Uncover Nutritional Strategies For Prostate Cancer Recovery

Introduction and guest background 0:00

Hello, everyone. Welcome again to the prostate cancer Summit. I'm your host, doctor Geo Espinosa. And I have. Yes. I say this all the time. I have another special guest. But really, this is a special guest, doctor Joseph Antoun, who is whose passion is on human longevity. Doctor Joseph Antounis is known as a CEO of longevity, having having led the first longevity company, L Nutra. You know, L Nutra, because they produce the fat fasting, mimicking diet protocols and little boxes that you already are familiar with.

Very science based. He's the CEO and chairman of the board of L Nutra, which is a unique type, nutrition technology company leading the longevity and food as medicine markets. Before taking on these roles, Doctor Antoun was the CEO of Health Systems Reform, a boutique consultancy aimed to elevating public health through reforming health systems, strengthening health care management, and improving health care delivery. He also was the co-director of Center Center for Health Policy at the University of Chicago and adjunct professor of health policy at the Buck Institute of Research on Aging, and a fellow at the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

I do want to say that Doctor Antoun is also, a graduate, of health policy from Health Policy Program at Harvard University. And his PhD is from Saint Joseph University. You know, Joseph, reading all this and looking at your bio and I'm saying, what is this guy doing at Al Nutra with that back where you would think you be, a researcher at, academic institution somewhere, with that, with that pedigree. And here you are. So let's start with this. What got you to be where you're at right now and working and fasting, mimicking diet and al Nutra.

Well, what was your the impetus for that? Well, it's, Thank you, thank you that I could tell. And hopefully we're going to change somebody's life today with this, with this podcast or with this summit. It's exactly what you said is, is I am bringing the research that and the ethics and the science from medicine to nutrition. And this is what L Nutra is about. It's, you know, al is longevity, dash Nutral nutrition is how can we help people give everyone the chance to live a healthier, longer lives through nutrition and and why?

Nutrition, right. This is what moved me all the way from medicine and and the accolades you mentioned,

Why nutrition and longevity matter 2:56

to to nutrition because we as physicians, we never been taught anything else besides medicine and surgery. Right? We give pills and we do surgeries most of the time. And in the traditional way. And, and I've done Harvard and Hopkins and the biggest it's not like we went to, I learned two things that changed my life. The first thing I learned in my career was that 90% of us will die at a for diseases. Cancer is why this summit Alzheimer's, AG, vascular disease and diabetes 90%. So everyone listening to us today, you have a nine out of ten chance to die out of one of these four diseases.

We in medicine tackle each one separately. But if you think about it, they're all diseases. Aging. The aging is the mother of all these big diseases. You're not going to get Alzheimer's at age 22. You're not going to get prostate cancer at age 27. You're not getting your first heart attack at age 24. Okay? So that's big because then it means it's all about our biological age, right? I never thought about the chronological age in biological age. So if you keep me from the inside, healthier, younger, you're pushing me away from the onset of one of my four killers.

Maybe if you think about this, is the biggest prevention the medicine can do today is to keep the body and the cells younger than their age. This is a very important sentence. Younger than your age. Yeah. And to do that, what can you do for that? I toured the world and every aging research lab and and everyone was pointing at Doctor Walter Longo, the founder of this company, because he found a way to reverse the age of the body through nutrition and fasting, mimicking nutrition and why nutrition is essential.

This my biggest moment is that the only product we consume every day of our life that they were born in, throughout all our life is food. Later in till today, we've used food as poison, unfortunately, especially the last 30 years, and it was time to put evidence based medical science behind food to transform nutrition. The product we consume every day into an age reversal. Intervention, so that we help prevention. So we help people and patients live a healthy long life. This is I consider a needs to be the culmination of my my endless, if you want hunger to is when I practice medicine.

I saw them giving multiple pills to people for the rest of their lives. I wanted to be a cardiologist. I did my training cardiologist. I was like, literally meeting people after, let's say, giving them 4 or 5 pills, cholesterol triggers, right. Blood pressure medicine. Right. And it's an endless subscription like when, when, when, when are you going to get out of it? And so bringing the evidence based science from medicine, putting it behind nutrition that most consume product, turning nutrition into medicine, in nutrition, into prevention became my passion.

This is what I'm doing as a leader. Well, I love it, I love it, and thank you for doing what you do. Look, I consider it I consider it medicine. I consider, I know we have to be careful with what we say about food and medicine and and the therapeutic value. But the truth is that if you look at the data, food is medicine, exercise is medicine. It's lifestyle, dissecting it's lifestyle medicine. And certainly the work that you guys have done, with, Al Nutra has been extraordinary as a clinician. I tell you, I prescribe it all the time.

Let's go back to so I started the whole fasting thing. Joseph. About 23 years ago where I started reading. Right. So this is where I got into natural medicine is like, wow. So I think I want to be a natural doctor because I think there's power here. And I'm reading all these old texts and books on fasting, the roots of natural medicine. One of the arms is fasting, right? 23 years ago. Little data. What are you doing? What's this fasting thing? I mean, really fasting as a therapeutic? Come on, that's silly.

Fast forward a lot of information. A lot of data supporting that fasting is a good thing.

How fasting mimicking diet works 7:18

And it does. You can expand on autophagy. What that is, when I came, when I became aware of FMD and FMD program, I said, My God, this is exactly what I need. Why? Because while I would love to fast for five days, I can't if I need to because I need to work and I need to. I need to continue with my life. I, you know, things are not going to stop for me. So I could do my fasting. And if I need to take a nap, I take a nap. What FMD did for me personally is, wow, I can eat, lower my calorie intake, you know, mimic fasting, still get the benefits and completed and still be functional.

As I complete phenomenal, I lose some weight and it's just phenomenal. So take us back what is fasting mimicking diet. And how does it help, patients with prostate cancer. So the, the, I'll take a step back and you talk about fasting. There's two types of taxing. There's that what we call intermittent fasting, which is anything below today's less than two days. And there's prolonged signs saying anything longer than today's. And why we we put this to the 2 to 3 days delineation because you have enough SAT and glycogen and the liver has some extra reserves.

There's enough reserves in the body to compensate for the deficit in, in fasting calories the first two days. So the first two days fasting is a metabolic, you know, impact. You know, you lose some weight loss and, that improves your blood pressure, but cholesterol, blood sugar, etc.. Now, once you cross day two or day three, fasting becomes moves, not only metabolic, it gets into deeper metabolic reset, but it becomes a cellular rejuvenation tool. So what happens is on day two a day three, the body's telling the cells, hey, I'm I'm going bankrupt, right?

I'm, I'm breaking down my, my side. I'm using my reserves. But when in a crisis, that word crisis on day three is very critical because the body tells every cell. I feel it, I feel I feel the Christ is underneath me. You have to feel it because every cell of your body, including your brain. Yeah, is actually feeling the pain of fasting. And they three and so this is the some that pain comes the gain of rejuvenation. So the body tells the cells you have to rejuvenate. You have to, you know, detox clean and clean everything inside and turns epigenetic.

The epigenetics us going backwards in aging. They would call the embryonic epigenetics so that the cell is able to rejuvenate and stay younger because a younger, healthier, stronger cell can resist longer the crisis of fasting. So it's a survival mode that the body gets into. And this is where the power of fasting comes from. Every cell in the body lives in calories. Therefore, when you fast, every cell of the body is engaged. There's nothing today in medicine. You cannot give one pill that can go super be it that pills works on receptors.

As you know, 99% of them is nothing. You can give it to the body. Now that engages all the cells and engage them positively into rejuvenation while you're losing weight, while you're improving your metabolic markers. So this is why when we studied and we're talking now, 23 years ago, we started studying fasting one hour, ten hours, one day to day three day four day, five days. We amassed 18 universities with us Stanford, USC, UCLA, Mayo clinic, Immersive Lay, the University of Geneva, etc. we put top medical centers to do randomized human trials with us on it.

And it turns out that five days is an ideal time to fast. If you go short, or you don't benefit from cellular rejuvenation. If you go longer, you bankrupt the body. So five days were critical. So 30 days of fasting with all the biblical things talking about. That's way too much. No, because there's intermittent fasting. You're eating in the afternoon. That's different. The biblical, of course, the the actually the fasting. It exists in the core. Divine religion is a good fast because it's it's a daily, time restricted evening. We can talk about that intermittent fasting.

It's meant to keep the body aligned and not not gain weight and stay healthy. I always say this if if the prayers were the healing of the soul, fasting was the healing of the body. I love it that fasting was to balance. You know you eat during the fast, so the next day that's intermittent fasting, as we said, from the metabolic balance. But it wasn't meant to. The slow rejuvenation the seller is finishing fast is a longer fast. Probably historically, there was no technology to fast for five days like we do today.

So what we're saying today, instead of doing five days of water fast, which comes with a lot of side effects, you have risk of hypoglycemia, you have risk of fatigue, and nobody can do it. This is how we were created. And we were created, by the way, through the NIH funding tens of millions of dollars to develop the fasting mimicking night. Knowing that fasting on water for five days is difficult, knowing that it's risky, we formulated a specific plan based, healthy nutrition gluten free, low glycemic index, blend based, premium ingredients.

So everything is ticked. Soy free, lactose free, milk free. All of that. It's a 100% plant based, diet that gives you the benefits of fasting, meaning when you consume it, you know, when you consume any protein or carbs, the body secretes insulin and IGF, which tells the body that there's food. So the goal of this diet we called to prolong the five day fasting mimicking diet. The goal of all is not to spike insulin. That's spike IGF. So then the body systemically and the blood wise doesn't recognizes the food when you go on a cellular level.

We studied what we call the nutrient sensing pathways, how the cells senses food. And our light is those around the sensing pathways, or does not trigger them enough for the cell to be satisfied. So we're nourishing the body over five days when you order prolonged or this nasty mimicking diet, or a Nutral health box, which is equivalent to all and for for people with conditions, it comes to your house. It's a box. You open it and you have day one through day to food. Beautifully organized, by the way.

It's remarkable because you would think that from a it's like so much science and from scientific institutions. You know, Valter Longo is a PhD at USC. You would think that the product would be not as beautiful, right?

Water fasting vs FMD and muscle preservation 13:56

Because all the attention of. The designers from Apple. Exactly. You're opening a new Apple MacBook? Exactly. Well, that's the feeling. Yeah. We hired the designers from Apple. We wanted to portray to the consumers that this is not a diet. This is not just lose weight. This is a nutrition technology. The same way the technology behind Apple that helps your cells rejuvenate and your metabolism to reset, which is a key unlock for prevention in longevity and for several health conditions. Untrusted.

It's bad. Well, let me ask you one more question before we move on to proxy. So what we're seeing here is that no fasting, which which has been my experience, fasting is good. If you could do a water fast for five days, great. Go for it. But I don't think so. Back to do I want to I want a little bit here. So so clarify that. So I took it. So what I want to make sure it of course. It deserves clarity. Is fasting if one is able to do just a water fast for five days, some would say, well, that's even better than anything.

The reason why we do that prolonged FMD is because it kind of ameliorate some of the side effects, or you don't feel as crappy. You're saying what? You're saying that no, some nutrition during those five days are better. What is it? What's the difference between the two for. People who can focus on water and versus eating hamburgers, it's probably better. What I'm trying to say is, is the fasting will begin diet. Is that only to give you the benefits? We thought we designed it this way, but it turns out to be superior to the water.

So when we went and studied this last night versus fasting, it turns out to be severe in many ways which which were striking to us. We developed it to help people do the science, but it turns out that when you water fast, only think about your microbiome. The microbiome is not getting any nourishment, so you lose all the bacterias, whether they're plant based or not. This the stem cell rejuvenation in the gut. If you don't have if you don't have an across the body, if you don't have any food, any nutrition, any minerals, any vitamins, it's not happening.

And and so on and so forth. If you talk about cells rejuvenating, well they need minerals vitamins, nutrients to the the best example I give is if you have a company, you're the CEO of the company and you need $1 million a month, say, to operate. Right. And we think you're not that good. The company is spoiled, is not good operations is the buddy is sick. And then we say, you know what? We're going to stop giving you the million dollar. Are you going to jump and restructure the company to fix it?

Right. We're going to put a pressure for you to fix it. If you give you $0, guess what's going to happen? Your best employee is going to is going to leave to another company because they can and because they're not being paid. You cannot order supply for next month. You cannot even pay your bills to operate when you when I come in and give you $500,000 out of the million and tell you how to use those to pay your best employees, use it to for it for basic. Now you're you're fixing while you're operating.

And that's very important. It takes it to the next level because you don't have to go down and then go back up. You're just going up. And one of the biggest symptom of this is the muscle. When you do water fast, you lose muscle because the muscle needs nutrients. Right. And and although growth hormone fasting is a stress a growth hormone increase when you do the prolonged or the five day fasting mimicking the IT growth hormone is high. The muscle is doing artificial rejuvenation, but you're nourishing the muscle.

And this is why we have multiple trials showing that even after you finish the prolonged five day fasting and making diet, you still have same muscle function and performance, which is critical for patients and also people above age 40, whether they're injecting the GMP ones and the semaglutide and the losing muscle, whether they're doing chronic of restriction, they're losing muscle if they do the prolonged fasting mimicking, but the the muscle function is preserved. And now we have patents and clinical trials on it.

You know, one of the things, that is fascinating with your company is your ability to stick to the science like no other nutritional company has. I mean, you guys are constantly publishing and doing research and putting a lot of money. I would assume, into research. Whose vision is that? And I say that because, you know, there's a lot of claims or this foods and that food and functional foods and but where where's the, where's the substance L Nutra and a pro and FMD full of science. What's that about?

Why why you guys chose the long game, right? You chose the long game, not the short game of low give. That's make claims. Good advertising. Good marketing. No, no. You guys chose the long game. And I barely see marketing actually for L Nutra or pro FMD. Yeah. Well it definitely goes back to the spirit of the founder, right? The founder doctor Walter Longo.

Research, ethics, and clinical evidence 18:58

For those of you who use ChatGPT, you can ask somebody who's the number one longevity expert or nutrition expert and you get Valter Longo. He's the head of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California. And he decided to do it differently. He decided to say, I'm going to put three decades of my life, just to do preclinical and clinical trials, exactly how Pfizer, how Lilly, how GSK, how does it but on food and in Valter it just that the ethics in his science but also the ethics of who he is.

He also formed the company and donated all his shares to the Quakers Foundation. So it's the only time we have not just randomized science clinical trials, but also the founder. Not to be biased and in his goal is not to be the next billionaire. He donates all of it to the foundation that he set up to help the patients actually get access to health care across the globe. And is is that same spirit that brought me in the early days, as a CEO, they wanted a Harvard M.D., Ph.D. to come and lead the first Nutri tech nutrition technology company.

If you go to the ultra, that com website is the spread you get. I did serve eight years as CEO, putting a lot of the funds into research, putting a lot of the funds into unlocking breast cancer, prostate cancer, autoimmune health conditions. We're waiting for the results from Stanford and University of Miami reversing diabetes. This is so big. We're showing that a diabetic patient and I would program we call the a Nutral health program. Under a Nutral health program, a diabetic patient decreases the dose or takes off a full medication every six months, six months, 67% of patients, six months, reducing their medication, metabolic syndrome.

Prediabetes. So. Is that separate from the foundational spirit that this has to become the first evidence base? And this is how when you read my bio, you're like, what are you doing? You should be researching like, I'm a we are the researchers in a company in the fusion company, which, as you said, never seen before. Let's connect. The product and, protein FMD directly to prostate and prostate cancer. The way I see it is the following. And I use it with my patients all the time. Right. So if, multiple scenarios, one is they are going to undergo they will undergo prostate cancer surgery and, but their belly is a little bit big.

Maybe their surgery is in three weeks. Okay. Don't pull on FMD once or twice before the surgery. That reduces a couple of inches off the waist makes the the surgeons ability to do a better job much easier. Patients that are you know, we know that higher BMI, they'll BMI is not everything. But when we look at a lot of people, BMI tells your story and higher BMI. It puts patients, for prostate cancer at a higher risk of development, higher risk of, aggressive liveness and higher risk of mortality for prostate cancer.

So I put these guys on, on, prolonged FMD once a month until they get to the ideal weight and then maybe once quarterly, patients with advanced prostate can. Now they're an up deprivation therapy, metabolic disease is more of a concern with me in terms of what can cause mortality even more so the in prostate cancer, even an aggressive and aggressive prostate cancer. Right. So I'm more concerned about metabolic disease than I am in that scenario. They're on ADT and that may induce it prolong FMD.

What are your thoughts on anything. So what are other scenarios where you say, yeah, that's a good scenario. And I know there's a paper on nature that was published. And maybe you can talk a little bit about that as well. Now I and you know, these are great.

FMD for prostate cancer and metabolic health 22:48

Great uses, doctor, to, we don't position the product directly to, to the cancer health outcomes, although we have done the randomized clinical trial to is a lot of prostate cancer patients, as you mentioned, they're at risk for surgery. So you need to take action before surgery. When you do the first thing we begin by to prolong the the you lose a lot of fat very fast. So we're talking protect muscle. This is very important for people at that age. And you lose fat only in this visceral fat descent that gives you insulin resistance.

And this side is at risk for surgery as well. The same time, a lot of, prostate cancer patients end up suffering from metabolic syndrome from diabetes, and they end up dying from cardiovascular disease more so than the cancer itself. And this is where the fasting mimicking light is key to unlock that, we have shown we can do on metabolic syndrome and prediabetes and diabetes, basically improving HBA one. See improving waist circumference, melting the visceral fat, protecting lean body mass. This is very important because that do never happens.

But how can preserve muscle and lose fat only is difficult to get even with the Olympics. And they will go with and you'll be losing a lot of muscle. So it's very important there. And cellular rejuvenation. Remember, the body is a better performer when it's a younger bio age. The inner the inner age. And prostate cancer is a cancer of aging. You know, prostate cancer. It's like where the pause is like, Alzheimer's is the clock is it's the body is all in in a mistake happen in the prostate becomes cancerous and the body is old to deal with it.

So prolonged is the only permitted intervention to show other things. Rejuvenate the cells. Go a little bit younger. Lose the central side. Protect the muscle, slip the metabolic signs. Blood pressure blood sugar. And there's nothing that can do this with five days. So the protocol you do it five days, you do it five days a month for few months. That's the. That's the protocol for prediabetes for sure. And then once you see your patient improving after four cycles, we're telling people five days a month, that's it.

Five days. They one day, 525 days. You go back to your own diet in five days, months to that five days monthly you do 3 to 4 months. And after that you can do it just to maintain once every 3 or 4 months. So within an entire 365 days. But what you need to do is 25 to 30 days, of, of the fast in between that if you have that syndrome or pre metabolic syndrome to support that and then just once every quarter to date. And the reason why that's important for the audience to understand is that, as, as Doctor Antoun is saying, we're not saying that we're going to cure prostate cancer with doing, you know, pro on FMD.

What I and the audience that's follow up follows me on social media or Doctor Dotcom or podcast knows that I'm trying to treat the micro environment. I don't know what happens to the cancer cells. I know that if we create a hostile micro environment, these cells are these cancer cells become unhappy and they are unable likely to move around and metastasize, which is the bigger problem. So something like, prolonged FMD can help with improving metabolism and not making them, not creating a metabolic pathway for cancer cells to progress the opposite, making a metabolic pathway for cancer cells to regress.

Yeah, that's a big that's a big thing. We study we studied prostate and colorectal and breast etc.. And the premise is, you know, cancer loves food. Once you have cancer, it's a cell that replicates so fast and it needs nutrition. It loves growth factor loves it loves. So the cancer wants to be starved to to be restrained and to resist less rather than being overfed and growing fast. And one of the ways to starve the cancer is this fasting mimicking diet. So this is one of the major theories we've been testing.

And for those who want to read the paper in nature, nature's the number one science short of the word. They can Google fasting, mimicking diet and prostate cancer.

Where to learn more and closing remarks 26:58

They can read scientifically how this acid mimicking diet can work on prostate cancer. Yeah, I'll be having it on Doctor Geo.com somewhere and we're going to have a whole article around that. So Doctor Joseph Antoun, thank you so much for joining me and sharing important information on nutrition and on FMD as a release of prostate cancer. How can people find more, learn more about L Nutra and Prolon FMD. L Nutra as well. That Nutral and Nutral.com. You can read the science of the company, the mission and the vision.

If you want to go deeper and read about fasting, mimicking diet, you can go to problem life.com. If you want to do it for healthy longevity and rejuvenation. Or you can go if you want to do it for health care purposes. L Nutra health.com. That's our medical part of the company, LDS Nutra health.com. It's going to follow me personally. I'm on LinkedIn that it shows off and on. All my social handles are advantages off and on. Thank you so much Joseph. I really appreciate your time here. Thank you everyone for watching yet another amazing episode of the Prostate Cancer Summit.

Tune in next time we have more information, more things, more experts, more activity, valuable information for you to be in charge and be involved in your own health care as it relates to prostate cancer, even prevention or any stage. Thanks for tuning in. This is Doctor Geo signing off. Talk to you next time.