Intermittent fasting is often done by those who would like to lose weight, but it turned out that while they are shedding those extra pounds off, they are also extending their lives by slowing aging.
Fasting is the abstinence from food and liquid for usually 24 hours or several days, while intermittent fasting is a form of dietary restriction which involves a 24-hour fast followed by a 24-hour non-fasting period.
Fasting is difficult to maintain, so researchers at the University of Florida initiated the study to determine if intermittent fasting would yield the same benefits of fasting. The researchers involved 24 participants for the study who underwent two trials.
"People don't want to just under-eat for their whole lives," Martin Wegman, student at the UF College of Medicine and co-author of the paper, said in a university news release. "We started thinking about the concept of intermittent fasting."
For the first trial that ran for three weeks, the participants alternated one day of eating 25 percent of their caloric intake with a day of eating 175 percent of their caloric intake. During the second trial, they repeated the same every-other-day diet but added antioxidant supplements that includes vitamin C and E. The researchers tracked the participants' sirtuin proteins, a class of proteins linked to extended lifespan and slower aging.
The analysis found that the sirtuin proteins level increased due to intermittent fasting. However, this observation disappeared when the diet was combined with supplements.
"You need some pain, some inflammation, some oxidative stress for some regeneration or repair," said Christiaan Leeuwenburgh, Ph.D., co-author of the paper and chief of the division of biology of aging in the department of aging and geriatric research. "These young investigators were intrigued by the question of whether some antioxidants could blunt the health effects of normal fasting."
Earlier studies suggest that intermittent fasting is effective against obesity and other diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer's.
The findings were published in the journal Rejuvenation Research.
