Gut Health
Fasting can increase the diversity of bacteria in your gut, which is important for your immune and overall health.[*] A healthy gut microflora is pertinent to digestive health which directly influences your immune health, your hormones, neurotransmitters, nutrient status, mitochondrial function, adrenal status and most importantly, whether or not your inflammatory response works for or against your health.[*][*]
Brain Health
Researchers observe that fasting pushes you to produce more chemicals (like brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF) that tell neurons to grow and speak with other neurons.[*][*][*] BDNF can lower oxidative stress and inflammation, reduce your resting heart rate, and likely boost your brain power. In addition, scientists now better understand that brain cells respond to short-term food restriction with an increase in autophagy (remember, it’s your cellular clean-up system).[*]
Other studies have shown that fasting can reduce brain inflammation, protect neurons from memory deficits caused by damage to the hippocampus, thicken the hippocampus with better learning performance, reduce plaques associated with Alzheimer’s, and more.[*][*][*][*]
Better Blood Sugar
By supporting balanced blood sugar and improving insulin sensitivity, fasting reduces brain cell damage from glucose (glycation). When you fast intermittently, insulin levels go down (thus decreasing insulin resistance) and glucagon goes up which has been shown to have benefits like increased metabolism, more energy, improved mood, and weight loss.[*]
Heart Health
Mouse models have shown alternate day fasting can reduce cardiovascular disease risk by improving cholesterol and triglyceride levels.[*] And another study of obese women showed that when practicing intermittent fasting, LDL and total cholesterol levels decreased (as well as body weight and fat mass).[*][*] More research showed that fasting helped improve healthy cholesterol (HDL) and decreased unhealthy cholesterol (LDL) over four weeks.[*]
Weight Loss and Control
Intermittent fasting for weight loss – One study with over 300 obese adult participants concluded that eating or skipping breakfast had no connection to obesity.[*][*] Other studies have suggested that skipping breakfast can actually be an effective weight loss tool for certain people. Another study of obese women undergoing intermittent fasting for 6 months saw subject burn fat with a reduction on average of 14 pounds,[*] while another study sound that that overweight subjects lost 8% of their body fat in 8 weeks of intermittent fasting.[*] Other research has shown that it can improve muscle mass as well.[*]
Anti-Aging
Several animal studies have found promising results on the potential lifespan-extending effects of fasting.[*][*] For example, when rats were put caloric restriction/intermittent fasting schedule, the study showed that the mean life span of the fasting group represented an 83% increase over that of the other group.[*] And another study showed that mice fed 60% of normal caloric intake or that underwent intermittent fasting lived from two to three times longer than their paired full-fed mice.[*]