fasting improves your health

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Study suggests fasting adds to life, health

 

By JEFF NESMITH

Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer

 

WASHINGTON -- Mice that were denied food on alternate days showed

marked improvement in key health indicators, even though they

consumed about the same number of calories as animals allowed to eat

all they wanted all the time, scientists reported Monday.

 

Scientists with the National Institute on Aging said the

intermittently fasting mice, which were allowed to eat all they

wanted on the intervening days, ended the experiment weighing about

the same as those on unrestricted diets.

 

But over all, blood glucose and insulin levels were markedly reduced

in the fasting mice.

 

Also, the fasting mice had a dramatically increased ability to

withstand brain cell damage resulting from injections of a poison

into the regions of the brain where cell damage is associated with

Alzheimer's disease in humans.

 

In fact, the fasting mice emerged from the 29-week experiment with

better results on these indicators than a third group kept on a daily

low-calorie diet.

 

The experiment, described in a paper published in the online edition

of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that

fasting may be a beneficial experience, regardless of the overall

effect on calorie intake.

 

In a second experiment, the scientists forced rats to skip food every

other day. Unlike mice, rats will not gorge on days when they are

allowed free access to food.

 

This experiment showed that fasting rats had reduced heart rates,

blood pressure and insulin levels, similar to those obtained with a

regular physical exercise program. The rat study was described in a

paper published last week in the Journal of the Federation of

American Societies for Experimental Biology.

 

Mark Mattson, lead author of papers on the two experiments, said he

thinks the results are relevant to human health and is designing an

experiment using human volunteers.

 

The human fasters will be given a diet identical to that given to a

control group, he said, but the fasters will be required to consume

all their food during a four-hour period every day and fast for the

other 20 hours.

 

" What we think is happening is when you go an extended time period

without food, it causes a mild stress on the cells, " Mattson said

Monday, " and when a cell reacts to this stress, it may increase its

ability to cope with more serious stress, such as disease and aging. "

 

He noted that in a precivilized environment, the availability of food

was not assured, so that humans and other animals may have evolved in

circumstances that involved periods of forced fasting.

 

" Evolutionarily, our bodies may not be geared for regular food

intake, " he observed.

 

Scientists have known for 50 years that animals maintained on

restricted diets have dramatically longer lives on average than those

given all the food they will eat.

 

Dieting animals have reduced insulin and glucose levels and an

increased ability to withstand brain damage consistent with several

neurological disorders, including epileptic seizure and stroke.

 

Aside from that, little is known about the differences and

similarities in the physiological effects of the two diet patterns,

Mattson said. Introducing a third pattern, the intermittent fasting

plan, could set up comparisons that were not possible before.

 

But he cautioned against fad fasting plans and self-designed

regimens.

 

" I would not want people to go out there and simply stop eating, "

Mattson said. " These animals were fed diets that carefully balanced

and designed to contain all necessary vitamins and minerals. All we

did was change the frequency of eating. "

 

 

 

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