The newest form of fasting, known as the Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD), is now in the mix. It is an approach to fasting that effectively tricks your body into thinking it is fasting while allowing some food intake. A fasting-mimicking diet aims to reap the benefits of fasting while minimizing the challenging parts of fasting, such as hunger, fatigue, and headaches.

Dr. Longo and his team at the Longevity Institute at The University of Southern California have been working with pathways in the body called “nutrient-sensing pathways.”

These pathways control something called autophagy-a type of “housecleaning” of our body’s cells. Autophagy is constantly going on in the body. It is the clean-up crew for all the processes in the cells of our body. Think of it as the garbage truck, taking away unwanted byproducts of cell activity. Every minute of the day cells are working and producing waste in the process. All this work produces “junk” that needs to be cleaned up. In comes the autophagy crew.

The cells in the body do everything to keep us alive such as breathing and making energy. The more clean-up that happens the better you feel and the less risk there is of health problems occurring in the future. The FMD speeds up autophagy (more clean-up). More autophagy is a good thing. Autophagy helps get rid of “bad” cells in the body that cause disease and promote aging.

The nutrient-sensing pathways are also involved in epigenetic expression. Epigenetics is how your genes are affected by the environment, i.e., why one person gets a disease but the other person with the same gene does not.

This is important. Why does one person with a particular gene get an autoimmune disease or have trouble controlling weight when the other person does not?  Epigenetics looks at the reasons why this happens. Could the FMD/periods of fasting affect what genes are expressed? That is a question yet to be answered.

The diet increases cell clean-up

Dr. Longo’s team created a scientifically formulated diet that increases the “housecleaning” (autophagy) in your body’s cells. This is the” ProLon Fasting Mimicking Diet”.

The diet is five days long. It is recommended to do the five-day plan once a month for three months to see optimal results. Prolon recommends repeating the diet every 1-6 months to maintain benefits.

 

Benefits Of Fasting

While it isn’t intuitive that periodically avoiding food offers benefits, traditional fasting has many positive effects backed by scientific evidence:

1. Decreases inflammation

2. Improves brain function and slows neurodegenerative processes such as dementia and Alzheimers

3. Decreases blood sugar levels in Type 2 diabetes

4. It prevents blood sugar swings which are associated with elevated cholesterol, inflammation, and hypoglycemia.

5. Improves blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides

6. Aids weight loss

7. Delays aging

8. It May help chemotherapy work better, may help with cancer prevention. In a 2021 study that includes humans, cats, and mice, fasting improved the efficacy of chemotherapy cancer treatments.

There are many benefits attributed to fasting. Research finds that fasting reduces inflammation markers, insulin levels, and glucose in the blood.

Many of the above benefits are currently being studied using the fasting-mimicking diet plan.