What Doctors Don’t Tell You

dushazmi

When it comes to diet, it’s now clear that one size
doesn’t fit all. Different people have different
metabolic types, so foods like meat that are lifesaving
to some are sheer poison to others.
We also have very different levels of the fat hormones
leptin and ghrelin, which regulate appetite and fat levels, and
appear to play an essential role in regaining lost pounds after
a severe weight-loss regime.
Even the state of your microbiome, and the particular
bugs that inhabit it, can play a big part in whether or not
particular foods help to reverse illness or lose weight.
Then there are individual reactions and intolerances,
even to healthy foods. Several years ago, two scientists at the
Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel carried out a unique
study of 800 people, attempting to identify which foods
caused blood sugar spikes after meals. They wanted to find
the foods and dietary factors responsible for the worldwide
epidemics of obesity and diabetes.
The problem was, they found no single
uniform response to any food, even sugar.
Virtually everyone in the study had highly
individual reactions to the food put in front
of them. One prediabetic woman cut out
all offending foods but still couldn’t control
her blood sugar, until she discovered that
the true culprit causing her spikes was tomatoes.
Certainly, more and more forward-thinking doctors and
naturopaths are turning to the Paleo diet to heal chronic
conditions. In this issue, functional medicine practitioner
Marc Ryan has found success in healing autoimmune
thyroid disease by combining the standard Paleo diet with
dietary ideas from traditional Chinese medicine (page 44).
But if we had to choose a single diet that is essentially good
for almost everyone, it would be the not-eating diet—at least
for a spell.
As Cate Montana reveals in our cover story this month
(page 28), new evidence shows that the ultimate diet for
restoring full health is either a short-term fast on water or
liquids, or intermittent fasting—controlling not simply
what you eat, but when you eat.
Giving your body a short break from food affords it a
chance to do a major clear-out, breaking down old and
possibly defective cells and consuming them. Monitored
water or juice fasts have been shown to reduce aging and
to prevent or promote recovery from cancer, dementia,
arthritis, high blood pressure and other conditions that lead
to heart disease. Certain types of intermittent fasting even
help to target chemotherapy more successfully, suggesting
that the standard medical advice given to cancer patients,
to consume lots sugar-laden food to keep their weight up, is
completely counterproductive.
But water- or juice-only fasts need to be monitored and
short term. And they aren’t a successful way to lose weight,
since any weight lost from these kinds of fasts is temporary.
The latest tweak on fasting is intermittent fasting.
Researchers are discovering that leaving a larger span of time
between the last meal of one day and the first meal of the
next can have an extraordinary number of health benefits,
including weight loss, without depriving yourself of food.
Pushing breakfast to noon, cutting out dinner or eating all
your meals during an eight-hour window has been shown
to decrease not only blood glucose levels but also evidence of
inflammation in the body.
In many animal and human studies,
periodic fasting has shown exciting
evidence of protection against a vast array
of degenerative diseases and even seizures.
And perhaps most promising of all, it
appears to help cells regenerate themselves,
including in the brain.
Diets where you focus on restricting
both the amount and types of foods during certain periods
are showing extraordinary benefits, not only for weight loss,
aging and a host of diseases, but even bone renewal.
Of course, there are certain people who should never fast.
Pregnant women, type 1 diabetics, those with liver disease
and others come to mind. You need to work with a qualified
professional, and you need to know how to prepare your
body for a fast and then how to start reintroducing food.
My late friend nutritionist Annemarie Colbin once told
me of a woman who, convinced that a fast would cure her
long-standing health problems, embarked on her own strict
liquid-only fast, trudging through the freezing New York
weather without sustenance for months, only to find that
she was more ill than she had been before she began.
But given the longevity research showing that many
people living in the Blue Zones, those areas like Okinawa
in Japan with the longest-living people on earth, eat 10–40
percent fewer calories than the Western average, we might all
do well to adopt the Okinawan dinnertime blessing as our
New Year’s resolution: “Hara hachi bu”—“May you eat until
you are eight-tenths full.”