What if you could eat an early supper this evening, say around 6 pm, get a good night’s sleep, and when you wake up at 6 am tomorrow morning, you’d have instantly improved your heart health and lowered your risk for diabetes?
Would you do it? This effortless technique to improve your health is called…
Fasting.
Researchers at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah have produced evidence supporting fasting’s benefits on the risk of diabetes and heart disease as well as improving blood cholesterol and lowering triglycerides (blood fats).
Fasting can also help you lose weight and improve your blood sugar levels.
“Fasting has the potential to become an important health intervention,” says Benjamin Horne, PhD, director of cardiovascular and genetic epidemiology at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute and lead researcher on the study. “Though we’ve studied fasting and its health benefits for years, we didn’t know why fasting could provide the health benefits we observed.”
Researchers notice that after 10-12 hours of fasting, the body starts scavenging for energy sources throughout the body to sustain itself. As a result, LDL (bad) cholesterol is pulled from the cells of the body. How the LDL is used is not clear, but over multiple episodes of fasting its level is reduced in the body. And so is fat…
“Fasting causes hunger or stress. In response, the body releases more cholesterol, allowing it to utilize fat as a source of fuel, instead of glucose. This decreases the number of fat cells in the body,” says Horne. “This is important because the fewer fat cells a body has, the less likely it will experience insulin resistance, or diabetes.”
Similar to other studies, the researchers also found that fasting boosts the body’s production of human growth hormone (HGH), touted by many as the anti-aging hormone.
HGH protects muscle and maintains metabolic balance, a response stimulated and increased when you fast. During a 24-hour fast, HGH was found to climb, on average, 1,300 percent in women, and about 2,000 percent in men.
Now, fasting may seem extreme to you at first, but you could ease into it. Begin eating supper earlier, avoid snacks before bed, then sleep through any hunger pangs. The benefits are definitely worth giving it a try a couple of times a week.
