Intermittent Fasting

INTRODUCTION

Intermittent fasting is a pattern of eating where you establish a balance between periods of eating and fasting. It doesn’t suggest which foods to eat, but rather when you should eat them. For instance, You can do this by eating your first meal at noon and your last dinner at 8 pm and skipping your breakfast. Potential dietary approach for weight loss and improving metabolic health. The Intermittent fasting approach may promote greater compliance than daily CER as individuals need not restrict their intake every day and thus may potentially facilitate more sustainable weight loss and maintenance. Food is not allowed during your fasting period, but you can drink coffee, tea, water and other non-caloric beverages. Hunger is usually not a big issue, although it can be a problem in starting, till your body get used to the eating pattern.

Intermittent fasting improves the lipid content to decrease inflammatory responses and change the genes expression related to inflammatory response and other factors. Intermittent fasting exerts an impact on the metabolic components commonly associated with cardiovascular diseases and cancer also. Intermittent fasting induces ischemic preconditioning in the cardiac muscle that protects myocardial cells from ischemic damage. 

If results in a significant decrease in blood pressure and maintained Plasma glucose levels. The public health benefits of intermittent fasting in humans have not been fully explored in the literature.

Independently of weight loss, the metabolic regulation of glucose and lipids can also be influenced by other dietary manipulations, including alterations in meal timing as well as abrupt changes in energy states such as fasting, 

TYPES

Intermittent fasting protocols are often grouped into 1 of three categories: alternate-day fasting, whole-day fasting, and time-restricted feeding.

1. Alternate-day fasting

This protocol involves alternating ad libitum feeding days with fasting days, which typically consist of 1 meal consumed at lunchtime that contains approximately 25% of the baseline caloric needs for the individual. For example, if a private consumed his last meal on Monday (feeding day 1) in the dark and his first meal on Wednesday (feeding day 2) at 6 am, the duration would be 30 hours. However, if the last meal on Monday was eaten at 5 pm and the first meal on Wednesday was eaten at 9 am, the duration would be 40 hours. There could be differences within the alterations of metabolism and health markers between these two alternate-day fasting schedules, counting on the duration of modified fasting. Bodyweight reduction6 and decreases in fat mass have been consistently observed during alternate-day fasting protocols.

2. Whole-day fasting

The methodology of whole day fasting can be as simple as doing one 24-hour fast per week, and some also include multiple fasts each week and/or fasts lasting longer than 24 hours. Reductions in body fat and body weight were consistently seen in the studies. Compared with control subjects who maintained their regular eating pattern, subjects who followed this method of fasting protocol showed reductions in body weight and body fat. Similar to alternate-day fasting studies, whole-day fasting studies have produced varying results, which might be attributable to several factors.

3. Time-restricted feeding

Time-restricted feeding protocols involve adhering to a daily routine that requires fasting for a certain number of hours and feeding for the remaining hours in 24 hours.y significant difference between time-restricted feeding and other fasting regimens is that time-restricted feeding does not allow for entire ad libitum days but rather just several libitum hours each day.

CANCER AND INTERMITTENT FASTING 

Autophagy is an evolutionarily conserved lysosomal catabolic process by which cells degrade and recycle intracellular endogenous (damaged organelles) and exogenous (viruses and bacteria) components to maintain cellular homeostasis. Autophagy has a potential target of pharmacological agents that activate the process for several human disorders, including cancer, obesity, infections and inflammatory diseases, neurodegeneration, metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. 

Autophagy can be related either to the prevention of tumorigenesis or to the enabling of cancer cell adaptation, survival, proliferation and metastasis. This indicates that autophagy could have an essential role in tumour suppression. Autophagy deficiency was prone to the development of hepatocarcinoma and lung tumours at an advanced age. The loss of autophagy genes function has not yet been demonstrated and identified in human studies, raising doubts about the applicability of autophagy to tumour initiation in different types of cancer.

In preclinical studies, dietary restriction (DR) has been shown to extend the lifespan and reduce the development of diseases such as cancer. Studies demonstrate that nutritional interventions can minimize tumour incidence and potentiate the effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiotherapy in cancer in different tumour models, highlighting dietary manipulation as a possible adjunct to standard cancer therapies.

The intermittent fasting improved the chemotherapeutic response to cyclophosphamide, cisplatin, doxorubicin, oxaliplatin, sorafenib, mitoxantrone, gemcitabine, etoposide, temozolomide and tyrosine kinase inhibitors in breast cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, hepatocellular cancer and lung cancer.

Fasting combined with cytotoxic agents elicited differential responses in normal and cancer cells, a phenomenon known as differential stress resistance (DSR). For DSR, normal cells prioritize maintenance pathways and inactivate growth factor signalling when nutrients are absent. In contrast, cancer cells, thanks to oncogene activation, don’t inhibit stress resistance pathways, thus becoming susceptible to cytotoxic treatment. 

Intermittent fasting has been shown to improves different conditions of an individual, including:

• Intermittent fasting has been shown significant benefits for insulin resistance and leads to an impressive reduction in blood sugar levels.
• intermittent fasting helps people eat fewer calories, which may result in weight loss over time 
• Intermittent fasting is highly protective for people who are at risk for developing type 2 diabetes.
• Intermittent fasting enhances the body’s resistance to inflammation, and oxidative stress in the body also benefits against the development of numerous diseases due to growing age.
• Intermittent fasting can improve several risk factors for heart disease, such as cholesterol levels, blood pressure, triglycerides, and inflammatory markers.
• Intermittent fasting triggers a metabolic pathway called autophagy, which removes waste from cells.
• Intermittent fasting has been considered to help prevent cancer in some human studies. Researches showed that it can help reduce side effects caused by chemotherapy in cancer.
• Intermittent fasting may also increase the growth of new nerve cells in the brain, benefitting brain functioning.
• Intermittent fasting also increases levels of the hormone in the brain called BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). Its deficiency has resulted in depression and various other brain problems.
• Intermittent fasting finds protective against neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s disease.
• Several studies show that intermittent fasting may help you live longer.