UNDER CONSTRUCTION!

What is Fasting?

Several types of fasting exist, below are a few common fasts:

• Absolute fasting: Involves not eating or drinking, usually for a short period.
• Water fasting: Allows intake of water but nothing else.
• Juice fasting: Also known as juice cleansing or juice detoxing, and usually involves the exclusive intake of fruit and vegetable juices.
• Intermittent fasting: This eating pattern cycles between periods of eating and periods of fasting, which can last up to 24 hours.

Every person is different listen to your body.

How Does Fasting Affect Your Immune System?

Fasting forces your body to rely on its energy stores to sustain normal function.

Your body’s first store of choice is glucose, which is mostly found as glycogen in your liver and muscles.

Once your glycogen is depleted, which generally occurs after 24–48 hours, your body starts using muscle protein and fat for energy .

Using large amounts of fat as a fuel source produces by-products called ketones, which your body and brain can use as a source of energy .

Interestingly, one particular ketone — beta-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) — was observed to benefit the immune system.

In fact, researchers at the Yale School of Medicine observed that exposing human immune cells to BHB in amounts you’d expect to find in the body following 2 days of fasting resulted in a reduced inflammatory response .

Furthermore, recent research on mice and humans showed that fasting for 48–72 hours may also promote the recycling of damaged immune cells, allowing for the regeneration of healthy ones .

It’s important to mention that the exact ways in which fasting affects the immune system are not yet fully understood. More studies are needed.

Basically short periods of fasting may support healthy immune system function by promoting immune cell recycling and limiting the inflammatory response.

Why Fasting May Help You Recover from Colds or the Flu

Common cold and flu-like symptoms can be caused by either viruses or bacteria.

To be perfectly clear, cold and flu infections are initially caused by viruses, specifically the rhinovirus and influenza virus.

However, being infected with these viruses lowers your defense against bacteria, raising your chances of simultaneously developing a bacterial infection, whose symptoms are often similar to your initial ones.

Interestingly, there is research to support the idea that the lack of appetite you often feel during the first few days of an illness is your body’s natural adaptation to fighting the infection .

Below are three hypotheses that attempt to explain why this might be true.

1. From an evolutionary perspective, lack of hunger eliminates the need to find food. This saves energy, reduces heat loss and essentially allows the body to focus solely on fighting off the infection .
2. Abstaining from eating limits the supply of nutrients, such as iron and zinc, that the infecting agent needs to grow and spread .
3. The lack of appetite often accompanying an infection is a way to encourage your body to remove infected cells through a process known as cell apoptosis .

Interestingly, results from a small study suggest that the type of infection may dictate whether eating is beneficial or not .

This study suggested that fasting may best promote healing from bacterial infections, while eating food may be a better way to fight viral infections .

A previous experiment in mice with bacterial infections supports this. Mice that were force-fed were less likely to survive compared to mice allowed to eat according to appetite .

All the studies so far seem to agree that the beneficial effects of fasting are limited to the acute phase of infection — usually lasting up to just a few days.

However, there are currently no human studies examining whether fasting or eating have any effects on the common cold or flu in the real-world.

Many hypotheses attempt tp explain how fasting can improve healing, but more resaerch is needed to confirm the effects on humans.

Fasting and Other Diseases

In addition to the potential benefits against infections, fasting may also help with the following medical conditions:

• Type 2 Diabetes: Intermittent fasting may have positive effects on insulin resistance and blood sugar levels for some individuals .
• Oxidative stress: Intermittent fasting may help prevent disease by limiting oxidative stress and inflammation.
• Heart health: Intermittent fasting may reduce heart disease risk factors like body weight, total cholesterol, blood pressure and triglycerides .
• Brain health: Animal and human studies suggest that fasting may protect against neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease .
• Cancer: Short periods of fasting could protect cancer patients against chemotherapy damage and increase treatment effectiveness .

Of note, intermittent fasting has also been shown to cause weight loss .

Thus, some of the aforementioned health benefits may be due to the weight loss caused by fasting, as opposed to fasting itself .

Indirectly or directly fasting may positively affect several medical conditions!!