The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
essentially during sleep, and in particular, during fasted states of sleep, we are undergoing a number of automatic seller processes that clear out debris from our brain enhance cognition, or at least offset dementia. This is now well-established as well as a number of the same processes occurring in the organs of our body.
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There is something special about the fasting that occurs during sleep, because it's associated with a number of processes that relate to the so-called lymphatic system, the movement of lymph like fluids and other fluids through the brain, and kind of sweeping out a garbage disposal, if you will, a clearing out of the metabolic debris and some of the autophagy that's associated with bad processes in the brain.
Fasting of any kind does tend to enhance autophagy. It is not the only way to create autophagic conditions. Autophagic conditions can be created simply by following a sub caloric diet. And there are other things that one can do in order to trigger autophagy, but fasting does trigger autophagy. So when we're asleep, the bad cells are getting gobbled up and eaten.
And now they will...those kind of experiments will guide us to see if we give the same high fat diet within eight hours or nine hours to mice and we do the same assays, what will happen, whether we'll see improvement and benefit. So that's one set of experiments. The other set of experiments that will be very useful... And I'm sure somebody else must be doing it because if I can think of an experiment, somebody else is already doing it. That's to take all these animal models of Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease, and then put them on time-restricted feeding. Yeah, it seems obvious. And then see whether the performance improves. Yeah. You know, I'll not be surprised if we see these kind of studies coming out in the next six months or a year. Well, surely, at the very least clearing away some of these protein aggregates because you're having a constant fasting period, then if, indeed, those protein aggregates are affecting cognitive function, you would imagine that that would be improvement.
And so, if you're eating with these very small windows of sleep and very small windows of fasting you're actually doing yourself harm and putting yourself at greater risk.
Time-restricted eating produces fat loss independent of total calories.
A 72-hour fast measurably improves autophagy markers in healthy adults.
One-meal-a-day (OMAD) eating patterns increase all-cause mortality in long-running cohort data.
Eating the largest meal before 3pm improves 24-hour glucose vs. an evening-heavy schedule, calorie-matched.