Interview with Leslie Dennis Taylor

On Diabetes, Fasting, Migraines, Autophagy, Diets, Cancer and much more.

I’m very interested in fasting at the moment.

It is clearly a healing modality, and it’s free, which is why there isn’t any “Fasting Cartel” promoting it.

My work on fasting so far is:

• Fasting

• Starving to heal in Siberia

• The Phoenix Protocol (Dry Fasting)

During this journey I came across the work of Leslie Dennis Taylor, and I’m very grateful that she agreed to this interview.

I got a lot out of this exchange and I’m confident you will too.

With thanks to Leslie Dennis Taylor.

Fast Well | Feast Well | Leslie Dennis Taylor | Substack

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1. Leslie, can you please tell us about your background and what led you to become so passionate about health and nutrition?

I’ve had an intense passion for science since I was a kid but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I directed all that passion toward health and nutrition. My interest in nutrition was piqued when my dad reversed his type 2 diabetes of 30 years by reading and following the book The Diabetes Code by Dr. Jason Fung. Why had no doctor in 30 years told my dad about the cure? Did the medical profession not know the cure to a disease that affects 1 in 2 Americans? My dad would have followed Dr. Fung’s advice earlier had he known what to do. Unfortunately, the damage done to his heart from the decades of diabetes was permanent, and he passed from heart failure in 2022.

2. You've mentioned experiencing a dramatic health transformation. Could you share more about your personal journey and how it shaped your current perspective?

This same year my dad passed, I found out I was prediabetic, and I was the exact age he was when he was diagnosed with diabetes. So I began intermittent fasting (as he had), and I reversed my prediabetes and lost 45 lbs. Then my migraines of two decades and a chronic bladder pain disorder I had for 2 1/2 decades called interstitial cystitis both just went away. Now I was really intrigued. How did something as simple as fasting cure all my health problems? I was suddenly on a mission to find out.

3. In your writing, you often discuss the science behind health and nutrition. How did you develop your interest in these scientific aspects?

My intense interest in all things health is rooted in my desire to know everything I can about this incredible human body, and its capacity for self-healing. What is it capable of when we fix our metabolic dysfunction? What if all disease is caused merely by toxins, nutritional deficiencies, and metabolic dysfunction? What can happen when we tap into ancient healing strategies such as fasting to allow our bodies to detox from our modern bombardment with foreign chemicals, endocrine disruptors, heavy metals, and Frankenfoods?

I don’t yet fully know all the answers to these questions but the more I learn, the more inspired I am to continue digging. This is such an exciting time to be alive because, when you know where to look, there is incredible research available. I love reading as much about health as I possibly can, and then synthesizing and assimilating it for my readers into something that is accessible, enjoyable to read, and most importantly, actionable.

I recently got a certification from The Nutrition Network in ketogenic therapies. This is an organization founded by Dr. Timothy Noakes out of South Africa. I picked this certification program because of the high caliber of instructors who also offer accredited certifications for healthcare professionals. I enjoyed receiving excellent instruction there in how to reverse metabolic dysfunction through low carb diets and fasting.

4. You've written about the relationship between fasting and insulin levels. Could you explain why you think insulin is so crucial to understand and how fasting affects it?

There were a few foundational books that I devoured when I first dove headfirst into my research, and they were The Diabetes Code and The Obesity Code by Fung, and Why We Get Sick by Ben Bikman. The key point to be gleaned from these three books is that insulin is a master hormone with over 200 functions in the body. Most people’s insulin levels are chronically elevated in response to 3 things: consumption of ultra processed foods, constant access to food resulting in eating every couple of hours, and reduced physical activity.

When insulin is chronically elevated, over 200 processes in the body are negatively affected leading to pathologies such as PCOS in women (which is a type of diabetes of the ovaries), diabetes, chronic inflammation, autoimmune disease, poor immune function, high blood pressure, heart disease, skin problems, cancer, and nearly every modern ailment.

Harvard professor and psychologist Dr. Chris Palmer has written extensively on the link between high insulin and mental health problems. He has healed dozens of people from schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, ADHD, etc just from healing insulin resistance from putting them into ketosis. His research fascinates me!

Fasting is the most powerful way to lower your fasting insulin level which is the amount of insulin present in your blood at all times regardless of what you eat. An ideal fasting insulin is between 2.0-3.0 with anything under 5 being decent. I have clients with fasting insulin levels 5 or even 10 times above ideal. Each time you fast, you drive your baseline insulin a little lower which means that fat stores will no longer be inaccessible but can be easily used. Gradually lowering insulin will reduce your risk for every chronic disease.

5. The concept of autophagy is central to many of your discussions. Could you explain in simple terms what autophagy is and why it's so important for health?

Oh man. The nerd in me just wants to corner people and talk autophagy all day long. But I usually practice self-restraint (usually). A Japanese scientist Ohsumi Yoshinori won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 2016 for his years of research into autophagy. Put simply, it’s the body’s innate recycling system. When you are low on fuel, your body takes damaged cellular parts, breaks them down, and remakes them into brand new parts. This dramatically upgrades your cells, and in return, whole organs which are made of cells.

But the catch is that autophagy can only occur when fuel is low because otherwise the body is too preoccupied with storing energy from food. The body cannot both store energy from food and break down energy in cells at the same time. This would be like you putting away groceries while also pulling food out of your deep freeze. You defrost food from your deep freeze only when you run out of groceries, otherwise you use what you have in the fridge. The body is no different. If you eat around the clock, the body never has a chance to recycle old cellular parts.

In past times, people naturally had lean times when they had less to eat and autophagy could be activated. With our packed grocery store shelves, over-stuffed pantry shelves, fridges, freezers, drive-thrus, gas stations, and treats everywhere we turn, we are a people in desperate need of autophagy.

The thing that makes me so excited about autophagy is that it’s entirely free: no pills or special food to buy. It actually saves you money and time as well, since you’ll be preparing less food.

6. You've talked about your experience with alternate-day fasting. How does this differ from other forms of intermittent fasting, and why did it work so well for you?

Alternate day fasting works well for those with hardcore insulin resistance. In my coaching practice, about 9 out of 10 clients can achieve their weight loss goals without doing something so hardcore. But occasionally, we have to bring out the big fasting guns.

Insulin resistance happens when your insulin has been elevated for so long that your cells are resistant, or partly deaf, to insulin’s signal. With alternate day fasting, you are doing two or possibly three 36 hour fasts per week. This gives the body a very long healing period where insulin can dramatically fall, and the cells can get a break from hearing insulin’s signal. Inflammation will dramatically decrease, and appetite will regulate because leptin resistance is also quickly healed.

It’s not an intervention that anyone practices long term; it’s just something to do for a few weeks or months to quickly reverse long term metabolic dysfunction in the body. Another similar therapy that I use with those who don’t want to fast that long or can’t fast that hard is to cut all carbs.

For example, I have client who was breastfeeding so could not fast (I never recommend fasting to anyone who’s pregnant, breastfeeding, or not yet an adult.) She had type 2 diabetes so I had her do the carnivore diet. In one month, she went from having fasting blood glucose numbers in the 150s and in the high 200s after meals (full blown diabetic numbers) to fasting glucose in the low 80s and after meal glucose readings around 120 (fully healed).

It takes some trial and error to find a fasting schedule and food plan that works for an individual’s unique situation. Some people need to be extremely strict for a while. Others having smashing results doing only 16:8 fasting, which means eating all food within 8 hours. For example, my husband lost 30 lbs, is now his college weight of 165 lbs at 6 feet tall, and brought his blood pressure down over 30 points and into normal range, and all he had to do was skip one meal a day. Meanwhile, I had to go without eating for 36 hours to get the same results as him. But that shows that we’re all different, and some of us need to push ourselves harder than others to overcome stubborn metabolic problems.

If you have a family history of diabetes, as I do, you might benefit from a hardcore intervention for a time.

7. Your writing often touches on the idea of "upgrading" the body through fasting and nutrition. What do you mean by this concept, and what are some of the most surprising upgrades you've experienced or heard about?

Sometimes when I’m researching something about the human body, I have to pinch myself because the magic on the human body reads just like a fairy tale. There are so many things about this amazing body that are actual magic.

Let me give you an example. Did you know that the pharmaceutical industry spends a combined $86 billion per year on the R &D of new drugs, yet they have never invented a drug that has anywhere near the anti-inflammatory healing effects of the simple ketone molecule that your liver makes when you are low on carbs?

You heard that right. Your own liver makes the most powerful medicine on earth. Although you can take ketones exogenously, the best way to keep them constant in your body is to make them yourself. Ketones stop seizures in two thirds of epileptics, they modulate the immune system of those with autoimmune diseases, they reduce inflammation, they calm the brain, and they are a signaling molecule that initiates powerful healing programs in the body—significantly more powerful than any drug. For example, a doctor named Matthew Phillips conducted a randomized controlled trial on Parkinson’s patients. The results were that the group on the keto diet saw dramatic improvements in every symptom after only 2 months of a ketogenic intervention. There is no drug that can do that.

8. You've discussed the potential of fasting to reverse conditions like Type 2 Diabetes. Can you elaborate on this and discuss any supporting evidence?

Dr. David Unwin in the UK has a great story. When a patient scolded him for the fact that she had to discover for herself how to reverse her diabetes, he changed the entire way he practices medicine. He has now put his 137^th patient into drug-free remission from diabetes. That’s 137 diabetics from just from one doctor’s small family practice! Now there’s some compelling evidence! (You can read more about his story here).

9. You've written about the potential of fasting to address autoimmune conditions. What have you learned about this connection?

I am continually amazed at the body’s ability to heal itself when you initiate pre-written healing programs. Intermittent fasting and the keto diet signals the body to heal itself. Ketones are signaling molecules that reduce inflammation and modulate gene expression in a way that no other substance on earth can.

Another way to initiate autoimmune healing is through the GAPS diet. Dr. Natasha McBride’s newest book, The Gut and Physiology Syndrome, is the highest quality research on the human body I have ever read, and I’ve read quite a lot. She has over 20 years of clinical experience of healing autoimmune disease by healing the gut.

One technique I use in my coaching practice that I learned from a researcher named Mary Ruddick is to put clients on a ketogenic version of GAPS (which is discussed in the McBride’s newest book.) In the most dire cases, I use carnivore GAPS. In less dire cases, we can use the GAPS principles but avoid oxalates and lectins. GAPS becomes ketogenic when you greatly increase the fat intake. For severe health problems, I have clients buy a keto meter and test often to make sure they are in ketosis. We aim for 1.5-2.0 mmol/dL of blood ketone levels for maximum healing.

10. The idea of fasting seems to go against much conventional dietary advice. How do you address skepticism or concerns about the safety of fasting?

Conventional dietary advice is fake news paid for by big food corporations who fund upwards of 20,000 nutritional observational studies per year that are so poorly designed they don’t even deserve to be called science. They are hypothesis-generating only, and mere epidemiological garbage. You can say anything with an observational study. They are banking on the fact that the public is too uneducated to see through their lies. Don’t let them confuse you! Fasting is a healing strategy dating back to Hippocrates. The Russians have used dry fasting for over a hundred years to heal intractable illnesses. There are many fasting clinics across Europe. In the late 1800s, a doctor named Edward Dewey used fasting to cure many ailments, and he wrote a book called The No Breakfast Plan and The Fasting Cure. Fasting is a tried and true healing modality practiced by every major world religion. However, I have quite a bit of skepticism and concerns about the safety of people NOT fasting!

11. You've discussed the concept of "clean fasting." Could you explain what this means and why it's important?

The body is much more intelligent than we give it credit for. This means that whenever the tongue tastes something sweet, the body immediately releases a small amount of insulin because it expects food. Insulin kicks you out of fat-burning mode and makes you feel ravenous. Clean fasting means no food flavors while fasting such as lemon in your water, stevia, mints, gum, La Croix, or herbal teas. Black coffee and black tea are fine because of the bitter flavor profile, but no milk or stevia or anything else in the coffee. Avoid even flavored black coffee such as Hazelnut, French vanilla, etc. Avoiding all flavors allows the body to go deep into fat burning mode and makes fasting easier.

12. You've written about the importance of organ meats in nutrition. How do you suggest people incorporate these into a modern diet?

I act like a big girl and fork-and-knife-it with a slab of organic, grass-fed beef liver sauteed in butter. Unfortunately, every other member of my household is less enthusiastic (i.e. won’t be in the same room with me while I’m eating it.)

Most of my clients are of the same culinary persuasion as my family. However, there is a very simple solution. I go to my local butcher, and he makes me up a special ground beef blend of any percentage of muscle meat and organs that I want. Since heart doesn’t have the strong taste that liver has, I do a higher percentage of heart. So I ask for about 50% muscle meat, 30% heart (it’s full of CoQ10!), and 20% a blend of liver and kidney. At first, I was only brave enough to use this ground beef to make taco meat, chili, spaghetti sauce, and other heavily spiced recipes. But then I got brave and started to use it even to make hamburgers, and my family is eating it.

You can also buy this renegade blend from Azure. Many local health food stores sell an organ blend. (I saw a meme the other day that said: “Wait a second, if that section is the ‘health food section,’ then what’s the rest of the store?”) You can also buy liver capsules to swallow but that’s somewhat cost prohibitive.

I always encourage people to at least try eating beef liver because you’d be surprised at how many people end up loving it. Some people enjoy liver pate.

13. You've discussed alternative treatments for cancer, particularly the use of fenbendazole. What can you tell us about that?

Last month, I was reading a great novel with my book group called A Tree Grow in Brooklyn, and it tells the story of immigrants who came to the U.S., and they couldn’t read. They thought they were buying land with money they had saved up for decades, and it turns out they were cheated out of their money because they couldn’t read the contract they were signing.

This amazing thing happened to me when I was between the ages of 5 and 6: I learned to read. That means that I am no longer at the mercy of the pharmaceutical industry to tell me what cures cancer. I can read for myself.

Why are people allowing an oncologist who makes up to 70% of his income on the sale of chemo drugs to tell them what poisons they should put in their body when we have access to reliable, high caliber research that tells us differently?

If you have cancer, it’s your body that has to suffer from the chemo. Don’t walk in and hold out your arm and let them juice you up with any old $100,000 patented money maker. You have options. If you’re scared out of your mind, visit an integrative oncologist to help you navigate the alternative world. Fear causes people to freeze up and not know how to consider their options logically. Don’t give way to fear.

Although there are hundreds of one-off anecdotes about how people cured their cancer in crazy ways, the evidence in favor of fenben goes way beyond far-fetched anecdotal evidence.

For example, in 2018, the journal Nature, which is one of the most prestigious medical journals in the entire world, published an article outlining the exact mechanisms by which fenben targets cancer titled: “Fenbendazole acts as a moderate microtubule destabilizing agent and causes cancer cell death by modulating multiple cellular pathways.” Did you hear that title: CANCER CELL DEATH. This isn’t someone’s blog. It’s the most prestigious scientific journal. And there’s only one reason why oncologists aren’t using fenben, and it’s not lack of evidence for its effectiveness; it’s $$$.

I don’t know what more evidence people need. There are incredible healing abounding stories  for nearly every kind of cancer, even incurable cancers such as Joe Tippens’.

Sometimes life gives you very hard decisions, and sometimes life gives you really easy decisions. Sometimes you have an equal number of pros and cons on each side, and that makes it really hard to decide what to choose. But other times, you have all pros on one side, and all cons on the other.

Fenben has fewer side effects than a Tylenol, is completely safe and non-toxic (as the above-referenced Nature article admits), costs next to nothing, and can cure many cancers deemed incurable by conventional methods.

Your second option is traditional chemo which is riddled with side effects, some of which can kill you, is insanely expensive, and in many cases doesn’t cure the cancer but causes it to come back stronger. All the pros are on one side, and all the cons are on the other side. The one consideration I didn’t mention is that one is backed by Big Cancer, and the other is not. So everything rides on how much you trust “the cancer system” to do you right.

14. You've discussed the work of Weston Price. What aspects of his research do you find most relevant to modern health issues?

I fell head-over-heals in love with Weston Price’s primary research in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration because the man was a nerd’s nerd. I respect that. He practiced the old scientific principles such as: a good scientist attempts to prove his own theories wrong.

The first time I came across his book, I was about to wrap it up for one of my married daughters who asked for it as a gift, but I decided to peek inside it first. I started reading, and then literally sat there for hours, riveted, reading it late into the night. The caliber of his research blew me away.

The chasm between the quality of Price’s research and the junk epidemiology fake science (funded by processed food companies) is the size of the Grand Canyon. The man visited 14 isolated people groups on 5 continents on his own dime in the 1930s when travel was not easy just to find out about nutrition. That’s one curious dude! (He might be my long lost cousin. JK) Meanwhile, the knuckleheads over at the Big Food-funded nutrition schools hand out one survey in four years asking people to write down how many eggs they age on average over the course of a week, in the last 4 years.

Here's a representation of modern nutrition research at its finest:

After being entirely disgusted with what passes for nutrition research today, reading Weston Price’s original work was like opening a treasure chest of information.

I wish everyone would read his book but I’ll summarize the cliff notes to whet everyone’s appetite:

1) Your teeth are an indicator of your overall health because teeth are just visible bones. Price found that deteriorated teeth were correlated with susceptibility to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. People whose teeth had not deteriorated had near perfect health with no infectious or chronic disease present.

He didn’t emphasize that the food eaten was breaking down the teeth, as in people eating a lot of sugar and carbs. Instead, Price believed that the teeth were weakened and susceptible to cavities from a lack of nutrition which made the teeth, the jaw, and all the bones in the body weak. Strong teeth would not break down even when carbs were eaten.

For many of the isolated people eating ancestral diets, he would find one or two small cavities for every 100 teeth he examined. These were people with no fluoride toothpaste or dental care of any kind. The genetically similar people living in cities eating a modern diet often had 40 or more cavities for every 100 teeth—40 times the cavities of those on their traditional diet.

2) Your body needs “fat soluble activators” to be able to utilize minerals for strong teeth, jaws, bones, and a robust immune system. It doesn’t matter how many minerals are in your diet; if you don’t have adequate amounts of vitamins A, D, and K, you will not be able to use the minerals in your food. These vitamins need to be obtained in food form along with their fatty acids. Supplementation of lab made forms does not work well with fat soluble vitamins. This is partly because we need the omega 3 fatty acids with the vitamins, and partly because of absorption problems when they are not in the food.

3) A, D, and K are a kind of trinity that work together. Dr. Chris Masterjohn did his post-doctoral research on this topic and confirmed Price’s findings. Everyone and his mother, whether into mainstream or natural medicine, may be supplementing with a lab-made vitamin D pill which possibly includes K2. This fad, which excludes a food form of vitamin A, completely ignores both the central point of Price’s research and Masterjohn’s. Please listen to this 5-minute clip where Masterjohn explains this Limited Hangout strategy.

4) Price found there were three nutritional patterns that provided excellent health. First, those who had access to exceptionally rich dairy products from cows who ate green, rapidly growing grass, such as the isolated Loetschental Valley in Switzerland. (This is also the diet that the Israelites in the Old Testament ate, first when in the promised land and then even in Egypt since Joseph settles them in the land of Goshen where there is rich grassland for their flocks and herds. They multiplied more rapidly than the Egyptians who it seems ate more grain. I’m open to the possibility that God supernaturally blessed them. However, God also works through creational means to effect his purposes.)

Second, people without access to rich dairy such as those living in the Outer Hebrides or the Eskimos, relied on seafood and especially fish livers to get their fat soluble vitamins A, D, and K. This research is how cod liver oil became well known.

And finally, those with access to neither dairy nor seafood and fish livers relied on vitamin rich organs of ruminants to get their “fat soluble activators.” The tribes of Native Americans living in Canada are an example of this. They valued the buffalo’s liver, adrenal glands, and the lining of the stomach which is exceptionally rich in vitamins. Hundreds of years of accumulated wisdom passed down had taught these people what foods were necessary to build strong bodies.

In all the tribes which exhibited such excellent bone health, resistance to tooth decay, strong jaw formation, resistance to infectious disease, and no chronic disease, all of them consumed a minimum of 10 times the vitamins A, D, and K that the average person in 1930 eating a modern diet consumed. Price had samples of food sent back to his lab from each place he visited, and he carefully analyzed the food for vitamin content and carefully recorded his findings. He then spent the rest of his life healing people in the US form various ailments by putting into practice what he learned. He tells those stories at the end of the book.

15. For readers who are inspired by your work, what's the best way for them to stay connected with your latest insights and recommendations?

I hope that readers will consider subscribing to my Substack Fast Well Feast Well. I also have two courses on there: an Intermittent Fasting Course, and a Health, Nutrition, and Chronic Disease Course. My fasting course walks you through how to fast, and my health course addresses diabetes, heart disease, nutrition, ketogenic therapies, etc. If readers are interested in my health or weight loss coaching, I offer a free 15-minute consultation through my website.

16. What excites you the most about what you do?

The success stories are what make everything I do worth doing. I have a very close friend whose husband has stage 4 colon cancer metastatic to the liver. His oncologist deemed him terminal but gave him 2 chemo drugs to possibly extend his life. While on the two drugs for several months, his cancer blood marker was in the 800s, then they dropped one of the drugs. Right after dropping a drug, they asked me to meet with them and explain the keto diet and fasting for cancer, which I did. After doing keto and intermittent fasting for 6 months, his numbers went from 800 to 30! Below 5 is considered remission—so he is almost in remission from the keto diet. His oncologist was floored and asked him to write down everything he was eating. The nurse also couldn’t believe the improvements.

I helped another older gentleman with lung cancer do the keto diet, and in 2 months he lost 43 lbs and reversed his diabetes of 10 years. He was not on chemo during those two months so the weight loss can’t be attributed to that. He is now in remission although the chemo he did prior to starting keto/fasting could have contributed, I just don’t know. I am continually amazed at the body’s ability to heal itself when you initiate these pre-written healing programs.

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