we're going to be covering when to eat and also what to eat within 24-hour periods as well as over a year not just to maximize your wellness and how you feel and look but how to maximize your overall longevity I'm going to talk about some of my protocols as well that I've developed over the last 20 years being a researcher in this area and what works for me and what might work for you as well eat less often those three words eat less often that is the one thing that will have the biggest impact on your longevity based on all the science we'll talk about today okay and and this means this doesn't mean eat fewer calories necessarily it can and that's good that's good but a lot of people struggle to do that to eat fewer calories well it comes naturally if you're down to one meal a day which I am now uh you shed weight and then you you you get your 20-year-old body back that's a nice bonus but then you you maintain that weight you have a larger dinner which is what I do to make sure I'm not becoming Mal malnourished clearly we're not talking about malnutrition or starvation here it's about packing your calories into a shorter period of time it's not just about the period of eating it's the period of not eating that's so important for boosting the body's defenses against aging to maximize longevity and we'll talk about what how that actually works in a in a minute but you can still have a large body and fast and get the benefits we've in my lab we've looked at mice that are obese and tricked them into thinking that they're fasted and they live just as long as a skinny mouse so really it's about getting your body into this state of Defense at any weight though I would say that there are certain optimal body weights that it's clear that if you're carrying excess weight you're going to accelerate your aging clock certain body weights uh waste to height ratios that are optimal for humans is about 0.5 um but yeah losing weight is is helpful we're we're not not fat shaming anybody but we're going through the science this podast discusses about what the science says not what's socially acceptable and it is true that if you're a leaner you will live longer that is a fact um it's not necessary to get benefits by doing what we're going to say but also interestingly as a side effect of eating less often you will lose weight I did I've shed about 15 pounds since uh the beginning of the pandemic and I look better I feel better um and it's a nice side effect but ultimately what we're going to do here is we're going to say these are the kind of things you should consider in your life lifestyle we're going to help you get there we're going to ease you into it there are some tricks that make it easier um and ultimately you're going to end up with a lifestyle and hopefully a body that allows you to live decades longer them in our book so that's also a resource I get questions every day from people how should I fast and my first answer is well you're an individual you've got a different lifestyle different tolerance for for pain and hunger uh you're a female or a male you've got different microbiome um you these are really important things to take into consideration you when we recommend things what we're saying is you can try this if it doesn't work for you try something else but also just to talk about our one of our sponsors inside tracker I use inside tracker because it's not just oh I feel better today we actually have to measure things get a dashboard on your body to know if the the what you're doing whether it's exercise or in this case your diet and when you eat is working for you um and that's why I've been able to optimize my diet over the last 20 in fact 30 years I'm not just guessing I'm actually measuring measuring so why do we do that for our bodies which are even more important yeah bad habits yeah that's what we do right that's what we've always done I feel bad I don't feel good yeah well this is why I've autopilot I drive a little crazy um I do that with my body as well it's all an experiment but let let's go through the diets okay so that the fat there's a fasting mimicking diet um Volta Longo colleague of mine uh from UCLA uh is a proponent of that that's is a diet that lowers mtor activity it's low in these Branch chain amino acids that I've mentioned okay and is that is that a diet that mimics fasting or does that include periods of actually not taking in any calories it's both but you don't have to be as rigorous about the period the food itself will the food itself is um being processed by your body in such a way that the body is like I could really use a little bit more I could really like a little bit more yeah you want them to the body to be in a state of perceived adversity oh my goodness I'm running out of food I'm not eating meat anymore because plants have less of these amino acids so it it responds to that low amino acid input vta's done some great work over the last few years he and his group have shown that on this fasting mimicking diet which they can send to your home uh that actually helps cancer patients survive and get get over chemotherapy quicker again more evidence that fasting is good not just for longevity but for diseases so that's one the next one let's talk about which a lot of people call intermittent fasting we'll just call it fasting um this is a period if you go longer than a day some people do three days some people go for a week um I wouldn't go longer than that CU then you'll start chewing up your muscle which you don't want to do but these long extended periods are doing a real deep cleanse on the body and turning on that autophagy that process of recycling proteins very deeply especially once you get beyond the 3-day Mark when your metabolism switches into what's called chaperone mediated autophagy the Deep cleanse so that's fasting and then there's time restricted feeding which is what I do because I'm not very good at going Beyond 24 hours well I think most people would really really struggle to get there yeah time-restricted feeding which is what what I do which is try not to eat till dinner that's hard enough I my hats off to people like Peter AA uh the doctor and podcaster who many of our audience will have heard of he can go for a week and he's he's got a lot of willpower if you've ever met the guy he's different than me I I'm more of a hedonist but he is he grumpier at the end of the week do you think than he is at the beginning of the week though I mean like after all of that time he's always serious that's that's what I can tell you uh but brilliant but let let's get back to the this um Tim restricted feeding uh you want to have at least 16 hours of not eating or not eating very much and then you can have 8 hours so typically that means having a late lunch if you skip breakfast or if you prefer to skip dinner uh skip that three if you include the brain fog but let's just talk about physiology here uh one is that you're going to have glucose attached to proteins that makes them glum up think of it like caramelized body parts this will ultimately lower your longevity reduce the longevity give you type type two diabetes and proberly cardiovascular disease on top of that so that's one keep those glucose levels down but also what glucose is going to be doing to you at high levels is shutting off those protective mechanisms remember particularly amk and the cin they get Switched Off by Sugar so by having that up for most of the day if you're eating three meals plus snacks your defenses against disease and aging are going to be working at a minimum so instead keep those glucose levels low and consistent you won't get the brain fog you'll get fewer proteins modified that'll lead to disease and thirdly importantly you'll actually stimulate your body's natural defenses against disease and aging you can quit something but you don't have to be Draconian about it I still like to steal a you know a few scoops of ice cream if I see it but I'm not going to eat a giant ball of ice cream every night that's you know a quick way just to short a lifespan we're not trying to ruin everybody's Joy no not at all Placebo controlled studies that are ongoing right now that are showing you know an impact in fasting on longevity there's like you say the experimental like really interesting like wow that guy's looking really good and he's been fasting sort of thing right but then there's these large populations and subgroups of populations all across the world who have fasted as a part of tradition and culture for hundreds thousands of years um and there's there's pretty good evidence from from these groups as well right well let's name some of them the Janss the Janss in India in India that they're probably the the the most well-studied group and that there's scientific evidence that they have the most number of people over 70 in good health than any other religion than any other group in in India India fair enough and a lot of people go oh well the Janss are often are also vegetarian but lots of people in India vegetarian and the Jans are even doing better than them yes and we'll get to the vegetarian diet and what the science says about that versus a meat-based diet but there are other religions of Christians fast there's Ramadan for Muslims these are these are not just coincidences these aren't just religious practices it's clear that Humanity has figured out that you get you feel better you look better you ultimately are disease resistant you might might even help cure diseases by going through these periods of being hungry or at least not having food in your tummy why because it activates these three longevity defenses that we just mentioned now let's get into these really interesting like sort of gold standard studies um there is one out of the Baylor College medicine it was run by uh Isam indlu um this was published just last year and it showed that fasting from dawn to Sunset for four weeks improved blood pressure reduced BMI decreased weight circumference and and this is the important part I mean not it's all important but it upregulated DNA repair proteins this is what we saw on all these model organisms as well yeah there are dozens of studies showing that fast periods of fasting are is beneficial to people who are obese uh not just because they lose weight but they turn on their body's defenses they become more insulin sensitive and their glucose levels come down also showing that people of regular weight like me can benefit from fasting there's a number of studies there uh and these are all in the show notes if somebody wants to go and check them out um but what's really interesting is that that certain diseases type 1 diabetes multiple sclerosis even cancer those diseases seem to also benefit from fasting including when you combine chemotherapy with fasting you get this double benefit for many types of cancers and then the final point that I think is really interesting is you can mimic fasting say metformin a number of doctors prescribe metformin to patients with prostate cancer because it more studies are showing that these mimicries these molecules that mimic fasting or fasting or combinations of both will help you beat cancer no surprise and what parent doesn't feel guilty when they feels hunger but for long-term Health even programming the epigenome for longterm health requires some hunger in individuals and what we do to kids is we say big breakfast here's a snack here's a lunch terrible lunch typically at schools public schools um big dinner go to bed full wake up eat some more we're not just causing problems for these kids physiology for the long run 20 30 years later cuz they're epigenome is now set for feast not famine right but we're also setting them up for obesity which shuts off their survival programs right now so their bodies are aging quicker than they otherwise would I wonder if that's that's not a really important sort of frame to put the what we call the Obesity epidemic into is it's not just an epidemic of making people bigger it's an epidemic of making people age faster absolutely and we're going to see the impact of this in two or three decades from now with an increase of these diseases because the clock has been accelerated so this is most of our listeners most of the people who listening to this um watching this are going to be adults are going to be making decisions for themselves but much of this if not all of this is really translatable to what parents should be starting to help their children develop the habits of of eating in these patterns as well right and part used to being hungry once while exctly yeah and uh and not just have food lying around that whenever they want a snack they can that is is the way that we we evolved we we have this metabolic winter hypothesis that we've published when we were you know going back probably 100,000 years ago back to 6 million what was our lifestyle we were cold and hungry these days we live in air conditioning and heated houses with food always available which goes against what we've evolved to be optimal and so we've got to go back to those days where occasionally we were hungry occasionally we were cold we'll get to cold therapy later but basically the concept if there's nothing else that you remember about this topic it just remember this that we need to put our bodies in a state of want for them to fight diseases and have Ultimate Health in old age and give us longevity that's a really good place I think to stop for now Arian diets plant-based diets here we're going to we're going to talk about a lot of those different choices a minute here but I do want to take us back for just a second to to what's happening like really what's actually happening inside our bodies when like when I sit that and I still eat meat I haven't followed you down this path yet I love a steak um when I put a steak on my plate and I eat it what's happening what are those aminos doing well before you get aminos out of meat you need to digest it and so the first step is acid in your stomach is going to break down that meat into amino acids and then your microbiome is can utilize a lot of them and then those amino acids are also going to leech into your bloodstream now so now you've got these amino acids circling in your body circulating and there are three ones that are particularly important to know about it's Lucine isol leucine and veine also known as the branch chain amino acids and these are used by the body to sense protein intake and the sensor is this protein complex we talked about called mtor and when there's lots of these three branch amino acids particularly Lucine it'll be activated and this mtor the role is to say wow we got lots of amino acids let's build muscle let's repair cells let's do all good stuff which is why you you feel good if you eat a red meat um and your microbiome can handle it yeah I feel great I feel like I can fight a lion yeah you might have to fight a lion to get it but what actually is is going on the dilus is in the long run is that mtor can do something even better for your longevity than build new muscle it actually can turn on this recycling program called autophagy autophagy and that is is very clear there's no debate as to whether autophagy is good for you or bad for you it's definitely good so what I think people could do is to if they want to eat meat go for it but try to focus on plant based food more often so that there periods during the week when there aren't as many Lucine isol Lucine veine molecules floating around in your body so that you have a chance for your mour downregulation to recycle proteins now why do you want to recycle proteins you might say well who cares about recycling proteins well Alzheimer's disease is a good example of proteins that get modified and accumulate in your brain and it happens not just in the brain but in all tissues we have these old proteins that linger cause us to get old to malfunction but it's reversible and it's reversible by fasting it's reversible also by having low levels of these Branch chain amino acids at least part of the week let's talk about these primarily plant-based diets there's lot I mean there there is vegan diets out there you said like probably that's for many people that's probably going to be the gold standard but a lot of these plant-based diets have a little bit of meat in them there's the Mediterranean diet there's the okan diet lacto oo vegetarianism right lacto oo vegetarian diet um is I mean is there anything you want to say about these or should can we talk about them as sort of an umbrella an umbrella group we call them like Blue Zone diets uh yeah well let's talk about blue zones in a minute I think what what's interesting is that there was a really big study by the Adventist Health uh group 2013 yeah let's talk about that because what they calculated was the chance of dying based on various diets and this these were thousands of people and what they found was that What's called the hazard ratio went down the more vegetarian and vegan you were what does that mean your chance of dying goes down and the number goes from 0 to one whereas one is your pretty likely to die tomorrow whereas a low number which is around 80 means you've got 20% less chance of dying on any given day with this Hazard ratio so the numbers are the following non-vegetarians are at one if you call that one compared to that uh the next best one uh was semi-vegetarians at 0.92 and octovo or lacto oo vegetarians 0.91 okay so about almost a 10% reduction in mortality death and then you get into uh vegans which point A5 so it's 15% reduction in death and then the best one was Pesco vegetarian so getting a little bit of meat a little bit of fish yeah a little bit of meat from fish probably the the fish oils in there are beneficial and then you're down to 081 so that's a 19% reduction in your chance of death at any given given day late in life okay now that's all caused mortality but we can also now see this in biologic aging because we now have clocks that we can use to measure our biological age and there are studies now also that are showing that these diets are effectively reducing biological aging as well right and there are a couple of these there's a one-year study looking at a diet of uh mostly vegetarian but the one that I think is really exciting is one that just came out a couple of months ago that looked at uh mostly women on a Mediterranean diet plus exercise over 2 years and they could now calculate what happens to your biological age over those two years having switched the diet and they had various recommendations it's very typical Mediterranean uh limit alcohol if you have red wine that's fine a little bit of fish only use olive oil as your fat uh and focus mostly on plants that was their lifestyle and then exercise was walking small weightlifting did that that's the fito study yeah okay so the the interesting thing about this study at least to me the thing that jumped out at me is it came out of uh giovana masala's Lab at the Cancer Institute in Italy and like you go like well why do people who primary responsibility to study Cancer Care about aging and it comes back to this thing that you've been saying all along which is that if we can reduce people's biological aging we can cut diseases off where they actually start well that's exactly right that these diseases that we think are just diseases are mostly caused by aging itself and that slowing down that that that clock by fasting or eating the right Foods Mediterranean diet is now shown not just to slow down the ticking of the clock but probably reverses your age as well and that's a that's a mind-blowing concept you have to think about that for a minute that it's possible by changing your diet to reverse your biological age