For most of us, a growling stomach is a siren song calling us to our refrigerator. However, for researchers and adherents of intermittent fasting (the practice of voluntarily abstaining from food and nonwater beverages), hunger is something not to vanquish but rather to embrace.
Fasting has been shown for years to be an effective nonpharmacologic strategy for counteracting some of the most entrenched modern ailments, from cardiovascular disease and cancer to diabetes and diminishing cognition.[1] The stumbling block was that this evidence was derived primarily from studies in rats and mice, which meant that intermittent fasting remained an interesting, but somewhat fringe, field of research. That has decidedly changed, though, with the recent publication of some small but promising investigations showing positive outcomes in humans.
"In the early 1990s, my own science colleagues viewed fasting as irrelevant, and it was largely ignored by the medical community," explained Valter Longo, PhD, a forerunner of fasting research and director of the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. "Now things are changing very rapidly, and fasting is the most widely adopted diet in those under age 34 in the United States."
