Andrew Weil, who is something of an apologist for aging, here holds forth on the merits of intermittent fasting (IF) - shown to improve health and extend life in laboratory animals through mechanisms that largely, but not entirely, overlap with those of calorie restriction: "An IF regime works, proponents say, because it aligns with our evolutionary history. Over the 250,000 years that Homo sapiens have been around, food supply has waxed and waned. We evolved to take advantage of this fact, building muscle and fatty tissue during times of abundance, then paring it back during lean ones. Fasting periods accelerate the clearing-out of waste left by dead and damaged cells, a process known as autophagy. A failure of autophagy to keep up with accumulated cellular debris is believed by many scientists to be one of the major causes of the chronic diseases associated with aging. Occasional fasting also seems to boost activity and growth of certain types of cells, especially neurons. This may seem odd, but consider it from an evolutionary perspective - when food is scarce, natural selection would favor those whose memories ("Where have we found food before?") and cognition ("How can we get it again?") became sharper. Research indicates that the benefits of IF may be similar to those of caloric restriction (CR) in which there are regular meals, but portions are smaller than normal. ... The positive effects of IF have been chronicled in a variety of animal and human studies, starting with a seminal experiment in 1946, when University of Chicago researchers discovered that denying food every third day boosted rats' lifespans by 20 percent in males, 15 percent in females. A 2007 review by University of California, Berkeley, researchers concluded that alternate-day fasting may: 1) Decrease cardiovascular disease risk. 2) Decrease cancer risk. 3) Lower diabetes risk (at least in animals, data on humans were less clear, possibly because the trial periods in the studies were not long enough to show an effect). 4) Improve cognitive function. 5) Protect against some effects of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases."

Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/fasting-health_b_1557043.html

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