Planet Earth

Meal Timing & Not Fasting Could Be A Key Reason You’re Not Losing Fat

The Facts:A couple of new studies outline the importance of meal timing when trying to lose weight and burn fat.
Reflect On:Why has fasting never been a medical intervention tool when it’s clearly extremely healthy and beneficial to the body in multiple ways?

Years ago, if a person withheld from eating for long periods of time in order to lose weight, it would work, but a common response from peers might have been, “Yeah, but you did it the unhealthy way.” Today, many more people are aware that caloric restriction and fasting are actually a great, safe, healthy and effective way to lose weight and shed fat from your body. In layman’s terms, when you fast, your body runs out of its glycogen (sugar) reserves, and when that happens it switches to fat burning mode. Fasting is now recognized as an effective tool to regenerate stem cells, kill cancer cells, repair damaged DNA, and help ward off and treat numerous age-related diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. It’s even been known to completely reverse type 2 diabetes. Every single study that has examined fasting or caloric restriction in living organisms has shown tremendous biological effects. Our biology is clearly built for it, and the ancients definitely knew what they were talking about. Modern day science has even confirmed it.

We don’t hear much from the mainstream medical industry regarding fasting, and the answer to that is simple, it’s because money can’t be made off of it. The science will only become popular when a pill, for example, is developed that mimics the effects of fasting. That would be unfortunate.

Long term fasts as well as intermittent fasting are, again, great ways to burn fat and lose weight, but that’s effective only when your eating periods are healthy. In my opinion, fasting combined with a whole foods, plant-based diet is what one needs to do if they want to optimize their health, and there is a tremendous amount of science to back that up.

A great place to start your research is at The Intensive Dietary Management. In addition to searching through all of the peer-reviewed literature that’s available online about fasting and caloric restriction, this blog is a great resource, which is primarily written by Dr. Jason Fung, a Toronto-based nephrologist who uses fasting to treat his diabetes patients.

On his blog, I came across some information that shows how important the times we choose to eat may be if you are looking to reduce fat and/or lose weight.

He points out an interesting study from Satchin Panda, a professor at the Salk institute. The study examined current eating happens tracked via a smartphone app.

The 10% of people who ate the least frequently, ate 3.3 times per day. That is, 90% of people ate more than 3.3 times per day. The top 10% of people ate an astounding 10 times per day. Essentially, we started eating as soon as we got up, and didn’t stop until we went to bed.
The median daily intake duration (the amount of time people spent eating) was 14.75 hours per day. That is, if you started eating breakfast at 8 am, you didn’t, on average, stop eating until 10:45! Practically the only time people stopped eating was while sleeping. This contrasts with a 1970’s era style of eating at 8am breakfast and dinner at 6pm, giving a rough eating duration of only 10 hours. The ‘feedogram’ shows no let up in eating until after 11pm. There was also a noticeable bias towards late night eating, as many people are not hungry in the morning. An estimated 25% of calories are taken before noon, but 35% after 6pm.
When those overweight individuals eating more than 14 hours per day were simply instructed to curtail their eating times to only 10-11 hours, they lost weight (average 7.2 pounds) and felt better even though they were not instructed to overtly change what they ate, only when they ate.

The circadian rhythm seems to suggest that late night eating is not good for weight loss since excessive insulin is the main driver of obesity, and eating the same food early in the day or late at night have different insulin effects. You can learn more about the circadian rhythm of fasting here.

You can find some strategies on how to go about this type of time-restricted eating here, and as Dr. Fung mentions: “It took participants 12 days on average to adjust to this way of eating, It can take up to 3 or 4 weeks to adjust. Most found the fasting period relatively easy to adhere to, but more difficult to adjust to the time restriction.”

The Takeaway

This is just a brief write up about fasting and the importance regarding what time of day you eat if you are trying to lose weight and shed fat from your body. Please follow the links within the article for more details and information. We’ve published a number of articles on our website regarding fasting and cited lots of science, so feel free to browse through there. Some of those articles are linked earlier in this article as well. It’s not that simple, but if you want to improve your health and lose weight, fasting combined with a healthy diet and perhaps some time-restricted eating is a guaranteed way to do so.

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Planet Earth

Scientists Dug Through Teens’ Trash to See What They’re Smoking

One person’s trash can be another’s treasure — and trash from teens might be the foundation for insightful new medical research.

On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published the details of a “garbology” study conducted by a pair of University of California, San Francisco, researchers in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Over a period of about eight months, the researchers walked the grounds surrounding 12 public high schools in Northern California, collecting any litter they could find related to smoking or vaping — refuse that included everything from cigarette butts to vape cartridges and cigarillo wrappers.

In total, the pair gathered 893 waste items, and their analysis seems to support claims that teens are drawn to flavored vaping products — 73 out of the 74 pod caps the researchers collected boasted flavors other than tobacco.

The researchers were also able to make connections between teens’ socioeconomic status and their nicotine and cannabis products by examining the demographics of families at each school.

“Our study novelly detected the under-addressed problem of flavored little cigars and cigarillos in low-income youth populations,” researcher Yogi Hale Hendlin said in a press release. “Youth e-cigarette use — as epidemic as it is — seems to be lopsided towards higher-income student populations, with combustible tobacco product waste found in higher concentrations in lower-income schools.”

Aside from providing insights into teens’ smoking and vaping habits, the study also shines a light on another, more obvious problem: that there’s a whole lot of smoking-related trash around high schools.

“These toxic products are contaminating school environments and surrounding areas, going down storm drains and contaminating the bay,” researcher Jeremiah Mock said in the press release, later adding that “action is needed to reduce youth tobacco smoking and cannabis access and use, and to eliminate environmental contamination from these products.”

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Planet Earth

Mammoths survived until just 4,000 years ago

Image Credit: CC BY 2.5 Public Library of Science

Mammoths almost made it to modern times.

A population of woolly mammoths still roamed the Earth at the time the Egyptian pyramids were being built.

Perhaps the most recognizable of all extinct Ice Age mammals, the majestic woolly mammoth is often associated with a time long before modern human civilization started to appear on the scene.

Incredibly however, despite most mammoths disappearing between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, a few isolated populations managed to hold on against all the odds.

Now according to a new study by an international team of scientists, the last remaining population of mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean up until 4,000 years ago.

By examining the isotope compositions of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and strontium from their bones, the researchers were able to determine that, unlike other isolated mammoth populations that died out due to environmental changes, the Wrangel Island mammoths may have instead succumbed to a sudden series of events – perhaps extreme weather conditions or an encroachment by human hunters.

“It’s easy to imagine that the population, perhaps already weakened by genetic deterioration and drinking water quality issues could have succumbed after something like an extreme weather event,” said study co-author Prof Herve Bocherens from the University of Tubingen.

Source: SciTech Daily

Planet Earth

Huge Meteor Fireball Illuminates Night Sky Over London, England

It was previously reported that a large asteroid was approaching Earth. Its diameter is approximately 190 to 430 metres, making it twice as large as the famous Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt.

According to eyewitnesses, London has been illuminated by a meteor, with some of them managing to record the dramatic footage.

Some of the witnesses were in Southeast London when they saw a flash in the sky.

Anyone just see a super bright meteor over london travelling northwards? Am in South London and it shone white/yellow that burnt to a bright blue green flash.. happened at 7.55pm gmt #london #meteor @VirtualAstro
— Robert Currie (@robertscurrie) September 24, 2019

Those who saw this unusual phenomenon got on social media to discuss it.

Did anyone else see a super bright meteor, green blue in color falling at around 8pm? #meteor #london
— D.Papadimitriou (@dimitriskp) September 24, 2019