Concentrating your diet in a period of ten hours and fasting the remaining 14 hours translates into better regulation of appetite, greater energy and a better mood, according to the results of a study carried out by researchers at King’s College London that was published today. presented at the European Nutrition Conference held in Belgrade (Serbia).
This is the largest community scientific study of its kind carried out in the United Kingdom and its results indicate that intermittent fasting, even without the need to apply very restrictive eating schedules, has health benefits.
Dr. Sarah Berry, a researcher at King’s College and head of the Zoe Limited health research project, said in presenting the study that this work “demonstrates that intermittent fasting can improve health in a real-world environment and that It is not necessary to be very restrictive to see positive results, because an eating window of ten hours a day, which is acceptable for most people, improves mood, energy levels and the feeling of hunger.”
To comply with the restriction proposed by these researchers, it would be enough, for example, to eat the first bite of the day at 9 in the morning and take the last before 7 in the afternoon. Or, if you have later hours, have breakfast after 12 and dinner before 10 at night.
The study involved 37,545 users of the Zoe Health app who were asked to eat normally for one week and then limit their food intake to a 10-hour period for two more weeks. A total of 36,231 participants chose to continue with this system for several more weeks and 27,371 users committed to this way of eating, mostly women with an average age of 60 years and slightly overweight.
As explained by the researchers, those people who were accustomed to a longer eating period throughout the day were the ones who benefited the most from the 14-hour fast. Those who maintained a fixed eating window also benefited more than those who varied the period in which they ate from one day to the next.
“This study adds to the growing body of evidence showing the importance of how you eat; “The impact of food on health does not depend only on what you eat but also on the moment in which you choose to consume it,” explains Kate Bermingham, another of the scientists who participated in the study, in an informative note.
And he emphasizes that “window eating,” or intermittent fasting, is an important dietary behavior that can be beneficial for health. “The findings show that it is not necessary to eat all the time; Many people will feel full and even lose weight if they restrict their eating to a ten-hour period,” says Bermingham.
The idea that it is bad to eat at all hours, as occurs in societies with constant exposure to foods like the Spanish one, arouses unanimity among specialists in endocrinology, dietetics and nutrition, but not the statement that intermittent fasting is a good option for slim down.
Some doctors and researchers consider that there is scientific evidence that intermittent fasting has benefits in animal models and in small clinical trials but not enough certainty about its effects in people with obesity or its long-term consequences.
In this sense, one of the aspects that most concerns specialists in metabolism regulation is how fasting will affect body composition over the years, because one of the great challenges for healthy aging is to maintain good mass. muscular.
Hence, there are many voices who believe that doctors should wait to prescribe fasting as a method to lose weight until they are sure that a dietary change applied at age 40 or 50 does not aggravate the loss of muscle mass at age 70, because people are Today they live very long and the loss of muscle mass is closely linked to dependency.
