Summary

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” - Hippocrates 400 B.C.

On the latest episode of The Bioverge Podcast, Joseph Antoun, CEO of L-Nutra, Inc, sits down with Neil Littman to discuss how his company is using state-of-the art science and randomized, placebo controlled clinical studies to use food as medicine to extend healthy lifespans and treat a wide range of diseases.

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Transcript

00:29
Danny Levine (producer)
Yeah, we've got Joseph Anton on the show today for listeners not familiar with him. Who is he?

00:35
Neil Littman (host)
Joseph is the CEO and chairman of the board of Lnutra, a company pioneering a concept known as food as medicine, which is nothing new if you think back to the days of Hippocrates. He first said in 400 BC, let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. I just want to briefly highlight Joseph's background because it speaks to the scientific approach the company is taking, which to me is a huge differentiator for them. Joseph completed his health policy studies at Harvard University. Has a degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University. He was formally an adjunct professor of Health policy at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. For those who aren't familiar with it, the Buck is one of the premier institutions focused on the biology of aging. During my time at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, we provide quite a bit of research funding to the bucks.

01:29
Neil Littman (host)
I saw firsthand the quality of their science. Turning back to alnutra, they have developed a fast mimicking diet which puts cells into a state of what's called autophagy. It's a biological state in which your body clears out what are called senescent cells. I think of them as zombie cells. They're unique in that they're not multiplying, but also don't die off when they should. I think a lot of what healthnutrius is pioneering is really applied in two forms. One, to healthy individuals to promote health span and lifespan, but then also can be applied to a variety of chronic diseases to achieve better health outcomes, including reversing disease. I'm really excited to talk to Joseph about both of those angles today.

02:16
Danny Levine (producer)
What exactly is El Nutrio trying to do?

02:21
Neil Littman (host)
Yeah, so they're really using and pioneering this approach as food as medicine. It's a topic I've been personally fascinated with for years. Right, so we've all heard the term, you are what you eat, and we all know that healthy eating is better for us. However, we also know that following that advice is way harder than it sounds. There's a lot of factors here at play. Really, Elnucha has, I think, a twopronged approach. One, targeting healthy individuals with a fast mimicking diet over the course of five days to help clear out some of these domestic cells and promote health span and lifespan. They have some products currently in the marketing targeting that approach, but they're also targeting various metabolic diseases, things like diabetes, for example, and other diseases like cancer, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and even cancer. They've done a lot of clinical studies with supporting data to show how their approach can help reverse, in many cases, some of these diseases.

03:24
Neil Littman (host)
I'm really excited to talk to Joseph about some of the clinical data that they have supporting their approach. What they've seen preclinically the foundational science of the company, dating back to Vulture Longo's lab at the University of Southern California, because all that really underpin what they're doing with the company. There's a tremendous amount of NIH funding that went into a lot of what they're doing all the way from pre clinical mouse models through supporting clinical studies. I think that's a big differentiator for the company. So I'm excited to talk to Joseph.

03:53
Danny Levine (producer)
About those topics, talk about that some more. On one hand, this seems not just reasonable, but obvious. At the same time, we're in a culture where we're bombarded with health claims of foods and diets. How might l nutrition's approach differ from the world of others promoting supplements, diets, and other lifestyle products?

04:16
Neil Littman (host)
Yeah, this is exactly the reason, Danny, that I'm excited to talk to Joseph today because I really feel like they are taking a very differentiated approach using rigorous science and clinical studies, which are randomized controlled trials. Right. RCTs, which is the gold standard of how novel drugs and therapies are approved, they're using that methodology and applying it to their clinical studies to come up with safety and efficacious claims and outcomes. Only by doing those clinical studies can they actually go out and market and talk about their products being used in these contexts because they have supporting underlying data from these randomized controlled trials. So, to my knowledge, no one else is really doing that, or certainly not doing it to the degree that L nutrition is across all these different therapeutic areas and disease states. A lot of their research has been published in premiere scientific journals.

05:13
Neil Littman (host)
To me, they're going about this really as food, as medicine, and they're coming up with the underlying supporting clinical data to support their claims. That is a huge differentiator for me that I'm really excited to dive into.

05:29
Danny Levine (producer)
What are you hoping to hear from Joseph today?

05:31
Neil Littman (host)
Yeah, so I'm hoping to hear about, number one, the foundational science that originated at USC and how that underpins what El Nutra is doing today. I want to talk about how they think about bifurcating what they're doing and targeting healthy individuals to promote health, span and lifespan, but then also a lot of their work they're doing around chronic diseases and using food as medicine. There reimbursement for this sort of thing? Right. As we all know, there's huge socioeconomic factors that play into people's lifestyle and diet choices, right. If reimbursement is in place for some of these programs and products that they have, that could be a huge game changer at the societal level. I'm really excited to talk to Joseph about that.

06:13
Danny Levine (producer)
Well, if you're all set, let's do it.

06:19
Neil Littman (host)
Joseph, I am incredibly excited to welcome you to the show today. Thank you for joining us.

06:24
Joseph Anton (guest)
Thank you very much. I start most of my podcast promising that we're going to change somebody's life today. So let's get onto it.

06:34
Neil Littman (host)
I'm all for that. Today we are going to talk about an area I've been really excited about for a while now, and that is the concept of using food as medicine. What that means and how it can not only prevent disease, but also how it can potentially reverse a variety of diseases, ranging from metabolic diseases like diabetes to cardiovascular disease and even cancer. There are also a lot of longevity related benefits for healthy individuals. I am excited to dive in today with you and talk about before we dive into specifically what Lnutra is doing, let's start with the basic problem from the 300 foot view. So, Joseph, many of us know that America spends a fortune on health care, four, 1 trillion annually, to be specific, 19% of GDP. However, most of us probably aren't aware that 86% of that spending is spent on chronic diseases, which are largely preventable and in many cases, even reversible.

07:27
Neil Littman (host)
Can you talk about the current limitations of how the healthcare system treats disease today? As you and I talked about before the show, why you refer to the current system as a sick care system instead of a health care system.

07:39
Joseph Anton (guest)
Yeah, and what I would add to your statement is that I wish when I graduated from med school, were spending 2.2 trillion. Now we're exceeded for you would wish that you live longer, but actually we lost half a year on our lifespan last year, so we're living sicker and shorter lifespan shrinks. So definitely super. Before we used to say, well, we're spending a lot to get better result, and now we're spending even more to get negative results on lifespan. This is mainly what you mentioned is we're spending too late, too much too late, which we should I mean, if your father may, God forbid, has sudden heart attack and needs help in the hospital, that should happen. The problem is that he should not have that heart attack at age 45 or at age 50 or 55. If he had a good lifestyle, he probably would have had it at latest age or not even have it.

08:43
Joseph Anton (guest)
This is where I think lifestyle medicine is starting to tip the balance and start to take over, whereby 90% of us will die out of one of four diseases diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease. If you think about it, they're all related to metabolic disorders. Most of diabetes is type two, and most of it comes from insulin resistance due to weight. So it's a foodborne disease. How come we keep people on pills for years and years and then we give them insulin after the pancreas fails? Versus why don't we change their lifestyle and help them lose the weight, decrease insulin resistance and reverse diabetes? Cardiovascular is very closely related to cholesterol inflammation and other metrics in the blood that actually the pill system or medicines are bailely able to regulate. Versus lifestyle changes can actually reverse most of them. Alzheimer's always used to be like the big horse and the black horse if you want another room.

09:54
Joseph Anton (guest)
Now we started calling Alzheimer's type three diabetes and the deposits in the brain are very much correlated with aging and unhealthy lifestyles. Cancer, again, is probably one of the most cellular type of disease. So we respond less to lifestyle changes. Some of the recent trials which we're leading as well, we're showing that through fasting nutrition or through starving, cancer and rejuvenating immunity can get a better results or better emission when you tag lifestyle with medicine. With cancer, probably you want to have both a lifestyle intervention and a medical intervention. Alzheimer's deficit as well, probably both. For a lot of cardiovascular and a lot of diabetes cases, lifestyle changes could prevent, avoid, or remit even these health conditions. Something we're really proud of is that major associations on the chronology got together a few months ago and they came up with a new concept called disease remission and regression.

11:03
Joseph Anton (guest)
They actually carved out farm and biotech from it. They said, well, this doesn't apply to pills. Pills can talk about treating a disease here. We're talking about remission and regression. Remission meaning you need no more medications for a disease and regression means you need less medication so it's on your way to cure, but it's called in a different way. That is a big landmark into Stamping from a claims perspective, from an efficacy perspective, lifestyle medicine. When I say lifestyle medicine, I'm talking about nutrition, exercise, stress, sleep and the emotional wellbeing and being happy and serene. All these factors are predetermined for many of the chronic diseases that we're seeing. If they're not directly the cause, they accelerate aging, they accelerate the speed of onset. If you have some genetic predisposition or we have other reasons to have these chronic disease, definitely lifestyle intervention could accelerate or decelerate that onset.

12:10
Joseph Anton (guest)
We're pretty excited that integrative medicine, functional medicine, lifestyle medicine started to emerge. They all started to emerge as disciplines. Probably today in the US. We only have 60,000 integrative and functional medicine doc and the association of Lifestyle Medicine aclm is also burgeoning. So we started seeing these disciplines. They did not exist when I went to med school, I never had more than 1 hour in my MD. PhD on nutrition. It was all about medicines and a pill or surgery. But things are changing, and I I.

12:45
Neil Littman (host)
Would agree, and things are changing pretty quickly. So, Joseph, let's talk about the foundational science that led to the formation of El Nutra. Can you talk about some of the initial research and the science that led you to want to start the company?

13:00
Joseph Anton (guest)
Yeah. Lnutra l stands for longevity, and it's lutra. So longevity through nutrition. The premise the founder of the company is Walter Longo. He's the head of the Longevity Institute at University of Southern California. His premise was very simple but very truthful is, food is the only product we put in our body every day of our life between three to five times. It must be the most impactful determinant of our longevity, of whether we get a disease or not. To the shock, we're all shocked that even till today, we haven't invested a fraction of what we have invested in the biotech industry and the pill industry behind food, knowing that food is the biggest signal that you send to the body every day again of your life. Professor Long goes from 25 years ago at USC, and then now we have 18 universities doing the research with us.

14:06
Joseph Anton (guest)
He decided to start doing two types of research what humans, when we are healthy, should eat to stay healthier. To stay healthy and live long. The notion of health spent living healthy long and the entire downstream discoveries, if you want, we got span off from USC, and Professor Long go into our company, Al Nutrition. The consumer part of our company is focused only on the science, evidencebased, science, to develop food formulations that can help people live healthy long and we can talk more about that. The second part of his research is like, how come that still in this century? When you get diagnosed with cancer, nobody prescribes you a special food to increase your chances of remission. If you get diagnosed with Alzheimer's, nobody even know. When I give my presentations or speeches, I always ask people, hey, do you have Alzheimer's? Do you know what to eat?

15:08
Joseph Anton (guest)
Nobody raises one hand in the 21st century. Same for diabetes, same for autoimmune diseases and cardiovascular disease. He decided to, with 18 other universities, do trials on food is medicine. Do literally like medicines, cell trials, mice trials, what we call preclinical, and then full human trials, what we call clinical trials, randomized in order to discover what you should eat if you have a chronic condition to increase your chances of permission. We license all these nutritional formulation into onutra. They're part of our food is medicine business units. We have a consumer longevity business unit. We have a food as medicine business units. What we do is heavy research and attrition and now sales and marketing to put these foods in the hands of people and help humanity gain back what we think could be a ten years of healthy longevity.

16:05
Neil Littman (host)
Joseph, I want to dive into some of the clinical trials in just a minute. I think that's super important, a huge differentiator for your approach, but let's start with the idea of caloric restriction and fasting. Can you talk about some of the biological benefits of fasting and caloric restriction.

16:24
Joseph Anton (guest)
Yeah. That was the cornerstone if you want to follow this coverage. Like people listening to us today might say, well, you guys discovered what we should eat to live long. They said they discovered how we can eat for different food condition. By the way, now we have 60 insurances that are reimbursing some of our food as medicine. We got a CDC code for Medicare and Medicare patients to Medicare and Medicaid are paying for full 100% reimbursement for 32 health conditions that use our food. We're not just stemmed from a scientific standpoint, but now we're very legitimate in the market and starting to get reimbursement. The secret the first if you want big discovery that professor Longe, a lot of us here listening to this podcast, I definitely recommend you read the Longevity Diet book by Professor Voltelongo was one of Amazon's top bestselling books. The Longevity Diet will explain a lot of the things that I'm talking about today.

17:24
Joseph Anton (guest)
The cornerstone of our research started about fasting. And why fasting? Fasting is very different from any typical nutritional intervention. It creates a special environment in the body due to stress. It's a positive response to the stress of absence of calories. It's a fascinating concept whereby same as a company, if you run a company and you need say, a million dollars per month to run your operations. Typical diets are for weight loss. You need a million dollar will give you $900,000, your bank account or fat when it comes to where it drops by 10%. This is how most diets would work when it comes to fasting. Imagine you're the CEO of a company giving the analogy to the body, and we give you $0, right? In the first stage of fasting, we call the first two days of fast. If you're the co, you have probably in the bank ten to 20 miles.

18:23
Joseph Anton (guest)
Like, okay, I'm going to be down by a million dollars this month. It's pretty dramatic weight loss. This is the metabolic part of fast. The first two days you start losing a lot of weight. The problem is if next month you don't have your million, the third month you don't have your million, you're in real crisis. You're going to go and restructure the company. You're going to cut some extra expenditures that are not necessary for the business. You're going to slow down some of the risky investments, et cetera. This is what happens to the buddy between day two and day four. The buddy does something called autofagy. It tells the cells, hey, we're not eating no calories. You got to find calories within the cell. Clean the cell, rejuvenate eat the debris, the organelles, whatever is left over. We got to all be in the best behavior and rejuvenate to survive the fast.

19:19
Joseph Anton (guest)
The longer you go, let's go back to the company and you restructured, you cut the unnecessary expenditure and now you're still with no revenue, you're going to take more drastic measure, you're going to unfortunately let some employees go and you're going to cut some investments, et cetera. What we see in the buddy does the same thing. When you cross that day three and four of fasting, you're reaching day five onwards. The buddies killing what we call senescent cells, old cells or zombie cells, and then tries to push the younger cells because the sinister cells are consuming calories, but they're not performing well and pushes younger cells to take over because they're very cost effective in their performance. That part of fasting we call the regeneration part of fasting. So you have three phases of fasting. The first two days of the metabolic reset, then you move to a seller to rejuvenation, which is seller to clean up, and then you move afterwards to sell a replacement or seller regeneration.

20:20
Joseph Anton (guest)
You can imagine now that from a longevity perspective, let's talk about a healthy consumer. Every cell in the body lives on calories. You fast, every cell in the body is impacted. If you do a five days of fast, you've just lost a lot of weight. 70% of Americans need that. You just rejuvenated the intracellular part from inside of the cell, that process that we describe as autofashion, which won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016. You regenerated some cells, increased of stem cell secretion to get younger cells in the body. From a biological perspective, probably you are younger or at least you're a better performer. That's the best thing you can do for longevity, is to decelerate your biological age, right? You get Alzheimer's or cancer, autoimmune, not autumn, but cardiovascular and diabetes, mainly at later stage in life. Age is the main the biological age of your body is the main determinant of whether you're going to get one of the biggest four killers.

21:28
Joseph Anton (guest)
By decelerating or even reversing the age, the inner age or the biological age, that's the best chance you're giving to a buddy to stay healthier longer or increase health span the healthy part of life. Now, the problem is we started as a water fasting company or technology at the University of Southern California, and then today we have Stanford and UCLA and Indian University and multiple European universities. As I mentioned, 18 universities supporting us with the research. When went to human trials, as you can imagine, asking people to fast for five days, it was almost impossible. Actually the first trial went to was Mayo Clinic and USC on cancer trials. Because if you water faster, buddy, when you have cancer is a cell that keeps replicating with no inhibition. And guess what cancer needs to grow. It needs calories and it needs growth hormone because that's the best nutrition to grow.

22:31
Joseph Anton (guest)
This is why people with cancer end up being very kesha. Cancer eats everything. What we discovered is that if you fast cancer for four days and then you hit it with chemo or with hormone therapy or other therapies, the cancer is so weakened by fasting that you increase chances of permission. We started the clinical trial on water fast, and then people cannot go four or five days on water fast. We then kindly asked the National Institute of Health, which is a big funder of very credible research around the country, mainly biotech, but now it includes us as well. We showed them the mice data, where were helping mice stay healthy longer. We were helping the mice reverse diabetes and many cases of cancer, etc. We asked them to sponsor us to develop the fasting mimicking nutrition or the fasting mimicking diet, which is the five days of food that we specifically formulated in order to trick the body that is still fasting.

23:31
Joseph Anton (guest)
So it's all plant based, natural. Actually, it's premium ingredients, much better ingredients than most of the food we eat every day. It naturally keeps the body in a fasting mode. For the first time, we made that oxymoron possible, where you're eating food and your body stays in the fasting mode for five days. That discovery of the fasting mimicking diet now became a product that we ship. We called prolong. We ship it too. We've sold over a million of it now. For the last six years, we put it in the market for people to buy it at home and help their body go through this fasting rejuvenation journey while they're eating food.

24:15
Neil Littman (host)
Joseph I mean, there's a lot to dive into. There one area that you mentioned a couple of times already, an area that I'm particularly excited about is what you're doing to support your approach with clinical evidence, and specifically in the context of randomized controlled clinical trials, which is the gold standard for demonstrating safety and efficacy of new medicines. Right. If you think about food as medicine, I think this is a big differentiator for a nutrient company. Can you talk about the clinical trials and the results that you've seen that underpin what you're doing?

24:48
Joseph Anton (guest)
Yeah, you hit it right on point. What we're known for, they call us the Pfizer or the lily or the GSK of nutrition, meaning we do commit before we sell any longevity formulation or any food is medicine. We put full trials like medicine preclinical and mice and clinical and humans. They're so valid and respected scientifically that they get published in the biggest and the top three or four journals in the world. For those familiar with Nature is the number one science journal of the word. We have multiple papers in Nature cell the second most respected science journal of the world. We have, I think, six or seven major publications there, and so on and so forth. Very credible medicine alike research in order to because these are big claims. What we're talking about today when I say food is medicine, this is a big claim.

25:42
Joseph Anton (guest)
When you talk food for longevity and food to be consumed by patients, this is way beyond what we've seen food traditionally do, which is basically an ingredientbased claim, right? I'm low gluten, I'm low carb. And these are ingredient based claims. They're simple claims here. We're talking about major health outcomes claims, and we couldn't go to market and or pitch them as such and gain the credibility of physicians. We have 150 healthcare practitioners that signed with us to offer prolonged clinics. We had to go through robust clinical trials to be able to talk about health outcomes in here. So today I'll give you an example. Literally today, if I remember well, we're in eleven active clinical trials and we're relatively small nurture company, versus if you think about the Nestle and the Abbot and the huge multibillion dollar company that at a given time, probably they have less or equivalent number of clinical trials.

26:45
Joseph Anton (guest)
We're the leading nutrition of the word in that sense. To date we have done a couple of trials on longevity, we have done four trials on cancer, we have done one trial on Alzheimer's, one trial on autoimmune, and we're waiting for a current trial ongoing at Stanford University and one at University of Miami. One is on crohn's, one is also colitis. We have done a trial on depression, we have trial a trial, we have done a trial on skin rejuvenation. I mean, imagine a nutrition that can change your skin global in five days. This is how big that skin rejuvenation is, as well as part of every cell rejuvenation. We've done trials on cardiovascular and diabetes. Actually, we just closed two major trials on diabetes remission as well. Because of the effectiveness, were able to gain 40 patents out of 205 patents globally. We're the only company in history today to have a fully issued patent on promoting longevity, fully issued patent on treating diabetes, treating cancer, treating Alzheimer's and autoimmune diseases.

27:55
Joseph Anton (guest)
It's such a big achievement, I think, for humanity, and I say more so humanity than us, because our founder, who still has a good 40 plus percent of the company, has pledged to donate all his shares, 100% of that. Almost half of our company is pre donated to the Kids Cures Foundation and other foundations to help the world discover more cures, but also to help the poor access the discoveries that we have.

28:25
Neil Littman (host)
It's really a great model. Joseph and I want to pick up on a thread that you mentioned before that ties into all the clinical work that you're doing, which I think is really interesting as well, which is how El Nutrition has been funded. Can you talk about what role non diluted funding, such as research grants have played in advancing the science of what you're doing?

28:46
Joseph Anton (guest)
Yeah, well, were blessed with multiple non diluted funding, and we also did three full runs of phrases. I think USC is the university we come up for spinner from USC, and God bless the leadership there. They spend all the money on the labs and the research, and the early foundational, if you want trials and food is medicine and food for longevity. This is millions and millions of dollars per year. The National Health granted Walter Long and in and the labs over there now over 20 million of dollars. We also got €13 million from Europe, and we have millions of dollars that came directly from the National Set of Health to our company. There's a good probably $40 million between the National Health, European governments, whether to the labs at USC and other universities working with us or directly to us. Now, on top of this 40 million, there probably another 50 or 60 million that came from the universities themselves.

29:54
Joseph Anton (guest)
So we finished 18 Clinton trials. We're in eleven now. So there's almost 30. 29 to 30 clinical trials is typically a trial. Again, medicinal trials are in tens and hundreds of millions. When it comes to nutrition, you're talking about 510 or 15. If you just say 10 million, for example, as an average multiply that by 30 trials, you have a good $300 million, or say $150 to $300 million that were put by every university that works with us to do the trial. A good total of 200 plus billion dollars of non diverse dollars went into our research and development and led to where we are today. On top of those, we raise ourselves also three rounds of capital.

30:40
Neil Littman (host)
Joseph, certainly back to the clinical trials. Can you expand upon some of the results that you've seen from these trials?

30:49
Joseph Anton (guest)
Yeah, the most conclusive trials that we have today are mainly on diabetes. The fasting mimicking nutrition technology was tested in University of Heidelberg at Top medical system in Germany. We published the twelve year and six cycles of the fasting mimicking diet. You do five days a month, 125 days to eat normal, 25 days a month, two for six months, so a total of 30 days only. We compare that to the Mediterranean Diet at the University of Heidelberg, and we shown that HbAonec drops by 1.4%. Just to put this in perspective, if HbAonec, which is an indicator of how long you've had a level of sugar in your blood, so when it drops by 1.4 point, the FDA gives you a clinical significant or a drug above claim if it's zero five, so almost triple, what the minimum floor for the drug to be called? Effective our 30 days only.

32:00
Joseph Anton (guest)
After all, within six months. We're able to do triple of that. We published that three months ago in July at the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Medicine, one of the top of the criminal journals. We just finished another diabetes trial for twelve months. It's unpublished yet, so I cannot mention the results. Imagine if six months were able to drive that result and the twelve months was actually us with current medications, meaning the fasting nutrition with current medication versus medication alone. One had to head with medication and the results were very striking there. Again, I cannot share how positive, but it's just by hundreds of percent positive, which is a very big promise for patients with diabetes. We're going to launch in Q one of 2023, we're talking 45 days. We're going to stop launching the first ever diabetes remission and regression program that is centered around a food product called the Fasting Mac nutrition.

33:06
Joseph Anton (guest)
That our core technology, plus an app, plus a dietitian to take care of the patients. We're going to go in partnership with doctors across America and the world and the doctors will take care of the medicinal part and then they would refer patients to us with our longevity dietitians trained by us with our nutritional intervention. They're going to be able to support patients with diabetes moving forward, which is a major achievement for us and for humanity. The other disease that we had a lot of trials on is cancer and especially breast cancer. We've shown that when you the fasting mimicking technology with cancer you're reducing three or four major benefits. Number one, you starve cancer and therefore you sensitize it towards chemo or hormone therapy or not immune therapy trials as well as Indian adversity. That's benefit number one. Benefit number two, when you fast a buddy, the normal cells, they hibernate, they defend themselves against fasting so you spare them the side effects of the chemotherapy.

34:14
Joseph Anton (guest)
Number three, we're seeing an immune rejuvenation. We talked about cellular rejuvenation, buddy. Well, the immune system is a system that responds very fast to fasting because it's by definition cells that replicate very fast. When you fast, immunity tries to rejuvenate. In mice we saw on pathology that there's better infiltration of immune cells into the cancer went faster in Europe, in the center of Italy. Also they looked at the immune cell attack and infiltration in humans in the cancer. So that's a fact. Benefit number three and benefit number four is you basically decrease the escape route of cancer visa, the chemo and hormone and immune therapy. The biggest challenge we're facing in current cancer cure is not that the intervention, the chemicals or the hormone therapy or immunotherapy are not effective, is that they leave a lot to a lot of side effects. You cannot give a high doses of them to kill cancer.

35:27
Joseph Anton (guest)
The other problem is that if you give high dosage as well, the cancer still can escape because the cancer is healthy. We always ask the patient eat well and drink proteins and the cancer lost proteins the most. You fast the cancer, you sensitize the cancer, you're limiting the cancer's ability to adjust and escape and become resistant. You're protecting the normal sense of the body and you're rejuvenating immunity to better attack cancer. These are the major if you want research premise behind the fasting mimic nutrition technology. When it comes to Alzheimer's, we've shown in mice that would decrease inflammation in the brain and we enhance their memory. We just published that two months ago with just the early human part of the trial. We have a trial currently in Italy going on Alzheimer's and we don't have the final outcomes. We just showed that it's safe and tolerable to do the fasting.

36:23
Joseph Anton (guest)
Macdritt there. It's a special formulation for people with higher age, it has higher calories and more the healthy fat for the brain. So we adjust the fasting. We make nutrition for that and for autoimmune disease. As I mentioned, Stanford is leading the trial on Crohn's, University of Miami and Ulcerative colitis.

36:47
Neil Littman (host)
Joseph, since your products are being used as medicine across a variety of therapeutic areas and diseases, we have touch on a topic that you had mentioned briefly earlier, which is Reimbursement. It sounds like you have secured reimbursement for some of your products or that's in the cards. Could you talk about reimbursement for your products and they are being used in the as medicine?

37:13
Joseph Anton (guest)
Yeah, we have a special line of product, not the fasting mimicking product because most of the trials on the fasting mimicking just came out and we're about to launch them in the market. It will take a few months before we start talking to insurance and get reimbursed. We have food that we ship, what we call medically tailored meals that we ship every day for people at home. Meaning outside of the five days of fasting, a lot of people order our food to consume it afterwards. Part of this new class of medically tailored meals, we're able to and we based our meals as one of the cleanest nutrition actually in the US. Very clean ingredients. A longevity formulation based on the Longevity Diet book. Again, I super recommend that people read this book by Vault or Longo and then we medically tailored them for health conditions.

38:06
Joseph Anton (guest)
We were able to secure reimbursement for 32 out of 36 allowable chronic conditions. Hypertension, diabetes, cancer, autoimmune, AIDS, many other conditions that were eligible for reimbursement. And we got the approval in November. Between January and today, we have secured over 60 insurances that assigned us to pay for our medicine. They will COVID patients on Medicare and Medicare by 100% no deductible. If you're otherwise nonmedicare Medicare patient, you can get reimbursement on it, which is probably a dream come true to see food being reimbursed by insurance up to 50% for patients with certain chronic condition.

38:56
Neil Littman (host)
Joseph, I think that's so critical because as a lot of us know, socioeconomic factors play a huge role in people's diet and lifestyle choices. Many people are food insecure don't know where their next meal is coming from or aren't in a financial position to shop at a place like Whole Foods or whatever, store and buy fresh organic groceries every week. I just heard a few stats the other day, but the more food insecure a person is, the greater their healthcare costs will be. For someone with mild food insecurity, annual healthcare costs increased by 15% and that goes all the way up to upwards of 70% for people with severe food insecurity. This whole idea of getting reimbursement for your product seems to me a huge differentiator and one that can help address some of the socioeconomic factors that lead to a lot of the chronic diseases.

39:53
Neil Littman (host)
Obviously, that's an important piece of the puzzle. I guess taking a step back, are there other things as a society you think we could or should be doing better to address some of these issues?

40:04
Joseph Anton (guest)
Well, first I agree with what you said is there's a perfect correlation between having less socioeconomic luck if you want opportunities with carrying more weight and being more sick on the long term, which is very unfortunate. On the other side you say, okay, let's help them with food stamps and then you're giving them food stamps that can barely buy the unhealthy food. We've built a society where the salad is more expensive than the burger and the fries. The system was a little bit reversed. Now allowing healthy food such as ours to be ready, accessible and fully reimbursable for Medicaid patients and Medicare patients is just such a great turning point in history of health care, I think, in this country. You ask me what other things we can do. I mean, the pillars of thing healthy long or the pillars of a healthy longevity or health span are five.

41:06
Joseph Anton (guest)
Nutrition is one of them. What competes with nutrition, probably at the top level is that happiness is the social capital, is that serenity is it seems when we're happy we're wellnessed with our family and that degree of happiness is a great source of healthy wellbeing. Maybe it's the mother of the healthy behaviors. Meaning when you're happy, you eat healthy, you exercise, you sleep better, you stress less. It's very important to also, I think, in the United Arab Emirates, it's the first country in history to have a department, a full department for happiness and a minister of happiness. This is something else that we're going to think about because the more we advance as humans and the more technology is adding to us. Technology was supposed to help us and to distress us, make our life easy. Till today, what technology has done is they ask us to react faster to things, to have to be performing at a much faster rate and be working.

42:14
Joseph Anton (guest)
Whether you're at the office or outside office, on a vacation, at night, anytime, anywhere you have access, technology should be working. Added a lot of stress to our life. I think going back and rethinking what's our true purpose on life as humans and how can we live in a serene, mentally healthy and happy life is going to be second major key for longevity and healthy longevity. Third is stress, which is very important today to decrease these micro stresses of the day and increase the baseline of happiness. Then the fourth pillar is sleep. Very important to get your quality sleep and your seven to 8 hours. And then finally is exercise. We all know how important exercise is for metabolic health, for Rejuvenation, for muscle performance, and multiple risk factors of aging and or age related chronic diseases. These are the five things that we as humanity should focus on to gain healthy years of life.

43:22
Neil Littman (host)
Yeah, obviously all critical areas. So, Joseph, I've got to ask. We've seen a lot of diet fads come and go from South Beach, staff in Paleo, Ketogenic. Some have stuck around. And, there seems to be something new popping up almost every year. How is how is what you're doing at L Nutra different? There challenges in getting people to recognize the benefits of what you're doing?

43:45
Joseph Anton (guest)
Yes, and this is one of the best questions I get. And the correlate. Fasting a fat or just a movement? Obviously not because it's the first time where you're bringing a natural recommendation. We're living on artificial. What is fat today is the way we're eating, which is a lot of times during the day and now extending late to the night with Uber eats and great refrigeration at home and the Netflix and the YouTubes and the late night watching across the couch. Where fasting was part of the human diet, and for hundreds of thousands of years, humans ate and did not eat. And that was the balance of life. We started optimizing food supply and then making food cheaper and more accessible at home, and we stored it at home, and now we have access to it all the time. And we're living today is a fad.

44:38
Joseph Anton (guest)
And exactly. We're harvesting the results. 73% overweight 40%. Pre diabetic, double digit diabetes rate, double digit percentage of death if you want cancer rates. Alzheimer's on the rise. You can see how we lost a miracle of biology. What if our doctors call it called fasting? The rejuvenation of the cells, which, again, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016. That was a miracle of biology. Our buddy. It's like the computer when you use it for weeks and weeks. You reset it. If you're driving a car race, you take the car to a pit stop and the engineers come in, check the tires, check the oil, the gas, everything, and they fix them. It's important to take the body through cycles of fasting. The same way in exercise we discover the role of stress exercise and intensive exercise. These are the intensive interventions that push your body in the same as sound and an old tradition of going from hot to cold.

45:47
Joseph Anton (guest)
These shockers, they help the body becoming more metabolically flexible and help the cells to rejuvenate and get biologically younger, which is an important determinant of longevity. The Atkins diet is just eat protein all the time or high level of proteins that's artificial. We never as humans for hundreds of thousands of years. We're living on a protein diet. It's the opposite. We're living on a plant based diet and sometimes eating fish. It was easy. We lived around rivers. This is where water and grass and fruits and vegetables were. We had a pescetarian diet and a flexitarian diet only when we're able to hunt . The Ketogenic diet is also an artificial imposition on our life. We never had access to high fat and super low carb. Actually, everything we eat in nature has complex carbs as rich in carbs, whether it's legumes, vegetables, nuts and so these are theories that we as humans brought and a lot of them defined by marketing push to push us to steer into one direction when science catch up.

46:48
Joseph Anton (guest)
Science tells us after a few years, oh, sorry, it was the wrong choice. Fasting is the only one coming from nature, coming from human evolution. We fasted all the time and we know biologically that the body responds to it the same way. There's a fleet response to it, mice response to it, the human because it plays with the essence of the cell function. We're proud to bringing back fasting to humanity, to restore humanity to what were supposed to eat.

47:17
Neil Littman (host)
Joseph, you mentioned a term that I love, metabolic flexibility. I think that's a great term. Joseph, I know we could probably talk for another two or three days about this topic. I want to be cognizant of your time and wrap things up with one final question. If we zoom out, what's your broad vision for the company? Where do you see aldutra, let's say, the next three to five years?

47:40
Joseph Anton (guest)
Well, our major goal, which I feel like now we're achieving our potential in the early days of it, before the first it's a company, it's a 13 year old company. It's a pretty well established in the science, but it was mostly a nutrite company. It was a lot of trials, a lot of discoveries and product development. Now that the trials led to amazingly positive results and that our products are in the market and we're seeing very fast growth. We have over 100% growth year over year. The first five years, we really were eager to get the results on diabetes and cancer that we discussed. We're waiting to exceed autoimmune and Alzheimer's. The way we see ourselves in the next three years is really that the first ever nuclear technology company that's going to present food for longevity and it's going to present food for major chronic disease.

48:32
Joseph Anton (guest)
In order to help millions of people around the world to gain healthy years of life, we would love to keep the company as close as possible to its mission, its ethics, to the foundational idea and the spirit of the founder, Professor Longo. Maybe to achieve all this and get funding to it and help the investors also feel great about it, is maybe to go public in three years where a lot of the folks who came in and help, if they want to reap financially what they have done, they can do that. At the same time, we keep the company truthful to its mission and cruising even at a faster pace. This is what we think we are is launching the first ever again nutrition remission and regression pipeline for multiple health conditions, helping people live a healthy, long life on the consumer side, and hopefully a very big successful IPO three years.

49:34
Neil Littman (host)
Joseph, what a powerful and amazing mission it is. With that, I certainly wish you all the best of luck. Joseph, I really want to thank you for your time today and being on the show with me.

49:44
Joseph Anton (guest)
I appreciate you very much. Bye bye.

49:49
Danny Levine (producer)
Well, Neil, what did you think?

49:50
Neil Littman (host)
I thought that was a great wide ranging discussion with Joseph. You heard us end on all these different diets and fads and what l nutrition is doing differently than a lot of others. I can't help but think my personal philosophy is barred from Peter OTIA. He calls the standard American diet or Sad diet. Right. Once you get off of that diet, which consists of largely processed foods, right. I think you're 80% of the way to living a much healthier life. I think what El nutrition is doing is really trying to optimize that even further through their fasting mimicking technology, through some of their food as medicine approaches targeting different chronic diseases and other diseases. I think it's really interesting to hear some of the supporting data that Joseph talked about and just their overall approach, because I think it's a big differentiator in terms of the supporting scientific evidence for what they're doing.

50:50
Neil Littman (host)
It's not just another supplement company. They're really doing things in a much more rigorous scientific way.

50:56
Danny Levine (producer)
As I was listening to him talk, it really is remarkable how the medical establishment doesn't do more to incorporate food in a more fundamental way to treatment. Why do you think that is?

51:09
Neil Littman (host)
It's mindboggling to me as well, but I don't think this is something that is really taught in medical school. Right. You heard us open the conversation about what Joseph calls the sick care system. Much of our healthcare system is geared toward treating disease when someone is already sick and already has that disease, as opposed to preventative medicine and helping people stay healthy and not need to eventually go on drugs to treat disease. I think in many ways medicine is geared toward treating the sick, not helping people stay healthy. I think there in many ways should be more of a curriculum in medical schools to talk about diet and the impact that diet has on health style and also the ability to reverse disease.

52:00
Danny Levine (producer)
How well understood are the biological benefits of fasting and el nutrition ability to mimic those effects?

52:10
Neil Littman (host)
Based on this conversation, I think there's a ton of supporting evidence and just based on what I know. Heading into this conversation, you heard Joseph talk about autophagy and the impact of putting your body into a phasomemimic state triggers that specific cellular state that helps to clear out what are called the senescent cells, which are typically referred to as zombie cells. They're unique in that they aren't multiplying, but also don't die off when they should. If you clean those cells out, I think that promotes what Joseph called metabolic flexibility, which is a term that I hadn't necessarily heard before, but which I think is really appropriate. I think there's a ton of underlying supporting data for this. I think the key is not necessarily that people don't know that diet is a major contributing factor to overall health, is making sure that people stick with a certain diet.

53:06
Neil Littman (host)
I think Alnutri has a pretty good program and a pretty good approach to help those of us who are healthy and hopefully can remain healthy, and also to help people who are sick and need this to try to combat or reverse a chronic disease that they may be suffering from.

53:25
Danny Levine (producer)
What do you make of the company's efforts to bring clinical trials into what it's doing?

53:30
Neil Littman (host)
I mean, to me, that's their single biggest differentiator as a company, right? Their ability to conduct randomized controlled clinical trials to generate supporting clinical data, to me is the key differentiator for them, right? I mean, the RCTs are the gold standard for how new drugs and therapies are approved. If you really want to consider food as medicine, you better come up with the same type of standards that people use to judge the effectiveness and safety of LVA, traditional drug or therapeutic. And that's exactly what they're doing.

54:01
Danny Levine (producer)
There are a number of metabolic conditions where people can't eat normal foods, things like fetal Cannonia, and it's difficult to get payers to reimburse for medical foods. One of the things Joseph said that really caught my attention was the ability of a nutrition to get reimbursement for its products from Payers. What does that tell you?

54:31
Neil Littman (host)
I think that's another huge differentiator and Danny that is directly tied with the clinical evidence that they have for their approach. Without conducting rigorous clinical trials to generate the data, there is no way that an insurance company would reimburse their products. To me those two are fundamentally tied together. That's a game changer I think not just for the company but for patients. You heard Joseph talk about some of the reimbursement that they have for their different products ranging from 100% to 50% reimbursement, right? I mean I think that is just a major point of differentiation for the company. I think it's a major benefit to consumers as well and patients in general. Well, until next time, thanks Danny.

55:24
Danny Levine (producer)
Thanks for listening.

55:25
Speaker 1
The Biobge podcast is a product of Bioburging, an investment platform that funds visionary entrepreneurs with the aim of transforming healthcare. Bioberg provides access and enables everyone to invest in highly vetted healthcare startups on the cutting edge of innovation from family offices and registered investment advisors to accredited and nonaccredited individuals. To learn more, go Neil bioverge.com this podcast is produced for Bioburg by the Levine Community. Music for this podcast is provided courtesy.

56:02
Neil Littman (host)
The Jonah Levine Collect.

56:04
Speaker 1
All opinions expressed in this podcast by participants are solely their opinions do not reflect the opinions of Biobridging or its affiliate. The participants opinions are based upon information they consider reliable. Neither BioBridge or its affiliates warranted completeness or accuracy and it should not be relied on. Its nothing contained in accompanying this podcast shall be construed as an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy or a recommendation to purchase any secure by BioBrick, its portfolio companies or any third party past performance is not indicative of future results.