I Supervised 25,000 Fasts... How 72 Hours Without Food Is Linked To Cancer

You have supervised over 25,000 prolonged fasts. What's been the biggest transformation that you've seen?

In this particular study was males and they fast an average of 2 weeks. They lost 10% of their body weight but 20% of their total fat and 40% of their total visceral fat. They also lost 6% of their lean tissue. But at 6 week follow-up, 100% of the lean tissue had recovered, but the fat loss continued.

And so it's the same dopamine that leads to alcoholism, cocaine addiction. It also is a problem with the ultra-processed chemicals in food, salt, oil, and sugar. It's amazing how many problems go with white powdery substance.

Lose 5% of your body weight, maintain it for a year, 95% failure rate. Doctors have a better chance treating heroin addiction than they do overweight. The one thing that has been shown to affect longevity is caloric deprivation or fasting. I don't think fasting is extending their life. I think overfeeding is cutting.

You have supervised over 25,000 prolonged fasts. What's been the biggest transformation that you've seen from before doing the fast to after?

Well, it's really a revolution because fasting impacts people in multiple ways. Some of the ways are really obvious. You see it in terms of fat loss. You know, right now people are sick and suffering and dying as a consequence of chronic inflammatory conditions like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease, some forms of cancer as a consequence of this unified generalized inflammation. We treat those conditions as if they're independent to the point where you have to go to a different kind of doctor to be diagnosed as say high blood pressure versus diabetes versus autoimmune disease. Different tests, different doctors, different treatments, but they do have a common basis. And one of the common basis is dietary excess that leads to fat. And about 10% of our fat is what's called visceral fat. And it's a fat that tends to accumulate around the bellies and in the organs. And it's hypertrophic. It's hyperplastic. It acts like a tumor.

And it's a source of this inflammatory base that creates all these different kinds of diseases. And so if you can figure out a way to understand why it is people are fat and why they have this visceral fat, then you can understand why we're dying from diseases that used to be rare and are now common. These diseases used to be called the diseases of kings because it was only the wealthy elite kings that could consistently do what it takes to cause them and that's consistently overeating on high-density foods that makes us fat, gives us the visceral fat, gives us the inflammation and leads to the disease. It happens to be that fasting, this biological adaptation that human beings had to have is a way of reversing that dietary excess. That all humans fast. That is all humans if you take food away, their physiology shifts and they change their main burner of glucose, which is the brain, from burning sugar to burning fat. That's what fasting is essentially. And humans have ridiculously large brains. They're two and a half times proportional mass as say chimpanzees or something. And they burn a massive amount of glucose. And so for a human being to go into a situation where it wouldn't have any food, if it wasn't for the ability to change the fuel of the brain, you could only live about a week. But a 70 kg male, put them on a fast, they can go up to 70 days with it.

Wow. Because we change our fuel from burning sugar to burning fat, which is more efficient. We use our fat stores. So, what happened was all the humans that couldn't fast, that didn't have that trick, they died. And we know that because of the 8.3 billion people on the planet, every person, every race, every country, you take food away and they go through this very stereotypical process where the body uses its glycogen stores. It takes about 48 hours and then it shifts over to mobilizing fat stores. You get ketones and more specifically beta hydroxybutyric acid, and that becomes the main fuel of the brain, and that's what allows us to be able to go long periods of time. Well, in a natural setting, that worked great because spring came late. There was nothing to eat. These big glucose-burning humans with their big brains would have been in big trouble. But we had this adaptation. We've taken that adaptation and learned to apply it in a situation that virtually never arose. And that's where people consistently got exposed to dietary excess. And their brains got fooled and they overeat and they become obese and then they develop all these characteristic diseases. If you take your pets and you give them access to our food, same thing happens. They get fat and they get the same diseases we get. It's not like a big mystery. There are no obese animals in nature unless they get exposed to ultra-processed food. Even whales are only 9% body fat. They're lean mean machines. They just happen to wear their fat on the outside of their body. A big insight is that it's dietary excess that leads to many of these particular, not all, but many of the leading contributing causes of death and disability, and fasting is a natural way of giving the body a chance to undo some of those consequences.

Yeah. And this is kind of where the light bulb comes with fasting. It's this perspective shift from what a lot of society is telling you, which is through addition. Right? We were told to add supplements. We're told to do sauna or do this certain protocol, eat this type of food. And fasting is the opposite of that. But there's a reason for that. We're designed by nature to be concerned about deficiency because we evolved in an environment of scarcity. It was the biological imperative of life to get enough to eat and don't get eaten. Most ancient humans didn't live long enough to reproduce and pass on their genes. It was the ones that were concerned about deficiency and managed to struggle to get enough to eat that survived. Deprivation was the rule, not the exception. So our, and for 200,000 years, modern humans have been struggling to survive in an environment of scarcity. It's only since the industrial revolution a couple hundred years ago that we started to shift things.

And so we are programmed biologically, our brain is designed above all else is to avoid deficiencies or inadequacies. Yeah. And so it's not surprising that we might have difficulty in this new environment of abundance, not getting into trouble. Sure. And so like, for example, our systems are designed to eat as much as you can whenever you can, store as much fat as possible so that when spring comes late, you'll survive. But now the problem is those mechanisms are there, and that's where we end up with this visceral fat, this type of fat that shouldn't even be there. But storing enough fat is so biologically important in a natural setting that it would never waste that. And now in this modern world, we get into trouble because we get this tumor-like material that creates a problem. But fasting, interestingly enough, helps undo that consequence. And that's why we see high blood pressure, for example. We did a study with 174 consecutive patients with high blood pressure. All of them normalized their pressure without medication. Type 2 diabetes, about 80% of our patients on the first fast will be able to lower blood sugar enough to eliminate the need for medication. Autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and ulcerative colitis and ankylosing spondylitis and asthma, eczema, psoriasis, and all these conditions that are caused by the immune system attacking itself reverse. And maybe it's elimination of gut leakage, maybe it's a reduction in inflammation, maybe it's getting rid of the visceral fat. Probably multiple mechanisms involved, but that whole class of conditions responds under medical treatment. And and we all, not to mention things like lymphoma and cancers, which we've published. We have a paper in the British Medical Journal showing complete reversal and 10-year maintenance of a healthy state in patients that had, you know, stage three lymphoma. So when you think about all these kind of modern diseases, all kind of being associated with excess, totally makes sense that fasting may have some utility.

If we look at something like cancer and autoimmune disease, they seem very different, but they're actually, in my experience, opposite sides of the same coin. When you think about cancers from growing, and if the cancer cells form and grow tumors faster than you can get rid of them, you end up dying of having serious problems. Yeah. In autoimmune disease, you have a situation where it's your immune system overactive, attacking your own tissues. In rheumatoid arthritis, it's your immune system that's causing the deformity. And so, when you treat autoimmune disease with powerful drugs to turn down the immune system, you often end up as a side effect with cancer. And when you treat cancer by stimulating the immune response to be able to fight off the tumor cells better, one of the side effects frequently is autoimmune disease because the drugs aren't or the treatments aren't perfect at turning it up enough or not too much. One of the great things with fasting is it kind of, it's like rebooting the hard drive in a computer that's become corrupted. You know, you don't know why. You turn the thing off, you turn it back on, now it's working again. Well, fasting is kind of like that in human beings. You're shutting everything down to baseline. When you turn it back on, whether it's the inflammatory process, the gut microbiome, all of these processes seem to recalibrate. And that may be why we're seeing such good clinical results that we've been documenting in our peer-reviewed journals.

Yeah. And that's the such a that's the powerful shift is that I mean, I know you mentioned that we're wired to look for potential deficiencies, but I just feel today we just live in such a world of abundance that fasting is really counteracting that. You know, there's a quote with Michelangelo where he talks about that I didn't sculpt David, I just removed everything that David wasn't. It's a very popular quote, right? And it talks about how a lot of the beauty, a lot of the magic comes from removing certain parts of ourselves, certain, uh, things that we're feeding ourselves to achieve this beautiful outcome. And I think that's a myth that a lot of people may have around fasting. It can feel scary. This idea of not eating for a day or two days or three days seems kind of crazy. What are some of the myths that we can debunk from this conversation around what most people think fasting is, but what's the actual reality?

Well, most people think fasting and starvation are the same thing. And fasting is actually that process where the body still has available reserves, but it's going through deprivation. At some point, you deplete your micro and macronutrient reserves. And then you enter a different process called starvation. But there is a, there's a period of time where fasting is able to be carried on. In our clinic at the True North Health Center, we've fasted 25,000 patients over the last 40 years for periods ranging from 5 to 40 days. So, we're routinely fasting people in the 2, three, four week range. Um, and as long as you stay within the biological reserves of the individual, it's a safe and effective process. In fact, we've published in the peer-reviewed literature a fasting safety study showing all the adverse events and all the complications that can arise and looking at what over the long-term outcome is. And it's clearly, if it, if you select the patients appropriately, rest and hydrate people properly when they're fasting, and then refeed carefully to avoid refeeding syndrome and post-fasting edema complications that can arise, if you do it properly as we've laid out in our book, "Can Fasting Save Your Life?" It is a safe and effective process. And we wrote this book because we wanted people to understand how fasting works, but also so that their physicians could understand what it takes to monitor a person through fasting properly, what tests to order, how to make sure that the symptoms that show up in fasting are part of a healing crisis rather than deprivation or debility.

And so when it's done properly with the appropriate patients, it is, in fact, a safe and effective process. And we've proven that over the last 40 years in doing it in over 25,000 people.

Yeah. I mean, 25,000, that's enough of a sample base. You get a pretty good base. Right? You get a pretty good base. And you said 5 to 40, which is interesting because most people think about fasting as 16 hours, right? Or 12 hours.

There is a serious component of fasting, intermittent fasting or time-restricted feeding, that we recommend virtually everybody do. And it's something they can do at home without exams, without changing their routine or their medication profile. And that's basically not eating 3 to 4 hours before you go to bed at night. So instead of eating all day and then all night, you stop eating 3 to 4 hours before you go to bed at night. So, for example, if you're going to bed at 10:00 p.m., you wouldn't be eating after 6:00 or 6:30 or something like that. That's going to give you a 12-hour fast every day. If you're trying to lose weight, you might even extend the breakfast in the morning a few hours so you can get some exercise in there and preferentially mobilize fat reserves. But whether it's 12 hours or 16 hours of fasting, that's things people can do every day. That means you're eating over an 8-hour window or a 12-hour window. And in that window of feeding, you want to make sure you're eating all whole foods. We advocate a whole plant food diet that's free of added salt, oil, and sugar. Salt, oil, and sugar. Use the term the mnemonic SOS because it's the international symbol of danger, and it stands for salt, oil, and sugar. And salt, oil, and sugar are the chemicals that people put in their food to make them taste better. And what tasting better means is it stimulates more dopamine production in your brain. Dopamine is the neurochemical associated with pleasure. So when you put these chemicals on the feed, you will like them more and you will eat more before your natural satiety mechanism kicks in. So, for example, if you feed birds a normal their normal diet, they'll get to a certain size. They never get obese. But you add these chemicals to their feed, they'll gain so much weight they can't even fly. If you give it to rodents, they'll gain 40% of their body weight in a couple months. It's the same thing happening in people. If you put the salt and oil and sugar on the food, they'll eat more. They will become overweight. It's just a question of how fat are they going to get.

So people that do these intermittent fasting, which I think is the more kind of mainstream way as people get into fasting because not everybody can do a 5-day fast or a 40-day fast. What are the outcomes, the realistic outcomes that they should be aware of between what they can benefit from doing just a 16-hour fast versus a prolonged fast, which is what you guys focus on, 5 to 40 days?

So that people don't have any expectations of them curing or reversing disease just by doing an intermittent fast. The main purpose for intermittent fasting is a tool to help people avoid some of the overeating that's making them fat, sick, and miserable. Mostly weight loss and sometimes the calories you're eating at night disproportionately turn into fat. You're not getting a chance to burn them. So, the body will put them into storage. And so not doing that late-night eating, giving yourself a body to kind of cleanse cumulatively day after day after week after month is thought to have benefit. There's not a lot of scientific evidence showing significant short-term changes as a consequence of that, but there's good evidence that long-term it may be a beneficial and helpful habit. And certainly anything you do to avoid the dietary excess is likely to have significant benefits. Now, what we're involved with at the True North Health Center is medically supervised water-only fasting. This is periods of from 5 to 40 days, and we've documented the effects that we've published over 20 articles in the peer-reviewed literature. "Can Fasting Save Your Life?" kind of reviews all of that information and the experience that we've had over the last 40 years in applying this in a variety of conditions with patients. And so we're not trying to say that like every intermittent fasting and long-term medically supervised fasting are the same thing, but they're both tools to try to help people undo the consequence of dietary excess.

So why does that happen in prolonged fasting? If I'm if I'm listening to this and I'm and I'm thinking, well, I've done fasting my whole life. I've done 16:8 and I don't eat 12 hours a day. What is actually happening right on day three, day five or day 40, that's different in the body?

So one thing that happens in fasting, if we just look at body composition, for example, we've done a study using a DEXA scanner on patients and we said, okay, if you take in this particular study was males and they fast an average of two weeks, they lost 10% of their body weight, but 20% of their total fat and 40% of their total visceral fat. They also lost 6% of their lean tissue, but at six-week follow-up, 100% of the lean tissue had been recovered, but the fat loss continued.

So, not only are you preferentially mobilizing fat and visceral fat, but you're also stimulating a catabolic process of ongoing fat loss, assuming people are eating a healthy diet. Now, if you're not using it as a catalyst to adopt diet, exercise, and sleep habits, you're not going to have long-term success. But it can be a huge catalyst because you get this preferential reduction in inflammation. So now you've got less joint pain. Now you can start walking again. You're out of pain. So you can sleep. You feel in more control. So there's less psychological stress, anxiety, depression. These things tend to be profoundly influenced by alterations in gut microbiome. The gut microbiome. Think about your gut microbiome. You have five pounds, like trillions of creatures living in your digestive system. So bacteria, protozoa, etc. These are living creatures eating, drinking, and pooing in you. And what they are giving off as waste products could be toxic waste like TMA, trimethylamine oxidase, which is associated with heart disease and all kinds of problems. Or they could be pooing fertilizer into you like vitamin K and things you need. What determines which organisms you have in your gut and what they poo in you is what you feed them. There's a thousand different creatures in a healthy human microbiome. If you look at say, heavy meat-eaters and you analyze, okay, which kind of bacteria do they have versus plant-eaters, a completely different microbiome and completely different waste products. For example, meat-eaters have much higher levels of TMA. This trimethylamine oxidase that shows up much lower in plant-eaters. So the idea is that if you took your body and separated out all the human cells and all the non-human cells, there's actually more non-human cells making up your body today than human cells. There's five pounds of them just in your digestive system, not to mention your skin. Now, these organisms have to work in balance with each other to maintain health. If they get out of balance, like certain ones overgrow, you may get symptoms. You may get candidiasis or yeast infection or other, you know, depending on what that, how that balance. In fact, if you think about it even further, let's say your heart stopped beating within just a few minutes, you would die. And within just a few hours, what would start to happen is those organisms in your body would start breaking you down. And within even just a couple days, you'd become a very smelly pool of festering pus as the body would be broken down, right? And if you've ever been around people that have passed away over enough time, you know there's a very accurate odor and very characteristic because it's your microbiome that would just tear you to bits. What keeps that from happening is that that balance between organisms in a living creature and the immune system. So if your immune system becomes suppressed, you can be pretty well sure you're going to start manifesting certain problems. But if your immune system is too stimulated, you'll also get problems. It has to be in balance. Important part of that inclusion of your microbiome. And you're saying fasting, the process of fasting helps you balance, almost resets that system, which is maybe why we see such profound events even quickly short-term in autoimmune disease where the pain goes down. And once people are out of pain and they're feeling more hopeful, it a lot of the other associated secondary symptoms begin to mitigate.

So we bring people in and we're not even doing anything to them. We're just creating a safe environment, monitoring them. They go through this fasting process. In fact, we have a lot of therapists at the center. Of course, we have chiropractors and osteopaths and physical therapists to do various types of therapy, but we amongst ourselves, we joke, we say, you know, you better treat people right away because if you wait till they're done fasting, there may be nothing left to have to treat because so much stuff just heals itself when you get out of the way and give the body a chance to do what it does in the fasting state.

You mentioned that people that do these prolonged fasting, they continue to lose weight and lose fat. What is the process like? Why is that happening?

Because part of the process of fasting at True North is we're educating people. We call it education. It's really a form of brainwashing, but we're getting people to adopt whole plant food diets. So, they're eating fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds. We're getting them to recognize that the salt, the oil, and the sugar, the excess animal products are what's causing them to be in the condition that they're in. So with education and then the experience even with fasting, things like taste and adaptation, your actual perception of salt and sweet changes. We've actually done a study showing objectively that your perception of sweet and salt changes. Good foods start to taste good. It's easier to get people to adopt eating those foods that everybody kind of knows they should eat. But don't want to eat. They don't want to eat the fruits and vegetables. They might have to chop it and chew it and you know, might take some more time. They have to find fresh fruits and vegetables. So they get some dehydrated powder they paid $29.95 a pound for that's going to theoretically give them all the magic. But it's not the same.

It's so true. Like now if I have, because I barely eat any sweets, so whenever I have friends over and they want to go for ice cream and we have a little bit of sweets, and for them it's like, for some people it's like it's not sweet enough. I'm like, this is so sweet.

Yeah. Well, think about ice cream or I call it coagulated cow paste. But if you melt ice cream to room temperature, you describe it as sickly sweet because it's so sweet it makes you sick. That then you say, "Well, why does it taste so good when it's cold?" But when something's artificially cold, like ice cream, your taste mechanisms are not designed to be able to detect the sugar in there. They have to be super saturated with sugar to make it when it's cold taste sweet. When you warm it up, you can taste what's actually there and it makes you sick. It just makes you just as sick when it's cold. You just don't know it because ice cream is not a natural food. You've never slipped in an ice cream pond or had a clop on your head from falling from a tree. You have to manufacture it and you have to super saturate it with sugar, or when it's cold, your lack of sensitivity to sweet with artificially cold things would not be effective.

So does fasting also then reset these dopamine, this reward circuitry in our brains as well after a certain amount of time?

Well, I think what it does is it makes things dramatically more sensitive. For example, you can taste sweet. You need less sweet in order to feel satiated. And so then if you try to eat stuff that you used to think was so good and you taste it, you think it's like, it's so salty or it's so sweet. After fasting, people eat Swiss chard and think, "Oh my god, it's so salty. Where do you get this chard?" It's the same chard. It's just now you can taste what's actually there because fasting's it's not that it made it more. It went back to the normal level. That's how your tastes actually are until they get denuded by the processed foods that we addict ourselves to.

Yeah. I wonder if that applies to other addictions like alcohol or obviously food addiction. Have you guys studied other forms of addiction and how that helps?

It's interesting you should ask that because, for example, nicotine, cigarette smoking, by the second day of fasting, most smokers report no cravings. It happens very quickly. Now, some people say, yeah, they're so miserable fasting, they're not thinking about the cigarettes. That's not the case. It's just it speeds up the process of detoxification. Alcohol, you know, it's interesting that we don't tell, for example, alcoholics to just drink beer and wine because it doesn't work. The only thing that works treating alcoholics is to get them to completely stop. Well, when you fast a person coming off alcohol, that process of withdrawal just happens very quickly. But then we tell them the truth. They can't drink. Okay. When we talk about weight loss, we don't tell people, "Well, just change the color of your meat from red to white." We tell them, "You got to stop eating the chemicals that are fooling your brain that are allowing you to become obese, like salt, oil, and sugar."

Okay? We don't tell them to just have a little bit. Tell them to stop it. Uh, and they that seems so extreme, but that's all that works with addiction, like alcoholism. It's all that works with smoking. And it's actually, in my experience, it's the only thing that works with obesity is stop the things that cause people to be fat and fool the brain so that they'll overeat. Now, can some people have a drink and not become a drunk? Sure. But if you're a drunk, it's not you. Can some people eat concentrated foods and not become overweight? Perhaps. But if you're overweight, it's not you. If you could have controlled it, you would have controlled it. It's not like people aren't trying and they're not thinking, "Oh, I want to see how fat I can get." They don't want to be overweight. They recognize at least on some level that it's not a healthy thing. It's not just a question of which clothes you fit in. It's how well you're going to live or die. And it's even immunity to infectious disease like COVID-19. You know, one of the big predictors of whether you would live or die when you got exposed to COVID was how much visceral fat did you have in your body? How well were you equipped to be able to cope with a, you know, a viral infection. So it's not just cancer and diabetes and autoimmune disease, but even acute infections are profoundly affected by your immunological response, which in turn is affected by what you put in your mouth.

Yeah, it's fascinating the process that you go through. So I've done multiple 72-hour fasts, although when you said it's minimum five, I felt like an amateur, not going to lie. I was like, minimum five. I've only done three. So clearly I got to step up my game. So maybe the next one's going to be five. But it's fascinating because those things do come up. Is your survival instincts do come up as you're thinking about in your brain, it's like, "Oh my god, where's the food?" First 24 hours is definitely the hardest for me. But what's fascinating is after 48 hours roughly for me, you stop to have hunger cravings. Why is that?

You go into ketosis, and ketones, ketone bodies have a hunger-blunting effect in the brain. It's basically human beings when there was nothing to eat because spring came late. It wouldn't serve any purpose to keep them ravenously hungry and distracted. And so the body apparently adapted to being able to adapt to the hunger state. Hunger is blunted. That's where a lot of these fasting-mimicking diets or the late Dr. Atkins diet, may his soul rest in peace, you know, come in where they put people on high-fat, high-protein diets and they go into ketosis because there's no carbohydrate. And so they have to mobilize their glycogen stores and then they have to go through gluconeogenesis or break down fat. Well, in a ketogenic state, whether it's from a high-protein, high-fat diet or from fasting, you get a hunger-blunting effect. And they're trying to take advantage of that fasting-mimicking effect to facilitate weight loss. Okay. Well, in actual fasting, you do get a hunger-blunting mechanism. It makes fasting relatively comfortable.

And so, even people two, three, four weeks into a fast really don't have much in the way of hunger or anything like that. They'll go to cooking classes, they'll attend, they'll go to dinner with people for social interaction, but even though they're not eating, and it's not like, oh, some terribly difficult kind of a thing. So, it's an unusual phenomenon because the hunger drives our habit to make sure we go out and eat on a consistent basis. But once the body realizes that there isn't going to be anything to eat, it goes into this fasting state and it gets a little bit more comfortable in that regard.

Yeah. So you're saying in 5 days or day seven, that'll likely remain. I won't feel that.

Between day, it takes about 48 hours to mobilize glycogen stores on average, two to three days to get into the fasting state. That hunger blunting will not happen, will not come back likely until you've depleted your fat reserves and enter a process called starvation, which we don't ever do with. And then hunger would come back very ravenously, but it's actually a mouth and throat sensation. So it's a true hunger most people have never actually experienced in the modern age. Modern age. Yeah. But um, so that even people 30 days, 40 days into fasting really aren't having anything in the way of hunger.

And what's the motive for me, let's say, to do a 5-day, 7-day, 10-day fast? Right? I don't think I'm going to do 40-day, but yeah, let's say 3 days versus a 7-day and a 10-day? Right? What's the additional benefit? And is there diminishing return after a certain number of days?

Right. So that's a really good and important question that's going to be the subject of a study that we're actually designing right now. A navigator study. What's the ideal for healthy people? We did a preliminary study on healthy. First of all, I might mention it's actually hard to find healthy people that are metabolically healthy and physiologically healthy. When we started recruiting, people come in thinking they're healthy, but when you actually check their blood and you check their turns out they may not be overweight, but they're over fat or their blood pressure is too high or they're, you know, there's all kinds of problems that they aren't even aware of. But we did finally recruit enough healthy people for the study. In fact, we started recruiting staff, people that live and work at the True North Health Center. They actually test out really well. Yeah. But anyway, we went took these people and as healthy as helpful as fasting is in sick people and normalizing their pressure and getting rid of visceral fat and all that, it turned out proportionally the results in healthy people were even more. It may be the people that get the most benefit from these relatively shorter 3, five, 7-day fasts, it may be that healthy people get the most benefit of all.

Why is that? Because it turns out if you treat the situation before you develop disease, it's a lot easier than waiting till you get sick and then trying to undo the consequences. And so what we're doing in this study is we're going to be recruiting people that'll do like you're doing, a 3, five, 7-day fast once a year, healthy eating, diet, and exercise. And what we hope to show is that the last 20 years of life can be absolutely your best instead of your worst. We can avoid the debility where all the money is spent on healthcare that's not effective at reducing all-cause mortality and people go through all that suffering, find themselves unable to talk or move, lying in nursing home beds waiting for people to come and change their diaper because they've had some stroke or heart attack or they develop premature cancer and they become debilitated. We believe that we can defer, delay a large percentage of that with healthy living and periodic fasting earlier in life.

You know, I can see the difference in myself. I was just mentioning to you before we went on air, I just came from Las Vegas where I competed in a senior basketball tournament and won. Yeah, the team actually won the US. For me, competing against people my age group is a joy because I get to be a young, fit, healthy person. I'm normally playing against people that are 20, 30, 40 years old because frankly, you know, you have to draw the whole country just to get a tournament of people that are 65 to 70 years old. When I play basketball on a regular basis at home, I was playing the other day with a kid who said, "Oh, you're older than my grandfather." You know, they're just not too many of us left because they've aged out prematurely. You see it in 40-year-olds that are having premature aging. And it's not that living healthy doesn't, you don't age. Of course, you age. You're going to age up, but you do it more slowly. And a lot of the debilitating problems that cause debility, the musculoskeletal compromise, the inflammation, the arthritis, these things are delayed, deferred, or avoided.

And really, that's a hard thing to pitch to a healthy 35-year-old that's getting away with kind of a fast-paced lifestyle because they're still feeling okay. And they, and it's changes are happening slowly. They don't even realize how compromised they are until you put them under a little stress. Okay. Or until they get some illness. It's like a frog boiling. Exactly. They don't recognize it. Once you fast them, even a short fast in a healthy person like 3 days or 5 days, there's a profound awareness of just how maybe a little bit out of balance they were, even though they don't have frank illness or whatever. So, is it 3 days or 5 days or 7 days? What's the ideal amount of time?

From my viewpoint, all we do is fast until they're stable. If you fast for a week and you don't have any symptoms and healing crisis and the blood values are all normal and your weight is off, that's it. We stop it. On the other hand, let's say you start getting skin rashes and discharge. Well, we'll keep going until those clear. And what we're finding is people that live healthy, exercise, and sleep, they don't need a very long fast before they reach clinical stability.

What do you mean, clinical stability?

Where they're not manifesting symptoms, their blood pressure, all their objective measures, their cardio-metabolic risk factors, all those things have normalized. So, some people may not be fat, but they still have too high a percent body fat. From an optimum health standpoint, that goes down. And proportionally, it goes down faster even than sick people. That's the point I make. So their blood pressure may be 120 over 80, as it's considered non-pathological. But it turns out if your blood pressure is 110, you have a 10% reduced risk of all-cause mortality. So 120 doesn't justify medication or any kind of intervention. But 110's even better. And the point is that proportional change towards health happens disproportionately in healthy people. It doesn't take very long. So, I would say our listeners and watchers are fairly health-conscious. Obviously, we've got a very general audience, but you're saying for most healthy people, a 5-day fast is perfectly fine. It's perfectly, like that's the optimal.

Well, what I'm saying is everybody should fast for that 12 to 16 hours that that you're doing baseline. And that it's a good idea for people that are good candidates for fasting and that are able to rest and hydrate and that will carefully refeed a longer period of fasting. Again, depending on the individual, it might be three, five, seven days is enough even in healthy people to have a rejuvenative effect where they'll perceive it to be of great benefit and objectively we can show it's a benefit.

What I would suggest though, before people undergo fasting, remember there are some contraindications to fasting. People that are on medications, you don't fast on medications. So, you have to first talk to the prescriber about how to safely withdraw the medications if that's possible. If you can't withdraw the medications, you're going to do a modified version of this. You're going to be on 600 calories of vegetable broth and juice and other things. So, we don't get compounding effect of fasting and medication. So, that's number one. Number two, if you have pathology, you really want to talk to a doctor that's familiar with fasting before you go engage in some prolonged water-only fast. And I might also mention that although our doctors do get involved in remote supervision of fasting where people can fast at home, those patients are carefully screened and we have them work with their own local doctor. And that's one of the reasons we wrote "Can Fasting Save Your Life?" because it has all the information their doctor needs to be able to safely help them guide, you know, determine are they a good candidate, get the appropriate lab testing to monitor and make sure that they go through the thing properly. They'll have all the information together so they can do it safely because you can get into trouble. You might be a good candidate for fasting and you might rest and hydrate during fasting. Okay? And that means you're not going to work. You're not driving a car. You're not running around exercising. People that exercise fasting lose more weight, but it's not more fat. They lose more lean tissue. And so when you're trying to preserve your lean tissue, we just want to burn the fat, the visceral fat particularly. That means you have to rest when you fast. But then where they make the mistake is they'll too rapidly refeed or they'll go back to eating ultra-processed foods and then they can get what's called post-fasting edema where they'll hold too much fluid quickly and get swelling in the ankles or theoretically even refeeding syndrome where their electrolytes get imbalanced and that can become a serious or even fatal problem. So we don't want people to get damaged by doing a prolonged fast unless they're a good candidate. They're resting, hydrating, and they're working with their local doctor using the information in our book so they'll do it safely.

Yeah. What about people that have low blood sugar or that are pre-diabetic or or diabetic themselves where maybe after a certain hours it's not going to be?

The treatment, the most effective treatment for diabetes is actually turns out to be fasting. Now, we're talking about type 2 diabetes here. Remember, in type 2 diabetes, they have plenty of insulin. In fact, they make more insulin than a type 1 diabetic that's not making insulin. So in type 2 diabetics, the problem isn't insulin, it's that the insulin is not working because of insulin resistance that it's not being effective in the liver, in the cells. And fasting reduces insulin resistance. And in fact, most type 2 diabetics will achieve normal blood sugar without the need for medication if they fast long enough and they're willing to eat properly and exercise after fasting. So we have tremendous success. Now, type 1 diabetes is different. That's where you don't make insulin. Those individuals should not fast because you need insulin in order to be able to adapt to the fasting process and you can't just inject insulin the same way you would in an eating state because you run the risk of a severe hypoglycemic crisis, which could become fatal as well. So type 1 diabetes is caused by the islets of Langerhans and the pancreas have been destroyed by the immune system or by there are certain viral infections too, most commonly by an immune response that's triggered from the use of dairy proteins in humans. If you give little babies dairy milk products, a certain percentage are genetically vulnerable and their immune system will attack their islet cells and they'll end up with type 1 diabetes. That's why cultures, for example, that don't use cow's milk have dramatically lower incidence of type 1 diabetes unless they move here and adopt our dietary habits, then they have more diabetes. Now, it is true though, there are viral infections that can do the same thing. So it doesn't, it's not 100% caused by dairy. But the point is that's one of the, in fact, even the American Pediatric Association says don't use unpasteurized milk products in kids under two because they recognize there is a risk factor there of triggering this immune response. So type 1 diabetics, we don't recommend water fasting. That's a whole different ballgame. But the majority of diabetics are type 2 diabetics. They make insulin but they have insulin resistance and this can be well managed. But those patients should be fasted under direct medical supervision. This isn't a diabetic shouldn't be doing fasting at home. There's too many complications that can come up that need monitored. When people are at the True North Health Center, they're seen twice a day by a staff doctor. They've had an initial physical exam, history with one of the physicians, and they're in a controlled refeeding state. So, you know, it's done very, very carefully. That's how come we've been able to establish the long-term success even with fasts up to 40 days.

Yeah, makes sense. Um, so just to kind of get people prepared, the whole fasting process, just the nitty-gritty. Yes. I'm assuming most people listening will try to do it on their own, whether it's a three-day fast or five-day fast longer. Talk to me about the lead-up to that. Are there certain foods that they should be eliminating, certain foods they should be adding into their diet so that the fasting itself is a lot easier?

Yeah, in fact, um, it's interesting. Most people have a really natural fear of fasting. Yeah. Okay. Because remember, your body and your brain's job is to make sure you don't starve to death. And you know, that was a major problem. You know, people, you know, predation and starvation are like leading causes of death and disability. So in the ancestral environment, in fact, people today if they get on a plane in New York and they were to fly to California, they pretty sure they're going to die over Colorado if they don't eat those pretzels. They think the pretzels saved their life, you know. So, first thing is preparation for fasting is huge. If you can get people to eat exclusively fruit, salad, and steamed vegetables for a couple days and avoid meat, fish, fowl, eggs, dairy products, all salt, sugar, alcohol, all the greasy, fatty, slimy, processed crap that everybody's living on. Just doing that for two days can dramatically make the transition to fasting easier. A lot of the symptoms people think they're having when they try to fast are not the fasting. It's the caffeine withdrawal. It's the headaches. It's the alcohol withdrawal. It's the withdrawal to ultra-processed refined carbohydrates. So, if you start that process a little slower by just eating really healthy before you fast, then the transition to fasting can actually be much less miserable for people. Contrast is

I just want to reinforce the idea though. If you're on medications, don't just arbitrarily discontinue your medications. For example, some medications like anticoagulant medications, steroid medications, very dangerous to just arbitrarily discontinue them. That can lead to PE, pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis, cardiac arrest, stroke. The medications are the real complicating factor around fasting. And the fact that people don't want to restrict activity. You're not safe when you're in the fasting state driving an automobile, for example. If you've been fasting for a few days, your reaction times are altered. Your brain is burning a different fuel. It's burning beta hydroxybutyric acid instead of glucose. You are not the same person. And you shouldn't be driving to work. You shouldn't be taking the kids to school. You shouldn't be doing any of that stuff. 12 to 16 hours, no problem because you still have normal physiology, burning glycogen, it's okay. Once we go beyond that 48-hour period, that's where filtration, the right people, control the environment, and appropriate.

Refeeding is going to be critical. And the longer you go, the more important that is. Okay? You know, most people that are young and healthy are able to do these um short fasts without any uh risk or complication if they follow the protocol, but we don't fast people over two weeks in a home setting. Okay? If it's going to go over two weeks, then we're bringing them into. And the reason is most healthy people don't need to fast longer. If they're fasting longer than that, there's usually a good reason and that reason needs to be monitored.

During the fast, are you an advocate of taking, let's say, for first-timers, taking some sort of electrolyte powders that have sodium, potassium, magnesium?

That's not fasting, is it? Fasting is the complete abstinence of all substances except water, except for water. And if you're taking supplements, there are some risks to that. Uh, first of all, if you're just taking isolated uh electrolytes, all of the rate-limiting factors that you would normally monitor in fasting, there are many things you can't monitor. You wouldn't know to monitor. But if you use, like we use sodium, potassium, things that are known, easy to monitor and rate-limiting, that if those are okay, then the downstream issues are likely okay.

But they're likely to have sodium. If you just supplement those sodium though, now all of the stuff you're not measuring potentially can become rate-limiting and you'll have no idea about it. And so it's arrogance exceeding ignorance when you start about supplemented fasting. Now, if you're supplementing with whole foods, if you're taking fresh vegetable juices and broth and stuff, that's a different physiology.

Okay. You're getting enough calories that you're not going into that facilitated fasting state. But if you're going to go into the fasting state, in our experience, it's water only fasting. But that's why it needs to be done in a controlled setting. If you're going to do, there are many programs out there which are basically between six and 1200 calories. Walter Longo has a program, all kinds of, and they may have all kinds of potential benefits. That's I'm not an expert on that. I'm not going to talk about those various kinds of programs. I'd refer you to the people that write about that. The thing that I know about is how to do water only fasting properly. And that unfortunately does need to be done with rest and consideration.

Yeah. And and it wouldn't be supplemented.

Wouldn't be supplemented. It wouldn't be. So if we were going to supplement, for example, let's say a person's sodium goes too low in fasting, um, we would use broth or whole food um support, not just isolated nutrient supplements. So we would be getting not just the sodium and the potassium, but the magnesium and all the other non-measurable ingredients that are downstream as well. So, you know, there is a whole process then we talk about that as fasting termination. We go through that. Everybody that fast goes through a period of recovery which includes vegetable juices and then raw fruits and vegetables and then steamed, you know, more progressive. It takes half the length of the fast progressively refeed to avoid these complications. So, a 20-day fast, there's actually 10 days of controlled refeeding we do in an inpatient setting before we are back to our unrestricted whole plant food diet that, you know, people can engage in normal activities.

You pulled the question right out of my mouth. So, what's what's the process once you have done your fast? What's the first food you should be eating?

Depending on the person, most people it's going to be for every week of fasting, there's a day of fruit and vegetable juices, there's a day of raw fruit and vegetables, and then there's progressively introducing the more concentrated foods, steamed and starchy vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds. And that process is usually again a day per week of fasting. Uh, some people you might have to give an extra day because they're having a little trouble refiring depending on their pathological history. Had colitis, it's different than if they're dealing with diabetes or something like that. With diabetics, we tend to mostly focus on vegetable materials, not a lot of simple sugars. With people that have ulcerative colitis, we got to be real careful about too much roughage. So, we might use more steamed starchy vegetables. So, you have to modify depending on pathology. But for healthy people, if they had a week-long fast, you know, you're going to take three or four days. So, it might be a day of juice, a day of raw fruit and vegetables, add some steamed vegetables, and then get into some starches, and then you're pretty much ready to go back to your.

Yeah. So like no hard meat or.

We don't use any greasy, fatty, slimy, dead, decaying flesh, processed foods, ultra-processed foods, any of that ever.

Yeah. Okay. Because we're advocating a whole plant food diet that's salt, oil, and sugar-free. So that's a more radical diet. It's the diet that we believe not only will help you today, but it's the diet that when you're fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth decade is going to help sustain you. And what's interesting is I have a lot of patients now that I've been treating for 40 years. So they were in their 30s, now 40s, now they're in their 80s and 90s. And what's interesting is you hear the same story from. In fact, my mother when she was 92, she realized she outlived all 50 of her lifelong friends. They were all dead. And she did this diet and she tried to apply these principles and she said it was getting harder and harder to make friends because even people 10 or 15 years younger were too old to play the bridge or do the stuff that she wanted to do. And she said, "Allan, you have to warn your patients. If they're going to eat this diet and live this way, they need to make younger friends, much younger."

You got to keep playing with those 25-year-olds.

Well, you know, that that's the thing we do see though is that you do age out, but you do tend to age out at a at a somewhat slower rate. And it has benefits, but it also has consequences, social consequences. And, you know, a lot of my patients are outliving their kids. So, their kids are in their 60s and dying of heart disease because they haven't been doing the diet. And these people are in their 80s and they're still cognitively intact and doing well. But, you know, it does create, you know, you you need to be aware of it. It creates complications. Um, I had one guy upset with me because, you know, he he didn't plan to live this long in terms of he's planning for his retirement and all this kind of stuff. So, he's outliving, you know, what his acclamations were because, you know, it's not all easy. In fact, it's really difficult socially. It's really difficult.

Um, because I mean, we see this all the time with women when they lose a lot of weight and go back to work. The other women aren't like all supportive and like, oh, we're so proud of you and you look at you, must have adopted a whole plan. What can we do to be helpful? No, they come back to work and it's like, oh, here she comes, that, you know, cuz they they're undermining. Where are you going to get your protein from? It's not good to be a fanatic. You're no fun anymore. You know, they just constantly giving them.

That happened when I stopped drinking actually. Sometimes you have to make new friends.

A lot of the times. I mean, think about how much culturally we're designed to drink everywhere.

You not drinking can make drunks uncomfortable.

Yeah. And the same thing when you lose weight, it's like, and especially if you're a woman,

They you piss off a lot of people, you and your thin clothes. Now, you know, guys don't have quite as much trouble with the weight because they lose 50 pounds and go back to work and the other guys don't notice.

Or if they do notice, they don't care. So, it's a little bit easier if you're a male. If you're a woman, you have to work harder. Also, women lose weight a different weight than males because women are full of estrogen, which is a fat storage hormone. You inject men with with estrogen, they grow breasts and get hips and and and gain fat. You inject women with enough testosterone, they would lose fat. Of course, they get hairy and get cancer and die. So, it's probably not a good strategy, but you know, the bottom line is there are differences between males and females. And if you're a woman, you will have to work harder, everything else being equal, to lose fat compared to a male. You're designed to store a higher percentage of fat to survive a biological period of vulnerability called pregnancy. You know, men don't have babies ever, no matter how they identify. What's interesting is that I just did a little math and I figured out if males had the babies instead of women, our species would have only lasted 20 generations. And I can prove it because uh any species needs to have 2.1 births per couple in order to maintain the species. And if men had the babies, I can guarantee you there never would have been a second birth. Not even one time.

Just because the men.

No way we're putting up with it again. And so as a consequence, after 20 generations, people would have been gone. So thank goodness women have the babies.

Yes. Speaking of male breast, I think one of the biggest, I guess maybe myths and I would love to go deeper into it was men particularly fear fasting because of the potential muscle loss that might occur. I mean women too obviously as well. So.

Is that a myth? Is that true? Like what are the actual studies showing about muscle loss?

So it's it what's true is that if you are too active in fasting, you will burn more lean tissue. As we said, if if males fasted for two weeks, lost 10% of their body weight, 20% of their fat, 40% of their visceral fat, 6% of lean tissue, and then with careful refeeding, the lean tissue came back, but the fat loss continued. So if you want to minimize lean tissue loss in fasting, you need to rest and hydrate. So some of the lean tissue is water, some of it's uh muscle. The muscle recovers and the muscle is preserved in fasting. So the idea that, oh, you're just losing weight and it's muscle is not true. And we go to our website trueorthalth.com, look at the studies, look at the body composition data. In fact, we've got articles published in peer-reviewed journals on what happens to the body with fasting. And under this protocol, lean tissue is preserved. That's part of the reason for the protocol.

It's a temporary loss, but it'll eventually come back.

Well, when you, let's say you lose weight fasting, some of it's water, you'll rehydrate. Some of it's the glycogen stores. You've got two pounds of glycogen in your muscles. You're going to definitely burn that. Even in your three-day fast, you've burned that two pounds. That's going to come back because you'll put glycogen back in your storage. Some of it's muscle. That muscle recovers. You don't lose any muscle cells. The cells get smaller and then they rehydrate and that's it. That takes six weeks.

And as per, in fact, the proportion of their body from lean mass was actually higher at six weeks than it was at baseline.

So in terms of preferentially mobilizing visceral fat for both males and females, it may have utility, but again, requires rest. You're too active. Yeah, you'll lose more weight, but you'll lose more lean tissue.

And what about testosterone?

Testosterone appears to be stable during fasting, as is bone density. You know, that was a concern we had. Yeah. We thought, well, gee, partly because of fasting and partly because of resting, maybe we would lose bone density, but actually in our DEXA scan studies, bone density was not uh negatively affected. So that was that was good to see.

Okay. So testosterone, because I guess.

There's no, we have not published data, systematic data on testosterone, but the general observation, testosterone levels, is we know that there's some uh reduction in testosterone during fasting, but it appears to be stabilized, um, post-fasting. So it doesn't seem to be a negative effect. During fasting itself, you may experience reduced testosterone production, but there's a lot of things that alter in fasting as as a conservation mechanism. Yeah. There doesn't seem to be a negative effect where people's overall testosterone levels are normalized. And in fact, in people with hypotestosteronism, there may be a normalizing effect.

Yeah. So you have to be careful about what you see in fasting versus where we're more interested at follow-up at six-week follow-up, where what's the consequences of it.

Yeah. You know.

Fascinating. Since our last conversation, one of the things that have popped up is the GLP1s.

You got the Ompics, the we go. I guess before I even ask any questions around that, what, what's your overall thoughts around this? Because this is clearly related to fasting, and very topical.

Yeah. Well, they recognize that there are natural things that happen in fasting, uh, in terms of hunger modulation, and they've reproduced this with a medication. And it's a brilliant medication because, first of all, you have to take it the rest of your life. As soon as you stop injecting these very expensive drugs, you blow back. I was had no challenge about that. And so short-term, what they're doing is, um, trying to affect satiety without changing your diet. So the real thing nobody wants to hear about is you have to eat healthy. You know, all this eat healthy food and exercise. No, that's not practical. They wanted to come up with a drug that would allow you to keep eating exactly what you're eating now, but would make you so sick by nausea, gastrointestinal motility issues, and other things that you wouldn't eat as much of it, that would affect your satiety mechanism. And it works. If you take these drugs, most people find they don't, uh, they don't drink as much, they don't smoke as much, they don't eat as much of the stuff. They can keep eating the same crappy diet, but they won't do as much of it, and they will lose weight. And short-term, being overweight is so dangerous that even poisoning yourself to lose weight may have some short-term benefit. Now, long-term, we know there's serious problems. In fact, gastrointestinal motility problems and all the osteoporosis and all the things that are starting to come out now. In fact, if you watch late-night TV, I'm told, um, they're already starting to advertise the class action lawsuits against these drugs from the people that are all didn't get told that, you know, whatever, like they always do. These things, as you know, come in waves, and this is a really lucrative, really brilliant, uh, from a business standpoint, because you can lose weight. Don't change your diet. Don't worry about the long-term. Just worry about the short-term. And and it does actually blunt some of those mechanisms by inhibiting those, those pharmaceuticals. And so not a good healthy, not from our viewpoint, which is trying to extend health span, not just lifespan, how long you live, but how well you live in the time you have left. It's important to know that in terms of life expectancy, how long you live is largely determined by genetics and luck. Okay. But how well you live in the time you have left is largely determined by diet and lifestyle choices. So GLP1 inhibitors, in my opinion, probably will not be shown to be very good in terms of long-term health span, but in terms of short-term weight loss, they're no question they're powerfully effective medications and very, very lucrative.

Yeah. You're not changing human behavior, which is one of the hardest things to change, and it's just something you can inject that will work like that.

Right? Very appealing.

Very appealing. No, I, I totally get it. Yeah, I've even seen the longevity folks, people that are very much into longevity talk about how they're taking small micro doses of these because it's supposed to be helpful for blood sugar levels, glucose, and all of that stuff. Have you looked into this as well? And what, what's kind of the actual science?

Well, they're using a lot of these. They've been, what's really interesting, Valter Longo, uh, published a study, and he looked at, um, life extension and in cancer treatment. For example, they would take 30 rats, induce cancer, and these are genetically rare rats, so they're identical. So they induce cancer in them. Give them enough chemotherapy so that you kill all the cancer cells, but all the rats die from the toxicity of the chemotherapy. Take the same rats with the same cancer and the same chemotherapy. But periodically fast them before and after treatment, all 30 rats survive, dramatically enhancing cancer survival. There's something called differential stress sensitization where cancer cells are more vulnerable to the fasting state than normal cells are because they're normal cells evolved fasting as a biological adaptation and the normal cells can adapt to it. Fasting cells, cancer cells have higher metabolic rates. They don't do well in that environment. So it makes chemotherapy more effective. And there's also a phenomenon where healthy cells are protected to some degree from the damaging effects of chemotherapy in the fasting state. Uh, differential stress sensitivity. So when they published that data, people said, "Oh, there's something happening in fasting that makes cancer more vulnerable to chemotherapy and less, this healthy cells less vulnerable to chemo." So what we need are fasting-mimicking drugs. Drugs that would do to you what fasting does, but in a way they could sell and without that nasty where you have to rest and fast and all that stuff, you know, we don't hear about that. And so now they're trying to use metformin and other drugs to mimic some of the effects that is lowering effects of fasting and stuff, thinking that that's going to somehow translate into better life quality, etc. And it's very nice theoretically, but show me the data. There's no good data showing that doing these things actually actually ends up in causing people to live better and live longer. It's it's a great theory.

Metformin has also shown to blunt muscle growth. Like that's a real thing, right? So there there's it's not all even in the theoretical side. It's not all positives that.

Have you ever seen a chart of metabolism? How incredibly complicated, you know, metabolic rates are? Any. It's like almost mind-boggling. And to think that you're going to just go in there and put a little thing here and pop a little thing out here and that's going to somehow all just work out the way you want is really, as I said, an example of arrogance exceeding ignorance. It's really a bit preposterous, you know, but certainly appealing. And, you know, and that's there's lots of people interested in that. Uh, they want to also live longer. They want to live forever, basically. But what's interesting, if you look at the data, there's been 80 billion modern humans born on the planet. Okay. There have been well-documented evidence that 10 have lived past 117 so far. Okay. So, right now, it's, you know, about one in eight billion chance of that happening. Now, they think they're going to manipulate a few things to change those numbers. That's not actually been demonstrated. Interesting enough, do you know all 10 of those were women?

Why is that?

Well, because uh women have different physiology, different environmental exposure, but, you know, right now there hasn't been actually any male ever shown to live past 117. Some of these guys start uh uh demonstrating that there's actually an effect there, certainly be interesting to pursue.

But to the degree that I've been able to look at that literature, I have not been impressed enough to try to incorporate into the practices that we offer at the True North Health Center. It's funny because a lot of the longevity gurus, Brian Johnson, to a lot of the billionaires, like Peter Thiel, all these guys that want to live forever, they're all males, right? The the one thing that has been shown to affect longevity is caloric deprivation and periodic undernutrition or fasting. And if, and again, you take rats and you systematically underfeed them or you fast them, you can increase their lifespan 30% up to doubling. So, I mean, there's no question that. And I look at it a slightly different way. I don't think fasting is extending their life. I think overfeeding is cutting them. So when you feed rats ad libitum, they overeat. If you have feed rats in a, uh, if you look at rats' intake in a natural setting, they eat about 40% less than they eat in an ad libitum environment. So I think that it's overfeeding that's cutting our life in half, not fasting that's doubling it.

Yeah. Even it's a semantic difference.

Yeah. Because people even talk about, I mean, pretty controversial, but the whole carnivorous diet where people are just eating meat. And some people swear by it. Jordan Peterson talks about how it's changed his life.

Yeah. Well, not eating refined carbohydrates can change your life. Getting rid of.

That's what I mean. It's the elimination part. I feel that's.

It's not that living on meat that's necessarily the big issue. And you'll see long-term, there's pretty good data now that long-term high-fat, high-protein diets, you know, have a lot of serious consequences. But remember, most people were already eating animal foods three times a day anyway. They just got rid of the refined carbohydrates. They got a lot of benefit. Well, we see that too without any animal foods being used. It's not the animal foods. It's the key to health. It's getting rid of dietary excess. So, if you eat a carnivore diet, you get into ketosis, you have a hunger-blunting mechanism. You're exercising, you may do better than your colleague who's also eating meat, fish, fowl, eggs, and dairy products. But all of this refined carbohydrates. And, you know, 93% of calories of the average person now is coming from animal food or ultra-processed carbohydrate. Only 7% calories comes from fruits and vegetables. And most of it's potatoes served as French fries and potato chips. Fruit and vegetables aren't even a statistically significant percentage of the diet of most people. It's the ketchup on your kids' school lunch program.

Yeah. Yeah. And you talk about this in in your previous book as well about how willpower is pretty overrated when it comes to dietary restrictions at least. What is the alternative? What can people do to actually eat healthier, especially if the people around them aren't doing it?

Maybe some people, this is a big problem. And, you know, our first book is called The Pleasure Trap. We talked about that when I was with you the first time. The fact that artificial stimulation of dopamine in the brain, the neurochemical associated with pleasure, is what reinforces behavior and also addiction. And so it's the same dopamine that leads to alcoholism, cocaine addiction, that also is a problem with the ultra-processed chemicals in food, salt, oil, and sugar. It's amazing how many problems have with white powdery substances. Just thinking about that. So the thing is, it's that artificial stimulation of dopamine that leads to addiction in general and also is what leads to obesity. And so recognizing it helps. Like if you don't know that alcohol can lead to alcoholism, you're not likely to modulate your behavior. You know, if you don't recognize there's a potential problem and if you don't understand that salt, oil, and sugar is what's fooling your brain and why you're fat, sick, and miserable, it's unlikely you're going to change. Uh, escaping addiction is really difficult. Um, if you are an alcoholic and you go to an inpatient program for 30 days, 90 visits in 90 days, and you have family support, there's an 83% chance you'll be drinking in 12 months. Heroin addiction, it's about a 90% failure rate. To lose weight, lose 5% of your body weight, maintain it for a year, 95% failure rate. Doctors have a better chance treating heroin addiction than they do overweight because they lie to the overweight people. Tell them to keep eating their same food but eat less of it, and it doesn't work any more than it tells tell alcoholics, we'll just don't drink as much. Fine, doesn't work. You have to stop it. And that's a harsh reality. Nobody wants to hear it, but that's what my experience has been. And the same thing with weight. If you want to lose weight, stop eating the chemicals that fool your brain, and you will lose the weight. People come to the center and they eat ad libitum foods that we're serving them. If they're a male, they're going to lose three pounds a week down to optimum weight. If they're a female, two pounds a week. If they fast, they're losing an average of a pound a day. And so, and that weight loss continues if they're willing to, you know, continue the diet. It's hard to continue the diet for the reasons you said. One, you break free of addiction, but you still have all the social issues.

Yeah. But we have shown, we did a long-term study with our colleagues from the Mayo Clinic on the treatment of stage two hypertension. Took 27 subjects underwent fasting, and 26 of the 27 people normalized their type two hypertension without any medication. Then we follow those people at six weeks and show that 26 out of 27 one required half-dose medication. We tracked them down at a year and the question was, will they have maintained their weight loss? Will they maintain normal blood pressure without medication? And if you look at the scientific literature, the prediction is that 5% of people can make long-term changes. 95% of people cannot. But in this particular group, 76% of the follow-up people were able to maintain their weight loss. And the majority still had normal blood pressure without medication. Now, in fairness, these are highly motivated, self-selected people. They were people that were willing to fast. They came to the center. They went through the program. But at least those highly motivated people were, and they weren't perfect with their diet. Not everybody ate exactly like I advocate, but what they did was they maintained enough change, didn't regain their weight, which means they didn't regain their fat or visceral fat, which means it was good enough to keep their blood pressure normal, so they didn't need the drugs, and they didn't get back the side effects of the drugs, the chronic cough, fatigue, the impotence, and the premature death that goes along with it. So at least highly motivated people can make these changes, but they are difficult. And they're mostly difficult because of the environment that we live in.

I was just going to say the environment because there's there's a study that I'm thinking of where they looked at, uh, people that went to the Vietnam War, and I think there was like 90% that were addicted to, was it heroin or opioids, something like that, and when they came back, they changed their environment, obviously, they went from Vietnam into back to the US, 90% of them did not go back into taking drugs, which is the total opposite when you're thinking about the rehab centers that we have today. So that speaks a lot about environment. Environments.

To me, I think it's a huge deal.

How do people get into the right environment?

First of all, my suggestion is you have to have a real heart-to-heart with your relatives and the people you're living with. In other words, you're not asking them necessarily to change, but they need to respect the fact that you're trying to make changes. If you're an alcoholic, you don't say that nobody in your family can necessarily drink, but they're not going to drink around you and they're going to have a create help you create a safe environment in the house. That's not an unreasonable request. If you're overweight, you have a weight issue, it doesn't mean you're going to demand that nobody else or kids or whatever eat whatever. But you might ask them to help create a safe environment for you because you have a problem with eating. So maybe they keep that food sequestered in an area that you're not exposed to. Maybe they have that away from the home, but not in the home. Try to create a safe environment in the home where you have all kinds of choices, but all those choices are healthy, and so you're not tempted constantly. That's number one. Number two, if you can do it at work to some extent, that helps too. A lot of people do find at home, but they go to work and there's big things of candy and all this stuff constantly calling their name out. Like, you don't tell your alcoholic friends when they become sober, well, the first thing you should do is become a bartender. That's what we should do. Let's get you to work as a bartender. That'll help with your sobriety. No, you try to help them be in an environment that's supportive. It doesn't mean all their friends have to quit drinking, but their friends have to respect that they're choosing to quit drinking. And if their friends are calling saying, "Well, a little bit won't hurt. What's in you? My doctor says red wine's good for you. You should have red wine." And they don't see this cancer juice that it actually is. That's a problem. Okay. So, again, it doesn't mean your friends can't drink, but they've got to be able to support you in your effort to get healthier and happier. And if they can't, get some new friends.

It's easier easier with friends. With family, family can be a big challenge, but you have that heart-to-heart. Create a safe environment in the home. Try to create a safe environment at work. And then try to recognize the fact that you're an addict. And you know, you have to establish behavior patterns and try to be consistent with them and try to find support so that you can be successful long-term. Sure. And it's likely to be the most difficult thing you'll ever do in your life.

And to be clear, this is not just for addicts, right? Food and drinking in general is so embedded into social experiences and culture. Like I was just talking about how just quitting drinking or not drinking as much, just kind of made me not hang out with a lot of my friends. And it's, you're kind of, but humans at the same time, we're such social creatures that you're kind of making someone go against the human drive to be social and not feel lonely for this healthy habit. This is why it's so hard.

What it means, it's nice to cultivate friends though that are, whether they live healthy or are supportive of you living healthily, so that you don't have to, you know, give up all, you know, uh, being effective socially. I've been doing this since I was 16 years old. So I've not used any meat, fish, fowl, eggs, dairy products, oil, salt, sugar, alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, anything since I was a kid. So for me, it's very easy. And I work in an environment, True North Health Center, where there's nothing but healthy food options. And I work with people that are out. So again, I'm not saying I can empathize with people that work in a challenging environment, that live with people that are antagonistic. But ultimately, the people that are successful figure out a way to navigate that and and work it out.

What do you do when you play basketball with people in different age groups, people in different backgrounds, and they want to go for a drink or they want to go out to eat?

Well, last night, for example,

Yeah. We finished our tournament with, and the team that wanted to go out and they wanted to celebrate. And normally, like all Dr. Ly and I did is we get a condo and we make our own meals, and the rest of the team that might be living more conventionally stay at the hotel and do whatever they do. Well, we wanted to have a meal together. So, we picked a Thai restaurant because I know Thai restaurants, you can go in, order side dishes. I had steamed vegetables, brown rice. I had a perfectly great, perfectly healthy meal. They had their whatever it was, you know, saucy.

You don't even know what it is. Whatever. You don't even name it.

But they didn't even, you know, they weren't cognizant of the fact necessarily. I mean, my stuff looked a little different, but, you know, it was perfectly good. The only thing was I got twice as much food for half the cost.

So, you learn how to navigate it. Like if if you go to a restaurant where they actually have a chef and you call ahead and you say, just can you get me a vegetable cut or a couple baked potatoes, you know, they don't say, I've never had them say, "Oh, we don't want your kind here. Don't come." No, they're f happy to. They just want your money.

Speak the same language.

I'd like to spend my money in your restaurant. Can you accommodate me? This is what my needs are. Almost always they're going to be just fine. I'm not saying it doesn't take extra effort. It does. But, you know, and for the rest of our meals, we had oatmeal and fresh fruit in the mornings before the games. We had salad, we had rice, pasta, we had steamed vegetables. We had great meals. They were fabulous. And we had that one. We were able to go out and socialize with, uh, with the team, and it worked out just fine.

Yeah. So if fasting can lower blood pressure, it can help with disease, potentially prevent cancer, and it can be the solution for many of, uh, the problems that we have today to be able to increase not only lifespan but hopefully health span. Why isn't standard medical practice?

Well, I think that up until, uh, recently, there hasn't been very much published on it. We're actually one of the first research groups that's actually publishing in peer-reviewed journals like the British Medical Journal, journals.

And so physicians, and until this book came out, which only came out a couple years ago, there really wasn't a text for physicians that was that cited the literature and referenced stuff in a way that they could relate to. And now it's changing. And so, you know, we're seeing the biggest growth in population at the True North Health Center. And remember, we're seeing 1500 people coming in a year, but the biggest growth is physicians coming in themselves because they've been frustrated. They've been following their own practices and now they've got cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and they're having, they're reading and coming in to do fasting themselves. It won't be long before they'll incorporate it into their practices. We hope.

Right? Because it's like a one-to-many model, right? Those are the people you want to empower, and then the people will listen to the physicians. And there is a whole class of physicians now, you know, functional medicine doctors and lifestyle medicine doctors, you know, thousands of people belong to these. I do continuing education for these groups. And now it's one of the big areas of growth in medicine is this idea of functional or preventative medicine and lifestyle medicine because the old ways don't work in terms of getting people healthy. They work great financially, but they don't work well. And that's why if you go to a doctor with high blood pressure or diabetes or autoimmune disease or lymphoma, and you say, "What's going to happen?" You say, they'll tell you, "You'll be on these drugs the rest of your life. I guarantee you'll never get well. You'll be sick forever." That's the promise of modern medicine for those particular kinds of diseases.

And what we're saying is, no, those people can actually get well. They just have to be willing to do dangerous and radical things like eat well, exercise, and go to bed on time. Well, radical comes from the word radicus, which means root or cause. So, we want to treat the actual causes of disease, not the leading causes of death.

The leading causes of death are heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. We wait until they're sick and then we throw these expensive treatments that don't work. Bypass surgeries and stents and powerful drugs instead of dealing with the actual causes of death. The reason people get heart disease and cancer and diabetes is smoking, drinking, and eating a diet that's based on animal foods and ultra-processed refined carbohydrates. If we start treating the actual causes of death, we will delay, defer, or avoid the leading cause of death.

Mhm. Right now, though, it's so lucrative treating sick people that there's not a lot of financial motivation for anybody to start talking about trying to stay healthy.

Well, there's no money in fasting. This is the biggest thing that I learned when I interviewed Dr. Jason Fung is that there's no incentive for someone to promote fasting.

Well, think about what Valter Longo did, which was interesting. He monetized fasting in the form of ProLon. So at the time, before he came in, there was no research really published, and there was nobody, no medical offices would talk about it. Then he introduced ProLon, and now they can sell a product, okay, and make money. It's $250 a day, you know, whatever the thing is. There's 10,000 offices selling ProLon now. Okay. So it was a practical, economically viable way of introducing the concept of fasting. And so that is, if you want to influence physicians, talk, look at the economics.

Yeah. Okay. The pharmaceutical companies know that. Think about how people make big money in medicine now. You know, for a while, they took selling drugs away from the doctors because of the obvious inherent conflict of interest, but now, you know, what infusion centers are? It's where people go to treat for cancer or autoimmune disease where they give you IV very powerful drugs, immunotherapy drugs. Well, they're sold by the immunotherapy centers that are owned by the doctors that are prescribing them. So if you want to make money in medicine now, you get into one of those fields and you operate infusion centers where you're selling and getting paid. The more you give, the more you make. There's no question that economics are a powerful influencing effect on what's happening in healthcare today.

And yeah, it's it's it's a very dark world if I think about it. And we can go into that rabbit hole, but I think just to circle back, one of the biggest things that I've kind of had this light bulb moment is we talked about how a lot of society is talking about addition and in addition, but I think what's really a perspective shift that I've uh come to learn and hopefully a lot of people have as well is through negation, through actually removal and subtraction.

It is something that you have within your control because addition often times I think comes from relying on someone else, whether you're taking a supplement or you're taking some sort of a protocol, whatever it might be. Whereas oftentimes removal, whether it's removing certain people in your circle, whether it's removing certain foods or drinks, you have that within your control. And I think that's a beautiful thing because you can change your life, but you're the one that can do it. You don't have to rely on something else by adding.

The problem is though, that's not intuitively obvious. So you have to do it consciously. It takes volitional consciousness to do that. The natural thing is to think there must be something missing. What can I add? More pills, more powders, more potions, more drugs, more treatments. That's that's what comes to us naturally. The idea that you're representing, I think, is actually the key to all this, which is recognizing that most people are sick and suffering and dying as a consequence of excess, not deficiency. There is no kwashiorkor or in industrialized societies, no protein deficiency. You've never seen a person that's that's not what's the problem. The problem is excess. Excess of fat and protein in general, excesses of animal fat and animal protein in particular, and dominantly refined carbohydrates, the use of ultra-ultrarocessed foods. There are not just salt, oil, and sugar, but all kinds of chemicals that modulate flavor, texture, perception, alter the gut microbiome, change the the way these the body responds to it. We're really poisoning ourselves into a premature death and disability. But to overcome that is a really non-intuitive, very difficult thing. It has to be done intellectually. That's why we write books. That's why we publish papers, peer-reviewed journals. That's why I operate a place like True North Health where people can come and experience what it means to get well again. Once you get that flavor of what food tastes like normally, what it feels like not to have joint pain and not to have headaches and not to be on drugs and not then it's it makes it a little bit easier for them to fight the fight when they go out and have to face the social consequences of the fact that, you know, the world's not going to be very favorable, especially when you're dealing with a bunch of addicts.

What's that one mindset shift that we can end the audience with today to help make that shift?

Health results from specific causes, just like disease does. And health results from healthful living. And healthful living involves diet, sleep, and exercise. The diet that's most likely to result in long-term health and health span is a whole foods diet that dominates whole natural foods, fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, and kind of minimizes or avoids the animal foods and the ultrarocessed refined carbohydrates. Um, if we get the diet, the sleep, and the exercise, and then we superimpose the intermittent fasting that we talked about as a routine habit and potentially occasional longer-term fasting, we believe that people can avoid the debility that causes such problems in the last 20 years of life. Our goal is to help people make the last 20 years of their life the most rewarding and the best years instead of, you know, becoming dependent on everybody around.

Beautiful. Dr. Angel, thanks so much for coming on the show.

My pleasure.