Fasting For Just 5 Days A Month Can Reduce Cancer, Heart Disease And Diabetes

Experts found that if you reduce your calories by half for just five days every month, you can live longer, according to dailymail.

Hence, a limited diet for just less than a week can slow your ageing, diabetes, heart disease and cancer compared to other groups. The effect of this kind of diet continued even after the fasting group came back to a normal diet.

Hence, while complete fasting is not possible for most, especially the older lot, any diet that mimicks fasts but ensure that vitamins and minerals are included "to minimise the burden of fasting" would help people to lose weight. Such a diet would bring down the calories eaten by between 34 to 54 per cent.

However, the strict regime only lasts for five days, and for the rest of the complete month, the dieters go back to a normal diet, eating whatever they wish, according to theindependent. Still, doctors warn people against adopting "trick diets" and ask them to adopt lifestyle changes.

The subjects began with only 1,090 calories on the first day, and them to 725 calories on the second to fifth days. In the next few weeks, they began to eat normally. But the five-day fast was repeated in the next month.

Experts noticed that in three months, blood glucose levels reduced by 10 per cent when they fasted, yet it plummeted at about six per cent lower overall. The fast reduced a chemical called circulating IGF1, linked with ageing, by 24 per cent.

Valter Longo, the lead researcher of the University of Southern California said: "Strict fasting is hard for people to stick to, and it can also be dangerous, so we developed a complex diet that triggers the same effects in the body. I've personally tried both, and the fasting mimicking diet is a lot easier and also a lot safer."

The diet was simple, comprising vegetable soups, energy bars, energy drinks, crisp snacks, chamomile flower tea, and a vegetable supplement formula tablet. It contained 11 per cent to 14 per cent proteins, 42 per cent to 43 per cent carbohydrates, and 44 per cent to 46 per cent fat.

During the rest of the month, the participants came back to their normal diets.

Another study by the University of Southern California team on mice found that they could fast every four days twice a month. Experts found that the mice cells including bone, muscle, liver brain and immune cells began to regenerate.

It led to long lives, less inflammatory diseases, cancer, improved learning and memory and reduced bone loss.