An audio addendum to my intermittent fasting post from yesterday

Transcript of the audio:

This is Paul von Zielbauer from Aging with Strength with a quick audio addendum, on this Thanksgiving eve, to my post yesterday on intermittent fasting, which I have found, through personal experience and by talking with many people who practice it in midlife and beyond, to have myriad benefits to daily well being. But not everyone thinks so, and some experts are on record saying intermittent fasting, or I.F. for short, works for losing some flab weight but not much else. One of my readers pointed out a recent WSJ article with almost that exact headline.

So, where do I, a journalist who’s not a nutritionist, not a doctor, not a clinician of any kind, get off cautiously recommending I.F. to people in their 50s and up? And also, how the hell does anyone, including yours truly, really know if I.F., as some research that I linked to in my article yesterday indicates, helps slow the pace of biological aging, or reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s, or makes muscle tissue stronger even if it reduces its mass in the process? (These are all findings indicated in research I linked to in the post yesterday, among others.)

Well, the answer is that I don’t really know — and neither do any of the “health and wellness” YouTube carnival barkers on the scale of Andrew Huberman and charlatans like him who profess categorical certainty about the efficacy of fasting and other experiments with nutrition, strength, eating and food. But I’ve talked to enough thoughtful people who practice I.F., about what they believe it does for them, and I’ve read the abstracts of enough credible research that isn’t bogged down by obvious conflicts of interest among the researchers, to believe that intermittent fasting done right can help wean us off the industrialized, ultra-processed food conveyor belt that so many Americans are on, or are susceptible to being on, because with every other daily stressor, it’s easier to just keep eating habitually, which for many of us includes snacking after dinner.

Of course, I realize the irony of saying this the day before we stuff our pie holes with way too much food for Thanksgiving. Good luck with that, by the way.

But if there’s one single thing that I.F. has given me, in my own experience fasting from 7pm to 10am almost every day, it’s the ability to not eat after dinner. And that alone creates knock-on benefits — for better sleep, better digestion, a less maniacal need for caffeine, a more durable daytime energy and ability to focus and the ability to simply remain food disciplined — that are lot harder to achieve, in my opinion, without intermittent fasting.

Are there longitudinal studies proving I.F. helps slow your rate of biological aging? No. Is there research on more than a couple thousand people from diverse ethnic, gender and socio-economic backgrounds that are dispositive about I.F. lowering your chances of getting cancer or dementia or Type 2 diabetes? No.

But when it comes to intermittent fasting, I’m encouraged by how it more closely resembles how humans evolved to nourish themselves and endure periods of involuntary fast. Physiologically, it feels natural to stop eating after dinner (once you get used to not eating after dinner, which takes some discipline.) At a genetic level amost, it just feels right to not wake up and immediately eat, then sit for three hours at a desk and then eat again, and continue the pattern of eating and “sedentarianism.”

I’ll continue investigating the research on I.F., and if you have thoughts or questions, please put them into a comment on the Aging with Strength substack. Until then, Happy Thanksgiving and thanks for listening.