Middle-Aged Fasting Still Beneficial
One of the concerns about most calorie-restriction and intermittent fasting studies, is that they use animals, and they put them on the study diet when they first reach maturity, and continue until the animal dies or the study ends. That doesn’t translate into real-life human experience very well. A big question, for example, is whether or not intermittent fasting is beneficial if it is started later in life, rather than at early maturity.
A 2005 study titled Mitochondrial production of reactive oxygen species and incidence of age-associated lymphoma in OF1 mice: Effect of alternate-day fasting looks at older (i.e. ‘middle-aged’) mice to see if the know beneficial effects of fasting can be instigated later in life. Here is a quote from the abstract:
Alternate [day] fasting, that was initiated in middle age mice through a 4 month period, reduced significantly the incidence of lymphoma (0% versus 33% for controls). No remarkable difference was observed in the overall food consumption between alternate-fed (AF) and ad libitum (AL) mice, suggesting that the efficacy of alternate fasting did not really depend on calorie restriction.
This is good news, since many of the other beneficial effects of intermittent fasting observed in rodents have been confirmed in humans. The above study went on to observe that there was less oxidative stress observed in mitochondria of the fasting mice, compared to the control animals. This is the type of basic biological function that transgresses species, and may well function similarly in humans as in mice.
The focus of research in the past couple years seems to have shifted away from anti-oxidant behavior to particular metabolic regulators and messenger chemical systems, but anti-oxidants have already demonstrated substantial beneficial effects on health and longevity. High anti-oxidant foods have the benefit of also tasting good, so it is no sacrifice to consume lots of them. When I lived in Michigan, my favorite was blueberries, but now that I’m in Mexico, those are hard to come by. Instead, I eat lots of chocolate — not sweetened, fattening, chocolate bars, but natural chocolate combined with spices and used as a sauce (check out Chicken Molé at your local Mexican Restaurant, for example). I also drink red wine for the ultimate anti-oxidant, resveratrol. Pomegranates, tomatoes, broccoli, garlic, spinach, tea and coffee, strawberries, and avocado are all high in anti-oxidants, and probably more beneficial than ever when combined with an intermittent fasting diet.
