I feel like this is a frequent topic around here, but I was recently talking with an MD friend about intermittent fasting. Now, she was not saying this as gospel, but she was talking about how some recent stuff has come out that indicates that IF might be an effective nutrition plan for people with or at risk for type II diabetes. There are the obvious benefits of being, for the lack of a better description, “less fat” if it helps individuals adhere to a caloric deficit - less fat around the pancreas and less fat in general = good, right? However, she was also saying that the long fasting period can effectively give the pancreas “a break” from hypersecreting insulin compared to calorie restriction with more traditional, frequent meal timing. My apologies for a layman’s understanding here - in my defense, she presented this all to me in layman’s terms so my eyes wouldn’t glaze over . Granted, nutrition is not her area of expertise (currently an internal med intern and will start residency in dermatology next year), but from how she described it, it sounded like there were perhaps some benefits to an intermittent fasting approach compared to other forms of calorie restriction, at least in this specific population.
However, I’ve done some googling on the topic, and have found some conflicting results. Some sources say that IF can work for at risk individuals like my friend described, while others say the exact opposite (that IF can actually be harmful for such individuals). Where do you stand on this?
I think the compendium of evidence on IF suggests that it does not offer any unique health benefits, which includes reducing risk of or progression of/to type 2 diabetes. I think if it improves adherence for individuals who prefer the IF approach, that’s cool. That said, the data does not show that it offers additional weight loss compared to any other calorie-restricted diet in free-living humans.
Thanks for the response. Sounds like that more or less lines up with my previous understanding of IF - that it’s good if it improves adherence but there’s nothing “magical” about it.
For what it’s worth, even in one of the pro-IF sources I was reading they were talking about how the main benefit of IF for pancreas function was that it reduced the amount of fat surrounding the pancreas…which I figured would also be accomplished with general fat loss from basically any other method of calorie restriction as well. The study was also looking at lab mice and involved only two treatment groups - one that was free fed unlimited food every day and one that was free fed unlimited food every other day and no food in between (no group that was fed every day but with more moderate portions), so it didn’t seem like the best study to begin with.
So, fat around the pancreas isn’t really a huge part of the pathophysiology of type II diabetes, though it happens. That said, fat loss from IF isn’t different than fat loss from other diets. It doesn’t matter.
. Granted, nutrition is not her area of expertise (currently an internal med intern and will start residency in dermatology next year), but from how she described it, it sounded like there were perhaps some benefits to an intermittent fasting approach compared to other forms of calorie restriction, at least in this specific population.