Fasting and its beneficial effects.

Fasting is a well-known religious diet practice that involves not eating for an extended period of time. However, some people are starting to take it for certain health reasons. Many research have been published in recent years suggesting that intermittent fasting or a fasting-like diet might reduce risk factors for serious health disorders including cancer and reverse symptoms.

What is intermittent fasting, and how does it work?

Intermittent fasting is when you fast on a set schedule and eat at different times. For example, you might eat regularly for the majority of the week, but only eat for 8 hours on Monday and Thursdays and fast for the remaining 16 hours. This diet is also known as a fasting-like diet.

Despite the fact that food is abundant in modern culture, the human body is designed to withstand times when food is scarce. Fasting has frequently been required throughout history in the face of famine or other natural disasters that limit food supplies.

Naturally your body is built to protect you from going hungry. It accomplishes this by storing a reserve of nutrients required for survival when you consume.

When you don't eat regularly, your cells are put under mild stress, and your body releases those reserves to sustain itself. Doctors advise that as long as your body has time to repair after this period of stress, you will not suffer bad consequences.

Because your body uses more calories than it takes in, one of the most immediate benefits of this type of diet is weight loss.

The science of cancer and fasting.

For a normal healthy (disease-free) adult, weight loss is merely one of the benefits of intermittent fasting. Recent animal research and a few early human trials have revealed a reduction in cancer risk or cancer growth rates. According to this research, this could be attributed to the following consequences of fasting:

· Reduced glucose synthesis in the blood

· Increased generation of tumor-killing cells when stem cells were activated to restore the immune system.

· As obesity is a major risk factor for cancer, hence fasting as a cancer treatment may be beneficial.

A combination of fasting and chemotherapy delayed the progression of breast cancer and skin cancer. The body produced more common lymphoid progenitor cells (CLPs) and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes as a result of the combined therapy techniques. CLPs are progenitor cells for lymphocytes, which are white blood cells that migrate into tumors and are known to kill them.

To summarize, fasting can slow or even stop the progression of cancer, destroy cancer cells, strengthen the immune system, and improve the efficacy of chemotherapy and radiation therapy.