#027 Valter Longo, Ph.D. on the Fasting-Mimicking Diet & Fasting for Longevity, Cancer & Multiple Sclerosis
FoundMyFitness
Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D.
4.8 • 5.8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2016
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Valter Longo
This episode of the FoundMyFitness podcast features Dr. Valter Longo, a professor of gerontology and biological sciences and director of the longevity institute at the University of Southern California.
Dr. Longo has made huge contributions to the field of aging, including the role of fasting and diet in longevity and healthspan in humans as well as metabolic fasting therapies for the treatment of human diseases.
In this podcast, Valter and I discuss...
- (00:00) Introduction
- (03:30) The fasting-mimicking diet makes fasting accessible to more people
- (08:10) Prolonged fasting stimulates stem cell regeneration
- (12:57) Does inflammation cause aging or is it the other way around?
- (17:59) Using the fasting-mimicking diet in a hospital setting
- (22:18) Fasting prior to chemotherapy preps cancer cells for death and protects healthy cells from damage
- (36:05) Using fasting and time-restricted feeding to control weight gain
- (42:08) How long do you need to fast to induce autophagy?
- (45:32) A fasting-mimicking diet reversed a multiple sclerosis-like autoimmune condition in mice
- (52:09) What are the cellular mechanisms that underlie the regenerative benefits of fasting?
- (58:27) Are fasting-mimicking drugs, such as spermidine and resveratrol, safe and effective? What about metformin?
- (01:07:03) Blocking the growth hormone/IGF-1 axis protects from cancer and diabetes in people with Laron's syndrome
- (01:14:23) Exercise is essential for healthy metabolism and longevity
If you're interested in learning more, you can read the full show notes here: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/valter-longo
Join over 300,000 people and get the latest distilled information straight to your inbox weekly: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/newsletter
Become a FoundMyFitness premium member to get access to exclusive episodes, emails, live Q+A's with Rhonda and more: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/crowdsponsor
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back friends. I hope you're my to conjure our running at maximum capacity because today's |
| 0:04.4 | guest is a great one. Today I bring you Dr. Walter Longo, who is Director of the USC Longgevity |
| 0:10.5 | Institute at the University of Southern California. I've been really excited about this one for a while |
| 0:15.6 | because I have a great deal of respect for the translational nature of Dr. Longo's research. |
| 0:20.8 | What makes his work so profoundly unique is that it spans from lower organisms such as yeast, |
| 0:26.3 | where he has teased out basic mechanisms of longevity to animals such as mice and finally |
| 0:31.8 | translates the research into actual clinical practice in humans. Many scientists spend their |
| 0:36.8 | entire career of specializing in just one model organism. In this podcast, Walter and I discuss |
| 0:43.1 | the effects of prolonged fasting, which refers to two to three days in mice or four to five days in |
| 0:47.7 | humans. Dr. Longo's work on the fasting mimicking diet, which is a five day restricted diet that |
| 0:52.9 | is meant to simulate some of the biological effects of prolonged fasting while still allowing |
| 0:57.9 | some food. How clinical trials have demonstrated efficacy for this diet for type 2 diabetes, |
| 1:03.5 | multiple sclerosis, and cancer patients, fasting as an inducer of differential stress resistance, |
| 1:09.8 | where it can simultaneously make cancer cells more sensitive to death stimuli, while also making |
| 1:15.8 | healthy cells more resistant to the same death stimuli such as chemotherapy and radiation, |
| 1:22.0 | which might otherwise induce death among healthy cells as collateral damage. Fasting as a biological |
| 1:28.4 | state, which humans historically experience with extreme regularity, and we may ultimately need in |
| 1:33.5 | order to mitigate various disease states. The effects of prolonged fasting on the immune system, |
| 1:38.7 | namely how it clears away damaged white blood cells via etythology, and how this causes hematopoietic |
| 1:44.5 | stem cells to self-renew and make more stem cells and also produce new blood cells to fully replenish |
| 1:50.8 | the white blood cell population. How prolonged fasting causes a shift in the immune cell population |
| 1:56.2 | towards one that is more representative of youth by normalizing the ratio of myeloid cells to |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D., and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D. and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.