Why Fasting Increases Longevity

Curious about the hidden health benefits of fasting? Is there a natural way to increase longevity that you might not know about? Bringing the answer is Dr. Joel Kahn, host of Hear Doc VIP!

Of all the versions of fasting, there is one called the Fasting Mimicking Diet, which is the research project of a professor in Los Angeles by the name of Valter Longo. Phd., born in Italy, but he’s been in Los Angeles most of his career for the last twenty five years. He does have a research institute in Milan, Italy. And he started working on aging at a time that aging research was very unpopular and very poorly funded.

And he made some breakthrough discoveries that along with other researchers. When you reduce the amount of calories, you feed a lab animal or even even go earlier than a lab animal, you reduce the amount of calories. You feed a yeast in this petri dish. You will extend the life of almost every type of experiment or animal or setup you do. He also took it a step further that there’s specific nutrients that most prolong life in these animal models. And when he lowered protein content in the feed of animals or these yeast, and when he lowered glucose content, he was able to particularly extend the life of these animals and he figured out the pathways. Why is it when you lower protein in the feed of a mouse or in an earthworm, why does it live longer? And why is that true with glucose? And those are pathways that have fancy names mtour pathway, pk, ras pathway.

But the biochemistry is amazingly well known and he contributed to that. Now, what really hit a home run for Dr. Longo in his large research team and institute at University of Southern California is humans have the same pathways and humans respond. We didn’t know that 25 years ago. When you alter the content of what you’re eating, how many calories and what are the nutrients, we respond like earthworms and yeast that no, we can’t say we’re gonna live 10 times longer like a yeast will or, you know, four times longer, like perhaps an earthworm will. Well, we have plenty of data to believe we can enhance our health by occasionally dropping the calorie content and specifically dropping what are in those calories we’re eating.

Find the full podcast episode HERE:

https://chantelray.podbean.com/e/245-the-fasting-mimicking-diet-and-lipoprotein-a-with-dr-joel-kahn/