Fasting and Body’s Healing System - Dr. Mark Adam Hyman

Healing System

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Your body has its own innate healing system, which is way way more powerful than any drug ever invented. And can reverse almost every disease....

What are three to five top benefits of this whole ecosystem of fasting?

So we're gonna get into all the nitty-gritty of all the ways to access your body's healing system through focusing on 

• when you eat 
• calorie restriction 
• ketogenic diets.

we're gonna go all into that. 

But at a high level your body has its own innate healing system which is way way more powerful than any drug ever invented. And can reverse almost every disease if we know how to activate it. And so all these approaches that are being heavily researched. And we are incredibly powerful do very similar things. 

Tubuh kita memiliki sistem penyembuhan bawaannya sendiri, yang jauh lebih hebat dibandingkan obat apa pun yang pernah ditemukan.  Dan dapat menyembuhkan hampir semua penyakit.... 

Apa tiga sampai lima manfaat utama dari keseluruhan ekosistem puasa ini?

Jadi, kita akan membahas seluk beluk cara mengakses sistem penyembuhan tubuh kita melalui fokus pada

•  ketika makan
•  pembatasan kalori
•  diet ketogenik.

kita akan membahas semuanya. Namun pada tingkat yang tinggi, tubuh kita memiliki sistem penyembuhan bawaannya sendiri yang jauh lebih kuat dibandingkan obat apa pun yang pernah ditemukan.  Dan dapat menyembuhkan hampir semua penyakit, jika kita mengetahui cara mengaktifkannya.  Jadi semua pendekatan ini sedang banyak diteliti.  Dan mereka sangat kuat dalam melakukan hal serupa.

Scarcity and Starvation

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And in a sense it has to do with this basic framework. Our biology is adapted to scarcity, to starvation. When we were hunter-gatherers we didn't know if we're going to 

• kill a buffalo 
• or find a root or a berry.

So we had to be really good at managing lack of food. And when we do that it activates all these conservation healing repair systems. So the body can actually survive without food. 

Dan dalam arti tertentu hal ini ada hubungannya dengan kerangka dasar ini.  Secara biologis, tubukita disesuaikan dengan KELANGKAAN, KELAPARAN.  Ketika masih menjadi pemburu-pengumpul, kita tak tahu apakah akan melakukannya

• membunuh seekor kerbau
• atau temukan akar atau buah beri.

Jadi kami harus pandai mengelola KEKURANGAN makanan.  Dan ketika kita melakukan hal tersebut, semua sistem perbaikan penyembuhan konservasi akan diaktifkan.  Jadi tubuh kita sebenarnya bisa bertahan hidup TANPA makanan.

Abundance

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Now the problem today is we are in a state of abundance. In america we have 500 calories more a day, than we did 40 years ago. And we're eating them, which is why we're obecity in america. So there's no problem with scarcity it's abundance and we don't have the genes to regulate abundance. We have over 200 genes that regulate starvation, and to help us adapt. So what happens when you activate this ancient healing system. Well first you radically change

• your hormones
• your cells 
• and your genes. 

Masalah kita saat ini adalah  berada dalam kondisi BERKELIMPAHAN.  Di Amerika, kita memiliki 500 kalori lebih banyak setiap hari, dibandingkan 40 tahun yang lalu.  Dan kita mengonsumsinya. Itulah sebabnya kita mengalami obesitas di Amerika. Jadi tidak ada masalah dengan kelangkaan, yang penting diperhatikan justru keberlimpahan.

Kita tidak memiliki gen untuk mengatur kelimpahan.  Kita memiliki lebih dari 200 gen yang mengatur kelaparan, dan membantu kita beradaptasi.  Lalu apa yang terjadi jika kita mengaktifkan sistem penyembuhan kuno ini.  Pertama, kita berubah secara radikal

• hormon
• sel
• dan gen kita.

Authophagy
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You change your gene expression and optimize expression 

• that controls inflammation 
• that increases your antioxidant systems 
• that gets rid of belly fat 
• that builds muscle 
• that increases your brain and focus and cognitive function. 

Because you know when you're starving you got to go look for food you want to be alert. 

• It helps build your bone density 
• it increases your your beneficial hormones 
• helps growth hormone 
• and it also helps repair your cells 
• it also activates something really extraordinary which is something called autophagy and mitophagy

what does that mean? 

Goal of Autophagy
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It means your body has a system of cleaning up and recycling old parts. And when you don't do that, you end up with a lot of old parts. And so the goal of autophagy is to literally 

• break down all the components of your cells, 
• and then clean them up
• and then rebuild them into new parts. 

Which is awesome. But if you don't do that, and a lot of the ways we live today in the 21st century do not let us do that we end up aging rapidly. So not only does it help you lose weight and build muscle not only does it help 

• balance your hormones 
• increase your in antioxidant systems 
• increase your stem cell production 
• increase your brain chemistry focus 
• but it also can actually reverse aging 

And there's a lot of data on how it actually can help in literally reversing the aging process. It also is protective against 

• cardiovascular disease 
• it may be effective in cancer treatment 

and we know that applying these strategies during cancer 

• reduces the side effects
• reduces the the complications 
• and increases the efficacy. 

And the benefits of traditional cancer chemotherapy so we're just scratching the surface and there's so many powerful processes that are activated by these strategies and we're going to get into those but that's the high level. So if there's one single thing you can do to activate almost every single healing system in your body it's changed when you eat.

Now you had a great newsletter recently and you were talking about this concept called zombie cells which directly ties in to what you just gave in the overview about autophagy i find it as a fascinating example can you just talk about what these zombie cells are and how they end up floating around our body?

Zombie Cell

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So it's complicated, but zombie cells are what they sound like they're they kind of don't die. And they're kind of cells that increase senescence or aging. That are part of our immune system. So the aging process is one of inflammation or inflammation we call it. 

And what happens is because of all life stresses and toxins and poor diet and all the things we're exposed to our bone marrow stem cells that make our white blood cells that are part of our immune system get damaged and those stem cells then produce damaged progeny right which are damaged cells. 

So we produce a million t cells a minute in our bone marrow. And they can get into our circulation but if they're funky which they are they call it chip cells then they create downstream effects of

• more inflammation 
• more heart disease 
• more autoimmunity 
• and so forth. 

And so zombie cells are part of this whole cocktail of dysfunction and what's exciting is by doing some of these practices and by including certain foods in your diet for example like himalayan tartary buckwheat which is a ancient an ancient plant it's not a grain actually it's a flower can help to increase the killing of the zombie cells and improve this whole immuno senescence and create something instead called immuno rejuvenation.

And fasting is a part of that whole process as well too absolutely 

Now let's take a step back and talk about some of the recommendations i remember reading articles in the early 2000s that it's dangerous to fast and people shouldn't fast and there was all these concerns and people were being told instead to eat every couple hours that was actually the best way to keep your metabolism high and burn more energy why did people think that back then how is that wrong and what changed it 

Well i think we had a view that in order to balance your blood sugar you had to eat every three to four hours. And i often advise patients about that these are people who are overweight, who had swings. 

And we did advise people not to eat before bed, like three or four hours because it makes you gain weight i call it the sumo wrestler diet which is how they gain weight they they eat and they go to sleep 

and they drink a bunch of alcohol too. 

Menurut saya, kita mempunyai pandangan bahwa untuk menyeimbangkan gula darah, Anda harus makan setiap tiga hingga empat jam.  Dan saya sering menasihati pasien bahwa mereka adalah orang-orang yang kelebihan berat badan, yang mengalami perubahan.

Dan kami menyarankan orang-orang untuk tidak makan sebelum tidur, misalnya tiga atau empat jam karena akan membuat berat badan bertambah. Saya menyebutnya diet pegulat sumo, yaitu cara mereka menambah berat badan dengan makan lalu tidur.

Dan mereka juga minum banyak alkohol.

And then your alcohol they have something called chunko nabe which is this huge like kind of japanese stew soup which is yummy but also it fills you right up and and even do that but but i think we kind of got in this idea that you have to eat all the time to keep your metabolism running and going and keep it burning and it's just turned out not to be true in fact it turned out the opposite is true that if we learn how to eat and focus on what we eat we don't have to worry about gaining weight or overeating because it will balance our blood sugar and insulin levels and we'll keep our metabolism even so if you eat the right foods you don't have to worry about eating that often because you won't be hungry you'll eat and you'll be hungry you know hours and hours later you don't have to eat every three to four hours.

The second thing we figured out is that that the body needs rest from food which is why we have something called breakfast or breaking the fast except most people eat up until they go to bed we have a snacking culture and then they eat as soon as they wake up and they don't get that rest period of at least 12 hours or 14 or 16 hours. Which really ends up being extremely beneficial for helping to not only repair and clean up waste and and and do the repair process that happen at night but to actually activate all the healing systems your body we talked about to reverse diabetes reverse heart disease improve your cognitive function may be improving your risk of alzheimer's or reducing your risk of alzheimer's it helps build muscle it reduces belly fat 

• it reduces inflammation
• it increases your antioxidant systems 
• it increases stem cell production 

So this is what we now know about these things. And so we kind of got it wrong before so i think Types of fasting this is a perfect time to go through the spectrum of different things that fall under the umbrella of fasting can you walk us through a few talk to us about what they are and how they're done. 

So there are many roads to rome there are many ways to access these healing systems in your body and they're each slightly different but they all do very similar things. so we have what we call intermittent fasting, i think most people when they say that mean time restricted eating meaning they eat within an 8 or 10 or 12 hour window. meaning you don't eat for 12 14 or 16 hours a day. that's what we call time restricted eating and that's been extensively studied and is great for weight loss for improving metabolism for helping with a whole host of chronic illnesses. 

The second is true intermittent fasting which may be a 24 hour or 36 hour fast once a week or it could be a three-day fast once a month there's a lot of ways to do it then there's. what we call fasting mimicking diets which are calorie restricted so you'd eat like say 800 calories a day for five days Dr. Walter Longgo who wrote the longevity diet he's been on the podcast he's done a lot of research on that and has millions of dollars in nih funding to look at how it affects 

• cancer
• heart disease diabetes 
• aging 
• and so many other things 

And because your body thinks 

• it's starving 
• it's you're not eating enough calories 

but your body's still getting some energy. So you can function better. But it's really a very powerful system and then there's the ketogenic diet which is sounds like you know you're still eating. And you can do keto with time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting too. But keto itself is what happens to the body 

• when we stop eating 
• when you have no food your body 

starts to burn your body's stores of fat. 

Now what's fascinating is we have about 2500 calories of carbohydrate stored in our tissues as glycogen in our muscle. So when you do the carb loading for a workout, that's what they're trying to try to fill up your glycogen stores. The problem is if you're if you're doing a long marathon run i mean i went for a 50 mile bike ride and i saw you know my calorie burn and i was like 2 300 calories towards the end of it and i'd sort of run out of gas from my glycogen. But the body has about 30 to 40 000 maybe more depending on your weight it can have a lot more calories of fat. So wouldn't it be better if you could burn the fat. 

So your body is like a hybrid car right electric and gas the gas is carbohydrates and it burns dirty the keto which is fat burns clean so your cells can burn fatter carbs. And when you burn fat again it's it's often that we had to do that because we're in a state of starvation it activates all the same healing mechanisms so ketogenic diets can have been shown to

 reverse cancer have been shown to be helpful in alzheimer's

reverse type 2 diabetes the work of virta health and our colleagues and friends there sarah hallberg and sammy have shown that we can reverse type 2 diabetes even in advanced cases using a ketogenic diet because it activates all these healing repair mechanisms. There's no drug on the planet that can reverse diabetes we manage diabetes you know we do we do chronic disease management by giving them drugs and insulin and we keep their blood sugar ideal and manage all their risk factors which is nonsense because when you understand how the body works you can work with it rather than against it and activate these healing systems so ketogenic diets do the same thing and then lastly there's there's true true calorie restriction for long-term diets and this is the only thing in animal studies has really shown to extend life by a third so in the human terms that means if you ate a third less calories you'd live a third longer instead of you live instead of living to 80 you'd live to 120. 

Now i know people who are on this calorie restriction for life there's a whole society and i met some of them i'm like what do so what do you eat i'm like well i have five pounds of celery for breakfast and i have three pounds of tomatoes for lunch and i'm like i'm like that doesn't sound like fun i'm gonna skip that and so what what's been happening is that scientists have been exploring how to activate the same mechanisms that control aging without having to starve yourself your whole life because that doesn't seem like fun so there's little hacks and tricks that you can use like time restricted eating intermittent fasting fasting mimicking diets ketogenic diets all can be ways to access that same healing system in the body When to start.

so the question that a lot of people have is how do they decide where to get starte and when to explore these different options on the spectrum of fasting.

It depends on you okay, everybody should do a 12-hour fast a day there's nobody who shouldn't do that. And What of us through that just like it's super easy dinner at six you're gonna eat breakfast at six you eat dinner at age you can eat breakfast today right it's pretty simple. it's simple but actually a lot of people don't do it no they don't do that they they late and they snack at night they have ice cream whatever snacks before they go to bed bad idea give yourself at least 12 hours and that's good for everybody when you start to move to 14 i mean think about if you're if you eat dinner at six you could eat breakfast at eight that's a 14 hour fast or if you want to do 16 you can eat dinner at 6 and have something at 10. so it's doable for  lot of people and i do it very often i don't have you don't have to do it every day i do it many days a week. some people who are overly thin certain people with with disorders like cancer, you have to be careful because there's weight loss issues that can happen it it can be stressful for the body for some people so it's not for everybody if you have adrenal issues if you're very frequent from some very tall thin women may not be effective for might cause cause symptoms. So it's not everybody should do like a long 16 hour fast uh in terms of in terms of the um true intermittent fasting that can be a very therapeutic thing so you can do a you know a day a two day three day five day seven day ten day some people do three week just water fast that can be very therapeutic if you have some type of serious chronic illness and it can reset the system. Then there's the ketogenic diets which are really effective for certain conditions like type 2 diabetes alzheimer's autism parkinson's those can be very effective it's a little harder to do i don't know if people should be on it all the time so there's a lot of nuances to prescribe it as a medical therapy, but but it also can be very effective. So i would sort of for people start i would say start with the 12-hour fast if you want to move to 14 16 is not that hard for most people so try it on see how you feel see what happens often people have more energy more focus they lose weight they increase body muscle decrease belly fat

and have lots more energy so there's there's there's there's no um there's no magic to it it's just looking

at who you are what your issues are how do you match the right approach to you and then try them and see how you feel

because if you for example if you do a 16 hour fast and you feel like crap maybe it's not right for you you know

but there could be some underlining reasons which is why it's important to get educated on it yes you know your blood sugar might be out of control and there's a few of your friends and uh colleagues uh peter tia has a free fasting app that's out there dr jason fung has one as well they've both been on your podcast before jason fung has been on my podcast before we'll link to those show notes that are out there and uh you know this is the start of getting people excited about wanting to go down the path of education to learn what it is now in your instance you mentioned that with time-restricted eating you'll often do that you'll often do that a few days a week when it comes to these other fasts that are there on the spectrum. Do you incorporate those in your own life 

Yeah i mean i've tried everything i've tried calorie restriction diets i've tried you know 24 36 hour fast i once did a sort of four day juice fast uh which is just green juices i also have tried keto um if i do keto too much i just drop too much weight i just like i it's it's a problem for me i didn't say that it gets shot down but i i do need some carbohydrate and and it really depends on your metabolism so i don't have any diabetes i'm very lean i don't have any insulin issues and so for me you know you know it may help me with certain other issues but i often will will really customize the way i prescribe diets based on what's going on with that person so if someone's overweight if they're diabetic or on the spectrum of diabetes you know i will recommend a ketogenic diet if someone has alzheimer's or autism i recommend it. but i don't think it's for everybody if during cancer therapy which is amazing it can be extremely effective in in magnifying the benefits of traditional radiation chemo and minimizing the side effects so there's a lot of therapeutic benefits around it in terms of cancer in terms of alzheimer's even in heart disease what was interesting with the the group that was run by sarah hallberg who was part of virta health is they looked at not only the weight loss it was a 60 reversal of type 2 diabetes 100 of the patients got off the main medication for diabetes called oral hypoglycemics 90 plus percent got off insulin or reduced their dose weight loss was 12 which which is staggering most weight loss studies we get 5 people are jumping up and down they also looked at i think 20 or plus different biomarkers of cardiovascular disease and almost every single one was improved so you think i'm eating like 70 fat i mean saturated fat how does that work right how does that work where all my heart disease risk factors get better because it contracts everything we knew about eating a high fat diet right well it's because if you have a certain metabolic type namely if you're diabetic or insulin resistant on that spectrum that's what will happen but i have other patients for example i had one patient i put on a ketogenic diet of coconut butter and butter and you know basically veggies and a little protein and she'd been struggling with her weight had been very inflamed her cholesterol was over 300 her triglycerides were like 3 400 very low hdl which is a good cholesterol and we just couldn't budge her and so i said why don't you try this and she tried it and she immediately lost 20 pounds and her cholesterol dropped over 100 points her triglycerides dropped like 200 300 points her hdl went up and she did amazing on the other hand i had a patient who was a mid-50s guy who was an athlete and a you know aggressive bike ride would go for 50 100 bike rides and uh he's like i want to try it and see if it helps my performance and he tried it and his cholesterol numbers just went off the chart so we had to stop so everybody's different and there's a lot of heterogeneity but you have to expect yourself and what i say to people is the smartest doctor in the room is your own body High saturated fat

you've also had an experience that your cholesterol went in the wrong direction on a super high fat diet just another reason high saturated fat high saturated fat diet another reason that it's important to remember that everybody operates a little bit differently there are broad spectrum themes that are there uh. do you want to talk about that a little bit because i think it's useful for some people to know 

i mean you know in terms we're sort of bearing off a little bit from the the sort of fasting thing and talking more about eating a high saturated fat diet now many many studies have shown that saturated fat seems to contribute to heart disease but when you look at the data carefully it's in the context of an american processed diet in the context of a high carbohydrate starch sugar diet when you eat saturated fats with starch and sugar flour and sugar it's deadly however if you eliminate starch and sugar or grammatically reduce it most people will tolerate saturated fats however there's a small group there called lean mass hyper responders meaning they're guys like me who are athletic who are muscular who i mean i'm not like you know i'm like a bodybuilder muscular but i'm mostly muscle and very little fat they tend to have this phenomena where they have the opposite response in terms of their cholesterol than you'd expect so their ldl goes up their particle number goes up their size goes down it's kind of a wacky thing so i think what we're learning is that there's a lot of genetic variability in the population and we have to actually match the diet to our genes and to our own personal biology so i always say don't let your ideology trample over your biology make sure you know oh ketogenic diet sounds good i'm going to do that saturated no it may not be for you you know it may not and that's okay and i think you have to really customize your diet to what works and then i can eat olive oil i can eat avocados i can eat nuts and seeds i can have a lot of fat in my diet i just don't have saturated fat Sleep 

let's talk about the impact on sleep what do we know about sleep and fasting specifically time restricted eating well it seems to be that that the time restricted eating helps to improve sleep quality in terms of the amount of sleep the depth of sleep and all the sleep cycles so it's one of those sort of interesting findings that it actually helps to which is important because when you sleep and you sleep well it's when your body is in the repair shop it's when growth hormone increases which repairs tissues it's when cortisol goes down it's when blood sugar goes down it's when all these systems kind of kick into gear to help the body reset and repair so the better and the deeper your sleep the more you'll heal and it seems to be part of this idea of of this adaptation to scarcity is that when we're in this fasted state our bodies just prepare better and heal better and sleep better because sleep is part of the healing process 

can you talk about some of the protection against neurodegenerative Alzheimers  disorders like alzheimer's and parkinson's disease when it comes to the spectrum of fasting 

well it's really interesting findings because we're learning that one of the biggest drivers of alzheimer's is sugar and in fact scientists have called alzheimer's type 3 diabetes it's diabetes in the brain and there's a subset a big subset of people with alzheimer's because they're not all the same some might be bearded metals or mold or lime or whatever but the large subset is insulin resistant and it's insulin resistance in the brain and that's really driven off of carbohydrates so when you have a high carbohydrate diet starch and sugar and even you know what they think of as good carbohydrates grains and beans it can increase insulin and it can actually damage your brain so it's really important to understand that that if you have alzheimer's this may be going on and there's ways to test for it and i've had many patients you know with insulin resistance diabetes and alzheimer's and this works amazing for them and when you put them on a ketogenic diet it really helps their brain function better why because when your body's running on ketones one you reduce inflammation which is the main cause of alzheimer's oxidative stress which is a big factor in alzheimer's you increase mitochondrial function which is your energy centers in the brain so your brain works better and you obviously cut out the starch and sugar which cuts out the insulin resistance in the brain and helps all these things work together so what happens is when you put people on a high fat diet and by the way the brain is made up of mostly fat it's 60 fat mostly dha which is for fish oil. So when you actually and it's got a lot of saturated fat in there and a lot of things in the brain so it's not that fat is bad you need fat for your brain and when you get in a keto diet when we were in this state before it was a state designed to increase our brain function why because if you're starving and you can't find anything to eat you better be focused alert on top of it so you can hunt and gather and find something to eat otherwise you die so there's a evolutionary reason for us to have better mental focus and concentration and memory and attention when we're in a ketogenic state or in a fasted state so i think i think that's the mechanism of action of how it works 

now i want to talk about fasting for Fasting For Women women and their unique biology how is fasting and the spectrum of fasting different for women especially women in their child-bearing years 

well this is why drew i really emphasize the importance of personalization because this is might may be good for some people it also may not be good for others so if you're a woman who's in the child-bearing years if your woman is breastfeeding who's pregnant who's very thin who has adrenal issues and a lot of people do from chronic stress in your lives having long periods without eating is not usually good for you and you often feel badly and it doesn't provide the benefits that you would normally think something like that would provide that's not to say that the 12-hour rule will go that that is something that everybody should do the 12-hour time-restricted eating that generally is regarded as safe for most people don't eat after dinner any breakfast okay it's not a big it's not a big stress but for a lot of women who are sort of thinking about getting pregnant or breastfeeding or in this childbearing years you have to be very cautious about what you're doing your body and whether you're actually doing the right things you need to preserve fertility because when you're starving which is kind of what you're doing when you're in these states you're you're starving the body doesn't want to have babies right it's dangerous like dangerous to have a baby when there's no food around so the body naturally will shift the hormonal function to stop menstruation to stop ovulation to lower testosterone to do all these things for both men and women which is okay from an evolutionary point of view but long term is probably not a good thing and sometimes women will even lose their periods yeah if they are extreme fasting or on an extreme yeah all right mark now is the part of the master class where we go to our community questions from instagram the podcast youtube and email that we've selected here to go through so here's the first question that we have from an individual asking does fasting affect high blood pressure

yes when you when you do any of these strategies that we talked about again they all activate healing systems so what causes high blood pressure it's actually an inflammatory disease it's a disease of oxidative stress it's driven primarily by two main pathways we call it essential hypertension which means essentially we have no clue what causes it but we actually do. and the two major drivers there's others

right low magnesium heavy metals and so forth the hormonal dysfunction there are two

major major drivers one is insulin resistance or the spectrum of poor metabolic health

from pre-diabetes to type 2 diabetes and that is extremely responsive to any of these strategies

and two sleep apnea which can drive all kinds of problems in the body

including insulin resistance and lead to high blood pressure so you kind of got to look at those two things and for

intermittent fasting time restricted eating keto diets fasting making diets they will all help blood pressure

all right fantastic next question how can you get enough calories if you lead an active lifestyle and still want to get the benefits of fasting 

it's a good point i mean i i often will struggle because i will start to drop weight if i'm not careful because it's great for the 88 percent of people in america are metabolically unhealthy and who are overweight or skinny fat so basically 9 out of 10 people awesome for weirdos like me it can be tricky so you have to make sure you in the time that you're eating in the 8 or 10 or 12 hours that you're eating that you're getting enough food and getting the right food so you often have to amp up some of the food you're eating and it's okay to do that 

as a follow-up question of that we have another individual asking i fast all day easily but once i have dinner the craving to eat more is horrendous why is that and is there anything that i can do 

yes yes so here's the problem you know sugar and starch will jack up your insulin insulin makes you hungry and crave more carbs and food when you load all your calories into too narrow window let's say i just eat one meal a day and you have to get 2 000 or 2500 calories in one meal it doesn't matter if it's the best food on the planet any large meal will trigger an insulin spike so you have to be i mean unless it's just pure fat like unless you just drink olive oil then it won't do that but i don't think most people are doing that so if you're having protein that gets turned to sugar it spikes insulin you basically will start to jack up insulin and that insulin is the hormone that makes you crave more food it makes you hungry and want to eat more even if you just ate a huge meal so you want to make sure you're not packing all your calories in one meal that's a problem and it's not just how much you eat it's

Time Restricted Eating

also what you're eating during that window that you are eating can you just make that distinction sure i mean yeah

okay so so here's some interesting data in time-restricted eating it works even if you don't change your

diet like what you're eating right if you're feeling crap and you do that it helps fix your metabolism but it works

way better if you eat the pagan diet meaning a whole foods plant rich phytochemical rich high fiber high

quality fat good protein diet which is what i recommend so actually optimizing your diet will help

optimize the all these technologies you know as you're doing them

Should You Fast After 50

next question we have should the fasting period get longer as you age over 50

should you fast longer when you age over 50. why should you fast at all after 50. well for sure you should and you can and

it's helpful because what happens as we age is we need more cleanup we need more repair

we build more waste we have more old cells we have we need more autophagy more mitophagy we need to build more

muscle we need to lose more body fat we need to reduce more inflammation because as we age all these things start to go

wrong that are really the result of not having the right strategy for optimizing our health

so the normal course of life in america is the typical american diet is lack of exercise chronic stress and unmitigated

or unaddressed those things will all accelerate aging so any of these strategies will help to reverse that and

actually reverse your biological age 

so we talked about this before big picture but i think it's worth hitting

on again so the question from the listener is is it appropriate to continue intermittent fasting during pregnancy yes no it's not i mean i i would not recommend pregnant women do what you're saying is intermittent fasting which is go for 24 hours or 36 hours without eating anybody can go 12 hours and i think we should and it's probably good for the baby to do that longer periods 14 16 you have to see how you feel but you know i think you know one of the challenges i see with with pregnancy is that

that doctors give women a free license to eat whatever they want you know just make sure you gain weight make sure your

baby's growing eat ice cream and all this crap bad idea you have to still regulate your diet

even more when you're pregnant because you're feeding the baby all the basic ingredients to grow and

develop so if you're not having a high quality diet your baby is not being made of high quality ingredients

so you want to make sure that you optimize the quality of your diet while you're pregnant and not just the ice cream and crap and

that you actually are getting enough calories which you need more calories right because you're feeding tube

but it doesn't mean you have to crap and and you can do a 12-hour overnight fast which is fine that's called breakfast

Intermittent Fasting For Fertility

but in general it's really important to focus mostly on this the quality component of it and if you're doing that

and you have certain cravings or other things like that as long as you're eating mostly quality food you really

don't have to worry about timing and fasting there's plenty of time to do that later on no no another question about women's health is intermittent

fasting good for balancing hormones it's tricky because if you do too much fasting or too much starvation you're activating systems in your body that are designed to prevent prevent fertility so you can go overboard but most infertility in women is caused by too much sugar and starch insulin resistance insulin resistance pcos being one of the big culprits polycystic ovarian syndrome but it's not an ovarian problem it's a nutritional problem and there's a book actually by a bunch of harvard scientists called the fertility diet which is about using an approach that lowers blood sugar to actually help fertility so if you are one of those women who's insulin resistant who's overweight who's got belly fat somewhere on the spectrum of p diabetes and by the way ninety percent of people have pre-diabetes have no clue like i said nine at most nine out of ten americans have pre-diabetes that's crazy right we said it was one out of two had pre-diabetes diabetes but this new data from government surveys and lab testing has found that 88 of americans have either high blood pressure high blood sugar or abnormal cholesterol all of those are symptoms of insulin resistance right that's what's causing that for the most part so when you when you look at that you go well if you're in that state and your hormones are screwed up and women's hormones do get screwed up they get lack of ovulation often they'll get high levels of estrogen because all the fat tissue makes estrogen they'll get increases in testosterone because of some of the ways the shunting of estrogen goes to testosterone there's a whole chicken wire pathways that connects all the hormones so progesterone estrogen testosterone very very similar hormones they're just slightly tweaked you'll get more testosterone which means you can get hair loss on your head you can grow facial hair you get acne uh you get irregular periods so intermittent fasting temperature needing all these techniques all will help fix that because it fixes in some resistance for men you know it's interesting because men also have the same phenomena happen but a little different thing happens when they gain belly fat and they're having too much starch and sugar it increases insulin which then increases fat cells which then produce estrogen and lowers testosterone so a lot of guys who have this will have low testosterone low sex drive low low low sex function 

they'll have high levels of estrogen they'll get uh loss of hair on their bodies they'll grow man boobs they'll kind of get

smooth skin so they look more like women you've seen these guys who have the beer bellies and this is because they're eating so much

toxic sugar so it can screw up men's hormones too and on all these techniques will also fix that

do you have any mindset tips to help you through the process of fasting whether it's time restricted eating or intermittent fasting 

i mean you just kind of have to decide to do it it's like it's not actually that hard i think you know anybody can do 12 hours and then you can try you know like if i said can you walk for one minute unless you're really you know old or decrepit or in a wheelchair most people can walk for a minute right then you walk for two minutes then you walk for three minutes and then you walk for four minutes and then you walk for an hour right so it's basically starting to actually push the limits of what your body is comfortable with and starting to notice the effects and the benefits and paying attention like i said your body is the best doctor in the room it will tell you exactly what works and what doesn't pay attention

 can you have coffee or tea when you're doing time restricted eating or intermittent fasting 

that's a great question i have understood that the

answer is yes if it's got nothing in it if there's no milk or sugar or cream or anything elsethat it won't break ketosis or it won't cause that other people have said it might but i think my gut feeling is that it probably won't have a huge impact because it's not a lot of calories and essentially it just it's just caffeine and water basically are there any other nutrients that you might tell people to include and the answer could be no when they're in their fasting window is there any other things that we're looking for or is it more just letting the body do its thing well i mean 

i think most people like us have always said should be in a multivitamin fissure and vitamin d that usually covers most of the bases to keep all your metabolic pathways going because you are needing more nutrients as you're fasting to actually clean up the waste to regulate pathways and all the enzymes all the functions in your body require nutrients so i think it's important people be on something uh with that said i don't think there's a reason to stop i don't think there's a reason to take extra stuff unless you have a specific goal like if you're trying to fix your liver or if you're trying to fix your kidneys or you're working on something specific but i think for most people it's okay to just take a good multificial and vitamin d and then they probably not only it's okay it's probably important to do that while you're doing some type of time restricted or intermittent fasting 

what are the biggest mistakes people make

when it comes to intermittent fasting the biggest one is when we just talked about people say well you know 12 hours is good 14 hours better if 14 hours is good six hours better if six hours good 20 hours is better  if that's good 22 hours is better and it's not um it's not if you're doing time restricted eating on a daily basis you want to spread your calories out over that window of eight hours because you don't want to load up your system with too many calories in one meal that is what will cause more problems so i really don't encourage that

with that said you know people can do other forms of of

fasting like intermittent fasting where they really are having a full fast for 24 36 hours that's okay but you don't

want to constantly load all of your calories into too short a window that's one of the biggest risks i see

when it comes to intermittent fasting in the west meaning north america a lot of you know the uk and other places that follow very similar lifestyles it's often that people will skip breakfast as a way to get into their intermittent fasting i saw an episode that you did with walter longo where he said in most of the world when they practice fasting especially in the east they actually do have breakfast and they'll skip other meals in the day because breakfast helps power their brain and give them energy for the day do you have any thoughts on that yeah i mean 

i think it depends on you like sometimes you'll feel like i feel better if i just don't eat in the morning and i have more clarity and focus but it also depends on what you eat when i have my power protein you know adaptogenic microbiome mitochondrial immune boosting shake in the morning i feel awesome right if i do after my workout but i usually usually give at least 14 hours from dinner so i'll maybe do it at nine o'clock or something like that after a workout other people if they have the wrong breakfast it can really cause huge problems if you're eating starch and sugar for breakfast basically dessert for breakfast which is breakfast in america folks right cereal which is 75 sugar and i like to say i'm a serial killer i don't think we should be eating cereals one of the biggest myths and propaganda stories of our time i i think we should not be eating the typical american breakfast which is pancakes french toast muffins bagels uh you know latte frappuccino mocha bacon those you know probably have 600 calories of sugar in them you know. 

those are not what we should be having for breakfast we need fat and protein for breakfast so if you start your day with fat and protein for breakfast and phytonutrients you're going to do way better and your brain will be fine. but it's also okay if you want to skip dinner and have breakfast and eat lunch and not eat late in the day that's okay too i think that's a fine way to do this there's no there's no trick you can try both ways and see how you feel

mark what else do you want to talk about when it comes to fasting there's some interesting components that we didn't get a chance

to touch on so i'm going to get a little geeky here guys because this is the stuff that interests me and hopefully it'll interest you which is

that there are master control switches for aging and health and there are 

often genes that regulate our metabolism

and our mitochondria so when i say metabolism what does that mean it means how well

does your body burn food in other words when you take oxygen and

calories that you eat in food and you burn them they burn a little part of your cell called the mitochondria and

there's tens to tens of thousands of these in the cells you have and this system has to work well in

order for you to be healthy many of the things we do cause our mitochondria to age fast and

cause them to slow our metabolism down and to have poor function and that leads to

loss of energy that leads to all the disease i mean everything we see is a mitochondrial disease heart disease

mitochondrial diabetes mitochondrial alzheimer's mitochondrial parkinson's mitochondria i mean all these things are mitochondrial so

what is one of the switches that we can play with that we can use the science

of of when we eat and what we eat to actually activate these pathways that are embedded in us

again that are way way smarter than any pharmaceutical company than any human being

we've been designed to have these systems that literally will reverse aging so as we begin to study these these

strategies including calorie-restricted eating they do a number of things there's a number of genes in the mitochondria that regulate

our insulin and blood sugar and metabolism uh daph2 foxo

mtor and and and these are really important genes and sirtuins that regulate all

these downstream effects you want to change the expression of those genes so you can optimize the function of your mitochondria which is the key to

longevity it's the key to healthy life it's the key to having energy so

uh you don't really have to know about all this sciencey geeky stuff but these particular pathways around uh sirtuins

and foxo and daf2 and mtor they're all regulated by our diet and by the quality of our diet and by the the timing of

eating and by all these techniques we just talked about and i remember i remember um

talking to one of the scientists i was in a longevity conference it was in upstate new york i was at menla which is

a robert thurman's retreat center that's a tibetan retreat center and he had the dalai lama there

all these tibetan doctors and every nobel prize winner and aging and longevity and hell it was quite a

collection of people and the talks were fascinating and this one guy from mit leonard guarte

is the scientist that uncovered this pathway around sirtuins now we've all heard oh red wine is good for you and

your spiritual is great and it can extend your life well he's the guy who kind of figured a lot of that out with david sinclair

and i said to him what's the deal with these fortunes like what is the thing that's causing them to be dysfunctional to

cause a decrease in mortality increase in disease and how do we how do we fix this he looks at me and he goes well it's pretty simple it's sugar that messes it all up so it's literally sugar and starch that are causing all these genes to be dysregulated

so what's the antidote to sugar and starch in our diet it's intermittent fasting time restricted eating keto diet

fascinating diet all these strategies are designed to reverse the harm that sugar has done to our

cells so you don't actually have to understand all this kind of fancy terms

but you just need to know that your body has these master switches that regulate aging longevity and health

and the key to living long and healthy is learning how to activate those switches

so that's the beauty of all these techniques you just do what do what they say and you'll it'll do it automatically

that's beautiful and sugar can be so addictive and you've built an entire program around hunting helping people

it's called a 10-day sugar you hold you built your whole life around sugar in a great documentary called fed-up with a

10-day detox diet there's a book it's out there people can get it they can follow that plan yes i mean i you know

 think i think i wrote this book it was probably 2014 so i wrote it in 2012.

you know i always i always see things in my practice with patience and i and then i'm like um this is coming like something about this is coming and i can understand that with sugar the science around addiction not just oh i'm wanted or like i need it or i like it but actually biological addiction where you have clear pathways that are activated in the brain that are the same that are activated with heroin or cocaine or there's clear withdrawal symptoms from not eating it it really meets the criteria of of sugar addiction i'm just going to tell you one quick story about it and why i wrote the book and how people can learn how to get unhooked right because it's really important like you're listening to this you're like oh my god you know dr hyman you're right but i love sugar i don't know i try to stop i can't i just crave it it's like a overwhelming i just don't know what to do like i got you okay i've got you it's not that hard 

so what what what happens is when you when you are looking at at the science about this it's fascinating i mean they they've taken a mice for example and these are kind of cruel and mean but you know it's scientists do this they they literally would would give them cocaine and they hooked them up to an iv of cocaine and if they hit this button they would get as much cocaine as they wanted or they could go eat some sugar they would work eight they would they would literally give up the cocaine and go get the sugar and they would work eight times harder to get the sugar than to get the cocaine that's frightening another study they put them in this special cage with an electric floor and whenever they ate sugar they would shock them

now most time when you shock an animal it will avoid whatever the thing is that shocked them these mice would keep eating the sugar even while they're getting shocked now that's a pretty cruel study but it's it's pretty uh it's pretty impressive when you look at the results there was a human study where they didn't put them in a cage they didn't shock them or anything like that but they took overweight guys and they this was done by harvard scientists rigorous study published in major journal like i think journal american medical association it's not like a kind of a third rate study this is a powerfully well-done and well-designed study by david ludwig and they took overweight guys and they gave them on different days different milkshakes now the milkshakes were identical in calories in protein in fat in carbohydrate and fiber so macronutrients or identical the only difference was one of the milkshakes had a slowly absorbed sugar to not spike your blood sugar and the other one had a rapidly absorbed starch or sugar but they tasted the same you couldn't tell them apart so they took these guys and one day they gave the low search one and then the high sugar one and then they measured their blood they put them in mri scanners they looked at functional memories of their brain the group that had the low starch sugar were fine they didn't activate any pathways related to addiction their blood sugar and they stayed even their lipids were fine their cortisol was fine the group that had the high sugar one actually not only did they activate adrenaline which is a stress hormone cortisol was a stress hormone insulin went up blood sugar went up blood pressure went up cholesterol went up but when they did the brain imaging they found the area in the brain that's responsible for addiction biological addiction like heroin cocaine that kind of stuff called the nucleus accumbens it lit up like a christmas tree

so you're like whoa they don't even know that they're eating something different it's like they oh i have so much pleasure it feels so good this milkshake tastes so good this one tastes terrible they tasted the same so it wasn't even a felt emotional response it was literally the biology of sugar which is staggering so and there are many many studies i wrote this book the 10-day detox diet because so many people are addicted to carbohydrates and sugar when i say sugar i mean it starts in sugar because white flour which is the main starch in this country is got a higher glycemic index than table sugar meaning you know a a sandwich will raise your blood sugar more than two tablespoons of table sugar right so that's not good and and so we have to think about them the same but that's why i wrote the 10-day detox site was to design a way of eating and a few simple lifestyle hacks that changes your hormones like that within a day or two and i remember teaching a workshop at grapala once years ago and this woman came in it was to do the 10-day detox diet and she was like dr hyman i really know i get enough sugar i just can't like i've been eating my whole life i try i try it never works i doubt this is going to work i'll try it i'll do it but i i don't think you're going to be able to help me and i'm like okay let's see what happens so you know we had the whole program developed we had bras we had shakes we had all the food designer exactly and it's all designed in a scientific way to balance all your brain chemistry to balance your hormones to balance insulin to fix everything

and after day two she's like i don't know what happened dr hyman my cravings are gone i don't really want anymore like i'm done like i'm like wow and so when you when you understand how hard it is to quit but how if you use

science not willpower you can literally hack food and sugar addiction and that's

really what the 10-day detox site is about a powerful testimony and luckily there's

Levels Continuous Glucose Monitor

a lot of new apps and tools and gadgets that are coming on the market there's one that you're involved in it's called

levels yes it's a continuous glucose monitor just chat a little bit about that it's not for everybody but it could

work really great for a lot of folks listen everybody's different you know in terms of your response to foods you

can't say you're like your friend or your sibling or your parent you don't know right we just don't know

how our own biology responds and i'll just kind of start with a little kind of anecdote about a research study

that was in israel a number of years ago and in this study they looked at how different people responded to the same

foods think okay if i eat a slice of bread it should raise my blood sugar the same

as yours or as yours or whoever is listening but it doesn't work like that so what they found was this was very

this was a very kind of nuanced study but they did was they found that looking at the microbiome

which is the mass of bacteria in your gut they were able to predict different

responses based on the microbiome so not everybody's blood sugar went up the same with the same food

it depended on what's going on in their gut that's just sort of one example right so not everybody has the same response

to any particular food which is why it's so important to know your body and i'm

so excited about these new technologies called continuous glucose monitors or cgms and this company levels has really

nailed it and they they had i'm an advisor an investor just to be transparent but they really nailed it

and they figured out how to you know this little tiny device that goes on your skin a little patch and it measures your

blood sugar all the time and you know you can tell i can i remember the first time i used it

i put it on i was visiting a friend of mine in martha's vineyard and there was this sort of regenerative organic like

farm and they they cooked all these gourmet foods and and they brought this like feast of you know lamb and veggies

and this and that and it was all healthy it was all really yummy food and my my friend

who was actually also my age but he's super fit he's muscular thin healthy like seriously

healthy and we both put it on we both had this meal and then we were in bed like 10

o'clock at night checking our blood sugar and we're like texting each other what's going on our blood sugar is like 160. how does this happen like both of

us freaking out i'm like i think it's just because we ate too much food so even if you eat too much food even as

healthy we'll do that so you don't really know and i you know i remember i was using it when i was in hawaii and

someone brought over this vegan macadamia nut ice cream which was so freaking good and i ate a little too

much and i was like whoa it just spiked my blood sugar whereas you know maybe another food wouldn't do that so it's

really good to know what your body is doing which is why i recommend people to in order to understand what's happening

to measure blood sugar but i've talked to casey who's the founder of the company i said look blood sugar is great

we need to know it but more important is insulin because a lot of people have blood sugar

very well controlled until the last minute because having high blood sugar is kind

of dangerous so the body has really good mechanisms for keeping it in control until it doesn't

which is then called diabetes right so the mechanisms can go on for 20 30 years

where your blood sugar stays normal but your blood insulin keeps going up and up and up and up and the insulin itself

will cause havoc even if you don't have diabetes it causes heart attacks strokes cancer

it can cause belly fat gain muscle loss inflammation on and on and on so fatty liver so just because your blood sugar

is okay doesn't mean you're okay but it's a first step and i think we're going to be measuring insulin soon when they figure out the technology around

that but i can't wait for that to happen it's all coming it's all coming in the future and in the meantime there's

plenty that you can do even with a without gadgets and devices to head in the right direction mark let's do a

little bit of a recap on this conversation on fasting and tell us like if people are just

going to get started after listening to this conversation what is literally step

one and take us through a little bit of a recap of some of the things that we covered i mean like the easiest thing to do for everybody is just a 12-hour fast

which we talked about if you want to extend it to 1416 play with that that's the easiest approach to activating these

systems fasting for 24 36 hours once a week another option a little more tricky

harder to do not going to kill you but you know we do it on yom kippur or people doing a ramadan or something it's

like it's it's in cultures but it's it's a little harder keto is even harder and calorie restriction you can't do

that long you can do it for five days so people can do that so there's all these different choices people have and even the five day fasting mimicking diet can

be really effective you can do it on your own which is 800 calories a day or you can use various products from

walther longo it all goes to his research which is quite good called prolon

that's an option but for most people just doing the 12 to 14 16 hour fast is great so why

should you bother well we all need to go to the repair shop

right we can't just lit i mean you don't forget about your car and not take it in to the shop for repairs not taking in

for an oil change for tune-up you know we go in and have like a thousand point checkup we reset everything and it runs

beautifully we can do that for our bodies and that's what these techniques do so just to recap they they activate

every system in your body that's designed to protect you heal you and make you live longer it reduces

inflammation which is the biggest cause of aging it increases your antioxidant systems which are important it causes

you to lose belly fat it increases muscle increases bone density increases your brain function it reduces insulin blood sugar

cholesterol helps with diabetes can help prevent or even reverse cancer in some cases so

there's so many benefits to it and it activates these mechanisms called these longevity mechanisms around sir two ends. and daph2 and foxo and mtor so there's a whole strategy around how to use these technologies

to actually increase your well-being to lose weight to reverse chronic disease and to live

longer if you loved that last video you're gonna love the next one check it out

here we eat dairy now in a homogenized pasteurized form which is unlikely ever

did before historically and pasteurization is good because it reduces the risk of infection and you know terrible things you can get from

raw milk but the homogenation process actually