Fasting Diets, Kill Or Cure? New Research Shows Surprising Health Effects

Fasting diets have been all the rage for a couple of years now.

But there has been relatively little research about the long-term effects on your health.

We take a look at different types of fasting, pull apart some of the unrealistic claims and introduce you to some surprising new research that proves at least one form of fasting might actually save lives.

Cleansing and Juicing

UGH, no.

Just no.

Juice-only diets, contrary to popular belief, can actually be incredibly bad for you.

Firstly, juicing takes the takes the fibre out of the equation. Fibre is actually really important for weightloss - insoluble fibre, such as that in cauliflower and green beans, helps the movement of food through your body and insoluble fibre, such as you would find in apples, citrus fruits and carrots, helps to lower your blood cholesterol and glucose levels.

Secondly, though many of us struggle to eat the recommended five portions of fruit and veg a day, there is also such a thing as eating too many of the wrong sort of fruit and veg.

Whereas you might chow down on one apple as a midmorning snack, your average juice probably has four or five different fruits and vegetables in it.

Many of the fruits that taste nice and satisfy your sweet tooth do actually have a high sugar content in the form of fructose.

Mangoes, kiwis, tangerines, apples, bananas and grapes all have upwards of eight grams of sugar in them! That's actually quite a hefty calorie intake. So you could be cramming your body with things that will make you fatter, rather than aid weight loss.

What is more, some people are now juicing so often, that they are failing to clean their juicer between uses.

The build up of old fruit and veg debris can breed molds and other harmful bacterias, which creep into the juices and enter your body.

Finally, cleansing - using either watery juices or other strange concoctions  à la Beyoncé with her honey, lemon, chilli drink - is only ever going to be a temporary fix.

Crash diets and cleanses encourage your body to slow its metabolic rate, meaning the weight is likely to pile back on at an even faster rate than it fell off.

5:2 and 4:3

These fasting cycles, which involve eating a calorie restricted mealplan on either two or three days of the week and eating normally on the other days, have many suggested benefits.

Advocates of the diet have suggested that, other than the obvious weightloss benefit, these intermittent fasting diets can stave off cancer, diabetes and dementia and even improve your life expectancy.

According to the NHS though, there is not nearly enough evidence to support most of these claims. Tackling lifespan, for example, they point out that all studies so far have been conducted on rats and other species and while this is a viable way to test out physiological theories, there is still no way to really know what the longer term implications are for human beings.

There is enough evidence to support the idea that intermittent fasting, or selective calorie control, can help achieve long term weightloss, but success stories usually exist among groups of people that made significant lifestyle changes, including a schedule of regular exercise.

This isn't exactly a negative - if the diet supports a healthy exercise regime and can be maintained longterm, it's probably of the healthier variety.

If, however, it encourages you to binge eat, or even just say yes to after dinner dessert where you would usually have abstained, not only will it not lead to longterm weightloss, it might actually increase your risk of diabetes.

Hmm.

Surprise Revelation

If weightloss isn't top of your agenda, there might be another reason to give fasting a go.

Recent studies have shown that prolongued fasting, for periods of three or four days at a time, can have incredibly positive effects on your immune system.

Scientists at the University of Southern California have watched the body as it goes into starvation mode and discovered something very interesting.

While it begins to store fat and slow the metabolic rate, so that reserves last longer, it also starts to rid the body of damaged, old and inefficient parts, such as white blood cells.

Obviously, having LESS white blood cells (important for fighting off infections) seems like a negative, but once the three day fast is over, the body is suddenly kickstarted into producing a whole new set of them, rejuvenating the entire immune system.

This could be a revelatory development for people suffering immuno-defficiency illnesses, or those whose immune systems have been damaged by chemotherapy cancer treatments.

Food for thought.... or not.

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