Gut health and body clock synchronization are the most important but lesser-known benefits of Intermittent Fasting which impact your health in a big way. Let us in this article look at how we can achieve Improved Gut Health and Body Clock Synchronization with Intermittent Fasting:-
Intermittent Fasting and Health
Improved Gut Health
The gut microbiome is a vast ecosystem of organisms such as bacteria, yeasts, fungi, viruses, and protozoans, that live in our digestive pipes. Collectively, these organisms weigh up to 2 kg (heavier than the average brain).
Each gut contains about 100 trillion bacteria, many of which are vital, breaking down food and toxins, making vitamins, and training our immune systems.
Over the past decade, research has suggested the gut microbiome might potentially be as complex and influential as our genes when it comes to our health and happiness. It is thought the gut microbiome influences our mental health, athleticism, weight, immune function, inflammation, allergies, metabolism, and appetite.
Fasting gives your overworked gut a break from energy-intensive tasks like digesting and assimilating food. It reduces metabolic risk factor, which has been found to increase the risk of obesity and insulin resistance. And potentially, it improves the composition of your friendly gut flora.
Eating the right way has a huge impact on our digestion and health. When we eat right we automatically reduce the Risk of Obesity.
Reducing the Risk of Obesity
When you eat, your body goes to work breaking down, assimilating, and absorbing those nutrients. This requires a degree of labor for your digestive system – about 25% of the calories from each meal.
When you digest food, your body shifts its focus and resources away from other physiological processes, like growing and repairing. Your immune system also has to be on alert, screening what passes through the gastrointestinal tract.
If you eat 3 meals a day and have a few snacks in between, then chances are that your digestive system hasn’t had much time off. It’s only after that 7 hours that the digestive process cools off. It’s not often that 7 hours go by without at least a tea/coffee, snack /meal, during the day at least.
Anything that has to be metabolized will change your gene expression away from a fasted state. Digestion and absorption of macro-nutrients take place in the period after a meal, known as the postprandial state. That’s important to understand because your body is in ‘storage mode’ in the postprandial state.
Even though your metabolic rate increases after a meal, the contents of that meal still get broken down and, for the most part, stored. About four hours after a meal, your body is back to its baseline ‘fasted’ state, during which it primarily burns through your stores.
By consuming frequent meals throughout the day, you spend a greater portion of the day in a ‘storage’ state, despite a slightly elevated metabolic rate. As mentioned above, you also don’t give your body the chance to release a larger quantity of satiating gut hormones, so you may feel hungry throughout the day.
In a study of almost 20,000 people, researchers found that men and women were about 1.5 times as likely to be overweight or obese if they ate five or more times per day (compared to three or fewer times).
Fasting & The Migrating Motor Complex (MMC)
The MMC is a mechanism that controls stomach and small intestinal contractions in a cyclical pattern (~ 2 hours). Its function is to essentially perform house cleaning throughout the GI tract, sweeping bacteria and undigested food particles out for elimination.
The MMC is instructed by a complex set of Neurohormonal signals in response to feeding/fasting, including but not limited to Ghrelin, Motilin, Serotonin, and Somatostatin.
MMC activity peaks in between meals, in the absence of food. The presence of food and nutrients interrupts and decreases MMC activity, and essentially steers hormonal control back toward digestion and assimilation. When the MMC has enough time and space to do its work, it becomes more difficult for food and bacteria to hang around.
Body Clock Synchronization
Fasting benefits our gut bacteria because of our circadian rhythm – our internal body clock. This is another reason why it is so important to learn how to live in sync with your body clock.
Believe it or not, our gut microbes also have a circadian rhythm. Many types of gut microbes oscillate in inactivity and abundance throughout the day and night. For example, the gut microbe Enterobacter aerogenes is sensitive to melatonin (the “sleep” hormone). This microbe in our gut plays an important role in fermenting sugars and producing gas. It can also cause infections when spread to other tissues or when its relative abundance increases due to antibiotic treatment.
Disruption of the human circadian clock can cause disruption in the microbiome and can potentially negatively impact our metabolic health. For example mutations in circadian clock genes, jet lag, or eating late at night can disrupt our circadian clock.
Professor Satchin Panda, a leading expert in circadian rhythms research and the author of The Circadian Code believes:-
Maintaining a minimum 14-hour overnight cleanse improves our gut health.
Conclusion
Intermittent Fasting helps us improve our gut health and body clock synchronization. It reduces the risk of obesity and insulin resistance. Fasting for a minimum of 14 hours and eating within an 8-10 hour window helps us achieve better health. Resulting in Improved Gut Health and Body Clock Synchronization.
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