The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Fast Without Feeling Hungry

Episode Date: December 6, 2019

Food has an amazing ability to heal, but the timing of when we eat or abstain from eating can also have really amazing impacts on our health. Autoimmunity, gut issues, Alzheimer’s, and aging have all been found to benefit from the right kind of fasting. In this mini-episode, Dr. Hyman sits down with Dr. Valter Longo to discuss the Fasting Mimicking Diet, a diet that helps you feel fed and nourished without completely starving the body, and has been found to support anti-inflammatory gut bacteria and support the mechanisms that lead to better aging.  Dr. Valter Longo is internationally recognized as a leader in the field of aging studies and related diseases. Known as a “Guru of Longevity,” Dr. Longo is currently Professor of Biogerontology and Biological Sciences and Director of the Institute of Longevity of the School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, as well as Director of the Oncology and Longevity Program at IFOM in Milan. He is also the Scientific Director of the Create Cures Foundation and the Valter Longo Foundation. Valter is the author of, “The Longevity Diet.” The culmination of 25 years of research on aging, nutrition, and disease across the globe, it provides an easy-to-understand, accessible and implementable road map to living well longer through improved nutrition. Listen to Dr. Hyman’s full- length conversation with Dr. Valter Longo:  https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/ValterLongo

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. People are not going to be old and sick. They're going to be old and healthy and contributing to our society. Hey, everyone. Before we get into today's mini episode, I want to tell you about my new cookbook, Food, What the Heck Should I Cook? Now, for those of you who know me, you know that I love to cook for my friends and family.

And I believe that cooking delicious and nourishing meals using food as medicine for your loved ones is one of the greatest gifts you can give them. And also learning to prepare meals using real whole foods paves the way for you to achieve your best health and to help reverse so many chronic diseases. And that's why I put together my brand new cookbook, Food, What the Heck Should I Cook? It's a beautiful cookbook. It has over 100 real food recipes that I use in my own kitchen. It's also filled with tips for overhauling your pantry, a grocery shopping list, and tips for recipe-free cooking.

Think of it as a definitive guide to cooking your way to better health. I think you're going to love it. For more information about the cookbook, you can go to foodthecookbook.com. That's foodthecookbook.com. Thanks, and I'll see you in the kitchen. Hi, I'm Kea Perot at one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. The topic of fasting has gained a lot of recent hype Thanks, and I'll help the brain function better. Dr. Hyman sat down with Dr. Walter Longo, an internationally recognized leader in the field of aging studies, to discuss Dr. Longo's research and development of the fasting mimicking diet. Let's listen in. Most physicians were trained to treat diseases with drugs that suppress symptoms or target a specific pathway or mechanism. But your work has shown that you're really not doing that. You're focusing on the inherent repair systems, the regeneration and healing mechanisms in the body, the programs,

as you call them, that can get activated by specific interventions, which then can be applied across all sorts of diseases. So it seems almost incredulous that you could say that eating this way, which is short periods of restricted calories for five days, could help treat Alzheimer's and cancer and diabetes and colitis and MS and all kinds of other stuff. Essentially, it's very short periods of calorie restriction, 800 to 1100 calories, five days, done a few times a year, two or three times, more if you're treating something serious like an autoimmune disease or maybe cancer. But it's not that much time out of the space of a year to do this. And this product, this program, has the ability to treat so many different things.

And one of the things you said this morning that was really powerful was that it takes many drugs to do what a fasting mimicking diet does. Yeah, I mean, and this is a- And these drugs don't even do the same effect. And this is a fact. How does that work? Because if you're only stopping the calorie influx

for five days, how does that carry over to sustained change? I don't understand that. I think many people are wondering how in fact does just restricting your calories for five days a few times a year have all these long-term lasting benefits it seems like too good to be true well yes and no for sure is going after the visceral fat right so we know that the visceral fat belly fat yeah we we show we know from many other papers that this this belly fat is so central in insulin resistance and all kinds of other problems and so of course after uh two or three days of a fasting mimicking diet we have shown in the paper that

everything turns into belly fat consumption so So the body is going after, I mean, that's it, the reservoir. That's a food reservoir. What you said was pretty profound. When you do this approach of short-term calorie restriction, you target the fat that causes all the chronic diseases, which is the belly fat or abdominal fat or visceral fat, and not the regular fat around under your skin or the subcutaneous fat that is a profound important discovery because that is the fat that we all need to target yeah the other interesting thing is the lean body mass differential effects right so it's targeting the fat and it temporarily you see the lean body mass as measured by dexa go down and then so you lose muscle you lose muscle

but only temporarily right so usually in all kinds of diets you lose muscle. You lose muscle, but only temporarily, right? So usually in all kinds of diets, you lose the fat and the muscle. Here, you lose the fat, you lose a little bit of muscle. When you refeed within a week, all the muscle is back, right? So now you have an increased relative lean body mass. So you now gain muscle mass. You pretty much go back to the absolute normal level of muscle but now compared to your body weight you've gained muscle mass so you have more not exercising without exercise no no intervention so that's one way the other way we think that makes a big difference is almost everybody will say the following when after I got through one two three cycles of the FMD, I started looking at food differently.

For example, if somebody had lots of sweets and lots of candy, lots of starches, et cetera, et cetera, they don't feel like eating like that as much. So they all say... So their cravings go away, their tastes change. Yeah. The fasting-mimicking diet is designed to push the body to start breaking components down, turn on the stem cells, and the stem cells, you see them, they're standing by. For example, when we damage the pancreas of mice, you damage the pancreas of mice, they stop making insulin, and then you start only then you start the fasting making diet and you see that the the pancreas is now turning this embryonic developmental

uh program on and uh and all these genes that are only turned down when the pancreas is first generated when the mouse is born starting getting turned on the many genes right so it's very clear it's a program it's not just simply few genes around all of them around and of course you want to do that when you repair your skin after you cut yourself that's a problem right you don't things are not just we're getting repaired by chance everything every cytokine every stem cell it goes in knows exactly where to go it gets recruited it binds to something else and slowly it just rebuilds everything right remarkable and i always say do you really think that we have a program so sophisticated for the outside of the body and we got nothing for the

inside there's no way so the the inside understands that and i think fasting but more safely fasting mimicking diets can trigger that program in the liver in the pancreas in the um in the brain etc etc in a sense you're you're not studying disease you're studying the science of health how do you a long-term. How do you turn on healing mechanisms of the body and repair mechanisms? And that is a very big difference from trying to treat diseases and symptoms. That is the future. People are not going to be old and sick. They're going to be old and healthy and contributing to our society. Many people associate fasting with restricting eating for long periods of time. There are actually many styles with different timing, which can make fasting a much more

approachable practice than you might think. In fact, many of you are probably already fasting without even realizing it. The most basic kind of fast is the break taken between dinner and breakfast. A fast during this time usually falls between 12 and 14 hours, which aligns with our natural circadian rhythms. It's interesting to note that many traditional cultures and religions incorporated fasting as a regular practice which is perhaps evidence that our ancestors knew of the benefits of fasting all along. One important caveat

of fasting is that when you do eat you still need to eat well. Fasting and then binging on ice cream and french fries is not going to get you anywhere. It's also important to note that fasting isn't for everyone. Be sure to talk about fasting with your health practitioner to see if it's right for you. Thanks for tuning in to this week's mini episode of the Doctors Pharmacy Podcast. Until next time. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode.

Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.