night. I used to be addicted to eating big portions of food. I didn't know that I can go without a steak for five days, so a lot of lifestyle changes come out of it. I always say it's it's too short as a diet is just five days.
We say it's not a diet. Aside, but it's five days too short that 91% we see the average compliance rate is 91% based on the surveys. So too too short to complete, but too long to be impactful on the body. As we've talked about the benefits of five days of fasting. As a 91% compliance rate is is huge. And that is as wonderful. So the other thing, you know, you and I we're talking about, and because we're dealing with mast cells is you have also seen positive benefits on the immune system specifically.
Yeah. We did we we did initial trials in mice and, and actually rats. And then we did the first trial in human that looked at the wild circulating white blood cells. And now we're doing two trials. We just finished those at Stanford University and University of Miami to see actually all the way in autoimmune diseases. what is the benefit of the fasting? So all the way from rejuvenating immunity to autoimmune disease, anything in between we're trying to test, it's it's it's very big. what's happening today to to to us.
And people don't realize it. The it's not about having a disease or not having the disease. Almost the majority of us have certain level of immune triggering happening somewhere right from the environment, from the toxins were exposed to from leaky gut. And when we're eating and how we're leaking the molecules into our body from stress, from lack of sleep, from the food we're eating. So we're and this is why, you know, you and I, when we went to, to probably to med school or to the traditional allopathic approach, they taught us that either you have a disease or not.
And there's parameters, right? I always take the example of diabetes. If you're 138, blood glucose, you're not diabetic. If you're 141, then that's like a mild error. You're diabetic, right. And but but when it comes to mast cell, when it comes to histamine, when it comes to the body being in the hyper reactive mode, this is probably over overwhelming majority of us in the US and in the Western world are somehow fitting that in the level, some level, right, because of the food would eat, because of the triggers that we have.
and we're seeing it expressing itself in, in mass or in increasing Hashimoto or increasing that. We're calling Alzheimer's diabetes by three in the breach of the blood brain barrier. So a lot of those syndromes are coming from toxins and triggers and hyper activation. or gluten or other or other. so what fasting does when you fast, you know, it's, it's the body. The body wants to conserve energy because it's in a fasting mode. And so the body does not allow hyper activity of immune cells. We see that.
We see when you go extreme an autoimmune disease, we see like the body shuts down quickly the immune attack because it's like a car with no gas. The last thing you want is overheat. The engine or go and accelerate. And so the body is telling the immune cells, hey, just calm down. I don't want you to be active and hyperactive. And also we see a mild decrease in immune cells. So the body is getting rid of the cells that are hyper active that are there, you know, releasing histamine cytokines, anything that triggers inflammation.
Inflammation is like a heated engine. It spends calories. It triggers the. So the body sets that down. We see a mild decrease in immune blood cells. And then a we increase. So we know there's rejuvenation in the first. Well we did that prowler. We saw what we call missing kind of senses. We saw a purpura report and circulating white blood cells. So we're seeing the body getting rid of some older immune cells
Immune system and mast cell benefits 17:08
and bringing little bit the younger ones, the pluripotent ones. we're now doing more trials to understand. Is that a full rejuvenation that can happen with, with, with immunity and, and we see that indirectly when we do the trials on cancer, we see better immune attack on in cancer cells. So we know immunity. Every cell that proliferates fast in the body is impacted by fasting, because whatever goes fast, the body stops it and tries to calm it down. And this is the why it's important to go on to prolonged fasting as well.
the fasting, the food, where we're not only decreasing pro-inflammatory and metabolic response the first two days, but we're also trying to rejuvenate immune cells and calm down the ones that are hyper active and potentially swapping some with might what we call naive new cells that are not hyperactive. And with the attacks. And that's great. And we will we're going to link all of this to so because it has shown such great success. So we will have all I have at show notes and we'll have prolonged access and all of that.
So people can try this because it just is, you know, anything that I know, people with mass activation with histamine issues, we're looking for. Okay. What are all the things that we all the pieces because there's so many pieces of this puzzle, but really working on that immune system and having tools that we can use. So thank you so much for sharing that. And we will link it. Can we talk a little bit about what is happening in days one through six? Because I know you talk about a specific process that your body's going through.
So I'd love to to get into some of that. Yeah. I'll I'll compared the body going through the pro on to say a company, with no funds or no revenues, what happens. Right. So, imagine that your body, you you're either in a body and consuming food and going through fasting, or you're the CEO of a company and suddenly say you need $1 million to operate for a month, and, you don't have money. you don't have enough money to operate. So the first thing you're going to do, you're going to say, hey, you know, I have some money in my checking account.
Let me go and use that. And this is what happens on day one of fasting. The money say, well, I have glycogen. These are extra, you know, concentrated sources of calories. I can go and tap into my glycogen. So glycogen is the checking account. And you say, you know what I'm depleting my checking account. Let me not use my savings account. Pick up and save for the deficit. So you got the fat in the body. What's saved is five. You break down fat into ketone bodies is what you get into ketosis. When you fast.
We say you're getting into ketosis and then now you're you're and depleting your your savings account. So you're getting a little bit deeper into that crisis isn't going to ask the bank for a loan, or are you going to use your credit card to the max and the money goes to deliver? It says, Hey, Marie, can you do me your glucagon? Is is can you dump a little bit more calories into the blood? Can I borrow from you? And so that's the credit that you get, from the liver that happens on day two. So they want and they to you're using the fast access to the reserve and then the deeper access of the reserve.
And now you're crossing the three. Right. Let's go back to the example. You're the CEO. You've now you used all your money and you get all the credit to the max. What are you going to do. You're going to say you're going to restructure the company. You're going to say, we're going to take measures. We're going to cut down some unnecessary costs. We're going to have to, unfortunately, let some few people go. We're going to restructure here. We're going to fix that. We're going to focus on sales, we're going to sell this on market.
So you try to to audit the company, fix the company, and then focus on what matters. And the buddy of the three will look at the sales and tell them, hey, I'm not going to, you know, I'm depleted a little bit. You got to go and look inside of every cell. You get a detox and get a cleanse. You're going to rejuvenate. You're going to consume all the the brains, the organelles, whatever is left over. Thanks yourself. Because this is tough times. And this is what we call RFA zoom is what won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016.
Is that self rejuvenation that happens after day three of fasting. So we see the cells rejuvenate and then the longer you go now the more nobody's saying, okay, here some cells are fixing themselves. They're young enough. They're effective enough. But some cells we call them the zombie cells or the senescent cells. The old ones, they just have no capability to recover. They're they're the triggering a lot of inflammation, by the way. We call it the inflammation. The more we age, the more the inflammation increases in the body.
Because some cells are just become zombie cells. They're not effective. They're they're they just, you know, trying to, just the triggers immunity and increases inflammation. Somebody tries to kill them to try, as we said, we call it a ptosis. It sends them to,
Day-by-day fasting process and bio age reversal 22:08
death and gets rid of them. And so this is the regeneration part, the cell, the resurrection part that's happening. And the as a last part of fasting, it's exactly where you as a kid, you get sometimes you come to an employee and say, hey, so you're not doing your, your, your job effectively. And we're going to have to try to, to, to eliminate that position or some, or something around that. And so you can see now how you're metabolically with the benefits then is a lot of us, 70, 50% of Americans have a metabolic related disorder and or a little bit of overweight.
So fasting helps with that. Then you go through cellular rejuvenation and then you go through cellular regeneration. And it's it's basically it's like driving in a, in a car race and to 2 or 3 times in a race, the driver goes to the pit stop and the mechanics come in and they they have all the diagnosis, the other the car, they get a change, the wheels are going to change, the guys are going to change whatever oil and and get the car back to the race healthier, stronger and can last longer. this is what happens in a cycle of prolonged, the five day cycles day by day.
And, we were fortunate enough to publish two weeks ago. This is fresh news or three weeks ago, probably, an article in nature. In nature, one of nature's, journal. Nature is the number one science journal of the word. We're able to show that if you do three cycles of trauma. So five days month, one, five days, month two, five days, month three, you can you can go back to your normal diet in between. Or if you want to spreaded throughout the year, do three cycles five days quarter one or trimester one five days, trimester two five days to three.
you're actually reversing a bio age score by 2.5 biological years. we have a fully issued pattern in the US, in Europe and reversing un reservation and bio age reversal. Now we have multiple clinical trials that have correlated. Of course, we can do a longevity trial and wait for 40 years to see what happened. But the US government has actually done a 21 year old longevity trial. We got the results of the blood markers. And because we know what benefits this problem, that's the those we're able to simulate, through a well published bio score that if you do three problems, you're reversing it by age by 2.5 years.
And I'm stressing that because the biological age of the body is ultimately the best measurement of how healthy you are, right? A lot of conditions happen as we as we get older and you're not going to get diabetes type two at age 24. In most cases, you don't get your first heart attack at age 26. You don't get Alzheimer's even if you have the AP gene at age 29. So aging and and inflammation and the mass of the in lot of disease, not every disease, but most chronic diseases are correlated with aging because the more we aged, the younger cells that can heal, they can fix, they can raise everything they can replace.
All cells are depleted. The pool of rejuvenation, the springs that can happen in our body are depleted when we age. And this is why a lot of the investments these years are coming in reverse. Aging, companies, while we're waiting for the pill to reverse aging. And they can happen when they can, that is a much powerful there's a very powerful intervention is very natural called fasting. And the fasting mimic invite will prolong it's fully planned, basically natural. No chemicals, not additives. It's giving you the natural benefits of fasting with our ancestors benefit from.
We lost that power today, the last four years, because we keep eating all the time and we're eating the wrong food. So we're seeing our bodies hyper inflated, called MCAS. We see it hyper, storing sugar. We call it diabetes. We see it going to Alzheimer's or diabetes. Type 3. We see cancer increasing. So the fasting in the fasting, you know, it is a way to take that car to the pitstop, take this company through an audit rejuvenated, and then get it back on track in a much healthier, and a better way.
That is so impactful. I think everyone needs to that 2.5 biological years. That's amazing. So, and I you did say three times to go through it. So I just wanted to follow up with a question on how, like, is there a regimen that works the best as far as how often you should do it, or how would you recommend that to people? so it depends on objective. If you're if you're otherwise I'll, I'll take a few profiles. Right. So you're, you're a 50 year old, 45 to 50 year old woman. you know, you're going through your menopause.
You're a little bit, you know, losing some muscle and and feeling a little bit, a little bit down and you're gaining weight and, that you're it's difficult to, to get rid of. This is why you can do it three times to four times per year. It depends if you have there's a lot of weight that you want to shed. And and you want to maintain your muscle mass. And you do it four times, you know, once every quarter, if not, if you're healthy, if you're still maintaining your weight and you just want to do it to reverse your body weight, you can do it only three times per year.
And it takes a special company to tell you, do my product three times or four. That's what. You're Your interest is what's best because otherwise you'd be saying do it. Do it every other week. Yes. No. And I would never, actually ask people to do it every month or every time or it just five days. It would three times, two, four times per year. Now this is this is for bio age. This is for my weight, my muscle, my skin. By the way, skin is a big benefit. We we studied autophagy on the skin and skin rejuvenates when you do.
with the fasting mimicking diet with a randomized clinical trial on skin rejuvenation with with ProLon now The more you get closer to a health condition, if you have diabetes, what we do with diabetes, we do it once a month for six month and it's showing. And then six month, 67%, two thirds of people will decrease the dose of the medication or eliminate
Recommended usage and where to learn more 28:38
a full medication out of, out of that or within six month. so you do it once a month for a six month and then to maintain, do it once every quarter. So that's the diabetes regimen. we have launched, a full medical business unit for diabetes and called, L-Nutra and L-Nutra as the name of our company L-Nutra Longevity Through Nutrition. So a L-NutraHealth.com as the health is the medical business unit that tailors the fasting mimicking diet platform to health condition. So the more you get closer to a healthy health condition, the more frequently you would do it.
And just to change the course of that, of that health condition. Okay. That's wonderful. Yes. Yeah. Thank you for clarifying that, because I know there probably be a lot of follow up questions there. Well, this has been so enlightening. Thank you for all of the wonderful information. Like I said, we will link ProLon in all of our show notes. And, you know, so that everyone can can, find you, but can you share any information if anybody wants any more information to find you where they should go?
Yeah. When, when you go to the prolonlife.com website, there's a science section that you can click on. It can read all the trials that we have talked about. It's important to trust the science. First and foremost. if you want to follow us, you can go on our Instagram and Facebook. the ProLon on, you know, all based on the ProLon handle is a group of ProLon is, I think 50, 60,000, that have created a, a Facebook group called the Fastination It's the is that global nation behind ProLon And I really encourage people to join the Fastination because these are ProLon that they did multiple times.
They support each other. They they they give tips to each other. you can find it there if you only read the general science, about the fasting mimicking diet that you can go to our company website. l-nutra.com to read more about it, I'm very active on LinkedIn. Dr. Joseph Antoun always give the latest on the science and discoveries. Probably once or twice a week. Well, thank you. Thank you for all the wonderful information you shared today. Thank you, Dr. Meg We promised, potentially changing somebody's life.
Hopefully we did that today. I hope so, have a wonderful day.
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