Why Eating While Fasting Could Give You Better Results, with Renee Fitton

If you were to do this just 15 days a year for 20 years, they were able to show a projected 11 year biological age reversal. So this is really again, quite impactful for relatively low lift.

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Hello and welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I'm Wendy Trubo. Here's Ed Levitan today and today we have a great guest. We're revisiting fasting, mimicking. And Renee Fitton is a leader in the intersection of nutrition, healthcare and education. She's the director of education at Prolon and she equips healthcare practitioners with cutting edge insights into nutrition and longevity. So, Renee, thank you for being here because we wanted to revisit what's new in the world of fasting mimicking. So first off, welcome.

Yeah. And we do have to back up for the people that haven't seen anyone who saw this. Absolutely. What exactly is fasting mimicking? Because we've been using it for a while as a practice. We get great results, but not everybody has knows what it is. So let's get to the basics.

Absolutely. Well, first, thank you so much for having me. It is a pleasure to kind of give a little bit of an addendum to what our CEO Dr. Anton had shared in the last round. And I can tell you that for anybody who did get the opportunity to listen to the last one, there is tons of new information since then. So we are going to be able to share a lot of some of the new research and I would say like in the dozens of studies that have been published over the last couple of years. So excited to share some of that as well. But for those of you who are less familiar with fasting and fasting mimicking, I'm happy to give a quick review. Fasting, mimicking is kind of what it sounds like. It is the ability to mimic a fast with food. So yes, that, that is exactly what I said. You can eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, real food while your body believes that it is in a fasted and water only fasted state. And this allows us to make water only fasting and particularly long term water only fasting 3, 4, 5 days long, finally achievable, safe, easy, muscle protective and this is really our goal here, is to bring some of the incredible value that can come from water only fasting into a significantly more achievable and approachable way.

That's great. So what's the new science?

Oh my gosh, there's so much. So, so first let me just say that there are now over 47 clinical trials in the world of fasting and fast, or specifically fasting mimicking. There's actually, I was looking the other day, there's more research in prolonged fasting mimicking, so fasts that are over about three days long than water only prolonged fasting. And that kind of makes sense because of some of the struggles that researchers have in, in researching water only fasting for that long because of the safety concerns. So, yeah, so there's a ton of research. Some of the stuff that's started to come out recently. I'm first going to touch on biological age. Then I'll touch on maybe our new study on chemosensory properties. That means the ability to taste and smell and kind of hinting at some of the stem cell capacity and regenerative capacity of fasting mimicking. And then I think we should touch maybe on type 2 diabetes. And a lot of the research that has really started to merge in metabolic health. And maybe we can touch on a few other things. But first, biological age. This study was just published about a year and a half ago now. It was a study published in Nature, one of the leading longevity research and one of the leading health articles and journals in the world. It showed that with just three cycles of fasting mimicking, that means five days a month for three months in a row, they were able to achieve a two and a half year biological age reversal. So really impactful. And what's cool about biological age, and specifically the biological age measurement that was used in this study, is that it considers a really large number of markers that have been long associated with healthy aging. So we're not just looking at one lab value or one bio marker. We're looking at an accumulation of many and importantly the ones that have been best associated with living a longer, healthier life. And so this drop, this improvement of 2 1/2 years is really, really significant. And especially with such a short time frame. And then in that same study, they were also able to show that if you were to do this just three times a year for about 20 years, so a grand total of 15 days a year for 20 years, they were able to show a projected 11 year biological age reversal. So this is really again Quite impactful for relatively low lift.

I have so many questions, Renee, so you already answered one question which was does doing it for more years lead to greater benefits? So thank you for that. And then what happens if you were to do a five day water fast compared to have they done comparisons with Prolon and water fasting? You said it wasn't as robust, but I'm just wondering.

It's a great question and honestly one that I'm still pushing for us to try and find a way to do. But unfortunately because water only fasting for five days does require for IRBs or the institutional review boards that decide what research can and cannot proceed, they need you to do it in person for the entirety of the five days. So there's a lot of costs and difficulty associated with that. So we have yet to be able to do a head to head study. And but that being said, at least not in humans. But that being said, we do have a lot of data on water only fasting that we can kind of do a side by side comparison with fasting mimicking. And we see the vast majority of these changes that we see in the water only studies occurring in the fasting mimicking in terms of benefit. But we see all of the kind of downsides that we capture in water only fasting not appear on these fasting mimicking protocols. There's a lot of safety trials and a lot of muscle protection trials that have happened in fasting mimicking to show some of those benefits. So I'm a big believer that even if you can water fast for five days or more, fasting mimicking can actually potentially be even a better solution because of the protective effects that it has on our muscle and the nutrient density that is included in the protocol and the energy that you, that you feel and the reduced stress on your body during this, this period. So certainly for for women too, this can be a really great way to get the benefits of fasting without all of the stress that can come from prolonged fasting. So the last thing that I'll just say to that question though is that there has been one study that I've been able to find that was done in mice that compared regular diet water only fasting and fasting mimicking. And this was done in a model of IBD or inflammatory bowel disease. And in this model we actually showed that yes, water only fasting was better than standard nutrition, but we showed that fasting mimicking was even better than water only fasting in terms of the regenerative capacity, the ability to rebuild the Gut lining in these models. And that makes kind of sense when we think about the fact that the beauty of fasting is that it allows our cells to do a really good cleanup. It allows it to repair and rejuvenate. We call, we call out autophagy probably. I'm sure Dr. Anton had shared that deep cellular cleanup known as autophagy. I like to think of it like spring cleaning, but that's part one. That's the fasting part. But the nutrition part or the refeeding part, that's where we rebuild. That's where we create and grow. And it's really important that we find this happy balance between the cleanup and the rebuilding. And that's really where fasting mimicking especially shines is in that ability to give you a little bit of both.

That's really cool. Okay, so when you do. So you mentioned the downsides to water fasting. What are the downsides to water fasting? That fasting mimicking does not have the.

Three big ones is obviously the ease. So the hunger specifically. Right. So while I would never promise that you won't be at all hungry on a fasting mimicking protocol because it is still calorie reduced, you are way less hungry than water only fasting. Just to kind of give an example, I have done the fasting mimicking protocol about 15 times now. And I have been able to achieve a grand total of one 36 hour water only fast because it's just like the difficulty is just drastically different. So that's one big one. The next one is going to be muscle protection. So there have now been probably over a dozen trials that have measured through DEXA analysis, MRI analysis, really deep assessment of body composition, the ability to protect muscle with fasting mimicking protocols. So this means that when you are losing weight, which we see, and quite significantly with fasting and fasting mimicking protocols, when we do fasting mimicking and we add nutrition, we are able to make it just fat focused weight loss and not touch our muscle, let that be maintained. And this is so critical for, for longevity, for balance, for immunity, for so many things. Even beyond just looking strong and big, our muscle is critical to maintain. And especially in a world of GLP1s and weight loss drugs where we're seeing up to 40% of the weight that is being dropped on the scale coming from muscle. And we see these people who are getting off of GLP1s regain the weight faster than they lost is this is really where we really need to call out the criticality of weight loss. Coming from fat preferred without touching muscle. And that's something that we see time and time again. So that's a big one. Not to mention there's also been studies on strength being maintained, which kind of ties into that. And then the last piece is some safety concerns. So individuals, certainly individuals who have high blood pressure and are on blood pressure medications, people who have high blood sugar and are on blood sugar medications, we have to be especially cautious with water only fasting, especially in that population. But even healthy individuals, there's just a higher risk that you'll be lightheaded, that you can have syncope or fainting. Right. Like all of these things become a higher risk when we have zero nutrition. And so those are all of the things that I would call out, as you know, some of the biggest concerns with water only fasting. Not to mention, I mean there's a, there's a, there's a handful of others, like some interesting ones that always surprise me, like dehydration. Who would have thought that water only fasting would be potentially dehydrating? But it is because you don't get any electrolytes with your, with your hydration. So it can be harder to absorb as much of it. And two people, when they stop eating, oftentimes stop drinking. It's just a psychological, like I don't need anything type thing. So anyway, I digress, but those are kind of the big ones.

So you talk about weight loss. What, what is the research shown? Because we know you talked about the benefits of autophagy, which is huge. You talked about reversing the biological clock. How does weight, the people that lose the weight, do they keep it off? Because a lot of people will do any kind of fasting for the weight.

Yes, of course. So importantly, one, there's a couple of things that I would call out here. So there have been long term studies with fasting, mimicking and prolonged weight loss and long term results. What importantly needs to happen is that you need to first get to a baseline. You can't just do, and I mean you can just do one kit and you'll see significant weight loss. But we generally recommend that first you do one cycle a month for about three months just to get you to like a really good baseline and kind of just train your body into this, this state. Now from there what we see is that after you've done three cycles in a row, what they, the researchers did is they told the individuals, eat whatever the heck you want for the next three months. And we're going to come back and, and see what happened. And about 75% of the weight loss was maintained even with absol. Totally regular and probably in many cases not necessarily great nutrition choices over the course of 90 days. And so that's really exciting. And that also then brings the next piece of this equation which is what does maintenance look like with these protocols? How do you keep these results? We know that you can't just do this three times and then you'll be good for life. No, of course, you know, ideally as a dietitian, I'm going to tell you absolutely make other healthy lifestyle changes. But even if you didn't do that, we would recommend that you do a top off every three to four months. You would do another five day cycle. Doesn't mean you have to do three in a row again, just one every three to four months. So most people are doing this, you know, three to four times a year just to maintain their results in weight. But also the autophagy benefits, also the skin benefits, also the immune benefits. I could keep going.

I have a weird question, Renee, and I'm not sure if I asked this of Anton. When people are doing this protocol you alluded to that they may feel hungry because it's not a full on meal, full meal program. So when people are doing this, if they decided to expand or cheat or augment and they decided to add in a pound of celery over the five days or something to take the edge off their hunger, does that impact, do you have any idea? Does that impact the results of the study of the doing the fasting mimicking plan?

Yeah, this is a great question. So it depends how you're fasting mimicking. Now I'm a big proponent of the Prolon five day fasting mimicking kits. And with those you really don't want to add much more than what's given because Prolon, the makers of Prolon El Nutra, who are also in partnership with Dr. Valter Longo doing all of the literature and the research that supports all of this. Right. These kits have been specifically designed to give you the absolute most you can get before reaching the threshold that would kick you out of fasting. So you know, you're really getting as much as you can to safely stay in a fasted state. So adding things, even very low calorie or mostly water based things like celery for example, could potentially kick you out of the fast. Now that being said, we have for example, one stalk of celery, one Persian cucumber, two thin slices of apples as kind of Our freebies throughout the protocol, we generally recommend that you limit those to one a day, just again, to be safe. But yes, there's definitely an important threshold that we have to live below. And the best recommendation is just to stick to the kit so that you don't run the risk of kicking yourself out of that fasted state. We didn't really go into too much of the science of what, how you live in a fasted mimicked state. But essentially it's these nutrient sensing pathways. I like to think of them like alarm bells on the cell surface, always scanning for food and nutrients. And when certain nutrients are present in high enough quantities, then the alarm bell sounds and says, okay, it's time to grow. We've got enough nutrition here, let's go. And what fasting mimicking does is it lives right below that. So what the prolon fasting mimicking kit is it really gets you like super, super close. So those nutrient sensing pathways might not even be triggered by things that you necessarily even would think about. So we know for sure that things like simple sugars and most people are like, okay, yeah, I get that simple sugars, of course they're going to kick me out of a fast. But people are oftentimes surprised to hear that protein is one of the biggest ways to kick you out of a fast. Sure, it'll keep you in ketosis, sure, might not spike your blood sugar, but it can and it absolutely will trigger those nutrient sensing pathways, because protein will tell our body that it's time to grow. And on top of that, you know, too much of any nutrient could also kick you out of ass, including caffeine, for example. Caffeine can trigger pka, or at least we've seen some early research in mice models that a lot of caffeine could trigger one of those nutrient sensing pathways. So we have to be careful with everything. And for that reason, I always say, live in the box, stick to the kit and you will, you will know that you're going to get the benefits that we see in all of the clinical trials and you're not risking kind of going offbeat.

You mentioned ketosis. How I'm assuming you get you switch over to ketogenic metabolic pathways within. What's the switchover usually with a regular water fast versus a fasting mimicking fast. Like how. How long does it.

So water only will typically start seeing that around the 12 hour mark. We have gotten rid of all of our glycogen stores and our free sugars that are floating around, and that's when the body will start shifting over into ketosis and then it's a gradual increase. It usually, you're usually in full ketosis by the end of day one or day two, at which point, you know, as long as you don't consume more glucose or sugar, you will just keep gradually increasing over time. Now, with fasting mimicking, what we see is that day one is our gradual transition into ketosis, with day two being when we start getting into that functional ketosis. So another important thing to note is that yes, ketosis is absolutely a part of the benefits of fasting mimicking and fasting, but is not the only one. Right. We also, and maybe more importantly, need to get into autophagy. And you can get into ketosis and never get into autophagy because ketosis is just about low carbohydrates, it's not about low protein, whereas fasting is about both of those things being low. And so it actually allows you to get even more benefits. So in order for the benefits of fasting mimicking to be seen, yes, we need to get into some level of ketosis and we still see all of these incredible benefits and we still get the wonderful wonders of ketosis like keto euphoria and alertness and awareness and mental clarity and all these wonderful things you'll still experience through fasting mimicking.

Got it. When people are coming off of this protocol, you know, if you did, if we did a five day water, water fiber fast, gosh, this is like 20 years ago at this point. But when we did, you know, when you come off of a fast, you don't go right back into your normal eating plan. Is this similar with, with the fasting mimicking diet? Do, do you ease back in or just full throttle bring on your regular eating plan?

So we generally recommend about less than 24 hours of kind of transition time. So the beauty of fasting mimicking is that you are still eating for the ENT and for anybody who's not familiar with the kit, like I'm talking nut based breakfast bars, soups with actual beans and peas and tomatoes and things in there. I'm talking about even a chocolate bar at the end of the day, this is whole food. So you are going through this experience and you're getting real nutrition. And so when you get to day six, it's not gonna be this crazy shock to eat solid food again, because you've been eating solid food. Now, that being said, throughout the five days you have had a fully plant based nutrition protocol, it's been very low in added Sugars, saturated fats, et cetera. And so it's really just about on that sixth day, just keeping it light, keeping it, you know, what we generally consider, quote unquote healthy, whole food, plant based nutrition, at least for that first day. And that'll help. I can tell you from experience, after again doing this over a dozen times, I one time had a burger because my husband had said, oh, this is exactly what you're gonna want. I woke up that morning and I was like, honestly, I kind of could just go for a salad. But I follow along and I go with him to get this burger and worst mistake I ever made. I've never felt worse than having that. And it really just goes to show, you know, you'll, you just listen to what your body is craving in that moment, and I can almost promise and guarantee that it will be something light and clean. We see it in actually some of the behavior change studies that we've done where people have a better relationship with food, they're more motivated to make other nutrition life changes, and interestingly, even more motivated to make other lifestyle changes like increasing their exercise and sleeping better, et cetera.

That's very cool. Okay, is there anything new and upcoming that we haven't asked you that we should ask you or you want to make sure we know about?

Oh, I think I just want to touch on that chemosensory trial that I hinted at a little before, which is that chemosensory or hyposmia are just fancy words of saying the ability to taste and smell being lost. And so in this is unfortunately relatively common. And in a group of individuals with type 2 diabetes that were going through a fasting mimicking protocol that as part of a controlled trial, where half of them went through the fasting mimicking and half of them went through regular healthy nutrition, what we saw is that in the individuals who did the fasting mimicking, there was about 40% of the population that had lost the ability to taste and smell. Now, at the end of the protocol, only 6% of the population could not taste and smell. That means that there was a full regeneration in the vast majority of these people who had hyposmia or who had lost the ability to taste and smell. And when we look at how or why this happens, we really can only point to because they also accounted for weight loss as being a factor in this, and they still showed statistically significant improvement even by accounting for weight loss as a driver for this change. And so then we think, okay, well what could it be? And we can Only really point back to two things, which is the cellular cleanup and autophagy, and very likely stem cell activation. So that true regenerative capacity that our body has, if we can turn on those pathways. And so this is just really exciting early research. It just got published about less than a year ago now. And we are. We're going to probably start seeing a lot more of that type of research starting to come out, because it's just. I mean, if we can really start to show this in human trials, which is what this was, there's going to be some really great ways that we can leverage us to help people through disease remission, which we already see in diabetes remission and metabolic health condition remission, among others.

I'm assuming this hasn't been studied, but is there a length of time for which the taste and smell should not have been present for that would then resolve? So if it's been present for 10 years, you're out of luck. If it's been present for six months, you're more likely. Is there any type of data around that in that?

Really interesting question. And no, I don't have the answer to that. But what I can say is that, for example, when we look at type 2 diabetes, for example, many of the participants that were in this trial had had diabetes for decades. This wasn't a new diagnosis. This was quite late stage. And so typically, along with that metabolic dysfunction, along with the weight gain, along with the other things that come with type 2 diabetes, that is oftentimes where some of this loss of taste and smell can originate from. So it's very likely that these individuals had a level of hyposmia for quite some time. So I can't say for certain, but that's just some assumptions based off of what I do know about the trial.

Yeah, we don't have a ton of diabetes in our practice, but we have a ton of humans, and a lot of them have had Covid and have the associated smell and taste dysfunction. So now I'm curious. I'm thinking of a patient, Anne, if you're listening, I'm thinking of you, because she's had just smell dysfunction for years since COVID So I'm curious if that'll make a difference. I'm gonna refer her to that, but.

Absolutely you should, and I would love to hear how she does, because I anticipate that we would see some improvement. Awesome.

Okay, I'll let you know. I'm gonna. I'm gonna talk to her next time I see her. All right, so tell me where can people find out more about you? We'll put all of this in the show notes so people who are accessing it on something visual will be able to see it.

Awesome. Well if you guys are interested in connecting with me, honestly the best way to do it is via Instagram. You can find me at Fitton Nutrition. That's F I T T O n Nutrition. I also have a website, fitnutrition.com if you are interested in learning more about fasting mimicking and those protocols, check out Prolon. That is going to be kind of the direct to consumer branch of fasting mimicking that gets you those kits. So the website is prolonlife.com and then there is also another company doing programmatic approaches to fasting mimicking where you get additional support and that company is called L dash Nutra Health. So L dash N U T R A Health and that company is great because for individuals that might have need just a little bit more support, might be diagnosed with a metabolic health condition, etc, you can get the support that you need to make sure that you're doing this safely. So those are going to be all of my resources and please don't hesitate to reach out and connect with me. I love hearing from individuals who are eager and have questions about what we're up to.

Renee, thank you so much for being here and for the listeners feel free to reach out with questions but this is a great way to help with autophagy and cellular health and I mean who doesn't want to reduce their their age by X number of years. So that's great. Thank you so much for joining us for the feel freaking amazing podcast.

Thank you guys.

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