Our blog

The diet industry is a growing part of the modern world. Sometimes it seems like everyone wants or needs to lose weight these days. Various diets have a variety of benefits and disadvantages, but fasting has one of the most important benefits possible for personal health. Scientists have known for years that fasting can extend the lifespan of certain mammals, as well as help them maintain a normal weight range, but the reason for this connection wasn’t discovered until recently. To help you understand the latest research, we’ve created this guide to fasting and how it could extend your lifespan.

 

What is Fasting?

With all the different research indicating the benefits of fasting recently it’s become one of the more popular dieting techniques. There are a variety of different fasting regimes as well, ranging from all day fasts, weekly fasts where you follow the same fasting pattern for 7 days before starting again, to intermittent fasting, which advocates fasting for a certain number of hours each day. No matter what your daily routine is like, or your personal health status, there is a fasting diet that will work for you.

 

Does Fasting Help with Weight Loss?

Recent studies have indicated that fasting may make weight loss easier. In laboratory settings, mice who fasted showed a change in the color of their fat cells from brown to white. Because brown fat cells burn more energy, and have a host of benefits for the body, this is a significant find for people who are concerned about their personal health or want to lose weight. The mice who experienced this change also lost significantly more weight than the control group who were given the same diet with no periods of fasting.

 

Looking at Fasting and Lifespan

Fasting may do more than help you lose weight however. For years longevity studies have shown that fasting causes an increased lifespan in some mammals, though the reasons for this remained unknown until a recent study shed some light on the issue. This study showed that epigenetics may play a big part in the phenomenon.

 

Epigenetics is the study of changes brought about in the expression of genes. These changes are usually caused by the environment or other external factors. In this study, scientists tested the idea that fasting makes changes in a mechanism called DNA methylation, which is a chemical tag that attaches to cells and determines their identity. For example, one of these tags could attach to one cell and make it a blood cell, and to another to make it cancerous.

 

When these tags are missing, it’s called methylation drift and the cell loses a part of its identity. When this happens, the relevant genes aren’t expressed properly, which probably causes many of the symptoms of normal aging. This drift occurs more and more with age, with older people and animals having more changes or drift than younger people or animals.

 

This epigenetics study tried to determine if fasting could change the rate of methylation drift and increase lifespan. The results were dramatic. The laboratory animals were put onto a fasting diet throughout their lifespan, and the scientists found that this resulted in their methylation drift being reduced, making the age of their genes several years younger than their chronological age. This suggests that methylation drift plays a strong role in aging and may be a central determinate of lifespan.

 

What this means for your Personal Health

This all sounds very technical, but what it indicates for your health and your waistline is that fasting isn’t just another diet fad. There are clear benefits to this type of eating pattern, benefits that go beyond simply decreasing your body weight and improving your general health. Eating in this way may actually be the key to living a long and healthy life, so fasting is definitely worth experimenting with. Before you start with any fasting program, visit your doctor to make sure your physical condition will allow for this type of diet. And monitor your health throughout the experience so you can adjust for any problems and immediately become aware of any positive effects on your personal health.

 

 

 

If you want to try fasting it’s important that you keep track of your personal health throughout the process to ensure that it’s working as it should. Try HomeLab, the health tracking tool that will measure the important changes in your physical condition, letting you focus on more important things.

 

Tags: personal health, prevention, health tracking