Medan interviews a professor of medicine John Hopkins: Is intermittent fasting really effective or just a fashion?

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The ancient father of medicine, Hippocrates, said: “Eating while you are sick is the nourishment of disease.” As for the Renaissance physician, Paracelsus, he described fasting as being more like a “doctor in your body”.

In almost all primitive cultures, fasting was an act of purification, and some practiced it in situations of war or just before entering adulthood, and of course we know that almost all religions are concerned with fasting.

Throughout our long history, humans have searched for the benefits of fasting, as some believed that it regulates the body’s vital processes and cleans it from the remnants of eating, leading to the expulsion of evil spirits, but scientific research on the benefits of fasting began in the nineteenth century. For example, you can look at the book of the famous American physician Edward Dewey "The True Science of Long Live" in 1894, in which he says that "every disease that afflicts humans has developed, in one way or another, from the habit of eating a lot of food."

The alternation between fasting and eating is just like exercising in the gym - your muscles don't grow during exercise but at rest

In the nineteenth century, cases of long fasting spread and a number of doctors studied their physiological effect, while fasting was introduced as a treatment for obsessive compulsive cases in France in 1910, and it was also used as a treatment for diabetes before the creation of insulin. In the twenties, Russell Wilder of the Mayo Clinic suggested a relationship. Between cases of starvation and the relief of epileptic seizures, but is fasting really beneficial?

Is there any scientific research that supports this approach?

At this point, in

Medan

we

turned to Dr. Mark Matson, professor of neuroscience from the prestigious Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who has examined the feasibility of intermittent fasting for more than two decades. “Studies in animals and humans have shown that there are many benefits. The health of intermittent fasting, but it is not simply a result of a decrease in the production of harmful free radicals in the body or due to weight loss, but rather it has deeper roots than that.

Mark Matson, Professor of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (communication sites)

Matson believes that intermittent fasting has evolutionary roots, as our bodies - about a hundred thousand years ago - were adapting to the existing environmental conditions at the time, and it was simply a state of permanent hunger, in those times the goal of one of us was perhaps to obtain fruit here or there. Or a wild animal to hunt, but that was a rare thing, and a full day or more might pass without food, so our bodies have adapted - not only to function normally during periods of fasting - but to function better in the meantime.

"During fasting, the body switches between two mechanisms to work on burning food," says Matson in his interview with "Maidan". The exchange between fasting and eating is exactly the same as exercising in the gym. Your muscles do not grow during exercise but during rest, but Exercise is basically what drives it, and so is your body. During fasting the body prepares its cells for many of the beneficial processes that occur during eating. Mattson calls this exchange a "metabolic switch."

This means - according to a research article that was published a year ago in the prestigious journal Nature - the body's ability to switch between two systems, the first during eating, during which the body digests carbohydrates that are broken down into a type of sugar, which burns into energy, and the other system is in The state of fasting, and in the meantime the body mainly burns fats, and turns them into fatty acids, which supply the body's cells with energy.

The professor of neuroscience told the editor of "Maidan": "In contrast to people today, our ancient ancestors did not consume three meals spaced regularly, including snacks, crackers, etc., they also made a lot of effort and were not stable." Advertisements for prepared foods and soft drinks hit our faces hundreds of times a day on television, the street and the Internet, which drives us to eat more, and this prevents the pattern of metabolic switching from occurring, which we miss out on the benefits.

In fact, no one knows exactly how a human cultural pattern arose that says we should eat three times a day, isn't that a bit too much? We now know that the contemporary lifestyle, in which laziness mixes with a lot of eating, has become - in one way or another - harmful to humans, and in our previous report, "Man and Obesity ... the stormy history of vanilla ice cream", you can clearly touch some important examples of situations that lead a healthy life such as Okinawa and Chimane.

According to Matson, during his conversation with the editor of "Maidan", there are several types of intermittent fasting known that serve this metabolic purpose, in particular the 16: 8 system, which means 16 hours and 8 hours fasting, and the two-day fasting regimen, which means that you eat whatever you want. For a day, but the next day, you limit your consumption between 500-700 kcal only, and fasting 5: 2, and it means that you eat a normal diet during 5 days a week, but only limit your use within the range of 500-700 kcal for two days, Matson adds: These are the systems that are most frequently examined in scientific research. "

A professor of neurology told "Maidan": "In periods of fasting, blood glucose is better regulated, the body and its cells resist various types of stress, and some types of cells are cleaned from the remnants of metabolic processes." Of the studies - it tends to indicate a lot of benefits for intermittent fasting, especially for patients with type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.

In fact, a study published in the famous journal "BMJ", only a year ago, despite the small sample, had indicated that intermittent fasting could be able to reverse the trend of type 2 diabetes, meaning that the subjects of the study, who were diabetic patients from The second type, they stopped using insulin, and some of them stopped using most of their medications that they used to control blood glucose levels, and their diabetes measures decreased significantly.

In another study, several years ago, it examined the effectiveness of the fasting-based system (5: 2) with 100 overweight women, the study indicated that they lost the same amount of weight as their female colleagues who reduced calories through other diets, but sensitivity measures Their insulin improved better.

In addition, Mattson enumerates for "Maidan" studies conducted on animals and humans, which found that intermittent fasting led to - as he put it - "a decrease in blood pressure, lipid levels in the blood, and heart rates at rest," adding that the general improvement in The functions of the cardiovascular system began to appear within a period ranging between two to four weeks from the beginning of the experiment, and things returned as they were during several weeks of interrupting the fast.

And the matter is developing to what is actually further, although there is still debate about the additional effectiveness that intermittent fasting provides in cases of weight loss specifically compared to other known diets that depend mainly on reducing the daily "caloric" ratio, there are other benefits. Expected intermittent fasting in medical domains, at that point we can consider a study published just a few years ago by researchers from Harvard University, indicating that the process of manipulating a cell's mitochondrial networks by intermittent fasting can help improve health and extend life. Harvard researchers based their experiments on a species of roundworm with an average lifespan of two weeks, which improved with intermittent fasting. Other studies in mice and monkeys have had similar results.

On the other hand, Matson says in his interview with "Maidan": "Fasting has found its way to cancer cases, and previous studies have indicated an effective role for a lifestyle that includes intermittent fasting in reducing the number of random mutations that cause cancer in mice." Published in the famous journal "Science", it indicated that the degrees of tumor shrinkage were clearly better if the mice were withheld food for a period of up to two days before the chemotherapy sessions, compared to the sessions alone without fasting. This study was an extension of another that preceded it several years ago, which indicated that one of the important functions of fasting is to preserve healthy cells from the toxic effects of chemotherapy.

In a Matson research article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the neuroscience professor focuses mainly on the relationship between fasting and the health of our brains. Previous studies conducted on animals have found a relationship between intermittent fasting and a clear improvement in working memory, which is that part of our brain's function that processes information, and then classifies memories as pieces, so we can perform complex functions and understand deep thoughts. Worker affects our intelligence.

"A multicenter clinical trial at the University of Toronto last April revealed that 220 healthy adults who had maintained an intermittent fasting regimen for two years showed signs of improved memory in a series of cognitive tests," Mattson told Maidan. . Matson points out at that point that much of the current research work focuses more on examining the effects of intermittent fasting on learning and memory, and adds that this may open the door to better regulation of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, or delaying their occurrence, especially as preventing body tissues from their food. It prompts it to release greater amounts of nutritional proteins that can combat neuron degradation.

The research scope of intermittent fasting still needs more confirmation, and with the increase in the number of human subjects we will be able day after day to do that, but from a general point of view, and without exaggeration, there is a clear tendency that intermittent fasting is beneficial, and the largest Its advantages are that, on the other hand, it is harmless, in the sense that you can easily follow a diet that includes some degree of intermittent fasting, and you will not lose anything. Continuing his conversation with Maidan, Matson says: "In any case, intermittent fasting can be part of a healthy lifestyle."

With the extreme complexity that diets face today and the difficulty of understanding them, there are very simple and very effective systems that you can apply in your life directly, this is one of them: Consider fasting as a lifestyle, let the mealtime be from 7 am to 3 pm, or from 10 am to 6 pm But not after that.

Ultimately there should be a big difference between your last meal and sleep.

Plus, include sugar in your minimum daily use and eat fruits and vegetables instead, and only.

In fact, intermittent fasting has existed in various forms during the past decades, except that it gained great popularity in 2012 due to a documentary program by a BBC journalist, Dr.Michael Mosley, followed by many books that were clearly popular internationally. To Dr. Jason Fung's 2016 book - which was on the bestseller list - titled “The Obesity Code” which raised the positive hype around intermittent fasting.

"But it should move beyond that," Mattson tells Meydan: "We can soon consider adding information about intermittent fasting to the curriculum of the College of Medicine along with standard advice on healthy meals and exercise," notes Professor Neuroscience suggests that awareness should be extended to teach doctors how to settle their patients, or natural persons, on the appropriate intermittent fasting patterns for them.

It has become imperative for us to diversify ourselves with the need to follow a healthy lifestyle that affects not only our bodies, but our psychological state and our relationships with others around us.

"In addition to that, the main point that patients and ordinary people must learn is that the craving for food will not continue to be as severe," Mattson adds, adding that this is a distinct point. Most of those who undergo intermittent fasting stop quickly because they feel an urgent need for food during intermittent fasting, but That bad feeling does not last long, as with time you will get used to it completely so that it is a natural thing in your daily lifestyle.

In the end, of course, we do not recommend that you raise the ceiling of expectations towards intermittent fasting, and you cannot in any way replace intermittent fasting with a treatment regimen under any circumstance. These studies - which we have talked about - still need more confirmation, as well as intermittent fasting in Many disease cases were an additional and not a main treatment, and some trials were on animals, and improvement was observed in some cases, but not in others.

But in any case, improving our daily diet is not a degree of luxury, but - along with continuous exercise - a basic necessity in the contemporary world, and with the high rates of obesity and its consequences from severe diseases, it has become imperative that we, and perhaps others, should follow a lifestyle. Healthy, this not only affects our bodies, but also our psychological state, our relationships with others around us, our jobs and our annual income, it is a totally inexpensive investment that depends only on being serious about your desires for a better life.