Transcription
Do you do any fasting anymore, or is that something that you have omitted from the current version of your schedule?
I do it situationally, and I think there are situations where I think I'll benefit from fasting or from just inducing a state of an energy deficit. Right? So you could do caloric restriction, time-restricted feeding, dietary restriction. You could do a restricted ketogenic diet, a cyclic ketogenic diet, a modified, a modified supplemented ketogenic diet, I guess, which is what I do. I like to do what I call, I mean, I kind of coined it. It's like sardine fasting.
And I had a cancer patient a long time ago. One of the first that I sort of engaged with, actually, you might know him. His name was Dr. Frederick Hatfield.
So he was like, kind of a famous...
Dr. Squat.
Yeah. Yeah. Dr. Squat back in the day.
Wow.
Yeah. We were good friends. He was a mentor to me in many ways. But he had advanced metastatic prostate cancer, and it went to the bones where they did a PET. And I was just getting into this area of research, and I was like, "Here's what I would do." And I would go to his house, and I'd bring him things, and he was testing things, and he loved sardines. So he kind of, I think he steered me onto sardines in like, maybe 2007 or eight or something like that. That was my love for sardines kind of was probably from him. But he would do low carb. He called it ketogenic, but I think it was just more of a low-carb diet. And then he would do five days. He would do a fasting-mimicking diet that Walter Longo has advanced, but he has more of a plant-based approach. But Dr. Hatfield would do, Fred would do one or two cans of sardines, maybe one can of sardine per day for a week. So we called it sardine fasting. And that was just as I was getting into this. And essentially what happened is that he went into rapid remission, and the doctors didn't really know.
Huh.
Fred ended up passing away maybe eight years later of something completely unrelated to his cancer.
As a non-oncologist, I have to pause and just say, I mean, it seems like prostate for a lot of people, they hear that, they think death sentence. Metastatic prostate cancer, they think, "No way, you're done." Am I exaggerating? I mean, how frequent is it that people have complete remission of something like that? Maybe I'm exaggerating things.
There's a lot of factors, like the Gleason score, and his was not good, and a number of factors. So he was given, I think he told me, like, three months to live. I mean, but he went years and years after that, and he was like, "No evidence of disease."
How often was he doing the sardine fasting? Was that once every month? What did his cadence look like?
He stayed ketogenic, and then I would go over there and encourage him to do that. And he loved to do it. He was like, "Okay, I do this, and now I feel better when I'm doing it." Fred also surprisingly would smoke a little bit, and I got him to maybe stop that too. So, we got him to dial back on some other behaviors, and maybe he would drink a little bit too, but not that much. But his health improved dramatically when he adopted a low-carb and then ketogenic diet. And then for years, he did the sardine fasting, and we communicated, and I just encouraged, "Hey, keep sending me your medical reports." And, you know, I was like, "Maybe there is something to this." So that actually steered me into, just like the Alzheimer's, we started Alzheimer's research because of Dr. Mary Newport. I studied seizures because Mike Dancer, just Google Mike Dancer epilepsy, and you'll find some remarkable stories. I kind of steered him to the ketogenic diet, and it was a remarkable, he got off all meds, and it worked way better than the meds. So, but that was prostate cancer. But then I started engaging with other patients and then connected with Thomas Seyfried soon after that.
How frequently was Fred doing the week-long sardine fast, if you had to guess?
Once a month. Sorry. Yeah, I meant a month.
Yeah. It's analogous to the fasting-mimicking diet.
Yep.
I think Walter Longo can do that. You know, he advises patients based on situationally their situation, but I encouraged Fred to do it every month, and his feedback to me was that he would do it once every month to two months. He enjoyed doing it. So, it was something that he kind of looked forward to doing. So, sardine fast. I can't wait for that to become a thing that's going to spread.