Dr. Walter Longo explains the fasting mimicking diet, which triggers cellular regeneration and fat loss while keeping hunger at bay. The approach targets aging and disease prevention by mimicking fasting's effects without a complete fast.
People are not going to be old and sick, they're going to be old and healthy and contributing to our society.
Hi, I'm Kasia Perowietz, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy Podcast. The topic of fasting has gained a lot of recent hype in the health world, and with good reason. Fasting has been shown to help with weight loss and losing dangerous inflammatory belly fat. It can reduce insulin levels and blood pressure, improve insulin sensitivity, and reduce the risk of diabetes. And it can help the brain function better. Dr. Hyman sat down with Dr. Walter Longo, an internationally recognized leader in the field of aging studies, to discuss Dr. Longo's research and development of the fasting mimicking diet.
Let's listen in. Most physicians were trained to treat diseases with drugs that suppress symptoms or target a specific pathway or mechanism. But your work has shown that you're really not doing that. You're focusing on the inherent repair systems, the regeneration and healing mechanisms in the body, the programs, as you call them, that can get activated by specific intervention. which then can be applied across all sorts of diseases. So it seems almost incredulous that you could say that eating this way, which is short periods of restricted calories for five days, could help treat Alzheimer's and cancer and diabetes and colitis and MS and all kinds of other stuff. 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 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, and these are like, these don't.
Even do the same effect.
And this is like, 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 calorie for five days a few times a year have all these long-term lasting benefits? 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. 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.
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 the 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. 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- so their cravings.
Go away, their tastes change.
Yeah, the fasting mimicking diet is designed to push the body to start breaking components down. turn on the stem cells and the stem cells you see them, they're standing by. For example, when we damage the pancreas of mice, you damage the pancreas mice, they stop making insulin and then you start, only then you start the fasting-mimicking diet and you see that the pancreas is now turning this embryonic developmental program.
On.
And all these genes that are only turned down when the pancreas is first generated when the mouse is born, it started getting turned out. Many genes, right? So it's very clear it's a program. It's not just simply few genes around, all of them around. And of course you want to do that. When you repair your skin after you cut yourself, that's a program, right? You don't, things are not just getting repaired by chance. Everything, every cytokine, every stem cell, it goes in, knows exactly where to go, it gets recruited and binds to something else and slowly it just rebuilds everything, remarkable. And I always say, do you really think that we have a program so sophisticated for the outside of the body and we got nothing for the inside? There's no way. So the inside understands that and I think fasting but more safely fasting mimicking diets can trigger that program in the liver, in the pancreas, in the hematopoietic system, in the brain, et cetera, et cetera.
In a sense, you're not studying disease.
You'Re studying the science of health.
Long-term health. How do you turn on healing mechanisms of the body and repair mechanisms? And that is a very big difference from trying to treat diseases and symptoms. Yes. That is the future. People are not going to be old.
And sick, they're going to be old and healthy and contributing to our society. Many people associate fasting with restricting eating for long periods of time. There are actually many styles with different timing which can make fasting a much more approachable practice than you might think. In fact, many of you are probably already fasting without even realizing it. The most basic kind of fast is the break taken between dinner and breakfast. A fast during this time usually falls between 12 and 14 hours which aligns with our natural circadian rhythms. It's interesting to note that many traditional cultures and religions incorporated fasting as a regular practice. which is perhaps evidence that our ancestors knew of the benefits of fasting all along. 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. It's also important to note that fasting isn't for everyone. Be sure to talk about fasting with your health practitioner to see if it's right for you. Thanks for tuning in to this week's mini episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy Podcast. Until next time.
