Intermittent Fasting. Very healthy

[Sam988]

If you want to skip the (for some people) boring introductions that will make you understand intermittent fasting benefits better, go to the 5th paragraph, the one that starts with "Intermittent Fasting".


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Some of you may know about the Calorie Restriction diet, which consists of limiting the dairy intake of calories. The most common CR diet is limiting calories by 30%. The results of this diet are that we get to become healthier and our lifespan increases (researches have been done in various animals, such as yeast, roundworms, fruit flies, rodents, and nonhuman primates such as monkeys. In all these species, their lifespans increased dramatically, up to 50%. For some info, AFAR: Caloric Restriction in Animal Models.

But who wants to do a starving diet, in which we have to measure and count what we eat every day, along with caring to eat only healthy things, otherwise we would extrapolate our daily calorie intake limit and still not have the proteins and vitamins that we need. Even though the prize is huge, few people ever go on this lifelong endeavour.


But a research done by the National Institute on Aging shows that an intermittent fasting diet yelds, in many areas, even better results on health/lifespan increase than calorie restriction.


Intermittent Fasting consists of fasting every other day, drinking only water in these days. In the beginning you may feel hungry in the fasting days, but after some time (no more than 2 weeks) you'll get used to it and won't be hungry anymore. What's better, on the days that you eat, you can eat pretty much anything you want (just go easy on junk food) and as much as you want.

Here's the research done by the National Institute on Aging that i've previously mentioned, it's not that hard to understand, even if you don't know biology very well (like me):

Intermittent fasting dissociates beneficial effects of dietary restriction on glucose metabolism and neuronal resistance to injury from calorie intake -- Anson et al. 100 (10): 6216 -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

[NotesMaeve]

Interesting. Not for me, but interesting.