How Fasting Can Slow Aging And Optimize Health

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

The understanding of fasting or intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating or even longer fasts, a day fast or a day fast a week or three day fasts, they have profound effects in our biology to optimize all the pathways that lead to health and even longevity. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

Something I get more and more excited about every year is personalized medicine. When I began practicing functional medicine over 20 years ago, it was clear to me we have to look at how unique each body is. Now with the technology advancing in amazing ways, we can truly take that concept to the next level. One of the tools I recently discovered that can help us all do that from home is InsideTracker. Founded in 2009 by top scientists in aging genetics and biometric data from MIT, Tufts, and Harvard, InsideTracker is a personalized health and wellness platform Like no other, it's purpose built to help you live a longer, more productive life. Their cutting edge technology analyzes your blood DNA and lifestyle to give you highly personalized recommendations. Then using the app, you can track your progress every day. Inside Tracker tells you what to do and why, so your health goals are clear and actionable and most importantly, based on exactly what your body needs. My team took Inside Tracker for a spin and really loved it. They discovered some important things about their health that led them to stop procrastinating when it came to certain parts of their health, like, for example, finally taking vitamin D supplements after seeing they were deficient, or eating more iron-rich foods due to low ferritin and hemoglobin, and making an effort to embrace stress reduction techniques after seeing high cortisol levels. Health is not black and white, and your wellness plan shouldn't be either. If you're curious about getting your own health program dialed into your unique needs, I highly recommend checking out InsideTracker. Right now they're offering my community 25% off at insideTracker.com/DRHyman. That's Dr. Hyman. insideTracker.com, that's I-N-S-I-D-E-T-R-A-C-K-E-R.com slash Dr. Hyman, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N, and you'll see the discount code in your cart. Now let's get back to this week's.

Episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. hi, I'm Kaya Perowich, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. We know that food has an amazing ability to heal, but the timing of when we eat or abstain from eating can also have really amazing health benefits. Dr. Hyman discussed the many ways to fast and how they work to optimize health in his conversation on Aging well with Dr. Frank Lipman.

So let's talk about this idea of time restricted eating because it's a fat and there are many ways to quote fast. There's what we call intermittent fasting, which is maybe not eating for a whole day or three days or a week sometimes. There's time-restricted eating, which is only eating with a certain time window. There's fasting-mimicking diets, which are eating less calories for a number of days to stimulate the same pathways. There's ketogenic diets. They all do a very similar thing. So what is the biology of how this works? We know that these things do work. looking at animal studies, human studies in terms of improving metabolism and the longevity biomarkers. But what are we seeing in how these methods actually work and what is the most effective?

What should people be doing in order.

To take advantage of this new science?

Right.

So what they're doing, I mean, the way I explain to patients is, which I think is, I mean, they're doing a number of things. It's triggering your body's own self-cleansing mechanisms. After you haven't been eating for a certain amount of time, 14, probably more 16 hours, your body's self-cleansing mechanisms kick in, which is very important with the aging process because one of the factors in aging is your body, once it goes back to functional medicine, the functioning of these systems don't work as well. so the fasting actually starts putting that autophagy system into play. So I think that's probably one of the most important aspects. It also will improve mitochondrial function, which also decreases as we get older. So the consequences of fasting or what happens in your body are often the opposite of what happens as you get older. So that's why I think it's so important. which way of fasting is best is the way that you'll do. I mean, whatever works easiest for a person is what I encourage. And I think the easiest one for most people is to eat dinner earlier and eat breakfast later, which is what I do and what I recommend. Now, if people want to do a day of just water fasting or three days or even more, that's great. That's a little bit more complicated and and most people won't do that, but if you can do that, that's fine. There's also this fasting mimicking diet where you do five days a month of very low calories and no animal protein and low carbs. And, you know, we've actually created some shakes or my health coach has some recipes for people. If they want to do it themselves, you can buy the ProLon shakes as well. I don't know, you should bring out some shake. I mean, it's a no-brainer to bring out a five day program of because it works. I mean, we've done it on patients that actually there's no question you get the same results whether you do fasting, mimicking diet for five days, or you do intermittent fasting. We're seeing positive results across the board with biomarkers and different types of fasting. So I don't think there's one way. I think the way is to find the way that you will do and that works easiest for your lifestyle.

Dr. Yeah, you know, people say, Dr. Hyman, what do you eat for snacks? and I'm like, I don't. I think snacking is the worst invention. Snack foods are typically really unhealthy and they're a modern invention and we used to not have to be eating all the time. And that's the problem, we're eating all the time. And I think, you know, just to underscore what you said about these different approaches to time restricted eating, intermittent fasting, fasting and making diets is they activate a set of mechanisms in the body that improve blood sugar control, that get rid of belly fat, that increase muscle synthesis, that build your bone density. that increase testosterone, that increase brain function and cognitive function, that improve your stem cell function, that help your immune system, and they clean up all the debris in your cells. It's called autophagy, which we're saying sort of self-cleaning mechanisms. There's mitophagy as well that comes from the same process. So these are things that we actually can take advantage about without actually changing what we eat. Now, if you change what you eat, you get a double benefit. But these are very powerful things that we should be paying attention to in the science. And I think you just feel better. You feel more energetic rather than being sluggish from eating food all the time.

Right.

And you nailed it. Thank you. All those mechanisms are what actually start, their function decreases as we get older. It becomes harder to keep your blood sugar under control, the muscle synthesis, all brain cognition and brain function. So fasting is like a magic pill or eating less and It's a magical. So to me, that's probably the most important thing you can do.

It's true.

Dr. Hyman also spoke about this with fasting expert Dave Asprey.

The understanding of fasting or intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating or even longer fasts, a day fast or a day fast a week or three-day fasts, they have profound effects in our biology to optimize all the pathways that lead to health and even longevity that help our energy, decrease our risk of disease, and do a whole series of different things. So can you kind of take us down that road of what do we know about the science of this? Because it's really phenomenal when you start to look at it. It's like, wow, you know, if you look at fasting or intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating or bulletproof fasting or fasting-mimicking diets or ketogenic diets, they all do the same thing, which is rejuvenate your biology. It's really rejuvenative and regenerative medicine.

It is so rejuvenating. What fasting does that's really cool is fasting allows you to say, okay, I'm going to teach my body to not worry so much about food. I'm going to turn off the voice in my head. And from that perspective, it frees up so much energy. and then biologically it does something else that's magic because when you have enough energy, you're able to emotionally regulate better than otherwise. So you're saying, but David, if you fast, you'd have less energy. But the cool thing is when you fast, the, the mitochondria, the little power plants in your cells, the ones that can't make it for four hours without food or for 16 hours or 18 hours, however long you're fasting, the body goes, wait a minute, I guess I should go to the trouble of getting rid of the weak mitochondria and replacing them with strong ones. And so now now you've given yourself a power upgrade because now you can generate more power when you do eat. So, okay, number one, let's fix our mitochondria with fasting. Number two, your pancreas, and to a certain extent, your liver makes enzymes, and their job is to break down proteins and other food items that you eat. It's also enzymes job to go into the body and fix stuff. So you can only make so many enzymes per day as the maximum enzyme production capacity of the body. Well, what if, because you're not eating protein, you're not eating carbs during the fast, what if the pancreas is available to make enzymes for healing the body instead of for digesting food? It will do that. And those two things work really well for aging. And not a lot of people are talking about supplementation during fasting because some supplements break fasting. One of the most important enzymes that I think people should be taking when they fast to accelerate this breakdown of old tissues in the body, break up scar tissue, adhesions is proteolytic enzymes. And the most common one is called serrapeptase. A lot of people who fast also miss out on electrolytes. Good old-fashioned salt is something that's important, especially in the morning when you first wake up. Some sea salt or Himalayan salt is a good idea, as well as magnesium and potassium. so when you add these precious minerals in during a fast, you actually feel much better and you're keeping your body more balanced. Yeah, it's so true.

I literally take electrolytes every day. I have a little bottle of a liquid electrolytes. I just squirt it into the water I drink. I think for interest, cellular hydration, it's a really important strategy that most people don't use. And I, I think I'm a big fan of that in terms of really dealing with the fundamental hydration status of.

The body that makes everything else work better. One of the things I do is I drink mineral water, which has a substantial amount of electrolytes in it. There's calcium, magnesium, potassium. There's probably less sodium in it, but I get plenty of sodium in my food. And it's funny, when you're fasting or when you're not fasting, a little bit of salt when you first wake up takes the load off your adrenal glands. And when you're fasting, it is a state of stress on the body. And it's not a bad stress unless you're already really stressed, in which case I tell you, maybe you ought not to fast. If you got a bad night's sleep.

Your jet lagged, it's okay. Have some breakfast.

Just have some protein and some fat and breakfast, don't have a lot of carbs, and you're going to feel better.

Are there some people who shouldn't really be doing this, that it's too much for their system?

There's a whole chapter for women in Fast this Way that's really important because Mark, you and I know this, we probably don't say it enough. Most of the studies that you'll find on PubMed, they were done on young white men. And so during certain times in your cycle, you know, it's okay to have breakfast. You already have enough biological stress. So you want to do your intermittent fasting on days when you're in pretty good shape. You do it three days a week. Is that good? I think for women, especially women who have a meaningful amount to lose or if they are in perimenopause, especially try it three days a week or five days a week, but have breakfast a few times and don't have, you know, a bowl of carby cereal, but have some eggs and, you know, salmon or whatever you like for breakfast. What you're going to find there is that if you do intermittent fasting, every single day and your metabolism isn't up for it, it's too much of a stress. And the idea of stress is turn stress on, recover, turn stress on, recover. But if you just turn stress on and stay that way, after about six weeks, what you'll find is that women hit the wall first and their thyroid goes off and their sex hormones go off. So their cycle becomes irregular, they don't feel as good, and their sleep quality goes down first. Guys take another couple of weeks on that if they're living a normal, stressful life, like, wait a minute, what happened? after you're used to it, after you've become trained on this, you can fast pretty much every morning if you want to.

So I want to sort of dig in a little geeky science here with.

You because I think that most people.

Don'T realize that all these strategies have a reason. We were designed and exquisitely adapted to starvation. We weren't designed to deal with the amount of abundant food supply we have now, which is about 700 plus calories more a day. than we had per person 50 years ago.

You've got to eat in such a way that you don't have cravings and then fasting becomes painless. And my kids have learned this. My daughter, when she was 10, she said, Daddy, we get to school and right away they start trying to make us have a snack. Don't the other kids have breakfast? I'm not hungry until lunch. And she literally asked me that and she was just really genuinely curious and it was so cute, but it was also so sad.

And so the idea is that when you do that, all these things happen. you increase your cognitive function because you want to be able to find the next meal. So your mental alertness and acuity improves. Your metabolism increases the fat burning so you can burn off your fat stores. You lose belly fat, you increase muscle mass, you increase bone density, you reduce inflammation, you activate your antioxidant enzymes, you increase stem cell production. So you literally go into a full-on rehab repair and remodel. It's like getting your old car and taking it to the body shop and cleaning out all the junk and putting in new parts. Essentially what happens when you do this kind of eating.

One important caveat of fasting is that when you do eat, you still need to eat well. Fasting and then binging on ice cream and french fries is not going to get you anywhere. Eating real whole foods, tons of non-starchy colorful veggies, healthy fats, and high quality protein is an amazing complement to any fasting routine. Autoimmunity, gut issues, Alzheimer's, and aging have all been found to benefit from the right kind of fasting. But like anything else, it's important to listen to your body and find what works for you. It's also important to note that fasting does not work for everyone. For example, those with a history of eating disorders or those who are pregnant or breastfeeding. If you are interested in incorporating fasting into your health routine, talk to your health practitioner to decide if it's right for you. If you'd like to learn more about any of the topics you heard in today's episode, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Dr. Frank Lippman and Dave Asprey. If you have people in your life who could benefit from this information, please consider sharing this episode with your community. We need each other to create a healthier us. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

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

Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.