Gladden longevity — Episode #36

Steve Reiter: Welcome to the Gladden Longevity Podcast with Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC, founder and CEO of Gladden Longevity. On this show we want to answer three questions for you. How good can we be? How do we make 100 the new 30? And how do we live well beyond 120? We want to help you optimize your longevity, health, and human performance with impactful and actionable information. Now here's today's episode of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

The Gladden Longevity Podcast is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice. This content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. The use of any information and materials linked to this podcast is at the listener's own risk.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, Joseph, it's great to have you here today. We're kind of excited to talk to you about everything you've got going on over there at L-Nutra.

Joseph Antoun: Thank you, Jeff. And I hope at the end of this podcast we will change somebody's life.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Oh, every podcast I know we change people's lives, and that's one of the thrills for all of us. I mean, we get lots of feedback on that. Love what you're doing. So, just to bring the audience up to speed, L-Nutra is a company that is involved with intermittent fasting. They have ProLon, the five-day fast mimicking diet and they have the Fast Bars, which we'll talk about. But we'll get to all of that and we'll get to impacts on longevity and get into some of the science behind it. But first, Joseph, maybe you would share with the audience how you came to be in this position as CEO of this company. What brought you to that?

Joseph Antoun: Yeah. Well, I started my career wanting to be a physician and I was a scientist. I'm an MD PhD. And my goal going into med school and becoming a physician is, probably most doctors, to help people, actually cure them, practice healthcare and cure diseases. And then when you start doing rotations you find out that you're doing sick care, seeing people only after they're sick. And you're not curing them, you're just putting them on four or five medications that they have to take for the rest of their life. And I wanted to be a cardiologist, and doing my rotations, again, it was giving most people a blood pressure pill and a blood cholesterol pill and a blood sugar pill and a blood thinner pill.

And I always asked one question, which no one was able to answer. I was like: "If those meds work, why people have to refill them every month?" And medicine had no answer for that. So, I left. And you're talking about somebody... Harvard then DrPH. It was a big passion of mine. I was top of class. And I stayed at Harvard, I did my health policy studies and did my public health at Hopkins and-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, tell me a little bit about that transition. So, you're disillusioned with being a physician, you don't want to practice sick care and you recognize that it's basically just a treadmill of more testing, more pills, more whatever. We're not solving anybody's problem. So, then you decided to go do what? I mean, I'm leaving, but what am I going to? What's the vision that you're thinking about?

Joseph Antoun: At that time, I didn't know of anything that can do prevention. There was no product for prevention. And being a physician you'll be like, either I go to business or I go to health policy and public health. Meaning my passion became health systems reform. Can I go back and actually work on the top of the pyramid, and help the Secretary of Health or global ministries to push the healthcare system to become a preventative one and push the biotechnology system to find true cures. So, for me, it was not knowing anything else, it was to do health policy and public health. And I was very passionate about the topics, thinking that if you want to change your system you have to change it with financial incentives and policies, and this is what governments do. So, for me it was: "Okay, how can I become a system reformer? How can I become an advocate within the system to change the system?"

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, really, that passion remained the same. It's just that you ran into a dead end with being a doctor in the trenches. And then I assume you ran into another dead end trying to reform public policy. But I'm putting words in your mouth, I don't know.

Joseph Antoun: Well, again, medicine and physicians, bless them, they actually have a major role to play, but it's a role that is lifesaving on many conditions and they're not well equipped to cure many of the diseases. That was my frustration when you go to health system and health policy. So, I got my studies there, I did my PhD there as well. And then I decided to start supporting governments around the world with reforms. And I did that, many countries on the world, supporting them. I even started-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: And what did that look like? What did that look like? You're supporting governments. What does that even mean?

Joseph Antoun: The goal was to, how can you start to measure health outcomes so that you steer policy and financial investments? Because this is where you can say: "Wait a second, am I going to pay forever for somebody after he's diagnosed with diabetes? And pay for the kidney side effects and the dialysis? Or should I go and truly invest into prevention?" So, it's like Peter Drucker says in business: "If you measure, you manage." And a lot of it was literally how can we support the system be more preventative. And that was the first bit.

And there was governments, and I was personal advisors to many ministers of health. And they would tell you: "Look, I mean, we're doing campaigns." Meaning prevention was not a product, a consumer, a scientific intervention. It was mainly a set of recommendations. You should eat healthy, you should exercise, you should stress less, you should sleep better, you should not smoke, you should... And in the eighties it was maybe a novelty, but today almost everyone knows that they should not smoke every day and not over consume alcohol. And so, you tell somebody “eat healthy”, and then when they're hungry you put a burger and fries in front of them, they're going to eat the burger and fries.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Exactly.

Joseph Antoun: And that's the problem. And unless you compete unhealthy lifestyle with healthy productize lifestyle... That was my conclusion is, how can we go back and productize healthy lifestyle?

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, your passion remained the same, but it sounds like you're moving... Because I've had thousands of those conversations with people one on one. Eating better, sleeping better, stress, whatever. But the uptake on that I found was about 1%, maybe, for a sustainable period of time. Maybe 5% for the short term, but maybe 1% in a sustainable fashion. And you ran into the same thing at a government level, right? Probably, I'm assuming. Right? So...

Joseph Antoun: Yeah, and these governments were saying: "We're doing campaigns," but the campaigns are educational. And now people know what they need to eat or how to stress less or how to exercise more. But where they're failing is they're not making the healthy choice the easy one. We always make the healthy choice the difficult one. The salad is more expensive than the burger. Staying on the couch and ordering from Uber Eats is easier than going to the gym and exercising. Finding even a safe straight, whatever, half a mile track to walk at night is not easy. And you're waiting to exit on Target and you're sitting in a line and everything around you is the last minute chocolate and the last minute chips and the last minute... So, we make the unhealthy choice the easy one, and this is where government failed. So, we got to move from educate... I mean, we got to keep educating, but at the same time you got to change the structure of urban planning, the structure of how you do your daily task.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Now you're kind of getting into other people's businesses though, right? Because are you really going to be able to tell a grocery store it's illegal to put chocolate bars at the checkout line? I mean...

Joseph Antoun: It's not illegal, but everything in life, if you go back to it, is driven by also financial incentive. So, if you incentivize with tax credit the Target, if they have the apples and oranges, actually not orange, but apple and bananas say, or blueberries at exit versus... They're making cents and pennies on the chocolate, it's just the last bite of the apple from them. They're not making a fortune from that. So, you go back and you give financial incentives, same thing. You should tax high sugar and you should put that tax towards the salad so that the poor who's on the food stamp actually can afford that salad rather than affording that burger. And by the way, you should not be always about salad because people don't like, at the end of the day, a lot of salads. You're going to make that healthy burger and a healthy potato, et cetera, that actually people would like and is cheaper for them to access. That's the problem, is cheap, healthy and accessible. We have not sealed that triangle yet.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Right. There is this real issue though with taste buds too, I find. And that is that if people... Taste buds are like children, for me. It's like, they're trainable, but let's say, are going down a path, they're going to go down that path until they're steered away from it. So, if you had a pizza yesterday and a burger and fries today and you're thinking about lunch tomorrow it's like: "Well, I don't know. Pizza's sounding pretty good again." But if you're eating healthy and you change your taste buds, it's all like: "Well no, that salad sounds really good. That wrap looks... That sounds really good to me today." So, there's that whole element of getting people over the hump of sugar, salt, and fat, which are addicting for the brain, and people literally become addicted to these foods. And so, you're trying to really break addiction on top of giving incentives. [inaudible 00:10:08] right?

Joseph Antoun: Yeah. I agree with that, but I'll go a little bit beyond it. This is why at L-Nutra my biggest lesson... I mean, L-Nutra is a nutrition company that puts science on developing food for longevity. L is for longevity. L-Nutra, longevity through nutrition. And one of my biggest lessons in here is that actually healthy food could taste better than your best pizza and the best chocolate.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Chocolate. 100%. 100% I agree. But it doesn't taste better to the person that really loves [inaudible 00:10:36] right?

Joseph Antoun: No, no, no. No, to the person that loves pizza. Let me continue, right? So, the nutrition industry today, the nutrition businesses today... and I'll give you a lot of examples. The tongue loves fat and loves carbs, right? Because we're on this planet hundreds, thousands of years ago, we had to taste something to eat and everything, it had fat. Fat has nine calories, it was great. Fat tastes great, actually. And then carbs. So, the problem is, what is cheap fat? Cheap fat is butter, is frying oil multiple times, is peanuts, right? This is cheap fat that the industry has tagged under the name of Snickers bar and the Mars Bar and whatever [inaudible 00:11:16] Guess what? Macadamia, which is same nut as peanut, is the nut family, has the healthy fat, the fat that would feed the brain, the new chain keto, new chain fatty acids. But it's very expensive.

So, instead of training you on macadamia butter they train you on a peanut butter. And peanut butter has a lot of trans fat. So, actually macadamia butter, which is things that we develop, taste much better than your peanut butter. And you can addict that person to that healthy thing 10 times better than... So, it's healthy fats versus unhealthy. Unhealthy fats are cheap. It's much cheaper to fry the oil every day. But guess what? You use EVOO, extra virgin olive oil, and your food is going to taste much, much better. But it's expensive. They're not going to use it. They're going to want to fry it 60 times.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Exactly.

Joseph Antoun: So, what we're discovering is it doesn't have to be that sexy, delicious pizza and pasta versus a salad, it could be actually the sexy burger versus a much healthier, much sexier burger. But you got to pay a higher price. And the nutrition business cares about margin, not about your health, and therefore they're going to use the cheaper one and therefore they addict us to the cheaper thing. And they crush the businesses, the startups that are ethical. And this is why we're so proud here at L-Nutra, we crossed that line, nobody can crush us anymore. The Nestlés and the others, they tried. The other companies, they tried to come and buy earliest. And most people would have sold but we said: "No, we're going to go big, and we're going to go big in the right way in the right [inaudible 00:12:48]"

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Oh, good for you, good for you.

Joseph Antoun: And I'm happy to send you bars that taste 10X better than the Bounty bar and Mars bar and the Snickers bar in the market. And they're full of the right fatty acids and the right parts.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, Steve and I were talking before the show about, we'll do a ProLon five day fast, we'll eat some of the bars, we'll report back to the audience on what those are like and what they're like to do. But one of the things, there's finances and there's taste and then there's also tradition. Families, right? They get used to eating... "We're an Italian family, we eat this. We're a Polish family, we eat this." Whatever, "California family, we eat this." So, there's lots of hurdles to overcome to this healthy eating, is what I've found. The best way to do it is actually to introduce people to it so that they can actually try it. And if they'll give it a bit of time, like 5, 6, 7 days, it will start to shift for them. And I think, just to jump forward to the ProLon, which is a five-day fast mimicking product you have, I think one of the beauties of the ProLon, quite honestly, is that it does reset people's taste buds, right?

Joseph Antoun: 100%. I mean, there are four major benefits, but the one that's mentioned the most, the people say: "It changed my relationship with food." That's exactly how they say it. Meaning: "I used to be addicted to late nights, I couldn't sleep unless I snack. Now with ProLon I got my soup, I do it at 7:00, 8:00 PM and I'm done. I just got the [inaudible 00:14:18]"

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: And I'm good.

Joseph Antoun: I get it.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: And I'm good. And it changes their taste buds away from that sugar, salt, and fat back to wanting something more healthy, right? So, I think one of the areas that you're probably working on is that transition off of the ProLon fast back into a much healthier diet than what they had coming into the ProLon fast. I would think that that would be really where the ticket was.

Joseph Antoun: Yeah, we're doing that in two ways. Because a lot of people, like you said, they come out of ProLon and they say: "Changed my life, changed my body, my performance, my mental clarity, my taste buds. I don't want to go back and get re-addicted by the nutrition industry." And we did this in two ways, actually in three ways. So, if you want to stay within a fasting nutrition regimen we have the Fast Bar, we're launching the Fast Shake this November, and you can continue with your intermittent... You can replace-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, let's tell the audience what a Fast Bar is. What is that? I mean, okay, so I do a ProLon fast or I don't do a ProLon fast. If I eat this bar, am I fasting? What are we saying? What's actually happening?

Joseph Antoun: Yeah, so intermittent fasting is now picking up big time in the US. It's actually 10% of US adults practice intermittent fasting. In their mindset, mainly, it's skipping breakfast to reach 16 or 18 hours of fast. I mean, you prolong the overnight fast by skipping breakfast and waiting till 1:00 or 2:00 PM to eat the next meal. But there are many issues that we're seeing with that. Number one is they binge eat after the 16 to 18 hours. So, a lot of the trials on intermittent fasting, they show you lose weight if you indeed skip breakfast but not overcompensate or over indulge after. Especially, the biggest mistake, if you eat late at night, that's the biggest problem. A lot of studies show that if you don't eat in the morning you tend to eat more at night. And eating more at night is worse than skipping...

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: This is a critical point you're making. I've had this conversation with so many clients, because really, if you're going to intermittent fast it's almost better to eat breakfast, eat lunch, and skip dinner. Because it's those calories at night that seem to really put weight on. Plus, willpower goes away in the evening. In the morning it's like: "No, I'm not going to have ice cream, I'm not going to have whatever else.” But at eight o'clock at night it's like: "No, where's the ice cream?" Right? And so, if it's in the house it's fair game. And so, keeping that stuff out of the house is number one. But I think if we could switch it around to where intermittent fasting really was about skipping dinner, then I think we'd actually make more progress.

Joseph Antoun: This is what the science is showing. You're not going to skip dinner because it's a very social event, but eat dinner early and do not snack late.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: That's right.

Joseph Antoun: And that's very important, is to get your dinner between six and eight max, and not eat after. That would be great. And for those who are listening here, I mean, just very quickly, if you eat dinner... And when you sleep your anabolic hormones are a little bit up, right? Your insulin spikes a little bit later in the night, your growth hormone is high to help the muscle with the [inaudible 00:17:23]. So, your body is ready for pickup if you want. The more you feed it at night the more it will pick up faster.

In the morning, when you eat in the morning or at lunch or in the afternoon, you're in catabolic mode, you're spending calories, you're walking, you're burning, you're down fat. So, this is why there's a big difference between, if you want to eat a certain level of calories, front load it during the day rather than delay the load and eat more at night. That's very important.

Tying that back to answer your question on the Fast Bar, a lot of people who are skipping the breakfast in order to... And it's practical to skip breakfast. You're at work, you're busy and you know don't have a high appetite. The issue is that a lot of them end up binge eating and eating at night. And a lot of studies are showing if you have something in the morning you eat actually less in the end tail of the day. And-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Let me get this straight. So, just for the audience to understand this, so they wake up in the morning, they're fasting, they skip breakfast. And the idea is that at 11 o'clock, 10:30, 11:30, somewhere in there maybe to eat a Fast Bar as a bridge to a meal later. And in doing so, you decrease your dinner consumption. That's what I'm hearing.

Joseph Antoun: You can have it in the morning. It's a breakfast replacement, so you can do it at eight or nine. It doesn't have to be at 11. So, you can just replace breakfast with a... Fast Bar, if you want, is a breakfast that does not break the fast. And we have randomized clinical trials behind it. It shows that if you water fast or if you eat the Fast Bar as a breakfast, your blood sugar stays flat and your ketones keep increasing. So, it's a perfect way to mimic a water fasting in the morning. [inaudible 00:19:01]

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Okay. So, now you're eating, but you're still fasting is what you're saying, right? Just so the audience understands it.

Joseph Antoun: That's our technology. Our technology at L-Nutra is the fasting mimicking nutrition. I feed you food that has been specifically formulated. We're talking $50 million in the research, we're talking 18 universities behind it, the National Institute of Health as a main sponsor and over 300 patents. So, this is something super well established now with 18 clinical trials, is we found a formulation that nourishes your body while the cell's not getting fully convinced that they're eating. So, we're giving them different micronutrients that feed the cell, but the cell main sensors for food are not triggered. So, we go around the radar, if you want, of the cells. So, the cell is getting nutrients, but the cell radars are saying there's no nutrients and therefore you stay in a fasting mode while you're eating.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, we're talking about intermittent fasting here, but now we've also previously talked about the ProLon five-day fast mimicking diet, which is essentially a kit that contains these foods that don't break a fast, that don't raise your blood sugar or are intended not to raise your blood sugar. And so, the question becomes, if somebody's doing a ProLon fast and they're hungry, can they still reach out for a Fast Bar in the middle of a ProLon fast? Or is that breaking that fast? What's happening here?

Joseph Antoun: Yeah, no, you cannot overstack it because then you break your fast. ProLon is pro longevity. So, ProLon is the only, by the way, product in history to have a patent and clinical trials on longevity behind it. And ProLon is a five days fasting mimic nutrition. It's very important to talk about why five days. I mean, we have a Fast Bar, replaces one meal, the breakfast. A lot of people, by the way, use the Fast Bar as a late night snack. That's the most interesting, probably, use of it is like: "Wait a second, I ate my early dinner at six, seven, I'm feeling hungry and watching a Netflix movie," or, "I'm sitting with my wife." Or, "I'm working late at night and I get hungry." A lot of people snack on a Fast Bar late at night. We have studies showing that actually it keeps you in the fasting mode.

So, that's actually a very important use of it. But moving from intermittent fasting to prolonged fasting, when you cross two days it's called prolonged fasting. And this ProLon is a fasting food for five days. And you got to do it in a row. And why five days of fasting nutrition? And why the 300 patents and why $50 million in research and the National Institute of Health and all these universities? They actually show that after two days of fast your body goes into a special defensive mechanism. So, imagine you are the CEO of the company and you need $2 million to operate per month. Same thing, imagine you're a big person and you need 2000 calories per day to have a healthy nutrition or a healthy food income.

And imagine you go to that CEO and you tell him: "Hey, you need $2 million for this month? I'm going to give you zero." Right? That's fasting. So, you can imagine the first few days that CEO has money in the bank, like the body, you have enough fat, you have some glycogen to tap into. But after a week or two it's a big crisis on the company not to have any money. And what that CEO's going to do, he's going to restructure the company. He's going to go and cut any ineffective spending, he's going to fix anything going wrong. He's going to reinvest into sales and marketing to survive.

So, what we see in the body that after two days the body tells the cells: "Hey, it's a crisis. You have to go and improve your performance. You have to use your lysosomes to eat every debris and organelle and you have to rejuvenate so that we all survive together. So, every cell in the body, when you fast, is impacted. Every cell in the body. That's a big intervention. It's not like medicine where it's one pathway and one organ. Every cell is impacted, every cell is pushed to rejuvenate. And this is why the fasting power, we call that autophagy or self-rejuvenation. And it won the Noble Prize in Medicine in 2016, that process of cellular rejuvenation through the stress of fasting.

And, therefore, what ProLon does over five days is that it's giving you the first two days to lose a lot of weight. And from day three to day five it's allowing your body to rejuvenate your cells. And it's a bio age score reversal, whereby it's a better performing you. And that's the best way to stay healthy, is you a little bit younger or you five years ago, or you a few years ago, a few months ago. And this is why the longevity and the fasting triangle started to get built on how to prevent health conditions, how to keep people healthier and why fasting won the first, actually, aging and enhancing longevity patent.

That was the cornerstone that we discovered is, I help you use a natural... And our ancestors, by the way, they never had food all the time. They had days of food and days of fasting, they stored the food into fat and they used it and they originated. This is why they didn't have as many chronic diseases as we have because they were not in a constant food intake, anabolic, chronic disease condition. They were with food intake and food burn, and they were balancing those. They died out of acute disease, they didn't have antibiotics and they didn't have a lot of sophistication in acute care, but they didn't die out of Alzheimer's, they didn't die out of major rates of cancer, et cetera, et cetera.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah. So, I have a question for you. So, I agree with everything you say. We're big fans of fasting, quite honestly. We love the fact that it'll reboot the body across the spectrum of all tissues and organs. I mean, it's truly a magical thing. And I think one thing for the audience to understand is that biology really likes being cycled. It likes being fed, it likes fasting, it likes exercising, it likes recovery, it likes being awake, it likes being asleep. And so, to get into your mind that I'm going to be keto all the time, I'm going to be running 10 miles a day every day, these things where we try to push the biology so hard in one direction and hold it there, I think really counteracts biology. Because biology really likes to be cycled and that's really how it maintains its health.

And I think to that end, when you're doing the ProLon fast, there are some supplements out there that can improve autophagy, like spermidine. There are things that can improve mitophagy, like urolithin A. There are other things that will activate AMPK, like hydroxy berberine and metformin and things like that. So, the question I would have for you is: have you done any research where you start to stack some of these other technologies, we'll call them, on top of the ProLon fast to see if you actually get a bigger push? If you're going to spend that time fasting, it's like, I don't want to just go 10 years back, I want to go 20 years back. So, can I get there? Right? So...

Joseph Antoun: So, yeah, we're launching our supplement line in January. I will keep it confidential, but exactly. It's a wise idea, what you just suggested, and I commend you for being an expert and knowing this. And yes, but if you want... People look at us as the nutritech of the world, meaning the biotech of nutrition. Everything we do, lab trials, preclinical trials and human trials. And we knew of Mark Meddeo and the spermidine studies six, seven years ago and 10 years ago. And Valter Longo, our founder, is one of the biggest reviewers on the longevity journals. And you've all heard about Valter Longo, he's one of probably the top longevity experts in the world.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Valter Longo is the guy that basically developed this five-day fast mimicking protocol. I think it was at USC, if I'm not mistaken.

Joseph Antoun: Yeah, he's the head of the Longevity Institute at USC. So, we waited on the spermidine until we see human trials. What I'm trying to say is that the ProLon, the Fast Bar, we do the human trials. We, scientifically, prove what are the benefits. On spermidine it was a lot of hype, theoretically, on the mice trials and now the human trials are coming in to show the benefits. So, this is why we have waited. That's our ethical promise to our consumers, everything has to be tested, scientifically, before we go to market with it.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, got it. Yeah. Well that's great because I think in the world that we live in we're stacking technologies and cycling them. That's really become our modus operandi here. So, it's interesting that you're tracking with the same thing. And I really think that's the best way to go, so...

Joseph Antoun: 100%. And we like to use natural intervention to boost physiology, right? And you said it right, it's cycles. I mean, even in the fitness industry you do the intensive training a few times just to get that extra push which pushes the body to perform better, and/or to rejuvenate better, and/or to build better. And if you think about this in every industry, you use your laptop for several days, it gets slow, you reboot it. You drive a Formula One race car, you go, you do two pit stops during the race to get... All the mechanics come in and they rejuvenate the car and change the wheels and change the... So, life is about that. Unfortunately, in food, marketing pushes food on you all the time and you can become just a consumption machine. You forget about fasting.

And fasting, people ask me today: "Is it a fad? Is it something new? Is it ala mode and next year will be something, or next 10 years it will be something different?" They don't realize is that fad is what we live today and fasting was part of the human diet. So, we're basically now taking back humanity to what dieting for longevity, true nutrition for longevity should look like, which is cycles of food and cycles of no food. And that's exactly what humans and animals today go through. And what we live is a fad, hopefully, and we'll hopefully take back humanity to a good, balance of food intake and [inaudible 00:29:10]

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Yeah, I would reinforce and echo that as well. I think this is really the path forward and it's not going away, quite honestly. So, there's a lot of what I call shiny objects in the longevity space and functional medicine space, a lot of people chasing this, that and the other thing. But I think this is one of those foundational pieces that was here yesterday, it's here today and it's here tomorrow, kind of thing.

Joseph Antoun: Yeah, yeah. Because it's natural and it works. It's not an artificial imposition and it's not something that's not working. It's actually people who do fasting, are into the fasting, we like that 12 to 14 hours is very natural. It follows the day and night cycles. And if you want to go longer you can do the fast part. But any faster, as you talk with them, is doing the general fasting, not eat super late at night and miss food up until two, three, and binge eat from three to 9:00 PM. That's not the right intermittent fasting. 

But the true fasters, they tell me they've never felt better. We've had the best mental clarity, we have the best performance. And a lot of them have metrics to show it. I get a lot of pictures of ProLon-ers, their Oura Ring tells them: "On day three, keep doing whatever you're doing. This is amazing." We see a change in weight, in pressure and everything, especially, if you have listeners with Oura Rings or other measurements. There's a major information shift from all these on day three of ProLon. And you'll be like: "Wow." It's literally the day two to day three transition-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: No, it's fun. And I think DNA methylation studies have shown basically that there's a reduction in age with fasting based on DNA methylation studies as well. So, one of the things for people to frame this up in their lives, so to speak, is that doing intermittent fasting is a good general practice, but then how often would you recommend that someone do a five-day fast mimicking diet? What is the cycle of that? Let's take a 365 day year. What does that look like for an individual if they're planning this out?

Joseph Antoun: We say do it three times a year only. So, five days time three is 15 days, all that I need from your 365 days, give us just 15 days. And we're going to publish soon a major, major finding on how that would help your longevity, actually. I cannot reveal it, but it's the top journal in the world and it's going to be a top, big longevity paper showing the major benefits of doing three times ProLon-

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Let me ask you this, how did you get to that? Was it that you tried doing it monthly for three months and then every quarter-

Joseph Antoun: I'll get to that.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: There was a recommendation like that at one point in time and... Did you actually refine this by some testing and things? Or how did you actually get to three times a year?

Joseph Antoun: Yeah, I'll get you the protocols. So, three times, because it shows that 60% of the benefits of ProLon will last for three to four months. So, every time you do ProLon, again, people are like: "Wait a second, I did five days. The benefits will last 50, 60? Will last for three months? That's impossible." And it is because it's a cell rejuvenation. Again, you change your taste buds, you change your relationship with food. Your cells are a little bit biologically different. So, we know that if you want to maintain only, you maintain by once every three or four months, hence the three or max four times a year.

Now the other recommendations that you're hearing about, meaning doing it four times per year, this is our article on if you want to lose weight and do the longevity. So, from a pure longevity and healthy aging you do three ProLons per year. From the longevity plus weight loss, you add another ProLon. And if you are close to prediabetic and diabetic, most of the studies, we have two major studies on diabetes that both are completed and one of them we just published this past June with the University of Heidelberg. Again, all the papers are university hospital driven trials. And we do six cycles on diabetic patients in the clinical trials. So, three for healthy aging, four for healthy aging and weight loss. And then you touch six, six is what we test in the clinical trials for health conditions.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Okay. Yeah, and that makes sense to me. And I think, if anybody's listening and you have what we'll call prediabetes or insulin resistance, which is really rampant in the US, quite honestly, and it's not detected adequately with a hemoglobin A1C and a fasting blood sugar. What we find is that it's a glucose tolerance test with an insulin curve where we see people's insulins skyrocket to try and control that sugar load. And we know that that insulin's driving the aging process, driving cellular senescence and vascular senescence.

So, I think if you are dealing with or flirting with insulin resistance, let alone diabetes, I think the idea of jumping into this in a fairly aggressive fashion where you're going to commit to doing it maybe even monthly for the first two or three months to kind of reset the stage and then space it out, I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. Correct me if I'm wrong, Joseph, but I think [inaudible 00:34:07]

Joseph Antoun: Yeah. There's something very important here to talk about, which is... I mean, 73% of Americans carry extra weight. And there's something very critical, because if you do any diet you are losing muscle and fat. It's very important. There's 600 diets out there, and now you have the Ozempics and injections of things that can help you eat less. There's a common problem to all of them. When you eat lower calories the body taps into muscle and fat. And the problem is once you default on the diet, because every diet is designed to be done every day, and when you default you gain back fat, you're not always gaining back all the muscles. You have a slower metabolic rate and it's easier to pick up the fat, and then you go on another cycle of diet and you lose more muscle. And this is why it's a vicious circle. And most people get what we call learned helplessness. They try, they try, they try, and the weight is off for a little bit, then it's much faster on.

It's very important to understand that on the ProLon and on the fasting nutrition... We actually have two randomized clinical trials on muscle and we have five patents, we're the only nutrition ever to file a patent and have two trials on protecting lean body mass. Because fasting acts as a stress. So, your stress hormones are high. So, your growth hormone is high, your cortisol is high, and if you were doing water fasting the muscle is getting the push to be tense and to grow because of the stress, but it's not getting fed. This is why water fasting doesn't do that well over there.

With ProLon what we're showing, and it's designed in that way. People always ask us: "Why you have certain calories with the soup at night?" Because I want to support you and feed you the plant-based proteins. So, when you do ProLon you are in that protective state, the muscle is rejuvenating, the muscle is getting the push to grow from the growth hormone and the body's response to the fasting stress. Now you're feeding the body, this is why fasting with nutrition and ProLon, you are feeding the body a minimum quantity of carbs and plant-based proteins, and therefore the muscle sustains and stay the same.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: This is important actually for the audience to understand, that when you eat carbs at night, that ice cream before you go to bed, it actually blunts your growth hormone release at night. If you're taking amino acids or proteins later, then actually your growth hormone is released.

Joseph Antoun: This is why bodybuilders eat very frequently during the day, they need to keep the anabolic, the insulin and IGF high. The problem is when they over eat, and ice cream is not healthy at night.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: That's not healthy at all. [inaudible 00:36:46]

Joseph Antoun: We give you that minimal spike without giving you any of the... And that's a big secret of ProLon, is what we published in June. It was a study on diabetics, and in six months only of ProLon, that was just five days every month, we were able to take 67% of the medication out, drop insulin resistance by 59%, and drop HbA1C by 1.4 points. If you drop HbA1C by 0.5, that's a drug claim, that's a druggable claim or that's a drug level. So, we tripled the impact of what the FDA would consider as a drug, in just... And the secret was you lose with ProLon fat only, it's a fat burn. You protect the muscle. So, when you're off ProLon, change your relationship with food, your muscle tone is there to keep burning. You feel you're de-addicted to bigger portions, you have a healthier lifestyle, you do it next month, another cycle of rejuvenation and insulin resistance decrease, et cetera. In six months, we were able to give you what medicines take years to...

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: Well they actually never do it. They only do it while they're there. They actually never allow you... And they never get your body to be there. They only artificially get you there. So, yeah.

So, let's talk a little bit more about during the fast. So, let's say you're on this five-day fast. What are the recommendations about working out? Can you go for a run? Should you lift weights? Are you doing saunas? In your research have you figured out that some exercise is probably good, but this is not the time to be doing your 10-mile run? What's the story there?

Joseph Antoun: Exactly that. I mean, obviously, it's a lower calorie fasting nutrition. And it's 1,100 day one calories and 800 the rest of the... You're not fasting by starvation with ProLon, you're fasting with food. But it's not a high calorie food. So yeah, you can do your yogas, your stretching, you can do weightlifting. Don't go and run the marathon on that day, or don't overheat your body or overexpose it to major cold. Just keep it balanced for those five days. Don't do anything extreme. You can drink your coffee, one cup, max two, no sugar and/or cream added to it. If you want to put stevia instead, that's fine. That helps a lot of people. But yeah, take it easy on stretching and yogas and meditation and/or light exercise. Yeah.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, I would think tea would be fine too, right? You could have your green tea, your-

Joseph Antoun: Tea would be fine, yeah. Just don't add milk and/or sugar. You can use stevia instead.

Dr. Jeffrey Gladden: So, let's just circle back for a second to this idea of eating carbs at night, how it blunts growth hormone. And then a lot of people are really fascinated by high protein diets. And the problem with high protein diets, as I see it, is that high protein diets are activating mTOR. mTOR is, again, growth hormone, IGF-1, mTOR. That's the pathway, it's an anabolic pathway. And we know that if that's activated again all the time, people die sooner. Higher incidences of cancer.

What we haven't talked about here is the biochemistry. There's a teeter-totter in the middle of this conversation, and on one side of it is mTOR, which is anabolic growth. And on the other side is AMPK, which is basically all the regenerative things that we've talked about that lead to autophagy and et cetera. So, fasting's a big driver of AMPK, as is exercise, saunas, metformin, things like that. So, anyway, in that teeter totter, you're coming off the ProLon fast and it's like: "Well I'm going to cut back carbs, so I'm going to go to a high protein diet." That may not be the right answer either, right? So, do you want to talk us through a little bit about where your research is on what people should transition to coming off this thing?

Joseph Antoun: First of all, I mean, your audience is blessed to have you. You're bringing them a very credible, very... I mean, the protein, everyone shies from talking about the protein because everyone hates carbs but everyone is on protein. If you tell them high consumption of protein increase IGF, and if you do it all the time, you increase your risk of cancer 400% worse than smoking. There's trials of that and major, major papers. And people don't get it because, again, the business of protein industry tells you: "Oh, carbs are bad. You should drink my shake every day." Right? So, you're 100% right. 

And I don't know if you saw our article we published, our founder Valter Longo published an article four months ago, a meta-analysis on IGF. And the goal was to show which level of IGF is the most correlated with longevity. You don't want it to be always high. And you don't want it to be always low. And the answer is not also absolute. It depends on life cycle. If you're 16 or 15, you want it to be high, you're still growing vertically, your risk of cancer... And your cells are young enough to respond to growth, but not with a mistake to become cancerous. At very, very late stage in life, you're 78, you're 80 and you're 85, well, you have malabsorption, you muscle becomes an organ of longevity. You want them to have high concentration of protein at that age as well because your cell is too old to replicate as a response. And, therefore, it's more important to preserve muscle rather than having a risk of cancer. People don't die of cancer at age 90, they die of cancer at age 50 and 60 and their seventies.

So, the critical age, I always call it the critical age, with protein is that age of 40 to 65. This is where you got to be cautious about having high HF in your blood, because you're pushing cells that are old enough to do the mistake and their responsive enough still to IGF and the nutritional intake. And this is where cancers start in most phases. This is where diabetes get established in more phases. This is where acute heart attack happens as well in many cases. So, that meta-analysis on IGF had shown that 140 to 160 on average to be a good level of IGF. Again, you have to take it not in a general way. You have to adjust it to different phases and ages of life. And this is where tailored longevity nutrition comes in, which we are the leading entity in the world on it, is we will help you tailor your protein and carb intake and cycles of food and fasting in order, at your age, to have an optimal risk balance of disease, muscle protection and longevity.