Give Your Stomach a Break: Time Your Eating
The quality and quantity of food play major roles in our health, but so does the timing — specifically, the hours we enjoy our food and drink.
Reducing caloric intake by 20 to 30% will result in weight loss and various other benefits. In fact, multiple studies, mostly in animals but there’s some evidence in humans, indicate long-term caloric restriction can even increase a healthy lifespan.
But is reducing caloric intake sustainable? Not really. Few people can maintain that 20 to 30% cut in calories for any significant amount of time. Enter intermittent fasting, which involves periods of significant caloric reduction, such as keeping intake at or below 600 calories a day for one or two days per week.
Intermittent fasting is the modern buzzword phrase but is more correctly referred to as time-restricted eating/feeding.
The practice actually has a long history.
Studies of early humans (through cave paintings, for instance) show a nomadic lifestyle where humans followed migrating herds before the development of agricultural practices. When the tribe brought down a large animal, it was a time to feast, meaning excess calories. This was followed by extended periods of calorie deprivation or fasting. This is, of course, similar to the behavior of most large predators in the wild, an evolution that has come to be known as intermittent fasting. In turn, humans’ gastrointestinal (GI) systems have evolved in the same way.
Various religions have long practiced periods of fasting, which is more common in Eastern culture, with the spiritual benefits of the practice recognized the world over.
While it may seem like a task to not take in food or drinks with calories for a stretch of time, time-restricted eating is worth it: It sets the stage for reducing inflammation in the entire body.
The ideal goal, from a health perspective, seems to be to eat during an 8-hour window and fast for 16 hours. Many clinicians find their patients do well with eating from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. But in this 24/7 world, there may be barriers to cutting off eating at 7 p.m., although that time would still allow most people to eat dinner with the family. However, if that timeframe doesn’t work for you, if you go to bed at 9 p.m., your last intake should be no later than 6 or 7 p.m. to allow the 2-3 hours before bedtime. Your fasting hours in this case would be 6 p.m. until 10 a.m., and your hours of eating would be 10 a.m. until 6 p.m.
How does intermittent fasting translate to healthier living?
In the U.S. and Canada, there’s a big problem of GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) — in simple terms, acid reflux, heartburn or indigestion. Billions of dollars around the world are spent to address reflux disease, including for medications used to treat GERD.
Here’s how GERD happens: The area between the lower esophagus and the upper stomach from the gastro-esophageal sphincter, which keeps gut contents that can be very acidic from escaping the stomach and refluxing into the esophagus. The stomach has defense mechanisms to protect itself from the acids it produces, but the esophagus doesn’t have those protections, so the acidic digestive enzymes can literally burn the lining of the esophagus. This chronic, recurrent damage can lead to Barrett’s esophagus, which can lead to esophageal cancer.
One of the most basic recommendations to prevent GERD is to stop eating at least two to three hours before going to bed (more precisely, at least two to three hours before lying down, which is the position that leads to reflux). So intermittent fasting/time-restricted eating will go a long way in improving or eliminating acidic GERD symptoms. Even my own reflux symptoms resolved within days of me stopping my late-night eating!
Dr. Shilpa Saxena, one of the educators with The Institute for Functional Medicine who’s among the thought leaders in the discipline, describes time-restricted eating in a way that I personally have found helpful.
Dr. Saxena suggested envisioning your GI system as an employee. You can’t expect someone to work 24 hours a day with no rest, but many of us will demand that our GI system keep working: Breakfast at 7 a.m., something at morning break, lunch, afternoon snack, evening meal, snack at night. This leaves no time for the GI system to repair and can lead to chronic inflammation and increased intestinal permeability (or how easily substances pass through the intestinal wall — something we will get more into in future articles). So, give your “employee” a break, and don’t constantly feed that stomach!
We will continue to discuss intermittent fasting and other aspects of healthy eating in future articles.
