Will Fasting Help You Live Longer?

Do you do intermittent fasting? Yeah, as much as I can. One of the other guys that was on this tour of Israel with me is Volta Longo and he's the arguably the world's expert on this. What a great name. Isn't it? He's an Italian guy. Volta Longo. Longo. Yeah, like the coffee. Sounds like a guy you call in when you've got a real problem. Yeah. Well, he's written a book and he is probably the world's expert in human periodic fasting. For everyone who wants to know about what the best periodic fasting protocol is, there isn't one. We don't know yet. We're right on the cusp. There haven't been enough studies, but there are a few types. I go through them in my book because we won't have time to go through all of it, but there's the, what is it, the 18- 18 hours. Yeah. If you can go skip breakfast, have a late lunch, that's a good start. That's what I try to do every day. It's not always possible like when you're in Africa and they're feeding you massive meals three times a day, but that's what you want to do. Be hungry for part of the day or you can go a little more extreme and skip two days a week. What's the benefit of being hungry? Great question. This is what my lab and others figured out in the first few years of the 21st century. We figured out that these genes that extend lifespan, these sirtuin genes, are activated by being hungry, in part by raising NAD levels, which we, NMN, will mimic the effect of. Being hungry actually raises your lifespan in some sort of way. Right. Chloric restriction is what we used to talk about a lot. If you restrict the calories of a rat, it was actually discovered back in the early 20th century, we'll make them live up to 30% longer. Not in an old state, but it prevents them getting old. The rats don't get cancer, heart disease, and all of these other good things. That was the only thing that we knew up until about 20 years ago, even 10 probably. We used to think you had to be hungry all the time. There still is a society called the calorie restriction society. They were hungry all the time. They had very small meals, which is pretty tough. I tried that and gave up after a week. This new paradigm is that you don't have to always be hungry. Similar to you don't always have to be on a treadmill. You can do it for a short time, make it intense, and then you can let your body recover and go back to a normal life for a little bit. That's great news. That means that we can have our cake and eat it too, so to speak, as long as the cake doesn't have a lot of sugar in it. When you are on this protocol of restricted eating plus metformin, when do you take what and when do you exercise and how do you balance it out? When do you know what to do what? I use my body as a guide. Now that I'm 50, I have a pretty good ... You know how your body feels and reacts. I'm also measuring it, a ring that measures my pulse and my sleep. Is that the aura? Yeah. How do you spell that? A- O-U-R-A. O-U-R-A. Yep. Isn't Kevin Rose a part of that company? Is that it? Is that it? Yeah. Jamie says yeah. Okay. From dig, dig.com. You don't know dig? No, I'm not. How dare you? Sorry. It's a good place to go find cool shit. Okay. Okay. Dig.com. Shout out to dig. Yeah, I go there every day because real interesting stories on the internet. You're always finding cool, weird videos and just fascinating science stories, human nature, human interest stories. Sounds good. I have a watch. What kind of watch are you using? The Apple Watch. Okay. How does that measure? By the way, they just released the Apple Watch 5 today. Ooh. Apparently, it's better. You might want to get it. What does it do? What does the Apple Watch do? Yeah. How's it? Well, it changes songs in my headphones. Tells the time occasionally. But yeah, what's useful with it is pulse and activity. And if I haven't moved enough during the day, I've got a standing desk and that's being helpful to make me move around a little bit more. But mainly, it's ... And I also do occasional blood tests to make sure that my body's optimized as best I can, personalized. And using all those measures. You read the data off your watch? How do you read it? What application are you using? Nothing special, just on my phone. Have a look. Do you just have a look at what your resting heart rate is? How much activity? How far you're walking? How many calories you're burning? That kind of deal? Yeah. Yeah, pretty simple. And I'm happy to say my resting heart rate's really low, which means things are going okay so far for me, even though I don't do enough exercise, as you rightly point out. I think my resting heart rate's 46.