Reverse Pre-Diabetes with a Fasting-Mimicking Diet, with Dr. Joseph Antoun

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Hello and welcome to this episode of the Five Journeys Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I'm Wendy Trubo. This is at Lava Tan and our guest today is Dr. Joseph Antoun. He is the CEO and chairman of the board of El Nutra and member of the Forbes Business Development Council. He's the former CEO of Health Businesses Reform, a boutique consultancy aimed at improving public health by reforming health systems management and delivery. And we're going to talk about really cool stuff today. So welcome Joseph. It's a pleasure to have you here.

Thank you guys. And I hope today we're gonna together maybe change somebody's life. Let's, let's go for it.

That would be the goal.

We've, we've known and used El nutrient for a while, right. And especially the, and we are big fans of the fasting mimicking diet. We're fans of fasting in general. But so we're looking forward to this conversation.

Yeah. So we're going to talk about diabetes, diabetic nephropathy, how to reverse and improve your health. So I think we should start with what exactly is diabetic nephropathy?

So you know, once you have diabetes, which is in general is, is when your body started increase blood sugar because there's some kind of resistance to the, to the hormones that take sugars out of the blood, then you're, you're called insulin resistance. You start becoming, getting pre diabetic. And when your diabetes crosses, when your blood sugar crosses a certain number, you get the label of unfortunately, you know, diabetes. And, and that has a lot of consequences. One of the most important ones is what we call the macro and the microvascular damages that this induces the microvascular, meaning the small vessels start micro clotting or micro kind of getting closed. And the kidneys are known, this is where the blood gets filtered. So the kidneys are known to have very, very tiny thin vessels where the blood goes there circulates and a lot of the detoxing that goes into the ur and a lot of molecules crosses those. But because they're very, very thin, when you have diabetes, you start getting damages there as well and you start having what we call diabetic nephropathy. And we started therefore seeing leakage of bigger molecule like albumin and others into the urine. And this is where this is one of the complications of diabetes. And so a lot of the thinking today about diabetes, whereas for the last 50 years was take medicine and let the medicine either stimulate hormones that take blood sugar out of the blood or Take another family of drugs that actually decreases that resistance to insulin. Today we're all thinking about, hey, how can we change the lifestyle to start with of that patient? How can we help the patient eat healthier, decrease insulin resistance in a natural way, and therefore decrease the complications of diabetes? And this is what probably today we're going to help our listeners, you know, learn about.

Well, I think before we dive into that, I think it's a huge plug for toxins, too, because we're on the other side of it, which is how do we, how do we resolve the underlying inflammation in your body so that you don't go down these paths? But once you've gone down this path, we have a, we now have two jobs. Resolve that inflammation and also start to work on preventing it from getting worse and maybe even resolving that. So huge plug for get rid of your toxins and optimize your gut and your liver in your adrenals.

Right. And I just want to. Let's. I want to dumb me down a little bit. So diabetic nephro Nephropathy, easy for you to say, say that three times fast, is really damage to the kidney as a result of high blood sugar and diabetes, which then allows you to leak proteins and other things out. Do I have that right?

Yes.

Well, it's not, I would imagine it's not just the leaking the proteins that's a problem. It's that the primary function of the kidney is then impaired. If it can't function properly, then it can't filter properly.

Yeah. And one of the symptoms is that leakage of albumin that increases into the urine. Yeah.

And if people have diabetic nephropathy, are they aware typically, or is this. I mean, they gotta get a lab test. They're not like, oh, look at that, I'm peeing out albumin.

Well, typically, the diabetic easily changes a little bit in colors. Actually, one of the symptoms is you start waking up at night and going more frequently to the restroom. That's one of the symptoms of that, because water follows molecules to keep the same osmosis on both sides. So the more you're getting molecules out, the more you're going to see water drainage following and the more you're going to go to the restroom. So one of the early signs of diabetes is your patients will start telling you, I'm waking up at night and I'm going to the restroom. So you start seeing that. But that doesn't mean that you have damage already in the kidney at that stage. It's more the blood glucose that's draining more water at that stage. It doesn't mean you have yet any damage. But as the more you progress, a lot of the physicians tracking your diabetes, they will ask you for blood measurement but also urine analysis. They're looking for these symptoms in the urine of starting the kidney damage because this is one of the, one of the major severe consequences of diabetes. Kidneys are such an essential organ that a patient with diabetes can evolve all the way to dialysis. And this is where lifestyle and quality of life gets curved big time.

I just want to, for the listeners that think they might have it and they'll know one easy way to do is as you mentioned, the urine analysis and look for microalbumin in the urine and that will give you a good sense of it. Just, just so people, if they're freaking.

Out, don't freak out. It's fixable. Easy, easy test, never freak out. It's always fixable. We're going to fix this. Okay, So I mean you, you take a nutrition, nutrition first approach to this, right?

Yeah, well, well, you know, you know I went to med school, I did my MD, PhD. You guys did a lot of education in medicine. They, they, we got trained that diabetes is a disease that comes right somehow. Genetics, predisposition, etc, and then these are the drugs and the drugs have been to take, have, need to be taken every day of the rest of the life. Actually if you think about it, diabetes is a foodborne disease. It's not maybe genetically like small fractional percentage. Type 1 diabetes is a small fraction, but above 80% of diabetic patients, they got it because of lifestyle and overeating and which increases insulin resistance. I mean increases blood sugars and becomes more fat. Fat increases insulin resistance. You advance with insulin resistance, the pancreas start failing a little bit and then you become diabetic at diagnosis. So it's a foodborne disease. Right. Nobody taught me in med school and we went to great schools and nobody taught us that, well, first treatment, you should change a lifestyle and you should, you know, decrease carb intake and insulin resistance. And that could be a majority of the patients that you can reverse before they get to end stage.

I mean, I think people know it quote unquote, but I think it's really like they know they should eat less carbs or eat, I hate to say this word, but the common dog was low fat, which is no.

Or lower carb. You mean lower fat.

Well, that's the old model, the old paradigm, but that was lip Service, I think. And then.

But they know it as like a support to medication, not as the medication. Right. So the, the, and this is, by the way, the, the fasting. A lot of the fasting started and it got promoted with, with doctors, diabetic doctors and nephrologists. I don't know if you guys know, for example, Dr. Jason Fung in Canada, who, who talks a lot about intermittent fasting, and he's a nephrologist and he used to see his patients going to dialysis and he felt very upset because, like, they keep eating, they keep damaging, they keep, they continue to become diabetics and the drugs never take, never reverse them, or very rarely reverse them. They get into dialysis and the same program persists. So in his, his theory is like, you overeat, you become diabetics. If I want to reverse you fast, I got to tell you not to eat intermittently. And this is how he started pushing intermittent fasting. What I'm trying to say is like, of course, every diabetic patient, the doctor tell them, eat healthy. But it is the medication, the drugs should be only as a last resource. When you fail of following the right lifestyle, we should stress much more on fasting and eating healthy. When you start having diabetes, that's the main message.

There's something I don't want to go head to head with you. On the other hand, I can't step over. I don't want the listeners to walk away hearing, oh, just eat better. And this is your lifestyle issue. I mean, obviously it's a lifestyle disease. However, that includes your sleep, the toxins you're exposed to, the function of your gut, the way you're able to excrete. So I think there's a lot of facets that go into this. I would say it's not simply eat better and walk every day. It's really transform your life, including the food you're eating, the way you're eating it, how often the fasting you're doing.

How many times you're chewing your food.

He makes fun of me because I chew my food a lot.

I don't make fun of you. It's good.

You do make fun of me a little. So, so there's, there's a lot more. I don't think it's necessarily only an overeating disease because you can overeat with broccoli and probably not get diabetes. But if you're overeating processed food with artificial colors, artificial flavors, high in sugar or artificial sweeteners, that's a Different pathway that your body's going to go down than overeating, you know, broccoli, you're not going to harm yourself.

No, I mean, we obviously what I meant lifestyle and overeating, it meant the entire lifestyle. So we talk about food, exercise, stress, sleep and happiness and social capital. These are the five pillars. So. But the number one out of the five is, is, is food. I've, I've yet to seen somebody overeating broccoli every day. It's, it's 99% of diabetics are not eating overeating broccoli.

So. Right, not yet.

I agree.

But if we have still anything to do with it.

Yeah, yeah, of course. If we get into the detail, I'm fully, fully agreed. And it's the same reason that pushes you to overeat is stress is the social capital, is the environment you live at is your sleep. So these are all interconnected. And food sometimes is the primary issue, sometimes it's the expression of all the other lifestyle issues that's actually getting, you know, symptomized into overeating.

And what's the kind of difference when you talk about fasting, mimicking diet versus nutrition, first, how does that go?

So obviously eating healthy and we can define what does that mean for a diabetic, but let's say a common denominator is having a lower carb intake. Let's simplify a little bit. We can talk a lot about whether with high fat or proteins or how in parts of the day this is something like mainstream eating, a healthy, say, Mediterranean or pescatarian diet, if you are, if you are a diabetic and maybe on the short term ketogenics, so that you actually try to reverse in the early stage and then migrate to more of a longevity diet like pescatarian or Mediterranean. But the main difference with fasting, where we discovered why fasting became such a big phenomenon and especially for potentially the diabetic patients, it's because it doesn't work only by calorie deficit. It works as a stress to the body. And so, so fasting obviously will give you a lot of calorie. You know, you're not eating calories, so you're flipping the table. You were overeating and now you're almost not eating. But there's an extra step due to the stress of fasting that pushes the body to rejuvenate the cells. And that's very, very important. I'll give you two or three examples from the science of the fasting mimicking diet. What we discovered is that when you cross two days of fasting, and probably we're confusing the audience a little bit because fasting diet is fasting with food, we can talk more about that. But when you cross two days of fasting, the body says, look, I'm burning a lot of fat, I'm depleting my reserves. I got to tell the cells that we might get into a crisis. So let the cells, you know, practice what we call autophagy or self eat or self rejuvenate. So the cell starts burning intracellular debris, organelles, anything that they can still extract calorie from and start rejuvenating. That's a very important phenomenon because it happens in every cell of the body. You're getting biologically a little bit younger, you're a better performer. And it's very important for diabetes because the detriment of the long term, healthy food with diabetes is sometimes patients, we see them losing metabolic rate, decreasing metabolic rate and losing a little bit of muscle. Whereas with fasting, because of that stressful rejuvenation, you maintain lean body mass and you maintain metabolic rate. And that's very important because once you go back to your food, you don't want to be a slowed down, low metabolic rate engine and you pick up back fat and insulin resistance pretty fast. So one of the major difference between that prolonged fasting, which we mimic with the fasting mimicking diet, is to preserve metabolic rate and preserve lean body mass. There are two patents filed actually on lean body mass preservation with the fasting mimicking diet. And this is probably one of the secrets of why it's so impactful, even on the medium and long term, on diabetes versus eating just a low calorie diet.

So when you say prolonged fasting, what time frame or interval are you referring to?

So we've researched fasting for over 23 years now, and we discovered that if you want to balance the weight loss with cellular rejuvenation, so you want to induce that metabolic reset, important for again metabolic conditions and cellular rejuvenation, five days is the real balance. So if you go below that, because you want to cross day two to get cellular rejuvenation, the first two days we all have enough fat, enough glycogen, enough. You know, the liver can do some neoglucogenesis. So the first two days you have enough reserves in the body to compensate for the deficit from fasting. The body starts practicing autophagy, you know, after day two. So you want to have two to three days of autophagy and Rejuvenation, if you go longer, you're bankrupting the body. You're reducing now side effects of fasting. So you day five was the right balance of inducing enough metabolic reset, inducing enough cellular rejuvenation without starting depleting the body. And again, not to confuse the listeners, we're not talking five days of water fast. We're talking five days fasting while eating food called the fasting mimicking diet. And that's the innovation, the technology that we have brought, actually USC and now Stanford and 18 other universities have tested and we're bringing it to the market.

So what's the benefit of a fasting mimicking diet versus I'm just gonna go on water and not eat for five days, Besides five days of fasting being painful?

So you mentioned being painful. So it's very, very difficult to, to do five days of water fast. Number two is, is side effects. So when imagine a patient on five days water fast, sometimes you have headaches, they experience headaches, they experience fatigue. Some of them get hypoglyce. Well, some of them got hypotension as well. So these are traditional side effects of fasting. Some of them have an increased risk of gallbladder stones fasting when the gallbladder doesn't squeeze and you sit on it for a few days. There's a lot of journals of surgeries that have published increased gallbladder stones when you do pure water fasting. So these are very established side effects. The third benefit, doing what we call a nourished fast or the fasting mimicking diet, is that you're financing the rejuvenation. This is how I use it typically is like it says, have to rejuvenate. But if you don't have macronutrients, if you don't have the enzymes, if you don't have the minerals, it's difficult for them also to rejuvenate. So you're funding the rejuvenation, you're giving the enough nourishment. And it's very important to fund to, to, to bring calories to the essential organs at the same time. Right? So you, you want to stress the brain, but you don't want to starve the brain. You want to stress the heart to rejuvenate. You don't want to starve the heart. You want to give them the macro and micronutrients in order for them to operate at minimum level.

And what's the difference then? So what's the innovation? I guess because it's not just calories because somebody can just eat a low calorie.

Yeah.

To mimic what you guys do. But yeah, you've got more than that. So what's the innovation?

Yeah, the calorie is actually a minor factor. We, we, I mean you can mimic fasting by eating two lettuce and one cucumber. Right. But you're, you're fasting by starvation still. We have developed, you know, the prolon, we call it the Prolo and Prolon 5 Day Fasting Mimic Nutrition. It's a thousand 100 calorie day one and then 800 calories every other day. So it's a fasting by nourishment. And the secret is that the formulation is tailored towards having the right carbs, the right complex carbs in the right part of the day. You know, cortisol and insulin in the morning are different than the afternoon. You have the right sequences of amino acid do not spike igf, so that the body is not recognizing that it's getting the proteins by the time carbs and the proteins get to the cell. We studied the nutrient sensing pathways, the pka, the TOR and the RAS pathway. So these are radars that tell the cell that it's food. So we studied the quantities so that when, by the time they get to the PK and the TOR and the RAS pathways, they're not overly triggering, triggering those pathways. So the cell is saying, I'm getting a little bit of nutrients, but I'm not convinced. I'm not safe enough to go off fasting mode. And there are some other ingredients that would not go through the radars. It would go completely undetected by the cell.

So let me make sure I got this right. You're eating in these five days, but the body stays in the fasting mode without crossing into too much stress and without crossing into the side effects that people often have when they fast. For on a water fast only for five days.

Yes.

It's very cool.

Yeah, yeah. I'm big just for the audience. It is a small amount of food. Just to be really clear. It's not, you're not getting full.

I know we sell Prolon here. I've never done it. Actually, we should probably do it so we know what we're like, what the experience is.

100.

So tell me. I'll go a little off script just because I'm trying to for myself. So has there been any. This part of it is you were talking about ketogenic diet and produce. You're, you're in the keto. Are you in the Ketotic state. When you're doing the fasting mimicking, for.

Sure, you're in a actually deep, better keto keto state than the ketogenic. So the ketogenic diet is super low in carb and this is where the ketosis starts, but actually still have detectable proteins. So your body like in a shallow ketosis, right, it doesn't go deep enough. The deep ketosis is what stresses the cells and pushes them to rejuvenate. This is why with ketogenic diet you don't hear the expert talk about rejuvenation of the cells and autophagy. It's a shallow ketosis, it's induced by super low carb, but still the proteins are under detection. With a fasting mimicking diet, it's super tailored to get you into an acute deep ketosis to push that rejuvenation across the body.

Is there any studies that show that like, I know sometimes when people go into a fast or want to go into ketosis, they actually take external ketones. Is there any studies that show that, that might benefit to start to kind of rev the system up or.

Yeah, the, the, the MCT o. What you're referring to is MCT oil is another other ketone. Like, you know, bodies that there's no studies showing major benefits from those they basically are telling, are simulating the body or are trying to create an environment where you're telling the body to go faster into ketosis. You're trying to circulate more ketones than the true state of ketosis is and therefore sending a signal to the body to enter faster into ketosis. They're not and they help the brain. The brain loves mid chain fatty acids. So it's a good, it's a good way to, to a little bit support the brain when you're fasting and a little bit accelerate telling the body to go into ketosis. But they're not nourishing the body. The, the fasting mimicking diet is giving you macros, it's giving you proteins, it's giving you carbs, is giving you, you know, healthy fat. So it gives you a deeper ketosis with nourishment versus with, with an artificial kind of MCT like environment.

So what's the experience people typically have? So I guess I have a couple questions. If people are in their what I'll call standard American eating plan, which is going to keep them on the path for diabetes and diabetic nephropathy and bad outcomes, what do people need to improve overall before doing prolong or is Prolon and the fasting mimicking program the step to then okay, when you're done with that, that here's when you alter what comes first and what do people experience when they're on the program?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean obviously we recommend people eat healthy regardless whether they're doing Prolon or not. So even before prolon start eating healthy, that's always the recommendation. But it doesn't have to answer your question directly. You don't have to alter your diet before doing Prolon. We've tested the fasting Mimbekin diet now in 34 clinical trials and 18 of them are done and published in cell, in Science, in Nature number one, number two and number three science journals of the word. In none of these trials we ask anyone to change their diet before or after Prolon otherwise it wouldn't be a true randomized clinical trial. So you do Prolon or you do the fasting mimicking diet. It's five days only a month. You don't need to alter your, your diet or exercise before or after. But one of the benefits we see four reported major benefits. Definitely the you know the first one is, is people lose a lot of fat and they preserve their lean body mass so which helps with, with performance as well. So they come out of it. You know, when you do diets typically you kind of, you're feeling a little bit depleted when you do the fasting, when we can diet, you feel actually more energized and empowered at the end of it. The number two benefit is changing relationship with food. And this is what you try to allude to. A lot of people after the fight they say hey, I never knew I could live on a smaller portion. I never knew that I could sleep without having to re snack at night watching Netflix etc. I never knew I didn't need to eat five, six times a day. And they start and I never knew I could do more plant based diet. So we see people changing their mentality after prolong saying you know what, I want to improve my, my lifestyle. So it's a great inspiration. It's a tiny win and that helps people get on a better, on a better track if you want. The third benefit we see is definitely, you know, blood markers and metabolic. A lot of people starting with, with a certain metabolic profiles get changed pretty.

Fast even after five days.

Like after five days, just like that. That's the beauty. So if, if you look at the we have two diabetes now trials that were that, that are completed the first one that we published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Medicine, one of the top diabetes journal is showing that just doing 6 months of fast Amin making diet, which is just 5 days a month, so a total of 30 days it was able to decrease HbA1c by 1.4. It was able to do 2/3 of the patient decrease their meds. 67% of patients decrease their meds.

Not changing the way they ate, not changing anything except doing fasting mimicking for five days a month for six months.

100%.

So that's crazy.

That is crazy.

That's the power of cellular rejuvenation. This is exactly the technology we're talking about. This is not low calorie for five days. This is a total body performance rejuvenation. So the aging, you know, diabetes happens for you know, eating and or lifestyle like you mentioned, but also aging because the engine slows down. The, the pathways of fixing the pathways of burning carbs slows down. When you do the fasting, we begin diet. Every cell of the body when you fast, every cell is impacted. That's the beauty multi systemic intervention. And then at the end of the day, the cells rejuvenate, they fix what's going wrong and they get biologically a little bit younger. So you're a better performer, you're younger, you know, you want to push, push somebody off or help somebody prevent. And diabetes is the first outcome, cancer is next and Alzheimer's is next and all the age related diseases come next. The best way to help somebody stay a little bit away from the onset of these chronic age related chronic diseases is to help them biologically stay younger. And that's the true goal of the fasting mimicking diet. And this is why we talk longevity and healthy aging with the fasting mimicking diet. It's the cellular impact that's very important.

Yeah. And you're gonna. People who are listening to this probably wanna listen to or we interviewed Kira Fitzgerald for this podcast about younger you like, that's all. And she's published a book. And so anyone who's interested in that should also check out that episode. So I have a question. When people complete the program, they're gonna do they just stop the program, go right back into their normal life of eating and do people experience a rebound in their weight because they've altered their behavior? You know, not doing and then just gain it right back?

Yeah. So from a scientific standpoint, in order to do true science and publication, we ask them to go back to their normal life. Right away. Right. So because you want to single out the effect, obviously we recommend that everyone eat healthier after and probably many of them are eating healthier after with, with Prolon or with the five days. But you talked about the rebound and this is really important, goes back to the difference between the fasting mimicking diet and other, you know, low calorie or weight loss or diabetes. You know, especially also with the ketogenic as well, diets for diabetes. The problem with these diets is that first, you know, a lot of them are great on the short term, but we got to watch out metabolic rate and muscle loss because the rebound that you mentioned happened when, when you go off a diet, you lost fat, but you lost muscle. And then when you eat back again, unhealthy, it's much fat. You, you, you gain fat much faster. You go back to insulin resistance much faster. And this is why the fasting mimicking diet is a key secret here. It preserves your metabolic rate again rejuvenating the muscle as part of the total body rejuvenation. So, and we have a couple of secrets with the formulation that boost actually the muscle at night. So this is one of the proprietary thing that we do is, is never compromise a muscle during these five days. So you get out of it, you lost fat, you kept your muscle. This is rarely happens in any diet. So when you go back, you're faster, you're, you're actually a better engine to spend calories coming out of Prolon rather than your slower engine, which is what happens with most diets that you end up with. So the rebound is less. When we studied when you would go back when the benefits of problems started disappearing, we did two trials and it's showing that 40 to 60% of the benefits would stay at least 30 to 60 days after. So it takes months for the, for the benefits to go off. It's again, people get inspired to eat healthier, they're burning fat, they're a much faster engine, their metabolic rate is preserved and it takes them time to go back to unhealthy diet and then start reversing the benefits.

I think we should do a monthly or, I'm sorry, quarterly fasting mimicking program that people can participate in. In our pract. You should do that like, and we'll do it like, like what human would be like, no, keep my fat just to, to.

FYI, like, we crossed now 15, 400 clinics registered with us in the US only we're registered and we crossed. Yeah, just today. Like it's a phenomenon now and we crossed a million user of the Prolon. Wow. So cool. So this is.

That's huge impact. Yeah. We definitely have found that people do really well and it's way easier than a water fast. And like you said, I have a.

Couple people I'm thinking of, I think Eileen, who listens to our podcast. Eileen, I'm thinking of you. I want to put you on this if you're listening. We're going to talk at your next visit. Okay.

And if you find that somebody is, is, you know, needs, is. Is too addicted to their food or need some preparation for the prolon, you know, we have launched the one day fast called Reset. The Prolon Reset. It's a plant based one box. I don't know if we're on video. I can, I can even show you the box in here. But a lot of people love it. It's just one day plant based fasting. Nutrition gets them trained to the taste, gets them, gets their microbiome also started to to be a more of a plant based microbiome. For those who like intermittent fasting, they just want to skip one meal a day. We have the fast bar and the fasting shake. So it's the same technology of making fasting. You can use it for one meat replacement, one day replacement or the five days. The five days is the only one that takes you into cellular rejuvenation. The other ones are more of a weight loss intervention.

So I mean if you think about this, if someone has a hemoglobin A1C of 6.8 and they do this program, you said they do it for six months and it brings their hemoglobin A1C down by 1.4 points. Did I get that? Did I capture the data or did I squish those together?

That's exactly what the trial we have done at Leiden University and sorry, at Heidelberg in Germany, we have done a one year trial also now at Leyden that's not published yet, but will be published soon.

Can you tell us like the.

What's the latest?

Are we allowed to know before it comes out or do you have to keep it secret?

All what I can tell you is that we had 800% better chance at reducing the medication versus medication alone.

Holy smoke balls. Okay, I didn't swear but like that deserves a swear, people.

That's pretty impressive.

800% improvement over what medication would do. So people brought their medication down by 800%. 800% improvement.

Yeah. If you add the fasting mimicking diet to your meds and There were many. Some people wear an early stage, mid stage, different meds, but it increases by 800% your chances to needing less medication, which is what we call regression. This June, we're launching a program called the Diabetes Remission and Regression Program. What does it mean, remission and regression? Regression means you need less medication. Remission, you need no more medication. This is very important. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine, the Endocrine Society and the American Dietetic association, they start talking now about a new claim called disease remission and aggression. And they define these claims to be a non pharmaceutical intervention, lifestyle intervention, non pharma. And instead of talking treatment or cure, they're talking regression or remission. You need less medication or no more medication. And this is what we're launching, a diabetes remission and regression program. So we have 800% better chance to do diabetes regression, needing less medication versus medication alone.

I mean this feels like you should be putting people with early, early dementia.

I mean, question for, how do you deal with people on insulin already? That's type two, not type one.

So I'm a little bit, so here's my situation. No, I'm a CEO and we sell products. I don't want to have claims. You're mentioning a lot of these now. I'm a physician, you're a physician. We're happy to talk this all day, but, but I'm a little bit, from a compliance standpoint, I cannot, you know, come in and pitch these. You have to talk to your doctor and you have, you have to have it. So we, we do have patients on insulin in the trial, just to let you know. So that was tested. I would, I would ask you to go and read if you want the outcomes. And we do have a medical team. I'm happy to connect you with them and they will guide you towards what to do with the program.

So insulin can do it.

The problem is I don't want everyone now listening and jumping tomorrow. That's, I have to be, I have to be very careful with, with everyone sending them to their doctors and let the Doctors know, do 100.

This really, especially if you are on blood sugar lowering medication. You really have to, you do have to be careful. Just. Yeah, I agree with that.

And I'll give you the general track. Like you can keep metformin and you can cut the rest for the five days and then you get them back, back on the rest. So that's, that's what's the general, you know, you just keep, keep them on the metformin if you want in the five days. But everything else, you can cut it for those five days when you do the, the fasting, when you can die.

Cut it out completely or just.

No, cut it out.

Okay, that's so cool. We, we need to do this.

Yeah. So for those listening just again, reiterate, do not do this if you're on blood sugar watch, please do this with a physician.

Yeah, yeah.

Or somebody at least that's very experienced guiding people through this.

Yes.

Yeah.

But what else should we know?

Okay, well, I want to talk about who else it's good for, because I think it's good for. It sounds like it would be good because Alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes, essentially. Right. So it seems like it would be effective for people with degenerative diseases, dementia or early dementia. Is this thought process accurate or is this not accurate?

So you're mentioning disease and these are big claims. Right. But here's my answer. We have published on Alzheimer's six months ago. And we are on pre clinical trial and on phase one clinical, meaning feasibility. So we have a special fasting, mimicking nutrition technology for Alzheimer's. It actually has 1,200 to 1,400 calories because the elderly would need a little bit more calorie intake or somebody with neurodegenerative. And now we're finishing up the human trial at University of Milan. And up until the trials are completed, we can report the results. So for now I can say we know it's safe. We don't know if it works or not in humans. We know it works in mice. So I recommend we hold up until we get the results of the human trials.

Right. And that being said, for our patients with Alzheimer's dementia, a ketogenic diet is the way to go in general, whether it's, it's manageable, mimicking to start, kick things off. But ketogenic diet is a way to start moving that, progressing with that.

Is it different for people who have a diagnosis of either metabolic syndrome or type 2 diabetes versus someone who just says, I want to improve my, my autophagy and my ability to live younger? Are the people who take it, are they different? Do they have different outcomes? What happens for someone who, like, I don't have diabetes, but I wouldn't mind losing some fat. Right. I don't need to lose weight, but fat.

So, so we've been selling Prolon for six years and it was exactly for that profile. It's healthy. People who are mid age, actually, it's, it's you and I, you know, I Do it every quarter, right? And we say, look, I would, I wouldn't mind rejuvenating myself. And actually we should, right? It's, it's cellular rejuvenation and optimizing your body again when you're healthy keeps you distant from the onset of age related condition. And that's the goal. The goal is not to wait up until you have a disease and then start. So the protocol is that you do Prolon. So this is where the separation between the longevity arm of our company called the Prolon for Promoting Longevity. So you can do the five days fasting nutrition times a year. If you're healthy and you don't have to lose a lot of weight, you want to lose a little bit more weight, you can do it three to four times a year. And you rarely hear a CEO telling you do just five days of one of my products, just three times a year. But that's exactly what it is. It's like when you watch a car race, right? You do a pit stop two or three times. That's it. You go in, the mechanics come, they check everything. They check the wheels, they check the gas, they check the oil, they check the steering wheel and they fix whatever goes wrong. Then you go back as a healthier car that can stay longer. You don't get the mechanics when the car is burning. You just do preventively two or three times. Now, if you have a health condition, this is where the medical side of our company, we're testing the fasting, mimicking nutrition part of a protocol guided by the doctor and the nutritionist for different health conditions. We're launching in June the diabetes one. We're going to launch cancer next year. And autoimmune or Alzheimer's we'll see depending on which results. Stanford and University of Miami are testing autoimmune. University of Milan is testing Alzheimer's. So depending on the results, we'll launch next year. The other one or two health conditions and those protocols would have a little bit more frequent use because you're coming in trying to support fixing or healing. So instead of doing three to four times a year, you're going to do four to six or seven times per year.

This is so cool. We got to do it.

Yep.

Okay, so let's, let's tell people where they. I mean, obviously if someone who is in our practice wants to do Prolon, they should talk to us because we do it. But where are listeners who aren't part of our practice? Where can they find out more about you? The diet, the type 2 diabetes, the treatment and Prolon, where, where should people go again?

If they're healthy, they can go to the prolon site, prolonfast.com and, and if they want to do this cycle for three times, you know, three times of the prolonged five days, we do have the one day as well. If they just want to maintain, we do have the fast part and the fasting shake. If they just want to continue in between Prolons doing intermittent fasting. If you have a health condition, you should go to your clinics, your doctors, to you guys. In June 15th, we're going to launch the first diabetes remission program. You guys can talk to us to register your clinic. For that, you will get the diabetes protocol. Our chief medical officer was the vice president of Harvard Diabetes, the Joslin Clinic. So. So we have a really, really robust, good protocol you guys can implement in your clinics. This is not something for a diabetic patient to buy directly from us and just do it at home. We only do at home the healthy products and everything through the clinics and through the doctors whenever there's a health condition.

Awesome.

Really cool.

Pleasure.

Do you have something else on your mind?

No.

Okay. I'm going to close out the podcast by saying this was really cool. I'm super grateful you came. We're super grateful you came on this podcast because it was really crystallized, you know, the proper use and the approach and the application. So thank you very much. And for the listeners, Our guest is Dr. Joseph Antoun. He is the CEO and chairman of the board of El Nutra, which is also the producer of the Prolon Fast, the five day fasting mimicking, which has extremely strong data for reducing diabetes. And if this was useful, please give us a five star review and let us know how we can be more useful. So thank you for being here, Joseph. This was extremely valuable.

Thank you.

Appreciate you very much.

Thank you.