Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Hello and welcome to the Bee Formless Flow Driven CEO podcast where we are reshaping life, leadership and business. And today I'm welcome welcoming to the show from I'm gonna say sunny Los Angeles, Joseph Antoun. Welcome to the show, Joseph.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Thank you, Bee. I look forward today to maybe changing somebody's life, right? That would be a good outcome. Yes. Yes.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: I love that. That's a great ambition ambition. Let's let's have that as a shared clear goal for our our podcast today. I think that the listeners, hello, and a big shout out to you all. We're gonna change your life today. How about that? Like, and for the better, not for the worse. Because there's a lot
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yes.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: of badness out there. So let's turn this into a really great goodness.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: You know? How's your week been? Short week. You had a public holiday on Monday.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Fantastic. It was a a pretty dense, pretty long week. You know, for an executive, we're we're in twenty-two countries today, so I kind of start super early, you know, last long, but super fruitful. you know, we're in longevity. This is the biggest thing happening today. Everyone is
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Mm. Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: talking longevity and we waited for for this to happen, for the longevity market to happen for thirty-six years. We started the first longevity trial thirty-six years ago. Can you believe that? Yeah, we are we actually hold the only trademark and the word trademark on the word longevity.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Really?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: We we have the first patent in history ever issued on a product called Prolon for longevity. prolon PROLON. I don't know if you know that product, but it helps you rejuvenate your cells and live long. And so we have a first ever issued patent, I think back in 2016 actually, 2016, 2017. And
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: then we have 47 human trials on longevity. So you can imagine we've been waiting, waiting, waiting because it's too expensive to kind of open the market. We did we did Contributing we did contribute to open the longevity market. They the media calls me the CEO of longevity for doing that. But Yeah, but we were waiting for definitely a lot of other products, scientists, clinics to come in and now it's the fastest growing market for sure. I think McKinsey assumes that or or their studies show that longevity will be a a one to two trillion dollar market very soon.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: It's crazy, isn't it? It's exciting though, because there's so what a time to be alive if you ask me. Like I said, there is, you know, a number every time you open the news or there's lots of doom and gloom. There's also
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: so much opportunity, there's so much possibility. And people are living longer.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah. No.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: And why wouldn't you want to live longer? Like, you know, it's it's
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Well I'll tell you a fun story. I'll tell you a fun story. So back in twenty twelve, we did the first survey. So we're talking 14 years ago. We did the first survey on longevity. And we asked people, it was in San Francisco, we asked people, Do you want to live long? Guess how many guess what's the split was for yes and a no? Only sixty percent said yes. Yeah, because the notion of health spend, living healthy long, was not existing then. They're like,
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: I don't want to be like my grandmother sick and you know, having cancer and suffer and then die. I don't want to be like grandpa having, you know, Alzheimer's and suffering and dying. So then we went back, we repeat the survey and we had a question, do you want to live healthy long? And now you have twenty nine sorry, ninety-one percent to ninety-three percent saying yes. So then that's the notion of health band, which is the longevity we care about, staying healthy long. And then we started saying is health span like a difficult word to pronounce is that is that a word that the market will take because when we talk longevity you really want to talk health spend you don't want to live sick long nobody which is what we're doing now un unfortunately right you get diabetes at age fifty and then you live 30 years with it. That's not
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: what we want. We want health span, but it's it wasn't a good marketing word. It wasn't easily understood or pronounced. So we dropped it and we continue
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: with longevity. We're talking twenty twelve can you believe that?
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: That's so incredible. Well, let's get into it then, Joseph. I am all about longevity. I mean I've been in this health, wellness, longevity space for a number of years. I've always seen an integrated doctor. So like this is this I love this subject. I absolutely love it. I mean I'm 49, right? And I feel like I'm only, you know, in my twenties. And I think it it is all around preventative, right, versus reactive. And I'm sure the listeners today, they're gonna get so many great takeaways from it. So you said you are the CEO of longevity, you're also the chairman and CEO of L- Nutra Which you established back in t two thousand and nine. You said to me you've got a hundred and ten staff at headquarters. You've also currently got eighteen clinical trials on the go at the moment. And and you so you said you've got roughly around three hundred and fifty staff, which is substantial given that, you know, you started only back in two thousand and nine. And it's it's been a like you're cracking, you're establishing essentially, you've established essentially a new category, right?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: So a nutrition technology company pioneering fasting and longevity solutions designed to help people live healthier, longer lives. You had an important inflection point yourself and it emerged through your own belief that healthcare needs to move beyond treating illness towards preventing it. And that shaped a mission to bring longevity science and food as medicine into people's lives every day. Today, as our Nutra continues to grow, you're also navigating a more personal evolution. And I love that you share this vulnerability, Joseph. It's it's great that founders like yourself are able to do so. And you said it's balancing the demands of building an ambitious global business with your own well-being, family, and how much of the business you need to personal carry, personally carry, I should say. So at the heart and soul of your work is a belief that living longer only matters if we can live healthier and better. And so for Joseph, you that means reimagining healthcare around prevention whilst also confronting what it takes to create a long, healthy, and meaningful life ourselves. You've given a fair bit like you've g you'd you've given us some context around you you you starting longevity and the patents and everything. I'm gonna hand it over to you. Can you tell us exactly what L- Mutra is doing? I mean, I've obviously got all the points down here, but I I I I don't wanna steal your thunder. So can you explain
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: it in more detail, please, for the listeners?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah, so the company that I'm the CEO of today is called L Dash Neutra. L is for longevity. Dash is through neutra. So we believe in longevity through nutrition. This is the core of what we started with and why we picked nutrition, because if you think about it, food and water are the only two products that you put in your body every day of life. Three to five times per day. So think about it. You know, we've we've looked at food As taste or lose weight or gain weight. This is what food is for everyone. We never looked at food as the new medicine, as the new asset of longevity. And this is why we exist. We said, wait a second, every one of us complies 100% on consuming this product three to five times per day. We call it food. Why not turn food with science, with ethical, drug-like science? Turn food into an asset of longevity. And if you are already sick, Because today we live sick for 30-40 years. Well, you get diabetes at age 50, then you stay sick with it until age 80. Same for Alzheimer's, breast cancer, etc. So we're living decades sick today. We call those chronic diseases. 87% of Americans suffer from one or more chronic disease after age 50. And so we decided to turn food as an asset of medicine and be part of the treatment and what we call disease remission, meaning get back. backwards or get off the disease and help you reach cure rate. This is why we created the companies, Turnfood as an asset of longevity and turn food as an asset of disease remission.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: I love that that food is an asset of longevity. Because, like, you know, the stats are out there. Like, there's a lot of, you know, obese people, there's a lot of chronic illnesses, there's a lot of you know food that we shouldn't be eating. In terms of treating food as medicine and longevity, and you you you called out that we eat, you know, three to five times a day plus c consumption of water. When we talk about food as a medicine. What are we talking what like what what is what particular food groups are the form
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: of medicine that you are that helps us live longer, I should say?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: You know, before us, unfortunately, really like food and the study of of you know nutrition was basically focused on calories, maybe some, you know, what carbs do to the body, what proteins, what are those? It was a a good starting point, but we've advanced this to a completely different level. You know, nutrition is what determines your microbiome. Right? You can take as many supplements as you want. It's a tiny, tiny and they call it prebiotic and probiotic, and the prebiotic is a tiny, tiny, tiny but food is what feels Bacteria in the gut, right? The supplements will change it for a little bit and then they're gone. So starting with the microbiome, which is super important for health, and we can talk
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: for hours about it. Then you go to epigenetics, right? So food determines what circulates in your blood. What kind of carbs, what kind of cholesterol, inflammation, all the markers, everything lives off hormones, growth hormones, aging hormones. This is where we come on longevity, right? When you eat carbs, insulin increase. Insulin is a growth factor. So you age with it. When you eat proteins, we just published on this and created a big controversy around the word. When you eat proteins, IgF increase, insulin-like, growth factor. It's a growth factor in the name, in the scientific name that every doctor studies in med school, such as myself, when you eat protein, IgF increase, insulin-like, this is like insulin, growth factor. So you age, right? So if you increase a lot of if you eat a lot of proteins and carbs you're increasing a lot of you're inducing a lot of spikes of IgF and insulin, so you're accelerating your biological age. If you accelerate
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Mm.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: your biological age, you're gonna die sooner. It's like if you're in a race, in a car race, the faster you go, you're gonna get your end sooner. It's
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: like all these big bodybuilders that eats that they eat protein, you know, six, seven, eight times a day in thousands of calories and and and and too many grams of protein. And you know, when they reach forty and 50, you look at them, you think they're 70, right? And they start having big issues
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: with ball players as well, right? So they start having major issues. You're like, they were athletes. How come they're getting sicker at this
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Mm.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: young age? It's because they're older, they're biologically older. And this is the most important actually factor to understand in aging and longevity. If you want to live long, Healthy lung. You and I were chatting about this concept of health sped. If you want to live healthy long, the best way to do that, the best way to do that is to keep your body younger than your age. Keep your body younger than your age. Why?
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, good then you're right. Yeah. I believe in that.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Why is that so? Because 90% of us die not from a car accident or a plane crash or whatever. We we die from four major health diseases. Diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, and cardiovascular disease. This is what you and I will die from. And they're all what medicine missed. We exist because medicine missed this factor. They're all age-related conditions. We call them you get older, you get Alzheimer's. You get older, you get a heart attack. You get older, you get diabetes type two. You get older, you get cancer. We missed that. We accepted this socially. my father is a little bit, you know, is in his 70s. He started developing dementia. And we accept it socially. But when you go to medicine, when you study the books of medicine, they don't tell you there's a pill for aging or let's reverse the age to treat Alzheimer's or dementia. They just give a pill and try to keep you on that pill forever, which will never reverse the disease because it's an
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: No.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: age-related disease. If you want to reverse a disease that's killing us, 90% again go backwards from the pyramid. 90% of what kills us. Is age-related health condition. If you want to treat those or prevent those, you gotta keep your body younger than the age. And this is how this
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Sorry, you go.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: is what our science focuses on. How can we steer nutrition to slow down or temporary reverse the age of the body? That's exactly what L-Neutra is about. The only food the only product you consume every day is food. How can I turn food as an asset of age reversal or slow down the aging of the body? When you do those, you keep yourself younger than your age and therefore you're gonna increase your health span, healthy years of life.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Which also increases your energy, your clarity. Like there's so many functions that that come out?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: When when you had more energy Bee when you were younger. When you had clarity, when you were younger. When you had
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, hundred percent.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: when you had more muscle when you were younger. When you were healthier, you had lower inflammation, what we call inflammation in your blood when you were younger. When you did not have high blood pressure, when you were younger. When you did have lower cholesterol, when you were younger. This is, I'm repeating this because it's so obvious socially. But then when you go to healthcare, right, I'm an MD PhD, Harvard Hopkins, best universities, and nobody told me that. And this
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: No.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: is why we kind of came and said, no, no, no, we're gonna do medicine. differently. We're practicing sick care today. You know, we want to go and practice health care. And health care means two things. Either prevent a condition, or if I have a health condition, reverse it so that I go back healthy. And none of these two are practicing medicine today. This is why we spend now five point seven trillion dollars. When I graduated, it was like one point seven trillion we spent on healthcare when I graduated from from medicine, from medical school. And now we spend five point seven trillion, four times more in twenty years, and guess what? We haven't increased lifespan by even one year.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Crazy, isn't it? It's absolutely crazy to think that. I mean, I'm 49 and obviously I'm at that age as a female or woman. And, you know, I'm very conscious of, you know, I guess living longer and how do I make my body feel younger again? Because there is just, you know, you're just getting older. It's just, it's just accept it it's life, you know, you're going through the change, like all these different things. And I'm like, no, I don't I don't know about that. I don't know if we just need to like succumb or accept and so like you're talking about like I've always pursued what the alternative is. You have some core innovation at Prolon, it's a five day fasting mimicking diet. Is that right? Like you've got different products that you like you've got your fast bar. Like can you tell us a little bit about some of the core innovation that's coming out of Al Al Neutra?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah. So as I mentioned, the mission is to help you live healthy long and the vision how to do that is to keep you biologically younger than your age. So how to use nutrition, because it's the product you consume every day of life, how can you use it to decelerate or reverse aging? So we divide our products into two two big groups of products. One is reverse the age, one is slow down the age every day. So how we do we slow down aging? I did hint at it a little bit before, is every day when you eat, you spike from when you eat carbs, you spike insulin. When you eat proteins, you spike IGF, insulin like growth factor. So we designed a full food suite of food, our longevity everyday suite of nutrition. We have a fasting bar, we have a longevity protein bar. We're about to launch our longevity meals, and all of those are structured to not spike insulin or IGF or What we call postprendial, post-food aging hormones. So our food is specifically designed, it's a precision nutrition specifically designed to not spike the postprendial aging factor. Therefore, you're eating, but your body is not pushing aging forward. So
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Incredible.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: It's that's that's how we slow down aging. So think about a car race. In in the car race of life, you want to be last, you wanna die the last, right? So you're like, you know what? Instead of kicking that pedal to the
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Così
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: max, let me slow down, right? You can slow down every day, you can slow down like one bit, or you can slow down intermittently. That's the intermittent fasting. We'll talk a bit about that. Or you can
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: I love
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: just get your your foot off the pedal slowly and just go slow. This is the longevity every day. We have longevity meals, we longevity. protein which is such an important product by the way. Again, the bodybuilders, the athletes, they eat a lot of proteins, they grow older faster. We see them sick at age 50 and 60 and 70, unfortunately. So the kind of protein you eat and the sequence that we have studied in amino acids, we have a product called the L-protein, specifically designed and patented to give you the 25 grams of protein, but without spiking the growth factor in cellular IGF. And so
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Incredible. I was gonna ask you about that protein. When you talk about protein, what what is the protein? Like are we talking, dare I say it, meat here? Like what what is it? Because there's so many forms of protein, right? And yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All our products are are plant-based. So we have no we have no animal sourcing, we have no chemicals, no artificials, we're gluten free, we're lactose free. So on the list on the checklist of I call the defensive checklist, okay, no
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Which is awesome.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: gluten, no it's w we t we take everything. Now on a positive normative list, meaning the positive effect that we do, the formulation and we studied for years, we we we just to give you an idea, we spent over a hundred billion dollars just in our research. there's no nutrition company like us in terms of how many clinical trials we have, how many patents we have, etc. So on the protein side, we were like, okay, how can we figure out sequence of amino acids? So every protein branch is formed of amino acids, right? And there are si depending on how they're sequenced, leucid, methionin, etc., depending on those sequences, IGF responds differently. This is why actually if you eat meat IGF spikes very high. You wanna build muscle super fast, you eat meat, right? Or weigh. And in
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, and I and I should retract that Joseph quickly 'cause I what I meant was meat is associated with protein, like rather than suggesting L- Nutra has it do you know and you're you're calling it out right now. Everyone thinks protein is meat and and so keep going, sorry, but yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah, so if you eat if you eat meat, you spike your growth factors the most. Very good on the short term, you look buff, you look happy, you say I have high energy, but you're just pushed yourself further. Like it's the it's the Formula One car that again
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Mm. Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: you you kick on the pedal, you go fast, you're happy, you have that adrenaline, but you're going faster to your end, right? So then you have chicken has different sequence of amino acid, this spikes IGF a little bit lower, still very high. Then eggs. Than plant-based. So when you eat plants, you spike IgF less. It's a there is a spike, but it's less. So you're aging less. We have studied the plant-based different sources of amino acids from for within the plant-based category, and we figured out a subcategory within the plant-based that actually almost does not spike IgF. And then, but the muscle loves IGF, the muscle wants to grow. So we figured out a way to supplement that with methionine, which is one specific amino acid. So we're
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: giving you now a a sequence of amino acid that does not spike aging factor, and we supplement it with methionine. Those together, this is where we have the patent, that actually is enough of a formulation to protect your muscle, but not to push your aging after you eat that protein, which nothing exists. We have two patents on it. This this is the only patented protein in history because nobody has figured out how to separate. Aging from muscle protection. It's either you
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Mm.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: build muscle, you eat a lot of red meat or chicken or whatever, but then you're aging
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: fast, or you don't do that, you go vegan, you lose muscle fast. The vegans, why don't they live longer than the average society people actually?
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Because muscle becomes an organ of longevity at older age, and the vegans come to that age, the older age, with the very low muscle and very low bone density. Muscle after age 50 and 55 is an organ of longevity. Why? Because it burns carbs, so you it prevents you from going into diabetes, it helps you walk, so it protects cardiovascular system, it supports the bone and bone density, right? So it's it becomes an organ of longevity. And then we always have had had this dilemma in the history of longevity. Should I go more animal protein and look great and then but age faster? Or should I be vegan? It's okay if I look a little bit frail, but I'll try to live longer. And now for the first time, we actually
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: It's not Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: put them together and we launched this L-protein by prolong. So if you to find It online, you can Google the Prolan protein or L-protein, L for Longevity dash protein by L Neutro or by Prolan, and you'll see that product. Two patents on it. It was designed
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Ingrid.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: by the Langevri Institute at the University of Sunny, California, Ed and another institute in Europe called the EFOM. They came together, they start studying in the lab sequence of amino acids that do not spike neither insulin nor IGF. We put it together and we we started selling it very recently. So it's one of our products. We have a longevity spread, we have a longevity bar, etc. All of them, their goal is to feed you, nourish your body. Again, on a defensive level, gluten-free, healthy, clean, you know, plant-based. So nourish the body, but not increase postprendial growth factors so that you
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, absolutely.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: oach you age slower than otherwise if you had eat you know eaten normal food. So
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: thought I was pretty healthy, but listening to you, like I'm I'm severely gluten intolerant. I I'm keen to talk about intermittent diet diet dieting 'cause you just mentioned before we'll we'll get to that. And then you obviously got this what the five day fast mimicking diet. There's a lot of There's a lot of subjectivity around eat intermittent dieting. There's a lot of subjectivity around dieting full stop. You know, I don't eat breakfast. You might roll your eyes at me. Like for me, it doesn't like I have a coffee. It's probably not the best thing. I've never really ha been a big breakfast person. There's so much ambiguity out there around what's right, what's not right from a longevity perspective. And I think half the problem is that consumers just aren't educated enough and if and there's quite a lot of still traditional ways of being healthy if that makes sense.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: How about how about we clarify? There's no ambiguity, it's just there's some some marketing distractors that just want to study
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yes.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: concept and there's true science. And science
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: is very clear. How about we c we clear that the biggest question of intermittent fasting is it good or bad for longevity?
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yes.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: And what's the difference between intermittent fasting and prolonged fasting because they're very different and and what do they do? So let me first clear the issue of intermittent fasting because we see a lot of positive articles on skipping breakfast and you know a lot of intermittent fasters they skip breakfast or just have cost.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: You're gonna convince me
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: And they're gonna
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: to eat breakfast.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: and they're gonna do the 16-8 and they're happy about it. And the other on the other flip side, there's some studies are showing that if you're skipping breakfast or you're an intermittent fasts, you do 16-8, then it's not good on for longevity. Let me settle this. So the confusion comes from the fact that there are two different trials on intermittent fasting. There's what we call the trials, the prospective by design, randomized clinical trials, right? In those randomized clinical trials, they're asking people to stop dinner at 7 or 8 p.m. And then you're eating breakfast at say eight or nine or ten or whatever if you want to do 14 hours or 16. Those articles are positive on intermittent fasting. Because they're doing two, three things right. Dinner early, which is the most important thing. If you want to practice the right intermittent fasting, I call it, I call the front-ended intermittent fasting. Start early and finish your dinner at six or seven. And this is what our ancestors and what centenarians, we study a lot of centenarians, people living hundred and beyond. They they they eat 6, 7 p.m. and then go to bed early. They don't snack at night. And this is so important because if you eat late at night, you know, when you eat and sleep. Overnight, right? Overnight you're not exercising or whatever. So you're you're in a storage. You're what we call you're in anabolic phase, meaning you're ready to store. You want to store the extras for the next day. So if you eat late or you eat unhealthy before sleeping, you're just pushing insulin resistance, fat storage, and increased inflammation. So those prospective studies, they they ask people to stop eating at 7 or 8 p.m. And then you go back and you have 16 14 or 16 hours later, that's 8 or 9 or 10 or you have your breakfast. Those studies are positive. They're actually trying to do 12 to 14 hours, not full 16, and they are starting. the the intermittent fasting early the night before. When you go to observational studies on intermittent fasting, meaning you just not by design, you observe people who skip breakfast, you see that they die sooner actually. And that's a fact. Why is that so? Because by practice, most intermittent fasters They they stay late at night, they snack late at night, they sleep, they have reflux, they wake up in the morning, they don't have an appetite, and therefore they eat at lunch or at one or two, or or they go busy at work, they grab the coffee, I don't have time for breakfast, I'm a busy mother, I'm taking my kids too, or I'm a busy mom at work, or I'm a busy father at work. So a lot of and especially the Spanish studies, there were a lot of study Mediterranean coast, is a late night living coast. So a lot of the studies coming unintermittent fasting that are observational, not randomized, and a lot A lot of them are coming actually from the Mediterranean Sea, which the which we know they stay long at night and they drink and they eat and then okay, I skip breakfast. Those are the ones that show a decrease in longevity or that intermittent fasting is not helpful. So to settle the dust here, if you do
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: the right intermittent fasting, dinner early. Then you still eat something the next day, skip say twelve hours or fourteen hours. We call that the circadian fasting. Meaning follow, we are creatures of day and night. All of us actually, we evolved, you know, one one common denominator of
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: our hundreds of thousands of years of life on this planet is day and night and and and hormones change, right? You have you're more anabolic at night, you're more catabolic during the day, etcetera. So the more you have your lunch, your sorry, your dinner early, and still have something the next day, why? Why breakfast is important, right? That's let me settle now the next biggest debate in the why breakfast.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: You're winning me over, Joseph, and I'm gonna start eating breakfast again.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah, you gotta eat something, right? You gotta eat something. Breakfast, we we we've we did the fast part. Why is that so? Because what which parts of your body in the morning needs calories? What what works in the morning? Your brain, because you go to work, you wake up, you're at max brain power. You're gonna use your brain. Going to work, you're reviewing your emails, going in and that's an essential organ. You don't wanna fast that. What's
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Exactly different. Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: What what do you do then? You go to work or you exercise your heart and cardiovascular system. Your kidneys in the morning, right? You go, you go to the restroom and now you're gonna filter a new batch. So in the morning, the essential organs of the body are those craving for calories. You're n it's not your fat in the morning, your catabolic when you wake up. You know, insulin changes in the morning at at when when when the sun is up because it's allowing you not to go and use carbs, not store carbs. Who b why you wanna be in a using carb? or catabolic more in the morning because you want to feed your brain, cardiovascular system, kidneys, liver, etc. This is where it's important to nourish your essential organ and not sacrifice them. When you eat at night, it's the opposite. You're going to sleep. Neither your brain is at max work. Your muscles are resting, heart rate is resting because you're sleeping. So why eat at night and then skip breakfast? This is what the wrong intermittent fasting, this is why you die younger. And but while you eat when you eat dinner early and you still eat something at breakfast, you're perfect perfectly aligning your body with the essential organs needs and with circadian rhythm.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: my goodness. there's so many I've still got so many questions. I am conscious that
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: That's fine, by the way. I'm not that's not my opinion. I'm settling the dust on if you look at the randomized clinical controls in terms of fasting positive because dinner early and done right. If you look at observational those who don't eat dinner in the morning, you look at them like they're a late night eater, they they you know, they work late at night, they snack s on something, or or by practice they wake up, they don't have a lot of appetites. But the science shows that they don't live longer. The mice actually, if you don't mice that skip breakfast in the labs, they don't live longer.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah. Absolutely.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: We know that. So
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Joseph, I want to ask you a couple of questions in terms of stress. And I you know, like I mean, obvious I I guess my big question is what are you seeing at Al Neutra and yourself in terms of what are some of the biggest friction points right now for consumers, high performers, y in terms of that is contribute contributing to this I'm being sick, for example, or not th not living longer, if we talk about health span, you know, I know that for for many years I had chronic stress, you know, scale scaling a business at tw to twenty million, running it at twenty million revenue annually, having a number of staff like you do, personally invested in the business, it takes its toll on you. You can be as healthy as you want to be. It takes its toll. How much is stress contributing to To this what's the question? Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah. I'll answer the question. Then maybe we go back just to talk about prolonged fast because there's now intermittent fasting and there's a longer fast and and the benefits or the the the the
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: the larger benefit for that. But let me answer your question first. There are six pillars for lingerie. I mean, obviously there's there's many, but six important pillars for living a healthy long life. There's nutrition and fasting. I always put nutrition and fasting together. We talk about intermittent fasting, but we'll talk about prolonged fasting. Very important. Because we as humans today are living a a mismatch nutrition system, right? Our ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years. If they didn't hunt, if it was winter, there was no veggies in the winter and there was no hunting in there. So eating and not eating was the balance of life. And not eating, my fasting is is related to longevity today because it was the right balance. You eat, you store like nature, right? Spring, summer you store and then you need the winter to rejuvenate.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yes.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: And you need to rejuvenate the body when you fast. And this is why it's the common word to all religions fasting right so it's so important to balance nutrition fasting and we'll we'll go back to it number two is exercise and movement we
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Mm.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: always talk about exercise the recent science is talking about movement every few minutes you gotta move a little bit it's showing a lot of
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yes.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: longevity benefits it's not just that 30 minutes that suddenly is gonna you know it's it's like fasting there's the there's the intermittent every little bit and there's the prolonged fasting and the stressful fasting so same thing Exercise and movement, and within exercise you need that stress exercise. It's important. And
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: what pushes you, whether it's prolonged fasting, and this is why we have prolong our product, or whether it's intensive exercise, it pushes all your body to say, Well, I need to be at a better place. I need a better equipment to match that resistance training or that upper level need. So let the stem cells get activated. I need new vessels to for the heart to pump. I need new vessels to protect. the muscle I need to re-rejuvenate this. So it's it's like taking the car to the to the mechanic and get it audited or you're on the car race. I love I always go back to that car race. You go for a pit stop
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, it's a good example.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: you go for a pit stop right hey you know I gotta I gotta change the wheel I gotta change the the the wheels I gotta change the oil I gotta change so it takes you to another level of rejuvenation not just chronic improvement so so movement and nutrition and fast Exercise and movement and within exercise the stress exercise or the intermittent stressful resistance training. Number three is stress. Number four is sleep. Number five is community and and and and and your your your surrounding. And we we need to talk about that. Because it competes for number one, by the way. Number one is between nutrition and and social your your community and your sense of purposefulness, et cetera. And we'll talk about
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Right.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: that. And number six is avoidance of toxin exposure. The environment you live within, the water you drink, and the plastics in it, etc. etc. So these are the six pillars of longevity. And so you brought up fat stress, which is one of the major six pillars. We believe it's somewhere number three or four, well, number one and two is that. social community and happiness because once you're there, everything trickles. You eat better, you exercise, you sleep better, you're it's the mother of all pillars I call it. That sense
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, it is.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: of happiness, purposefulness, and and then nutrition comes second with exercise. Things is your daily movement, your daily food. It's a daily intact intake or a daily daily movement. So definitely stress is a is a has a lot of because when you're stressful a lot of people some people stop eating, some people eat more, right? then you don't sleep well,
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, I must have eight
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: then you sleep so it's it's it's such an important factor and and today we're suffering not just from stress but from loneliness. They're coming together today.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah, one of the biggest diseases like even if your family is around you, you have your own you're in a bubble, your phone, your social media, your the man at work that you cannot, you know, share, then you're worrying about the kids, then you're worrying about in we're in our own bubble which we didn't have before. The loneliness was not there thirty years ago. Our parents did not suffer from it. We're suffering from loneliness plus stress and definitely impacting our longevity or enhancing. I I I invented a word called Short devity. I it wasn't in a dictionary, I looked it up. So
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: So TV.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: short divity, I guess, the opposite of longevity. Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, I love that. It's so good. It's so you raise a really valid point around this loneliness. And, you know, the younger generations, they're look they're calling them the lonely generation because they're just fixated on their their phones. We've had a lot happening in government just in the like this past week around the opportunity to switch off from the algorithms. It is concerning and, you know, this does come right back to purpose and purpose and meaning, human connection. You talk a lot around our ancestors, you know, like back from it even from a tribal perspective. th I mean obviously longevity is is i there's a s huge spotlight on it the moment and I and it f it is going to continue to be like the I guess the pioneer, the driver of how we go forward. How do we though can combat this this loneliness piece? Stress is one thing, but the loneliness is another, right? Like do you have a perspective, point of view on that in terms of what we could be doing better as a society?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: I do actually in in It goes back to the balancing every day and then technology after that, right? Till now in in the last in the last decade, technology created loneliness for us. Because technology, meaning, you know, I I have my phone now, right? So I need to respond faster to I mean it used to be people used to call you if they needed you in the past. Then then it was an email and then you would answer the email after hours or the next day. Now if you don't answer your email in two hours, you're you're behind. So you're the technology now s excellent the technology we have today accelerated our access but ac but actually loneliness because it took us off being present with the family. What I'm trying to say is we we haven't acquired an ADHD now that we ha I have to do this, I have to do that, I have to quickly respond to this. I have to and that's creating a bubble that's pulling us away from our community. But hopefully the next technology coming up and and there's a lot of negative views on AI, but there's some positive views on AI and and I would say let's take the positive view and let's us create the right AI for us, which is
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, agree.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: You know, let my agent take care of my email. Let my agent, AI agent, take care of my whatever and and let me go back and live within my family. Let let me replan my day now. I don't have me as an ineffective human versus technology versus the new technology, the agent. Let me not be the person, again, driving the car. Another agent or the car could drive itself. Let me not be the person to have to walk and answer an email, open a laptop, put a password and close. These all this time could be brought back to us so that we live back with ourselves and our family. And I'm I'm betting on that. Hopefully we're not gonna say, now you can respond faster, you have ages, now we're gonna ask more of you. So we gotta we gotta build our next society, benefiting from AI first to turn AI into the there's a there's a saying I love it. We say let's put the the heart and instinct of the mother into AI so that it cares.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yes. Right.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: And then let us plan for an AI future. And Elon Musk. talks about that is like how can we mo how can we be in more abundance so we're not in scarcity so we're not fighting for scarcity and part of being abundant is not just having more products and services but having more time. And time
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Agree.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: can bring us back to ourself and our community.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, I and I I completely agree with you and I think this is the opportunity, right? Because at the moment I'm noticing a tension with my clients and, you know, when you when you speak to people and even myself at times, when we have more optimization from an AI perspective and and it's taking away the admin and the the low value tasks I call them. There's this there's this almost like a bit of a conundrum. We can either Do more, do more work because we've got more time, or we can actually use that time to go, actually, what do I want to do that's going to fulfil me? What's going to fulfil my purpose? And that can be more creativity, socialising,
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: community, giving back, all of that. And I think this is where we really need to get focused, right? Like rather than thinking, my goodness, I can do more now because I've had I've got less admin tasks to do. It's like, well, what am I actually doing with this time?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Me do.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: as such. I think that's super important.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: So so I think, you know, technology can help us with that. And then number two is, you know, how can we make decisions also today before technology about how to set boundaries for ourselves. our dedication to work and task versus spending time with others. So that's very, very important. And so
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Absolutely.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: make time and be decisive in the opposite way now. Say more no's than yes on the demands on you and say
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, agree.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: more yes to the ones that you love. And number three is really, you know, stress is like everything else. There's the there's the stressor and there's the perception of the stress, right? So don't let stress now work on yourself so that stress does not impact you as typically does. And so increase your resilience against stress, increase your sense of purposefulness, increase your sense of happiness. And try to understand that stress will come to you no matter what. It's how much you're sensitive to it, how much you embrace it, how much you let it hurt you, and how much you let it control, therefore, what you do after that, your s your sleep, your appetite, your everything else. So that number three is a self focus on
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Agree.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: how you be you you become more aware of what's stressing you, you decrease its impact, you decrease that stress, but also you decrease the perception and impact on you and you decrease the downstream consequences of what you do when you're stressed.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Absolutely. It's all starts from the inside, right? All the answers come from within. I've got one final question for you. It's been such a a great conversation, so insightful. You you have an you have huge ambition with the business, with L- Nutra, you know, looking to go public. You also talked around this delicate I'm not a fa I'm not a massive I won't lie, I'm not a massive f fan of the word balance in terms of like it's one extreme or the other. It can be used that way. There's there's certainly good positives to how you can use balance. You talked around this, you know, ambitious global business that you have and then you've got your own your own well being, your family and and how much of the business you need to carry. How do you how do you manage yourself? Like you you can't And you you might disagree with me. There's days where you you know, you un you are under pressure as a CEO, as the founder of a a of a global company. You know, when you talk about public, I've I've done a couple of IPOs from from a business perspective. It's it's hardcore, like I won't lie. So how do you how do you then as a founder, CEO, ensure that, you know, you you're ex extending your health span as well, you know, from a longevity perspective?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah. I think I have three words planning, resilience, and then self love and s and happiness to to kind of always lead with this and and a sense of awareness. So planning number one, I think most important thing for a successful leader is really planning because you can y y y i so important and and planning meaning planning work, planning family, planning somebody to plan work, planning somebody to plan family, and surround yourself with people who are better than you. Because then you can delegate, then you can create time for yourself. This is such a critical thing. Number two is resilience, right? You know, again, I feel everything comes to us. Whatever the impact is, let's say the impact is one X Some people will perceive it as 2x, some people would perceive it as 0.1x. And I learned to be resilient. I learned to that it's not every news is a negative news. It's not like if it's negative, it doesn't, there's an opportunity in every negative. The negative is what helps you rebond more. Positive, it's what helps you improve the system, improve the staff, improve the output. So that that perception of whatever comes to me, I don't I don't get it as stress, I get it as tasks to do, as long as I have the right team, the right system, and I'm a good person. Planner, I'll actually take it just to improve the system. And number three is that happiness, awareness. And and my father helped me a lot with this when I was when I was young. He's like, look, life will throw you in a tunnel. Your profession, your family, it's this is a limitation. You gotta go beyond your limitation. You gotta understand that we were born on this planet not to be a doctor, not to be whatever. We this is all man-made and money is a as a currency that we created, boundaries and countries, and it's all man-made. We were these are things, these are decisions that humanity made, but but this is not who we are. What we are is to come, have a beautiful journey and create positive memories for us and for our people, the people we care, and on a social impact level to change humanity in a positive way. When you live within that realm, you know, my father used to have a he used to bring flowers at his his assistant every day, every day in Ubuntu K5. So he
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Beautiful.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: lived the true meaning of life. When you keep that and you merge it again with resiliency and you merge it with the planning, then you have a level of happiness and confidence and resilience that you live with. within every day and you're so rigid that whenever bumps on your door you perceive it less impactful and you turn it into a positive momentum. So important.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah. Agree. I'll give you one other one is anti-fragile. I don't know if you've heard that term before. I'll send you the book. It's a it's a great book around how to become anti-fragile. And if you think about we have fragile
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Exactly.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: moments, we we then bounce back from a resilience perspective. How do we continue to go forward? How do we continue to bounce forward? And that and that's creating those anti-fragile systems around because that's where the evolution comes in terms of
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Exactly.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: you know. So Joseph, what a profound conversation. I've certainly taken a lot away from this myself and I'm No doubt the listeners have as well. How do we find out more about L-nutra? How do we find out more about you?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: So if if you want to know about the mission of our company and the story, go to L-nutra.com l dash nutra n .com. If you want to read about the products or consume the products we talked about, we didn't talk much about prolong the five days, which is the master of reversing their biological age. But you can find more information about the products at prolonlife.com. Prolon is P R O L O Nlife.com. If you want to learn more about myself, all my social handles start with Dr. Joseph Antoun, whether it's on Twitter or or Instagram or Facebook or whatever, they all have the same handles. You can track me. I I do post a lot about the latest on longevity, my opinion on some topics, and this is where you can get to know a little more about me.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Incredible. And if you wanted if if you wanted to do a little elevator pitch on Prolon how would you how would you articulate it?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: prolons actually, if you remember we talked about we have a lot of lung nutrition for Langevi products that slow down aging. Proloin is that Five day fasting mimicking. So we we found a formulation that we can nourish you with over five days. So we send it to your home, you open the box, you eat the food for five days. It's precision nutrition that is patented to nourish your body, but your cells do not recognize the food. So as if the cells are fasting for five days. You've been the CEO of a company. If I come to you and say you don't have funding for the next few days, what are you gonna do? You're gonna be like, I need to restructure the company, right? So let me cut whatever it was unnecessary. Necessary cost, let me you know develop the team, let me focus on my weekend. So it's the same. I love I everything Logic for me goes back to that car race. It's like saying, you know what? I gotta take a pit stop. I gotta change the wheels, I gotta change the I gotta audit and change. So when the when the cells go through five days of perceived fasting, on day three they start rejuvenating, they started fixing, they started restructuring, right? there's a debris here that I can consume, there's an organelle, there's a dysfunction in the DNA. I'm I was about to become cancerous. I was about in all this gets rejuvenated within the cell. We have 37 trillion cells as of day three and starting day four. You have to you have to cross day three and day four because the first two days you have enough reserves in the body. You break down your fat and kill ketones, you use your glycogen, you ask the liver to help with neoglucogenesis. The first two, three days on a company with no revenue, you say I have some money in the bank. I can live a little bit off the money in the bank.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, analogy,
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Right.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Two three days, you live off the money in your bank. Now you're going bankrupt, you're gonna restructure the company. And so we develop prolon as a fasting nutrition to help you go over five days of fasting. So again, you're eating plant-based, clean. Again, remember all the checklists, positive checklists,
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: but your cells do not recognize the food. We learned about what we call nutrient sensing pathways, the radars on the cell that tells the cell there's food or not, and we go around those. And so the the food is not recognized by the Cell, the cell thinks there's no food, and the cell starts rejuvenating. This process is called autophagy, self-rejuvenate, self-eats, rejuvenate. And autophagy won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016. And it's a secret of life. It's so important that at
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: least two to three times per year, again, go back to the car race. You see the cars taking two or three pit stops during a race. It's so important that every year of our life, you take two or three pit stops during That year, and you do the prolong fasting nutrition, fasting mimicking diet, so that your cells get audited, they check, they restructure, they rejuvenate, they get biologically younger. So when
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Regenerated.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: so when we showed, we published that in Nature, the number one science journal of the word. We're showing that if you do three cycles of prolong again, three pit stops, you're reversing your biological age by 2.5 years. That was published in Nature, the number one science journal of the word.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Get on board, everybody.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: And it's still important. This is this is the cycle of life, right? Remember nature. You go through the winter
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yes.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: you go through the summer, then you have to let the leaves go down and rejuvenate. The trees, the roses, everything in life has to go through that cycle. In the last three decades, we started eating all the time. There's no more rejuvenation. Our bodies stuck fat, inflammation, cholesterol, age faster, disease, die. Where's this? Where's the check? Where's the audit? Who's auditing our cells when they're getting older? Who's fixing our cell? Where's the doctor from within? The doctor from within is called autophagy, Nobel Prize in Medicine. It's a self-check system that we lost because we started eating every day. Intermittent fasting, serving breakfast is not enough. If I tell you I'm gonna get your money as a CO next tomorrow, you say I have some money in the bank. So when you do intermittent fasting, you lose some weight, but you're not rejuvenating the cells because you have enough storage, you have enough. fat, glycogen, and and and liver reserves that you're you can pull from. Those is why you lose weight. But you never get into a deep ketosis enough to restructure the cell. This only happens after three to four days of fasting. And this is why we created prolonged five-day fasting nutrition
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Incredible.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: to help you go through the cycle.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: My God, I'm glad I I'm glad I asked you to to do an elevator.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: And Prolan is the only product now, is the first product to be patented for longevity. It has a trademark on longevity and it has now been tested in forty-seven clinical trials at Stanford, at Mayo Clinic, at UCLA, at USC, all the big universities, 18 actually big universities have tested Prolon for longevity and disease remission.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Right Incredible. I love your ambition and your vision for L-nutra and what you're doing. It's in it's absolutely astounding and looking forward to exploring and getting into the products myself. I just I wanna I wanna I wanna live till like I'm a hundred and I don't know. I'm just kind of just putting it out there, like you know. So thank you, Joseph, so much for your time. What a joyful, insightful conversation and I just love your humbleness also, like just your ability to to make it very simple in terms of understanding exactly how important it is for us to to be preventative when it comes to our I I'm gonna say our mind, body and soul, you know, in terms of it, it's it's everything, right? So thank
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: you again and have a wonderful evening and rest of the week.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: I appreciate you much. We did say we're gonna save we're gonna change somebody's life today. Hopefully we've done that for hundreds of people or thousands of people and and thank you very much, Bee.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: No you're welcome, absolutely. Thank you.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Thank you, Bee. I look forward today to maybe changing somebody's life, right? That would be a good outcome. Yes. Yes.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: I love that. That's a great ambition ambition. Let's let's have that as a shared clear goal for our our podcast today. I think that the listeners, hello, and a big shout out to you all. We're gonna change your life today. How about that? Like, and for the better, not for the worse. Because there's a lot
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yes.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: of badness out there. So let's turn this into a really great goodness.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: You know? How's your week been? Short week. You had a public holiday on Monday.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Fantastic. It was a a pretty dense, pretty long week. You know, for an executive, we're we're in twenty-two countries today, so I kind of start super early, you know, last long, but super fruitful. you know, we're in longevity. This is the biggest thing happening today. Everyone is
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Mm. Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: talking longevity and we waited for for this to happen, for the longevity market to happen for thirty-six years. We started the first longevity trial thirty-six years ago. Can you believe that? Yeah, we are we actually hold the only trademark and the word trademark on the word longevity.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Really?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: We we have the first patent in history ever issued on a product called Prolon for longevity. prolon PROLON. I don't know if you know that product, but it helps you rejuvenate your cells and live long. And so we have a first ever issued patent, I think back in 2016 actually, 2016, 2017. And
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: then we have 47 human trials on longevity. So you can imagine we've been waiting, waiting, waiting because it's too expensive to kind of open the market. We did we did Contributing we did contribute to open the longevity market. They the media calls me the CEO of longevity for doing that. But Yeah, but we were waiting for definitely a lot of other products, scientists, clinics to come in and now it's the fastest growing market for sure. I think McKinsey assumes that or or their studies show that longevity will be a a one to two trillion dollar market very soon.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: It's crazy, isn't it? It's exciting though, because there's so what a time to be alive if you ask me. Like I said, there is, you know, a number every time you open the news or there's lots of doom and gloom. There's also
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: so much opportunity, there's so much possibility. And people are living longer.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah. No.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: And why wouldn't you want to live longer? Like, you know, it's it's
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Well I'll tell you a fun story. I'll tell you a fun story. So back in twenty twelve, we did the first survey. So we're talking 14 years ago. We did the first survey on longevity. And we asked people, it was in San Francisco, we asked people, Do you want to live long? Guess how many guess what's the split was for yes and a no? Only sixty percent said yes. Yeah, because the notion of health spend, living healthy long, was not existing then. They're like,
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: I don't want to be like my grandmother sick and you know, having cancer and suffer and then die. I don't want to be like grandpa having, you know, Alzheimer's and suffering and dying. So then we went back, we repeat the survey and we had a question, do you want to live healthy long? And now you have twenty nine sorry, ninety-one percent to ninety-three percent saying yes. So then that's the notion of health band, which is the longevity we care about, staying healthy long. And then we started saying is health span like a difficult word to pronounce is that is that a word that the market will take because when we talk longevity you really want to talk health spend you don't want to live sick long nobody which is what we're doing now un unfortunately right you get diabetes at age fifty and then you live 30 years with it. That's not
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: what we want. We want health span, but it's it wasn't a good marketing word. It wasn't easily understood or pronounced. So we dropped it and we continue
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: with longevity. We're talking twenty twelve can you believe that?
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: That's so incredible. Well, let's get into it then, Joseph. I am all about longevity. I mean I've been in this health, wellness, longevity space for a number of years. I've always seen an integrated doctor. So like this is this I love this subject. I absolutely love it. I mean I'm 49, right? And I feel like I'm only, you know, in my twenties. And I think it it is all around preventative, right, versus reactive. And I'm sure the listeners today, they're gonna get so many great takeaways from it. So you said you are the CEO of longevity, you're also the chairman and CEO of L- Nutra Which you established back in t two thousand and nine. You said to me you've got a hundred and ten staff at headquarters. You've also currently got eighteen clinical trials on the go at the moment. And and you so you said you've got roughly around three hundred and fifty staff, which is substantial given that, you know, you started only back in two thousand and nine. And it's it's been a like you're cracking, you're establishing essentially, you've established essentially a new category, right?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: So a nutrition technology company pioneering fasting and longevity solutions designed to help people live healthier, longer lives. You had an important inflection point yourself and it emerged through your own belief that healthcare needs to move beyond treating illness towards preventing it. And that shaped a mission to bring longevity science and food as medicine into people's lives every day. Today, as our Nutra continues to grow, you're also navigating a more personal evolution. And I love that you share this vulnerability, Joseph. It's it's great that founders like yourself are able to do so. And you said it's balancing the demands of building an ambitious global business with your own well-being, family, and how much of the business you need to personal carry, personally carry, I should say. So at the heart and soul of your work is a belief that living longer only matters if we can live healthier and better. And so for Joseph, you that means reimagining healthcare around prevention whilst also confronting what it takes to create a long, healthy, and meaningful life ourselves. You've given a fair bit like you've g you'd you've given us some context around you you you starting longevity and the patents and everything. I'm gonna hand it over to you. Can you tell us exactly what L- Mutra is doing? I mean, I've obviously got all the points down here, but I I I I don't wanna steal your thunder. So can you explain
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: it in more detail, please, for the listeners?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah, so the company that I'm the CEO of today is called L Dash Neutra. L is for longevity. Dash is through neutra. So we believe in longevity through nutrition. This is the core of what we started with and why we picked nutrition, because if you think about it, food and water are the only two products that you put in your body every day of life. Three to five times per day. So think about it. You know, we've we've looked at food As taste or lose weight or gain weight. This is what food is for everyone. We never looked at food as the new medicine, as the new asset of longevity. And this is why we exist. We said, wait a second, every one of us complies 100% on consuming this product three to five times per day. We call it food. Why not turn food with science, with ethical, drug-like science? Turn food into an asset of longevity. And if you are already sick, Because today we live sick for 30-40 years. Well, you get diabetes at age 50, then you stay sick with it until age 80. Same for Alzheimer's, breast cancer, etc. So we're living decades sick today. We call those chronic diseases. 87% of Americans suffer from one or more chronic disease after age 50. And so we decided to turn food as an asset of medicine and be part of the treatment and what we call disease remission, meaning get back. backwards or get off the disease and help you reach cure rate. This is why we created the companies, Turnfood as an asset of longevity and turn food as an asset of disease remission.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: I love that that food is an asset of longevity. Because, like, you know, the stats are out there. Like, there's a lot of, you know, obese people, there's a lot of chronic illnesses, there's a lot of you know food that we shouldn't be eating. In terms of treating food as medicine and longevity, and you you you called out that we eat, you know, three to five times a day plus c consumption of water. When we talk about food as a medicine. What are we talking what like what what is what particular food groups are the form
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: of medicine that you are that helps us live longer, I should say?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: You know, before us, unfortunately, really like food and the study of of you know nutrition was basically focused on calories, maybe some, you know, what carbs do to the body, what proteins, what are those? It was a a good starting point, but we've advanced this to a completely different level. You know, nutrition is what determines your microbiome. Right? You can take as many supplements as you want. It's a tiny, tiny and they call it prebiotic and probiotic, and the prebiotic is a tiny, tiny, tiny but food is what feels Bacteria in the gut, right? The supplements will change it for a little bit and then they're gone. So starting with the microbiome, which is super important for health, and we can talk
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: for hours about it. Then you go to epigenetics, right? So food determines what circulates in your blood. What kind of carbs, what kind of cholesterol, inflammation, all the markers, everything lives off hormones, growth hormones, aging hormones. This is where we come on longevity, right? When you eat carbs, insulin increase. Insulin is a growth factor. So you age with it. When you eat proteins, we just published on this and created a big controversy around the word. When you eat proteins, IgF increase, insulin-like, growth factor. It's a growth factor in the name, in the scientific name that every doctor studies in med school, such as myself, when you eat protein, IgF increase, insulin-like, this is like insulin, growth factor. So you age, right? So if you increase a lot of if you eat a lot of proteins and carbs you're increasing a lot of you're inducing a lot of spikes of IgF and insulin, so you're accelerating your biological age. If you accelerate
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Mm.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: your biological age, you're gonna die sooner. It's like if you're in a race, in a car race, the faster you go, you're gonna get your end sooner. It's
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: like all these big bodybuilders that eats that they eat protein, you know, six, seven, eight times a day in thousands of calories and and and and too many grams of protein. And you know, when they reach forty and 50, you look at them, you think they're 70, right? And they start having big issues
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: with ball players as well, right? So they start having major issues. You're like, they were athletes. How come they're getting sicker at this
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Mm.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: young age? It's because they're older, they're biologically older. And this is the most important actually factor to understand in aging and longevity. If you want to live long, Healthy lung. You and I were chatting about this concept of health sped. If you want to live healthy long, the best way to do that, the best way to do that is to keep your body younger than your age. Keep your body younger than your age. Why?
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, good then you're right. Yeah. I believe in that.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Why is that so? Because 90% of us die not from a car accident or a plane crash or whatever. We we die from four major health diseases. Diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, and cardiovascular disease. This is what you and I will die from. And they're all what medicine missed. We exist because medicine missed this factor. They're all age-related conditions. We call them you get older, you get Alzheimer's. You get older, you get a heart attack. You get older, you get diabetes type two. You get older, you get cancer. We missed that. We accepted this socially. my father is a little bit, you know, is in his 70s. He started developing dementia. And we accept it socially. But when you go to medicine, when you study the books of medicine, they don't tell you there's a pill for aging or let's reverse the age to treat Alzheimer's or dementia. They just give a pill and try to keep you on that pill forever, which will never reverse the disease because it's an
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: No.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: age-related disease. If you want to reverse a disease that's killing us, 90% again go backwards from the pyramid. 90% of what kills us. Is age-related health condition. If you want to treat those or prevent those, you gotta keep your body younger than the age. And this is how this
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Sorry, you go.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: is what our science focuses on. How can we steer nutrition to slow down or temporary reverse the age of the body? That's exactly what L-Neutra is about. The only food the only product you consume every day is food. How can I turn food as an asset of age reversal or slow down the aging of the body? When you do those, you keep yourself younger than your age and therefore you're gonna increase your health span, healthy years of life.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Which also increases your energy, your clarity. Like there's so many functions that that come out?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: When when you had more energy Bee when you were younger. When you had clarity, when you were younger. When you had
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, hundred percent.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: when you had more muscle when you were younger. When you were healthier, you had lower inflammation, what we call inflammation in your blood when you were younger. When you did not have high blood pressure, when you were younger. When you did have lower cholesterol, when you were younger. This is, I'm repeating this because it's so obvious socially. But then when you go to healthcare, right, I'm an MD PhD, Harvard Hopkins, best universities, and nobody told me that. And this
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: No.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: is why we kind of came and said, no, no, no, we're gonna do medicine. differently. We're practicing sick care today. You know, we want to go and practice health care. And health care means two things. Either prevent a condition, or if I have a health condition, reverse it so that I go back healthy. And none of these two are practicing medicine today. This is why we spend now five point seven trillion dollars. When I graduated, it was like one point seven trillion we spent on healthcare when I graduated from from medicine, from medical school. And now we spend five point seven trillion, four times more in twenty years, and guess what? We haven't increased lifespan by even one year.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Crazy, isn't it? It's absolutely crazy to think that. I mean, I'm 49 and obviously I'm at that age as a female or woman. And, you know, I'm very conscious of, you know, I guess living longer and how do I make my body feel younger again? Because there is just, you know, you're just getting older. It's just, it's just accept it it's life, you know, you're going through the change, like all these different things. And I'm like, no, I don't I don't know about that. I don't know if we just need to like succumb or accept and so like you're talking about like I've always pursued what the alternative is. You have some core innovation at Prolon, it's a five day fasting mimicking diet. Is that right? Like you've got different products that you like you've got your fast bar. Like can you tell us a little bit about some of the core innovation that's coming out of Al Al Neutra?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah. So as I mentioned, the mission is to help you live healthy long and the vision how to do that is to keep you biologically younger than your age. So how to use nutrition, because it's the product you consume every day of life, how can you use it to decelerate or reverse aging? So we divide our products into two two big groups of products. One is reverse the age, one is slow down the age every day. So how we do we slow down aging? I did hint at it a little bit before, is every day when you eat, you spike from when you eat carbs, you spike insulin. When you eat proteins, you spike IGF, insulin like growth factor. So we designed a full food suite of food, our longevity everyday suite of nutrition. We have a fasting bar, we have a longevity protein bar. We're about to launch our longevity meals, and all of those are structured to not spike insulin or IGF or What we call postprendial, post-food aging hormones. So our food is specifically designed, it's a precision nutrition specifically designed to not spike the postprendial aging factor. Therefore, you're eating, but your body is not pushing aging forward. So
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Incredible.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: It's that's that's how we slow down aging. So think about a car race. In in the car race of life, you want to be last, you wanna die the last, right? So you're like, you know what? Instead of kicking that pedal to the
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Così
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: max, let me slow down, right? You can slow down every day, you can slow down like one bit, or you can slow down intermittently. That's the intermittent fasting. We'll talk a bit about that. Or you can
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: I love
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: just get your your foot off the pedal slowly and just go slow. This is the longevity every day. We have longevity meals, we longevity. protein which is such an important product by the way. Again, the bodybuilders, the athletes, they eat a lot of proteins, they grow older faster. We see them sick at age 50 and 60 and 70, unfortunately. So the kind of protein you eat and the sequence that we have studied in amino acids, we have a product called the L-protein, specifically designed and patented to give you the 25 grams of protein, but without spiking the growth factor in cellular IGF. And so
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Incredible. I was gonna ask you about that protein. When you talk about protein, what what is the protein? Like are we talking, dare I say it, meat here? Like what what is it? Because there's so many forms of protein, right? And yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All our products are are plant-based. So we have no we have no animal sourcing, we have no chemicals, no artificials, we're gluten free, we're lactose free. So on the list on the checklist of I call the defensive checklist, okay, no
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Which is awesome.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: gluten, no it's w we t we take everything. Now on a positive normative list, meaning the positive effect that we do, the formulation and we studied for years, we we we just to give you an idea, we spent over a hundred billion dollars just in our research. there's no nutrition company like us in terms of how many clinical trials we have, how many patents we have, etc. So on the protein side, we were like, okay, how can we figure out sequence of amino acids? So every protein branch is formed of amino acids, right? And there are si depending on how they're sequenced, leucid, methionin, etc., depending on those sequences, IGF responds differently. This is why actually if you eat meat IGF spikes very high. You wanna build muscle super fast, you eat meat, right? Or weigh. And in
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, and I and I should retract that Joseph quickly 'cause I what I meant was meat is associated with protein, like rather than suggesting L- Nutra has it do you know and you're you're calling it out right now. Everyone thinks protein is meat and and so keep going, sorry, but yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah, so if you eat if you eat meat, you spike your growth factors the most. Very good on the short term, you look buff, you look happy, you say I have high energy, but you're just pushed yourself further. Like it's the it's the Formula One car that again
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Mm. Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: you you kick on the pedal, you go fast, you're happy, you have that adrenaline, but you're going faster to your end, right? So then you have chicken has different sequence of amino acid, this spikes IGF a little bit lower, still very high. Then eggs. Than plant-based. So when you eat plants, you spike IgF less. It's a there is a spike, but it's less. So you're aging less. We have studied the plant-based different sources of amino acids from for within the plant-based category, and we figured out a subcategory within the plant-based that actually almost does not spike IgF. And then, but the muscle loves IGF, the muscle wants to grow. So we figured out a way to supplement that with methionine, which is one specific amino acid. So we're
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: giving you now a a sequence of amino acid that does not spike aging factor, and we supplement it with methionine. Those together, this is where we have the patent, that actually is enough of a formulation to protect your muscle, but not to push your aging after you eat that protein, which nothing exists. We have two patents on it. This this is the only patented protein in history because nobody has figured out how to separate. Aging from muscle protection. It's either you
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Mm.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: build muscle, you eat a lot of red meat or chicken or whatever, but then you're aging
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: fast, or you don't do that, you go vegan, you lose muscle fast. The vegans, why don't they live longer than the average society people actually?
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Because muscle becomes an organ of longevity at older age, and the vegans come to that age, the older age, with the very low muscle and very low bone density. Muscle after age 50 and 55 is an organ of longevity. Why? Because it burns carbs, so you it prevents you from going into diabetes, it helps you walk, so it protects cardiovascular system, it supports the bone and bone density, right? So it's it becomes an organ of longevity. And then we always have had had this dilemma in the history of longevity. Should I go more animal protein and look great and then but age faster? Or should I be vegan? It's okay if I look a little bit frail, but I'll try to live longer. And now for the first time, we actually
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: It's not Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: put them together and we launched this L-protein by prolong. So if you to find It online, you can Google the Prolan protein or L-protein, L for Longevity dash protein by L Neutro or by Prolan, and you'll see that product. Two patents on it. It was designed
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Ingrid.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: by the Langevri Institute at the University of Sunny, California, Ed and another institute in Europe called the EFOM. They came together, they start studying in the lab sequence of amino acids that do not spike neither insulin nor IGF. We put it together and we we started selling it very recently. So it's one of our products. We have a longevity spread, we have a longevity bar, etc. All of them, their goal is to feed you, nourish your body. Again, on a defensive level, gluten-free, healthy, clean, you know, plant-based. So nourish the body, but not increase postprendial growth factors so that you
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, absolutely.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: oach you age slower than otherwise if you had eat you know eaten normal food. So
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: thought I was pretty healthy, but listening to you, like I'm I'm severely gluten intolerant. I I'm keen to talk about intermittent diet diet dieting 'cause you just mentioned before we'll we'll get to that. And then you obviously got this what the five day fast mimicking diet. There's a lot of There's a lot of subjectivity around eat intermittent dieting. There's a lot of subjectivity around dieting full stop. You know, I don't eat breakfast. You might roll your eyes at me. Like for me, it doesn't like I have a coffee. It's probably not the best thing. I've never really ha been a big breakfast person. There's so much ambiguity out there around what's right, what's not right from a longevity perspective. And I think half the problem is that consumers just aren't educated enough and if and there's quite a lot of still traditional ways of being healthy if that makes sense.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: How about how about we clarify? There's no ambiguity, it's just there's some some marketing distractors that just want to study
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yes.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: concept and there's true science. And science
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: is very clear. How about we c we clear that the biggest question of intermittent fasting is it good or bad for longevity?
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yes.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: And what's the difference between intermittent fasting and prolonged fasting because they're very different and and what do they do? So let me first clear the issue of intermittent fasting because we see a lot of positive articles on skipping breakfast and you know a lot of intermittent fasters they skip breakfast or just have cost.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: You're gonna convince me
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: And they're gonna
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: to eat breakfast.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: and they're gonna do the 16-8 and they're happy about it. And the other on the other flip side, there's some studies are showing that if you're skipping breakfast or you're an intermittent fasts, you do 16-8, then it's not good on for longevity. Let me settle this. So the confusion comes from the fact that there are two different trials on intermittent fasting. There's what we call the trials, the prospective by design, randomized clinical trials, right? In those randomized clinical trials, they're asking people to stop dinner at 7 or 8 p.m. And then you're eating breakfast at say eight or nine or ten or whatever if you want to do 14 hours or 16. Those articles are positive on intermittent fasting. Because they're doing two, three things right. Dinner early, which is the most important thing. If you want to practice the right intermittent fasting, I call it, I call the front-ended intermittent fasting. Start early and finish your dinner at six or seven. And this is what our ancestors and what centenarians, we study a lot of centenarians, people living hundred and beyond. They they they eat 6, 7 p.m. and then go to bed early. They don't snack at night. And this is so important because if you eat late at night, you know, when you eat and sleep. Overnight, right? Overnight you're not exercising or whatever. So you're you're in a storage. You're what we call you're in anabolic phase, meaning you're ready to store. You want to store the extras for the next day. So if you eat late or you eat unhealthy before sleeping, you're just pushing insulin resistance, fat storage, and increased inflammation. So those prospective studies, they they ask people to stop eating at 7 or 8 p.m. And then you go back and you have 16 14 or 16 hours later, that's 8 or 9 or 10 or you have your breakfast. Those studies are positive. They're actually trying to do 12 to 14 hours, not full 16, and they are starting. the the intermittent fasting early the night before. When you go to observational studies on intermittent fasting, meaning you just not by design, you observe people who skip breakfast, you see that they die sooner actually. And that's a fact. Why is that so? Because by practice, most intermittent fasters They they stay late at night, they snack late at night, they sleep, they have reflux, they wake up in the morning, they don't have an appetite, and therefore they eat at lunch or at one or two, or or they go busy at work, they grab the coffee, I don't have time for breakfast, I'm a busy mother, I'm taking my kids too, or I'm a busy mom at work, or I'm a busy father at work. So a lot of and especially the Spanish studies, there were a lot of study Mediterranean coast, is a late night living coast. So a lot of the studies coming unintermittent fasting that are observational, not randomized, and a lot A lot of them are coming actually from the Mediterranean Sea, which the which we know they stay long at night and they drink and they eat and then okay, I skip breakfast. Those are the ones that show a decrease in longevity or that intermittent fasting is not helpful. So to settle the dust here, if you do
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: the right intermittent fasting, dinner early. Then you still eat something the next day, skip say twelve hours or fourteen hours. We call that the circadian fasting. Meaning follow, we are creatures of day and night. All of us actually, we evolved, you know, one one common denominator of
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: our hundreds of thousands of years of life on this planet is day and night and and and hormones change, right? You have you're more anabolic at night, you're more catabolic during the day, etcetera. So the more you have your lunch, your sorry, your dinner early, and still have something the next day, why? Why breakfast is important, right? That's let me settle now the next biggest debate in the why breakfast.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: You're winning me over, Joseph, and I'm gonna start eating breakfast again.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah, you gotta eat something, right? You gotta eat something. Breakfast, we we we've we did the fast part. Why is that so? Because what which parts of your body in the morning needs calories? What what works in the morning? Your brain, because you go to work, you wake up, you're at max brain power. You're gonna use your brain. Going to work, you're reviewing your emails, going in and that's an essential organ. You don't wanna fast that. What's
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Exactly different. Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: What what do you do then? You go to work or you exercise your heart and cardiovascular system. Your kidneys in the morning, right? You go, you go to the restroom and now you're gonna filter a new batch. So in the morning, the essential organs of the body are those craving for calories. You're n it's not your fat in the morning, your catabolic when you wake up. You know, insulin changes in the morning at at when when when the sun is up because it's allowing you not to go and use carbs, not store carbs. Who b why you wanna be in a using carb? or catabolic more in the morning because you want to feed your brain, cardiovascular system, kidneys, liver, etc. This is where it's important to nourish your essential organ and not sacrifice them. When you eat at night, it's the opposite. You're going to sleep. Neither your brain is at max work. Your muscles are resting, heart rate is resting because you're sleeping. So why eat at night and then skip breakfast? This is what the wrong intermittent fasting, this is why you die younger. And but while you eat when you eat dinner early and you still eat something at breakfast, you're perfect perfectly aligning your body with the essential organs needs and with circadian rhythm.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: my goodness. there's so many I've still got so many questions. I am conscious that
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: That's fine, by the way. I'm not that's not my opinion. I'm settling the dust on if you look at the randomized clinical controls in terms of fasting positive because dinner early and done right. If you look at observational those who don't eat dinner in the morning, you look at them like they're a late night eater, they they you know, they work late at night, they snack s on something, or or by practice they wake up, they don't have a lot of appetites. But the science shows that they don't live longer. The mice actually, if you don't mice that skip breakfast in the labs, they don't live longer.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah. Absolutely.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: We know that. So
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Joseph, I want to ask you a couple of questions in terms of stress. And I you know, like I mean, obvious I I guess my big question is what are you seeing at Al Neutra and yourself in terms of what are some of the biggest friction points right now for consumers, high performers, y in terms of that is contribute contributing to this I'm being sick, for example, or not th not living longer, if we talk about health span, you know, I know that for for many years I had chronic stress, you know, scale scaling a business at tw to twenty million, running it at twenty million revenue annually, having a number of staff like you do, personally invested in the business, it takes its toll on you. You can be as healthy as you want to be. It takes its toll. How much is stress contributing to To this what's the question? Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah. I'll answer the question. Then maybe we go back just to talk about prolonged fast because there's now intermittent fasting and there's a longer fast and and the benefits or the the the the
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: the larger benefit for that. But let me answer your question first. There are six pillars for lingerie. I mean, obviously there's there's many, but six important pillars for living a healthy long life. There's nutrition and fasting. I always put nutrition and fasting together. We talk about intermittent fasting, but we'll talk about prolonged fasting. Very important. Because we as humans today are living a a mismatch nutrition system, right? Our ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years. If they didn't hunt, if it was winter, there was no veggies in the winter and there was no hunting in there. So eating and not eating was the balance of life. And not eating, my fasting is is related to longevity today because it was the right balance. You eat, you store like nature, right? Spring, summer you store and then you need the winter to rejuvenate.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yes.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: And you need to rejuvenate the body when you fast. And this is why it's the common word to all religions fasting right so it's so important to balance nutrition fasting and we'll we'll go back to it number two is exercise and movement we
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Mm.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: always talk about exercise the recent science is talking about movement every few minutes you gotta move a little bit it's showing a lot of
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yes.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: longevity benefits it's not just that 30 minutes that suddenly is gonna you know it's it's like fasting there's the there's the intermittent every little bit and there's the prolonged fasting and the stressful fasting so same thing Exercise and movement, and within exercise you need that stress exercise. It's important. And
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: what pushes you, whether it's prolonged fasting, and this is why we have prolong our product, or whether it's intensive exercise, it pushes all your body to say, Well, I need to be at a better place. I need a better equipment to match that resistance training or that upper level need. So let the stem cells get activated. I need new vessels to for the heart to pump. I need new vessels to protect. the muscle I need to re-rejuvenate this. So it's it's like taking the car to the to the mechanic and get it audited or you're on the car race. I love I always go back to that car race. You go for a pit stop
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, it's a good example.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: you go for a pit stop right hey you know I gotta I gotta change the wheel I gotta change the the the wheels I gotta change the oil I gotta change so it takes you to another level of rejuvenation not just chronic improvement so so movement and nutrition and fast Exercise and movement and within exercise the stress exercise or the intermittent stressful resistance training. Number three is stress. Number four is sleep. Number five is community and and and and and your your your surrounding. And we we need to talk about that. Because it competes for number one, by the way. Number one is between nutrition and and social your your community and your sense of purposefulness, et cetera. And we'll talk about
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Right.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: that. And number six is avoidance of toxin exposure. The environment you live within, the water you drink, and the plastics in it, etc. etc. So these are the six pillars of longevity. And so you brought up fat stress, which is one of the major six pillars. We believe it's somewhere number three or four, well, number one and two is that. social community and happiness because once you're there, everything trickles. You eat better, you exercise, you sleep better, you're it's the mother of all pillars I call it. That sense
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, it is.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: of happiness, purposefulness, and and then nutrition comes second with exercise. Things is your daily movement, your daily food. It's a daily intact intake or a daily daily movement. So definitely stress is a is a has a lot of because when you're stressful a lot of people some people stop eating, some people eat more, right? then you don't sleep well,
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, I must have eight
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: then you sleep so it's it's it's such an important factor and and today we're suffering not just from stress but from loneliness. They're coming together today.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah, one of the biggest diseases like even if your family is around you, you have your own you're in a bubble, your phone, your social media, your the man at work that you cannot, you know, share, then you're worrying about the kids, then you're worrying about in we're in our own bubble which we didn't have before. The loneliness was not there thirty years ago. Our parents did not suffer from it. We're suffering from loneliness plus stress and definitely impacting our longevity or enhancing. I I I invented a word called Short devity. I it wasn't in a dictionary, I looked it up. So
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: So TV.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: short divity, I guess, the opposite of longevity. Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, I love that. It's so good. It's so you raise a really valid point around this loneliness. And, you know, the younger generations, they're look they're calling them the lonely generation because they're just fixated on their their phones. We've had a lot happening in government just in the like this past week around the opportunity to switch off from the algorithms. It is concerning and, you know, this does come right back to purpose and purpose and meaning, human connection. You talk a lot around our ancestors, you know, like back from it even from a tribal perspective. th I mean obviously longevity is is i there's a s huge spotlight on it the moment and I and it f it is going to continue to be like the I guess the pioneer, the driver of how we go forward. How do we though can combat this this loneliness piece? Stress is one thing, but the loneliness is another, right? Like do you have a perspective, point of view on that in terms of what we could be doing better as a society?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: I do actually in in It goes back to the balancing every day and then technology after that, right? Till now in in the last in the last decade, technology created loneliness for us. Because technology, meaning, you know, I I have my phone now, right? So I need to respond faster to I mean it used to be people used to call you if they needed you in the past. Then then it was an email and then you would answer the email after hours or the next day. Now if you don't answer your email in two hours, you're you're behind. So you're the technology now s excellent the technology we have today accelerated our access but ac but actually loneliness because it took us off being present with the family. What I'm trying to say is we we haven't acquired an ADHD now that we ha I have to do this, I have to do that, I have to quickly respond to this. I have to and that's creating a bubble that's pulling us away from our community. But hopefully the next technology coming up and and there's a lot of negative views on AI, but there's some positive views on AI and and I would say let's take the positive view and let's us create the right AI for us, which is
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, agree.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: You know, let my agent take care of my email. Let my agent, AI agent, take care of my whatever and and let me go back and live within my family. Let let me replan my day now. I don't have me as an ineffective human versus technology versus the new technology, the agent. Let me not be the person, again, driving the car. Another agent or the car could drive itself. Let me not be the person to have to walk and answer an email, open a laptop, put a password and close. These all this time could be brought back to us so that we live back with ourselves and our family. And I'm I'm betting on that. Hopefully we're not gonna say, now you can respond faster, you have ages, now we're gonna ask more of you. So we gotta we gotta build our next society, benefiting from AI first to turn AI into the there's a there's a saying I love it. We say let's put the the heart and instinct of the mother into AI so that it cares.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yes. Right.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: And then let us plan for an AI future. And Elon Musk. talks about that is like how can we mo how can we be in more abundance so we're not in scarcity so we're not fighting for scarcity and part of being abundant is not just having more products and services but having more time. And time
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Agree.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: can bring us back to ourself and our community.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, I and I I completely agree with you and I think this is the opportunity, right? Because at the moment I'm noticing a tension with my clients and, you know, when you when you speak to people and even myself at times, when we have more optimization from an AI perspective and and it's taking away the admin and the the low value tasks I call them. There's this there's this almost like a bit of a conundrum. We can either Do more, do more work because we've got more time, or we can actually use that time to go, actually, what do I want to do that's going to fulfil me? What's going to fulfil my purpose? And that can be more creativity, socialising,
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: community, giving back, all of that. And I think this is where we really need to get focused, right? Like rather than thinking, my goodness, I can do more now because I've had I've got less admin tasks to do. It's like, well, what am I actually doing with this time?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Me do.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: as such. I think that's super important.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: So so I think, you know, technology can help us with that. And then number two is, you know, how can we make decisions also today before technology about how to set boundaries for ourselves. our dedication to work and task versus spending time with others. So that's very, very important. And so
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Absolutely.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: make time and be decisive in the opposite way now. Say more no's than yes on the demands on you and say
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, agree.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: more yes to the ones that you love. And number three is really, you know, stress is like everything else. There's the there's the stressor and there's the perception of the stress, right? So don't let stress now work on yourself so that stress does not impact you as typically does. And so increase your resilience against stress, increase your sense of purposefulness, increase your sense of happiness. And try to understand that stress will come to you no matter what. It's how much you're sensitive to it, how much you embrace it, how much you let it hurt you, and how much you let it control, therefore, what you do after that, your s your sleep, your appetite, your everything else. So that number three is a self focus on
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Agree.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: how you be you you become more aware of what's stressing you, you decrease its impact, you decrease that stress, but also you decrease the perception and impact on you and you decrease the downstream consequences of what you do when you're stressed.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Absolutely. It's all starts from the inside, right? All the answers come from within. I've got one final question for you. It's been such a a great conversation, so insightful. You you have an you have huge ambition with the business, with L- Nutra, you know, looking to go public. You also talked around this delicate I'm not a fa I'm not a massive I won't lie, I'm not a massive f fan of the word balance in terms of like it's one extreme or the other. It can be used that way. There's there's certainly good positives to how you can use balance. You talked around this, you know, ambitious global business that you have and then you've got your own your own well being, your family and and how much of the business you need to carry. How do you how do you manage yourself? Like you you can't And you you might disagree with me. There's days where you you know, you un you are under pressure as a CEO, as the founder of a a of a global company. You know, when you talk about public, I've I've done a couple of IPOs from from a business perspective. It's it's hardcore, like I won't lie. So how do you how do you then as a founder, CEO, ensure that, you know, you you're ex extending your health span as well, you know, from a longevity perspective?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah. I think I have three words planning, resilience, and then self love and s and happiness to to kind of always lead with this and and a sense of awareness. So planning number one, I think most important thing for a successful leader is really planning because you can y y y i so important and and planning meaning planning work, planning family, planning somebody to plan work, planning somebody to plan family, and surround yourself with people who are better than you. Because then you can delegate, then you can create time for yourself. This is such a critical thing. Number two is resilience, right? You know, again, I feel everything comes to us. Whatever the impact is, let's say the impact is one X Some people will perceive it as 2x, some people would perceive it as 0.1x. And I learned to be resilient. I learned to that it's not every news is a negative news. It's not like if it's negative, it doesn't, there's an opportunity in every negative. The negative is what helps you rebond more. Positive, it's what helps you improve the system, improve the staff, improve the output. So that that perception of whatever comes to me, I don't I don't get it as stress, I get it as tasks to do, as long as I have the right team, the right system, and I'm a good person. Planner, I'll actually take it just to improve the system. And number three is that happiness, awareness. And and my father helped me a lot with this when I was when I was young. He's like, look, life will throw you in a tunnel. Your profession, your family, it's this is a limitation. You gotta go beyond your limitation. You gotta understand that we were born on this planet not to be a doctor, not to be whatever. We this is all man-made and money is a as a currency that we created, boundaries and countries, and it's all man-made. We were these are things, these are decisions that humanity made, but but this is not who we are. What we are is to come, have a beautiful journey and create positive memories for us and for our people, the people we care, and on a social impact level to change humanity in a positive way. When you live within that realm, you know, my father used to have a he used to bring flowers at his his assistant every day, every day in Ubuntu K5. So he
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Beautiful.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: lived the true meaning of life. When you keep that and you merge it again with resiliency and you merge it with the planning, then you have a level of happiness and confidence and resilience that you live with. within every day and you're so rigid that whenever bumps on your door you perceive it less impactful and you turn it into a positive momentum. So important.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah. Agree. I'll give you one other one is anti-fragile. I don't know if you've heard that term before. I'll send you the book. It's a it's a great book around how to become anti-fragile. And if you think about we have fragile
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Exactly.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: moments, we we then bounce back from a resilience perspective. How do we continue to go forward? How do we continue to bounce forward? And that and that's creating those anti-fragile systems around because that's where the evolution comes in terms of
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Exactly.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: you know. So Joseph, what a profound conversation. I've certainly taken a lot away from this myself and I'm No doubt the listeners have as well. How do we find out more about L-nutra? How do we find out more about you?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: So if if you want to know about the mission of our company and the story, go to L-nutra.com l dash nutra n .com. If you want to read about the products or consume the products we talked about, we didn't talk much about prolong the five days, which is the master of reversing their biological age. But you can find more information about the products at prolonlife.com. Prolon is P R O L O Nlife.com. If you want to learn more about myself, all my social handles start with Dr. Joseph Antoun, whether it's on Twitter or or Instagram or Facebook or whatever, they all have the same handles. You can track me. I I do post a lot about the latest on longevity, my opinion on some topics, and this is where you can get to know a little more about me.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Incredible. And if you wanted if if you wanted to do a little elevator pitch on Prolon how would you how would you articulate it?
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: prolons actually, if you remember we talked about we have a lot of lung nutrition for Langevi products that slow down aging. Proloin is that Five day fasting mimicking. So we we found a formulation that we can nourish you with over five days. So we send it to your home, you open the box, you eat the food for five days. It's precision nutrition that is patented to nourish your body, but your cells do not recognize the food. So as if the cells are fasting for five days. You've been the CEO of a company. If I come to you and say you don't have funding for the next few days, what are you gonna do? You're gonna be like, I need to restructure the company, right? So let me cut whatever it was unnecessary. Necessary cost, let me you know develop the team, let me focus on my weekend. So it's the same. I love I everything Logic for me goes back to that car race. It's like saying, you know what? I gotta take a pit stop. I gotta change the wheels, I gotta change the I gotta audit and change. So when the when the cells go through five days of perceived fasting, on day three they start rejuvenating, they started fixing, they started restructuring, right? there's a debris here that I can consume, there's an organelle, there's a dysfunction in the DNA. I'm I was about to become cancerous. I was about in all this gets rejuvenated within the cell. We have 37 trillion cells as of day three and starting day four. You have to you have to cross day three and day four because the first two days you have enough reserves in the body. You break down your fat and kill ketones, you use your glycogen, you ask the liver to help with neoglucogenesis. The first two, three days on a company with no revenue, you say I have some money in the bank. I can live a little bit off the money in the bank.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, analogy,
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Right.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Two three days, you live off the money in your bank. Now you're going bankrupt, you're gonna restructure the company. And so we develop prolon as a fasting nutrition to help you go over five days of fasting. So again, you're eating plant-based, clean. Again, remember all the checklists, positive checklists,
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah, yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: but your cells do not recognize the food. We learned about what we call nutrient sensing pathways, the radars on the cell that tells the cell there's food or not, and we go around those. And so the the food is not recognized by the Cell, the cell thinks there's no food, and the cell starts rejuvenating. This process is called autophagy, self-rejuvenate, self-eats, rejuvenate. And autophagy won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016. And it's a secret of life. It's so important that at
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yeah.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: least two to three times per year, again, go back to the car race. You see the cars taking two or three pit stops during a race. It's so important that every year of our life, you take two or three pit stops during That year, and you do the prolong fasting nutrition, fasting mimicking diet, so that your cells get audited, they check, they restructure, they rejuvenate, they get biologically younger. So when
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Regenerated.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: so when we showed, we published that in Nature, the number one science journal of the word. We're showing that if you do three cycles of prolong again, three pit stops, you're reversing your biological age by 2.5 years. That was published in Nature, the number one science journal of the word.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Get on board, everybody.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: And it's still important. This is this is the cycle of life, right? Remember nature. You go through the winter
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Yes.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: you go through the summer, then you have to let the leaves go down and rejuvenate. The trees, the roses, everything in life has to go through that cycle. In the last three decades, we started eating all the time. There's no more rejuvenation. Our bodies stuck fat, inflammation, cholesterol, age faster, disease, die. Where's this? Where's the check? Where's the audit? Who's auditing our cells when they're getting older? Who's fixing our cell? Where's the doctor from within? The doctor from within is called autophagy, Nobel Prize in Medicine. It's a self-check system that we lost because we started eating every day. Intermittent fasting, serving breakfast is not enough. If I tell you I'm gonna get your money as a CO next tomorrow, you say I have some money in the bank. So when you do intermittent fasting, you lose some weight, but you're not rejuvenating the cells because you have enough storage, you have enough. fat, glycogen, and and and liver reserves that you're you can pull from. Those is why you lose weight. But you never get into a deep ketosis enough to restructure the cell. This only happens after three to four days of fasting. And this is why we created prolonged five-day fasting nutrition
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Incredible.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: to help you go through the cycle.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: My God, I'm glad I I'm glad I asked you to to do an elevator.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: And Prolan is the only product now, is the first product to be patented for longevity. It has a trademark on longevity and it has now been tested in forty-seven clinical trials at Stanford, at Mayo Clinic, at UCLA, at USC, all the big universities, 18 actually big universities have tested Prolon for longevity and disease remission.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: Right Incredible. I love your ambition and your vision for L-nutra and what you're doing. It's in it's absolutely astounding and looking forward to exploring and getting into the products myself. I just I wanna I wanna I wanna live till like I'm a hundred and I don't know. I'm just kind of just putting it out there, like you know. So thank you, Joseph, so much for your time. What a joyful, insightful conversation and I just love your humbleness also, like just your ability to to make it very simple in terms of understanding exactly how important it is for us to to be preventative when it comes to our I I'm gonna say our mind, body and soul, you know, in terms of it, it's it's everything, right? So thank
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: Yeah.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: you again and have a wonderful evening and rest of the week.
joseph Antoun, MD PhD: I appreciate you much. We did say we're gonna save we're gonna change somebody's life today. Hopefully we've done that for hundreds of people or thousands of people and and thank you very much, Bee.
Bee Murray, Bee Formless: No you're welcome, absolutely. Thank you.
