This is part 5 in a series on the book LIFESPAN by David Sinclair. I'm
having a blast doing it because it covers all the topics... not all the topics
but it covers a lot of the topics that I cover in my channel. It's about extending
healthy lifespan and there's a lot of practical applications. There's some
geekiness and theory as well, but it gets down to the cellular level. It's not
whack-a-mole with every disease that you find out there and trying to stop heart
disease or stroke or kidney disease or blindness. It's going back to the
cellular and metabolic genetic and epigenetic drivers, and stopping that
process. So we don't have any of these diseases.
This one's on fasting, and he mentions his friend Valter Longo. And there's
going to be a couple of things that a lot of folks don't like in this. I'll
give you a spoiler. One is caloric restriction really does
work. And number two, there are some components to plant-based diets that are
not the best for longevity. They have to do with amino acids. So without further
ado, let's just go on into the video. As I said, this is cellular aging. It's not
organ-related disease. And so medical schools and medical training is all
oriented wrong, sending docs for more years of training to learn how
to be a cardiologist or a renal specialist, a nephrologist, a neurologist.
Let's move it back up 20 years earlier and stop the cellular processes. You may
remember I've covered Valter Longo as well.
He had a chapter talking about Valter Longo and different types of fasting. He
also mentioned what Roy Walford. Those of you that may remember Roy Walford and
Biosphere 2. These guys went into a big aquarium or terrarium in the desert and
didn't have external sources of food. They got hungry, really hungry for a long
time. They were there for two years. And so basically, it was significant caloric
restriction. Roy Walford, as you may remember, was the father of caloric
restriction, and he was the mentor for Valter Longo. So fasting we used to think...
and this is a Sinclair quote, "we used to think that fasting gave the body a rest...
actually it activates coordinated responses. It's clearly one of the most
powerful interventions. We can rediscover..." it's not something that rediscovered..."to
promote and coordinate changes that do not disrupt the harmony of the human
body." Back to Roy Walford, caloric restriction -
30% friction chronically. That's one of the
basics for caloric restriction. It's been criticized by Fung and others
They say it decreases the basal metabolic rate, and it's a "Biggest Loser"
phenomenon, and that you gain all the weight back. That's not necessarily true.
And if you look at this picture of Roy Walford at baseline, when he got out of
the Biosphere 2 project in six months later. Number one, I told you they got
really hungry for a couple of years. They looked like concentration camp
survivors, very thin. But after refeeding, they ended up with better muscularity
and in a healthier shape than they were before they went in. So Longo was working
with Walford when he was in... when Walford was in the biosphere.
He said they used to talk by phone and he didn't necessarily like all of this
caloric restriction. He said it made Walford and others too angry all the
time. So Longo went with more of a natural
diet. And yes, he did talk about meats, and he cut meats as well. We'll cover
that in just a minute. There were two areas in Italy where he
focused Calabria diet (where he was from): garbanzo beans, minestrone, walnut, all of
oil sauces, olives, nuts. compared to Tuscany and Liguria where
you had pastas, heavy meats, and heavy cream sauces. Here's the problem with
meat and dairy. Longo said in his book, "A typical response of an interview of a
centenarian was, 'Meat? Yeah, I had meat. My friends and I snuck into a wedding on
time and we had meat.' " in other words, they had meat once during their youth. They
did not eat a lot of meat and Sinclair brings up the point again. For all you
keto guys, and especially to keep their guys that think that means nothing but
meat and dairy, mTOR inhibition... pardon me if that's a little bit geeky but
here's the thing... mTOR inhibition, what's it? We'll explain it in just a
minute. It forces cells to spend less energy
dividing and more on autophagy. In other words, you get less autophagy
when you're eating meat and dairy products, and autophagy does decrease
inflammation. So I will tell you, this got a lot of patients with significant
rip-roaring insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. If you're only... if you need to
do meat-based to back that off, then it's far better. It's everything in life is a
trade-off, and I'd rather see you manage your diabetes and insulin resistance
then give up on that in order to go plant-based. You can, however, go
completely keto plant-based for those of you that are major proponents of it.
Sinclair: Inhibiting this mTOR is really as simple as limiting meat and
dairy. Again, that's reality. I know, there's a lot of debate about this. That
issue I've waffled myself several times. I used to be committed plant-based then
I backed way off on my plant-based over the past year or so. I have never really
gotten into that full-blown keto where all your report and clearly not a
carnivore type - the type of diet where eating nothing but meat and cheese and
dairy products. Those of you that don't remember mTOR (mammalian target of
rapamycin), David Sabatini won a some sort of a really big award for his work there
and may end up winning a Nobel Prize at some point for it again. Won't go any
deeper on that. If you're interested in mTOR and autophagy and David
Sabatini, I've got a couple of videos on that. We talked before about how both
Longo and Sinclair did a lot of work on just lowly baker's yeast Saccharomyces
cerevisiae because that helped both of them
understand a little bit more the impacts of genetics, epigenetics. And in Longo's
perspective, the things that he did for four different types of fasting. If
you've made it this far, thank you very much for your interest. Looking forward
to seeing you in Louisville, November 8th and 9th. Get all your labs, your arterial
scan. Spend time one-on-one with me and two days of intense focus on how to
prevent your heart attack, stroke, dementia,
blindness, kidney disease, erectile dysfunction. Looking forward to seeing
you there.