Types of Dieting – Intermittent Fasting

Video Transcription:

Hi, this is Elizabeth Hanawalt. And I am a diabetes educator in Austin, Texas. And I thought I would cover today a little bit just a little bit of details about different diets that you might have heard of over the last couple of years. And the one that makes the most sense right now or the one that's got the most talk is intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting as a practice in which individuals fast for 24 hours every other day or they do 16 hours every day.

The 16 hour every day is the most common that people do. You eat your last meal at 8:00 at night and don’t eat until noon the next day, so you’ve only have 8 hours to eat. Studies have shown that there’s long lasting beneficial effects on metabolism and weight loss. It causes a fasting state and this is part of the reason why this diet sometimes works for people, but you have to eat a healthy diet.

It results in increased glucagon (storage form of glucose), secreted from the liver, which promotes glycogenolysis. This is the breakdown of the storage form of glycogen into glucose. It releases that free glucose to prevent hypoglycemia.

Intermittent fasting tends to not do that and sometimes that's why intermittent fasting doesn't work in the long term.  There is no long term studies on it.

In the short term, it works pretty well.  Long term, they're still having to try to figure out why it doesn't work. But short term, it seems to work pretty well. But like I said, there have been no long term studies on this.

One benefit of restricting feeding times and extending the fasting time, is the promotion of weight loss. It's thought to be modulating the gut microbiome - all the good bacteria that grows in your gut all the time.

Unfortunately over the years what we've done with our food supply and lifestyle, we've interrupted that and it's not what it used to be and that's why a lot of different diseases are on the rise. This tends to (intermittent fasting) get it back to what it should be.

Another diet that has been around for a long time and goes by different names is a low-carb diet. Technically, low a low-carb diet is 60-130 grams of carbs a day. Most people think that this is a lot of carbs, but technically it's not.

You'll know that this diet is also called the South Beach or The Zone Diet. These were very popular years ago. These are good diets to be on; they are healthy if you follow the tenets of that diet.

The other one that is popular right now is the ketogenic or the very low carb diet.  This is a diet where less than 50 grams of carbs are eaten a day.  A lot of people go all the way down to 20.  The reason it works is that instead of fuel being glucose, the fuel is ketones. Most of your body can run on that pretty well, the brain can, but it doesn't like to. It can be dangerous for type 1 diabetics.

Ketosis - if you look at the body in the long run, the body would rather be in anabolism, not catabolism.  It would rather be building things than breaking things down.

Yes, we want to lose weight, but that might not be the best way to do it as far as our body is concerned, over the long term. Most people can't keep it up for the long term because it's basically meat, fat and non starchy vegetables and 20 grams of carbs. That could be a slice of bread. And that would be all you'd get for the whole day. So a lot of people cannot do that.

The good diets that actually have been shown to work and are really healthy for you are the low carb Mediterranean diet. It has been linked to lower mortality and improved A1C and fasting blood glucose.

If you can think of the cultures that live in it along the Mediterranean, in that part of the world, they basically follow more of a plant-based diet. It's a whole lot less beef and a whole lot more fish. The fat principally is olive oil. There's low levels of saturated fat and limited sweets. That would be good for everybody.

The other diet that's very healthy, that's similar to Mediterranean, is the Dash diet. And that was of originally the same tenets, basically, but that was developed for hypertension.

But in the long run, the more it's been studied, these two have shown to be on the top as far as the healthiest diets that you can be on for a long term. By that point, you don't call it a diet. It's a way of eating.

Do you know of another "diet" that's popular right now?  Leave a comment or get in touch and I'll see what I can do about posting about it.