Use This Diet to Target Cancer at Its Roots & Slow Cellular Aging - With Dr. Valter Longo

28:25Shawn Stevenson:It's just like, it's a system that's built in. That system can become dysfunctional. And as you talk about primary driver aging, we start to have immunosenescence, right? And so, but there are certain things that we can do to slow down the aging process, slow down the progression of even immunosenescence, to keep our immune system doing the job that it's supposed to do longer. And so my question for you is, would the longevity diet, because that's your other kind of primary focus, would that be, would it be accurate to say that this is also a potential benefit in reducing the risk of cancer? More focus, specifically my question is, with prevention, the longevity diet, or would this be something where we can proactively utilize a fasting mimicking diet to increase our longevity i think both right so the longevity diet is really the um at least the the fasting mimicking diet is part of the longevity diet but but the the usually we think about the longevity diet is that every day what do you do every day right so what kind of food do you eat every day and and and so you know as similarity to the mediterranean diet similar to the okinawan diet similarity to the Loma Linda diets and so you know mostly plant-based pescetarian low but sufficient protein etc etc so yeah so both clearly affect the aging process or certainly aging markers and so for example for the fasting mimicking diet we showed we did three cycles and and we showed that biological age in two different clinical trials was reduced by about two and a half years, right?

30:11And so, but in that trial, at least in one of the two trials, we also looked, we wanted to just not only include biological age because it's based on measurement of markers that, you know, some people can agree, some people can disagree that those are measuring aging. So we also measure fatty liver and we measure, you know, of fat in the liver, and then we measure what's called the lymphoid myeloid ratio, which is one of the ways to measure immunosenescence, which you just mentioned, right? And so fat in the liver was clearly reduced, right? And this was done by MRIs, right? So we wanted things that are hard to argue with.

30:52Is this going to make you longer lived? Yes, probably, right? So if you're accumulating fat in the liver, not good. And so it's good to begin to reverse that. And there was pretty strong effect, actually, in fatty liver in the patient in the trial after FMD cycles. And then the lymphoid myeloid ratio. So eventually, humans have more myeloid cells in the blood and less lymphoid, like lymphocytes, right? The T cells, the B cells. It is a ratio. And so three cycles of the fasting-making diet reestablish or certainly reduce this age-dependent increase in this, you know, unbalance of myeloid cells and lymphoid cells, right?

31:38So, yeah. So then together with the biological age changes, we also showing that, you know, the blood is becoming younger and the liver, if you will, at least is becoming less fat and it's probably also something that younger people, you know, don't have, you know, the fat accumulation, right? So, yeah, I think that FMD is definitely contributing to lots of things that make it easier for the body potentially to prevent cancer. And the longevity diet, I think it's the same. It's just that we haven't tested it yet on biological age and on those markers, right? So, you know, we don't have a, we have, we don't yet have data.

32:27We're finishing trials, big trials right now with the longevity diet. So we'll see. But, but I think that, you know, the FMD for sure. Great.

32:36Shawn Stevenson:Thank you for sharing that. Longevity isn't just going to come to us. We've got to walk towards it. And walking is the key word in the sentiment. According to a study published in the journal PLOS Medicine, walking for just 11 minutes a day is enough to extend your lifespan by two years. Let me get that. 11 minutes, two years? Yes, please. While research from Australia's University of Sydney shows that swapping one hour of sitting for an hour of walking daily can slash your risk of premature death by about 14%. That could mean roughly nine additional years of life. How sway? Well, a big part of this has been affirmed by research that was published by the American Heart Foundation, noting that walking for an average of 30 minutes or more per day can lower the risk of heart disease and stroke by 35 percent and lower the risk of type 2 diabetes by 40 percent.

33:30Shawn Stevenson:The researchers called it a wonder drug. If they were selling this and getting these kind of results, it'd be the biggest blockbuster drug of all time. And it's unlocked by simply walking. and what's at the foundation of this is that it's improving our insulin sensitivity. It's helping one of the most important aspects of life and durability. It is triggering the creation of more mitochondria, the energy power plants of our cells that is utilized and unlocked when we are actually using our muscles. The list goes on and on and on. Now, what if we are able to not just get all this value from walking, but habit stack, habit stack that bad boy and help to get some rehabilitation to one of the most important aspects of human function and performance, which is our feet.

34:18Shawn Stevenson:When it comes to walking and human performance, our movement truly is built from the ground up. And each of your feet has 26 bones, 33 joints, 19 muscles, 107 ligaments, and each foot has over 200 ,000 nerve endings that are all there for collecting data about your movement. And we're muting all of this intelligence with these crazy iterations of boxed up shoes that are scrunching our toes together and muting again, muting this intelligence in our movement and our performance. And so for rehab and prehab for my feet and for my performance, one of my favorite things to do is not just to go walk, but it's to go walking wearing my Palovas.

35:00Shawn Stevenson:Paluvas have an incredible stylish design with a wide toe box and science-backed five-toe functionality. And right now, you're going to get 10 % off of your new pair of Paluvas when you go to Paluva.com forward slash model. Just use the code model at checkout for 10 % off. Again, that's Paluva.com forward slash model, P-E-L-U-V-A.com forward slash model to take advantage. They are up-leveling things in a big way. You're going to notice how you're moving better, how you're feeling better, and how your performance is elevated once you start wearing and walking in your Paloovas. And by the way, they've also got some new court shoes for pickleball and things like that.

35:43Shawn Stevenson:They've got their golf shoes as well. They've got designs for hiking. The list goes on and on. If you want to live an active life, definitely check out paloova.com forward slash model to show your feet some love. And now back to the show. This brings us to a really important point in the conversation about real health span versus longevity with frailty. Right. And I said this statement years ago. Many of my colleagues have shared this sentiment as well and shared it since. But one of the things that I kind of just hit me one day, I was actually doing the show and, you know, we argue about humans are living longer now, but we're not necessarily living longer.

36:23Shawn Stevenson:or we're dying longer. We are extending suffering. We're extending the amount of time that you can kind of stick around in managing symptoms. What we really want is an extended health span to where we can have high quality of life and to enjoy those longer years. And so this is another really important part of your work and also figuring this out for yourself and your unique N of one because you talk about like really catering things and this is what you and your team do, catering things for the individual, right? And so it's finding that balance, you know, with maintaining our muscle mass, which I wanna circle back and talk about the GLP ones a little bit as well, but also being able to, of course, have the disease prevention and also the importance of, well, let's talk about this first, the joy in what you're doing and something that's sustainable, right?

37:20Shawn Stevenson:Because that's one of the things, again, And you see, you publish this mouse study and you're like, this is going to change everything. Like people are going to, and nobody wants to participate, you know? And you talked early in the book, there was a story about grappa. Is it grappa? The drink? Grappa. Grappa. Grappa. You talk about that. And somebody had kind of shared this story at a conference. And let's talk about that story first. Yeah, yeah. So somebody, I was at a conference in, I think it was in Trentino. in the eastern part of Italy. And somebody got up and the audience said, you know, there was this lady and she was 98 or whatever, and she used to eat grappa, this very hard liquor, you know, every morning, right?

38:11And then eventually the doctor in the clinic that she was living in said, no, stop. I can no longer have grappa. And then she dies right after that. And so everybody started laughing. And then I said, you know what? There's no way I would have taken the grappa away from her. She was like 102 or something like that. And why would they possibly get the grappa away from this lady? And so I think, yeah, you have to, you have to. so of course if somebody was much younger and it was drinking three or four a day probably say uh yeah stop but in this case um you know she enjoyed this so much and i'm assuming that to to her was just hell to to not be able to do that every morning and i have another story this gentleman, 104 years of age, right, down in southern Italy.

39:14And so he's always, we go to the house and to talk to him. And we're like, well, when did he go out last time? Oh, we don't let him out, right? That's what they were saying. And I say, why? I said, oh, he's 104. You can't. I said, look, you know, he's 104, let him just live, right? And so, you know, a couple hours later, he was in the square, like with his hat on, he was so happy, right? And he lived for another, however many years. So, yeah, so I think that, you know, first you have to be happy, right? And this is why at the foundation clinics, we like to sort of start with that, right? What will make your life not happy, right?

39:58And so, and that includes the fasting we're making that. So lots of people, maybe half of the people that come to the foundation clinic will do the fasting-making diet, then half of them won't do it, right? But you got to do something. You can't just say, I don't want to make any changes. I don't want to do any of this. So I think that our job is to get people to slowly embrace lots of different things that eventually are, you know, the longevity diet, the fasting-making diet, 12-hour time restricting eating, right? Eat within 12 hours, sleep for eight hours. You know, you, you've written a book on that.

40:35So yeah, so all of those things, we try to get people to do and, and hey, you know, we published a study a few years ago that we always, I always wanted to do it, right? So let's just give mice the worst, the most terrible diet that you can imagine. Like high fat, high processed food, high sugar, it's just as bad as it gets. And so the mice become huge. And then we said, okay, what if you give them, so I'm thinking of the people that don't want to change, right? Then I said, what if you give them five days of a fasting-making diet only once a month? And we thought, it's probably going to make it a little bit better, right?

41:15But five days, what can five days get? 26 days a month of terrible diet. Sure enough, perfect, right? And not only do we measure cholesterol, we measure glucose levels and a lot of acute measurements, we measure lifespan and they restore the normal lifespan. And we measure heart function and heart ability to recover from damage, restore, restore. So five days a month of the FMD, of the fasting-mimicking diet, we're completely, at least in mice, reversing all of the problems caused by this really terrible diet. So yeah, so I think that this is what we're moving towards. Instead of saying, well, it's either this or that, right, or drugs, right?

42:08It's either you're going to be obese and sick, or you're going to take drugs, or you're going to have to change your life. So yeah, we need to start coming up with reasonable lifestyle interventions. Like, for example, now we finish in Calabria, the five-day FMD once every three months, right? So now it becomes even more reasonable for people to say, okay, every three months I do five days. Yeah. So much easier than once a month, let's say, right? What we did for the mice. So let's see, we haven't analyzed the data yet, but, you know, soon enough we'll have that data.

42:44Shawn Stevenson:Yeah. Our bodies are resilient. Like our bodies know what to do if we create the right conditions. And part of the conditions, again, are joy and also what works for you right now where you are, you know, let alone let's step outside of the realm of cancer, but just in our day-to-day lives. Another story that you shared was Emma Morano as well. And she was over a hundred years old and she loved her red meat. And she had a journalist tell her like, you're gonna die if you have red meat. You're gonna get cancer. You're gonna get cancer. And so she told her doctor, she was like, I've gotta stop having this.

43:19Shawn Stevenson:He's just like, listen, you made it this far, you're healthy, just continue to enjoy. But also again, the overall lifestyle as well matters so much. Eating a lot of different plant foods, even with the alcohol component, that example with the drapa is, this is something humans have been consuming forever. All right, even if on accident, the ethanol that might, and foods that have quote gone bad. And so being able to concentrate that and get this psychoactive effect is a whole other story in the degree at which people do it. But we do have data affirming like red wine, improving the microbiome, right?

43:58Shawn Stevenson:Or, but again, small amounts and reducing cardiovascular risk, but it might increase the risk of this thing. And it's just kind of like, again, where's the trade-off? We don't think about that in terms of our conventional treatments, because a lot of our conventional treatments were trading off diseases. for years it was well established that radiation specifically on the breast the left side in particular increased the risk of heart disease because we're doing this radiation right at the spot of your heart now of course uh we have new innovations that have kind of made it less but still there there's still an imbalance there with the side versus the other side but it was just trading off diseases like we'll cure you of this thing but we're going to contribute to causing another thing.

44:41Shawn Stevenson:And then playing this kind of, you know, Russian roulette of medications and treatments and missing out on number one, and most importantly, what are the conditions that are causing this disease in the first place? Let's address these things, help to remove the cause. And it's not about being perfect, but it's about finding what's perfect for you. And what you're doing is you're sharing with people what some of those ingredients are. And so to circle back and talk about this, the GLP-1 phenomenon and looking at the influence of, you know, our, our modern lifestyle with insulin resistance and obesity.

45:21Shawn Stevenson:Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between insulin resistance and cancer? Because one of the things I picked up, And again, this is probably people have heard this before, but certain types of foods do preferentially like cancer enjoys a lot more than other types of foods. So talk about the relationship between insulin resistance and cancer. Yeah. So we, you know, we've been working on cancer for a long time and both human cancers and mouse cancers. Right. and and if you think of about two things that the cancer almost all of them love is either sugar or growth factors insulin like growth factor one right igf1 insulin could be the third i'd say but almost all cancers would like one of these three insulin insulin like growth factor one igf1 or sugar.

46:22But not all cancers are highly dependent on sugar. We see some cancers that don't care that much, but most cancers, they care a lot, right? So yeah, if you have insulin resistance, then you most likely have hyperglycemia. So meaning that you have higher levels of glucose in the blood, and that's really favorable to cancer cells, right? So a lot of cancer cells have lost the ability to utilize mitochondria properly. So they like to cycle through what's called glycolysis. So they like to just use sugar as a quick source of energy. And not just energy, because now they're also using glycolysis to produce a lot of other, you know, component of, you know, DNA and proteins.

47:13So, yeah, so I think that the cancer just are dependent on a few things primarily, but they like lots of things, right? So, for example, we published on hormone therapy in breast cancer, and the cancer in that case liked leptin, IGF-1, and insulin, right? So if we took, if we replace any of these, the cancer started growing again. So we use fasting, mimicking diet, but then if we either give them back IGF-1 or leptin or insulin, then the cancer started growing again. And this is also why it's so important to have what we call like a wild card type of intervention, like a fasting, mimicking diet.

48:05Because between two cancers of the same type, you could have differences in what the cancer depends on, right? So imagine now needing a different cocktail of drugs for each cancer and even the same cancers, right? So you need the wild card. And the wild card that we think is fasting mimicking diet, just making it more difficult for the great majority of cancers in those five days to stay alive. And so you really wipe out lots and lots of different cancer cells or the majority of cancer cells. And, you know, but of course, it has to be done in combination with whatever drug or cocktail or drugs is effective for that particular cancer.

48:46In this case of breast cancer, it was, you know, Fulvestrant with estrogen blocking drug and then Palbosically, which is a CDK4-6 inhibitor. So it's going after the cancer cell division, cell proliferation process, right? So these two drugs, plus the fasting-making diet, now you start seeing cancer regression. Instead of cancer staying flat and then eventually start growing, cancer started going down, down, down, down until you start seeing the masses disappear. So this is mice. Well, we also did this in a clinical trial with women. And lots of women did, you know, very well, but there was not power to look at efficacy between the fasting-making diet and not.

49:39We actually put together 11 of the best hospitals in the world to do that, and we never got funded so far, right? So it was MD Anderson, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic. So, you know, a lot of the top hospitals and unfortunately the reviewers that are very much drug oriented did not think even these 11 top hospitals together, you know, had the right to do a trial and something so, so important. Yeah.

50:17Shawn Stevenson:You shared that, and this is the truth, each cancer has a molecular weakness. And so being able to exploit that and using this as a complement and just to circle back with the obesity and insulin resistance in the book, you share how these are modern conditions arising from normal states evolved to survive long winters or periods of starvation. Our bodies are now, even though we have the same genes, we're in these conditions to where the starvation never comes. The long winters never come. The fasting never comes. And so we're in constant consumption and our bodies are just doing what they have evolved to do, which is to store lots of fat, store lots of energy and to stock up for when that winter comes, but it never comes.

51:04Shawn Stevenson:And so coming in with an intervention, like for example, with the GLP-1 to address this, to get us to ramp down on that consumption is obviously something that can be helpful. However, we might be missing out on the fact of like, what is this actually doing from the level of our metabolism, our metabolic health, and slowing it down? Because you also talk about this phenomenon of the thrifty genes. Like our bodies, once we hit a certain spot, if we start to aggressively pull away calories, something else is gonna kick in to fight back. Talk about that a little bit. yeah so the the point is a lot of times you hear people saying fasting is good right and and these uh statements and and i always say fasting is good bad and neutral right because it depends how long for whom how frequently etc etc and and also what type you do fast what are only fasting or a fasting mimicking diet so so yeah so if you go too long uh so there are clinics that keep people um you know for weeks and weeks right so and i've looked at some of the data and at least in some cases the data look like if you go for a long fast you're lose a lot of weight but then if you look at the people the year after they're back at their weight their preview their baseline weight right so they regained all the weight back uh and so the the I think it was the label lab at Columbia, had shown, and this was a New England Journal of Medicine paper, had shown that if you severely restrict humans for long enough, they'll go into some type of a low energy expenditure modality.

52:50Why? Because they're scared of running out of food. I mean, like you said, with the result of billions of years of evolution, So if the organism senses low availability of calories for long periods, it might start going into epigenetic reprogramming, meaning it's starting to control long term how we use energy, right? So in their control, maybe I don't want to use it. I want to keep as much as possible. Now you got a problem, right? This is where you hear people saying, I'm not eating anything, and I just can't. I don't know what's going on, right? So they'll probably enter this low energy expenditure mode, and that could potentially last years.

53:34So we know this very well from calorie restriction studies also, right? So the studies in calorie restriction, they will show adjusted per body weight. Now, after you've lost weight because of chronic calorie restriction, the body is consuming less than expected, even if you adjust it for the lower body weight. So yeah, so you don't want to enter that, right? So you want to, like you were saying earlier, you want to get out of the summer mode where you're storing energy because you get a lot of energy available, but you don't want to enter it in the long winter mode. You don't want to enter hibernation.

54:09If you enter hibernation, you got a problem, right? Because now the body, and you might feel tired, right? You're hibernating, right? You might feel tired. I don't know why I'm tired. I don't know why I'm hungry all the time. Well, exactly, right? The body is trying to protect you from death. And, you know, so interestingly, the mother medicine doesn't look at it like this is, you know, yeah, to believe me for this, I mean, this is textbook stuff, right? And yet it almost has no place in medicine whatsoever. Let's just give you GLP-1, insulin, you know, metformin. So I think that, yeah, I think that we need to change the way, I mean, there's gotta be a lot more science into medicine and if we don't do it, AI will do it for us, right?

55:01So, so yeah, we need to, you know, almost as soon as possible. So, you know, again, this is what we do in our, in our clinic, you know, your physicians, molecular biologists, nutritionists, sleep experts, you know, psychologists. yeah that's a way to do it and uh and that works you know and and uh but also the the biologist there or the molecular biologist has to know about the bear or the emperor penguins in the south pole and why do they gain weight and when do they lose weight and and and lots of things that you know from from all kinds of pillars right it's a completely new you know way of viewing it um And that's why you cannot just have the physician alone do it.

55:43And you can ask the physician working with us, right? They'll say, yeah, if I didn't have the molecular biologist telling me about all these things, I wouldn't even think about it, right? So I think that, yeah, so that's what's needed. And we need universities to start training this personnel because it's not existing, right? So now you have the dietitian, but the dietitian, they're great, but they may get a couple of years. You know, they may have an undergraduate degree and then a couple of years of training master, you know, whereas the doctor now does four plus four plus four. So it's a lot of training.

56:17So we need that kind of training, right, for for specialists that can can solve the problem. Yeah.

56:23Shawn Stevenson:And also training specifically in how do you support treatment, you know, and also affirming like the science that you're teaching and the fasting mimicking diet. what if that was taught to dietitians to complement treatment with physicians? You know, like again, it's not just the education, it's what people are being taught as well. So it's not receiving it alone. It's also, thank goodness, we're actually changing what physicians are being taught, what dietitians are being taught. And, you know, it's so crazy, you know, as we sit here today, that according to the BMJ, the average American's diet, adult diet is like over 60 % ultra processed foods.

57:04Shawn Stevenson:And a lot of that, I took a nutritional science class in college as well, big auditorium, classroom and all this stuff. And it was really one of the hallmarks was low fat diet, low fat diet without context of the quality. And so marketing was used for low fat. If it had low fat on it, I was eating it. You know what I mean? And so it's like having context with these things because obviously fat is very important, especially in the fasting mimicking diet, but where are the fat sources coming from? And so there's an abundance of really great plant fat. So can you talk about some of your favorite foods that might cross over with the fasting mimicking diet, but also just these longevity foods as well?

57:45Shawn Stevenson:Like what are some of those foods for us to focus on? Yeah, and that was the idea of the fasting mimicking diet, right? So I could have made it with really unhealthy ingredients, just match the need, right? So I could have made it with lard and a lot of, you know, animal fat. But the decision back 20 years ago was, let me, I sort of anticipated that eventually people will do it for aging and not just cancer. And so the idea was, let's just make it as healthy as possible, right? So let's give five days, let's give people the opportunity to have very healthy food for five days. And so, you know, so nuts and olive oil and vegetables and whole grains or at least grains.

58:33There is also some starches in there. We also wanted to make sure that people finished it and it was okay to eat, right? It was pleasant enough so that people could eat it. Yeah, so you don't get everything you want, but I think we got most of the things we wanted. And that was a very good idea, right? So now Stanford just published, and I was mentioning to you earlier, published on Crohn's disease and University of Miami published on colitis disease. And so these FMDs are making drugs work better or a lot better. You know, Crohn's, I mean, the Stanford study was really remarkable, the effect of just three cycles of the FMD in regression and even remission from the disease, right?

59:28At least temporary remission. Yeah, so I think that it was a good idea to, and I imagine, and this we showed for mice, we have never shown it for people. But when we did the mouse study for inflammatory bowel disease, we either used water-only fasting or the fasting-mikin diet. And the water-only fasting only had about half of the effect of the fasting-mikin diet. And we were surprised. So then we dug into it and realized this was because the fasting-mikin diet contained a lot of prebiotic ingredients. It was feeding lactobacillus, bifidobacteria, and other protective microbes that then were helping the gut reverse the autoimmune disease.

1:00:16So yeah, so I think that lots of data from, I mean, I was happy to see, so we do a lot collaboration with Harvard School of Public Health. But when I designed the longevity diet, I was just looking at everything, right? And in five pillars, right? So, you know, clinical trials, epidemiological data, mouse data, centenarian data, you know, complex system. But then I was very happy in the last however many years to see Harvard and my longevity and also these Norwegian big studies converging on the same ingredients, right? You could argue about it. There's like a few, the fruit is the only one that we're a little bit arguing.

1:01:04I think my data and my longevity diet in the Norwegian data is suggesting normal levels of fruit and Harvard is suggesting high levels of fruit, more like fruits and vegetable of the Mediterranean diet. But yeah, so it's legumes, number one, or very close to it, whole grains up there, nuts, and then, of course, low red meat, low processed meat consumption or very low or absence of consumption of those. Yeah, so those are a common denominator, meaning they seem to be very solid and I think everybody should move in that direction. Now, another thing that most people are ignoring is that, you know, you can have tomatoes and tomatoes for a lot of people cause inflammatory responses.

1:02:02Right. So we should also be very careful in going back to what we were saying earlier about personalization. So you can have a brother and a sister or two brothers and one is going to be on this longevity diet and eating lots of tomatoes. and the other one uh cannot eat tomatoes at all right so then this could even be in twins they can even be twins absolutely right yeah because maybe one twin took antibiotics took some drugs and and and that just disrupted the the microbiota and now they find themselves in the completely different responses to something like tomato or nice shades or or lots of different things, you know?

1:02:43So, yeah. So I think that, that the ingredients are those, the, and, and they are for the fasting making diet and the, for the longevity diet, but, uh, but be careful because, um, you know, there's lots of these autoimmunities, uh, probably. So we know this very well for celiac disease, right. And gluten. And, and so I, I think there was a very important, you know, discovery decades ago about gluten causing autoimmunity, because it basically said, it's not like you heard because, you know, the medical community will say, yeah, come on, it cannot be food, but it was food, right? And so, and I think it's important to think if it was, if it caused celiac disease, if gluten causes celiac, then lots of other ingredients, maybe combination of ingredients, may cause lots of other autoimmunity, autoimmunity, right?

1:03:38So this is why it's so important to pay attention to, you know, is this ingredient triggering an inflammatory response in me?

1:03:48Shawn Stevenson:Yeah. So amazing. So in the book, you have sections dedicated to some of the most pervasive cancers as well. So fasting, nutrition, and breast cancer, fasting, nutrition, and prostate cancer, fasting, nutrition, colorectal cancer, the list goes on and on. And so you're specifically addressing these different issues and how it all relates to nutrition and the fasting mimicking diet and the potential benefit. So this is a great resource for us to share with our friends and family members and for us to get educated as well, because, you know, it's it's it's not just impacting the lives of the individuals, but it's impacting the lives of families and communities.

1:04:30Shawn Stevenson:And we have solutions and it's going to take an integrative approach. is going to take more communication it's going to take leaders like yourself to you know to to to study this and to to run this stuff in your lab and to get this out into the world and you've provided that in so many different ways of course the new book is fasting cancer which is available everywhere books are sold but also you have the new documentary can you talk a little bit about the documentary the documentary is called fasting and the longevity revolution and um and uh you can watch it streaming. And the documentary, the director and the producers, I think did a great job basically taking several of my books or lots of my books and put it into an hour and a half.

1:05:20And of course, the books are not about only my research. They're about research of lots of lots of uh different scientists around the world and you know and so i've dedicated almost 40 years now i started working on aging now 40 years ago um in in texas and so i i think it's about like this 40 years journey in collaborating and with so many great scientists and and and so bringing all of that to uh people in an hour and a half right that's that's a documentary um and trying to i push him very hard to make make sure it was i was i was part of lots of documentaries and a lot of times it's just it's stories right oh you know this patient did this and that patient did did did that and i always felt um as a scientist and somebody that runs a lot of clinical trials that's not good you know um you know you can have the story but then it's got to be followed by multiple clinical trials, right?

1:06:20And so that was very important. It was not easy to convince everybody to do it, but I think they were convinced that, yes, it's not as entertaining talking about clinical trials as - It's entertaining to me. I love that stuff. Yeah, right. But not to most people. But I think it was important, right? So yeah, this is not our opinion. It's not a story about a doctor having his diabetes reversed by the fasting-micking diet. Then there was six clinical trials done, all confirming what we just showed you. Same thing for cancer, same thing for lots of other diseases. And by the way, I think there's like 20 oncologists or something like that, I forget how many, that read every chapter that their name is on.

1:07:08So MD Anderson, USC, Norris Cancer Center, and lots of great cancer centers. So it was very important for me to run it through them, by them and have them come back sometimes and say, no, no, no, no, no. You know, what if it was the chemo they did? What if it's not the fasting? What if, yeah. So I think every time they spoke up about it, I made, I went back and made that correction and said, okay, yeah, it is possible that in this particular case, it might have been, I mean, you know, the mouse data, of course, is very strong, but in the case of patient, um you know i i try to say i try to be very um very much based on data and my enthusiasm based on basic research so so there is enthusiasm there but and there's of course the idea that you know hey if you don't have other options you got to talk to your oncologist about it right if you get to the point where your oncologist says i'm sorry i don't think you know we got anything else.

1:08:09So, so that, that's definitely a time where, you know, you want to push, you gotta, you know, get the team together, right? Because that's your life. And so, yeah, so that was very important without false promises, but say, hey, people, we've seen, like, I talk in the book about, you know, the, the National Cancer Institute in Milan, the Italian National Cancer Institute. And when I first presented this, this many years ago, I remember they're very skeptical, right? the room, you know, is the leading oncology place in Italy, right? And they were very skeptical. And then three years ago, they published a study where they had, I think, it was 100 patients that underwent the fasting-mimicking diet, many cycles.

1:08:51But out of the 100 patients, I think there were like 20 with metastatic cancer. And out of the 25, in a very, you know, unexpected way, went into remission, right? By a combination of fasting, making diet and immunotherapy, FMD and, and chemotherapy. And they were so surprised that they published this in a leading journal, because yeah, you could get one case, you know, some stage four patient going into remission, but getting five cases in the same trial, they thought, this is not usual, right? So yeah, so it doesn't conclude anything, but, but it certainly says, Hey, if five out of 20 went into remission, even in a stage four, it is possible, right?

1:09:32So, so yeah. So keep that in mind and, and, and if you need to use it, yeah.

1:09:38Shawn Stevenson:And so if you want to see the film, everybody can go to fastingandthelongevityrevolution.com. So that's the name of the film, fastingandthelongevityrevolution.com. And you can stream the entire documentary. I encourage you to watch this with friends and family members as I did. And I just appreciate you to put all this together. I know it's been a lot of work, but also for real, it's a, it's a labor of love for you. You really love what you do and it comes through in the way that you do it. And for me, it was just a joy to see all these incredible cultures around the world and to see what's possible.

1:10:13Shawn Stevenson:You know, there was a guy, I think he was like 95 or something. He was like going to get in his car and like swerving around. He was He was 100 years old. Yeah, that guy was 100 years old. And his car had like, it had an ass to it. It was a sizable vehicle. He was swerving around. But also, it wasn't like he looked frail. He was strong. He was sharp. And he was just living his life. And so to have these examples of what's possible, especially in a culture where we're bombarded with messages of the other. And I just really appreciate it. And also, I just appreciate you for coming to hang out with us today.

1:10:47Shawn Stevenson:This is a true blessing. Yeah, and I appreciate you and your podcast. Great, great. Thank you. So again, Fasting Cancer, everywhere the books are sold. Check out FastingAndTheLongevityRevolution.com for the new documentary. Thank you again, the one and only Dr. Walter Longo, everybody. Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. This is something else to add to your superhero utility belt and also to share with your friends and family for true science-backed support for disease prevention, but also disease treatment.

1:11:23Shawn Stevenson:In particular, in this rampant area of accelerating cancer rates, still to this day, we found treatments to help slow the progression of many other diseases, but cancer is still on the rise and we can do something about this. And so this education is more important than ever. And of course, checking out the resources from this episode, enjoying Dr. Longo's amazing documentary. By the way, it was narrated by Edward Norton, okay? AKA the Incredible Hulk, all right? So, but you know, that's the more the Marvel big budget, whatever. He's got a lot of great like independent and classic films, The Italian Job.

1:12:07Shawn Stevenson:Shout out to The Italian Job. But he's really been about that life when it comes to his health and wellness for a long time and putting his time and energy behind this mission was something that was very meaningful for him. And I was truly blessed to be there for the screening of this film. And, you know, all the contributors were there, the director and, you know, Edward Norton was there. And, you know, to, again, further this message and to create a resource because we have a very visual culture, right? So sometimes it's seeing a documentary, but this documentary is unique in that it's spending a lot of time in the lab, in lab data, plus all the stories and the amazing examples of longevity displayed, but it's really focusing on the science.

1:12:52Shawn Stevenson:And of course, his new book is available everywhere that books are sold, Fast and Cancer. And again, we just want to equip ourselves, stack conditions in our favor so that we can be as healthy as we can possibly be for our friends, our families, and our community. We've got some epic masterclasses coming very soon. We're knocking on the door of 1 ,000 episodes. Be ready. We've got some special things in store. And I appreciate you so much for being on this journey with me. We're just getting warmed up. Take care. Have an amazing day. And I'll talk with you soon.