What are your thoughts on ProLon therapy, i.e., fasting with minimal calories for five days?

We do use [the] Fasting Mimicking Diet. I don’t love the idea of packaged foods even when they’re healthy packaged foods, so we’ve kind of reverse engineered the macronutrient ratios for that and we’ve created a whole recipe book to help patients create their own Fasting Mimicking Diet. I think it’s one tool in the bag of fasting approaches that can be helpful. I have some patients who really prefer that to doing a complete fast or even doing intermittent fasting, so we will use it, and I think there is some benefit, but I also think that some of that benefit has been overstated. There’s not that much research in humans. Most of it’s been done in animals, and while it definitely makes sense on a lot of levels, I’d like to see more research. Generally, just eating less and taking time off [from] eating is helpful for the body, no matter how you do it.