Fasting as a Method of Life Extension

Dear Reader,

  (I have taken this directly from Patrick Cox's news letter of 7/24)

As a species, we are unprepared for many of the changes technological acceleration has wrought.

Take, for example, the agricultural technologies that have fundamentally changed the human relationship with food. In my lifetime, the cost of basic nutrition as a percentage of household budget has plummeted, as has the acreage needed to produce it.

In less than a century, we have made the transition from caloric scarcity to abundance. For the first time in human history, Western lower-income populations suffer higher rates of obesity than wealthier populations.

Very few people understand what this change means. In fact, most younger people don’t seem to be aware that hunger and malnutrition were commonplace a hundred years ago. The consequences of this unprecedented nutritional bounty in the form of adipose tissue are easy to see.

The costs associated with extra adipose tissue, however, are not so obvious.

I won’t use this space to examine the truly alarming statistics about obesity and disease, but this overview at BioMed Central is a good starting place. Disease rates and medical costs rise dramatically with BMI, while productivity falls. Moreover, measures of body mass index (BMI) increase with age.  Since the population is aging, healthcare costs will continue to rise—until science is liberated to solve this problem.

In the US and Canada, almost one-third of adults are currently obese and about two-thirds are overweight, using the standard BMI definitions. BMI is measured as kg/m² or weight divided by the square of body height. Obesity is 30 or more. Overweight is defined as a lower BMI than obesity, but over 25.

This measure, of course, has its own problems. Athletes with very little fat but lots of muscle often fall into the overweight category. Moreover, some people will suffer the ill health effects associated with obesity without having BMIs over 30.

Until recently, it was believed that Asian populations had much smaller overweight and obese populations, but it seems that many Asians suffer from diabetes and other diseases associated with metabolic syndrome at lower BMIs.

It’s no surprise that the science is confusing or that researchers are only beginning to sort out this new world of caloric plenty. Very few of our ancestors experienced constantly available, inexpensive, and enjoyable food. Our metabolisms are in brand-new territory, and we have adapted neither genetically nor psychologically to the situation.

Solutions Are Coming, Fast

Weight loss drugs continue to improve, though marginally. Down the road, I’m sure we’ll find solutions to the problems associated with higher BMIs. I think regenerative medicine offers the most interesting therapeutic possibility: implants of fat-burning, brown adipose tissue. I’m talking at length about it in my upcoming ebook. (Register here to be among the first ones to receive a free copy once it’s published.)

But right now, there are no “cures,” so many of us are looking for any kind of help we can get.

One of the hottest areas in the area of weight loss isintermittent fasting (IF), which entails not eating for a part of every day or for several days a week. As far as I can tell, interest in this strategy emerged strongest in the UK, but it has spread to North America and beyond.

No long-term research has been done on IF, so I’m not going to describe these strategies, despite the fact that I dropped about 30 pounds some time back while limiting food intake to a six-hour window. At that time, the research indicated that the strategy wasn’t dangerous, though the benefits weren’t clear, beyond those that come from losing weight.

Many proponents claimed that IF provided many of the health benefits of calorie restriction, an extremely low-calorie diet of optimally nutritious foods that has demonstrated life extension benefits in animals. The data, however, didn’t exist.

It still doesn’t, actually, since in order to collect that data, a statistically significant number of people would have to suffer a diet generally described as torturous for decades. On the other hand, really interesting research is emerging.

The most interesting, I think, comes from the field of biogerontology, the study of aging, and specifically from Valter D. Longo of the pioneering USC Davis School of Gerontology. Longo’s most prominent research has been in the field of cancer.

Some years ago, Longo showed that fasting helps animals survive chemotherapy with less severe side effects. He now argues that fasting puts normal cells into a protective mode, making them more resistant to the damage inflicted by chemotherapy drugs. Cancer cells, though, are always growing, so they can’t enter that protective mode. As a result, they are weakened by fasting, making them more susceptible to the drugs designed to kill them.

This protective state triggered by fasting is of interest to many scientists. The NAD+ precursors and sirtuin activation, which I’ve discussed in this letter, are part of that research. Similarly, scientists studying rapamycin believe that the naturally occurring compound’s demonstrated life-extension effects in animals are related to calorie restriction pathways.

Longo was concerned, however, that fasting might be impractical or even dangerous for cancer patients and others who already suffered from extremely low body weight. This seems to have led him to wonder if absolute fasting was actually necessary to tip cells into protective mode. Instead, he put animals on very low-calorie restriction diets and found the same benefits.

This is described in an excellent paper in Cell Metabolism. The title of the study is, “A Periodic Diet That Mimics Fasting Promotes Multi-System Regeneration, Enhanced Cognitive Performance, and Healthspan.”

Longo found that animals enjoyed significant benefits from periodic “fasting-mimicking diet” (FMD). Animals eating a calorie-restricted diet four or five days per month experienced improvements in organ function and intelligence, as well as health spans.

In a pilot study of 19 people who ate the same kind of diet, subjects showed the same improvements in markers, such as weight loss and reductions in IGF-I. Moreover, the fat people lost using FMD was the dangerous abdominal organ fat, which is usually very hard to shed.

This is pretty big news, for several reasons.

First, it implies that we may not need to endure permanent calorie-restricted hunger to gain many of the benefits of calorie restriction (CR). Longo speculates that for many people, a five-day fasting-mimicking diet every two to three months could reboot their bodies’ system and deliver profound health benefits, including weight loss.

It’s possible, in fact, that periodic CR might be better than permanent CR because many of the benefits he describes come after the low-calorie diet. There seems to be a pruning of older, less effective cells during the FMD. For example, Longo’s research indicates that a cycle of FMD results in the death of about one-third of some types of immune cells, which are then replaced by younger, stronger versions when a normal diet is restarted. These younger, stronger replacements improve immune system function.

Obviously, I’m not your doctor and I’m not going to encourage you to try this at home. On the other hand, I think this study represents a really important breakthrough for those of us who want to optimize health and BMI. For more information, the Cell Metabolism article is here. Science Daily has a good article about the study here and NIH Research Matters describes the results here.

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Sincerely,

Patrick Cox
Editor, Transformational Technology Alert