The Rich Roll Podcast - Valter Longo PhD: Fasting & Nutrition Protocols for Longevity & Disease Prevention

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

When it comes to fasting, how do you parse fact from fiction? How do nutrition and lifestyle choices make or break disease? And how do we eat to live longer, healthier lives? To help us answer these questions, Dr.Valter Longo is back. Dr. Longo first graced the show back on RRP #367, where we covered the basics for fasting for longevity. Today we are getting granular on the science of longevity & nutrition, including an analysis of the latest research on fasting and what Dr. Longo calls the fasting-mimicking diet and its connection to healthspan extension & disease prvention, So today we pick up where we left off four years ago, covering: The latest research on fasting and his fasting-mimicking diet; the 5 nutrition pillars of longevity and various fasting strategies, optimal protein intake based on age, high fat versus low-fat diets, and how to think about and contextualize continuous glucose monitoring; the science around rapamycin, metformin and sirtuins; and many other topics. Today’s episode is also viewable on YouTube. Learn more + show notes: https://bit.ly/richroll690 Valter is one of the world’s brightest minds on the cutting edge of longevity science and this one is full of prescriptive advice. I hope you learn as much as I did. Peace + Plants, Rich

Let's start thinking about repairing systems and not just putting a band-aid on it. You have diabetes, drug number one, then you escalate to drug number two, then you get cardiovascular disease and you have two more drugs there. This is what happens. It's really criminal, I think, you know, in the United States, in Europe, all over the world. I call it unconspired conspiracy, right? So everybody is going along with the system and you have a lot of bad food and a lot of drugs that people take and nobody wants to change it.

And so we're moving away from facts and moving into fashion. And this is very convenient for people that are making lots of money the way the system is. We know that nutrition can revolutionize almost everything in medicine. It's not going to cure everybody, but it can certainly make an incredible difference, more than we've ever seen, right? So certainly anything that is obesity related and overweight related, but we need to have the schools and we need to have the teachers. That's by far the number one thing we're missing. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody, welcome to the podcast.

Very exciting because we got Dr. Walter Longo in the house today. He's gonna get granular on the science of longevity, the science of nutrition. He performs an analysis on the latest research on fasting. We talk about what Dr. Longo calls the fasting mimicking diet and its connection to healthspan extension and the prevention of disease.

For those unfamiliar, Dr. Longo is one of the world's top researchers in the prevention of disease. For those unfamiliar, Dr. Longo is one of the world's top researchers in the aforementioned field. He's a professor of gerontology and biological sciences at the University of Southern California. He's also the director of the Longevity Institute at USC, one of the leading centers for research on aging and age-related disease. leading centers for research on aging and age-related disease. He's the director of the Longevity in Cancer Program at the IFOM Institute of Molecular Oncology in Milan, Italy. He's also somebody who's been named one of the 50 most influential people in healthcare by Time Magazine in 2018 for his research using fasting to improve health and prevent disease. He's also the author

of the international bestseller, The Longevity Diet, all profits of which he donates to research and his foundation. And he's the founder of ProLon, a five-day fasting mimicking diet program. This is Walter's second appearance on the program, and it's coming right up. But first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many

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And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. and the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, so today we pick up where we left off four years ago, episode 367, if you missed it, covering the latest research on fasting, longevity, nutrition, and his fasting mimicking diet,

including his take on the recent study out of China that controversially showed no efficacy in intermittent fasting for weight loss. We discussed the five nutrition pillars of longevity. We talk about various fasting strategies, the acute versus chronic effects of food on metabolism. We talk about optimal protein intake based on age, high fat versus low fat diets,

how to think about and contextualize continuous glucose monitoring, as well as his take on the science around things like rapamycin, metformin, and sirtuins, among many other topics. I love geeking out with Walter. He really is one of the world's brightest minds on the cutting edge of longevity science.

This one is full of prescriptive advice, including how to separate what we know from overblown hype. And I sincerely hope you enjoy it. So here we go. This is me and Dr. Walter Mongo. Walter, it's great to see you. It was awesome to reconnect with you in Miami recently. I'm glad that I did not give you COVID experience.

Me too. It's been four years since we did this. And after seeing you, I thought it would be great to have you back on. And there's so many things I think that we could talk about. There's been a lot of research in science since four years ago, but I thought a good place,

an interesting place to start would be with this recent study that just came out, this study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a study coming out of China that showed that intermittent fasting had no impact versus regular feeding windows in terms of weight loss. Now, I know your expertise is in longevity and not weight loss,

but because this study was sort of widely covered in the media and caused a little bit of a kerfuffle amongst fasting enthusiasts in the kind of wellness world. In general, I assume you're familiar with this study and I thought it would be wise to kind of solicit your thoughts on it. Yes, so my understanding of the study was that they looked at long-term calorie restriction,

plus or minus time-restricted eating. So either you're calorie restricted severely, and then you eat within a window of eight hours, I believe, or you just calorie restricted. So first of all, it's really a pointless study because these long-term calorie restriction studies, we already know that they're gonna result in people regaining the weight back.

They're too excessive. And also most people don't realize that they're probably associated with this thrifty mode, meaning that the body eventually slows down metabolism. We know this from multiple calorie restriction studies. And so now you're stuck, and there was an old New England Journal of Medicine study showing that.

So now you lose weight, but now your metabolism adjusts even lower than your adjustment per kilogram of body weight. So that means that you're pretty much condemned to regaining all the weight. So it's a pointless study to begin with. And then in addition to that, you add the time restricted eating.

I don't think it's a valid argument. I'm not a big fan of 16 hours a day. I'm a big fan of 12 hours of fasting a day. But I don't think it should be used against the 16 hours because it was just a study that shouldn't have, I don't think it should be done, not that way. And it doesn't really lead to any conclusions. Right, I mean, what was interesting about it,

I mean, first of all, it was conducted over a period of a year or so, at least according to the media, that was the longest term under which they had studied humans with some kind of setup like this. But the feeding window was 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., which I guess it's sort of like eating an early dinner. It's not that different than a normal feeding window was 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., which I guess it's sort of like eating an early dinner. It's not that different than a normal feeding window.

Yes, but again, you're associating it with severe calorie restriction, right? So this idea- 1,500 calories, 15 to 1,800 or something like that. For males, it's severe calorie restriction, even worse than what Walford and other people did in the past, right? So these are already starting with something

that is so extreme that, and at the end of the study, you can see that what we know happens in most cases, they start regaining weight, right? So, you know, starting the eight or nine months, you start seeing the weight regain, which is, you know, again, what's been observed in so many studies.

Right, I mean, they also identified no substantive difference in risk factors, which of course is related to longevity, but in your mind, is that a function of the calorie restriction or why was that part of the results as well? Well, I mean, if you go from 25, 3000 calories, 2,500, 3000 calories a day to 1,500 or whatever,

yeah, it's not surprising that an addition, compacting it into eight hours versus however many hours, it makes no difference. Right. So I don't think that says anything about fasting in general. I mean, fasting, first of all, is not 16 hours every day. I mean, fasting is a lot of different techniques.

Some work and some don't. And that one happened to, I think it told us that if you're already severely restricted, eating within eight hours doesn't help you any further. Right, so we're gonna define these different fasting modalities, what works, what doesn't, in your opinion,

and how we're thinking about longevity. But before we do that, I mean, if you were to construct a proper study, what parameters would you set up? Like, what did they get wrong? And how could somebody do this where it would show a legitimate, effective results that would be reliable? Yeah. Well, first of all, you don't wanna do severe interventions like that, right? Because people will abandon it. And then when they abandon it for a few times, it's worse than when you never started, right?

So it's better to let somebody be overweight and even obese than take them to these yo-yo cycles of losing a lot of weight, regaining a lot of weight, right? So we know that from previous studies. So yeah, you want to, as we do in, I have two foundation clinics, right? And we try to minimize the changes and try to be as effective as possible with minimal changes. And you want to probably take a couple of years to get there. So we have diabetes patients and people with cardiovascular disease. It takes a couple of years to convert somebody, but really convert them into something

that they can sustain for the rest of their lives, right? So you wanna intervene, for example, the longevity diet, which I just published an article describing why the longevity diet should be adopted. It's a high carbohydrate, but not high refined carbohydrate. And now a high carbohydrate, but not high refined carbohydrate and not a low sugar, low refined carbohydrate,

high carbohydrate composed of lots of legumes, lots of whole grains, nuts, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the type of diet. Of course, each person is gonna have a different version of it, right? So this is not meant to be, so if you're gluten sensitive, you're probably not gonna have a whole grain high carbohydrate diet,

but you can pick a different type of high carbohydrate diet. So by just the protein restriction, we now know to be regulating weight, right? So the people, most people, lots of people eat a lot of proteins to lose weight. And it turns out that looks based on our research and research from many others to be the opposite, right? The protein restriction is leading the system

to go into a fat catabolism, a fat burning mode. So this is just one trick. Another trick is eat a lot, right? So if you eat legumes, it might take a pound of legumes to get 45 grams of proteins. If you eat a steak, it takes 200 grams, right? So a lot less, right? So I think there's lots of tricks to get somebody

to in short term, lose weight, particularly abdominal fat without losing a lean body mass. We just finished a study where we're looking at Mediterranean diet. And after four months of the Mediterranean diet, patients lost three pounds of muscle mass. And after seven months, sorry, after, yeah, three pounds and after seven months,

five pounds of lean body mass. So I think there is a whole system to be adapted. And as you know, I believe in this periodic fasting and eating diets that can get you to slowly lose weight without losing lean body mass. And again, in a couple of years, by the combination of the everyday longevity diet,

which you just described and the fasting-mimicking diet, I think that most people that adhere to it are gonna mostly lose fat, but also undergo some type of reset, going after insulin resistance, going after maybe some inflammatory issues, certainly some cholesterol, high cholesterol, et cetera. So you mentioned this article that recently came out.

I assume you're talking about the article in Cell that you coauthored with Rosalind Anderson? Yes. Yeah, so explain that. I thought that was really interesting. It basically establishes the parameters for this longevity diet and why it's so effective. So maybe explain what the longevity diet is

and what this article kind of explored in terms of the link between nutrients, fasting genes and longevity, et cetera. Yes, so the longevity diet tries to move away from an opinion and move into a multi-pillar system. How dare you? Exactly. So, you know, for sure the epidemiological studies,

lots of epidemiological studies, so studies of big populations, but then, and then the clinical studies, the centenarian studies, and lots of focus, at least in that paper that you just mentioned on model systems, right? So what happens in mice and what are the genes that control aging and what are the nutrients that control the gene

that control the aging process, right? So on one side, you have the obesity and all the problems that come with it. On the other side, you have the acceleration of the aging process itself. And we know, we always think about smoking and obesity as major risk factor for diseases, but when you compare them to aging,

they disappear as risk factors, right? So targeting aging is the most important thing, even more than obesity, way more than obesity, right? So if you can slow down just a little bit, the aging process, you can do much more than obesity does. Of course, obesity and smoking are a big second and third, but they are dwarfed compared to the aging process. Right, so you began your career looking at yeast,

aging in yeast to try to identify what these mechanisms are. Maybe explain how this is applicable to human health and what exactly, like how we should think about what that aging mechanism or process is. Yes, so actually I started with Roy Walford working on humans and mice, and I understood that it wasn't going anywhere. So I went back to yeast from humans and mice, right?

So which at the time people thought it was just a bad idea. Right. And so I think that if you look at the genes that regulate aging in many organisms and we think humans, because now we've been following people with a certain mutation, which I'll talk about in a second,

the growth pathways seem to be at the center of the aging process. So if you take a yeast, a fly, a mouse, and now we'll talk about humans, they live a lot longer if you block IGF-1, insulin, and other growth factors. And so, and not only they become a lot longer lived, so yeast, for example, by blocking this protein pathway,

and then on the other side, blocking the sugar pathway, and then starving them, they live 10 times longer, right? So you completely reprogram their ability, their lifespan. And this is compressed as you move up. So in mice, they live about 40 to 50% longer if they have deficiency in these growth genes, particularly the growth hormone gene and the growth hormone receptor gene.

And so when we then study humans, those deficient in the same gene growth hormone gene and the growth hormone receptor gene. And so when we then study humans, those deficient in the same gene growth hormone receptor, we haven't proven yet longevity extension, but they're protected from cancer. They're protected from cognitive decline. They're protected from diabetes. So they seem to be protected from most of the human chronic age-related disorders, right?

So we suspect that we're also gonna see lifespan extension. We're not gonna see 50% like in mice, but even if we saw 10%, 15%, with very little chronic diseases, that would be, I think, remarkable. How do we understand the nature of that compression as we go from yeast all the way up to humans

and why it doesn't scale in a more linear fashion? Probably because of evolutionary theories, meaning that every organism is evolved by being able to have different modality, right? So for example, yeast, you can have a modality, it's a life in the fast lane, and they live about two or three days.

Then you can starve them a little bit, or starve them and they live about two weeks. And then you have something called the spore state. And in the spore state, they live a hundred times longer than in the fast lane. So they live years. So that tells you that probably in every organism, there are, you know, there's like a reproductive

grow, grow, grow mode. And then there is a maintenance mode where the decision is made that there's probably not enough food, not enough to grow, not enough to reproduce. So I'm just gonna stand by and try to protect myself as best as I can. So now, of course, most of us are now reproducing

most of the time. So probably a good idea, right? To switch to that modality and stay there until we are ready to reproduce. Right. Okay, so then with respect to humans, you've identified these five pillars of longevity. So maybe we can walk through them

and then get drilled down more specifically on the diet piece. Yes. So in this study you just mentioned, epidemiology of course is very central. So lots of studies, epidemiological studies looking at, you know, what people that live long eat, right? And so one thing we published on a few years ago was,

if you look at Americans, those that have a high protein diet, they do very poorly compared to those that have a very low protein diet, but that's only true up to age 65. And then after 65, it turns around a little bit and those that have a moderate protein intake do bit and those that have a moderate protein intake do better than those that have a low protein intake.

And so, and I think if you look at the data and you look at this Harvard studies, they're supportive of this, right? So they will say that a low carbohydrate diet is bad for you in general, unless it's a plant-based low carbohydrate diet. They haven't looked so much at the age-dependent effect, but I think we are in agreement

that low-carbohydrate diet and high-protein are not good for you. It should be the other way around, low-protein, high-carbohydrate. And so epidemiological studies are, I think, generally consistent with this notion. So for example, there's another Lancet meta-analysis looking at carbohydrate intake,

and it's better for lifespan to be an 80% carbohydrate diet than to be in a low carbohydrate diet. And if you go to very low carbohydrate diet, say 20%, there's a 60% increased risk of mortality compared to the 50, 60% of the calories coming from carbohydrate. So, but then what happens is the people confuse this with excess carbohydrate. They think that when I say high carbohydrate diet,

I mean excess, so excess carbohydrate. So we had doctors, for example, complaining, say, well, now we're in United States, 70% of people are overweight and obese, and you're talking about high carbohydrate diet. But in fact, I'm talking about proportions, right? So you gotta get food from somewhere. Of course, you have to have the right amount of calories.

You cannot have excess, but 50 to 60% should probably come from carbohydrate. Yeah, so epidemiology shows that. And then if you, just to give you an example, right? If you think about carbohydrate, if you look even at a yeast or a mouse, if you feed them a lot of sugar, in most of the cases,

you're gonna accelerate some of the aging pathways on the sugar side, and then even more clearly on the sugar side, and then even more clearly on the protein side, but especially on the amino acid, certain amino acids, like methionine seems to be at the very center of the acceleration of the aging process. And so, and this is pillar two, right? So basic research.

And then clinical studies, I think, are pillar three. They're very supportive of all of this. And so for example, in the longevity diet, we talk about certain fats, yes, but certain type of fats. And if you look at, for example, the work by Astro in Spain, thousands of people randomize one group at risk for cardiovascular disease, one group placed on a low fat diet

and one group placed on lots of olive oil or lots of nuts. That was like, there was a study that came out like just last week about that, I think. Yes, been many studies that followed up. I didn't see the, maybe there was one last week. I didn't see that one. But now it's pretty consistent and showing that the high olive oil,

high nut diet is better for people. Which is so interesting and somewhat counterintuitive with respect to cardiovascular disease. Yes, historically and to this day, lots of prominent experts will say, go to a no fat diet, no matter what it is, right? So sure, it seems to be true. It's better to not have saturated fats, animal fats.

And again, the epidemiology agrees with that. But when we're talking about this monounsaturated fats, olive oil, nuts, probably certain fish like salmon, that seems to be consistently associated with living longer. And then the centenarian studies, of course, one of the most important pillars. So if a low carbohydrate diet is not so good for you, let's look around, let's look at Okinawans,

let's look at people in Sardinia, in Calabria, in Loma Linda, in Costa Rica, in Greece, do they have a low carbohydrate diet or do they have, as we will expect, a high carbohydrate diet and all of them, high to very high carbohydrate diet, including the Okinawans, who used to get about 70% of the calories

from sweet potatoes, as you heard at the conference from Dan Buettner. Right, so with all of that, and of course, it's about, when you're talking about a high carbohydrate diet, you're talking about, you have to drill down on what that means specifically. It's not eating pretzels and tons of refined carbohydrates. These are like whole plant foods for the most part.

Yes, I mean, it can also be whole grains, right? So whole grains in the study done by this Norwegian, this meta-analysis came out a couple of months ago, but this Norwegian group, the number one source of food associated with life expectancy increase was legumes. And number two was whole grain cereals, right? So it's not just, let's say vegetables,

but it's also lots of carbohydrate that may not necessarily be associated with health, right? For example, say whole grain pasta, but even pasta, it's probably okay, right? If you don't, certainly it was okay for most of the centenarians in most areas. And so, for example, for the Okinawans, the sweet potato, you wouldn't necessarily think the sweet potato

is that good for you, but it was very good for them. And so I think you cannot for sure have lots of bread and lots of potatoes and lots of pasta, but a certain amount of it is probably not bad. And don't forget that our body is not fueled by complex carbohydrates, eventually is fueled by complex carbohydrates, eventually is fueled by sugar, right? So eventually it gets turned into pure sugar

and that's what the brain and every other cell wants, unless you have ketone bodies or fatty acids around, right? So yeah, sometimes we forget the basic biochemistry, but we are fueled by sugar. So with this understanding, the kind of basic tenants of what comprises a diet that promotes longevity based on this research, where does fasting come in?

Like what is the relationship between these dietary pillars and these protocols around fasting or fasting mimicking? So I think there are two, I always look first at the safety factor, right? So what is it that we don't know if it's safe or not? And then I just exclude them until we have many decades, I think of evidence. But if you look at safety and efficacy both,

I think you come up with 12 hours every day as being very solid. I always say, I've never seen a study showing that if you do 12 hours of fasting a day, you're going to have a problem. When you get to 16, and as we, I think already discussed before, you get to 16 hours, you get to breakfast skipping, and you see meta-analysis, not just studies, but studies of all studies showing increased mortality, reduced lifespan. Now, what is the reason for it? We don't know.

Probably there are double edged swords, right? So for example, ketone bodies, maybe fatty acids ketone bodies are going both ways, right? They're helping you on one side and they're hurting you on the other side. But so 12 hours, very solid, right? And the work by Sachin Panda and everything else is supportive of it.

And then I would say probably people, we eat all the time. And so in the thousands of years ago, but as humans evolved, we evolved probably insulin resistance as a way to survive the winters, right? So you eat as much as you can during the summer or whenever food is available, you become diabetic, essentially pre-diabetic or diabetic,

you put everything away and then the winter comes or some period where there is no food and then you become insulin sensitive again. So I think what happens now is everybody's insulin resistant all the time or somewhat insulin resistant all the time because the winter never comes. And that's where this prolonged, not just, you know, 16 hours of fasting, but say five days,

that's what we've been working on. That's where they come in. There seems to be pretty clear. Now we have three more clinical trials that we've been working on. That's where they come in. There seems to be pretty clear. Now we have three more clinical trials that we are about to publish. Very clear that they switch you into an insulin sensitive mode. So, and also they switch you

into a long-term anti-aging mode. So for example, Leptin, and now this is about four clinical trials that we've done. Leptin stays low for a long time after you return to normal diet. IGF-1, the central growth factor pro-aging, it stays down for months. So in the first trial,

we showed that after three months from the end, IGF-1 was still lowered. Yeah, so then I think that there is, on one side, insulin sensitization. So the system now goes into a fat utilization mode versus building. And the system also goes into a maintenance mode.

So now I'm just gonna protect myself as much as possible, age as slowly as possible, waiting for the next wave of lots of food where maybe I can focus on reproducing. Right, so with this understanding that there is no winter, the winter is not coming and everybody's kind of hurtling towards some degree of being pre-diabetic because of the Western way of eating, how malleable is that?

Like if somebody has been in that pre-diabetic state or in a situation where they lack insulin sensitivity for a prolonged period of time, what is your sense of how one can repair that? Like if, obviously, if you've just arrived in that situation, it's probably gonna be easier for you through fasting and these other protocols to bounce back and create some insulin sensitivity.

But if you've been in that state for a decade, does it become more difficult or can you still repair it? You can still repair it. We just finished like a trial on diabetes in Holland, a hundred patients. And I mean, I cannot tell you the results, but I can tell you that even if you're diabetic, you're obese, you've been taking medicine

for years and years and years, no problem. We can bring it back. We cannot bring it back in everybody, but I would say the great majority of people, you have the team, the physician, the dietician, and you have to have the method. So, and in that trial, it was just fasting mimicking diet, no longevity diet.

In the clinic, we do both, right? But again, we don't push you to 1500 calories if you had 2500 calories, we push you to keep the calories, maybe just a little bit lower, you maybe go from 2500 to 2300. And then we work on the NutriTech, what I call Nutri technology.

We work on making it easier for you to lose weight rather than starving you for a year, hoping that you stay like that for the rest of your life, which you're never going to do. So in the four years since we sat down, there's been quite an explosion of interest in fasting. It's gone from this kind of curious endeavor into something that has truly gotten mainstream attention.

A lot of discussion about different ways of fasting and many different, as you mentioned, different types of thinking about fasting, intermittent fasting, alternate day fasting, time-restricted eating, fasting mimicking. Maybe it would be worth kind of just talking about fasting in general and the validity of these various protocols

and why you feel so strongly that the fasting mimicking approach is optimal. Yes, so alternate day fasting, it's an extension of the 16 hours, let's say, right? So there is no doubt that if you do 16 hours of fasting every day, or you don't eat every other day, you're gonna get a lot of metabolic effects. The problem and the question is,

now that we have meta analysis showing that if you skip breakfast, you live shorter and you have more cardiovascular disease and probably more cancer, et cetera, et cetera. Is there some issue with these ketone bodies, with these fatty acids, et cetera, et cetera. So no arguing with the metabolic effects short term, but a big problem with longterm, right?

So I would say, don't do it. Certainly don't skip breakfast. Now, when we were starting a trial is now what happens potentially if you skip lunch. So keep the 12 hours and then skip lunch. That's what I've been doing for 20 years, but now we're gonna finally get to test it. We don't know, but let's see.

And so that's alternate fasting or let's say 16, eight. Then you have, let's say five, two, right? That's another popular one. Well, what happens if you do two days a week of fasting or semi fasting? Well, we don't know, right? Because there is not very many studies. There's a few, it looks promising.

The problem I see with that is most people have a difficult time, I say, going from four coffees a day or three coffees a day to two coffees a day. Half of the people that used to smoke are still smoking, even though we know that it kills you and it says that on the package. So is that gonna really be more than a small,

small percentage of the population? So even if we show that was effective, who's gonna do that, right? I mean, I don't know personally, I don't know anybody that would go two days a week without eating anything, right? I don't know a single person, but that doesn't mean it could not be effective.

And it doesn't mean there are not people that could do it long-term. So I'm not arguing that with the effectiveness and I'm not arguing that some people could do it. I will say the great majority of the people are not gonna do it. And then I will say, we even don't know what will happen long-term.

So we gotta go with things that are more realistic, less invasive. And that's where the fasting-making diet comes in. And this is, again, 30 years of work since the Walford years, right? So it's not an idea that I say, oh, I see a few patients in my clinic. They're doing so well with these five days.

I'm just going to do that. As it happened for many very popular diets in the past. So this was 30 years of building, building, building from all these pillars, right? And then you get to a point where you say, this looks very promising. Like what if we made people do this three times a year for five days, four times maybe.

And if you have diabetes in the diabetes trial, we did one cycle a month for 12 months, but most people did not do 12 cycles. Some people did two, some people did six, some people did eight and some people did 12. So now we're gonna analyze the data and we'll be able to tell who is doing well, but overall they all did well.

So I think that two to four times a year, let's say some people may even last, somebody like you probably a couple of times a year it'd be more than sufficient. But for most people, let's say three to four times a year, that seems to be very realistic. It's clearly showing this long-term efficacy. It allows for FDA-like, it doesn't have to be FDA,

but FDA-like procedures where you can say, hey, this was tested. That's exactly the way you should test it. And everybody can test it. Everybody can grab it. So now we have 30 clinical trials running. Some of them, we help them with, some of them people just get it and they do their own trial.

So that's the way it should be. Allow everybody to test it and let's see, right? Eventually we're gonna see these are millions of people and we're gonna see the reports from it. And I really think that that's slowly moving in the toolkit of physicians on one side for lots of diseases, but it's also moving in the toolkit of the people

that are paying attention and that want something that is being clinically tested. And just because we haven't defined it, essentially what you're saying is this is a five day protocol where we provide you through Prolon this meal delivery meal kit situation. And when you eat this way, you're mimicking your biological response to fasting

without being overly calorically deprived. Yeah, I cannot talk about products, because I'm prohibited from doing it. So in the FMD, for example, for cancer, it's four days. It's very different from the one for normal people, which is five days, as you just mentioned. Then we have one for autoimmun cancer, it's four days. It's very different from the one for normal people, which is five days, as you just mentioned. Then we have one for autoimmunities is seven days. We have one for Alzheimer's we're testing now in Italy,

which is five days, but then it has a daily supplement for the in-between. So it's really about nutrient technology. And, but yes, the fast immune diet, let's say it goes from four to seven days in most cases, plus or minus what could be supplements. For example, in the Alzheimer, we were worried about people losing weight

and some people did lose weight. And so that's why we give them a supplement between the 25 days between one cycle and the next of the fasting-mimicking diet. We also, because they're so old, let's say 75, 80, 85 years old, we give them a higher calorie fasting-mimicking diet. So yeah, so we adjust based on the age, on the disease,

and eventually I think there might be adjustments also. For example, now we're developing a non-inflammatory one. Lots of people with inflammatory bowel disease, colitis, gastrointestinal problems, we're developing something that is non-allergenic, non-inflammatory, which I think it's gonna be very important for, and we, I mean the university,

I don't mean, I'm not talking about company. So yeah, I think that's certainly, I'll be very surprised if this doesn't move into more of a mainstream and start competing with the drugs, right? I mean, that's what we're trying to say. Like, let's start thinking about repairing systems, based on all the things that we discussed

and not just putting a bandaid on it. You have diabetes, drug number one, then you escalate to drug number two, then you get cardiovascular disease, you have two more drugs there. This is what happens. It's really criminal. I think in the United States, in Europe, all over the world,

I call it unconspired conspiracy, right? So everybody is going along with the system and you have a lot of bad food and a lot of drugs that people take and the whole system is profiting from it. But people, the average 45 year old now has got two chronic conditions in the United States. And so by the time you get to 55, 60,

you probably have about three chronic conditions taking lots of drugs, right? So you were saying, what is the system, not to just block that, but to bring you back to a healthy status. And it used to be ideas, now we see in the clinical trials, but we also see it in the foundation clinics

where we follow lots of people. So we're very confident that this can work, but it's not gonna work unless you have, you know, the team that I was discussing earlier, the doctor, the dietician, and the knowledge, and probably also the molecular biologists, right? When you get too complex, so we get people at the clinic all the time

and they have very complicated problems, right? And so you have a very busy physician, even our own, right? And you have a very busy dietician. And I think that the molecular biologists specialized in whatever field, it could be the key person, right? So the strategist like I am, right? So this person comes in, works with the physician and works with the dietician to strategize.

How do I solve the problem? This person's got three chronic conditions. Where do they come from? And how do I solve them without creating another problem? Right? That's gotta be at the very center of everything and it's not. Well, what's interesting about all of this

is understanding the incredible resilience of the human body. Like it can be abused for extended periods of time. And when you course correct that, it's kind of amazing that the body is able to get back to some sort of homeostasis without a pharmaceutical intervention. The trick of course, as you mentioned,

is getting the medical establishment to truly grok this and make it part of what is recommended in their protocols. So what is your sense of where you're at with that right now? Like, do you have doctors who are on, I'm sure you do, that are prescribing this, that are on board with it? And what is the resistance or the obstacles that you still face?

I mean, obviously the gold standard would be getting it to be reimbursed by insurance and that kind of thing. I assume you're not quite there yet. There are, I don't know, maybe 30 or 40,000 doctors around the world that are now recommending fasting mimicking diets. And I think they're all saying more clinical data,

more FDA style clinical data and absolutely. So then we and others, most of the studies we're not doing, universities are doing it on their own. We're just helping them. So yeah, so I think that everybody's waiting for more studies, they're coming. Lots of them are already finished

and we're about to publish them. But I think for cancer, Alzheimer, auto I think, you know, for cancer, Alzheimer, you know, autoimmune disease, et cetera, et cetera, we're going to see more and more. But I think in addition to the FMD, I've been talking to lots of politicians, both in Italy and here, and I'm saying, you know, imagine you have over 70% of people that are overweight or obese with all the chronic conditions that we discussed. And I said, imagine if you say, well, people aren't educated in a country,

but I'm not gonna have schools and I'm not gonna have teachers, but I want everybody to be educated. It's never gonna happen, right? You can say it as much as you want, right? Until you build the schools, until you have the teachers, it's not gonna happen. So here we know that nutrition can revolutionize, almost everything in medicine.

It's not gonna cure everybody, but it can certainly make an incredible difference, more than we've ever seen. Certainly anything that is obesity related and overweight related. But we need to have the schools and we need to have the teachers, right? But these are gonna be schools and teachers

of nutrition and lifestyle. And I think that that's by far the number one thing we're missing. Then I think, you know, if you can get that, as we've shown it in a mouse study that we recently did, which you may have seen before, you know, so we say, okay, forget it. It's never gonna work. So let the mice eat lots of fat and lots of calories

and become huge. And then once a month, we give them the FMD, the fasting-mimicking diet, and we reverse everything, right? So I'm sort of going against that. I think people should be followed and should be professional so you don't get into very bad diet every day

and then use the FMD to fix it. But I think that's the idea of the FMD. Maybe for those that are now willing to make daily changes, that's where you bring in the food as medicine. Right, right, right. I mean, it's such a massive problem because every force that surrounds us is driving us towards that unhealthy choice.

Everywhere we turn, all the marketing, the way the stores are configured, et cetera, you're almost bucking the trend in order to eat healthy and considered an outlier. So education certainly is central to all of that, but there's also a social piece and a psychological piece. And as Dan Buettner talks about, creating infrastructure or environments that are conducive

to the healthy choice, because like smoking that has the label on it that says it's going to kill you. A lot of people just want to eat what they want to eat because it tastes good. And until they suffer from some kind of chronic ailment, they're really not going to look in the mirror and redress it. Yes. And I think you get a, probably even get closer, right? So you have to have like the teacher in the school, right? You have to show up at eight o'clock and then you have to stay there until such. So yeah, no, I don't mean that for people,

but I mean, you know, let's say for example, once a month you have a telemedicine call on the computer with your dietician and your molecular biologist, and maybe once every six months with the physician. That's not very invasive, right? So, but now with all the apps and devices, you can monitor their weight from the distance. They wouldn't even have to tell you what their weight is.

You can monitor the blood pressure. You can monitor lots of different things. And now pretty soon the glucose level, you're gonna be able to monitor without even using a needle. Yeah, so I think we're already at a point where, and that's what we're doing in Italy, by the way, we're starting this 500 people clinical trial with control, fasting making diet, longevity diet,

plus the fasting making diet. So hopefully in about a year and a half, we'll have solid data showing, I hope success. But yeah, so it's not school eight to one, it's one telemedicine call once a month. And just to make sure that you're on track, you have any questions, for example, with the cancer trial,

we see that when we do that, it's very successful, very high compliance. So we do a fasting-mimicking diet and chemotherapy, et cetera, et cetera. When we, the only trial, when we didn't do that, we allow the clinics to do, to just say, oh, here's a fasting-mimicking diet. You take it home and do it. Then we went to 30% compliance, right?

So most of the people could not comply for more, maybe 50% for two cycles of the fasting-mimicking diet with chemotherapy, and then it dropped down, right? So it just told us that, yeah, and hopefully at some point it'd be also good to have a psychologist involved, as you mentioned, right? So this team of four people, I think physician, psychologist, molecular biologist, dietician,

it should be our schools and our teachers for lifestyle. And we don't have it yet. Yeah, well, I think that some of these new apps and technologies can really help with compliance as well. Like I started working with InsideTracker and Levels, the continuous glucose monitor. And there's something about being able to pull the app up and look at where you're at in real time.

That makes it very, you know, kind of maybe not urgent, but you're just connected to it in a way that's very different from going to your doctor once a year and getting your blood work done and seeing what it looks like on a piece of paper. Yeah. So how are you thinking about some of those technologies? Like, do you think there's a place for continuous glucose monitors

with respect to kind of the avenues to which you're trying to push your patients or the people that you're working with? Yeah, the technology of course is gonna be central, but I think the human part, we cannot underestimate it, even if it happens by telemedicine in the psychological part. So lots of things will have to be done, the old style, but yes, as new technology comes in,

the ones that we're talking about, whether it's the scale connected directly to the network or the continuous glucose monitor, et cetera, et cetera, those are gonna make everything easier. But I think that now we're starting to start a program in South Central for, you know, you're a very highly educated lawyer, right? So most people are not as educated as you and I are.

So I think that we need to also create a reality for people that may not have access to this world, this very tech, high tech world. And so, yeah, so we're starting a program in South Central in there, I think we're gonna, if it gets funded, we're gonna try getting into the houses, right? And try to convert slowly, again, take a couple of years, maybe longer, right? Can we convert this family, the houses, right? And try to convert slowly. Again, take a couple of years, maybe longer, right? And can we convert this family, the children,

but also the parents into this changed lifestyle? And I think it's gonna take a lot of, I don't think we're just gonna be able to say, oh, here's, I sent you an email with an application attached to it. I'll see you in a year. I think for the great majority of people in the world, for a number of years, we're still gonna need to be present.

And the physician is definitely too busy and not trained for any of this, by the way, right? So then, yeah, we need to have this team, but the applications will certainly, and eventually artificial intelligence and the collection of, let's say microbiota data, metabolomic data, et cetera, et cetera. It's gonna take a while, but at some point,

you get maybe a drop of blood and you'll be able to say, I don't know why, but you have a problem with iron intake. So Leroy Hood and other people are working on this. And so I think that, but it's gonna be maybe five, 10 years down the road, right? So now I think having a, you know, 70% overweight group or obese group here and 50% overweight or obese in Europe,

we need to act now, right? So, and then once the technology comes, I think that even better. Yeah, well, you can't solve the problem without understanding how to solve the problem in underserved communities like South Central, because that's really where the problem rests. And those communities are,

they're not going on PubMed and reading research. There's gonna have to be a completely different approach to try to figure out how to penetrate those communities and create real change. Yeah, and that's the extreme, but I think there is a middle group, right? All over the United States that is not in that conditions, maybe as a lot of people in South Central,

but it's still gonna be much harder to penetrate than the Los Angeles or San Francisco or New York highly educated individual that follows everything we do, right? So I think the majority of people live in a very different world than some of us. And I think that, but the majority of people will appreciate if you get a call from a dietician and a psychologist or this team once a month,

I think the majority of people will respond very well. And we certainly see it with the sick people, you know, I mean, whether they have cancer or diabetes, that sort of feeling like we're following them and we're, you know, okay, you got a problem, but here's the team. You got a team following you and helping you, you know? So I think that psychologically,

in addition to everything else is essential. One of the things I'm curious about, and this sort of came to me in the process of experimenting with a continuous glucose monitor, is that you get this real-time data after you eat, and you can see, you know, the kind of curve and the graph of where your blood sugar is at post-prandial. But I'm wondering, so me as a consumer and not a scientist,

I can look at that and I can draw conclusions from that, but I'm not sure those are the best conclusions because what's happening post-prandial, post-meal is probably different from how it should be looked at from like a chronic perspective, right? So when you're thinking about or conceiving of what should go into the fasting mimicking diet or just a healthy diet in general on a daily basis,

how do you think about what's happening biologically with each meal versus the chronic conditions that are the result of eating a certain way over a very long extended period of time. Yeah, so we get all the time people, they may do something that is contained in the fasting-mimicking diet, they say my glucose spike, right?

And so it's not really about, I mean, your glucose should spike if there is glucose or some form of carbohydrate in the diet. And in the fasting-making diet, we put the carbohydrates on purpose, right? It's a lot less than you will have in a normal diet, but it's still there. And it was designed on purpose to make sure that we don't have this yo-yo

that I was talking about before. Why do I know that this yo-yo, let's say we went much lower in carbohydrates. Let's say we went to zero carbohydrate, 10%. I don't know that will hurt people to go back and forth like that, but I'm worried that it may, right? And I'm also worried that it might affect muscle.

So now we have three clinical trials showing no muscle loss and increasing relative lean body mass. And that's very important. So now we believe that sugar, I mean, not sugar, but the little bit of carbohydrate we have in there, and even though they come with a little spike on fasting glucose, we believe that be protective of the muscle mass.

And so now, eventually we're gonna look at more lower glucose versions to see what happens, both for compliance and for muscle mass, et cetera, et cetera. But right now I think we feel pretty good about having all these great results from clinical trials that that's irrelevant, right? And not just the fasting-mimicking diet, it doesn't really matter, even in the everyday diet.

You don't worry so much about your glucose monitor and whether there is a spike, worry about the consequences on abdominal circumference, body fat, insulin resistance, right? So if your A1C, HbA1C is 6.5, you got a problem. If you have a spike in glucose and your A1C is 4.7, you're fine. It means that your glucose goes up,

your body can process it. I wouldn't do 20 meals like that a day. I would stick with, say, two plus one or three meals a day. And that's it. So you only have three opportunities for that to happen. And that's perfectly fine. And it's obviously not affecting your body in a negative way.

Yeah, so it's very important to, you know, glycemic index fine, but don't become obsessed with things that are part of a much more complicated network, including that may help you protect lean body mass. So we now know that TOR can be affected. Well, we knew from our work in yeast 30 years ago, but we knew that both sugars and amino acids

could feed into TOR. And so now there's starting to be data looking at, say, leucine levels being essential for muscle building, but the glucose might also be pushing that loose in the amino acids to perform more, right? So, I mean, these are still preliminary data, but certainly now that's a possibility that, that, you know, if you go too low in sugars,

the muscle might struggle in building as long as you're insulin sensitive. Right. Let's go to protein for a minute. You mentioned earlier the idea that you've arrived at that lower protein before age 65 is optimal. And then after 65, it's important to increase your protein intake.

So maybe walk me through how you arrived at that conclusion and what that means specifically for somebody who's listening or watching. Yeah, so if you look at the mouse studies done, for the past 50 years, low protein is one of the ways that you can substitute the calorie restriction to extend the life of a mouse.

Then I think we did our study that I mentioned earlier, clearly showing that the low protein group had overall lower mortality and the high protein group at a 400% increased risk for cancer mortality compared to the low protein. Now keep in mind that low protein doesn't mean you're not eating protein. It means that you have to have the 0.35 grams

per pound of body weight. So if you weigh a hundred pounds, it should have at least 35, 40 grams of proteins. If you go below that, now you're starting to get into malnourishment. So it's low protein without malnourishment. Right, which is correct me if I'm wrong, about half of what the FDA would recommend.

Isn't it 0.8 grams per kilogram? Per kilogram, I was talking about pounds. Okay, okay. No, no, yeah. So 0.8 is fine, right? So we're staying with the medical association. So the American medical association, I think says about 0.8.

So that RDA, but in terms of like how most, at least Westerners eat, that would be considered low protein, even though that's like kind of exactly what we're supposed to eat. Yeah, so the average American will have maybe 50 to 100% more than that, right? Yeah, and so 0.8 is perfectly fine per kilogram.

And then, but then it should be mostly plant-based. And I think our study, all the Harvard study, the Giovannucci, Frank who, et cetera, et cetera, they agree with that. And the Centenary and the Okinawans adds 9% calories from protein levels. The Southern Italians certainly mostly plant-based, the Loma Linda people, low protein.

So it's pretty consistent, pretty consistent, no matter where you look. And now the clinical data is also supportive of that potentially causing weight loss and the opposite of what everybody thinks. So having a low protein, high, the right carbohydrate diet can lead to weight loss instead of weight gain. And we love to wait and have bigger studies,

but that's what it's looking like. It's we're going to see happening. And is that related to a reduction in mTOR activation and IGF-1 levels, or what is it specifically about the protein biomechanically that's happening? It looks like certain amino acids are controlling the fat cells and they're controlling the hypothalamus.

And they're really in charge of the decision to accumulate fat or break down fat, right? So we were talking about before about the fasting-mimicking diet. It looks like, and so we are actually now submitting a large grant to study that in the brain. It looks like the certain amino acids are at least in charge or maybe helpful those effects, right?

So telling the body, okay, now I'm gonna start burning fat or now I'm gonna get into a fat accumulation mode. And yeah, so some of these switches are probably long lasting, right? So maybe epigenetic may not be epigenetic. So epigenetic meaning that the DNA is getting modified. And so once it's modified, this could last a long, long time

but there's certainly long lasting. And this is why after the fasting-mimicking diet, which of course is very low in protein, we see the leptin down for a long period in people. And we see the IGF-1 down for a long period. So yeah, so we don't quite know the answer to your question, but I think it's looking like reprogramming. It's got a reprogramming effect on multiple systems.

And so what is happening around age 65, where that flips and it becomes more important to increase your protein intake. Yeah, so if you look at the enhance, which is the CDC database of in the United States, and you look at the weight, right? So most people, and most people don't know this. Most people are on average, people gain weight until 65,

and then they start losing weight after 65. So there's something that we don't know what it is, right? But aging, of course, is the very center of that. And there may be some key moment of the aging process where you are now getting into this rapid aging modality. And we know that because most of the deaths occur after 65. So yeah, so after that, probably the, and this is also the Simpson group did in Australia,

did this in mice. So after a certain age, it may be that the redundancy, so that the system needs more of the amino acids to do its minimal job. And if you don't, if you started having deficiency, you have a problem. And in our own study, we did that with mice. We took young mice and we gave them a very low protein diet.

Nothing happened. We took all mice and we gave them the same very low protein diet. And within days they started losing a lot of weight. So it's probably a matter of redundancy and maybe some of these growth factors are involved. And once you get below a certain threshold, you have a problem.

And you may have a problem in the immune system, may have problems with bones, with muscle. You may have a problem in the cognitive system. So yeah, so I think it's just unsustainable for an older organism. Yeah, well, it would seem that the more you're on top of these healthy practices as you inch towards 65 and after 65, the better position you're in

to prevent those sort of declines being as rapid as they would otherwise. So if you're maintaining your muscle mass with resistance training, if you're eating appropriately in accordance with your protocols and the sort of blue zones criteria, and you're engaged in your community and you have purpose in your life,

that a lot of that like extension or prolonging of longevity is really about the robustness that you enter that stage of life with so that it doesn't hit you like a ton of bricks and you kind of become decrepit in an expedited way? It's a equilibrium of robustness, right? Because you, on one side, you could be feeding your muscle with IGF-1

and there's no doubt about it. And on one side, you could be feeding the cancer cell with IGF-1. And so as you enter that stage. But if you're doing the plant-based protein. Well, if you are doing the plant-based protein, then you're gonna become frail as most of the Southern Europeans, the Italians.

Actually the Italians- Don't tell me that, Walter. Well, not, yeah. So we can now mix the doing it right with doing it, right? So the Southern Italians are actually twice as frail as the Northern Europeans, right? Or the Italians are twice as frail. At a certain stage in life or later in life, they become more frail.

Yeah, they're long lived, but frail. That doesn't mean that you cannot be vegan or pescatarian and be very strong. Just there is like, and that's what we've been working both in Italy and here very hard with mice. We said, what is the nutrition, the age-specific nutrition that prevents a frailty to the bones, to the muscle, the immune system, but at the same time does not affect

the longevity extension, right? It's very tricky. There's a sweet spot in between those two polarities. And there is an age dependent sweet spot. That's why we're saying now don't go from low protein to high protein, go from low protein to moderate, maintain the plant-based, but start introducing more, let's say vegetarian, if you don't wanna have,

you know, meat component, a vegetarian component, more eggs, more cheeses, et cetera, et cetera. Now, of course you can do it without any of this. You can do it with the seeds, the eggs, more cheeses, et cetera, et cetera. Now, of course, you can do it without any of this. You can do it with the seeds, the nuts, right? So it doesn't, you can be 100% vegan and do it. It's just a little bit more of a job to do it while staying vegan, but that's perfectly fine. But when you're 100, what else do you have to do?

Yeah. You could divert some of that energy towards being focused on that. It's not just Yeah. You could divert some of that energy towards being focused on that. It's not just energy. You gotta have the people that, sure, some people that know what they're doing, right? So for example, the legumes are very low in leucine, methionine, et cetera, et cetera,

but the seeds are not, and the nuts are not, right? So yeah, you need to pay attention and have somebody help you, guide you through it, because otherwise you can become osteoporotic and not realizing it at all until you have a fracture and then you're in trouble. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a guy in here a couple of weeks ago who is 100 and he broke all these marathon records

when he was 90 and 91 and just an amazing guy, but he went plant-based at 70 in response to a colon cancer diagnosis and has been plant-based for 30 years. And at age 100, he's as passionate about it as ever. And he still is running and training and doing all of these things. And so when you're saying that,

like I understand everything you're saying, and I see this living example of a guy who appears to be doing it correctly and was telling me he's having the most fun he's ever had in his life. So it's crazy. I mean, keep in mind, a lot of people that are vegan eat a lot of proteins, right?

So a lot of vegan proteins. I'm sure he's eating a lot more protein. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, if you eat a lot of protein, let's say 25% of your, and this is very common among vegans. And so for example, I think Luigi Fontana did a study where he was looking at the vegans

and their IGF-1 was actually pretty high, right? Because they were high protein, they had such a high protein diet. So even if you're eating a ton of plant-based protein, you can still drive up IGF-1. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, because we're talking about 10% and below in our study, right?

10% of the calories or less had to come from proteins to be in the low protein group. So if you're now 25% of your calories coming from protein, you're most likely are gonna be in the high risk. And in fact, in our study, we did the people that had mostly plant-based instead of a four fold increase in cancer risk, they had a three fold increase in cancer mortality risk.

So it changed better, but went from 400% to 300% increase risk of cancer mortality. I'm interested in your thoughts on another, like the other side of the coin with respect to healthspan science and longevity, because a lot of the press is oriented around this, the sexiness of things like rapamycin and metformin

and sirtuins and the like, which is very different than the kind of longevity science that you're interested in and focused on. So how are you thinking about what's going on in that kind of related field with respect to looking towards extending healthspan? Yes, so first of all, I come from that world, right? So I come from the world, we were testing rapamycin

in yeast and I think we got it from Mike Hall back in 1995 or that. So we were probably the first lab in the world that was working on rapamycin and longevity. And we're, you know, my lab discovered the role of the TOR pathway in aging in 2001. So we're very much, you know, supportive of the understanding of what genes and what drugs that affect genes do.

But I think that for the next 10, 20 years, maybe 30 years, reality is that we have 3 billion years of what I call 3 billion years of R&D, right? So our body has been developing for 3 billion years if you think about the origin of species. And so you could say, I'm gonna biohack my way through it, right? So I have this incredibly sophisticated system and I'm gonna intervene with a drug that blocks TOR. But TOR does so many things, right? And guess what?

If you block TOR in people with rapamycin, they become hypoglycemic, right? And mice become hyperglycemic. So it's just very clear evidence that it's not as straightforward as people think. All these downstream, you have to look at it holistically and understand there's a bazillion intervening variables

and it's all very complicated. It's very complicated and you have no data, right? So who knows what happens after 40 years of rapamycin or metformin. I mean, metformin's got more data, right? So who knows what happens after 40 years of rapamycin or metformin. I mean, metformin has got more data, right? So in support of what Nir Barzilai is trying to do, metformin has got a lot more data, but even metformin, what happens if you give it

to somebody that is perfectly healthy? Well, we don't know. And I think that that's gonna be an issue. And also, but if you look at statistics or if you do some calculations, the easiest success is going to come from something that is already existing for that purpose. So if you are a yeast,

and I already know that I can switch you into a modality where you live five times or 10 times longer, because you've evolved that modality to sustain moments where you don't have enough to reproduce, then that's by far the safest, right? Because it's there for a purpose. So then the question is, is there a human alternative modality

that is much longer lived? And everything points to yes. Right, otherwise we wouldn't see these little people in Ecuador not getting any disease. We have one guy that we just interviewed and he's 80 years old and he's been drinking and smoking every day of his life. And everybody else does not have a disease.

But we thought this guy is no way. And sure enough, never had any chronic condition and is drunk all the time, smoking all the time. So having the mouse data and having the human data now and all the other organism, we know that there is alternative mode. So if you're gonna intervene with drugs, my opinion is that intervene in the master regulator,

don't intervene downstream, right? So intervene very high up, let's say the level of growth hormone, releasing hormone, growth hormone, et cetera, because that's more likely to not interfere with anything intracellularly and not come up with as many problems as solutions. Right, so I assume that would be the same perspective and not come up with as many problems as solutions. Right.

So I assume that would be the same perspective with respect to supplementation. When you hear about NR and NAD and all of these kinds of protocols that people are adopting in the kind of biohacking world, do you see any efficacy or validity in playing around with that? or what do you think? Playing around with the research, yes.

Right, but I think that when you have, you know, this is why we go multi-pillar, right? So, yeah, you have to have the epidemiological studies, the clinical studies, the centenarians, you know, how many centenarians have been taking this for seven, eight years, you know, and what is the research on all these different organisms saying?

So I think the closest you get to four or five pillars supporting it and the more you can think about it, but it's hard to imagine, right? Any of this having that kind of support thus far. So yes, you could say, I see, take the 16 hours of fasting, right? Again, there's no doubt that that's very beneficial, but then you gotta wait 30 or 40 years

and then you get the meta analysis and people that skip breakfast have a problem. So you would never have known that for until you get to that point, that the famous, those famous studies of all studies. So then the question is for all these supplements and interventions, where's the data competing, let's say with what we already know can get you

to 100 to 110 now. So I think now we're starting, if you look at the study in Norway, the life expectancy increase, if you started just what it's about a third of what I described in the longevity diet, it was associated if you started at 20 with 11 to 13 years of life expectancy increase.

If you started at 60 was associated with eight to nine years of life expectancy increase, right? So now you had the fasting making diet at 12 hours a day, three times as much, are you're thinking 15, 20 years, not thinking, the data will suggest maybe 15 to 20 years of life expectancy increase. So you introduce a supplement, what if that decrease your lifespan by 20 years

after you take it for 30 years? So that's what you- We don't know yet. Yeah, you have to make sure that you don't, we're not in Las Vegas and this is people's lives, right? So you wanna take a chance like that on your life, much better to go with what we know than what we think is gonna happen.

My sense from looking at your work is that what's good for longevity also appears to be good for cancer risk reduction. Is there a point at which those two diverge? Because you're looking, you are focused in these two worlds. So what's similar about them seems to be a lot, but is there anything dissimilar or something that somebody who is suffering from cancer

or concerned about that should be doing a little bit differently from somebody who's purely focused on longevity? The only thing, the only concern is of course, the frailty and the cachexia, et cetera, when you are a cancer patient, right? So, and this is a big fight we have in every clinical trial in many places around the world.

So the physicians will say, I'm not gonna allow you to put this extreme vegan or close to vegan diet in between fasting, mimicking diet cycles. And we fight to get it in there because we're saying treat cancer first and get the cancer. And then if the patient is losing some muscle mass, that's okay compared to, let's say,

a very rapidly advancing cancer. So yeah, but it's a legitimate concern. And so we've been collaborating with Alessandro Laviano at the University of Rome, who's an expert in this and trying to get to the point. And in fact, in the clinical trial that we published last year, we were successful in doing that.

So the women that had breast cancer and receive hormone therapy with the fasting-mimicking diet, we dose the in-between diet in a way that it allowed them to maintain a very good lean body mass, muscle mass. Yeah, I noticed on your website, you have different kind of protocols or marching orders for different types of people with respect to FMD. So you have protocols for people

who are undergoing chemotherapy or about to undergo chemotherapy for pregnant women, for adolescents, et cetera. So how do those protocols like shift and morph depending upon your stage of life or whatever it is that you're kind of going through? Yeah, I'm not sure which website you're referring to. I can't remember.

Yeah, or maybe it was the other one. Yeah, I mean, obviously for diseases, we tell people, talk to your physician, right? And together with your physician decide whether this should be applied. And then in most cases, we like to have a clinical trial rather than improvisation.

But yeah, it's a discussion with your physician. And then for everybody else, again, different people, different situations. Some people are gonna need a dietician to work with. Some people are gonna need a physician to work with. Some people don't need anybody if it's just trying to lose some weight and maybe gain a little bit of reset.

But I think that, as I was saying earlier, the team is not there. Maybe it's not all necessary, but certainly a dietician that knows what they're doing should be consulted before starting. So we do this at the foundation. It's a nonprofit clinic in Santa Monica, and we have one in Italy.

And so we'd be happy to help anybody that, even those that cannot pay at all. So we have one in Italy. And so we'd be happy to help anybody that, even those that cannot pay at all. So we have a program for those that cannot afford even the visit. So I think it's good to figure out what you need. Right, so yeah. Is there, what is the ideal period of life

to begin this process? Like if you're a teenager, can you see benefits doing an FMD? Like what is your sense of what the science says in terms of younger people? Well, so we started a clinical trial in Gaslini Children's Hospital for type one diabetics at age 10 to 18.

And we've been talking to CHLA, Children's Hospital Los Angeles, about one for obesity and overweight control. So we've been talking to CHLA, Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, about one for obesity and overweight control. So we don't know. And this should only be tested as a clinical trial. In fact, in Gasolini Hospital, they're going to be inpatient, right? So nobody wanted to take a chance with the children and allow them to do it outside. But yeah, I think that it may turn out, and I don't know, but we'll test it for the possibility that these five days of a vegan diet will allow the physical improvement in the child,

but also psychological improvement, right? So it's an exposure to five days of a vegan diet with certain characteristics, which may be very different from what they eat all the time at school and at home. And so that's our hope, is able to reprogram the child psychologically and physically so that they eat better.

We clearly see this in adults, right? So that, yeah, some of the effect, the IGF-1, et cetera, is not psychological, but some of the effect we think is psychological, meaning that many of the adults are changing their relationship with food and they don't feel, they're not appreciating some of the bad food

as much as they did before. Because now I think that, you know, in science, we have something called food aversion. So some foods are associated with problems and you stay away from it because they cause some other problems, but there will be also,

probably there is also the opposite of food aversion. You feel so good with this vegan five days, fasting, mimicking diet, that your brain might be telling you, let's move in that direction. Cause I don't know why, but I felt better in those five days, right? It may be in the few days following.

So yeah, so I think that the child, my speculation is that the best moment to do it would probably be, let's say in a teenager, because that could really change your life, right? So we know that I wrote a book about children and longevity and we know that if you're overweight continuously from age seven to age 18, you have a fourfold increase

in the risk of developing diabetes. So intervening at that age could have even a bigger impact than- Right, as you're forming those dietary habits that will become more calcified with age. Habits, but also potentially epigenetic changes, right? So we know that, for example, you can do a methionine restriction

or a protein restriction in a mouse early in life and stop and they live longer. It's really remarkable, right? Is there a connection to the microbiome with that? I would assume there is some gut microbiome changes that take place that take root. It could be affected by the microbiome, but it could be the entire,

the brain and maybe cells in the brain and the adipocytes, the fat cells, everything is now reprogrammed into, okay, let's accumulate fat for potentially the rest of our lives. Because, and this is why some people, we see people that have been say overweight for 20, 30 years. And you were asking earlier, right? It takes a long effort to convert them. Their brain is completely set into, I have to get back to that weight because probably it makes sense, right?

So if you've been okay for 20 or 30 years at a certain weight, even though that is overweight, your brain is trying to bring you back because it knows that you're stable at that weight. And so trying to move it to another weight, it's a challenge. So yeah, so the child potentially could be condemned

for the rest of its life, of his or her life to be at this overweight status, which evolution set to protect them and not to hurt them. Right, and there's something metabolically that happens that creates like a set point that becomes very difficult to permanently alter. Like you can go on a diet, you can gain weight, you can lose weight, but ultimately,

you're gonna always settle back to that one place. Yes, and that's why I was saying, that's probably like the steady state that your brain recognizes as safe. Because everything was working when you were there, your reproductive system and everything else was working. So I know if I get you back there, let's say that you were 140 pounds,

a woman that is overweight, 140 pounds. And the system, if you've been there for 25 years, the system knows that you're doing okay at 140 pounds. And so it wants you to get back there, also because what we were saying earlier, of course it wants the reserves to be there. The fat accumulation is a part of survival, right? So you used to die if in those two months of no food,

you did not have that extra 10 pounds or 20 pounds of fat. So there is more than you were healthy at 140. There is also, I don't want to take any chances. Let's keep that fat. So we stigmatize, right? Obesity and yet obesity and even diabetes potentially is part of our survival mechanisms, right? So that's why it's so important to, instead of,

no, now we're talking about, oh, you can now say every weight is good for you. I think we need to move into, first of all, don't stigmatize it because it's part of now we're talking about, oh, you can now say every weight is good for you. I think we need to move into, first of all, don't stigmatize it because it's part of who we are and part of what the emperor penguins and so many animals have an obesity state periodically. So it's perfectly fine to be obese, but it's not perfectly healthy to be obese all the time.

And in fact, it's better to be a normal weight all the time. So, you know, instead of stigmatizing, let's remove that, but let's also try to help people make it to a weight where they can be happier and healthier. Is there a sense of the mechanism that's creating that set point? Because if you could really understand that, perhaps you could figure out a way of changing it. So metabolically you create a new sort of steady state for that individual that would be healthier than whatever it is that they're currently settled on. Yeah, I think we're getting pretty close

with the molecular mechanism, right? So for example, in mice, when we take the mice on a high fat, high calorie diet, and then we give them the FMD, the fasting making diet, and you see, and then we look later, four days later and 15 days later, they're still breaking down fat, right? So, and Laptin is down,

and so the whole system is now being rewired. Now, I think it's just a matter of details, but we have a pretty good handle of what controls these different states, either put fat away or break it down. And it makes sense, right? You enter the winter state and at some point you fast for long enough and that's your switch, right?

And so it's your switch that start breaking it down and continue to break it down. But then, as I was saying earlier, you fast for too long and now it's your thrifty mode. So now your system says, okay, now I'm gonna starve if I keep using fat at this level. So I'm gonna slow down my metabolism and I'm gonna try to burn the fat more slowly.

And that's why you need to have the science to get you, yeah, do the fasting and vegan diet, but don't go too long. Don't go too short because you don't enter this catabolic mode. Don't go too long because now you're gonna enter the thrifty mode. And so-

You have to thread the needle. You have to convert the switch and then allow it to be in the high metabolic fat burning mode. And for example, that carbohydrates that we include in the fasting-making diet, they could also be helping that, right? We don't know all the details of the molecular switches,

but it could be that one of them is very low carbohydrate, zero carbohydrate. This could be one of the triggers of thrifty mode. Okay, so now I am going into a very low metabolic mode because I don't want to risk running out of fuel. What is the role of exercise in all of this? It would seem that if you're vigorously exercising, obviously you're going to eat more food.

I don't know what the relationship between exercise is and metabolic health, but when you're burning more calories, maybe that changes the way that your body is dealing with all of this. Like how does that all play into longevity? Yeah, so it shouldn't be about calorie levels. It should be about the results of that, right?

So if you're losing muscle mass, then you probably need to eat more. So there is not a set level of calories that you should take on, and you probably should eat more proteins. So different people, different sports, different training regimen, different nutrition. And of course you need to try to stay as close as possible

to the longevity diet, but for some people, they might be too extreme to maintain whatever they muscle mass or the ability to train that they have. And so they have to tweak it so that you can do what you think is so important to you. And so get the longevity benefits and don't compromise what's essential for your sport. Well, I guess I'm thinking more in the context

of how exercise fits into longevity more broadly, because when you look at the Blue Zones communities, these people are not going to the gym and doing anything that's all that extreme. They're just living kind of consistently engaged, active lifestyles. When you look at the way we think about exercise in the Western world, it is going to the gym, putting muscle mass on,

or it's being an endurance athlete and going out and doing very long stuff. It seems that there would be sort of a middle ground where this is helpful in terms of life extension, but past a certain point, you're harming yourself or you're undermining your body's ability to persist. Yes, so as I was saying earlier, lots of people in the blue zones are frail.

It's okay. I mean, it doesn't kill you because they live long, right? But they're frail. And some of the people that might have record longevity probably have genetic predisposition to it. It's pretty clear. You know, I took a lot of trips in Italy and interviewing hundreds of centenarians

and I hear a lot, my sister made it to 95 and my brother made it to 92. And when you see that, there's a big genetic component. But the lifestyle- Except with Loma Linda maybe. That seems to be a unique case study. But Loma Linda does not have many centenarians, right? Loma Linda has longevity extension,

you know, worker Gary Frazier and others, but not necessarily lots of centenarians. So, yeah, so I think that when you look at the meta analysis for exercise, 150 minutes of exercise per week seem to be ideal. As you go to 300 minutes, you don't get any benefits. So now you wanna probably keep to around 150 and learning from the blues on in the centenarians,

I would say an hour of walking a day, maybe a couple hours of walking during the weekend, that seems to be a good compromise and also weight training. Yes, they didn't do it, but again, I see them all the time. They're pretty frail. So of course they were not frail

as when they were working in the field and doing manual labor, but when they stop, then they become very frail. So I think that's why it's so important to keep the weight training very light. For example, in a cancer patient, we have a video now, we utilize and there was 20 minutes a day of a very light, for example, in a cancer patient, we have a video now we utilize, and there was 20 minutes a day

of a very light muscle exercise, right? So just enough protein, light muscle exercise training, and then 150 minutes a week, which is not that much. And then one hour a day of walking and maybe a couple hours during the weekend. That seems to be pretty solid, no matter how you look at it, whether the centenarians in the blue zone people were right

or whether the meta-analysis are correct. But I think that's why you wanna get the common denominator. Let's just get in the middle of all of it. And does this violate anybody's rule? No, it doesn't. So I don't think a centennial will say 150 minutes of a little bit more strenuous exercise is gonna hurt you. And again, lots of them that like the shepherds,

they used to do five, 10, 15 miles a day going up and down the hills, right? They might not be exercise the way we view it, but pretty close, right? Pretty close. And even the women that stayed home in Seul when we interviewed them, they say, my husband used to go and walk with the sheeps,

but I would be in the field as I was a farmer. And that's a lot of energy that goes into farming. So yeah, I would say they probably did a good portion of exercise like activities. So walk me through your daily routine with food and exercise. What do you do in practice? Yeah, so I do, in breakfast, I have this almond,

almost 100% almond and cocoa spread, very low sugar. And then I have, it's called a frisella, I get them both from Southern Italy. It's a whole grain toast, but it's very particular, right? And then I, in the United States, in the six months that I'm in the US, my lunch is a, oh, sorry. And then I have an apple and tea.

That's my breakfast every morning. No coffee. No coffee. Coffee is my lunch, right? So that's all I have for lunch is coffee. In the United States. In Italy, I can't skip lunch. So I have lunch also in Italy.

And then if my weight is under control, then at five, I will have another frizzella and maybe another fruit. If my weight tends up, then I skip the snack at 5 p.m. And then my typical dinner will be, let's say about 70 grams of pasta, about 350 grams of legumes, beans, chickpeas, et cetera, et cetera.

And then about 300 grams of mixed vegetables, like green beans, et cetera. So pretty big dish, lots of olive oil and usually like a little piece of bread. So of course then I have fish maybe two times a week and that's about it. So that would break down, it feels like somewhere around 70% carbohydrate, 20% fat,

10% protein. Yeah, maybe 50, 60% carbohydrate because lots of nuts, olive oil. Yeah. Yeah, so those are of course more calories per gram. Yeah, so I would say probably about 60, 30, 10 to 13, 14% proteins, yeah. And when you're in Italy, more pasta?

No, not necessarily more pasta. More big, long lunches? But lunch is added. More wine. And of course, and then I gain weight, a little bit, not very much, but I gain weight by doing these three plus one, three meals plus a snack. And so, yeah, so now we're gonna test that.

My lifestyle on 500 people, let's see, randomize, let's see what happens. And all your blood markers are good and fine? I'm sure you're- No drugs. Of course, I come from a family of hypertension and all kinds of problems. So thus far I've never taken a drug.

Everything is in place. And how old are you now? 54. 54, not a gray hair on your head. No, I have gray hair. A little bit, but. And how often do you do the FMD then for yourself? I do the FMD maybe a couple of times a year,

but I'm pretty strict with the rest, right? So I think that in the trials we see that, I mean, the ones that are like the examples of health, they're not benefiting at least acutely as much as the normal people, let's say, right? Yeah, so I think that I'm already probably because of the longevity diet every day and the 12 hours, I do that, so I do 12 to 13 hours of fasting per day.

And so, yeah, so I think, and then the lunch skipping, so I have a double sort of daily fast, right? So I do the nightly fast, but I also do at least a partial daily fast. So I think that probably twice a year is good enough. Yeah, you mentioned that you have a study coming out soon. I mean, where is your focus clinically at the moment and what are you looking to kind of explore

in terms of your research? The moving it to standard of explore in terms of your research? The moving it to standard of care is my ambition for anything that is cardiometabolic, right? So diabetes, prediabetes, metabolic syndrome, I think we're getting very close to have the conclusive studies. And this is not gonna be conclusive, but it's certainly these three or four

that we're publishing now are gonna move in that direction where I think most people say, okay, I believe this. And then we're gonna need in some cases, talking to the FDA, in some cases, maybe not, maybe you have programs that are more lifestyle centered in support of the standard of care. But I think the FDA is now starting to understand, appreciate more that they have to allow

so this lifestyle intervention to go after the diseases because of the obvious very bad state we're in, you know, with almost 20% of the GDP going to healthcare. So yeah, so cardio metabolic and then slowly moving, I mean,, and then slowly moving, I mean, metabolic, and then slowly moving to cardiac, you know, prevention and potentially treatment. And then of course, cancer. So lots of trials going on for cancer,

and we're excited now. We just went to the FDA, filed an IND, and now we got sort of the okay to proceed with the FDA process for a food as a drug for hormone therapy. So in combination with a hormone therapy for women with breast cancer. So that's great because we thought maybe the FDA

is gonna be opposed to this, but I think they were very, they seem to be very supportive. That's cool. So that's good news. And I think, the more the merrier, I encourage every university that wants to do studies, we'll help them, we'll give them the FMD

and they can tell us the results, right? So I'm very enthusiastic about Alzheimer because of course of the brain rewiring that occurs during, I mean, now we have data from mice, but let's say that this is really changing the way the brain functions for five days. And so we like this idea that maybe that's what's needed for Alzheimer's.

So many drugs have failed. And so maybe a complete reset of the brain in some ways that may help, it's kind of gonna be a miracle, but certainly if it help people, I mean, people don't realize if we postpone aging by five years, we will cut Alzheimer's cases by half or so, right?

So all we need to get rid of almost half of Alzheimer's cases is to slow down the aging process five years. That's why I think that, you know, Dale Bredesen and others now are talking about, slow down the aging process five years. That's why I think that, you know, Dale Bredesen and others now are talking about, you know, the ability to detect 20, 30 years before. So now if you're 50 and you can tell that 80, you're gonna have Alzheimer,

then that's a great time to switch to longevity diet plus FMD. And we're, I mean, I'd be shocked if we don't give you the extra five years. But as I mentioned earlier, now we have data, not just our own, looking at 15 to 20 years of life expectancy. So yeah, so I think that's some of the enthusiasm for what we do here.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think with the advent of scanning technology and the ability to early detect some of these things is gonna be a huge thing as well. Because if you know early on, this is where you're headed and you have these tools that you're developing at the consumer's disposal to deploy to prevent them from getting that. I mean, it's massive.

Yes, and especially now, because I think that a lot of physicians were trained in this world, whether it was cardiovascular disease or diabetes or Alzheimer, there's nothing you can do about it. That's it, you're stuck with diabetes, which is shocking that anybody will say that,

but that's been the story for a long, long time. Now, I think everybody, including the physicians are starting to say, well, maybe not, maybe now we can do something about it. That's when then you wanna know, you wanna know that you're insulin resistant, or you wanna know that your calcium score is very high and you are at risk of having a heart attack,

et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, because now you have intervention, especially nutritional, that can revolutionize or certainly have a big, big effect on the risk. And so, yeah, good to know. I mean, it's massively important, heart disease being America's number one killer, the explosion of rates of type two diabetes,

Alzheimer rates also escalating alarmingly. Like this is where our focus needs to be at dealing with. These are the three big conditions that are plaguing the most people. Yeah, and don't forget that diabetes almost doubles the chance of Alzheimer's, right? So we already know the big factor in Alzheimer is the metabolic dysfunction.

So if it doubles that now, if you can intervene and now you have 70, 72% of people overweight or obese, and 10% of the population being diabetic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, that's just shocking. Shocking there is not a government center, big effort. And we're now presenting some of the calculations that how much you will save if you had the team

that I'm talking about. You will spend every dollar you spend, you get 10 back or five to 10 back. But then you get it back just with the diabetes. That's an incredible thing, right? So if for every dollar you spend in this team of dietician, molecular biologist, physician, psychologist, you get five back just for diabetes.

Then the rest of it is bonus, the Alzheimer, the cardiovascular disease, the cancer, right? So it's just, I don't have an explanation other than the unconspiracy conspiracy. There's just too many people that are making money the way it is and nobody wants to change it. And so the media is confusing the hell out of everybody. And people, they say, I don't know what to do every day,

low carb, high carb, high protein, low protein. Now they're gonna listen to me and say, oh, low protein now, this is a new thing. So yeah, that's, you know, we're moving away from facts and moving into fashion. And this is very convenient for people that are making lots of money the way the system is, because then if it's confused,

you don't change it. Right, yeah, from the tobacco industry, confusion is our product. As long as consumers are confused, they'll continue to purchase our thing and remain in the dark. And this is much harder because now food, I just mentioned pasta, bread, you know?

So if you eat the right amount, it's perfectly fine. And when you go to an excess, if you have, like in Italy, everybody was blaming sugary drinks for the overweight. The Italians are now at the same level of overweight as the Americans. And everybody was blaming junk food and the sugary drinks. When we looked at it, it turned out that it was pasta, bread, the potatoes, fruit juices.

They had one pound a day of this, right? But yet everybody was blaming something else, right? So I think that it's much harder to fight because most of these things are perfectly fine for you until you have one pound a day or two pounds a day of it, right? So now it becomes a problem. So then the company that sells bread or pasta or potatoes

say, you're crazy. There's nothing wrong with potatoes. I agree. But yeah, once you now have 10% extra every day, that's all you need, not even 2%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two percent, an extra 50 calories a day. And if you look at the last 40 years,

that's all that has increased, calorie intake. It's not about protein. When we had the low fat period, people gained weight. We had the low carb period, people gained weight. So, but we now have hundreds of calories more than 50 years ago that we take in per day. And that's what does the trick.

And of course the composition also matters, right? So if you have the red meat, et cetera, et cetera, now we know that, as I just mentioned from this meta analysis, so it's not just about the calories, but certainly the calories are a good place to start. I do think the pasta in Italy is different though. When you eat it there, I don't feel,

I feel fine after eating it there. Whereas when I eat it here, I feel lethargic and tired after eating it. I don't know if the flour is different or what's going on. Like, do you have a sense of that? Or is it just, I have a romantic, you know, I'm having a romantic experience being in Italy and enjoying it.

No, I'm gonna make the minister of agriculture very happy by saying, buy Italian pasta. It's available in the United States. And so we didn't set up to advertise for anybody, but maybe, right? It's possible that there are certainly different pastas and made different ways and with different gluten levels, with different grains.

And I think the best one is probably the one that with the whole grains. Sure. The much lower gluten, that's what we used to use back in the days, maybe 70 or 80 years ago. And those are probably preferable, but most of the pastas out there are high gluten

and they're not using these old grains. Not anymore. Well, I think a good way to kind of end this is with a few thoughts for the person who's new to all of this and is thinking, "'Wow, this is some great information. I'm excited about this. I wanna try an FMD.

I should get my blood work done, figure out where I'm at. Like what is like a good on-ramp for the uninitiated to begin to start thinking about food, diet, lifestyle, longevity? Probably get my book. It's all, I don't make a penny out of it. It's all going to the- It's right, you give all the money to-

100% of the funds go to charity or to the foundation. And I think the book is pretty extensively explaining everything we talked about. I don't think I have anything that I would like to change or that maybe emphasize more the personalization. I don't think I did a that I would like to change or that maybe emphasize more the personalization. I don't think I did a good enough job in the original book talking about if you're gluten sensitive, if you're sensitive to tomatoes or you're sensitive

to something, you probably need to avoid some of these things and find an alternate. And next year, I'm gonna come up with, I published it in Italy and now it's coming, the cancer book. So all that we do focus on cancer and now nutrition can make a big impact in fasting and mimicking diets,

but also nutrition make a big impact on cancer patients, both prevention and treatment. So that's coming maybe about a year from now. Well, I think you're performing an unbelievable service at a great time of need in terms of health. So I applaud you, I'm at your service. I appreciate the work that you do, and I'm excited to see where this science takes us.

I think it feels like we're on the precipice of some pretty amazing breakthroughs as the convergence of all these different research modalities and technologies become more robust and widely available. I think we're gonna see some really cool stuff happening. Yes, yes. And thank you for doing an amazing job on your side. I think the information,

we could do all the work in the world and if it doesn't get out there explained correctly, it's like, like Peter Andello used to say, it's like it never existed. Yeah, well, I appreciate that. So pick up Valter's book, The Longevity Diet. And if they wanna learn more about you, your website, ValterLongo.com or where should they go?

I think the foundation, Create Cures Foundation. And again, there's a createcures.org. There's a clinic that you can visit. And yeah, so createcures.org is probably the best information. Facebook also, Professor Walter Longo English site. We have lots of articles that we publish and everybody not just what we do.

Yeah, cool. And enjoy Italy. Thank you. Yeah, you go six months, six months. Six months in Italy now, rough six months of Italian summer. Yeah. I'm jealous my friend.

Well, I appreciate talking to you always. You're always welcome here and enjoy your summer and stay in touch. Thanks Rich. friend. Well, I appreciate talking to you always. You're always welcome here and enjoy your summer and stay in touch. Thanks, Rich. Sure. Peace. Bye. That's it for today. Thank you for listening.

I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way,

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