The application of a fasting-mimicking diet in periodontitis. A feasibility study

Twenty patients with periodontitis were randomly assigned to receive the first two steps of periodontal treatment alone while following their normal diet, or the same treatment plus one adjunctive 5-day course of a Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD). Blood and gingival crevicular fluid were sampled for inflammatory biomarkers, alongside clinical measures and patient-reported outcomes, at day 1, day 7 and three months after treatment. Food diaries were used to assess compliance. Nineteen patients completed the three-month follow-up.

The authors reported only minimal adverse events in the diet group, including nausea, fatigue, weakness and dizziness, with no differences in patient-reported outcomes between the groups. They reported a serum hs-CRP reduction at three months in the diet group that was not statistically significant compared with controls, and a trend toward lower gingival crevicular fluid levels of MMP-8, IL-6 and IL-1 beta after treatment. They described one cycle of the adjunctive diet as feasible, said it may modulate the inflammatory response, and said larger studies are needed to test that hypothesis.

This is a feasibility study in twenty patients, presented by the authors as a test of whether the approach can be delivered rather than of whether it works. The inflammatory differences reported were either not statistically significant or described as trends. Participants were patients with stage III to IV periodontitis undergoing dental treatment, not a general wellness population, and the study does not evaluate Prolon directly.