Water Fasting Scientist: Surprising Link Between Fasting & Cancer! Fasting Completely Resets Your Gut Microbiome!

25:05I'm what's going on there because there's physiological changes that take place. If I went into a 40 -day water fast with you, there's some physiological things that are going to happen. Of course, I'm going to go into ketosis. My fat's going to start to become my primary fuel source. But there's also going to be a physio -psychological relationship. There's going to be something that happens in my psychology. I mean, you talked about dopamine. My brain is going to change in some respect. My relationship with food is going to shift in some respect. Absolutely. If you look at the outcome data, for example, we've got studies we've done with dexascanners that look at body composition changes during fasting.

25:42And so people that would say fast for two weeks would lose 10 % of their total body weight, 20 % of their total fat, but 40 % of their visceral fat. Visceral fat being the bad fat inside the body. Yeah, that's the 10 % of fat that produces the inflammation that's thought to contribute to disease. Those same people would have only lost 6 % of their lean tissue. Now what's interesting tissue? Like muscle, water, nonfat tissue. So the lean tissue mass at six weeks was fully recovered so that the percentage of their lean mass was actually higher at six weeks than it was at baseline. But the fat loss continues.

26:19So even though they're gaining weight after fasting because they're putting their glycogen back in their muscles, which is about two pounds, they're rehydrating, they're putting fluid in, they're putting fiber back in the gut. So the scale is going up. But the fat loss even with that weight gain is continuing down. And so what you look at is their whole body composition begins to change. And also their brain composition too, probably in terms of their functional relationship to themselves. For one thing, a lot of people feel that any kind of pain is a bad thing. Any kind of pain is a bad thing.

26:51And pain must always be avoided. They have a pain. They have to take a pill. They have to do something. Because pain is the evil issue there. where athletes learn that pain isn't always bad, that sometimes discomfort can be associated with a positive response. We find it's easier working sometimes with athletes than people that have not been athletic because they've learned to push their body a little bit. And fasting creates a hormetic effect as well, whereas there is some physiological stress that's introduced that stresses associated with a healing response. Would it not just be healthier if it were simple to take those people and remove all the processed food from their diet and then keep them on like a Mediterranean diet with like high protein, high fiber.

27:36Would that not be a more healthy intervention? Because at least then I'm not going to lose. You've mentioned there I'd lose 6 % of my lean tissue. At least then I wouldn't lose any muscle necessarily. Well, I would agree that if your only goal is weight loss, diet and exercise are the key. Fasting introduces not just a chance to lose weight, but specifically to mobilize visceral fat. You will eventually mobilize that visceral fat with exercise alone. There's an advantage to getting rid of that sooner rather than later, particularly for people that have high blood pressure diabetes, autoimmune disease, because the sooner you get rid of the visceral fat and the inflammation, the sooner you can get them off the medications.

28:11The medications themselves present their own problems. And people don't understand, if you have high blood pressure, you're being medicated not for your high blood pressure, but for the diet that causes the high blood pressure. Literally, the day you change the diet to a health -permaning diet, the need for medication begins to reduce. And if you don't reduce the medication adequately, you can actually shut people down from, you know, consequences of excess medication. Is there a different advantage between me doing the fast, the water fast versus just going on the ketogenic diet if I was trying to reduce my visceral fat, which is that sort of stubborn fat around your organs.

28:46Yes, water fasting is a more efficient method of mobile license specifically visceral fat. And the other problem with that when we talk about a ketogenic diet, remember there's a lot of different ways of getting into ketosis. You can do it with a high fat high protein diet, which is commonly advocated, you know, the dead doctor, acnes diet, may as well as the rest of these or those kind of programs. Those has some disadvantages. High protein, particularly high animal protein, is actually thought to be one of the major contributing factors to as many of these health compromises, including cardiovascular to ask your disease and cancer and inflammation and the rest of it.

29:16So we need protein. It's an essential nutrient. You need about 10 % of your calories from protein. When you get excess protein, you put yourself at risk for kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, and other problems. We need fat. Essential fatty acids are a critical part of our ability to be healthy. And you also need carbohydrates. You're designed as a carbohydrate -burning machine. But you get all the fat, all the protein, and all the carbohydrates you need from a whole plant food diet. You don't need to eat large amounts of animal foods. You don't need to eat oils. You don't need to eat refined carbohydrates to get the foods you need.

29:51And in fact, a whole plant food SOS -free diet gives you the quantity and quality of nutrients you need without some of the negative consequences or the risks of dietary access that come from these more processed modern diets. So if you were to pitch to me the unique selling points of a water faster at your clinic versus any other intervention, medical or lifestyle, it would be the speed in which you're able to burn visceral fat and the speed in which you're able to lower blood pressure is unlike anything else. It also reduces insulin resistance. There is no drug that reduces insulin resistance, but fasting does.

30:34And a significant percentage of our type 2 diabetics will achieve normal blood sugar levels without the need for medication with fasting. Again, if you do diet and exercise consistently enough, long enough, you're likely to get many of the same benefits. There are some things, though, that seem to change in fasting, that don't change as well with these modified feeding improvements, for example. Fasting, you know, when you have a computer and it gets corrupted and you turn it off and you turn it back on and you don't know why, but now it works. You know, you've kind of rebooted or flashed the memory, whatever it is.

31:06Fasting does a similar thing in humans, it appears, and particularly when it comes to the gut microbiome. So you've got a trillion creatures, well, trillions of creatures living just in your intestinal tract, particularly bacteria, but all kinds of organisms. They're an important part of your digestive mechanisms, your immune response, and they're different depending on what you eat. So if you're eating animal -based diet, you have different organisms than if you're on a plant -based diet, If you're on a high sugar diet and even fruit sugars and things, you get different organisms flourishing than you would if you're in a fasting state.

31:42In a fasting state, there's a big drop off in total organisms. And then when you re -feed, depending on how you re -feed, you can actually re -grow those organisms and repopulate that. I'm right in thinking if you do a water fast, you're going to wipe out a lot of the bacteria in your gut, including the bad ones, but also some good ones. right. And then you can reintroduce certain foods that will bring back the good bacteria. That's why refeeding after fasting is so important. If you refeed carefully, you have a chance to reestablish that normal micro -floral balance. And that may be why we see such good response in many of these GI -related conditions, like ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease and chronic constipation, irritable bowel syndrome.

32:23But you also see it affecting things like depression and anxiety. And probably they say 90, 95 % of the dopamine and serotonin is produced by the bodies actually produced in the gut. And so the balance in your gut microbiome may be critically involved in cognitive function as well as what's going on in the digestive system itself. So we're just now learning the impact that fasting has and the effect that microbiome has and the relationship that those two things have together. There was a 2024 study that found after a seven -day -water early fast levels of harmful fuzobacteria dropped by more than 80 % and the gut microbiome shifted to a healthier balance.

33:03So it's clearly doing some of the work to wipe out some of the bad unhealthy gut microbiome bacteria, which gives you an opportunity to reset the gut microbiome, which is really interesting. Especially for you, as you say, you have some of those sort of gut -centric diseases. Is there a gender component to this between sort of men and women? Because obviously women have menstrual cycles and certain hormone fluctuations that men don't have. So do you have to think about gender when you're thinking about fasting? Well, we know that women have complicated systems in different ways than men. And they have different diseases too that show our fibrosistic breast disease, dysmenorrhea, in Asia, polycystic ovarian syndrome, all of these conditions that males don't know anything about seem to be associated with excess estradiol hormones.

33:55When estradiol is high, there's a higher association with many of these conditions. Estradiol normally breaks down to something called estriol and it's excreted in the urine. And what breaks it down is that got microbiome and liver function. And that got microbiome and liver function are both profoundly affected by fasting. For example, we've got in studies we've done looking at fatty liver disease, we show significant changes and reversal of fatty liver disease with fasting. And as I mentioned, the gut microbiome goes through a whole kind of rebooting. And that may be why patients that come in with those symptoms, the fibrosystems, breast disease, dysmineries, the menoragia, etc., often get profound short -term improvement and long -term benefit post -fasting.

34:36Now, all of these things things that I'd have to say, fasting is great, but unless it's a motivating factor to make the diet and lifestyle changes, I wouldn't be optimistic about long -term outcomes. When we use fasting, we're also providing intense education to try to get people motivated to adopt healthy diet and lifestyle habits, and it's those diet and lifestyle habits that are going to be necessary to sustain the benefits. I mean, I'll give you an example in lymphoma, which is the type of cancer. We published a paper in the British Medical Journal of case reports on a young woman who had flicker lymphoma head progressed for a couple years.

35:13And interestingly enough, her doctor, her oncologist, told her that diet didn't matter. The diet wasn't related to this particular type of cancer, she could eat whatever she wanted to. But nonetheless, she decided to come in rather than go through chemotherapy and underwent fasting. and we did three weeks of fasting during which time you could literally feel these tumors disappearing. She had her follow -up CT scan, and at a year we submitted this case report. And it was interesting because BMJ said, well, maybe she got lucky. And yes, it progressed for two years. Yes, it went away in 21 days of fasting.

35:48But maybe, you know, it was just naturally the time for it to go into a mission, a small percentage of lymphoma patients do go through spontaneous remissions. So they said, once you follow her for three years and see whether she can sustain that because we can treat lymphoma with drugs and the tumors will go down but they tend to come back and that's the problem. It doesn't really reduce necessarily all cause mortality because the condition isn't actually resolved. So we followed her for three years and I told her that she had to stick strictly to the dietary protocol or it would be fatal because I'd track her down and kill her and she did stick to the diet and at three years we have CT evidence that she was cancer -free and we submitted that to BMJ.

36:26And interestingly enough, at first they rejected the follow that they invited. And we kind of appealed that and eventually they did decide to publish the follow -up. And then we followed her for 10 years and she continues to be cancer -free. And she continues to follow a whole plant food, SOS -free diet. And she went public with her story. She told some podcasts about what her experience was. And so we got a lot of lymphoma patients coming. Did Trumorathath. And now we've published a case series, which is a series of lymphoma patients, including one particular gentleman who was even more progressive as the stage 4 that are already metastasized into the bones.

37:03He had failed chemotherapy. He also did well. And we did a three week fast with him. Interestingly enough, his oncologist was kind of antagonistic because he was concerned the fasting would make him too weak for treatment. But he came in, he did the treatment, did well, went back to the oncologist who said, wow, that's really impressive. I want you to go back and do some more of that. He came back, we did another 39 day fast, and he was able to get dramatic improvement. And again, those studies have been published in curvy journals that he didn't go into remission with lymphoma. It would be considered remission, but it's not a cure.

37:38It's just like you can't cure lymphoma any more than you can cure obesity. You can lose the weight and keep it off, but if you go back to doing the things that cause it, it's coming back. You can't cure high blood pressure. You can normalize the pressure. I've got people who have been normal pressure for decades now But if they go back to eating the greasy fatty slimy salty processed food it'll come back Because you're managing it you're not curing it the whole concept of a cure is a little bit of a misnomer in medicine You know cure just means you're a live five years after treatment doesn't mean that you've actually resolved the underlying cause of the condition Interesting And we have 120 plates here, which is how much food someone would be passing up if they did a 40 -day diet.

38:24So that's how many meals that they would miss on a 40 -day water fast, which is a lot of food, staggering when you see it. Yeah, and it's a lot of work for the body to digest that food. And when you take that work away, those energies are able to be diverted to dealing with some of the accumulated problems that people have built up, whether it's excess fat and visceral fat, it's diabetes, it's autoimmune diseases, where the body's actually attacking itself. I don't know if most people realize that, but in autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, ankle -losing spinalitis, these conditions, it's actually your immune system that's attacking your tissues.

39:02And the theory is that a lot of that is because you have the immune system being compromised by gut leakage, where people have leaky tight junctions in their intestinal tract or absorbing materials, and then genetically vulnerable people, the immune system becomes hyper reactive and begins to attack its own tissues. If it attacks your thyroid, we call it Hashimoto's thyroiditis. If it attacks your joints, you might call it rheumatoid or osteoarthritis, different names for different inflammatory conditions, all triggered by leaking of materials into the intestinal tract. When you go on a fast, first of all, you're not eating, and so there's not the inflammatory oxidative damage and free radicals that are causing the leaking to begin with.

39:44And second of all, the body's healing process is available to be accentuated, and so the gut leakage is able to heal. After you heal the gut and go back to eating diet that's not full of free radicals, you're smoking, you're not drinking alcohol with all of the free radicals from peroxidation of alcohol. You're not eating high fat foods and particularly heated fat foods and fried foods, etc. There's not the onslaught of oxidative damage and now you can manage those conditions with a whole plant food SOS free diet. Now that doesn't mean they're cured. If they go back to eating the other foods, they're going to flare up their condition, but to the degree they're willing to eat healthily, they can manage their condition without the medications often times that are very powerful and have often long -term side effects.

40:29When someone does a water fast with you, if they're doing a 40 -day water fast, do you make sure that they get electrolytes and vitamins and other things? Are there other things that you have to give them? No, we're just giving them water, but we are monitoring their electrolytes and their blood levels to make sure that their reserves are being recycled adequately and they're normal. If, for example, potassium gets below a certain point or sodium gets below a certain point, then we go back into a refeeding mode where we're given broths and juices and other materials in order to refeed them. We don't allow them to develop symptom secondary to deficiency.

41:05Now what's interesting is potassium, for example, normative potassium might be 3 .5 fasting tolerances would be 3 .0. If it goes below 3 .0 then we're gonna we're gonna terminate the fast. But generally people are so efficient at recycling their nutrients during fasting that they stay within normal limits without us having to do premature termination. And when you finish a long fast, like a 40 day fast, what are the, or even a shorter fast, like a five day fast, what is the protocol for refeeding them? What, what, what you give them? What do you avoid? What's the speed in which you give them calories again?

41:40They get a day of fresh fruit and vegetable juices for every week of fasting, more or less. So they're going to get about 600 calories of fresh fruit and vegetable juices if they had a three week fast for about three days. What's the thinking here? Like what's the underlying thought? The idea is that we want to introduce initially food without fiber. So if there's any digestive challenges that's short -lived, we want to introduce food starting in the morning rather than at night. So if there's any challenges, it doesn't disrupt their sleep. We want to make sure that they're rehydrating and getting some glucose without necessarily overloading their capacities.

42:15Once they've acclimated to the juices, which are relatively easy to absorb and bring up blood sugars relatively quickly, moving them out of the fasting phase into more of a feeding phase, then we'll introduce raw fruits and vegetables, which introduce some fiber, and then we'll introduce more concentrated foods like steamed and starchy vegetables, until by the length, half the length of the fast -refeating, they're back to a whole plant food, SOS -free diet, the kind of diet that we want them to sustain forever. If you're starting a business, that means you're one person doing the workload of probably about 50 people.

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44:47That's simplysafe .com -doac. There's no safe, like simply safe. And what about healthy people? Healthy people come to you as well and do fasting. It's not just people that have these sort of severe health predicaments. I think I'm pretty healthy. Is there a reason or a benefit to someone like me fasting? You know, we did a study actually on this very question about what happens to healthy people that fast. And although there's tremendous improvements in sick people, it turns out when you look at the cardiometabolic risk factors, when you look at even things like weight and percent body fat and visceral fat on healthy people, people that are within, healthy limits, there's additional improvement.

45:28Their blood cholesterol drops even lower. Their blood pressures drop lower. Their percent fat drops even lower. In fact, proportionally, the people that get the most benefit of fasting are healthy people that are doing it preventatively. But they tend to need short fast, not long fast. You're not necessarily taking a healthy person to go 40 -day fast. These are five to 10 -day periods of time rather than the very longer fast. Or usually because there's a condition that takes that long to resolve. We want to fast as short as possible, but long enough to resolve the problem. If you come to me with blood pressure, that's 2, 10 over 100 capped on on 5 medications, you're likely to need a longer fast than a person that's 140 over 90.

46:06But if I'm not medication. If I'm a healthy person, how frequently and for what length should I be thinking about fasting, if it will? I think you should be fasting every day for 12 hours. And then we don't know what the ideal is. That's one of the things we're going to be doing in this study is trying to figure that out. But what we do in practice is we have people fast once a year for a week. If they're clinically stable, they don't have any healing crisis, their numbers are all good. That's it. We move on. And even that week of fasting, though, has a profound effect on healthy people. I might mention, though, that most people that think they're healthy, when you actually objectively look at their biomarkers, aren't as healthy as they think.

46:46Many people are maintaining higher visceral fat, higher inflammatory markers, higher lipid levels than what they probably ideally should be, even though they're asymptomatic. They say somewhere around two to two and a half percent of people are actually objectually measuring out as healthy. Some studies say as much as 12%, depending on the standards that you're using to define health. So speaking directly to the viewer now, who's at at home and there's a reason why they clicked on this conversation. They found the subject matter in the title of a thumbnail somewhat compelling. If you were speaking directly to the different personas of people listening, so you've maybe someone who is healthy, someone who is maybe got a little bit of a weight on that they might want to shift.

47:22Someone that's got specific diseases and has been given diagnosis and maybe has given pills. Going through these different personas one at a time, how would you prescribe water fasting to them? And what would you tell them the benefits for them would be if we're thinking about these different personas. So starting with the person on the left side of the spectrum who is largely healthy, but is interested in maybe how it'll make them feel or whatever. So for the healthy person, the main benefit that I see a fasting is it's a forced period of rest and introspection. You get a certain clearing of the palate.

47:58We've actually done a study like this, it's on our site where we looked at the sensitivity to sugar, the sensitivity salt, it's actually enhanced during fasting. And so by fasting once a year, people kind of recalibrate their palate and it makes it easier for them to make better choices. Sometimes there's been some slipping and sliding along the dietary regime as people go along during the course of the year. It reboots the gut microbiome, it tends to enhance cognitive capacities as well as probably brain serotonin and dopamine levels. It can affect people's mood states and just how they feel about themselves in the world around them.

48:32It's obviously not as dramatic as when you take a person that's in agonizing pain or ability and you see those dramatic changes. What about then if I want to just lose some weight? What protocol should I use for water fasting and what kind of results would I expect to see in what time frame? We never know exactly how long a patient's going to fast until we see how they respond to fasting because fasting itself is as much diagnostic as it is therapeutic. But usually we can get a pretty good idea. For example, I always like to try to get people as close to their optimum weight as possible. Whether it's with diet and exercise or with fasting.

49:07We don't think maintaining extra fat is a good thing. We think for every pound of excess fat you have on your body There's all kinds of downstream consequences And so if a person say for example 20 pounds overweight they think I they feel best to say 150 pounds But there are 170 pounds we know that they could it will take them about three weeks to to lose that weight Because people lose an average of about a pound a day So I wouldn't have any concern assuming everything else looks okay, fasting that person for three weeks, I'd be concerned about fasting into an emaciated state. I don't wanna get them very weak.

49:41I don't wanna have them debilitated. I don't wanna get them depleted. And so we're gonna monitor them carefully to make sure that we're well within their reserves. But a person that's a bit overweight, that has maybe their blood pressure is a little bit higher, their blood sugar is a little bit higher. Maybe they have some joint pain, maybe they have some various symptoms. We want those things to resolve. So we're going to estimate how long do we think this person's going to need to fast to get to the point when they feed They'll keep getting healthier rather than sicker. Can you explain these full -grossed to me here?

50:11There's some full -gross that come from work you've done. Okay. Well, this is outcome data that comes from Studies that we've published and this basically is looking at the percent body weight change and if you look at the bottom graph You'll notice it's over time. Yeah, okay So we're looking at the percentage body weight change during fasting and you notice during refeeding it actually comes down a little bit more even though people are re -alimenting. They're losing fat, they're regaining water and muscle and then they're able to maintain that percent body change. This is 65 -day follow -up.

50:47So we're not for people that aren't watching the video right now and they're just listening to audio. What is it essentially saying happens and in what period of time with what protocol? So, in this particular study, these people lost about 10 % of their body weight over an average of two weeks of fasting. They refed for a week at the facility and then they were followed up 65 days later. And at 65 days later, you'll notice they maintained their total body weight change and then just a little bit more. Now they've been back to eating and exercising. In the next graph, the percent body weight, this is the visceral fat mass.

51:25And visceral fat again. So fat is the 10 % of the fat that makes up the fat that typically accumulates around the belly in the organs. It's the fat that's hyper -trophic, hyper -metabolic, hyper. It produces inflammation to acts like a tumor. So there's two types of fat there. The subcutaneous, which is on the outside. Right. And then there's visceral, which is in the inside. And the stuff in the inside is the worst. It's fat that wouldn't normally be there. Here's the problem. You evolve into an environment of scarcity. Storing fat is so critical to survival in a world of deficiency or of Depletion that the body does everything it can to store fat because the people that store fat in a natural setting They live to reproduce.

52:06In the modern world, it's become a disadvantage because we live in this very natural environment where you can get dietary excess And so even the body's designed for a environment of deficiency is responding with that genetic programming. And so it stores fat even though it's not helpful for you. As far as the body's concerned, spring might come late, the more fat you store the better. And as a consequence, that visceral fat is associated with these diseases of dietary excess. In fasting, the body preferentially mobilizes that visceral fat. It gets rid of it just like if you go on a fast and have a breast tumor, you lose 10 % of your body fat.

52:39You don't necessarily lose 10 % of the tumor. You might at least 50 % of the tumor. You might lose the entire tumor because the body has some intelligence to in terms of how it's mobilizing these tissues. You can take a person, an animal, for example, and starve at to death. And if you measure its nervous system, you'll find the nervous system isn't depleted even when it's starve to death. It will preserve those tissues in preference to the visceral fat or the fat tissues. And so this graph is showing that visceral fat not only comes down during fasting, but it keeps coming down, and it continues to come down with refeeding.

53:13And this particular graph here, This is blood pressure. So again, blood pressure comes down as during fasting. It comes down even lower with refeeding and people that are following diet and lifestyle changes are able to maintain that pressure without medication. So if you look at our study, people that started with stage 3 hypertension, so they're 180 or higher systolic blood pressure, they lost an average of 60 points on systolic blood pressure, not counting the fact that the baselines were often taken on medication. And the final graph here that you've got is percent in lean mass. So lean mass also went down in fasting because your lean mass is your your fluid, your muscle, lean mass goes down, but then it recovers during refeeding and re -alimentation.

54:01And the percentage of lean mass, which includes your muscle mass at six week fall was actually higher in those patients than it was at baseline. Are they exercising there? During recovery, they are not during fasting. And you mentioned PCOS earlier when we were talking about the implications for women. Have you ever done any studies or had patients come to your fasting clinic that have symptoms of PCOS? Yes, we treat... We've had dozens and dozens of patients with polycystic ovarian syndrome. And it's a condition that responds consistently to fasting. It also responds to diet and lifestyle change.

54:32But understand, many of the people that have made the diet changes but are not successful are then referred to us for fasting. We always want to try the diet first, because a lot of things resolve just by getting a person on a good diet and exercise program. And PCOS for people that don't know. I'm sure a lot of men don't know about PCOS, but some of them will, because they might have fertility problems with their partner. My partner has been very public that she has PCOS, and she's found that the ketogenic diet, removing sugar from her diet, has had a profound impact on recalibrating her menstrual cycle.

55:05her menstrual cycle was very inconsistent, a regular could be up to 60 days or longer or not at all. And then when she removed sugar from her diet and carbohydrates, it's now perfect. So it's like every 28, whatever days it is. And so I was wondering if there's lots of women that are suffering with a variety of different hormonal challenges or things like PCOS. If you have any case studies from your clinic of that resetting their menstrual cycles or reversing the symptoms of PCOS. Right. It's not uncommon for us to have women, for example, have their plumbing's good in terms of their tubes and whatnot, but they're having difficulty initiating pregnancy.

55:46They fast, they reboot and sure enough within a cycle or two, you know, they're able to achieve pregnancy. And it's not unusual to have people that have disrupted dysmenorrhea, menorage, et cetera. Within usually not the very first cycle, but the second cycle will normalize function. I think the reason for that is the hormones and stuff for the next cycle are already kind of set up and where you see the changes often, you know, at that six week follow up. So let's be clear, because if you fast, it is a form of stress on the body, is it? From everything I know about sort of evolution, if you're fasting, your menstrual cycle is probably going to stop.

56:22If you're doing an extended fast, because your body sends a signal to say, listen, we don't have the resources in here to give a kid life. So we're going to shut down. If you take yourself below optimum weight or below optimum fat, yes, that's true. Disruption of menstrual cycle happens with excess weight loss of any kind or rapid weight loss. But for the patients that we're fasting, oftentimes it's quite the opposite. They're able to actually normalize their hormonal cycle. And as I mentioned, it may be the conversion of estradiol to estradiol because of improvement in the gut microbiome. It's responsible for normalization of that and other hormonal issues that maybe we have having even been able to measure yet.

57:00Because your body needs energy to perform its menstrual cycle. That's it. It's my thinking there. If the body senses, you don't have the energy to have a baby, it's going to shut down your menstrual cycle. Because having a baby would, I think if it doesn't have the reserves. So if you're in a, the thing is, many patients though, even though they're fasting, they aren't in a depleted state. And so you don't see universal disruption of menstrual function because people are fasting. But, you know, athletes oftentimes see it when their percent body fat goes too low, they will become amenoriac. Do you see when someone comes to your clinic and does one of these extended fasts, that there's other areas of their life that also improve, that are completely sort of like unrelated to the benefits from the fast?

57:48And I'm talking about world power here and their ability to motivate themselves and be disciplined and persistent. And there's, I don't think there's any question that those factors are involved. You know, it's also just education and fear. People think if they get on a plane in New York and they flew to California, they would die of starvation or call it rattle. They think the pretzels that they ate saved their life. And once people are fasted for five days or ten days or forty days, the idea of having to skip a meal doesn't seem quite so terrifying. You know, if there's not something that they, that's healthfully eating, they just skip the meal until the next one.

58:21and they're not afraid of the, of the, that they're gonna die or that they're gonna interstarvation or they're gonna have depletion. A lot of people have a lot of fear in their head that's completely illogical, unnecessary, and harmful. It's so true, when you tell me that someone can actually fast, what's the longest a person could fast will? Well, without severe consequences. They say that a seven kilogram male could fast about 70 days, but the longest we fast people is 40 days. And what happens is you get beyond 40 days, everything gets a little bit more delicate. You have to be a lot more careful with the right balance and other things.

58:54So 40 days, understand is only 1 % of our patients. The vast majority are fasting between two weeks and four weeks. So it's 10 days or 14 days or 20 days. That's where the big bell curve is. You have a small number of people that need to fast longer than that. And you see this as a medical intervention. You don't see this as something that these people should be doing on a frequent monthly basis. You see this as a medical intervention for people with specific issues predominantly. I think that everybody should fast every day for 12 hours. I think that everybody, including healthy people, should at least consider fasting once a year for a week.

59:32And that anybody that has a condition where it's appropriate to fast should fast however long it takes to resolve the condition however frequently it takes to get well. So we do have some patients that we're fasting two or three times during a year because they can't fast long enough, the first fast to resolve the condition, but they don't have enough reserves to be able to do a longer fast. So we will do it periodically until the condition resolves. And what are the safety concerns with waterfosts? Yeah, well, the biggest and most obvious concerns are orthostatic hypotension. When people are used to having high blood pressure and you lower their pressure, their brains used to higher profusion levels.

1:00:12when you drop the pressure, they can get dizzy at first until they used to having normal blood pressure. And you don't want people falling over and fainting and breaking something or having a problem. Dehydration is an aromatic effect of fasting and it's an important part of stimulating healing crisis. But you also don't want to get somebody so depleted that they get into cardiac dysrhythmia or they have problems. And that's why we monitor people twice a day and we make sure that they maintain balance. You know, one of the things we did in Confasting Save Your Life is we laid out all the protocols of fasting.

1:00:44So a person could really understand What's going on in fasting? You know what the benefits are but we also wrote it so that their physicians would stop thinking They're crazy because they're interested in doing something like that because at first blush this sounds like kind of Crazy that you're gonna have a person do take nothing but water for a prolonged period of time and somehow that's gonna be a good thing But when you really look at the science and you look at the experience we've had, you found when it's done according to protocol, it is a safe and it can be an effective intervention in giving the body a chance to heal itself.

1:01:19What are the big misconceptions about fasting that you encounter consistently? Well, one thing is people think that you're going to become depleted because they don't understand the recycling capacity of the body when fasting is done properly, and that they're going to regained after fasting. So there's no beneficial reportioning of the body composition. And they're driven by the fear, and I think instinctive fear, that we're designed to be intimately concerned about getting enough to eat. Because in a natural setting, that's a constant biological imperative. You're always struggling. Try to get enough to eat.

1:01:57And because we live in a constant state of deprivation in a natural setting, the use of fasting was never anything other than a survival tool. Some adaption in the body could make only under force, not by choice. But it is interesting that every major religion, the Jews, the Jains, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Christians, the Buddhists all have a deep respect and tradition about fasting. There's a reason because it changes the way you feel about yourself and the world around you. It's so linked to spiritual traditions like meditation and clarity of mind and spiritual experiences. And I think because it is difficult to do that, you know, some of the benefits you mentioned earlier may be part of the, you know, part that are hard for us to quantify.

1:02:41Yeah. What is the most important thing we haven't talked about as it pertains to fasting that we should have talked about? We haven't talked about the different kinds of mechanisms which might be going on in fasting that sometimes people are interested. We've talked about weight loss, you know, that's kind of an obvious one. If you don't eat, you're going to lose weight. But there's also a natural retic effect. The body gets rid of the excess sodium accumulated in the body. And that has a profound effect because literally people will lose several pounds of fluid a day early on in fasting just because the body's been holding on to this in order to buffer the effect of sodium.

1:03:17Sodium, you think about it, you take a tablespoon of it, it's endimetic, it'll make you throw out. If you take enough of it, it'll kill you. It'll actually have, it was an LD50 with it. even though it's an essential nutrient in small amounts, an excess quantity, it's associated with hypertension, and not to mention obesity. And you might say, well, why would sodium, which has no calories, make people fat? And it's because sodium stimulates what's called passive overeating. So if you eat to your full of anything, say brown rice, you just eat to you reach your satiety, you don't want anymore. Everything else being equal, salt that rice up, and eat to your full, you'll eat more before you feel satisfied.

1:03:55People say, yeah, because it tastes better. But that's what tasting better means. It means it results in more dope means stimulation in the brain. So your brain is gonna get fooled with salt. And if you take some foods like, for example, bread, the staff of life, 1 ,500 carries a pound before you turn it into a butter -boat and spread coagulated cow pus all over it. And you remove the salt, oil, sugar, and yeast. What do you get? It's called maca and it's punishment on Passover. Nobody's getting fat eaten maca, but they're certainly having trouble with bread and bread -related products. And it's because the wheat and the water become a carrier agent for these chemicals.

1:04:31Take beef, boil it, and non -it. Do you like plain boiled beef? Not so much. It's a carrier agent for the sauces, the salt, the things that it's carrying to the palate. So we're using ultra -process foods as carrier agents for these chemicals. And that's why we're in trouble. 70 % of the carrier of the average person is ultra -process foods. And we haven't even talked about the chemicals and other things besides the salt, well, and sugar, the most of far as the other things that are thought to affect gut microbiome, et cetera. So the natural retic effect of fasting is a kind of rebooting effect that gets rid of the sodium.

1:05:04We haven't talked about detoxification. If you take a fat bobsie of human beings, what? A fat bobsie. A bobsie. You take a piece of fat or a piece of tissue and you analyze it. What you find is there's hundreds of different chemicals, PCB, B .B. Dioxin, pesticide ravages, heavy metals. In everybody, to varying degrees, people have different degrees of vulnerability to that. In fasting, the body rapidly mobilizes those materials and eliminates them. In fact, some people have said, oh, it's so, it's so, so efficiently, you shouldn't fast. The body doesn't know what it's doing, and it would put it out too quickly and it overloads your system.

1:05:37And so don't do it. But the reality is the body, this is a biological adaptation. It does a good job of mobilizing the materials and eliminating them. If you take that fat biopsy and you say, where did all those toxins come from? As much as 90 % of some of those toxins came from eating animal foods, which biologically concentrate those pollution in their environment. Then you eat the animal food, you get its entire lifetime of accumulation of toxins. So when you fast, you kick in the system, you use to get rid of that stuff. And every time you do it, it gets better. And so these are things that don't necessarily happen to the same degree with our juice fasting or on modified feeding regimes.

1:06:15We talked about the autonomic nervous system. This is the part of the nervous system that controls all the stuff you don't think about. Like for example, if you were to go out running and your heart didn't speed up, you would be in big trouble and potentially die. But it doesn't happen because your heart automatically speeds up and pumps more blood that you need. And that's controlled by the autonomic or automatic nervous system. It has two parts, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. They have to be in balance. And we've invented hundreds of healing systems to try to rebalance the autonomic nervous system.

1:06:50Massage by a feedback, homeopathy, chiropractic manipulation, osteopathic manipulation, acupuncture, relaxation, biofeedback. How do you think all these things make people feel better? At least to some degree, it's to the degree that help rebalance the autonomic nervous system. The most powerful way to rebalance the autonomic nervous system in my experience is fasting. fasting. Fasting is a profound impact on this autonomic sympathetic, per sympathetic balance. And I think one of the most profound effects, honestly, is effect on taste neuro -adaptation. As I mentioned, we did a study on how you taste things.

1:07:28And when you go on a fast, good foods start to taste good. When you first come off a conventional diet, this kind of food is disgusting, tasteless, schwil. People have no interest in it. They can't imagine how anybody could choke it down. What kind of food? Well, whole fruits, vegetables, simple foods without salt, oil, and sugar added to it. They just can't even imagine how anybody could eat that. But after fasting, whole plant foods start to taste good. And the longer you eat them, the better they taste. It gets to the point where you actually would prefer to eat whole plant foods rather than the salty, greasy, fatty processed foods that everybody else is eating.

1:08:03So these are big changes that occur in fasting that are not necessarily as easily objectified from a research standpoint, but have a profound difference on how people feel and how they live their lives. Yeah, I noticed that as well. When I was in the ketogenic diet, I noticed that the things that I would usually get cravings for, suddenly there was no cravings at all, and funnily enough, when you're talking about taste changing, when I was in a ketogenic diet, things tasted sweeter. And I don't mean, I actually don't mean, because I was really eating much sugar, It was actually some sugar -free drinks just tasted significantly sweeter.

1:08:38There were zero sugar drinks, but clearly because of some of the sweetness in there, I almost couldn't drink them. But when I came off the ketogenic diet and I started having carbohydrates again, those drinks didn't taste so sweet anymore. But it's your palate that changes. The ketogenic diet is a fasting, mimicking diet. It mimics some of the effects of fasting, not the least of which is changes in taste, what's called taste neurodotation or sensitivity. And it's not carbohydrates that desensitize you, it's refined carbohydrates. And so if you get people on a whole plant food diet, you know, fruits and vegetables, or whole simple foods, they maintain that acuity of taste.

1:09:13But as soon as you put them back on refined carbohydrates, the process carbohydrates, then they begin to go back into the dietary pleasure trap. Got you. This one change has transformed how my team and I move train and think about our bodies. When Dr. Daniel Lieberman came on the diereverse co, he explained how modern issues with their cushioning and support are making our feet weaker and less capable of doing what nature intended them to do. We've lost the natural strength and mobility in our feet and this is leading to issues like back pain and knee pain. I'd already purchased a pair of Viva barefoot shoes so I showed them to Daniel Lieberman and he told me that they were exactly the type of shoe that would help me restore natural foot movement and rebuild my strength but I think it was planter for shilters that I had where suddenly my feet started hurting all the time and after that I decided to start strength in my own foot by using the Vivo barefoot.

1:10:01And research from Liverpool University has backed this up. They've shown that wearing Vivo barefoot shoes for six months can increase foot strength by up to 60%. Visit vvobearfoot .com slash DOAC and use code diary 20 from my sponsor for 20 % off. A strong body starts with strong feet. And I guess what is the next step if someone is curious? What would you recommend they do? Well, we have a, I think, a really valuable free service for your viewers. And that's that if they go to our website and complete the registration forms in true northhelp .com, I offer a free phone conversation with them to tell them whether this might be something they should be considering and try to point them in the right direction.

1:10:46If they're really interested, they can read our book and fast and save your life. And it will tell you, Andrew, Dr., everything you need to know about what it takes to safely get into a fast, through a fast, and what the benefits of fasting are thought to be. I'll link all of that below for anybody that is curious and wants to learn more. And just as a sort of a disclaimer, if people are doing water fasting, they should seek medical advice and medical support. They should see a seek a consultation from someone who knows what they're doing before just trying to do this at home. They want to make sure they're a good candidate with history exam and lab.

1:11:25They want to make sure if they do fast, they're fasting in a restful state, staying hydrated properly, and that they refeed carefully, because it can be a serious problem if you don't do it properly. Is there a particular case study that comes to mind when you think about the power of fasting? And you talked a little bit about the lady that had lymphoma, which I read about in the British Medical Journal, and I think it was 2015 that it was published. I think even more powerful than individual case reports are these studies that we've done involving dozens, and in some cases, almost 200 people, and the consistency of the data.

1:11:58This works is the most effective treatment that's ever been shown in treating the leading cause of death and disability, which is high blood pressure in its consequences. If a person has essential hypertension and they fast long enough, they're going to normalize their blood pressure. And if they're willing to do dangerous and radical things like eat well, exercise, and get to bed on time, they can sustain those results. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is quite tricky when it, but it's interesting.

1:12:29It is, what is the biggest lie that you think is ruining most people's life? I think one of the biggest mistakes is that people think that health comes from pills, potions, powders, and treatments instead of healthful living. Health is the direct result of healthful living, And that means diet, sleep, exercise. But they're hard. Especially in the world we live in, where, you know, everything I see is trying to play with the neurotransmit chemicals in my brain, to get me to be addicted and to, well, people are trying to sell the pleasure trap. They're trying to tell you what you want to hear or not, what you need to know.

1:13:05What you want to hear is that there's a way to not do hard things, but still get good benefits. And what you need to know is how to do hard things so you can be successful. I think that's like the defining trait of the 21st century is like your ability to do what you know you should for long term benefits, not short term benefits. I think like delayed gratification is maybe the defining trait of the like the 21st century. I mean we've all heard of like the those cookie experiments they did on those kids to see which kids would take the cookie and which ones would wait for two cookies later. But I think the further in my life I've gone, the more I've realized that actually like every self -help book ever written could be one page And it could just say like delay gratification.

1:13:45Like do the thing that is in the best interest of long time you versus short time you. I think that there's three characteristics that everybody should aspire for. Whether it's a mate, whether it's an employee, or whether it's a friend. What you really are looking for is honesty, integrity, and intelligence. So honesty means they're going to tell the truth. integrity is they're going to do the right thing and intelligence means they're going to do things right. And that applies for ourselves, right? As well. And wouldn't we, honestly, have high integrity and be intelligent with your own decisioning?

1:14:26I think those are the characteristics that determine both success but more importantly happiness. The people that I meet that are happy have a high degrees of all three of those things. Some people are very intelligent, but they don't necessarily do the right thing. Some people are honest, but they'll tell the truth, but they won't necessarily tell the whole truth. So, you have to have all three, I think, to have a high degree of probability of success. And what do you work on at the moment? What's keeping you busy at this moment in time? We're in the process of getting ready to launch a major study.

1:15:02We're going to enroll between two and three thousand people for the rest of their life, and we're going to track them and try to see if we can avoid the average 16 years of the ability that greet people at the end of their life. We believe with diet, sleep, exercise, and periodic fasting, we can avoid the ability that's so common and that make the last 20 years of people's lives the best years of their life instead of the worst. You know, you said at your clinic, you 1 % of patients do the 40 -day fast. What, who are those patients? What are they suffering with? What are they struggling with? Because that's pretty extreme.

1:15:39One woman was a dentist who had had a traumatic brain injury, secondary to getting hit by a pole, an outdoor pole at a, ironically enough, a continuing education conference. And she developed a headache and she had had constant daily head pain from eight to ten every minute of every day for 16 years. And she came in and fasted for 41 days during which time she resolved to a large extent or headaches. She refed, she had some pro -dromal symptoms, minor symptoms, and then did a second, 40 -day fast six months later, and now it's been 12 years she has no headaches. So in her case, she was motivated by like a lot of our patients paying the ability and fear of death, and they were willing to do anything in order to be able to get well including, you know, a long period of fasting.

1:16:23So the people that fast a long time, oftentimes are very motivated individuals, mostly motivated by physical health goals, not always. Some people are doing fasting for spiritual or other types of practices. But most of the people we have are just people that have not been successful resolving their conditions with diet and lifestyle change, with medications and drugs. They say that it should be the true North Health Center, the last resort. One of my colleagues, may he rest in peace, John McDougall, used to say we were the punishment. And if he had a patient that he would do the dietary changes with it, but it wasn't successful, it fully resolving the problem, he would apologize to them and say, I'm so sorry, but you need to go to Goldhammers place.

1:17:06Good luck to you. Because he thought that was one of the more difficult things that people were ever asked to do. I think it is the most difficult thing you ask people to do, not the fasting. That's not that difficult. What's difficult is to go back and live in a world designed to make you fat, sick, and miserable, and try to live healthfully and live with integrity, and deal with the social outflux of being successful. As I said, a lot of times the people that I see that have the easiest time are the ones that aren't necessarily the most sociable kind of people. Thank you so much for the work that you do, because it's fascinating and you're providing another old time -as -you -of -treatment to people who who are very often out of choice.

1:17:45Before I came here today, my wife said, don't be nervous to talk to him because it's just like, you know, I speak a hundred times a year to 50 to 100 people. And I said, yeah Jennifer, it's just like talking to 50 to 100 people except doing it every day for 400 years. Thanks for getting the word out. Well, my audience opened mind at Desmarth, the savvy that curious, I hope as well. And also, it's really fascinating. And I think, when we think about these longer fasts, we often focus on the physiological changes that are going to take place, like we talked about, the glycogen reserves being depleted and the ketone bodies, all these things, and the Beth and my Mahidra, you to rate, whatever that big word was.

1:18:30But I actually think there's really an appreciated part of all of this is the psychological change that takes place when you realize that you can accomplish something. But also, as you said, when you're, You sort of rebalance and reset your dopamine levels. And when you change your taste adapts to the fasted state and how that can act as an intervention, a psychological and physiological intervention, just to reset you a little bit. Every year, I do ketosis at least once, maybe sometimes twice or three times. I have a ketogenic diet. And it is, it's like a tremendous reset of my habits. It's like resets my habits.

1:19:10It resets my urges, my cravings. So think about when a patient goes to a medical doctor and they say, oh, I've high blood pressure and they say, listen, we promise you, if you do exactly what we tell you, we guarantee you, you'll never get well. You'll be sick the rest of your life and you'll be on these drugs forever. And there's not a one I've had so far that that turns out to be true for. It changes their entire paradigm. when they get overcome the problem that supposedly is helpless and hopeless and nothing can be done, changes their, it changes their view of reality. Of course, I mean, what you're speaking to there is learned helplessness where if someone tells you there's nothing you can do, then you do fall into, I mean, the studies show this, you fall into a state of learned helplessness where you actually stop trying to help yourself and you submit, I was reading, I was actually reading a study of the day about rats who, who fell into a state of learned helplessness because they won't even, They wouldn't even try it.

1:20:05Yeah. Well, that's a really good example. Yeah. The same happens with humans. If someone tells you something, something can't change, you'll start your fucked. When you're ready to have a life -changing experience, we love you to be our guest. You have to come. Come to the center, do a bit of a fast. I'm telling you, you're a great candidate. You'll have a intense, but positive experience. Okay. And we'll make sure that if you walk in, you walk out. Okay. That's a prerequisite of my visit. Thank you so much, Dr. Corbin. Keep doing what you're doing. Thank you. Thank you. Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself.

1:20:37I'm inviting 10 ,000 of you to come even deeper into the Diary of Aseo. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my pad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never released. We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've never, ever released. and so much more. In the circle you'll have direct access to me, you can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview and the types of conversations you would love us to have.

1:21:12But remember for now we're only inviting the first 10 ,000 people that joined before it closes. So if you want to join our private close community, head to the link in the description below or go to D -O -A -C circle dot com. I will speak to you then.

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