Health New Update: Intermittent Fasting and Healthy Aging
Hello once again everyone:
If you are curious about how Intermittent Fasting works, this paper should help explain things once I explain things:
Highlights
Throughout observational time, prolonged intermittent fasting affected dynamical changes in autophagy, senescence and inflammasome activities. These include:
· Prolonged intermittent fasting significantly induced ATG5 and ULK1 expression but reduced the other autophagy gene, BCN1.
· Prolonged intermittent fasting significantly induced the expression of inflammasome gene NLRP3 and IL-1b but not it’s active component, ASC.
· Prolonged intermittent fasting could significantly reduce p21, p16 and p53 expression at a later point in time.
Taken together, this manuscript combines novelty and clinical relevance to help our understanding of fasting, especially intermittent fasting. Furthermore, it can be implemented as a non-pharmacological and low-cost therapy to promote rejuvenation.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666149723000063?via%3Dihub
Bottom Line:
Ok…so what does all that stuff actually mean?
· The first bullet point related to intermittent fasting upregulating autophagy in a good way. Briefly, autophagy is the self-cleaning custodial work that our body (mostly immune cells) do on a daily basis, and most of it is at night in the absence of calories. This is why intermittent fasting improves autophagy and helps to maintain an internally clean environment and adequate surveillance against infection and tumor induction. To quote the paper: “dysregulation of autophagy is associated with many diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, vascular diseases, and many others.” This is an incredibly important essential benefit!
· The second bullet point reveals that intermittent fasting significantly lowers inflammation, and as you know, inflammation causes, perpetuates, and/or aggravates every known human condition. Thus, lowering inflammasome expression will lower our total non-purposeful background inflammation, thus promoting a longer health span and lifespan with less illness and disability. Another amazing benefit. It is also shown to lower autoimmune diseases!
· The last bullet point reveals that markers of immune senescence are reduced. Immune senescence is the same as immune senility…certain aspects of the immune system begin to become ineffective and act old. Recent research revealed that those without immune senescence live the longest with the greatest health span.
The best form of intermittent fasting (at least this is what the current literature states…but that can change) is called early time restricted feeding, or eTRF. Basically, it works like this: you have breakfast before 10 AM and lunch before 2 PM and consume 80% of your total daily calories in that early time. Your dinner is as early as you can and is very light with only 20% of your total daily caloric intake. You then fast for at least 12 hours without any calories…up to 14 hours is a bit better but longer than that does not seem to bring more benefit. A helpful hint to get started with this is to prepare your normal dinner, but only eat about 1/3 of it and have the rest for breakfast…this is actually a lot better than it sounds. Give this a try and let me know how it works for you.
I do recommend that before you attempt eTRF you should consult your health care provider, especially those that are pregnant or breastfeeding, have a history of eating disorder, or are diabetic.
