I got started with intermittent fasting back in 2022. It’s been around a lot longer than that and has been growing in popularity since 2011. But anytime up-and-coming health advice rushes onto the scene, I like to take a step back and wait to see what happens. The reality is that health fads come and go, and it’s hard for me to take most of them seriously. But intermittent fasting didn’t go away, and I think that is about the best test we have for good advice in health science— whether or not it can stand the test of time.
So, I finally took a look at some of the science behind it and was pleased by what I found. It quickly checked all my boxes for logical consistency. Intermittent fasting was about giving our cells a break from the constant metabolic load being put on them. After all these little cellular machines are subject to wear and tear, in much the same way that your daily drivers wear out over time.
In the cell, this happens as a result of biochemical errors, in the form of genetic errors and failed chemical processes. At first, these errors are benign but, as they mount up, the cell becomes less and less effective at carrying out its many cellular duties. Ultimately the cell will have to undergo apatosis, self-inflicted cell death.
To compensate for the loss, nearby cells will undergo mitosis (cell division) and create two daughter cells. But even this is subject to degradation. Because there is a limit to how many times our cells can divide, and each time we accelerate them having to do so, we are pushing ourselves forward faster to the end of our lives.
To put it short, our cells are not infinite in their capacity to do work, and giving them a lighter metabolic load will give them greater longevity and health.
There are two ways to do this. The first is to eat less throughout the day. That means eating light meals, and not stuffing our faces as many of us are prone to do. It is here that we have some of the strongest evidence for the connection between life span and caloric intake. In multiple studies, we have learned that calorie restriction can drastically extend our life spans.
The problem is that many of find this strikingly difficult to do. See we also happen to have these nagging behaviors, utterly hardwired into is by the forces of evolution. One such behavior is to EAT, when there is food around. This was an important priority for much of human history, since food had to be painstakinly sought out, and was not always consistenly around.
So when a hunter gathers foraging in the forest stumbles on some berries that may be rotten in a couple of days. The behavior of stuffing one’s face is a powerful driver of survival. Such are the behaviors we have inherited from our ancestors or the millennia, and such is the reason why they are so hard to resist. They have been long laid by generation after generation of survival of the fittest.
The problem is that it no longer applies. Food is everywhere now, courtesy of the Industrial Revolution.
But for those of us who don’t do well trying to keep our portion sizes small, intermittent fasting is a great option. It utilizes the same science as calorie restriction, but it does so in a different way. By narrowing your eating window, you can minimize the number of calories you take in each day, and this can be a great tool for weight loss.
The cells still get a break from the metabolic load, and the long period of non-eating closely aligns with our evolutionary past of not knowing where our next meal will come from. For this, our bodies are calibrated and aligned.
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