Rhonda: Do you practice fasting yourself, do you?

Valter: Yes, of course, I practice fasting, I don't normally eat lunch. But also, I just, sort of, finished a book, which was published in Italy, and it's gonna follow here in the U.S. And in it, I talk about the need to use this in a flexible way, right? And this is gonna have to be the future of nutrition, and I think nutritionists, and dietitians, and doctors are gonna have to get used to this. So that, for example, I say, if you're overweight, or obese, or you tend to gain weight, then you have to go to this two-meal-a-day program, with breakfast and lunch, or breakfast and dinner, okay, as I did for 15 years.

Then if you're underweight, you can't do that anymore, so you have to go back to three meals a day, right? So, you have to use fasting and time-restricted feeding, and such in Panda's work, which I also utilize, for that purpose, you know. So, keep the feeding to 12 hours or less, and then decide the meal frequency. And Satchin and I just wrote an article on this, and to control the weight, it's really important, particularly control, you know, visceral fat. So, we hope that that's what doctors start doing, and say, instead of...gives simple solution because two meals a day may not be easy to follow, but it's a clear rule, right? And that's what people need.

You can say, "I go for it, or I don't. But if I do go for it, it's gonna work," right? Whereas, now we have a system, where it's almost impossible for anybody to regulate. When you tell somebody, "Eats five or six times a day," it's almost impossible to regulate what somebody eats, right? By making it two meals a day, then you have a much higher control. In time restriction and two meals a day, they can serve to, you know, regulate the amount of calories as such and as shown for the time restriction. And so now, we know, we need to do more studies on meal frequency, but, of course, this is likely to get the same similar effects.

Rhonda: Do you think it's more important, so if you're eating within this 12-hour window, which is coordinated with circadian rhythm? Then if you're eating two meals, do you think that you'd get more benefits if you had the two meals closer together, because then you in theory would be fasting for longer, you'd have, you know more, beta-hydroxybutyrate, ketone bodies, things that are being produced upon a prolonged fasting?

Valter: I would say, you know, I spent, you know, almost 25 years since the Walford days, and I would say I had learned one thing. And also being Italian, and I spend a lot of time around the world, I learned that you cannot take happiness away from people, you know? So, I always stayed away from trying to regulate too much, to close, two hours apart what do you gotta eat. So, I think we always start with how can we keep you as close as possible to what makes you happy, while optimizing the longevity aspect? So, I never started doing that because I know that people are not gonna do it, just like calorie restriction. Calorie restriction has been around for 100 years, and nobody does it, right? I mean, maybe 1 in 1,000. I'll be surprised if it's even that, right? Maybe 1 in 10,000, right? So, after 100 years of calorie restriction research, 1 in 10,000 American, maybe, are doing calorie restriction. So, I think that it's important, you know? For example, with the two meals a day, there's a lot of people that have done that on their own, right?

Rhonda: Yeah.

Valter: There's a lot of centenarians if you go to Loma Linda, or you go to Okinawa, or you go to Southern Italy, a lot of people say, "Yeah, eat twice a day, that's okay." So, that told me that, from the beginning, that that was something that was doable, and people are even doing it in a voluntary way. Anything else, we start regulating, no, you should eat [inaudible 00:36:56]. And also 12 hours, I think a lot of people did that kind of time restriction, right?

You know, so when I grew up, that's how we did it, you know? Maybe at breakfast at 8:00 a.m., and then 8:00, 8:30, the most, you're finished, you know, that was it. And so, yeah, so I think that that's important not try to push for every inch of the longevity plan. Because people will abandon it, that's another thing we're sure of, you know? If you tell them to do things that are very much not in tune with what they're used to, they'll do it for six months, and then they'll never do it again.

So, you know, this is why the skipping meals because a lot of people do it, and when you switch to it, that's just an easy thing to do, and you can do a lot the rest of your life. And then, the periodic fasting-mimicking diets because also it's not very invasive, and people say, "Yeah, you know, every three or four months, I'll give you five days," like that. You know, "Make it simple for me, don't make me, you know, don't make it too low-calorie, make me eat, but I can do it." So, I think, if we want the masses to do it, it has to be the technology, and the safety, etc., etc., has to match their needs. And I think that that's where the effort should be put in, rather than trying to regulate everything, how people do everything.

Rhonda: Yeah, compliance is very important.