#059 Aliquot #3: Q&A Mashup - Fasting

Rhonda Patrick (0:05)

Hello again, friends. Today's episode is our third special Aliquot mashup episode featuring a collection of clips on a range of topics related to fasting, including health benefits, associated mechanisms of health span and longevity, and when and how to break a fast. This two-hour episode covers many fasting-related topics, including comparing and contrasting different types of fasting, the effects of fasting on the gut microbiome, the effects of fasting on the immune system, caloric restriction memetics such as resveratrol and spermidine, fasting and IGF-1, fasting mimicking diet, the ketogenic diet for autoimmune diseases, sensitivity of biomarkers of inflammation and autophagy, aerobic exercise and sauna use while fasting, the effects of fasting on muscle mass, what we know about the minimal fasting time it takes to induce autophagy and apoptosis, refeeding after a prolonged fast, thoughts on coffee and other calorie-free substances and breaking a fast, differences between a fasting mimicking diet versus a water-only fast, and much, much more. This is a special preview of the Aliquot Members Only podcast. For a full timeline with time codes for each topic and access to the entire episode, head over to foundmyfitness.com forward slash aliquot, that's A-L-I-Q-U-O-T, aliquot. If you were a premium member, you can also find this entire episode with a timeline on your private podcast feed. Now, let's dive in. Hope you enjoy. There are other ways of changing the gut microbiome. For one, actually, a pilot clinical trial found that intermittent fasting for 15 days, intermittent fasting, but on the days of their fasting, in this pilot study, people could eat with like up to 500 calories. It's sort of like a fasting mimicking diet almost in a way. They basically did this for 15 days. So they were fasting for a total of seven days and then not fasting for a total of seven days. And there was an increase in bacterial richness in the gut microbiome in certain types of bacteria that have been shown to promote the production of T-regulatory cells.

And basically, there's, this was including lactobacilli bacteria, which are commonly used in probiotics as well. Those have been shown to play a role in promoting T-regulatory cell numbers through the production of short chain fatty acids. It also enriched other bacterial species like Prevotella, which is another one that's also been shown to play a role in T-regulatory cell production in the gut. Interestingly, it was also shown that fasting induced sort of its own ketone body metabolism was happening that was regulating the micro, that basically was facilitating microbiome growth as well. So I thought that was a really interesting study because fasting itself has been shown to also affect autoimmunity through other mechanisms, aside from the gut microbiome, which that study I just cited really focused on. But there have been other studies, a lot of studies have been done by Dr. Valter Longo and colleagues that have found either fasting, a fasting-mimicking diet or even a ketogenic diet has been shown in animal studies and a very, very small pilot clinical study in patients with multiple sclerosis, again, an autoimmune disorder, where individuals basically after just one week of the fasting-mimicking diet or six months on the ketogenic diet, so much longer period to be on the ketogenic diet versus the week of the fasting-mimicking diet, they had an improvement in clinical measures for a variety of clinical measures for multiple sclerosis. And then animal studies sort of confirmed that there was a lot of effects on T regulatory cells and a variety of different effects on autoimmune regulation from the fasting-mimicking diet or also fasting. So other studies have found that fasting.

Itself can basically lead to, preferentially lead to the death of dysfunctional cells, and this seems to happen quite a bit in the immune system.

So as a fast becomes more prolonged, autophagy starts to happen, and autophagy is basically clearing out damaged stuff within a cell, but as the stressor becomes stronger, if the entire cell is actually damaged enough, the cell will die via apoptosis. And this has been shown to occur in, definitely occur in animal studies, where basically if you take a mouse and fast it for 48 hours, about 28% of the immune cells in the mouse will die off, and this activates stem cells in the blood system and the hematopoietic system, where the stem cells increase by sixfold. And this causes stem cells then to make brand new immune cells, young, brand new healthy immune cells. And interestingly, Valter has shown that they make functional immune cells. So you can clear out a non-functional immune cell that perhaps was playing a role in autoimmunity and replace it with a healthy functional immune cell that basically is not having that autoimmune defect.