8-Hour Diet: Fasting Rules and Tips

STANDING IN A DARK CONFERENCE ROOM at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, Satchidananda Panda, Ph.D., is at the epicenter of a research movement that has rocked conventional weight-loss thinking to its core. Gesturing toward a big-screen display, Panda clicks over to a pair of maps. The one on the left shows the varying degrees of darkness and light pollution in the night sky over the continental United States. The one on the right: diabetes incidence, county by county, in the U.S. population. The charts have been adjusted to control for the greater population numbers in city areas, but still, the two are mirror images of each other.

"Where there are more lights," he says, "there is more diabetes." Those aren't refrigerator lights depicted on the night map, but they might as well be, given the effect on all of us.

Panda goes on to explain what may be happening: "My hypothesis is that staying up and eating late may be the cause. [Early on] we didn't know how to use fire. In the daytime, human beings would hunt something, eat something; but in the nighttime they had to protect themselves against predators. It was only about 200,000 years ago that we learned how to control fire, and only a few people could use fire to stay up past sunset. For the past 50 years or so we've been staying awake late into the night. That's when we see the rise of weight problems."

He has a theory about the mechanism behind it: The advent of artificial light has also led to an artificial extension of our feeding times. Our circadian rhythms have a natural stop sign built into them, and we run into that sign almost every day. Think about how you regularly sidle up to a bowl of ice cream while watching Leno, or stop at Wendy's for a late-night drive-thru snack. Modern technology has created an artificial daytime for us, and we're filling it up with meal four, meal five, and meal six. That extended eating interval throws our digestive system off-kilter and messes with the many hormones and enzymes that manage it. Our bodies can't process the food we eat, and those calories end up where they shouldn't—around our bellies and butts.

Not convinced yet? Hang in there.

Panda's laboratory devised an ingenious study to test his ideas on mice. The mice were divided into two groups and put on the same high-calorie, high-fat diet: One group was given the freedom to eat anything at any time of day. The other mice could eat as much as they wanted but only within an 8-hour time frame. The study went on for 100 days. Guess which group was plumped up?

"Simply limiting food intake to 8 hours gives you all the benefits—without having to worry about food intake," Panda explains.

For years we've been told, "You are what you eat." Turns out, we are when we eat too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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