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

GLP-1s are the fastest growing drug trend in health right now. But a 30-year fasting study says there's something every user needs to know before their next dose. Dr. Valter Longo has spent 30 years studying aging and longevity at USC, running over 40 clinical trials on what actually makes people live longer and healthier. What he found challenges almost everything the wellness industry is pushing right now, from 16-hour fasting windows to high-protein diets to GLP-1 drugs. In this episode of Habits and Hustle, Dr. Longo breaks down the science behind the Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD), why 12 hours of fasting beats 16, and what centenarians around the world actually eat. He also shares his latest research on cancer, Alzheimer's, and why your body already has the tools to heal itself if you stop getting in its way. It's time to ask the right questions about the hottest longevity trends that are costing people more than helping them. What's Discussed: (2:01) Who is Dr. Longo and the training behind his research. (3:18) The hypothesis behind why we should be fasting differently. (5:39) What a Fasting Mimicking Diet actually contains and why. (7:27) The difference between the longevity diet and the FMD. (8:30) Why 12 hours of fasting beats 16 every time. (11:18) The hidden risks of skipping breakfast nobody talks about. (15:47) How the FMD resets your body's locked-in weight. (21:12) How the "recipe" behind the FMD was built over 20 years. (29:51) Why the cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes versions of FMD are all different. (35:11) The trial showing nearly double survival rates in cancer patients. (38:04) Dr. Longo's real take on protein and why less may mean longer life. (51:24) How often you should actually do the FMD. (53:08) What the research says about fasting and women. (56:40) Dr. Longo's honest breakdown of GLP-1 risks and side effects. (1:16:19) Findings beyond fasting that slow aging. (1:23:21) The four things the FMD triggers that nothing else does. (1:36:31) Why nutrition beats exercise for longevity and why that's not the full story. Thank you to my sponsors! Kion: Visit getkion.com/habits http://getkion.com/habits for 20% off. AirDoctor: Head to AirDoctorPro.com http://airdoctorpro.com/ and use promo code HUSTLE to get up to $300 off today! AirDoctor comes with a 30-day money back guarantee, plus a 3-year warranty (an $84 value) FREE! AX3®: Visit www. AX3.life http://www.ax3.life/ to get a 20% discount on your first order with promo code HUSTLE at checkout. Magic Mind: Head over to www.magicmind.com/jen http://www.magicmind.com/jen and use code JEN at checkout. Find more from Jen Cohen: Website: www.jennifercohen.com https://jennifercohen.com Instagram: @therealjencohen http://instagram.com/therealjencohen Books: www.jennifercohen.com/books https://jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements https://jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements Find more from Dr. Valter Longo: Website: https://valterlongo.com/ Instagram: @prof_valterlongo https://www.instagram.com/prof_valterlongo/ Facebook: Prof. Valter Longo https://www.facebook.com/profvalterlongo/ YouTube: @Prof. ValterLongo https://www.youtube.com/@Prof. ValterLongo Fasting Cancer Book: www.valterlongo.com/professor-longos-new-book-fasting-cancer/ https://valterlongo.com/professor-longos-new-book-fasting-cancer/ Longevity Diet Book: www.valterlongo.com/the-longevity-diet/ https://valterlongo.com/the-longevity-diet/ The Weight of Longevity Book (Italian): www.amazon.it/ https://www.amazon.it/dp/8856699923 Fasting and the Longevity Revolution Documentary: www.fastingandthelongevityrevolution.com/ https://fastingandthelongevityrevolution.com/ Dr. Longo's Foundations: US: www.createcures.org/ https://createcures.org/ Italy: www.fondazionevalterlongo.org/en/ https://www.fondazionevalterlongo.org/en/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hi guys, this is Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

• 0:09Jen Cohen?

  Welcome to Habits and Hustle with me, Jen Cohen, where we break down the mindsets and strategies behind extraordinary lives. Today, I'm joined by Walter Longo, one of the world's leading voices in longevity science. He's a biochemist, director of the USC Longevity Institute, and the creator of the fasting mimicking diet, backed by over 40 clinical trials. For more than 30 years, he's studied what actually helps people live longer and healthier. Not trends, not hype, but what the science consistently proves. And what he's found challenges a lot of what you're hearing right now, from intermittent fasting, to high protein diets, to GLP-1 drugs. In this

• 0:52Jen Cohen?

  episode, we break down what really works, what doesn't, and the simple science-backed approach your body is designed to respond to. He also shares how he lives himself. No shortcuts and no extremes. This one will change how you think about aging and your body's ability to heal. So let's get into it.

• 1:18Jen Cohen?

  We today have a very special guest on Habits and Hustle. We have someone that I've been wanting to have on the podcast for probably like three or so years. I've heard exceptional things about him, and I'm sure you guys have already heard of him. His name is Dr. Walter Longo. He is a doctor, and he's gonna actually, you know, before, I'm not even gonna tell you, he's gonna tell you himself. Dr. Longo, what kind of doctor would you say you are? You obviously do a lot of longevity, cancer research.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. So I have a PhD in biochemistry from UCLA next door here, and undergraduate degree in biochemistry in what's called postdoc in neurobiology. So it's a training that you do after the PhD in neurobiology. But I've actually been trained in a lot of different disciplines, you know, from endocrinology to oncology to, you know, gastroenterology, or at least, you know, the clinical research part of that, right? I'm not, I'm not a medical doctor, I don't practice medicine, but I certainly do a lot of clinical trials, human clinical trials, and all these topics.

• 2:27Jen Cohen?

  Well, I got familiar with you, well, a little bit before, when you wrote the book Fasting Cancer.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  This is my latest book.

• 2:34Jen Cohen?

  That's your latest book?

• 2:35Speaker 02

  My first book was Longevity Diet, which was

• 2:37Jen Cohen?

  That was a few, that was like five

• 2:38Speaker 02

  2018.

• 2:39Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, like seven years, seven or eight years ago.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 2:42Jen Cohen?

  But when did you write Fasting Cancer? What did it come up?

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Fasting Cancer came out very recently, like six months ago, yeah.

• 2:48Jen Cohen?

  So I was familiar with you, of course, before that, but that was the book that really kind of struck my, like, the whole idea of cancer to me is the most, the scariest thing in the world, right?

• 2:58Speaker 02

  To most people.

• 2:59Jen Cohen?

  To most people. It's like the biggest fear of everybody. And so that, when I saw the title, I was like, oh, my God, like, I need to delve into all of the stuff and all the research. Because you've been doing so much research on longevity and, obviously, aging and fasting. I mean, can you tell people, just, let's start with the thing that you're most known for, right? Which is the fast mimicking diet, longevity diet. What is kind of your whole hypothesis that we should be fasting? It's, what should we be doing in terms of, like, how do we live the longest and healthiest?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Right. So that's really my focus and the focus of the institute that I started at USC is how do we make people live as long as possible, as healthy as possible, right?

• 3:48Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  That's what we've been working on for 30 years. And even before then, when I was at UCLA, I was a student of Roy Wolford. And Roy, at the time, was the most famous person in the world. He was a medical doctor at UCLA. And he was focused on how do you make people live longer, healthier? And, yeah, so I think that after all these years, when we came up with, I came up with something called the Longevity Diet. And then I came up with something called the Fast and Mimicking Diet. And so these were also, we were also thinking about things that are feasible, right? That people can actually do and not just something that's very beneficial. For example, we can go into it if you want, GLP-1, right?

• 4:25Jen Cohen?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Most people abandon them, you know, within a couple of years. And you, for those to be effective, you need to do it permanently, right? Or certainly very, very long term. So, so to us, That's not feasible, right? That's not a good idea. It may work, you may get very good effects short term. But then what did they achieve? Maybe I achieved that I gave you side effects. And then now you regained all the weight and you're even unhealthier than when you started. Yeah, but so the longevity diet is what you do every day, right? And the fasting making diet instead is what can you do once in a while, right? Is it possible that you can just do, in this case, five days of a vegan diet that mimics fasting, right?

• 5:08Speaker 02

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

• 5:43Jen Cohen?

  Glycerin, I saw it has, does it have glycerin or?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  It's glycerol, yeah, and the glycerol, the Jabo glycerol is, for example, people, going back to GLP one, right? So GLP one receptor agonist, most of these drugs, you lose two to one or three to one parts of fat for lean mass, right?

• 6:04Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  So you're losing a lot of muscle essentially while you're doing this. And and so with the fasting making diet, we don't see that, right? And and one of the reasons is because it's an evolved process that has the job of just making you lose the fat. You know, you don't wanna lose, if you think about history and you're fasting, you do not want that organism to be losing muscle, right?

• 6:26Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  You wanna have it so that the muscle is protected. And one of the ways the muscle is protected is glycerol, right? So the fat is broken down and glycerol now can be used to make sugar for the brain. And instead of taking muscle to make sugar through what's called gluconeogenesis. So now the glycerol is used to feed the brain. Instead of the muscle being used to feed the brain, or certainly the amino acids released from the muscle.

• 6:53Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Used to feed the brain, right? So this is just one of the many tricks that we have in the fasting making diet to make sure that we get lots of benefits and no side effects or very little side effects.

• 7:06Jen Cohen?

  So let me start from the beginning. Okay, so you first write this book in 2017, 18, The Longevity Diet. Now, is the longevity diet, is the diet the fast mimicking diet? Are they one and the same?

• 7:19Speaker 02

  No, the longevity diet is everything, including the fasting making diet.

• 7:24Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  So the longevity diet is, for example, a pescatarian diet.

• 7:27Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  A fish plus vegan or fish plus vegetarian, actually, probably. And those seem to optimize longevity, but also minimize frailty, right?

• 7:39Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  So people can live long, but can live long frail. For example, the Southern Italians are famous for many having a lot of sense. Centenarians, but the Southern Italians are also some of the most frail people in Europe, right? So you don't wanna have, you wanna live until 100 and be sick for 30, 40 years. Or even be frail. I mean, you know, you cannot go up the stairs or you cannot go for a walk or you cannot do lots of things that you wanna do. Yeah, so that's what this longevity everyday diet is. And then it has all the components, for example, 12 hours of eating and 12 hours of fasting per day, right? So we're staying away from the 16 hour, 18 hour fasting for lots of reasons, which we can discuss.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  But we picked the 12 hours because of safety, feasibility, people can do it. And but also because of, you know, it just takes longer for it to be effective. But in the end, it can be very effective without the problems that the 16 hours causes it.

• 8:43Jen Cohen?

  What's funny because, actually not funny, I mean fasting for a long time was very trendy. A very trendy, like the intermittent fasting, the water fasting. And I feel lately it hasn't been as, like it hasn't been as popular, right? Because people are coming back and saying it's not something that people like to do, whatever. And I was noticing that the people that were like super into fasting, they were like shortening their windows from like a four hour window. Like it went from like the sixteen hour window to the eight, like to the, there's other people, they're only eating within a four hour window.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Some within a two hour.

• 9:20Jen Cohen?

  I was gonna say some are even in a two hour window.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:23Jen Cohen?

  Or not eating at all for five days with a water fast. Why did, when did you realize and what are the, what are the benefits of, or what, why now have you noticed that doing twelve hours is just even better than doing a sixteen? Or these long stretches of diet?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  I mean, the longevity diet is, is based on five pillars, right? But, but meaning that it's not just, a lot of diets are based on epidemiological data, right? You look at these big studies of who eats this, which stat, and how do they compare? The longevity diet is based also on centenarians. What did the centenarians all over the world, Okinawa, La Malinda, California and, and Sardinia, et cetera, et cetera? What did they eat? And then, how do you make a mouse live longer? How do you make a rat live longer? How do you make a monkey live longer? And so those are all important in addition to the, to the epidemiological data, to come up with something that it's less likely to be affected by the new study, right? Somebody's, every day is something new comes up.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  And if you do that, you're gonna go crazy because then each, if you, if you look at any study, they're always gonna prove everything and everything against it, right?

• 10:33Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Uh, and the opposite. So, so from the very beginning, uh, we say twelve hours, I say twelve hours. Because, uh, for example, I was noticing there was old data, but very good data. They were saying if you skip breakfast, you live shorter with twice or much higher levels of cardiovascular disease, right? And so I say, you know, I, I, then I started thinking, this is really strange. Is it just by about the breakfast or is it about the sixteen, eighteen hours of fasting?

• 11:01Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  And then, you know, there were also data showing that after twelve hours, your cholesterol, your circulating cholesterol level go up, the LDL levels go up and they keep going up the longer you fast. And then I was looking at data, and this is like ten years ago, all gallstone and gallbladder operations, women that were fasting for fourteen, sixteen hours, they were twice as likely to need, uh, and, and people with gallbladder disease, twice as likely to need an operation. So, yeah, so all of that from the very beginning. And then the feasibility, right? I was a student of Roy Wolf for back in the nineties and, um, and he was talking about something called calorie restriction, which is what if you severely restrict your calorie all, every day of, of the year?

• 11:47Speaker 02

  And then I was noticing that nobody was doing that, right? And, and so I always thought, you know, it, it may be good for the lab, but it's not good for people, right?

• 11:57Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Because, you know, to, to do calorie restriction, you have to be losing a lot of weight. I'm, I'm already pretty thin. Imagine me minus thirty pounds, right? That's what calorie restriction looks like. Yeah. So I thought it cannot be something that pushes people all the time to the edge. And, uh, you know, so the twelve hours made sense scientifically, clinically, and also made sense feasibility wise. It's just easier and, uh, most people can do it. And I think I got it right, you know? And now we're starting to see the data indicating it may not just be skipping breakfast. It may be any sixteen hours. And there's a study published last year indicating that any time you do sixteen hours,

• 12:39Speaker 02

  you are putting yourself at twice as much, uh, twice as higher, twice higher risk for cardiovascular disease and also overall mortality, increase overall mortality.

• 12:49Jen Cohen?

  Really? What about, is it, how about the fact that you just end up eating more? Because when you, I, I, for me, when I skip, let's say breakfast, let's just go with the breakfast thing. When I don't eat breakfast, I'll just end up eating those calories anyway later on during the day. Day because I'm just like I'm making up for it like my body also has a I don't. What do you believe in like baseline like do you feel like everyone has a baseline weight that you can only modify so much where it gets to be uncomfortable? Or do you think that we can all? Or is it not about that at all? I mean, I know you take it from a health perspective, but for the weight piece of it. Cause a lot of people are doing the fast for weight as well.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Right, right. Yeah. So first of all, the the breakfast keepers, uh, there was no other information. It was just people that skip breakfast.

• 13:36Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  They do worse, right?

• 13:38Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  And for a long time, the idea was all they do worse because they have bad behavior there. But it doesn't look like that, right? It doesn't look like that's what it is. Yeah. So I think that it probably is about fasting, right? It for so long, right? It's just too long and and somehow the body is particularly if it involves if it's sixteen hours and involves skipping breakfast. The body, you know, has negative responses, right? It does. It it turns into a modality. Maybe it's the cholesterol, maybe something else, but something is negative about it.

• 14:10Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  And then, you know, the this your second question about the the weight. It's, yeah, the body likes to go back to a weight that at which you were stable, right? So if somebody's overweight thirty pounds and you stay in this thirty pounds overweight long enough. The body likes that because it understands that that's a good situation, right? It may not be modern in modern time, a good situation, but it was for the history for a hundred thousand years.

• 14:36Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  You know, Homo sapiens have been around. So so it tries it tries to keep you there. It tries to keep you there. But that's where the fasting mimicking diet kicks in, right? So for example, in the documentary, the, um, you know, uh, it's gonna be shown very soon. Uh, the and the premiere is gonna be shown in the doc in the documentary. Uh, we're showing that the body likes to go back to a certain weight where it's stable. And so i- if you if you try to move it, and so in documentary, we're showing a doctor, right? I in this doctor, we, um, that had was overweight, obese, hypertense for a long time. And so we put him on the longevity diet, on the everyday longevity diet. And the doctor, after nine months, doesn't change a lot.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  He loses a couple, maybe three or four pounds, but doesn't change a lot. Then we start the fasting making diet. So again, he had been about maybe ninety kilograms in a very steady way. And so the longevity diet, this like maybe Mediterranean diet, but taken to even more extreme, doesn't do anything, right? So now we put him on the fasting making diet. So in about six months, the following six months, eight months, he does three cycles of the fasting making diet. And then you see his weight comes down, his glycemia comes down, his blood pressure comes down. Now he gets rid of, he was on Ozempic and other drugs. He gets rid of drugs and he gets rid of not just the glycemia drug, the diabetes drug.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  He gets rid of the hypertension drugs and his weight goes back to normal, right? So probably what happens is that we are locked, people are locked in that, you know, in their weight modality. Until there is a very strong message switch, right? Get out of it, right? Get out of it because, you know, now, you know, you kept the fat. And now the three cycles of the fasting making diet come around and it just pushes you to, to start burning fat versus accumulating fat, right? So, so, yeah, so people are stuck, but they can get out of it. The fasting making diet is certainly a good way to do it.

• 16:40Jen Cohen?

  So the fast, so the fast mimicking diet can actually trigger you to get out of that baseline diet that you've been stuck with?

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, the fasting making diet can do that. But now I think it's important for people to understand that if you go too long, right? If, if the restriction is too long, and these are studies that have been done for a long, long time. Now you can get into something called the thrifty mode, right? And the thrifty mode now is tries to save energy as much as possible, right? So if you fast for too long, that doesn't happen. The body doesn't switch into a catabolic, into burning fat. If you fast, if you fast for too short, if you fast for too long, now the body starts to be worried about, I may have to save energy because I might die like this, right? If I don't start putting away, keeping the fat, then I'm I'm gonna be in trouble. And so now you enter this thrifty mode.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  And this thrifty mode, we're worried that may be epigenetic. And that may be why so hard for people, once they get into this fat saving mode, it may be so hard for people to get out of it. Because basically, everything tells you eat and go maybe in a lower energy expenditure mode. And that's what it was shown, meaning you are burning less calories.

• 17:53Jen Cohen?

  Right, right.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you enter that, then you you got a problem, you got the opposite problem. Yeah, so if you do too short, you don't enter the catabolic mode. If you do too long, you enter the energy saving mode. And this is why people underestimate the power of understanding the science.

• 18:09Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  And and you know, understanding that you have to be do it just right. So then you you unlock it and and you can keep going. And then you can go to a to a different weight, right? Which could be thirty pounds lower than you.

• 18:22Jen Cohen?

  Right, it's a very delicate balance, it sounds like.

• 18:25Speaker 02

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

• 18:47Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Uh, and so, you know, and there is no more pressure, uh, natural selection pressure than starving to death. Meaning that evolution is very much aware of the danger that could kill you. And then it wants to eliminate those as much as possible. And certainly starving to death is probably one of the common, most common ways that people have died in the last, you know, a hundred thousand years.

• 19:11Jen Cohen?

  Wow, so like, so can you just give us a very brief description? And when people who don't know and they're not familiar with what the fast mimicking diet is? Like, what is it, what does it contain? Like, like if someone to say, hey, Dr. Longo, what is this fast mimicking? What do you mean by this?

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so the fasting making diet, the the, when I first developed it, like twenty years ago. I started developing it. The idea was to first make it fasting mimicking, right? And so, and then you use a lot of, again, low protein, low sugar, relatively low carbon, not too low.

• 19:45Jen Cohen?

  So your body, just to interrupt you, so people understand. So when you say fast mimicking, it's basically your body thinks it's in fast mode. But you're, you're basically giving people little things to eat and drink to supplement. So they don't feel that like ravenous feeling and deprivation of a normal fast. Would that be can?

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, the deprivation, but also I think that it's very important to, the deprivation also includes just the opportunity to stop and have a meal, right? So if people, I think there is a problem with, you know, you need to have a certain amount of foods and calories, but also the routine of having breakfast, of having lunch, of having.

• 20:29Jen Cohen?

  Psychologically.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, psychologically, that's very important. And then, of course, lots of other things that, that need to be in there. Like I mentioned, you know, the, the salts and all of that. Yeah. So then the fasting mimicking diet has the, I mean, the molecularly, and without going into the details, there is four markers, you know, IGF one, insulin like growth factor one has to go down, glucose has to go down. And then something called IGF BP one, which is an inhibitor of the growth factor has to go up. And then ketone bodies, they have to go up, right? So ketone bodies are the, these byproducts or fat breakdown. And so this is where ketogenesis, the word ketogenesis come from.

• 21:06Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 21:06Speaker 02

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

• 21:28Jen Cohen?

  Right, right, right. Okay, yes.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  So then, then, then the idea was let's match the fasting mimicking properties with the very healthy ingredients of the, you know, of the longevity diet, let's say, right? So what did the, can we take ingredients from Okinawa, from La Malinda, from, from Italy? And then use those to make the fasting MDFMD.

• 21:50Jen Cohen?

  So is there like a, so when you do a fat, like you basically, was it a lot of trial and error to figure out the exact, like you had, like, like to kind of figure out what to do, like the balance, like 20 years ago? How were you kind of figuring this out? Like, what was your team doing? Were they trying different foods? Were they incorporating? Were you trying it in rats? Like, how did you kind of figure out this, this ratio of salt or glycerol? Or whatever you put in that thing, like to figure out that perfect balance of how your body doesn't feel deprived, or it's not burning lean muscle, because that was the other concern, right? Like, people don't want to burn lean muscle, so that's another thing. How did you kind of figure out the, the measurements? Like, how did you get the recipe, so to speak?

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we are, we've always focused on the genetics of longevity and the genetics also of weight loss and weight gain. So we already started from understanding the connection between ingredients and the consequence of having that ingredient, right? So then it was just a matter of testing it out. So for example, you know, we knew that we had to have low protein in the diet. And now people shouldn't mix the longevity diet with the fasting making diet. You know, the longevity diet is normal protein. The fasting making diet is very low protein, right? But it's not just the protein, but the amino acid content. So meaning that you could have a relatively low protein content, but if it comes from one source, especially animal source,

• 23:18Speaker 02

  the amino acid that we want to have very low, and usually there is what's called essential amino acids. The amino acids are high, are too high, right? So it's not just protein level, but then protein type. And even between two vegetable sources, you can have a two, threefold difference in the content of certain amino acids, right? So then that's why, you know, you want to have, so we were more thinking about amino acid level, right? So, yeah, and then we're picking protein sources, just to give you an example, with the, with the, with the amino acids. Protein sources that will contain low levels or, or higher levels of those amino acids. Yeah, so then, then everything in the F M D goes through that reasoning, you know, whether it's, you know, fat.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  And so you could have any fat, but then you, you, you have olive oil and it's got monounsaturated fats. And, and, and, um, and so each ingredient was tested in mice. Uh, and then we're looking for the effects in mice. Then first we, you look at the, at the short term effects, right? What happens in a couple of weeks, but then eventually we started doing the lifelong, uh, studies, right? Then, and, and that's really, those are the very expensive ones. And they're the ones that you need to then have a chance to make somebody live longer, healthier, right? So for example, a few years ago, first we did it in normal mice. And then we did it in mice that were fed a very bad diet, right? So we wanted to test both, right?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  And, um, and, you know, for example, the, the mice that had a very bad diet, uh, this was published a few years ago. We showed that, you know, they get very big, right? And they get very unhealthy and, and, um, and it's really remarkable how unhealthy they become. Because I thought, yeah, what's a western diet gonna do to a mouse, right? I thought maybe it'll make it a little, a little shorter. It almost cuts their lifespan in health, right? And it just completely messes up cholesterol level, heart function, inflammation, you know, insulin resistance. So, okay, so this is a bad diet, right? Fine. And the mice become very big. Then we start with the fasting making diet once a month for five days. And we thought it's probably gonna make him a little bit better, right?

• 25:28Speaker 02

  We thought the, the, just mice on the normal diet and mice on this really bad diet. And the mice on the, on the bad diet for 25 days a month and a good diet for five, five days a month. They're gonna be in between. They were not, they were like identical to the, the mice on the good diet. And, uh, so that was very surprising to us, right? So just five days a month of this F M D, how can it be? You know, this, you know, 25 days, it's five times as much bad diet than good diet. And yet the five days were enough to bring everything back. Cholesterol, heart function, glycemia, uh, insulin resistance, uh, you know, name it. So now we just finished a 500 people trial in Southern Italy. We overweight and obese people, I cannot talk about the results, but they, but they, but yeah, because it's not published yet.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  But the, um.

• 26:15Jen Cohen?

  Are they good?

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Well, we'll see, but but the idea is, is it possible that, you know, it's not really about good food and bad food. It's about the role of the bad food. So we we think of bad food as something that every day does a little bit of damage to you.

• 26:32Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  But that study show that it's not true, right? Because otherwise, I, you know, you got twenty five days of damage every month.

• 26:38Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  So then you don't come back from that with five days. And so, um, you know, either is there is a regenerative process that brings you back? Or maybe the food is just pushing you into a modality, which then accelerates the aging process. So it's not doing damage, but it's just pushing you, let's say, in insulin resistant modality, in an inflammatory modality, et cetera, et cetera. And that eventually, if you don't unlock it every month.

• 27:06Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Uh, then that that makes you age faster.

• 27:10Jen Cohen?

  So, okay, so a couple, you you said a few things. So one question I have is, how have you revamped the diet from twenty years ago to now? Like, what are some of the findings that you have kind of revised? That you know now that you didn't know back then?

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, twenty years ago, it was the the mouse version, right? So.

• 27:31Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  And we use it for cancer. You know, now there is a lot of fasting making. There is one for Alzheimer that is very different from from the one for everyday people. It's very different from the one in cancer. Cancer is much lower calories.

• 27:44Jen Cohen?

  So let's talk about that. I'd love to. So you basically took the diet and kind of tailored it to disease specific. So there's a there's a specific fast mimicking diet for an Alzheimer's patient versus a cancer patient versus.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Autoimmunities, uh, yeah, versus diabetes, uh, versus.

• 28:01Jen Cohen?

  Wow, talk about that. I'd like to know the difference. How much how much different can they all be?

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, for example, the cancer one is much lower calories, six hundred kilocalories. Because with the cancer, we need to get a quick, uh, quickly in and out, meaning that the cancer patient gets chemo and the chemo is gone within a few days. Let's say it gets chemo. It could be getting chemo, could be getting immunotherapy, kinase inhibitor and lots of different. And a therapist. So, uh, so we need to try to achieve these changes in IGF one, etc., that I talked about before, quickly, right? Uh, and so, so because, you know, we, we don't have the time to, uh, to get there more slowly. But for Alzheimer, for example, is the opposite. We have high calorie. We, we add an extra

• 28:46Speaker 02

  three or four hundred kilocalories per day, because now we're dealing, we just finished a trial in, in, in Italy. Uh, we're dealing with people that may be as old as eighty five, ninety, and we cannot give them a six hundred kilocalorie, which is what we, so, uh, for normal people is eight hundred to eleven hundred kilocalories per day. For cancer is six hundred, and for Alzheimer is fourteen hundred, right? So, yeah, because we don't want to push somebody who's eighty five

• 29:10Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  to a very restricted diet. And, and, you know, that was probably a good idea, because so far we've had very little, you know, high-grade toxicity, meaning like the type of toxicity that makes the doctor worry, right? So it's minor things, like a little bit of a headache and things like that, but you, you really don't see the, we, we haven't seen very much of the grade three, grade four toxicity, which makes worry, uh, makes clinicians worry.

• 29:38Jen Cohen?

  So what do you do in the Alzheimer's fast-mimicking diet, like besides adding more calories? Are you just adding bigger portions? What are you adding? Any specific ingredients?

• 29:49Speaker 02

  And, and we're adding lots of, I mean, in the Alzheimer is not just, uh, calories, it's also other things. So we add caffeine, and it's a ketogenic supplement that we actually give, give patients between the cycles, right? So, so they did the cycle, and then all day, twenty-five days in between cycles, they got this three, four hundred kilocalorie ketogenic supplement. So high fat, very healthy, most of it from nuts and olive oil. But there was also caffeine and some, some other things in there that have been associated with, uh, uh, protection, uh, from, from cognitive decline. So, you know, Alzheimer is a little bit special because there's really nothing out there that works, right?

• 30:31Speaker 02

  And so we felt, let's just go all the way, uh, which we usually don't do. Because then if you put all these things in there, you don't know what worked.

• 30:39Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  But we thought, especially because we were talking to neurologists, I remember six or seven years ago. And they were telling us, you know, good luck, right? Because by the time somebody's got early Alzheimer, I mean, their, their brain is so damaged that it's gonna take a miracle for anything to bring it back, right? That's when we started thinking, okay, let's just go with everything we can. And yeah, we'll see, but in mice works very well. But, but you know, I think it's, it's a lot rougher because in mice we start early, right?

• 31:10Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  But yeah, if you're starting an eighty two year old patient that is already been diagnosed with Alzheimer.

• 31:15Jen Cohen?

  It's not helping.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. We don't have high hopes.

• 31:18Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, it's, you're right past the point. I'm also asking because my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's recently, a year ago. I'm looking, thank you. And I'm looking for anything. And the truth of the matter is like, once you've kind of hit some, a place, there's nothing that you can really reverse. Yeah.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  I mean, it's, everything is possible, but it's extremely complicated compared to other diseases, right?

• 31:42Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Once the nervous system is, is badly damaged and you know, your brain undergoes atrophy and a lot of the, the brain cells are lost. So yeah, it takes, it would take like a, a, some remarkable regenerative process.

• 31:58Jen Cohen?

  To do it.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, to bring it back and, and bring it back without doing damage to, to the very delicate nervous system, right? So it's not just you gotta bring it back, but you know, you also have to save what's left that is still working.

• 32:14Jen Cohen?

  Exactly.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Alzheimer patient can still function relatively normal physically, right? Not, not all of them, but the, many of them can. And so you have to preserve all of that. Don't, you cannot add to it. And then, you know, you have to restore learning and memory, but. It's just, it's a, it's a rough, you know, enterprise.

• 32:34Jen Cohen?

  It is. What's interesting though, people who have been diagnosed with cancer have been prescribed fast mimicking diet. It's been, it's been kind of known in research to, to have had pretty remarkable results on cancer patients.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there are many trials now on fasting making diets and cancer. And the, the one that is most studied is triple negative breast cancer for good reason, right? The triple negative is much more aggressive. Mortality is very high at five years, right? And, and that's one of the most common cancers, you know, in the planet. So the multiple trials now are showing patients that did chemotherapy alone versus, I mean, patients did fasting making diet plus chemotherapy versus chemotherapy alone, they do much better, right? Survival wise.

• 33:25Jen Cohen?

  How much, how much, what's the percentage?

• 33:27Speaker 02

  At four years, about three and a half, four years, it was about nearly twice as high the survival in the FMD plus chemo versus chemo alone.

• 33:36Jen Cohen?

  Oh, wow.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then the new study, which is published by the Vernieri Group, is showing progression free survival, which is not survival, overall survival, but it's like how, how long you, you live without the cancer progressing, right?

• 33:51Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  So they're showing improvement in that and also improvement in what's called complete pathological response. And which basically is what they call a surrogate for overall survival, right? And so this is much higher in the patients that do a fasting making diet compared to the, you know, what they normally expect from, from the database, right? So, so, um, yeah. So then multiple trials are now showing with some of the most metastatic in the metastatic cancer, the most aggressive and the, the initial trials are, are very promising. Now for the earlier type of cancer, if somebody is going to receive, let's say, surgery, that's a different story, right? So we're, we're trying to be maybe more careful

• 34:35Speaker 02

  and we're saying, you know, if you have a 98% chance of being cured. Maybe live alone, right? You know, just take your 98% and don't. So the foundation that I started, so they follow lots of cancer patients every year. And usually they put them on a longevity diet, a 12-hour time recipe eating and lots of other things. You know, muscle training and aerobic exercise, but they don't. We usually, in the early-stage cancer patients, we don't. Not that we have any evidence that it's not good for you, but you know, certainly it makes a big difference for mice and cancer. But we're just saying, until there's a trial that is showing superiority versus the therapy alone.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  We don't, we just don't feel like, you know, we should recommend it.

• 35:26Jen Cohen?

  What about protein? Because in the, you said like the longevity diet, A, you said it has five pillars. We talked about the centarian pillar. We didn't talk about the other four. But that has fish in that, it's a, you said it has fish in that diet. Fast Mimicking, it's vegan, like you said. What is your take on protein? Because do you, like, do you believe that too much protein can actually age you quicker?

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm writing a review now on proteins, but then. And it's interesting, right? Because if you look at overall, all the science that has ever been done. If you, you know, proteins, what's called calorie restriction, what I was talking about earlier. Which is just normal calories, you reduce it by, let's say, 20%, 25%, right? That's the most successful anti-aging method ever done, right? If you look at, you know, thousands of studies, right?

• 36:22Jen Cohen?

  By reducing your calories by 20%.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  Reducing it not below excess. I mean, reducing it is normal calorie intake, let's say, whatever, 3,000 kilocalories, then you reduce it by 25%, right?

• 36:32Jen Cohen?

  And that's the best aging, that's the best way to slow down aging.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  That would beat any other intervention. Cause there are literally thousands of, of, of studies, including human studies, showing remarkable effects, right? And so. So if you think about the second one, it's probably protein restriction. And or if you think about the the only one that doesn't require you to eat less is protein restriction. Mice, rats, you know, and the monkeys that live longer, they were calorie restricted, but also protein restricted. Yeah, so I think if you look at all the studies, the the indication would be that it is sufficient, but low protein diet. That is mostly plant based is gonna make you live longer or a lot longer.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Now, if you look at the epidemiological data only, which is what most of my, you know, the most of the podcasters, let's say, out there talk about. Then, you know, it's a little, you you could get lots of different answers, right? You could get high protein is good for you, mid protein is good for you.

• 37:39Jen Cohen?

  That's why I'm asking, yeah.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  So.

• 37:41Jen Cohen?

  Especially in the fitness and wellness world, right? We're all told that we need to be eating like a lot of protein, especially in midlife, right? Like to keep, you know, lean muscle on, like all you hear now is protein, protein, protein, creatine, creatine, creatine. Like anything to kind of increase your protein.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:59Jen Cohen?

  So you're saying the opposite, you're saying if you wanna live longer and age better, stop eating so much protein.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Yes, for sure, stop eating so much protein, but have enough protein and have proteins that, you know, include proteins, let's say, two thirds of very good quality amino acid profile, right? So for example, if all your protein is coming from legumes in your law, you're gonna have a problem, right? Yeah, so so and and I think the vegans, you could be vegan and very healthy. But you need to pay attention to what you're eating, because otherwise you're gonna end up being malnourished, right? So it's it's a lot easier, and this is probably why the doctor has always recommended, yeah, eat a little bit of everything.

• 38:40Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Because it's much less likely that somebody eats meat once a week and fish two or three times a week and, you know, and chicken. Those are gonna do pretty well, you know, now they're not gonna do as well maybe as those that are vegetarian and and they have a more restricted diet, but they're generally gonna do pretty well. So so then you have to, you know, you have to look at what you're trying to achieve. So if you're trying to achieve a long lifespan and, you know, but you also want the strength. I think it's it's probably good to, I go back to the pescatarian diet, like pescatarian, pescovegetarian.

• 39:16Jen Cohen?

  Right, like fish.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Fish, but also some eggs, maybe up to three a week, three eggs a week.

• 39:22Jen Cohen?

  Only three eggs a week? What if you eat three eggs a day?

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, the the data indicates that, you know, after three days eggs a week, you know, in general. I mean, let's put it this way, they're not lots of, we're going back to epidemiological studies. Lots of studies say it's fine, right?

• 39:40Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  If you have, if you don't have too many eggs, but some of the biggest ones are showing that past three eggs a week, you're starting to see a mortality increase, right? Now, you know, it's a, it's an association. It doesn't mean the eggs were causing it, but that's not a good start, right? If you start seeing, you know, this particular food is not, eggs are normally not associated with living long. Meaning it's like, you know, legumes are and and whole grain wheat is and, you know, nuts are and and olive oil is and.

• 40:10Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  But the eggs, you don't see it. So it's either neutral or negative. That's, that's, that's usually where you see them. Now, red meat is you always very negative. And then white meat, it's negative to neutral. And eggs and and dairy is usually, you know, neutral to bad. Yeah, so I think that probably okay for most people, like if somebody has to have lots of eggs. It's probably okay, but you know.

• 40:37Jen Cohen?

  But maybe not, maybe not. If you're saying like it's either it's neutral at best.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  Is neutral at best.

• 40:44Jen Cohen?

  At best.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:46Jen Cohen?

  So, but okay, so dairy, like Greek yogurt, would that be neutral?

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Generally, lots of the the data will put them in the in the center, right? Neither good for you. So for example, this is very nice work done at Harvard, looking at what are the ingredients that are going to get you to seventy or seventy five healthy? And and, you know, and you have the, in this case, fruits.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  I'm not, you know, I, I think it should be more limited because if people hear, you know, fruit is, is at the top, then they can, you know, eat too much fruit.

• 41:21Jen Cohen?

  Yes, that's.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  But, but I say, you know, vegetable and, and fruit and nuts and legumes and whole grain were at the top. And then, you know, the bread meat and the processed meat was at the bottom.

• 41:33Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  And then, you know, and the lots of the, the eggs and the dairies and the yogurt and in the center, right? So probably, you know, i- i- if you're not looking for a record, uh, you know, i- if you, most people are not looking to get the record longevity and they're basically, it's, it's not a bad compromise to, uh, to eat, you know, yogurt or, or any, and of course it's very, it, it, it's high nourishment, right? So then certainly in the, as you get to sixty five or older or sixty or older, those are probably the type of ingredients that might help you, uh, not become frail. So, so then there is also the idea of different stages of life.

• 42:13Jen Cohen?

  For different foods.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  For different food and food quantities, right?

• 42:17Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  So, once you get to a certain age, then most people start losing weight and that weight loss is usually associated with living shorter, right?

• 42:24Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  So that's why when you get to sixty five and, and for somebody could be sixty, for somebody else could be seventy, right?

• 42:30Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Chronologically, chronological age. So when you get to the point, you wanna stay there and stay strong, right?

• 42:35Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, so for, to stay there, stay strong, some people might have to have, you know, yogurt and, and, and eggs or more eggs and more yogurt. Some people may not, yeah.

• 42:46Jen Cohen?

  I guess you're right. You gotta think about all the different, like, there's so many different benchmarks that you're like, or like different variables that you're looking at, right? To like what, what will make someone healthy. But you're saying that, which fish, you say fish is neutral?

• 43:02Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 43:03Jen Cohen?

  Fish is positive.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Fish is neutral or positive, meaning like.

• 43:06Jen Cohen?

  Neutral or positive?

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. The pescatarian, the pesco vegetarian, they tend to do better than everybody else, right?

• 43:12Jen Cohen?

  What about salmon that's farm raised though? Like fish that's farm raised, is that still neutral to positive?

• 43:18Speaker 02

  We don't know that, right? So we know there are toxins associated with it. And so usually the recommendation is maybe eat it once a week, right? So if you have a farm-raised salmon, yeah, once a week. So you limit whatever toxins that are associated with the fats in the salmon. And because if you think about so many food, so much food.

• 43:40Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  It's got toxin in it, right?

• 43:42Jen Cohen?

  So much.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so if you went around and analyzed, so for example, I tell people, most people don't know that brown rice has got arsenic.

• 43:51Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, arsenic for sure.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so I mean, in, you know, and the mercury and the, so there's in the acrylamide. And so, and a lot of it is in vegetables, right? And, and so, yeah, so I think that.

• 44:03Jen Cohen?

  So would you say?

• 44:04Speaker 02

  You also have to say, I gotta eat something. So maybe rotate a lot, right? And don't eat the same foods all the time and don't eat salmon, the same farm-raised salmon three times a week or the same tuna twice a week. Because, you know, the mercury, mercury poisoning is a reality. And so, yeah, so then instead of scaring people with, you know, don't eat anything. Because then people go into the modality and say, well, I can't, you know, I cannot have anything. But yeah, you can, but try to, you know, if it's salmon, farm-raised, make it once a week.

• 44:36Jen Cohen?

  So what about, because you said, you said that brown rice does have arsenic, which some of us know. Do you recommend to people to have white rice then and stay away from brown rice because of that? Poison?

• 44:49Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a poison, right? But, you know, if you had, let's say, once a month, it's got maybe twice as high as some of the white rice, right? Or two or three times. It's not like 20 times higher, right?

• 45:02Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so I think that the bigger problem comes in when somebody and you, I, I meet these people all the time. They say, I eat it three times a week.

• 45:11Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  That's when you're gonna get in trouble, right?

• 45:13Jen Cohen?

  That's when you get in trouble.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  And that's when you may get, end up with arsenic poisoning like mercury, right? So if you, if you start having swordfish and tuna three or four times a week, that's gonna be a problem. If you have tuna once a month, you're probably gonna be okay.

• 45:26Jen Cohen?

  You'll be okay.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  And.

• 45:27Jen Cohen?

  What do you eat? What does your diet look like?

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, my diet is really everything that I preach, right? So I have a lot of whole grains in the morning, for example. Then I have like an almond spread. Both of those I get from Southern Italy and I store them. And then, you know, I have some fruit and then I skip lunch. And, you know, and it's not necessarily a good thing, right? But that's an example of a compromise, right? So for me, whenever I don't skip, I've been doing it for 20 years. And that's the only way, together with the fasting making diet, that I can keep the weight that I want.

• 46:08Jen Cohen?

  That you want.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. So going back to your question earlier, you know, my weight is probably set like 20, 25 pounds higher than I am.

• 46:16Jen Cohen?

  But you've changed it.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  To keep it there, I have to do lunch and I have to do the FMD. And I have to do the longevity diet, right? So then at night, I have this big, you know, minestrone with the legumes and lots of vegetables and olive oil and pasta. And but, but, you know, I have maybe 75 grams, 80 grams of pasta. And, you know, yeah. So the mistake people make is to have a lot of these starches and little nourishment, right? And you gotta turn it around. You have to have a lot of vegetables and legumes and little pasta. Or rice, right? White rice or brown rice. And, yeah, those are the ideal combination, right? And that's how people used to do it because they were poor.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  And that's all they had. You know, the minestrone is all over Italy, right? Because you have the Genovese, in Liguria, you have the Genovese minestrone. And in the south, and what it was is people were poor. And at certain point, they're running out of food and they were like just grabbing anything they had.

• 47:22Jen Cohen?

  And putting it in.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  And put it in, right? So that you get an extra meal. So that's gone now, right? Even in Italy, nobody does that anymore. And now you have this big, you know, rice dishes and pasta dishes and whatever else, right? The starches that, you know, of course, you're gonna make you gain weight and they're gonna make you insulin resistant.

• 47:43Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  And they're gonna make you die earlier.

• 47:46Jen Cohen?

  So how often would you suggest people even doing fast mimicking diets? Like, what's the most optimal, to get optimal results, to live the longest and healthiest? How often?

• 47:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that it depends, right? So, for example, in the diabetes trials, it's every month for either six cycles or 12 cycles, right? These are patients that have diabetes. But the case that I told you earlier, this doctor only did it three times, right? In six months. And it still worked, right? So I think that, yeah, you could start, the doctor, in this case of a, in the case of a diabetes patient, could start with every month, and then move to once every two months, and then every three months, and take it from there. You know, for everybody else, I think maybe like, three times a year.

• 48:34Jen Cohen?

  Three times a year?

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe even two, maybe I do once or twice, right? But I skip lunch, you know, and I do the longevity diet, and I do everything else. So, yeah, to me, it's not as, I don't need as many. But, you know, most people are overweight and obese, and they have lots of other issues. And so, as those issues come around, so for example, Stanford just published on Cohen's disease, the University of Miami published on the FMD and ulcerative colitis, and the University of Rome published on FMD and iposmia, the loss of olfactory function, smell and taste, right?

• 49:16Speaker 02

  And the ability of the FMD to restore taste and smell loss. So, yeah, meaning every, different people have, or don't have different problems, and then they have to decide how to use the FMD based on where they start from, based on baseline, right? Where their starting point.

• 49:38Jen Cohen?

  What about fasting in women? Because there's a lot of chatter about fasting not being great for women, hormones, especially as women are in middle age.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean fasting, again, is good, bad, and neutral. It doesn't mean anything. We just mentioned like sixteen hours, eighteen hours, probably not good. Twelve hours, probably very good. And yeah, so I think that probably is very good for women and, you know, at least fifty percent of the patients in the many forty clinical trials that are being completed now with the fasting making diet. I would say the majority are women and they did very well in the great majority of the trials. So yes, working very well for women. I think what we still need to define, so for example, we just finished a trial on polycystic ovarian syndrome and one on endometriosis and we're gonna be publishing those soon.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  And yeah, I think the timing is still, you know, somebody's period, for example, when is the best time to do it?

• 50:39Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  You know, so we were talking to endocrinologists and some of the female and specialized endocrinologists saying, you know, maybe there is a period where it's not gonna work very well, right? So I think soon enough, we're gonna start publishing, you know, don't do it in this moment, you know. But yeah, beside maybe that one week a month where maybe it'd be ideal to do it, I would say that the effects have been remarkably positive.

• 51:09Jen Cohen?

  Can fasting help prevent cancer? Or can it help when you only when you've already been diagnosed and help potentially with the diagnosis?

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there is no doubt that diet prevents cancer, meaning like if you have the perfect diet versus the

• 51:24Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  the bad diet. And now in mice, we were able to, you know, show about a forty-five percent in female mice, forty-five percent reduction in tumors lifelong, so big, big effect. And but also it looked like not only it was a forty-five percent reduction, but many of the tumors were benign versus malignant.

• 51:45Jen Cohen?

  Oh.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's a dual effect and they were, they happened later, they were benign and they were much lower, like overall. But yeah, then, you know, whereas with some of the diets like Mediterranean diet. We know there is about like a seven percent lower cancer risk, right? More cancer mortality risk lifelong, which is not a lot, but you know.

• 52:07Jen Cohen?

  Better than nothing.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  It's better than nothing. And yeah, so for for these newer diets and more, you know, at least scientifically, diets that have expectation to be much stronger, like fasting making diet, longevity diet. We need to do a lot more work, right? So so now we're starting to do the first trials with, you know, for example, the Calabria trial. They would just finish also had an arm that was doing both the longevity diet and the fasting making diet.

• 52:32Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  So so now, you know, we're about to publish several studies in mice that where we do the longevity diet. You know, for the entire life. So so we'll see now what what they show on cancer prevention. But yeah, the expectation is cancer will be lower or much lower. Or certainly it'll happen later and it'll be, you know, some of the malignant cancers will will be. Will show up as benign tumor.

• 53:01Jen Cohen?

  So let's talk about the GLP ones. We touched upon at the beginning of the conversation. Do you think there's any potential side effects to GLP ones? Like, could you think a GLP one could possibly show it's a cancer causing medication peptide later down the road? Because people don't know, right? They they've been using it for diabetes for so long or for many years.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:22Jen Cohen?

  And now everyone and their dog is using it for weight loss.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  Right, yeah, people don't know. And everything is possible. It's also possible that it's going to reduce cancer, right? So so that's will be the the expectation based on.

• 53:35Jen Cohen?

  Because it does help with inflammation.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  It may help a little bit with inflammation, but it it just lowers your your your risk factor for cancer, which is obesity and diabetes, right?

• 53:49Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  So those are risk factor for cancer. And so if you reduce that, you know, then.

• 53:54Jen Cohen?

  It could potentially.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  For example, cardiovascular disease, now we know that GLP one, at least the initial data.

• 54:00Jen Cohen?

  Could help.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  It reduces above 10%, right? So so people on on GLP one have about 10% cardiovascular disease.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  Reduce risk. Now, you know, in my new book, which is not in English yet, it's called The Weight of Longevity. You know, I'm comparing it to just a Mediterranean diet. And I'm saying the Mediterranean diet seems to have a 30% decrease in cardiovascular disease. Right? So now, don't show off, please don't show off the GLP-1 10% effect.

• 54:31Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  When the Mediterranean diet is showing 30%, right?

• 54:33Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  And it doesn't have any side effects. And now we're saying that we could probably do much better than the Mediterranean diet. But even if you just use the Mediterranean diet.

• 54:42Jen Cohen?

  You get 30%.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  It's so much better, right? You say you get the weight loss and you get the, and you get lots of, lots of benefits. Yeah, so I, so I think that there is a long list of side effects of GLP-1. And now the new studies are showing something very scary, which is you do it. You're gonna need to continue to do it. If you stop, you're gonna regain the weight. And when you regain the weight after you stop, you regain the weight much quicker or quicker than people that have lost the weight with diet. Right? So, and, and at least the, the potential mechanism that I saw was that you're not making your own GLP-1. Because, you know, you're getting the drug.

• 55:24Jen Cohen?

  It's like when you take testosterone, your body stops taking testosterone. So it could be the same thing.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  It could be the same thing, right? So this is what the scientists that published the paper, I think speculated, or they have some evidence for it. But either way, it was clear that

• 55:39Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  They regain weight more quickly. And so, and probably because they were no longer functional, right? So, so it's really condemning you to be stuck. It's a little bit like addiction, addictive drugs or, you know, addictive foods, right? So all of a sudden now, I give you something that you can never get away from.

• 55:59Jen Cohen?

  A hundred percent. Also, though, it's.

• 56:03Jen Cohen?

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

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Not only that, but now what you regain is fat, right?

• 56:26Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 56:26Speaker 02

  So we're not even counting that you're regaining the fat more quickly.

• 56:30Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  But you're not regaining the muscle or you're getting a lot less muscle, right? Yeah, so that, that really may condemn you to be stuck on this drug that has got so many side effects for the rest of your life.

• 56:42Jen Cohen?

  I know.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  Or certainly for decades.

• 56:44Jen Cohen?

  It's scary.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, scary. And, and you know, I think what's problematic, very problematic, is that the physicians are not saying this, right? The physicians are now saying, well, you know, and I, I can see that when somebody has tried. I mean, so if you, if you, if you look at our foundation, you know, sometimes we have doctors, we have PhDs, we have nutritionists. Sometimes they cannot do it, right? So they could take somebody and, and for most people, great. They do very well and they, they become better and they become healthy. But some people cannot. And so I think it's, it's fair to say, hey, I tried everything. We've been trying for three or four years and, and it takes two to three years.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  As, as that happened for the doctor that I was talking about earlier, it took them two years to get back to normal, right? From diabetes, hypertension, obesity to a normal person, right?

• 57:39Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  And so, so if the team, let's say in his case, worked on him for three years.

• 57:45Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  And after three years, he's just still stuck on, on all these problems, then I think it's okay to be on GLP-1, right?

• 57:52Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  And I think it's okay to.

• 57:54Jen Cohen?

  If you tried everything.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  I tried everything, but not the way it is now. You go to the doctor and the doctor, you know, says, you know, I don't know if you want to spend, spend the money and go to a dietitian.

• 58:07Jen Cohen?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  The system is not really there to, to provide what we provide as a foundation, which is, or the, the clinicians provide the foundation, which is, I'm going to follow you, you know, I'm going to be your friend for the next two or three years.

• 58:23Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 58:24Speaker 02

  And so that. We find a way to get you back to to full health that that's not reimbursed. That doesn't exist, right? And so either you have the money to pay for it. Or you don't get it. And what you get reimbursed is the drug.

• 58:38Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  And so the doctor says, come on, you know, I don't know anything about nutrition and I cannot follow you every couple of weeks and to see how you're doing. I cannot be your friend.

• 58:46Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  You know, so I'm just gonna give you a drug to begin with. That's what the that's a big problem, right? Then I'm just really surprised that the media are not talking about more and the doctors are not talking about it more. Say, hey, you know, please reimburse the rest, right? Because once the rest is reimbursed, then it's a fair game to say, hey, you need GLP one, right? Because at least get that 10% lower cardiovascular risk. Because you're not gonna be able to do the Mediterranean diet. You're not gonna be able to do the longevity diet. You're not gonna be able to do the FMD or whatever. And yeah, so then then we do the second best and the drug is certainly valuable in that sense.

• 59:24Jen Cohen?

  Well, no, I've seen myself with friends of mine who are on it and they lost a lot of weight and they looked great. And then when they got off, could they thought they thought, oh, great, you know, now I'm at my lower than my my goal weight. And they gained the weight plus more within a month, within a month. People were gaining like 40 or 50 pounds in a month.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:48Jen Cohen?

  That's scary.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  But even more scarier scary is what is the chance that somebody can stay on it for five or 10 years?

• 59:57Jen Cohen?

  I know, exactly.

• 59:58Speaker 02

  Is that because I think it's over 70% abandon within two years, right? But what about five years or 10 years? Because if the answer is 95% are gonna abandon, then you know, then you're making a big mistake, right?

• 1:00:13Jen Cohen?

  Right, because everyone's gonna be overweight again.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  Everybody's gonna be overweight, but with all the side effects, they come with those five years of of the drugs, right?

• 1:00:21Jen Cohen?

  What are the side effects that you've seen?

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  Well, for example, NAYON, so this is ischemia, optic nerve ischemia. And then there is, you know, certainly studies showing both things, but certainly. In multiple studies showing depression, anxiety, some studies are showing positive effects, but some studies are showing very bad

• 1:00:42Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  negative, like doubling of suicide rates. So now who's right? I don't know, but certainly it's not good when you see all those

• 1:00:52Jen Cohen?

  Wow.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  you know, studies in major journals indicating twice as high, you know, anxiety and depression and suicide rates. So, yeah, so then I'm not saying they're, they're, you know, conclusive, meaning all we know that they're, but that's not, you know, a good association to, to see those type of studies. And so, yeah, then we just say the muscle loss, potentially bone density, although that doesn't, you know, again, the muscle is very clear, the bone density is not very clear, some studies are showing no, no loss of bone density. But then again, it's pretty short term, right? So what if you did it for 10 years, you know, then are we going to see then the bone density loss?

• 1:01:37Jen Cohen?

  Exactly.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  We're gonna see osteoporosis increase.

• 1:01:39Jen Cohen?

  For sure.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  Somebody that has been on it for 20, 30 years. Yeah, so i- it's just a minefield. And, and I think, you know, people are just walking through it, right?

• 1:01:51Jen Cohen?

  Walking through it. What about the fact that, like you said, people get off of it or abandon it, as you put it, within two years? Why is two years the point where the people are just getting off of it?

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is the papers that I saw, multiple papers, they don't show why. So it could be that you're satisfied with what you do.

• 1:02:08Jen Cohen?

  Right, or you think you got it, you think you got it under control.

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  Or it could be that you're depressed, or it could be that, that you have big side effects, right? So, you know, the doctor, for example, that we followed had major side effects, right? So, yeah, so there is a lot of gastrointestinal side effects and lots of issues. So, yeah, but for all the reasons combined, that over 70% were no longer doing it.

• 1:02:30Jen Cohen?

  What about the fact, what, what did you think, or have you heard that after a time period, people's bodies tend to acclimate on the drug? Because like people can eat through their appetite, like, you know, like I have a lot of people I know. Who worked great for a year, year and a half, even two years. And now they're just eating back to where they were because they've, they've, like their body became so acclimated to the drug. So unless you keep on increasing it and increasing the dose, you're kind of screwed.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's certainly, uh, uh, you know, in need of more studies, but also if you think about drugs, GLP one is one case, but also statins, right? They're, they're really, we think of drugs as very sophisticated, right? So there's a lot of studies behind it and you know, now you have a molecular target and this is going after this receptor of GLP one. But the drugs are really dumb, right? Because now you have the human body and this is like this perfect orchestra with every moving part. You know, there is three and a half billion years in the making, right? Three and a half billion years of evolution. And so now you have that and what we were saying earlier, right?

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  The fasting response and the fat is broken down and, and it's preserving, it's making glycerol. So the glycerol now is preserving the muscle. So this is very sophisticated and now you're replacing it with, keep pushing the same button, right? Okay. So you, somebody's sitting there and pushing GLP one button all the time, right? If you think about it, it just doesn't look good, right? Compared to this sophistication of the human body that now you have somebody pushing the button. So i- i- in the great majority of the cases, it's just a matter of time before you're going to get bad results from somebody pushing the same button 10 times a day for the rest of your life, right?

• 1:04:17Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  So, so, yeah, so.

• 1:04:19Jen Cohen?

  Well, they keep on coming out with a new, like it was first the GLP one. Now there's like, it works on two receptors with threzepatide. Now it works on three receptors.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  But the more you do that, the more you do that, probably you have now a potentially synergistic trouble zone, right? Because if one drug can cause problem, now two drugs may cause five times more problems, right? Or at least the potential, we don't know. Because now you're interfering with two pathways, right? And then if you have three, now you probably, you know, there's probably, I don't know, I'm speculating and you know, but. You know, now, as you imagine, let's take a car. Yeah. Right? And let's take, I mean, a good example is that, you know, you, you take a, a, a laser that is, that is very powerful, right? And you start using the laser running through your engine and every part of your car.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

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

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  It's just, it's just on its own, and it's just, you know, I put a hole in there, and that's not the way you wanna make a car go like longer. Wow. Yeah, so you're setting your car up for, for breaking down, right? Right. And, and so, yeah, so I think at the theoretical level now, and hey, I'm saying at the theoretical level, but yet we know that every drug out there eventually, so the new data, for example, a statin shows that people that have less than one seventy or so in LDL don't live longer, you know, don't have a decrease in mortality if they take statins, right? So, so I think that, and these are like JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, you know, meta-analysis, right?

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  This is not like one study. These are studies that are looking at all the studies. Right. And they put it together and say, hmm, that's really interesting. People that have, you know, LDL one sixty, LDL not total cholesterol, they seem to do better than people that have very low cholesterol. So I do explain that, right? And, and so, yeah, so I think at the beginning, you get the story, oh, you know, this should be in the water, like statin should be in the water, they're so good for you. And then twenty, thirty years later, you get the story, it's like, no, the meta-analysis, so maybe you shouldn't have taken it. So, so, yeah, so I think that.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  Again, I'll go to the GLP-1 thing. If you need it, you need it, right? So, so some people.

• 1:07:25Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  For example, the studies, I think it was New England. It was showing that for people that already had cardiovascular event, there is no doubt the statins were good.

• 1:07:34Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  It reduced your mortality by 10%, no doubt. So there was very clear even after 20 years. But there was the only group that seemed to be benefiting from the, from the statins. And yeah, so I, I, I think that we need to have a system that is, that can help you do it the right way. And then with all the tools, like including the FMD, the 12 hours and lots of other things, you know, that can help you because, you know, if it's not feasible, if you're asking people to do something, like Italians and the Mediterranean diet, you know, probably less than 10% of Italians are doing the Mediterranean diet. Why, it's just, people don't like to be told what to eat, right?

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  And, and that includes me telling them what to eat. This, but this is why we're saying, okay. Yeah, you can have the longevity diet and this is what we do in the clinic. Or you can have the FMD, right? And look at the mouse and look at the people, right? You know, they, they have a crazy diet and, and at least they do the FMD, right? So.

• 1:08:36Jen Cohen?

  Let's talk about a mouse for a second, right? Like, has there been any like data, anything talking about that how a, does a mouse correlate to a human? Cause I've seen studies that say that doing tests on mice doesn't necessarily correlate to how a human will behave or perform.

• 1:08:54Speaker 02

  You know, it correlates. It doesn't necessarily mean that humans are going to behave the same, respond the same way, right? So, so, yeah, so most of the drugs that you see out there have been tested in mice first, right? So immunotherapy, chemotherapy, just name it, cancer drug, diabetes drug.

• 1:09:09Jen Cohen?

  All the drugs.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  Everything goes to the mouse and, and usually that's how it starts. So it starts with, oh, it works for the mouse. And then let's come up with a drug that they'll do the same in people. Yeah. So the mouse is a very good model and.

• 1:09:22Jen Cohen?

  What else can you test on?

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  Well, you could test that in rabbits, you can test it in rats. You can test that in some cases, they require monkey studies, you know, because it is so dangerous for a person. And so they may require a, you know, a primate model.

• 1:09:39Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, but those are, you know, expensive and ethically, you know, the medical field is trying to move away.

• 1:09:48Jen Cohen?

  From that.

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  From, you know, from using monkeys to.

• 1:09:52Jen Cohen?

  But is a mouse and a rat the same thing, I would imagine?

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  No, you know, no, the rat for certain things is a better model, right? And the mouse is a better model for other things. It's easier to work with mice. But I think that, for example, we have shown the FMD cycles being able to cause reprogramming and stem cell dependent regeneration in mice, right? In multiple, so the pancreas, the gut and different systems. And so a year ago, we published for kidney, we published in the rat. And so we now show that we can damage the rat kidney and then start the fasting making day cycles and the rat kidney goes back to being functional after six FMD cycles.

• 1:10:37Speaker 02

  So that was particularly important for us because it's just unlikely that you now tested in two different models and you're gaining very similar effects. So that makes your case much stronger moving to people. Of course, we already done forty human clinical trials. But in fact, in that trial, we had the small human trial for chronic kidney disease patients.

• 1:11:00Jen Cohen?

  Oh.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  And it worked, right? It worked very well for them too, right? So it's preliminary, but it worked. So, yeah, I think that having studies in mice and rats and then in humans is the best way to go.

• 1:11:14Jen Cohen?

  Wow, okay. What about, like, you have these, you have these labs, both in UFC and in Italy? Right now?

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, the lab in Italy is still open. I probably close it by the end of this year, but it's too much. But, yeah, the Italian lab was focused on oncology, molecular oncology, so cancer.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  And the US lab here, USC, is instead focused on aging and regeneration and fasting and longevity diet, et cetera.

• 1:11:44Jen Cohen?

  What other findings have you found in all of your work beyond fasting that help with aging backwards or slowing down the aging process?

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so yeah, the longevity diet. So now we're going to publish several papers on that. And then, you know, protein restriction has always been one of the things that we worked on. For example, some years ago, we used an Alzheimer's mice that have this genetic mutation that give people Alzheimer early. And so it's called triprotranogenic mouse. It's got three bad mutations that make this mouse develop this bad learning and memory. And then we use the, in the first paper, we use, we alternated one week of very severe protein restriction and one week of normal proteins, right?

• 1:12:38Speaker 02

  We just kept going back and forth and it made a lot of, it wasn't as good as the fasting mimicking diet, but it was very good, you know, very good effects, right? So, so just alternating very low protein diet with normal protein diet, week, one week on, one week off, that made a big difference. Yeah, so.

• 1:12:58Jen Cohen?

  How much of a difference, like 20%?

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  Oh, you know, we looked at lots of different things, but, but, you know, in some of the cognitive testing, it made a big difference, you know?

• 1:13:09Jen Cohen?

  Really? But how much? Could you give me an example? Like, give me a data point.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Well, you know, usually we look at restoration of normal function, right? So, so in some cases, it was making it, bringing it back to normal, right?

• 1:13:21Jen Cohen?

  Oh.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so now you see a big effect of the genetic mutations. And then what you want to see, you have a, you have a control mouse and you have a genetically modified mouse that's got this cognitive impairment. And then you do the alternate protein restriction. And then many of the, really several of these changes went back to normal or close to normal or, you know, no longer is bad, right? So a range of effects.

• 1:13:49Jen Cohen?

  What's your take on all these supplements? Like, or peptides even, you know? Everyone's taking all these peptides for longevity, right? You have so many. Do you have any, like, do you have an opinion on all these things?

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it goes back to what I said earlier, which is the sophistication of the system versus something comes in.

• 1:14:13Jen Cohen?

  Yes, so like a GLP one.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's the same argument, right? The exception would be, like in the case of rapamycin, right? So rapamycin is a drug that blocks a particular pathway, which we and others have described as being pro-aging or aging accelerating. So if the peptide or whatever, or the drug goes after a master regulator, then I think it could be triggering this sophistication, right? But those are very rare. So most things you do are gonna, you know, act downstream somewhere. Meaning like they're blocking something that is down there, right? It's not the master regulator up here.

• 1:14:54Jen Cohen?

  Right, right.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  So if a peptide changed, for example, growth hormone or IGF-1, these very high-level master regulators, then it's got a chance, right? Because, you know, it could be telling the body, don't go in mode A, which is B, which would be, for example, high reproductive mode, high growth, right? So at a certain age, we're not reproducing and we're not growing, right?

• 1:15:18Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  So why is it that we're putting all this energy into reproduction and growth pathways, right? It makes no sense.

• 1:15:24Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  So then, a lot of organisms, we know that, for example, 30 years ago, we made unicellular eukaryotes, unicellular organism, lived 10 times longer, right? 10 times.

• 1:15:36Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

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

• 1:15:51Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  Just focus on yourself, right? So, interesting, right? Yeah, so if there are master regulator and there seem like in all organisms that have... Been tested there are if you turn on the switch to stop focusing on the next generation. And then focus on yourself, uh, that can make a big difference, right? So, yeah, so there could be peptides that are that eventually hit that uh, switch, right? And if they hit that switch, I mean, the, the, the, the science fiction switch would be one that doesn't affect metabolism. It doesn't affect performance. It just affects your, you're not growing and you don't need to grow. And you're not reproducing and, you know, and you can stop it when you wanna reproduce, right? So you could say, okay, you know, yeah, I'm, whatever.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  I use it until I'm thirty four and then at thirty four, I stop for a year, I reproduce and then go back on the, on the, on that peptide or, or, or, you know, it could be a dietary intervention or both, yeah.

• 1:16:44Jen Cohen?

  Or about, about just even the fact that people, a lot of people are taking, you know, N A D is really, is really important, uh, popular. Uh, N A D, uh, metformin is very popular. You're saying the only one that can maybe move the needle is rapamycin.

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  Well, metformin is also a little bit of a master regulator, right?

• 1:17:03Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, but, uh, but, uh, um, the data, if you look at metformin effects in mice, it doesn't make even a mouse live longer, as, as far as I remember. Rapamycin does and does in a very consistent way, right? Yeah, so that I would say, you know, if you made a mouse live longer by whatever peptide, you made a rat live longer, like say twenty percent longer or something like that, at least, right? If you made the mouse live twenty percent longer, you made the rat live, live twenty percent longer. Okay, then it starts and, and then it's very safe, like, let's say metformin. Then I think it'll be a good candidate, right? But, you know, we, we don't have anything like that right now. And rapamycin is probably the only one now.

• 1:17:44Jen Cohen?

  Should we take that? Should everybody be taking it?

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  No, no, because rapamycin also causes hyperglycemia. And, uh, and, yeah, yeah, it's not good. And, and so, you know, and that's where maybe it might be good for a mouse and not necessarily for a person, right? So, so, uh, yeah, um, but that tells you that the potential is there for some drugs to, to go after, uh, master switches. And then eventually, you know, we're gonna say, hey, this is really safe. But of course, you know, the FMD is already there, right? The FMD may be done three times a year. It's already doing all of this.

• 1:18:20Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:18:20Speaker 02

  With no safety issues, right?

• 1:18:22Jen Cohen?

  Well, FMD also takes out all the senescent cells, right? Isn't that like a benefit that people get?

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, four things, right? One, autophagy, right? So you need three, four, five days, probably the whole five days for autophagy. So the cells start eating themselves, right? And that's one. Then clearly is doing stem cell activation. And now we're seeing it in multiple human clinical trials. We've seen major increase in either stem or progenitor cells. And then reprogramming of cellular level. Like, so, you know, now the hardest thing in aging research is how can you take an old cell and make it young again, right? And it's called, you know, cellular reprogramming and epigenetic cellular reprogramming. And, uh, but now we're shown over and over and over, the FMD refeeding cycles do that

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

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

• 1:19:57Speaker 02

  did the USC, three months later, 60% of the effects were still there, right? So after five, you know, three FMD cycles once a month, we stopped. And then we look at three months later and then you see about 60% of the changes that are still there, right? So, so, uh, yeah, so I think drugs are okay, but, but I would say that we probably haven't been as loud as others, you know, in advertising. Is in, you know, the, the, this, uh, I, I think the people that do some of these peptides and, and, and pills have been louder than us. In, in claiming and over claiming, we've been, um, uh, and, and also the companies involved, I, I think there have been more.

• 1:20:41Speaker 02

  Let's stick to the data, stick what you know, don't, don't overclaim and, and maybe that's why some of these other things are more popular than the FMD.

• 1:20:48Jen Cohen?

  I, I think they're both, I mean, I think that people who know, know, I know, like, the community of doctors I know who, who prescribe. The fast mimicking diet to patients just for their overall health, never mind for like, you know, longevity or for cancer. It's pretty extraordinary. Like, I think people who know the research, I mean, I think it kind of speaks for itself. It's just more about. People who know, know, and if you don't know, you don't know, right? So.

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  Right, right. Yeah, but, but I think, you know, now there is soon enough an opportunity to make it mainstream, right?

• 1:21:21Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  And it should be mainstream, right? Because of all the things we say, you know, it's going after Cohen's and colitis and, and cognition and. And inflammation and it's going after, uh, cancer cells as a. And it's doing in a safe way. I, I don't think too many people are arguing if you do this three times a year.

• 1:21:38Jen Cohen?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:21:39Speaker 02

  Vegan diet three times a year, that, that, you know, not, you're not gonna find too many doctors say, oh, no, this is gonna cause problem in the long run.

• 1:21:46Jen Cohen?

  You're not saying every day, you're not like restricting, so you're not into calorie restricting every day, you're not into yo-yo dieting. You're actually not even necessarily into vegan every day.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  No, I'm not.

• 1:21:58Jen Cohen?

  You're not, so you're like saying long, the longevity diet, it's eating pes, like, you know, eating fish, you know, more like a mediterr- a Mediterranean diet.

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  I say, you know, Mediterranean is for Mediterranean people, right? So if you're, if you're, your genes are from, are from Norway or from Sweden. Or, or, or from Japan, you shouldn't have a Mediterranean diet. You should have a longevity diet that is, you know. That is personalized for you, right? And, and it's not gonna have.

• 1:22:23Jen Cohen?

  Which is about fish typically?

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  Which is still gonna be about low mercury fish and low toxin fish and it's gonna be about, uh, legumes of different kinds, right? It's gonna be about whole grains, um, it's gonna be about oils and maybe there's a few different ones, the olive oil is different, definitely good, but. Doesn't mean it's the only one. So if you have, if you come from, there are older vegetable oils that are good and the nuts. Well, there is some, you know, I haven't investigated as much as I've done for for olive oil, but no, there's some like maybe sunflower or some of these vegetable oils that have good data behind it, but, but you know, I, I don't wanna, I, I've never spent the time

• 1:23:09Speaker 02

  because I'm so happy with the results of the olive oil and it just covers so much of the world population that, you know, I can, can do, deal with that, that, that, you know, and, and then I think the nuts and the dark chocolate and so there is a lot of sources of, of healthy fats that are fairly confirmed to be healthy or very healthy for you that, you know, we, we never investigated, but it doesn't mean that are not other oils, for example, or fats, sources that, you know, eventually could be as good as, as olive oil.

• 1:23:43Jen Cohen?

  Okay, but you're basically just saying though, that for 15 days of the year, five days, you know, maybe even every quarter is a good chance, it can give you a fighting chance, so to speak, to really live longer and healthier.

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wouldn't call it a fighting chance. I mean, the data is just spectacular.

• 1:24:02Jen Cohen?

  I know, no, no.

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  And I mean, you know, it's like if you look at it.

• 1:24:04Jen Cohen?

  Oh, you're saying it's a good, oh, yeah, I'm saying, yeah, yeah. Like, so basically, let me, let me, let me re-say that then.

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:09Jen Cohen?

  Basically, you're saying that if someone does fast mimicking at least every quarter, let's say for five days, the chances of them living longer and healthier are spectacular based on your research.

• 1:24:20Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no, I was going too far on the other side. I mean, I think the results have been spectacular, especially mice, especially in rats. I mean, really unbelievable, right? You know, they've taken a kidney or pancreas that is completely, you know, damaged and irreversibly, and then restoring its normal function, right? I mean, it's hard to believe.

• 1:24:38Jen Cohen?

  That's pretty amazing.

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, so.

• 1:24:40Jen Cohen?

  That is spectacular, though, doctor.

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

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

• 1:25:01Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:01Speaker 02

  So those are very good. Yeah, so I think that that that I mean it's not a fighting chance because A, if it's making your cholesterol lower, if it's making your blood pressure lower, if it's making your glycemia lower, it's making your biological age younger by two and a half years, at least based on on a number of of factors and the measurement, the number of factors. I mean, it's it's hard to imagine how you would die in the same time. Everything is is much, much better, but you're still gonna die on the same day. Yeah, so much, much less likely. There is no guarantee, but.

• 1:25:35Jen Cohen?

  You're stacking the deck.

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 1:25:37Jen Cohen?

  You're stacking the deck for you.

• 1:25:39Speaker 02

  You're doing all the right things, you know, if you combine the longevity diet and you combine the the sleep and the twelve hour time or the eating and you combine it and put the two, three cycles a year of fasting making diet. I think, you know, you're getting into this fifteen, twenty years of life expectancy increase range, right? Based on lots of data. And also, if you look at the Harvard studies, you know, the chance of getting to seventy five without needing drugs, we cognitive.

• 1:26:06Jen Cohen?

  It's amazing.

• 1:26:07Speaker 02

  You know, being cognitively functional and and and healthy. You know, only less than ten percent of the US population is in that group, right?

• 1:26:15Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, that's amazing.

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  One chance in ten right now with with the with the way, you know, if you look at the general behavior of the population. Now, if you do all the right things, that study show that you're doubling your chance of making it to seventy. So now, all of a sudden, it could be, you know, twenty, thirty million people.

• 1:26:35Jen Cohen?

  That's amazing.

• 1:26:36Speaker 02

  Then, all of a sudden, are getting to seventy or seventy five, healthy, just by making those changes. Yeah, but and this is not even counting the fasting making diet. This is just changing your everyday diet. And, you know, and and following a few things that everybody can follow. Yeah, so I think that, you know, that that that's the way to go. There's four or five things you can do and A, you know, if you can do them all, do them all.

• 1:27:02Jen Cohen?

  Right, it's amazing. What what is the documentary really going to be focusing on this?

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  All of this.

• 1:27:07Jen Cohen?

  All of it?

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  All of this, yeah.

• 1:27:08Jen Cohen?

  That's amazing.

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  Cancer, diabetes, the doctor that I talked about is in there, he talks.

• 1:27:13Jen Cohen?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  He'll tell the story. There's cancer patients that are basically saying, you know, I was in trouble and then I came out of it. But I think that what we also done, which was very important and compared to lots of our documentaries, the I pushed the director and the producer to put in the clinical trials, right? I said, you know, don't make it about case. Case is irrelevant, right? But make it a, tell the story with the case, but then let's show the three or four clinical trials that have been completed. And that, right? Yeah. So I, I, I think that that's what's special about this documentary.

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  Is that, you know, do it right, you know, science wise, but also have the emotional part, but don't be too focused. And maybe it doesn't make it as entertaining, but it certainly makes it, you know, very convincing. I think that, that you have, you know, multiple clinical trials backing up the story.

• 1:28:15Jen Cohen?

  And when you talk about your lab in Italy, that's focusing on cancer. What are a couple of findings that maybe we don't, we haven't heard of that you've kind of brought to the surface?

• 1:28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, the exciting new findings are what we call starvation escape pathways targeting. So meaning that we can, we, we take the fasting making diet and now we're starting to do this in patients, right? We take the fasting, in the old days it was like, okay, let's combine chemotherapy plus FMD, immunotherapy plus FMD. Fine. And it works so much better together than, as I would say there. Now we're saying, okay, what if instead look at how the cancer changes after we give them the fasting making diet, right? And you see rewiring, meaning the metabolic pathways, and not just metabolic, the, the cell changes completely. Its modality to adjust to the fasting making diet.

• 1:29:07Speaker 02

  Then we can learn, we do something called RNA sec, we can learn how they change and why they change. And then we can use drugs that are already available to target those. And this works extremely well. It can go pretty fast. So we're very excited about this can be used for any cancer because, you know, it doesn't matter. You expose them to the fasting, you can diet, you look at how it changes and you do this computational analysis and eventually we're going to do with artificial intelligence. And then it tells you, okay, these are the drugs you need to kill them all, right? And yeah, so I think that we're very excited about this and hoping to get a lot more funds to to keep it going because it's got a lot of potential.

• 1:29:48Jen Cohen?

  Do you take any other supplements just for your health?

• 1:29:52Speaker 02

  I take multivitamin and then I alternate between like D,

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  vitamin D and vitamin B12.

• 1:30:00Jen Cohen?

  You alternate?

• 1:30:01Speaker 02

  And omega three. Yeah, yeah, I alternate because you know, probably don't need each all the time. I don't think it's good to get overloaded with supplements. But I alternate. Yeah. So every four day, every fourth day or so, I'll get.

• 1:30:18Jen Cohen?

  Take a break?

• 1:30:18Speaker 02

  One or the other, yeah.

• 1:30:20Jen Cohen?

  Oh, wait. So you take vitamin D once every four days or four days on, one day off?

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  No, no, I will take it every four days. Let's say three days.

• 1:30:29Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:30:29Speaker 02

  Three days and then I'll switch to a B12 because a lot of my diet is vegan vegetarian. And then I'll have, let's say, a, you know, omega three. Usually I mix algal oil and fish oil.

• 1:30:47Jen Cohen?

  What about exercise? Have you done any type of research on the effects of exercise for longevity, aging well, health span?

• 1:31:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:00Jen Cohen?

  In addition to the fasting?

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll say something that is not going to get me a lot of friends first and then I'll. Your exercise, whether it's in animal studies or in human studies, does not fair very, does not compete with nutrition and fasting, right? It's very far. And so I was just in Italy and this Rosetti group was showing the data in, you know, a. Days or you know, the the number of sick days in your life. And it was a sevenfold between the effects of lack of exercise versus a bad diet, right? Sevenfold difference in how impactful is a bad diet.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  And you know, how sick you're gonna be in your life versus how is no exercise uh you're gonna be. Now that said, I think exercise is very important, right? You know, so I said that extra thing that that um.

• 1:31:57Jen Cohen?

  Right, because nutrition is eighty percent of it, at least.

• 1:32:01Speaker 02

  I.

• 1:32:01Jen Cohen?

  You're saying it's a hundred percent.

• 1:32:02Speaker 02

  No, no, I'm saying it may, you know, these data suggest there may be eighty five percent, right? Yeah, eighty five percent of the lifespan extension and the health span extension that you get. It's gonna come from nutrition and fasting.

• 1:32:15Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Speaker 02

  Or nutritional intervention and then the extra fifteen percent. But but I think that, you know, exercise is very important mentally. And so, I mean, I'm I'm all a hundred percent behind exercise, say. You know, one hundred and fifty to three hundred minutes a week uh muscle training and all of that. I think it's it's very important, so.

• 1:32:37Jen Cohen?

  But why is it important if you've seen if you've seen the data that says it's not as not important for?

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  Well, this that's not important for uh how sick you are, right?

• 1:32:48Jen Cohen?

  But for your mental health.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't mean that you're not gonna be happier.

• 1:32:52Jen Cohen?

  Mood.

• 1:32:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, serotonin and lots of other things that happen when you when you exercise. And so, yeah, so I think that and that fifteen percent is not is not, you know, it's not insignificant, right? So having a fifteen percent extra.

• 1:33:07Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:07Speaker 02

  Benefit i- is very important, right? So a- and you never know, right? So, you know, as part of my classes, I also show the the effects of exercise. And some of the really remarkable effects are on cancer patients, right? Uh and you you you you'll see these results where they're showing people that are exercising regularly. They have cancer and they do so much better if they're exercising versus not exercising, right?

• 1:33:31Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:33:32Speaker 02

  And you're thinking, is it possible that the so I don't know if it's a motivation thing and and or if it's the actual. You know, physiological effect, but the ones that exercise, they tend to do so much better. Uh, you know, in progression and and survival and lots of other things. Yeah, so.

• 1:33:50Jen Cohen?

  Get the mood and the mental elements of it, right?

• 1:33:52Speaker 02

  It could be mental, it could be that helps them fight, you know, they're fighters and they're gonna do it with all different things, but some of these, these, some of these trials are randomized, right? So it's not like you pick the ones that are more motivated. You take a hundred people and you divide them by two and you say you exercise and you don't. And then maybe you cross it over, right? So some of this data is real, it's not about selection of motivated patients. But some of it might be affected by bias, yeah.

• 1:34:22Jen Cohen?

  Wow, gosh, you're right, you didn't make a lot of friends with that one, no kidding. No, but I think, I mean, people know more or less that it's also with like weight loss, right? Like you can exercise until the cows come home, but if you're not eating properly or eating the right foods, you're gonna gain weight, it's just, it is what it is, you know?

• 1:34:41Speaker 02

  And there is a bigger problem that, you know, exercise and there was a paper, actually they came out of there, you know, this is the biggest loser, right?

• 1:34:49Jen Cohen?

  Of course, yes.

• 1:34:50Speaker 02

  But then it ended up being a real paper, right?

• 1:34:52Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:53Speaker 02

  And the real paper went and followed, and I'm forgetting what journal it was. And it went and followed and most of them, I think they were doing like hours a day of exercise, right?

• 1:35:02Jen Cohen?

  Six, yeah.

• 1:35:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so, so I think when the camera is on and the show is on, right? Whatever your show may be, you could do that. Eventually, you're gonna be upset, you know, and you got problems and you don't have time. What are you gonna do then, right?

• 1:35:19Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:35:19Speaker 02

  And that's, you're still gonna eat and you can still eat the right food. But are you gonna take the, forget the six hours, but are you gonna take the one hour a day and go exercise every day? Most people don't, right? You know, in the long run, as you get older and as you get, get more things to worry about, you may say, you know what, I don't feel like, oh, it's raining outside or it's too hot or it's too cold, you know? Yeah, so there's a lot of, so the compliance and the feasibility that I was talking about before with the Mediterranean diet, eventually you're gonna have it also for the, for the heavy exercise, right? And then you're gonna have, like my brother and my sister, for example, right? My, my brother was a soccer player and I told, and I was a soccer player. And I told my brother, you gotta stop, right? Ah, no, no, no, no, no. And now he's limping, right?

• 1:36:04Jen Cohen?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:36:06Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  And my sister was a triathlon runner and now she has a hip replacement, right?

• 1:36:11Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:36:12Speaker 02

  So, so, you know?

• 1:36:14Jen Cohen?

  Too much of anything is not good.

• 1:36:16Speaker 02

  Well, it wasn't even too much. They weren't professional. They were not professional.

• 1:36:19Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:36:20Speaker 02

  It was like they enjoyed it and they did it all the time.

• 1:36:22Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:36:23Speaker 02

  Until

• 1:36:24Jen Cohen?

  They couldn't.

• 1:36:25Speaker 02

  They had to get surgery, right? And so, so.

• 1:36:27Jen Cohen?

  Oh, I see your point. So now they have to stop exercising, but they have to be eating right to keep, they have to, right? They have to learn the discipline of eating properly and.

• 1:36:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're both eating the longevity diet, right?

• 1:36:39Jen Cohen?

  Of course they are, because of you, I'd imagine.

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  But they're not doing soccer anymore. They can't. And they're not doing triathlons anymore. And I mean, it's just, we're three and, and I'm the only one that, you know, I played until I was forty five, right?

• 1:36:50Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  Played.

• 1:36:51Jen Cohen?

  How old are you now?

• 1:36:52Speaker 02

  Fifty eight. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I played.

• 1:36:55Jen Cohen?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa. You're fifty eight?

• 1:36:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:57Jen Cohen?

  And this is, okay. And like this, and this is, you haven't done anything to you? Cause you look really young.

• 1:37:03Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I haven't done anything. No. God forbid, yeah.

• 1:37:06Jen Cohen?

  Yeah. And so this is all just doing the fast mimicking diet, living a certain lifestyle.

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  I mean, longevity diet, fast and making diet and, yeah.

• 1:37:14Jen Cohen?

  I was gonna say longevity diet too. Just your, your diet, I should say.

• 1:37:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:18Jen Cohen?

  And, and habits, daily habits. But you're saying, because you didn't really, you exercised, you played soccer, sorry, you played soccer, but then you didn't play after a while, like after forty five?

• 1:37:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, after forty five, I stopped, right? Then I started doing biking and things that, and eh, I, my hip is still my hip and I still don't have any problems, right? So, yeah, to me, it was very important. I mean, if somebody else could say, and there was a case of my brother and my sister, I don't care. I'm just gonna keep doing it. Okay, fine. But keep in mind, I mean, it's okay, but then keep in mind what the consequences could be. So in my case, I, I, I said, you know, I don't wanna be, I don't wanna be sixty and, and, and needing a hip replacement.

• 1:37:54Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:54Speaker 02

  And yeah, so far.

• 1:37:56Jen Cohen?

  You're okay. Yeah.

• 1:37:57Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm good, right? So I can still do my bike, you know, every, every other day.

• 1:38:01Jen Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:02Speaker 02

  And, and lots of other things and, and, you know, that don't put me at risk for, for, you know, inflammatory conditions, you know?

• 1:38:10Jen Cohen?

  Yeah, absolutely. Uh, is there anything we haven't covered, Dr. Longo, that's important for people to know about?

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  No, I think, uh, I think we've pretty much covered it, yeah.

• 1:38:21Jen Cohen?

  Are you sure? Cause you're here right now. I wanna make sure.

• 1:38:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:25Jen Cohen?

  That I got everything done with you.

• 1:38:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think with the diseases, we talked about cancer, Alzheimer's. Yeah, I think we covered a, a lot of ground.

• 1:38:33Jen Cohen?

  I like fact toys. Like there's, is there any like, like facts that we can like, like, that you can like share that maybe we haven't? Like any kind of data points that we haven't covered? No?

• 1:38:44Speaker 02

  I think, you know, one thing that I was gonna say, then I didn't say was we're now going through, you know, I mean, I'm doing this review on proteins, but it's more like longevity diseases, right? And, and so, you know, that that's consistent with what we've been saying. The other thing I'm having my team at the foundation do is the, um, the muscle part, right? Yeah. So, so then we're looking at hundreds of papers on, you know, plant supplements, plant protein supplements and, and animal proteins. Yeah. And, and so I think that what we're gonna conclude is that probably what we already concluded before, zero point eight grams

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  plus training, plus muscle training, zero point eight grams per kilogram or zero thirty seven grams per pound of body weight is enough for the majority of people, even if you wanna build muscle, right? But in fact, if you look at all these hundreds of papers, you know, those that are leading one to one point two, they tend to have an easier time building muscle, right? So, so I would say, don't do it, but if you care so much about muscle,

• 1:39:56Jen Cohen?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:39:57Speaker 02

  Then, then I think the one point one to one point two of good quality amino acids, like some animal proteins and some.

• 1:40:06Jen Cohen?

  Oh, I know I was gonna ask you. Okay. So wait, so you're just saying that like you're, if you can have point eight grams of protein, it's, it's, you don't need to have one, one, because the whole thing is one gram, one.

• 1:40:19Speaker 02

  Well, now people are advertising you two grams, one point six grams. So there, there is a lot of.

• 1:40:23Jen Cohen?

  For muscle.

• 1:40:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, for muscle. And, and so now for sure, what we're concluding is two grams, one point six gram is not needed. You know, it's very little difference.

• 1:40:32Jen Cohen?

  Right.

• 1:40:32Speaker 02

  You know, very few papers are showing if you have one point six versus one point two, you do better with one point six. Very few. Most of them show no effects at all. And also, most of the papers show if it's animal based, it's not superior to plant based. As long as it's a good mix of, of, of plant based supplements, right? A lot of them are, are actually, they're showing total protein intake, they can also come from supplements, yeah.

• 1:40:55Jen Cohen?

  Okay. You said something, you said it a few times about amino acids. What if you just take a nine, like, like a, like nine essential aminos? Like a, like.

• 1:41:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:03Jen Cohen?

  Like a scoop of aminos.

• 1:41:05Speaker 02

  But the data, you know, we don't know what the consequences are. I think, you know.

• 1:41:10Jen Cohen?

  But that way you're not eating as much protein, but you're having the, the, the building blocks to protein.

• 1:41:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no. I mean, theoretically, I think it can work, but it wouldn't be, you know, the, those essential amino acids that are going to be the one driving the aging process, right? So if you look at the studies in mice and rats, always essential amino acids, right? The one that accelerate the age essential, right? So brain chain amino acids, methionine, you know, so those, almost exclusively.

• 1:41:42Jen Cohen?

  Are the ones that.

• 1:41:42Speaker 02

  If you, if you look at the non-essential, they're the only one like glycine that seem to be doing good if supplemented, right?

• 1:41:52Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 1:41:52Speaker 02

  So restriction, if you look at the restrictions, they're all on essential amino acids. They work, making rodents longer live and healthier, much healthier, right? If you look at the few cases of, of supplementation with amino acids and living longer is glycine, which is not a, a non-essential amino acid.

• 1:42:13Jen Cohen?

  Non-essential.

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  Non-essential, right? So, yeah, so then if you do the, what you, you said, yeah, it's just like, then you might as well eat protein, right? And, and that's okay, right? In fact, it may be better to eat proteins because now you have the non-essential, including glycine, they may be beneficial.

• 1:42:30Jen Cohen?

  Really?

• 1:42:30Speaker 02

  Because it turns out that glycine is an inhibitor of methionine, of, of methionine. It facilitates methionine decomposition, right? Yeah, so, so if, the higher the glycine, the less methionine you're going to have in the system. And so it's going back to, probably it's going back to the essential amino acids, lowering essential amino.

• 1:42:52Jen Cohen?

  Lowering essential amino acids. Okay.

• 1:42:55Jen Cohen?

  Wow. Dr. Longo, thank you so much for being on my podcast.

• 1:42:59Speaker 02

  Oh, you're very welcome.

• 1:42:59Jen Cohen?

  It's been, it's been a long time awaiting for me, so I appreciate this. And where do people, I mean, they can buy your book, Fasting Cancer, or the Longevity Diet book from 2018. But they want to know more about you, or where can they find you?

• 1:43:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Facebook, Professor Walter Longo.

• 1:43:19Jen Cohen?

  Facebook?

• 1:43:19Speaker 02

  And Instagram.

• 1:43:22Jen Cohen?

  Okay.

• 1:43:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, most, most USC faculty now have Facebook and Instagram. So most professors anywhere. Yeah, so Instagram is the same, Professor Walter Longo. And then the foundation, Create Cures Foundation is here in Los Angeles, and we help lots of people, and, you know, including those that cannot afford it.

• 1:43:42Jen Cohen?

  That's great. Well, thank you again for being on the show.

• 1:43:45Speaker 02

  Thanks a lot, yeah.