The fasting-mimicking diet was developed to achieve effects equivalent to water-only fasting on IGF-1, IGFBP-1, ketone bodies, and glucose.

“So, it's not just about difficulty, it's also about safety. And so, when we first started with the fasting in cancer patients, basically the patients didn't want to do it, and the doctors didn't want to do it, so it's really a struggle. And it took us forever here at the Norris Cancer Center, our own University, to get 18 patients to go through it, it took us like five or six years. So, it was very difficult. And then, we started asking people, "What if we give you a fasting-mimicking diet?" And we started asking doctors, "What if we give patients a box, and it has all the foods that they need?" So, it's more of a medicine, right? You just hand over to the patient a medicine. And then, everything turned around, so people were much more likely to do it, they felt like...”

“And then I think they gave us an opportunity and the motivation to look for a fasting-mimicking diet, so a diet that works as well as fasting, but allows patients to eat. And this was funded by the National Cancer Institute first, and then by the National Institute on Aging. And so it's of course exploring all these understanding, all the understanding of the connection between let's say amino acids and TOR and IGF-1, sugars or certain sugars, and PKA actually we'd shown that, as we had shown for yeast, we now shown in mammalian cells that glucose levels activate PKA, and so that's part of the...that's a lot of what went into the development of a diet that can nourish the patient and yet have effects on IGF-1, IGFBP-1, ketone bodies, and glucose that is equivalent to that of water-only fasting.”