Origin of the Fasting Mimicking Diet & the path to broader clinical acceptance | Valter Longo
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Fasting has been shown to have powerful effects in animal models, although translating these results for human models is crucial. Initially, researchers had difficulty recruiting patients to participate in clinical trials involving prolonged fasting as both doctors and patients expressed concerns about safety and tolerability. The fasting-mimicking diet was formulated to assuage some of these concerns. Physicians regarded this structured and packaged diet as a medical therapy, and patients felt it was more acceptable since it allowed them to eat some food. The fasting-mimicking diet has opened up clinical trials on diseases such as cancer, diabetes and multiple sclerosis. In this clip, Dr. Valter Longo discusses the origin of the fasting-mimicking diet and a possible future which may lean away from a drug-centered mentality to one which allows the body to heal itself.
Rhonda: So, you were talking about this fasting-mimicking diet in humans this clinical study in humans that you have a pilot trial that you had done in humans, where you're... So, with the mouse studies into fasting, and their autophagy in the regenerating of the stem cells, and, you know, that stuff's all very exciting and has relevance for, you know, for cancer, and for aging, in general. But how can you translate like a 48-hour fast to humans, and is that, sort of, why you've come up with this fasting-mimicking diet because the amount of time would have to be like a week, or five days, or something that seems a lot more difficult for humans to do?
Valter: Yeah. So, it's not just about difficulty, it's also about safety. And so, when we first started with the fasting in cancer patients, basically the patients didn't want to do it, and the doctors didn't want to do it, so it's really a struggle. And it took us forever here at the Norris Cancer Center, our own University, to get 18 patients to go through it, it took us like five or six years. So, it was very difficult. And then, we started asking people, "What if we give you a fasting-mimicking diet?" And we started asking doctors, "What if we give patients a box, and it has all the foods that they need?" So, it's more of a medicine, right? You just hand over to the patient a medicine. And then, everything turned around, so people were much more likely to do it, they felt like...
Rhonda: It's more compliance.
Valter: ...psychologically, we give them something, they also, of course, they're eating almost normal...I mean, normally in the sense at the right times, they're not eating normally, but obviously, the diet is very different than the normal diet. And the doctors felt so good about it. So, I think, it was really important to get to get the fasting-mimicking diet going, and, you know, so now we have a number of trials in cancer patient, in diabetes patients. Soon enough, we'll start with...well, we finished one multiple sclerosis, and so, now, we're ready to start talking to the FDA about moving to the next level.
I think people are underestimating the power of this, and there's good and bad, I guess, but I think that it's got a real potential as we're seeing now that we're talking to doctors. And now we're seeing a lot of doctors, cardiologists, and endocrinologists, gynecologists prescribing it, right? Or recommending, and they're not prescribing, it's not a drug. But they're recommending it to a patient, and it's been great, you know. And now we have a couple of hundred doctors that we're been talking to see this group of people changed from this drug-centered mentality to, maybe there are things that we didn't realize could be very powerful, and much more able to, again, let the body fix itself. And so, I would not be surprised if in 10 years, worldwide, these type of interventions are gonna be standard in the doctor's office.
An intracellular degradation system involved in the disassembly and recycling of unnecessary or dysfunctional cellular components. Autophagy participates in cell death, a process known as autophagic dell death. Prolonged fasting is a robust initiator of autophagy and may help protect against cancer and even aging by reducing the burden of abnormal cells.
The relationship between autophagy and cancer is complex, however. Autophagy may prevent the survival of pre-malignant cells, but can also be hijacked as a malignant adaptation by cancer, providing a useful means to scavenge resources needed for further growth.
A diet that mimics the effects of fasting on markers associated with the stress resistance induced by prolonged fasting, including low levels of glucose and IGF-1, and high levels of ketone bodies and IGFBP-1. More importantly, evidence suggests these changes in the cellular milieu are associated with a sensitization of cancer cells to chemotherapeutic drugs while simultaneously also conferring greater stress resistance to healthy cells.[1] Evidence also continues to emerge that properties of the fasting-mimicking diet, particularly its ability to cause immune cell turnover, may also make it useful in the amelioration of auto-immune diseases like multiple sclerosis.[2]
Fasting-Mimicking Diet Breakdown
- Day 1 - consists of 1,090 total calories (10% protein, 55% fat and 34% carbohydrate)
- Days 2 through 5 - consists of 725 total calories (9% protein, 44% fat and 47% carbohydrate)
[1] Cheng, Chia-Wei, et al. "Prolonged fasting reduces IGF-1/PKA to promote hematopoietic-stem-cell-based regeneration and reverse immunosuppression." Cell Stem Cell 14.6 (2014): 810-823. [2] Choi, In Young, et al. "A diet mimicking fasting promotes regeneration and reduces autoimmunity and multiple sclerosis symptoms." Cell Reports 15.10 (2016): 2136-2146.
A cell that has the potential to develop into different types of cells in the body. Stem cells are undifferentiated, so they cannot do specific functions in the body. Instead, they have the potential to become specialized cells, such as muscle cells, blood cells, and brain cells. As such, they serve as a repair system for the body. Stem cells can divide and renew themselves over a long time. In 2006, scientists reverted somatic cells into stem cells by introducing Oct4, Sox2, Klf4, and cMyc (OSKM), known as Yamanaka factors.[1]
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