Joseph Antoun - Chairman and CEO, L-Nutra

Welcome to another CEOism podcast. Today we have Dr. Joseph Antoon with us. Today's chairman and CEO at El Nutra. El Nutra is about longevity, nutritech company. It's fasting mimicking diet. So quite an interesting one. Joseph is a member at YPO, Forbes Business Dev Council previously, and just an interesting guy altogether. I see Harvard Kennedy School of Yeah, MPP healthcare policy here. So Joseph, welcome to the pod. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you've been up to.

Thank you, Charles. I lead Alnutra. Alnutra means longevity through nutrition, and we're focused on longevity for the last 36 years. A lot of people today started talking longevity. We pioneered that field. We have 136 patents on longevity. We have the, the longevity trademark on the word longevity. We have over 40 clinical trials. So we, we kind of had this philosophy of ultimately we as humans, we want to stay healthy long, right? Nobody wants to die soon or be sick long. This is how we're living today. The current healthcare system is not helping us. getting cured. It's just helping us staying sick long. And since food is the only product we consume every day of life, we decided to be the first company to turn food as medicine and food as an asset of longevity. So we started doing scientific trials on nutrition to help healthy people stay healthy long and live a long life. And those who are sick with diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, those chronic diseases we call them, you live decades with them. We try to formulate nutrition that can help them increase the chances of remission. I was able to do this because, as you mentioned in the introduction, I started my career as a physician. I'm an MD-PhD, and I thought I'll be a great doctor who can cure patients. But then when you go and you start practicing, you see that you're— you may be a good doctor, but you're just giving people pills that they have to take for the rest of their lives. Yeah. If you have blood pressure, you're going to take this pill for the rest of your life. If you have blood sugar, you're going to take that pill and that injection. And I felt like we're just subscribing people for, for a lifelong prescription. And that was not healthcare, that was sick care at its best. And left the system, learned a little bit more business through biotech and pharma, and decided to go on my own and build the next generation of true healthcare products. And decided to turn nutrition into medicine because that's the product again that we consume regardless every day of life.

I love this. Why do you think most of your ex-doctor colleagues didn't wake up the day that you did and launch their own companies, just stayed in the cog and stayed in the system, via reinventing it?

It's not easy, right? The It starts with going to medical school with all the good intention, but then you end up paying, you know, $100K to get educated per month, per year. And then you get into residency, then you, you have a low salary. So you end up starting practicing with— today I think the average doctor in the US starts practicing with half a million dollars in loans, in student loans. And you have to compensate for that, build a family. You had spent 11 years 7 plus 4 specialty, you know, studying. So you start thinking about, hey, there's my life as well, and I have to build my own family, get my own house, etc. So there's a lot of economic pressures on doctors upon graduation that they have to fulfill, and they have to jump into practice and the clinic. So that's, that's reason number 1. Reason number 2 is when we study in medicine, we study in books that show us clinical trial results. And the major clinical trials are made by pharma companies. And, and nothing against it, it's, you know, pharma is here to help. They're not the only solution. Uh, that's the problem we're facing today, is the most of the science in healthcare is coming from pharma, which again is needed but is not the only solution. But it turns out to be the only solution. We read, we read about diagnosing a disease And if you think about it, a doctor, what he does or she does at the end of the day, they prescribe medications, right? And I, I sometimes tease, tease my colleagues. I ask them about their, you know, purpose as doctors, and many actually would answer to prescribe medication. That I, I've heard that before, and in good intention, no bad intention here. But this is how the system has been built. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars. The latest statistic is around $600 million to discover a drug today, a new, a new technology in healthcare. So that's reason number 3— it's a long route, you need a lot of cash. And reason number 4, we as doctors are not trained to be entrepreneurs. We're not trained to take risk. We're trained the opposite— do no harm, be cautious— because we're playing with people's life. We do, we do have to be cautious. But at the same time, there's no entrepreneurial education, there's no business education in medicine. There's no education about lifestyle medicine. You know, we don't get a lot of— you know, I've done whatever, 12, 13 years of schooling. I've only had 1 hour on nutrition. I had 0 hours on sleep. I had 0 hours on stress. I had 0 hours on social community. I had 0 hours on avoidance and thoughts.

Meditation.

Meditation and all of that. So I think we gotta a little bit re— reformulate the curriculum in medicine to create people doctors, professionals who have— who are laser-focused on healing and curing people and, and are willing to use medicines when needed, surgery when needed, but in a lot of cases as well, um, a lifestyle and nutrition and exercise, stress relief and management of sleep, of community, of the root cause. You know, people, people go to the doctor with depression, they get a medication. Well, They're depressed because they're divorcing, maybe, right? That's, that's the— this is the root cause that maybe it's not the doctor, but support system has to help them, and versus getting them on medication and then 2 and 3 and then 4. So that's, um, that needs a real overhaul. And, um, there's a lot being done today with the current administration on the nutrition side of the— of adding more nutrition training to doctors. There's a There's a Harvard survey that shows 73% of doctors would love to step into nutrition and learn more. So there's that, that's happening, but we have still ways to go to add all the other aspects of disease remission and lifestyle medicine.

I still remember one of my doctors when I was a kid. He always used to say fruits and vegetables, right? And he was, he was a good doctor and very few doctors actually were focused on nutrition. Yeah, you're right with the crutch thing on the medicine versus the real cure, right? Like, I think you can, you may take an antidepressant as a crutch for some time, but the danger is that it's addictive, right? It really like gets into habit and then you just don't get out of that. So, no, it's fascinating, right? But from what I've heard from you, is it mostly about reshaping of financial incentives in the system? And wasn't RFK, uh, into that as of late, like into refunds and trying to reshape that?

Yeah, you're 100% right. You know, like everything in life, if you want to steer people's behavior, you steer the finances and the, and the, and the carrots and the sticks, right? So it's regulation and incentive, financial incentives that steer people. And, um, if you think about it, the healthcare system we built Um, we make money when people are sick, right? The, the food business makes money out of feeding us cheap, a little bit less healthy. You know, this is where the margins are. And then nobody's upset on the other side in healthcare because the hospitals will make money when you're sick. The, the doctors, you know, we make money when, when you're sick. And the only entity that does not make money when you're sick is the payer who's paying for this entire system— insurances and Medicare and Medicaid. And we've allowed a system where, okay, you can increase the premiums, right? And this is why, you know, year over year you keep seeing premiums going up. And, uh, and we allowed that, we accepted that, and then the system keeps getting inflated. When I, um, when I graduated medical school some 20, 20-plus years ago The, uh, the, the— I remember very well, we, we used to spend $1.7 trillion in the US on healthcare per year. Uh, we crossed $4 trillion a couple of years ago. Can you imagine that? I mean, this is like—

And the population is growing, right? Or—

Yeah, not that much. We added probably less than 5 million.

Well, we did it 2x for sure.

Now, 320 million to 330 now or something, right? It's not a major increase, but, but the, the real statistics is we did not increase our lifespan. So we're spending—

That is scary.

Yeah, we actually— if I don't know if people realize that, uh, we lost 0.5 years on the US lifespan.

Oh my God.

Yeah, so we used to— we, we thought longevity— we're spending $2 trillion more in the last 2 decades and we did not increase Our lifespan. And there's another concept we call the healthspan, meaning, okay, say you didn't live long, say you live till 85, but at least live healthy and then be sick the last 2 years. That concept of healthspan today also, we're not increasing healthspan. We're just getting people on medication and chronic and chronic care, and we're getting sick sooner. So we shrank this healthspan and we're dying a little bit sooner, just a tiny bit. Um, this system needs to be overhauled. I think, uh, yes, RFK is doing, um, is doing what he can, starting with nutrition, starting with avoidance of chemicals and, and, and hurt and, and stuff that we, we put our food in the US. I mean, you hear this a lot, right? Um, you go to Europe, you can eat 1.5 more, uh, you know, than the US, and you feel less less bloated, less GI tract side effects. You, you don't gain the weight as fast. So here in the US, we have allowed a lot of freedom, which we, we are, we, we are a holistic, free entrepreneurial country. But when it touches to human health, we should a little bit be more interventional to protect consumers.

And let's talk about what you're building, right? Because you have huge, uh, power and accountability in what you can do as an entrepreneur, as a CEO. And that, uh, tell us about L-Nutra and the ProLon life, which is fascinating.

Yeah. So L stands in the name L-Nutra, L stands for longevity, and Nutra through nutrition, right? You know, today, a lot of entrepreneurs are working longevity, a lot of people trying to bring the next drug in longevity or diagnostics, etc. We, we said, okay, before we, we come up with a drug, and again, every drug has side effects and potential and Because longevity is tricky. If you want to start doing something early in your life to live long, you cannot allow side effects. You have to have something purely safe so that you're doing it for decades and not having side effects or not taking any risk in your life. And we— I think we were smart enough to pick nutrition, which is number one, is a poison today. And how can we transform that into healthy nutrition? But then how can we transform it even as an asset of longevity. And for those patients that are living decades now with blood pressure and blood sugar, etc., we, we just launched our Nutrition for Remission, which helps you actually reverse those diseases— diabetes, prediabetes, blood pressure, blood sugar. This is what Elytra is. We have a business unit called Prolon for promoting longevity for healthy people. And our core, core product, we have a lot of nutritional products there. Again, we have over 40 clinical trials. We have over 136 patents on longevity, on disease remission. And so I'm just trying to say this is like a pharmaceutical of nutrition. This is not a company built on an idea or a book or an author or a— or this is the most scientific nutrition company you will meet. And, and so ProLon, what it does It's a— it's the core product is a 5-day fasting nutrition. You mentioned that. And we discovered that if you eat food that we have designed, we spent $48 million to design the fasting nutrition called ProLon, again, P-R-O-L-O-N. And you eat it over 5 days and your body doesn't know that you're eating. So your body thinks you're fasting over 5 days. And when you fast long enough, you have to cross day 3. Uh, the cells start rejuvenating. So on day 1, 2, 3, if your body thinks you're fasting, you have enough fat, enough reserves, the body burns the reserves. But after day 3, this is our biggest scientific discovery actually, the body starts practicing cellular rejuvenation, tells the cells, hey, I cannot feed you any longer, you gotta rejuvenate, you gotta eat the debris, the organelle, you gotta detox, you gotta fix the DNA, you gotta do everything to operate in the right way. That process is called autophagy, or cellular rejuvenation. It happens after day 3 of fasting, not, not by skipping breakfast like a lot of people think intermittent fasting will get there. No, you gotta start, you gotta cross day 3. And then the— and it won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, the autophagy process. So it's a big, big discovery in medicine. Um, and so, so our product is a 5-day nutrition that gets you through those fasting cycles. It's, uh, this is why there's a patent, food that mimics fasting, which is an oxymoron. But this is what it took, $48 million. We tested it at Stanford, Mayo Clinic, UCLA, USC, University of Indiana. We have 18 universities that did the testing with us. And the goal is to help your cells rejuvenate from day 3 to day 5, um, and which is a major, major reversal of the biological age of the cell. Um, this cell, it's like a company with no revenues, right? You restructure the company to survive. And the same thing, the body restructures the cells to a younger, more effective, clean stage. And the younger you are, the longer you live, right? So the best thing you can do today to live long is to stay young. And we don't have today any intervention that is patented and tested to reverse the biological age at a scientific level. There's a lot of fake claims here and there, but we have published this December, this past December, the first article on inducing autophagy, cellular rejuvenation, with ProLon, the fasting nutrition. Again, it's a 5-day box. That's all what you have to do— 5 days of our nutrition, plant-based, no chemicals, super high-end, gluten-free, lactose-free. So we're talking about the best food you can put in your body over 5 days. Your body goes through the cycle of cellular rejuvenation. And, and it reverses the biological age of the body. And reversing the bio age today, to our knowledge, is the best longevity asset that you can do, because the younger you are biologically, the longer you would live.

I love it. I have been a practitioner of keto religiously for 3 years, OMAD for 6. I stopped it because I'm an ultra athlete, right? And I didn't get enough calorie intake, plus keto was too much oil for my gut. And bad things would happen when I would go on very long runs. And yeah, I've tried like these fasting mimicking things as well. I did feel empty sometimes, right? I felt like something was missing in my body. You're saying that you don't realize it, but the body starts fasting and generating the good stuff, right? Like the ketones. Um, is, is that the feedback from clients that they still feel full, right? Like, do most people stick to it or they— do they abandon? Because you're like David against Goliath, right? Like, these guys have been on McDonald's and a bunch of fast food stuff. Isn't it a shock for their body, like an addict that is going through withdrawals?

Well, not at all. This is why it's 5 days. So I agree with you, we never ask people to go on keto long term, and you should not, by the way. You talk about all for your gut, but it's high fat, and cardiovascular system, as you know, does not like fat, right? And with ketogenic diet, you don't rejuvenate because you have enough protein in it. It's deducted by the cells, so you're not really fasting. You can do the ketogenic if you're obese, pre-diabetic. You need to quickly cut carbs and get your body into— on the short term— into— but we have— I mean, and again, with one of the largest nutrition technology and science company. And we did study— we did study, uh, ketogenic and, and all other diets. And this is why we came up with the 5-day fasting nutrition. You don't need to be in fasting for a long time because then you deplete. This is what you're saying, I felt empty. Of course. Imagine, imagine you have a company and you say, you know what, guys, I'm not going to give you calorie or funding for a long period. You are going to deplete the company, right? This is what happens a little bit with the GLP-1 on the long term today. Now, if you're on Mounjaro or Ozempic, they tell you on the long term, I lost a lot of muscle, not just the weight. I lost bone, I lost this. So you should never— we were not built to be on long-term depletion, but we were definitely built to get short-term stress. And this is part of our genetic. You do stress-intensive exercise, you build new vessels for the heart. You do short-term 5-day fasting, you rejuvenate your cells. Nature— winter is a stress to rejuvenate the leaves. Right, exactly. So we are built to what we call, uh, protect hormesis and homeostasis, so protect the harmony of the body. But definitely we are built to have smaller stresses in life to build up, to rejuvenate. Otherwise you don't rejuvenate, you're just gonna chronically move forward. And this is why we have— and this is why we have science. We don't— we, you know, you, you've done keto, you've done OMAD based on no trials, no randomized clinical trials or longevity trials based on an influencer that told you to do that. We, again, we've done— yeah, yeah, show me one OMAD trial that shows people live longer, or ketogenic that shows people live longer, I'll give you whatever you want.

Exactly.

These are influencers-driven misreading the science. We do 40 clinical trials. We hire— we work with Stanford, with Harvard, and we do true science. And true science shows for longevity, again, for longevity, cycles 3 times a year only, a 5-day fasting nutrition reverses the bioage and puts you the same way intensive training exercise reverse the age of the heart and gives you new vessels. The same way winter for the, for the, the same way you're, when you're driving a car, a race car, you take it to 2 to 3 pit stops to re— to, for the engineers to test and and re—

re—

rechange the wheels and everything. This is not what you get with OMAD or with, um, or with intermittent fasting or ketogenic. There's no regeneration or rejuvenation. You're mildly chronically stressing without getting into deep fasting like in the regeneration.

Hmm. It's interesting. I think my body vibed well with it. And also as an entrepreneur, I could just like focus on getting stuff done without worrying about food, right? The company itself, you recently raised a new round, right? And what will you do with that money? I saw Mudavala also, you raised outside the US. Are you international? Give me a bit more details about the company.

Yeah, we raised around the totaling over $80 million and or $70-something million. And the goal was to grow our international footprint. And more importantly is to keep doing our science and launching— you know, we talked about Prolon, but we recently launched what we call NutraHealth, which is the programs with our nutrition to reverse or increase the chances of remission from diabetes, blood pressure, blood sugar, using doctors plus licensed dietitian plus our food. That combination with an AI app platform doesn't exist in the world where you have the food solution scientific, you have the dietitian, you have the doctor supervision, and AI coaching every person to how they should get out of diabetes or blood pressure or blood sugar, etc. It's probably the most scientifically advanced program in the world called NutraHealth, and we wanted to boost that. We, we just finished our— with Stanford, our trials on Crohn's, on autoimmune. So that will be our next launch as well. We were showing an increase by 72% the chance of remission, and we were improving the clinical symptoms in Crohn's by 400%. Again, supervised nutrition, but nutrition formulations that we developed scientifically. We're very excited about the prospects to help move sick care into healthcare. And, and again, we believe in science. We're a bunch of MDs and PhDs running the company, not a bunch of business guys. That, that shows you what we do and how we think and what's the heart of the company. And we're just fueling now more research, market access for these programs, and global footprint.

I know you have a B2C channel, but you also get into clinics or med spas and, yeah, like biohacking clinics. I had on my podcast last week the CEO of Humanoid Health. They want to get to 100 locations next year, and they're like next biohacking facility, right? Like, I could see these guys as good partners. Uh, what about the B2B channels?

Yeah, we actually have over 12,000 doctors and clinics registered with us and over 8,000 or 7,000-something med spas and chiropractors. And, and, uh, that— but as exciting for us is the B2G now is emerging. So Uh, Cigna started to reimburse our food as a drug. Um, in, in the UAE and Abu Dhabi, the government started— that's the first government ever to reimburse us as a drug as well. And we do have Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement for our medical nutrition therapy. And we have recently signed 134 insurances to reimburse not our fasting nutrition but our medical nutrition therapy. So it is when we say food is medicine, ours is a medicine with science and now reimbursement by insurance. And so would love to meet your friend, uh, um, and, and we do, we do deals with big clinics, you know, Fountain Life, uh, and others that are in longevity and biohacking.

Yeah, he's gonna be the, the biggest for sure. He's very well funded as well. I'll facilitate an intro for sure. Abu Dhabi, fascinating market. I guess Saudi as well. You've checked there, like these governments are easier to adopt new protocols, right? Like, have you seen the difference in dealing with them versus like US government?

Especially when it's— I mean, both the leadership in Saudi and the UAE are exceptional leaders, you know, and because it's a sovereign nation, when you have leadership on board and leadership is pushing Longevity big. Saudi has the biggest longevity fund in the world, $1 billion, called Evolution. Abu Dhabi has, through Mubadala, one of the, one of the largest funds, sovereign funds in Abu Dhabi. They've invested a lot in longevity. Dubai, for the first time in history, has created a longevity authority, which is an official governmental department to regulate longevity. So they're very, very forward-looking and And they have the advantage to move fast because it's a single-payer, single-vertical system versus here. Here you have to go and sign every insurance regional health plan, right? So you're going to sign United, you know, in every state and every district. You've got to sign Humana and you're going to— which is, you know, this is how the US operates. But, but, you know, we have the blessings of partnering with them as well. It takes longer now in the US. But, uh, but it's a great market and, um, and, and we're excited for, for the future.

What are your top 3 goals for this year, last but not least?

Um, since we just crossed middle of the year, it's really definitely hitting, uh, the priorities that we had for this year. And the priority number one for us was to keep leading in longevity, but also help, help bring people to ethical longevity. You know, you got to understand, in the past a lot of, you know, influencers, marketing, whatever, book authors, they're just— we're skewing people towards this diet or that. And you can play on short-term things. What is the best weight loss thing? But when you talk longevity, you're going to put people on products for a long, long time. So we want to make sure that we don't do any harm and that we use science, you know, to, to, to help people go on the right products and the right technology. So one of my, my top goals is to brand Prolon and Alnutra as the leading longevity product for the world. The next priority for— go ahead. Then the next priority for this year was to launch the diabetes remission program. So this is Alnutra Health, the healthcare side of the company, and we did that and we're seeing a lot of traction. Again, Cigna was the pioneering insurance to partner with us in Florida on this, and many others are talking to us. the United, the Humanas, and the others. Priority number 3 is, um, I cannot reveal it. It's a, it's a decision on the board, but it's a, it's a big financing slash going public slash etc. I cannot say anything more about that, but definitely something about how can we make this company a company for the world? How can we make this company a company that is a companion to everyone who wants to eat healthy? So we're thinking about those lines. We're, we're probably the best-kept secret today. Um, we're the most scientific longevity company, but nobody knows much about it. And this is because we do science before we write books and do ads. But soon enough, we're gonna, we're gonna open the, um, the curtain and tell the world a big story about longevity. So that's something we're preparing for.

Love it. Where can people find out more about you and the company?

If they want to find directly about the company, lnutra.com. L-nutra. Again, it's longevity through nutrition. L-nutra.com. But if you want to specifically try the products, we talked about the fasting nutrition. We do have the first ever longevity protein called L-Protein. It's there on it's under ProLon. We have the first longevity spread and pills and supplements. But if you want to find all these products to try for yourself. you can go to prolonlife.com. Prolon is again promoting longevity, so prolonlife.com. And if you want to— if you have a chronic condition such as blood sugar, blood pressure, diabetes, prediabetes, and you want to use our nutrition as medicine, you can go to lnutrahealth.com. That's our healthcare vertical. About myself, I'm Dr. Joseph Anton, is the same handle on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, all the platforms you can find me as and follow me as Dr. Joseph Anton.

It was Dr. Joseph and Charles for another CEO Wisdom Podcast.