Therapeutic fasting is in vogue today. As the authors of self-help books assure us, diet will help you burn excess fat, cleanse your DNA, and lengthen your life. New scientific research supports the idea that fasting is good for your health. Clinical trials have shown that abstaining from food for as little as five days a month can help prevent or cure age-related ailments such as diabetes and heart disease.
"It's not easy to do this kind of research," says biologist and circadian rhythm specialist Satchidananda Panda of the Biological Research Institute. J. Salk (San Diego, Calif.), Who was not involved in the study. "The work they have done is commendable."
In previous experiments in rodents and humans, scientists have concluded that intermittent fasting has a number of beneficial effects, such as reducing body fat and lowering blood insulin levels. True, you can starve in different ways. One of the most famous programs, the 5: 2 Diet, allows you to eat normally five days a week. On each of the remaining two days, you need to limit your calories to 500-600, which is about one quarter of the average American's daily calorie intake.
An alternative is the fasting-mimicking diet, which was developed by biochemist Valter Longo of the University of Southern California at Los Angeles with colleagues. For most of the month, participants in the experiment eat as much as they want. They then eat a diet of crackers, energy bars, and soups for five straight days, consuming roughly 700 to 1,100 calories per day.
These foods are produced by a company that Longo himself helped found (but from which he does not receive any financial benefits), and are high in unsaturated fatty acids and at the same time low in carbohydrates and proteins - a combination that can help our body renew and combustion of accumulated fat. Two years ago, Longo's team reported that mice that ate an appropriate rodent diet lived longer and showed other positive effects, such as lower blood sugar and fewer tumors. The scientists also presented preliminary data that indicate the possible health benefits of this diet.
Researchers recently completed a randomized clinical experiment in which 71 people ate a fasting mimicking diet for three months, while the control group did not change their diet. The dieters lost an average of 2.6 kilograms (5.7 pounds), while the weight of the control group remained the same, scientists reported in the online journal Science Translational Medicine. Those who cut calories also reported lower blood pressure, decreased body fat, and a change in waist circumference.
In a three-month study, it is impossible to determine whether a given diet can increase the lifespan of humans, as has been observed in mice, which rarely live longer than two years. But Longo notes that in the low-calorie group, levels of insulin-like growth factor 1, a hormone that promotes aging in rodents and other laboratory animals, dropped dramatically. And those participants in the experiment who had a high risk of age-related diseases also noted a decrease in indicators that indicate metabolic disorders: blood glucose levels and total cholesterol.
The diet "cures" aging, a key risk factor for life-threatening diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease, Longo said. “It looks like you can finally tackle the underlying problem instead of sticking a patch on it,” he says. Through future research, the team hopes to determine whether the diet can help people who already have age-related illnesses - most likely diabetes - or are predisposed to one of them.
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Dieting is often difficult, but 75% of the low-calorie diets completed the experiment, said Rafael de Cabo, a gerontologist at the National Institute of Aging in Baltimore, Maryland, who was not involved in the study. The next step, says physiologist Eric Ravussin of the Pennington Center for Biomedical Research in Baton Rouge, will be to determine if the diet works for people “who, unlike the participants in this experiment, do have health problems.
Nutritionist nutritionist Michelle Harvie of South Manchester University Hospital in the UK adds that she would like to see results from longer studies that confirm the benefits found and that people continue to follow the diet. “We need to help a lot of people, but what if only two percent are willing to do it?
Mitch Leslie
