Habits and Hustle - Episode 549: Dr. Valter Longo: What 30 Years of Longevity & Fasting Study Reveals About The GLP-1 Trend

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

GLP-1s are the fastest growing drug trend in health right now. But a 30-year fasting study says there's something every user needs to know before their next dose. Dr. Valter Longo has spent 30 years studying aging and longevity at USC, running over 40 clinical trials on what actually makes people live longer and healthier. What he found challenges almost everything the wellness industry is pushing right now, from 16-hour fasting windows to high-protein diets to GLP-1 drugs. In this episode of Habits and Hustle, Dr. Longo breaks down the science behind the Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD), why 12 hours of fasting beats 16, and what centenarians around the world actually eat. He also shares his latest research on cancer, Alzheimer's, and why your body already has the tools to heal itself if you stop getting in its way. It's time to ask the right questions about the hottest longevity trends that are costing people more than helping them. What's Discussed: (2:01) Who is Dr. Longo and the training behind his research. (3:18) The hypothesis behind why we should be fasting differently. (5:39) What a Fasting Mimicking Diet actually contains and why. (7:27) The difference between the longevity diet and the FMD. (8:30) Why 12 hours of fasting beats 16 every time. (11:18) The hidden risks of skipping breakfast nobody talks about. (15:47) How the FMD resets your body's locked-in weight. (21:12) How the "recipe" behind the FMD was built over 20 years. (29:51) Why the cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes versions of FMD are all different. (35:11) The trial showing nearly double survival rates in cancer patients. (38:04) Dr. Longo’s real take on protein and why less may mean longer life. (51:24) How often you should actually do the FMD. (53:08) What the research says about fasting and women. (56:40) Dr. Longo’s honest breakdown of GLP-1 risks and side effects. (1:16:19) Findings beyond fasting that slow aging. (1:23:21) The four things the FMD triggers that nothing else does. (1:36:31) Why nutrition beats exercise for longevity and why that's not the full story. Thank you to my sponsors!Kion: Visit getkion.com/habits for 20% off. AirDoctor: Head to AirDoctorPro.com and use promo code HUSTLE to get up to $300 off today! AirDoctor comes with a 30-day money back guarantee, plus a 3-year warranty (an $84 value) FREE! AX3®: Visit www.AX3.life to get a 20% discount on your first order with promo code HUSTLE at checkout. Magic Mind: Head over to www.magicmind.com/jen and use code JEN at checkout. Find more from Jen Cohen:  Website: www.jennifercohen.com Instagram: @therealjencohen Books: www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements Find more from Dr. Valter Longo: Website: https://valterlongo.com/  Instagram: @prof_valterlongo  Facebook: Prof. Valter Longo YouTube: @Prof.ValterLongo Fasting Cancer Book: www.valterlongo.com/professor-longos-new-book-fasting-cancer/  Longevity Diet Book: www.valterlongo.com/the-longevity-diet/  The Weight of Longevity Book (Italian): www.amazon.it/  Fasting and the Longevity Revolution Documentary: www.fastingandthelongevityrevolution.com/ Dr. Longo’s Foundations:  US: www.createcures.org/  Italy: www.fondazionevalterlongo.org/en/ 

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it. Welcome to Happens and Hustle with me, Jen Cohen, where we break down the mindsets and strategies behind extraordinary lives. Today, I'm joined by Walter Longo, one of the world's leading voices in longevity science. He's a biochemist, director of the USC Longevity Institute and the creator of the fasting, mimicking diet, backed by over 40 clinical trials. For more than 30 years, he studied what actually... actually helps people live longer and healthier, not trends, not hype, but what the science consistently proves. And what he's found challenges a lot of what you're hearing right now, from intermittent fasting to high protein diets to GLP1 drugs. In this episode, we break down what

really works, what doesn't, and the simple science-backed approach your body is designed to respond to. He also shares how he lives himself, no shortcuts and no extremes. This one will change how you think about aging and your body's ability to heal. So let's get into it. We today have a very special guest on Habits and Hustle. We have someone that I've been wanting to have on the podcast for probably like three or so years. I've heard exceptional things about him. And I'm sure you guys have already heard of him.

His name is Dr. Walter Longo. He is a doctor. And he's going to actually, you know, before I'm not even going to tell you. He's going to tell you himself. Dr. Longo, what kind of doctor would you? you say you are you obviously do a lot of longevity cancer research right yeah so i have a phd in biochemistry from ucla next door here and uh an undergraduate degree in biochemistry in what's called post-tac in neurobiology right so it's a training that you do after the phd in

neurobiology but but i've actually been trained in a lot of different disciplines you know from endocrinology to oncology to you know gastroenturenties gastroenterology, or at least, you know, the clinical research part of that, right? I'm not, I'm not a medical doctor, I don't practice medicine, but I certainly do a lot of clinical trials, human clinical trials, and all these topics. Well, I got familiar with you, well, a little bit before, but you wrote the book, Fasting Cancer. This is my latest book.

That's your latest book. My first book was a longevity diet, which was 2018. Yeah, like seven years. seven or eight years ago. Right, right, right. But when did you write fasting cancer? What did it come up? No, fasting cancer came out very recently, like six months ago, yeah.

So I was familiar with you, of course, before that, but that was the book that really kind of struck my, like, the whole idea of cancer to me is the most, the scariest thing in the world, right? To most people. To most people. It's like the biggest fear of everybody. And so that, when I saw the title, I was like, oh, my God, like, I need to, like, delve into all of the stuff and all the research, because you've been doing so much

research on longevity and obviously aging and fasting. I mean, can you tell people, just let's start with the thing that you're most known for, right, which is the fast mimicking diet, longevity diet. What is kind of your whole hypothesis that we should be fasting? What should we be doing in terms of like how do we live the longest and healthiest? Right. So that's really my focus. the focus of the institute that I started at USC is how do we make people live as long as possible as healthy as possible. That's what we've been working on for 30 years.

And even before then, when I was at UCLA, I was a student of Roy Walford. And Roy at the time was the most famous person in the world. He was a medical doctor at UCLA. And he was focused on how do you make people live longer, healthier? And yeah, so I think that after all these years, I came up with something. called the longevity diet, and then I came up with something called the fasting mimicking diet. So we were also thinking about things that are feasible, right?

People can actually do and not just something that's very beneficial. For example, we can go into it if you want, GLP1, right? Yes, absolutely. Most people abandon them, you know, within a couple of years. And you, for those to be effective, you need to do it permanently, right? Or certainly very, very long term. So to us, that's not feasible, right? That's not a good idea.

It may work. You may get very good effects short term. But then what did they achieve? Maybe I achieved that I gave you side effects. And then now you regained all the weight and you're even unhealthier than when you start. But so the longevity diet is what do you do every day? And the fasting making diet instead is what can you do once in a while, right? Is it possible that you can just do in this case five days of a vegan diet that mimics fasting?

So then the idea was first developed in simple organism, then in mice, and then in people. Can you eat but get the same responses molecularly as if you were water-only fasting? And that's what a fasting-making diet is. So it's a low-calorie, low-protein, low-sugar, high-fat, plant-based diet that does all these things. Death, water-only fasting does. But as advantages, because, of course, it has salts, has... carbon sources, meaning it has energy backups, right? So, so yeah.

Glaceryn, I saw it has, does I have glycerin? It has glycerol, yeah, and the glycerol, the job of glycerol is, for example, people, going back to GLP1, right? So GLP1, receptor agonist, most of these drugs, you lose two to one or three to one parts of fat for lean mass, right? Yeah. So you're losing a lot of muscle, essentially, while you're doing this. And so with the fasting we're making that, we don't see that, right?

And one of the reason is because it's an involved process that has the job of just making you lose the fat. You know, you don't want to lose. If you think about history and you're fasting, you do not want that organism to be losing muscle, right? Right. You want to have it so the muscle is protected. And one of the ways the muscle is protected is glycer. Right. So the fat is broken down and glycer now can be used to make sugar for the brain.

and instead of taking muscle to make sugar through what's called gluconeogenesis. So now the glycerol is used to feed the brain instead of the muscle being used to feed the brain. Or certainly the amino acids release from the muscle used to feed the brain. So this is just one of the many tricks that we have in the fasting making diet

to make sure that we get lots of benefits and no side effects or very little side effects. So let me start from the beginning. Okay, so the long-jointed. So you first write this book in 2017-18, the longevity diet. Now, is the longevity diet, is the diet the fast-mimicking diet? Are they one and the same? No, the longevity diet is everything including the fasting mimicking diet.

So the longevity diet is, for example, a pescatarian diet. Okay. A fish plus vegan or fish plus vegetarian, actually probably. And those seem to optimize longevity, but also minimize, frailty, right? So people can live long, but can live long frail. For example, the southern Italians are famous for many, having a lot of centenarians, but the southern Italians are also some of the most frail people in Europe, right? So you don't want to have, you want to live until 100 and be sick for 30, 40 years, or even be frail. I mean, you know, you cannot go up

the stairs or you cannot go for a walk or you cannot do lots of things that you want to do. Yeah, So that's what this longevity everyday diet is. And then it has all the components, for example, 12 hours of eating and 12 hours of fasting per day, right? So we're staying away from the 16-hour, 18-hour fasting for lots of reason, which we can discuss. But we picked the 12 hours because of safety, feasibility. People can do it.

But also because of it just takes longer for it to be effective. but in the end, it can be very effective without the problems that the 16 hours causes it. Well, it's funny because actually not funny, I mean, fasting for a long time was very trendy, very trendy, like the intermittent fasting, the water fasting. And I feel lately it hasn't been as, like it hasn't been as popular, right? Because people are coming back and saying it's not something that people like to do or whatever. And I was noticing that the people that were, were like super into fasting, they were like shortening their windows from like a four hour window.

Like it went from like the 16 hour window to the eight, like to the, there's other people, they're only eating within a four hour window. Some within a two hour. I was going to say some are even in a two hour window. Yeah. Or not eating at all for five days with the water fast. Why did, when did you realize and what are the, what are the benefits of or what, why now have you noticed that doing 12 hours is just even better than.

doing a 16 or these long stretches of diet. I mean, the longevity diet is based on five pillars, right? But meaning that it's not just a lot of diets are based on epidemiological data, right? You look at these big studies of wheat this, wheat stat, and how do they compare? The longevity diet is based also on centenaries. What did the centenarians all over the world, Okinawa, Loma, Linda, California, and Sardinia, etc., what did they eat? And then, how do you make a mouse live longer?

Are you make a rat live longer? Are you make a monkey live longer? And so those are all important in addition to the epidemiological data to come up with something that it's less likely to be affected by the new study, right? Somebody's, every day something new comes out. And if you do that, you're going to go crazy because then each, if you look at any study, they're always going to prove everything and everything against it, right? Yeah.

And the opposite. So from the very beginning, we say 12 hours. I say 12 hours. Because, for example, I was noticing there was all data, but very good data, they were saying if you skip breakfast, you live shorter with twice or much higher levels of cardiovascular disease, right? And so I said, you know, then I started thinking, this is really strange. Is it just about the breakfast or is it about the 16, 18 hours of fasting?

Right. And then, you know, there were also data. showing that after 12 hours, your cholesterol, your circulating cholesterol level go up. The LDL levels go up, and they keep going up, the longer you fast. And then I was looking at data, and this is like 10 years ago, all Goldstone and Goldbladder operations.

Women that were fasting for 14, 16 hours, they were twice as likely to need, people with gallbladder disease, twice as likely to need an operation. So yeah, so all of that, from the very beginning. And then the feasibility. I was a student of Roy Walford back in the 90s,

and he was talking about something called calorie restriction, which is what if you severely restrict your calorie every day of the year? And then I was noticing that nobody was doing that, right? And so I always thought, you know, it may be good for the lab, but it's not good for people, right? Right. Because, you know, to do calorie restriction, you have to be losing a lot of weight.

I'm already pretty thin. Imagine me minus 30 pounds, right? That's what color restriction looks like. Yeah, so I thought it cannot be something that pushes people all the time to the edge. And, you know, so the 12 hours made sense scientifically, clinically, and also made sense feasibility-wise. It's just easier.

And most people can do it. And I think I got it right, you know. And now we're starting to see the data indicating it may not just be skipping breakfast. It may be any 16 hours, and there's a study published last year, indicating that any time you do 16 hours, you are putting yourself at twice as much, twice as higher risk for cardiovascular disease and also overall mortality, increase overall mortality. Really? What about is it, how about the fact that you just end up eating more? Because when, for me, when I skip, let's say breakfast, let's just go with the breakfast thing.

When I don't eat breakfast, I'll just end up eating those. calories anyway later on during the day because I'm just like I'm making up for it like my body also has a base I don't what do you believe in like baseline like do you feel like everyone has a baseline weight that you can only modify so much where it gets to be uncomfortable or do you think that we can all or is it not about that at all I mean I know you take it from a health perspective but for the weight piece of it because a lot of people are doing the fast for weight as well right yeah so first of all the breakfast keepers, there was no other information. It was just people that skip breakfast, they do worse, right?

Yeah. And for a long time, the idea was, oh, they do worse because they have bad behavior. But it doesn't look like that, right? It doesn't look like that's what it is. Yeah, so I think that it probably is about fasting, right, for so long, right? It's just too long. And somehow the body is particularly if it involves, if it's 16 hours, it involves, keeping breakfast, the body, you know, has negative responses, right?

It does, it turns into a modality. Maybe it's the cholesterol, maybe something else, but something is negative about it. Right. And then, you know, your second question about the weight, it's, yeah, the body likes to go back to a weight at which you were stable, right? So if somebody's overweight 30 pounds and you stay in this 30 pounds overweight long enough, the body likes that because it understands. that's a good situation, right?

It might not be modern in modern time a good situation, but it was for the history for 100,000 years. Right. You know, homo sapiens have been around. So it tries to keep you there. It tries to keep you there. But that's where the fasting mimicking diet kicks in, right?

So for example, in the documentary, you know, it's going to be shown very soon. And the premiere is going to be shown. In the documentary, we're showing that The body likes to go back to a certain weight where it's stable. And so if you try to move it, and so in documentary, we're showing a doctor, right? In this doctor, we had was overweight obese, hypertence for a long time. And so we put them on the longevity diet and the everyday longevity diet.

And the doctor after nine months doesn't change it all. It loses a couple of, maybe three or four pounds, but doesn't change it all. Then we start the fasting making diet. So again, he had been at about maybe 90 kilogram in a very steady way. And so the longevity diet, this like maybe Mediterranean diet, but taken to even more extreme, doesn't do anything, right? So now we put him in the fasting making diet. So in about six months, the following six months, eight months,

it does three cycles of the fasting making diet. Then you see his weight comes down, his glycemia comes down, his blood pressure comes down. Now he gets rid of it, he was an Olympic and all the other. drugs, he gets rid of drugs and he gets rid of not just the glycemia drug, the diabetes drug, he gets rid of the hypertension drugs and his weight goes back to normal, right? So probably what happens is that we are locked, people are locked in the, you know, in their weight modality until there is a very strong message switch, right?

Get out of it, right? Get out of it because, you know, now, you know, you kept the fat and now, you know, the three cycles of the fast-emicking diet come around, and it just pushes you to start burning fat versus accumulating fats, right? So, yeah, so people are stuck, but they can get out of it. The fasting-making diet is certainly a good way to do it.

So the fast- mimicking diet can actually trigger you to get out of that baseline diet that you've been stuck with. Yeah, the fast-emaking diet I can do that. But now I think it's important for people to understand that if you go too long, right, if the restriction is too long. These are studies that have been done

for a long, long time. Now you can get into something called the thrifty mode, right? And the trifty mode now it tries to save energy as much as possible, right? So if you fast for too long, that doesn't happen.

The body doesn't switch into a catabolic, into burning fat. If you fast for too short, if you fast for too long, now the body starts being worried about, I may have to save energy

because I might die like this, right? So if I don't start putting away, keeping the fat, then I'm going to be in trouble. And so now you enter this thrifty mode. And this thrifty mode, we're worried that it may be epigenetic. And there may be why so hard for people once they get into this fat-saving mode, it may be so hard for people to get out of it. Because basically everything tells you eat and go maybe in a lower energy expenditure mode.

And that's what it was shown, meaning you are burning last calories. Right, right. Yeah. If you enter that, then you get a problem. You get the opposite problem. So if you do too short, you don't enter the catabolic mode. If you do too long, you enter the energy saving mode. And this is why people underestimate the power of understanding the science and understanding that you have to do it just right. So then you unlock it and you can keep going. And now you can go to a different weight, right, which could be 30 pounds lower than you. Right. It's a very delicate balance. it sounds like.

It's a delicate balance because it's a program that is there to protect you from starving to that. Right. It's also, you know, there to protect you from, hey, maybe it's a good, it's good to keep saving fat, right? Right. And in the majority of the history of human beings, and not just human beings, any organism, you know, starving, it was a real possibility, right? Right.

And so, you know, and there is no more pressure, natural selection pressure than and starve into death, meaning that evolution is very much aware of the danger that could kill you. And then it wants to eliminate those as much as possible. And certainly starving to death is probably one of the most common ways that people have died in the last, you know, 100,000 years here. Wow. So like, so can you just give us a very brief description and when people who don't know

and they're not familiar with what the fast mimicking diet is? Like, what is it, what does it contain? Like if someone to say, hey, Dr. Longo, what is this fast mimicking? What do you mean by this? Yeah. Yeah, so the fasting-making diet, when I first developed it, like 20 years ago, I started developing it. The idea was to first make it fasting mimicking, right? And then you use a lot of, again, low protein, low sugar, relatively low carb, but not too low.

So your body, just to interrupt you so people understand. So when you say fast mimicking, it's basically your body thinks it's in fast mode. but you're basically giving people little things to eat and drink to supplement so they don't feel that like ravenous feeling and deprivation of a normal fast. Would that be? Yeah, the deprivation, but also I think it's very important to, the deprivation also includes just the opportunity to stop and have a meal, right? So people, I think there is a problem with, you know,

you need to have a certain amount of foods and calories, but also the routine of having breakfast, of having lunch or having a snack. Yeah, psychologically. Yeah, psychologically, that's very important. And then, of course, lots of all the things that need to be in there, like I mentioned, you know, the salts and all of that. Yeah, so then the fasting making diet as the, I mean,

molecularly, and without going to the details, there is four markers, you know, IGF1, insulin, like growth factor one, has to go down. Glucose has to go down. And then something called IGFPP1, which is an inhibitor of the growth factor, has to go up. And then ketone bodies, they have to go up, right? So ketone bodies are these byproducts or fat breakdown. And so this is where ketogenesis, the word ketogenesis come from.

Right. So now this diet that I just described, lots of vegetables, lots of nuts, lots of oils, olive oil. They have the job of changing those markers. And, of course, you know, the fasting making diet theoretically could be made with lard, for example, right? You know, theoretically, even Lard will make it a fasting-imicine diet, but it wouldn't make it necessarily a healthy fasting-making. Right, right, okay, yes.

So then the idea was, let's match the fasting-mimicking properties with the very healthy ingredients of the longevity diet, let's say, right? So what did the, can we take green ingredients from Okinawa, from Lomalinda, from Italy, and then use those to make the fasting media FMD? Yeah. So is there like a, so when you do a fact, like you basically, was it a lot of trial and error to figure out the exact, like you had like to kind of figure out what to do like the balance like 20 years ago. How were you kind of figuring this out? Like what was your team doing? Were they trying different foods? Were they incorporating? Were you trying it in rats? Like how did you kind of figure out this, this ratio of salt or glycerol or whatever you put in that thing? Like to figure out that. perfect balance of how your body doesn't feel deprived or it's not burning lean muscle because that was the other concern, right? Like people don't want to burn lean muscle.

So that's another thing. How did you kind of figure out the measurements? Like how did you get the recipe, so to speak? Yeah. I mean, we've always focused on the genetics of longevity and the genetics also of weight loss and weight gain. So we already started from understanding the connection between ingredients. and the consequence of having that ingredient, right?

So then it was just a matter of testing it out. So, for example, we knew that we had to have low protein in the diet. Now, people shouldn't mix the longevity diet with the fasting making diet. You know, the longevity diet is normal protein. The fasting making diet is very low protein, right? But it's not just the protein, but the amino acid content. So meaning that you could have a relatively low protein content, but if it comes from one source, especially animal source,

the amino acid that we want to have very low, and usually there's what's called essential amino acids, the amino acids are high, are too high, right? So it's not just protein level, but then protein type. And even between two vegetable sources, you can have a two, threefold difference in the content of certain amino acids, right?

So then that's why, you know, you want to have, so we were more thinking about amino acid level, right? Really? Yeah. And then we're picking protein sources, says just to give you an example with the amino acids, protein sources that will contain low levels or higher levels of those amino acids. Yeah, so then everything in the FMD goes through that reasoning, you know,

whether it's in a fat. And so you could have any fat, but then you have olive oil and it's got monosaturated fats. And so each ingredient was tested in mice. And then we're looking for the effects in mice. then first you look at the short-term effects, right? What happens in a couple weeks? But then eventually we start doing the lifelong studies, right? And that's really, those are the very expensive ones,

and they're the ones that you need to then have a chance to make somebody live longer, healthier, right? So, for example, a few years ago, first we did it in normal mice, and then we did it in mice that were fat, a very bad diet, right? So we wanted to test both, right? And, you know, for example, the mice that had a very bad diet, this was published a few years ago, we showed that, you know, they get very big, right? And they get very unhealthy. And it's really remarkable how unhealthy they become.

Because I thought, what's a Western diet going to do to a mouse, right? Maybe I make it a little shorter. It almost cuts their lifespan in health, right? And it just completely messes up cholesterol level, heart function, inflammation. on insulin resistance. So, okay, so this is a bad diet, right? Fine. And the mice become very big.

Then we start with the fasting making diet once a month for five days. And we thought it's probably going to make them a little bit better, right? We thought just mice on the normal diet and mice on this really bad diet. And the mice on the bad diet for 25 days a month and a good diet for five days a month, they're going to be in between. They were not, they were like identical to the mice and the good diet. And so there was very surprising to us, right? So just five days a month of this FMD, how can it be?

You know, 25 days, it's five times as much, bad diet and good diet. And yet the five days were enough to bring everything back. cholesterol, heart function, glycemia, insulin resistance, you know, name it. So now we just finished a 500 people trial in southern Italy. We overweight and obese people. I cannot talk about the results. Why? Why?

Because it's not published yet. But the... Are they good? Well, we'll see. But the idea is, is it possible that, you know, it's not really about good food and bad food. It's about the role of the bad food. So we think of bad food as something that every day does a little bit of damage to you. But that's the study show that it's not true, right?

Because otherwise, you know, you got 25 days of damage every month. Right. So then you don't come back from that with five days. And so, you know, either there is a regenerative process that brings you back or maybe the food is just pushing you into a modality which then accelerates the aging process. So it's not doing damage, but it's just pushing you, let's say, an insulin resistant modality, in an inflammatory modality, et cetera, et cetera. And that eventually, if you don't unlock it every month, then that makes you age faster. So, okay, so a couple, you said a few things. So one question I have is how have you revamped the diet from 20 years ago to now? Like, what are some of the findings that you have kind of revised

that you know now that you didn't know back then? Well, I mean, 20 years ago, it was the mouse version, right? So, and we use it for cancer. You know, now there's a lot of fasting making that is one for Alzheimer that is very different from the one for the one for. For everyday people, it's very different from the one on cancer. Cancer is much lower calories. So let's talk about that. I'd love to. So you basically took the diet and kind of tailored it to disease specific.

So there's a specific fast mimicking diet for an Alzheimer's patient versus a cancer patient versus... Versus autoimmunities, yeah, versus diabetes versus prediabetes. Wow, talk about that. I'd like to know the difference. How much different can they all be? Well, I mean, for example, the cancer one is much lower. carous, 600 kilo-calories, because with cancer, we need to get quickly in and out, meaning that the cancer patient gets chemo and the chemo is gone within a few days.

Let's say, it gets chemo. It could be getting chemo, could be getting immunotherapy, kinase inhibitor, and lots of different therapies. So we need to try to achieve these changes in IGF1, et cetera, that I talked about before quickly, right? And so because, you know, we don't have the time to get there more slowly. But for Alzheimer, for example, is the opposite. We have high calorie.

We add an extra 300 or 400 kilo calories per day because now we're dealing, we just finish a trial in Italy. We're dealing with people that may be as old as 85, 90, and we cannot give them a 600 kilo calorie, which is what we, so for normal people is 800 to 1100 kilo calories per day. For cancer is 600 and for Alzheimer is 1400, right? So, yeah, because we don't want to push somebody's 85 to a very restricted diet. And, you know, there was probably a good idea because so far we've had very little, you know, high-grade toxicity, meaning like the type of toxicity that makes the doctor worry, right?

So it's minor things like a little bit of a headache and things like that. but you really don't see the, we haven't seen very much of the grade three, grade four toxicity, which makes worry, makes clinicians worry. So what do you do in the Alzheimer's fast-mimicking diet, like besides adding more calories? Are you just adding bigger portions?

What are you adding any specific ingredients? And we're adding lots of, I mean, in the Alzheimer's is not just calories, it's also other things. So we had caffeine, and it's a ketogenic. supplement that we actually give patients between the cycles, right? So they did the cycle and then all the 25 days in between cycles they got this 3, 400 kilo calorie ketogenic supplements. So high fat, very healthy, most of it from nuts and olive oil. But there was also caffeine and some

other things in there that have been associated with protection from cognitive decline. So, you know, Alzheimer is a little bit special because there's really nothing out there that works, right? And so we felt, let's just go all the way, which we usually don't do because then if you put all these things in there, you don't know what worked. Right. But we thought, especially because we were talking to neurologists, I remember six or seven years ago, and they were telling us, you know, good luck, right? Because by the time somebody's got early Alzheimer, I mean, their brain is so damaged that it's going to take a miracle for anything. to bring it back, right? That's when we started thinking, okay, let's just go with everything we can. And, yeah, we'll see. But in mice, it works very well. But, you know, I think it's a lot rougher.

Because in mice, we start early, right? Right. Yeah, if you're starting an 82-year-old patient that has already been diagnosed with Alzheimer. It's not helping. We don't have high hopes. Yeah, you're right past the point. I'm also asking because my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's recently a year ago. I'm looking. Thank you. And I'm looking for anything. And the truth of the matter is, like, once you kind of hit some, a place, there's nothing that you can really reverse.

Yeah. I mean, it's everything is possible, but it's extremely complicated compared to other diseases, right? Right. Once the nervous system is badly damaged and, you know, your brain undergoes atrophy and a lot of the brain cells are lost. So, yeah, it takes, it would take like a. some remarkable regenerative process. To do it.

Yeah, to bring it back and bring it back without doing damage to the very delicate nervous system. Right. So it's not just you can't bring it back, but, you know, you also have to save what's left that it's still working. Exactly. Because Alzheimer's patient can still function relatively normal physically, right? Not all of them, but many of them can. And so you have to preserve all of that. you cannot add to it and then, you know, you have to restore learning and memory,

but it's just, it's a rough, you know, enterprise. It is. What interesting, though, people who have been diagnosed with cancer have been prescribed fast mimicking diet. It's been kind of known in research to have had pretty remarkable results on cancer patients. Yeah, so there are many trials now on. fasting-making diets and cancer. And the one that is most studied is triple-negative breast cancer for good reason, right?

The triple-negative is much more aggressive. Mortality is very high at five years, right? And that's one of the most common cancers in the planet. So the multiple trials now are showing patients that did chemotherapy alone versus, I mean, patients did fasting-making diet plus chemotherapy versus chemotherapy alone, they do much better, right, survival-wise. How much? What's the percentage? Four years, about three and a half, four years, it was about nearly twice as high,

the survival in the FMD plus chemo versus chemo long. Oh, wow. Yeah. And then the new study, which is published by the Vernieri Group, is showing progression-free survival, which is not overall survival, but it's like how long you live without the cancer progressing, right? So they show an improvement in that and also improvement in what's called complete pathological response, which basically is what they call a surrogate for overall survival, right?

And so this is much higher in the patients that do a fasting making diet compared to what they normally expect from the database, right? So, yeah, so then multiple trials are now showing it with some of the most metastatic, in the metastatic cancer, the most aggressive. the initial trials are very promising. Now, for the earlier type of cancer, if somebody is going to receive, let's say, surgery, that's a different story, right?

So we're trying to be maybe more careful and we're saying, you know, if you have a 98% chance of being cured, maybe live it alone, right? You know, just take your 98% and don't. So the foundation that I started, so they follow lots of cancer patients every year. And usually they put them on a longevity diet,

that 12 hour time we sit there eating and lots of other things, you know, muscle training and aerobic exercise, but they don't. We usually, in the early stage cancer patients, we don't, not that we have any evidence that it's not good for you, but certainly it makes a big difference for mice and cancer, but we're just saying, until there's a trial that is showing superiority

versus the therapy alone, we don't. don't, we just don't feel like, you know, we, we should recommend it. What about protein? Because in the, you said, like, the longevity diet, A, you said it has five pillars. We talked about the centaurian pillar. We didn't talk about the other four. But that has fish in that. It's a, you said he has fish in that diet. Fast mimicking, it's vegan, like you said. What is your take on protein? Because do you, like, do you believe that too much protein can actually age you quicker? Yeah, I'm writing a review now on proteins, right?

And it's interesting, right, because if you look at overall, all the science that has ever been done, if you, you know, proteins, what's called calorie restriction, what I was talking about earlier, which is you just read normal calories, you reduce it by, say, 20%, 20%, 25%, right? That's the most successful anti-aging method ever done. Right? If you look at, you know, thousands of studies. By reducing your calories by 20%. Reducing it not below excess.

I mean, reducing it is normal calorie intake, let's say, whatever, 3,000 kilo calories, and you reduce it by 25%. And that's the best aging, that's the best way to slow down aging. That would beat any other intervention because there are literally thousands of studies, including human studies, showing remarkable effects, right? And so if you think about the second one, it's probably protein restriction. Or if you think about it, the only one that doesn't require you to eat less is protein restriction. Mice, rats, you know, and the monkeys, they live longer, they were caloresticited, but also protein restricted.

Yeah, so I think if you look at all the studies, the indication would be that it is sufficient but low protein diet that is mostly, plan-based is going to make you live longer or a lot longer. Now, if you look at the epidemiological data only, which is what most of my, you know, most of the podcasters, let's say, out there talk about, then, you know, it's a little, you could get lots of different answers, right? You could get high protein is good for you, mid-protein is good for you. That's why I'm asking, yeah. Especially in the fitness and wellness world, right? We're all told that we need to be eating like a lot of proprone. especially in midlife, right, like to keep, you know, lean muscle on. Like all you hear now is protein, protein, protein, protein, creatine, creatine,

like anything to kind of increase your protein. Yeah. So you're saying the opposite. You're saying if you want to live longer and age better, stop eating so much protein. Yes, for sure, stop eating so much protein, but have enough protein and have proteins that, you know, include proteins, let's say, two-thirds of very good quality. amino acid profile, right? So, for example, if all your proteins coming from legumes in your law, you're going to have a problem.

Right. Yeah. So, and I think the vegans, you can be vegan and very healthy, but you need to pay attention to what you're eating because otherwise you can end up being malnourish, right? Yeah. So it's a lot easier. And this is probably why the doctor has always recommended, yeah, eat a little bit of everything. Yeah. Because it's much less likely that somebody eats meat once a week and fish two or three times a week and chicken.

those are going to do pretty well. Now, they're not going to do as well, maybe as those that are vegetarian and they have a more restricted diet, but they're generally going to do pretty well. So then you have to look at what you're trying to achieve. So if you're trying to achieve a long lifespan and, you know, but you also want the strength, I think it's probably good to, I go back to the pescatarian diet, like pescatarian, pesco-vegetarian,

like fish. Fish, but also some eggs, maybe up to three eggs a week. Only three eggs a week? What if you eat three eggs a day? Well, I mean, the data indicates that after three eggs a week, in general, I mean, let's put it this way. They're not lots of, we're going back to epidemiological studies. Lots of studies say it's fine, right? Right.

If you don't have too many eggs there. But some of the biggest ones are showing that past three eggs a week, you're starting to see a mortality increase. right. Now, you know, it's an association. It doesn't mean the eggs were causing it, but that's not a good start. If you start seeing, you know, this particular food is not, eggs are normally not associated with living long, meaning it's like, you know, legumes are and whole grain wheat is and, you know, nuts are and and olive oil is. Right. Well, the eggs, you don't see it. So it's either neutral or negative. That's usually where you see them. Now, red meat is always very negative. And then white meat, it's negative to neutral and eggs.

And there is usually, you know, neutral to bad. Yeah, so I think that probably okay for most people. Like if somebody has to have lots of eggs, it's probably okay. But, you know, if you're thinking about... Maybe not. If you're saying, like, it's neutral at best. Is neutral at best? At best.

Yeah. So, but okay, so dairy, like Greek yogurt, would that be neutral? Generally, lots of the data would put them in the center, right? Neither good for you. So for example, this is a very nice work done at Harvard looking at. What are the ingredients that are going to get you to 70 or 75 healthy? And, you know, and you have the, in this case, fruits, I'm not, you know, I think it should be more limited because if people here, you know, fruit is at the top, then it can, you know, eat too much

fruit. Yes, that's me. But I say, you know, vegetable and fruit and nuts and legumes and a whole grain, we're at the top. And then, you know, the bread meat and the processed meat was at the bottom. Right. And then, you know, and the lots of the eggs and the dairies and the yogurt and in the center, right? So probably, you know, if you're not looking for a record, you know, if you, most people are not looking to get the record longevity and they're basically, it's not a bad compromise to eat, you know,

yogurt or, and of course it's very high nourishment, right? So then certainly in the, as you get to 65 or older or 60 years older, those are probably the type of ingredients that might help you not become frail. So, so then there is also the idea of different stages of life. For different foods. For different food than food quantities, right? So once you get to a certain age, then most people start losing weight, and that weight loss is usually associated with living shorter, right? Right.

So that's why when you get to 65, and for somebody could be 60, for somebody else could be 70, right? Chronologically, chronological age. So when you get to that point, you want to stay there and stay strong, right? Right. And so, yeah, so to stay there, stay strong, some people might have to have, you know, yogurt and eggs or more eggs and more yogurt. Some people may not.

I guess you're right. You've got to think about all the different, like there's so many different benchmarks that you're like, or like different variables that you're looking at, right? To like what will make someone healthy? But you're saying that which fish, do you say fish is neutral? No, no. Fish is positive.

Yeah, fish is neutral or positive, meaning like. Neutral or positive? Yeah, okay. The pescatarian, the pesco-vegetarian, they tend to do better than everybody else, right? What about salmon that's farmries, though? Like fish that's farm raise, is that still neutral to positive? We don't know that, right?

So we know there are toxins associated with it. And so usually the recommendation is maybe eat it once a week, right? So if you have a farm raised salmon, yeah, once a week, so you limit whatever toxins that are associated with the fats in the salmon. And because if you think about so many food, so much food, it's got toxin in it, right? So much. Yeah. And so if you went around and analyzed, so for example, I tell people, most people don't know that brown rice has got arsenic. Yeah, arsenic for sure.

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, and the mercury and the so there's in the acrylamide. And so, and a lot of it is in vegetables, right? And so, yeah, so I think that you also have to say, I got to eat something. So maybe rotate a lot, right? And don't eat the same foods all the time and don't eat some the same farm. raised salmon three times a week or the same tuna twice a week because, you know, the mercury poisoning is a reality. And so, yeah, so then instead of scaring people with, you know, don't

need anything, it's because then people going to the modality and say, well, I can, you know, I cannot have anything. But yeah, you can, but try to, you know, if it's salmon farm raised, make it once a week. So what about you? Because you said, you said that brown rice does have arsenic, which some of us know. Do you recommend? Do you recommend? to people to have white rice then and stay away from brown rice because of that, poison? I mean, it's a poison, right? But, you know, if you had, let's say, once a month, it's got maybe twice as high as some of the white rice, right? Or two or three times.

It's not like 20 times higher, right? Oh, okay. Yeah, so I think that the bigger problem comes in when somebody and I meet these people all the time, they say, I eat it three times a week. Right. That's when you're going to get in trouble, right? And that's when you may end up with arsenic poisoning, like mercury, right? So if you start having a swordfish and tuna three or four times a week, that's going to be a problem.

If you have tuna once a month, you're probably going to be okay. You'll be okay. What do you eat? What does your diet look like? Yeah, my diet is really everything that I preach, right? So I have a lot of whole grains in the morning, for example. but then I have like an almond spread, both of those I get from southern Italy,

and I store them. And then, you know, I have some fruit. And then I skip lunch. And it's not necessarily a good thing, right? But that's an example of a compromise, right? So for me, whenever I don't skip, I've been doing it for 20 years. And that's the only way, together with the fasting making diet,

that I can keep the weight that I want. That you want. Yeah. So going back to your question earlier, you know, my weight is probably set like 20, 25 pounds higher than I am. But you've changed it. To keep it there, I have to do lunch and I have to do the FMD. And I have to do the longevity diet, right? So then at night I have this big, you know, minestronees with the legumes and lots of vegetables and olive oil and pasta.

but, you know, I have maybe 75 grams, 80 grams of pasta and not, you know. So the mistake people make is to have a lot of these starches and little nourishment, right? And you're going to turn around. You have to have a lot of vegetables and legumes and little pasta or rice, right, white rice or brown rice. And, yeah, those are the ideal combination, right? And that's how people used to do it because they were poor. and that's all they had. The Minestrone is all over the Italy, right?

Because in Liguria, you have the Genovese, in Liguria, you have the Genovese Minestrone. And in the south, and what it was is people were poor, and at a certain point they were running out of food, and they were like just grabbing anything they had and put it in. Right, so that you get an extra meal. So that's gone now, right?

Even in Italy, nobody does that anymore. And now you have these. big, you know, rice dishes and pasta dishes and whatever else, right? The starches that, you know, of course you're going to make you gain weight and they're going to make you insulin resistant. Yeah. And they're going to make you die earlier. So how often would you suggest people even doing fast mimicking diets?

Like what would be the, what's the most optimal, to get optimal results to live the longest and healthiest? How often? Yeah. I think that it depends, right? So, for example, in the diabetes trials, it's every month for either six cycles or 12 cycles, right? These are patients that have diabetes. But the case that I told you earlier, this doctor only did three times in six months.

And it still worked, right? So I think that, yeah, you can start with the doctor in this case of a diabetes patient could start with every month and then move to once every two months and then every three months and take it from there. You know, for everybody else, I think maybe like three times a year. Three times a year? Yeah, maybe even two. Maybe I do once or twice, right? But I skip lunch, you know, and I do the longevity diet and I do everything else.

So, so, yeah, to me it's not as, I don't need as many, but, you know, most people are overweight and obese and they have lots of other issues. And so as those issues come around, so, for example, Stanford just published on, on, on. Crohn's disease, the University of Miami published on the FMD and ulcerative colitis, and University of Rome published on FMD, and I posthmi, the loss of olfactory function, smell and taste, right, and the ability of the FMD to restore taste and smell loss. So, yeah, meaning every different people have or don't have different problems, and then they have to decide how to use the FMD based on where they start based on baseline, right, where they're starting point.

What about fasting in women? Because there's a lot of chatter about fasting not being great for women and hormones, especially as women are in middle age. Yeah, I mean, fasting, again, is good, bad, and neutral. It doesn't mean anything. We just mentioned, right, 16 hours, 18 hours, probably not good, 12 hours, probably very good. And, yeah, so I think that probably is very good for women and, you know, at least 50% of the patients in the many 40 clinical trials that are being completed now with the fasting making diet.

I would say the majority are women, and they did very well in the great majority of the trials. So, yes, working very well for women. I think what we still need to define, so for example, we just finished a trial on polycystic ovarian syndrome and one on endomethine. metriosis, and we're going to be publishing those soon. And, yeah, I think the timing is still, you know, somebody's period, for example, when is the best time to do it? Right. You know, so we were talking to endocrinologists and some of the female,

and specialized endocrinologists saying, you know, maybe there is a period where it's not going to work very well, right? So I think soon enough, we're going to start publishing, you know, don't do it in this moment, you know. But, yeah, besides maybe that one week a month where might not be ideal to do it, I would say that the effects are being remarkably positive. Can fasting help prevent cancer or can it help when you only when you've already been diagnosed and help potentially with the diagnosis? Yeah, so there is no doubt that diet prevents cancer, meaning like if you have the perfect diet versus the bad diet. And now in mice, we were able to, you know, show about a 45% in female mice,

45% reduction in tumors lifelong. So big, big effect. And, but also it looked like not only there was a 45% reduction, but many of the tumors were benign versus malignant. Oh. Yeah, so it's a dual effect. And they were, they happened later. They were benign and they were much lower, like overall.

But yeah, then, you know, we're really. with some of the diets like midterranean diet. We know there's about like a 7% lower cancer risk, right? Cancer mortality risk, lifelong, which is not a lot, but, you know, better than nothing. It's better than nothing. And yeah, so for these newer diets and more, you know, at least scientifically, diets that have expectation to be much stronger, like fasting-making diet,

longevity, we need to do a lot more work, right? So now we're starting to do the first trials with, you know, for example, but the Calabria trial that we just finished. I also had an arm that was doing both the longevity diet and the fasting making diet, right? Yeah.

So now, you know, we're about to publish several studies in mice that we do the longevity diet, you know, for the entire life. So we'll see now what they show

on cancer prevention. But yeah, the expectation is cancer will be lower or much lower. Or certainly it'll happen later and it'll be, you know,

some of the malignant cancer will be, will show up as benign tumors. So let's talk about the GLP ones. We touched upon at the beginning of the conversation. Do you think there's any potential side effects to GLP ones? Like, do you think a GLP1 could possibly show it's a cancer-causing medication, peptide, later down the road? Because people don't know, right?

They've been using it for diabetes for so long or for many years. Yeah, people don't know. And now everyone in their dog is using it for weight loss. Right. People don't know, and everything is possible. It's also possible that it's going to reduce cancer, right? So that would be the expectation based on... Because it does help with inflammation.

It may help a little bit with inflammation, but it just lowers your risk factor for cancer, which is obesity and diabetes, right? So those are risk factor for cancer. And so if you reduce that, you know, then... For example, cardiovascular disease, now we know that GLP1, at least initial data, it reduces above 10%, right? So people on GLP1 have about 10% cardiovascular disease reduce risk.

Now, you know, in my new book, which is not in English yet, it's called the weight of longevity. You know, I'm comparing it to just a Mediterranean diet. And I'm saying the Mediterranean diet seems to have a 30% decrease in. cardiovascular disease, right? So now don't show off. Please don't show off the GLP1 10% effect when the Mediterranean diet is showing 30% right. And it doesn't have any side effects. And now we're saying that we could probably do much better than the Mediterranean diet. But even if you just use the Mediterranean diet, it's so much better, right? You say you get the weight loss and you get there and you get lots of benefits. Yeah. So I think that there is a long list of side effects of

GLP1 and now the new studies are showing something very scary which is you do it you're going to need to continue to do it if you stop you're going to regain the weight and when you regain the weight after you stop you regain the weight much quicker or quicker than people that have lost the weight with diet right so and at least the the the potential mechanism that I saw was that you're not making your own GLP1 because, you know, you're getting the drug. It's like when you take testosterone, your body stops taking testosterone. So it could be the same thing. It could be the same thing, right?

So this is what the scientists that published a paper, I think, speculated, or they have some evidence for it. But either way, it was clear that they regain weight more quickly. And so, and probably because they were no longer functional, right? So it's really condemning you to be stuck at some. a little bit like addiction, addictive drugs or, you know, addictive foods, right? So all of a sudden now, I give you something that you can never get away from.

100%. Also, though, it's, if you're burning a third muscle, right? So right, so you're burning some muscle off your body, your metabolism will obviously slow down. So when you get off of them, your body doesn't have the same accelerated metabolism or whatever metabolism you have because you don't have as much muscle to burn.

Not only that, but now what you regain is fat, right? Right. So we're not even counting that you're regaining the fat more quickly, but you're not regaining the muscle or you're getting a lot less muscle, right? Yeah, so that really may condemn you to be stuck on this drug that has got so many side effects for the rest of your life. I know. Or certainly for decades.

It's scary. Yeah, scary. And, you know, I think what's probably. very problematic, is that the physicians are not saying this, right? The physicians are now saying, well, you know, and I can see that when somebody has tried. I mean, so if you look at our foundation, you know, sometimes we have doctors, we have PhDs, we have nutritionists, sometimes they cannot do it, right? So they can take somebody and for most people, great, they do very well and they become better.

and they become healthy. But some people cannot. And so I think it's fair to say, hey, I tried everything. We've been trying for three or four years. And it takes two to three years, as that happened for the doctor that I was talking about earlier.

It took them two years to get back to normal, right? From diabetes, hypertension, obesity, to a normal person, right? Right. And so if the team, let's say, in his case, worked on him for three years. Right. And after three years,

he's just still stuck and all these problems, then I think it's okay to be on GLP1, right? Right. And I think it's okay to say... If you tried everything. I tried everything, but not the way it is now.

You go to the doctor and the doctor, you know, says, you know, I don't know. If you want, spend the money and go to a dietitian. Right, right, right, right. But the system is not really there to provide what we provide as a foundation, which is, or the clinicians provide the foundation, which is, I'm going to follow you, you know, I'm going to be your friend for the next two or three years. Right.

So that we find a way to get you back to full health that's not reimbursed. That doesn't exist, right? And so either you have the money to pay for it or you don't get it. And what you get reimbursed is the drug. Right. So the doctor says, come on, you know, I don't know anything about nutrition. And I cannot follow you every couple weeks and to see how you're doing. I cannot be your friend.

Right. You know, so I'm just going to give you a drug to begin with. That's what the, that's a big problem, right? Then I'm just really surprised that the media are not talking about more. And the doctors are not talking about it more. Say, hey, you know, please reimburse the rest, right? Because once the rest is reimbursed, then it's a fair game to say, hey, you need GLP1, right? Because at least get that 10% lower cardiovascular risk.

Because you're not going to be able to the Mediterranean diet. You're not going to be able to do the longevity diet. You're not going to be able to do the FMD or whatever. And yeah, so then we do the second best, and the drug is certainly valuable in that sense. Well, no, I've seen myself with friends of mine who are on it, and they lost a lot of weight, and they looked great. And then when they got off, they thought, they thought, oh, great, you know, now I'm at my lower than my goal weight. And they gained the weight, plus more within a month. Within a month.

People were gaining like 40 or 50 pounds in a month. Yeah. That's scary. But even more scarier, scary is what is the chance that somebody can stay on it for five or 10 years? I know. Exactly. Is that because I think it's over 70% abandon within two years, right? But what about five or years or 10 years?

Because if the answer is 95% are going to abandon, then, you know, then you're making a big mistake, right? Right, because everyone's going to be overweight again. Everybody's going to be overweight. But with all the side effects, they come with those five years of the drugs, right? What are the side effects that you've seen? Well, for example, neon. So this is is eczema, optic nerve, eschemia. And then there is, you know, certainly studies showing both things,

but certainly multiple studies showing depression, anxiety. Some studies are showing positive effects, but some studies are showing very bad. negative, like doubling of suicide rates. So now who's right? I don't know, but certainly it's not good when you see all those, you know, studies in major journals indicating twice as high,

you know, anxiety and depression and suicide rates. So yeah, so then I'm not saying they're, you know, conclusive, meaning that all we know that they're, but that's not a, you know, a good association to see those type of studies. And so, yeah, then we just say the muscle loss, potentially bone density, although that doesn't, you know, again, the muscle is very clear.

The bone density is not very clear. Some studies are showing no loss of bone density. But then again, it's pretty short term, right? So what if you did it for 10 years? You know, then are we going to see that the bone density loss? Exactly. We're going to see how stuporosis increased. For sure.

Somebody that has been in there for 20, 30 years. Yeah, so it's just a mind-filled, and I think, you know, people are just walking through it. Walk it through it. What about the fact that, like you said, people get off of it or abandon it, as you put it within two years? Why is two years the point where their people are just getting off of it? Yeah, this is the papers that I saw, multiple papers, they don't show why. So it could be that you're satisfied with what you do. Right, or you think you got it under control.

Or it could be that you're depressed. it could be that you have big side effects, right? So, you know, the doctor, for example, that we followed had major side effects, right? So, yeah, so there is a lot of gastrointestinal side effects and lots of issues. So, yeah, but for all the reasons combined that over 70% we're no longer doing it. What about the fat? What did you think or have you heard that after a time period, people's bodies tend to acclimate on the drug? because people can eat through their appetite.

Like, I have a lot of people I know who have worked great for a year, a year and a half, even two years. And now they're just eating back to where they were because they've, like their body became so acclimated to the drug. So unless you keep on increasing it and increasing the dose, you're kind of screwed. Yeah. I mean, that's certainly, you know, in need of more studies. but also if you think about drugs,

GLP1 is one case, but also statins, right? They're really, we think of drugs as very sophisticated, right? So there's a lot of studies behind it. And, you know, now you have a molecular target and this is going after this receptor of GLP1. But the drugs are really dumb, right? Because now you have the human body

and this is like this perfect orchestra with every moving part, you know, there is three and a half billion years in the making, right? Three and a half billion years of evolution. And so now you have that. And what we were saying earlier, right, the fasting response and the fat is broken down

and is preserving, is making glycerol. So the glycerol now is preserving the muscle. So this is very sophisticated. And now you're replacing it. Keep pushing the same button, right? Okay, so somebody sitting there and pushing GLP one button all the time, right? If you think about it, it just doesn't look good, right,

compared to this sophistication of the human body. Right. Now you have somebody pushing the button. So in the great majority of the cases, it's just a matter of time before you're going to get bad results from somebody pushing the same button 10 times a day for the rest of your life, right? Right. So, yeah. Well, they keep on coming out with a new, like it was first the GLP1.

Now there's like it works on two receptors with phrys appetite. Now it works on three receptors. Yeah. But the more you do that, the more you do that, probably you have now a potentially synergistic trouble zone, right? Because if one drug can cause problem, now two drugs may cause five times more problems, right, or at least the potential, we don't know. Because now you're interfering with two pathways, right? And then if you have three, now you probably, you know, there's probably, I don't know, I'm speculating, and, you know, but, you know, now as you imagine, let's take a car.

Yeah. And let's take, I mean, a good example is that, you know, you, you, you, you, you take a laser that is very powerful, right? And you start using the laser running through your engine and every part of your car until the car goes a little bit faster, right? Okay. And then you say, okay, wow, you know, now I found a point where the laser, you know, it makes the car go faster.

So let me keep doing that, right? And now you're going to do another laser, another hole through your car. So that goes a little bit faster, right? Well, I guess what's probably going to happen if you ask any. mechanic. Well, by the time you have pocked three or four holes in my car, it might go faster, but it's going to break down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can think of this as the same way, right? You know, it's really put in a hole. I mean, yeah, it can achieve an effect, like weight loss, but it's really not coordinated with the rest of the trillion cells in the human body.

Totally, yeah. It's just, it's just on its own. And it's just, you know, I put a hole in there. and that's not the way you want to make a car go like longer. Wow. Yeah. So you're sending your car up for breaking down, right? Right. And so, yeah, so I think at the theoretical level now, and, hey, I'm saying at the theoretical level, but yet we know that every drug out there eventually. So the new data, for example, and statin shows that people that have less than 170 or so in LDL don't live longer, you know, don't have a decrease in mortality. if they take statins, right?

So I think that, and these are like JAMA, New England general medicine, you know, meta-analysis, right? This is not like one study. These are studies that are looking at all the studies. Right. And they put it together and say, hmm, that's really interesting. People that have, you know, LDL 160,

LDL not total cholesterol, they seem to do better than people that have very low cholesterol. So you explain that, right? And so, yeah, so I think at the beginning, you get the story, oh, you know, this should be in the water, like statins should be in the water. They're so good for you.

And then 20, 30 years later, you get the story. It's like, no, the meta-analysis, so maybe you shouldn't have taken it. So, yeah, so I think that, again, I'll go to the GLP1 thing. If you need it, you need it, right? So some people, for example, the studies, I think it was New England, it was showing that for people that already had card. the cardiovascular event, there is no doubt that statins were good, right? It reduced your mortality by 10%.

No doubt. So there was very clear even after 20 years. But there was the only group that seemed to be benefiting from the statins. And yeah, so I think that we need to have a system that is, they can help you do it the right way. And then with all the tools, like including the FMD, the 12-hour. and lots of other things, you know, that can help you. Because, you know, if it's not feasible, if you're asking people to do something like Italians in the Mediterranean diet,

you know, probably less than 10% of Italians are doing the Mediterranean diet, why it's just people don't like to be told what to eat, right? And that includes me telling them what to eat. But this is why we're saying, okay, yeah, you can have the longevity diet and this is what we're doing in the clinic, or you can have the FMD, right? And look at the mouse and look at the people, right? they have a crazy diet and at least they do the FMD, right?

Let's talk about a mouse for a second, right? Like, has there been any, like, data, anything talking about how a mouse, does a mouse correlate to a human? Because I've seen studies that say that doing tests on mice doesn't necessarily correlate to how a human will behave or perform. You know, it correlates. It doesn't necessarily mean that humans are going to behave the same way, respond the same way, Right. So, yeah, so most of the drugs that you see out there have been tested in mice first, right? So immunotherapy, chemotherapy, just name it cancer drug, diabetes drug, GOP1. Everything goes to the mouse. And usually that's how it starts. It starts with, oh, it works for the mouse. And then let's come up with a drug that they'll do the same in people. Yeah, so the mouse is a very good model. And what else can you test on?

Well, you can test that in rabbits. You can test it in rats. You can test it in some. cases they require monkey studies, you know, because it is so dangerous for a person. And so they may require a, you know, a primate model. Yeah. But those are, you know, expensive and ethically, you know, the medical field is trying to move away from that from, you know, from using monkeys to But as a mouse and a rat, the same thing, I would imagine? No, you know, no, the rat for certain things is a better model, right? And the mouse is a better model for all the things. It's easier to work

with mice. But I think that for example, we have shown the FMD cycles being able to cause reprogramming and stem cell dependent regeneration in mice, right, in multiple. So the pancreas, the gut, and

different systems. And so a year ago, we published, for kidney, we published in the rat. And so we now show that we can damage the rat kidney and then start the fasting making die cycles and the red kidney goes back to being functional after six FMD cycles. So that was particularly important for us because it's just unlikely that you now tested in two different rodent models and you're gaining very similar effects.

So that makes your case much stronger moving to people. Of course, we already done 40 human clinical trials. But in fact, in that trial, we had a small human trial for chronic kidney disease patients. Oh. And it worked, right? They worked very well for them, too. So it's preliminary, but it worked. So, yeah, I think that having studies in mice and rats and then in humans is the best way to go here.

Wow. Okay. What about, like, you have these labs both in U.S.C. and in Italy right now. Close labs? The lab in it is still open. I probably closed by the end of this year, but there's too much. But yeah, the Italian lab was focused on oncology, molecular oncology, so cancer. And the US lab here at USC is instead focused on aging and regeneration and, you know, fasting

and longevity diet, et cetera. What other findings have you found in all of your work beyond fasting that help? help with aging backwards or slowing down the aging process. Yeah, so yeah, the longevity diet. So now we're going to publish several papers on that. And then, you know, protein restriction has always been one of the things that we worked. For example, some years ago, we used an Alzheimer's mice that have this genetic mutation that give people Alzheimer early.

And so it's called triple transgenic mouse. It's got three bad mutations that make these. this mouse, developed this bad learning and memory. And then we used the, in the first paper, we alternated one week of a very severe protein restriction and one week of normal proteins, right? We just kept going back and forth. And it made a lot of it.

It wasn't as good as the fasting, mimicking diet, but it was very good, you know, very good effects, right? So just alternating very low protein diet. with normal protein diet, one week on, one week off, that made a big difference. Yeah, so. How much of a difference? Like 20%, 20?

Oh, you know, we looked at lots of different things, but, you know, in some of the cognitive testing, it made a big difference, you know. Really? But how much? Can you give me an example? Like, give me a data point. Well, you know, usually we look at restoration of normal function, right?

So in some cases, it was bringing it back to normal, right? Oh, yeah. So now you see a big effect of the genetic mutations. And then what you want to see, you have a control mouse and you have a genetically modified mouse that's got this cognitive impairment. And then you do the alternate protein restriction. And then many of the really several of these changes went back to normal or close to normal or no longer is bad. So a range of a vaccine. What's your take on all these supplements, like, or peptides even, you know, everyone's taking all these peptides for longevity, right? You have so many. Do you believe, what's your, do you have any infer, like, do you have an opinion on all these things? Yeah, I think it goes back to what I said earlier, which is the, the sophistication of the system versus the something comes in. Yeah. So it's like a GLP one. Yeah. So it's the same argument, right? The exception would be, Like in the case of rapamycin, right? So rapamycin is a drug that blocks a particular pathway, which we and others have described as being pro-aging or eugen accelerating. So if the peptide or whatever or the drug goes after a master regulator, then I think it could be triggering this sophistication, right?

But those are very rare. So most things you do are going to, you know, act downstream somewhere, meaning like they're blocking something that is down there, right? It's not the master regular up here. Right, right. So if a peptide change, for example, growth hormone or IGF1, these very high-level master regulators, then it's got a chance, right?

Because, you know, it could be telling the body, don't go in mode A, which is B, which would be, for example, high reproductive mode, high growth, right? So at a certain age, we're not reproducing and we're not growing, right? So why is it that we're putting all this energy into reproduction and growth pathways, right? It makes no sense. Right. So then a lot of organisms we know that, for example, 30 years ago, we made unicellular ucarius, unicellular organism, live 10 times longer, right?

10 times. Yeah. And so you do that by, we did it by fasting them and by imposing two genetic mutations which push them to be in this what we call maintenance modes. So don't worry about growth. Stop growing. And, you know, and stop reproducing, right? Right.

Just focus on yourself, right? So interesting, right? Yeah, so if there are master regular and there seem like in all organisms that have been tested, there are, if you turn on the switch to stop focusing on the next generation and then focus on yourself, they can make a big difference, right? So, yeah, so there could be peptides that eventually hit that switch, right? Right. And if they hit that switch, I mean, the science fiction.

switch would be one that doesn't affect metabolism, it doesn't affect performance. It just affects your, you're not growing, and you don't need to grow, and you're not reproducing. And, you know, and you can stop it when you want to reproduce, right? So you can say, okay, you know, whatever, I use it until I'm 34, and then at 34, I stop for a year, I reproduce and then go back on the peptide or, you know, it could be a dietary intervention or both, yeah. Or both even the fact that people, a lot of people are taking, You know, NAD is really popular. NAD, metformin is very popular.

You're saying the only one that can maybe move the needle is reprimicin. Well, metformin is also a little bit of a master regulator, right? Yeah, okay. But the data, if you look at metformin effects in mice, it doesn't make even a mouse live longer as far as I remember. Rappamacin does and does in a very consistent way, right? Yeah, so I would say, you know, if you made the mouse live longer by whatever peptide, you made the rat live longer, like, say, 20% longer or something like that, at least, right?

If you made the mouse live 20% longer, you made the rat live 20% longer, okay, then it starts, and then it's very safe, like, let's say, metformin. Then I think it would be a good candidate, right? But, you know, we don't have anything like that right now. And ribomycin is probably the only one now. Should we take that? Should everybody be taking it? No, no, no, because aeropomycin also causes IPA.

hyperglycemia and yeah it's not good and so you know and that's where maybe it might be good for a mouse and not necessarily for a person right so so yeah but that tells you that the potential is there for some drugs to to go after master switches and then eventually you know we're gonna say hey this is really safe but of course you know the FMD is already there right there the FMD maybe done three times a year, it's already doing all of this with no safety issues. Right. Well, F&D also takes out all the senescent cells, right? Isn't that like a benefit that people get? Yeah. Well, four things, right? One, autophagy, right? So you need three, four, five days, probably the whole five days

for autophagy. So the cells start eating themselves, right? And that's one. Then clearly is doing stem cell activation. And now we're seeing it in multiple human clinical trials. We've seen major increase in either stem or progenitor cells. And then reprogramming of cellular level. So, you know, now the hardest thing in aging research is how can you take an old cell

and make it young again, right? And it's called, you know, cellular reprogramming and epigenetic cellular reprogramming. But now we're shown over and over and over the FMD refitting cycles do that in a very amazing and

coordinated way. And then metabolic reprogramming, right? What I said earlier, the fasting, mimicking diet, refeating are now metabolically rewiring your system. And it's not a cellular process necessarily, but it's more, it could be cellular somewhere, maybe in adipocytes, but it's basically telling your body, stop accumulating fat, start using fat. And the beauty, if you look at our working mice, rats, and humans is that keeps on going, right? So it's not that you do the fasting making diet, and then a week later, it's all gone.

You do the fasting making diet, and then for months, actually in the first trial, we did the USC, three months later, 60% of the effects were still there, right? So after three FMD cycles once a month, we stopped, and then we look at three months later, and then you see about 60% of the changes that are still there, right?

So, yeah, so I think drugs are okay, But I would say that we probably haven't been as loud as others, you know, in advertising, you know, these. I think the people that do some of these peptides and pills have been louder than us in claiming and over claiming. We've been, and also the companies involved, I think there have been more stick to the data, stick what you know, don't overclaim. And maybe that's why some of these other things are more popular. than the FMD. I think they're both, I mean, I think that people who know, no, I know, like, the community of doctors I know who prescribe the fast mimicking diet to patients just for their overall

health, never mind for like, you know, longevity or for cancer, it's pretty extraordinary. Like, I think people who know the research, I mean, I think it kind of speaks for itself. It's just more about people who know, no, and if you don't know, you don't know, right? Right, right. Yeah, but I think, you know the research. you know, now there is soon enough an opportunity to make it mainstream, right? Yeah. And it should be mainstream, right?

Because of all the things we say, you know, it's going after Crohn's and colitis and cognition and inflammation and it's going after cancer cells. And it's doing it in a safe way. I don't think too many people are arguing if you do this three times a year. Right, right. If you do this vegan diet three times a year, that, you know, you're not going to find too many doctors say, oh, no, this is going to cause problem in the long run. You're not saying every day.

You're not like restricting. So you're not into calorie restricting every day. You're not into yo-yo dieting. You're actually not even necessarily into vegan every day. No, I'm not. You're not. So you're like saying the longevity diet, it's eating fish, you know, eating fish, you know, more like a Mediterranean diet.

I say, you know, Mediterranean is for Mediterranean people, right? So if you're your genes are from Norway or from Sweden or from Japan, And you shouldn't have a Mediterranean diet. You should have a longevity diet that is, you know, that is personalized for you, right? And it's not going to have. Which is about fish, typically. Which is still going to be about low mercury fish and low toxin fish. And it's going to be about legumes of different kinds, right?

It's going to be about whole grains. It's going to be about oils. And maybe there's a few different ones. The olive oil is definitely good, but it doesn't mean it's the only one. So if you have, if you come from, there are all. all their vegetable oils that are good. Like what? Well, there's some, you know, I haven't investigated as much as I've done for olive oil,

but no, there's some, like maybe some flour or some of these vegetable oils that have good data behind it. But, but, you know, I don't want to, I've never spent the time because I'm so happy with the results of the olive oil and it just covers so much of the world population that, you know, can deal with that. And then I think the nuts and the dark chocolate. So there is a lot of sources of healthy fats that are fairly confirmed to be healthy or very healthy for you that, you know, we never investigated.

But it doesn't mean there are not other oils, for example, or fats sources that eventually could be as good as olive oil. Okay. But you're basically just saying, though, that for 15 days of the year, five days, you know, maybe even every quarter, is a good chance. It can give you a fighting chance, so to speak, to really live longer and healthier. Yeah, I wouldn't call it a fighting chance. I mean, the data is just spectacular right there. I know. I mean, you know, it's like if you look at it. Oh, yeah. I'm saying, yeah. Like, basically, let me, let me re-say that then. Basically, you're saying that if someone does fast mimicking at least every, you know, every. quarter, let's say for five days, the chances of them living longer and healthier are spectacular based on your research. No, no, no, no, now it's going too far on the other side.

I mean, I think the results have been spectacular, especially in mice and especially in rats. I mean, really unbelievable, right? You know, they're taking a kidney or pancreas that is completely, you know, damaged and irreversibly and then restoring it's normal function, right? I mean, it's hard to believe. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, right. So.

That is spectacular, though, doctor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I was saying. That part is spectacular, but it's in mycinous. Now the 40 clinical trials are showing really remarkable results with insulin resistance, you know, glycemia and inflammatory markers and cholesterol and blood pressure and, you know, over and over and over and over in a very consistent way, clinically, right?

Yeah. So those are very good. Yeah, so I think that it's not a fighting chance because, hey, if it's making your cholesterol lower, if it's making your blood pressure lower, if it's making your blood pressure lower, If it's making your glycemia lower, is making your biological age younger by two and a half years, at least based on a number of factors, and the measurement, the number of factors, I mean, it's hard to imagine how you would die in the same time.

Everything is much, much better, but you're still going to die on the same day. Yeah, so much, much less likely, you know, there is no guarantee, but... You're stacking the deck. Yeah, so... You're stacking the deck, like, for you. You're doing all the right things. if you combine the longevity diet and you combine the sleep

and the 12 hour time recital eating, and you combine it and put the two, three cycles a year of fasting making diet, I think, you know, you're getting into this 15, 20 years of life expectancy, increase range, right? Based on lots of data. And also, if you look at the Harvard studies, you know, the chance of getting to 75

without needing drugs. We cognitive, you know, being cognitively functional and healthy. you know, less than 10% of the U.S. population is in that group, right? Yeah, that's amazing. So you have one chance in 10 right now with the way, you know, if you look at the general behavior of the population. Now, if you do all the right things,

that study showed that you're doubling your chance of making it to 70. So now all of a sudden it could be, you know, 20, 30 million people. That's amazing. That all of a sudden are getting to 70 or 75 healthy. just by making those changes. Yeah, and this is not even counting the fasting making diet. This is just changing your everyday diet

and following a few things that everybody can follow. Yeah, so I think that that's a way to go. There's four or five things you can do and, hey, if you can do them all, do them all. Right. It's amazing. What is the documentary really going to be focusing on this?

All of this. All of it? All of this, yeah. That's amazing. Cancer, diabetes. it is. The doctor that I talked about is in there. He talks. Oh, yeah. He'll tell the story. There's cancer patients that basically said, you know, I was in trouble and then I came out of it. But I think that what we also done,

which was very important in compared to lots of our documentaries, I pushed the director and the producer to put in the clinical trials, right? I said, you know, don't make it about our case. case is irrelevant, right? But make it tell the story with the case, but then let's show the three or four

clinical trials that have been completed and that, right? Yeah, so I think that that's what's special about this documentary is that, you know,

do it right, you know, science-wise, but also have the emotional part, but don't be too focused and maybe it doesn't make it as entertaining,

but it certainly makes very convincing, I think, that you have multiple clinical trials backing up the story. And when you talk about your lab in Italy that's focusing on cancer, what are a couple of findings that maybe we haven't heard of that you kind of brought to the surface? Yeah, the exciting new findings are what we call starvation escape pathways targeting. So meaning that we can, we take the fasting making diet. And now we're starting to do this. in patients, right? We take the fast in the old days,

it was like, okay, let's combine chemotherapy plus fmd, immunotherapy plus fMD, fine, and it works so much better together than, as I would say there. Now we're saying, okay, what if we instead look at how the cancer changes after we give them the fasting making diet, right?

And you see rewiring, meaning the metabolic pathways are not just metabolic, the cell changes completely, its modality to adjust to the fasting making diet, die. Then we can learn, we do something called RNA-Sic. We can learn how they change and why they change. And then we can use drugs that are already available to target those. And this works

extremely well. And it can go pretty fast. So we're very excited about this can be used for any cancer because, you know, it doesn't matter. You expose them to the fasting making diet. You look at how it changes and you do this computational analysis and eventually we're going to do it with artificial intelligence and then it tells you, okay, these are the drugs you need to kill them all, right? And yeah, so I think that we're very excited about this and hoping to get a lot more funds to keep it going because it's got a lot of potential. Do you take any other supplements just for your health? I take multivitamin and then I alternate between like vitamin D and vitamin B12 and

Alternate? And omega-3. Yeah. Yeah, I alternate because, you know, probably don't need each all the time. I don't think it's good to get overloaded with supplements. But I alternate. Yeah, so every four-day, every fourth day or so I'll get... You'll take a break?

One or the other, yeah. Oh, wait. So you take vitamin D once every four days or four days on one day off? No, no. I will take every four days. Every day to say three days. Okay. Three days and then I'll switch to B12 because a lot of my diet is vegan, vegetarian.

And then I'll have, let's say, a, you know, omega-3. Usually I mix alcohol oil and fish oil. What about exercise? Have you done any type of research on the effects of exercise for longevity, aging well, health span? Yeah, exercise. In addition to the fasting. Yeah, I'll say something that is not going to give me a lot of friends first, and then I'll revise.

Your exercise, whether it's in animal studies or in human studies, does not compete with nutrition and fasting, right? It's very far. And so I was just in Italy, and this Rosetti group was showing the data in, you know, sick days or, you know, the number of sick days in your life. And it was a sevenfold between the effects of lack of exercise versus a bad diet, right? Sevenfold difference in how impactful is a bad diet and, you know, how sick you're going to be in your life versus how is no exercise you're going to be.

Now, that's said, I think exercise is very important, right? You know, so it's that extra thing that... Right, because nutrition is... Oh, it's 80% of it, at least. You're saying it's 100%. No, no, I'm saying, you know, these data suggests there may be 85%, right? 85% of the lifespan extension and the health span extension that you get

is going to come from nutrition and fasting or nutrition intervention. And then the extra 15%. But I think that, you know, exercise is very important, mentally. And so, I mean, I'm all 100% behind exercise. say, you know, 150 to 300 minutes a week, muscle training and all of that, I think it's very important.

But why is it important if you've seen the data that says it's not as important for health? That's not important for how sick you are, right? But for your mental health. Yeah, it doesn't mean that you're not going to be happier. Mood. Yeah, serotonin and lots of other things that happen when you exercise.

And so, yeah, so I think that, and that 15% is not, you know, it's not insignificant, right? So having a 15% extra benefit is very important, right? So, and you never know, right. So, you know, as part of my classes, I also show the effects of exercise. And some of the really remarkable effects are on cancer patients, right? And you'll see these results where they're showing people that are exercising, regularly and they have cancer and they do so much better if they're exercising versus not exercising right right and you're thinking is it possible that so i don't know if it's a motivation thing

and and or if it's the actual you know physiological effect but the ones that exercise they tend to do so much better uh you know in progression and survival and lots of other things yeah so get the mood and the mental elements of it right it could be mental it could be that helps and fight, you know, they're fighters and they're going to do it with all different things. But some of these trials are randomized, right? So it's not like you pick the ones that are more motivated. You take 100 people and you divide them by two and you say you exercise and you don't. And then maybe you cross it over.

Right. So some of these data is real. It's not about selection of motivated patients, but some of it might be affected by bias. Wow. Gosh, you're right. You didn't make a lot of friends with that one. No, I'm kidding. No, but I think, I mean, people know more or less that it's also with like weight loss, right?

Like you can exercise until the cows come home. But if you're not eating properly or eating the right foods, you're going to gain weight. It's just, it is what it is. Yeah, and there's a bigger problem that, you know, exercise and there was a paper actually they came out of, you know, there's the biggest loser, right? Of course, yes. But then end up being a real paper, right? And the real paper went and followed, and I forget in what journal it was, and it went and followed, and most of them, I think they were doing like hours a day of exercise.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think when the camera is on and the show is on, right, whatever your show may be, you could do that. Eventually, you're going to be upset, you know, and you got problems and you don't have time. What are you going to do that, right? Right. And this is you're still going to eat, and you can still eat the right food.

But are you going to take the, forget the six hours, but you're going to take the one hour a day and go exercise every day? Most people don't, right? In the long run, as you get older and as you get more things to worry about, you may say, you know what, I don't feel like, oh, it's raining outside

or it's too hot or it's too cold, you know. Yeah, so there's a lot of, so the compliance and the feasibility that I was talking about before with the Mediterranean diet, eventually you're going to have it also for the heavy exercise, right? And then you're going to have it also.

have like my brother and my sister for example right my my my brother was a soccer player and I told and I was a soccer player and I told my brother you got to stop right yeah no no no no and now is limping right because right yeah and my sister was a triathlon runner and now she has a hip replacement right right so so um you know too much of anything is not good well it wasn't even too much they weren't professional they were not professional yeah but it was like they enjoyed it and they all the time until they had to get surgery, right? And so, so I see your point. So now they have to stop exercising, but they have to be eating right to keep the cap the, right?

They have to learn the discipline of eating properly. Yeah, they're both eating the longevity diet. Of course they are. But they're not doing soccer anymore. I can't. And they're not doing triathlons anymore. And I mean, it's just we're three and I'm the only one that, you know, I played until I was 45, right?

Yeah. How old are you now? 58. Yeah. So I played it. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You're 58? Yeah, yeah.

And this is, okay. And like this is, and this is, you haven't done anything to you. Could you look really young? No, no, no, I haven't done anything. God forbid. Yeah. And so this is all just doing the fast mimicking diet, living a certain lifestyle. Yeah, I mean, longevity diet, fast mimicking diet.

And, yeah. I was just a longevity diet too. Just your, you're a diet, I should say. Yeah, yeah. And habits, daily habits. But you're saying because you didn't really, you exercised, you played soccer, sorry, you played soccer, but then you didn't play after a while, after 45. Yeah, after 45, I stopped, right?

Then I started doing biking and things that. My hip is still my hip and I still don't have any problems, right? So, yeah, to me it was very important. I mean, somebody else could say, and there was a case with my brother and my sister, I don't care. I'm just going to keep doing it. Okay, fine, but keep in mind. I mean, it's okay, but then keep in mind what the consequences could be.

So in my case, I said, you know, I don't want to be, I don't want to be 60 and needing a hip replacement. And so far, I'm good, right? So I can still do my bike every other day and lots of other things. And, you know, they don't put me a risk for, you know, inflammatory conditions. Yeah, absolutely. Is there anything we haven't covered, Dr. Alango, that's important for people to know about? I think we've pretty much covered there. Are you sure?

Because you're here right now. I want to make sure that I got everything done with you. Yeah, I think with the diseases, we talk about cancer, Alzheimer's. Yeah, I think we cover a lot of ground. I like fact toys. Is there any, like, facts that you can, like, that you can, like, share that maybe we haven't? Like, any kind of data points that we haven't covered, no? I think, you know, one thing that I was going to say

that I didn't say was we're now going through, you know, I mean, I'm doing this review on proteins, but it's more like longevity diseases, right? And so, you know, that's consistent with what we've been saying. The other thing I'm having my team at the foundation do is the muscle part, right? Yeah. So then we're looking at hundreds of papers on, you know,

plant supplement, plant protein supplements and animal. Yeah. And so I think that what we're going to conclude is that probably what we already concluded before, 0.8 grams plus training plus muscle training, 0.8 grams per kilogram or 037 grams per pound of body weight is enough for the majority of people, even if you want to build muscle, right? But in fact, if you look at all these hundreds of papers, you know, those that are in the go one to one point two, they tend to have an easier time building muscle, right? So I would say, don't do it. But if you care so much about muscle, then I think the one point one to one point two

of good quality amino acids, like some animal proteins and some. Oh, I don't I was going to ask you. Okay, so wait, so you're just saying that like you're, if you can have this, is 0.8 grams of protein. You don't need to have one, one, because the whole thing is one gram. Yeah, well, now people are advertising, two grams, one point six grams. Right, right, right.

So there's a lot of, for muscle. Yeah, for muscle. And so now, for sure, what we're concluding is two grams, 1.6 grams, is not needed. You know, it's very little difference. Right. You know, very few papers are showing if you have 1.6 versus 1.2, you do better at 1.6.

Very few. Most of them show no effects at all. And also, most of the papers show if it's animal-based is not superior to plant-based. As long as it's a good mix of plant-based supplements, right? A lot of them are actually, they're showing total protein intake. They can also come from supplements, yeah. Okay, you said it a few times with amino acids. What if you just take a nine, like a nine essential aminos?

Like a, like a scoop of aminos. Yeah, you could do that, but the data, you know, we don't know what the consequences are. I think, you know. But that way you're not eating as much protein, but you're having the building blocks to protein. Yeah, no, no. I mean, theoretically, I think it can work, but it wouldn't be, you know, those essential amino acids are going to be the one driving the aging process, right? So if you look at the studies in mice and rats, it's always essential amino acids, right? The one that accelerate the aging essential, right?

So brain chain amino acids, metionine, you know, so almost exclusively. In fact, if you look at the non-essential, they're the only one like glycine that seem to be doing good if supplemented, right? Really? So restriction, if you look at the restrictions are all on essential amino acids. They work, making rodents longer, lived and healthier, much healthier, right? if you look at the few cases of supplementation with amino acids and leaving longer is glycine, which is a non-essential amino acid. Non-essential.

Non-essential, right? So, yeah. So then if you do what you said, yeah, it's just like then you might as well eat proteins, right, and that's okay, right? In fact, it may be better to eat proteins because now you have the non-essential, including glycine, there may be beneficial. Because it turns out the glycine is an inhibitor. or metionine, or metionin, it facilitates metionine decomposition, right?

Yeah. So, the higher the glycine, the less metion you're going to have in the system. And so it's going back to, probably it's going back to the essential amino acids, lowering essential amino acids. Lowering essential amino acids. Okay. Wow. Dr. Longo, thank you so much for being on my podcast.

Oh, you're very welcome. It's been a long time awaiting for me, so I appreciate this. And where do people find, I mean, they can buy your book Fasting Cancer or the Longevity Diet book from 2018. But they want to know more about you or where can they find you? Yeah, so Facebook, Professor Walter Longo. Facebook? And Instagram.

Okay. Yeah, most USC faculty now have Facebook and Instagram. So most professors. anywhere. Yeah, so Instagram is the same professor Walter Longo. And then the foundation, Create Curious Foundation is here in Los Angeles and we help lots of people and

you know, including those that cannot afford it. That's great. Well, thank you again for being on the show. Thanks a lot.