How Fasting Works To Increase Longevity And Prevent Disease

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

With inflammation and aging, I think people got it wrong, right? People think that inflammation causes aging, but it's the other way around.

It's aging that causes inflammation.

Then what's causing the inflammation?

The dysfunction. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. People are always surprised when I tell them that even with a whole foods diet rich in plants, we can still be nutrient deficient. And addressing nutrient deficiencies is one of the lowest hanging fruits for optimizing our health and feeling better at any age. and that is why I'm a huge fan of AG1 from Athletic Greens. Now, since our soils no longer have the same levels of essential nutrients or not enough of the microbiome in the soil because we've killed it with glyphosate and other stuff and they can't extract the nutrients, we're up against issues like chronic stress, toxicity, sleep deprivation like never before. Our bodies actually need some extra help getting all the right information to work properly. And that information comes in the form of vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and good bacteria, all of which help ourselves remember how to efficiently tackle their important jobs. One of the things I use every day to support my diet is AG1 from Athletic Greens. It's a comprehensive superfood powder with a special blend of high-quality whole food ingredients that work together to fill the nutritional gaps in your diet. It's specifically designed to support energy and focus, aid with gut health and digestion, and support a healthy immune system, which we all need. I've made AG1 part of my daily ritual because I feel better knowing I have a little extra nutritional insurance to complement my healthy diet. It also gives me a nice energy boost without feeling overstimulated. I like to think of it as a huge leafy green salad shrunk down into a simple glass of water that I can take anywhere. Right now, you can get 10 free travel packs of AG1 when you make your first purchase. Just go to athleticgreens.com/Hyman. That's A-T-H-L-E-T-I-C-G-R-E-E-N-S.com/Hyman. One of today's episode sponsors is ButcherBox. With all the factory farm animal products at the supermarket, it's hard to find meat that actually supports your health goals instead of hurting them. Feedlot cows are pumped full of antibiotics and hormones and they're fed corn that makes the meat not so healthy. And that is why I love grass-fed, grass-finished ground beef from ButcherBox. Ground beef is probably the most dynamic protein out there. I love how quickly it makes up a healthy meal without a lot of fuss or muss. Grass-fed meat is also better for the environment so you can feel better eating it. In fact, grass-fed and grass-finished beef actually helps put carbon back into the soil, reversing climate change. And with Butcher Box, I get 100% grass-fed and grass-finished beef delivered right to my doorstep. They also offer wild-caught salmon, which I love, including in my weekly meal plans too. And grass-fed ground beef is the first protein I recommend for people who are trying to get more comfortable in the kitchen because you can just throw in a pan with some salt, herbs and spices and it just makes a great meal. My favorite way to cook grass-fed ground beef is by sauteing it with lots of fresh garlic and onions and peppers and cumin and chili oil and oregano and tossing it over a bed of greens for a super easy homemade taco salad. Just talking about this makes me hungry. So if you've been looking for a way to get higher quality protein in your own diet, be sure to check out the grass-fed beef from ButcherBox, along with all their other humanely raised meats. that are never given antibiotics or added hormones. They make eating well, easy, delicious, and accessible. And now, new subscribers to ButcherBox will receive ground beef for life. That's right. Sign up today and ButcherBox will send you two pounds of 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef, free in every box for the life of your subscription. So to receive this limited time offer, go to butcherbox.com/pharmacy. F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. That's butcherbox.com/pharmacy. Now let's dive into today's show, the next episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. There are many health benefits to fasting. It can be a great way to give our digestive system a break and allow the body to use stored glucose and fat for energy. Fasting can also be beneficial in helping to heal autoimmune conditions, gut issues, Alzheimer's, and much more.

And there are a variety of ways.

To fast, including intermittent fasting, time restricted.

Eating, or fasting mimicking diets.

In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy about the benefits of fasting. Dr. Hyman talks with Dr. Walter Longo about the benefits of the fasting mimicking diet.

He also speaks with Dave Asprey about.

The psychological effects of fasting, as well as with Dr. Jason Fung about the.

Role of fasting in cancer prevention. Let's jump in. Let me just back up a little help people understand what the fasting mimicking diet is. before we go into more detail about it, because it's fascinating. Essentially, it's very short periods of calorie restriction, 800 to 1100 calories, five days done a few times a year, two or three times more if you're treating something serious like an autoimmune disease or maybe cancer. But it's not that much time out of the space of a year to do this. And this, this product, this program, has the ability to treat so many different things. And one of the things you said this morning that was really powerful was that it takes many drugs to do what a fasting mimicking diet does.

Yeah, man. And this is like, these don't even.

Do the same effect.

And this is a fact. If you just look at cancer, and in fact, I had somebody that came to me recently and said, you know what? When we use these cancer drugs, we got a problem because we can lower insulin and we can lower glucose. We have nothing yet that can lower insulin and glucose at the same time. And he was saying that your diet is about it, right? So this is just two of the things it does. It also lowers IGF-1, it lowers leptin, it revolutionizes the growth factor and inflammatory, et cetera, et cetera environment. Yeah, so it would take many, many drugs to get the effects of fasting. And nobody argues with this. It is not an opinion anymore. Now, you could argue that all those changes may or may not affect cancer, you know, we have to still see, but we have lots of clinical trials now and certainly mouse data indicating that it does and that's in a very powerful way.

So there's a bunch of things you threw in there like ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting. There's this whole field out there that's moving in the direction of some type of fasting mimicking approach, right? Not your fasting diet, but ketogenic diet is sort of a way mimics fasting and may activate a lot of the same mechanisms.

Yes and no, right?

So let's- it's a good opportunity to talk about that. I think people are confused and ketogenic is the latest hot thing.

What you're saying is that necessarily necessary? Yeah, the ketogenic diet, first of all, it can be high protein, it can be low protein, right? So that's already a big distinction why, because we can see that if you add back proteins to the fasting mimicking diet, you can cut out half of the effect, right? And if you had sugar, you cut out the other half. So if you had sugar and proteins, you now eliminated the effect pretty much of the fasting mimicking diet. So, you know, the ketogenic diet, if it was a high fat, and that's what the fasting mimicking diet is, right? The high fat. But we also have relatively, and this is the prolonged fasting mimicking diet, We also have relatively high carbohydrate, all from vegetables, right? No legumes, all from vegetables, 'cause we wanna keep the proteins low, right? So it's vegetables, nuts, and those are the major ingredients in there. And the reason for that is that we are thinking not what happens after you do three cycles of this. We're thinking, what if you were to do 300 cycles of this, right? And I don't want, even though I could get more benefits from a lower, more ketogenic diet, a lower carbohydrate diet. I don't want to do that. Why don't I want to do that? Because I don't want people to go back and forth in this yo-yo manner to very low carb, very high carb, very low carb. Because I'm worried that in the long run, that's going to stimulate too many variation in the programs and some of them are going to have detrimental effects. So we're not used to this back and forth. and so I don't want to introduce it. I already have a very potent effect, but not as potent as I could because we always get asked, oh, why don't you reduce the carbohydrate in the FMD? And that's on purpose. We want to keep it so we don't push you to the edges. But it's not starch, right?

It's vegetables.

It's not starch. It's all vegetables and nuts which have carbohydrates. But it turns out to be 45% carbohydrate of that kind, right? So in the long run, that's an.

Important distinction because when you say carbohydrates, people think of pasta and bread and sugars and sugar. But you're talking about plant rich carbohydrates that are low in glycemic index.

Oh yeah, these are low or very low. I mean, you have some, some, so you have tomatoes, you have broccoli, you have all kinds of vegetables and, but they do contain lots of carbohydrates. And, and so at the end, it's about 45 carbohydrates, 45 fat and about 10 protein.

Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I mean, you take 21 cups of broccoli, that's the same amount of calories as one big gulp soda, right? They both have 70 calories, they're both carbohydrates, they're both really different.

Absolutely, yeah. So we're not trying to say that it's about having carbohydrate, we're trying to say that it's about to have very specific carbohydrate. And in a paper that we are about to publish, that looks at water only fasting, and the fasting mimicking diet. And we're showing that the prebiotic ingredients in the fasting mimicking diet, which are vegetable-based, all vegetable-based, are feeding the good bacteria, lactobacillus bifidobacteria, et cetera, et cetera. And now you have this big increase in these protective anti-inflammatory bacteria, which you don't get with the water-only fasting. So now the content of the diet together with the fasting. So it's the combination of the fasting and the content of the diet driving the repopulation of the gut of the mouse to the point that it reverses IBD, right? So it reverses colitis, it reverses Crohn's, it's a mouse model.

So, you know- what are the fibers and prebiotics that are in there? Is it just vegetables?

Yeah, we don't know which ones are responsible for this growth, but there is a number of the vegetables that are known to promote lactobacillus beefed bacteria, etc. Growth, right? So we suspect that the high content and it's just, we actually have high content on one of the days and then we lower it. So it seems to be about content, it seems to be about timing and it seems to be also about refeeding, right? So you have the big switch doesn't really occur while you're in the FMD mode. It occurs after the mice return to the normal diet, right? So it's a really complex remodulation or modulation of the bacterial or microbe population in the gut that seems to be then communicating with the immune system and communicating with multiple systems. And, you know, it's not the whole effect because we see much more than that. But certainly when we do fecal transfer, so we just take the FMD, the the bacteria from the fasting mice, fasting mice exposed mice, and we transfer into recipient mice, they have some of the effects, they show some of the effects, but not all of the effects, right? So it means that that micro, that microbe population is important, but it's not the whole deal as we expect, because we also see, for example, gut regeneration, and we see a general anti-inflammatory effect. So even systemically, the inflammation comes down, right? So it's affecting microbiota, it's affecting inflammation, it's affecting regeneration. And again, you have to think it's going back to the body detects something wrong and it does all that is needed to.

So essentially you're challenging the body with a stress, which is a low calorie diet, but it's highly nutrient dense for a short period of time. and the body is like, oh, danger, danger, I gotta put in and get all the repair mechanisms going so that I can fix this problem.

Yeah, but you know, a really interesting thing that was just pointed out by my student the other day, if you take water only fasting and you give it this toxin, and so this is very nice because it's very recapitulating of how we might get Crohn's disease and colitis, you know, a lot of toxins from the outside, right? And so you give it this toxin and you're doing water only fasting, guess what happens? they have more leakage, they have more blood in the stools, right. So the water only fasting is making the gut leaky and worse, right. If you do the FMD instead, it seems to maybe because it's telling the gut, I'm not fully fasting, there's still food coming through, don't break down. So because one of the things that are very well established with the fasting is the breakdown of the lining of the gut, right? Because you don't need it. It's not as important in that moment because you're not feeding, right? So it is a good, probably way to save energy. And so potentially, this is how tricky it gets. And I would never in a million years have expected that water only fasting would make the gut more leaky, but only in combination with this toxin, right? so probably if the toxin is not there, you're okay. When the toxin is there, now.

The.

Blood is starting to get in the stool. So then I think this is the food that is giving the signal, don't break down completely yet, do it partially, and we see high levels of regeneration, the intestinal stem cells are getting activated, very potently. And then during the refeeding, they give rise to rebuilding, the inflammation is moved out, and you actually shorten the colon, and then you start the FMD cycles, and it goes back to its regular size. It's really remarkable.

It's amazing. So we know a lot about aging in terms of what are the mechanisms that are driving it. It's inflammations, and they call it inflammaging. oxidative stress and activation of various pathways like mTOR, which is basically a pathway that's activated by protein and various other things that can, when it's overactivated, can cause aging, mitochondrial injury. We have to activate stem cells in order to heal. And it seems like this one approach of a nutrient-dense, short-term calorie-restricted diet seems to take care of all these things. Is that true? Well, I mean, I don't know about.

All of these things, but it seems the majority. And I think, for example, with inflammation and aging, I think people got it wrong, right? People think that inflammation causes aging, but it's the other way around. It's aging that causes inflammation. Very clear, you know? Inflammation, in fact, one of the criticism in the paper was- Then what's causing the inflammation? The dysfunction. You're starting to have accumulated junk in the cells, you're starting to have DNA mutations, you have, you know, damaged mitochondria, you have just general damage. As you move forward, any system is going to accumulate protein aggregation, right, in the brain, phosphorylated tau, beta amyloid, oligomeric amyloid, right? So every system is got, it's junk that it gets accumulated. And of course, what happens in the brain if you start accumulating beta amyloid? the microglia start attacking. That's the immune system of the brain, right? Yeah, the microglia, the immune system of the brain, or part of the immune system of the brain, is starting to recognize them as foreign.

They start attacking, you begin the process of inflammation, right? So yeah, it's also inability to get.

Rid of junk and waste. And in fact, you know, one of the things that happened in this paper that we just published, interleukin, I think it was TNF-alpha and several other pro-inflammatory marker were way high in the fasting-mimicking diet.

Really?

And all the reviewers were saying, oh, this is bad. And we said, no, go read the papers. If you look at these two markers, they're central in what's called inflammatory regeneration. So the inflammation may actually have always been good for you if coordinated. What is the body is trying to do with the inflammation is fix the problem.

Yeah.

But it cannot do that because the system is so damaged, and there is not the conditions to repair it. So it keeps spinning the wheels. So this TNF-alpha and other inflammatory marker interleukins are trying to fix it, and this is not, I'm not saying it, is very well established that these are central in the repair process.

So then after you finish the fasting-mimicking diet, you'd assume that the markers would come down as the body repairs.

Yeah.

Is that what you see? Yeah. Well, we haven't looked long enough, but of course they're gonna come back down. So once you repair it, once the autoimmune problem has gone away, Now they're gonna come back down. In fact, we looked this also in the paper, we have human inflammation, body inflammation. So what you see is that in people that have high C-reactive protein, systemic marker of inflammation, we looked in this new paper and we see that white blood cell count goes up, right? So then you start doing the FMD and the CRP comes down and the white blood cell count comes back to normal, right? and it does during the FMD, but more also after. When you look a week later, now the white blood cell count is restored to the normal levels.

So you're sort of treating all these different conditions we talked about, whether it's autoimmune, whether it's gut issues, whether it's the aging process itself, whether it's Alzheimer's, but also it seems that just these short periods of fasting leads to reversal of metabolic diseases like weight and obesity and diabetes. How does that work? Because if you're only stopping the calorie influx for five days, how does that carry over to sustained change? I don't understand that. I think many people are wondering how in fact does just restricting your calories for five days a few times a year have all these long-term lasting benefits. It seems like too good to be true.

Well, yes and no. for sure is going after the visceral fat, right? So we know that the visceral fat- Belly fat. Yeah, we know from many other papers that this belly fat is so central in insulin resistance and all kinds of other problems. And so, of course, after two or three days of a fasting-mimicking diet, we have shown in the paper that everything turns into belly fat consumption. so the body is going after, I mean, that's it, the reservoir, that's a food reservoir.

So you don't need the ab roller, you just need the Proline diet.

You don't, interestingly, it didn't take it from subcutaneous fat, it only took it from visceral, and we showed this in mice with the scans and in people with the DEXA. So that's for sure one way, one of the major ways.

I gotta pause here because what you said was pretty profound. when you do this approach of short-term calorie restriction, you target the fat that causes all the chronic diseases, which is the belly fat or abdominal fat or visceral fat, and not the regular fat around under your skin or the subcutaneous fat. That is a profound, important discovery because that is the fat that we all need to target.

Yeah, the other interesting thing is the lean body mass differential effects, right? So it's targeting the fat. and temporarily you see the lean body mass as measured by DEXA go down. And then- so you lose muscle. You lose muscle, but only temporarily, right? So usually in all kinds of diets, you lose the fat and the muscle. Here you lose the fat, you lose a little bit of muscle. When you refeed within a week, all the muscle is back, right? So now you have an increased relative lean body mass. So you now gain muscle mass, you Pretty much go back to the absolute normal level of muscle, but now compared to your body weight, you've gained muscle mass.

So you have more- Without exercising.

Without exercise. No intervention. So that's one way. The other way we think that makes a big difference is almost everybody will say the following. When after I got through one, two, three cycles of the FMD, I started looking at food differently.

So-.

Yeah, you want some water?

So.

After I went through one, two, three cycles of the FND, I started looking for food differently. And so, for example, if somebody had lots of sweets and lots of candy, lots of starches, et cetera, et cetera, they don't feel like eating like that as much. so they all say... Their cravings go.

Away, their tastes change.

Yeah, I think maybe because the microbiota, maybe because the brain now gets sees the association, lots of people may have never done five days of a vegan diet so often, right? Completely, 100% vegan. So it is possible that the brain now recognizes the wellness that is associated with it. And then without anybody telling them anything, they begin to say, I felt better when I did that. I'm not sure. So for example, I had some obese people that said, I used to eat pizza all the time and I could finish, you know, two entire pizzas. And now they say, I may have a few slices and I just don't feel like continuing to eat. So it's really, I think, a conversion of the behavior based on instinct and not based on, on, on, rational or thinking about it.

So, we were talking a little bit before about the ketogenic diet combined with fasting mimicking diets for cancer and other things. Talk more about that because I think people are confused about the variations between fasting mimicking diets and ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting and when you should do what or if you should do any. What is the expert's opinion here? Because you're probably one who knows most about this.

Yeah, so first of all, I always say I hate the word intermittent fasting because it doesn't mean anything. I mean, intermittent fasting goes from I haven't eaten for two hours to I haven't eaten for two months. And it goes from I haven't eaten anything at all or I had lots of food in a fasting mimicking meal. So, yeah, it doesn't mean anything. So we need to move to what exactly did you do or what exactly should you do? And I think my- People are referring.

To like time-restricted eating. where you eat within an eight hour period.

Yeah. So if you look at time-restricted eating and the work by Satchin Panda, but if you look at all the data, you would say that, say 12, 13 hours of fasting per day are very good and very safe.

That's right.

Well, it's normal, but nobody does it anymore. If you look at Satchin's data, it'll show the average is about 15 hours. And I think this average of 15 hours, It comes with this idea that you should eat five or six times a day. So now, you know, to eat five times a day, you're stretching the amount of hours. And so when he did this study, and they just asked people, you just mark down when you eat. It was 15 hours. It was not 12. So now I think if you went, in fact, when they went back to 12, people started doing a lot better. Now, the argument is, well, what if you go down to six? Could you do even better? Or eight, say, hours where you eat and the rest of it you fast? Well, then you start seeing, A, not too many people in history did that, and B, you're starting seeing the problems. And the problems include goldstone formation and the problem include many, including our own trial, our own study, epidemiological study, people that skip breakfast. they usually do worse.

And.

Understandably, you can argue that there are reasons for that. But that's not a good start, right? So I would say if you keep it 12-13 hours, seems to me like it's a good way to go and it's very safe. There is really no negative association with even the 13 hours that I've seen. Maybe a little bit of slight increase in gold stone formation. but it's very slight. When you get to 16-18 hours, then you start seeing twice as much risk of, you know, gallbladder removal, not the nicest thing that could happen to you. So, so that's, that's, that's the thing. So, yeah, so there is all kinds of fasting.

And what about ketogenic?

So, yeah. So ketogenic diet. Again, what does it mean? You know, does it mean that you're gonna do it for a month? Does it mean that it's going to be low protein, high protein, animal based? And so again, we're ketogenic. We gotta go move move away, in my opinion, to the world and move into what do you mean?

Right?

Just like medicine, any drug that you take and say, oh, my, it's a drug that generally blocks the cholesterol pathway. No, it doesn't work like that. It's like, well, exactly what does it do? And show me the data on thousands of patients, etc. Etc. So here, I think we need to say, in my opinion, a, a little bit higher fat. you know, ketogenic, not ketogenic, but certainly I think the 60-30-10 is an ideal diet if you for all time. So 60% carbs, mostly from vegetables and legumes, 30% fats, mostly from olive oil, nuts and fatty fish.

Yeah.

And 10% protein, mostly from legumes and fatty fish. that seems to be ideal, not based on my opinion, but really going around the world, looking at the basic research, looking at the clinical trials, etc. Etc. Now, for you specific uses, I think that the ketogenic diet can be modified, be more extreme.

Right.

So if you, you have somebody that has, you know, overweight, obese, all kinds of other problems. Yeah, that's where I see that. you know, let's say a much higher fat level, a much lower carbohydrate level being very useful to get the person to where they need to be.

-So, we're two billion people on the planet.

-Exactly, exactly.

Right. So, in this country, it's 50 to 70%.

-Yeah. So, the question is, is that reasonable and is it safe for, and how should you do it? let's say an 80-10-10, right? That could be a possibility. So 80% fats, 10% protein, 10% carbs. But how long can somebody stay on that?

And.

How long can they stay on it? And how long do you want to keep them on that without risking them getting into the epidemiological data clearly showing that low-carb diets if they're animal based, they could be detrimental. And I know we disagree on this, but I mean, you know, I'm just thinking, I think it'd be good to come up with things that we know, and that's what I try to do with the book. Come up with things that we know there is no way it is bad for you.

I mean, you know, that is a good point.

I came up with this denominator where like, there is no way, I don't care what they need to, like 200 years of publications, to say that this is why? Because the centenarian is one of the pillars. These guys have been doing this for over 100 years and in different parts of the world.

They eat real food, they don't eat.

A lot of sugar. They eat real food, yeah. And that's a recommendation, right? So if you do that, then you're for sure in good shape. Now the argument could be who's going to be able to do that? Okay, then we say, well, what's the second best that people can reasonably do? I think it's reasonable to eat a 60% vegetable and fish and legume diet. I think it's reasonable to have 30% fats. And if somebody cannot do it only from vegetable sources, whatever you can add some animal sources, that's okay. And 10% protein, to most people is 50, 60, 70 grams of protein a day. so it's not a lot.

Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I know a lot of you out there are practitioners like me helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as your framework for getting to the root cause. What's critical to understanding what each individual person and body needs is testing, which is why I'm excited to tell you about Rupa Health. Looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other internal variables can help us find the most effective path to optimize health and reverse disease. But up till now, that meant you are usually ordering tests for one patient from multiple labs. And I'm sure many of you can relate how time consuming this process was and then it could all feel like a lot of work to keep track of. Now there's Rupa Health, a place for functional medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty labs from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains and more. Rupa Health helps provide a significantly better patient experience and it's 90% faster, letting you simplify the entire process of getting the functional medicine lab tests you need and giving you more time to focus on patients. This is really a much needed option in functional medicine space and I'm so excited about it. It means better service for you and your patients. You can check it out and look at a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com that's R-U-P-A-Health.com .com Now, let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

But the cool thing is when you fast, 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 you've given yourself a power upgrade because now you can generate more power when you do eat. And the only thing that's left is how do we overcome that part of us that says, eat the cookie, eat the cookie? And for that, I'm a busy guy. I am CEO right now of four companies, not Bulletproof. I hired a CEO for that, but these are upgrade labs and Bulletproof media. And, you know, I write books like you do, and you know how busy life gets. And I'm a dad and I'm a husband, right? And so with all of these things, I really want my energy to be where I want it to be. And fasting lets you do that, except if you're hungry and distracted and anxious and cold and shaky, which does happen, especially when people start fasting. So over the course of the last 10 years, people have lost a million pounds on the Bulletproof Diet, including intermittent fasting. And I've learned a few things from talking with thousands of people about this, as well as my own experience. What happens When you fast and you fast the old way, so I'm just gonna go two days without food, you know, like you would in a cave, after about two days, you start making ketones and ketones are the preferred fuel for the neurons in your brain. And if you, if you put the neuron in a petri dish with sugar and with ketones, it'll eat ketones first cuz ketones have more energy than sugar. So the body's like, yeah, of course there's parts of your body that really require carbs on a regular basis too. So you don't wanna be in ketosis all the time, but the reason spiritual traditions fast for at least two days much of the time is because clarity comes on and all the energy that's going into digestion stops and you get a power upgrade because now you're burning fat instead of sugar. And you're like, oh man, I just feel so good. I feel so clean and you stop being hungry after two days of fasting. But who can have a job? Who can have multiple jobs like you and me and like most people listening here and deal with all the crap in the world and being hungry? So there are hacks that turn off hunger during fast.

So.

You can actually go through a day and skip breakfast and maybe even skip lunch and just not worry about food and take that 30% of thoughts, that second effort and just remove it and go, oh, I guess, yeah, I could eat lunch. I could not eat lunch. I'm okay either way. No thoughts, no willpower involved. And so during the week- oh, okay.

How do you do that?

And that's why fast this way. That's why I wrote it because that first stepping off a cliff to do your first, even your first intermittent fast, it's a little bit scary. This is to remove the pain of fasting so we can all be high functioning humans. And then on the weekend, I teach how to do a spiritual fast. But here's the first hack for coffee, for fasting. It is coffee. And just black coffee, the amount of caffeine in two small cups of coffee, so about a medium sized large cup of coffee, is enough to double ketone production. in studies. And when you get your ketones up.

To a very low- Low coffee, not.

Not Bulletproof coffee, just plain coffee. Plain black coffee or Caffeine Table would do it if you really are into that kind of things, which I don't really recommend, but it's the caffeine itself, not coffee. Coffee has its own set of powers apart from caffeine. And in those studies, doubling ketone production is pretty good. So let's say that you already slept for eight hours, even if you had a snack right before bed, which is a bad idea, You've got eight hours of fasting, which raises ketones a little bit, and then you have some coffee with no sugar in it, no creamer, nothing like that. And that alone is enough to help suppress hunger and turn off all the thoughts about food that are distracting to you when you're trying to do it. If you can get your ketone levels up to 0.5, which is much less than the keto bro, you know, haven't eaten carbs in a while, or you can get up to one or two or higher, just 0.5 is shown in studies to , turn off the hunger hormone called ghrelin, which I know your listeners are familiar with, and to turn on CCK, which is the fullness hormone. So the first hack black coffee. Second hack is make it bulletproof and you put in grass fed butter or ghee and ghee has no milk protein whatsoever. Well made ghee shouldn't trigger milk allergies, whether they're lactose or milk protein. I'm very sensitive to milk protein. I can handle butter just fine. and you add the MCT oil. And this for most people can kick their ketones up to that magic number. So then you've got energy from burning fat, but because you didn't have any sugar, your insulin levels didn't go up and you didn't turn on protein digestion, you're still getting the vast majority of the benefits of a fast. So if you do this, it's easier on the body, easier on the mind, and it lowers physiological stress. And that matters even more for women. And so the first one is black coffee, second one is bulletproof coffee. The third one is prebiotic fiber. And this is a type of fiber that cannot be digested by the body. So you're not feeding yourself whatsoever, but it makes you feel really full. And you can eat it.

It has the good bugs in your gut.

Feeds the good bugs in your gut, helps to crowd out the bad ones. And one of the things that happens during a fast is that the bacteria in your gut, they're like, we're getting a little stressed here. We got no food. When we're stressed, we make more of those fear compounds. Remember I said all life practices that run away from kill or hide. So the bad guys in your gut, when they don't have food, they make something called lipopolysaccharides or LPS. And you're very familiar with this, Mark, because of your medical background. But LPS crosses the gut barrier and it's a toxin and it creates a state of anxiety and hunger and it.

Creates a state of inflammation.

So what would happen if you also causes weight gain and diabetes?

Yeah, LPS is really bad.

And if you have bad gut bacteria, it's a problem. So what if during a fast you took a prebiotic fiber that actually turned off hunger and fed the good guys and helped to crowd out the bad guys, but you didn't raise your insulin levels, you didn't turn on protein digestion, you just reduced the amount of toxins that were being formed in your gut. Well, what happens is the benefits of fasting I'm up to 18 or more if you want to. There's many different names for fasting and it's a good thing. Lots of people are popularizing fasting. So they'll put cool brand names on it. And I've done the same thing, the Bulletproof intermittent fast circa 2011. That was with Bulletproof coffee, but we know so much more now about fasting than we did back in the early days.

Mm-.

You can use any of these three, you can use all three of them together. And then suddenly during the week, you feel better than you did when you had breakfast. And it isn't any cost. There's no pain at all. And then lunchtime rolls around and because you're still not that hungry, you make better food choices. Like, you know, I think I'll have the salad instead of, you know, the hamburger. And you can really, really just have more control biologically. And those three things matter. as well as just understanding the base psychology behind it all.

So you're basically talking about a phenomena we call time restricted eating and hacks to make it easier, which is giving your body a break from, let's say, after dinner. And by the way, listen, if you have dinner at six o'clock in the evening and you have breakfast at eight, that's a 14 hour fast.

That's the other hack. Have dinner early. Who would have thought, right?

Have dinner early. if you have dinner at 5, you can eat breakfast at 9. That's a 16-hour fast, right? Yeah. So it doesn't have to be as onerous as it sounds. And what you're saying is that by doing that, you are going to create a whole series of biological changes in your body that doesn't just make you feel better, have more energy, have better focus, but that actually deals with some of the fundamental biology of aging. Now, you wrote a book called Superhuman. We had you on the podcast talking about it. But we used to think that, you know, longevity was genetic. You got handed a good deck of cards from your parents or you didn't. But it turns out that a lot of longevity is not determined by our genes. Unless you're really lucky and you got those genes like UV Blake or, you know, he's like, I would have lived to 100 and something years old. He said, if I would have known I was gonna live so long, I would have taken better care of myself. You know, he smoked, he drank, he did all these horrible things. It's just not fair. But that's not fair. fair. But that's not most of us. We have to pay attention. But it turns out that what we do in terms of our lifestyle and our diet makes huge impact. And 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, 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, they all do the same thing, which is rejuvenate your biology. It's really rejuvenative and regenerative medicine.

It is so rejuvenating because, well, geez, there's a lot of pathways that are involved, but one of the most important one that I talked about there is mitochondrial biogenesis. So when you fast, your body will build new, stronger mitochondria. It's really important for aging. As we age, we lose the ability to combine air and food effectively. A lot of people have heard about intermittent training or high-intensity interval training, where you just exercise really hard for a brief period of time. Then the body's like, oh man, I might have to do that again, I guess I should get strong. Fasting is the same thing, but for the mitochondria in the cells, they go, oh, I might have to skip some meals again, I guess I should get strong. Everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial deficiency unless they're actively managing it, and 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial deficiency, according to research by Frank Shallenberger, who's been on my show.

Has he been on yours?

He's one of the ozone guys. Yeah, yeah. And he measures mitochondrial efficiency with a very serious set of oxygen masks and all kinds of stuff. So it's real data. 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. It's 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 there's a bunch of other things around AMPK, which caffeine or coffee can help with, sirtuins, and not a lot of people are talking about supplementation during fasting because some supplements break fasting. And since I wrote a lot about anti-aging supplements and all the other technologies and techniques in superhuman, I really got into the science about what supplements should you take when you're fasting and which ones should you not take.

Tell us, tell us.

This is stuff I haven't seen online. This is from combing PubMed and I do a lot of background research when I write a book. So 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. And there are other formulas that I mentioned in the book that are essentially, Hey, pancreas, now you don't have to do that. And these can break up the stuff that makes your blood sticky, like called thrombin and fibrinogen. And if you do that when you're fasting, you're getting a whole deep tissue work out there that's really powerful. 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 into the water I drink. Tom Brady does it, drink water without electrolytes, which may explain his longevity and health. And I think when people get hydrated, they think, oh, I'm just drinking water, I'm gonna be hydrated. But the truth is, you want your inside of your cells to be hydrated.

Yes.

The only way to get your inside of your cells hydrated is by having enough electrolytes. So if you just drink water without.

Electrolytes, you can literally die.

Yes. People do that in marathons all the time. In marathons, right? They did. Hyponatremia. Yeah, they dilute their blood so the salt in their blood goes so low that it causes seizures and coma and death. So, you need electrolytes.

You really do.

Afraid of those. And, I think for interest, cellular hydration, it's a really important strategy that most people don't use. And, 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. uh, 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, 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 in breakfast, don't have a lot of carbs, and you're going to feel better. So electrolytes help. The other thing is when you do the prebiotic fiber, that means that you have more water sitting in your digestive system longer and it can absorb better. So it turns out having fiber helps you stay hydrated. And if you do fiber and electrolytes together, even during a fast, some people still say, oh wait, you can only have water during a fast because that's what the mice did. I'm like, yeah, but we're not mice and we have jobs and the mice just sit there and run on a wheel if they feel like it. So, what we want to do is get the benefits of fasting and having a caloric surplus during a fast isn't going to work, but we're talking not very much from a calorie perspective and very specific types of calories that your body either doesn't use or doesn't use in a way that's going to break the fast. So, you add your electrolytes, you add your digestive enzymes, and away from those, the other supplement that I talk about in Fast this Way that's really important is activated charcoal. Now, we talked about LPS at Lipo- polysaccharide. Those- Wait, before you get into the.

Charcoal, explain what kind of prebiotic fiber you're talking about. Give us an example of some prebiotic fibers that you'd use.

There are now a great variety of prebiotic fiber products on the market, and certainly I formulated one for Bulletproof, But the primary ingredient in many of them is acacia gum, which is basically a sap from a tree that is shown in studies to feed the good guys. You can also add a variety of oligosaccharides. Hydrolyzed guar gum is another one that's out there. And there are literally dozens of formulas that are designed to be prebiotics. And I wrote a lot about these and looked into the anti-aging effects of getting enough of this is called soluble fiber. This is not the chunky sawdust kind of, you know, mucil or psyllium husk. I don't mean those. What I mean is the stuff that dissolves in water and you do that and magically you'll probably have healthier poop, but most importantly, you're changing the ratio of the bacteria in your body. You can also take probiotics with prebiotics and doing that during a fast is okay as well. In fact, at that point, if you eat nothing and then you take the good guy prebiotic and the good guy probiotics, you're crowding out the bad guys pretty effectively. You might as well do that. You were fasting anyway. You didn't have breakfast.

It's pretty easy to do. Now, if I, if I do too much fasting or inter, even intermittent or time restricted eating, I'll tend to lose too much weight, which I probably shouldn't advertise in public, but it makes, it.

Makes people jealous, right?

Yeah. I mean, I, and I, you know, I worked hard at optimizing my metabolism, so I think I, I do very well, but. 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 that's because that's who was in college. And they used college students as guinea pigs. And until about 20 years ago- I.

Did it being the research.

Yeah, exactly. These guys are cheap. They're fodder. For women, fasting really is different. I have routinely seen women who go on a full ketogenic diet. This is why I've always recommended cyclical keto. That's at the core of the bulletproof thing. Cyclical keto with low-tox plants. When you get that dialed in, it still can be a lot for women. 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 and you don't want to do it when you're completely wrecked.

And there's a benefit if you're not doing it every day, like you get, if 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 a bowl of carby cereal, but have some eggs and 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 me, I do an intermittent fast five days a week, Saturday morning, I have breakfast with the kids and sometimes Sunday morning too. And you know what? Sometimes I even have carbs for breakfast.

Even though it's not good for me to say it was a Saturday morning, right?

I just don't have gluten and corn syrup.

Both fasting and ketogenic diets have the same sort of goal at the end, which is trying to lower insulin. Because the difference between a ketogenic diet, say, and a low carb diet is that, you know, you're sort of low carb, ultra low carb for the keto, but sort of moderate protein because protein can also stimulate insulin, whereas some of the older low carb diets were like.

Very high in protein.

You take protein shakes or whatever it is. And that's Atkins, right? Yeah, like Atkins. And so high protein is not always the best idea because you can get high insulin, but you also get this high mTOR, which is sometimes not so good for cancer as well. But the idea is to really drop your insulin levels. And if these are diseases of too much insulin, then that's going to be a very useful adjunctive treatment. So fasting is actually fascinating because there's all these different things we're discovering. So one of the things is sort of autophagy. So as you fast, of course, your nutrient sensors go down, so mTOR insulin go down, and then you activate this process called autophagy, where you actually start to break down some of your subcellular organelles and stuff. So, basically, your body's just trying to clean house.

It's like Pac-Man coming around and cleaning up all the garbage.

Yeah, exactly. People think it's a bad thing.

Maybe people don't know who Pac-Man was, but that was the original video game that we all played back in the 70s. Pretty simple. Very exciting though. Yeah, Pac-Man is anymore.

You can still find them sometimes. But the idea is that people think that this sort of breakdown process is really bad for you, but it's actually really good for you. And in fact, it's sort of one of the keys to rejuvenating the body. That is, you want to break down all your old stuff and then sort of rebuild the stuff that you need. So the whole idea of fasting is you're trying to put the body into this sort of regenerative maintenance mode. Because what we've recognized over the last little bit is that your body sort of has sort of, you know, you can go into growth mode or you can go into sort of the cell maintenance repair mode. And it really depends on your nutrients availability. When nutrients are available, you want to grow. When nutrients are not available, you don't want to grow and you want to go into this sort of maintenance repair mode. And everybody thinks growth is good, but growth is not always good, especially as an adult. So I always say think about a car. Like if you have a sports car and you rev that engine and you're running it fast all the time, you're going to go fast, which is great, but it's going to burn out much faster. So you can't just keep revving that engine, keep redlining it. You go to sometimes bring it to the shop, put it in the garage, let it rest and all this stuff.

A pit stop.

Yeah, exactly. A little pit stop. So that's the point of the human body too. You can either go for growth or you can go for longevity or cellular maintenance repair. But you gotta have a bit of both. It's a balance there. It's not all growth. And this is where you say, oh, EDDDD. Well, you're gonna put your body, your nutrient sensors are gonna go up, your growth factors are gonna go up, you're gonna put yourself in growth mode.

Mode.

But you don't want to do that, especially for a disease such as cancer, which is a disease where cells are growing too much. You're basically feeding into that growth, and that's going to be very, very bad for you. So what you do instead is you do the fasting and you put your cells into this sort of maintenance repair mode. And it actually allows you to undergo the, both the chemotherapy and probably the radiation therapy better, because chemotherapy We have a couple studies on fasting and chemotherapy where what you do is you fast just before and during and just after your chemotherapy. What they've noticed is that those people tend to get a lot less side effects from the treatment because what you've done, of course, is taken the cells of your normal body and you've put them into a more quiescent state. They're not trying to grow. They're actually trying to slow down. Chemotherapy the general way it works is it kills the fastest growing cells, which are usually the cancer cells, but it also kills the hair follicles because they're fast growing cells. It kills the lining of the GI tract, so you get nausea and your hair falls out. If you can put those cells into a quiescent repair mode, it's not going to sustain as much damage from the chemotherapy. Instead, the cancer cells, which can't stop their growth, they're always trying to grow, they can't do that. So therefore, they're going to sustain full damage from the chemotherapy while your body is relatively protected. And that's one of the things that might be very interesting to use as an adjunct to sort of standard treatment. I would never advise not to take the standard treatment because of course we're spending. You know, there's a lot of interesting.

Work by Dr. Mukherjee, Siddhartha Mukherjee and others looking at ketogenic diets in cancer. And I've heard him present on this. It's just fascinating. He wrote the Emperor of All Maladies. It's about cancer. I'm sure you've read that. and he said that to me, he said, Mark, you know, we figured out the solution to cancer. I'm like, what is it? It's this big discovery. It's like, and the cause. I'm like, what is it? He's like, it's sugar. I'm like, yeah, you know, I guess that's not really news, but maybe it's good you know that now. And then he said, we've been studying ketogenic diets and seeing incredible results with pancreatic cancer, melanoma, stage four cancers that weren't responding to anything else. And animal models they literally were curing cancers with ketogenic diets, and now they're doing human trials. Can you talk a little bit about some of that research and how it might be applied to people who are struggling with cancer?

Yeah, so this was the sort of big discovery of Dr. Lou Cantley who's discovered sort of this whole pathway, the PI3K pathway that links sort of insulin and growth and cancer. So, The important thing is that insulin acts as that growth factor and therefore acts as a sort of pro-growth and therefore a sort of pro-cancer agent. Sugar, of course, plays a big role in the hyperinsulinemia. And it's interesting because Dr. Luke Cantley in several of his, you know, articles or whatever, he goes, Sugar scares me, right? Here's this guy who studies cancer for a living and he's like, Yeah, sugar just scares me. And that's the same sort of thing that Siddhartha Mukherjee is talking about too, right? And that's the whole point is that with ketogenic diets, with fasting, and of course fasting, you have to cycle it because you can't obviously fast. You can't fast forever, right? As opposed to ketogenic diet, which is sort of very low carbohydrate, you could sustain that for years and years. You can't fast forever. You need some food at some point. But the idea is the same. What you're trying to do is really reduce those insulin levels. They're of course studying this in terms of drugs. They're trying to develop these blockers to the whole pathway of PI3K and so on. I think they've developed a couple companies for that. But just like anything else, it's like, why would you want to do it with a drug when you can do it with your diet?

You know what's so striking, Jason, is that, you know, often when people go get cancer treatment, their doctors, make sure you keep your weight up, eat ice cream, eat milkshakes, have cake, you know? And I'm like, what are you telling them that for? I mean, that is death. And yet it's, it's, it's, it's, I mean, I actually had a radiation oncologist as a patient who worked at MD Anderson, and he was very aware of these studies and these issues, and he tried to tell his patients do the right things. He said, all the nutritionists, this is like the number one cancer hospital in the world, are telling their patients to eat a lot of starch and carbohydrates and sugar to keep their weight up. And it's just such a unfortunate situation that is going on right now. So when we talk about cancer, we're clearly talking about some of the risk factors, right? Sugar. There's other risk factors. And one of the things that I think is very concerning to me is these obesogens, which are environmental chemicals that not only are directly toxic and carcinogenic, but they're actually causing insulin resistance. So they're really creating a double whammy, pesticides, herbicides, additives, all these environmental chemicals that we're exposed to, 80, 000 of them that have been developed over the last 100 years. What's your perspective on that? And how do we reduce our risks?

Well, I think that stuff is really hard because they're not adequately studied. I mean, there's so many chemicals and what do we know about the effect on the human body for most of these? Like very, very little, right? I mean, you know, they have this classification as generally recognized as safe, but, you know, I mean, that just means it doesn't kill you within a month, right? I mean, that's about it. So, and all of these chemicals, like the, you know, even the ones that we eventually find out are really bad for us, I mean, they were originally approved and and, you know, for you. So, you know, we, we trust our government to sort of keep us safe from all these sort of chemicals. Very elementary. Like, you do it in a, you test the toxicology in some rats and it doesn't kill them. And, hey, nothing, you know, you get out there and it doesn't kill people right away. So, hey, you're good. That's the sort of idea that we have. But, yeah, I think that, unfortunately, it's hard to know exactly what say because one, there's just so many of them. They're changing all the time. How many causes that? Yeah, just change. So like the classic sort of pesticide was like DDT. Remember it was, yeah, I date myself here a little bit, but DDT was this big, big time pesticide was amazing, killed everything, right? Turned out it was like super, super bad for us and, you know, causing cancer all over the place, right? There's all kinds of stories like that. Um, now, of course, there's all these other chemicals in there and we don't even know what they are. I mean, they're not.

Yeah, I mean, the government did write, the government did write a whole report on the environmental chemicals and how they're linked to cancer. So I think that's a big thing. And I, I encourage people to check out ewg.org, which is the environmental working groups website, where they have guides on how to reduce your exposure through your food, through household cleaning products, through skincare products, and many other ways to reduce your exposures, household cleaning products. So I think, I think the more we can do to reduce our intake of these chemicals is a good idea. So let's talk about how to reduce your risk. What can people do who are listening that you talk about in your amazing book, the Cancer Code, a revolutionary understanding of the medical mystery. I encourage everybody to get a copy of the Cancer Code. It's out now because it really is a revolution and understanding of cancer that I think could help so many people. So tell us what can we do to reduce our risk of getting cancer?

Yeah, I think the most important thing is to go after the sort of hyperinsulinemia because we know it's such a big risk factor. So you can, you know, you can't always test it, but you'll know because if you are overweight, for example, then you want to try and get back to a normal weight. And there's lots of different ways to do that. Sort of ketogenic diets are not the only way. You can do, you know, all kinds of different diets and, you know, vegetarian diets and sort of paleo diets. There's also sorts of good ones. And then the other one, of of course, is the sort of reintroduction of intermittent fasting into sort of the normal schedule. And I think that's really important because what we've lost, of course, is that balance between feeding and fasting, right? We've gone to a sort of feeding all the time model, which is not so good for growth because we all, you know, you're always telling your body to grow more. And of course, if you have type 2 diabetes, which is becoming a huge, huge problem. So if you look pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes in America, it's like it just skyrocketed over the last 15 years. And that too is a sort of massive, massive risk factor for the development of cancer. The World Health Organization actually classifies 13 different types of cancer as obesity related cancer, so including breast and colorectal. So that's a huge- and prostate and colon, liver, pancreas. And interestingly, if you look at the types of cancer, so we've actually been doing really well for most cancers over time as you track them through the years, most cancers are actually slowly declining, except those obesity related cancers are actually going up. So pancreatic cancer going up, liver cancer going up, all of these cancers are going up and they're not rare diseases. So breast cancer, for example, is very, very common. Colorectal cancer, very, very common. And I think that this is one of the things that we hadn't recognized. So I went to medical school in the 90s. We never talked about diet and, you know, cancer. It just wasn't even on the radar screen. It was crazy, except maybe a few people who are really into it. But for the most part, people just, we just didn't talk about it. And then it wasn't until sort of 2003 that the first large papers started to come out that said, hey, this is a, big risk factor and then you multiply it by the millions of people who have it. And that's why it's such a big risk factor. So staying to a normal weight, you know, which includes getting your diet in order, cutting out sugar, cutting out the processed foods, for the most part, adding back the intermittent fasting, which is part of a normal sort of regimen.

When you, when you say that, what do you mean? You mean time restricted eating, right? You mean.

Yeah, so I up to 14 hours. should be your sort of baseline because that's just 1970s style eating when we didn't have so much obesity. Now, if you're trying to lose weight or if you have type 2 diabetes and you can extend it to say 16 hours, which is time restricted eating, or you can even go further 24 hours or even multiple days of fasting. And people always worry about that, but that's why I talk about it a lot because a lot of the stuff that we worry about Simply isn't true. People worry about, oh, they're going to lose muscle. They can't work. They can't concentrate. I'm like, all you're doing when you don't eat is that you're making your body rely on your body's own store of calories, which is sugar, right? Or body fat. That's how your body stores calories. So you're literally using the body fat for precisely the reason that you carry it. So what could be wrong with that? What is more natural? than that. If your sugar is high and you don't eat, you're going to use up the sugar and your sugar will fall. Now, that's great news if you have a high sugar and type 2 diabetes, which of course that high sugar drives a high insulin, which drives, you know, cancer risk and so on. So something like that is a completely natural way to get this, all of this back in order. And if you're too far along the scale of, you know, you have too much insulin, you don't have to stop at 14 hours. There's nothing to stop you from taking your fast out to, you know, a couple of days at a time, right? And that's the thing. It's a free intervention. It's a natural intervention. It's been used for thousands of years, right? Every culture and history has used it. It's crazy that we don't use this sort of thing.

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