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Sunday 30 September 2012

Dining In The Fourth Dimension

Dining in the Fourth Dimension

Remember when your parents or grandparents warned you against snacking and told you to wait till mealtimes? It turns out they were right, and that when you eat is almost as important as what you eat when it comes to the effect on your health.
Eating in time-restricted windows, or intermittent fasting, is proving to be a powerful tool for clearing liver fat, normalizing blood sugar, and improving energy. It costs nothing and does not involve eating less.
Even grazing animals don’t eat at night, and humans aren’t designed to graze. We have a gall bladder, which is an adaptation for digesting big fatty meals. A crocodile has a gall bladder, and it doesn’t eat every day.
It used to be thought that snacking brought us closer to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. It was assumed that if you hunted and gathered all through the day, you’d eat as you went. The people who thought that had never lived with hunter-gatherers, and had forgotten about the importance of cooking and food preparation in their own lives. Hunting provides occasional kills, and gathered food tends to be collected to provide shared meals - such societies are co-operative and highly social. One or two large meals a day is the norm, not constant nibbling.
Experiments in humans and animals have confirmed that fitting one’s eating into a regular “window” improves markers such as liver fat, blood lipids, blood sugar control, and inflammation.
Mice get fat easiest on a high-fat diet, the way humans get fat on refined-carbohydrate diets. When mice were fed the same fattening diet, but only allowed to eat during an 8-hour window every day, they gained significantly less weight than mice that ate the same amount, of the same fattening food, but had had access to it round-the-clock. Better still, they even out-performed mice that had been fed a “healthy” diet (for mice) but had had access to it 24-7.
http://www.salk.edu/news/pressrelease_details.php?press_id=560
http://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/abstract/S1550-4131(12)00189-1
Two things seem to have contributed to this result: the 16-hour periods between meals when no food was entering the bloodstream allowed the body to go into “fasting” mode and use up stored fat, and generally sort out its energy arrangements (just as closing a supermarket at night makes it easier for staff to restock the shelves and clear up any mess); and the daily rhythm of hormone regulation became more defined. This is particularly relevant to hepatitis C as “brain fog” fatigue, insomnia and depression can be due to abnormal levels of cortisol, melatonin, serotonin and other hormones, the rise and fall of which should follow a daily pattern. The improvement in liver fat in the IF mice was also highly desirable.
I recommend eating between 10am and 6pm to “reset the body clock” in this way.
There are other variations but this one is least stressful to adapt to and works for me.
Intermittent fasting is the icing on the cake, and not the place to start with a Hep C diet. Begin with supplements and herbs, removing food toxins, restricting carbohydrate, before experimenting with IF.

6 comments:

Puddleg said...

Don Pardi: "What is that minimal threshold that we need to surpass in order to maintain these normal rhythms? Well, I would say that getting morning light is definitely important. That serves as an anchor. So I think waking up in the morning, getting outside, and getting light for a good 10, 15, or 20 minutes is a really smart thing, particularly if you do any fasting, by the way. I do intermittent fasting myself, and I think that there’s some really interesting science behind it. I know it’s not for everybody, but I’ll just bring it up to mention that if you do do fasting, then it is important, I think, to get bright light exposure first thing in the morning, because what a lot of people might do if they’re fasting is that their circadian rhythm will shift, right? The body is always trying to listen to understand what part of the day are we in? Like if you travel to Europe or basically you change time zones, over time, the body is taking in signals, not only light but also sleep, physical activity, food, those to a lesser degree than light, but they are affecting the circadian rhythms. They’re gonna eventually help you shift and get onto that schedule where that schedule now feels normal. So all of those things really do matter, and actually you see this in people that will do fasting for religious purposes. What happens is that — it’s usually a month long — over the first couple of days, they basically shift their schedule. So even though they’re fasting, they’re able to eat at night, and so they end up being up at night much longer than they normally would be if they weren’t fasting. So be careful of that. Get a lot of bright light exposure if you do fasting, particularly in the morning. And then I would also say getting outside a couple of times a day whenever you can does make sense."
http://chriskresser.com/why-most-people-are-sleep-deprived-and-what-to-do-about-it

Unknown said...

hi george, what are your views on having bulletproof coffee (mct oil, butter, coffee), i usually have one at around 7.00 then eat again around 14.00...I believe the bc breaks the fast but my body stays burning fat, what do you think?

Luigi_uk

Unknown said...

ps..i forgot to mention im on lchf woe

Puddleg said...

I drink coffee with cream when not eating, keeps me satiated.
In theory MCTs are good, yet not a real food. Medium chain FAs in cream, butter or coconut will be mixed with other fats in triglycerides, pure MCTs are I believe created artificially. So they're a supplement not a food, a very useful one it appears, not saying anything against MCTs but they are perhaps as artificial as margarine. If it matters.

Unknown said...

But does one stay in fat burning mode
When drinking bc in the morning? I'm guessing the answer is yes

Puddleg said...

I certainly think so - there's nothing else to burn!
There can be an insulin response to fat, but unlikely to make any difference, BC is not a meal.