Fasting could be an effective medical intervention for prediabetics.
Medical researchers identified a biological process associated with periodic fasting that converts bad cholesterol into energy, an Intermountain Medical Center news release reported.
The research team found that after 10 to 12 hours of fasting the body started searching for other sources of energy. The body tended to pull LDL (bad) cholesterol from the fat cells to use as energy.
"Fasting has the potential to become an important diabetes intervention," Benjamin Horne, PhD, director of cardiovascular and genetic epidemiology at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute and lead researcher on the study said in the news release. "Though we've studied fasting and it's health benefits for years, we didn't know why fasting could provide the health benefits we observed related to the risk of diabetes."
Prediabetes means that blood sugar is higher than normal, but is too low to be called diabetes. One day of water-only fasting led to lower glucose (sugar) levels and weight loss.
"When we studied the effects of fasting in apparently healthy people, cholesterol levels increased during the one-time 24-hour fast," Doctor Horne said. "The changes that were most interesting or unexpected were all related to metabolic health and diabetes risk. Together with our prior studies that showed decades of routine fasting was associated with a lower risk of diabetes and coronary artery disease, this led us to think that fasting is most impactful for reducing the risk of diabetes and related metabolic problems."
This was the first study of its kind that looked at patients of all weights, as opposed to only those who were obese.
"During actual fasting days, cholesterol went up slightly in this study, as it did in our prior study of healthy people, but we did notice that over a six-week period cholesterol levels decreased by about 12 percent in addition to the weight loss," Doctor Horne said. "Because we expect that the cholesterol was used for energy during the fasting episodes and likely came from fat cells, this leads us to believe fasting may be an effective diabetes intervention."
