Use These FASTING SECRETS To Lose Weight & Prevent CANCER! | Jason Fung & Lewis Howes

The secret to managing all of these things is not more medicine and surgery, it's less. It's actually within our grasp because fasting is free to every single person on Earth.

I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really?

Yeah. Please welcome Louis Howser.

Welcome, everyone, to the School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about our guest today. His name is Jason Fung. Dr. Jason Fung is a as a physician, author, researcher, and he's got groundbreaking science with a number of his books about diabetes, obesity and fasting. He's got a book called the Diabetes Code, the Obesity Code and the Complete Guide to Fasting. Sold for millions of copies sold. And you've got a new book out called the Cancer Code, which I'm very excited to talk about. The Cancer Code. And I wanted to start with a question to ask you. What are the main causes of cancer? As it seems like you hear about it more and more recently that so many people are getting cancer or the early stages of cancer, what are the main causes of cancer?

Yeah, that's a great question. And that's something that we've always been trying to deal with. Sometimes some people say, well, we don't know what causes cancer. That's sort of a cop out because we actually do know a lot about what causes cancer. And these are things that cause cancer are called carcinogens. And the World Health Organization maintains a huge list of these carcinogens. But if you want to break it down into what causes cancer in most people, you can look at the sort of. A couple of studies have looked at the sort of percentage contribution of these carcinogens to cancer. And the biggest one, of course, is tobacco smoke. So that's sort of by far and away the biggest contributor to cancer at around 35%. And these estimates were from 2015. So it's. It was higher before when more people are smoking. But as a contributor to cancer, it's the biggest. Interestingly, the second biggest and almost as big is actually our diet. So it's a huge, huge part of what contributes to cancer in general. And far outstrips of those two are way above any other causes of cancer. So when you worry about things such as radiation or chemicals, sunscreens and pesticides and stuff like that, they do cause cancer, but the contribution in a whole population is very small. So what's interesting about diet is that we know this from our studies, but what part of the diet actually contributes to cancer? And that's where things sort of bogged down a lot. So Initially in the 70s people talked about fiber. So people thought about, oh, hey, well, you know, maybe if you eat a lot of fiber, what you're going to do is have a lot of big bowel movements and that's going to clean out your bowel and you're not going to get cancer. Turns out that wasn't true. Then the next thought was, hey, maybe it's dietary fat. So if you remember the 80s and 90s, there's this huge movement against fat that, you know, all fat is bad for you. It caused heart disease and all this sort of stuff, much of which is sort of been overturned at this point. But there's this thought, maybe it causes cancer too. Turns out that wasn't true either. Then people talked about vitamins. So maybe cancer is like a vitamin deficiency. So we did many, many studies, millions of dollars, decades of research, where we would randomize people to say one group that took a certain vitamin and one group that didn't and see if there's any difference in cancer. So we tested vitamin A didn't work. Vitamin D, B didn't work. Folic acid didn't work, Vitamin C didn't work, Vitamin D didn't work, Vitamin E didn't work, Selenium didn't work, omega 3 fatty acids didn't work. So all of those supplements didn't actually make any difference to the incidence of cancer. So we're sort of stuck at that point in the mid-2000s saying, oh no, it's the diet, but what part of the diet? And that's when it became sort of more and more clear that this cancer is actually an obesity related disease. So what happened, of course, is that in the 70s, 80s and 90s, people didn't really think about it. But then we had this obesity epidemic, so it became a bigger and bigger problem. So obesity in 2003, when they started to look at the studies, that was the first really definitive studies that said, hey, you know, obesity is actually a huge risk factor factor, as well as type 2 diabetes. And both of those conditions will actually increase your risk of certain types of cancer a lot. So it really depends on what type of cancer you're talking. Like if you're talking lung cancer, obesity plays almost no role in it, right? That's smoking or if you have asbestos, which causes mesothelioma, which is a cancer of the lining of the lung. Again, obesity plays no role, but things like breast cancer and colorectal cancer, which are sort of really important cancers, they actually are obesity related cancers. So that was the sort of big link. And to this. You know, at this point the World health organization considers 13 different types of cancer as obesity related cancers. Which is huge because from 2003 we didn't even know. Like when I went to medical school, nobody thought obesity caused cancer.

Really.

It's as almost as big as smoking. It's a huge, huge thing. So therefore if you know that that's super powerful because if you can main a normal weight, you're going to reduce, just like stopping smoking, right? You're going to reduce your risk of these types of cancer.

But aren't there a lot of healthy people out there or non obese people that also get cancer?

Absolutely, because there's a lot of different things that go on and that's what I spend the first half of the book talking about is how the sort of cancers develop. So it's not just about obesity. Just like you can smoke forever and not get lung cancer, but it raises your risk.

So what are the other factors? If you're say you're, there's people out there, they're super healthy, they're working out, they're eating well, but then they get cancer. They're under 15% body fat, 12% body fat. What are those other factors of people getting cancer? Main factors?

Yeah, the rest of it we actually know very little about. So we need to know more about those because certain things. So smoking and diet are probably your biggest factors. And then there's a whole, there's like a hundred different. The other risk factors for cancer. These are the other carcinogens that we talk about. But also things such as, you know, background radiation and sun exposure, you know, like if you get too much sun, for example. So there's all sorts of other things and genetics plays a role. But one of the big mistakes I think we made is that we focus so much on the genetics part of it, thinking that well, this is sort of a random mutation that causes cancer. Not sort of, which puts the, puts the onus on sort of this random luck sort of idea that it's just bad luck.

My parents had this, my grandparents had this gene. So I have this. I'm gonna get cancer.

Yeah, exactly. And some people think that that's sort of a death sentence. Like if you take brca, which is a certain type of gene, for example. So this is the gene that Angelina Jolie, for example, got diagnosed with. Her mom had cancer, I think, or you know, an aunt had cancer. So she got tested and she had the gene. And people think, well for sure you're going to get, you know, cancer but it turns out that if you look at the incidence of cancer, if you have brca, if you have that gene, in like, you know, in the 30s and 40s and 50s, that risk of breast cancer was like 30% compared to sort of like 80% in modern day America. So what's the difference? Even though you have the same genes, what's the difference between those two situations? And it comes down to the lifestyle. So the point about cancer is that cancer is like a seed. So if you have other genetics, you have the propensity to develop cancer. And this seed of cancer actually exists in all of our cells, and actually not just all our cells, but in all multicellular animals have that sort of seed of cancer. So what's important then is we can't do anything about the seed. But what you can do something about is the soil, which is that if you provide a fertile sort of soil for that seed, seed to germinate, then you are going to increase your risk of developing this cancer. And cancer is not a rare disease. I mean, it affects like 1 in 10 of us, 1 in 8 of us, something like that. So it's something that we really have to think about as we live longer because it is one of these really important things.

And it sounds like, you know, in the next 30 to 60 years, if we don't figure out how to reverse this or solve this, or I guess create bad soil for the seed of cancer by creating healthy habits in other ways, it seems like this is going to accelerate. Where it was 30%, I guess, 20, 30 years ago or 50 years ago, and now it's 80%. I guess it's going to be even more in 20 to 30 years, right?

Oh, absolutely. And the trend is very clear because if you look at the, you know, the biggest killers of Americans, it's always been heart disease and cancer. So if you go back sort of to, so 50 years ago, you look at heart disease, number one killer of Americans, that's heart attacks, strokes, that kind of thing. Cancer was a fairly distant second. But the rate of death from heart disease has been improving very, very quickly. And the rate of improvement for cancer has been improving very, very, very slowly.

Why is that?

It's because cancer is a very complex disease. And the way we think about cancer, we just don't know what it is. So for such a common disease, it's a total mystery why we get this cancer. Because if you think about it, it doesn't make any sense for cancer to develop because it's actually part of us that is if you develop breast cancer or colon cancer, for example, that cancer cell was initially derived from our own natural cells. So what? Why would it want to do this? That is, if you get cancer, then the cancer grows, and then it kills you, and it kills itself in the. In.

Yeah.

Why would this sort of thing ever develop? It doesn't make any sense from a sort of. That. That looking at it that way.

But most diseases want to spread, but they want to stay alive.

Exactly, exactly.

Like the coronavirus doesn't want to kill you necessarily. It wants to be able to spread, to affect. Infect other people.

Exactly. And if you sort of bystander, it just kills you along the way. But that's not its primary purpose. So the point about cancer is that we have never sort of understood what this is as a disease. That is, if you look at heart disease, Heart disease is caused by blockages in arteries. So we develop all kinds of things. So we develop drugs, we develop blood thinners, we develop, you know, you go in and you use a balloon to open up the artery. You develop new technologies, such as imaging technologies. You develop ways to monitor patients because you know what causes it. Because if you don't know what causes something, it's really hard to fix. Like, if you have a car and all you hear is a random plank and you don't know what the clanking is from, it's really hard to fix it. Same thing with diseases. If you have a disease like Covid, for example, you know it's a virus, well, now at least you have somewhere that you can start that is, okay, it's a virus. Let's develop vaccine or let's develop some antiviral drugs. But if you have no idea what this disease actually is, then you have nowhere to go. So that's what I talk about, is how we think about cancer. The paradigm of cancer as a disease, what causes it, you have to first understand what it is. And that's been the real mystery. The medical mystery is what is cancer? And the way we look at cancer has changed significantly over the last 10 years, and most people don't even understand that. So it's a very interesting story from that standpoint.

Yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned the. The heart disease. I saw Dr. Stephen Gundry endorsed the back of your cancer code book, and he's been on my show a few times. And he's a guy who did 10,000 heart surgeries and realized that, like, the things that he was doing on the surface level to create temporary relief, people were coming back in because they weren't solving the root problem, which was a lot of it around diet and lifestyle. And that's what I'm hearing you say is that diet is a massive contributor to cultivating the seed of cancer to grow and flourish. With the wrong diet, is it possible in your mind to reverse cancer by the right diet and by fasting, which is something you talk about a lot.

Oh yeah. Because the thing is that if you like, once you have the cancer, it's really hard because that's sort of like, you know, if you, if you don't change the oil in your car then your car breaks down, then you say, oh, I'm going to start changing the oil in my car. Well, yeah, that's good. But you need a lot more than that. It's the same thing. Once you actually develop the cancer, then it's really hard to fix. From a diet standpoint you really need the drugs that we've spent millions and billions of dollars developing over these last 30 years. But in terms of preventing cancer, there's actually no reason why you couldn't. Because you can look at people who live in a traditional society, for example, so you can take a look at say the Inuit or the American Indians sort of before, sort of they became westernized or you can look at the African people before they're sort of assimilated into a western culture. And interestingly, those peoples were actually considered, some of them were considered immune to cancer. There was so little cancer that they thought that the Inuit for example, or what used to be called the Eskimos actually could not get cancer. So the university, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, they used to send an expedition up to the Arctic Circle every year to study why these, these Inuit couldn't get cancer. Of course, as they became westernized and started eating, you know, sugar and white flour, then they started getting all the same cancers that we did in Africa. For example, this, this fellow by the name of Denis Burkitt who is a sort of missionary and, and doctor, when he got down there he's like, wow. In my, he was like, look at these, the difference. The, the people who live traditionally Africa get no cancer, no colon cancer. But the minute they transition to a western style civilization with their foods, with their, you know, the whole thing, they actually start to get cancer. You don't find cancer when that. So it was called actually a disease of civilization. So all of these diseases, obesity, diabetes and cancer were not found in people living traditionally. So the point is that, not that, you know, one is that they didn't live as long. But the point is that if you can find and understand what makes it, you know, protective from them, why this soil, sort of soil, like we all have to seed that the soil was different. What it is about that, if we can understand that, then you can, you can, you can reduce your risk substantially to the point where your, you know, your risk is very low. Again, as an example, if you take a Japanese or Chinese woman from Japan or from Shanghai and you move them to San Francisco, within a couple of generations, the risk of breast cancer approximately triple.

Crazy.

So it's crazy. Exactly. But that's great hope, because if you.

Know the root of it, then you can go back to a different way of living.

Exactly. Because if you can and remember Shanghai and Japan and so on, they're, you know, modern societies. So if you can understand what it is about the diet, about the lifestyle that's so important, you could actually take that woman in San Francisco and reduce her risk of breast cancer by a third. So that's very, very powerful knowledge.

So what would you say are the five foods we must eliminate to support us in preventing cancer? What are those five key things? You're like, and if you can get rid of as much of this as possible, it's going to really support your chances?

Yeah, I think that's a good question. And it's sort of. Sugar is probably one of the very, very important things that we really need to lower because that really supports it and it gets to how cancer develops. A lot of the refined foods and people talk and the most that we eat, like the one thing we eat more than anything else tends to be refined carbohydrates. So, you know, white bread and that kind of thing, that's probably the most important thing is the sugar. Refined grains, refined anything is probably bad for you. So, you know, even if you're not talking about carbohydrates, but refined, say oils, you should eat natural oils, like, eat. Eat foods that are sort of in the natural state and refined meats, like, you know, you know, eating bologna, for example. People talk about meat all the time. It's like there's a big difference between bologna and, you know, grass finished beef sort of thing. It's. There's a huge difference because one is jam packed full of chemicals and other crap, and one is just beef, right? And people have been eating beef for thousands of years. So those refined foods are refined carbs, but also refined fats and refined proteins. Probably those play a decent role, although the evidence is lower. And then the other thing that is really important. The fifth thing that's probably very important is likely the frequency that we eat. That is, eating all the time provides that sort of fertile soil. So to understand why this is, you, have to get back to sort of how cancer develops. So you have to understand that cancer almost develops, evolves almost as a separate species from us. So when you have a breast cancer cell, for example, it originated from a normal breast cell, but after evolves, it grows or doesn't grow, depending on growth factors. And it's almost a separate species from us. That is, it will grow and it won't. The normal breast cell or a normal lung cell, they will do everything to, you know, play on the team. Right. So they're always supporting the body, your partner, team player. Those cancer cells are not team players. Basically, they're out for themselves, the enemy.

And it's the enemy coming to attack you.

That's right. It's like the guy who's just trying to pad his stats, you know? Right. It's like, you should have passed. It's like. But that's the point, that this cancer cell now is only interested in its own survival. That is, it will grow, and it will grow at the expense of its neighbors. So it will keep growing, and it will destroy everything around it. So it will move around, for example. So a breast cancer cell will move around the body, and that's not for the good of the whole body. Right. It's for the good of itself. It's trying to spread itself around. So you got to realize that the cancer cell responds as a foreign organism. And it sounds very strange to say, okay, we have this foreign organism almost like an infection in us, but that's actually how our body sees that cancer that is our immune system actually detects is a very powerful, you know, it kills stuff, but it's very powerful. So it has to be reined in because you don't want it destroying normal parts of the body. So it recognizes certain cells as foreign and certain cells as self. And cancers are actually innately seen as foreign cells. So it is a foreign invader, almost, that has evolved from us. But during the development of this cancer, it will grow or not grow, depending on growth signals. So our body has certain nutrient sensors. So nutrient sensors tells our body when food is available. So when you eat, certain. Certain hormones like insulin and mtor will go up. That tells our body that food is available. We should grow. Right. Because you don't want your cells to grow when there's no food. Right. It's just natural. If there's no food. You got to get rid of some of those extraneous cells. So if you have, if you're eating all the time and you're always activating these nutrient sensors, you're actually telling your body, grow, grow, grow, grow. So if you eat six, eight times a day, you're telling your body, your cells in your body, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. If you eat fewer times, like three times a day, or you do intermittent fasting, if you don't eat at all, what you're going to do is shut down those, those growth signals and the cancer will have a more difficult time to grow. So if you grow breast cancer cells in the lab, for example, you can't do it without insulin. It will actually wither up and die. So therefore, if you know that, then you can say, well, if I. And that's one of the secret.

Insulin. Insulin comes from eating any food, or is this only sugar?

Mostly it's carbohydrates and protein. So, you know, but the nutrient sensors come from different foods. So different foods will activate different nutrient sensors. But the point is that if you don't eat, like fasting, for example, one is you're going to lower your insulin levels, which will, you know, lower the growth, overall growth signaling in our body, which is a good thing for adults, and adults, growth is not good. Generally you stay the same size, you don't want to be growing too much. Because the, you know, growth, high growth environment, of course, lets the cancer sort of grow out of control. And that was the secret to why vitamins, for example, was not a good thing. Because it's basically growth, it supports growth of cells. And what they found in a lot of studies was when they gave people these vitamin supplements, they actually got more cancer. They didn't get less cancer, they got more cancer. So in fact, it's just like if you spray spread fertilizer on an empty field, you want the grass to grow. But what grows are a bunch of weeds because you've put down all this growth signaling stuff. So therefore all you get is the weeds. Same with the body.

So are supplements and vitamins bad for us then?

There's no evidence that it's really bad for you. When you give high doses in these studies, you do get certain ones. So folic acid, for example, and beta carotene, which is a precursor to vitamin A. And those two studies, there is actually a suggestion that you actually get more cancer from them. Because in our current situation in North America, most of us are not vitamin deficient. Most of us Actually have too much. You actually want to slow down the growth, really. And this is why obesity and type 2 diabetes are so intimately linked with cancer, is because both conditions are conditions where we have too much insulin in our body.

So we want to lower insulin overall because insulin is one of the main causes of the fertilizer for cancer to potentially grow.

Exactly. And there's several ways to do that. One is to change either the foods that you eat, and that is the sugar, for example, the refined carbohydrates that make up the bulk of our diet. And the other thing is to change the frequency with which you eat, because you can affect both things. So just like if you're, for example, to Pay, you know, $10 and you pay it every day adds up quickly. Right? If you have a coffee every day and it's like, you know, five or seven bucks at Starbucks every day, Every day, every day, it adds up. So just like that, it's not just the amount that you're paying, which is not much, but it's the frequency. Right. Same thing with the foods. It's not just the amount that you eat or what it is that you eat, it's how often you eat it. So if you're eating now six, eight times a day, well, that's a lot worse if you ate once a day. Right. That's just basic math. Like you can't get around that. And the problem is, of course, that if you look at how people eat today compared to sort of 1970, it's very different. So in 1970, people ate three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. No snacks. Nobody ate snacks back then.

Now it's snack culture. Like snacking all day.

Exactly. And people say it's good for you. People say, oh, you should eat multiple times in the day, six times a day, it's good for you. But nobody in the history of humanity has done that before because we had work to do. Right. It's not like your great grandparents, you know, working in the factory, they're taking off every two hours to make themselves a little, you know, ham sandwich or something. Right. It was like there's work to do. You eat when you have time. So, you know, in the 70s, it's funny because I always say you had breakfast, lunch and dinner, and that was it. If you wanted an after school snack, your mom said, no, you're going to ruin your dinner. And if you wanted a bedtime snack, she would have said, no, you should ate more at dinner. Right, Right.

You should have finished your meal.

Exactly. And that was the point. And nobody ate. Not a lot of desserts and all that. Nowadays, of course, when you look at the studies, people are eating five, six times a day. You even look at schools, it's like, you know, oh, you know, they're going to have breakfast, then they're going to have a mid morning snack, then they're going to have lunch, then they're going to have an after school snack, then they're going to eat dinner. And then if they play soccer in between the halves of soccer, parents think that you need to feed them like cookies. It's like, hey, well, you know, I played soccer growing up and nobody chased me around with a bunch of cookies. We had a great time. You didn't need it, right? But that's six times a day, every single day. And it's ingrained into us. You know, a few years ago when my son was, you know, going on a trip or something, the school said, well, you should pack him two snacks. I'm like, why? Why would you want to give him a bunch of snacks? Like, they're not good for you. But there's this idea now that it is good for you. But it's tough because it's.

What is. What does snacking do to our body, our brain, our digestion system? One word every couple hours. Putting something in her mouth. What? Even if it's a few nuts or a fruit or a protein bar, like, what is that doing to our brain and our digestive system?

Yeah, and this is the big thing that I've had, and you know, I talk about this in the obesity code, is because our body really exists in sort of one of two states. You're either in the fed state or you're in the fasted state. Okay? So when you're in the fed state, you're eating, insulin is going up. And as insulin goes up, its job, like its normal job, is to tell your body to store those calories. Okay? So you can store it as glycogen, which is sugar, or it can store it as body fat, but that's the point. So you eat lunch or dinner, there's way more calories in that meal than you can use, right at that point. So you want to store that. So when you don't eat, which is anytime you don't eat is called fasting. So when you fast, that means your insulin is going to drop and that's the signal for your body to now start pulling those calories out of storage. Right? And that's the reason you don't die in your sleep. Every single night is because we have the ability to hold some of those calories in storage. So in the fed state, insulin goes up, you're storing calories or body fat. In the fasted state, you're not eating, your insulin's dropping and you're using calories, you're in one or the other. You can't do both at the same time. So if now you say, okay, when.

I'm eating, I'm storing, I'm not using calories, is that right? Every time I sit down, store, I'm not burning body fat.

You're not burning body fat because you're putting in sugar, for example. And that sugar is going to signal that, hey, sugar is coming in. Use the sugar that's coming in.

Don't burn anything off my body.

Yeah, exactly.

Keep all that stored fat, keep it, just keep piling it on.

Right, exactly. So the only way that you can actually use the body fat is to let the insulin fall and not eat. So if you are now eating constantly, so the minute you get up, somebody tells you, oh, you have to eat, you can't skip breakfast, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, and then you have to snack all day long. So now if you look at studies, the average duration of how long people eat food is about 14 hours and 45 minutes. That's the average. So if you start eating at 8am, you don't stop till 10:45pm that's on average, that's the average 14 hours.

You mean a 14 hour span of eating from the start to finish? Right. You may not be eating every moment, but you're eating every few hours. Within 14 hour window, it takes about.

4 hours for you to switch over into the fast. So the point is that before where you'd eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and by 6 o' clock, you're done, you know, boom, you're, you know, now you shift into using those calories. And your mom would you say, oh, you need time to digest. Right? That's what she sort of said. But the point was that you need to start using those calories that you stored up during your mealtimes. And that was the secret, that they could stay relatively slim. Now if you're eating constantly, then you never give your body a chance to switch over into that fasted sleep state and start using those calories. The problem of course, is that insulin stays high, which tends to keep your body storing calories. Your body. So the high insulin, for example, blocks fat burning. You can't burn your fat stores because your body's like the Instructions that I'm getting is to store energy, not use energy. I want to keep my stored energy for when there's a time that there's no food. The problem of course, is that there's never a time there's no food, right? Every day is the same, same thing, right? 14 hours of eating and no time of not eating. And that's the point. So now if you understand the problem, you can say, well, how am I going to change this? Well, it's simple. Increase the amount of time that you're not eating. And that's all. Intermittent fasting is if you eat one meal a day, for example, or if you eat within a eight hour window or a four hour window or whatever, what you're doing is you're simply allowing your body to use the calories that have been stored, which is body fat, predominantly. But that is precisely the reason you carry body fat like that. Body fat is not there for looks, is there for you to use. Right? And that's the whole point. What's so bad about using it? If you don't eat, you're gonna burn it. Well, so again, go back to the 70s and everybody says, oh, you can't fast, you can't fast. Well, you know, they're eating breakfast, lunch, dinner, and if you're a naughty boy, you got sent to bed without dinner. So you went from 12 o' clock to 8am 20 hours, you look good.

The next day you're looking clean, you got a six pack, it's burning fat.

Exactly. And nobody died. Nothing bad happens, Right? There was nothing wrong with that. And hopefully you learned your lesson too. Right? And that's the whole point, is that there's nothing wrong. It's a natural part of our human physiology. If we couldn't survive without eating like we would not be here today. Because when we were cavemen and cave women there we didn't have food every day. Exactly. They couldn't. There might be a stretch of three, four, five days where there was no food and therefore they had to survive on their own body fat, which they did. And that was the whole point. So let's let our body, you know, use it because that's the most natural thing to do.

What's the process for you, your day to day life? Do you eat one meal a day, two meals a day? Do you fast every month for a day? Are you always doing intermittent fasting? Is there a downside to intermittent fasting? What's your process?

Yeah, I usually do a lot of sort of, I rarely eat breakfast and I'll tell you that it didn't come. I mean, I started this in medical school and that was mostly because I really wanted to just roll out of bed and go like, you know, I'd wake up literally like five minutes before I left the floor. I brushed my teeth, put on some clothes and rolled out the door. I was, you know, it's just that the way I was. Right. And so I don't eat breakfast now because again, people say you have to eat breakfast, you have to eat, but there's actually nothing magical about breakfast. If you don't eat breakfast, what's going to happen? Well, my body, which is now burning fat because I've had eight hours of sleep. It's to going, gone into sort of fat burning mode because that's the storage form of calories or it's burning sugar. It's just going to keep doing it right. There's nothing wrong with it. So, so a lot of times I try and confine myself to sort of an eating window of sort of six to eight hours. And then once in a while when I get very busy, I will do a 24 hour fast, which is a one meal a day. And then every so often I'll do a longer fast. And the longer fasts are actually not as bad as you might think, but they really disrupt your schedule sort of socially. It's, it's a tough one because a lot of our socialization happens at meals. So I often have dinner with my family, for example. And doing those longer fasts is really, really disruptive to that sort of thing. Which is why when you look at traditional societies, like if you look at say, you know, during major religions, for example, there would be a period of fasting that's sort of universal.

So, you know, everyone's doing it. So no one's feeling.

Exactly.

Because stress when they smell the food and they're like.

Exactly. So if you're, if it's like Good Friday or during Lent or during Ramadan for Muslims or you know, during Yom Kippur for Jews or whatever, everybody's fasting. So it's actually terrifically easy because you're not disrupting the sort of social fabric of your life there. Whereas nowadays if you fast and I've done this, it's just really hard to do. It's not physically, it's not hard, but it's hard. And I do it mostly, you know, when I, when I've gained a bit of weight, usually after the holidays and after a vacation, I will sort of schedule a longer Fast right after. Because I know that I can lose that weight very quickly, but that means I can enjoy myself. Like a couple years ago I went on a cruise and really ate too much. Just a lot. I had a lot and I knew it and I could feel it and my pants were tight and stuff. So I did sort of a three or four day fast. And I'll tell you, by the next week I was back to my normal weight. Well, that's great because a week. But I got to enjoy the whole week prior where I really didn't look at what I was eating or how often I was eating or anything. I was like, this is my vacation, I'm doing this. But at the same time I know, hey, I've got this next, you know, after this week, the week after, you know, very little to eat. And it gives you a great tool to use if you need it, right?

Yeah. It's almost like either every day, don't indulge and balance and create a schedule where you're only eating in a certain window of time, whether it be four, six, eight hours, which I'm hearing is kind of the. Which would be a great standard to have between four and eight hours of a feeding time. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you want to lose weight, you can do very well, of course, with a sort of standard 70s style, sort of 8am to 6pm which in a 14 hour fast every single night. Remember, they're doing 12 to 14 hours a day every single night without even thinking about it. Like that's a secret because they don't even think about that. That's just a period of time that they're not eating. Right. But now, of course, the traditions are different. You can eat anywhere you want. You can eat in the theater, you can eat at your desk, you can eat in a car. Like in the 70s, stuff like that didn't exist. You didn't eat in a meeting in a boardroom, for example. Now you go to a meeting in a boardroom when there's food everywhere. Donuts, Donuts and cookies. Right. Somebody's ordered a plate of bagels or something like that. Why we're having a meeting here. Right. So that's the, that's the thing. So you could do very well with that kind of, you know, eight hour eating window. For 10 hour eating window, you can do very well with it. But if you're not doing well, then you can extend it. And that's the beauty of it. You could extend it as much as you want. Right. So if you Think about fasting. You could go three days, you could go five days, you could go 30 days. People do that all the time.

But no food.

No food. Yeah. So if you look, if you think about fasting, so the amount of energy that you need. So a pound of fat has 3500 calories, roughly. If you need about 1800 calories. So that's for like a regular person, not like an athlete or somebody who's working out a lot, it takes about half a pound of fat per day. So if you're dealing with a lot of obese people, like 100 pounds overweight, you could go 200 days. You know, if you want to lose 100 pounds, you could go 200 days without eating before you get.

And survive.

And survive. Exactly.

And be okay.

Exactly. Be perfectly fine. Because this is a very efficient fat, is an efficient store of calories, Right? It's very efficient. That's why we developed.

It's to keep you alive when there's no food around.

Exactly. So use it.

Does it affect your digestive system? Does it mess with your metabolism if you don't eat after a certain amount of time? And what happens when you start eating again? Does that affect your. Again, your stomach, your intestines, your colon, metabolism? What's affected there?

And this is the interesting part, is that everybody thinks that fasting is like the worst thing you could do. When you actually look at the science of what happens during fasting, it's actually one of the best things you can do for yourself from both a mental standpoint and a physiologic standpoint. Assuming, of course, you're not malnourished, right? I mean, I'm assuming if you're the average American who's, you know, 10, 20, 30 pounds overweight, then this is something that actually has a lot of benefits. So there's a lot of sort of myths around it. One is that you're going to burn a lot of muscle. And the truth is that you don't. I mean, when you, you know, if your body, your body stores energy as body fat, so people say, oh, you're going to burn muscle. It's like, well, you've got to think that our body is so stupid that it stores energy as fat, but the minute you need it, it starts burning muscle, right? Like, why would our body be so stupid? And if it were so stupid, how did we survive? Right? And it's like, you know, if you save firewood all winter for the winter, and then as soon as it gets cold, you chop up your sofa and throw it into the fire. Like, why would you be so stupid, right? Our body's just the same. It's not that. So you know and I know and everybody knows that the way that you build muscle is that you exercise, right? So if you have, you know, lift heavy weights, then your muscles become stronger. It doesn't become stronger because you eat, right? That does nothing for building muscle. Like, otherwise, we'd be, you know, the strongest nation on earth, right? But we're not. We're the fattest nation on earth. So that's the whole problem, right? I mean, you're confusing two completely different things. There is a point during fasting where there is a little bit of protein breakdown, and that's where people get very confused and say, well, you're burning muscle, but you're not. Protein is not the same as muscle. So our body has all kinds of protein, including all the connective tissue, like the skin and stuff that holds stuff in place, and some of that is often burned off. So, for example, when you look at those shows where people get surgery and they lose £150, they get all this floppy skin. That's not excess fat. That's excess protein. So that's, you know, it's functional tissue that you've never used up. So we actually see very little of that problem when people fast because there's a small period of time where they're actually using up the protein. The body will maintain its musculature based on what exercise and stuff you're using. So another big myth. So muscle burning is one thing. The other big, big myth is people talk about is starvation mode, or metabolic rate. So metabolic rate is the amount of energy that your body uses in a day, the number of calories you burn in a day. And this is what we see if you simply cut calories. So this is a standard medical advice. Cut 500 calories a day, and you'll lose a pound of fat a week. What happens, of course, is that you cut 500 calories a day, and then your body quickly reduces the amount of calories it uses by about 500 calories. So now you're actually not losing any weight. That's what happens all the time. Because why does this stop?

Why does it stop burning those calories?

Well, it stops burning the calories by reducing its metabolic rate. So the metabolic rate is the energy that your body uses to, say, generate body heat. Your liver, your kidney, your heart, and so on. We've known this for a hundred years that if you simply restrict the number of calories but keep the foods very similar. What happens is that your body is going to start using less because it doesn't like running a deficit. Right. It's just like if you normally make $100,000 a year and you spend 100,000 DOL dollars a year, now you make 50,000. You don't keep spending 100. Right. It's, it's, you're gonna, you're gonna get thrown into jail, but so you reduce your expenditure same as a body. So it's getting less, so it's gonna use less. And that's the natural reaction. It's important because it's a survival response. It cannot do anything different.

So it's almost like you need to be extreme in your use.

Yeah.

In order for it to burn and kill off these cells that might be harmful to you. But if you just do a little bit, I'm going to eat a little bit less today. It's not going to be that much.

It doesn't work. And people assume that if you go to zero, which is fasting, say you fast for a full day, you have zero calories, you don't die. Right. Because what happens is completely different. Now you've lowered your insulin, so you're changing the hormonal profile of the body. And as you do that, you're now switching fuel sources. So instead of using food as your fuel, you're switching it into body fat. Just like those hybrid cars where you go from gas to electric, right? So it's using food and then boom, it goes, okay, I have no food coming in. I need to switch over now into body fat. And then it goes, whoa, I have like 500,000 calories of body fat here. So why do I need to cut. Cut it down? And the point is that it doesn't. Because assuming if you have no body fat, of course it's a problem. But for people who have adequate stores of body fat, which is most of us, and truthfully, most people do it for weight loss, too much body fat, then what happens is that there's so much there, why wouldn't you use it? Because it's a fuel source. That's all it is. That's the way you have to look at the body fat. If you're eating all the time, you can never use your body fat because your insulin's here, your insulin's high, you're using food, then you get hungry, so you eat some more, you have a snack, you have a low fat muffin, you stay here, you can only burn food, all that stuff over there. Those 500,000 calories of body fat are completely inaccessible for your body. So if you simply dial it down like this and say, okay, instead of 2000 calories, I'm going to eat 1500, but I'm going to eat 10 times a day, keeping myself here. Now you only have 1500 coming in. You can only burn 1500. You can't access that. If you go to zero, you go boom. And then your body burns the full 2000. So they did a study, for example, where they took people and fasted them for four days and measured how many calories they're using. They also measured their VO2, which, as you know, is something that. It's a measure of how much cellular work your body is doing and what they found. So they measured the metabolic rate at time zero, then they measured it at four days of zero food, and they were burning 10% more calories than they were per day than they were when they were eating. The VO2 was 10% higher. You're doing more work. Your body is actually not shutting down, it's revving itself up. And again, there's a good physiologic reason for that. And we know that when insulin goes down, when you switch yourself into this sort of, you know, mode that you're burning fat, other hormones go up, including your sympathetic nervous system, which is your noradrenaline. So you're actually pumping your body up. The reason for that is sort of, again, it's a survival response. So imagine, again, we're cavemen, and it's winter and there's no food. So if you don't eat for two days and you get weaker, you're never.

Going to eat again.

You're going to die. Because every day is going to be harder. You're going to circle the drainage. So our body's just not that stupid, right? So what they do is that your body says, okay, there's no food coming in. Boom. I'm gonna switch you over to body fat, and then I'm gonna pump you up so that you have energy. You go out there, you go, kill that woolly mammoth.

You're focused, you're clear in the zone, everything.

Exactly. And that's the reason that we actually pump ourselves up. And the mental aspects is actually fascinating because people also say, well, I. I have to eat because I have to concentrate. It's like your concentration is actually much higher when you don't eat. Think about when you had a huge Thanksgiving meal. Well, were you really sharp, or did you really want to just lie down? On the sofa and watch some football, right? You don't have any sort of focus. But if you think about animals, it's the same thing. Lions, they just eat. They just like lounging around. But if you're the hungry wolf, that is not. That is a very dangerous animal because he's focused, he's ready to kill you. Same thing for us. Our level of concentration, our mental ability, mental agility goes up significantly when we're hungry. Like, if you think, oh, you're hungry for this, hungry for that, that doesn't mean you're falling down, lethargic, it means you're focused. So it's interesting because there is this book a few years ago called Unbroken, which is a biography of this fellow who went to a prisoner of war camp in World War II, Japan. And he was talking about starvation. And he. They were literally starving. Like, there's. They'd eat, like, almost nothing for the full day. And he's talking about how his other prisoners were doing these incredible mental feats. So one guy was reading a book entirely from memory. Another guy learned all of Norwegian in a week. And he. So the guy says, this is simply the mental clarity of starvation. So it was incredible. It's like it was so widespread, everybody was starving. And they'd see these incredible feats that nobody else in the world could do all the time, because your mental ability is ramped up to such a high degree. And then, you know, in the ancient Greece, the ancient mathematician Pythagoras Hebrew require his students to fast in order to come to his class, because otherwise he thought they had no mental agility to learn this stuff. And it's like, wow, this is incredible. Completely different than what we were taught, but again, same thing. Our body's actually ramping up, ramping up because again, our major advantage over the lions and tigers and bears is really the. Is really that mental ability.

But isn't there a fa. Isn't there like a period of time in the day for most people where they feel, man, I'm really hungry. Like, I can't focus, I can't concentrate because I'm starving. Like, I want food now. And it's actually hurting them and focusing. It's almost like a window of time where you have to just deal with that period. And then it switches on into, okay, I'm not hungry anymore. I haven't eaten in a day, but I'm not hungry anymore and I'm focused. Isn't that kind of window of time there?

Absolutely is. So this is why it's important to get, you know, to understand what happens during fasting so you can prepare for it. So if you look at hunger during fasting, so they've done, again, studies where they fast people for 24 hours and they measure a hormone called ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone. The higher it is, the hungry you are. Turns out that our ghrelin peaks three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. So you get hungry at, you know, 12 o', clock, it's lunchtime, you get hungry. So it's a learned response. The question is, what happens if you don't eat? Does hunger keep going up and up and up? It doesn't. In fact, the ghrelin actually peaks and then it just falls. If you don't eat, it will actually just fall down. And it will fall down within a couple of hours, right to baseline, which means that your level of hunger at 12:30, 1 o', clock, you're hungry. No question about it. If you don't eat by three, four o', clock, that hunger level is actually the same whether you ate or you didn't eat. What happened? Well, your body simply took the calories it needed from your body fat. You took that meal from your body fat, and your hunger went down. So that's really interesting. So if you know that it's a wave, right, you just have to let the sort of wave pass over you. I often tell people you will get hungry, okay? Don't pretend that you're not, because you will. What you got to do is prepare for it and say, okay, well, if you get hungry, then you either. There's several things. One, stay busy, you know, keep doing stuff. Don't just think about how hungry you are. So we all have had this where we're, you know, working on some kind of, you know, doing work at work, or if you're doing some kind of, you know, home renovation or something. I get this all the time where I'm like painting, you know, the house or something like that, right? And I'll just power right through because I just want to get it done. And I'm not hungry at all because I'm so busy. I'm so focused on doing the work that I just forgot about it, right? You see this all the time. You know, people who go to the casino and people who play video games, they just get so engrossed. So that's one strategy. The other strategy is to get something like green tea or coffee that you can drink. By the time you finish, you know, big cup of green tea, the hunger will have passed. But you know that it's going to pass. And that's the point, you know, it's not going to get worse and worse and worse. And that's how you do it. What's even more interesting actually is if you look at multiple day studies where they fast people for three, four, five days, the ghrelin peaks and then after about two days, it starts going down. So by day two, day three, as you get to day four, day five, the hunger almost completely disappears. It's actually fascinating if you've never done it. I've done a few of these four or five day fasts and interesting because there's actually no physical sense of hunger. There's a whole lot of, hey, that slice of pizza looks really good. I really want to eat it. But there's no actual physical hunger. So if I hadn't seen it, which is hard now, of course, with all the advertising and all this sort of stuff, I would actually, you know, gone and right by and done it. But the point is that the hunger is something that you have to learn how to deal with. That's not impossible because again, one of the big objections to people with fasting is that nobody can do it. Like, it'll work. Sure, if you don't eat, you'll lose weight, but nobody will do it. Well, you know that literally millions of people throughout history have done this. Look at Ramadan, you look at Yom Kippur, you look at Lent. Like when people say, okay, we're gonna fast together because our strength is in our togetherness, right? You know, it's Good Friday, we're not gonna eat for this amount of time. Well, that's, that's how people did it, right? They supported each other. There was no food around. Somebody's not frying up, you know, steak while you're trying to baking cookies. Yeah, exactly. So that's how you do it, right? You get yourself a supportive community. You know, you figure out something that you really love to do that keeps you active during that time and that's how you get through it, right? And while you do that, of course, course, your body uses up the body fats, you're going to lose weight, it's going to use up the blood sugar, which is going to keep you from becoming diabetic, and its insulin is going to fall, which is going to reduce your risk of cancer in the long term, as well as those other conditions, obesity and type 2 diabetes, which puts you at such high risk of cancer in the first place. You're doing all kinds of good Stuff for your body and it's completely fine. Free, right.

You don't spend any money on it. Yes.

And this is the parent that's crazy. It's because if you think about the number of diseases that you can make better, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, which is the leading cause of blindness, of kidney disease, of amputations. The secret to managing all of these things is not more medicine and surgery, it's less. It's actually within our grasp. Because fasting is free to every single person on earth. You can do it literally right now and start right now on the path to getting better. It's just a matter of having that knowledge to do it. The people tell you, oh, you can't do it, you can't do it. It's like, that's not true. We all used to do it. Right. If you think about, you know, a community of like, you know, on Yom Kippur, like millions of Jews around the world are doing, or Ramadan, millions of Muslims are doing it, or, you know, millions of Catholics are fasting during Good Friday. Like my priest used to tell me all the time during Lent, you know, fasting, fast, like that's all he talked about practically. So it's, it's, it's such an incredible tool that we've just sort of forgotten about and yet has more power than almost anything else to prevent all of the diseases. And we don't have to charge anybody anything. We're not trying to sell anybody anything. We're just trying to tell you, yes, you can do it. Because if you have too much weight and it's putting you at risk of this cancer, then let your body burn off that sugar. Let your body burn off that fat.

A couple months ago, I did a four day fast where I just had water and a black coffee a day. And it felt incredible. First couple days was challenging, but by day three, I was like, I'm in the zone. And I felt good. I looked younger, I felt healthier. I was doing it more of like seeing what I could do in my mindset and seeing what it would do for my, you know, kind of cleaning out my system. I just so happened to lose seven and a half pounds. It was burning a lot of excess fat. But I just felt better, I felt more confident. I felt like, oh, I could do something challenging, which gave me more strength in my mind. It was a spiritual experience in a lot of ways. And I'm curious, what are the other myths about fasting that people are afraid of that you've debunked?

I mean, the point about being healthier is one of these things that people think it's super unhealthy for you. It's actually one of the healthiest things you can do as long as you're, again, not underweight and you're doing it safely. Right. You're not on a bunch of medications that need adjustment and that kind of thing. But there's this whole recent scientific sort of revolution into this process called autophagy, which has been, you know, very, very topical. People have been going crazy on it, because in 2016, one of the Nobel prizes in medicine was awarded to one of the early researchers. And what it showed is that when you fast and you turn down these nutrient sensors, then your body actually starts to activate a process called autophagy. And autophagy is where your body breaks down these sort of subcellular organelles and just gets rid of them. Right. It breaks it down and recycles them. And everybody thinks, well, if you're breaking down stuff that's bad for you. Right. You're breaking down. Protein is bad for you, is good for you. Because the first thing you need to do, whenever you want to renovate, for example, say you want to renovate your bathroom, the first thing you got to do is throw out everything in there. Right. That avocado green tub has to go, otherwise you can't put in a new tub. Right. Just the way it is. That's just. So your body works the same way. The first thing you have to do is get rid of the old, junky old protein. You got to break it down.

You got to kill off those cells.

Yeah.

Them off the body and let them, Whatever. They flush out your skin or whatever they do.

Right, exactly. The skin proteins, the connective tissue, all of that goes. And it's not like the body knows what it needs and doesn't need. What happens is that everything starts to go, and then the stuff you need, like if you're still exercising, your body's like, hey, I still need those muscles. I'm going to rebuild that. So that's the key, that one of the things that activates during fasting is actually growth hormone. So if you fast for 24 hours, your growth hormone level is like four times what it is really when you're eating. Yeah. And it sounds very strange. Why would growth hormone goes up? Well, it's because of this whole process where you want to break down stuff. As soon as you start to eat it, you want to rebuild all of it. So the Nobel Prize in medicine, which is Dr. Osuni said this is the body's intracellular recycling system. So it's not let's flush out all our old stuff. It's not flush it out and rebuild into new stuff. But if you think about it, that's incredibly powerful because that's the whole process of rejuvenation, right? Get rid of the old stuff, bring in new stuff. It's like renovating your body, right? So all the cells in your body undergo this process of regeneration that you're not going to get if you are eating all the time. Time. So this is this whole, you know, in people who are very interested in wellness, a lot of people are looking into this autophagy and so on, and you get this, this point where you're doing, you know, so you've done these longer fasts. It's like, wow, this is, you just feel really good about yourself, you know, you're full of energy, right? And this is the thing that I thought very strange when I did my first sort of three or four, four day fast is like I have a ton of energy. Like I could feel like I could do anything. My friend who used to work, he's a, he's a doctor and he worked a lot of nights and stuff, he said it felt like my brain was like on fire. Like I thought I could do anything and everything faster than I could and better than I could ever do it before. Interestingly, another friend of mine who's a cardiologist, so he's a heart specialist, he says, you know, I used to, he played piano for his whole life. He says, there's always this piece that I couldn't play. And then as soon as I started fasting, I noticed that I could start to do it. That's incredible, right? And the doctors, when I talk to the doctors, they actually instantly see the logic of what I'm talking about because they know the physiology, what happens in the human body. Because what I'm talking about, which is what all the stuff we know about medical physiology is in contrast to all the stuff that people tell you about fasting, which is, oh, you can't do it and it's not dangerous and it's really bad for you. Whereas the opposite is true, right? It's actually part of a natural cycle, right? It's feeding and fasting, feeding and fasting, right? You don't feed all the time, you don't fast all the time. But we've gone so far into that one thing. So, yeah, I mean this, this whole point of autophagy is very, very interesting. And very topical. If you look at studies of longevity, for example, in animals, the only thing that really makes people, makes animals in the lab live longer is caloric restriction. And so even almost a hundred years ago, people were talking about it and saying, well, you can try and restrict your calories, but if you do that day after day after day, it's really hard. So fasting may be a better way to go, which is something they figured out sort of ages ago. Because if you look back, that's how people thought of fast. That people called it a cleanse, detoxification, you know, reawakening, spiritual, you know, purification, that kind of thing, right? There's this whole sense of rebirth and something super healthy for you, which got turned in the 80s into something really bad for you, right? It's strange how things work, but without any sort of scientific evidence, and as we become as a nation who more overweight, it becomes even more important. And that's just one of these sort of fascinating things. So, you know, it's not like something I just made up. It's like literally the oldest dietary intervention in the books, right? I'm just rediscovering this and trying to tell people, hey, there's a lot of good medical science that tells you this is actually something that is applicable to what we're seeing today in our healthcare. And you can do something like, you don't need your doctor, you don't need your dietitian, you can do something about it right now for no money, right? And there's the sciences all there, right? Imagine how much money you could save as a society if we got rid of this problem. And it's like, oh my God, like it's mind blowing.

Well, I think that's part of the issue is the reason it's not popular, I guess, is because businesses make a lot of money on medicine. Businesses make a lot of money on selling more food, not selling less food. And therefore people want to make more money. And so they have to market their products, they have to market their medicines, they have to market their foods to try to sell more of it. Not to say, oh, just have a few of these, just have a couple of cookies a day. No, they want to sell boxes of cookies, right? It's not like they got to make money as in their mind, this is a business to be run and we need to sell more. More means more. People need to eat sugar, refined sugar, breads, all these things, refined oils, refined meats, refined fats, all these things you said that are horrible for us to Eat. The company's making them. In order for them to survive financially, they need to sell more of these things to us, which a challenge.

It's a real problem because if you look at, say, you know, the doctors and the dietitians, you go to conferences, they're sponsored by Kellogg's and you know, the breakfast makers and so on, it's crazy. I was watching the show the other day, one of these, you know, TLC shows with like these very heavy women. Anyway, they're trying to lose weight and they're taking these protein shakes, I'm thinking, and they couldn't drink it as horrible stuff. They tasted really bad, so they spit it out. I'm thinking somebody's just trying to make a buck on you because you should just drink water, let your body use the fat and use the protein from your own body. Why would you want to drink two of these protein shakes a day except that somebody wants to sell it to you? You're being played here. You're drinking this horrible, horrible tasting stuff and there's spitting it out. They couldn't take it. It's like, oh, this. The whole thing is so sad because it's like if you knew you could simply take nothing at all and be far healthier and save yourself a lot of money. It's a sad, sad sort of state of affairs that we get into.

What would you say are the top four or five benefits of fasting then? If we had to recap that part of it, what would you say? The top five? I'm hearing it's free.

That's one of them. Yeah. So it's free. That's a huge thing. Really. You can add it to any diet because remember that it does not tell you what to eat when you're eating. It only tells you the period of time that you're not eating. So whether you're vegetarian or carnivore or paleo or keto or whatever you want to be, even if you want to eat fast food all day, it doesn't tell you you can't eat fast food. It tells you that during this period of time, don't eat. So you can add it to any diet. Which is incredible because now we're pulling on a completely different leap. That is, if you think about weight loss and nutrition in general, there's two levers, right? We always think of the what you're eating, right? Eat more vegetables. That's great. But what if you don't like vegetables, right? Well, that lever doesn't work, right? So here's a Completely different lever you're talking about. Well, there's this other thing I can do to lose weight or get healthier, right? So you can add it to any diet. It's completely free, flexible. That is to say, you can do it whenever you want. Or if you don't want. If it's Christmas and you do not want to fast for these few days, then you don't have to. If they decide to fast longer after Christmas, then sure, you can do that. That's completely up to you. It's not like you're locked in, you know. The fourth thing is that it's very simple. So if you look at a lot of diets, that is to say, say you're on a paleo diet. It's a great diet, right? But it's like this is paleo and this is paleo and this is not paleo, Right? It's complex or keto or whatever you want to be. So it's very difficult for some people to understand. And I've tried to explain sort of these differences because they'll always get confused. And you always get the, is this keto or is this paleo or whatever? Whereas fasting is very simple. It's like you can drink water and tea and herbal tea. Say, that's it. Everything else you can't eat, right? So it's very simple to explain to somebody. It makes it very easy for them to follow because it's very black and white. If you ate a peanut, that's not fasting, right? Yes, it's not a big deal, but at the same time, that's not fasting. And then the other thing is that it's powerful, right? Because if you. If you follow any type of a diet, there's always a natural limit. So say you want to lose weight, and so you say, I'm going to do a keto diet or a paleo diet or a vegetarian diet. So you do a vegetarian diet and you lose a few pounds, but not as much as you want. Well, you can't go more vegetarian than vegetarian. Exactly. So what else are you going to do? There's nowhere else. Or you can't go more keto or you can't go more paleo, whereas there's no actual upper limit to what you can do in terms of fasting. And it's powerful because you're eating zero, which means that it is, by definition, for weight loss, the most powerful diet there is. Like, absolutely. You cannot lose more than that if.

You put any calories in your body, no matter what diet you're on. You're not going to lose as much as if you had zero calories.

Exactly. So that's the whole thing. It is the most powerful diet, it's the most powerful Starbucks. But it's, it's like, okay, well, why would you not want it, right? If you have a lot of work to do, you want the best tool. That's it, right? This is the best tool. And somehow we said, don't ever use this. Right? It's like, why, if you use it, you'll actually get all these other benefits. So it's just free, it's available, it's simple. You know, you can do it with any diet and it's powerful. And you actually don't have to stop. You can actually keep going. You can, you know, do a seven day fast and take a little break, do another seven day fast and you can't go lower than zero. There's no way it is possible physiologically to go less than zero. So it is the most powerful diet. So there's so many benefits. And yet for years, I'll tell you, when I started using it with patients, in about seven or eight, seven years ago maybe, it was like, the stuff we saw was just incredible. People were like coming off their medications, they're reversing their type 2 diabetes, they're losing weight. It's like, you know, all from this simple intervention that is literally the oldest one in the book. Crazy.

What is the cause of type 2 diabetes? How does that develop in humans?

Yeah. Type 2 diabetes is essentially too much sugar in the body. So it's not just in the blood, but it's in your whole body. Right? So if you think about the body like a sugar bowl. So imagine your body is sugar bowl, and over the years you're sort of eating a lot of sugar, you're eating a lot more and not using it up. So the sugar sort of builds up, builds up, builds up. Eventually it gets to the point where it starts to overflow. That's basically what type 2 diabetes is. You stored up so much sugar in your body that it overflows into the blood. As the blood sugar goes up, then you get diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Now, the point is that if you look at standard medications, so some of the newer ones are quite good, but the older medications like insulin and so on, what those drugs did was they have this full sugar bowl that's full every time you eat, the sugar would go into the bowl, flow out and spill out into the blood. The blood sugar would go high. The solution to these old drugs was to take that sugar that's in the blood and simply cram it back into the body, right? You just shove it and shove it in. And of course, there would be right reach a time where shoving it in didn't work and it still overflow. So then you get a second medication and really shove it in.

Is that what insulin does?

That's what insulin does.

It plug it back into the body?

Yeah. So your body has too much insulin. So remember, insulin's job is to take that sugar that you've eaten and put it into the body. And the point is that you have had too much insulin over time because you've put in so much into that bowl that it's overflowed. The solution is not to put more in, right? It's just like if you have a suitcase, think about a suitcase. You put in a few shirts, it's fine. Then it gets full, you can't close it, right? So the solution is not to put more and more force to push it in. The solution is to get rid of all that stuff, same as the sugar bowl. The solution is to get rid of all that sugar. So how do you do that? There's only two things you need to know, right? Don't put it in. And two, let your body burn it off. And that's it. So that's. How do you do that? One, you can use a low carbohydrate diet, and two, you can use intermittent fasting because when you don't eat, nothing's going in and you're going to start burning off the sugar. I mean, you can think about an analogy. For example, suppose you have a car and you go to the gas station three times a day and fill up on gas. Now your gas tank is full and every time you go to pump the gas, it overflows and spills into your backseat and is now making you sick. So what should you do? Well, I'll tell you what you wouldn't do. You wouldn't go back to that gas station three times a day. What you would do, of course, is drive that car around, drive it, drive it, drive it until the gas tank starts to go down, same as the body. Every time. You're just putting more sugar and putting more sugar in. So what should you do? Well, run that body without sugar for a while. That's what intermittent fasting does. And that's why we were able to reverse. We wrote a case series about three patients who we did this and we just reversed diabetes like they had 20 years of diabetes, and we still reversed it in them. It's insane how quickly they got better.

What does type 2 diabetes do to someone? How does it affect them?

Yeah, the type 2 diabetes is one of the worst diseases we have. Unfortunately. Type 2 diabetes and prediabetes is about 50% of the American population.

Wow. Yeah, 50% of the American population has type 2 diabetes or pre diabetes.

Pre diabetes is the majority. So about 10%, 10, 15% is type 2 diabetes, about 30, 35% is prediabetes. So the point is that if you put all that sugar into your body, what happens is that you can cram it in, cram it in, but then all that sugar sort of goes all over the body and every single organ just starts to rot away. And this is the problem. This is the reason you get like gangrene. You know, the foot goes black, the toe goes back. That's the reason why you get all kinds of infections that you don't normally get because there's sugar everywhere. The bacteria love that. Right. So you get infections that you don't see in any other diseases. You get, you know, too much sugar, it rots away your kidneys. You get kidney disease, you get blindness because all the sugar damage to the eyes, it's the leading cause of non traumatic blindness. You know, kidney disease is what I deal with a lot because the kidneys just start to sort of rot away. So you go on to dialysis, for example, you get heart attacks, you get strokes, so the whole gamut. And then you get cancer, of course, because of the too much insulin. Insulin is not only a nutrient sensor, it's a growth factor, so it tells your body to grow. So all of those things that are important in terms of killing people, which is heart disease, heart attacks, strokes and cancer is going to be made much worse with type 2 diabetes. And that's why it's so important to really take care of yourself.

If someone is listening here, how would they know if they have type 2 diabetes or if they're pre diabetic?

Yeah, generally you have to get a blood test to do that. You test something called the A1C. Most people who are overweight are at risk of that. And the point is, a lot of people will say that type 2 diabetes is sort of chronic and irreversible and progressive. It's actually a total lie. Type 2 diabetes is a completely reversible disease. It's simply too much sugar. You need to empty that sugar bowl. That's the whole idea. And that's how you reverse it. Taking medications is not going to reverse your disease because you're simply cramming more stuff into the body. So you can get a simple test, it's a routine test, and you can see if you are at risk of this. And the point is that if you do find out that you're either Diligent or type 2 or pre diabetic, then you got to understand this is a reversible disease, but it's largely a dietary disease. So therefore the treatment must be dietary. Exactly. You got to get to that root cause. And it's not. It doesn't mean you have to buy expensive food. Right. You could simply fast, which is free, and you could still reverse and get so much healthier.

So what I'm hearing you say is it's 100% possible to reverse type 2 diabetes and pre diabetes through fasting and through eliminating sugar from the body.

Yeah. So sugar, refined sugars especially. So sugar, which is fructose and high fructose corn syrup and that kind of thing. And then a lot of refined carbohydrates are. Carbohydrates are actually chains of sugar. They're actually chains of glucose in the body. So they tend to raise blood sugar.

Is that like breads and bagels?

Bread, bagels, rice, potatoes. Yeah, all of those things.

So potatoes and rice are not good for you if you have type 2 diabetes?

If you have type 2 diabetes, it tends to. So we do this thing called the glycemic index, which is of certain foods, which one raises the blood glucose goes the most. And carbohydrates like rice and potatoes and bread tend to be the highest. I think sugar is probably much worse for you than any of those. So. But the. So. So sugar sort of is number one enemy for me. Number two is eating all the time is probably the really. The other thing that's really bad. I mean, you get this advice sometimes. I think it's so dumb. Eat six times a day. It's like one. Nobody's ever done that before too. What happens when you eat six times a day? Well, if you eat a small portion of food and then deliberately stop, which is what they're telling you to do. So eat a small portion, not until you're full, but just a little bit, and then stop. What happens? Well, we know what happens because that's what an appetizer is. A small, tasty portion of food that makes you more.

More hungry. I want to put more in my stomach.

So why would you want to do the six times a day? You're gonna, you know, Eat a little bit of food. Then before you're full, actually stop while you're hungry and wanting more, and do this six times a day. You're gonna use your willpower. You're gonna use all your willpower just to do this. When that was completely. You know, it's totally against it because everybody, you know, there's this inertia, right? It's like my son, right? You can't get him into the bath once he's in. You can't get him out of the bath, right? Because once you're in, you're comfortable, right? Same thing. When you eat, you should eat until you're full, hopefully, of good food. That's the way that we are designed to eat. When you're not eating, you don't eat, right? You just let the existing conditions sort of run. You don't eat a little bit, make yourself hungry, then stop and do it over and over and over again. That's a recipe for failure, right? And then when people fail, what happens is people say, well, you know, these people had no willpower. It's like, it has nothing to do with willpower. It all has to do with the habits that you put in. If your habit is to eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and nothing in between, like, virtually Everybody in the 70s, well, hey, it's easy to stay slim. They were eating white bread. Like, nobody ate whole wheat bread back then, right? I ate a sandwich for lunch at school every single day, as did everybody else in my class, right? Peanut butter and jam. Classic, right? So it was. It's not the. It's not the willpower. It's putting in those healthy habits. Not eating all the time of not snacking all the time of, you know, hopefully avoiding those. Those foods. And there's so many things we do to sort of sabotage ourselves, right? I mean, if you're a. You know, if I was a business owner with a lot of people, the first thing I do, I mean, and this probably applies pre Covid, is, you know, to say there is no food in the office, right? Because there's no reason that you need to eat if you're working, right? If you were and say there's no food in the office, there's no food in the conference rooms. When we have meetings, we won't have food. There might be coffee, but there's no cookies, right? And these are the ways we sabotage ourselves, right? Like, why do we need to do this? Like, I always think if I'm in a meeting, right, and it's in the middle of the afternoon, And I was hungry in 1970s, would I really get up, leave the meeting, go find myself a donut and come back, People be like, what the hell is this guy doing? Right. But if I'm bored out of my mind in this meeting and there's a donut sitting in front of me, guess what? There it goes. Right? Or in the movie theaters or in front of the TV or whatever. Right. Or in the car or whatever. It's simply the habits that you put in. It's not a matter of willpower. It's identifying these behavioral changes that can sort of lead you to success and finding a community of people that is going to say, yes, we agree with you. There's no bowls of candy on the desk. This is a place of work. I don't want to sabotage weight loss efforts by putting out a bowl of candy that's not acceptable. Because if somebody's losing weight, I don't think this person should be doing that. Right. You're tempting people every single time. Time. Like, it may have been a good gesture in 1975, but it's not a good gesture now. Like, this is not. This is where we work. This is not what we do. Right. And these are the sort of things that you can. Now I start. Once you understand obesity, you can start to identify, okay, these are behaviors. These are little things we never thought about that really are very simple. Like, you know, very simple to do that could lead to a big change. And we have a website, we have a program that does that called thefastingmethod.com and that's what we try to help people with, establish these patterns, find themselves a community where you can say, hey, I'm having problems with headaches during fasting. Has anybody else had this? And then people will chime in and say, yeah, there's this, there's this. Right. And that's what your mom used to do for you. But now, of course, nobody fasts, so nobody's able to help you. So you need to find this supportive community. And that's what we've tried to build. And also the tools to ask questions, get the education, that kind of thing.

Yeah. Especially if you're the only one in your local community trying to fast. It's gonna be very hard when everyone else is eating around you and they don't get it. They're not in on the game of what you're trying to do. So finding that support and accountability is gonna be crucial. I'm curious, your take on fruit. I've had many different doctors and Scientists and researchers on Dr. Rhonda Patrick, Dr. Stephen Gundry, just recently, Dr. Peter Attia, who all kind of mention that fruit may not be the best thing for us in abundance. And being very specific on when we eat fruit, how much with fruit we eat because of the sugar intake that it has. What's your research show about fruit in terms of our diet? Is it more beneficial or is it more harmful?

In general, I'm sort of. I agree with them because the fruit contains fructose, which is chemically sort of what you get in sugar as well. So when you eat carbohydrates like bread, it's mostly glucose. When you eat fruit, it's mostly fructose sugar. Table sugar is sort of half and half. That's where you get high fructose corn syrup as well. And the fructose is fructose, no matter where you get it from. So in whether it's an organic apple.

Or banana, it's still fructose.

It's still fructose. So if you drink a Coke and it has high fructose corn syrup, it's still fructose and it's some glucose, right? Which is no different than you'd get if you were to eat an apple with, you know, some rice or something. It'd be like glucose and fructose. It's the same thing. On the other hand, there's all kinds of other things that happens with whole fruit that may mitigate some of that badness. Right? And this is the whole point that I try to make, is that there's a difference between added sugars and natural sugars. So if you eat an orange or an apple, yes, the fructose is the fructose. But there's a natural limit that you have. You can't just keep eating that, Right. Because you can't eat like 10 apples at a time. You'll just feel full and you'll just not want to. Right? That's just life. Whereas if you put sugar in, like, you know, a Coca Cola, like a Big Gulp or something, you can keep drinking that thing. Like the whole thing. Like lots of people, those giant things at the movie theaters people do, they sign sort of mindlessly sip this sweet, sweet stuff, and the amount of sugar is probably equal to like 10 apples. But the apple had all this fiber, it had all this, you know, the pulp and all this other stuff that naturally put a break on how much you can get. So, yes, on the one hand, fructose is fructose. So I sort of agree with that on the other hand, I sort of disagree in that I don't think that whole fruit is nearly as bad as added sugars because there's no limit on the amount of sugar you can add to something. Like, you can always make it sweeter. You can always make it sweeter and you won't even, you won't ever get that sort of break. So on, on, on stopping. So I think it's a real different. There's a, there's a big difference, but I'm not a huge fan. If you're trying to lose weight. Yeah, I think you do need to limit your fruit. It's still fructose. It's not the best, it's not the worst thing, but it's not the best thing for you either. But as a, as a sort of treat or whatever, it's probably a whole lot better than a cookie, for example, which doesn't have those natural satiety hormones.

Curious. I've asked this with a few different people in this space. If you are on a five food only diet for the rest of your life to help the quality of your life, the health of your body, your mind, and to help lengthen your life to the best of your ability, obviously. If you can only eat five foods, what would those be based on your scientific research and based on what those foods would do for the body?

Well, I think that's, I mean, meat is probably one of the most nutritious foods there is. And I know that there's a lot of sort of debate, sort of environmental debate, there's ethical debates about ethical raising of meat and so on. But the, you know, if you're just set all that aside and just say, from a nutrition standpoint, one is delicious. And you know that because when you watch shows like Naked and Afraid, like you ever see how excited they get when they get a fish or something? It's insane, right? They're like, oh my God. Or they'll be like a rat or something and they'll be like, oh, right. It's like you don't go like, whoa, cauliflower, right. Even though I love cauliflower. Right. It's a great food, but you can see that it's a natural food for humans. Like, we really get. That's part of the natural thing. So meat is, you know, meat and fish and chicken for sure would be up there. And you know, scientifically, of course, they're much more complete sources of protein for us than natural because we're animals. So therefore we use animal proteins much better than we can use plant proteins. So that probably be a base if you, you know, if, you know, so you could actually survive just on meat. So people like the Inuit, for example, subsisted largely on meat. However, if you set aside the ethical, you know, costs and so on, then you might want to, you know, eat some other foods. So there, there are some carbohydrate containing foods which can be very good too. Something like beans, for example. People have eaten beans for years, like, you know, millennia, like subsisted on beans and so on. So that'd be a very again, a vegetarian source of very good protein and can actually be quite delicious. Like, you know, people eat it in all different kinds of ways. You know, for me it's, it's one of these things that is, you know, one of these things that you can put on a plate that, that, that takes that sort of carbohydrate. But there's lots of food fiber and all that kind of thing. You know, some other vegetables and fruits that I really enjoy. Like something like avocado. It's like I love, I think everybody loves avocado, so. And there's so many vitamins in there and so on. So, you know, that's, that's something. Those are probably the main things I could think of like other, other vegetables that would be well up there. So any of the above ground vegetables. Like to me, I love cauliflower and broccoli. I mean those are just foods that I could eat sort of easily. It's one of these things. If you're trying to replace a carbohydrate side dish, like if you're thinking about, okay, I have a bit of meat. And then, you know, in the past you might say, oh, I have a lot of potato or rice. You could easily put cauliflower or broccoli or something in there. That just totally takes the place of one of those. Yeah, so those are some of the foods that I think are, you know, I'd probably, I could probably do pretty well with those things. I mean, beans. I would include tofu as well because I eat a lot of tofu. Being, being Chinese.

Okay, I like those, Those are good. What about athletes and fasting? I'm an athlete. I'll, I'll mix it up from being like a, a power sprinter type of athlete, doing different basketball, weightlifting, training, things like that to right now. I'm also in marathon training because I'm committing to do my first marathon in the next six months, so I'm doing longer runs. How does fasting work with someone who is working out often? Can you do both? Do you need to limit your ability to exercise? And again, going back to, would you lose muscle as an athlete if you're doing intermittent fasting or three to four day fastings?

Yeah, so that's a great question. You have to sort of differentiate between sort of the weekend athlete, the one who really isn't at that super high level of competition. For those people, you could probably do whatever fasting you want because remember, the point is that you can leave it up to your body to find those sources of calories. So if you're one of these guys, works out two or three times a week and so on, plays a little bit of ball on the weekend sort of thing, and that's most people, you could do whatever, you could fast and then do workouts. So that's perfectly acceptable because if you don't eat, your body will simply take those calories that it needs from time to time from, from your body fat. There is a period of adaptation from when your body. So remember there's two sources of fuel in the body. There's, there's sugar, glucose and there's fat. So your body, your muscles, so your legs and so on can use either glucose or it can use fat. In order to efficiently use fat, you have to train it to use fat. And that often takes weeks, like three, four, five weeks in order to get that. And you can do actually muscle biopsies of people who are undergoing this transition and you can see that they start to gain the machinery that it needs to efficiently metabolize fat. So if you are eating a high carb diet, as most of us did for most of the 90s and 2000s and so on, and then all of a sudden you say, I'm going to fast. Well, you have no more glucose. Muscles are going to be highly inefficient because they haven't been used to using fat. So some of the top end athletes have actually started to train themselves to use fat. So Chris Froome, for example, the Tour de France ultra low carb. And there's Zach Bittner, who's one of these ultra marathoners, hundred mile races and stuff. He uses a very low fat. Sorry, a low carb diet, training his muscle a lot of fat. So he's training his muscles to metabolize fat. So a lot of these. Dave Scott, so very sort of legendary triathlete who really talks about low carb, high fat nutrition. Tim Noakes, who writes a lot about that. And these are all exercise physiologists. So you could really do well with that. And fasting is really just the same. The problem with fasting, of course, in elite sort of high level athletes is that you actually need all those calories, right? So you really can't get by without eating because you're using it, you need it, right? And most people don't have enough body fat to sustain, sustain those sort of things, right, because they're in that sort of less than 10% body fat, not the sort of 25% that you see in the general population. So what we do there, and we've worked with a number of elite athletes, is that you have to separate what you're trying to do. So in the on season, you really can't fast. It's not, it's, it's hard to do. You need too much energy and your body, you know, to perform at a high level. The carbohydrates often are slightly better than fat, unless you're in one of these ultra marathon sort of endurance events, in which case that will be a perfect.

Because they give you, the carbohydrates, give you the sugar that your body needs for the energy in that moment.

Like it probably gives you extra boost. So if you're like sprinting, the, you know, metabolizing glucose is probably slightly better than fat. Even if you train yourself to use fat, when you get to triathlon and ultramarathon and stuff, you probably don't see that, that difference as much, which is why you have somebody like Chris Froome who's a, you know, he won the Tour de France a number of times and Dave Scott who was, you know, did all these triathlons who talk about eating high fat meals and so on. So you know, Peter Bruckner, who's with the Australian cricket national team and you know, Tim Noakes who did all this research and then. But in the off season you certainly could do this. And this is something that's called training in the fasted state, which is something that they're doing a lot of research on. And this is sort of the off season. So we work with baseball players and soccer players and rugby players and stuff on this. And the point of this is that when you fast, what you do is you fast for 24 hours, then you do your training and then you eat. So when you fast, your insulin goes down, but your growth hormone goes up and your noradrenaline goes up. So as you train, you actually can work harder than you have before and your growth hormone goes up. So when you eat and preferably a high protein diet, then you're going to rebuild. So this is especially important in the off season because you're, what you're trying to do is sort of rebuild all that sort of stuff, the wear and tear on your body.

You're trying to clean out the autophagy, you're trying to get rid of that stuff and then build muscle or build, get rid of inflammation, you know, heal your joints, all that stuff.

Exactly. And this is something that will do with people in sort of the off season and then process it like a.

24 hour fast and then train or eat first. After that.

No, you train and then you eat. Because if you train and then eat, your body will start to use some of that protein to rebuild. Your growth hormone is up, you've got the protein and that pro, that period of time where you, you eat afterwards, it doesn't have to be like, you know, you stop running and start showing you have about 12 hours worse in that window where your body's actually going to more efficiently use the protein. So this is something that, you know, we'll do with people in the off season to try and prevent injury and all this kind of stuff. The one other interesting thing is we worked with Georges St. Pierre, who was this mixed martial artist and he actually was very fascinating because he loved the fasting. So he'd do these long fasts and.

He shredded guys, a machine shredded.

And he said that boy, when he used to fast every. He said that when he used to go and fight, because he did this during competitions too. He'd say when I went to fight or when I was training in the fighting, like everything looked like he was in slow motion as hitting and you know, as, you know, he felt unstoppable. So he would actually use it during his, you know, which we don't often do, but you're, you know, again, understanding the physiology of what's happening with that higher level of noradrenaline, you know, that increased concentration. Everything kind of gets like that hungry wolf. You get tunneled in, you get focused in to a higher degree. He said that, you know, oh boy. He, you know, that was this sort of like secret, you know, weapon. He could, he could, you know, he could move and do other stuff. And it is crazy. But he, that was an example of it depends on your sport. Something like baseball, for example, we've done it for people in the season because if you're a starting pitcher, you have like four days where you're doing nothing. So you could actually use that in your sport. Because even during the season if you're a starting pitcher, while you've got two or three days in the middle where you actually try and try to get this sort of rebuilding, regenerating and then sort of break it in time for your, for your start or whatever. So it depends a little bit on the sport and the situation. Yeah.

I'm curious about fasting. Eating unhealthy while you fast, like intermittent fasting. Are you able to do a 14, 16 hour window of fasting or 18 hour window fasting and then eat any junk food, fast food, candies, sugars you want and still get the same benefits? Or is it really the quality of foods also that you're eating in that four hour window while you do intermittent fasting?

Yeah, it's both. So if you eat just junk and fast, you're gonna get, it's better than if you ate junk all the time, but it's not better than eating healthy and not fasting. And that's what one of the recent studies said. So one of the recent studies that was completed on fasting, they said, well, if you do this sort of eight hour window, you don't lose any weight. And maybe it might be bad, but the, one of the things and the way they did the study is they said that you eat whatever you want during that period of time. So it's like, you know, we don't know what they ate. But if you eat, you know, chocolate donuts and stuff and french fries all day, you know, in that eight hour window, that's not good for you. So there are two sort of different levers. So one is the foods that you eat and one is the fasting. And so if you're, you know, if, if you're doing both, you're going to get the biggest bang for your buck if you do one but not the other. I mean. Okay, but you know, doing neither, of course is the worst, right?

You're eating whatever you want and you're eating all fasting. You're screwed.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. For a lot of diseases and you know, cancer is sort of one of those ultimate diseases that winds up being very, very, you know, once you get it, it's really hard to turn that back. And that's why it's so important to really stop it before it gets to that point. And that's the thing that we have to really look at is, you know, let's really talk about what it is that you have to do because it's not this sort of, you know, predetermined event, right. It's not like, oh, I'm predetermined to have cancer when I am 65, or whatever. It is like the genes are the same, you know, the lifestyle to some extent is, you know, determined by where you are born and where you live. But there's so many things that we can do to. To raise or lower. Like even to the extent that it's almost as powerful as stopping smoking. Right. It's just such a powerful determinant of cancer and dwarfs every other thing in there.

Right.

If you talk about pesticides and, you know, stuff, it's like 1%. We use this term called PAF, or population attribution factor, which is like 35% of cancer can be attributed to smoking, and 30% is diet. And pesticide might be 1% and radiation might be 2%. Right. It's negligible compared to the diet. Why? Because we're exposing ourselves to this diet day in, day out. Day in, day out, as opposed to pesticide, which were. Or, you know, some sunscreen or something, which is not like every day, day after day.

Right. Are there toxins stored in our fat? And if so, is that dangerous to fast if there's toxins in the fat?

Not really. I mean, some people talk about that, and if there is, it's a very minor point. I mean, so I know there's this whole theory that we get fat because, you know, our fat is trying to lock away these toxins and stuff, but there's really very little data to suggest that's true. If that's true, then of course being fat is better than not being fat. That is, the skinny people should also be being exposed to these sort of toxins as well. But it's not true. You can clearly see that the people who are fatter have more risk of all kinds of diseases, predominantly type 2 diabetes and cancer and heart disease.

You mentioned paleo and ketogenic diet. What's the biggest myth about ketogenic diet? Right now? It seems like everyone's trying to do this or talking about it.

Yeah. I think the ketogenic diet is a perfectly reasonable diet from a scientific standpoint. That is, if you look at what it is, it's really high in fat, but not just fats. Review. You know, as with anything, and I was sort of in on the beginning of this, is that we talked a lot about natural fats, like not eating a lot of corn oil and refined fine vegetable oil and margarine. Right. It's eating natural fats like animal fats and coconut fat and that kind of thing. So natural fats, not going crazy on protein, and then really, really going very low on carbohydrates. And I think that that makes a lot of sense for weight loss, and that's why it's become such a popular diet. I think there's all these. There's this reaction to it that, oh, it's really, really unhealthy for you. I don't think there's anything inherently unhealthy for you about the keto diet. It's also not a super easy diet to follow. Anything that's really different from what you're used to is not easy to follow. That's not to say that you couldn't follow it, but it does tend to get a little difficult over time because people enjoy carbohydrates. So this is the thing is, it's that it's. It's. There's a, you know, when you're only talking about the foods, and you have to be very, very strict on the foods as opposed to when you can say, okay, I can be leaning on the foods. If I'm going to up the fasting, like, well, I'll dial this down, but I'll dial this up so that I can sort of balance it. Right. It gives you more flexibility to do it. But I think one of the big myths is that it's a super unhealthy diet, but it doesn't necessarily have to be as. As it gets better, bigger. Then you wind up attracting all these people that are trying to sell you keto bars and keto shakes. And it's like that was sort of like the, Remember the Paleo movement, which was all about the caveman diet? And then you get these paleo bars. I'm like, yes, the cavemen did not eat right. It's like, that's not a thing. So the movement winds up getting a little bit diluted, as opposed to the original sort of movement, which was a lot of natural fats. A lot of intermittent fasting was sort of built right in because there's talking about, well, you're going to eat until you're full. And don't eat unless you're not, you know, unless you're really hungry. So there's a lot of intermittent fasting baked into keto originally. And like I said, some of it gets moved out. You wind up attracting all these other people who try and put their sort of spin.

Commercialize it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Commercialize it.

What about. What's your thought then on the bulletproof or the coffee with Ghee method, you know, where you fast, intermittent fast, but then you have coffee with a little bit of ghee or something like that. Is that something you feel like is useful while intermittent fasting? Or is it better to just do water only and black coffee or no coffee?

Yeah, I think that the classic is water only coffee like black coffee and tea like green tea, herbal tea make very little difference. So even though they're not part of a classic fast, black coffee makes no difference. There's no calories, there's very little anything else. Right. When you get to bulletproof coffee, it's actually very interesting because again, the main point of intermittent fasting is you're trying to reduce your insulin. So you're getting into the sort of fat burning when you take pure fat. So coffee with ghee or whatever like that, you're taking almost pure fat, which is interesting because it's actually not going to affect your insulin at all. So some people do very well on that. Because what you try to do, of course, is you take that bulletproof coffee and then you don't eat. Like, that's the point. You're not taking it and then eating, you know, muffin. Right. That's not the point of that exercise.

You're not dipping the donut in the coffee.

Exactly. So you're just trying to take it and then not eat. And if it allows you to not eat for a long enough period of time, because some people say, oh yeah, I get this full, then you're going to be net better. So remember, when you're taking almost pure fat, you're not having any insulin effect. That fat actually goes almost straight into your fat stores, but it keeps you in that fat burning mode.

So it's adding some fat storage, but it's burning as well.

Exactly. So it depends on your net balance. That is, if the fat that you put in allows you to fast for a long enough period that you're going to balance it out, then your net better. If you're going to take a bulletproof coffee at 9 o' clock and then eat something at 10 o', clock, well, you didn't take, you didn't buy yourself enough time with that bulletproof coffee to offset that. It's the way that the body metabolizes fat. And it's, it's strange because it's not usual for our body. Like we don't usually just eat a stick of butter. Like that's not right. So therefore, that's why this is sort of like a hack, because it's sort of this thing that people do, but it has to give you enough time to come up benefit. Right. It's like investing. Right. You have to put in money to make money and you hope that you don't just throw it away. Right. Same thing. You're taking in calories to try and fast for long enough to burn net more calories.

What would be the ultimate way to do intermittent fasting in your mind? And is this something that we should do every day, intermittent fasting or periods of time, seasons of life?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that fasting is actually a part of natural life. So if you think about fasting, people think it's some, you know, strange thing that you do, but it's really not. That's where the word breakfast comes, comes in. Right. So the meal that breaks your fast, you have to fast to break your fast. So even baked into the English language, and it's actually not just the English language, in French it's petit dejeuner. Jeuner is the word to fast. So it's to break your fast. So the point is that you're supposed to feed and fast. So you're supposed to be at 12 to 14 hours every single day. Yeah, maybe once in a while you'll have a midnight meal or whatever. But that's for, in general, you should be fasting every single day. Then I think, then there's occasional longer fasts. And I think this is the point is to, you know, every once in a while just to sort of cleanse the system, keep things kind of going. And that's the way we did it. Right. If you look at any of the major religions, you know, some did it more than others. Greek Orthodox had all kinds of fasting periods and, but you know, and people would do it differently, Mormons would do it differently from Catholics would do it differently from Buddhists for example. But they all had this idea of fasting. Buddhists, for example, won't eat after 12 noon, so they'll just fast until the next day. So sort of a four hour eating window every single day sort of thing. So that's, that's the way they do it. But this occasional longer fast is I think beneficial to sort of activate this autophagy and get the benefits of a longer fast. Because you're getting different things happening at different stages. If you're getting 12 to 14 hours every day, you're getting a lot of the benefits. And then every once in a while you try and get the benefits of that longer fast and you do it at Pre specified times of the year. And religion is what used to tie people into this whole cycle. Or they do it because it was winter. Right. You'd have a big meal at Thanksgiving. After that, you know, there's not a lot of food coming in. So then you know, you'd have longer periods of very little to eat.

Yeah, I mean, I've had both Dr. David Sinclair on and also Dr. Peter Attia who've talked about if you want to live a longer life, you almost need to have fasting in your life. You need it to help with autophagy, to help with getting rid of these precancerous cells, to help with eliminating diseases, all these different things. The body needs less food or windows of time where it's eating a lot less food to help cultivate a longer living life. Now obviously there's certain things that might happen that aren't going to guarantee the length of our life. But what have you found in your research on this process to extend life?

Yeah, I totally agree with those guys. Those are smart guys. And I think that the point is that our body has sort of two ways that it can go. You can either go into sort of growth mode or it can go into cell repair and maintenance mode. And the point is that you really, in order to maximize sort of longevity, you want to go more towards sort of maintenance mode. And the way you do that, of course is by eating less. And fasting plays a big role in that because again, if you eat, then your going to activate the nutrient sensors. The nutrient sensors are going to tell your body you must grow because you grow when food is available, right? So you put yourself into growth mode. When insulin is up, when mtor is up, you're going to go into growth mode. And it's great. If you're young, you know, you're a kid, you want to grow, that's fine. But think of it like a, like a race car, right? You rev that engine, you're going to go really fast. But you keep revving that engine, it's not going to last for very long.

Right.

So you need to put that engine into sort of storage for a little while if you want to maximize the length of it. So they're diametrically opposed. That is growth versus longevity. So you need to push yourself into longevity. If that's your goal, then you need to eat less. Right. And whether you do it by sort of chronic calorie restriction, which you could, but it's difficult because that's not the way we're sort of built. We're not built that way. I'm convinced that that's a very artificial way to do it. Not that you couldn't do it, but when we're, you know, we're designed to eat until we're full and then stop. And if we don't get food, then the hunger just dissipates. So naturally, I think we're more built towards the intermittent fasting model as opposed to every day eat a little bit less, which I think could work, but I think it just takes sort of willpower every single day.

It's a lot of energy.

It's a lot of energy just to think about it as opposed to saying, well, I'm only going to eat twice a day because that way I have time to do this and I don't have to buy, you know, myself a lunch, which will save money and it's going to give me an extra hour of the day, that kind of thing. So I think that that's the point is that in the end you've got this sort of, sort of seesaw between growth versus longevity. Sort of just like that, you know, race car engineering, you can either go fast or you can use it for a long time. You really can't do both. It's really hard to do both. So as you get older, you want to push yourself into that longevity stage, which means eating less, which means doing more fasting.

Ultimately, can you build muscle while you're doing a lot of this fasting, or is it.

Oh, yeah, oh yeah. I mean, you got to understand that most of what we use for energy is not muscle because that's only one organ system that's skeletal muscle. So if you're riding a bicycle, that's your, you know, that's your muscles. There's all these other organ systems that we have no control over. So there's the liver, the kidney, the heart, the lungs, the brain, you know, generating body heat and all these sort of automatic systems that also require energy. So when you don't eat, then your body starts to reduce energy. It will reduce, you know, all of those things. If you exercise, you will still keep building muscle and so on. That's totally different. But if you start to, you know, use less energy, then you'll feel a bit colder. And your, you know, your, your liver may slow down a bit, your heart may slow down a bit. But again, people think it's a bad thing, but it's probably a better thing. You don't want to be, you don't want to be revving that engine all that time. You actually want to go down a little bit bit as you get older.

It's interesting you mentioned briefly the different societies that we found probably had very little or no cancer. I think you mentioned the Eskimos that you said before, before they became westernized, I guess, or before things started to shift. It's interesting. I just did. I've. I've done a lot of training with Wim Hof. I'm not sure if you've heard the name Wim Hof. He's a guy who focuses on breathing, on mindset and on cold therapy, exposure, extreme amounts of cold therapy exposure. And he has done a test, I don't know if you've heard about this, where they injected, I believe it was E. Coli into his body and he rejected the disease from breathing and cold therapy, where it actually didn't harm him and he didn't contract the disease, I guess. And he did this with a group of other subjects of just people who he did the method with, where it was cold therapy, breathing, where they're able to reject the infection. I'm curious in your mind about cold exposure, knowing that the Eskimos are in cold and they didn't have. Maybe it was only all they did was eat meat and then cold. How much do you think cold therapy, cold exposure supports with eliminating cancer?

I don't know. I haven't really looked into that. I have to say, I don't think it's just the cold because the Inuit, of course, when they started to eat like they're still in the cold, but when they started to eat all kinds of processed foods like sugar and bread and stuff, they wind up getting cancer. But you also see it in Africans who live a traditional African diet. Again, they really have very little cancer. So it was. That was where they described these sort of diseases of civilization. So it didn't have to do just with the cold. On the other hand, I actually think there's a lot of interesting stuff, both with extreme cold and extreme heat, where people, you know, talk about the benefits of like saunas and all this sort of stuff, which I think is very interesting. I actually haven't looked into it a lot myself. I actually think that the extreme cold to me seems like it. There may be something there. You know, there's actually a few things that people talk about, like the browning of white fat and all this kind of stuff, which makes a lot of sense to me. But I, you know, seems, you know, and there's a lot of people who do it, like in, in Scandinavia and Russian and Stuff there's all these people who do this sort of cold therapy and they swear by it. And it's like. I think that there probably is something there. I don't know how much it has to do with what I talk about, which is most obviously like insulin and foods and fasting and so on. But I think that there's actually going. I think somebody should look into that. But again with the. Because nobody makes money on jumping in.

The ice is not a money making thing. Yeah.

And it's not. Doesn't seem so comfortable to me. But you know, on the other hand, I actually think that there probably is something there that is highly beneficial.

Maybe that's your. The next book down the line, the Cold Code, the Cold Therapy Code, to see what that does with cancer. This has been fascinating. I feel like I have so many more questions I want to ask you, but I also want to be respectful of your time with this interview. For me, I could ask more and more about this stuff because I feel like the body is. It's our temple. It's the thing we need to take care of the most. And if we want to have a high quality of life, we need to take care of our body. And if we want to have a longer life and be around for more memories with our friends and family, then we've got to also take care of these things. A few final questions for you. Before I ask these final questions. Is there anything else that we should be aware of when it comes to the mindset around cancer? Have you found any research on healing the mind in order to heal the body physically? Or is it more been around nutrition?

Mostly most of the data is around nutrition. I think that the way it interacts is that. I think that there's actually like a lot of those things are super important. So when people talk about positive attitudes and gratitude and community and staying connected and all that sort of stuff, it sounds hokey, but it actually has a huge impact on life and quality of life and even longevity. But it's hard to see study because how do you quantify if somebody is grateful, for example, or if they have a positive attitude? It's very hard to quantify that. So it tends not to get studied. But I think the. Where it interacts is that it. If you are one of these people who has a lot of stress and very unhappy or isolated like a hermit compared to somebody who has tons of friends and goes out and you know, has a great support, supportive church and all this sort of stuff where I think it makes a big Difference is that you can measure sort of stress levels. Like, and there are certain things that get activated during chronic stress, like cortisol, which is certain hormone. And I think that impacts the immune system. So the immune system, which under chronic stress winds up getting degraded. Right? So if you produce, if you're under too much stress, your immune system really doesn't work as well. And the immune system plays a key role in fighting cancer. So I think that there probably is some, I think there's a lot of truth to that. But the data is hard to find because then you get all these sort of, you know, very by the book sort of doctors who say, well, there's no proof that having a lot of friends makes you live longer. It's like, well, that's data. Or if you're great for, or keep a journal or whatever, or meditate. It's like that's, it's, it's, it's not that there's not a real effect, I think. And they confuse the fact that it's very hard to study with the fact that it doesn't work. Like, I think it works. I think it's super important. I think that's actually more important than almost everything else. Like being, you know, being grateful, being happy, you know, being connected. I think that's actually has a bigger impact on life than most anything else. But it's so hard to put it into a scale where you can say, okay, this is this and this is this. So I think it does play a role. But yeah, the data is going to be so hard to find. When I look at it, what actually astounds me is how far ahead a lot of the religions were. And it doesn't matter what religion you are because the basics are the same, right? You go to, you gather every week. So hey, that's staying connected. You pray. So that's like meditation. You give thanks, like you say grace, right? You give thanks to God or whatever. And it doesn't even matter what God you believe in. And they fast. It's like, oh my God, like those are the pillars right there. And it's not if you're Catholic or if you're Jewish or you're Muslim. It's all of them the same thing. Or Buddhism or Hinduism or whatever. And always astounds when I look at that and say holy. They're way ahead of us. And why? Because these were things that just worked. They didn't care why it worked, right? So gathering every week to do something, right? And it doesn't matter if you're gathering to do this or do that, but you're gathering as a community, connecting. You're seeing the people that you're living with. You're giving thanks for the food that you're eating. You're giving thanks for having the friends and being here on this earth. You know, all of this stuff, it just worked, so they kept it. What didn't work, of course, got dropped long ago, and what worked stayed. And it's a core, all of these things. The prayer, which is like meditation, the connectiveness, which is the gathering together, the fasting and the, you know, the gratitude, all of these things are sort of core part of sort of what makes us human. And that's why you see it in every single one of these things. And it's like, wow, I always think that is crazy how far ahead they were. And then we get to the 20th century, we live in our own McMansion and, you know, we stop doing stuff together because we want our own space and not realizing and not fasting anymore and not praying anymore. And we don't realize that, hey, you know what? These people might have known what they were doing. They might have developed this over thousands of years. And we just think we're just smarter than them when we're actually not. We're actually not, you know, not even smart enough to realize that that was the core of what, what good, good quality of life is.

Yeah. I'm so glad we've connected. I've got these couple final questions I want to ask you that I ask everyone at the end of my show. Before I ask them, I want to remind people about all the books you have. You've got a new book called the Cancer A Revolutionary New Understanding of Medical Mystery that's out. You've got a few other ones. The Obesity Code and also the Diabetes Code and also the Complete Guide to Fasting. So you've got also the fasting method.com which can help you with fasting if you need a support community, if you need tools, if you need resources. So go check out the fasting method.com I believe that is correct. And check you out on social media. You're Dr. Jason Fung on Instagram, Twitter and Fung Style Fasting on Facebook and thefastingmethod.com this has been extremely insightful and eye opening for me and hopefully it's a lot of great tools for so many other people that listen to this and watch this. If you're watching online, feel free to share this. Feel free to like this up. Leave a Comment below of what's supported you the Most over on YouTube. This question is at the end that I asked people called the Three Truths. So I'd love for you to imagine for a moment a hypothetical scenario, Jason, where it's your last day on earth and it's as you get to live as old as you want to live, but eventually you got to turn off the lights and you've created and accomplished and lived the exact way you want to live. You've written many books and done so many different things, but for whatever reason, all the content you've put out in the world has to go with you to the next place, wherever that place is. And so no one has access to this interview or any of your content anymore. But you get to leave behind three things you know to be true from all of your lessons in life, kind of these three lessons you share with the world, or I call the Three Truths. What would you say are those three things for you?

I think one of them is, of course, the importance of intermittent fasting. Like, it's. It's really just a part of the way you're supposed to live. That is, everything is a cycle, right? Yin and Yang, it's all a cycle. Feeding and fasting is that same cycle. You can't do all of one or all of the other. We've gone so far, of course, towards feeding that, you know, you really have to turn back the dial a little bit on that side. So that's one of the sort of great things that I'd love to sort of leave with people. And I think that's what the obesity code was about, was like, let's really think about what causes this disease. The second thing is very similar to that. I'd love people to really understand that type 2 diabetes, and that one is near and dear to me mostly because that's what I deal with a lot in my profession. As a kidney specialist, I see a lot of type 2 diabetes. So I'm always invested in it because my patients are suffering from it. And I always think it's a shame. Like, boy, I wish that people would have told you that it's reversible. Like, you don't have to suffer this disease. You can do something about it if you want. If you don't want, that's fine, too. But, you know, it's a reversible disease. And that's one of the things I always think about when, you know, it's like, there's so much suffering in this world that really is not necessary if people had the right understanding. And then the third thing I think, of course, is to always sort of stay real, which is that, you know, as you get out there, like, you know. You know, I mean, because you're in the public eye a lot, you get a lot of, you know, admirers, but you get a lot of haters as well, right? So you always got to stay real and similar to, like, this whole idea of living a digital life or, you know, on social media life, you know, how everybody's happy and smiling. That's not real life. And I always think, like, stay real. Like. Like, just do real things. Like, you know, it's fine to be on social media and stuff, but that doesn't mean you don't see your friends and make sure you go out with, you know, to run or to play some ball or to whatever it is that you enjoy doing, you know, read. There are other things that you can do that you have to sort of stay in the real world, right? It's like being present. You have to be there, right? Because in the end, that's what you will always remember, right? It's not the Facebook friends that you had or whatever. And it goes the other way, too, right? There's lots of Facebook friends and stuff, and they're great. But you also get those haters who are always, like, ragging on you and stuff. Oh, you're such a phony, and you're just trying to sell out and all this stuff. And I always think, okay, one, I wind up just blocking those because they're a pain to deal with. But I always think that you got to stay real. Like, if somebody came up to me, and I get this a lot, some people say, oh, he's full of crap. That's I can't believe he's a doctor kind of thing. And I'm always like, imagine going up to somebody and saying that to my face, right? You'd never do it. I'd never talk to you again. So why would I want you to talk to me? I just mute you right away, right? And that's part of staying real, right? Like, so stay doing real things. And it's so easy, especially. Especially now with COVID where we're all supposed to be going and doing virtual things. But, you know, it's like, you're not going to remember that. Like, a virtual trip to, you know, the beach is not the same as going to the beach. I mean, you know, you got to go to the beach, right? And I think that that's one thing that I've Been thinking about maybe more during this period of time where we're not allowed to do anything. But, you know, when it comes back around to it, it's like, remember, there are friends. You know, there are friends. And you can, you know, don't get down on the stuff you see online, either from old people ragging on you or the fact that people are always smiling in a beautiful place on Instagram, right? It's like, that's not real life either. So go out, do something real, talk to real people. It benefits you no matter, no matter what, right? It's always better to do that. Even though it's easier to sit in front of a screen and, you know, play video games or watch somebody else's life and stuff. Right?

Love that. Those are good. Three truths. I want to acknowledge you for a second, Jason, for you have amazing analogies. You turn the complex into something that's understandable and easier to break down, which can seem very scary, very overwhelming, very hard to understand when you're dealing with sickness, disease, illnesses, viruses, obesity, cancer. These are scary subjects. And the fact that you're able to communicate effectively the hard data and research so that everyone can understand it is extremely powerful for us. So I acknowledge you for the decades of research and work and practice in mastering this and constantly trying to learn new ways to make it better for the rest of us. I acknowledge you for that and for being a nice doctor, for being a kind hearted doctor. I appreciate that. Hopefully when you're in la, we can do this in person again sometime and get some more content out of this, because I think this was really helpful for myself and I think for everyone listening and watching. My final question for you, Dr. Jason Fung, is what is your definition of greatness?

I think that greatness is really about being able to impact people in a positive way. Right? And I see so much of this again online because of course, everybody's online nowadays, right? Because that's all you can do. But. And I'm sure you've seen this as well, right? It's like, because I think this is the core of what you want to do, is do something good for people. But there are people who get famous for putting other people down, right? And it's like, oh, God, like, I get it, you want to be famous for putting somebody down, whether it's people you think deserve to be or not. Like, oh, you know, people rag on this guy or that guy and it's like, yeah, but you're just trying to build yourself up, right? The greatness is not in tearing somebody down or saying that this guy's stupid or this theory is stupid, right? It's like, you know, when I talk about calories and stuff, sometimes I get frustrated. I say, that's really stupid, right? But that's not what I'm trying to do, right? What I'm trying to do is not just tear something down because I don't really like to do that. I like to sort of say, this is a better way to look at it, right? Think about it this way. Because this is what's going to make you better, right? And to be able to impact somebody so that, you know, I won't even have seen them and they'll be able to lose weight or they'll be able to reverse their diabetes or they'll understand cancer better as of disease is a humongous privilege and makes me feel great. I mean, that's why I do it, right? Because I like that feeling that I've been able to help somebody, that I can impact, you know, hundreds or thousands of people and they are going to be better. And to me, that's greatness, right? To be able to make something where people say, wow, he helped a lot of people, people like I'm, you know, or somebody even, you know, a few people who will say, wow, you know, I listened to him and I really turn my life around. Like, that means a lot to me because that's what healing is. That's what being a doctor is. But you can only do that on a one, on one basis, which is very limited, as opposed to being able to, say, write a book where you can impact a lot of people. And I think that's what greatness is, is to be able to sort of impact people and make the world so, so much better. For you, having been there for. For me having basically obsessed about these sort of questions, you have no idea how much time I spent looking at this stuff. Like, I. I'm sort of obsessive about some stuff and it's like, once I dig into it, I like, I'm digging, I'm digging, I'm digging, I'm digging. And it just takes a ton of time. Like, so, you know, for me having obsessed with. About these sort of questions just because I like to understand stuff, you know, I want people to say, well, I'm glad he obsessed about this so much and thought about this in a different way that somebody else did, because it does no good to say the same stuff. Like, if everybody tells you, you know, eat 500 less calories a day, what good Is it for me to come out and be the millionth and first person to say, you should eat 500 less calories per day. Right. Completely useless. Like, completely worthless. But if I come out and say, as I did sort of seven, eight years ago, consider intermittent fasting, I don't think you have to do it, but you should consider it, which nobody, practically nobody said at the time, then it's like, that's useful because it's a new piece of information. And that's what I try to do in the cancer code, the obesity code, the diabetes code, is to say, let's take this problem, let's look at it differently so that we can understand it. And by understanding it, we can do something about it. Because that's great. That's really great.

My man. There you go. Dr. Jason Fung, thank you so much for your wisdom, and thank you so much for being here. If you want to learn more about how to master your mind, check out this next video right here.

We're all faced with great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations. And we are at that point, that nexus point in our evolution as a species. So then you don't try to fix that. That's never going to work. What you do.