Intermittent fasting can help you live longer and help you lose weight, but can you have too much of a good thing? Yes, according to a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, which found that the regenerative benefits of fasting may have a dark side.
In the journal Nature in a published study, researchers identified a process in the mouse intestine that is activated by intermittent fasting. This process is critical in promoting stem cell regeneration, an important process in wound healing.
They found that this process was activated when the mice resumed eating after intermittent fasting. But there was a downside: cancerous mutations caused by regeneration were more likely to turn into early-stage tumors.
“Increased stem cell activity is beneficial for regeneration, but too much of a good thing can have long-term, less-than-favorable consequences,” said lead study author Professor Omer Yilmaz.
Stem cells divide frequently, helping the intestinal lining to completely regenerate every 5-10 days, but this makes them a common cause of precancerous cells.
To investigate the effects of intermittent fasting on stem cells, Yilmaz and his team divided mice into groups: one that fasted for 24 hours and then ate whatever they wanted for 24 hours (which they called the “re-feeding period”), and a control group that did not fast and ate whatever he wanted all the time.
They found that the stem cells proliferated the most at the end of the refeeding period, much more than the stem cells of mice that were not starved at all. This intense regeneration is driven by the re-supply of nutrients, which causes the stem cells to activate a process called mTOR. mTOR stimulates other cells to make more of the proteins that stem cells need to divide and multiply, which then give rise to more specialized cells.
However, in this state of high regenerative capacity, cells are more prone to become cancerous.
“I want to emphasize that this was all done in mice using very well-defined cancer mutations. In the case of humans, it would be a much more complicated process, said O. Yilmaz. “But it leads us to this conclusion: Intermittent fasting is very healthy, but if you’re exposed to mutagens when you eat after an intermittent fasting period — like a burnt steak or something like that — you can actually increase the chance of developing changes that can lead to cancer.”
The researchers stress that more detailed human studies are needed to confirm this effect in humans, according to BBC Science Focus.
2024-08-28 11:35:32