Intermittent fasting and inflammation are two of the biggest topics in the health and wellness space. Here’s how they’re related.
Our modern Western eating habits are leading to some pretty serious — and even fatal — health consequences. In an era when heart disease is the number one cause of death and where an estimated 60% of Americans have at least one chronic condition, it’s bringing up some major concerns about our lifestyle choices and the havoc that they can wreak.
So it’s no wonder that so many of us are looking for ways to neutralize the threat by improving our diets and losing weight.
Intermittent fasting (IF) has become an extremely popular method for weight loss in recent years. But recent findings suggest that the benefits of fasting go far beyond the number on the scale: it can also help minimize the damaging effects of inflammation, the insidious culprit behind many of those life-threatening metabolic conditions.
Here’s everything you need to know about inflammation, and how intermittent fasting might help.
Looking for the right diet for you?
Take our quiz to build a bespoke testing plan that will help you lose weight and improve your health.
Health implications of inflammation
Inflammation is a damaging process that’s behind some of our most pressing health concerns of the modern-day. But on its own, inflammation is not automatically a bad thing. In fact, it’s one of our immune system’s first lines of defense to protect us from harm.
So first, let’s talk about how inflammation is supposed to work.
Your immune system is designed to keep you healthy by detecting and attacking anything that could make you sick, like bacteria and viruses.
When your body recognizes these foreign pathogens, it springs into action by sending white blood cells and their chemicals to attack and destroy the invaders before they can cause your body harm.
You can usually recognize the signs and symptoms of this inflammatory response as your blood rushes to the site of injury. For example, your immune system’s fight against bacteria that causes the common cold might lead to an inflammation of your nasal passages, cueing symptoms like runny noses, coughing, and watery eyes. Or if you get a cut, you might notice swelling, heat, and tenderness as your blood cells rush to the site of injury to prevent an infection from outside bacteria and viruses. These are both examples of acute inflammation, and only last as long as it takes for your body to heal from the potential pathogens.
But this immune response, while helpful in normal circumstances, can also go sideways and end up causing you more harm than good.
Under certain conditions where your immune system is compromised, like with obesity or in the presence of toxins, inflammation can become chronic. This ongoing immune “attack” can last for weeks, months, or even years.
So as you might guess, it’s this ongoing chronic inflammation that can become a serious problem. This constant inflammatory response can damage your own DNA, cells, and tissues, which can then lead to long-term damage that you may not see or even feel right away.
Chronic inflammation might manifest itself as a laundry list of generalized symptoms that are hard to put your finger on, like fatigue, depression, stomach pains, or weight changes.
But even worse, chronic inflammation gone awry is thought to be a major culprit behind the world’s deadliest health diseases and conditions including diabetes, obesity, strokes, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and cardiovascular disease. It’s even linked to other serious health problems that can severely impact your quality of life like allergies and rheumatoid arthritis.
Inflammation and your diet
One of the best things you can do to give your immune system a boost is to take a close look at your diet. This is especially true when it comes to minimizing chronic inflammation since it can often stem from a wide range of dietary and lifestyle factors.
For example, eating a diet rich in plant-based foods like fruits and vegetables means that you’re increasing your intake of antioxidants, which are compounds that can minimize cell damage. Minimizing your intake of processed foods and refined grains can also limit your inflammatory responses.
And as it turns out, fasting may also be a powerful tool to “turn off” those inappropriate chronic inflammatory effects, and that’s because fasting is something that we have evolved with. Even though we’re currently living in a world where we have electric lights and access to food around the clock, our ancestors were eating on a schedule that coincided with daylight and scarcer food supplies. So by using fasting as a tool, we’re limiting our overfeeding, and this has benefits on a cellular level that give us time to heal from the damage.
Several studies have shown that intermittent fasting can reduce the chronic inflammatory responses that run rampant and wreak havoc on our health, and it can do so in several different ways.
- For example, a 2019 study found that intermittent fasting reduced the number of monocytes, a kind of inflammatory cell, circulating in the blood of both human and mice test subjects. The researchers of this study ultimately concluded that fasting was an effective way to improve chronic inflammatory conditions without negatively impacting your overall immune system.
- Another 2016 study on fasting and inflammation found that “turn on” a gene switch that stops the bacteria in your gut from getting into your bloodstream, which can trigger an inappropriate immune response.
- Still another study conducted by Yale School Of Medicine researchers found that fasting can cause your body to create a compound that directly inhibits the “inflammasome,” a protein that drives chronic inflammation in several chronic conditions.
Intermittent fasting can also help reduce your risk of heart disease another way: by helping you to lose weight. When you have excess fat tissue, especially around your midsection, your body sees it as a foreign threat and initiates an inflammatory defense against it. Because intermittent fasting is used as a tool to minimize overeating and restrict calorie intake, the resulting weight loss can do your body a world of good when it’s constantly under attack by your own immune system.
Fasting and heart health
Poor heart health is the number one leading cause of death in the country.
When your body has high levels of cholesterol, they can “stick” to the sides of your arteries. Your immune system sees this buildup as a potential threat, so it initiates an inflammatory response which can create hardened plaques that block blood flow or loosen them to cause blood clots that block off the arteries. This can then lead to fatal consequences like heart attacks and strokes.
So how can fasting improve your heart health? According to MayoClinic, two ways:
- Improving your cholesterol by lowering your levels of the “bad” cholesterol LDL that sticks to the sides of your arteries and forms buildups
- Optimizing your sugar metabolism by improving insulin sensitivity, which can prevent excessive weight gain and diabetes.
Researchers have even found that lowering inflammation can help reduce heart disease and strokes in people who don’t have high cholesterol!
Fasting and chronic pain
Remember, part of the acute inflammatory response results in painful symptoms like swelling and redness. So when inflammation is chronic, it can also lead to chronic pain, and the results can severely affect your quality of life.
Inflammatory arthritis is a good example of this. It’s actually an umbrella term that contains many different conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, gout, Lyme disease, and lupus. In addition to the swelling, joint pain, and redness, the cell damage that results from chronic inflammation can also lead to damage to your cartilage, tendons, bones, and nerves as your immune system continues to attack
So because regular fasting could help bring rampant inflammation down, it can also help relieve some of these debilitating chronic pain conditions. For example, one study found that fasting resulted in substantial reductions in joint pain and swelling in people with rheumatism.
Interestingly enough, there’s even evidence that fasting can also have an analgesic. pain-relieving effect on the body in the meantime! Scientists believe that this is because fasting can increase levels of serotonin, opioids, and endocannabinoids, which are neurochemicals that can minimize your pain levels.
How different types of fasts impact inflammation
There are several variations of intermittent fasting. For example, some people choose to do an every day “16:8” time-restricted fast in which they limit their calorie intake to eight hours and fast for the remaining sixteen. Others do weekly “5:2” fasts which involve two days of fasting and five days of regular eating. These all work to help you lose weight through a system of calorie restriction, but is one better than the others in terms of inflammation?
The answer to this question isn’t too clear yet, but there’s reason to believe that 24 hours or more is ideal. Some experts believe that a longer fast, like one that lasts for a full twenty-four hours or more, may be more effective for inflammation than shorter fasting periods, especially because this full-day time period has been so heavily studied.
However, that’s not to say that a daily 16-hour fast isn’t going to do anything for your inflammation — there just isn’t enough evidence at this point that shows exactly how inflammation changes after that shorter fasting period.
Ultimately, there’s more research that needs to be done if we want to definitively understand the difference between different types of fasting and how they can affect inflammation. But, like any other kind of diet or lifestyle change, it’s all about consistency. One 24-hour fasting period probably won’t be as effective for reversing months and years of chronic inflammation, but incorporating it at least once a week over the course of the long run seems to be very promising. Similarly, a week of sixteen-hour fasts won’t do much for your weight or your inflammation, but sticking to it for the long run definitely can.
Conclusion
Chronic inflammation is a big deal today, but making better dietary choices seems to be one of the best ways that we can take action and help our bodies minimize the internal damage caused by this immune response gone awry. Fasting is an especially promising solution since it very closely mimics the feeding conditions that we evolved with!\
Remember, inflammation is not always easy to recognize on its own. To give yourself all the safeguards you can against this damaging immune response, consider checking your own inflammation levels on a regular basis. Base’s at-home Diet Test can give you key insights to your own levels of inflammation and guide you to take specific steps to heal and health.
Looking for the right diet for you?
Take our quiz to build a bespoke testing plan that will help you lose weight and improve your health.
