Fasting Diet: Is It Healthy For Everyone?

 

Specialists do not recommend it for children, adolescents and pregnant women.

 

Photo by Emanuela Picone

The intermittent fasting diet has become one of the most popular in recent times. Different celebrities use this method to lose weight, which consists of alternating periods of fasting with times where you can eat. Cecilia Sepúlveda, president of the College of Nutritionists of Chile, commented that the intermittent fasting diet has many modalities, but they all have irregular energy intake. “There are models where you can do daily fasts of 16 hours, also 24 hours twice a week; there is one where you do 2 days of fasting followed in a week and another of 3 intermittent days in 7 days. But, on the days when you are not fasting, your maximum limit is 125% of the calories one requires,” he added. In the same way, he stressed that if you want to start with the fasting diet, "there must be a clear diagnosis of the patient's metabolic condition, we must rule out conditions that may put their health at risk by fasting. "

 

Isabel Morales, a nutritionist at the German Clinic, said that this diet provides benefits such as reducing risk factors for certain diseases, reducing blood glucose and blood pressure, as well as reducing body weight and fat mass: “In this way, they are less likely to develop diabetes, cardiovascular disease and even cancer ”. "Certain studies indicate that it could reduce the occurrence of neurodegenerative diseases, " he noted. He also highlighted that improvements have been seen in the biological cycle of the organism, improves cell health, maintains a healthy intestinal microbiota, and allows people to modify lifestyles, especially in diet, exercise, and quality of sleep. However, he mentioned that more strict and controlled studies in people are still lacking for better evidence. The specialist assured that many times people who do this fast eat again after meeting certain hours but continue to eat less because they want to lose weight quickly, and this can cause them to fall into a chronic or permanent fast that brings more dangers than benefits.

 

Sepúlveda added that there are no long-term studies that can support the population recommendation for this diet. In addition, he added that if you compare this with a regular diet, it is more effective in losing weight in the short term. However, he mentioned that "if you do the intermittent fasting diet for 52 weeks and compare it with a diet with 25% caloric restriction, the weight loss is the same." Morales assured that the intermittent fasting diet is not for everyone: “ I do not recommend it for children or adolescents because they are growing and pregnant or breastfeeding women. Nor do I recommend it for people prone to hypoglycemia, who practice high-intensity training, people with a history of eating disorders, underweight and people with chronic diseases such as diabetes ”.