Welcome to the Nutrition Science Podcast, where we help you cut through the noise and make

informed science-based decisions about nutrition and your health.

How's it going, everyone?

Welcome back to another episode of the Nutrition Science Podcast.

I am your host, Dr. Adrian Chavez, and in this episode, we are going to discuss fasting. We're going to discuss

whether or not there are unique health benefits to practicing fasting. And when I say fasting,

I mean going long periods of time without eating. There's various ways that people have done

this. There's the standard

shortened eating window, which is typically called intermittent fasting, and that can look like

16 hours of fasting and then an eight hour eating window. So if you're doing that, for example,

if you stop eating at 8 p.m., you're going to go 12 hours to 8 a.m.

And then another 4 hours to 12 p.m. And that's going to be your next meal. There's various

approaches similar to the 16.8. There's 18.6. There's 24. And then there's some individuals who

actually do one meal a day and who swear by that. And there's also

what's called alternate day fasting or alternate day fasting. And this is going completely one day without eating any food and the next day eating whatever you want. And another popular approach is going very long periods of time without eating three, five, seven days,

10 days, even longer than that in some cases.

This is popularized in various circles on social media and in alternative health circles.

And what I want to do today is just discuss what the research shows in terms of

benefits to fasting and whether or not, you know, it's something that you should be practicing.

And if so, what types of fasting are going to be most beneficial? So the first thing that I want

to mention is that the research on the benefits of fasting

is vast.

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