Your Heart’s Menu: The Fasting Mimicking Diet And Longevity Foods

Introduction to fasting and the guest 0:00

Hello. Everyone. Doctor Jack Wolfson, cardiologist here. Back with another episode inside of the Heart Attack and Stroke Prevention Summit. And one of my favorite strategies as it relates to preventing a heart attack and preventing a stroke or recovering from is the concept of fasting. And I've got one of the world experts in fasting. His name is Doctor Joseph Anton and he is it. Just as you will learn, so knowledgeable about this so much experience in this as well. He is an absolutely dynamic and visionary leader when it comes to medicine, but also science.

And then certainly from the kind of the impact regarding health care policy. And he works, as the CEO of a company called El Neutra. He's got a PhD, MD, master's in public policy. I can go on and on about him and he'll talk to you so much, really, about fasting and really just how we can prevent heart attack. So, Doctor Anton, welcome to the summit. Thank you very, very much. And hopefully we're going to improve somebody's life today. No, I know, I know we're going to because I've heard you interviewed so many other times.

And I think you're going to provide people a lot of value. So please, people pay attention, take notes. The recordings will be available. You'll be good to go. But, Doctor Insight, tell us again what is your background and what brought you to to this very. You know, how we're going to be talking about fasting. You know, I always wanted to help patients. So the typical way is to do your MD. And if you're interested in more science for the European PhD, and I did that, but I figured out I was being trained to give it multiple pills for everyone, first meeting people after they're sick.

So it's practicing seek care, not health care. And after they're sick. The best thing I could do for them, from a chronic disease risk perspective, is to just give them a few pills that they have to just add more pills to for the rest of their lives. So I felt medicine, especially on the four biggest killers diabetes, cancer,

From medicine to prevention and longevity 1:58

Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease hasn't reversed those conditions. It's just get addicted people to pills for the rest of their life. And no pun intended. There's a lot of pills that are amazing and great and should should be taken, but it shouldn't be the only tool in health care. So I got interested in health policy and public health, and I did my studies at Harvard and Hopkins for those. And then I figured out that prevention is so important and I wanted my passion became, you know, how can I bring a product for prevention, not just recommendations, how to eat, how to exercise, how to sleep, which are critical, but people like to consume. Right?

So I was I don't want people to be in between. Should I exercise or eat a burger? Let us get them a delicious product or a product that can replace both and and help them increase their longevity and healthspan at the same time. So that became my passion, my passion. And to two things changed my life from their number one is something that they don't teach us in medicine, which is, you know, 90% of us will die. This we know from four diseases that cardiovascular, diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer's.

But what it what they don't tell us is that they're all age related diseases. You're not going to get Alzheimer's under age 22. You're not going to get your first heart attack at age 25. So it's literally that aging is the mother of all these diseases. And if you really want to practice prevention, you get to keep the body younger from the inside. How can we keep I always say this, you know, my best, my, my most favorite slogan is stay younger than your age. Right? So keep your cells and your metabolism younger than your passport, age, your ID, age. Why?

Because if you're 75, you're going to get diabetes or cancer or Alzheimer's. But from the inside, if you're 55, hey, you're 20 years away from those or ten years or five years or whatever that is. So I became passionate about what could keep the body younger from the inside. And I traveled the world to find to and met all the aging scientists you can think of all the way from Singapore and Hong Kong and China, all the way to Europe, all the way to the US, all the way to San Francisco. And I literally met most of the aging research.

And I'm like, how can you keep the body younger? And there's theories about that 80 plus and the memes and a lot of pills and supplements. But all of them were telling me one thing. What we know today is that fasting ex slash calorie restriction is one of the ways that you can slow down or reverse the biological age of the body. So I got fascinated by fasting and they all were pointing at Valter Longo, who was the head of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California. He's the grandfather of the fasting discipline, has a lot of trials on fasting, and I got fascinated.

So I met met with Valter, and I learned that there's two phases of fasting. We'll talk in detail about that, but basically it can help you both with metabolic health condition because when you fast, you lose, you wave, you lose the insulin resistance, etc., etc. we'll talk more and details about that. But when you cross three days of fasting, now you're touching the cells. The cells are getting into crisis and the rejuvenating to survive. So you're rejuvenating your cells. So for the first time, metabolic reset, cellular rejuvenation, the age of the body is now younger.

And therefore it could be an amazing way to prevent, or delay or keeping you younger. To stay healthier longer. Get fascinated with that. Obviously people, they don't want to fast for five days or six days or four days on water. Too risky, too difficult. So Valter Longo, has developed the fasting mimicking diet, which is a food that gives you those benefits without having to fast.

Why fasting works as a systemic intervention 5:47

And therefore I came I started working with all these universities, doing the research to, build on the uteri. The company I'm CEO of today and bring all these discoveries to the market and put more science, more clinical trials and support millions of people accessing the fasting mimicking diet. Two diverse their biological age and hopefully have a longevity lifestyle. Now that's a great opening. Intro and that it is amazing the work that you're doing. And we see so many benefits when we put people, you know, on fasting programs and we'll talk about what you guys are doing over at El Neutra.

You know, one thing that, you know, you're big, I know, in the anti-aging community. And for example, recently in Las Vegas at a forum, you got tens of thousands of people that are there, the American Academy of Anti-Aging, and there's all these different bio hacks that are there that people are talking about. They're talking about sun on red light therapy and IVs and all these different things. And they're all fine and dandy. But, you know, fasting goes back to this fundamental thing as it relates to something foundational, which of course is food and lack thereof.

And then a lot of times, too, right, people complain about, the cost of some of these biohacking strategies or supplements and then the fasting actually saves you money. I love that concept. So, so so what do you think about those areas now? I mean, there's something very fundamental and important, but fasting that puts us aside from all the other interventions, which including pills and supplements and cryotherapy, and what's fundamental is that every cell in the body, we have 37 trillion cells in the body.

Every cell in the body lives on calories. And when you fast this this doesn't exist anywhere. Every cell in the body goes through a process like this. Everything suffers when you fast in our body. So that's number one. So you're engaging every part of your body when you fast. Number two is so it's a profound very we call it in medicine upstream intervention. So that like I'm giving you a pill it's one receptor. And then it's a side effect. And we don't know what's artificial intervention. It's just an upward big intervention by number two it's a natural intervention.

He was like oh I don't want to fight humanity. Lived with a little bit of food and a lot of fasting for hundreds of thousands of years. We live in fad today. Eating today every 4 to 6 hours is a fad. Calling Uber Eats at night and eating and then Bam! Is it. This is all deviation from the norm. The norm is that we have some food, and there's periods where there was no food, and the peers with no food are very important to rejuvenate the body. This is why our ancestors were strong, even at older age, to sway their immunity was strong, their muscle remained strong and rejuvenated.

So it's very important to understand that fasting is a natural intervention versus everything else. Number two, it's a systemic intervention. Number three, it hits the deep function of the cell and pushes the cells to rejuvenate. To survive, they start fixing they side of healing. I always give the story of as a company, I always say fasting to the body is like a company with no revenues. So if you if you're the owner of a company and and you have no revenues, you know, you get restructured. It's it's the biggest crisis that's going to push you to come inside of the company and fix here and fix there and correct everything going wrong.

And there's nothing that you can do. There's more dramatic to to that company than, than no revenue.

Intermittent fasting vs prolonged fasting 9:20

So it's a deep, very effective, very beneficial intervention. All right. So talk about the different types of fasts. Maybe the whole concept of, you know, there's what I'd like to see is time restricted feeding. And then there's extended duration fasts, I think in the conventional world. And that's where there's a lot of benefit. But of course, end of the program you guys are doing over at al-Nusra and pro in the work of Victor Longo, to really be able to introduce this, to make it a lot more palatable to people.

Yeah, a lot of people are scared off by by the concept of 3 to 5 day water fast. And we'll have you talk about some of the dangers there. But and tell us about some of the different types of fast that are out there, what's really fasting, what's not break it down. And they should not to water fast for periods. We have a food solution. So we'll clarify all this. We started in a lot of fasting right. So for for everyone listening here today, a lot of the fasting data that you read about is all coming from us.

And then we had to develop the food. It's not like we're coming to take advantage of the we are. 23 years ago we started the research on water fast. But what we've observed is that and we categorize fasting into two, what we call intermittent fasting and prolonged or periodic fasting. And the cutoff is is 2 to 3 days, so that for each person is different. But just I'm generalizing here a little bit. So three days is a typical cutoff 2 to 3 days. Why is that. So the first and so, so 0 to 2 or three days, you call it intermittent fasting within the same day.

We call it a time restricted eating. So if you're restricted to 16 hours, 2 to 8 hours to 5 hours to 4 hours, whatever that is, but anything below 2 or 3 days, the body has enough reserves to cope with it. So and I'll go back to the example of the company. Right. So if you're the owner of a company so you need $1 million to operate a month. And I tell, I say you have no revenue. Is this, you know, today or tomorrow or whatever. Well first you say, okay, I have money in my checking account. So the buddy, the first, 10 to 12 hours, the money goes to glycogen.

Okay, that's the fastest reserve and the muscle to deliver it, etc.. You go a little bit longer, you say, I'm going to go to my savings account, I save some money, so the body starts going to the fat. And so we see ketones increasing in the body around our 1415. So after the glycogen comes fat breakdown. That's your savings. You save extra calories into fat. Now if you go longer as the owner of the company and you still now you depleted your checking account, you're saving accounts, you're going to talk to the bank for the credit line or fork is going to use your credit card and the buddy talks to deliver.

Say, hey, can you do this glucose Genesis? Can you dump a little bit more calories into the bloodstream to help us? And this is all can cover you up to two days to three days. Now you consumed everything you have in the bank. The banks say I cannot loan you any longer. You're on your own. You're going to jump into the company and start restructuring. You going to fix sales, marketing, operations, cut costs here. So after day three we see the body telling the cells, hey, look for intracellular sources of calories.

Detox, fix what you can fix. You got it put it is survival mode. You have to be at your best performance. This is the process of rejuvenation that we call autophagy. Self eat self rejuvenate. It's won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016. This is what took fasting. The big across the world. The big mistake is that a lot of marketers and fasting they tell tell people skip breakfast, do 16 hours and you'll you'll have autophagy. This is why a lot of people seven, 6 to 7% of Americans have done or are practicing intermittent fasting.

And they you can do it. And it's great for weight loss, etc., but you're not going to get autophagy if I delay it paycheck for you and you still have some money in your checking account savings account, you have credit cards. You're not going to go restructure the company right away. So you need to have a little bit suffer to day 2 or 3 to for the cells to rejuvenate. So that's a very important distinction. Is no autophagy acceleration. If you just skip breakfast or you're doing 0 to 2 days it starts after day three.

And now we can measured in humans and we did measured in humans. And we have a proof that autophagy happens after day three. So after day three what's happening now. You're losing your weight. So on the metabolic side you lost weight. But there's decreasing inflammation. And so the resistance a lot of benefits and the cells are rejuvenating. This is why we love prolonged or periodic fasting. There's a downside. You know, if you have no revenue for your company, you get some people who leave. The company cannot order supply.

There's a crisis. Not so the price. All these benefits happen at the price of you're going to feel weak on water fast, so you're going to feel a headache. You're going to see difficulty. So when we showed the benefit to the National Institute of Health and to multiple universities of water fast, we told them we can develop a fasting mimicking diet. We can. We understand how the cell detects nutrition and and, you know,

Fasting mimicking diet and the research behind it 14:22

our founder, Valter Longo, was an expert of how the cell senses food. And we were able to develop what we call a fasting mimicking diet. We called it cruel on. And a lot of people know that prolonged five days, prolonged, the product and basically it nourishes you. It's a box you order, you get at home, at your home, and you open it. There's five boxes in it food for day one, food for day two, food for day three and four and five, and your drinks and your supplements. And it's a very precise formulation.

It's all it's a plan based five days. It has, no soy and no GMO, gluten free, etc. so very healthy ingredient base and the precision formulation. We tested it over 12 years, close to $48 million in research today. We have 41 human trials on it at Stanford, University of Miami, at USC, UCLA, mayo clinic. So we partnered now with 18 universities. We're doing a lot of human trials on a fasting, mimicking diet. And, and we have over we just crossed 15,000 doctors prescribing or recommending, approval on the five day fasting intuition for the benefits we talked about.

So now you're eating for five days. Your body your cells do not know that you're eating. That's that was the art of the development. And therefore you're benefiting. You're getting the benefits of fasting without getting most of the side effects of the fast. That is, fantastic stuff. So many doctors. I mean, that's just such a testimony right there. The fact that it works 15,000 doctors is a lot of people. In your corner recommending it and obviously for, for good reason, a real quick I mean, just go back and touch on this problems, you know, with water fasting, maybe.

I mean, what about, you know, people talk about juice fast bone broth fasting. The first introduction I had to fasting, which isn't fasting, but but a juice cleanse, if you will, is what it is. Where I did not. No juice. You know, for a week. My wife at the time did it for three weeks. And, you know, again, tell me, tell me some of the issues with water fasting because I still, you know, recommend that I want to make sure I'm on the right track here. Yeah. It's very important to notice the difference.

So with the fasting mimicking, I would probably getting a perfect beginning, a pseudo perfect fast. You're nourishing the body with the exact macronutrients that it needs without triggering the sense the sensors of the cells. So you're mimicking the true deep fast, which gets you into cellular rejuvenation and tested proven pattern that, etc. the issue with the juice fast or the bone broth fast is that there's two issues is number one, you're you're not getting all the macros that you need for the entire body.

But number two is the cells sense. Some of the some of the ingredients. So they're not designed to get perfect fast. So they get you in a shallow fast. It's the same like the ketogenic diet. The ketogenic diet also gives you a very, very low carb. So the body thinks it's fasting but gives you enough protein that the Tor pathway is triggered. So you get into to shallow fast a shallow fast becomes like the benefits of a chronic restriction, which means you get some metabolic benefits as well. You you know, if you're diabetic, you do keto or you do the juice faster.

You blood, the blood markers improve, but you don't rejuvenate the cells. What we love the most about prolonged or the five day Facebooking that is, is cellular rejuvenation. Why? Because we want the your biological age to be younger. Why? Because we thought we talked about the biggest diseases that are killing. 90% of us are age related. Right? So you can slow down. You can slow down aging with calorie restriction, with juice, with it. You can slow down this that push that rush of carb and proteins which secrete IGF and protein growth factors.

But to reverse the bio age a little bit temporarily, you need to fast thing we making diet and a deeper fast to act on the cells. Do we have much evidence as far as maybe heart end points to heart attack stroke? This is the heart Attack and Stroke prevention summit. I understand certainly that, is as successful as you guys are and as many people you have and as much money, the millions you've invested. Right. Pharma would invest, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars looking at statin drugs, etc., looking for hard endpoints.

But maybe talk about some of the softer end points that you guys have as well. Yeah. So we just we published, in 2024, in February 2024, we publish, an article in Nature Communications, nature propagation as part of the nature family. As you know, number one, science showing up the world. And we we took multiple clinical trials that we've done the the first thing we began that we looked at blood sugar. Right. It's a it's a correlation number one secret of prediabetes and diabetes. We looked at cholesterol that triglyceride.

That's CRP at lymphoid myeloid ratio which is a sign of rejuvenation the immune system. So we took a lot of metrics. We put them all. We aggregated those. And we use the Nhanes study. So the US government is is is sponsoring a longevity trial called the Nhanes, the Nurse Health Study basically. And they're following over 9000 people. And and now we're, I think, years 22 or 23. So they have a longevity data on them, and we have access to this data. They do blood draw on them. So we we saw who basically based on your blood profile and your age and other metrics, we, we built cohorts where we know if you're prone to urological to diabetes, to cancer, when you would die, etc., and we're able to construct a biological age metric.

And then when you input the benefits of the problem, fasting, mimicking diet into this, we're able to show whether we can decrease the rate or prevent or slow down the rates of diabetes, neurodegenerative, cardiovascular events, and cancer. And of course, this is a simulation because although it's a factual trial, it's a factual, observational, by the US government Nhanes study. But the data we input into it is from short term data, prolonged.

Heart health, biological age, and clinical evidence 20:38

But that article got published after three years of scrutiny, by the way. It took its signature three years to publish it because it's the first time they're publishing a biological case for reversal based on the product. Right. Prolong the five day. It took three years, of diligence and then finally got published. So what it's showing is that if you do three times per year, the prolonged fasting mimicking the three times. So for everyone listening to us here today, 15 days only and getting your food, your do your prolonged you go to prolong life.com the prolong life website.

You buy your five days subscribe for three times. If you do three times, we're showing that you're buying your biological age score decreases by 2.5 points. What we do simulated also is if you're between age 50 and 70 and you do it from 50 to 70, so you're doing three times 15 days, only 50 to 70. The aggregate biological age score decreases 11.5 years. And basically you're double digit decreasing the rate of cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer and cardiovascular disease. Again this is a simulation. It's published there.

We're not claiming that you do it and therefore you're not going to have any of those. But what we're saying is a simulation at the best of what we know today, it's showing that it can support a longevity lifestyle. It may help you, reverse your biological age, score, which we know is a correlate of an incident, correlate of health conditions. Well, that's definitely better than any pharmaceutical data I've ever heard of. That's, that's for sure. And I love the idea that it's, you know, even for those of us over 50 that that can be beneficial, and get that kind of, you know, changes, is, is really impressive.

So three times, per year is what's going to be recommended. Is it something where, more is better? Is for better than three and five better than for, as you know, some people, not many. Because fasting can be difficult and you guys make it easy, but some people are actually able to fast, maybe a 36 hour fast. I've got people who are committed to doing that on a weekly basis. I just talked to one guy. He does a 72 hour fast on a weekly basis, but tell me that sweet spot for prolonged what we should be doing there.

So, just for those who just the water fast, the science is on your side. Do it with the fasting mimicking diet. Why? Because go back to the same example of the company. If you have zero revenues on a company, you know you have, there's a cost to be paid. The best employees are leading to another company. You can order your supply for to sell the next month. So there's a price when you do it. It's the benefits come as a survival, but it's a survival to a big stress. And the stress comes at a cost, right?

You're going to pay the price of a long water fast. This is what. And and we are we where the water fasting you know researchers and we did figure out that there's a lot of price to fat muscle. You know the person you're talking about is going to lose muscle with time. To a tissue, to bone. I mean, you know, the health of this is the JLP one today that we see, right? When you see people eating less chronically, you see all these, all these side effects. So, with prolonged and fast five day fasting, we we can die.

There's muscle protection. We have two articles published. One of them is a randomized naked eye just on muscle and it shows protection because you're nourishing the muscle while the cellular cells are the muscle rejuvenating. And, you know, fasting is a stress of growth hormone is it increases. So you have a high growth hormone when you're on prolonged, you have your nourishing. It's not a fast, it's a nourished fast. And it's other rejuvenation of the muscle. So these are very important distinction.

And so I definitely recommend that you do the fasting when we can rather than the water fast. So so that was that the core question or I missed the second. But no, no, no, I mean that doesn't make sense. I love the fact that you guys are gluten free, soy free, non-GMO. You've been around this industry a long time, and so many different people, they do have various products, you know, regarding weight loss or whatever it may be. And there's so much other crap that's mixed into the stuff. And I love that your products are so clean the way that they are.

And that's why that's one of the we really getting good results. We are as anal as a first of all, this cotton. This company is governed by PhDs and MDS. And you know, that's that's number one. It's not covered by MBAs and business. And business. It's very important actually from an ethical standpoint to what we sell. Number two, as much as with anal about the science and spending two decades to get to a product, we are as OCD on the supply chain and the cleaning of what we do, right? I do my products.

My kids actually do my products. My four year old son. There's our longevity protein, right. And I have a big story on that too. You know, when I went to produce The longevity. But we have a product called the L protein, the longevity or L protein. And when I went to produce it, it's basically we studied sequences of amino acids that don't over spike IGF. So you're not aging while you're protecting your muscle.

Practical guidance and closing thoughts 25:48

You're not pushing the biological age and every supply of protein in the US. So we went to wanted to add silica and other things because it just it's the you know, it's powdered the protein, chalky. They clog the machine. So they add two things to them to make it easier to produce and cheaper. And we had to wait 16 months and invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure that we partnered with one of the suppliers so that we have nothing added to it. And we do it super clean, blend based, soy free, gluten free, non-GMO.

I mean, we take all of those. Yeah. The food industry in the U.S. is a tricky one. It's being governed by profits and margins, not by science. And we're trying to reverse that trend. All right. Well, that is all fantastic. So proline website is full on life. Excuse me. Dot com is the website. And of course this will all be in the show notes. Any final, any final words, doctor time that you'd like to share with our audience here as we're looking at preventing a heart attack and stroke, or maybe even recovering from one or preventing a second one.

Any final words. For everyone listening here today is, is, you know, remember that medicine is governed by drugs and by and by management of symptoms. Right at the end of the day, the only product you put in your body every day is food. And I say it because I'm coming from medicine and I use to, to to just treat food as if it's a leisure or it's about losing weight or gaining weight. I never looked at it as medicine, as prevention, as empowerment, as who I am. Right? Every day, the only product you put in your mouth every day is water and food.

And it's, sends a lot of signals to the body microbiome, epigenetics, weight, insulin resistance, all of it where we are, what we eat. And please appreciate more what you eat and think twice about what you buy. And if you want to improve your biological age, score and or reset your metabolism, we're giving you something very scientific. It's called pro life, and you can do it three times per year, and it will support you with, with a longevity lifestyle journey. Well, there you go. Doctor. Joseph Anton, thank you so much for being on this episode of the Heart Attack and Stroke Prevention Summit.

Our listeners for sure got a lot of value, and we'll see you all next time with another fantastic guest. And till then, be well. Thank you.