Fasting Without the Suffering: The ProLon Science Behind Autophagy

4 crops versus hundreds and hundreds of crops.

Yeah.

Most of those 4 crops being carbohydrate-rich crops. And also now suddenly food is just constantly available. And there was also this blip of time in the '50s, '40s and '50s when, and I don't know if you know this evolutionarily, but when we started settling and having farm animals, we suddenly the our meat consumption exponentially increased.

Yep.

We're eating a lot of pigs and cows and things like that. And, and suddenly, you know, people were dying of heart attacks at younger and younger ages and they're like, what's going— this is like novel. This was—

Welcome to the Peptides and Longevity Podcast. Each week we'll dive into groundbreaking science, innovative therapies, and the future of health and longevity alongside visionary physicians and experts. We'll explore how peptides, cutting-edge medicine, and lifestyle strategies can redefine the way we age. Get ready transform your health, optimize your vitality, and unlock the secrets to a longer, healthier life. Let's get started. Thank you, everybody. I want to thank you for joining us at the Peptides and Bioregulator Summit today. I have one of the most incredible human women on the planet Earth. We have Melanie Richter herself, and she is going to delve into topics that I feel like are life-changing to our health and our existence. She's a registered dietitian nutritionist. She's a scientific queen, and she's a super mom, and she just has knowledge and radiance just flowing out of her person at all times. And so we're gonna get into what is ProLon, which is this incredible tool for fasting and it can help you adhere to fasting protocols in a way that will just amplify your body's ability to manage a fast. So you get all of the benefits with none of the suffering. I've used it before multiple times in my life, multiple times in my practice. And if you're in any spiritual practice on earth, if you are in any sort of healing crisis, even our body's own innate intelligence will tell us that fasting is a way to clean up our system, to reactivate dormant cells, to start to heal the potential— or sorry, to healing potentiation of our bodies itself, and completely transform your body from the inside out. So Melanie, thank you so much for joining me today. You are literally a radiant fasting angel. Freaking love it. And I'm excited to talk about fasting with you.

I'm gonna need you to follow around and introduce me to everybody.

Okay, I got you. I will team you up everywhere.

Best cue-up ever. Thank you.

Okay, thank you.

I feel great. I feel great.

Nice.

Um, thanks for having me. This is awesome.

You're so welcome. I love that. Well, Melanie, why don't you give me a little bit of background about you, your practice, what do you do, and then let's delve straight into Prolon fasting. What does it mean to you? How do you use it for your clients?

Sure, sure, sure. So I am a registered dietitian by trade. It's actually my, my second career, second life. I was in healthcare PR before this and had my own health journey that led me to my master's degree in healthspan and longevity. So now I'm a dietitian and I have my own private practice where I treat people with gut-related— well, gut is the underlying condition or underlying system that I treat, but I treat people with autoimmune conditions, anxiety, depression, the gamut of gut-related things. And then my main hat is that I'm the director of communications at L-Nutra, which is a longevity science company. We are the leading longevity science researching company, and we have our flagship product, which is the ProLon 5-Day Fasting Mimicking Diet. That is probably the best known product that we have, but it is the— it is a breakthrough in fasting science and in the ability to tap into the fasting mechanisms in the body by staying below those nutrient sensing radars that we can go into today. But still allowing you to eat food. So it's a, it's kind of a, a novel concept. It's, it's an incredible breakthrough, kind of a biohack, if you will, for people who are interested in getting that cellular rejuvenation benefits while also still nourishing the body and doing it in a way that's easier, safer, more delicious, honestly, but in a way that's, that's more accessible, I would say, for a lot of people because, you know, avoiding food altogether is hard.

Very true. It's super hard. Yeah. I love that. That's so cool. It's powerful. I, I remember my first introduction to fasting and speaking of gut issues, just to relate with you, I, I have had two traumatic brain injuries and a traumatic brain injury, a leaky brain creates leaky gut.

Yeah.

And I had severe, severe Crohn's colitis, diverticulitis. I could not get away from an autoimmune manifestation of gut irritation at all times. It was just, Anything I ate, I had digestive issues, either too much, too little. I was just nonstop in the bathroom, made fun of when I was a kid because I— there's just no way I could control it. And I'll never forget, I read a book a long time ago. It was actually a woman researcher named Hulda Clark. She's like the queen of parasite cleansing, and she was— had me go on a fast. It was my very first fast. It was a 3-day fast. With psyllium fiber, taking all of these antiparasitics, and lo and behold, it broke like a 4-year sugar curse in my body in just 3 days where I couldn't even look at a donut or a Nutter Butter bar or a Cosmic Brownie, and I could— I had, had no desire for it anymore when all of that flushed out of my system.

Yeah.

So it's amazing how powerful fasting can correlate with terrain modification, completely shifted my gut's ability to heal itself. And fast forward, I'm 35 now and I don't have gut issues anymore. Just, you know, just teeing you up even more, Melanie.

Oh my God. You're, you're such a walk. You're like a, you have such an incredible story. I, I was saying before this that some of our most painful experiences in life can really truly be the best gift ever. And like, look, look what you're doing. You're doing the most amazing things.

Heck yeah.

Yeah, I'm really, really excited. But, but our brain and our gut work and communicate through the vagus nerve. So if you have brain issues, if you've had a concussion, if you have had a really severe like injury to the brain, you are absolutely going to have gut-related issues. And it comes as no surprise that most I would say 80 to 90% of the people that I treat with, that come in with, you know, Crohn's, SIBO, leaky gut, all have anxiety, depression. You know, it's, it's, they go hand in hand. Yep. Happening in the brain is happening in the gut and vice versa. So if, yeah, it's, it's a, what a story. What, what a, what a coming of age, health coming of age story you have.

It's been wild. I, I, yeah, it was, yeah, it was crazy. Cause I just, I didn't realize like, I didn't, I didn't put the emphasis on fasting back then.

Sure.

Like I did as I progressed through my journey, but it really was the core of how I started to heal myself.

Sure. And okay, so let's, let's talk about this for a second because I think, I think you are 35, I'm 37. So we, we were brought up in the age of where, where convenience foods and the amount of ready-made foods was like at its peak. I, I think that we, we were brought up at like the, the worst part of it, I think. And part of the reason that— well, first of all, fasting, but it's not— this is not a novel concept. It's been around forever. In fact, we were— as humans, we've evolved to not have food available all the time. That's, that's actually how our systems, these internal systems called autophagy— as early humans, when we were evolving, we didn't have food available all the time. So we, we— our body evolved to create these processes to keep us alive. Because believe it or not, and this is actually something that I stress to my patients all the time, because, and I know you felt this with your history, that it can feel when you're in terrible disarray physically that your body is like revolting, right? Like auto— in the term autoimmunity, where your immune system's acting against you, actually it's not true. Your body is constantly trying to keep you alive. It is, it is its job to keep you alive. And one of the One of the things that came about, you know, the not having food available all the time was this process called autophagy, which won the Nobel Prize in 2016 for its, you know, we discovered that our body can actually recycle old and dying cell parts that are like just basically slowing us down, bogging us down, taking up energy that we don't need. When food isn't present, this process happens to help us when food does become present again, we can hunt that elk, we can hunt that deer and get the food with energy.

Yep.

If we didn't have energy to do that, we'd die. So this, these natural processes, we are supposed to have extended periods, not all the time, but often yearly to have extended periods of prolonged fasting to help support autophagy and help to support this process of cellular cleanup that helps your body function better.

Yep.

I have Pete. So all told, autophagy is this incredible powerful system inside the body that helps to allow your cells to function and actually look younger than they were before autophagy took place. This is, this is the, the actually autophagy is the, the definition of the difference between a biological age and a chronological age. Chronological age being the day you were born, biological age being how healthy are you, how young are— is your body acting right now, right? And autophagy is the quintessential component to that.

Let's go. I love that. And I, I don't, I don't think people understand the power of autophagy when it comes to in any chronic illness situation where there has been any sort of autoimmune creation, any sort of age-related disease accumulation, there's one correlative factor that starts to accumulate, and that's senescent cells. Those are zombie cells, these dead cells that are sitting in our system. They're accumulating this disease-oriented state. They're throwing off the regular regulation of everything in our body. And what's the way— what's the tool that we have to clean it up? It's autophagy. And I feel like, because you mentioned it earlier, we are Paleolithic primordial people. I know we don't see ourselves like that because we're driving around in Teslas and drinking poppies and eating protein bars, going to CrossFit every day. And we assume that that's killing elephants and stoking fires is not the same as our blacktop grill outside. And so we do live a different situation here on Earth. But it doesn't mean that our genetics aren't predisposed to the fact that we're still Paleolithic. And so how do we bring in a tool, which is autophagy and fasting, into the modern day where you can still function? This is why I love ProLon. Like, ultimately, for a, for a fasting kit, is you can actually function in everyday life because you have these little nutrient-dense things that keep your fast going, but your tongue's still satisfied, your hunger's satisfied. You don't necessarily knock yourself out of the autophagy state. You allow it to stay strong for 5 days long, which is clinically shown to hit all of the major benefits into the body. You go 5 days and you are literally going to be probably, you know, I would say at least 6 months younger. You're gonna, your skin will turn over. Yeah. That's, Anecdotal by any chance?

Actually, it's— so our recent biological age study, if you haven't seen it, if you do, which is based on doing 3 cycles over the course of 3 months, can reduce your biological age by 2.5 years.

Golly, so I was almost close.

You were, you were undercutting.

Okay, sorry.

And this is, this is clinical, this is scientific. Yeah, it's, it's, it's incredible. And to think, you know, Humans, we've been around for 300,000 years. We have, as, as Valter Longo, who's the founder of our company, aptly says, we're working off of 300,000 years of R&D. Like, our bodies know what's going on. And in the last, you know, 150, I would say the last 150, which is like literally the tiniest sliver of time for how long we've been around.

Yeah.

We suddenly started bombarding our bodies with 4 crops versus hundreds and hundreds of crops.

Yeah.

Most of those 4 crops being carbohydrate-rich crops. And also now suddenly food is just constantly available. And there was also this blip of time in the '50s, '40s and '50s when, and I don't know if you know this evolutionarily, but when we started settling and having farm animals, we suddenly the our meat consumption exponentially increased.

Yep.

We're eating a lot of pigs and cows and things like that. And, and suddenly, you know, people were dying of heart attacks at younger and younger ages. And they're like, what's going— this is like novel. This was so new at the time. There was a period of time. So people were dying of heart attacks and this was novel at the time. And one of the things that was, uh, found was that fat was doing this. Fat, fat was cons— was, was contributing to our hearts not working well, but they didn't differentiate between the types of fat. They just said fat in general. So around the 1950s, we went into this probably two-decade period of time where we were just removing fat from everything because every— everything was low fat. Do you remember this?

Oh yeah.

Our dads, our grandmas, low fat this, low fat that. There was low fat in everything.

Yep.

But when you remove fat from food, you're removing the flavor, you're removing the umami, the delicious, mm, yum, what makes food palatable.

Yeah.

So when all of these food manufacturers were tasked with removing fat, all their products started tasting like crap. So they're like, what do we do? Add sugar. Sugar is technically a low-calorie food at the upfront, right? But so we had— so now, and that hasn't changed, by the way, that, that Even though we know now that fat is good, especially certain fats from nuts and seeds and olive oil and avocados, all these things we need for a healthy heart, but it hasn't changed. We still have added sugar added to everything. So we have these— we are just in a constant fed state and a constant state of, you know, glucose insulin spikes, which is in part contributing to our, you know, chronic disease epidemic and metabolic epidemic, diabetes epidemic, obesity epidemic. Pandemic. It's nuts.

It's crazy. And I, and I told you my story a little bit earlier, but I used to be a type 2 diabetic and mine was dietary induced because of what you just said. I mean, I used to tell people Little Debbie was my side piece. I ate every snack she ever created and I was eating myself into a diabetic, like, and it happened when I was a teenager.

Yeah.

And you know, it just, that, that is so true. That food that was really killing me was all of that sugar that I put in my system nonstop.

Yep.

Yeah.

And then before we get to the fasting, but, and then you, you had talked about how you did that parasite cleanse and suddenly you stopped having sugar cravings, which is such a, like, to me that's obvious. But what happens when you start eating sugar, sugar, sugar, or carbohydrates constantly, or processed food constantly, you're feeding specific types of bacterium and microbes that then feed only on sugar. So they make you crave sugar. So those sugar cravings that you have are often not even coming from your willpower. They're coming from your gut. They're coming from the dysbiotic microbes in your gut that are saying, hey dudes, we're hungry. We're here. We're having a party. Anyway, it's, it's in fact, fasting is, is one of the first, in my opinion, one of the first places you can start to remove, neutralize, remove the inflammation so that you can then start taking the steps that you need to heal. Because obviously, you know, fasting isn't the answer to the whole process, but it's a critical key part of the process to help you get back into a baseline so that you can make the changes that you need to make.

Yeah, I agree. I, I'm gonna allude to something you said earlier, which is like, now we're 4-crop eaters. Corn is in everything, wheat is in everything. Like, our, our diversity of food options is almost nothing compared to a Paleolithic person. One of the most profound things happened to me, which was I actually went to a conference in Thailand and I spoke to a bunch of doctors on peptides and bioregulators out there. But going to Thailand was an incredible fast for me because no products that exist in America exist in Thailand. So when I went there, my entire diet style changed overnight and my body felt the best it's ever felt in its entire life.

It was good.

The food was the freshest. It was extremely diverse. Compared to American cuisine. Like every single thing I had was completely different. And it just reminded me of the power of variety. So when I came back here, just to open up the expansiveness of just doing things different, not becoming food apnea oriented, where you actually create allergens, the more you consume the same foods over and over again. And the way to break that cycle is going to fast. You don't have to go to Thailand. You can just literally grab a Prolon kit.

You should go to Thailand too.

Well, you should, because there's like, you can take Prolon with you. You could take Prolon with you. I also, I got 12 massages while I was down there, like one every single day I was there. Cause they were like $7 for a 2-hour massage. It was really wild. Just a magical place to get body work done was so nice. But I like the fact that those types of fasts, like a Prolon kit, can literally be the origin point to completely shifting the microbiota of your gut to shift cravings, to kick off your weight loss journey, to kick off lowering inflammation. I mean, there's a direct correlation to inflammation and the weight we hold on to. When you start to reduce inflammation, all of a sudden the puffy bloatedness starts to go away, And I would say you can't get there any faster than doing a fast. Like, yeah, it's incredible.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. You, and you know, so we have, we have a few clinic, preclinical trials, preclinical meaning in mouse models. We have two divisions of our company. We have our consumer division, which is where you can, anyone anywhere can go onto prolonlife.com and get the ProLon 5-Day Kit. And then we also have our medical program, which is called L-Nutra Health. These are like 360-degree programs that we pair not only FMD, but we do dietetic oversight, medical oversight, laboratory review. We do the whole comprehensive thing.

Wow.

And in our preclinical, so we have our metabolic and diabetes programs in our medical division right now, and we're going to expand that into IBS, IBD, PCOS. We, we're, we're developing programs for all of these specific conditions in the future, probably twice, 2026 or 2027. But the thing that in our preclinical trials, which is in mouse models, we did see not only were the lactobacillus, bifidobacterium, these really beneficial healthy bacteria increased over the course of several cycles of, of the ProLon FMD, but also the junctures of your gut lining tightens. It's not even that when you're eating, some people are eating what they deem and on paper looks like a healthy diet, but so it's not just people that have processed foods and are only eating processed foods, but if you're eating an incompatible diet for your body, that can also cause, even if it's full of fruits and veggies, but if they're incompatible with your system, you are also creating inflammation and the junctures of your gut lining, which are supposed to remain really taut and tight, um, become loose and things can pass in. Parasites can pass in, foreign invaders can pass in. And out and nutrients don't stick the way that they're supposed to stick. And we found that the junctures actually tightened on our program. So, from a gut component and, you know, there's also some downstream that the CRP inflammation metrics, when you measure those 3 to 6 months after doing a ProLon series of cycles, that will decrease over time. So, there's a lot of— there's a lot of really incredible evidence, which is what we're testing in humans now, which hopefully will be will be available to people in the next year or so. But yeah, it's, it's, there's, so we know physiologically something is really incredible is happening in the gut, but also mentally, I mean, we, we've kind of talked about this mental component, but mentally people are changed after ProLon, which is like, mm-hmm, not as easy to quantify because I think there's a few things happening. First of all, when you do ProLon versus say a GLP-1, or if you do ProLon versus like a calorie restrictive diet or something, you're going to have muscle loss. You know, there, with, with, with weight loss generally comes muscle loss. Also on ProLon, you don't on ProLon because of the precise amount of macronutrients in the program, you're actually targeting visceral fat loss and protecting your muscle. So there's an element of And I don't know if you can speak to this yourself, I'd love to hear your experience, but on days 4 and 5 and 6, people are like, I could run a marathon. I am like 100% raring to go. And I think part of that is like, you feel lighter, you feel more energized, you feel like you could hike Mount Kilimanjaro if you've never even hiked before. It feels like you can like conquer the world. There's like something mental that happens. And also like the, you know, there's a conquering something hard to do is also really empowering, right? Like there's a, there's a lot of things that go happening, but people do feel like they can, their, their sugar cravings reduce and they feel more inclined to stop doing, you know, taking on these bad habits over time. So there's a couple different things, factors at play, but there's, there's, um, Yeah. People feel pretty great.

Yeah. I, I, I can resonate with that. And I think it's because in the pursuit of nutrition, the way that we're actually built is novel foods that are in greater diversity have a micronutrient profile. So when you get away from macros to micros, what your body actually desires is inside a Prolon kit. There is micronutrient absorption. That keeps you satisfied, that doesn't necessarily have to do with the macros. And when that micronutrient is filled, all of a sudden your nutritional levels come topped up in a fasted state where you're producing more energy, you're increasing mitochondrial potential, you have more oxygen in your blood, you're basically lighter because there's less weight that you're carrying around. I mean, literally less weight that you're carrying around. And most of us are putting ourselves under a digestive burden because we overeat and we don't move enough. And that's just the recipe for stagnation, which can lead to disease and all the things. And so the one, the reason why I love ProLon is because I was talking to a really powerful doctor friend of mine and he said, I asked him what's the greatest tool for healing in his practice. And he's a super crystalline new age kind of, you know, interesting human man. But he said it's to stop everything, breathe, and to assess yourself. And it's so simple, but I feel like one of the greatest stop breathe techniques is a fast. Yeah. Because as you disconnect from what's familiar, you open yourself up to more possibilities. And from a, a spiritual rooted perspective, they would see the most powerful way to like increase your spiritual power or let God's energy increase in you is to deny your body from the pleasure of eating. And I find that correlation so powerful because thousands and thousands of years ago, they were tapped into healing energy in a way that I think we're just now coming to understand with clinical trials, like you alluded to earlier, but back then without the clinical trial, they were, doing this and feeling that euphoria. Day 5 or 6, it's euphoric. And a lot of my clients who would go on a ProLon, they would double their, their time. They would make it like 10 days or they'd make it 12 days because they felt so good. And guess what? When they came back to eating, their diet was completely different. When they came back to their supplement stack, they realized they need a lot less.

Yeah.

They, that literally every single thing in their life was built on overconsumption based on marketing. And so I find it very fascinating that a company like ProLon, cuz I don't know any other fasting kit companies, there probably is ones out there, but I've never even heard of 'em. But I love that ProLon created, at least for me, the original one that I started with in practice with patients. That it made it easy for them to do, easy for them to follow the instructions. I mean, literally the kit is beautiful. I used to tell them it's like the Apple products of fasting where everything is laid out. Okay, good.

Say it louder. Yes, we are the Apple.

No, I'm serious. I'm a big fan of like good packaging, good marketing, and also education creates expectation. So when things are laid out correctly, it really helps us to understand the signs of what we're gonna look for. And even this, what you're hearing now from you and I, this is gonna, when you open your ProLon kit and you're listening to this, you're probably gonna be like that much more excited about going on the journey and receiving all these benefits. And if you think about out of a year's period of time, what's 5 days? It's really not anything. And for 5 days to change your life is just a no-brainer, you know.

Yep, man, there is something so emotional that happens on ProLon too. I, I appreciate when people bring this topic up because I feel like in my practice I start with the physical body because we all have it and we're, we're very burdened by our physical body, most of us. But ultimately what I'm doing in my practice is helping people to, to get to that spiritual level, find their gifts, find their joy in a way that's transcendent of being in the physical body, right? That we can get past that. But it's, you know, it's really hard in our society. We're super fast-paced, where food's constantly available. We forget— when you, when you do Prolon for the first time or for the 10th time, I think it's a great reminder of how much time we spend thinking about food, what to eat, where we're going to get it, who we're going to spend it with, where, you know, Like, and then you, you take that away. You take that process away. You've gained like 3 hours of your day back and you're like, there's no way I spend that much time thinking about food. You absolutely do. And you, you get all this time back and you, and you have to like sit. It's, it's not easy for people to sit in partial discomfort like that. It's uncomfortable to not have the next thing to think about. You have to be. Still. It's very interesting, but so much of that process, it's so fortifying. It's such a, such a human, spiritually fortifying experience, I think, to, to do, to go through a fast. But, you know, Prolon, Prolon 2 is my, my OG. I studied under Valter Longo in my master's program, and then I worked for him. It's been a, he's been a massive influence in my life. And in how I practice nutrition. But yeah, it's, it's a spiritually fortifying experience because you do have to pause. You do have to sit and reflect and you can use that to be itchy or you can use that to be, huh, I'm gonna journal, I'm gonna read, I'm gonna like pause. It can be, it can be incredibly empowering if you let it.

Ah, it's so true. I love that. Well, Mellie, I'm curious on your journey because I feel like when it comes to digestive issues, like women get hit so much harder than men do because y'all have a hormonal component to the, the cyclical way that your body detoxes that's different than a man, which you guys get to live longer and all these other benefits, not to mention cradle life, which is the coolest thing on the planet. But it also makes the existence for y'all a lot harder because a lot of my female clients, I mean, I used to tell people 90% of who I worked with were fe— were women and children. And the husband who was forced to see me, who thought I was the weirdest guy that had ever existed because I'm trying to tell him, you can't just pour whiskey on your wounds and expect your body to heal itself. You can't just go lift 300 pounds in the gym and think your mental state's gonna switch. And so I was always at a, a struggle to be like, ugh. And I, what I found was that the woman was at the center of the house health. So if she was about the health of the family, the whole family changed. And one of the things that I felt like was always this balancing act for a woman's body was how do you get rid of the lower gut bloat? How do you start to balance out the digestive system inside a cyclical process of hormone fluctuation? And I found that a Prolon-style fast was actually extremely nourishing to a female's body. Without putting anything into disarray. It was actually a good balancer. But I'm curious for you, since you're a super mom and, you know, a lovely woman, what's your experience with using fasting as a technique for female clients in bringing balance to their system?

Yeah. Oh man, it's a loaded question. I have—

it's so loaded.

7 things I want to talk about that would take 7 hours probably. No, I think— I think that— well, I actually will start by saying that women We are, because for varying reasons. First of all, we, we are forced to be more aware of other people, and so we're constantly digesting, pun intended, the emotions and things of other people. So I think in general we do hold more in our bodies, emotionally, spiritually, and physically than, than men do, just by the way, you know, it's partially a female wound. I think a, like a mass female wound that we're all dealing with. But yes, the way that our hormones work each month does change our— it changes how we digest and absorb and what we need to be doing. And I think in my practice, actually, if you go on a— if you're a research nerd and a science geek, if you— most of the research out there is looking at female hormone with water fasting, which is different than what we provide on ProLon. So if you're looking at the science that's out there on female health and fasting, it will, it will recommend that you do it during your follicular phase, which is the first half before you ovulate, the 2 weeks before that, more or less, because of how insulin is regulated during that cycle. But in my decade of practicing, within 90%, no surprise, of my patients are women because I think women are just generally more in tune. It's best in luteal, like right before you bleed, or, you know, sometimes it even prompts. And I think part of that, part of it is because of of the nutritional, how much sugar and insulin resistance we have in our society. And, and especially women with PCOS, in my experience, will do better during the luteal phase doing this, a Prolon fast. It actually helps to ignite a period usually. But I would say in my own personal experience, I've, I've probably done 18 Prolon fasts in my, in the last decade. And I would say, and I was also prior to this in like a professional fitness person, I had to, you, you, you do need to figure out the balance between the nourishment and the fasting. Cause I think also as women, we tend to have a lot more pressure on what our physical bodies look like. And that can sometimes overextend into underfeeding, regularly underfeeding, not just in fasting cycles, but I had to, there was a, there was a period of time where I had to, I was doing probably 4, 4 ProLon a year and I had to reduce to 2 because that was, that, that balance was better for my body at the time or my hormones to, to feed more on fats and proteins and things that I maybe was undercutting for a while. Anyway, I just went off on a major tangent. I think it depends on the person. Depends on where you are too. Like I'm still a bleeding woman. So if you, you know, this is very different for women who are perimenopausal and menopausal. That's, this is actually a very different conversation for those, for those people. You, you actually would be probably safer to do it at any part of your cycle. But if you're trying to mimic a cycle, then, you know, you might wanna follow the cycles of the moon and do it during luteal there, you know, the luteal, uh, moon cycle. But anyway, it depends on where you are. I think it comes with a lot of other societal conversations about just, you know, I think women tend to undernourish and I have a lot to say about that. But fasting can be really powerful, I think, for women who are trying to get back in touch with their bodies, have— especially if you have metabolic issues, insulin dysregulation, if you have— if you're overweight or obese, all of these types of things can be. And also, like, for me, I had IBS, IBD in severe way. Fasting, having fasting as part of my cycle for, for a few years. This wasn't something I got, and actually, in fact, I would say I didn't love my first few cycles on ProLon, having gut-related issues, because it can exacerbate them to a certain degree. After about 6 cycles, for me, that was the turning point. Wow. Enough of that autophagy, cellular rejuvenation, and the things I was doing on my, on my own, but it took me a little bit before I started doing ProLon and felt incredible. So it, it is also like a dedication. I just talked about a lot of things there.

No, I love that. That was, that was really super informative. And I'm curious because we're basically teeing up the ultimate to the ProLon, you know, challenge, if you will. Um, but what actually is in a ProLon kit? What does a client do? Like what makes it different than just getting a gallon jug of water and trying to drink it every day for 5 days?

Yes. So, and this is the most foolproof thing ever. So you get this big, beautiful white box. Inside the white box, there is a mini box for each of the 5 days. You literally have a menu card. It has all the things that— it tells you exactly what you eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For breakfast and for snack, you usually have this nut bar. It's made of macadamia nuts almonds, coconut oil, olive oil. Amazing. We're, it's very high in monounsaturated fats. This program lunch and dinner is made up of soups depending on the variety of Prolon that you get. Most of them, the original Gen 3 are dehydrated vegetable and like quinoa vegetable soups. The new version that we just launched, the Next Gen is actually not dehydrated. So if you haven't tried that version, it's The flavor profile is pretty awesome.

Oh, beautiful. I have to give it a shot.

Yeah, please, please do. I will connect with you afterwards. But you get soups for breakfast and lunch and you get some snacks. You have like kale crackers. Olives is a big piece of our program, which sometimes people don't like, but they're pretty great. They're from Sicily. They're great. And then you, on some of the days you get a dessert too, which is like a quinoa, uh, cacao little dessert on 3 of the days that you're fasting. And then from days 2 through 5, you also get this vegetable glycerin drink that helps to protect even more, protect your muscle during the program. But so you get, you get real food. It's all from real foods. Yes, there is, has been a process of dehydrating some of the soups, and that's actually originally was because the ratio of glucose to fiber that was needed to regulate the insulin process needed, we needed to add inulin to our product to help balance out the, which is why the dehydrated soups were our first formulation. But it's a precise ratio of macronutrient to micronutrients, which stays just below the, your body's nutrient sensing radar. So we have, we have 3 primary nutrient sensing pathways. There's IGF-1, which is probably the most popular or most well-known, I'll say mTOR and PKA. All of these Uh, pathways are stimulated by protein consumption and carbohydrate consumption primarily. And when those pathways are turned on, which by the way, we need them to be turned on during certain stages of our life. If you're under 18 and you're growing a body and growing brains and growing bones, you need IGF-1, mTOR, and PKA to be stimulated to grow, right? Um, when you are pregnant, you're growing another human, you need growth. Um, when you're healing from something, you need growth turned on. There's, there's a, there's stages of life where growth needs to be turned on, but when you don't need growth to be turned on, which is generally for a healthy individual between, between the ages of 18 and 65, you wanna keep that growth really low so that you can elongate a healthy life. So this program is giving you the maximum threshold of nutrients that your body will accept. Before tipping it into a fed state. So that's where you can get this really del— like you can have your cake and eat it too, if you will. Yeah. Like you can have food, you can have that circadian pattern, like I'm sitting down for breakfast and lunch and dinner and you have that hand-to-mouth stimulation that a lot of us are triggered by. Mm-hmm. Find comfort in, right? You have all of that. And I think one of the most powerful parts of our program because of the nutrients that are in it is that You are protecting your muscle. This is a massive part of our program that most programs can't say is that when you're on our program, because of how the nutrients are set up, your muscle, that which takes a lot of time and effort to build a pound of muscle. Oh my gosh, it is. Oh yeah. You don't wanna lose that. And if you're older, if you're, if you're, you know, it's, it's even harder. There's certain stages of, you don't wanna lose muscle.

Yep.

And on our program you protect it and you're targeting this very challenging visceral fat that's around your organs that is highly linked to chronic disease. So yeah, our, our program is, and it's foolproof. I mean, it's truly like if you want to not think about what you're doing, you just take a box, take it with you. It tells you exactly what you eat, what you're gonna be eating on any given day. So it's pretty, pretty awesome.

I love that. I feel like in a day where turnkey and comprehensive solutions are needed so much so, because patient compliance is at an all-time low. I think because there's just— we're option drowned. It's like you can take 20 different of this and 40 of this and do this diet and this and this. It's just everything's overwhelming. So the one thing I love about ProLon, it's never overwhelming. It's literally so easy. It like kind of guides your hand into it and you have the little box supervisor that just tells you when to make your soup, when to eat your snack. You know, the olives are one of my favorite part of the entire program cause I'm an olive fanatic, so I'm all about it. But it's incredible how you will look up at the day and realize that you've gone by feeling amazing. And like you said, by day 5, you know, 6, you're so euphoric that you wonder why you didn't do this a long time ago, you know? So I think I can, yeah.

Yeah. Those first couple days and not to be, you know, this is still a challenge. It's still, you know, you're still, it is still low calorie. And if depending on where you're starting on your journey, if you've been a decently toxic person, you might struggle for those first round. Like I had, I struggled for the first couple rounds that I did it, but I, I stuck with it. And I, you know, you, I think it's important to, to call out that all of our studies, so we have upwards of 47 clinical trials, more than 30 of those are in humans. But all of them are, most of them except for one that I can think of, are looking at 3 cycles of ProLon. So, you know, the BioAge study is based on 3. The Cardiometabolic study is based on 3, actually 4. When you're looking at these studies though, you were actually not measuring what people are doing in between their cycles. So as a dietitian, I will preface, you should always count on what you're doing in between cycles. You can always optimize what you're doing on a day-to-day basis, but what we're finding in our studies is based on quite literally those cycles and nothing else. So the findings that we're finding are you could technically— and I will never say this to actually recommend this, but you could technically go back to your diet.

Yeah.

In the meantime, what you were doing before and the benefits are still seen. So that's— and that talking about the compliance, if you're trying to do something— and actually our Mediterranean diet study that we— that was also super cool. We looked at people who followed the Mediterranean diet for 120 days straight, so 4 months, like every day doing the Mediterranean diet versus doing 4 cycles of ProLon over the course of 4 months. The results were the same.

Wow, that's incredible. Dang.

And we weren't looking at what was in between time. So you can amplify your benefits by focusing on what you're doing in between time, and you should. Yeah, but the science is not looking at that, and we're still seeing these benefits. So it's, it's a, it like, you know, and it also, you know, our chief medical officer, Dr. Xu, says it so perfectly too. He's like, you know, if diet and exercise worked, if calorie restriction and diet and exercise worked, we wouldn't have any of the problems we're having. But it doesn't work because it's hard to stick with, it's hard to do, and our, our lives aren't set up to support us. We're busy, we're, we're, we don't have good food that's cheap and available and ready. And, you know, we're just not there. So we need something different. And this is something that is different and that is shown to really make a big impact.

Let's go, Melanie. I'm inspired. I'm so excited. I'm going to like—

ready to do Prolon. Let's go.

Ready to Prolon with you. I need a buddy to Prolon with.

Accountability buddy for sure. Anytime.

So, Melanie, how can people find Prolon, how can they get in contact with you? Kind of where do we reach out to get connected?

So Prolon, if you are coming off the streets, want to try Prolon, Prolonlife.com, P-R-O-L-O-N-life.com is where you can get your 5-day that we got lots of different options for you. You can follow me personally at Health and Wellness on Instagram. I'm— it's H-E-A-L-T-H, the letter N, and M-E-L-L-N-E-S-S. That's my Instagram, Facebook, anywhere, anywhere. Any socials, you can find me there. But yes, please come. And if you, if you do have existing metabolic conditions, diabetes, obesity, then please check out our medical programs. We have, we have full comprehensive programs. You can find those at L-Nutra Health.com. So L-Nutra Health.com.

Awesome. I love that, Melanie. You're an inspiration. This is an incredible interview. I'm stoked to to connect, to fast, and just to grow my network with someone as amazing as yourself. So I appreciate you— you're— for your time today and joining us.

Thanks for having me, Michael.

Thanks for joining us on the Peptides and Longevity Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. It helps us reach more listeners passionate about optimizing their health. For more insights, resources, and updates, visit our website at www.holtorfmed.com. Together, let's embrace a future of health and vitality. Until next time, stay inspired and keep thriving.