Valter Longo discusses fasting mimicking diets and intermittent fasting based on clinical trials. He covers how different fasting protocols affect aging, longevity, and health across age groups, including safety data from epidemiological studies.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. Is there a difference in the length of fast that's appropriate based on your age?
Well, again, depends on what fasting you're talking about. I think that the five day fasting mimicking diet, as we're testing clinically, we think it's appropriate until age 65 to 70. Then it does not mean it's not appropriate anymore, let's say to do it three times a year. We now have an ongoing clinical trial on Alzheimer's patients. And so they're fine so far. They're doing okay. They're doing fine. So you know, they're much older than 65. Some of them are in their 80s. So it doesn't mean they cannot do it. But right now we just don't have enough data to do this long fast in the 70 and older. Let's say then if you're talking about intermittent fasting, again, you know, if you do 12 hours is perfectly fine, there is really no reason to, to, to stop at any age. In fact, that may be very healthy, even for 100-year-old person. If you're looking at other forms of fasting, I think I would put it in the same category. Let's say that somebody does two days a week or one day a week. I would put in the same category as the fasting mimicking diet, meaning that to do one day a week of let's say a 24 hour fast, I would not recommend that to somebody who's 75 years old.
I agree with that assessment. I found one person who's 81 who's been doing about a 14 to 16 hour fast every day for 59 years. She does not look like she's 81. Her brain is totally sharp. Her name's Margaret Paul. She was just on the show, does a lot of work more around emotional and psychological trauma. But you know, when you look at the few people we can find who've practiced it, it seems that there's something going on that's, that's really beneficial.
Right, Right. But if you, if you, I mean we, we're starting to think of a standard or an FDA like standard, right?
Yeah.
So then you have an FDA like standard. If you think about that, it's like saying, you know, if you give a vaccine to a few people, they've done pretty well. Can we give it to the whole world? Right. No. Well, we need 70,000 people.
We do.
So yeah, that's the same. The same is true here. And unfortunately the epidemiological studies, when you do 70,000 people or 700,000 people, they show a shorter lifespan. Right. So for the biggest group that we can find doing 16 hours, that's why you have to say wait a minute, you know, what am I? Even though it could be beneficial to a lot of people, what if it's detrimental to even more people than it is beneficial to. And this is very typical for most of the traditional things. If you look at something that's very old, they usually tend to do lots of good for, for in one sense and lots of bad. Right. And that's why they, they never quite stick around. And so yeah, then we need to find how do you get. And this is calorie restriction, for example. Calorie restriction that my, the Roy Walford used to study has been around for 100 years. And if you look at it now and they used to do say fantastic things about calorie restriction back in the 70s. How many people do calorie restriction right now? Almost nobody.
Like 20.
Almost nobody. Right. So but why? Well, because even the monkey studies, after Richard Weindrug, somebody else that was in Roy Walford's lab, He did the 25 year long study, realized that, you know, there is lots of positive and lots of negative. So if you look at cholesterol, blood pressure, fasting glucose, amazing results. Right. And then the monkey may drop dead after anesthesia and you're thinking, wow, how is it possible what happened that in calorie restriction that makes somebody so sensitive to anesthesia? But yeah, so. So the age related disease caused that were much affected by the long lifelong calorie restriction. But then the overall survival was not that much improved. And when they did the same study at the nia, the National Institute on Aging, it wasn't improved at all. Right. There was no difference in survival. Yeah. So that's the type of thinking that we try to put together to then come up with what's very safe for people and at the same time can make them live to 110 healthy.
