Health & Nutrition by Michael R. Eades, M.D.

My friend Tim Ferriss asked me to post an up to date version of my thoughts on intermittent fasting. I wrote a post about a year and a half ago on intermittent fasting that generated numerous comments and questions. Between then and now I’ve received many emails from readers who have gone on intermittent fasts, some with success, others with not so much. The early animal studies that looked so good prompted a number of researchers to look at intermittent fasting as a potential therapeutic tool for humans. I figured it was time for an update.

You can find my two part post on Tim’s blog.

Part I

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I’ve posted on the health benefits of intermittent fasting (here and here) and on my thoughts on the inflammatory properties of food and overnutrition. These posts, particularly the one on inflammation, inspired a host of questions on whether intermittent fasting decreases inflammation. Based on my knowledge of the medical literature on inflammation and intermittent fasting I’m pretty sure that it does. A recent paper presents data indicating that it indeed does.

The April 2007 issue of Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism includes an article on the positive changes in inflammatory markers brought about by the intermittent fasting Muslims undergo during Ramadan.

As the authors put it in the introduction: Read more »

Anyone who is a regular reader of this blog will have noticed that the last post on intermittent fasting generated an enormous number of comments, just about all of which I tried to answer. Most of these comments were questions about intermittent fasting or people giving their dietary histories or people informing us that they were starting an intermittent fast. Other comments asked for answers to specific medical questions while others wanted to know if MD and I had abandoned the low-carb diet in favor of intermittent fasting. I figured that this would be a good time to set the record straight.

MD and I feel strongly that we as a species have a genome that was molded by the forces of natural selection over the past few million years to operate optimally on the food that was at hand during those few million years. What was available? Mainly fairly high-protein, high-fat fare. There weren’t a lot of carbohydrates readily available until the advent of agriculture a few thousand years ago. For the time that we developed our ancestors ate meat, fish, insects, clams, reptiles and pretty much anything live they could get their hands on. This primarily protein and fat diet was supplemented with whatever fruits, nuts, berries, roots, shoots and tubers were in season. Work done by Loren Cordain shows that, based on the Ethnographic Atlas, modern day hunter gatherers get about 65 percent of their calories from animals and the other 35 percent from plants. Most researchers believe that Paleolithic man got more than that from animals because during Paleolithic times many more large animals roamed the earth than do today. In fact, Paleolithic man hunted many of these large animals to extinction.

It is pretty safe to say that the macronutrients that set our genome were fat and protein. Many unenlightened people seem to believe that early man lived in land of carbohydrate abundance, and, consequently, thrived on a high-carbohydrate diet. It can easily be seen that this wasn’t the case simply by calculating how much food would have to be consumed to get enough calories from the available plant sources.

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How would you like it if I told you there was a way to eat pretty much anything and everything you wanted to eat and still maintain your health? Or better yet, what if I told you that you could eat pretty much anything and everything you wanted and even improve your health? Would you be interested? I figured as much.

There is a way to reduce blood sugar, improve insulin sensitivity, reduce blood pressure, increase HDL levels, get rid of diabetes, live a lot longer, and still be able to lose a little weight. All without giving up the foods you love. And without having to eat those foods in tiny amounts. Sounds like a late-night infomercial gimmick, but it isn’t.

Before I get to the real nitty gritty of how such a thing can be done, let’s look at a method that has been proven in countless research institutions to bring about all the above-mentioned good things. It’s called caloric restriction.

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