Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
A podcast about practices to promote healthy lives featuring experts, businesses, and clients: we gather to share our stories about success, failure, exploration, and so much more. Our subscription episodes feature some personal and vulnerable, real-life stories that are sensitive to some of the general public.
Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
Plant-Forward Eating and the Science of Cellular Aging with Melanie Murphy Richter
Dietitian Melanie Murphy Richter takes us on a journey through the fascinating connections between gut health, intuition, and longevity in this enlightening conversation. Recognized as the 2023 Young Dietitian of the Year, Melanie shares how her personal battle with IBS became the catalyst for her career transformation and passion for holistic nutrition.
The concept of "body literacy" emerges as a powerful framework—learning to read and respond to your body's signals rather than relying solely on external expertise. As Melanie explains, "We rely on other people to tell us what's wrong or how to fix it," but with practice, we can develop remarkable awareness of our own needs. This self-knowledge becomes the foundation for making aligned choices not just about food, but in relationships, career paths, and overall life direction.
Diving into the science of longevity, Melanie breaks down why plant-forward eating supports cellular health, highlighting the dramatic difference between our ancestors' fiber intake (over 100 grams daily) and modern Americans' meager 20 grams. She illuminates how different protein sources affect our nutrient-sensing pathways—IGF-1, mTOR, and PKA—and their influence on cellular aging and disease risk.
Perhaps most fascinating is her explanation of the fasting mimicking diet developed by Dr. Walter Longo, which allows people to experience the powerful cellular rejuvenation benefits of fasting while still consuming food. This breakthrough approach has particular significance for cancer patients and others with chronic conditions who might benefit from fasting's effects but cannot safely undertake traditional water fasting.
Whether you're navigating a health challenge, exploring longevity practices, or simply seeking to optimize your wellbeing, this episode offers practical wisdom for becoming your own best health advocate. As host Joe Grumbine reminds us, "You are the medicine, and all the things that we put into the body unlock the medicinal powers that your body already has."
Ready to transform your relationship with food, gut health, and intuition? Subscribe now and join us on this journey toward vibrant, long-lasting wellness.
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Hello and welcome back to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine, and today we have a very special guest and her name is Melanie Murphy Richter and she's a Dynamic Registered Dietitian. Nutritionalist and I had to say that slow and carefully because there's a lot of words there nutritionalist and I had to say that slow and carefully because there's a lot of words there. And she's also the 2023 recognized Young Dietitian of the Year by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. As Director of Communications and Medical Science Educator at El Nutra, she drives the company's mission to promote health through evidence-based nutrition. Melanie is also a graduate instructor at UC Irvine where she mentors future healthcare professionals. Founder of Holistic Ritual, and she combines science-backed nutrition with holistic healing. She's been featured in Forbes, usa Today, men's Health and more Well. That's quite an intro. Melanie, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, joe. It's a pleasure to be here, happy to have this combo with you.
Speaker 1:Well, this is good. I come from a place where all the things I learned I just learned by doing and trying and reading and all the old-fashioned ways, and had a few teachers along the way. But you jumped in and you got into the classic educational side of things. I like that. That means people are being taught and learning some things aside from what gets handed to us on a plate through media. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what brought you to this line?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's funny you say that, because even though I am traditionally trained as a dietitian and I have my degree in that world, there's so much that we don't learn in going to dietetic school. So I feel like I started my second round of dietetic exploration once I graduated and did a lot of self-learning and training on my own through different institutes and things like that. But dietetics is my second life. I was originally in healthcare PR for about 10 years prior to this, and it's an interesting part of my story because at the time I was, uh, suffering from really bad IBS, um, irritable bowel syndrome. I was really unhappy, even though I was super successful in this other line of work. I was miserable, didn't like it.
Speaker 2:I was holding onto lots of inflammatory weight and I remember waking up one day and thinking you know, I simply can't live my life this way and I was like what, what do I love? What lights me up, what brings me passion? And food has always, since I was a little girl, food and nutrition have been. I've always been fascinated by how food can impact your ability to be well, to also to it can impact your body in so many different ways, and I've always been fascinated by that, so I decided to go get my master's. I was like I'm quitting everything, I'm doing something completely different, and went to go get my master's.
Speaker 2:I have um. I wanted to go to an integrated school that was a more um, holistic, if you will, in terms of what, how, what types of modalities they teach, and and um. University of Southern California has a um, the one and only longevity Institute in the U S, Dr Walter Longo, originally founded by him and um. So I went. Now I have my master's degree in longevity and health span from um USC Um, and since I've graduated, I've I've kind of specialized in both gut health as a root for so many different chronic diseases, and so most of my patients, even if they come with non-gut-related, traditional gut-related symptoms, the gut is where I start with most of my patients and I've I've I would say. Longevity is also my main, my other main focus in my world and helping people to live in healthy bodies for as long as humanly possible.
Speaker 1:Well, you've tapped into some very powerful areas of the health world. First of all, food. You know, in just about any tradition that is health related would recognize food as the first medicine. And you know it affects everything you do. It affects your health, it affects your lack of health, it affects your sleep, it affects your stress levels, your inflammation, your cortisol, everything. And so as you get to understand that, you realize that's all tied up.
Speaker 1:And then, fairly recently, in the last maybe 10 years, the importance of gut health has really come to light. And well, guess what? The gut deals with Food. And then again, in the last probably 10 years, longevity has become sort of in and I think, as all these boomers are getting older, they're the ones with the money. They're like, hey, why don't we live longer? And they're putting sponsoring, figuring out how to, how to make this stuff happen, and people are jumping in and really digging deep. Technology is helping. When I started studying herbs, it was 40 years ago. There was no computers, so I had to go to used bookstores and buy old books and read them and compare them to all the other books and none of them agreed with each other and I had to sort of find my way the old-fashioned way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Nowadays you can look at peer-reviewed studies and you can see this person did all this work and I can just scoop the cherry off of it. And that person did all this work no-transcript.
Speaker 2:They're healthy.
Speaker 2:I know it's, it's crazy, because I I, you know, I know, having gone through my experience with IBS and really reaching a pretty deep low in my health many years ago.
Speaker 2:I consider it such a gift though, because I don't think that I would have made change had I not had this really catastrophic health experience. I thank my lucky stars because now I know what 100% feels like, and I don't know that I would have gotten there had I not, you know, taken this harder path, but I the reason this is so fascinating is that I, you know, we're getting, we're in the longevity in world where we're living longer lives, because, you know, medicine has helped to keep us alive longer, but we're not living in healthier bodies for those years. And that's like who wants that? Who wants to live longer in a body that can't, you know, get up or that aches and pains, and you know, that's it. Just it doesn't. It doesn't make sense to me that we, that our focus shouldn't be on health span and our the ability to live in a really healthy body until the day we die. So that that's kind of my my, of my inroads into this world.
Speaker 1:I like it. Well, I think we all have a potential and it's funny that all the different guests that I have always try to kind of find what got them here and many, many times, a similar story to yours. Yours is the first I've heard with IBS, but I know people that have gone through Ibs. It's brutal and it's connected to the gut, it's connected to nutrition, it's connected to all those things you know.
Speaker 1:Less than a year ago, I was diagnosed with a very aggressive cancer that almost took my life, and I got hit with this giant wake-up call and the first doctor I went to see told me he goes well, you're so healthy, that giant tumor sticking out of your neck's probably not cancer, and I said, oh good. And so that sent me down a bad road, just by listening to a doctor and believing my body was going to fix itself instead of, you know, really figuring out. But here I am. You wouldn't be able to tell, aside from my bald head, that anything might be off, and I've. I dedicated all my energy to it, and now a big part of this podcast is about teaching people how to find their own answers, and that's part of what you're here for is to share the tools. It's not that what I did will help you the way it helped me, but if you go about it the way I did it and treat it the way I did, maybe you can find similar type answers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for sharing that.
Speaker 2:I think what you're tapping into is an element of what I teach quite a lot in my practice with my patients, just in general, is this concept of body literacy that a lot of a lot of us are and not to say that you weren't body literate, but perhaps had you yeah, I was like not had you known the right, the nuances of how your body was feeling in that moment, or? Um, there's a lot that we don't. We rely on other people to tell us what's wrong or or how to fix it, and I feel very impassioned that you know, with some cognizant awareness and practice, we can get very good at understanding on our own what our bodies need and how to get it, whether it be from food or from maybe we do then know okay, I need outside help and sources for this, but body literacy is a big element of what I Well, a big part of my message is that you are the medicine, and all the things that we put into the body unlock the medicinal powers that your body already has.
Speaker 1:And you're the teacher, you're the doctor. You have to advocate for your own health because nobody feels what you feel. Nobody knows, even if you have a good doctor who listens to you and you tell them everything you think of. You forgot something. But if you learn to pay attention to yourself and really take stock of where am I today, how was I when I felt this way or that way, and really start paying attention, well then all of a sudden you're like you can get to a pretty good place pretty quick.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, exactly. Well, I'm glad to hear you're hopefully on the other side of things.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, you see where I was.
Speaker 2:What a strange gift, but a gift in and of itself.
Speaker 1:I tell people that all the time it's like the most crazy, unexpected, uh, unwanted to begin with, and I certainly wouldn't want to do it again. But what I've gotten from it, I would never. I would never take it back. Yeah, yeah, community, I've built. Understanding I've built, I have an empathy that I never had. There's all these things that I can help people in a way that you know. I don't have any degrees, but I don't need them for what I do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, that's beautiful. I'm glad to hear it. We need more. We need more of us out in there. Exactly we come in all cheap Soldiers on the ground Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, so tell me about your practice and tell me about what you're doing today.
Speaker 2:Sure, I mean I do. I think I've hit on some really important ones. But body literacy is a really big component of what I do. I intersect in the world of gut intuition, which I like to preface by talking about how we have a spiritual intuition. That kind of also lives in our gut, and when our gut isn't functioning properly, our intuition is not as easily. We can't read our body as well. So it loops into the body literacy that I teach. But it also combines what I do with gut health and gut healing.
Speaker 2:So I work with a lot of patients that have autoimmune conditions, anxiety, depression.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I work with a span of different people, but I would say most of it's helping to restore people's physical gut so that their gut intuition and their intuition and their ability to make decisions that are healthy for them in the rest of their lives whether that be with relationships with you know, career paths, things like that are also aligned to what they want to do, because you know a lot of what.
Speaker 2:I was just having a wonderful conversation with a friend of mine yesterday about you know, when you start down a healing path, you know a lot of people do start, I think, with their body, with their, with you know food or diet, and you start to heal this one element of your life and then you realize, oh shoot, I'm actually really unhappy at my job and that's been causing like such inflammation in my body and such you know anxiety that's now impeding my ability to continue down this path. Right, you start to kind of have you have to cut through all of the different elements of your life that are not aligned or not serving you. So I work kind of at that juncture in people's lives where you know your physical body and your life path are needing to meet at the center, and usually that that begins in the gut for me and how I practice my patients.
Speaker 1:So, in looking through some of the notes that I have, I am very aware of in the last 10 years or so at least.
Speaker 1:I mean you know it's been going on forever since the Back to Eden books or whatever but there have become these ways of eating that are touted as being very healing and I see that you've touched on several of them.
Speaker 1:But the problem that I see is you have people from widely varying spectrums of influence bringing out widely varying points and maybe having validity for certain groups, and I know people that are just adamant about the carnivore diet and I know people that are adamant about the keto diet and I know people I see you got into fasting, mimicking and fasting, intermittent fasting, and that was a big part of my journey. That was instrumental in my way to health. But I learned, for somebody who has cancer, the keto diet, which was pretty much where I was at that, took me from being 50 pounds overweight to a healthy point where my doctor thought I didn't have cancer with a giant lump sticking out of my neck because I was just so darn healthy for a 58-year-old guy told me that you know, like you were saying, you can fix parts of your body dramatically while still leaving parts completely unaligned or unserviced.
Speaker 1:And I learned, you know, with dealing with cancer, that the plant-based diet is instrumental in a healing journey and, combined with many different things, you know people think, oh, you can't have sugar. But it turns out if you eat whole fruit as a primary food source and you limit your protein dramatically, there's a huge thing that happens. And I believe I know a guy who was a good friend of mine, I've known since high school and he was in a bad injury and ended up, you know, being very overweight. But he always worked out. He was a you know gym rat and even though his knees, legs were all messed up, he'd always worked out. He was a you know gym rat and even though his knees, legs were all messed up, he'd always get out there and pump that iron.
Speaker 1:And eventually he found this carnivore diet and kind of started out as a keto thing and he switched over to the carnivore thing and he lost a ton of weight and I, you know he tried to hand that to me while I was dealing with my thing, after I had already learned what I learned. I'm like, dude, it might work for you but it's definitely not for me. The keto thing helped me lose a lot of weight. I cut out all the sugar, I cut out all the bread, the carbs, and I ate a lot of healthy fats and protein. Intermittent fasting was huge. We can get into that in a bit, but just the source of food. So tell me, where do you come from with that? It sounds like you're very strong into the vegan side of things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, this is this is. You've touched on so many really important things. I, I I will say before I dive into what I my thoughts on your comment is how emotionally tied people are to their food, their food choices.
Speaker 1:It's almost political you know, like you know, the hardest things I did was give up my meat and fish. I mean, I even had a guy who told me what I needed to know months before I accepted it. I was just like no, I know I'm-.
Speaker 2:This is like part of my identity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm not going to give that up. And then when you learn the things you learn, you're like, well, what do you want?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I do like to preface it with that, because I need people to check themselves sometimes and they get really emotionally tied to like, oh well, I'm not going to listen to this person anymore because they're saying things that I don't you know, fundamentally don't believe. I have, you know, harnessed my line of work in the longevity space and it's important to understand that longevity to me when you because that word is thrown around all the time like longevity, longevity, but what do you mean? What I mean by longevity is that I want my body to be functioning at the best possible place when I am chronologically very old, right, like I want my cells to be functioning younger than my chronological age. That's what I mean. That's going to be different than you know, being in a really chiseled, you know, body that it can, you know, has an eight pack. That might look different. You know, it doesn't have to be different, but it might look different for somebody with different health goals. But so I need to be very clear about what I mean From a longevity perspective.
Speaker 2:There is a way of eating that has been studied and researched and has evidence behind it that supports cellular health and reducing your biological age, which is the age of your cells and ultimately that is what healthspan is is reducing the age of your cells, and that's going to be different than the age on your license or on your birth certificate, right? And that kind of composition is what we call the longevity diet, which is also, you know, coined by Dr Walter Longo, but plant-based, plant-forward eating. And I don't want to say plant-based because it doesn't mean that animal products don't have a place in a healthy lifestyle, but the emphasis isn't on animals. So, mostly in the United States, especially in Western culture, we have made animal products meat, milk, yogurts, cheese as the centerpiece of our plate, when it really should be a supplement to our diet.
Speaker 1:So, yeah.
Speaker 2:So plant forward eating is really critical to living a long time, and part of that is twofold. One, the fiber component. Plant-based, plant-based foods have a ton of fiber and when we have fiber is the prebiotic food that are the those gut microbes in our, in our, in our gut eat to keep them alive. And if we don't keep, if we keep supplementing with probiotics but then go and eat a carnivore diet and aren't feeding them fiber, you're not going to be. You're basically planting flowers and letting them die outside. That's not. It doesn't help keep them alive. So fiber is critical and our early human ancestors, the way that we evolved, was by eating little bits of a lot of different plants we used to consume Whatever we could find we used to consume upwards of a 100 grams of fiber a day easily. That's how we evolved and now most of us are struggling to get 20 grams of fiber a day from like the standard American diet. So that's the first key. But you brought up a really, really, and I'm happy. I don't even have to convince you because you already know, already know.
Speaker 2:But the other component to plant forward eating is staying below, and this is I'm going to try to explain this in a way that's not so heady. But when you are trying to keep your cells younger, you want to make sure that the nutrient sensing pathways in your body and we have three main nutrient sensing pathways in our body and we have three main nutrient sensing pathways in our body we have IGF-1, mtor and PKA. Igf-1, I think, is probably the most popular. People probably know that one from eating carbohydrates and proteins and things. But if you stay below, if you don't trigger those pathways in your body, your cells will not grow. So, basically, those nutrient sensing pathways are growth pathways.
Speaker 2:And if you don't have anywhere for growth to go and I'll give you an example so let's say you're eating 150 grams of protein and all you're doing for a workout is like briskly walking or you're you know you're not, you're not really growing your muscles at all, triggering eating a hundred grams of protein, which which is will trigger the IGF-1 and mTOR pathways, the two of the nutrient sensing pathways in our body. If you eat all that protein and you don't have to grow anything, you're not growing muscles, you're not growing a brain, you're not doing any of that. You're still going to grow something and growth is going to age. It's going to age your cells faster, that's that's essentially what's happening here, so um cancer cells work with the mTOR pathway.
Speaker 1:That's the thing that I don't. You know. That comes up all the time.
Speaker 2:Yep, so I, I work, I'm, I'm, uh'm not only the director of communications, but I'm a medical science educator at Alnutra. And Alnutra is a leading longevity science company and we have upwards of 25 years of research and development, over 47 clinical trials, of which a third of those are, if not more, in human trials. Looking all at these nutrient-sensing pathways and their impact, specifically how fasting can impact them. But you know also how protein impacts them and glucose impacts them, accelerate those nutrient sensing pathways faster than plant-based sources of protein, which is really important to note, because when you talk about low protein.
Speaker 1:It's important to remember because that really triggers people. They're like what do you mean?
Speaker 2:I'm not going to do protein. You go to the store and you see protein everywhere.
Speaker 1:Oh, and it's having a heyday right now.
Speaker 2:Whoa, oh yeah Whoa. Everyone is eating way too much, but the story here is that you do need amino acids and protein for almost every single process in your body, so there is a reason why people are so obsessed with it. It is so important. It's right behind water. Protein is used for just about everything that our body needs, so there's a reason why it's important to have, and you need to get, adequate sources of protein.
Speaker 1:But your body recycles protein at an amazing rate. All those amino acids they get taken apart, put back together.
Speaker 2:Our body is highly, highly resourceful, for sure. But if you're not, if you, if you're not utilizing it, it's going to go either to it's going to get stored on your body as fat, or it's going, and or it's going to age your cells and and all of that is linked to higher disease risk, you know, higher cancer risk, accelerated aging, which you know again, all all of which is what we're trying to avoid when we're talking about, you know, living in a long, healthy body. So you know, plant-based proteins are a great place to be in this happy medium to help you get enough protein, but not to accelerate that aging, the aging pathway faster. Plant-based sources of proteins are incredible for that, and they also provide a ton of fiber. So plant forward eating is one of the cornerstones, fundamental cornerstones, of living a long and healthy life and actually preventing disease.
Speaker 1:I couldn't agree more. Well, you know, this is a spot where I recognize that we have a lot more we could talk about Forever. I would like to invite you to come back and continue this conversation. We didn't talk about water, we didn't talk about fasting, we didn't talk about so many things, but I would like a little more about L-neutra and just how that that works.
Speaker 2:Sure, and I I'll. So. One of the one of the pillars of the longevity zones, the blue zones around the world, is the fact that they all fast, they all have, they all follow yearly periodic fasting. And our founder, dr Walter Longo, is the godfather of this space. He, he was an oncology researcher for many years and was studying cancer patients actually and researching cancer patients and had found you know, over almost 30 years ago now that those who fasted in and around chemotherapy actually did better with chemotherapy, like the chemotherapy worked better in their body and also they recovered faster after chemotherapy, preaching my gospel, that's two days or one day after.
Speaker 1:There's published papers all over the place. Yep Living proof.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, and he actually has since founded a nonprofit organization specifically on cancer. So he knows this very well. But one of his research questions at the time and this is why El Nutro was born um is that, you know, oncology patients um tend to be. They're the most immunocompromised of our population and they already struggle to eat.
Speaker 2:It's a lot of them struggle to eat and you're not, you know there's there also is this balance of we don't want them to fast we are already struggling to get enough food Like we don't want you to also avoid and fast and that's also not good. So he had this research question. He's like okay, we know the power of fasting, this is clear. But for our most immunocompromised people, what are? What are we going to do for them? How can we, how can we make sure that they get the benefits of autophagy, which is that cellular rejuvenation that happens during fasting, that's so powerful? How can we help them activate that pathway without avoiding food altogether?
Speaker 2:So in came the fasting mimicking diet, which is, which is essentially a um a five yeah, it's a five day program.
Speaker 2:That um is we took. It took us many, many years to figure this out, but there's a very precise ratio of macro to micronutrients that is enveloped within the program. So each day is a very specific, unique amount of macronutrients. So you get to eat food, but it stays below those nutrient-sensing pathways that we talked about before. But it stays below those nutrient sensing pathways that we talked about before, so that you still activate autophagy on day three, four, five, six and seven. But you'd get food and you get nourished, and so it's a lot easier and safer for most people, because water fasting is not necessarily safe for everybody. No-transcript. Obviously you'll see benefits after one cycle, but the benefits compound the more that you do it.
Speaker 1:Every practice change, you know it takes your body, shows you what it did.
Speaker 2:And it's and it takes a second. I mean especially for us adults like, we have a lot of toxins and sludge and things that we have. It's hard to work all that out in one cycle but you, you can over time. Um, but essentially, uh, now L-nutra has two different, two different arms we have we have, um, the, the main fasting mimicking diet, Prolon, that most people know and love, that's been on the commercial market for the past nine years, almost 10 years, um, that you can purchase on your own.
Speaker 2:You know people use it for weight loss, for metabolic health, it's wonderful for helping to, you know, reset your relationship with food too. There's lots of, like you know, anecdotal evidence to support that. You know, decreased sugar cravings and improved self-confidence and all these really incredible things. And we've, since about a year, almost a year and a half ago, we you're on diabetes medications, heart, you know, cholesterol, blood pressure medications. We help to monitor that even help to reduce medications over time, include laboratory reviews. So it's their comprehensive programs that are helping to address specifically metabolic conditions. But we, in down the pipeline, we're working on cancer too. We're launching our cancer program here in the next few years.
Speaker 1:So we're busy. We're busy, love it. Well, it's been amazing hearing about this. You know the fact that the things that you're talking about are things I discovered. You know on your own that worked for me, and I tell people about these things all the time, and all I have is you know what I used to be and I can show you what I am now and get people to take me for.
Speaker 2:You're a walking proof. It's incredible.
Speaker 1:Well, Melanie, I would love to definitely continue this conversation in the future. As always, I'd like to give you a chance to let people know how they can reach you and any final parting shot you want to share with us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. If any of you are interested in learning about the fasting mimicking diet, which is truly something magical and science-backed and incredible, you can visit ProlonLifecom, which is P-R-O-L-O-N-L-I-F-Ecom. You can look at the Fast and the Moving Game Diet there. You can follow us at Prolon on Instagram, facebook and all over. If you're looking for me personally, I'm on Instagram at healthandmelness H-E-A-L-T-H-N-M-E-L-L-N-E-S-S, and I like to you know it's not salesy over there. It's a lot of education, empowerment and lots of tools and tips for living your best and most optimized life.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. Well, I thank you so much for sharing your time with us and your wisdom, and this has been another episode of the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, joe Grumbine, and we thank you for your support and we will see.
