[Rhonda]: Do you have any practices that you do?
Do you, for example, do intermittent fasting or any type of fasting or time-restricted
eating?
[Dr. Kroemer]: So, usually in my ordinary life, when I'm in Paris and working, I only
have one meal per day.
So I have dinner with cheese and wine containing spermidine resveratrol.
It's an ideal combination because inhibiting the acetyltransferase and activating the deacetylase
will have, of course, a synergistic effect.
[Rhonda]: Oh, you do?
[Dr. Kroemer]: Well, if you can show this in mice and this is an excuse for me to...
[Rhonda]: Yeah, wine and cheese go great together.
[Dr. Kroemer]: ...profit from a banquet combination.
And I do also practice some fasting twice per year also when I don't eat anything for
five days.
[Rhonda]: Oh, wow.
So you do a prolonged fast twice a year.
[Dr. Kroemer]: Well, it's not so prolonged, so you know that Gandhi, for instance, has
been doing fasting exercises for 20 days or more, which is the time at which a normal
individual could have some long-term consequences on the health.
So, 20 days is some period that usually is could be easily supported by a healthy middle-aged
individual that has no underlying pathologies.
[Rhonda]: I have a couple of friends that have done.
One of them is used to very prolonged fast, like 20 days.
He's morbidly obese, and he's lost now like 200 pounds over the course of a year by doing
just several rounds of these prolonged fast.
But he's got a lot of fat, you know, to supply energy.
I'm not sure I would still subject myself to a 20-day water fast, but it's cool to know
that you do these five-day water fast, twice a year, and eating one meal a day.
[Dr. Kroemer]: Yeah, and doing exercise.
[Rhonda]: And doing exercise.
And when you're eating...
Sorry, throughout the day, when you're not eating, do you drink coffee?
[Dr. Kroemer]: Yes.
[Rhonda]: And there's polyphenols in coffee that actually...
[Dr. Kroemer]: Yes, we published a study in mice giving them a non-toxic dose of caffeinated
or decaffeinated coffee with a drinking water continuously.
And we could show that this was magnificently inducing autophagy.
Like caffeine independent fasting.
[Rhonda]: Right, totally independent caffeine, so just the polyphenols.
And this was like, I think, I read your study, it was like after four hours or something
in the mice.
So, in humans, potentially, maybe the fasting plus the coffee...
[Dr. Kroemer]: Well, coffee abuse has been linked to major health-promoting effects.
So, most cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases are actually reduced in heavy coffee
drinkers as an independent link between lifestyle and pathology.
So, of course, it's an association that obviously can be criticized because it's just a study
in which you find a statistical correlation.
It would be much more interesting to do a randomized clinical trial on coffee intake.
[Rhonda]: More interesting and more expensive, yeah.
[Dr. Kroemer]: Yeah.
Absolutely.
[Rhonda]: Great.
So fasting, coffee, wine and cheese, one meal, exercise, you're doing it all.
Awesome.