Improving Health and Preventing Disease
While the medical community often blames preexisting conditions for illness, many of the chronic diseases facing public health are preventable. Lifestyle factors that contribute to poor health aren’t noticed until several decades later and a diagnosis from a physician suggests urgent care.
An example of this is prediabetes and diabetes that usually takes 10-15 years to develop. The bad lifestyle of consuming high amounts of sugars with consumption of frequent meals throughout the day can contribute to the condition known as hyperinsulinemia.
The real pandemic facing the public today is the food placed on their plates and forks, as the effect of poor dieting is currently widespread throughout the world.
Currently, more than 80% of the United States are living with either prediabetes or diabetes. This problem is a growing epidemic particularly in India, as 14% of Indians have prediabetes without knowing it.
While calories in and calories out have been the focal point for the food and fitness industries the last several years, hormones play a larger role in the development of preventable diseases. This is because hormones interact with your cells and organs regularly, which can have a large impact on the state of your health.
Intermittent fasting is a lifestyle adaptation to a time period where the availability of food was more scarce and maintenance of the body’s hormonal levels were balanced. The human body was never designed to live in a world of an abundance of food as what currently surrounds us in modern society.
Rather than eating food for pleasure or for the sake of living longer lives, we should be focused on our health span not our lifespan.
How Intermittent Fasting Can Aid Chronic Disease
The relationship that we have with food originates from our younger years when we first were raised and later on when we interact socially as adults. In developed nations, food was more than a means of survival, it became a means to alter emotions and build relationships within our culture.
As cultures have become more intertwined over time, the reasons for eating has become more compulsive. People are finding more reasons to eat more often socially and the dopamine release from eating have made food addictions a reality.
These are the main contributing factors of metabolic syndrome, symptoms of high blood pressure, diabetes, or heart disease. The effects of bad eating habits can have a toll on the body after a long period of time.
The hormone insulin is responsible for the storage of energy in the cells of the body and responds to the amount of glucose broken down from food. Insulin stores this energy in the form of fat in four main places: the liver, the pancreas, around the vital organs, and the muscles.
When insulin levels are elevated for a period of time, the cells used to store this excess energy become less responsive to the release of this hormone. This phase known as insulin resistance, is a precursor to numerous illnesses that affect the body, including obesity and hypertension.
Insulin resistance has also been correlated with calcification of the arteries, which is usually detected using a coronary calcium scan. It’s quite common for people to be evaluated for heart disease using a stress test and many of these artery blockages go undetected for years.
Calcification of the arteries is one of the primary causes for cardiovascular diseases, mainly heart attacks or stroke. A heart attack is when a calcium deposit breaks from inside the artery and blood clot forms on top of it.
Intermittent Fasting to the Rescue
To prevent the chronic conditions of metabolic syndrome, it’s important to resolve the root cause of the issue. Treating the diagnosed disease only prolongs the issue and will make the symptoms worse later on.
When intermittent fasting is incorporated into your daily life, the high insulin levels that contribute to health problems are lowered dramatically. This is because intermittent fasting is a protocol that controls when you eat, not the quantity of food that you eat.
While standard diets focus on specific foods that you need to consume, fasting turns off the hormones that are active when in a fed state. When you eat in a fasted state, less insulin is released from the pancreas and the cells become more insulin sensitive.
Intermittent fasting also aids inflammation that occurs around various parts of the body, which is often the symptoms experienced with joint pains and brain fog.
This also is an ordeal with the digestive tract known as leaky gut, where the consumed food creates an antibody response. When you fast, you give your gut bacteria a break from digestion and an opportunity to repair the damage from inflammation.
The gut bacteria also changes during fasting, with increased microbe diversity and increased production of short chain fatty acids. When more short chain fatty acids are produced in the gut, this increases the precursors for feel good hormones like serotonin.
Typical intermittent fasts last anywhere from 12 to 24 hours, yet there are health benefits to prolonged fasts that start 72 hours or longer. A process of cellular repair begins around 18 hours of fasting called autophagy and this phase starts stem cell rejuvenation after 3 days.
Stem cells are important because they become less effective as we age, which is crucial for intestinal cell repair and the effects of aging. Intestinal stem cells are responsible for maintaining the lining of the intestine that renews itself every 5 days.
Intermittent fasting is also beneficial for the repair of damaged brain cells and the regrowth of new ones. This can help conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Multiple Sclerosis by improving the gut/brain pathway and lowering inflammation in this area.
Starting Intermittent Fasting
It’s well proven that there are long term health benefits to intermittent fasting, as the protocol is very simple to adapt into your lifestyle. An unfortunate situation is when certain people anticipate great results and tend to move too quickly with their eating plan.
While this process is simple, it’s not easy for everyone to switch from consuming 5 meals to 2 meals or less per day. The body needs time to become conditioned to switching energy sources from glucose to ketones, which is not an overnight process.
Intermittent fasting should be started with the longest window possible and gradually reduced from there.
An example would start with a 12 hour window with breakfast, lunch, and dinner eaten with no snacks in between meals. After a couple of weeks, you can move the breakfast up a few hours until the eating window has been reduced down to 6-8 hours.
Once you’ve adapted to a 16-18 hour daily fast without feeling hunger, you can then reduce your meals down to 2 or 1 meal a day. To process further, you can eat your meal every other day and later adapt to prolonged water fasting of 3-5 days.
Intermittent fasting is where you can see the effects of weight management and rapid fat loss, but prolonged fasting is where the true health benefits begin. While prolonged fasting can be used for weight management as well, periodic prolonged fasts can help to reverse many common ailments and damaged tissues within the body.
The Wrap Up
The fact that many chronic diseases are mostly a condition of lifestyle is not made obvious to the public, which is why these illnesses still plague many people. Without isolating any particular type of food, intermittent fasting manages the habits of discipline that many of us struggle with on a daily basis to correct our behavior. Regular fasting can make resounding changes to anyone’s overall health and can remedy the many issues of metabolic syndrome that’s widespread throughout the world right now.
