All The Benefits of Fasting While Still Eating? 106

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Chris Rhodes dedicated over 8 years to studying the benefits of fasting on the human body, and after his discoveries co-founded Mimio Health, a biometric supplement company designed from human biology to optimize health, slow aging, and enhance longevity. With his work recently published on ScienceDirect, Dr. Rhodes and a team of UC Davis researchers proved that specific doses of nicotinamide spermidine, PEA, and OEA reduce inflammation, combat oxidative stress, and enhance heart health. This revolutionary finding makes fasting-like benefits accessible to everyone, ushering in a new era of health innovation.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Heal, Grow, Nourish, Grow podcast. I don't even know the name of my own podcast. I'm flubbing my words today. But anyway, I'm really excited about today's guest. I'm here with Dr. Chris Rhodes, and he is a nutrition scientist. I'll let him better describe himself, but you will have heard his full bio, of course, before this. But I always like to start out, Dr. Rhodes, with just having you kind of share in your own words what brought you into this space, what made you passionate about working with Mimeo Health and the technology there. Like, what led you to this point? Yeah, great question. Really happy to be to be here, Cheryl.

Thanks for having me on. Really got me interested into the longevity space, the healthy aging space, and eventually the fasting space was coming out of college. I got my BS in biochemistry from Loyola Marymount University, but you know, like a lot of college kids didn't really know what I wanted to do there. So to try and figure that out, took an immunology fellowship at Stanford, just kind of started pouring through all the research I could get my hands on, going to all these seminars, and eventually came across the longevity research. And I thought that was so fascinating because it was this thing that used to be relegated to myth and legend, right? It was like Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth. And now it's this very active, very rigorous area of scientific research with a ton of funding and a ton of companies and a ton of, you know, government and scientific attention on it. And it's one of those things that helps with everything, right? If you can solve aging, then you can pretty much also solve disease because by and large, you know, most young folks don't get disease. We really see that aging is something that's an underlying underlying factor in every disease that happens. So if you can tackle these fundamental issues of aging at the cellular level and really slow that process down, then you can not only, you know, potentially enhance lifespan, but also healthspan at the same time, which I think is what we're all really going for, living our lives as, as well as possible with as best health as possible for as long as we can. When you're in the healthy aging and longevity space, eventually you come across fasting because fasting is, you know, one of the only ways that we know of to reliably extend lifespan and healthspan span helps to treat, prevent, or delay most major diseases. And the reason why that was so fascinating to me is because it does all of that without actually adding anything into the system, right? So it's not this superfood or this wonder drug that's doing all the work, but somehow fasting is activating these dormant longevity bio programs that we already have inside of us at the cellular level, but just aren't being activated on a daily basis, so just aren't turned on. And when that clicked for me, it actually made me mad because I was like, great, my body knows how to live to be 120 years old and in perfect health, but it's just not doing it. And that's what kind of catapulted me into the fasting research space and what I was doing for my PhD, which eventually became Mimio.

That's a great background. And Before we get into some of your, more of the science behind it and some of those other things, you know, what's going through my mind is kind of knowing the timing from your bio and knowing a little bit about when you were in school. I would imagine that you probably had to be just making some of these decisions about this when the Nobel Prize for autophagy was awarded. I believe that was 2016. And that's actually when I first ran across it. I had just found out that my dad had cancer and I started like digging around and doing all this research and came across the, you know, the fact that this had been awarded the Nobel Prize and then just started reading more about autophagy and got— went down this whole rabbit hole. But I would love it if you could share with people from a more scientific perspective, you know, autophagy kind of means self-eating, and I think most people at this point have heard that term before. But if you could maybe describe some of the mechanisms there and just to give people background before we kind of launch into the tech.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So yeah, autophagy does mean self-eating, and what that's actually referring to is essentially are cellular cleanup and recycling mechanisms. So cells initiate autophagy, which is this process of these, you know, these little, what it's called autophagosomes, these little like tiny, like lysosome encapsulation particle things that go around and they'll selectively absorb and digest and break down into their component parts. These dysfunctional proteins, dysfunctional organelles, what I like to call cell junk. They'll take that up, they'll break it down, and then once it's in, it's like constitutive parts, it's amino acids, it's carbohydrates, it's fats, it's lipids. Then your cells will take all of that and then utilize it to create new functional organelles and new proteins. So it is this process of breaking down the damaged elements of a cell and then recycling them into new nutrients, into new energy sources, into new organelles and proteins. So you kind of have a refreshed new cell on the inside anyway. So that's kind of the process of autophagy at the cellular level. What that usually ends up meaning for an organismal level is that when you have enhanced autophagy, you typically have extended lifespan and healthspan as well. Because if you think about it from that context of a cell is constantly, you know, cleaning itself up, it's recycling its parts, it's got a lot of metabolic efficiency that's happening, then that allows them to function better. And then that to overall organismal health, which then of course leads to overall organismal longevity. Yeah.

And I think originally, of course, like most research starts, it usually starts in rodents or rats, which is not always, which is not always totally transferable to humans. But at the time when I was digging into it, you know, there were definitely some human studies at that point. Since this is kind of what you're, is in your day-to-day, I would love to hear kind of any new things that are going on in this space as far as longevity as it relates to fasting. And I think I, on one of the previous interviews I heard with you, I think you were actually describing a study that you guys were doing on people to kind of test out some of these theories. But anyway, just anything new and exciting in the research world that you're seeing that kind of is informing what you're doing now with your research.

Yeah. It's not necessarily informing what we do now with our research, although it kind of is because it's, it's unavoidable, right? But like the really big thing that's happening in the, in the health and longevity space right now is kind of how Ozempic is impacting everything and like the other GLP-1 drugs and agonists, right? Because yes, they have great effects on, on weight loss, but when you're tackling things from a metabolic perspective, metabolism and longevity are super duper linked together, right? Usually when you're looking at the cellular pathways that impact longevity, they are also very much related to metabolism, whether that's mTOR, which is like, you know, pro-growth, pro-protein kind of pathway that leads to decreased lifespan and these pro-aging effects versus like AMP kinase, which is really, really associated with anti-aging properties, but is also kind of like your body's like lipid pathway modifier. You get to see how Ozempic is impacting not only the weight loss portion of it, but because it's impacting things at the metabolic level, then you also see, all right, there's a lot of reduced disease incidence, there's a lot of reduced disease risk because we're tap— like this cellular metabolic processing that is intimately connected with the healthy aging and longevity pathways.

Yeah, that's pretty exciting. And I think, obviously, as time goes on and more and more people are using it, there'll certainly have to be more, more research around that. And I know that there's even new, like, second gen GLP-1s that are being worked on. So, and so you're saying, if I'm understanding correctly, that those are having a positive effect on longevity pathways?

Correct. So, So the reason why Ozempic could be, and you know, the GLP-1s could be really good for longevity in general, is that one of the main reasons for disease progression and disease risk in general is, you know, overweight, obesity, all of these like chronic metabolic problems that Ozempic is really helping people to avoid. So by helping to kind of restabilize organismal metabolism, helping people to lose weight, get into better glucose levels, insulin levels, HbA1c levels, cholesterol levels, triglyceride levels, all this fun stuff. Then you're really helping the underlying fundamental thing that's driving a lot of this disease and this dysfunction that happens over time and helping to also, I think, slow down the actual process of aging.

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So it could have the same excitement that maybe like metformin or rapamycin used to have as kind of not only being a weight loss thing but something that can also promote longevity, it sounds like.

Right, exactly. And isn't it funny how, you know, the best drugs that we have for longevity just also happen to affect the metabolic pathways, right?

Yes, it is.

That's why, that's why like fasting is so interesting to me because fasting is of course all about affecting metabolic pathways and it does so at enormous level. You have a, you have an entire shift in how we process food, how we, how we do cellular metabolism in a fed state versus a prolonged fasting state. And that was kind of what we were, you know, studying during my PhD to actually develop the Memeo formulation. Yeah.

And how did you, so I'm assuming at some point, just as a, a personal aside before we jump into that, that you ran across this, did, did you experiment with this on yourself at all so you could kind of see what would happen and how you would feel if you did some extended fasting?

Yeah, definitely. So that's, I kind of got a little obsessed with it when I was, when I was at Stanford. You know, I started reading all the, reading all the papers, came across all the fasting research and I was like, oh, that's so amazing. At the time I was also learning how to do all of these immunological techniques to look at immune cells and their functionality and their survivability and their like reactivity to autoimmune stimuli. So I thought to myself, well, I can fast and then I can take my blood and I can look at my cells and I can see what happens and I can confirm all of these amazing things that the literature says is happening. So that's what I did. You know, I started off small with like, all right, I'll skip breakfast, I'll work my way up, I'll get to a 24-hour fast, a 36-hour fast, you know, and then beyond. And eventually I did an entire time course where I looked at what happened in my body during a 60 hour fast. And I was taking my blood at all those different like time points at the 0-hour, you know, 6-hour, 12-hour, 16, 18, 24, 36, 48, 60. And you can see this progression of enhanced functionality within your— well, within my cells, I could see this happening. So they became, you know, less autoreactive, became— I had much better cellular survival, they had much better stress resistance, they had much better metabolic functioning. And being able to see that in your own cells in something that you can do in just, you know, a couple of days is so powerful to like a quantified self, like scientist person like I am. I just, I got very, and I was like, this actually works for me. I'm gonna do it. So I started doing this alternate day fasting regimen and I kept that up for about 1.5, 2 years.

Oh wow.

Yeah, that, like, it was, it was really, really amazing. I had, like, I was very healthy, but at the same time, it has this big social drawback, right? Because you're not going out to lunch with coworkers, right? You're not having meals with your family. Like, when friends would ask me out on a fasting day, I'd be like, okay, sure. Like, I'll come and I'll, you know, like awkwardly drink water while I walk. Right. And nobody wants that. I got to the point where eventually my sister, we were on vacation and I was still like fasting actively and she was like, you know, you're gonna live longer, you're gonna like, you're gonna be healthier, right? But what is the point of living longer if you have to live less? And that was this kind of thing that was like very impactful for me. And I was like, she's, she's right. Like there's, there's gotta be a middle ground. Like there's gotta be another way to do this. And so that's again, kind of what catapulted me into developing Memeo as a, as a fasting memetic because I was like, all right, Is there a way that we can figure out what's happening in the body during a fast and then recreate those effects on demand?

So yeah, that, and I, I think that's so brilliant because I, I've experimented with fasting a ton myself too, and I've actually kind of moved away from it from, for similar reasons as you. I still do some intermittent fasting, but the longer fast, like I had done a, a 5-day was the longest one I'd ever done. I, I just found it like the things that you mentioned and then you know, there's always been a concern that maybe it promotes more muscle loss, things like that. And it's just kind of, it adds, now that I'm an older person and worried about keeping my muscle mass and, and, you know, staying strong so that I can be very functional into my older age, I've started to back away from it a little bit for that reason. Even though there's definitely arguments on both sides of whether that really happens. 'Cause I think, you know, the process you described with the organelles, like some people will say, well, your body's not gonna go after healthy, good tissue when there's all this other stuff around to eat. But the, I think it's difficult. And I've never seen anything convincing one way or the the other, where it convinced me to, you know, keep doing it or not.

Yeah, this is, this is totally the thing. And you get different effects from different time courses of fasting, right? So like doing something like a 5-day fast, inevitably, inevitably you're gonna lose a little bit of muscle along the way because if you're not taking in food, your brain is an obligate glucose consumer. So it needs at least 50% of its calories to come from carbohydrate and glucose specifically. But even as you get into ketosis in the later stages of fasting, you know, 24 hours plus you're gonna be breaking down fat and the rest of your body, the rest of your organs, your muscles, your liver, all of that fun stuff, they're going to utilize the ketone bodies in order to survive. But your brain is gonna at least have to utilize some of that glucose where that glucose is gonna come from because you're not getting it from the diet, it's from protein breakdown. 'Cause that's the only other pathway that we have in our body to generate glucose without getting it from food. So, you know, in order to keep your brain active and healthy and alive, you're gonna have to break down some protein. And usually that's gonna come from muscle. Sometimes it'll come from the organs themselves, which sounds, you know, like very, very terrible, but it's actually okay because it's, it's another way that your body has this like metabolic efficiency, right? Where it's like, okay, if I don't have a lot of food coming in, I have all these like, you know, these organs that take up a lot of energy. Let's just like shrink them down a little bit so they don't take up as much energy but still perform their fasts, right? But inevitably you will have some muscle breakdown at those later stages of fasting versus something like a 24-hour fast or a 36-hour fast where you're still getting into the true blue fasting metabolism, but you're not so far into the process where you're gonna have significant muscle loss.

Yeah. And I think that 36-hour is a big sweet spot. And I think I remember from one of your previous interviews that, and that's based on my personal experience and also just things I've read, like you get a lot of the benefits and it's not an extremely difficult amount of time for most people, especially if you've been doing it for a while. So how did you, how did you land on the fact that, you know, you started doing that, you realize all the benefits, you're like, oh, maybe we can make a pill out of this, right? Like, which is what we love to do in America. How did that process go? What made you think that you could recreate it and, you know, kind of tap into the same pathways? There must have been something in the science that you thought, oh, this is possible.

Yeah. So actually there wasn't anything in the science at the time. That kind of led me to think that that was possible. There were, you know, there were molecules out there already that were called caloric restriction mimetics, right? That were designed or, you know, or called caloric restriction mimetics because they had some kind of evidence of being able to activate a singular pathway that was associated with caloric restriction. So like metformin is a very good example. Metformin is considered to be a calorie restriction mimetic because it activates AMP kinase, just like calorie restriction does. But what no one was really doing at the time was doing that with the molecules that your body actually produces in that state. Right. So it was always usually, you know, a, a plant compound or a drug compound or something, something like that. Not trying to recreate the whole system with natural human molecules. But when we originally started, it wasn't actually our mission to create a pill or, you know, develop Mimeo so much as it was just to— we wanted to understand what happens in the body during a fast. So what we did for that was we had 20 people come in, 10 men, 10 women to avoid a gender bias. We had them fast for 36 hours and looked at their before and after and did those same, you know, cellular functional metrics that I was doing on myself when I was at Stanford. And what we found was that when people fasted for 36 hours, there was a huge increase in their cellular functionality, just like we saw with me. They became more anti-inflammatory, they more antioxidant, they became more cardioprotective. And to see that kind of change with a nutritional intervention over like basically just one day, right? Taking these young healthy people and basically turning them into super people is really, really significant. You hardly ever see that happen. So we really wanted to figure out what is the difference between one state and the other that could be causing those beneficial effects to happen. So we did what's called comprehensive metabolomics, basically looking at all of the small molecule components of the plasma.. And what we found was that there were over 300 significant differences between a baseline state and a fasting state that could, you know, be responsible for inducing those changes. When we screened through those molecules, we were able to find around 2 dozen of those that had some kind of literature activity of already having these like bioactivities, whether that was helping to enhance autophagy or create these anti-inflammatory effects. And then when we screened through those molecules on our ex vivo modeling assays with the, the cells, cells, we were basically able to show that there was this synergistic combination of 4 of them that could recreate all of these beneficial effects of fasting that we were seeing. And then beyond that, because we were really interested in the longevity piece of it, we did a C. elegans lifespan extension analysis and saw that we could extend their lifespan by 96% just through supplementation with these 4 molecules. So that is ultimately what Mimio is. It's taking what the body naturally produces during a 36-hour fast and then just giving it back to people as a supplement. So you can, you can recreate fasting at the molecular level and get those same benefits but without actually having to fast.

86%, that's pretty amazing. And just in case anybody out there doesn't recognize the whole C. elegans thing, they're, they're worms, right?

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Yeah. Yeah. When you first do research on, so since then, I'm imagining, okay, you identified these molecules, you saw this amazing result on worms, on the C. elegans. Then did you decide, okay, we should, I mean, I'm sure you tested out on yourself for sure, but did you do any kind of studies or comparisons to fasting using the Memeo product?

Yeah. So we, we definitely looked at, you know, how does the lifespan extension with fasting compare to the lifespan lifespan extension with NEMEO. We were able to see that, you know, just an ordinary fasting actually had a 56% lifespan extension from previous studies. And then that, you know, we were getting this 96% extension with NEMEO. So that was very cool to see. We also looked at like rapamycin and metformin and how those extend lifespan as well. And, you know, metformin can extend lifespan by around 3%. Rapamycin can extend lifespan by around 19%. So when we saw that, you know, this natural combination of human molecules like combined together could outperform these longevity drugs and then like fasting in and of itself, we were like, okay, I think that we found something really interesting and powerful here. And then from there we went on to do some pilot clinical studies to look at, all right, let's take this formulation, let's do different dosages, let's see how it's absorbed, metabolized, if it appears in circulation and if it has any short-term effects. So in order to do that, we had people come in and ate a standardized breakfast alongside a placebo control. Then after a washout period, have those same people come back, eat that same standardized breakfast, but then with supplementation with the Mimio formulation. And what we found there was that when people ate the breakfast with the placebo, they had this big loss of plasma functionality, which is really typical of the postprandial state, the post-eat. So you have all this, you know, metabolic chaos, that's coming into the system. You have this inflammatory effect that's happening from taking in food. And so you get a big perturbation of the natural homeostasis. So they were, you know, pro-inflammatory in their plasma. They had less antioxidant ability. They were less cardioprotective as measured through cholesterol efflux capacity. And of course, you know, their, their metabolic markers were really altered. When they ate that same breakfast but with supplementation with NIMEO, we found that we could not only prevent all of that loss of function that happened, but we also had gains of function on top of that, that mimicked what we saw when people were fasting. So instead of being pro-inflammatory, their plasma became anti-inflammatory and antioxidant and cardioprotective. So that was kind of another, you know, big wake-up call for us where again, like we're taking a single dose and just looking at it a couple hours after ingestion and already seeing these big changes to plasma functionality and cellular functionality. And so after that, then we were like, all right, We could actually turn this into a product and start immediately helping people and making an impact for both their metabolic health and then their longevity.

Yeah. When it's, I mean, just one day, that's, that's amazing. Have, have you seen anything else as far as maybe either from your personal experience or studies of using it for a longer period of time, maybe things that you've observed or blood markers that changed kind of in a more permanent way, for lack of a better way to ask that? Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. So we did partner up with Mount Sinai to do some case studies there looking at longer-term therm supplementation with the Mimio formulation. And what we found was that 8 weeks of supplementation, we could improve a lot of, you know, these plasma blood marker metrics. So we could include improved glucose levels, HbA1c levels, insulin levels, triglyceride levels, HDL/LDL ratio, and then actual total cholesterol levels as well, which is really great. And then we were also looking at biological age and found that we reduced reduced biological age by 2.5 years in just those 8 weeks of supplementation. So that's kind of, you know, the, the big clinical data that we have right now. We're also currently doing a larger randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study looking at that same time course, 8 weeks of supplementation in healthy overweight people with elevated HPA1A.

Very cool. And so where my brain's going now, this may or may not make total sense, but I'm thinking about, you know, you mentioned the mTOR pathway, which is kind of a both and possibly longevity shortener. I mean, I've heard some conversations on that. You know, a lot of people like to argue for vegan or vegetarian kind of use that pathway as a way to say that, you know, you're activating it constantly when you're eating meat. And so maybe that's not so good. Or on the other hand, your body absolutely needs a certain amount of protein to maintain the muscle and all the processes. They're always kind of, you know, mTOR and AMPK, at least in my basic understanding, they're always kind of like balancing each other out a little bit or going back and forth between them. But I guess where my brain is going with this, so if you're a person that is regularly strength training. And so, you're purposely trying to stomp on the mTOR and create growth. Would taking something like this, 'cause we talked about how the fasting could possibly, you know, impact that in some ways. Any concern around Mimeo shutting off the ability for growth, if that makes sense? I mean, I think you kind of know where I'm going with this, but.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I totally understand what you're saying. And, and I would say that you don't have to worry about it. It at, at all, to be honest, because the, the molecules in NuMeo aren't gonna shut down muscle growth so much as they are going to promote these beneficial things at the same time. So that's kind of the homeostasis and the balance that we're trying to restore to the system. So when you think about what a typical Western diet looks like, we're almost constantly in a fed state cuz you have your 3 meals a day plus snacks, and it takes around, you know, 4 to 6 hours after a meal for your body to properly digest everything, utilize it, incorporate it into cells, and return back to its like natural homeostasis. But, you know, we eat almost every 3 hours, right? As part of Western diet. So we're never really coming out of that postprandial state. So you kind of have constant stimulation of mTOR and IGF-1 and insulin and glucose and all of these, you know, pro-aging metabolic pathways. What Mimio is really trying to do is to activate the fasting pathways at the same time to kind of restore this balance and this homeostasis that you wouldn't otherwise experience during of day of eating. So it's not that we're tamping down mTOR, we're just also co-activating the fasting pathways to give it a little bit more balance and to provide those beneficial effects.

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Definitely makes sense. And that's exactly the answer I was hoping to hear. But sometimes it's, it's dangerous when you have, you know, a little bit of understanding of some things, but not the deeper level because, you know, in my mind that kind of made sense like, oh, well maybe that would counteract the other one. But yeah, I was hoping it was that.

What's funny is that usually what we hear with people who are on Mimeo, especially older men, is that it actually really helps them with their strength training. They feel stronger, they can hit PRs. ARs better. One of the reasons why our main investor invested in us was because he was trying out Mimeo. He had a cycling trip that he was going to do with his buddies and they had run this course before and he then like, they were in a race and he took Mimeo the day of the cycling trip, set a personal record for the actual course, said like he didn't even have soreness afterwards, beat out all of his buddies and he was like, okay, cool, I'm hooked. And then we Exactly. We had, we had Ben Greenfield too, who was like, you know, trying it out to see whether or not he liked it and found that he gained like 8 pounds of muscle during the time that he was on Mimeo. So like not only is it not preventing muscle growth, it seems to be helping athletic performance.

Yeah.

I would imagine like the anti-inflammatory part of it would be useful because, you know, possibly getting rid of some muscle soreness or just making your body feel more ready to train could be a huge benefit.

Right. And then you have, you have the NAD+. Element to it as well. So the nicotinamide that's in the formulation is helping to kind of stabilize cellular energy and put you more in that, you know, that fasted state where you can generate a lot of clean energy throughout the day.

Yeah, very cool. Well, I think, I think you've done an amazing job of really explaining how it works and some of the mechanisms involved without going too deep into the science of it. But is there anything that we didn't talk about yet that you really just want to share with people about Mimio or about the science behind it or about fasting? Just anything that we haven't touched on that could be of interest to people.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think, I don't even, I don't think that we've actually listed the ingredients in the formulation.

There we go. That would be a good idea. An idea apparently.

Four molecules that we identified from the dataset were nicotinamide, spermidine, palmitoyl ethanolamide, PEA, and oleoyl ethanolamide, OEA. And all of those things are kind of combining together to help more holistically recreate this bioprogram of fasting. Fasting, activating these complementary pathways and producing these synergistic effects that are greater than the sum of their parts. But individually, they're also big powerhouse anti-aging molecules. So we were talking about nicotinamide, which is, you know, broad spectrum NAD+ precursor. It's actually the thing that your body will make nicotinamide riboside and NMN and, and NAD+ from. So you kind of get all of those, all of those pathways and all those benefits benefits just from this one starting molecule, which is great. And then NAD+ is more or less how your body or how your cells sense their energy status. There's a, this thing called the NAD+ NADH ratio. If you have more NAD+, then that's a signal to your cells that there's not a lot of energy around. So we should modify our cellular metabolism, modify our, our DNA methylation patterns, modify our protein transcription and translation to be more of this like fasting system.. So the big axis that we're looking at there is like the NAD+ SIRT system. And of course, SIRTs are, sirtuins are really associated with healthy aging and prolonged lifespan. And so that's kind of helping to put the cell in this state where it's like really receptive to receiving these other fasting signals from the other molecules. So helping to kind of potentiate what everybody else is doing. And below that we have spermidine. Spermidine's a really well-known autophagy activator. And so that's kind of where you're getting this like pro-autophagy effect from, from fasting in the memetic is spermidine's coming in and helping to promote that process. Then palmitoyl ethanolamide, PEA, is a really interesting molecule. It's involved in the endocannabinoid system. It helps to stimulate CB1, CB2 receptors. So it's kind of like your body's natural CBD almost. It has cognition enhancing effects, it has mood elevation effects, but then also these really powerful anti-inflammatory effects as well, especially on neuroprotection and neuroinflammation. So it also has these cool elements of pain relief to it as well. It's a COX-1 and 2 inhibitor. So not only like your body's natural CBD, but also like your body's natural ibuprofen.

Cool.

So those are like the big effects from the PEA cognition and discomfort relief, you know, achy joints, muscle soreness, things like that. And then finally we have oleoylethanoleamide, OEA, that is involved in the gut-brain axis and is actually produced by the body during prolonged periods of fasting as a way to suppress appetite. So what happens most people when they do prolonged fasting is that they eventually stop feeling hunger and OEA, that elevation is kind of the reason behind that. So it's operating in access to kind of stimu— or sorry, suppress appetite, decrease weight and stimulate satiety as well. But it's also a PPAR-alpha activator. So helping to promote lipid metabolism and fat breakdown while sparing muscle cells at the same time. So all of these 4 things together are, you know, having broad spectrum effects on your cellular system or total body system and helping to kind of like give you not only those benefits that, you know, when you're eating, but also to enhance shorter term fasts that you might be doing and kind of make them easier, right? The hunger suppression elements of the OEA with the mood enhancement and cognitive enhancement of the PEA and the energy side from the nicotinamide. MIMI-O can really help people get through fasting a lot easier and accelerate their benefits.

Yeah, that's amazing. So would you in fact then recommend people do occasional fasts still when they're using this? It just kind of, like you mentioned, it makes, makes it easier. Are there additional effects on top of what it's already doing if you fast in addition to taking the pills?

Yeah, that's a great question. We definitely say that MIMI-O can be used as a fasting mimetic or as a fasting enhancer. That's how I use MIMI-O. So I still do like one meal a day, kind of like 24-hour fasting cycle, cuz that's what I find works really well with my lifestyle. But I like to take Mimeo in the morning as a way to, you know, just really get over, get over that initial hunger hump throughout the day. So I find, I find it really helpful there. And then if anyone's doing a fast that's less than 36 hours, the Mimeo formulation was designed to mimic the benefits of a 36-hour fast. So you can kind of, you know, help to accelerate your benefits there. Like specifically autophagy is a great example. You know, you don't you don't really kick off autophagy in a fasting timeline until at least 24 hours without food. And in some cases we've seen, you know, 48 hours, 72 hours is how long it takes to really get to that maximal level of autophagy within the system. So if you're doing, you know, fasts that are shorter than that, this can really help to, you know, boost your, your fasting benefits at the same time. And the added bonus is that the molecules themselves will be a bit more effective because like we talked about before, when you're taking them with food, we're kind of like balancing out pathways. Whereas when you take them fasting, you're really just helping to enhance the activation of those beneficial effects.

Yeah, I love that. I mean, this is making me, obviously I've known about your product for a while and I, I test out a lot of different products, right? As, as part of what I do for my job. So sometimes it's like a little bit of, you know, just money thing really. Yeah. You gotta, you can choose your battles. Battles.

There's so much cool stuff out there. It's hard to choose what's right.

But I would say just having heard again, and like I said, I'd heard you interviewed before, but the way that you put it today, I'm like, okay, I feel like this is something I can't live without.

So, well, there we go. I'm doing my job.

Yes, you are. Okay. Well, Dr. Rhodes, I just wanna thank you again so much for joining us today. If anybody does wanna check out the product, I do have a link for you guys attached to my website. So it's tealnourishroses.com and yeah, you can read more. I, I looked at it again today. You can read more about the science and just kind of about the team, Dr. Chris Rhodes and a couple other doctors on the team and some other Great people. So anywhere, if people wanna find you personally or follow the work of Mimeo or any research or anything like that, are there any additional ways they can follow you besides the website or is that really the best way?

Yeah, the website for the Mimeo information, definitely. And get on our newsletter, you'll get all the, the latest stuff from us. And then, you know, tips and tricks specifically from me. I also have a TikTok account. It's @thenutritiondoctor. So so if you want, you wanna watch me scream about nutrition into my bathroom mirror, that's a great place to do it.

Yes. I can't wait. I'll link that in the show notes and everybody be sure that you go follow Chris on TikTok and read all about the fun and cool stuff they're doing over at Mimio. So thanks again, Dr. Rose. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. It was such a great time.

This has been the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast. Again, I'm Cheryl McColgan, founder of Heal, Nourish Grow. You can find show notes for this episode at healnourishgrowpodcast.com. If you have feedback on today's episode or questions about the content, please email us at podcast@healnourishgrow.com. We'd love to hear from you. Be sure to sign up for our email list at healnourishgrow.com and subscribe to the show with your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. Join us next time for more information that helps you live your best and healthiest life Thanks for listening. Content on the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast does not constitute medical advice. Content contained in the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast is not intended as medical diagnosis or treatment. Neither the company nor its owner, Heal, Nourish, Grow LLC, nor any of the company's employees, agents, or guest speakers provide medical advice. The content provided on Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast is for educational for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please consult your medical provider with any questions about what health practices are right for you.