Dr. Paul Anderson explains intermittent fasting as scheduled 12-13+ hour eating windows, triggered by water intake and medical guidance. A 5-year study found breast-cancer survivors who fasted 13 hours daily had one-third lower recurrence rates. Side effects like headaches usually stem from dehydration and resolve with more water.
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Good day and welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul, and here we are doing some questions and answers from you folks out there in internet land that I collect over time. And the next topic that I got a lot of questions about is intermittent fasting. And so, first off, because we're going to talk about a health-related topic, I'm not giving any medical advice. I'm giving background information. You should make any healthcare decisions with your healthcare providers, and that is not somebody who's on YouTube or on the radio. That would be your actual medical providers. Other ways to find all of the media outlets: dranow.com, D-R-A-N-O-W dot com, and we got links to just about everything on there. We're on All the Pod Burners. We're on YouTube, directly on CTR Radio, and we livestream this to Facebook. And if you do like it, please do like, share, subscribe, and do notifications, because that's a lot of times the only way people figure out that we put new content out. But intermittent fasting, let's dive into this here. So the first thing is, big question, you know, what is it and how is it different from fasting, just fasting fasting? Well, as the name indicates, it is fasting. That's the second word. And intermittent literally means it's scheduled fasting. So a normal fast, if there is such a thing, is any time where you are restricting the food that goes into your body. So you probably have had to take a blood test and they tell you you have to be fasting for the blood test. It could be 8 hours, 10 hours, 12 hours for a fast. Usually one of those time periods, maybe a longer one for certain types of tests. But then there's a therapeutic fast you might do, and that may be as long as it needs to be. So it could be 24 hours. It could be from sundown the day before till sundown the following day. So roughly, again, 24 hours. It could be for 2 days, 3 days, it could be 7 days. Wow. Okay. Now, normally when you're doing longer fasts, even a 24-hour fast, the thing that you want to keep in mind is in most instances, and certainly medically speaking, it's recommended that you still drink water. Now, there are people that do dry fasting. If you're going to do any type of fasting, work with a healthcare provider who knows about fasting because you can get yourself in trouble. I always recommended non-dry fasting, so water, so that you stay hydrated, especially the longer you're fasting. The other thing is that your body, you know, the longer you fast, you're going to be, you know, moving stuff through, and we're going to have some positive benefits for detoxifying and stuff we're going to talk about in a minute. So you need to remember that the other reason to stay hydrated is hydration not only, you know, keeps your blood volume up, But it helps to move water through the system, which often is where a lot of nutrients go in cells and how a lot of toxins leave the cells. So the better hydrated we are, the more we move the good stuff in and we move the bad stuff out. Now, what about intermittent fasting? That usually is somewhere from 12 hours up to a longer amount of time, less than 24 hours. The idea behind it generally is that you're going to have this period of time that is intermittently fasting, and then you're going to be eating the rest of the time, hence the intermittent nature. Usually it's the same time period every day, just for schedule purposes. Okay. So something to consider as you look at intermittent fasting, and there's a ton of information, a lot of talking heads about it, and a lot of research. Is that the benefits appear to start somewhere between 12 and 13 hours. And then if you go a little bit longer, theoretically, you might get more benefits. Now, a version of intermittent fasting people will call, and this is on, you know, online a lot, one meal a day or OMAD. And so that's basically where the person is picking a meal. So oftentimes it's, you know, dinner, the evening meal, but it really can be any and then the rest of the day they're just drinking water. Some people do this. We use intermittent fasting a lot with chronically ill people and with cancer patients. And many times it's not appropriate to do one meal a day with a very, you know, maybe medically unstable person or a frail person or whatever, but they can do a 12 or 13-hour intermittent fast. And so when we're giving advice about diet and intervening for your chronic illness or your cancer, the base of our recommendations start actually with a brief intermittent fast. And so why? What's it doing for us? Well, there's kind of two sides to the coin with intermittent fasting. One is scientifically we know that after your body has gone without food, and water doesn't count, like I said, it actually helps if there's water and hydration in there, but if you go without food, At about 12 to 13 hours, you start to do this cell house cleaning called autophagy or autophagy, depending on what side of the country it seems like you come on. So autophagy or autophagy is essentially cell house cleaning. And so what triggers that is this break from food. And then again, yes, we got enough water going through to make the processes go. Now, in addition to this cellular cleaning process, which is very, very helpful in healing and resetting a lot of stuff, etc., you get other benefits through intermittent fasting. One of which is that your— during the fasting time period, your insulin triggering, your insulin levels will start to become more level. That's very good because as levels of insulin are predictable and of a normal level, we have less inflammation. If our insulin is bouncing around all day and we're snacking and eating and snacking and eating, we're going to have these fluctuations in insulin that might overshoot the mark and create inflammation. So you can get a number of benefits from intermittent fasting. Now, in the human data on it, of which we're getting more now, which is really nice, what we see is things such as breast cancer patients who are survivors were followed over a period, I believe, of 5 years. And the only change they made in their diet was one group, the control group, just ate their normal diet, whatever they wanted. The study group was told, eat your normal diet, eat whatever you want, but don't eat for 13 hours a day. And I'll tell you how we do that. But what happened was that they had 1/3 less recurrence of the breast cancer during that 5-year, I believe it was, period in the group that— they didn't change their diet. They just restricted the time that they were doing it to 13 hours off. So So it's this whole thing of signaling in your body where our bodies developed over time when certainly if you go back prior to the modern era, humans did not have reliable food sources and we may have feast and famine or we may have one meal a day. We may have other stuff going on just because of the availability of food. Well, in modern times we have the other problem where we have no unavailability of food for the most part. And so our body is constantly metabolizing using in the full setting, in the fed setting. And so that means that a lot of this housecleaning doesn't happen. I was talking about this with my father. He passed away, but he was in his later 90s. And I was telling him the idea and I was telling him the health benefits. He was a retired physician and he smiled and he says, yeah, he says, I remember During the Depression, we did a lot of intermittent fasting. He says, maybe that's why I lived to be so old. I thought it was hilarious, but it probably had something to do with it. So, you know, it wasn't that long ago where we had to do this just because we were out of food. And so it is a thing. Now, again, this is not medical advice. You can do any kind of fasting. Please work with a fasting-oriented or trained healthcare provider. But what we would tell people would be, okay, you sleep during the night, you're not eating while you're sleeping in most cases, right? You can eat, drink all the water you want, just don't eat food. So let's say for the sake of argument, you're sleeping between 7 and 9 hours. You say you got 8 hours of sleep time. Well, the next thing that you can do then to get to the 13 hours is just to add another 5-hour bumper on each side of the sleep. So you stop eating dinner at a certain point every night. That plus your 8 hours and maybe a little bit of bumper time in the morning, drink water during, and you got your 13 hours. And so a lot of people would still be doing 3 meals a day. They would just have them adjusted around. A lot of people did 2 meals a day and it would depend a little bit on their other needs that they had going on. So it can be done very effectively. Now, I've done it a lot. I've experimented with a lot of these different types of fasting and intermittent fasting. And another thing that can happen, especially if you're also doing physical movement and working out, intermittent fasting can modulate your insulin inflammation and also can help to trigger some weight loss too. So some people will do it for that as well. Interestingly, say with our cancer patients who didn't need to lose any weight, we wanted them not to lose weight as long as they got sufficient caloric intake and the other things we're doing during the day, they didn't tend to lose weight. It tends to mostly happen with folks who need to lose weight. So that's the big picture on intermittent fasting. Now, most of the side effects, whether it was headaches, dizziness, stomach pain, all that, in my case and in most of my patients' cases, was due to dehydration. So if I just drank more water, Headache would go away, dizziness would go away, stomachache would go away. And so most people can do that. Now, if they really were afraid, I'd just have them start with, you know, don't eat an hour before you go to bed, sleep those 7, 8, 9 hours and wait for an hour before you start to eat in the morning. And then move out from there. You can do it in baby steps or increments. So it's important to keep in mind that that's also, you know, you don't have to go from eating You know, 16, 18 hours of the day to, you know, whatever. You can step into it a little bit at a time. Now, certainly if you're used to fasting and you're used to fasting for longer periods of time, you're already going to kind of have those tools, but a lot of us don't do that. So again, remember, big thing, hydration cures most intermittent fasting side effects. The one other caution that you have to work with, which again, certainly if you're going to be, you know, doing intermittent fasting, like I said, you need to be working with a healthcare provider that does fasting. But if you have blood sugar irregularities, for example, you may or may not be able to intermittent fast depending on what type of blood sugar problems they are. Now, if you're a type 2 diabetic and you've got your diet under control during the day, generally they don't have any problems. problem, they can work up to say a 13-hour intermittent fast. Type 1 diabetics are going to be a little bit more dicey and you really need to work with whoever's managing your insulin around that because that is a whole different kettle of fish. So if you're anywhere in the diabetic spectrum, again, when you're meeting with a healthcare provider who does fasting work, make sure that they know what you're taking for your blood sugar issues, what kind of blood sugar issues you have, and they're probably going to be very conservative and step into that very slowly. But intermittent fasting can be an incredible tool. It can augment almost anything else that you do with your diet and exercise and all the other things. And another thing that I think is really cool is I'm doing a presentation in I don't know, very, very soon here. And they asked me to go into things that don't cost extra money for chronic illness therapies or things that are very economical. And one of the things that we do go into there is intermittent fasting because it is a way long-term to help with chronic illness. Well, we're out of time for this, and so we will be back for some more questions. But I'm Dr. Paul with Medicine Health, and I'll see you in the next segment.
