Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | The Benefits of Fasting for Health and Longevity | Dr Mindy Pelz #427
Episode Date: February 16, 2024CAUTION: This podcast discusses fasting, and its advice may not be suitable for anyone with an eating disorder. If you have an existing health condition or are taking medication, always consult your h...ealthcare practitioner before going for prolonged periods without eating. It’s not just what we eat that’s important for our health and longevity, but also when we eat, and how much. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 342 of the podcast with nutrition expert and author of the book ‘Fast Like a Girl’, Dr Mindy Pelz. In this clip she shares the potential benefits of different types of fasting, and why men and women may need to adopt different approaches. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Find out more about my NEW Journal here https://drchatterjee.com/journal and click here https://drchatterjee.com/events to join me at an exclusive event on 29th February. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/342 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.
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Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism
to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 342 of the podcast with nutrition expert and author of the book Fast Like a Girl,
Dr. Mindy Peltz. In this clip, she shares the potential benefits of different types of fasting
and why men and women may need to adopt different approaches. Please note the advice in this episode may not be suitable if you are suffering with or recovering from an eating disorder.
Also, if you have an existing health condition or are taking medication, always consult your healthcare practitioner before going for prolonged periods without eating.
You believe that fasting is for everyone and we were designed to fast.
Yeah. We've got to go back to this concept and it's been slowly emerging in the health space
of how was the human body designed? You know, we are in an evolutionary mismatch right now.
The amount of physical, emotional, and chemical stressors that the
modern world is presenting to us has us really off course with how our original design was built to
be. And when we look at the primal years, what we know back in the caveman days is that we had to
depend on another fuel source to be able to go hunt for food. Let me explain myself.
When we came out of the cave, we didn't have a refrigerator. We didn't have DoorDash. We didn't
have any way to get food. So we had to go and hunt for food. And in that hunting of food,
our body switched over into a different energy system. It switched over into the ketogenic energy system, or as I refer
to it in the book, the fat burning system. And in that system, the body burned fat to make ketones
as a fuel source so that we could go hunt. So now let's fast forward to today. What we know
that's happening today is that it doesn't matter what diet you go on, we are not accessing
this secondary fuel source. We're only operating from the sugar burner fuel source. And so we are
missing out on all the healing that happens when we switch over into this primal fat burning system.
So if we are eating all day long, we're literally going against our genetic design.
We're working against our genes, not with our genes.
The body thrives in a fasted state because it can access this other energy system that
you can't access by manipulating your food.
You've got to let your blood sugar come down enough so that your body's forced to switch
over into that system.
Yeah.
And that's the same for men and women, right? That's the kind of top line overview.
We are designed to fast. We're designed to have periods of time where we're not consuming food.
And when you're not tapping into that experience for your body, it's like skimping on sleep.
You're missing out on all these healing effects that can really
support you metabolically. I know from some of the research Professor Sachin Panda at the
Salk Institute has done, he has shown that a huge percentage of people in the Western world are
eating food over 15 hours in every 24-hour period. This is a modern phenomenon, isn't it? It's not something that we would have done 100, 200 years ago. But now many of us are sort of, as you say, we're working against
our genetic evolutionary heritage. And I also want to point out that what we're seeing is in a time
where the food source is so toxic. We have so, I mean, especially here
in America, our food source is ridiculous and now it's permeated everywhere. We've got to have
some way to overcome the metabolic damage that poor food is doing. And what the research is
showing, like something like a 16-8 diet, is it's showing that when you go 16 hours without food, you become metabolically immune
from the damage of a Western high fat, high sugar processed diet. Your insulin does not raise,
your glucose has a chance to balance out. Hemoglobin A1C is better. Your CRP inflammation
goes down. You can literally, and I don't recommend this, but you could eat
toxic food for eight hours and fast for 16, and your body would be able to repair itself from the
damage that that food source is doing in the eight-hour period that you're eating.
Yeah, very, very powerful. So we are designed to fast, and you're saying that in the current
toxic modern food environment, which frankly, most of us,
most people listening are going to be facing that wherever they are. What we're saying is,
even if we don't change our food intake, and I know that's not what you recommend, but even if
we don't, a period of fasting is going to have profound benefits on our body.
When you actually dive into the science, what you see is that once
you've switched over into your fat burning system using the tool of something like intermittent
fasting, the longer you stay there, the more healing happens. So in the book, I lay out six
different lengths fasts, and this is the general overview of them. At somewhere between 12 to 16 hours,
you're going to switch into the fat burning system. So you will start to make ketones.
Now, what's interesting about ketones that I really want to point out is as ketones go up,
it also triggers the production of a key neurotransmitter called GABA. And GABA is what
calms us. So a lot of people believe when they
get into that fasted state, they're going to be really anxious. They're going to be really hangry.
But actually the opposite happens because once you make ketones, you become, you get GABA. So
you become calm and ketones will, will shut off the hunger hormone. So you stop becoming hungry. And all of that happens around
12 to 16 hours. We also have some evidence that inflammation markers come down. We know
testosterone for men go up. We see a little bit for women going up. And we know growth hormone
starts to kick in between 12 to 16 hours. So that's the base phase, isn't it? What you call intermittent fasting. It's a fast of
somewhere between 12 and 16 hours. So you have these six length of fasts, right? Length one
is that 12 to 16 hour one. Length two is what you call the autophagy fast, 17 hours plus. What's
going on there? Yeah. So autophagy around 17 hours, look at your body will start to go into this state of autophagy.
And it's like a dimmer switch.
It starts at 17 hours.
And there's based off science, it peaks at 72 hours.
So you're just starting this new state.
And here's what the state is.
Your body was so well designed that at 17 hours of that blood sugar dropping, it starts to
go, okay, I get it. No food's coming in. I need to become stronger. And the intelligence will turn
within the cell and it'll look around at the cell and it'll say, what inside this cell is not
working for the survival of this human that we're in. So it's going to start to look at bacteria
and viruses and push those out of the cell. It's going to repair mitochondria. You're going to see
things like endoplasmic reticulum and all the working parts within the cell start to become
stronger and the body repairs itself. The second thing that happens at 17 hours is some cells are incredibly damaged.
Some cells are going to become cancer cells. Some of them are rogue cells. Some are aging cells.
We call those senescent cells. And so the intelligent body, if it decides a cell is
going to slow down the survival of a human, it will actually kill that cell and get rid of it.
And we call that apoptosis. And all of that happens without a detox supplement,
without any kind of special strategy. You just go 17 hours without food and the body figures out
what cells it needs to repair and what cells it needs to get rid of.
Yeah, it's just incredible. And I know you
write about improved immune system function. You just mentioned cancer cells there and how there
is research now showing how fasting at set periods can have an impact on your risk of cancer and all
kinds of things. So there is a case for us all to consider some form of fasting in our life,
whatever that might be, however it
might fit our lifestyle. So I just wanted to highlight that, that gut health, right? Gut
health is something you also talk about. And I think that's the third level of fast. That's a
24 hour fast you say is very, very good for your gut. Yeah. Yeah. So the research on that one was done out of MIT
and it showed that at 24 hours, there is a reboot of intestinal stem cells. So we have to stop and
think, why does the body do this? So at 24 hours, it's a long enough period for the body to go,
okay, food is not coming in. So I need to be prepared for that moment that food comes in.
I need to make sure that when food comes in, we are utilizing food to its best, our best advantage.
So what it will do in these intestinal stem cells is we have this thin mucosal lining on the inner
part side of our gut. It starts to repair that. So anybody with a leaky gut, a 24 hour fast is
an incredible tool for you. Anybody with SIBO, what we know is that what also will happen in
that moment is that bacteria that no longer serves us, the bad bacteria in our gut will actually,
we will get rid of that. So with SIBO, with any kind of gut dysbiosis, now we're seeing the bad go away
and we're creating an environment where that good can really flourish. And then the last thing on
that, and this one's really interesting. I'm not sure if you've ever talked to Dr. Emrin Mayer.
He's wrote several books on gut health. And he talks about the idea that when our bacteria are clumped together inside our guts, that we cannot
absorb the food and turn it in to pull the B vitamins out and all the nutrients that we need
to pull out of our food, that we actually need our microbes to be more evenly spaced on the inside of
our gut linings for nutrition to be able to be broken down. So at 24 hours, we see a relocation of
these microbes where they stop clumping together and they start to spread out. So think about that,
the implication of that. One day, let's say one day a week, maybe one day a month, you go 24 hours
without food. That has a better chance at repairing your gut than all the probiotics in the world,
all the enzymes in the world. Once I clued into this, I literally stopped giving supplements
that supported gut health to my patients because I found a 24-hour fast was way more powerful.
Yeah. I mean, it's so powerful. Let's go through four or five and say it's the fat burner fast,
the dopamine fast, I found really interesting and the immune reset fast. Yeah. So I'll go through them quickly, but they also,
they really, there's some incredible healing that happens at 36, 48 and 72. So 36, I call it the fat
burner reset. You know, so many, what I saw is that as I was teaching these concepts on YouTube, there were a lot of people showing up
saying, okay, I'm doing a 24-hour fast. I'm doing all the things you're saying that I should do,
but I'm not losing weight. And what I realized is that they needed to go into some longer fasts.
And at 36 hours, there's some great research showing us that over a 30-day period, that if people did 36 hours of fasting followed
by 12 hours of eating, and then 36 hours of fasting, 12 hours of eating, repeating that
cycle for 30 days, that not only did they lose more weight than people who just did like one
meal a day, but that they actually lost the weight in belly fat. Now think about that for a
moment because everybody, you know, wants to lose belly fat. Obviously that's a big motivator,
but that's visceral fat. That's the fat that kills you. So use dipping into a 36 hour fast,
you can really start to turn. And one of the things that it does, it'll turn white fat into
brown fat so that it's a lot more, it's easier for your body to burn. So that of the things that it does, it'll turn white fat into brown fat so that it's a lot
more, it's easier for your body to burn. So that's why I called it the fat burner reset.
At 48 hours, what we see is your whole dopamine system gets rebooted. So the whole process in
which we utilize dopamine is reset, but that's not the most impressive part.
We actually started to see D2 receptor sites, dopamine receptor sites, more receptor sites start to be produced and open up so that when you come out of that fast, you actually are
able to enjoy the simple dopamine rushes of life.
And so that happens at 48.
And then 72 is the immune reset that
Valter Longo brought us, which is rebooting your whole white blood cell and your whole immune system.
Okay. So why do women need a different approach to fasting than men?
The easiest way that I can explain this is we've got to look at the different profiles
of our sex hormones.
So let's start with men.
Men, you are almost 100% run by testosterone.
You, in a 24-hour period, you're getting testosterone every 15 minutes.
And that testosterone is going to go up into the brain and convert into estrogen.
So all you need to do when you look at your hormonal profile
and work on your hormones is drive one particular sex hormone.
And luckily, testosterone loves when you fast.
1,300% increase in testosterone if you fast for 13 hours,
2,000% increase in testosterone for men if they fast for 24 hours.
Women, we are not just running off of one hormone. We are running off of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone.
And when we look at the personalities of these sex hormones, what we can see is that estrogen
loves when we fast. So anytime we want to bring estrogen up, low carb, more fasting, keeping ourselves insulin
sensitive is going to be amazing.
But progesterone is completely the opposite way.
In fact, the week before a woman's cycle, she actually becomes more insulin resistant
because we need glucose to be higher so that we can make progesterone.
And so we should not be fasting the week before our cycle. This is not the time to
go low carb because we need that glucose to be higher. We need to understand ourselves and where
these hormones are coming in and out. And we have to stop trying to do everything from how we eat
to how we work out to the medications we take at the same as men, because we are massively different and we have
been taught to do it the way that we teach men. And that is what needs to stop in order for us
to thrive. And, you know, if people listening, if this is brand new hormonal language, I'm a visual
learner. So I put a lot of graphs in the book, but you also can just Google a woman's menstrual cycle.
And when you see it over a 30-day period, the general principle is when hormones are high,
we need to change our fasting behavior. When hormones are low, we can really fast as long
as we want. We can do all six of those fasts. For people who feel inspired by what you've said
and think, okay, i've been skeptical about fasting
and never thought it was for me but i think i'm gonna give it a go have you got any final words
of inspirational wisdom to share with them yeah here's what i would really say is i hope that
after this conversation you are at least your interest has been piqued. And what I want you to know is look at it like you would run a marathon.
You don't just run out and try to do, you know, 26 miles as we do it over here, that
you really have to train yourself to get to that place.
So as you embark upon fasting, understand there's a lifestyle.
And I have a whole chapter on what a fasting lifestyle looks like in the book, but it's a training process and difficult moments
are going to happen. That's where the physical and spiritual and mental growth is going to happen.
So be playful, be curious about this tool and know that the more you exercise your fasted states,
the easier it gets. I don't know any diet that gets easier with
time. It actually does the opposite. So don't be discouraged if in the beginning it's tough,
your body's adapting, and then you're going to see all these benefits that we're talking about.
So that would be my final thought. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have
a wonderful weekend.
And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.