Dr. Valter Longo: The Science of Fasting and Longevity and the Truth No One Is Telling You

33:06Darin Olien:Well, the funny thing is going back to your point, like when you eat well, a lot of plants, a lot of fiber, you exercise, you naturally turn on your own GLP-1 inside your body anyway, right? Without the side effects. Yeah, that's another interesting thing, right? A new paper came out saying if you've lost your weight with diet, you regain weight slowly, right? if you've lost weight with GLP-1 now you're gaining more quickly and probably is because you're not making GLP-1 anymore so now you have the GLP-1 coming out from the drug coming into the blood from the drug and the body adapts and stops making it yeah and that's the same thing with like exogenous testosterone or something it shuts down your own endogenous productions and like there's always this trade-off.

34:00Yeah, all of them, right? So this is why the supplements in general, you have to be very careful. And yeah, if you have a real, if you're never in the sun, right? And we always used to be in the sun. Yeah, maybe vitamin D, you don't have a choice, right? But I mean, if you can fix it, that's by far the best way to go.

34:21Darin Olien:Yeah, natural, 100 % of the way. So let's unpack a little bit when people hear, because they may not know, fasting mimicking diet let's unpack that a little bit because they've heard it a couple times and this is sitting off of your research so it's like a way to eat calories not hurt yourself and get the benefits of fasting yeah yeah so this is going back or whatever you know 15 years or 20 years and basically we were doing water only fasting we were showing that if you take a mouse and you fast it with water, it becomes very resistant to chemo and other cancer therapies. And the cancer becomes more sensitive.

35:05So then we brought that to the clinic, and it was a disaster because we thought cancer patients are motivated. My cancer patient just felt, this is not something that I can do. And the oncologists watching were saying, hmm, maybe we're not comfortable with that either. So the FMD, the fasting mimicking diet, came out of that. So they're going to the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Aging at the NIH, and basically saying, hey, we're not going to be able to tell people. The cancer patient gave the message, you're not going to be able to do it with us or probably with most people in the world.

35:43So then the FMD comes out of our technological, our ability or our knowledge of what are the ingredients that cause changes that interfere with fasting, right? So they just remove most of those and then match it, you know, with what we call fasting response, right? So we make sure that, you know, however many days, let's say five days of fasting-mimicking diet are equivalent to four days of water-only fasting. But then we make it enhancing. What does that mean? We made it with the healthiest ingredients that you can find in the world, right? You know, the vegetables, the nuts, the almonds, the olive oil, right?

36:25So, and that was a good idea because then, you know, these ingredients are healthy and, you know, for a reason, right? They're healthy because, for example, and this was one study of about 10 years ago, they have prebiotics that can feed the lactobacillus, the fetal bacteria. the protective bacteria population in the gut. And we've shown that, you know, there was superiority that the fasting-mimicking diet had over water-only fasting. Oh, wow. Yeah, so...

36:57Darin Olien:And that changes really quick, too. They find more and more that the more you feed good bacteria, the faster that changes pretty quick. Yeah, yeah. So that changes pretty quick, and it changes a lot, by the way. So an interesting thing, the water-only fasting was increasing gut leakiness, right? Really? Yeah. For good reason, right? And not necessarily a bad thing because there's no food in the system, right? So if there's clearly no food in the system, let's say 20 ,000 years ago, maybe for two months you're not going to eat. Okay, so that's fine, right? The gut, and they probably knew that the refeeding, they probably knew how to avoid what's called the refeeding syndrome, right?

37:40Don't eat too much too fast once you get the food, you know? But so, yeah, so then during the periods of complete fasting, the leakiness of the gut was allowed because you probably, you know, there may have been some advantages to it. And so, yeah, but in people normally that's not an advantage, right? And then now it could cause the immune cells to get to the gut and begin inflammatory processes, which could be long-lasting. And that's exactly what we saw in the study. But the FMD, by feeding the bacteria, on one side had regenerative effects, on one side had microbiota, so effects on the gut.

38:34Darin Olien:It's a pretty big distinction difference between because feeding the microbiome what it needs is extremely important. And especially if you're coming off of ultra processed food or whatever, and that dysbiosis is already rampant. If you're going, I want to heal this and you're going to a water only, it doesn't change it, maybe makes it worse. But in this case, I didn't even know that. That's incredible. Yeah, no, water-only fasting helped, but it helped about health, right? So it was still, you know, partially effective against it. This was an inflammatory bowel disease mouse model. It was partially effective, but the real, you know, a big effect came with the FMD.

39:18And now Stanford just published a 197-patient trial showing, you know, 60 % remission in the FMD, the fasting-making diet group versus drug alone, which was less than 40%, maybe like 35%. So, yeah, so now we're showing that the use of drugs together with the fasting-making diet for Crohn's and colitis is leading to remission, right? You know, progression-free survival.

39:43Darin Olien:And for people to be able to do that, we can kind of steer them towards Prolon and things like that. Yeah, I don't talk about products, but I mean, you know, yeah. I've done it, so it's powerful. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so yeah, the fasting-making diet is out there. It's available. I don't make a penny out of it. You know, I donate everything to charity, at least the part that will go to me. But I think it's good that there is a company out there, and I'm very proud of having it started because, so for example, Stanford, it was their trial, right? This was not a company trial. It was Stanford, a gastroenterologist saying, hey, I think it's promising.

40:21Let me buy it, right? Get the funds independently and rent their own trial. Also understanding that they had freedom to say, hey, it doesn't work or makes things worse, right? So that's what you want. You don't want company-sponsored trials that say, okay, yeah, I'll pay you, I'll give you$2 million. And, you know, so we know that if it's a company-sponsored trial, you know, most of the results are positive, right?

40:50Darin Olien:So this was also important. Yeah, so it's working, and it's working from independent. University of Miami also tested it for colitis. It's working very well. And, yeah, although it would be nice to get 500, 600 people to trial. They are more conclusive. Yeah. I'm curious. You know, you've been in this space for a long time. And you had a child this year. I did, yeah, yeah. Congratulations. Well, thank you. Congratulations. I'm curious, like, your personal view on longevity, especially now through the lens of a child and your life. Like, what does, because, you know, people deduce longevity down.

41:35Darin Olien:I'm living longer. That's not the whole picture, right? There's this quality of life. There's functioning high and all these things. So for you now, like, being in this field, having a child, What's your personal view on what longevity means to you? Yeah, I think that as a father, now I'm worried about the environment, right? I'm worried about AI and the overuse of AI and all the things I was saying before. And getting into a space where, you know, you can deprive, let's say, the child of a cell phone and a lot of the AI world, but then are you going to isolate the child, right? So this is interesting.

42:26And I think because of the same corporate interest that we see with the pharmaceuticals and the food industry and the health industry, we're not seeing the type of analysis that we should be seeing, right? Okay, this is the right way of doing it, right? So everybody's pushing just like the food. everybody's pushing their AI driven method right and so so then I think that the concern is if you have a school where nobody's using AI and nobody's using the cell phone for however you know 11 hours a day or you know 23 hours a day you know then then you don't isolate anybody right but if the great majority of people are sort of addicted to AI and to cell phones, they're addicted to food, then something that I learned recently, I never thought about it, and I said, because I have a friend who's a scientist in Austria, and he's like, they get the phone one hour a week, one hour a day, one hour.

43:36School, no phone, then home, no phone, one hour a day, everybody gets to use the phone, done. until they're 18. And so I thought, wow, this is great, great idea. And then I was talking to a friend of mine here in West LA, and she was saying, we did that, and then my daughter became isolated.

44:00Darin Olien:Because the people around her weren't doing that. Because everybody had the phone, and she was the only one without the phone. So now you're going from something bad to something else that is bad. Now you're alone. And yeah, so I think that that to me is a real worry for the newborn, right? So yeah, so I'm looking at this, I'm thinking, it's gotta be a better, just like for food, there's gotta be a better way of doing this. And I think there should be more of a organized effort to say, hey, schools and after school, and let's just regulate it in a way that, you know, it's reasonable. It's an advantage.

44:43Some of these AI think I use it. It's great, but I'm not obsessed by it. And I can still do most of the things on my own, right? So it's not like I cannot write an essay because AI is there. No, it's like I can write it, but hey, sometimes maybe I'll get the help of AI. and now you're starting to get this mentality of like, why should I learn how to write it? You know, I can do a great job. So look at me, I'm performing very well. No, you're not performing. You don't know how to do anything. It's not AI doing it for you, right? So why would you be happy about that? Yeah, so I think that's a big concern.

45:23Darin Olien:Yeah, and unless we, seems to me, unless we drive it ourselves and our communities, it's not like it's going to come from the top down. It's not like the AI god is going to say, you know what, we need to restrict this. But it could come from governments, right? I mean, it could come from governments. I think the scientists now have to do a better job at worrying the governments, right? And the government then can say, oh, this is a problem. Like look at anxiety in schools, sky high, right? And suicides and mass murders. And so, yeah, so this is not normal, right? I mean, what we've been seeing in the last 15, 20 years, not surprisingly, you know, matching the explosion of all these alternative worlds, you know, this is going to be a bigger and bigger problem.

46:18So, A, you know, we regulate lots of things, right? And people, you know, people, I would love sometimes to drive 100 miles an hour, right? but you can't but you can't there is a speed limit but are you taking away my freedom no I'm just trying to protect everybody and yeah so I understand it it's the same thing for AI I think if the case can be made this is bad for you like not exercising right then I think most the doctors and the government will support it and say yeah you should exercise

46:58Darin Olien:for 150 minutes a week yeah yeah and and how much time could we pull back if we didn't use social media and ai and actually put towards our creative adventures in our own life too you know it's like in building our life rather than kind of almost a false sense of life social media life ai life it's like well and it's a danger zone right the brain the human brain is doesn't understand that because it's not something that is part of our biological history. And so the consequences, the psychological consequences, are going to be devastating, right? Because the human brain is not prepared for that.

47:44And all of a sudden, for the first time in history, it's going to find itself. Because, yeah, things, industrial revolution, a lot of things change, right? I mean, things change in the past. but not like this, right? And not, you know, with the replacement of the human brain, right? So the replacement with something does a much better job for lots of things, right? Yeah.

48:12Darin Olien:Yeah, so let's talk about cancer. Let's talk about fasting and cancer. Let's talk about what you've seen in terms of the benefits that a type of fasting before someone goes into treatment and what you're seeing. Isn't there like some protective mechanisms the body has over its own healthy tissue and cancer itself? Like what are you seeing in that zone? What you see is that the body, of course, not surprisingly, immunotherapy is now the product number one anti-cancer therapy, right? And so what is immunotherapy? Immunotherapy is basically saying, let's use the immune system of the human body to go after the cancer generated by the same organism.

49:03So I think that one of the things you see with fasting and fasting-mimicking diet is immune cell activation against the cancer. for example. Now this is also being shown in clinical trials. Without using the immunotherapy or with using the immunotherapy, now the T-cells, et cetera, of the immune system are going after, are infiltrating the cancer and starting to do the killing of the cancer. So that's one thing. But I think also the biggest thing about fasting and cancer or fasting and dieting cancer is that it's sending normal cells and cancer cells in opposite direction. Meaning that a normal cell will understand, because it's one of the oldest responses, will understand the fasting response.

49:53So it understands that there is no food or there's less food. And so stop dividing or divide less and go into a protective mode. And the cancer cells, by definition, do not understand that. and refuse to obey the anti-growth order. This is what's called the hallmarks of cancer. So one of the definitions of cancer is refusal to obey to anti-growth signal. And so the cancer says, I don't care.

50:23Darin Olien:So I always give this analogy. It's almost spiritual in a way. It's like wild. Obedience, right? Obedience is where you come from. So understand where you come from, and this is not the time to do many, many different things. Stop, right? This is the time to focus on protecting yourself, make it to the next moment when food is going to be around. So I always use the analogy, like imagine you put a million people in the desert, and I use that in the documentary. You put a million people in the desert, and then, or let's say a billion people in the desert, And then you starve them and you make them run and you put them under the sun.

51:11And, you know, at the end of two weeks, even if it was a billion people, there'd be not a single person alive. There'd be all that. And I think that the trick is to combine all of this. So you could see the sun as like a chemotherapy. and then not eating, not drinking as the fasting. And then the running is the property that cancer cells have intrinsically, meaning they cannot stop running.

51:42Darin Olien:Right, keep producing, keep producing. So that's where you have to exploit, this inability to understand, I better stop and protect myself. And so, but then if you take another billion people and put them in the desert, but you put them in the shade, you know, that's already, you're going to get some survivors. Not very many after two weeks, right? But you're going to survive. If you put them in the shade, you give them water, you know, and if you put them in the shade, you give them water and you make them sit down, almost everybody is now alive after two weeks, right? So you go from 100 % of a billion people dead to maybe close to 100 % of a billion people alive, just changing these three things, right?

52:25So I think that's what we're focusing on, is separating the two groups. And then now we're bringing in the technology. So there was this first wave, and it was working very well, right? So even in the clinical trials. But the second wave is more technological. Now we're saying, okay, well, there are going to be cancer cells. If you fast and then you give chemo or immunotherapy, you're going to do a lot of killing, a lot more than if you're just fasting alone or chemotherapy alone, right? So the two work together much synergistically, so much better than the sum of each one. But you still get lots of cancer.

53:03You get survivors, right? So cancer cells that can manage to survive. So now the new technologies, we do something called RNA-seq, and we look at how the cancer cells stay alive. And then we take already FDA-approved drugs to target those, right? So it's working very well, and we had a couple of publications on this and hopefully a lot more coming up where you use fasting, mimicking diet as a wild card. Then you use whatever standard of care there is, let's say immunotherapy, and then you watch how the cancer cell stays alive, and then you learn, and you can do this very quickly, and then you can target it with already available drugs.

53:47Darin Olien:So depending on how a person is reacting and the cancer inside is reacting, and if you've got some rogue cancer cells, you can then hit them again with other protocols. Yeah. So then the idea is that eventually be like antibiotics. We call it cancer antibiotics. So then the idea is in the future, there's a possibility. You go to a regular doctor and say, yeah, you have cancer, but yeah, take this, kind of like what we do now for antibiotics. Take these three pills and then come back a couple weeks. Let's see if it's gone away or if we have to use the system to learn how they survived. And then we target those with a different drug.

54:34And especially if you start early now with the detections. Now you can detect the cancer. You have all these new diagnostic kits. you can detect lots of cancer much earlier right so now especially if you get detected very early and now you learn how they stay alive you target those and hopefully the cocktail or drug kills them all and you're done or you know or you have to go through more longer type of treatment but I mean at least opens up the door for doing this now how long it takes how much money you need to do this for all of them you know we'll see but certainly, of course, that's our technique.

55:20Others have other things that they're doing. And so hopefully, finally, the technology is catching up with the cancer sophistication so that we can start having victories versus just hoping for victories.

55:35Darin Olien:Right. So do you see then a world where there's very little downside to having a fasting mimicking diet pre, before they go into heavy treatments, put their bodies in protection mechanism. Do you think that that's going to happen in a healing protocol anytime soon? Some hospitals are already using it, right? Not a lot of them, but some hospitals are using it. A lot of clinical trials are suggesting that they may work, but it's early, right? Whereas like FMD for diabetes and prediabetes and obesity is very clear. It works. and everybody should use it, right? Everybody should use it. But for cancer, you know, there's many, many different cancers, many different therapies.

56:19It's a much more difficult territory or terrain. And so, you know, the oncologists have to make the decision, right? And so usually we say in the foundation clinic here and the ones we have in Europe, we usually say if the oncologist feels, he or she feels that they ran out of options, right? So it's metastatic cancer. It's not working. It's not really anything that looks promising. Yeah, that's when the oncologist wants to be considering the, until we have more data, right? If you have more data and we can show that efficacy at stage one, then great. But right now, you know, if you have an, I always say if the patient has a 98 % chance of being cured, stick with that, right?

57:10Don't bring in, including fasting, don't bring it in. You can bring it in as a preventive measure, but not necessarily as an early stage treatment.

57:21Darin Olien:Let's talk about the big one that people say all the time that you get a question on all the time. I even get questions on it because I've been plant-based for 25 years. but is the level of protein. And you've said this long, I mean, way back. The level of protein, overall calories. I think it was right once you start getting over 15%. Yeah, I read it in percent. I think it'd be good for people too because every label now has got the grams, right? Yeah. So then it takes you maybe 30 minutes. Just save some of the food, right? And you can look it up on ChatGPD. and then figure out about how many grams of proteins you have per day, right?

58:06And then you look at your weight in pounds or kilograms and then you calculate, right? So that's about 0.37 grams per pound, right? So if you weigh 100 pounds, you probably have about 40 grams of protein, good quality, right? So some of it like the legumes tend to have very low levels of essential amino acids. So if your diet is 40 grams, if you're vegan and it's 40 grams of legumes per day, you're probably going to be protein deficient, right?

58:31Darin Olien:But no one's eating just 40, you know, just legumes either. And by the way, you know, because the other day just, this happens all the time, right? The journalist, and they first wrote 40 grams of protein and then they wrote 40 grams of legumes, right? So do not confuse the two, right? Because 40 grams of protein is 400 grams of legumes, right? Yeah, so it's a lot of legumes. And that's what you were saying. Like who's going to eat 400 grams of half a kilogram or, you know, however many ounces of legumes per day. So, yeah, so then there should be, could be nuts and seeds and legumes and, you know, cereal.

59:18So if you have that, if a quarter is legumes and three quarters are other sources, then probably pretty good mix. You could maybe go down to 0.9 or 0.4 or 4.5 grams per pound. But yeah, as long as you stay in that range and the quality is good, then you're good to go.

59:39Darin Olien:So the other side, people still push so much protein. I mean, like Natural Food Expo just went off just recently. Okay, everybody. Are you ready to upgrade your operating system? I know I am. I'm always game to do that. Not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. That's what we're doing over at Super Life Patreon. This isn't just behind-the-scenes membership. It's a global experiment in conscious living that I am connected to, committed with, in every cell of my body. Each week, you'll get exclusive access to deeper podcast conversations, extended interviews, voice notes from the road of me personally, personal reflections, behind-the-scenes footage, community wellness challenges, and even surprise drop-ins that I no longer do on social media because I don't really dig it anymore.

1:00:42Darin Olien:We're talking decentralized healing, reclaiming sovereignty, ancient wisdom meets future tech, any tribe of people with you walking the path. If you love this podcast, the Patreon is where we go deeper, get more real, and reclaim our power together. Join us at patreon.com forward slash Darren Olin. That's patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com forward slash Darren Olin. D-A-R-I-N-O-L-I-E-N. Join the movement. Support the mission. Let's rise together. Everything is freaking protein. Everyone's pushing 2.2 whatever per pound. All this is going to do a lot of damage, right? So it's already doing a lot of damage.

1:01:34Now we see that in Italy, we were looking at the data, and it showed up that children were eating two to three times. And I think in the United States, it's pretty similar. Two to three times more proteins than any pediatric association is recommended.

1:01:51Darin Olien:So currently today, the kids are eating way too much protein. Way too much, right? Because you have a child that, so for example, my kid is one year old, right? And so every pediatric nutrition book says about one gram, no more than 1.2 grams per kilogram. But, you know, because protein, protein, protein, the typical mom and dad are saying, well, you know, let's give you this and this and this. And then at the end of the day, instead of having, he weighs about, you know, 25 pounds or 30 pounds or whatever. and instead of giving him, you know, the correct amount, they give him two or three times as much, right?

1:02:35Right. And because they feel that, you know, he needs to grow.

1:02:41Darin Olien:They're growing and, yeah. Yeah, he needs to grow. And so,

1:02:49you know, probably, and also the portion, I think that's one thing that's also affecting things. where the adults have a portion, and forget they're one-year-old. It's an extreme case. But let's say somebody's 10 years old, right? And I think a lot of people feel bad. Oh, I'm having the adult portion, and the poor kid is eating a third of that, right? Well, yeah, he should have a third of that, right? So make it small and make it according to his weight. And most kids are slim, so it's not even an issue of having to adjust for fat percentage. So, yeah, so that's a problem. And, yeah, and, you know, so we're now writing a paper, I'm writing a review on this, right, for one of the leading journals, but also for the foundation, we're going through hundreds of studies, right?

1:03:42We're trying to formalize the, you know, the education on this and saying, because we're looking at weight training, athletes, old people, young people, middle-aged people, hundreds, and we're looking at tens and tens of meta-analysis, like studies of all studies, right? And yeah, we're trying to put an end to it because this is going to cause a lot of problems, right? Especially because you could say 0.37 grams are not ideal, but most people and most medical associations will say they're sufficient. So now we already established that that's sufficient and good for people, and you now got two to three times as much, right?

1:04:33And what do you have to show that this is better? Very little, right? A lot of studies, some studies show advantages. advantages. We're seeing them like, you know, 300 grams of lean mass increase, right? Well, you know, and this is something that we're just discussing an hour ago with my team. You might see, you know, 10 times as much increase caused by the training, the resistance training. And then only maybe 10 % of that is due to excess protein. So you really want to get into that danger zone for the sake of that very small effect on muscle and muscle strength. You know, yeah, you don't, right?

1:05:19You want to sort of focus on longevity. I mean, the Okinawans used to have a 39 gram per proteins per day, all vegan, right? Or a great majority of it. They did not eat fish, unlike popular belief. The Japanese used to have just slightly above. They did not use to eat fish back in the days. Now they do, but so, and you know, the Japanese have been life expectancy number one, ranked number one, at least among the big countries for, you know, many, many years. And still, you know, whereas the Europeans have caught up in the protein intake with the United States or certainly very close to it, and they've caught up with breast cancer, prostate cancer.

1:06:02A lot of the cancers, now you're starting to see Europeans, especially Northern European, but there are southern Europeans catching up with the US. And Japan is still doing much better, right? And also another thing that I was talking about, people that move from Japan to the United States, now within so many years, now get into the risk that the US population has.

1:06:27Darin Olien:So in the Western model, no one's protein deficient. No, no, no. You have protein, you have a lot of protein deficiency. Yeah, yeah. Because, and this is what's causing the problem, right? You know, I have even, you know, very educated people within my own foundation, you know, and for years, you know, watching their diet and asking questions like, well, what else did you eat today, right? Especially vegans, right? Well, I had this, and then I would say, well, that's like 14 grams of protein. Where are you going to get the rest, right? So, so I - So it's very poor quality plant-based eat. Like people can eat really bad.

1:07:11Darin Olien:Yeah. It's not the majority. You know, the studies show about 16, 20 % of the vegans get in that category. But that's a lot of people, right? Right. So I think that if you're vegan and you're not paying attention or vegetarian and you're not paying attention, you can easily end up in the malnourished group, right? Because you're saying, well, I had lunch and their lunch had some good level legumes. Well, what's a good level legumes? Well, I had 100 grams. Okay, that's 10 grams of protein, right? And low quality protein. Not low quality because they're bad. They're just essential amino acids. Essential amino acids.

1:07:49So now it's like having five grams of animal-based protein or three grams, right? So now you're missing, even if you think about the Okinawa level, 39 grams, you're still missing 35 grams. Where are you going to get those in the day? And to me, it was clear that a lot of them had no plan to get to even close to 39, to this very low level. So I think malnourishment and even protein malnourishment is very common, very common, particularly among the ones that are maybe socioeconomically disadvantaged. and they might not get the meals. And then among those that are like overwatching, right, overregulating and not really understand the science behind it and saying, well, but I thought this is good, right, this is good for me.

1:08:39And, yeah, so I think.

1:08:40Darin Olien:So it really comes in the, it really pushes into that ultra-processed food space a little bit too, especially if the people can't afford a lot of food. It's like it's just poor quality food. There's no diversity. Yeah, for the socioeconomically disadvantage, now they eat a lot of ultra-processed food, you might get, again, to the end of the day with no protein. Most of them are probably not buying the protein bar or the healthy animal-based food. So then they could end up in the protein deficient. Now, this is probably not a big group, but if you thought about 5 % of the United States, that's still you know 20 million people or whatever and you know for me it's like maybe early on i i was thinking about my calories more like when i first started but now i i don't really i just eat a wide variety of you know nuts seeds legumes vegetables soups like and i just change it up all the time and I just eat volumes of that very little if anything's processed.

1:09:52Darin Olien:Yeah. And I have never felt protein deficient. I'm still pretty strong. And this is the good news about plant-based, mostly like my longevity diet is pescetarian, right? So vegan plus plant, plus fish. A little bit of fish. And the good news about those types of diets is that it's almost impossible to get too much, right? You just have to worry about not getting too little. Like I get 30 grams of legumes and that's all the proteins that I'm going to have today. So that's the problem. But the opposite problem, whether it's weight, I mean, it depends. You can get overweight also. But if it's a healthy plant-based diet, it's so much harder to get into trouble.

1:10:38even without worrying about calories and without really watching everything that you're eating and weighing everything you're eating.

1:10:48Darin Olien:I guess it's so habitual for me that I don't even think about it anymore. It's just the way of life. It's so great to see you again after... Literally the last time I saw you in person was in 2018 when we were in Sardinia. Sardinia, yeah. Amazing. And Blue Zones and the whole thing. Like, I'm curious, since that time to now, what has been some of the biggest awarenesses you've had, both maybe in research but also personally? Because it's been like eight years. Yeah, I think research, at least, I mean, two things I think are very exciting and not surprising. I think one of the ones comes from my labs in Italy and the U.S.

1:11:50And it's, you know, multi-system regeneration, cellular reprogramming, stem cell activation, autophagy. So now we're showing that fasting-breaking diet refeeding is activating these very sophisticated programs that have the job. So, you know, you could damage the pancreas, damage the gut, damage the kidney. And then we begin the FMD refeeding cycles. And we're showing these amazing programs that have the job of rebuilding no matter how it was destroyed. So, for example, you take a toxin and have the kidney completely damaged, not functional, and completely disrupted. And then you start the fasting-making diacycles.

1:12:30And now we have this something called special transcriptomics. and you see that, you know, so everything is perfect and then you use the toxin and it just, you know, gets destroyed permanently or long term. And then you use the FMD and you see it go back exactly to where it came from. And then you see the molecular evidence of these embryonic developmental genes all turned down, including what's called Yamanaka factors, which are these reprogramming factors, right? So now we're starting to see that this could be used for almost anything. So anything that's been damaged, the body has the ability to repair it.

1:13:10And fasting, refeeding, and the fasting make it that is probably the safest way of doing it, is now giving the order. A, this is not working, whether it's an autoimmunity or it's a damaged liver or it's a fatty liver or so many different things. and then go back to where you came from. Now, if you look at futuristic, and that's the other exciting thing, which is not ours. If you look at futuristic intervention, it could make people live twice as long. Then I think Belmonte and others have been working on reprogramming. So can you take an old cell and now make it young so you can? We know that.

1:13:57but now how can you do that in a mouse, right? And of course, first, this has to be shown a mouse. We're not there yet, but it's very exciting or scary, however you want to look at it,

1:14:11because, you know, now can you make an old mouse young, right? And so, I mean, some people claim that that's happened, but that's not happened for a good reason, right? And that's why I think, you know, the technologies have to be combined, right? that you have to understand what are the programs that generated a pancreas or a kidney in the first place. And you have to activate that kind of sophistication. And then you add maybe the push of these factors that can rejuvenate cells. So far, we're still fairly far from it. But I think soon enough, we're going to start seeing evidence of this being used for specific problems.

1:14:52People that have some specific problem where a cell is not functioning properly Can you make just that one type of cell? Can you make it younger and then reactivate functionality?

1:15:05Darin Olien:And this is mostly from endogenously. This is not like from something like a stem cell coming from. No, in our case, it's endogenously. And that's, you point out, that's the third one, the stem cell, right? In this case, it's exogenous, meaning you're bringing in somehow with gene therapy, for example. You can bring in these factors. these developmental factors, and you're pushing and imposing on the cell. You need to become younger, right? Of course, that comes with, right now, it comes with a ton of problems, and it's very far from making an organism younger or much younger. Because, you know, you can imagine if you try to take me or you and take all of our cells, you know, and make them younger, all of a sudden we fall apart, right?

1:15:52Because we have so many cells that cannot be embryonic cells. They have to be specialized, differentiated cells. They have to have a job and keep that job, right? And function, like a delivery. You know, you have so many cells, each doing a different, you know, detox job, right? So if all of a sudden, they all become embryonic, so you have to find a way to bring it back and bring it back. So, yeah, so, but this is 10 years, all of this, like, including ours. I mean, we have, the first paper we published on this was 2014, right? So where we showed that the blood, right, We could turn the fasting-mimicking diet was turning hematopoietic stem cells, the blood stem cells, turning them on.

1:16:31And then they start, you know, regenerating the immune system, right? And so that was the first one. And then we did the pancreas and the liver and the gut and now the kidney. And then we started doing the trials and we're starting to see, for example, in the kidney trial that we did in Rome, we saw a tripling of circulating stem cells in the patient with chronic kidney disease that had taken three fasting-micking diet cycles. And then the proteinuria, the damage of the kidney, in most patients went back to normal. And a year later, it was still normal. So now it's still early, but interesting now.

1:17:13Kidney progenitor and stem cells tripled. Then the proteinuria comes down, and a year later it's still down. So it's starting to suggest maybe it is about this rebuilding programs that can detect damage, which we've demonstrated for mice and rats. So in mice and rats, this is very clear. But in people, we're starting to see the evidence for that, but we've got to do more work.

1:17:42Darin Olien:I love that. I love that your approach is seeing what's turning on and turning off inside the body. And then playing. Because exogenously, it gets the wild west. There's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of issues. There's a lot of things. GLP-1s, stem cells. I know colleagues that almost got killed on the table getting stem cells from a lot of different chains of custody, issues of contaminations. And then all of a sudden. And that's what I was saying, right? If you force these factors in, whether it's by stem cells or by drugs, you are imposing something that the system may or may not be ready to deal with.

1:18:25And so, yeah, the stem cell could cause benefits, but it could cause problems. But I think eventually, even for the stem cell, that's also exciting because you'll start seeing it work for certain things. Let's say somebody that has bone deterioration deterioration is a password. And now I, you know, inject osteoblasts and, you know, stem cells, and that can, you know, do at least some partial repair of the damaged area.

1:18:56Darin Olien:Yeah, I had Dr. Christopher Rogers under the FDA right to try. I was able to do some in San Diego with me, and he's very conservative. So you got injected with the stem cells? Yeah, my own, not exogenously. and now did that very really good yeah like i had a i had a 30 year back football injury and i couldn't sit here like i was i was starting to be sweating and in pain yeah yeah so much and and they're very conservative they're following the science good it was what's the yes um god what's the name but his name is dr christopher rogers another very good friend of mine dr barbara Kritschkoff been involved in hundreds of stem cell studies.

1:19:42Darin Olien:And they're the only ones in the U.S. that we know of under the FDA's right to try through phase two trials. Yeah. And so I fit into that because I was basically debilitated from that. And I had. And so that was when? It was about three, four, five months ago. Yeah. And so now it's still good. Still good. Well, there you go. Yeah. So I agree. Right. So there is a lot of these interventions that have potential, but they need the testing and they need to prove that it can work. Well, lovely conversation, man. It's so great to see you again. And I'm so stoked for the work that you're doing and continue to work and keep kicking ass.

1:20:31Yeah, yeah. Thank you. You too.

1:20:32Darin Olien:Thank you.