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This research was done by Prof. Valter Longo at USC. I recently interviewed Valter and he talked in great detail about prolonged fasting and how it affects the clearance of damaged cells through autophagy, boosts stem cell production to replace the damaged cells and more. He also talks a great deal about the fasting mimicking diet and how it may affect disease risk and treatment. It is a really great podcast and I recommend to listen to it (or watch it).


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    Dr Longo has commercialized his research and one must pay a pretty penny to use his product.

    Josh Mitteldorf has an article that talks about his take on it with a link to recipes derived from the macros in the research paper.

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      I’m not sure what this is supposed to prove. Firstly it’s a “fasting mimicking diet” in which the participants eat commercial preparations of carbs, protein and fat - i.e. not entirely dissimilar to SlimFast shakes.

      Secondly they are on a pretty decent calorie deficit for 5 days a month which obviously causes them to lose weight. And we know that all those disease risk factors can be lowered by being on a diet and losing weight.

      What we can’t know, from this, is whether the timing is doing anything special.

      Lastly it appears to be be done on behalf of a company who make the supplement/food which, whilst that doesn’t negate it entirely, doesn’t offer the confidence of an impartial, independent trial.