“Intermittent Fasting may bring heart health and other health benefits.”
Intermittent fasting can offer many health benefits. It can aid in weight loss, control diabetes and prevent many other health conditions, according to several medical experts.
The benefits are thought to result from a process called metabolic switching, which is when the body goes into a fasting state and begins using body fat instead of glucose to meet its energy needs, according to Consumers Reports.
Intermittent fasting helps preserve the body’s normal interplay between the hormone insulin and blood glucose, preventing insulin resistance (when the body doesn’t respond properly to it). Metabolic switching also signals the body to activate maintenance and repair systems, which aid in disease prevention.
Intermittent fasting is an eating plan that focuses more on when to eat than what to eat. And, more people are trying intermittent fasting due to its abundance of impressive health results from scientific studies, word of month and social media. Intermittent fasting has become the number one fasting technique and a popular weight loss tactic.
Fasting is voluntary and controlled period without food. Fasting, especially intermittent fasting, is for health, religious and spiritual reasons.
Eating cycles involve fasting for a period of time and eating for the rest. These periods can be aligned to a person’s lifestyle, dietary requirements or health conditions.
When You Eat Matter
It seems that regularly fasting can potentially improve your risk factors related to heart health. Although researchers aren’t sure why, at least one study has indicated that people who follow a fasting diet may have better heart health than people who don’t.
Regular fasting and better heart health may be linked to the way your body metabolizes cholesterol and sugar. Regular fasting can decrease your low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad,” cholesterol. It’s also thought that fasting may improve the way your body metabolizes sugar. This can reduce your risk of gaining weight and developing diabetes, which are both risk factors for heart disease.
More studies are needed to determine whether regular fasting can reduce your risk of heart disease. Most scientific evidence on fasting comes from animal, not human, studies. If you’re considering regular fasting, talk to your doctor about the pros and cons. Keep in mind that a heart-healthy diet and exercising regularly also can improve your heart health.
What you eat matters.
Many studies have shown that the types of food you eat affect your health. Additionally, scientists are beginning to understand that when you eat may also make a difference.
Throughout history, people have experienced periods when food was either scarce or completely lacking, says Dr. Valter Longo, an NIH-funded longevity researcher at the University of Southern California. “So, they were forced to fast,” he says.
But current technology “has shifted our eating patterns,” explains Dr. Vicki Catenacci, a nutrition researcher at the University of Colorado. “People now eat, on average, throughout a 14-hour period each day.”
Studies suggest that this constant food intake may lead to health problems and researchers have started looking at whether fasting can have potential health benefits for some people.
Intermittent Fasting
Many fasting diets mainly focus on the timing of when you can eat. These fasting diets are sometimes called “intermittent fasting.”
In intermittent fasting, you eat every day but only during a limited number of hours per day. Instead of eating three meals spread out during the day, you may only eat between a six- to eight-hour window each day and fast for the remaining sixteen to eighteen hour. For example, you might eat breakfast and lunch, but skip dinner.
The most popular intermittent fasting method is 16:8. This is a schedule that involves 16 hours of fasting and 8 hours of eating.
Other timed intermittent fasting similar to this include 12:12 and 14:10. The first number always indicates the hours you fast for. During fasting a person must not consume any food or calories. Calorie free drinks are allowed such as water, black coffee and tea.
Other methods include alternate day fasting. This is where a person fasts for 24 hours every other day or two days. For the other days a healthy nutritious diet should be consumed.
Another intermittent fasting method is 5:2. This involves eating healthy nutritious non-calorie restricting 5 days a week. The other 2 days a person should consume 600 calories or less.
But scientists don’t know much about what happens to your body when you fast. Most research has been done in cells and animals in the lab. That work has provided early clues as to how periods without food might affect the body.
Researchers have found that in some animals, certain fasting diets seem to protect against diabetes, heart disease, and cognitive decline. Fasting has even appeared to slowed the aging process and protected against cancer in some experiments.
“In mice, we’ve seen that one of the effects of fasting is to kill damaged cells, and then turn on stem cells,” explains Longo. Damaged cells can speed up aging and lead to cancer if they’re not destroyed. When stem cells are turned on, new healthy cells can replace the damaged cells.
Studies are starting to look at what happens in people. Early results have found that some types of fasting may have positive effects on aspects of health like blood sugar control, blood pressure, and inflammation. But fasting can also cause weight loss. So researchers are studying whether the beneficial changes seen in the body are side effects of the weight loss or the fasting process itself.
Body Changes
For many people, the main reason to try fasting is to lose weight. Currently, most people try to lose weight by restricting how many calories they eat each day.
“That doesn’t work for everyone,” Catenacci explains. “It takes a lot of focus. It takes a lot of math, and a lot of willpower.” Her research team is running a study to compare how much weight participants lose with fasting versus calorie restriction, but over a one-year period. “There’s a lot of debate about whether the benefits of intermittent fasting are due to the extended fasting period itself,” says Dr. Courtney Peterson, an NIH-funded nutrition researcher at the University of Alabama.
To understand this better, Peterson did a study in pre-diabetic men. It was designed so the volunteers would not lose weight. The men ate an early time-restricted feeding diet for five weeks. They could eat only between 8 am to 2 pm. They then fasted for the next 18 hours. Next, they ate the same amount of food but only during a 12-hour period per day for five weeks. None of the men lost weight.
The longer fasting period alone made a difference. The intermittent fasting diet “improved their blood sugar control,” Peterson says. “And we found a blood pressure lowering effect equivalent to what you see with a blood pressure medication.”
These findings suggest that an extended fast or the timing of when you eat—even when it doesn’t affect your weight—can bring health benefits for some people.
Health benefits of fasting
Fasting may bring health benefits, but Longo and other experts caution against people trying fasting diets that are not based on research. If you’re fasting, talk with your health care provider first. People with certain health conditions or who are taking certain medications should not try fasting.
Even if you fast sometimes, you still need to make healthy food choices overall, Peterson explains. “It looks like when you eat matters a lot, but what you eat probably matters more.”
Autophagy and Anti-Aging
After 16 to 18 hours of fasting, you should be in full ketosis. Your liver begins converting your fat stores into ketone bodies — bundles of fuel that power your muscles, heart, and brain.
If you can do intermittent fasting for 16-18 hours a day, you’ll burn through body fat and fill up quickly when you break your fast, which makes it easy to stay in a calorie deficit and lose weight.
When the body fasts and goes without food for an extended period of time, it begins a waste removal process. This is better known as autophagy.
Autophagy is a cellular process where the body removes old cells and replaces them with new healthier cells. Replacing old cells with new ones help the body fight disease and cancers.
Studies show that the autophagy process begins with long term fasting. Autophagy can only begin when glucose and insulin levels are low. It is a healthy process for cells and tissue to repair.
Studies suggests that autophagy begins after 24 hours of calorie restrictions. It can increase with exercise during periods of fasting.
After a full-day fast, your body goes into repair mode. It begins recycling old or damaged cells and reducing inflammation. If you’re looking for anti-aging or anti-inflammatory benefits, a 24-hour or greater timeframe fast is required. .
When your body is under mild stress (such as exercise or an extended fast), your cells respond by becoming more efficient.
Intermittent fasting is a valuable and an effective tool to improve your mental and physical health.
References:
- https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2019/12/fast-or-not-fast
- https://www.consumerreports.org/dieting-weight-loss/intermittent-fasting-best-times-to-eat-for-weight-loss-health/
- A monthly newsletter from the National Institutes of Health, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
- https://order.store.mayoclinic.com/books/GNWEB20
- https://fcer.org/intermittent-fasting-benefits/#2_8211_Anti-inflammatory_properties
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