Let's say you really need to find reliable information about the best diet for high blood pressure or heart disease or diabetes.

Where do you go? You go to a website sponsored by Big Pharma that wants to sell you pills to fix your problem or do you want to treat the cause?

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. Most of us want to live longer. And if we could locate that fountain of youth, we would probably take a sip or two.

However, there is a hormone already in our body that does something very similar. It's a longevity hormone called FGF21.

Here's our first story. In the year 2000, a new human hormone was discovered. It was the 21st documented Fubberblast growth factor.

So they called it FGF21. Since this discovery, FGF21 has emerged as a key agent for a promotion of metabolic and artery health,

leanness and longevity. Injected into fat monkeys and they lose body weight without reducing food intake.

And not just a little, a 27% drop in body fat eating the same amount. In mice, it increases their lifespan, 30 to 40% comparable to lifelong caloric restriction.

But again, it was achieved without decreasing food intake. The researchers concluded that FGF21 could potentially be used as a hormone therapy to extend lifespan in mammals, which has gotten big Pharma salivating, raising the question, can aging be drugged?

And that's not all it can do. The idea that one drug can treat obesity, diabetes, dyslipidemia, high cholesterol and hypertension all at once might have seemed impossible a few years ago, but is now a tantalizing and exciting prospect.

The reason you can't just give people straight FGF21 is that it gets rapidly broken down in the body. So you'd have to get injections like every hour or two around the clock.

Drug companies try to patent a variety of longer acting FGF21 local likes and indeed give people a little PF05231023 and they can lose about 10 pounds in 25 days along with dramatic drops in triglycerides and cholesterol.

But then the side effects of these newfangled drugs started cropping up. Oh, okay, so hey, what about this? We packaged the FGF21 gene into a virus and then inject the virus and have a like stitch extra FGF21 genes into our DNA or you can just lace on your running shoes.

Exercise, boost FGF21 level, which may in fact be one of the reasons exercise is so good for us, which works better though. Aerobic exercise, eight weeks of running training or resistance exercise, eight weeks of weights.

The answer is both, but the resistance exercise edged out the running of 42% increase in FGF21 versus a 25% increase in the aerobic exercise group. Okay, but what can we do with food?

Yeah, you could try engineering and injecting it, but wouldn't it be easier to just stimulate our own endogenous natural production through diet?

One way is through no diet at all. You may have noticed it's been dubbed the starvation hormone. That's because fasting induces FGF21, but not just a day or two. Physiologically, FGF21 expression is markedly increased in response to fasting starvation, but unlike mice, which show an increase after just six hours of fasting, humans don't get a notable surge in FGF21 until after a week.

Fasting can quadruple FGF21, but it takes 10 days of fasting, which is the very poster child of an unsustainable eating pattern.

So how can you get the benefits without the starvation? Might a ketogenic diet be able to mimic the fast? Nope, ketodides don't work. In fact, keep it up for a few months and you can actually get a significant decline in levels.

High fat diets may even interfere with the boost you get from exercise. What kind of diet does work then? We'll find out next.

Over a century ago, fasting was held not only as a means of competing cerebral laced to but also for the pro-engation of healthy longevity. That turns out to be true, FGF21 might be a missing link. FGF21 is characterized as a systemic enhancer of longevity. It can be boosted through prolonged fasting, but thankfully, there are other less drastic measures such as more carbs or less protein.

It can give people lots of starchy foods and you can shoot up FGF21 levels. The healthier sources would likely be whole grains and beans since buterate appears to boost FGF21 too.

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