Fasting mimicking diet reduces biological age by 2.5 years in 3 months

What's the news: Fasting mimicking diet reduces biological age by 2.5 years.

Why should we believe it: This news is based on a new paper published this past Tuesday by scientists at Yale and USC. The scientists took 100 healthy participants, aged 18 to 70. They split them up into two groups.

One group, the control, ate a normal diet. The second group followed the fasting mimicking diet (FMD) for 5 days a month. They repeated this for three months, and ate a normal diet otherwise. Results:

• The FMD group showed reduced insulin resistance and other prediabetes markers

• The FMD group had lower fat in the liver and improved indicators of immune system age

• The FMD group lowered their biological age by 2.5 years, independent of weight loss

Why this is a big deal: FMD is a simple 5-day diet. It's designed to provide the benefits of fasting without completely restricting calories. Previously, scientists showed that FMD reduces body fat, blood pressure, and cancer risk.

The current study adds a new data point. It shows us that FMD actually reduces biological age, independent of weight loss.

So what specifically can you do now: If you want to try FMD, there are two ways to proceed. One is to order an all-in-one meal package from L-Nutra. That's a company started by Valter Longo, the USC professor who invented FMD.

The other way is simply to create your own fasting-mimicking diet. The principles behind it are described in detail in chapter 6 of Longo's 2018 book, The Longevity Diet.