The Novel Diabetes Remission Program: Nutrition Technology To Regress Diabetes

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Thank you, Dr. Yates, and look forward for a hopefully a discussion that’s going to change somebody’s life today.

Beverly Yates, ND

Absolutely. We’re all about that here. This reversing type 2 diabetes summit. Will you please introduce yourselves to this audience because you have a fantastic background.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Well, appreciate it. I am again, Dr. Joseph Antoun, MD., PhD. with a couple of masters. On top of this, I’ll focus on medicine, but also prevention in primary health care and health policy and public health. And so in a nutshell, I started my career as a physician and then figured out that I was trained to give everyone four or five pills. I wanted to be a cardiologist. So, you know, most of the time you leave our clinic with a pill for diabetes, for blood sugar, for blood pressure, for blood thinner, for the statin, for cholesterol, and which is fine. There’s a role for these medication. But the big question I had is if they work, why we have to refill them every month. And nobody had any answer to me and does and, you know, I went to Harvard and other big, in Hopkins and big institutions and even at that level no attending had an answer to if they work, why we have to take them every day of our life. So this is when they started thinking about more preventative interventions. So left medicine went into health policy and public health and started supporting governments around the world with doing more prevention. And that also is an interesting challenge because people know they should eat healthier already by now. Hopefully they should not smoke, they should eat that over, drink, etc. But you know, if you’re hungry and there’s a very good friend, you’re going to be tempted. So I found that the recommendations always losing against the product or the easy way, which is food or laying, you know, across from TV, you know, watching Netflix rather than go to the gym. So my next evolution, my last decades, I spent it thinking about how can I bring a product that represents health care, that represents prevention? And this is where a couple of a couple of meetings changed my life. In. One of them was it was at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, and I was talking with the CEO of a big aging research institution. And he told me, you know, you doctors and you health policy experts and public health like so you get it all wrong. And I was like, what do you mean? He’s like, It’s all about aging. And it was like, what he means. It’s like diabetes is no different than cancer or Alzheimer’s or other chronic diseases when the body is used and abused. Right. So we’re going to talk about abuse because that’s the prevention in. And this is where you capability you’re inner body and your cells are not capable of fixing themselves. And if the pancreas falls first and cannot produce insulin fast and with age, you’re talking more fat, you become diabetic. 

If the brain is older and then you’re more prone to Alzheimer’s, then and if the cardiovascular system also, you know, gets little bit high inflammation and the plaque disrupts in the coronary arteries, you get a heart attack. So for him it was aging. That’s making us less prone to fixing the body. And then and then this is behind the chronic diseases, which is why we don’t get most diabetes at age. You know, 23 or most cancers at age 25, where we don’t have a heart attack at age 27 and we’re never going to get Alzheimer’s at age 21. I mean, never say never, but that’s the gist of it. So I started focusing on how can I reverse aging to help the body deal with these chronic diseases. Now, the second meeting that changed my life was with a person called Valter Longo. He’s the head of the Longevity Institute at USC, and he’s trying to reverse aging and chronic diseases with nutrition. And so he’s trying to use food to push the cells to get younger and therefore getting you out of these chronic diseases. And if you’re healthy, it’s just a preventive preventative intervention. 

And it was like, how can food, how can nutrition reverse aging or slow down aging? And he’s like, you know, we’ve been able at USC to to come up with the precision nutrition that when somebody is the cells do not recognize the food. So it’s like fasting. But you’re eating and it’s a very sensitive precision food formula, all vegan, healthy, natural and the people can consume and for a period of five days, only a month. And over these five days, although you’re eating the cells do not recognize the food that goes around this the raders of the cells. And so it gives you like a fasting benefits and and when you stress the cell with five days thinking it’s not eating it rejuvenates to to survive right it’s to give an analogy if you’re running a company and you have no funds, you try to restructure and be at your optimal performance to survive. And so what’s happening here is the cells. Every cell in the body is impacted when you fast or when you’re thinking or fasting. So every cell tries to rejuvenate and to survive. And it’s a process called autophagy, but in we call it in biology physiology, and it won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2016. So that changed my second part of my life. I was like, if I can support this research in nutrition and nutrition gives the benefits of fasting. Maybe we’re going to help patients to go back, prevent diabetes, or at least go into remission or regression needing less medication by helping them lose the weight, protect the muscle, rejuvenate the cells and be healthy from the inside, rather than keeping them on pills that work on one receptor and creates a lot of side effects on others.

Beverly Yates, ND

Okay, this is all fantastic. Great to know. And when you think about it, you know, fasting is something that humans have done for a very long time, but we haven’t necessarily always had a fasting mimicking diet, which I think really in this era is a key therapy because, you know, for a lot of people to truly fast and not eat anything is tough, right? So why is fasting in general key to diabetes remission?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

So it is the question I always get. But if you think about it and it shows me how we got brainwashed through the last 30 years. Right. So fasting is a disease of overeating. Well, diabetes, a disease of overeating. And if you grab any person completely uneducated 60 years ago and you tell them if somebody eats a lot and the body cannot deal with the food, they become diabetic. What should you do if you should stop eating. That’s it. That’s the natural. You know, if you hit somebody with a habit on the head and they have a headache, you say, what do you do? Say stop hitting him. Right. And the same way. But we never thought about it this way. We complicated with medicine. And in which phase and which stage. And hey, there’s a role for all of that that nobody nobody is debating that. But the biggest role in fasting should be about eating the right nutrition and trying to decrease insulin resistance to alleviate the pressure of overproducing insulin from the pancreas and giving that patient the chance to heal the pancreas and then go off, you know, under remission. So fasting, though, the true question is the difference between fasting and eating a low calorie diet every day because there’s a big difference. A lot of the listeners will confuse fasting between let me go then eat healthy or locally, which is what what’s what. 

A lot of doctors and a lot of nutritionists would advise you to do today. Eat a low carb. You know, and it’s tricky because if you go on a low carb, low calorie diet, unless you exercise and you protect the muscle, you’re just slowing as well. Your metabolic rate and you come out of a low calorie diet with a low metabolic rate, low muscle. And then when you stop your diet, you gain back the fat right away and you go back into diabetes. So healthy nutrition has also little failed diabetes because it’s imposing an everyday change off of lifestyle that people, if they can stay on, is actually the perfect way to go. You should eat healthy every day. But if you cannot eat healthy everyday, make sure you have your proteins and you exercise to keep your muscle. Otherwise, these fasting is a solution because you don’t have to do it everyday, you just do it. Five days and fasting comes as a stress, not just as a calorie deficit to your cells. When you stress the cells, growth hormone is a hormone of stress. Growth hormone goes up with a fasting mimicking diet. You’re giving nutrients. That’s the secret to the body and muscle. Seeing high growth hormone and seeing nutrients is so happy and it gets maintained. And in some trials we saw even a little slight increase in muscle mass. So if you’re a person who cannot change their behavior and eat healthy every day, do the five day fasting mimicking diet. We called the program the diabetes remission and regression program. You can go to Elektra Health, come and check it out. But if you cannot, did the ABC Remission regression program. You want to change your lifestyle everyday, which is actually ideally what we were recommend. Make sure you have enough protein and you exercise so you don’t decrease your metabolic rate. Now here a lot of people are trying to shortcut it with the semaglutide and taking the there was ozempic and they were over here. We can talk about that. Yeah.

Beverly Yates, ND

Let’s talk about it because I think that’s critical. You know, the idea that you have to maintain your muscle mass, you know, obviously you’re spot on. This is true. I don’t think the general public understands how important muscle mass is for blood sugar control, balance and overall health, especially as we age. And if you want to have a metabolism, you got to have muscle, Right. So please share with us what’s the story with these peptide therapies like, you know, Mounjaro and Ozempic and all the others?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

I mean, it’s a very tricky new introduction to the market, right? It’s on one side. People are very happy. The appetite decrease, they lose the weight and it is worth it for some to start on something. But, but it is a problem to sustain it and to stay on it because you’re going to lose muscle with weight in with fat and the problem thing about muscle, that’s the engine of the car, right? If the engine slows down, the entire burn rate goes down. And therefore, whenever you go back, you leave these injections and they’re going to come into the form of orals soon when you leave them, you have a very slow engine. You’re going to pick up fat very fast. Instead of burning the calories fast. When you pick up your fat back, you pick up your insulin resistance again and then you’re going to need more medication. So once you start a chronic consumption of the Ozempic and the Mounjaro in the book, you’re going to have to stay on them to decrease your appetite. Or if you stop, you’re going to pick up back fast and that’s it very tricky, very tricky lifecycle now if you’re overly obese, you have a short term high risk of, you know, death or disease. And you need to, you know, yes. On a short term, maybe we still prefer the natural way, you know, diabetes. Most diabetes type 2 comes from food. The solution should be in food and lifestyle should exercise. You should eat healthy, you should sleep better, you should stress less and should increase your social capital and be happy and be have a positive mood that will take you off diabetes and most important, prevent many other chronic conditions that are related to aging and how good you are from the inside. And this is what lifestyle in the longevity good longevity lifestyle will give you versus just taking one pill or one other injection, solve one problem and increase the risk of others.

Beverly Yates, ND

Definitely. We so well said, you know, solve one problem and create a whole bunch of new ones. Right. So how is it possible to provide the benefits of fasting with this novel fasting, mimicking diet?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

So we we it took us 20 years to get to where we are today and in 17 universities are doing the research with USC, University of Southern California, US, including Stanford and other big ones in in the National Institute of Health. This is important because it gives the credibility that the New Age put over $20 billion into the research in these different universities to come up with a plan based vegan healthy foods for five days. And we studied the nutrients, the macronutrients. When they get to the cell, the cell perceives food has three receptors that precede food, the pKa, the Ras and the Tau pathways. So there are three pathways that tell the cell, Hey, there’s enough carbs, you’re not fasting or there’s enough protein, you’re not fasting. And the proteins are important because some people think with the just the ketogenic being very low carb, you’ll you’ll mimic fasting, you won’t because the proteins are sensed as well. So they’re perfect fasting, mimicking nutrition and fasting mimicking diet should not overstimulate the receptors of recognition of carbs and proteins. And that’s exactly how how University of Southern California and many other universities devise together this precision nutrition formula. You eat very healthy, tasty plant food diet. It is a low calorie, so it’s around the 800 to 1100 calories, but it goes around the cell receptors that detect food. So the cell is getting food, but not knowing that, recognizing that cell’s thinking, it’s fasting, it rejuvenates, it’s fix a detox, it’s a better performing one. It’s biologically younger, so deals better with the disease, deals better with aging, it is better with performance and metabolism.

Beverly Yates, ND

That’s exciting to know. So these are wonderful benefits. And one of the things I’m wondering and I’m pretty sure people in the audience listening will be thinking about this to both our general public audience members, as well as our other health professionals who attend the summit, which is when someone’s on a fasting mimicking diet, what is the recommendation to them around exercise both for that five day window when they’re on this FMD, the fasting mimicking diet, and then for the rest of the month when they’re not on the fasting mimicking diet.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

So what we have done, we have asked people when they do the five days to to do minimal exercise, they want to stretch. They want to do dumbbells. They just just, you know, muscle meat basically not to run, you know, three miles which which or go on a marathon or do it strenuous exercise because you’re on a low calorie diet. So just do the normal exercises of the day, but do not over overexaggerate and and and go into intensive exercise, which I actually a lot of people love is like, okay, I get to take it easy and I get to lose my fat and I get to keep my metabolism. And that’s the secret of it. And again, it’s works because it rejuvenates cells. It’s not, oh, I lose just the weight and therefore I’m fasting. No, this is not a low calorie diet. This is this an artificial stress imposed on a cell with fasting so that the set rejuvenates and you’re a better performer, you deal better with your condition and you need you. A lot of people would need less medication. Actually, it shows that if you do the five days per month of the fasting mimicking nutrition over six month, so five days, month, one, five days, month, two, etc. 30 days in total, two thirds, 67% of patients will need less medication in six months, and then they lose on average £22 and they drop HB once you by 1.4, you know, it takes pills years to get there and actually you never let let go of the pills. And here we’re talking just in six months a drastic change while people are saying happy, while they’re cutting their fat, while they’re keeping their muscle and they’re living a better life. And this is how we should induce diabetes, diabetes, remission, not by losing muscles with injections, not by moving calves from the blood to the cells and increasing insulin resistance. Like most of the drugs for diabetes. We should resolve it with getting a better you, a better performing younger year. Who can deal with the with the disease in a better way?

Beverly Yates, ND

Absolutely. I totally agree with you. I love this approach. So another question. In fact, I have two that come from this is what if someone is hardheaded and doesn’t listen? Because you and I both know as practicing clinicians, people do not always follow directions. What are the risks Someone runs if they are doing five days of a fasting mimicking diet and for whatever reason they decide to ignore the advice around, chill out on the exercise and instead they exercise doing that at a more intense pace. What risk do they run?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Well, just two things. What is if you over exercise, your blood sugar might drop a little bit. So you have you know, you can always keep with you say juice or a bar or something to just compensate for that. But I love that person, that person. I should not do anything else to just keep exercising and lose the weight. And if you have a person who’s willing to to run the run and miles and miles per day while on the fasting would be they’d let them first wait for three days and do it because it will accelerate after the fasting mimicking diet their their health and but definitely on the fasting mimicking diet take it easy and and or if you have to exercise if you have to play that hard hard game of basketball keep something on a side in case you need to compensate for that for a low carb.

Beverly Yates, ND

Okay, so avoid the crashes. All right. That makes sense. The moments of hypoglycemia. Yeah, that could be really it sounds like magnified in this situation.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yeah, we haven’t seen it in our. It’s amazing how the body finds its balance when the nutrition is optimal. We haven’t had those cases, but we should always warn people, you know in case it happens in the clinical trials did not happen but we should be cautious you know safety first and definitely pay attention to this.

Beverly Yates, ND

All right. Great, great. And for those who, you know, love to exercise just a few days off, five days and you’re going to do lightweight things, please listen to Dr. Antoun. He’s telling you very clearly what the secret to success is here. It’s not a secret. Just please follow the directions and then you can go on with your exercise regimen, hopefully with more energy, too. That makes sense. All right. So with fasting nutrition, can this free people? Can this free patients, clients, health seekers from diabetes, from type 2, diabetes, pre-diabetes? What did the clinical trials indicate about this?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

So we have done two clinical trials. So far, one at Heidelberg University in Germany, one of the top and one at Lady University. And in Holland, the actually in the top health system over there. And they’re both showing that when you do the fasting mimicking diet, there’s a correlation. The more you do the five days, the more your HB Once he is dropping and you’re doing will be called a regression. Regression is a new term that the American College of Lifestyle and Medicine and now under society and others are embracing. It means I’m needing less medication in the remission. It means I’m actually getting off medication. And so what the trials are showing and now we have patents on is the fascinating insight. The more you do it, we’re recommending the protocol of doing six month once every month and then once every three months to maintain and it’s showing 67% of people will need less medication already in six months. And then some of them getting into remission as we go.

Beverly Yates, ND

Okay, great, great. So with this then I’m wondering, you know, for some people, they always think more is better. And in this case, is there any caution for people who say, wow, this is working great for me? I’ve been following the protocol. It’s five days a month every 30 days. Right. Who might say, well, geez, maybe if I do this for five days every three weeks or every two weeks, what what should be what should people know about that?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

We have never tested. Every two weeks there’s there’s one hospital that actually uses the product to help donors of transplant of liver transplant, because a lot of the problem in liver transplant today, a lot of the donors that match with the with the host, they have actually fatty liver because just of general obesity in society. So they’re using the fasting nutrition every three weeks because it melts fast. The fats in the liver, you know, one of the biggest we didn’t talk about benefits for diabetes is the fasting taps into the visceral fat, the most, you know, the harmful fat. So we’re seeing the fat in the liver going very fast that using it every three weeks. We have seen no incident there. But these are practiced by surgeon trespassers. And we haven’t done a randomized clinical trial to give you exactly what happened. So the recommendation, did they just do it once a month? Something would happen if you do once every three weeks, We don’t know. But it again, it’s a plant based nutrition would be safe. Follow science and we’ll let you know in the future if we have a trial on that.

Beverly Yates, ND

All right. That’s great. I love that. Follow science. It doesn’t make sense. Right? So if someone is looking to improve, let’s say, their body composition, maybe they don’t have type 2 diabetes, maybe they have pre-diabetes or no diabetes. You know, people who attend these summits don’t necessarily always have the topic in hand. You know, that is their personal experience. Maybe they simply want to do weight loss. Maybe they have belly fat. That visceral fat, the abdominal fat. You were talking about. Can they also benefit from this?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yeah. And this is how we actually we just launched it for diabetes. But we have we have been in the market for six years selling it for these, you know, for more healthy but carrying some extra weight people where and this is where prevention is right and in and we we actually have a part in on promoting longevity and we do it by helping the body through fasting reshape lose fat mainly improve the biology of the cell and then focus on that visceral fat, which is the most harmful one. This is in humans. We people always ask me, is this a fad? Is this a new way? Well, we live today as a fad today, having access to eating food every three, 4 hours or five or 6 hours, eating four or five times a day. Snacking at 10 p.m. is a fad. We as humans, we lived hundreds of thousands of years of our life on this planet with cycles of food and no food. So we’re just re matching our body. And when we start eating every time, all the time we accelerated aging, we started developing diabetes at a high rate cancer to dehydrate Alzheimer’s, the dehydrate. And now we’re telling humanity, come back to what your body is used to work with, which is lipids, a food and peers, a fasting to reconvene say, recalibrate you know, the food

We see it in everything in life. You know, you drive, you watch a car race two or three times, the car takes a pitstop, you fix, the engineers come, they see what’s going wrong, they fix it. If you stay on the track, the engine, the wheel will wheel or something will go wrong with the car we’re driving over. But in the same way today, we’re eating all the time. But exercising less was stressing more. We’re sleeping, not healthy, and we should bring back fasting because it harmonize. The body again helps the cells, helps the weight. There’s a lot of benefits. We haven’t talked about the mental clarity, the focus. This sleep to three empowers the body. A lot of what’s happening to us today. We think it’s because we’re in a financial situation, things at home, but is a lot of it driven by food and microbiome that drives us towards those and we don’t know about it. And this is where fast they could come back and rebalance the body and the mind. And for us to live happier and healthier.

Beverly Yates, ND

Absolutely. Those are all wonderful, wonderful things. And, you know, one of the pieces that I really love about this is the fact that it is doable. This can work for anyone’s lifestyle.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Yeah, for sure. It’s five days of healthy food that people can consume. The first time you do, it’s not going to be the super easy if you’re used to eat all the time and high carb and high calorie, but then the regular people adjust to it. And and and we’re seeing tremendous success with that without.

Beverly Yates, ND

Okay, great, great. So after listening to this, people are inspired, they’re excited. How can they access the diabetes remission program.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

If you want to go and subscribe? And we you know you can go to L dash nutral is for longevity that’s nutra we believe in in diabetes remission. But we want you to live a good long life. And this way it’s a longevity with diabetes makes its l-nutra.com and l-nutrahealth.com a nutra health outcome.

Beverly Yates, ND

All right great. So everyone taking notes. Remember it’s l-nutrahealth.com. Make sure that people are hearing this clearly because the details matter when we’re surfing on the Internet. Yes. Okay. Okay. What other nutritional recommendations do you have for diabetic patients?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

So what I like a lot is this the did the overnight spending 12 or 14 hours overnight. You know, if I want to use the word fast, but it’s actually normally sleeping early having your dinner early 6 to 7 P.M.. Give your body 2 hours of rest and then sleep without really snacking. It seems to be people always ask me if I will lose weight. What is if you want to say number one, I mean, I know exercise, I know, eat healthy, I know this data. If there is one thing that can rebalance the body or be the most cost effective to do is eat your dinner early and then make sure everybody goes for 12 hours after that to spend a little bit what you know, what you ate. It’s a little bit more complicated because at night you’re anabolic, your insulin is a little bit higher. Growth hormone is a little bit higher. The body’s absorbing and storing. So you don’t want to give it the fuel to absorb and store E during the day where you burn the fuel, don’t eat late at night to absorb to absorb it. And obviously, you know, exercise, sleep better, stress less and definitely social capital where in today’s world where we live on computers and we work all the time and we’re watching TV and YouTube, make sure you spend time with the loved ones. Make sure you be happy. Give yourself a purpose in life. That serenity is so important to for you to be relaxed, for you to be wanting to exercise, wanting to eat healthy, wanting to take a good step in life. So all these five pillars of longevity, you know, eat healthy, exercise stress less, sleep better, and increase your social capital and purposefulness. This is the recipe for success.

Beverly Yates, ND

Perfect. Perfect. All right, Dr. Antoun, thank you so much for these insights. Are there any final words you’d like to share with our summit audience?

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

I think, again, just the final word is, is we are focused in the summit on diabetes. But my biggest lesson in life, it’s a symptom of how young we are from the inside. Take care of yourselves. Take care of your, you know, mental health and body health. And you’re going to see better improvement not just in diabetes, but the next thing that might hit you in life. And that’s the way we should practice health care. And that’s the care.

Beverly Yates, ND

I agree with you. Health care, not sick care, not just disease management, but really freeing people so they can be healthy because this is a disease we can do something about. All right, great. Thank you so much for being part of the summit. I appreciate you.

Joseph Antoun, MD, PhD, MPP

Appreciate it very much.