Timing meals right could add years to your life

TEN years ago I made a documentary called Eat, Fast, Live Longer, where I explored the science behind different forms of calorie restriction, also known as intermittent fasting.

I put myself on what I called a 5:2 diet (cutting my calorie intake to around 600 for two days a week and then eating normally for five days).

Most of you will know the rest: I lost 9 kg and several inches from my waistline and, having previously been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, I got my blood sugar

levels back to normal. I wrote a book about this, the Fast Diet, which I’m proud to say became an international bestseller.

A decade on, I’m still diabetes-free. Meanwhile, intermittent fasting has become very popular, with a lot of interest now in a form of it, which I also explored back in 2012, called timerestricted eating (TRE) — instead of cutting calories, you cut the hours within which you eat.

Studies have shown that both forms of intermittent fasting help with weight loss, but also lower your risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease.

More recently, there’s evidence that doing a combination of calorie restriction and TRE can extend lifespan — in mice, at least. In a study, published in the journal Science, mice were put on different forms of intermittent fasting regimens — some involved calorie restriction but also following a 12:12 eating regimen.

The researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center discovered that calorie restriction alone extended the animals’ healthy lives by 10 per cent, but if they were also put on a 12:12 TRE regimen this extended their lives by 35 per cent, adding an extra nine months to their usual twoyear lifespans. Normally with age, genes linked to chronic inflammation (a major cause of heart disease, dementia and cancer) become more active, but tests showed that intermittent fasting helped offset these genetic changes.

The researchers hope this work will lead to medications that can mimic the effects of intermittent fasting and extend the healthy lifespan of humans.