[00:00:00] Luke: So there's been a lot of hype around fasting over the past couple years, and strangely, I don't think I've ever done a show dedicated to this practice and its benefits, so I'm really excited to talk to you today.

[00:00:15] Chris: Yeah, I'm your guy for it. PhD in fasting, basically.

[00:00:19] Luke: That's amazing. I know. I was looking at your pedigree. I'm like, "This guy spent a lot of time in school. Wow." My experience with fasting is very limited. I used to do it a bit more because I would get sick more often, but back in, I don't know, my early to mid-30s, started getting into natural healing. And anytime I would get a cold or a flu, I would just immediately go on a juice fast, where I would eat no solid food, but just tons of bittery green juice and things like that.

[00:00:48] And then I think I did it long enough. I pretty much stopped getting sick. I was like, "I don't know how that worked." But at the basic premise of that, I think, as I understood it at the time, was helping my body reserve resources, energy so that it could fight off whatever I happen to be going through, and also probably doing a little detox at the same time.

[00:01:10] That's as deep as I ever got into it. Now many friends of mine are really into water fasting and even dry fasting and explain all of these almost like spiritual experiences they're having as a result. And I think, yes, I'm going to do that. And then I wake up in the morning and I go, "A smoothie really sounds good." And then I don't do it.

[00:01:31] So I'm really excited to extract your expertise on this. So where should we begin? Maybe you could give us, if there is even like any historical context of fasting. I know in different cultures and traditions this has been something humanity has explored long before there were such thing as biohackers and health optimization and all this.

[00:01:55] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. So the historical context of fasting, both from a societal and evolutional perspective is that it's just something that humans typically would always experience. It was very rare for us to have constant access to food. It would be very much a be like, we go out, we maybe hunt a gazelle, we find some berries, but then we would experience these long periods of time where there weren't available resources, nutrients, food around.

[00:02:23] So fasting as an evolutionary program is built into our DNA because we had to go through these long periods of time where we weren't taking in any nutrients and our body learned how to adapt and respond to that. And I think actually incorporated into its natural rhythms of what would happen.

[00:02:43] So our biology really revolved around and evolved around these periods of feast and then "famine." So we have these very built-in natural mechanisms that our body deals with for fasting that puts us in this cellular survival mode.

[00:03:03] So if you think about this from an evolutionary perspective, what happens in the body during a fast is essentially this signal that is telling us this environment is not great for bearing children. Because we barely have enough nutrients that are around for us to be able to survive, the current generation to be able to survive.

[00:03:25] So this is not a good time to actually have kids. So what that says to ourselves is, "All right, there's not a lot of nutrients around. So we have to conserve our energy. We have to protect the cells that we have right now, the current generation so that we can go and find an environment that is rich in nutrients, whether we can get more of a feast type of environmental response, and then that's where we want to have children."

[00:03:54] So fasting puts our own cells in this state of hyper protection, hyper maintenance, hyper repair, so that we can survive as long as we can in order to then find an environment where we can have the next generation. So that's the evolutionary context of fasting. It really was designed to help promote our own longevity and our own survival as an evolutionary mechanism to get to the next generation.

[00:04:23] Luke: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I watch a lot of these survival shows, and it's very difficult to get food in the wild.

[00:04:30] Chris: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:04:31] Luke: So you think pre agriculture, people just by default were having periods of time in which they ate literally nothing or very little. It seems to be just the way nature's designed. No one's sitting around with an endless bag of Cheetos and Haagen-Dazs in front of them.

[00:04:47] Chris: And now we are. And that's definitely the big problem. And I think that's one of the things that fasting can be so great for-- is that in our modern Western society, we are fed this narrative of you have to eat three meals a day, plus snacks, or your body will literally start eating itself. I remember being told that as a kid all the time. It's like, your stomach's going to eat itself. You can't be hungry. Being hungry is such a bad thing. It's associated with scarcity and poverty, and it's bad for you biologically.

[00:05:17] And now come to learn after many, many years of research on my part into fasting, that that's really not the case. We can go for incredibly long periods of time without food, and a lot of times that's very beneficial. Because when we get into this state of chronic overnutrition, these three meals a day plus snacks, you are not giving your body enough time to actually resolve the impacts of one meal before you go into the next.

[00:05:47] So this is called the postprandial response. So you get a lot of nutrients that are coming into the system. You get a lot of foreign molecules that are coming into the system. Those are kicking off inflammatory responses because any foreign molecule, even if it's food is non-native to the body, so there'll be some kind of transient immune response that happens.

[00:06:09] And then you also have this shift away from the maintenance and homeostasis that your body would naturally be in to then deal with all of the nutrients that are coming in. So the glucose that are flooding the system, the lipids that are flooding the system, the proteins that are coming into the system, if we don't do something about that biologically, then we'll die.

[00:06:33] We get to high glucose levels and you collapse and you pass out. So our cells need to be in this hyper vigilance mode where it's like, where does this carb need to go? Where does this protein need to go? Where does this lipid need to go? We need to rum them around. We need to store them. We need to digest them. We need to metabolize them. We need to create energy out of them.

[00:06:51] So it really puts your body in this state of overprocessing. And when it's focused on that, it's not focused on cellular repair, cellular maintenance, cellular protection, because it's just not top of mind. It needs to get rid of all these nutrients, find the place for them to go, or you'll literally die.

[00:07:10] So when we're in that state over and over and over again, it takes around four to six hours for the postprandial state to resolve. So if we're eating three meals a day, plus snacks, we're really never getting out of that postprandial, hypervigilance, damaging state of eating all the time.

[00:07:31] Luke: Have you ever looked into breatharians?

[00:07:34] Chris: No, actually I haven't.

[00:07:36] Luke: I've been hearing about breath s for, I don't know, 25 years or something. I think they're like unicorns. They may or may not exist. Or Bigfoot. Very few people have seen them, and you're not sure if you believe them. But I have met first person, people that I know that know someone, a secondary kind of anecdote of people who have mastered their own prana, Kundalini energy, and know how to work with the energy of the sun and breath, and essentially just drink water and don't drink food for years.

[00:08:13] I think there have also been some charlatans who have claimed that for notoriety or other means that probably behind the scenes are eating a can of sardines or something. But I've always been fascinated by that because in my own life, just day-to-day basis, I don't have much of an appetite, and I don't eat a lot, and my energy, mental and physical energy does not seem to be impacted whatsoever by the amount of food I eat.

[00:08:42] I don't feel any different if I wake up and don't eat all day than if I woke up and ate a hamburger for breakfast. It's just exactly the same. Which leads me to think, wow, I bet one could go quite a while without eating food if you're resourced in other ways.

[00:08:58] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the biggest lengths of time that we've ever seen somebody fast-- there was a man, I want to say 10 or 15 years ago who was, I think around 300, 310 pounds. Very obese, needed to lose a lot of weight. So he underwent medically supervised fasting where he basically just stopped eating.

[00:09:22] But he was getting IV drips of essential nutrients, essential fats, essential proteins, amino acids, things like that. So still getting some calories, but he wasn't consuming anything. And he did that fast for about a year and dropped 150 pounds, something like that.

[00:09:41] So this really long period of time, under medical supervision, of course. But yeah, the human body, when it has those replete resources that it can draw from for energy, that's what they're there for. It's what we're going to utilize.

[00:09:54] Luke: On that note, if someone was clinically obese, such as that gentleman, and they underwent a fasting protocol and as a result lost a lot of weight quickly, is it possible that they would run the risk of mobilizing all of the toxins that were stored in their fat and poisoning the well while trying to become healthier?

[00:10:20] Chris: That's definitely a possibility for sure. Unfortunately, there's no real way around that, so to speak. Your fat cells, lipids especially, are very good at holding on to environmental toxins. And yes, they do get released when you lose weight. But that's just the process that you have to go through.

[00:10:38] Luckily, when you're doing it in a fasted state, your body becomes much more resilient to exterior stresses and interior stresses. There's a whole host of mechanisms that happen at the cellular level to increase their stress, resistance, the amount of damage that's being produced from energy generation, better mitochondrial functionality, less waste products that are being produced.

[00:11:03] You're kicking off autophagy, which I like to think of as like a cellular detox process. It's essentially what our cells do for cleanup and recycling, breaking down all these dysfunctional proteins and organelles that aren't functioning correctly as they should and could be spewing out some extra damage or causing things to jam up in the system.

[00:11:25] So autophagy's going to break those things down into their constitutive parts, the amino acids, the lipids, the carbs. And then it's going to use those resources to then create new functional proteins in organelles. So that's where this recycling rejuvenation process comes in with fasting. So as you're being exposed to more of the environmental toxins that might be coming out of your fat cells, your own cells will at least be in a more protected and repair-oriented state.

[00:11:54] Luke: Got it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about some of the different styles of fasting. There is, of course, intermittent fasting, which has become pretty popular in the past few years, which is probably what I do without trying just because I forget to eat. Thank God I have a wife who likes to remind me if I haven't eaten in 12 hours or something. She's like, "Dude."

[00:12:18] So the intermittent fasting and then, of course, water fasting, and dry fasting, which is really bizarre to me. What are the different protocols that you've seen people have success with, and what are some of the risks involved in any of those?

[00:12:37] Chris: Yeah, so with fasting, especially when you look at the science of fasting, there can be this problem in the field of the research where we have a ton of different styles of fasting that we're looking at from a scientific perspective. And oftentimes, there are very different results depending on what different type of fasting that you're doing from just a biological, biochemical perspective.

[00:13:00] And then those benefits, those effects often end up getting conflated with each other. So you'll have something where we've done a study on a 72-hour fast, and we've seen X, Y, and Z effects. Like immune cell regeneration or autophagy or things like that. And then you have a 16:8 hour fast, where you're fasting for 16 hours. You have an eight-hour condensed eating window.

[00:13:24] And that's the intermittent fasting that everybody more or less thinks about. And that has its own particular benefits, but they're very distinct from the 72-hour fast benefits because your biochemistry is going to be changing throughout that entire course.

[00:13:38] So a lot of times people who are doing the shorter term fasting, the 16:8, will think that they're getting these benefits like autophagy or like the immune cell regeneration or some of these deeper states of cellular maintenance protection functionality, but that's actually not really the case.

[00:13:57] And the reason why that isn't the case is because our body has what's called glycogen stores. And our glycogen stores are essentially our stored carbohydrates in the body. During the initial stages of fasting, we're going to be utilizing those glycogen stores to create glucose and keep ourselves in this carbohydrate, glucose-oriented metabolic state, which is very similar to what we experience when we're doing our typical three meals a day plus snacks eating style.

[00:14:27] Those glycogen stores aren't going to be depleted until around 20 to 24 hours of no caloric intake fasting. And then at that point, that's really where you see this big metabolic switch that happens from the glucose and the carbohydrate metabolism over to fat metabolism and ketone body production.

[00:14:48] So at that 24-hour mark is really where you're going to start to see the shift from ordinary metabolism into fasting metabolism. And that's where autophagy is going to just start happening. That's where ketosis is just going to start happening. Then you get into these later stages of fasting like a 36-hour fast or a 48-hour fast, and that's really where you see what we consider to be all of those more robust cellular longevity promoting effects of fasting.

[00:15:18] So the maintenance and repair, the metabolic efficiency, the autophagy, the anti-inflammatory effects, the antioxidant effects that are coming with fasting. And when we look at the literature on where you see the best health span, the lifespan extension with fasting, it's usually in through this protocol called alternate day fasting.

[00:15:40] So one day of eating, normally one day of fasting, and that's going to be no calories, but water is okay. Dry fasting isn't all that well researched in the actual academic papers. But when you do alternate day fasting, like rinse and repeat, that eating, fasting, eating, fasting cycle for an entire organism's lifetime, you can get anywhere between a 30 to 50% lifespan extension there, but without actually having to reduce calories at all.

[00:16:09] Luke: What?

[00:16:09] Chris: Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

[00:16:10] Luke: That's nuts.

[00:16:11] Chris: This is actually what got me really into fasting in the first place, was I just got very much excited about health and longevity research. It used to be very mythological, like Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth, but now is this very active area of scientific study.

[00:16:28] And when you're in that space, eventually you come across fasting because it's one of the only reliable ways that we know of right now to extend lifespan and healthspan. It can also help to treat, prevent, or delay most major diseases. So it's this one thing that does everything, and that's what fascinated me about it.

[00:16:45] Luke: I can tell.

[00:16:46] Chris: Yeah, it's super cool.

[00:16:49] Luke: So it sounds like a lot of people that might hearing information about some of these profound benefits of fasting or maybe adopting a more intermittent fasting protocol, but they're not doing it long enough to get the benefits that they think they're getting.

[00:17:08] Chris: Right. And that's exactly the case. So when you really dive into the fasting research itself, you see a lot of studies of shorter term fasting that just don't produce all that interesting, or magnitude shift order changes that you see when you do the longer term fasting.

[00:17:30] Then again, that really comes back to the glycogen reserve question. So when we do studies of 16:8, you can definitely see some benefits, especially to glucose levels, triglyceride levels, cholesterol levels, all these metabolic markers. You get a stabilization there.

[00:17:48] You're increasing your insulin sensitivity, reducing insulin resistance. But that's really more at a holistic systemic level, the resolution of the postprandial response versus truly depleting your glycogen stores, getting to that 24 hour facet state and beyond, where you really see this big change in holistic metabolism and biochemistry at the cellular level.

[00:18:11] Luke: Got it. And what about muscle loss? I've never had muscles no matter how hard I've tried, but every once in a while, I get on a routine and I go, "Yeah, you know what? I'm going to lift a little bit and see what I could do." And I can't do much. But then I notice, because I don't eat very much, that if I go through a period where I do start to gain a little noticeable muscle, unless I keep eating a lot to maintain it, it doesn't really stick.

[00:18:45] And then I'm skinny again. And I'm not that familiar with the gym bro kind of world, but I do have some friends that are pretty ripped. and I've interviewed a lot of people, of course, that are fitness experts and things like that. And the amount of protein they're eating to build and maintain that kind of muscle is insane. I literally could never eat that much.

[00:19:11] Chris: Yeah, it's incredibly difficult to actually do that. The whole one gram per pound of body weight is the standard right now in the gym bro, bodybuilding world. When you actually look at the studies of it, I'm pretty sure that the maximal protein incorporation where you can still see measurable gains is around the 1.6 to 1.8 grams per kilogram mark, which equates to something around 0.8 grams per pound, something like that.

[00:19:45] So I think the one gram per pound is a little bit more on the upper side of what you really need. But for heavy-duty athletes, for people who are making that a part of their lifestyle, you do need a lot of protein to be able to maintain that muscle mass. And then also really importantly to maintaining that muscle mass is making sure that you're pressing the right biochemical pathways in order to keep the growth up.

[00:20:13] What's interesting about that whole thing though is that a lot of the pathways that are associated with muscle growth are also associated with aging. Because those are the typical fed pathways. So like mTOR and IGF-1 and insulin, glucose signaling, things like that, things that are really associated with high nutrient density, then also, of course, promote muscle growth and cellular proliferation.

[00:20:43] But the fact that we are promoting that muscle growth and that cellular proliferation also means that we're more rapidly running through our DNA, doing more cell replication, getting to this what we call hayflick limit.

[00:20:57] So the hayflick limit is essentially the amount of times that a cell can divide before it's run through all of its telomeres. It's accumulated too much DNA damage. It can't survive and divide anymore. So just reaches the end of its replicative lifespan and dies. So the more cellular turnover you have, the more DNA replication you do, the more of these growth pathways that you're stimulating to cause those effects to happen, the faster you are typically aging on a cellular level.

[00:21:29] And that's why fasting is usually the opposite effect. It's really focusing on let's not overgrow the cells. Let's not over divide. Let's not over replicate. Let's focus on maintaining, repairing, and protecting the cells that we have right now because we don't have the nutrients to make a new cell if something goes wrong.

[00:21:49] Luke: That's interesting. And that brings to mind the observation that you don't see too many super ripped elderly people.

[00:22:00] Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah, very true.

[00:22:02] Luke: If you see someone who's living into their 90s-- I think of men for the most part, I guess-- they're usually thin. And sometimes even skinny fat or a bit pudgy. I wouldn't say like morbidly obese. You don't see really overweight 90-year-olds, but you see a lot of very thin ones and very rarely muscle-bound people. Maybe that explains why that appears to be the case.

[00:22:30] Chris: Yeah. I think that there's definitely a certain degree of that.

[00:22:33] Luke: I'm just trying to find an excuse to not work out.

[00:22:35] Chris: Yeah, that's perfect. I got you. Don't worry about it. Terrible for longevity. Exercise is awful. But yeah, it's very much, I think, finding a balance between those two states. Again, this whole concept, especially in the bodybuilding world where it's like not only three meals a day plus snacks, but it's like, oh no, I need to eat six small meals a day basically to make sure that I'm constantly getting nutrients and there being the maximum bioavailability, the maximum digestion, the maximum absorption that they can possibly be, so that I can constantly be stimulating these growth pathways, that's probably a problem in the long term.

[00:23:14] And you can see this with elite athletes as well. A lot of Olympians don't have exceptional longevity. Even though they are performing at the peak of human function, that's not the best for longevity because that constant high degree of exercise strain also has these transient inflammatory effects.

[00:23:39] And you're doing a lot of repair maintenance that has to happen because of the damage that's being induced by all of that exercise and all of that inflammation that's happening. So it's really accelerating this process of damage and repair that ultimately is not going to be great for longevity.

[00:23:58] Luke: That makes sense. So if someone is interested in health span, of feeling great and having vitality to an older age and living as long as they can and still having a quality of life, it seems as though being a high-performance athlete or a bodybuilder might not be the optimal choice for that.

[00:24:20] Yet, at the same time, it's pretty widely understood that maintaining your bone density and some healthy level of musculature is useful because older people, even if they a long time, if they're thin and frail, they break bones easily and things like that. So what do you think-- I'm sure there's no one-size-fits-all for every person because we're all so unique.

[00:24:46] But it makes sense to me that even into your older age, you'd want to do a little bit of resistance training and just keep your muscles alive and not atrophied, and make sure that you're keeping some density in your bones so that they don't turn into chalk as you get older. Right?

[00:25:05] Chris: Definitely. And that's the other side of the coin. We know that one of the best predictors of longevity and one of the primary biomarkers that we use for that is muscle strength and grip strength specifically. So if you go into age 65, the amount of muscle that you have at that age is very, very predictive of longevity.

[00:25:27] After that point, it becomes a little bit squishier. We have plenty of data that shows that, yeah, people who are not super-duper muscular, but go into old age with a more balanced body composition, are usually the ones that end up having the best longevity. And then as you get into the later stages, then yeah, what you were describing before is typically the case, where it's like the more slender people are typically the ones who are really getting into those higher age ranges of like the 90s and the early 100s.

[00:26:01] So it really is this interesting balance because, yes, muscle mass for delaying sarcopenia and muscle wasting that happens with age, the frailty that comes along with that, the bone density for the osteoporosis, and just the bone leaching that's going to happen over time that gets compounded in old age, the balance and the flexibility that you need to avoid falls in old age, which is still one of the primary killers, all of those things are really, really important for maintaining your health span and your longevity.

[00:26:32] So I'm not here to discount exercise at all. It is very essential, and muscle mass is certainly a part of that. But just not, I think, to the extent that we think it is as much as our society has propped the bodybuilders and the enormous Arnold Schwarzenegger type people up. Number one, it's not super sustainable into old age. You really need that younger hormonal balance to be able to maintain that type of body composition. But then number two, it just doesn't seem to be incredibly helpful for longevity.

[00:27:11] Luke: What about longer period fasting? So we talked about the optimal windows there being-- some of the fasting protocols are too short to really get the longevity benefits. And there seems to be a sweet spot that you've identified. Well, you and others have identified. What do we know about doing, say, a 21-day water fast or some of these dry fasting protocols, which I know very little about? Is there any research or any valid data on the longer fast with or without water?

[00:27:46] Chris: Yeah. For the longer fast, we don't have as many big studies that have been done or really controlled studies that have been done.

[00:27:54] Luke: And no one's willing to be the subject.

[00:27:56] Chris: Right. No one's willing to be the subject unless they are in dire straits. So there are fasting clinics around the country and especially internationally that will take people in and do these medically supervised fast like we were talking about before as the last ditch. Nothing else has worked for me. I need something to do, something to give me hope and something to turn it around for me situation. So there is actually a fasting clinic out in Santa Rosa in California, a little bit North of San Francisco where Mimio is based out of.

[00:28:28] Luke: That's where I'm from.

[00:28:29] Chris: Yeah. And they have a fasting clinic.

[00:28:31] Luke: Your company is based out of Santa Rosa?

[00:28:33] Chris: Oh, no. We're based out of San Francisco. Santa Rosa's just hop, skip, and a jump.

[00:28:37] Luke: Yeah, yeah.

[00:28:38] Chris: Yeah. So the fasting clinic in Santa Rosa is really interesting. They'll take people who have diabetes, metabolic conditions, autoimmune disorders especially, and they'll have them fast in these medically supervised environments, sometimes up to two weeks, three weeks, even a month at the facility. When people do this, this two weeks of water only, non-caloric fasting, especially with autoimmune diseases, you can get this very profound symptom ablation that happens.

[00:29:12] So the example that I know of from there is someone coming in with lupus. They can fast for these two-week time periods and then get six months symptom free after that. Then they'll just come back, and they'll do it again and rinse and repeat that process. So that's the anecdotal-- or even medical side of these longer periods of fasting, it can really be beneficial for people who have tried everything else, and it just doesn't work.

[00:29:41] And especially for that immune cell regeneration and that immune cell reset that we know about for these later stages of fasting, like a 72 hour fast for. In terms of a 21-day fast or even dry fasting, there really isn't a great amount of scientific data that's available on any of that.

[00:29:59] It's something that's more in the ether of just the fasting community itself and hasn't really entered into the science side of things. I think because it's very hard to do a long-term study of dry fasting because it's very medically dodgy. Dehydrating people for an extended period of time can really cause some issues.

[00:30:21] Luke: Yeah. And you'd have to really monitor the participants too to make sure they weren't cheating.

[00:30:26] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. And that's hard to do. When we were doing our study, when we had people fast for 36 hours, even when we did it, we had to ensure compliance by making them do glucose monitoring. And this was before CGMs became really popular. So they were just doing like the blood prick every two hours or so, and we were monitoring their glucose levels that way.

[00:30:49] So not only were we fasting people for 36 hours, but then we were also making them poke themselves over and over again. So we had some not uber happy participants, but that's what you need to do in order to ensure the quality of the study. And hydration would be even harder.

[00:31:06] Luke: So doing the glucose monitoring, you were able to determine whether or not they ate a drop of food.

[00:31:13] Chris: Right. Exactly. So you can really tell because the typical fasting glucose level is going to be in the 70 to 100 at most range. So if anybody ever went above 100 for any reason, for any significant period of time, we'd ask them what happened. But if it was something like 110, 120, we were like, "Yeah, you ate some food."

[00:31:37] Luke: Really?

[00:31:37] Chris: Yeah.

[00:31:37] Luke: You caught people cheating?

[00:31:38] Chris: Oh, yeah. We only caught one person cheating.

[00:31:41] Luke: Oh, that's funny.

[00:31:43] Chris: Luckily, it was pretty early on in the process, but we just had to remove them from the final pool.

[00:31:49] Luke: Wow. That's funny. That must have been embarrassing for them.

[00:31:52] Chris: Yeah. It's like, what did you think we were doing with these glucose monitors?

[00:31:55] Luke: That's hilarious, dude. Many people listening, and myself included-- I'm sure some people have experience with fasting. It might be part of their lifestyle. As I said, it's something that it's on my to-do list, and I have a difficult time finding the day that I'm going to start it, really.

[00:32:16] It's just one of those cans I kick down the road, and I'm like, "Ah, yeah, I got to do this." It's been validated. I know people personally that have benefited from it so much, and it's not on the calendar, so it doesn't happen. So you and your company Mimio, which by the way, for those watching on a video, this is the sickest supplement bottle I've ever seen.

[00:32:41] Chris: Yeah. We love it.

[00:32:43] Luke: For those just listening, you can hear it. It's like anodized aluminum. It's super beautiful, and it has a really nice seal on it. I feel like it would be waterproof and awesome. So I'm going to use this for other things once I finish this bottle. So you somehow managed to create something that mimics fasting in terms of its effects, so let's start from the beginning of formulation creation, and then we can talk a little bit about how it works and some of the clinical data you have to support that. Because I think it's super interesting and much more convenient for folks like me who have a hard time just picking that day and sticking to it.

[00:33:26] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, the fasting mimetic product we have is Mimio, M-I-M-I-O. Also the name of the company. And that speaks to this biomimetic approach to research that we're doing. So basically, what biomimetic means for us is that we are studying the human body in these very interesting regenerative states.

[00:33:48] So fasting for one, but then also things like exercise and sleep and meditation, and basically trying to figure out what happens in the body that causes these beneficial effects of each of those states to actually happen. And then finding a way that we can recreate those benefits on demand through supplementation.

[00:34:09] So the way that we did this for fasting was we had people come in and just do a 36-hour fast, which is the time period where we see these really great cellular health effects of fasting and also where you get that kind of like alternate day fasting longevity impacts as well. So what we saw there was that when people fast for 36 hours, there's this unique set of molecules, metabolites that are produced by the body that are really only elevated during a fast.

[00:34:44] And when we screened through those molecules, we were able to find this synergistic combination of four of them, that when we put them together, supplemented them back onto cells, we could recreate these beneficial effects of fasting. So the same anti-inflammatories, same antioxidant, same cardioprotective, same metabolic efficiency programs, pathways, functionalities that we saw when people were actually fasting for 36 hours.

[00:35:14] And then even beyond that, because we were looking at this as a longevity intervention, why is fasting so good for longevity, we took these molecules and did a lifespan extension analysis with C. elegans, which is a really, really common model for aging. And what we saw there was that we could enhance lifespan by 96% just through supplementation.

[00:35:39] So basically doubling their lifespan without any need for them to fast. No energy restriction, no caloric restriction, just supplementation with these fasting mimicking metabolites.

[00:35:49] Luke: That's nuts.

[00:35:51] Chris: Yeah. So basically what Mimio--

[00:35:53] Luke: When you guys got that result, you had to be freaking out, right?

[00:35:57] Chris: Oh, yeah. We were so surprised. And we were super excited because, again, these are natural just human molecules, things that the body naturally produces during a fast that trigger these pathways that make up that, what I like to call bio program of fasting. And that's all Mimio is doing.

[00:36:17] So we're biomimetic in the sense that we are taking what your body naturally does during a fast and just giving it to you as a supplement so you can basically recreate fasting at the molecular level, trigger those same cellular pathways, and get those same benefits, but without having to fast.

[00:36:34] Luke: If you wanted to be super badass, could one-- not medical advice of course, but just hypothetically speaking, if someone wanted to be super badass, could they do a 36-hour fast and also stack the Mimio.

[00:36:51] Chris: Yeah, definitely. So Mimio is a great fasting mimetic. We've done three clinical studies showing that when you take the formulation, even when you're eating without altering lifestyle anyway, you can get these fasting like benefits.

[00:37:04] But it's also a really good fasting enhancer because if you're doing anything less than a 36-hour fast, your body's not really going to be producing these molecules at a very high level. So you can really jumpstart the benefits of your shorter-term fast, like if you're doing 16:8, if you're doing one meal a day, then you can get these longer-term benefits in a shorter fasting window. But then also the effects of the molecules themselves can make fasting easier because it has some appetite suppression effects. It has some mood elevation effects. It has some cognitive enhancement effects. So it's really great for taking shorter-term fasts and blowing them out essentially.

[00:37:46] And that's how I use Mimio right now. So I am on a one meal a day schedule, and what I like to do is take Mimio in the morning alongside my green tea. That'll give me the appetite suppression and the cognitive enhancement to get me through the day. Then after I'm done working, I'll work out in a fasted state, typically just strength training, weightlifting.

[00:38:06] And then I'll have my big reward meal at the end of the day where I'm really getting all the protein, all the carbs, all the macros that I need to maintain muscle mass and muscle growth. And then stacking that all at once. So I'm getting the maximum growth response while still minimizing the postprandial disruption that we were talking about before.

[00:38:29] Luke: Ah, interesting. That's super cool. I haven't had this very long, the Mimio, but hopefully I'm doing it right. I've been taking two first thing in the morning with water on an empty stomach.

[00:38:43] Chris: Perfect. Yeah.

[00:38:44] Luke: Now, to be honest, like I said, I don't even have an appetite anyway. And so it's always difficult for me to do-- I'm not a great test subject because I'm doing so many different things. And when I introduce something new, I want to be authentic and be like, "I don't notice a huge difference." But I have been taking it on an empty stomach, and I would say, if anything, I have more energy and even less appetite. Just counterintuitive.

[00:39:18] So I don't know how much of it I can attribute to your product, but it's enough to the point where I'm like, "I think I could just do this all the time." Of course, you're going to be biased as the inventor and founder of a company, but is there any downside to this mimetic approach in the long-term? Is it something that should be cycled and you just go back to your normal life here and there?

[00:39:44] Chris: Yeah, that's a great question.

[00:39:45] Luke: Or can we just keep going on this train if it's working for us?

[00:39:48] Chris: Yeah, so we designed it to be a daily use supplement, a consistent daily use supplement. So that's what we've seen in the animal data. When we look at the lifespan extension, these animals were on Mimio every day for their entire lives, and that's where we saw that 96% lifespan extension. So there really doesn't seem to be any long-term negative impacts or any need to cycle from the product.

[00:40:16] And that is actually the beauty of the biomimetic approach in and of itself, is that all of these molecules that we're using, that we're identifying through the research are naturally produced by the body already. So they were evolutionarily designed to not only have a purpose, work within the human body, perform a specific function, but then also specifically evolutionarily designed to work together within the context of this fasting state to activate all of these complementary pro longevity, pro fasting pathways.

[00:40:51] And that also gives them a really great safety profile. Because your body inherently knows how to take them up, absorb them, utilize them, digest them, break them down very safely and without really any side effects.

[00:41:04] Luke: Does that assist with bioavailability in your body, your body being able to have a memory of, oh yeah, we know what to do with this?

[00:41:12] Chris: Yeah, I definitely think so. And a lot of these things, they're human metabolites, which means that they're breakdown products of just normal macronutrients. So not only are they produced by the body, but they're also found in different plant-based sources, food sources throughout the world. Our body knows how to take them up in that context as well. When it sees them, it finds them, and it's like, oh, great. I like this. Let me incorporate it.

[00:41:41] Luke: And tell me about the four ingredients and how they work synergistically.

[00:41:46] Chris: Mm-hmm. So the four that are in Mimio are nicotinamide, spermidine, palmitoylethanolamide, oleoylethanolamide. So nicotinamide is behaving as an NAD precursor in the formulation. So nicotinamide will come into your body, get absorbed. It'll be converted into nicotinamide riboside as well as nicotinamide mononucleotide, as well as NAD. So nicotinamide is basically this broad spectrum, NAD precursor.

[00:42:17] Luke: Sorry to interrupt you.

[00:42:18] Chris: Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

[00:42:18] Luke: One day I woke up and took two  nicotinamides of another product, and I took two of yours, and I got really hyper and anxious. I might have OD'ed on that because I didn't look at the ingredients on yours. I was like, "Ah, take two in the morning. Okay." And then, yeah, I was like, "Whatever I did today was not a win."

[00:42:39] Chris: Yeah. Do you remember what the dosage was?

[00:42:41] Luke: I have it in the other room. I took two of yours. I think maybe two or three of these other ones. I don't know the milligrams, but it's rare that I have a reaction like that. And that day I was like, "Okay, I did something wrong." Because I'm like--

[00:42:55] Chris: Yeah, something's going on.

[00:42:56] Luke: Yeah. I'm like, "My fingers are shaking. I can't hold them still. So I did something, and I think I got a little too hyped on that, the NAD precursor.

[00:43:03] Chris: Yeah. Generally speaking, the max dose for NAD precursor is going to be around like one gram per day. And so a Mimio has 250 milligrams in it. So if you got more than 750 mgs from your other one, that might have just knocked you a bit over that level.

[00:43:21] Luke: Yeah. Makes sense. I learned my lesson. Okay, sorry to interrupt.

[00:43:25] Chris: Oh no, you're good.

[00:43:26] Luke: Go back.

[00:43:27] Chris: So nicotinamide, broad-spectrum NAD+ precursor. And NAD+ is important within the context of fasting because NAD is one of the primary ways that your cells senses its energy balance. So you have a ratio between NAD+ and NADH. And if you have a higher NAD+ concentration, that's basically a cellular signal that's telling your cells, we don't have a lot of energy.

[00:43:55] So that's actually going to trigger these fasting-like responses, especially when it comes to epigenetic modifications as well as DNA methylation and DNA transcription and translation, working through the NAD SIRT pathways, those sirtuins. So that's helping to put the cell more in this state where it thinks that it is in an energy-restricted state.

[00:44:21] So bringing a lot of these guardrails down of the feedback mechanisms that would ordinarily exist in a Fed State. And that allows the other ingredients in the formulation to do their jobs even better.

[00:44:33] So after nicotinamide, we have spermidine, and spermidine is a autophagy inducer, really well known for that. It's becoming really popular in the longevity space now. So autophagy, again, is that cellular recycling process, that cellular repair process that's really helping to enhance the metabolic efficiency side of things, grab extra nutrients to break down the dysfunctional organelles and proteins, and then create shiny new ones so the cells can have better functionality that way.

[00:45:01] And this is especially important for mitochondrial function, which if you have damaged or dysfunctional or old mitochondria, they'll leak a lot of free radicals that can then cause cellular damage over time, be a primary source of aging. So that's what spermidine is doing in the formulation.

[00:45:21] Then there's palmitoylethanolamide that is involved in the endocannabinoid system, so stimulates through CB1, CB two receptors. Like your body's natural CBD, a little bit. So it has these mood elevation effects, It has these cognition enhancement effects. It also has this powerful impact on pain relief, discomfort relief, and then anti-inflammatory effects.

[00:45:44] And it can cross the blood-brain barrier, which is really important because it helps with neural inflammation as well. So it's being studied in a lot of neurodegenerative diseases right now, like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and being shown to be really helpful within those contexts. So it's like your body's rest, relax and recover molecule.

[00:46:05] Luke: Interesting. Because I think about one of the critiques against fasting is this idea of being loaded with cortisol and adrenaline and adrenal fatigue and all this kind of stuff. Is there any truth to any of that? And if there is, it seems like perhaps your body's producing the thing you just said that I can't pronounce to help mitigate the stress of not eating. Do you think there's a relationship?

[00:46:34] Chris: Yeah, definitely. So yeah, the cortisol is definitely a primary stress hormone, and fasting is definitely a stress. What we call fasting as a stressor is what's known as a hormetic stressor. So basically a hormetic stressor will add a little bit of stress to the body that will then trigger your cells, the rest of your systems to have a stress response, a protective stress response that's then greater than the stress itself.

[00:47:04] So the end result of that is that your body will actually be more protected, producing more of the antioxidants and the bioactives that promote stress resistance. So that's what fasting is doing. It's a little stress that then promotes a big recovery response.

[00:47:22] Luke: Saunas and ice baths work in the same way, right?

[00:47:25] Chris: Right, exactly. And so where the cortisol really comes into that is that, yes, cortisol is going to be a little bit elevated during a fast, but that's also going to be conditional upon how far into a fast you're really going.

[00:47:40] So in the shorter stages of fasting, the 16:8, one meal a day, 36 hours, you're not going to be experiencing that much of a cortisol bump. But as you get into more past the 72-hour mark, where you're really getting into the starvation response and less the rest, recover, fasting, detox response, that's where you're going to see more impact of the cortisol and stress.

[00:48:05] Luke: Got it. And what about fasting into the duration where you go into full-blown ketosis because your glycogen reserves or smoked? Is that going to add to that? Because I've heard some people, that get into keto and they get the keto flu, and they can't sleep. And they're anxious and all this kind of stuff.

[00:48:27] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. So the funny thing about the keto flu is that that's actually your brain adapting to ketone body. So ordinarily, especially in the normal states of eating, your body likes to be what's called an obligate glucose consumer.

[00:48:45] So your brain is an obligate glucose consumer. That means that it needs to have glucose at some level in order to function properly. And that is around 50% of its energy capacity needs to come from glucose or else brain cells will die. And what happens is when we switch over to ketone bodies, your brains can also utilize ketones for energy. But they don't like to do it.

[00:49:11] And so when they're transitioning from a glucose only metabolism to a glucose plus ketone metabolism, that's where they're just trying to get up and running. They're trying to figure out how to use it correctly. They need to get adapted to it. And that's where the keto flu comes from, is that adaptation period between your brain utilizing the glucose to your brains utilizing the ketones. But after around three days, that's when your brain will be like, okay, fine. We will utilize the ketones. We won't be dicks about it anymore.

[00:49:45] Luke: It stops fighting it.

[00:49:46] Chris: Yeah, exactly.

[00:49:48] Luke: Okay. Let's go into the fourth ingredient and how that works.

[00:49:53] Chris: Yeah. So that one is oleoylethanolamide. And oleoylethanolamide is involved in the gut brain axis, so it's usually secreted by intestinal cells and then operates through the vagus nerves to then tell your brain, "Okay, we have food in the system." And so what it's doing is actually promoting satiety and helping to reduce appetite, as well as creating some of these metabolic switching effects.

[00:50:18] So OEA, oleoylethanolamide, is a PPAR alpha activator. And PPAR alpha essentially tells cells, "Let's not utilize carbohydrates for fuel. Let's utilize fats and lipids and ketone bodies for fuel instead." So it helps to create these metabolic efficiency effects as well as metabolic stabilization effects within cells, but then also systemically.

[00:50:45] So that's really helping to, again, get cells into this more fasted metabolism. What's really interesting about OEA is that initially, for a very, very long time, people thought that OEA was only produced in intestinal cells after a meal. And that's what you see when you look at it in a baseline, overnight, fasted state.

[00:51:07] It's not very highly produced. Then if you eat a meal, it goes up. And what we found that was really interesting was that OEA was really, really highly produced in a 36-hour fasted state. And we actually think that this is an evolutionary adaptation to fasting because, if you think about it, it doesn't do your body any good when you're fasting to be doubled over and hunger pains and constantly experiencing that just debilitating hunger.

[00:51:35] Because you can't go out and get berries or hunt down that gazelle if you got to be dealing with hunger pain at the same time. So we think that OEA gets highly regulated or upregulated and produced during a fast as a natural response mechanism to be like, "Okay, we need to suppress the hunger so that we can focus on finding food."

[00:51:54] Luke: Ah, that makes perfect sense. God, the human body is so cool, isn't it? Obviously, you spent years in school studying it for-- God knows how many hours a day, but me, as someone who just gets the secondhand benefit of people like you doing all that stuff, I just get the fascination part.

[00:52:11] It's just like, wow, that is so cool that the body has evolved to know how to take care of us so beautifully. Because if we go without food, you would think that the body would start to break itself down and put you in a panic. But it actually, as you're describing, has this innate intelligence to satiate you so that you can fix the issue at hand. And we probably wouldn't be here if we didn't have these adaptations. We would've all just keeled over.

[00:52:41] Chris: Exactly. Yeah. And that's why I love like the biomimetic approach that we're doing. Like you said, this innate evolutionary intelligence that's held within our DNA, our cellular functionality, just like our human beings, is something that we just don't know nearly enough about, but it's all contained within us. Our body knows naturally how to heal itself.

[00:53:07] And we could spend hundreds and hundreds of years trying to develop our own unique ways of healing the human body, or we could do what we are doing, which is using a scientific cheat code. The human body has been evolving for thousands of years, and nobody knows how to heal a human body better than a human body. So we should study how that happens and recreate it.

[00:53:30] Luke: I love that. What about the effects on cognition and mood?

[00:53:38] Chris: Yeah, sure. So primarily those are going to be coming through the PEA and the OEA. So the PEA is part of the endocannabinoid system. It has a really good clinical track record of inducing these pain relief effects, especially in the context of fibromyalgia or other nerve disorders, diabetic neuropathy, things like that.

[00:54:02] It's also a COX-1 and 2 inhibitor, and that's the same mechanism that, say, aspirin or ibuprofen use to both relieve pain and reduce inflammation. So again, like your body's natural CBD, your body's natural ibuprofen, there have been great studies with PEA in college kids showing that it can help them enhance their cognitive function, enhance their memory when doing hardcore studying.

[00:54:29] And then the OEA, again, it's also involved in the endocannabinoid system, so having some similar effects there. But the primary thing that OEA is going to be doing for you on the cognitive side is really reducing cravings in general. So there is, yes, the appetite suppression effect.

[00:54:45] But there's also been some really interesting animal studies with OEA showing that it can help to curb alcohol use disorder as well, both from the perspective of reducing the actual cravings for alcohol, but then also mitigating some of the side effects of hardcore alcohol use. So intestinal inflammation or intestinal permeability and just reducing pain from alcohol use as well.

[00:55:15] Luke: I'm just picturing drunk monkeys.

[00:55:17] Chris: Yeah, drunk mice.

[00:55:18] Luke: I hope it's not monkeys. I think you get higher on the food chain with animal testing, it starts to feel less ethical. As you were explaining that, I'm thinking, have they been able to turn animals into alcoholics where they're actually dependent on that?

[00:55:34] Chris: Oh, definitely.

[00:55:35] Luke: Really?

[00:55:35] Chris: Yeah. If you offer mice cocaine, if you offer mice alcohol, usually keep feeding it to them over and over again, they'll get addicted just like anybody else.

[00:55:46] Luke: Wow. That's so interesting.

[00:55:47] Chris: Yeah, yeah. The things we do for science.

[00:55:51] Luke: What about the Mimio or even just the effects of facts in which you obviously seem to be pretty good at mimicking with Mimio on testosterone and hormone profiles, and I guess in men and women, if there's any data on that?

[00:56:11] Chris: Yeah, for sure. So we have done a clinical case study in partnership with the Dave Putrino lab at Mount Sinai, where we looked at the impacts on the hormonal balance and a lot of these metabolic markers and also biological age with eight weeks of supplementation with Mimio.

[00:56:29] So again, no diet, no lifestyle change, just eight weeks of supplementation. And what we found was that we could get a 50% increase in free testosterone from that--

[00:56:40] Luke: 50?

[00:56:40] Chris: 50%. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:56:42] Luke: I got to get on this stuff.

[00:56:44] Chris: Yeah. So some real--

[00:56:46] Luke: Because I went halfway through the bottle and then I left it in the other room, and I have 500 freaking supplements laying around the house. But I got it back out for this talk today. And now I'm like, "Okay."

[00:56:56] Chris: Now we're remembering.

[00:56:57] Luke: Yeah, I'm getting back there. You got me at the testosterone. Okay, I'm in.

[00:57:00] Chris: Easy peasy. Well, the other cool thing that we found in that study was we were able to really improve a lot of these metabolic markers, raise HDL levels, lower LDL levels, improve triglyceride levels, decrease HbA1c levels, decrease fasting glucose levels. So a lot of metabolic stabilization there. But we were also able to see a two-and-a-half-year reduction in biological age. So basically taking him from-- I think his initial biological age was 50 years old, down to 47.5. So really, really cool being able to just see someone age in reverse.

[00:57:36] Luke: And that was in eight weeks?

[00:57:38] Chris: That was in eight weeks. Mm-hmm.

[00:57:39] Luke: What a trip. I can't wait until we're five years down the road and you have studies that are five years. I wonder what's possible with that.

[00:57:49] Chris: Yeah. That's what we're planning on doing now. So at this point, we've done three clinical studies with the formulation, and we just completed our randomized double blind placebo controlled study. But the next one that we want to do is another randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study, but in just a larger population for a longer period of time and track more things.

[00:58:08] So we really are very committed to research. Me as the founding scientist, as a clinical researcher, I'm like-- I like to call myself a selfish founder, in that I'm very dedicated to the science because I want the product to work for me. It doesn't do me any good to create a product that doesn't impact my life because I want all these benefits.

[00:58:31] I want the longevity effects of fasting. I want these metabolic effects. I want this rejuvenation effect that can happen. So me going out there, improving the formula over and over again, making a product that actually works, I want that for me. And luckily, I also get to share it with everybody else.

[00:58:49] Luke: Yeah. Unfortunately, in the realm of supplementation, there's a lot of bandwagon jumping, and there's just a lot of stuff that just doesn't work. There's just no effects subjectively or even to be able to be clinically proven, which is probably why many people don't do the type of clinical research that you are an endeavor to do more of.

[00:59:14] Of course, it's probably really expensive to do it too, but I think that it's a tell when no one's doing any research on their own product, because it's going to let the cat out of the bag that it's not that meaningful.

[00:59:28] Chris: It's not doing much.

[00:59:29] Luke: And not to say that all those supplements are shitty, but it's like, say you sell a vitamin C or vitamin B12 supplement or something. It is probably not bad for you, and it's probably good for you, but do those supplements really move the needle in a meaningful and novel and interesting way that it's worth talking about? Or is it just one of those things, oh yeah, everyone should supplement a little vitamin C.

[00:59:55] We know that, but it's not going to change your life. Yet maybe the company marketing said vitamin C, and I'm just picking on vitamin C because it's just a basic one. But the company marketing can market it like it's going to change your life or add to your longevity in meaningful ways that aren't necessarily ways that can be validated and proven.

[01:00:15] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Vitamin C is a perfect example, honestly, because at this point, we know that vitamin C, especially in high doses, is not going to do much for you unless you're already deficient in vitamin C. And there was this big narrative of vitamin C for immune health, right?

[01:00:33] You have the brand emergency who's out there, and they're being like, high dose vitamin C for your cold. If you feel sick, start taking this. When in reality, at that point in the process, the extra vitamin C is just not going to be doing anything for you unless you are actually deficient in the vitamin C.

[01:00:51] And by and large, when it comes to vitamins and minerals, our body is usually pretty good at knowing how much it can actually take in and maintaining those stores. So if you're already replete, you're full up on vitamin D, vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin A, whatever it is, your body is not going to be very good at absorbing or incorporating any new stuff to a certain degree. So you can be taking 10 grams of vitamin C a day, but the amount that your body's actually going to be taking up is going to be so tiny.

[01:01:24] Luke: Yeah. You can learn that very easily on n to one study of upping your dose of magnesium until you shit your pants. You'll be able to tell, "Okay, we're flush with magnesium. We're good to go. No need to take more. Yeah.

[01:01:38] Chris: Yeah. Absolutely. And that's the cool thing about the molecules that are in Mimio, is that typically speaking, since they're not produced outside of the context of a 36-hour fast at very high levels, you don't really get that same problem of we're not going to absorb them. We're not going to utilize them because we already have so much of it in the system. It's like, no, we are actually creating this state that you otherwise wouldn't be achieving. And that's where they're really doing their work.

[01:02:07] Luke: Are there any counter indications for people that are using the semaglutide peptide or these weight loss drugs, which I'm starting to understand they're the same thing? I always thought the peptides were more natural and then the Ozempic and stuff were like some evil pharma thing.

[01:02:24] And I don't know if there's really a difference. I took the semaglutide for, I don't know, maybe a month or something. I just thought it was another peptide, like the many other peptides I was injecting for many years, and I lost a shit ton of weight in a month. And then someone's like, "Dude, you took Ozempic." I'm like, "Wait, what?"

[01:02:42] Chris: How did this happen?

[01:02:44] Luke: I didn't know I did if I did. But it felt great and shed a few pounds. It was no big deal. I know that's something in our culture now that's becoming quite ubiquitous and there's a lot of different opinions on it. Maybe it's very useful for some people, and maybe it's harmful to others. But it seems like using something like Mimio or actually doing the fasting protocols alongside that could be good or maybe not.

[01:03:13] Chris: Yeah. What we have seen is that it's typically pretty good. It's not contraindicated at all. We have a lot of longevity clinic partners that we have around the country, and what they like to use Mimio for is actually as a way to help wean people off of the GLP-1s and towards a more natural, sustainable, long-term solution.

[01:03:35] Because a lot of people, they'll go on the GLP-1s. They'll lose the weight that they want to lose, then they'll want to come off of it because they don't want to be on the drug for their entire lives. But what happens when you come off of the GLP ones is that there's this big hunger withdrawal, basically. I think the statistic right now is essentially that the majority of people that come off of Ozempic regain around two thirds of the weight that they lost--

[01:03:59] Luke: Oh, really?

[01:04:00] Chris: Yeah, within the first year of coming out of it.

[01:04:01] Luke: Oh, brutal.

[01:04:02] Chris: Yeah. And it makes sense because when you're using a pharma intervention to do cravings control like that, usually that's all people are doing. It's like, oh, I'm taking the drug. I didn't have to naturally alter anything or learn how to live a healthier lifestyle. I just took this drug, and everything magically happened. But then you go off the drug and then you never adapted to a healthier lifestyle. So then it all just comes back.

[01:04:26] Luke: It's the modern bypass surgery kind of thing, right?

[01:04:29] Chris: Exactly. Yeah. And so, yeah, Mimio is basically a good bridge for people because it has those appetite suppression effects that can help to mimic those cravings control, cravings relief things that are happening with the GLP-1s. But again, at a more natural and sustainable thing. That's also doing other nice things for you at the same time, like the cellular health and the longevity benefits.

[01:04:52] Luke: Right on. What do you think about urolithin A for, is it autophagy or mitophagy?

[01:04:59] Chris: Mitophagy.

[01:05:00] Luke: Yeah. Do you think that's legit? It's something I've been taking for a long time, and there seems to be a decent amount of data to support its efficacy, so I'm just rolling with it. But it's not the type of thing you can check yourself, right?

[01:05:12] Chris: Right, exactly. Urolithin A is, I think, a great molecule. It's got a lot of clinical evidence behind it. It's got a lot of scientific evidence behind it. I think the major thing that it's focusing on right now is muscle strength and endurance, as well as the cellular energy effects.

[01:05:32] So I think the two or three clinical studies, most recent ones on urolithin A have basically shown that around 500 milligrams of it are really good for helping to enhance strength and endurance particularly in older populations. So increasing grip strength and increasing mobility and time of walking.

[01:05:56] Luke: Did you at any point think about including that in your formula? It seems like it could be synergistic just from a armchair expert's point of view.

[01:06:06] Chris: Yeah. So the reason why we don't have urolithin A in our formulation is because urolithin A is not a human molecule. So it's actually a bacterial metabolite of pomegranate. So that's one of the reasons why we just don't have it in our--

[01:06:23] Luke: So that disqualified it.

[01:06:23] Chris: Yeah. It's not upregulated during fasting. It doesn't really fit into this larger bioprogram that we were trying to recreate.

[01:06:30] Luke: That's respectable.

[01:06:31] Chris: Yeah.

[01:06:32] Luke: So you're a purist.

[01:06:33] Chris: I'm a purist to a certain degree. Yeah, this is very much my philosophy where it's like, again, these molecules that are produced during a fast were designed to work within the human body to perform a specific function and then designed to work together.

[01:06:47] So I think this biomimetic approach is really great for developing and discovering synergies between molecules, because that's another thing that typical supplement formulators are not actually assessing. They'll stack things together based on the existing clinical evidence, but they don't know whether or not those molecules are actually working in conjunction with each other.

[01:07:12] We're just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it does, and not doing the testing. But in that context, you can also have things that work against each other, and you just don't know whether or not these things are activating, complimentary, synergistic pathways, or if they're activating antagonistic pathways.

[01:07:30] Luke: Yeah, that's a really good point. There are a lot of, again, the bandwagon jumpers in the supplement industry where people will take 45 ingredients that have been proven to be good for you and throw them all in one formula. And maybe each one of them, or the majority of them, have been tested for safety, efficacy, etc., but no one knows what happens when you throw them all in the same gumbo.

[01:07:52] Chris: Exactly. And then even worse than that, no one typically with the 45 ingredient formulations-- they're not going to be giving them to you at a clinically validated dose. There's this big problem in the supplement field as a whole of basically ingredient marketing where yay--

[01:08:13] Luke: Fairy dusting, I think they call it.

[01:08:14] Chris: Yeah, fairy dusting. Mm-hmm.

[01:08:15] Luke: You can put it on your ingredient label, but you don't have to say how much it is. Especially a lot of them will do this proprietary blend. You're like, "Okay, I see. You're trying to protect your IP on one side." There's something to be said for that. Otherwise anyone could just copy your formula. But it's also an easy way to mask the lack of a clinical dose of said ingredient, right?

[01:08:39] Chris: Yeah, exactly. There's this one brand that I won't mention.

[01:08:42] Luke: You could tell me afterwards. Make sure I don't have it in my cabinet.

[01:08:47] Chris: I know. Yeah, exactly. But they have a proprietary blend that is probably around 12 molecules inside of it. And the proprietary blend itself, it's total weight is 250 milligrams. And I know what some of the molecules are and I know their clinical dosage, and I'm like 250 milligrams is not even a clinically effective dose of one of these molecules, let alone all 12.

[01:09:12] Luke: Right. Actually, that's a really good way that I think even a layman could probably assess something like that, those multi-ingredient formula. If the proprietary is, say, 250 milligrams or 500 milligrams, but the thing you really want, the one that packs the punch in there, if that's 5% of that equation, there's no way you're going to get enough. It's a pretty good, maybe obvious tell.

[01:09:35] If there's just too many ingredients per milligram, you can use common sense to deduce, I'm probably not getting the effective dose. Especially if you AB that proprietary blend with one of the leading brands of one of the single ingredients, and you see that their single dose is 500 milligrams of just the one thing, or 250 or whatever, that's going to tell you that that proprietary blend is probably fugazi.

[01:09:59] Chris: Right, exactly. And even beyond that, I think that the argument against that would be like, oh, we're blending it together so that these things create synergy. That they're like, oh, they're greater than the sum or their parts, and that's why we can use less. But if you're not going to do the clinical work to show me that that's true, or at least the cellular work to show me that that's true, at least at the cellular level, then how would you know that that's actually the case? And how would I know?

[01:10:27] Luke: Right. Yeah. I had an idea for the first time in, oh, it's been nine years plus, I think. I think it's nine years this month actually, that I've been doing this podcast, and I've always wanted to create my own product, something really cool and interesting, innovative in terms of a supplement.

[01:10:46] And a couple of weeks ago, I had a really good idea, which I'm not going to share yet because I don't want to jinx myself. But the first question I had to myself and to a couple of formulators that I ran the idea by was, is there any counterindication in terms of mixing these things up? Are they going to cancel themselves out or create a mess?

[01:11:11] And so that's the research I'm doing right now. Can I pack enough of each ingredient in that's going to really be effective without causing harm in the process. And it's like, absolutely. It's one of those things. We can research each one, but you really have to get to the end of the line of production. This is the final formula. Now how can we prove that we're not causing any harm or that it's not been rendered inert by competition between the different molecules.

[01:11:42] Chris: Yeah. And that's exactly what we had to do as well. The easiest way to do that, especially from a cost perspective, is to start off at the cellular level. So do these cellular tests with the formulations of molecules.

[01:11:56] Because the concentrations that you're going to use within cell culture models are not going to be the same concentrations that you're going to use for your final human product, but they will tell you at least, are these things working together to create good cellular health benefits, cellular effects, or yeah, are they antagonizing each other and we don't see that synergy happening?

[01:12:17] So that can be a good place to start. And so that's what we did. So when we were developing the actual fasting mimetic formulation, there were over 300 metabolites that were significantly elevated during a fast. And of those, we saw around two dozen or so that had some previous literature result for having bioactivity, whether that was enhancing the anti-inflammatory effects or promoting autophagy or what have you.

[01:12:45] And so from that list of 24, we then screened through those on our cellular assays to find the ones that could mimic the cellular effects of fasting, and then had those synergistic effects together. And that's where our combination of four comes from.

[01:13:01] Luke: Wow. And you whittled it down to four.

[01:13:04] Chris: Yeah. And we whittled it down to four. Yeah.

[01:13:06] Luke: That's a lot of editing. That'd be difficult to do. I'm just such a over the top, next-level person, I'd just be like, "Put all 24 in. Screw it."

[01:13:15] Chris: And we did try that, but it didn't work. That was the thing. So we went through all the various iterations and combinations. But when you put all 24 of them together, there was just something wrong about the concentrations or anything where it didn't work as well as just the four on their own.

[01:13:32] Luke: Wow. Super cool. I want to let everyone know the show notes for today are lukestorey.com/fasting. lukestorey.com/fasting. You can also click on that in the show description on your podcast player app. And there you will also find a link to lukestorey.com/mimio, and you get a code there, which is LUKE 20 for 20% off, if you guys want to check this out. I'm a big fan so far, especially after what I've learned here today. So if it piqued your curiosity, definitely encourage people to check it out.

[01:14:04] What's next in the field of biomimetics? What do you see, not just for you and your company, but the big vision? What is possible if we dream hugely for the future?

[01:14:17] Chris: Yeah. I think that if you really achieve the end goal of biomimetic research, it's going to be, you can put each and every single one of your body's natural processes on demand, is that you can access your body's natural ability to heal itself, to regrow stem cells, regrow organs, regrow anything, rejuvenate itself, really utilize that innate's evolutionary intelligence within our DNA and be able to unlock that fully and completely to totally control human biology.

[01:14:54] Luke: What do you think is next in terms of feasibility? Unless it's something you're in the process of working on and you don't want someone to beat you to the punch.

[01:15:02] Chris: Yeah, so what we are working on right now, and I'm not really afraid that anybody's going to beat us to the punch because it takes so many years of clinical research to do this, but what we're working on right now is we've done this process with fasting. We want to continue pushing that forward, keep diving into that cellular research to find more complementary molecules that can stack on top of the current fasting mimetic to make it more complete, give people even better benefits than what we've already shown.

[01:15:31] But then also, we want to extend this process out into these other regenerative states of the body. So sleep, exercise, cold exposure, meditation. We really want to tease out what's happening there and how can we recreate those states to get those benefits. And the next one that we're going to work on is exercise, and I'm really excited about that.

[01:15:51] Luke: Wow. Cool. What I'm looking forward to is the meditation one. The meditation pill. Just crack the bottle open, and poo, you're in theta.

[01:16:00] Chris: Exactly. Done.

[01:16:01] Luke: Which reminds me, actually, I didn't take these today, so I'm going to take them now before I forget.

[01:16:05] Chris: You can do a little bite and smile.

[01:16:07] Luke: Yeah, I know I have an empty stomach right now, so it's a good time. Tell me who are the three most impactful teachers or teachings in your life that have contributed to who you are today?

[01:16:23] Chris: I think that those teachers are definitely, number one, my original mentor when I was doing my immunology fellowship that got me started into fasting, Dr. Jeremy Sokolov. He is amazing. He was so supportive of me. Just fresh out of college. Didn't really know what I wanted to do. He helped me get all the research that I needed. He let me do my own experiments. He let me just learn so much that ultimately was the foundation for all of the fasting research.

[01:16:58] And then I got lucky again with my graduate school mentor and also my co-founder of the company Dr. Angela Zivkovic. And she at UC Davis, a professor of nutrition. She was also just really enthusiastic about like, you have your own project you want to do, and you're bringing new immunology techniques to the table.

[01:17:16] Yes, we'll support you. You can do your own research. I'll help you with all the clinical side of things. So she really taught me how to do all this research. She was the one who helped enable the metabolomics research that we did that actually helped us identify the full Mimio formulation and actually launch the company after that. So she was amazing for me.

[01:17:36] Luke: So she was impressed with you enough that you actually went into business with her?

[01:17:40] Chris: Uh-huh. Yes.

[01:17:41] Luke: That's great. I wonder how often that happens. Probably not much.

[01:17:44] Chris: Yeah. There's a pretty good history of university spinouts of professors and their students coming together. Especially because it's very hard for professors to actually find the companies themselves because they want to keep teaching. They have a full-time job already.

[01:18:01] Luke: Right. That makes sense.

[01:18:02] Chris: Yeah. So they pass on their knowledge and their expertise and give it to the students who then continue it with the company.

[01:18:09] Luke: So a viable student can be a vessel for their legacy in a way.

[01:18:14] Chris: Right. Exactly. Yeah.

[01:18:15] Luke: Yeah, that makes sense. I just imagine that it's not that common that a student is bright enough to catch the attention of a tenured professor or something.

[01:18:27] Chris: It takes a very specific person to have that ambition. A lot of graduate students come into the program, and they're reliant upon their mentor to give them the purpose, the guidance, the research direction. I was very much not that. I was like, "I know what I want to do, and this is what I'm going to research. Will you let me do that?"

[01:18:48] And she was like, "Yes, I'll let you do that. I'll support you. I will teach you new things that will allow this to be better." Like I said, like the metabolomic stuff, the HDL metabolism things that we were doing. So it just really enabled me to take my idea to this next level that wouldn't have been possible without that environment.

[01:19:08] Luke: Got it. Who's the third?

[01:19:10] Chris: So the third, I would probably say is Dr. Valter Longo. And Dr. Valter Longo, I've never personally met him, but he is the one who has written just the most about fasting in the entire world. If there's one preeminent expert about fasting, it's definitely Valter Longo.

[01:19:30] He's just like the OG. And his paper, one of his original papers that he co-wrote with Dr. Mark Mattson on fasting was what got me into it in the first place. It was just like prolonged fasting clinical applications and molecular mechanisms was what it was called. And it was just this giant review paper about all the great things that fasting does, all the health span increases, how it can help to treat, prevent, or delay most major diseases, the lifespan increases, the molecular biochemistry of how it all works.

[01:20:03] And that was the paper that set me down this course. So all three of those folks together were just integral to me becoming the scientist that I am and then me having the business that I do.

[01:20:16] Luke: Epic, man. That's cool. I'm always interested in what people are going to say when I ask them that question. I've probably forgotten a few times because I just spaced out, but it's really interesting. Sometimes people really labor over it, and they're like, "Oh, geez, man. Whoa. God. You caught me off guard."

[01:20:33] They really have a hard time. And some people like you, it's just right on, and it's very focused to the topic or what you're doing professionally. Some people, it's my mom and dad, my grandma. Sometimes it's like, Jesus, Buddha. That's why I never get sick of asking it, because it's so interesting to see what people come up with on the fly.

[01:20:52] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. And we talked about this a little before the show, but I feel like my progression as a scientist, as a person has been one of just serendipity. I just happened to meet the right people at the right time and had these very rare mentors who gave me the time, space, and resources to grow and do my own thing rather than foisting whatever their goal, dream, ambition was onto me and just using me as a cog in a machine rather than an individual person.

[01:21:24] Luke: Yeah. That's a good sign for the education system.

[01:21:26] Chris: Absolutely.

[01:21:27] Luke: You don't hear those stories very often.

[01:21:29] Chris: Yes. I think that's a bad sign for the educational community, but they exist. There's always a rare exception.

[01:21:34] Luke: You're a good sign, your experience of it. It is like encouraging innovation and fostering creativity. That's what mentors and teachers, professors are supposed to do. It's like, here are some tools. Build something.

[01:21:48] Chris: Right, exactly. And I think that one of the reasons why we don't get that as much in the academic space is that a lot of times academia is very focused on, yeah, it's the professors' show. You have the students that come in and out all the time that need to be trained up. And as soon as they get good, then they leave. So it's very hard for professors sometimes, to do anything except for just like, yeah, I need you to be focusing on what we are doing because we're trying to achieve something.

[01:22:18] And then they're not there specifically to teach. They're there to push that research forward and then teach at the same time. So you get plenty of people who get into the academic space with teaching or mentoring. It's just like, ugh, that's the thing that I have to do in order to do the thing that I really want to do, which is research.

[01:22:42] Luke: Got it. Got it. That's a great insight. All right, dude. Well, thank you so much for making the time to speak with me today. Super stoked, great information, great products. Seems like you're doing everything above board. You found something that works, you proved that it works, and you're out sharing it with the world.

[01:22:58] That's awesome. And I'm just very impressed that you went to school that many years. I made it through seven grades and I was like, "I'm out. Can't do it." It wasn't within my skillset. So I'm always fascinated by people that like actually really took advantage of their education and are manifesting something cool in the world with it.

[01:23:19] Chris: I really appreciate that. And it feels really cool to be in this position because it is very rarefied in the scientific space. I thought I was going to be just a lab researcher, career scientist who is going to be working on this problem of how do we decode and recreate fasting for decades and decades and decades.

[01:23:39] I never thought that I was going to actually get to see the fruits of my labor as a scientist go from the lab to a physical product that's now making a big impact in people's lives and getting them to tell me that, like, "Wow, this product like really changed my life." And it's been just so humbling and motivating and impactful for me to be able to see that progression.

[01:24:05] Luke: That's very cool. I never thought about that. I bet that is exceedingly rare. You have people that are pioneers in research. And then they die, and decades later someone picks up the mantle of their work and actually creates something tangible in the world out of it.

[01:24:22] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Even in the sense of a typical pharma pathway, it's a whole team of people all working on something that then eventually, maybe 10 years down the road, becomes something. And in my case, it was very much just like, this is my baby. This is my project.

[01:24:39] I did most of the research for it. And then it became a thing that then I also am leading the charge for and being the CEO for and being the primary messenger for. So my life kind of unified in that way and expanded in this amazing way that I wasn't ever expecting for myself.

[01:24:58] Luke: Badass man. Well, thanks for being a way show.

[01:25:00] Chris: Yeah. I appreciate that.

[01:25:01] Luke: I'm hoping some college kids hear this and go, "Man, maybe I could take that path too."

[01:25:06] Chris: Yeah, absolutely do. Yeah.

[01:25:07] Luke: We need more innovators that have that ambition and intelligence and also a sincere desire to be of service to humanity.

[01:25:15] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. And if you choose that path, make sure that you are 100 dedicated to it. Because one of the main lessons that we learned as a company from our accelerator program, IndieBio, was that nobody cares about your startup, but you.

[01:25:32] Luke: Yeah, yeah. Totally.

[01:25:33] Chris: So if you don't have the individual passion to be able to be like, this is my project and I'm going to punch it into existence basically, then that's really not going to be the right path for you.

[01:25:47] Luke: Awesome, man. Well, thanks again for coming today.

[01:25:49] Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.