Recap: Is it time for you to try fasting? | Dr Valter Longo & Tim Spector

Hello, and welcome to Zoe recap where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Most of us have heard about the health benefits of fasting from lowering disease risk to even slowing down aging. The catch? Going without food is tough, really tough. However, according to doctor Valter Longo, it doesn't have to be so hard. His pioneering research, including the development of the fast mimicking diet, is making fasting more practical and accessible for everyone. Today, Volta joins Tim Spector and I to explain how a pause from food transforms the way our cells behave and how you can make fasting part of your life. I always challenge everyone with the question, find me anything that will revolutionize gene expression more than fasting. And I still haven't got anybody to even come up with something that they think could challenge. Meaning, if you fast a person for, let's say, five days, it'd be hard to find something else that causes more changes in the body than those five days. Right? Of course, if you go longer, even more changes. But but but, you know, I say anything you can do in five days. So so everything happens during during fasting for obvious reasons. Right? So you now, can no longer rely on energy coming from the outside. You need to rely on energy come from inside. And so the body slowly, gets into a modality where it starts burning fat and relying on on fatty acids and ketone bodies. And ketone bodies are these, you know, you you heard of ketogenesis. And so ketogenesis refers to making these, ketone bodies that, are byproducts of fat breakdown, essentially. Breakdown and then reprocessing. So for example, the brain, after three or four days of fasting, starts functioning both on glucose and on ketone bodies, and the heart can function using fatty acids and other organs use fatty acids, which is basically fat breaking down. Fats are broken down. Then there's something else that's called glycerol that is released, and glycerol and amino acids coming from muscle and other systems, they're they can be used for gluconeogenesis. So now the body can make its own glucose because, of course, there is no carbohydrates coming from the outside. Right? So these are just some of the examples of the things that happen in a human body in the fast. Now a lot of people use words like autophagy and and and thinking that's gonna happen, you know, very quickly. So autophagy is this process where, cells begin to eat themselves. Right? Eat their own components. So they shrink and they start eating themselves. So, Voltor, that's a good thing if your cells are eating themselves? It doesn't sound like a good thing. It it is a good thing. Right? So and so these bacteria do it and yeast do it and all organisms do it. So it's an opportunity to get …