Time-Restricted Eating Vs. Blood-Sugar, The Sweet Study Results:
Much of the time we consider nutrition, it’s for simple but superficial reasons.
Trying to just lose weight, or even get that movie-star physique.
Food-choices factor greatly; but the specific Plan can influence results, too.
One of the more interesting ones of late is something called Intermittent-Fasting.
Though it comes in many forms, the most popular one is Time-Restricted-Eating.
And the more science progresses, the more it finds that it’s probably the most useful diet-strategy of all.
Especially if you believe the new work out of the University of South Adelaide…
TRE May Not Be Just A Diet:
So the main idea behind any diet choice is to lose weight through some type of restriction.
Usually it’s Sugar, Carbs, or if you’re really a pro, Calories.
Secondary to that is usually food-quality and nutrient-content.
But here’s the trick: Intermittent-Fasting may just be much more biochemistry than it is a mere “diet”.
And the short answer here is, the TRE version of it works so well, that pre-diabetic men on the program had their blood-sugar drastically-changed,
Even if the only thing they changed or reduced was the total amount of time they spent eating during a day.
Read on to find out more…
The Weird World Of Intermittent-Fasting:
So what we found out earlier is that a lot of smart people, including researchers at The Salk Institute,
Have done work looking into the weird benefits of Intermittent Fasting.
What they found in those studies was that mice on the same diet had radically-different outcomes.
And yes, though many movie-stars do use Time-Restricted-Eating to stay slim,
The Salk results were way better.
By taking the same exact type of mouse in the same environment,
But simply changing the total time they could eat food from 24 hours/day to 10 hours/day,
Researchers wiped-out obesity, lethargy, premature-aging, and fatty-liver disease.
That’s on the exact same Type and Quantity of food!
Time-Restricted Eating, The Holy-Grail Of Diet-Plans?:
And that’s really the Holy-Grail almost, isn’t it?
Diets are a pain in the ass.
They have weird requirements no matter which one you try.
And there is a fair bit of math if you really want to optimize.
This does get easier as you go, but it’s daunting at first and a reason to quit.
But what if you could lose weight and have all different wild health benefits,
From fixing almost every organ in your body pre-emptively, including your Brain,
And extend your healthspan and possibly your lifespan?
-All using the simplest possible tool that produces results?
Yes, I know this sounds like an infomercial.
The Small Human Study Adds To Salk’s Results:
Well, it’s looking like that’s what Time-Restricted Eating does.
Because in the current work by Adelaide, they didn’t use mice.
The experiment was run on a small group of 15 men,
All of whom were at elevated risk for developing Type 2 Diabetes.
Each of them was put on a 9 Hours On / 15 Hours Off eating-schedule, similar to work by Dr. Satchin Panda’s team that studied 10/14.
And interestingly, some started that schedule at 9:30 AM, and some at Noon.
The results showed that at-least for that difference, time of day didn’t matter either.
Every single participant’s blood-sugar became much more controlled as a result of the change.
You Will Not Believe This Part Of The Results!:
Now here’s the real kicker for anyone who’s tried a diet.
The blood-sugar-response was measured with respect to 1 standard test-meal so the experiment could be consistent.
But during the rest of the study period, subjects were encouraged to, drumroll please,
Eat the same food they’ve always been eating!
-BOOM.
That’s right. The people who’d been making themselves pre-diabetic were able to reverse it simply by changing the amount of time in which they ate.
It Seems To Work Even With Sub-Optimal Nutrition:
This is perhaps EVEN BETTER than Dr. Panda’s previous results.
Because it’s an experiment done on people, not test animals.
And it’s done using a very “real”, and if-we’re-honest, not very optimized nutrition to be sure.
And it also showed that subjects can start and finish almost any time in the day,
Just as-long as the eating-window is no more than 9 hours long.
So that suggests that TRE is EXTREMELY FLEXIBLE to be adapted to both a normal person’s daily-schedule,
And less-than-perfect nutrition!
Satchin Panda Was Right, “Metabolism” Does More Than 1 Thing:
This just adds more fuel to the idea that when you’re not eating,
Your body really is doing something with the same pathways.
Up until this point, it’s looked like it was burning-calories and cleaning out Zombie-Cells.
Given the current-work, it is clearly also doing a fantastic job of disposing-of and managing blood-sugar.
-Which must be quite some feat, given the men in the study had already gotten themselves into a risky-state with the same nutrition.
That honestly makes Time-Restricted Eating look downright miraculous.
Who Knows What Else They Might Discover:
Just imagine if the study measured other markers of health.
If the Salk study basically eradicated Fatty Liver Disease, guess what the other indicators might look like for these same 15 men!
Remember that the post on cell-cleaning agents showed that high-fat diets are the horrific polar-opposite of the current best plan going,
And some of the markers for bad health are also ones cleaned up in the mice-studies.
So perhaps they are in people, too.
You Might Even “Fix” Your Faulty Circadian-Clock:
TRE also fights aging too.
Another reason to get good enough at TRE that it’s not a problem.
Your Circadian Clock gets worse with age.
But one of the Salk tests showed that you can pretty-much re-time that clock if you practice TRE.
So, because of that, the people in this study might even be Aging more gracefully, too
Now just think what they could do if they got at least a rough-count of their calories with some simple measuring,
And got the sugar, fast-carbs, and ultra-processed-foods out of their diets?
If You’re Considering A Change, Please Be Safe!:
In-closing, let’s remember a few safety-notes.
1) Don’t make big changes to diet or exercise without consulting your MD first
2) CAUTION!: The 15 men in the study were people who had problems with blood-sugar
2a) This is one of the more at-risk groups for trying anything like TRE
2b) All the more reason to refer to 1) if you’re considering this change
Please be safe and always consult a Pro!
But either way, if you’re allowed to do the plan, you can add leveling-out blood-sugar for pre-diabetic men to the list of magical-benefits that the Time-Restricted-Eating plan can now claim!
Photo Credits: “Clock on a red brick wall”, by John Nyberg
⧉ Links:
• Source: U S.Adelaide
• More Coverage: HT – Intermittent Fasting & Obesity
• Source Study: Obesity – Time‐Restricted Feeding Improves Glucose Tolerance in Men at Risk for Type 2 Diabetes: A Randomized Crossover Trial
Leave a Reply