Dining In The Fourth Dimension

Dining in the Fourth Dimension

Remember when your parents or grandparents warned you against snacking and told you to wait till mealtimes? It turns out they were right, and that when you eat is almost as important as what you eat when it comes to the effect on your health.

Eating in time-restricted windows, or intermittent fasting, is proving to be a powerful tool for clearing liver fat, normalizing blood sugar, and improving energy. It costs nothing and does not involve eating less.

Even grazing animals don’t eat at night, and humans aren’t designed to graze. We have a gall bladder, which is an adaptation for digesting big fatty meals. A crocodile has a gall bladder, and it doesn’t eat every day.

It used to be thought that snacking brought us closer to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. It was assumed that if you hunted and gathered all through the day, you’d eat as you went. The people who thought that had never lived with hunter-gatherers, and had forgotten about the importance of cooking and food preparation in their own lives. Hunting provides occasional kills, and gathered food tends to be collected to provide shared meals - such societies are co-operative and highly social. One or two large meals a day is the norm, not constant nibbling.

Experiments in humans and animals have confirmed that fitting one’s eating into a regular “window” improves markers such as liver fat, blood lipids, blood sugar control, and inflammation.

Mice get fat easiest on a high-fat diet, the way humans get fat on refined-carbohydrate diets. When mice were fed the same fattening diet, but only allowed to eat during an 8-hour window every day, they gained significantly less weight than mice that ate the same amount, of the same fattening food, but had had access to it round-the-clock. Better still, they even out-performed mice that had been fed a “healthy” diet (for mice) but had had access to it 24-7.
http://www.salk.edu/news/pressrelease_details.php?press_id=560
http://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/abstract/S1550-4131(12)00189-1

Two things seem to have contributed to this result: the 16-hour periods between meals when no food was entering the bloodstream allowed the body to go into “fasting” mode and use up stored fat, and generally sort out its energy arrangements (just as closing a supermarket at night makes it easier for staff to restock the shelves and clear up any mess); and the daily rhythm of hormone regulation became more defined. This is particularly relevant to hepatitis C as “brain fog” fatigue, insomnia and depression can be due to abnormal levels of cortisol, melatonin, serotonin and other hormones, the rise and fall of which should follow a daily pattern. The improvement in liver fat in the IF mice was also highly desirable.

I recommend eating between 10am and 6pm to “reset the body clock” in this way.

There are other variations but this one is least stressful to adapt to and works for me.

Intermittent fasting is the icing on the cake, and not the place to start with a Hep C diet. Begin with supplements and herbs, removing food toxins, restricting carbohydrate, before experimenting with IF.