Transcription
Can you explain these four graphs to me here? There's some four graphs that come from work you've done.
Okay. Well, this is outcome data that comes from um studies that we've published. And this basically is looking at the percent body weight change. And if you look at the bottom graph, you'll notice it's over time.
Yeah. Okay. So, we're looking at the percentage body weight change during fasting. And you notice during refeeding it actually comes down a little bit more even though people are realimating. They're losing fat. They're regaining water and muscle. And then they're able to maintain that percent body change. This is 65day follow-up.
So on that for people that aren't watching the video right now and are just listening to audio. What what is it essentially saying happens and in what period of time with what protocol?
So in this particular uh study, these people lost about 10% of their body weight over an average of uh two weeks of fasting. They refed for a week at the facility and then they were followed up 65 days later and at 65 days later you'll notice they'd maintained their total body weight change and then just a little bit more and now they'd been back to eating and exercising.
In the next uh graph, the percent body weight, this is the visceral fat mass.
And visceral fat, again,
visceral fat is the 10% of the fat that makes up the fat that typically accumulates around the belly and in the organs. It's the fat that's hypertrophic, hyper metabolic, hyper. It it produces inflammation. It acts like a tumor.
So, there's two types there.
There's subcutaneous, which is on the outside,
right?
And then there's visceral, which is in the inside. And the stuff in the inside is the worst. It's fat that wouldn't normally be there. Here's the problem. You evolved in an environment of scarcity. Storing fat is so critical to survival in a world of uh deficiency of or of defic depletion that the body does everything it can to store fat because the people that store fat in a natural setting, they live to reproduce. In the modern world, it's become a disadvantage because we live in this very unnatural environment where you can get dietary excess. And so even though the body is designed for an environment of deficiency, it's responding with that genetic programming. And so it stores fat even though it's not healthful for you. As far as the body's concerned, spring might come late. The more fat you store, the better. And as a consequence, that visceral fat is associated with these diseases of dietary excess. In fasting, the body preferentially mobilizes that visceral fat. It gets rid of it. Just like if you go on a fast and have a breast tumor, you lose 10% of your body fat. You don't necessarily lose 10% of the tumor. You might lose 50% of the tumor. you might lose the entire tumor because the body's has some intelligence to it in terms of how it's mobilizing these tissues. You can take a person, an animal for example, and starve it to death. Um, and if you measure its nervous system, you'll find the nervous system isn't depleted even when it's starved to death, it will preserve those tissues in preference to the uh the visceral fat or the fat tissues. And so this graph is showing that visceral fat not only comes down during fasting but it keeps coming down and it continues to come down with refeeding.
And this particular graph here this is blood pressure. So again blood pressure comes down is during fasting. It comes down even lower with refeeding. And people are a that are following diet and lifestyle changes are able to maintain that pressure without medication. So if you look at our study, people that started with stage three hypertension, so they're 180 or higher systolic blood pressure, they lost an average of 60 points uh on systolic blood pressure, not counting the fact that the baselines were often taken on medication.
Um and the final graph here that you've got uh is percent in lean mass. So lean mass also go down in fasting because your
lean mass again is
lean mass is your your fluids your muscle lean mass goes down but then it recovers during refeeding and re-elementation and the percentage of lean mass which includes your muscle mass at 6 week followup was actually higher in those patients than it was at baseline.
Are they exercising there
during recovery? They are not during fasting.
Okay. And you mentioned PCOS earlier on when we were talking about the implications for women. Have you ever done any studies or had patients come to your fasting clinic that have symptoms of PCOS?
Yes, we treat uh we've had you know dozens and dozens of patients with polycystic ovarian syndrome and it's a condition that responds consistently to fasting. It also responds to diet and lifestyle change but understand many of the people that have made the diet changes but are not been successful are then referred to us for fasting. We always want to try the diet first because a lot of things resolve just by getting a person on a good diet and exercise program. and PCOS for people that don't know. I'm sure a lot of men don't know about PCOS, but some of them will because they might have fertility problems with their partner. My partner has been very public that she has PCOS. Um, and she's found that the ketogenic diet, removing sugar from her diet, has had a profound impact on recalibrating her menstrual cycle. Her menstrual cycle was very um inconsistent, irregular, could be up to 60 days or longer or not at all. And then when she removed sugar from her diet and um carbohydrates, it's now perfect,
right?
So it's like every 28 whatever days it is. And so I was wondering if you know there's lots of women that are suff suffering with a variety of different hormonal challenges or things like PCOS if you have any case studies from your clinic of that resetting their menstrual cycles or you know reversing the symptoms of PCOS.
Right. It's not uncommon for us to have women that, for example, have their plumbing's good in terms of their tubes and whatnot, but they're having difficulty initiating pregnancy. They fast, they reboot, and sure enough, within a cycle or two, you know, they're able to achieve pregnancy. And it's not unusual to have people that have uh disrupted uh dismenoria, menorasia, etc. within usually not the very first cycle, but the second cycle will normalize uh function. And I think the reason for that is the hormones and stuff that for the next cycle are already kind of set up and where you see the change is often, you know, at that 6 week follow-up.
So let's be clear because if you fast, it is a form of stress on the body, isn't it? From everything I know about sort of evolution. If you're fasting, your menstrual cycle is probably going to stop if you're doing an extended fast because your body sends a signal to say, "Listen, we don't have the resources in here to to give a kid life, so we're going to shut down."
If you take yourself below optimum weight or below optimum fat, yes, that's true. Disre, you know, uh, disruption of menstrual cycle happens with excess weight loss of any kind or rapid weight loss. Um, but for the patients that were fasting, often times it's quite the opposite. They're able to actually normalize their hormonal cycle. And as I mentioned, it may be the conversion of estradiol to estriol because of improvement in the gut microbiome that's responsible for normalization of that and other hormonal issues that maybe we haven't even been able to measure yet. Because your your body needs energy to do to perform its menstrual cycle. That's like it's am I right my thinking there that if the body senses you don't have the energy to have a baby it's going to shut down your menstrual cycle because having a baby would
I think if it doesn't have the reserves. So if you're in a The thing is many patients though even though they're fasting they aren't in a depleted state and so you don't see universal disruption of menstrual uh function because people are fasting. Um, but you know, athletes oftentimes see it when their percent body fat goes too low, they will become a minoric.
Do you see when someone comes to your clinic and does one of these extended fasts that there's other areas of their life that also improve that are completely sort of like unrelated to the benefits from the fast and I'm talking about willpower here and their ability to motivate themselves and be disciplined and persistent. And
there's I don't think there's any question that those factors are involved. You know, it's also just education and fear. People think if they get on a plane in New York and they flew to California, they would die of starvation over Colorado. They think the pretzels that they ate saved their life. And once people have fasted for 5 days or 10 days or 40 days, the idea of having to skip a meal doesn't seem quite so terrifying. You know, if there's not something that they that's healthful eating, they just skip the meal until the next one. and they're not afraid of the of the that they're going to die or that they're going to enter starvation or they're going to have depletion. A lot of people have a lot of fear in their head that's completely uh illogical, unnecessary and harmful.
It's so true when you tell me that someone can actually fast for what's the longest a person could fast for?
Well,
without severe consequences.
They say that a 70 kg male could fast about 70 days, but the longest we fast people is 40 days. And what happens is you get beyond 40 days, everything gets a little bit more delicate. You have to be a lot more careful with electrolyte balance and other things. And so 40 days, understand is only 1% of our patients. The vast majority are fasting between 2 weeks and 4 weeks. So it's, you know, it's 10 days or 14 days or 20 days. That's where the big bell curve is. You have a a small uh number of people that need to fast longer than that.
And you see this as a medical intervention. You don't see this as something that these people should be doing on a frequent monthly basis. You see this as a medical intervention for people with specific issues predominantly.
I think that everybody should fast every day for 12 hours. I think that everybody including healthy people would probably cons should at least consider fasting once a year for a week and that anybody that has a condition where it's appropriate to fast should fast however long it takes to resolve the condition, however frequently it takes to get well. So we do have some patients that were fasting two or three times during a year because they can't fast long enough the first fast to to resolve the condition. Uh but you know, they don't have enough reserves to be able to do you know a longer fast. So we will we will do it periodically until the condition resolves.
And what are the safety concerns with water fasts?
Yeah. Well uh and most obvious concerns are orthostatic hypotension. When people are used to having high blood pressure and you lower their pressure, their brain's used to higher profusion levels. So when you drop the pressure, they can get dizzy dizzy at first until they get used to having normal blood pressure. And you don't want people falling over and fainting and you know breaking something or having a problem. Dehydration is an a hermetic effect of fasting and it's an important part of stimulating the healing crisis. But you also don't want to get somebody so depleted that they get into, you know, cardiac dysriythmia or they have, you know, problems. And that's why we monitor people twice a day and we make sure that you know they maintain uh balance. You know, one of the things we did in can fasting save your life is we laid out all the protocols of fasting so a person could really understand what's going on in fasting. You know, what the benefits are, but we also wrote it so that their physicians would stop thinking they're crazy because they're interested in doing something like that. Because at first blush, this sounds like kind of crazy that you're going to have a person do take nothing but water for a prolonged period of time and somehow that's going to be a good thing. But when you really look at the science and you look at the experience we've had, you found when it's done according to protocol, it is a safe and it can be an effective intervention at giving the body a chance to heal itself.
What are the big misconceptions about fasting that you encounter consistently?
Well, one thing is people think that you're going to become depleted because they don't understand the recycling capacity of the body when fasting is done properly and that they're going to deplete their muscles and that the weight they lose in fasting is immediately regained after fasting. So there's no, you know, beneficial reproportioning of the body composition. And they're driven by the fear, uh, and I think instinctive fear that, you know, we're designed to be intimately concerned about getting enough to eat because in a natural setting, that's a constant biological imperative. You're always struggling, try to get enough to eat. And because we live in a constant state of deprivation in a natural setting, the use of fasting was never anything other than a survival tool. Some an adaption the body could make only under force, not by choice. But it is interesting that every major religion, the Jews, the James, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Christians, the Buddhist, all have a deep respect and tradition about fasting. There's a reason because it changes the way you feel about yourself and the world around you. It's so linked to spiritual traditions like meditation and clarity of mind and spiritual experiences
and I think because it is difficult to do that you know some of the benefits you mentioned earlier may be part of the you know part that are hard for us to quantify.
Yeah. What is the most important thing we haven't talked about as it pertains to fasting that we should have talked about?
We haven't talked about the different kinds of mechanisms which might be going on in fasting uh that sometimes people are interested. We talked about weight loss, you know, that that's kind of an obvious one. If you don't eat, you're going to lose weight, but there's also a naturetic effect. The body gets rid of the excess sodium accumulated in the body. Uh, and that has a profound effect because literally people will lose several pounds of fluid a day early on in fasting just because the body's been holding on uh to this in order to buffer the effect of sodium. Sodium, you know, you think about it. You take a tablespoon of it's a medic. It'll make you throw up. If you take enough of it, it'll kill you. it'll actually have there's an LD50 with it even though it's an essential nutrient in small amounts in excess quantity it's associated with hypertension and not to mention obesity and you might say well why would sodium which has no calories make people fat and it's because sodium stimulates what's called passive overeating so if you eat till you're full of anything say brown rice you just eat till you reach your satiety you don't want anymore
everything else being equal salt that rice up and eat till you're you'll eat more before you feel satisfied. And people say, "Yeah, cuz it tastes better." But that's what tasting better means. It means it results in more dopamine stimulation in the brain. So your brain is going to get fooled with salt. And if you take some foods, like for example, bread, the staff of light, 1500 calories a pound before you turn it into a butter boat and spread coagulated cowpas all over it. And you remove the salt, oil, sugar, and yeast. What do you get? It's called matzah. And it's punishment on Passover. Nobody's getting fat eaten matzah. But they're certainly having trouble with bread and bread related products. And it's because the the the wheat and the water become a carrier agent for these chemicals. Take beef, boil it, and gnaw on it. Do you like plain boiled beef? Not so much. It's a carrier agent for the sauces, the salt, the the things that that it's carrying to the pallet. So, we're using ultrarocessed foods as carrier agents for these chemicals. And that's why we're in trouble. 70% of the calorie of the average person is ultrarocessed foods. And we haven't even talked about the chemicals and other things besides the salt, oil and sugar, the emulsifiers, the other things that are thought to affect gut gut microbiome etc. So the naturetic effect of fasting is a kind of rebooting effect that gets rid of the sodium. We haven't talked about detoxification. If you take a fat bopsy of human beings,
a what?
A a fat bopsy, a biopsy, you take a a piece of fat or a piece of tissue and you analyze it, what you find is there's hundreds of different chemicals, PCB, dioxin, pesticide residues, heavy metals in everybody to varying degrees. People have different degrees of vulnerability to that. In fasting, the body rapidly mobilizes those materials and eliminates them. In fact, that some people have said, "Oh, it's so does it so efficiently. You shouldn't fast." that the body doesn't know what it's doing and it would put it out too quickly and it overload your system and so don't do it. But the reality is the body this is a biological adaptation. It does a good job of mobilizing the materials and eliminating them. If you take that fat biopsy and you say what where did all those fats come where did all those toxins come from? As much as 90% of some of those toxins came from eating animal foods which biologically concentrate those pollution in their environment. And then when you eat the animal food you get its entire lifetime accumulation of toxins. And so when you fast, you kick in the system you use to get rid of that stuff. And every time you do it, it gets better. And so these are things that don't necessarily happen to the same degree with our juice fasting or our modified feeding regimes. We talked about the autonomic nervous system. This is the part of the nervous system that controls all the stuff you don't think about. Like for example, um if you were to go out running and your heart didn't speed up, you would be in big trouble and potentially die. But it doesn't h it doesn't happen because your heart automatically speeds up and pumps more blood that you need. And that's controlled by the autonomic or automatic nervous system. It has two parts. The sympathetic and the parasympathetic. They have to be in balance. And we've invented hundreds of healing systems to try to rebalance the autonomic nervous system. Massage, bio feedback, homeopathy, chiropractic manipulation, osteopathic manipulation, acupuncture, relaxation, bof feedback. How do you think all these things make people feel better? At least to some degree, it's to the degree they help rebalance the autonomic nervous system. The most powerful way to rebalance the autonomic nervous system in my experience is fasting. Fasting is a profound impact on this autonomic sympathetic parasympathetic balance.
And I think one of the most profound effects honestly is effect on taste neur adaptation. As I mentioned, we did a study on your how you taste things. And when you go on a fast, good foods start to taste good. When you first come off a conventional diet, this kind of food is disgusting, tasteless, schwill. People have no interest in it. They can't imagine how anybody could choke it down.
What kind of food?
Well, whole fruits, vegetables, you know, simple foods without salt, oil will, and sugar added, too. They just can't even imagine how anybody could eat that. But after fasting, whole plant foods start to taste good. And the longer you eat them, the better they taste. to get to the point where you actually would prefer to eat whole plant foods rather than the salty, greasy, fatty, processed foods that everybody else is eating. So, these are these are big changes that occur in fasting that are not necessarily as easily objectified from a research standpoint, but have a profound difference on how people feel and how they live their lives.
Yeah, I noticed that as well when I when I was on the ketogenic diet, I noticed that um the things that I would usually get cravings for, suddenly there was no no cravings at all. And funny enough, when you're talking about taste changing when I was on a ketogenic diet, things tasted sweeter. And I don't mean I actually don't mean because obviously I wasn't really eating much sugar. It was actually some sugar-free drinks just tasted significantly sweeter. They were zero sugar drinks, but clearly because of some of the sweetness in there, they I almost couldn't drink them. But when I came off the ketogenic diet and I started having carbohydrates again, those drinks didn't taste so sweet anymore.
But it's your pallet that changes. The ketogenic diet is a fasting mimicking diet. It mimics some of the effects of fasting, not the least of which is changes in taste, what's called taste neurotration or sensitivity.
And it's not carbohydrates that desensitize you. It's refined carbohydrates.
Mhm.
And so if you get people on a whole plant food diet, you know, fruits and vegetables, all whole simple foods, they they maintain that acuity of taste. But as soon as you put them back on refined carbohydrates, the processed carbohydrates, then they begin to go back into the dietary pleasure trap.
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