Intermittent Fasting: Pros and Cons for Your Health | Dr. Will Bulsiewicz

intermittent fasting one of the most popular diets in america but what are the pros and cons for your health that my friend is what we're gonna find out today hi i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll and this is the exam room live appreciate you raising your health iq with us in more than 150 countries around the world making this one of the most downloaded nutrition podcasts anywhere on the planet check this out according to the international food information council foundation that's a mouthful more people practice intermittent fasting than follow the keto diet or a low carb diet or the dash diet a vegetarian or even a vegan diet in fact one out of every 10 people who follow any sort of specific eating plan are choosing to follow intermittent fasting so what is the real the real deal with this why is it so wildly popular that's what we're gonna find out today when we weigh the pros and cons for your health with dr will bulswitz he is a two-time new york times best-selling author and one heck of a gastroenterologist he's here with a fasting gut check literally gonna be telling us all the ways that it can affect your health inside and out so can fasting help fight flab does it help with digestion what are the risks associated with it are there any can it help with inflammation can it help with heartburn is it most effective if it's combined with another diet we're going to answer all of those questions and yours as well because we're going to be opening up the doctor's mailbag so if there's something that you would like to ask dr bolsowitz go ahead drop it in by posting your comment in the in the comment or in the questions and we're going to get to as many as we possibly can here today and with that let's go ahead and fast track our knowledge on fasting with dr b what's up my man that was a tongue twister i was very impressed that you got through that chuck and um it's a it's a testament to your professionalism and not to butter you up before you start grilling me but i mean i i appreciate that it i feel like there was a couple of stumbles i would like a mulligan but you were very generous today with your comments thank you i want to give a quick shout out because my people there are my people are here all right so hello yes hello to emily and dj move it i'm sure that's your full name from upstate both of which are from upstate new york so these are these are my people and dj move it says i love his cookbook and jk sampling said in response to that i'm preparing the warm apple pie oatmeal literally right now oh that's awesome that's awesome i want to know uh how it turns out that recipe i'm very familiar with it is fantastic i play jk can we yeah yeah i see bodhi uh also checking in from denmark uh so that's pretty cool too that's that global effect so hi to every everyone joining us all the exam roomies uh dr b let's go ahead and talk about fasting here wildly popular when i was pulling the stats i was honestly not surprised that like one out of every 10 people who's dieting and we're gonna put that in quotes is trying intermittent fasting and that could be a lot of them are in fact combining it with another diet but what is the general idea with fasting why do people say it's so good for them well uh first of all this has been a very trendy topic and i think we need to separate the trend from the science and um be honest and sincere in terms of evaluating the science as opposed to getting really excited about something that people are doing and you know talking very highly about i do think that the intermittent fasting or there's different versions of it we can talk about those i do think that intermittent fasting can be something that can be beneficial to our health and one of the things that's nice about this is that it does cut across dietary patterns so you know independent of whether you're someone who's pro plant-based vegan keto paleo whatever sort of your dietary approach may be here is intermittent fasting in its many forms that is something that you could potentially implement in your life and there may be benefit to it and um you know where does this idea come from what chuck uh we live in a unique time within the context of the broader human history you know if we look at the entirety of human history across three million years 99.99 of human history actually predates any sort of form of agriculture and we lived in a time of food scarcity and now here we are and at least in the united states for the vast majority of us we are blessed that there is no food scarcity if if anything um we have an excess of highly appealing ultra-processed foods that are just like surrounding us and making us want to eat them and so our body though evolved during this time again 99.99 of human history we evolved during this time where we would eat and then we would not eat and so when we were eating the body would basically flip into a mode of energy conservation where it's like okay i need to store what i can store right now because i'm going to need these calories later and on the flip side when there was food scarcity and we didn't have access to food that's when the body would basically flip into this other mode we call it metabolic switching you would flip into this other mode where you dial back on food storage and instead you start using the storage that you've built up meaning the fat you start using this as your source of energy to burn through it so the general idea behind fasting is that we are going to flip that metabolic switch rather than us consuming food around the clock every single day um instead what we're going to do is we're going to sort of recreate using this modern technique of fasting where we set boundaries and we say look during this period of time i'm going to allow my body to not be consuming food and what that leads to is us flipping that metabolic switch and there are uh benefits to us doing that which we can explore absolutely let's get to some of those benefits the first question today comes to us from mariah who's wondering whether fasting can help with digestion we think so i think that there so one of the big things about fasting is that this um became trendy before we were able to really start studying it as much as i would have liked us to and much of the research was coming actually from animal model studies and i don't really think that taking animals and studying them and then looking at humans and saying oh that's the same thing we're not the same and so we need human research but there has been an explosion of human-based research in the last couple of years looking at these techniques and there is um evidence it's not always consistent and i think the reason why it's not always insistent is our individuality as people and the fact that we're coming from different angles or perspectives so a person who is eating a healthful diet already healthy is not the same as the person who's eating an unhealthy diet and has metabolic issues um with that being said there is the suggestion that that um intermittent fasting can be beneficial to the gut microbiome and so it's beneficial to the gut microbiome uh then the uh expectation would be that this is also beneficial to our digestion so i do i do believe that time restricted eating or intermittent fasting are things that we can apply um to our life and potentially improve our gut health which is why i have them in both of my books that i've published so far chuck is it okay if i comment on the different forms of intermittent fasting of course my man okay yeah i feel like that's an important part of yeah starting this conversation because um i feel a little bit stuck using these terms and not really explaining them so drill it down man absolutely okay so the idea of intermittent fasting this is a very broad term and it can mean many different things intermittent fasting is exactly what the words say which is that you are going through periods of occasional fasting and what that looks like could be a number of different things so there is fasting that could be like you fast for a series of days and you do this occasionally such as once a month uh intermittent fasting could be something within the context of your religious beliefs so for example there's fasting that occurs during the day for ramadan and this is something one of the sources of our information in humans is actually looking at what happens during ramadan and the way that they fast in fasting could also be something where you look at a week and you say like an example is what we call five to two fasting where five days you eat regularly but two days a week you either don't eat or you eat a really restricted diet where it's like you've reduced your calories substantially all right these are different forms now another thing that falls under this umbrella of intermittent fasting is something that i would describe as more lifestyle oriented because you're not doing a big hard hitting fast once in a while but instead you're building a daily routine that's designed to still give your body rest and this is what we call time restricted eating and this is by the way the form of fasting that i'm personally most interested in because i think that it's the most sustainable um and something that can be implemented in many different ways for many different people so you can sort of individualize it to what your needs what your needs are but the idea is this you know if uh the average american wakes up at six in the morning and starts eating food right um like they're eating something they're having their coffee they go through their day they're eating throughout the day and then it's the evening and it's 10 o'clock at night and you're watching netflix and having some snack and maybe even an alcoholic beverage okay that person is fasting for like seven hours a day that's not really actually resting the body our evidence suggests that in order to rest the body it needs at least 12 hours ideally a little bit more in many cases so the idea of time restricted eating is to say that i'm going to give my body at least 12 hours of rest for example you could say it's 7 p.m i'm not going to eat any more food until 7 a.m tomorrow or another pattern that many people do is 16 to 8 fasting where basically what you would say is there's an eight-hour window that i'm going to eat and then i'm going to go 16 hours before i eat again and that eight-hour window could be in the morning it could be in the evening there are actually some differences between those choices we could talk about that but the but the bottom line is this is just another way you can dial it you could be 12 hours of fasting 14 hours of fasting 16 hours of fasting there's many different forms um and you get to make it what you want it to be so i i guess like how does the body kind of heal itself with the during the fasting period and and what happens if there is not this time restricted eating pattern here like if somebody's eating like a minimum say that or the biggest break that they get maybe is like a six hour window right so they're not getting a full eight hours they eat right before they go to sleep and then as soon as they wake up they're eating their breakfast right so they're only getting this six hour window what kind of healing or repair or changes is that person missing out on yeah so there's a couple things that happened uh happened during this period of of taking a break and we're going to call it 12 hours or more of of resting and fasting um so let's talk about the gut first when you eat a meal your gut is going to come into contact with the food that you just consumed and it's going to work your your gut microbes are actually going to be put to work they got to put on their hard hat and get in there and help you out taking care of whatever it is you just put into your mouth and swallowed now the issue is it's not done the instant that you chew it up and swallow it that's actually just the beginning and your gut microbes will be wearing that hard hat for the next six to eight hours working on these things so for a minimum of at least eight hours your gut microbes are not getting to rest at all so if you have that 10 pm snack in an alcoholic beverage and then you wake up the next day and you get back to eating again your gut has been working around the clock now i can tell you being a medical doctor having worked around the clock you're not functioning the way that you should be functioning after about 24 hours of work in fact i would argue that it's actually far less than that and they've with doctors changed the rules about this it used to be the doctors would work two days in a row and they've cut it down substantially to now doctors can only work about 16 hours straight without getting a good good break and some rest so with our gut microbes they need an opportunity to rest let's talk about your metabolism so when you are in this state of there is uh you know you've just consumed some food your body once again going back to what i was mentioning earlier your body is sort of like okay um i am designed for food scarcity so during this period of time there's a glucose level that's elevated there's going to be a release of insulin insulin to control your blood sugar but also to take that blood sugar and turn it into fat and so your body is basically in this sort of metabolic mode of storage when you stop when you give it a break you flip out of that mode your body dials down the insulin your blood sugar levels out and then what you start to do is you start to burn up some of your reserves first you burn up glycogen that's in your liver but after about 10 to 12 hours of fasting the glycogen starts to get burned out and then your body flips into burning fat and this activates the ketones so ketones start to get to be released after 12 or 13 hours of fasting that's where we start to see these ketones now this is not a conversation about the ketogenic diet right now but what we're talking about is specifically these ketones that get released that actually have benefits very similar to short-chain fatty acids which we get from fiber so um the other thing that i would add the last thing not to be too nerdy and complicated here nerd out man the last thing that i would add is that um our uh our cells deserve an opportunity to sort of reset themselves and when we are in sort of food processing mode they're working and when we give them a break there's an opportunity for things to kind of okay let's reset let's get back to baseline here and that's one of the things that we see is that there are certain sort of physiologic changes that take place that can affect different parts of how our body functions that's not just our metabolism but our metabolism is a big part of that all right so all of that sounds really really good uh let's go brass that's kind of an answer here uh if we could pull up a question from 1114 from lewis hamilton i don't know if it's the lewis hamilton it'd be really great lewis hamilton it's nice to nice to hear from you again calling me man you're calling me constantly lewis hamilton at 11 14 is fasting necessary to be healthy well clearly not clearly not necessary to be healthy because um gosh that really is lewis hamilton what's up man so all right uh it's clearly not necessary to be healthy you know the quickest easiest way for me to get to this is to say look at the five blue zones and for the most part they're not there's not some sort of structure where within the five blue zones they're all doing fasting that being said during in okinawa they do practice versions that are somewhat similar to this and so i think that the point from my perspective is this is not required to be a healthy human nor is this the backbone of human health you give me a choice between eating more plants in variety and fasting i'm gonna take the plants in variety right i would rather fuel your microbiome with a healthful diet than have you fasting and eating what the standard american diet is but this can be a tool among many other things that can be implemented in a healthful lifestyle and can benefit you so i think this is something that can be added it's not you know required but it can be something that we can do that house all right let's look at the other side of the equation uh stephanie has a question she sent this one in early uh wondering whether there are any risks though that are associated with fasting is there any sort of downside that any data shows or is this all good uh fasting first of all is not for everyone so fasting is a form of dietary restriction chuck you know this and i'm guessing that the people who have read my books they know this as well i'm not a fan of dietary restriction i don't believe in calorie counting and when it comes to fasting if it becomes something where it started to cause anxiety or food fear then we have crossed the line into a place where i am not comfortable and i would not recommend it and so for people that have a history of any sort of disordered eating and it could be something like a formal diagnosis of anorexia or bulimia but outside of that as well if there is um a history of disordered eating or food fear or food anxiety then i'm quite apprehensive about implementing this i feel like there's other opportunities that could be done instead this is not required to be healthy as i just said there's other things that we could be doing that are a better fit for you patricia at 11 17 wondering whether fasting might be a good option for someone with diabetes fasting can be a good option for someone with diabetes and specifically talking about time restricted eating if a person does time restricted eating one of the things that many of the clinical trials and humans have shown is that fasting can improve insulin sensitivity um and that to a person with diabetes is the critical piece so i i'm a believer that this is something that people with diabetes should be looking at and considering implementing in a part of their as a part of their life i want to say special hello really quickly to molly uh who's tuning in live for the very first time all the way over in israel that's pretty cool thanks for tuning in um that's i love the global impact dr b love it uh okay here's a fun question so we're talking about not eating but what can you drink while you are still honest fast that's a question from kenan okay water is clearly fair game water is cruelly fair game um so if we're okay let me be super nerdy for a moment and separate the effect of fasting on the gut microbiome from the effect of fasting on your metabolism because i was talking about the metabolic switch and flipping from basically food storage mode into fat burning mode so to make the metabolic switch quite simply if we are reducing our chloric intake to a significant degree basically fasting taking a break from food then you will flip that metabolic switch all right so that's just sort of uh hey if you're not really eating any food or it's so minimal such small calories you're good now on the flip side microbiome anything that has a bioactive molecule that comes into contact with your gut microbiome is asking them to basically deal with it in other words do work so now the fast is over so the reason why i'm bringing it up this way chuck is that the research suggests that 12 hours of fasting is beneficial to the microbiome and i like this number in terms of giving it 12 hours before you have for example a cup of coffee or a cup of tea they may have zero calories the coffee in the tea they may have zero or five calories and that's not going to disrupt the metabolic switch but what it is gonna do is it's going to activate your gut microbiome so now they're not really resting anymore so my point is this you want to extend the uh into the break in terms of calorie intake but you also want to make sure you get at least 12 hours of not drinking tea or drinking coffee so there's that window of water only for 12 hours so here's the way i approach it just to kind of break this down and make it simple it's like this i'm a big believer early dinner time now what does that mean you know we all have our challenges some people they they get home from work and it's like 6 45 okay the best that you can but to me early dinner time means you finish dinner before 7 p.m boom start the clock 7 p.m here we go all right if i wait until 7 a.m if i have water after that like i can be up watching netflix i can have some water totally fine the following morning at 7 00 am it's been 12 hours coffee is fair or i could start with water extend the fast a little bit longer before i have my morning coffee but meanwhile i have this cup of coffee i don't add any i mean i don't add dairy anyway but i don't add any cream or sweeteners or any sort of calories to it just black coffee i may put some fiber in there and i have that in the morning and then i just kind of delay my breakfast a little bit and delaying that breakfast may mean breakfast i mean frankly i don't wait until i'm hangry it could be 9 a.m 10 a.m 11 a.m somewhere in there when i'm feeling like i'm starting a little bit hungry it's time for me to have a snack time for me to eat something many times i'll eat a piece of fruit and whatever that is let's pretend started at 7 a.m and now it is uh 11 a.m yo that was 16 hours not bad what if somebody wants to put like a squeeze a little bit of lemon into their water something like that make it fruit infused does that uh do any sort of disruption there as well so it doesn't affect the the the sort of metabolic fast that we're talking about and getting into ketosis that will not affect that but it would affect the microbiome so like it's 10 o'clock at night you're squeezing the lemon in there your microbes are gonna have to deal with that they're gonna have to deal with water i'm not a lemon water i'm just trying to i'm just trying to be clear in terms of the rules here it's just funny the way that you put it your micro your microbes are gonna have to deal with that oh man that's great uh somebody's asking i'm not trying to be nasty chuck okay it caught me off guard man that's all i'm saying i'll uh you're not the enemy uh nikki here is wondering whether fasting can help with acid reflux yeah we think so we think so um and i think a big part of this is actually to be honest with you it's giving you a framework and a structure so you're not eating food late at night and anything that you put into your mouth and and and leave in your stomach when you lie down flat the problem is gravity used to be your friend and now gravity is actually your enemy you're lying flat your esophagus is basically a horizontal line and it's very easy for things to basically reflux into your esophagus now so what we want you know if i were counseling a person who has acid reflux i would say i want at least three if not four hours of not eating any food prior to going to bed well guess what that's a great start to a fast right on um let's talk about some other ways that it can help adriana is wondering whether fasting if there's any data out there showing that it can also reduce the risk for a lot of these chronic diseases that we talk about all the time here on the show there so uh the strongest data is with metabolism so that includes blood sugar control or diabetes includes blood pressure and includes cholesterol and um it includes your weight all right so that's where the strongest evidence is there is um a belief based upon animal model studies and some early human studies that fasting is going to have additional benefits this includes in terms of our brain and our cognitive function so the thought is that fasting actually may be a good pattern for us in terms of reducing our risk of degenerative brain diseases like alzheimer's and there also is some evidence with regard to autoimmune diseases so you know as a quick example chuck um there are studies actually multiple clinical trials where the approach that they took to treating rheumatoid arthritis which is an inflammatory autoimmune disease that affects the joints one of the most common autoimmune diseases out there the approach that they took to treating this condition was fasting and a vegetarian or vegan diet and it worked i would assume uh or would i be correct in assuming that it would help reduce inflammation that's associated with other conditions as well olivia's kind of wondering the same thing uh ra obviously an inflammatory condition but if fasting has anti-inflammatory effects could one say that it would help with other conditions that are inflammatory chuck is there are you talking about autoimmune diseases or is there a specificity olivia wasn't specific here uh but i would assume we can keep it with autoimmune diseases so maybe sjogren's would be another example yeah so um again i think that there's more uh research that we want to do but the suggestion is that fasting does reduce inflammation and um and we we again see this not only with rheumatoid arthritis but with multiple sclerosis i can tell you speaking clinically as a gastroenterologist if a person for example was admitted to the hospital with crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis believe it or not one of the things one of the tools that i have that has nothing to do with like infusions of medication was actually to give their gut a rest and in many cases it would improve the symptoms of crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis and help in terms of healing not in isolation like i typically didn't do it just like hey i'm just going to bow rest them and then and then add back the food but it was a part of what we many times would do for crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis so this is actually already a routine part of medical care all right let's talk about fasting plus something else we were talking about at the top where one out of 10 people if they're following any sort of dietary pattern or fasting but they could also be combining it with another type of diet lizzie specifically is wondering whether fasting is proven to be most effective when combined with a plant-based diet the data that i've seen on this is with regard to rheumatoid arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis the beauty of it in in this regard in terms of research is that because it's common because it's one of the more common autoimmune diseases there actually is quite a bit of research that's been done in terms of what are dietary patterns that are beneficial for this condition and the overwhelming evidence is in five in favor of a plant-based diet and and then there are these clinical trials that were done these are not new by the way they were done 20 years ago that they combined fasting with a vegetarian or vegan diet and saw significant improvements in rheumatoid arthritis so that's where i've seen the most data with regard to this specifically i would expect to be i expect these to be synergistic things to be honest with you chuck like why do one or the other when you can do both do you think especially if somebody's gravitating toward a whole food plant-based diet which we know is nutrient-dense but definitely lower in calories in fat do you have any advice for how they can still make sure that they're getting adequate nutrition if they have that time restricted eating it's a good point and i think that like flipping to a plant-based diet like if you make an aggressive flip towards a plant-based diet and simultaneously start doing intermittent fasting at the exact same time like oh man i heard dr b and chuck on the exam room and i'm i'm going to change my diet today and start doing fasting it's a bit much this is why i'm a believer in easing into things because first of all i want your body to be given an opportunity to adapt to what you're doing second of all i don't want too many moving parts all at the same time because then if you don't feel well we're not really going to know what's doing what and um and third of all at the end of the day it should be like really sustainable i want i want whatever you choose to do to be something that you actually can continue to do and is not so tough and restrictive that it's unsustainable so you know with regard to this chuck i would focus on changing the diet first focus on transitioning to a plant-based diet some people when they transition to a plant-based diet if if they misconceive what a plant-based diet is and they're literally just eating like greens with a couple vegetables and that's it they end up in such a calorie deficit that they don't feel well and they have to dig in things like this they feel sluggish that's the calorie deficit and the reason why that's happening is because a plant-based diet is not just exclusively vegetables plant-based diet includes fruits vegetables whole grains seeds nuts and legumes and i would make the argument that whole grains of legumes are the backbone of a plant-based diet and those tend to be more calorically dense so when a person's transitioning to a plant-based diet focus on that first get settled in with plant-based diet be comfortable feel good you're going to feel good feel good on your new diet give it some time and then this is when you start to look at this and i would also ease into this start off with a 12-hour break 12 hours start there don't change it within one week give it some time see how you feel make sure you feel good then you can move to 13 in a couple weeks let's do an exam roomy roll call here big aunt checking in from houston texas telling people to hit them likes so yeah like this video subscribe to the channel thank you big ant i also want to say hi to annette and sherry says that she just gave fiber fuel to her bestie that's awesome thank you sherry and let's take a question from dolores now at 11 29. she says love you both you're amazing thank you dolores the question is what would happen if you did a prolonged fast of 30 days that's a long time to fast man yeah i know i know that there are places where this is being done um my crew north for example and um but i wouldn't say is this so first of all let me just say that from a gut microbiome perspective when we start extending the fast beyond 24 hours we are actually selecting for specific bacteria and what we're missing is we're missing fiber and so microbes that thrive when we eat fiber they can't like really get stronger in that setting because they're being deprived and starved of their preferred food so when you send the rest beyond 24 hours i have a concern about the effects that this have and there is some research suggesting there's um this biofilm that exists within our intestines and there's specific microbes that chew on that biofilm when there's not a food supply and what can happen is you can actually thin the biofilm out to the point that it can actually put you at risk for things like dysbiosis or leaky gut so i personally would not recommend that people do this of their own idea and certainly not independently if you are to do this you should do it under the guidance and direction of a trained health professional who's also monitoring you while you're doing it uh ian checking in from norway says love fiberfield so all the way over in norway against some other that's pretty cool yeah uh all right sir louis he is an inquisitive one today lewis hamilton at 11 32 is fasting beneficial if you are already a healthy vegan all right first of all i'm starting to wonder if louis is just really good at getting his questions answered because he's lewis hamilton um but is fascinating beneficial for already healthy vegan i haven't seen it may exist i have not secret study specifically to answer this question where you take a population of vegans and you randomize them where half of them would start doing fasting and the other half would just keep in what they're doing i haven't seen that study perhaps it exists but do i think that this can be unofficial absolutely because at the end of the day a healthy lifestyle is not just the food that goes into your mouth it also includes other factors includes factors like sleep and exercise and are circadian rhythm and the circadian rhythm is the part i think is really important and a part of the story here when it comes to fasting circadian rhythm by the way chuck for those who are curious and wondering what i'm talking about i'm talking about the fact that there's a 24-hour clock that naturally exists and this is because the sun goes up and it comes down and it does this on sort of a 24-hour cadence and it's been doing this because we're planet earth and we evolved in the setting of having a sun it's been doing this since the very beginning so every what's unique is that every single creature in every single part of this planet evolved with this one same concept in mind which is that there is the rise and fall of the sun on a daily basis and what you find is that we all as a result of this have a rhythm throughout the day that is the that is um uh the result of of evolving with the circadian rhythm this includes microbes this includes plants this includes us as humans and when we do time restricted eating the advantage of time restricted eating is that we're tapping into this normal rhythm where we stopped eating food at times that normally we would not be eating food because we're supposed to be sleeping and resting and instead we're condensing our food intake into normal daytime waking hours and that actually is beneficial all right we were talking uh you you alluded this a little bit earlier there being a difference in fasting earlier in the day versus later in the day mishimishi love that name at 1134 is wondering if you could elaborate on that what's the difference between eating during the day versus fasting um or or versus in the evening i should say okay so let's pretend that we're going to do this idea of 16 specifically 16 to 8 fasting because it's a little bit hard to move a window around if it's only a 12-hour window right i mean you can really how do you do that but when it's an eight-hour window the question is what are your eight hours it could be six a.m until 2 p.m or it could be 12 noon until 8 pm and these are very different things and there was a study that was published recently where they looked at these two different choices either starting your food intake early in the day meaning like 6 am or 7 am and going until 2 pm or 3 pm and then no food after that until tomorrow versus the alternative choice of starting at 11 a.m or 12 p.m and going until 7 p.m or 8 p.m okay and baby what they found was that the benefits were actually more significant in the people that had early morning or early day fasting meaning that you start your window for eating earlier in the day now i personally would struggle with this because i can it's very easy for me to skip breakfast and i could do an eight-hour window very easily uh if it's just lunch and dinner but it's hard for me to skip dinner i get hungry so you have to think about what would work for you that being said my interpretation of this study i think the part of it chuck is that we tend to not like go super hard at breakfast we're kind of waking up we're getting going we eat a moderate breakfast we a moderate lunch and then many of us for dinner we smash it you know and so if you skip dinner you're skipping the meal that people smash and if you skip breakfast you're skipping the meal that most people eat moderate so um that's my interpretation of that study you know denise has a really great point though she's wondering at 11 40. what about people that work really odd hours like up at 2am and working until 1 o'clock in the afternoon if somebody's a shift worker or working a skewed schedule like denise what's the best way to do this thing first of all i'm grateful to our shift workers these are people that are typically civil servants um we would not be able to have the great society that we do without them i think i'm thinking of nurses something about police officers firefighters things like this to some agree degree doctors but honestly i take a back seat to the nurses because they're the ones in the hospital in the middle night and more than nurses all healthy all health care workers that are there in the hospital working the middle of night for us the research actually chuck is rather clear on this um i don't like that this is the case but this is the truth it comes back to the circadian rhythm our body is designed to be awake when the sun is up and to be asleep when the sun is down that's the way that we are designed and we flip that and we do sleep wake reversal you actually will find that this has metabolic effects that are unwanted people who work shifts tend to as a result have higher weight higher blood pressure higher cholesterol and are greater risk for diabetes so the population based research is there um it's hard for me to globally answer this question because different people have different schedules so most people who are shift workers for example a nurse may be working three or four nights in a week and have a break and so i think that the point from my perspective is i still think that there's value to um restricting your food intake to a limited number of hours and what i would try to do what i would encourage i mean it's hard for me to explain this without taking 20 minutes but what i would encourage you or try to do is try to get it as close to normal waking waking hours as possible so if that's the case rather than eating at like midnight and 5 a.m i would prefer to you that you be eating at you know for example 6 a.m and maybe noon or something like that all right let's uh grab a couple of more here we'll start with pete who is wondering about the overall effect on the immune system say you're exposed to cold the flu whatever the case may be if you're fasting is your immune system more up to snuff than if you're not it's a good question uh you know i i'm guessing that that has been studied and i did not see a study specifically on that but what we do know is that fasting is beneficial not only to your gut microbiome but it does appear to be beneficial to your immune system and so i would generally generally um expect that this would be beneficial in that particular setting that being said it's a bit complicated like i'm not trying to make a global recommendation that if you're sick for example with clovid 19 that you just start fasting you know i think lean into your intuitive signals if your body's telling you that you need food you need to nurse your body because that's an important part of being strong and dealing with the infection as well all right and the last question is actually from a few people in the chat who have been wondering whether uh this could be beneficial for someone who has ulcerative colitis yeah i think so i think it would be beneficial to people who have ulcerative colitis i would expect that there you go let's go ahead and close up the doctor's mailbag if we didn't get to your question today have no fear the good news is dr b will be back again one month from now uh the second tuesday of every month so go ahead keep on submitting your questions in the comments or in the chat and we will save it for a future episode uh man this has been great so many people are really curious about fasting um i certainly learned a lot man you want to talk about raising your health iq today i think that we did that in an epic way as terms in terms of uh what we know what we don't know fasting windows the different types of fasting that intermittent fasting isn't just this one thing it's this one thing and then there's a bunch of different ways to do it man so uh excellent work as always my friend oh my pleasure chuck thank you for having me here and um uh quick shout out to lewis lewis next time we go live why don't you just go live with us let's get yo let's get you on the camera man do it let's do it sir lewis sir lewis and uh by the way uh that uh warm apple pie oatmeal recipe is available in the fiberfield cookbook if you have not yet picked up your copy of that there is a link to do so right now in the show description or in the episode notes highly highly highly recommend it and uh dr b my friend i will talk to you again soon great seeing you chuck thanks so much man thank you everyone for being here and hanging with us thank you thank you thank you thank you and uh one last thing before we go if you have not yet got your uh reservation set for the international conference on nutrition and medicine do so now there literally are just a few seats remaining and the conference is coming up next week august 16th through or august 18th through the 20th at the grand hyatt washington dc absolutely beautiful three days nearly 30 speakers all with the latest on nutrition science you want to talk about taking your health iq to the next level this thing is going to make you a straight-up nutrition mensa candidate this is just a fantastic conference and we're going to be recording episodes of the exam room all three days so come join us in washington dc pcrm.org icnm is the place to register for that but for today my friends that is all the time that we have once again dr b thank you as always for raising our health iqs into the crew behind the scenes that makes the magic happen you guys rock as always and to the exam roomies this show is nothing without you thanks for all of the wonderful questions i can't wait to do it again soon so we can continue to learn all together and for everyone here at the physicians committee i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll we'll talk to you again soon but until then keep it plant-based

Channel: Physicians Committee

Views: 98,359

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Id: B7UV35Ek_0I

Length: 43min 59sec (2639 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 10 2022