The Journey To Longevity And Well-Being

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Well, thank you, Dr. Jockers, and hopefully, we may change somebody’s life today. I’m going to go straight to it. Fasting probably is one of the only two or three interventions that we know today that can really reverse biological age and help people live healthier and longer lives. And what’s the correlation is when you fast you’re doing two major benefits to the body. I mean, we can talk about it in detail about the types of fasting and the impacts of each on longevity. But in general, you’re doing it in a big intervention on your metabolism and doing a metabolic reset. 73% of Americans today are overweight. 90% of Americans suffer from one, or two kinds of metabolic disorders and meaning something going wrong with the metabolism, whether it’s cholesterol, triglyceride weight, etc. So, when you bring fast, just to start with that, you’re helping 90% of the population try to reset one of their metabolic markers. And this is the if you want, the low-calorie setting of fasting and helping the body lose weight, then improve blood pressure and cholesterol and better use the right hand and all the other inflammation and inflammation, etc.

Now what took fasting to the prime scene of longevity was around 2013 to 20 2016 when the science coming from USC and Professor Valter Longo, we’re seeing that if you do fasting in mice, you’re rejuvenating their cells and you’re bringing new stem cells up to the surface to replace old senescent cells, the zombie cells. So USC has established a longevity institute and they were looking at fasting. And under the leadership of Dr. Valter Longo, a lot of folks probably listening to us know that name and have read The Longevity Diet book. And if you haven’t read it, please go and buy the longevity of that book by The Longevity Diet book by Dr. Valter Longo. He explains how first in mice they were looking at if you do two or three days of fast, which is equivalent to 4 to 5 days in humans, the mice metabolism is a little bit faster. He was showing that the body is going into a type of crisis in fasting in mice or fasting the body. The body in the first couple of days has enough calories from the liver, from glycogen, from fat to the reserves of the body. They help you in the first couple of days and then on day three, you go into a crisis where the body telling the cells, hey, I cannot feed you any longer, you’re going to go and eat that reason the organ and you get it rejuvenated and you get to perform at your best is so that we together all the cells can survive that fast. So the crisis and the cells after the three of human fasting or after the second day in mice, is what pushes the body to rejuvenate the cells. That discovery won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016 under the name of Autophagy, and then for the first time we’re seeing a fast that pushing the cells to fix and therefore they’re going biologically younger, and when you fix the cell going back in time and a younger you as a you further away from the onset of the four big killers diabetes cancer, Alzheimer’s and autoimmune disease mainly the age-related health conditions that are killing 90% of us. 

Now, what Valter Longo and USC developed actually, they went even further we all talk about autophagy fasting. The next step, so imagine, so the first two days, the body relies on the reserves fat, and glycogen in the liver. Then the day three and day four the body tells the cell, hey, no more food. I’m depleting the bank account to get to the inside, that’s autophagy, let’s establish that if you move forward and the cells are saying, I depleted, I rejuvenated what’s next? And this is where the elimination process had been, what we call the regeneration. And the body is saying, okay, I have cells that I don’t need. They’re old, they’re zombie cells, they’re senescent cells and the body kills them in a process called apoptosis for those and pushes the younger cells to replace them. So basically get ineffective cells and push the younger cells. And we see this very much so in mice and we see it in humans in our prolonged trials. We’re going to talk about a prolonged, and we saw a spike in stem cells and the precursor of white blood cells. That is then kind of a totally different, you know, stem cells in which means the body is getting that older cells. And these older cells are key in the process of aging because once you start having many of them, they’re very pro-inflammatory. They start creating that environment of accelerated aging. You know, folks who are 50, 60, 70, they start having a lot of these old cells, and the accelerated aging actually even faster. We call it the exponential aging at the end of life. So it’s very important to look at not just intermittent fasting, but the prolonged one whereby improving metabolism benefit number one we talked about due to the way. Benefit number two, rejuvenating the cells. That’s the autophagy benefit. Number three, replacing old cells with new cells. The result as part of fasting, all those things is reversing bio age and helping you stay healthier longer.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yeah, what a great explanation. I mean, fasting is this, like you mentioned, this hormetic stressor. It’s a stressor on the body, but the body actually becomes stronger, and more resilient through it by getting rid of these old, damaged, senescent, or zombie cells that are just kind of going along. But they’re not functioning properly and they’re causing poor function inside the body by getting rid of those and then replacing them with new young stem cells or repairing cells that are still able to repair through that autophagy process. So yeah, really incredible stuff. Now, when I was growing up, I was told, you got to eat three meals a day. It’s got to be, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner. You got to get, you know, all your calories. And so, you know, I never really heard the term fasting. Now, my family would do fasting one day a year for spiritual and religious purposes. And I thought that was like the worst thing ever. And so now, of course, you know, you and I are big advocates of fasting. You hear a lot of people online talking about fasting. A lot of people are certain to practice this. Is fasting new or has it been around for a long time?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

No. And everything you said is right, both eating three times a day. And we’re actually a proponent of that. And prolonged fasting has to be added to this. So I’ll put it all together. Well, first of all, fasting has been part of the human diet since the beginning. Imagine the first few thousand of years when humanity didn’t even have any fire, any refrigerator, or anything. And humans lived, I hear all these theories about the caveman and then, we lived around the rivers. We didn’t live in the cave. In the cave, you can hide at night but there’s no food or water. And by the oceans, the water in the ocean wasn’t drinkable and there were no trees. So we live there around rivers and humanity lives because with the river you have water, you can drink and you have a lot of grass and a lot of trees and a lot of fruits.

And so we were plant-based and a little bit pescatarian. The fish is the only animal that cannot fly or run and it was easier to fish. This is why for the longest period our diet was a plant-based pescatarian. Then we started learning how to hunt a little bit. We became flexitarian, we added a little bit of meat to it, and there were periods when there was rain and snow. So in the summer with abundance, we would store. Our bodies would store in fat because of the winter and the winter has a lot of fasting periods. There were a lot of times when because we can in stores with the way we can store it today. So the notion of not having food all day or going several days without food coexisted with us for the longest time. Imagine in the middle of the snow or you’re migrating packing your tents and going and all that. There were a lot of periods of long fast. 

So the body learned how to cope with all of it, learn how to store when there was abundance and learn how to deplete, and learn how also to react when the depletion goes longer. By fixing the cells, fixing the spoilage, and being very ready to walk and find the next foods. And this is why we, what happened with fasting, we transformed fat into ketones. The ketones are just food for the brain to stay up and be able to walk and not faint because then we would be exterminated as a race. And the second thing that the body does is to protect lean body mass. This is very critical and the body invests to the brain and the muscles to keep walking and collecting fruits and vegetables. And why is critical today? Because today for all the folks who are diabetic or overweight or have some, we put them either on a chronic diet or they lose muscle and they lose that fat. But because they lost muscle, they’re not able to go back and resist restoring the fat. And they always everyone tell me I’ve learned helplessness. I go on a diet and then I go off and they regain everything because they lost the muscle. And now we have the new semaglutide injections that a lot of people are doing. And up to 20 to 30% of the weight loss is muscle loss, which means that the day you stop those, you going to pick up the fat again. It’s very difficult to rebuild the muscle, it’s very easy to store the fat. So it’s critical to understand that fasting is one of the very few, if not the only intervention that helps you lose a lot of fat while maintaining lean body mass.

Despite of the success today of athletes who still do it, or in what do we do with the fasting-mimicking diet? Probably we’ll talk about it. We even accelerate that because we’re giving the muscle, even the nutrients that it needs to develop. So we have an even better way to preserve lean body mass. In some trials and then we see an increase in lean body mass when you do fasting-mimicking nutrition but to go back and close on the end. Fasting lived with us for a long period of time as humans even then when we started storing food, religion was the predominant adoption with humanity, and all divine religions actually, have one common word which is fasting. So we kept it as a tradition, as a cultural tradition up until the last 40, 50 years. We became less religious. We store now food better than ever. We accelerated the delivery of food, late-night deliveries with UberEats. And we started working late at night and overeating. So we went from fasting and feeding to multiple times, eating per day and eating late at night, which is the worst thing you can do to your body.

But your parents were right. We should eat three times a day. This is a big discussion between intermittent faster and longevity proponents, whether you should do the 16 hours of the 12 and 14, and I’m happy to go into all of it. But one recommendation here is to eat early and do the frontloaded intermittent fasting. If you want to do your 12, 14, or 16, just have your dinner at five, six. And then still eat something the next day in the morning, which will give you the 14 hours that you need or the 16 versus eating late at night and starting your body into the evening time, because that creates a delta between your circadian rhythm and your biological clock versus. And you’ll be starving your organs when they need the food in the morning and you’ll be feeding them at night when they’re just relaxing and it pushes insulin IGF and accelerates aging. So that’s a separate discussion on how to do intermittent fasting. But definitely, we should do intermittent fasting and not during the night phase and 2 to 3 times per year, which is what our ancestors did, and prolonged fasting when there was no food.

Today, the science is showing that actually the five days of fasting done two or three times per year helps us refix our metabolism, fix ourselves, and be a pro-longevity intervention. The simple example to give here is that, as is a Formula One or a NASCAR Cup car race. If you watch those, if you’re driving, you’re going pretty fast. That’s life today. We’re getting toxins. We’re getting the wheels are being abused. The engine is heating. What you can do is you can slow down intermittently. That’s intimidating. I think it helps you a little bit to decrease all this heat on the engine. But what you can do optimally, you can go to the pit stop, the mechanics come in, they fix, they change and that’s the five days fast. That’s the prolonged fasting and it can die. You take the five days the zombie cells are or the senescent cells. You’re fixing the existing cells, you’re resetting your metabolism and your car goes back on track, and can stay longer, healthier, and faster.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yeah, really fascinating. And you made a really good point as far as the sarcopenia or muscle loss we know when we talk about longevity, one of the biggest risk factors for all, causes of mortality is muscle loss. It’s called sarcopenia. And fasting helps preserve that because you get an elevation in human growth hormone and HGH helps your body preserve your lean body mass. We think about it from an ancestral perspective. When our ancestors didn’t have food for a few days, if they got weaker, it would be hard to hunt or harvest. So they actually got in a sense, they preserved that lean body mass and their senses because of the ketones in their brain, their sentences got heightened and therefore they were more mentally clear. They have less brain inflammation, so they’re more creative. And all their senses were heightened. So it was easier for them to get food.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

And you mentioned the keyword, it’s stress. So fasting is not a low-calorie setting. We see that in other restrictive diets. It doesn’t work that you lose the muscle. The fasting works because it’s an injection of stress. It’s like intermittent intense exercising. You get the same benefits. Fasting is actually like intermittent transient and high-intensity exercise. It develops a superior level of intervention, the level of stress that then the cells say, okay, I need to flex, I need to adjust, I need to be metabolically flexible, but I need to rejuvenate and fix and be at my optimum to survive and you don’t need to do it all the time. The ProLon one. You get to do it when you when the body is needing it. And we think it’s every 4 to 6 months is when you would go and do it, which again, whether it’s a car race due to a pit stop during that race, whether it’s humans, we used to migrate two or three times during the year with the snows, the springs, and the autumn. It’s part of the cycle of life.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yeah, for sure. And you know, some people that are listening here have done a three or five-day water fasting. And so for a lot of people, water fasting, they see amazing results with it. They feel good about it. But a lot of people are very intimidated by it and really have trouble as they get started with it. And that’s what’s interesting about L-Nutra. You guys have made these great food technologies where you’re getting the benefits of fasting, but you’re still actually eating and you don’t actually have to make food, prepare food, or really think about food. You just in a sense, all your food in a box, and it’s all set out for you. So you’re still fit, you’re still eating. A lot of people are taking medications and you’ve got to take, you know, that they need to eat with and things like that. They don’t have to disrupt their day-to-day life with that.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yeah. And you know, we used to be a water fasting clinical trial. Our story L-nutra as an, of the University of Southern California.  We were founded by Dr. Longo, the head of the Longevity Institute at the USC. And we were the results of their water fasting clinical trial, so this is 20 plus years ago they were looking at the benefits of intermittent fasting and then fasting for a day or two or three. And there were a lot of actual benefits for cancer patients. The first time USC went in human trial, it partnered with the Mayo Clinic to go on a pure water fasting intervention for patients with cancer. And it took a year and a half to just do two or three patients because nobody cared or wanted to do a four or five-day fast.

But in mice, we were showing major benefits for diabetes and cancer on autoimmune. So we took all these results in mice to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and we asked for grants to go and develop the fasting-mimicking diet, meaning can we because we were also our founders are experts into what we call the nutrient sensing pathways of the cell, how a cell recognizes food, what are the sensors of the cell and they thought they would devise a very specific precision nutrition formulation that would feed the body and the cells, but keep the signals of fasting at the cellular level.

So this is why it’s called the fasting-mimicking diet. You’re feeding the body over five days, and I’ll tell you how the cell misses that. But at a cellular level and a metabolic level, the body doesn’t recognize the food. And therefore you’re getting the benefits of a five-year fast. Actually, you’re getting even more benefits because you’re funding the transformation of the body. When we say autophagy, you’re going to mobilize Lysosomes and others. So if you don’t have minerals, if you don’t have the vitamins, if you dont have the macros that you need, you’re not going to do that. If you want to push renew cells you got to also feed them. So we were seeing in a lot of cases the fasting-mimicking diet to be not just safer and more compliant and easier to do but actually had much better results than fasting on certain determinants. 

And the big question I always get is how can you trick the buddy into fasting and what is this formulation about? So it all goes to how the body understands what you eat. When you eat these two macros that stimulate if you want the recognition of food, you have the carbs that stimulate that insulin. It’s a growth factor at the systemic levels think, okay, we have carbs, we’re growing, we’re all fasting and the proteins trigger exactly similar IGF insulin-like growth factor. So whenever you have a protein intake you’re also telling the body I have one of the macro nutrients and therefore we’re not fasting. So the first step at a systemic level is to not spike insulin and to not spike IGF. And so one of the core formulation of the fasting-mimicking diet is we call the Prolon, for promoting pro-longevity ProLon in the market is to not spike insulin and to not spike IGF. 

And there are two secrets there because people are wearing CGM now, they say, oh, I did get a spike after, little spike after lunch and a little bit bigger spike after dinner. And we engineered actually two of our soups to do that because you want to feed you want to create a mini spike of carbs and insulin at night when the body naturally is pushing the growth hormone as well when you sleep so that the muscle is getting the calories and the boost to be preserved. This is why we do better at protecting your lean body mass than water fast. We’re nourishing the muscle and giving a signal of double signal of insulin and IGF and growth hormone naturally for the muscle to be preserved and to rebuild but it’s a small spike.

In general, no big spike of insulin as a response to that big spike outside. You know, when you get on the cellular level, the cell perceives nutrition through the PKA pathway, the mTOR pathway, and the REST pathways. And they interject that are other many paths pathways. And so the formulation does not over-trigger these three pathways. We have to study every ingredient, the 77 ingredients of ProLon is fasting by nourishment and not by starvation. You’re getting a lot of nutrients. And we studied every combination of nutrients that the cell does not get satisfied and said, well, I’m getting some nutrients, but I think I got to be cautious that I get to still be protective and stay in the fasting levels. And these are the two layers that we need to cover to put the body in tune. We do give kickers with the Omega supplements, etc. to, and the healthy fats. It’s rich in macadamia and pecans and all that. It’s all plant-based, it;s all vegan and there’s nothing engineered in it. So it’s clean, vegan, and one of the healthiest things you can eat outside of fasting from an ingredient perspective. And we also play on the healthy fats to boost that environment of ketosis, an environment of fasting.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yeah. And so it’s a calorie-restricted diet and short-term, you know, long-term calorie restriction, you have a lot of the problems as you talked about where you start to lose the muscle. But these short-term balance of calorie restriction where you’re also keeping your insulin or your mTOR pathways down or your growth pathways down, you’re getting all those benefits like you talked about, the stimulation of the autophagy, the stem cells  and different things like that, getting rid of the apoptosis, getting rid of the zombie senescent cells. And so can you talk about like because it’s, you guys have it all down to a science. And so it’s like day one, you’re consuming a certain percentage of your normal caloric load, right? And then day two, three, four or five to five day approach. Can you break that down how what it looks like from day one through five?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

And I want to clarify, that it’s not the calorie restriction so much as much as the formulation. Yeah, because for Alzheimer’s, for example,  we have a fasting-mimicking diet that’s up to 1400 to 2000 calories. So it’s calories restriction part of it but the precision formulation that does not spike insulin and IGF and does not trigger the nutrient-sensing pathways. The release of the senescent cells is the big key secret.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yeah, because you could eat a thousand calories of fruit and it’s all sugar.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

This is why the ketogenic diet, by the way, which can be also restrictive, is not getting you into deep ketosis because the protein in the cell senses the protein. So you’re very low on carbs, but you’re sensing the proteins and therefore you don’t go into food deep, fast. And sometimes you can just then people say, oh, I’m doing juice fasting or others. I mean, if you even with a 300-calorie or 400-calorie intake per day, you can excite one of the receptors on the cell. And therefore, the cells would be an in-between fast or a partial or a non-fast stage. So it’s very important to, this is what took us $36 million in the research and 12 years literally to get to that formulation. Now we have 18 universities that are tested on Stanford University of Miami, USC, UCLA, all the big ones in the US and in Europe. And it took a long, long time. It’s very, it’s balancing calorie intake with ingredients and effectiveness on longevity and chronic conditions. But day one is 1000 calories. And two, three, four, and five are 800 calories each of the day.

And again, we have a formulation that goes for cancer patients a little bit more restrictive. We have one for Alzheimer’s patients that’s even higher in calories. We adjusted to different health conditions. But if you’re doing the prolonged longevity package, it’s a passive 1000 calorie day one and then 800 calories every day. It comes in boxes. You get a big box. There’s one box here behind me. You get a box and it has day one, day two, day three, day four, and day five. You open the box of day one, you have your breakfast bar, you have your soups, you have your lunch and your dinner. You have the snack, the drinks and the supplements. So you do not need to do anything else. You have your drinks, you have your hydration, you have your pills, your supplements of the day, and the food. And you just enjoy five days of the structured delivered meal, and you get the rejuvenation and the metabolic benefits of it.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yeah. And I’m most familiar with your basic ProLon package. I’m interested to know the science there with you were talking about with Alzheimer’s patients, you bumped the calories up a little bit. What is the reason for that?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

You know, most Alzheimer’s patients are actually an older population and a little bit more frail. They have less reserve or they can adjust less, even if they have their reserves a little bit metabolically flexible, their metabolism is different. So we allow ourselves to go a little bit higher up, giving them a bigger and bigger, nutritious if you want intervention to adjust. We also a little bit on Alzheimer’s, it is a condition of the brain and you can allow a little bit more ketosis and funding that ketosis with healthy fat as well to get to prime the benefits.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting. Now you said with cancer sometimes you’re more restrictive. Can you go into that?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

So we have a fasting-mimicking diet that we’ve studied probably now we have eight papers on it and the goal is to couple the fasting nutrition with chemotherapy or with immunotherapy. So whatever standard of care you’re doing, we do the fasting nutrition. We tested right before the four days before and the day of the intervention and why we wanted to fast in cancer. And this is how the entire company, by the way, started. We started as bringing nutrition to cancer patients for testing them on fasting, and nutrition with cancer. As I indicated, the goal is cancer is, what is cancer. Cancer is a cell that loss inhibition, it replicates typically a segment replicates when it touches other cells, and it stops replicating. Cancer is a cell that just lost it inhibition keeps going, going. And when it’s too big locally, it just goes in the blood and goes everywhere.

It just loves the proliferation. And so cancer doesn’t know how to stop replication and we use this to the disadvantage of cancer. So when you fast the body before chemo, the normal cells, the normal cells of the body, there’s no fluid, there’s no growth factors. They hibernate, they don’t replicate the hibernation and the cancer doesn’t know how to do that. So the cancer is being starved and doesn’t know how to respond, doesn’t know how to stop. So it gets into a very oxidative, very stressful, very weak state. And then you hit it with chemo and therefore and you’re hitting a cancer that is malnourished, that starving, and it doesn’t know how to escape. So the first theory is, how can we create, how can we weaken cancer versus chemotherapy, or immunotherapy. Number two is, as you know, chemotherapy has a lot of side effects because it kills any cell replication, any cell doing mitosis and replication gets impacted by chemo. Cancer first because it duplicates the most but you lose hair because the hair replicates fast. You lose white blood cells because they replicate fast.

By fasting the body before the chemo, the normal cells are hibernating. So you’re sparing them the side effects of the chemotherapy. So benefit number one sensitizing cancer to chemo. Benefit number two is sparing the normal cells. We call this phenomenon differential stress resistance. You’re hitting, that you’re spreading the normal cells, you sensitizing cancer, which unlocks the biggest dilemma in chemotherapy, in cancer treatment, because you cannot give high doses, you can induce cancer cure today. If you can give very high doses of chemo, but you can not because of the side effects. So what we do, we enable, we unlock this delta called differential stress resistance so that the doctor keeps giving the high dose of chemo to the patients and spared the normal cells and hyper to kill cancer to increase chances, hopefully of remission. We’re studying all this. There are two or three papers already published on it.

There’s a third benefit which is, as we know, the fasting mimicking that rejuvenates white blood cells. So white blood cells are supposed to attack cancer. This is why we have immunotherapy now to help unlock that. But they coexist and they get lazy and they adjust to the cancer. By doing fasting for four or five days you’re swapping your white blood cells, you reactivating them, and they have infiltrated that cancer in a better way. And these are the three major benefits. Now, if you want to overstuffed cancer we do the version of on but it’s a version for cancer specifically we haven’t launched it yet but we’re launching it next year, but it’s more restricted because you want to oversight of the cancer before the chemo and over sensitized to it.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yeah really interesting. Now some people with cancer are dealing with Cachexia where they’re rapidly losing weight, losing muscle. Is there any sort of modifications they need to make as you’re doing this?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yeah, if they already have lost a lot of weight. And by the way, that’s the dilemma. The problem is doctors do chemo without the fasting or without spitting. And therefore, you have a lot of GI side effects. They have nausea, and vomiting, then you lose weight and it’s a vicious circle. So if you want to do the fasting, if decided early on so that you don’t get to that stage, but if you already are frail, if you’re really frail below BMI of 18 or 19, then you should not fast. You should actually replenish and it’s important to replenish with healthy fats, not to feed the cancer with high protein. With the other big mistake that a lot of oncologists and a lot of people do today. They replenish them with high doses of, a big concentration of carbs and protein. And why it’s a mistake because you’re feeding cancer. First and foremost, the cancer is hunger is the hungriest organ once you have it and want to take it. So it is very important there to give them complex carbs, to give them plant-based proteins that there’s an over spike IGF and growth cancer and to fill them with healthy fats, give it the calories mostly there as well, so that they are actually boosting the cancer drug. When they pick it up on the way there, then you can go back for to do the fast. So for some, it’s too late. For some, you can really feed them and help them and do it.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Yeah, really powerful stuff. So this fasting-mimicking diet again helps to protect the normal healthy cells but helps to sensitize the cancer cells, basically starving them down and making them uptake more of the chemotherapy or whatever sort of oxidative therapy that you are utilizing. Radiation, whatever it is that you’re using to try to kill the cancer cells. So they get more of that, less side effects that it’s just a great combination. And how about diabetes, right? What kind of results are you guys seeing with diabetes? And, you know, a common question people give is when, you know, if they are diabetic, how do I go about fasting? What do I do with that?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

And this is why the fasting nutrition is important. They’re not on water fast and they don’t risk hypoglycemia. This is where we’re fasting our main court. And we actually just launched a month ago or two months ago our fasting, what we call the diabetes regression and remission program in, you know, the word remission is now there’s the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, the Endocrine Society and the and the American Dietetic Association. They came together and they kind of did a national position paper to say if treatment is reserved as a claim for drugs, we want to create the word remission reserved as non-drug intervention to reverse diabetes. So the word remission, means a patient does not need medication any longer and the word regression and they define to whereas the word regression it means the patient needs less medication. So that very patients typically today when you know in traditional medicine the stories they start on one pill, they go to two, they go to three, they inject and then they go on insulin. That’s the normal course you don’t hear stories about. I was diabetic for ten years and then I reversed it and we accepted that that’s the problem. It’s a lifestyle disease that we accepted to just code as a progressive disease. But now seeing that eating healthy and actually in the National Position Paper, they mentioned that fasting-mimicking diet because the results of the fasting were so effective on diabetes that it was one of the reasons for them to create this regression in remission position because we’re seeing a lot of patients needing less medication or no more medication with the classic American diet. So why to do the fasting-mimicking diet on diabetes? And we have a separate program again under L-nutra health for diabetes that people can go and subscribe to and have the product of the fasting nutrition for it, and they’ll be supervised by the dietician also on our behalf. But the premise is that diabetes is, is a disease of three pillars.

Number one, and this is the most surprising is aging and, you know, most people who get diabetes at age 50 or 55 or 60, they were still overweight, most of them even at 40 to 35. But their body had enough muscular metabolic rate and muscle mass and their cells were young enough to correct and escape it. So it’s a disease of aging first and foremost. And even if you get it at a younger age, you’re accelerated aging with overnutrition and you’re biologically older this late to get it at the younger age. Number two, it’s a disease of also muscle, retaining muscle because muscle is the engine of burning carbs. And when you start losing muscle mass, correlate it sometimes with aging, you start seeing your blood sugar going up and then you have the lifestyle, you know, it’s a disease of over-storing calories which creates insulin resistance and then gets you into it for diabetes. And obviously, there is genetic predisposition as well. The problem today when you look at aging, we’re talking about the rootcauses of aging, having enough muscle in the body, and that over eating and having the right lifestyle. We never had an intervention that deals with all three, the chronically diets help you with insulin resistance but then you lose a lot of muscle. They don’t work much on aging and therefore, you know, once you stop them, you go back to diabetes. And the other side, the drugs, the diabetes drugs play mainly on the uptake of HbA1c of blood sugar to accelerating insulin sensitivity or insulin production. They’re both leading to more carb storage into fat and accelerate the disease. 

And now we have the see, those PIFs. And they’re just helping you lose weight fast but you’re losing 20 to 30% muscle. So whenever you stop those, you pick up back the fat and you don’t pick up fast the muscle quickly, unfortunately. And then you go in a vicious circle. So there’s never been a solution for three up until the fasting-mimicking diet because with artificially reversing biological age, you’re protecting lean body mass. As you mentioned, it’s the stress growth hormone is high. We’re nourishing the muscle and maintaining body mass. And obviously, we’re working on insulin resistance. You lose a lot of fat to the presence of the resistance and you escape the pathways and what we’re seeing now, we’ve done two clinical trials on fasting, one in Leiden,Holland. It’s showing in six month only, five days a month you do the fasting. So an aggregate of 30 days, six times five, you have two-thirds of the patients needing less medication, two-thirds already. Some of them off medication. They lose 22 pounds. They decreased their consumption of blood pressure as well, as pills. And their A1C is decreasing by 1.4 points, tripled by MBA by at the recommendation. If you have 45 decrease each procedure already clinically significant and you can become a drug. In six months, the drop is 1.4 to 8 points.

And then we did another trial Holland, in Leiden University one of the biggest health systems over there. For 12 months, showing that if you did a fasting-mimicking diet versus the metformin or a healthy lifestyle, you have 53% chance of a better regulating the drug the disease versus just 8% when you do the traditional recommendation of how to eat or whether you do metformin alone. So we’re over 800% superior and better at regulating the disease versus today the most used drugs, metformin, and or lifestyle recommendations that typically have a lot more gives to the patient.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

So 800% results, clinically studied, really awesome stuff. That’s one of the great things that I love about your company is that you guys use proceeds to actually further research on this, which is really important because, you know, there’s really not much money to be made in fasting. As opposed to a pharmaceutical drug or something along those lines. So there’s not a whole lot of government grants and things like that. So it’s like we need to be funding this because we want to actually show more and more research on these benefits. And you guys are the leaders in the industry when it comes to funding research on fasting and basically using these kinds of products like ProLon to support the benefits and to reverse metabolic diseases and overall chronic disease burden in our society. So great stuff and people can find it out at prolonlife.com is that correct? And you can find practitioners that help support this. And you guys have a support team as well.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yes. And as you mentioned, we’re the first Nutri-pack of the word. Like we apply randomized clinical trials to, and people trust us for that. It’s like, okay, this is almost like it’s like how every drug gets tested. We do have this science in mice and then in humans, and then we bring the products and the claim forward to market. We’re showing two lead nutrition for longevity and nutrition as medicine and we want to keep using our revenues to fund more and more trials. We’re now in our 34th clinical trial on one food formulation. Yeah. If you go to prolonlife.com you can buy the ProLon five days there. We have products for intermittent fasting. We also have longevity proteins and longevity spreads. And you can benefit from any of those for healthy aging. And if you subscribe, you can also reach out. We have a team of our customer service team is all nutritionists and dietitians. And if you go on the program, if you want the diabetes program, you can go to l-nutrahealth.com and l-nutra is the name of the company. L-nutrahealth.com get you into the diabetes program where you have a personal dietician with us and we have also doctors and or we send you to your doctors to help you. You know, every three months, reduce your medication or be checked with it. And it’s an fully integrated program.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Well, you know, I have to commend you and just acknowledge the great work that you’re doing really leaders in this industry and pioneering this approach to reversing chronic metabolic disease. So thank you so much, Dr. Antoun. Any last words of inspiration here for our audience?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

What I want to say is a lot of, 90% of us here, you, me, and everyone listening are going to die from four conditions diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and cardiovascular diseases. 60 to 80% of why we get any of those is due to aging and lifestyle. And so let’s make these optionals in our life, or at least let’s push them by 10, 20, 30 years. The way we’re living today with eating all the time and stressing all the time and not sleeping well all the time and not exercising is not the right approach. You know, Warren Buffett always says because they asked him on changing assets in the best way is, the only asset I cannot replace is the body. And this is why it’s like you cannot go wrong about it. And one of the best things that tradition and religion and science all agree and all identified that can change your life is fasting doing intermittent fasting. Do the right one overnight circadian, 12 hours. This is the balance of life for you to lose weight fast so you extend a little bit and or do three times a year prolonged fast significant nutrition. It takes you but it is a cycle that our ancestors used to go through when they were going summer to winter and then emerging into the spring. This is what’s going to fix your cells, reset your metabolism, and always give you that temporary reverse by your age and keep you further away from whatever incident or accident is correlated with aging and you not having the right lifestyle.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

I love that vision, Dr. Antoun, and thanks so much for your time. It’s been an honor and a privilege. Everybody be blessed.