With so much information these days, how do you determine what is true? Which of the many, many news stories, YouTube videos, Facebook posts, and even research articles do you trust? If you don’t trust these, where are you getting your information from?
Face it: we may be skeptical of the news, but we don’t know where else to turn. We say we don’t trust the news sources, yet we hear or read that something can revolutionize our health or wealth, and we accept and run with that information. How much of what you think you know is simply myth, repeated and echoed enough times that you think it to be true? You can’t be an expert in everything, so you rely on those who call themselves experts. But if you pay close attention to the beliefs that you have held over the years from these experts, you will see that many of them have changed. A lot of what you were told was good for you turned out to be bad, and vice versa. What can you believe?
Surely the best information comes from scientific research. Even so, you may find research studies to be contradictory at times. Just like news media, it helps to look at opposing sides and consider the arguments from both sides. Which studies make the most sense, are well prepared, and have concurrence with other studies?
Sometimes a study comes out because there has been so much misinformation spread that the researchers feel compelled to get to the truth. This appears to be the case with a study conducted by a team at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC), published in Nature Reviews Endocrinology, where the researchers reviewed other studies and ran their own tests to debunk popular myths about intermittent fasting. (1)
This form of time-restricted eating has gained popularity recently, and for good reason. It makes dieting simple. Many use it for weight loss, because it can be quite effective in shedding pounds if the dieter does not make up for the skipped or delayed calories during the eating window. But the diet’s popularity has also resulted in myths propagating almost as quick as the diet itself. These myths tend to steer people away from the diet, but as this study shows, that is needless. The diet is amazingly safe and easy to follow. It’s simply a matter of picking a shortened time period in which to eat each day, and therefore extending the “vacation” that your system gets from food load. There are variations to the diet, but that’s the basic idea. In this study, they chose an eating window of from 4 to 10 hours daily.
Common myth-takes
This UIC study reviewed four intermittent fasting myths and explained why they are false. The first is that it leads to a poor diet. Maybe for some the psychology would lead them to skip more nutritious food, but what you eat is what you eat, whether it is throughout the day or in a narrow window of time. The study found that people on an intermittent fasting diet generally eat the same variety of food and gain similar nutrition. These reason is simple: intermittent fasting has nothing to do with what you eat, so if you eat good foods during your eating window you are gaining nutrition simply because of the food. More than that, because your digestive system got a mini vacation, it likely will work even better and get more nutrition from your food.
The second myth was similar: that this diet would lead to eating disorders. In the studies that they reviewed, there were no cases of the participants developing eating disorders. Their research had, however, already screened out people with a history of eating disorders. The researchers suggested that some groups of people are more likely to develop such disorders, that intermittent fasting has little to do with that tendency, but extra care should be taken with those prone to such disorders.
Another myth is that intermittent fasting can impact sex hormones negatively. The argument is that the prolonged periods without food would change hormone production. The research found no change in estrogen, testosterone, or related hormones with the diet.
The big myth is that intermittent fasting will cause extra loss of lean muscle mass. The researchers found that any diet used for weight loss causes the same amount of muscle mass loss as intermittent fasting. The myth is that the prolonged periods without food will cause the body to burn muscle protein because it has run out of fuel. It does run out of stored sugar, but you will never become a “fat burner” if you avoid letting your body run out of sugar. You want your body to switch to burning fat. If you are not accustomed to fat burning, the transition from sugar burning to fat burning can be a little rough. Too many people will try a fasting diet, hit that period of sugar crash, and give up. Unless you are on blood sugar medicine, which skews your body’s sugar management, you won’t completely crash. You will switch to fat burning after a while, but if you keep up intermittent fasting, you will train your body to make the switch much faster. In between sugar burning and fat burning, you have gluconeogenesis, which does burn muscle protein. Consistent intermittent fasting makes the period of gluconeogenesis a very short period of time. Your body makes the transition smoothly and quickly once trained. Bodies are inherently lazy, but they do respond to training — it just takes a little persistence.
This study was all about what isn’t wrong with intermittent fasting. But you won’t be interested in doing this diet if there aren’t significant advantages, and there are many. For one, your digestive tract works best when given rest breaks. A cow may continually graze, but its digestive system has many stomachs and can work almost continuously. We are made quite differently. When we have an empty system, we starve out some of the bad bacteria, especially those that depend upon sugar to survive. A rest period gives time to clear up some inflammation which was caused by the food load. Basically rest from food is healing time for the digestive tract.
The more toxic the food you eat is, the more you need these vacations from eating. Intermittent fasting isn’t by any means an antidote to bad food, but it helps — and with modern food, you need all the help you can get. So much better if you can fast regularly and eat good food! That’s a great combination.
Perhaps the most important advantage of intermittent fasting is sugar management. If you expand your non-eating window to at least 14 hours of a day (preferably more at least some days), you are forcing your body to shift metabolism away from sugar dependence. Your body stores glycogen in your liver for up to 24 hours, but as the glycogen drops your body starts switching over to an alternate fuel source.
Other studies
Now we don’t want to rely on a single study, even though this one actually encompasses a number of studies. Some studies warn of dehydration with intermittent fasting, both because people tend to drink something with meals and because food itself contains water — as a result, the long period without food may also mean a long period without water. This is easily overcome by hydrating throughout the day. Water is not restricted with the diet, and without the liquid from food, water should be increased to compensate. Just like the warning about developing eating disorders: it’s easy to avoid the problem but you must be disciplined in your diet.
The warning about hormone levels bears further examination, because women in particular are warned by various media that intermittent fasting would impact estrogen, which could be dangerous to their menstrual periods and fertility. So we look to other studies to verify that the diet is safe.
Published in Obesity (Silver Spring), researchers found that, despite the warnings about female hormone levels being affected, the subject had been barely studied. (2) Myths develop well when little real data exists. The researchers determined that the concerns about hormones came from a single animal study, where fasting did impact female rodent hormones negatively. Upon further investigation, they determined that the study only involved female animals of a very young age, the equivalent of 9 years old in humans. That’s before puberty, so doesn’t make a very good case study. The Obesity researchers conducted a human trial of pre and post-menopausal women ages 18-65 with an eating window of only 4 to 6 hours. With these parameters over an 8-week study, they observed no change in hormone levels for either pre or post-menopausal women except for DHEA, which did drop — although stayed well within normal limits. Estrogen levels were completely unaffected by the diet. They concluded that intermittent fasting posed no hormonal threat to women, either before or after menopause.
The evidence for intermittent fasting posing any threat is scanty at best, and mostly based on poor food management by the dieters. If you are doing this fast, you are being intentional about it and won’t be abusing the process. Eat good food when you do eat, hydrate well, don’t skip exercise just because you are fasting, and generally follow a healthy lifestyle. Then intermittent fasting will greatly assist you in your health journey.
You must search deeper for true information. It’s not always apparent on the surface.
So much information is merely myth that isn’t borne out by solid research, which could harm you by keeping you from something helpful. Intermittent fasting has so many benefits that it would be a shame to shun it just because of bad information.
Dr. Nemec’s Review
Eating food is stressful to the body. This is because it has to be digested. What type of food you eat either greatly increases or decreases the stress to the body. If you eat living and raw plant based food, it is natural. It contains enzymes that help the food digest itself. It has no additives, preservatives, or chemicals (usually) if it’s organic, and if chewed well or even blended, it provides the highest absorption in the body. Compare that to eating meat that is cooked, eggs that are cooked, and dairy products that are cooked — and all of them are cooked when they’re pasteurized. This food consists of animal protein and animal fat. When you cook them, they lose all enzymes that are naturally occurring. These are predominantly heavy proteins and heavy fats which are very hard to break down in the body so digestion is greatly reduced. If digestion is reduced, so is absorption of nutrients. This food is much, much heavier: a greater load to digest meaning it taxes the digestive system much more to break this down into essential fatty acids, essential amino acids, and vitamins and minerals.
So of the two diets, which do you think is most important to intermittent fast?
The answer is the animal product diet because it’s much harder to digest and absorb. This means it really overworks the digestive system which leads to even greater advantages when you take a break from eating. The system can in a sense catch up.
Look to the Animal Kingdom for the answer
In general, if you look to the animal kingdom, you can see how animals eat and digest. Let’s compare a gorilla to a lion. The gorilla eats plants — mostly growing greens — and it eats these plants most of the day. So the gorilla spends his day eating anywhere from 8 to 10 hours. The gorilla does this every day, and he would only fast if there’s a food shortage which usually does not occur in the climate that he lives in.
Now compare to the lion which is a carnivore. The lion eats a zebra on the African plain. He eats this huge amount of meat/flesh, and then what does he do? He sleeps for 20 hours. How often does the lion eat? Usually once every 3 to 4 days.
Case settled
So in nature, animals that eat meat intermittent fast between two and three days in between meals. Animals that eat plants do not fast. So who should intermittent fast? The people that eat animal products and cooked foods, because this gives them a digestive break that animals in the wild naturally take that eat heavy animal, fat, and protein foods.
Do plant eaters have to intermittent fast?
No, not at all — just like the gorilla.
Is intermittent fasting still beneficial to plant eaters?
Yes, definitely, because all food — even living, raw, plant-based food is still some stress on the digestive system and takes energy to break down. So it is still beneficial to give yourself a digestive break for so many hours during every day. It’s just not mandatory like for those who eat animal products.
The second best benefit of all
When you intermittent fast, the body senses that there’s less food and nutrients coming in, so it adapts to that by absorbing more nutrients from the food itself. This is an amazing benefit of intermittent fasting that is not mentioned very often. So if you eat less often, your body absorbs more nutrients from the meal, because it senses decreased availability so it increases absorbability.
The best benefit of all
What is fasting? It is willfully going in to some pain. Not physical pain, but the mental-emotional pain of deprivation. Very simply it’s saying “no” to the pleasure centers that have been trained in the brain by repetition, so to retrain that, it is somewhat painful to say “no” to the usual routine. When you say “no” to the addictive pleasure mind, you actually take more control of your life and your health.
Just say no
A while back there was a slogan: “just say no to drugs.” You can use the same phrase with everything and anything that decreases your level of health — either physically, mentally-emotionally, or spiritually.
And one of the best ways to say “no” is to fast.
A very interesting observation is this: Jesus gave his disciples the power to cast out demons, yet there was one demon-possessed man that they could not affect. They asked Jesus why they could not do this. His reply: This kind can only come out by prayer and fasting.
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(1) Varady KA, Lin S, Oddo VM, Cienfuegos S. Debunking the myths of intermittent fasting. Nat Rev Endocrinol. 2024 Sep;20(9):503-504. doi: 10.1038/s41574-024-01009-4. PMID: 38898301. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38898301/
(2) Kalam F, Akasheh RT, Cienfuegos S, Ankireddy A, Gabel K, Ezpeleta M, Lin S, Tamatam CM, Reddy SP, Spring B, Khan SA, Varady KA. Effect of time-restricted eating on sex hormone levels in premenopausal and postmenopausal females. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2023 Feb;31 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):57-62. doi: 10.1002/oby.23562. Epub 2022 Oct 6. PMID: 36203273; PMCID: PMC9877115. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9877115/
