Fasting diets could be the future of healthy diet advice

An investigation into how time affects our diets has generated promising data which may help to stave off obesity and even type 2 diabetes.
Looking not at how but when we eat may hold the key to remaining healthy even for people who don’t have access to healthy foods.
One of the issues that have helped to cause the obesity pandemic we have in the western world is that the healthiest foods are often the most expensive; people working long hours; are on low pay and have little control over the foods they can afford to buy, or have the time to prepare.
“We found that animals fed within a window of eight to twelve hours had a number of protective and therapeutic health benefits compared with animals allowed to eat the same number of calories from the same food source at any time,” said associate professor Satchidananda Panda, from the Salk Institute of California.
The study was published in the journal Cell Metabolism, and looked at the way mice can benefit from not having constant access to food. It is hoped that the findings are applicable to humans, and that fasting controls could help to prevent a myriad of diet related illnesses from obesity to type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease.
Panda’s research also found that there are fluctuations in the gut microbiology; that the bacteria populations change throughout the day. It is this that is thought to have led to the beneficial medical markers in the mice who were fasting for half days at a time.
“The effect of eating time to nudge the gut microbiome and host physiology towards health or disease without altering genes, nutrients, calories, or drugs opens new research avenues and cost-effective healthcare strategies,” Panda commented.