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Intermittent fasting, also known as time-restricted eating (TRE), can be intimidating. Questions about perpetual hunger and the ability to engage in various activities often arise, especially during the holiday season when food takes center stage at many gatherings.
In general, it’s crucial to adopt an eating pattern that aligns with your lifestyle while promoting good health. Researchers for a recent study claim to have identified an effective and easily achievable form of intermittent fasting that reduces hunger and improves mood and sleep.… Story continues…
By: Meaghan Cameron
Source: Study: Daily Fasting for This Long Results in Weight Loss and Better Mood
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Critics:
Fasting may have different results on health in different circumstances. To understand whether loss of appetite (anorexia) during illness was protective or detrimental, researchers in the laboratory of Ruslan Medzhitov at Yale School of Medicine gave carbohydrate to mice with a bacterial or viral illness, or deprived them of carbohydrate. They found that carbohydrate was detrimental to bacterial sepsis.
But with viral sepsis or influenza, nutritional supplementation with carbohydrates was beneficial, decreasing mortality, whereas denying glucose to the mice, or blocking its metabolism, was lethal. The researchers put forth hypotheses to explain the findings and called for more research on humans to determine whether our bodies react similarly, depending on whether an illness is bacterial or viral.
Alternate-day fasting (alternating between a 24-hour “fast day” when the person eats less than 25% of usual energy needs, followed by a 24-hour non-fasting “feast day” period) has been shown to improve cardiovascular and metabolic biomarkers similarly to a calorie restriction diet in people who are overweight, obese or have metabolic syndrome.
A 2021 review found that moderate alternate-day fasting for two to six months was associated with reductions of body weight, body mass index, and cardiometabolic risk factors in overweight or obese adults. See also: Preoperative fasting, Body cleansing, and Nothing by mouth
Fasting is almost always practiced prior to surgery or other procedures that require general anesthesia because of the risk of pulmonary aspiration of gastric contents after induction of anesthesia (i.e., vomiting and inhaling the vomit, causing life-threatening aspiration pneumonia). Additionally, certain medical tests, such as cholesterol testing (lipid panel) or certain blood glucose measurements require fasting for several hours so that a baseline can be established.
In the case of a lipid panel, failure to fast for a full 12 hours (including vitamins) will guarantee an elevated triglyceride measurement. In one review, fasting improved alertness, mood, and subjective feelings of well-being, possibly improving overall symptoms of depression, and boosting cognitive performance.
There is little evidence to suggest that intermittent fasting for periods shorter than 24 hours is effective for sustained weight loss in obese adults. In rare occurrences, dry fasting can lead to the potentially fatal refeeding syndrome upon reinstatement of food intake due to electrolyte imbalance. Scientists have studied populations under famine conditions, and hunger strikes. Data from the Second World War suggests fasting inhibits atherosclerosis.
This data led to the alternative name of “starvation diet”, as a diet with 0 calories intake per day. There is no sound clinical evidence that fasting can promote longevity in humans. Although practitioners of alternative medicine promote “cleansing the body” through fasting, the concept of “detoxification“ is marketing myth with few scientific basis for its rationale or efficacy.
During the early 20th century, fasting was promoted by alternative health writers such as Hereward Carrington, Edward H. Dewey, Bernarr Macfadden, Frank McCoy, Edward Earle Purinton, Upton Sinclair and Wallace Wattles. All of these writers were either involved in the natural hygiene or new thought movement. Arnold Ehret‘s pseudoscientific Mucusless Diet Healing System espoused fasting.
Linda Hazzard, a notable quack doctor, put her patients on such strict fasts that some of them died of starvation. She was responsible for the death of more than 40 patients under her care. In 1911, Upton Sinclair authored The Fasting Cure, which made sensational claims of fasting curing practically all diseases, including cancer, syphilis, and tuberculosis.
Sinclair has been described as “the most credulous of faddists” and his book is considered an example of quackery. In 1932, physician Morris Fishbein listed fasting as a fad diet and commented that “prolonged fasting is never necessary and invariably does harm..
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