Claudia von Boeselager: My guest today is Dr. Joseph Antoun. Dr. Antoun has dedicated his professional experience to reforming health systems towards preventative care. So right up our alley here at Longevity & Lifestyle. He is the CEO and chairman of the board of L- Nutra, and is passionate about bringing back fasting as a longevity practice to humanity.

Welcome today to the Longevity & Lifestyle Podcast. Joseph, it's such a pleasure to have you on.

Dr. Joseph Antoun: Thank you Claudia, and I hope today we're gonna change somebody's life. We're gonna give a lot of great tips for longevity today.

Claudia von Boeselager: I'm really excited and I want to start with, for some they'll have heard this, but we can always learn something new.

And others this might be new or they might be terrified of the idea of fasting. So I know just personally when I started getting into fasting and I would talk to people about it, this is going years back now, they're like, why would you starve yourself? That's not healthy. It's terrible, it's really bad.

So can you help from my audience that might not be familiar with fully understanding the concept and the benefits for the body of fasting. What exactly is the science behind it? Why should people be looking at fasting and intermittent fasting?

Dr. Joseph Antoun: First of all, this humanity lived for hundreds of thousands of years, on planet earth with fasting and feeding periods, right?

We never, we're living a fat today where we're eating all the time and we're paying the price for it because we're aging fast. You, every time you eat the pro aging hormones are up, it's insulin and insulin, like growth factors. And we're picking up weight and developing chronic diseases. Although it might sound a little bit fearful, it's actually going back and balancing your lifestyle and your nutrition patterns with periods of fasting, periods of eating.

Now, we're gonna have a lot of good news. The good news, number one is that the fast thing that has. To be the most correlated with longevity is what we call the circadian fasting, which is just a 12 hour. So circadian meaning follows the night and day rhythm. And in our founder, professor Walter Longo, he studies centenarians around the world and meets with them and follow their diets and how they lived.

 Satchin Panda does the same thing from a research standpoint. And it seems that 12 hours of overnight fast is a really solid pillar behind. Potentially healthy longevity or health span. And a lot of centenarian actually they don't snack late at night, they're not sitting, watching Netflix or watching YouTube late at night or staying at work.

And we see that pattern. They get their dinner, sometimes around seven and eight when the sun is down. It's a social dinner as well because happiness and social capital are part of longevity. That might be actually the number one determinent of longevity. But then, they spend an hour or two and then they sleep and then, all the way to the next day they wake up and they still have breakfast.

So what we did wrong with fasting lately is that we didn't talk about dinner. We talked about know, starve the next day as long as possible so that you've reached 14 and 16 and 18 and then went all the way to nomad which is one meal a day fast. And maybe that's not a great way to do intermittent fasting.

First it's difficult. And second, by the way, because it's difficult. Why? It's difficult because our brain is craving, it's saying, Hey, I'm hungry, I'm gonna develop a headache. And the headache is a symptom of calling us to bring food. this is what a headache of fasting is. So what's important is what I started calling in the last couple of months, a front ended intermittent fasting.

meaning start early the day before rather than pushing the end of it towards the four and 5:00 PM the next day and actually, there's a couple of articles in the Journal of American College of Cardiology that are showing that skipping breakfast might not be a longevity lifestyle. And it was a big shocker because intermittent fasting in other trials is showing that it could support longevity and it's not sci-fi if you're going to binge eat at night. Eating at night wise is so harmful because, growth hormone increase at night and then you have insulin in the morning.

So your body overnight is ready to store what you eat. That's important for the audience to learn at night. We store during the day we spend, so you don't wanna put more calories in the body when the body wants to store and then go, when the body's ready to spend the next morning, you're thinking, you're going to work, you're exercising, you're walking.

The body is ready to spend. This is where you want to give the calories. And when the body wants to sort, this is where you can a little bit decrease the calorie intake and this is where fasting becomes a true longevity pattern, which is doing that 12 to 14 hours max. But again, starting by the early dinner rather than keeping the body in the morning starving till two 3:00 PM and then binge eating is what happens with most fasters they end up super hungry and then they over binge after that. So this is the first connectivity between fasting and longevity. So the good news, you don't have to starve for 16 and 18 hours. And if you remember this 16 hour fasting was led by doctors Dr. Jason Fung, Dr. Peter Attia, you know, many other doctors that pushed for it. And Rhonda Patrick and doctors see people with a condition. So if you're obese and pre-diabetic or have diabetes yes, go to 16 hours, or your kidney is starting to get damage from blood sugar, you go to 16 because the short term endpoint of saving the body quickly, that carb surge and correcting outweigh the potential longevity harm of going this long without food. So we gotta understand then when doctors peak, they're talking maybe a little bit about short term cases. And then when it comes to healthy people wanting to practice the right fasting for longevity, do more than 12 hours and the 14 hours, it mimics what the biological clock of the body is.

And by the way, there was the Nobel Prize in medicine of 2017. It was about the biological clock of the cell. We always talk about the 2016 Noble Prize because it was with autophagy and fasting. And we're gonna talk about it. The 2017 was equally important saying, Hey, the body needs to sleep at night not to be active or eating, et cetera.

So first tip, start your fast early the day before for healthy longevity. The second tip for healthy longevity is that the trials where we are more involved in and our founder Professor Valter Longo, and now we have 18 universities, Stanford, USC, UCLA. Um, In Europe we have University of Genoa, Berlin, a couple of universities in the UK and Ireland.

So we do a lot of research on the prolonged fast. And the prolonged fast is very different than intermittent fasting. And to clarify this, any fast that is less than two days, we call it intermittent fasting. Any fast that goes beyond two days, we call it periodic or prolonged fasting and why that two days cut off and the body, there's no switch on off at 48 hours that happens. It's just an average time because the first two days your body has enough reserve to metabolically respond to fastings. Imagine you're fasting in day one and you have, I call the three bank accounts. You have the checking account that the body can goes to, that's glycogen.

So the first thing the buddy starts using is glycogen. Then you have your savings accounts, that's fat. And then you can ask for a credit or a loan from your bank. And that's the liver doing a glucogenesis and dumping more calories in the blood. So the first two days, the body is equipped with good checking savings account and some people have more in the savings accounts than others that can last more than two days. But now the importance comes that when you cross the second day, the body is telling the cells, Hey, we're depleting it. It is becoming serious. It's two days of no calories and therefore I need you to participate now. And the body tells the cells,

Hey, look for intracellular sources of calories and rejuvenate and improve your performance because it's a crisis. It's a survival mode. And again, our ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years had many days without food. So this is all natural defense of the body telling the cells I gotta audit you, I gotta fix you. We're gonna have to survive.

We're gonna be at our optimal performance to survive. This is what we called autophagy. And this is what won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016. So fasting becomes a cellular rejuvenation after day two and peaks on day three another. Myth here that I wanna a little bit burst is that they told us the last five years that if you do 16 hours, you're gonna have autophagy and cell rejuvenation.

Sorry to inform most fasters 16 and 18 hours is not a big stress to get the body into autophagy. The body always themselves do autophagy, but unless you're super skinny, unless you're exercising in the morning so you don't have reserves in the bank and you're spending a lot, then you start touching on autophagy at 16 and 18 and 20 hours. But full fledged autophagy requires two to three days. So that's important.

And then, You cross day three, and now the body. Actually, if you touch day four and day five and day six, the body's saying, okay the cells are now depleting and rejuvenating. What's the next step? The next step is to get rid of old cells, because these cells, even if they fix themselves, they're not gonna perform the senescent cells.

And now the recent science, they call them the zombie cells. And then let's push the younger cells. Stem cells to replace them because they're very cost effective in the way they use food, right? So the way they consume nutrition and they perform their job. So first two days are fast, is a metabolic, is a weight loss fast.

The second two days and three days, it's autophagy, and then it becomes so cellular, reparation, and rejuvenation. And then it becomes a cellular regeneration, meaning you're getting rid of some cells that are hopeless, that body's just carrying on, and they're more toxic than anything else and pushes the younger one to replace those.

And to understand this in a simple analogy way, imagine you own a company, right? And you need say a million dollars or pounds or Euros to operate it. And fasting would be like, Hey, I'm gonna give you $0. And you'll be like, whoa. The bank account is gonna drop fast. So you lose a lot of weight fast.

People love that. But then you're gonna restructure your company. You're not gonna accept that to sit and wait and go through that crisis. So you wait a little bit and then it is okay, it's serious. Let me go and restructure the company. First thing you do, you cut budgets. That's the autophagy. Now you cut the budgets, you review some expenditure on marketing, some expenditure on supply.

You cut everything that's ineffective. If it lasts longer, you can tell your team, sorry, we're gonna have to do some more deeper cuts. Sometimes you let some people go. Sometimes you change track or you shut down departments, or you take a bigger step into regeneration and the body does the same thing to survive.

while doing all this, you have actually hit multiple birds with one stone first. 73% of us are a little bit overweight, so the weight loss is very beneficial. Even with intermittent fasting, even the first two days. Number two, you're putting every cell of the body in check. When you cross day two, they're all trying to do autophagy and rejuvenating because every cell in the body needs calories. Every cell literally needs calories. So it's one intervention that's putting in check every cell in the body. This is why fasting is so powerful and it's so different than any medicine and any weight loss diet. It's literally touching every cell of the body. And then at the end, if you can last till that five days, you're a little bit replacing older cells with younger cells and this is the science coming, the fasting science. They called USC, university of Sunny California, the Mecca fasting because Dr. Long and the team there for 23 years have been doing the fasting studies and they discovered that that five days was critical for the body to rejuve it and generate, if you go way longer than you're bankrupting the company at the end of the day.

If you keep going, then it's just surrendering. So it's like an audit that you put your body through and it's healthy to do it two or three times a year. The same way when you do a Formula 1 race car, the car takes a pit stop twice. You go to the pit stop and so intermittent fasting is like slowing down, right?

You slow down. You help the engine relax a little bit, but then you have to take a pit stop. The mechanics come in, that's autophagy. They're seeing what's going wrong, they're fixing it, and then they let the car go back and it's a strong, healthy car that can last longer. That's the connectivity between periodic or prolonged fasting with longevity.

And obviously, very few people can fast for five days and it's not healthy for many. And this is where the National Institute Health. Came to us and said, okay, if I sponsor, I saw your preclinical trials. Fastly could be one of the biggest longevity pillars. And we didn't talk about therapeutic fasting, but when you put every cell in check, if the brain is developing Alzheimer's, the cells are trying to rejuvenate there.
If you have diabetes, we're seeing in mice is that, and now in humans is that the body is trying to correct that. So when you put a company under the stress of no food, of no financing, the CEO's gonna try to go with what's going wrong? Is it marketing? Let me start fixing marketing, right? If it's sales, I'll fix sales. So the buddy does the same thing and there's a longevity aspect if you're healthy, but there's also a therapeutic aspect if you're not healthy. So when we showed the National Institute of Health, what we had, which was a water fasting intervention but it's improving the cellular function, which was never done before with nutrition or pharma. They actually asked us to go to human trials and they were willing to sponsor the innovation called today the fasting mimicking nutri technology, which is can you feed the body with a special nutritional program that the cells would not recognize?

So you're feeding, you're nourishing the body. The cells have three radars for nutrition. We call them the nutrient sensing pathways. Can you develop a diet that does not trigger the nutrient sensing pathways so that the cells don't know that they're getting food, but they're getting nourished at the same time?

 So, a, it's an oxymoron. It's a fasting nutrition we've been in the market with it for six years. It allowed humanity for the first time to do a nourish fast and to get a fast as long as the five days. We call it ProLon, the product, but allowed the body to, for the first time to go through a five days metabolic and cellular rejuvenation part of fasting.

Claudia von Boeselager: Thank you so much for that explanation. There's a bunch of stuff that I want to dig into . I think for a lot of people it's almost a relief to hear that research is coming out to say that 12 to 14 hour window is optimal. I know men who do longer intermittent fasting windows, shorter eating windows, they have less of an issue.

But I think for women, particularly around hormones et cetera, struggle a lot more. So I'd love to hear your view on male versus female what you're seeing from your side?

Dr. Joseph Antoun: It's one of the most frequent question I get because it is important. I think, the 12 hour fast is very natural and would not stress, would not interfere with the cycle. So men and women can easily do the 12 hours of fast. And again, it is actually how everybody was supposed to eat and not to eat for hundreds of thousands of years.

 So that part of fasting I keeps telling people is not a new thing. They ask me, is that a fad? Is fasting is gonna be here to last? And of course, because what we live today is called overfeeding and that's not natural. And and eating all the time. I still remember in the nineties when they told us you should eat six times a day.

You remember the theories and we're just storing fat all the time. So definitely the 12 to 13 max 14 hours is homeostatic or is in line with the balance of our body. Now when you go 16 and 18 and 20 and there was a lot of push recently to go very long in fasting is definitely a stress, and if the body's getting ready for producing a follicle and getting to the middle days of the cycle we don't have randomized clinical trials to say at, per based, but a lot of gynecologists say, try to avoid a long water fast around that period. Again, we're scientists. So we would only say yes or no if we see strong evidence either way. But when we don't see evidence, we have to first do no harm. And therefore I don't see a need for somebody to go, honestly for 20 hours of fast because you're not getting the autophagy, you gotta wait another couple of days. And number two, you're just depleting your brain, your heart, and your essential organs that have to perform. So unless again, you have diabetes or you have a short term, and by the way, what we're gonna come out with is fasting and cancer at some point, because you wanna underfeed cancer actually for a long period.

And so there is short term reasons why to do 18 and 20 hours. And again, this is why it was doctors pushing this long periods of fasting, rightfully so for certain conditions, we're not against that, but we're saying for certain conditions. Otherwise you do the 12 to 14 or you do it with food.

And this is why we got created again. We got created by University of Southern California and the NIH and they're saying, wait a second, there are benefits to do longer fast. People should not be starving for days. And now we develop the fasting bar and the fasting shake for people who just wanna replace breakfast.

Have a one day fasting called reset. And we have the five days ProLon all done with food. In our clinical trials. And now we crossed 18 clinical trials all randomized at big universities. We use the five days ProLon or the Fasting Mimicking diet on male and female between ages 20 and 70, and we've never witnessed any intervention or disturbance into the cycle because it's a nourish fast, and that's very important. A lot of folks ask me why to do fasting with nutrition? Because you take the side effects of fast, you take the overstress of fasting and you keep the inspiration of fasting, which is a weight loss plus cellular rejevenation.

Claudia von Boeselager: So I'd love to dig into the What is exactly happening to provide nutrition while at the same time not having that metabolic response? So it's not storing the food a s fat. What is actually happening in the body there?

Dr. Joseph Antoun: So the body recognizes food in two main ways. One at a systemic level. When you eat carbs insulin increase and insulin is an anabolic hormone. It's a growth hormone. So it tells the body, Hey, let's take sugar from the blood, put it in the cells and let's grow.

 We have nutrition. The same way when you eat proteins, you have insulin-like growth factor, IGF, we call it, and it's called rightfully insulin-like growth factor. So it's another growth factor that tells the body, Hey, we have protein, we can grow. We're not fasting basically. So when you eat insulin spikes, fat does not trigger, growth hormones.

So when you eat the three micronutrients, fat is not gonna spike. And you have the growth hormones, then you have insulin as a spike, as a response to glucose, and you have IGF as a response to protein. The way we formulated the fasting mimic nutrition, and again, it's all plant-based, gluten-free, healthy ingredient, lactose free. Soy free, gluten free. So it's very healthy and it's based, a lot of it is also around macadamia nuts and the high end nuts, which have healthy fats and have plant-based sources of protein and have complex carbs.

And this is what we studied as a formulation where when you eat it, insulin is not gonna spike. Insulin barely increases and stays steady, and IGF is not gonna spike. So IGF barely increased because there is some plant-based source of protein and then stays flat. So the body is not getting that surge of, oh, okay, we ate.

So that's on the systemic level. When it gets to the cells, the cells have three main, and I'm simplifying here, there, there's intricacies and more, but I'm just being a little bit simplistic. In description, the cells have three main pathways that detect food, the Thor pathway, the PK and the RAs pathways, and they're triggered by carbs and they're triggered by proteins basically. In the way we, we studied and we devised the nutrition is that some of it goes through these pathways, but not at the level to trigger the satisfaction. The cell is not fully detecting and being satisfied by the food. So the cell still is in a fasting mode.

Claudia von Boeselager: In terms of prolonged fast of three days, where you get to is that five days is the optimal timeframe of doing that. And then you said two to three times a year is the optimal way spread out throughout the year? Is that a good regime, a good protocol that you would recommend?

Dr. Joseph Antoun: With the fasting mimicing nutrition, you can do one day or two or three or four or five, but the five is the gold standard because you want to cross, as we talked, the metabolic part of fast.

 You want get autophagy and you wanna touch on cellular rejuvenation regeneration. If you do three days, you're basically doing the breakdown phases, which is I breakdown fat. I lose the weight, which is a good starting point, but you barely touch on autophagy. You barely got a day of autophagy.

 And so it's like telling the car you can take a pit stop, but we'll change the wheels and we'll get you back on track. You're not gonna change anything else. We don't have the time for anything else. That five days. And we studied, just for the audience to know, we're talking about over $50 million in research and development over 23 years of research now that we, that University of Southern California, the Longevity Institute, by the way, it's the only longevity institute in the world based university now, I think there are a few others. But it's the oldest, let's say longevity Institute. They were studying fasting and what happened with one hour and two and all the way to one day to do days to three days. And not only longevity, but on health conditions as well. And it seems that five days, or four to five days is the balance between enough metabolic reset great cellular rejuvenation, no bankruptcy.
Claudia von Boeselager: So the clients that follow the protocol and we can dig into that shortly, they don't feel hunger or are they still experiencing fasting like symptoms at all? Or does that fall away, with the fasting mimicking formulations that you.

Dr. Joseph Antoun: So when you read the statistics , and I'll answer it in an objective matter on how many people can do five days of fast or longer. It's below the 0.1% the completion rate on ProLon, so ProLon is the name of the five days nutrition that we have. We have three major market research one showed 89% completion. One showed 91 and one showed 93% completion. It's higher than any diet because diets are long term, people always say ProLon is five days, there's a day one, there's a day five, and then I'm done. Doesn't mean that there's no hunger, especially the day two, three.

So when people do ProLon, it's the same like we hear the journey all the time. Day one was great and it's actually 1,100 calories day one. The other days are 800 calories. So you're getting almost half of what you eat through the day. You're not getting 200 or 100, but you're getting enough all the way to 800. And so some people feel a bit hunger, but what they feel the most on day two and day three, they feel that there's a special stress on the cells and something is happening to the body. And we consistently hear that. And then they, four to five, they say, I'm just cruising it's so great. I'm sleeping, great sleep performance is high, energy is high. Five hours of sleep our enough for me. I feel empowered. I feel because it's, the cells are changing. So you get the mood boost, you get the energy boost, you get the performance's.

Something really important to talk about here. Performance and muscle. While most diets, you lose muscle and fat. With the fasting mimicing nutrition, you're protecting muscle function. And so why, because fasting is a stress and uses rejuvenation, including muscle. Now, when you do it on water, the muscle cannot rejuvenate.

There's no new ingredients there's no new plant based, protein, et cetera. But you're doing it with ProLon and we devised it as such. Some people, fight it odd that at dinner we have a little bit higher protein and carbs than they ask us, how come this mimics fasting? We get you in a deep fast and then we play in a zone there to keep feeding your muscle so that you're protected. At night the growth hormone is high, is plant-based protein. Your muscle is rejuvenating and therefore you protect the muscle function. And we've done trials actually on muscle with ProLon, and it shows the protection. We file the patent on it. And that's critical because when you go towards longevity, and especially woman and men in mid age, you know, 40 and 50 and 60 where, and crossing menopause as well. This is the age where you're concerned with protecting your muscle, not losing bone density, increasing cardiovascular risk. And this is where you wanna keep muscle protected and rejuvenated and just cut the fat. And and that's a great longevity lifestyle.

Claudia von Boeselager: I wanted to ask about ketosis and what role does ketosis kick in at all during this phase ? And what is your view in general with the ketogenic diet?

Dr. Joseph Antoun: Yeah, if you wanna think about the fasting mimicking diet that we have or the fasting mimicking nutrition, it's like a second generation. Is keto 2.0, whereby keto 1.0 that most people do. Where keto got it wrong is that keto went with very high fat and any fat. High fat in the buddy is not healthy if it's not good fat. There's a macademia based fat and there's a, bacon based fat. They're very different. So this was in our opinion, was less nutritious . Then the second issue is it kept normal proteins and it went super low on carb, right? It was a politically correct way to put a food formula where, oh, I'm gonna give you the proteins because people love their proteins.

But how can I put you in ketosis? I gotta go super low on carb. Very low on carb. . And the body works on carb. Carb is the currency of every cell, right? It's not natural that cells don't get carbs. But it was a good selling point to tell people, Hey, I'm gonna put you in super low carb on no carbs.

But that's not a longevity. We're on a longevity podcast. That's a good diabetes diet to be super, super low on carb on the short term, but it's not a longevity diet because the body lives on carbs and low carb is still good. And then it kept the proteins there, and when the body eats proteins igf increase and therefore the body recognized that there's food.

So the issue with the ketogenic diet for longevity, and it's not a longevity diet, let me repeat it very clearly. The ketogenic diet is not a longevity diet. you're starving the body from a carbs standpoint. IGF is increasing because there's protein. So the cells are not going into a deep rejuvenative fast, which would happen with a fast amn diet. And so the cells are confused, the buddy's confused, are we fasting? Should we rejuvenate or no? Because we have proteins. And it's like a mild fast that never gives you the true benefits of fasting and is not putting you into a longevity diet level.

So I would not recommend in the recent science is not showing that the ketogenic is a long term good longevity diet.

Now, on the short term, there's two very good uses of the ketogenic diet. One use. If you're diabetic or you have high blood sugar, it makes sense to go on a very low carb diet. It makes sense to keep the proteins but we recommend to go more plant-based sources of proteins and it's okay to swap that with a little bit of high fat, but let's have the healthy fats over there rather than the unhealthy fats.

The other use is for neurological disorders as well, because the brain is a fat organ. Most people dunno. It's a healthy fat, it's a good fat organ. When you go into ketosis, you're feeding the brain, mid chain fatty acids. So the brain loves that. And it could enhance a little bit the performance of the brain. So to summarize, short term use, Diabetes, pre-diabetes and some neurological condition.

The ketogenic diet is not a longevity diet because it confuses the cells from one angle, says, am I gonna feed you carbs? Which is what you like. And on the other side say, I want you to fast and go into keto, but I'm giving you proteins, and the cells are a little bit confused. This is why it's likea shallow fast that never takes you into rejuvenation regeneration.

Claudia von Boeselager: Which is key for longevity. So thank you for that explanation as well. I want to ask also who is fasting and Fasting Mimicking not for, so I would assume, pregnant women, females breastfeeding, but are there certain cases where you say, this is not the best way ?

Dr. Joseph Antoun: Yeah. And again, from a scientific stand. We gotta define, so if you say fasting for 10, 12 hours, again is a normal, shouldn't be even called fasting. It's a normal practice of eat and not eat. But if you wanna go to 18 hours and 20 hours, then you know, it's not a practice for people with the risk of hypoglycemia or the risk of hypertension. Say they're taking drugs for those and then they're not getting the nutrients. So sometimes you get a little bit of lower blood pressure or lower, blood glucose. That's the one side. So the risk of some metrics going down. The other side is when the body needs to develop or grow, then you don't wanna fast it for long periods. So if you're below age 16 and 17 and 18, where you still need to grow vertical. If you're a woman, growing a baby, if you're woman growing milk and for lactation, these are when you think that, oh, I need to grow physically because I'm young and or because I need to produce milk or grow a baby. These are the conditions where you don't need to fast or you wanna actually eat and have a good amount of protein as well develop. Also late stage of life, after age 65, but mainly 70, 75. And when you cross the 80, there's a little bit of mal absorption. The muscle is a little bit frail at that point in time.

And probably at that age, you don't wanna put the body into long periods of fasting. You wanna nourish at that time. So the goal of fasting is to put a body that is healthy, but at risk and rejuvenated and put it in check. It's ideal for intermittent fasting. Again, the 12 to 14 hours could be done at any stage.

The fasting with ProLon and the fasting mimickin diet is ideal between that age 40 to 70, where early. diseases start forming before diagnosis. This is where the cells are too old to start doing mistakes, so will benefit the most from rejuvenation. This is where the body starts slowing down.

We find it difficult to burn the fat, we start losing the muscle. So it's a very ideal to do ProLon within that age.

Now because ProLon is adding nutrition to fasting if you have allergies to these nutrients, then you should not do it.

Claudia von Boeselager: Before we dive into the products, I wanted to ask for some people listening, they may have or may struggle with emotional eating and emotional eating issues . So how could this help change your relationship with food to also improve emotional health?

Dr. Joseph Antoun: When we did our surveys about why people do ProLon, there was three main benefits cited there. Number one was the weight while protecting lean body mass. So there's a special, effect there. Number two was longevity and healthy aging. And number three was changing my relationship with food.

 And because a lot of us are, at the end of the day, addicted to. You know what the new lifestyle and behavior became, which is, especially if you live in the US for example, we love big portions, right? And we love eating late at night. And in Europe we'll love to eat late at night and be out and be, on the shores of the beaches and the sea. We're social species. We love the late night and we love also when the food is delicious to eat a little bit more and we're adding desserts and snacks and all of that. So we get addicted to food. Food is the biggest addiction in the world. And the problem is, up until today, all the nutrition and diet companies, they don't wanna help you integrate with your lifestyle. They wanna change your life. So you gotta go in, move on a new diet and be on it forever. And this is where you fail. And that created what I call a social learned helplessness. We start diets. We have to leave them some point. We feel bad.

And by the way, this is why I keep mentioning the fasting of the muscle connection. Every time we embark on a diet, we're losing muscle and fat. Then we go back when we eat again, we gain fat very fast, but we don't gain the muscle if we don't train. And so it's a vicious cycle. And this is why with hundreds of diets, humanity has not unlocked obesity or diabetes yet.

Again they're designed to be long, so people will default on them. They're not protecting the muscle. So you end up losing metabolic rate and picking up back fat easily. And so this is where ProLon comes in to say, okay. I'm not very easy. I'm gonna change you from the essence of the cell, but I'm gonna reprogram you.
But I'm long enough to induce that change five days, but I'm short enough for 90% of people to do it. And coming out of it, a lot of people start saying, I never knew I can last this late at night without food. I didn't know I can go without big portions. I didn't know they can, I can eat vegan or plant-based for five days, and I didn't know that actually eating less gives me more energy and more performance.

And that's the secret of fasting. It's the miracle of regeneration of the cells or rejuvenations of the cell to catch the fat, decreases the fat and gives you that enhancement in energy and mood and performance. So it is a life changing experience within a short period of time and people rave about that change of relationship with food.

Claudia von Boeselager: That's really helpful because I know that, often they say you shouldn't do fasting if you have emotional eating issues But I think because of the fact that, and I'd love to dig into this, now that you are actually, ingesting something and you're not just sipping water, let's say, it just takes away that sort of extreme focus on, I need to eat, I need to eat et cetera.

L-Nutra you, can you walk people through the conception of it and what your vision and mission is?

Dr. Joseph Antoun: Yeah, so L-Nutra L stands for longevity through Nutrition dash Nutrition and hence the relevance today. We're the first nutrition company that is fully dedicated for human longevity.

we were basically founded by University of Southern California and Professor Valter Longo, who's the head of the Longevity Institute at USC and who has written the Longevity Diet book. I don't know if you're familiar with it or, it's probably one of the most sold book in longevity.

I do have a copy here on my side.

Claudia von Boeselager: I have one.

Dr. Joseph Antoun: Over there. Yeah. And I have one here by Behind Me. It's one of Amazon's best seller, I think in books for you a few years ago and to the charts when it was launched in most Reds books. So he's the founder of that concept of how food is actually one of the biggest pillars for longevity and how to tailor food so that humans live healthy long.

And we went. All the way today we have a full Food is Medicine Business Unit where we study nutrition for people with cancer. We study nutrition for people with Alzheimer's nutrition for people with autoimmune diseases and diabetes. And the essence was food is the only product we put in our body every day, multiple times a day.

And it's the essence of how a cell functions. So how come we never tailored food for longevity? And how come if today may, God forbid, you and I got diagnosed with cancer, how come we don't tailor nutrition to help cancer with remission? We're not talking about eat healthy when you have cancer or eat better or eat whole. We're saying how can we increase the chances of remission?

We're talking with diabetes. I mean, Diabetes is a foodborne disease . I'm still puzzled and this is why I left medicine and came to this company. I'm still puzzled till today with. You overeat, you become insulin resistant, and then you become diabetic.

The solution, instead of that being eating less or no eating with fasting, the solution is just take a pill for the rest of your life and you will continue to be diabetic for the rest of your life. And that by itself is a documentary and it could be a tragedy or a comedy, it can go either way . But so the essence of our company is how can we use food as a tool for longevity and then how could we use food as medicine if you have one of the biggest chronic diseases.

And we decided to partner with 18 global universities, usc, Stanford, again, university of Miami we talked about. And in Europe we have. Over, I think eight or nine Genoa, Berlin, Milan, Heidelberg Laden, and Holland Kalin in the UK, Ireland. So we're very proud to have brought the first fully integrated network of research centers to study food as medicine and food for longevity.

And we have three, offerings today for people. The first offering is the fasting nutrition, and this is where we're known the most. There's the ProLon five. Fasting nutrition. We talked a lot about it and why the five days is a reset, which is for a one day fasting nutrition.

A lot of people say, Hey, I'm new to fasting. If I eat food, I can do one day. And so the pro and reset is a very popular product that we have. And then for a lot of intermittent fasters, they wanna try to go to 16 hours, but in nourished way for all the reasons we talked about, not pushing a starvation fast for 16 or 18 hours.

They do the fast bar or they do the fasting shake. So that's our fasting portfolio we're launching in January a fasting pill basically, which when you eat it, when you consume the pill, it gives you the prebiotic from ProLon, meaning you get the prebiotic of the formulation that keeps you in a fasting mode and gives you the bacteria, the probiotics of the bacterias that we studied that survived during the fast.

So what we're trying to do is when you consume our fasting nutrition, you keep taking the pre and probiotic, which basically keep your microbiome a fasting microbiome. . And so that's the fasting portfolio. And then we have the longevity nutrition portfolio.

We're launching, actually this is probably the first time I announced this. We're gonna launch the longevity drink in January. . And it's gonna be the first time actually a protein based drink that we studied, the amino acids there to not over spike insulin-like growth factor. So we're giving you a great nourishment with high proteins, but we're not over spiking your age response and the pro-growth response to it. So it balance is strong and long. we file patents on it and it's called the Longevity drink.

We're gonna also launch a longevity chocolate, by the way and other products and all under the same umbrella. Clean nutrition, low carb, rich in ingredients that are healthy, but then they don't over spike the body's aging response, and the body Pro growth response so that we decelerate the essence for our consumer.

Longevity part is how can I not accelerate your aging and how can I decelerate your aging? when you're 70, you're actually 60 from the inside. And that's the goal. That's what's gonna keep you away from the onset of major health conditions. . So that's our pipeline on the consumer side.

Now, if you have a health condition, we're launching in Q1 of next year, 2023 our diabetes remission and regression program. , so it's a, it's our nutrition plus guided with dietician and an app to help patients with diabetes to increase their chance of regression. Regression means needing less medication or remission, meaning needing no more medication.

 At the end of next year, we'll launch the cancer nutrition program. And then next year we're still waiting for our Alzheimer's trial to be concluded at university in Milan, in Italy. And we're waiting for our autoimmune trials at University of Miami and Stanford University be concluded.

And then we'll launch in 2024, the nutrition program for Alzheimer's and nutrition program for autoimmune diseases.

Claudia von Boeselager: Exciting pipeline you have going on. I think that this is so groundbreaking because of the potential to help people to really reverse these chronic diseases, which should all be diseases of the past. So yeah, really hats off and huge congratulations for what you guys are doing.

Dr. Joseph Antoun: Yeah, I appreciate you very much. We, In our company, there's probably more MD and PhDs you can find in any proportional to the rest of the team, than you can find anywhere. And because we're all frustrated, how come food has never been respected enough to earn the same science and the same benefits as medicine, right?

 The pharma and biotech sector did a great job by bringing, regulations and investments and science and evidence based medicine to the pill industry. And we as L-Nutra were trying to build this to build the same rigor that is used in medicine if you want, and this is why we have the best MDs and PhDs that we brought to this company to say, okay, we're gonna treat food as medicine and we're gonna put it in randomized clinical trials the same way we do in medicine to bring, truth, ethics and evidence based nutri technologies to the market.

Claudia von Boeselager: I speak obviously on the podcast with countless scientists and doctors, and I've yet one to say that they've had more than one hour of nutritional training during their medical school years. It's the medicine, as you say, that you feed your body every single day.

I think the problem is that for so many consumers, they're so confused in terms of marketing and they're like, oh on the packaging it says healthy, but there's. 50 grams of sugar in there and they're like, oh, but it's low fat, so it's okay. All this confused marketing around what's actually healthy and what's not. So I think having that simple, clear messaging, and obviously with the podcast helping experts like yourself, trying to get out those messaging as well.

What I'd love to look at as we close up today who is this for and what does that protocol look like? What is the commitment like? Cause I know some people are like, oh, I need to change my routine. How do you help that customer journey to make it as easy as possible so that the success is there?

Dr. Joseph Antoun: We actually tried to make it as easy as possible instead of recommendations and prescriptions and you have to, and you have that.

We we took the science and we filtered all the science and it actually added to the science. We study center areas to make sure that when we recommend something, first of all is true. And it works. Because I think that's the biggest part is people are confused. As you said, every day there's a book on food.

Every one day is ketogenic is good, one day is bad. Right now it's like today they heard that 18 hours might not be the best. They gonna go to 12. And this is our role is to bring ethical science and filter that for the consumers. So that's checked with us.

Number two is we decided to be a product based company. There's a lot of companies that, hire nutritionist or dieticians or have doctors or even. Them solve. They just recommend and write books and draft protocols. We decided to bring a product solution. A lot of that also was based on my experience and my lifetime journey, where when I went from medicine first to health policy and I figured out that recommending to people is I thought it was the right way to go.

When the back of your brain is saying you should eat healthy and there's a burger in front of you, it's difficult to compete with it unless you have a better burger that tastes as good. By the way, it tastes simple. It has to taste as good and then be healthy. So after a long journey for me, going from medicine than to health policy and public health and then the biotech industry, I and throughout new trial I learned that you can actually produce healthy.

True healthy food that can taste great. And then people can just consume it. And of course with the education around it and bringing, dieticians and nutritionists and health coaches and doctors. But the solution at it best has to be a food that tastes good and is healthy. What we have tried to achieve, is to launch products we mentioned, if you wanna fast with us is as small as short as one meter replacement with the fast bar or the fasting chain to the one day reset to only five days of ProLon. We don't ask you, and there's very few CEOs in the word that will tell you, do my product ProLon just two or three times per year. That's, that doesn't happen in, in nutrition.

And then on the other side is the longevity nutrition, whether it's the longevity drink or the longevity pill or the fasting shake. These are easy products to consume on a daily basis. So we decided to. Be the technology and nutrition and give you a product and wrap it with the apps and the dietician support and the health coach support.

Claudia von Boeselager: What are some examples? I think maybe people will be wondering listening to this what do they get to eat? What do they have to eat for this? Is it food- like ?

Dr. Joseph Antoun: As we said it's all natural and plant based. So a day of ProLon, let us describe what is one day of the five days of ProLon. So in the morning you would have the L bar, the longevity bar, so it's a bar format. Rich in Macadamia. Macadamia is the most expensive thing you can buy from nature because it's the perfect combintion of healthy fats of the plant-based protein and the complex carb.
 And has many other ingredients for sure. And everything we're gonna talk about is vegan, is gluten free. Is again lactose free, et cetera. So during lunch, you're gonna have your soup and you're gonna have some olives and you're gonna have your tea as well. And then for dinner, you have your soup for dinner, you have the sugar crisp, and then you have also your tea.

And then throughout the day you have a snack and you have your pills for supplementation to get your minerals and your vitamins. . And you have one drink that you sip on the entire day. Called the L drink. So we cover your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We give you one snack, and you have the drink throughout today.

We don't customize. People ask us a lot about, Hey, does the five days work for everyone, even if you're male or female, if you're 150 pound or 250 pounds or 70 kilos or 110 kilos. And the answer is simple number one. We have to be truthful to the science. So what we tested is what we can say, and that's our promise to people. But number two, yes, there are difference in the bodies and there's difference in how each body process fasting.

So if you're 150 pounders or if you're 60 kilos and you don't have a lot of reserves and you're very active , you're gonna touch autophagy maybe at day two. Or the end of day one at day two. And you're gonna benefit from, four days of autophagy. A person who's, let's say pre-diabetic and has a BMI of 29 or 30 has a little bit more reserve is not gonna get to autophagy until day four maybe, or day three and day four. So it'll benefit only when they have auto. And so each person can benefit to different decrees from prolong. And then why we don't then adjust it? Because if you wanna adjust it for the person with the higher BMI to benefit from four days of auto phase, you want to go to six days and seven days and eight days, these are the same people who would then default on it because so difficult for them from the first path to go for seven days of fasting, et cetera.

So I always call it, it's a product adjustment to the body. You do it the first time, you lose the weight, so your BMI drops. You only benefit from one or two days of autophagy. The next time you benefit from the more you go, the more your body is what we call metabolically flexible, and then you can switch into ketogenesis and autophagy earlier.

There's a self correction. It's easier for the people who need it the least, but then they benefit the most out of four days of autophagy. And it's little bit more difficult for people who need it the most, but you don't wanna make it even more difficult on them and give them longer days. So they will self adjust them more later with.
Claudia von Boeselager: Joseph, what excites you most about the future of health and longevity?

Dr. Joseph Antoun: I think for the first time in the last five to seven years, we're seeing so many companies focus on longevity. I think what excites me the most is before we were throwing branding and marketing stigma this is plant-based, this is low carbon.

In the story of Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger, it's plant-based burger, everyone went to it, but there's some colorant and other stuff. So now for the first time we're taking a full look at longevity. Give me something from all angles that's gonna help me live healthy long, so that we're very excited about.

The second thing that I'm very excited about is that food is medicine and we're unwrapping a lot of secrets and food to help the body really live long and to help the buddy actually increase it's remission and regression chances from the big four killers around the words. I'm very excited about that as well.

And number three is, again the tragedy of. The government's overspend on healthcare and now they're going into financial crisis. So they started to spend on the right healthcare. So food is medicine started to be reimbursed now in the US and the last three administrations have supported that.

And now there's reimbursement codes for many food companies. Where one of them actually we have over 60 insurance companies now that they signed to pay for our food for certain health conditions. So I'm very excited that under financial pressure, it wasn't a proactive thing. We were pushing for it.

I, as a health policy expert was pushing for prevention and food is medicine for years. But I think we had to hit the crisis financially on the budgets on healthcare. So that systems went back and said, okay, we gotta start paying for healthcare. We gotta keep people healthy at home rather than having them be in hospitals, in and out and consume a lot of expensive dollars or pads or euros depending where you are.

So that I'm very excited about as well. So finally, I think. Decades ago, we didn't die from chronic diseases. There was no medicine. We died still early, at age 60 and 70 and 80. But it was infectious. It was the first heart attack. We would die then. We were so hopeful that medicine with the discovery is gonna increase our lifespan.

We thought we were gonna live for a hundred. We're still living for that 80, 80 plus 82 plus. And we lost half of a year of lifespan, by the way, last year on the American longevity. So because we solved the acute part of medicine, but with food bad lifestyles, we're actually are killing ourself sooner.

And medicine is just trying to put bandaids on it. What excites me the most about it now is I think we're finally tackling true medicine and through healthcare not sick care, and with development also of acute part of medicine, I think we have the best chance today to cross that a hundred years of healthy life. So hopefully we're gonna hand our kids a little bit better chance of living to that 100. And this is what excites me the most.

Claudia von Boeselager: Very exciting indeed. I have a biological age of 26 Joseph, so I'm trying to get down to 20 and stay that way.

Dr. Joseph Antoun: That's fantastic.

Claudia von Boeselager: Thank you. Yeah. Joseph, where can people learn more about what you are up to, social media, websites what would you like to share with people? And we can link all of these in the show notes.

Dr. Joseph Antoun: Yeah. If you wanna read about the mission of our company, it's l-nutra.com. Our products are under prolonfast.com. If you wanna read more about me and my mission, what excites me, I'm on LinkedIn and I'm on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. @ Dr. Joseph Anton. So this is where you can find me. Same name, handle on all.

Claudia von Boeselager: Do you have a final ask, recommendation or any parting thoughts or message for my audience, Joseph today?

Dr. Joseph Antoun: Two conclusions. Number one is you know, when somebody pitches you, any idea whether it's, it's related to how you sleep, you exercise, you eat, you know, anything related to longevity, please read the science and make sure it's there so that you don't, do the opposite of that.

And number two is eat your dinner. Sleep for eight hours, but make sure you get this circadian fasting, the 12 hours do ProLon on a couple of times a year. I think this is gonna help you, at least from a nutrition standpoint. We encourage also a pescatarian slash flexitarian diet as a day to day diet.

Again, each person is different, goals are different, but for longevity eating that pescatarian flexitarian diet, doing the daily right, intermittent fasting two to three times a year, put your body in check and rejuvenated with ProLon, I think that from nutritional standpoint that will put you on a good, healthy longevity pathway.

Claudia von Boeselager: Thank you so much, Joseph, for coming on today. It's been such a pleasure speaking.

Dr. Joseph Antoun: Thank you, Claudia.