ECE2019 Symposia News on nutrition: when to eat what (3 abstracts)
UK.
Food restriction and weight-management strategies have been at the forefront of most efficient strategies to prevent and reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, when people find themselves in an increasingly obesogenic environment it becomes challenging to achieve and maintain successful behavioral changes. Fasting protocols such as intermittent energy restriction (IER) and time-restricted feeding (TRF), or restricting food consumption to specific period during the day or week, have received considerable interest as approaches for weight-management and reducing risk for metabolic diseases. In these strategies, food consumption is altered to produce frequent, repeated periods of short-term fasting, or severe energy restriction. For example, the 5:2 dietary pattern, involving 2 fast days/week (with normal eating on the remaining 5 days) has been shown to be particularly successful. Our previous work in humans has shown significant effects on weight-reduction in addition to lowering blood glucose and lipids, both key risk factors for type diabetes and CVD. TRF is an example of a timed dietary approach, which also falls under the intermittent fasting umbrella, involving limiting intake to a period of several hours (usually ≤12 hours), which thereby extends the length of the daily fasting interval. There is some suggestion that the length of fasting duration may exert an additive benefit, presumably by elongating the time spent in a catabolic state. Both IER and TRF appear to demonstrate a metabolic advantage above a simple reduction in energy intake although much of the data is still in rodent models.