Amazing New Study Reveals Miracle Benefits Of Fasting

Hello Health Champions. Today we're gonna talk about a new study on intermittent fasting

that talks about some amazing benefits. Coming right up. Hello I'm Dr.

Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if you

want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works

make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss

anything today we're going to talk about something really exciting it's a new

study on intermittent fasting and what's so exciting is that this was published

in the New England Journal of Medicine this is one of the most prestigious

medical journals in the world and it has to be basically bulletproof and

watertight in order to get published in that journal they look at it they

critique it they dissect it and if they find any flaw or any lack of proper

reasoning then they don't get published in there so this is exciting because

it's something that people are gonna pay attention to it's something that's going

to move intermittent fasting in this step in a huge step in the right

direction toward mainstream medicine and towards mainstream health thinking and

dietary thinking so they start by bringing up an interesting point that

they have done a lot of studies in the past on caloric restriction and they

have shown very very clearly that there's a significant increase in

lifespan if you restrict calories but they weren't really sure about what the

mechanism was they thought that it had to do with with weight loss or with

reduced radical activity free radical activity but what they're pointing out

here is that for example as their first example we give them their their whole

food allotment for the day they're gonna eat that in the first few hours which

means that these rats are then going to be fasting for about 20 hours so they're

really doing intermittent fasting more than they're doing calorie restriction

so in this study where there going through everything they have shown

that many of the health benefits of intermittent fasting are not simply the

result of reduced free radical production or weight loss but instead

it's adaptive cellular responses and there are three things that intermittent

fasting improves glucose regulation it increases stress resistance and it

suppresses inflammation and this is what I've said all along that a calorie is

just a notion alright the benefits have to come from how the metabolic processes in

the body change and it's primarily about insulin and autophagy so throughout the

paper they use a term called metabolic switching and intermittent fasting

introduces it induces metabolic switching and what does that mean it

means that you're making the body switch from one food source to another that you

change the metabolic pathways in the body and this is because of what we also

know as feast or famine and they're explaining that after meals glucose is

used for energy because now we have a surplus then glucose is the main fuel

however while glucose is used for energy fat is stored in adipose tissue as

triglycerides and that's during the feast then during famine now we have

periods of fasting now triglycerides are broken down to fatty acids and glycerol

and now we can use those for energy so it's the switching it's going back and

forth from from storing to retrieving and I want to think about this when we

have an excess we have insulin dominance and we are storing another way of

looking at that as far as health is that in that state we are clogging up the

body that yes we are we're building and we're in an anabolic state we're

building new tissue which is a good thing but we are primarily clogging

things and we need famine period to unclog to start

cleaning house so they mentioned that there have been in the studies there are

three main strategies there are alternate day fasting there's something

called 5:2 fasting and there's time restricted fasting but it doesn't really

matter what you do as long as you have some form of feast and famine that

there's a period where you are feeding less so that the body is forced to start

retrieving to start cleaning and unclogging next they talk about

intermittent fasting and what they call stress resistance and this is one of the

main mechanisms by which intermittent fasting has its benefits so they're

saying that repeated exposure to fasting periods result in lasting adaptive

responses that confer resistance to subsequent challenges what does that

mean it means that if you stress the body a little bit then it gets better at

handling that stress in the future that if you stress it it has to adapt

that's what exercise does exercise does not build you up exercise breaks you

down it's a stress and then your body responds it has an adaptive response and

it becomes stronger so that it can handle it better next time so if we do

this on a regular basis the body gets better and better and better at this

metabolic switching and at handling these challenges in these adaptive

responses they consist of increased expression of antioxidant defenses

increased DNA repair increased protein quality control it results in

mitochondrial biogenesis meaning the body makes more of the mitochondria

that's the the powerhouse the little inclusions in your cells that produce

the vast majority of your energy so the body starts breaking down the bad and

rusty ones and they're increasing the production of good new ones and lastly

it down regulates inflammation so these are some major major changes

that it that helps the body handle stress better and this is something that

builds up over time and that over time gets inherited in future generations and

on that topic they end up saying these pathways are untapped or suppressed in

people who overeat and are sedentary so we we are designed for this metabolic

switching and we're designed to move those are necessities they're not

optional anymore so what they're saying basically is sedentary living is

dangerous and if you start understanding the benefits of intermittent fasting

what they're really telling you is 3 meals a day plus snacks is dangerous all

right it is not natural it's unnatural for the

body to have that many meals to have that consistent a food supply so number

4 they're talking about lifespan and this is one of the most studied benefits

that there it's the evidence is very very strong that intermittent fasting

and calorie restriction by making the body have periods of famine where it

starts unclogging and cleaning it is extremely beneficial and it is proven to

extend life animals and humans will live longer if we have a period of

restriction of food but then they go further and say that there's more to it

than just what appears at the surface so there's a lot of bonuses and they quote

one study where they say intermittent fasting seems to confer health benefits

to a greater extent that can be attributed to just a reduction in

calorie intake so in one study they had one group of women do a 5:2 intermittent

fasting and another group did a 25% calorie restriction but no specific time

restriction on their intake and after six months they had lost the same amount

of weight but the people in the fasting the

intermittent fasting group who structured their meal by time they had a

greater increase in insulin sensitivity and they had a larger reduction in waist

circumference okay they reversed insulin resistance and they reduced their belly

fat more even though they had the same weight loss so in other words they got

much healthier their likelihood to get metabolic syndrome and these

degenerative diseases were much much lower even though they had lost the same

amount of weight so when you eat is just as important as how much or what you eat

so next they go over physical and cognitive benefits so physical endurance

physical strength prowess and cognitive function so focus thinking and memory

and some of these studies are in mice and some are in rats and some are in

humans but I'm just going to read off a few better running endurance better

balance and coordination enhanced cognition better spatial memory better

associative memory better working memory reverses the adverse effects of obesity

diabetes and neuro inflammation improved verbal memory so there were lots and

lots of different studies on cognitive function especially in elderly and I

love this last part in this section they're saying there is certainly a need

to undertake further studies of intermittent fasting and cognition in

older people particularly given the absence of any pharmacological therapies

that influence brain aging and progression of neurodegenerative

diseases so what they're saying is as far as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and

dementia and neurodegenerative decline there is no pill so we have shown they

have proven that intermittent fasting and reversing insulin resistance can

help so in light of that it's especially important because there are no pills

that are going to do anything for you in that regard

and next they list a bunch of conditions where they suggest that intermittent

fasting be used as a clinical application that it be used as a

prescription basically and they're saying that for cases of obesity type 2

diabetes cardiovascular disease cancer neurodegenerative disease asthma

multiple sclerosis and arthritis as well as surgical outcomes it should be

recommended it should be part of part of standard care as a clinical application

to use intermittent fasting for these things and surgical outcomes that means

that they've shown that it can improve the healing ability the healing capacity

of the body will heal better from surgery if you fast before or after or

both so you can do it preventatively or you can do it after to just make the

body heal better and from a holistic perspective we also want to understand

that there are no lasting treatments for these things the only thing that they

can do is to manage the symptoms they can give you a pill to suppress

something they can suppress the blood sugar they can suppress a symptom they

can suppress the blood pressure but they can't make the body heal they can't make

the body go back to normal function whereas intermittent fasting does

exactly that without drugs without costly medication or intervention you

just stop eating for a period of time and according to the research these

things get better that's pretty powerful and on that note another thing to

consider is that if you add up all the morbidity and all the mortality of these

different conditions I think you'll find that it's probably in the high 90% range

of everything that people suffer from and that people die from so all the more

reason to take this seriously so as excited as I am to find a study

like this and thorough and as eloquent as the authors

of the paper were neither one of us are extremely hopeful that this is going to

turn the world around overnight because there's a lot of resistance and there's

a lot of obstacles on the way so here are a few that they list the in

considerations they say well you know the the studies the literature the

research says this works but the biggest problem we have to overcome is that the

culture the habit the societal culture our customs are to eat three meals a day

breakfast is the most important meal of the day make sure you don't go more than

a few hours without fueling up we have these these myths these this dogma that

is so hard to overcome and that might be the the biggest obstacle that when

something is so ingrained then anything else is weird

and it's off the beaten track and it's unusual and strange and undoable which

is exactly why that the low-carb and the keto diet and intermittent fasting are

receiving so much resistance because it's different from the cut the cultural

customs that we have the second issue they bring up is that if people have had

three square meals every day of their life if they've never missed a meal in

their life and then someone tells them to change say oh you should eat fewer

meals in a shorter window you should skip breakfast that's tough

these people their metabolic machinery their mental habits they're not ready so

they're gonna get hungry and they might throw in the towel way way too soon and

they say in the paper that if people only knew that you know the body adapt

and it might take a month or so but once you get used to it there's no problem

well a lot of people might not overcome that hurdle so if you've been following

this channel for a while you know that we talked a lot about switching from

carb dependence - fad adaptation and you want to do that

kind of slowly but as soon as your body learns to use fat primarily over

carbohydrates then that hunger is not an issue and it doesn't even have to take a

month the third area that might be an obstacle is that there very very few

people in the medical community that understand intermittent fasting they're

still on the other side of the fence most of them still think that the

general recommendations of frequent meals and three meals plus snacks and

high carb diets and low-fat and so forth and calorie restriction they still

believe that is the norm because that's the only thing they've ever heard so a

lot of people even when they find out this knowledge they have to fight with a

doctor to sort of convince them to be able to do it so there's very little

guidance in this area much less a standard of care where the

medical profession recommends this so I love it that they're actually coming up

with a plan that I don't know if this would be the way to do it but at least

they have the foresight to suggest that you know we need this in the medical

education in the basic sciences we need physicians dieticians and nurses to know

this stuff we need to have lifestyle change centers that this needs to be

part of a wellness organization that's part of that medical system and they're

suggesting that fasting should be a prescription that just like the doctor

has a notepad to write out a prescription they can write out a

prescription for intermittent fasting and just spell it out exactly how it

they also recognize a course that there may be some that don't want to change

that they're just not willing for whatever reason however some people are

unable or unwilling to adhere to an intermittent fasting regimen so then we

may be able to develop targeted pharmacologic therapies that mimic the

effects of intermittent fasting without the need to substantially alter feeding

habits so again this is the dream of something for nothing basically that we

want the solution in a pill we want the quick fix we we want the results but if

there is a shortcut then let's take it and then they're saying however and I

love the political correctness of their statement they're saying however the

available data from animal models suggests that the safety and efficacy of

such pharmacologic approaches are likely to be inferior to those of intermittent

fasting and that's very very delicately put depending on the forum I might not

be quite so delicate what they're really saying is the safety that means that

anytime that you push a chemical into a system and you use that chemical to

alter the body's behavior there's something called side-effects okay

that's the safety he's talking about and they will always be side effect when you

try to do things like that and then he's talking about

the efficacy meaning how well will it work so you may be able to get some

short-term benefits you might be able to alter the body's behavior but in the

long run there is no chemical that can restore the body to its original

function to restore the activities and the signals and the integrity that's

supposed to be there there is no chemical that can do that so an analogy

that I like is if you have a lake a polluted lake and there's a bunch of

fish living in the lake and the fish are getting sick from manmade chemicals then

would anybody think it's a good idea to clean up the lake with by adding more

man-made chemicals or do we need to find a way to restore the lake to its

original purity right that's what we're talking about here that a pharmacologic

approach may be able to mimic some of these behaviors but they're not actually

gonna clean up the lake doing that whereas if you go with nature if you use

the natural mechanisms that are already in place then Nature has a way to figure

it out so I have no illusion that this is going to be a major part of the next

government guidelines for Health for dietary advice and don't wait for the

medical doctors or the healthcare system to embrace this before you have a go at

it alright this is the proof that it works so put it to good use if you enjoy

this video make sure that you check out that one and thanks so much for watching