A five-day fasting-mimicking diet improved human aging-risk markers

English digest

Fasting is hard to study because people rarely want to stop eating; a five-day diet that imitates fasting gave researchers a cleaner human test.

In a 2017 Science Translational Medicine trial, Min Wei, Sebastian Brandhorst, Mahshid Shelehchi and colleagues randomized 100 generally healthy adults in the United States to either continue an unrestricted diet or complete three monthly cycles of a fasting-mimicking diet. Each cycle lasted five consecutive days and was low in calories, sugars, and protein while relatively high in unsaturated fats. The researchers measured body weight, fat distribution, blood pressure, fasting glucose, lipids, C-reactive protein, insulin-like growth factor 1, and other markers associated with aging, diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular disease.