The 8-Hour Diet (6 page)

And the revelations didn’t stop there. Mice normally eat at night, a wise choice for an animal that has to dodge cats, hawks, and shrieking housewives. But when Dr. Panda further divided the mice, giving some of them a high-fat diet and others a healthy mix of carbs, protein, and fat, he discovered that those who had access to healthy food stuck to their normal eating pattern. The mice on the high-fat diet, on the other hand, tended to expand their eating time, nibbling day and night. His conclusion: “When we eat fat-rich food, we become addicted to food, almost. It is the big question in neuroscience today. If we can disconnect that addiction, we can cure it.”

In other words, the longer we stretch out our eating cycle, the fatter we get. And the more fatty foods we eat, the longer we stretch out our eating cycle.

Clearly, Dr. Panda has given a lot of thought to how this mouse research will translate into the species you and I belong to. He sees the human body as something like an office building: Most people go into the office during the day, work for 8 hours, and go home. Then, at night, the janitorial staff comes in to clean up the trash and repair the damage. The human body operates most efficiently on the same schedule; we just don’t let it.

“Just like your brain needs to sleep for repair and rest, maybe your stomach and your liver also need to rest,” he says. “A huge part of food isn’t just nutrition; a lot of it is toxic, things our body doesn’t need. And our stomach and liver have to break them up and send them out. It’s a huge amount of work, and it’s causing a lot of damage to our system. The stomach lining has to regenerate once a day, and that happens in the middle of the night. This is something no one thought about: Dampening of circadian rhythm and reduction of fasting time are contributing to obesity and diabetes.”

As Dr. Panda proceeds through the rest of the slides, he stops again and again to point out all the negative stuff that fat mouse is dealing with: Hypertension. Dementia. Lousy cholesterol numbers. Cancer. Being a really large—and tempting—target for any cat who happens to stroll through the lab. It’s hard not to feel sorry for that rotund rodent.

Now, if this were just a mouse study, we’d have to classify it as simply interesting and move on. But that’s not what the people who work at the Salk Institute are doing. Based on what they’ve been seeing, a lot of people in the lab have begun further experimenting—on themselves.

“In our lab, because most of the people are seeing this on a daily basis, it influences us,” he says. “So it’s changing behavior for almost all of us. We don’t eat after 8 o’clock at night. The guy who first did this experiment, almost no member of his family has lived beyond 55. All died of obesity, diabetes, heart attack. After he saw these results, he’d eat brunch at 11 and eat dinner at 7.”

Which brings us to another skinny, fit colleague of Dr. Panda’s at the Salk Institute: Ron Evans, PhD, one of the world’s foremost experts on biorhythms and how they affect the body. Dr. Evans is 63 years old now, but his trim form and effervescent energy speak more to an enthusiastic teenager—albeit one with gray hair and a PhD. One look at him and you begin to wonder what’s in the water on this elegant seaside campus. But of course, it isn’t the water they drink, it’s the 8-hour diet they follow.

“I’m in better shape than I’ve ever been in,” says Dr. Evans. “We work on this stuff and I’m convinced by what we see, what it does. Certain kinds of changes can have a big impact on your body.”

Research so compelling that the foremost weight-loss doctors in the world have changed their lifestyles in response? Sounds like something worth sitting up and taking notice of. And it’s not just Dr. Panda’s lab that’s producing these studies. Over the next two chapters, I’m going to walk you through some of the stunning new science coming out every day and show you how everything you thought you knew about eating to lose weight was wrong! I’ll explain why eating whatever you want—but focusing on getting eight Superfoods into your diet, and eating them all within an 8-hour period—will change your life forever.

You see, for years we’ve been told, “You are what you eat.” But at least we now know there’s more to that nostrum. We are what we eat, sure, but we are
when
we eat, too.

What Drs. Panda and Evans and their voluptuous vermin are discovering isn’t entirely new. For the last several years, researchers have been producing remarkable weight-loss results in people as well, using this technique they call “intermittent fasting.”

Don’t let the f-word scare you. In this case, fasting isn’t about denying yourself anything. Instead, it’s simply about eating whatever you want, but staying within a sensible 8-hour window. (And remember, you don’t even need to do this every day. Throughout this book, you’ll meet people who saw incredible results following this plan just 3 days a week.)

Fact is, you’re already fasting on a daily basis. Think, for a moment, about the word
breakfast
. It is exactly the sum of its parts—the point of the day at which you break the fast you started whenever you stopped eating the night before. In the simplest terms, the 8-Hour Diet is a way of extending the period between your last snack and your “break fast,” giving your body the chance to burn away your fat stores for the energy it needs.

And burn it does. Consider a study cited in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
in 2007. Researchers broke their subjects into two separate groups and fed each group the same number of calories—enough for them to maintain their weight. The only difference: One group ate all their calories in three meals, spread throughout the day. The other practiced intermittent fasting, eating the same number of calories but in a restricted time frame. Among the results: Subjects who ate in a smaller window of time had “a significant modification of body composition, including reductions in fat mass.”

Part of that fat burn comes simply from the body’s searching around for energy and finding it in your belly. But part of it also comes from a surprising source: According to Dr. Panda’s research, restricting the time period during which you eat causes your body to burn more calories throughout the day. That’s right: The longer you draw out your feeding period, the lazier your body’s metabolism gets. But fit your food intake into an 8-hour window, and your body steps up to the plate, burning more calories day and night!

The folks at the Salk Institute may look lean, but it’s not vanity that’s driving their research team to follow an 8-hour diet. It’s the importance they place on good health. In that same
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
article, researchers asserted that if, instead of counting calories or cutting out “bad” foods, we simply trim back the period of time in which we eat, the health benefits might begin to pile up. Consider the list of conclusions the study authors found:

“Lower diabetes incidence and lower fasting glucose and insulin concentrations”

“Lower total cholesterol and triacylglycerol concentrations, a lower heart rate, improved cardiac response … and lower blood pressure”

“Decreases in lymphoma incidence, longer survival after tumor inoculation, and lower rates of proliferation of several cell types”

In other words, eating in this manner not only helps your body burn its own fat at a more prolific rate, but it also seems to be a magic bullet that protects against the three great diseases of our day: diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Let’s take a closer look at each.

Remember that map Dr. Panda had, showing diabetes incidence across the country? It might as well be a map of the zombie apocalypse, with all the lit-up dots representing where the undead flesh eaters lurk. You should do anything possible to avoid finding yourself in the middle of one of those hot spots. Diabetes may well be our nastiest national plague, one that can simultaneously increase your risk for heart disease, stroke, hypertension, sexual dysfunction, blindness, limb amputations, and kidney disease.

Yes, it’s that bad.

Diabetes, in a chocolate-covered nutshell, is a malfunction in the way your body manufactures insulin, a hormone that regulates energy stores. It works like this: Your digestive system turns the food you eat into glucose—the form of sugar your body uses for energy—and sends it into the bloodstream. When the glucose shows up, your pancreas releases insulin to shepherd the glucose into your cells, which powers all their functions.

That’s all well and good, until you eat too many high-energy foods and produce too much glucose and too much insulin. After years of overworking the system, your body eventually begins to lose the ability to react properly to the insulin—a condition known as insulin resistance. Suddenly you have “high blood sugar,” which is death to the small capillaries in your eyes, toes, and private parts. One or all of them may fail.

The 8-Hour Diet can help prevent this risk.

In a study at the University of Copenhagen, researchers found that when men fasted every other day over a 2-week period, the insulin in their bodies became more efficient at managing blood sugar. And, in a study at the National Institute on Aging, researchers compared two sets of people—one group that followed a calorie-restricted diet and a second that ate as much as they wanted, but fasted every other day. They found that “intermittent fasting resulted in beneficial effects that met or exceeded those of caloric restriction including serum glucose and insulin levels.”

Benjamin Horne, PhD, at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute at the University of Utah, has also studied people who stretch out the time period between meals. His conclusion: “We found something we did not anticipate, which was that people who fast also have a lower risk of diabetes. We looked at just regular diabetes, but we also looked at body mass index, baseline glucose, and fasting glucose and found that people who have been routinely fasting over the years have a significantly lower body mass and blood sugar.”

Imagine eating all you want, whatever you want, and slashing your heart attack risk just by watching the clock. That was the promise offered up by a study that was delivered at the 2011 conference of American College of Cardiology. It found that people who followed a regular fasting plan—simply stretching out the period between their last meal today and their first meal tomorrow—enjoyed a 58 percent lower risk of coronary disease, compared to those who didn’t follow this plan. This backed up the findings of a 2008 study of nearly 500 people, who demonstrated a similar ability to sidestep the cardiac ward with the same eating strategy.

Dr. Horne, who conducted the University of Utah study, told the
New York Times:
“[This] was not a chance finding. We were able to replicate the findings and show that people who fast routinely have a lower prevalence of coronary disease.”

And do you remember the fat mouse vs. skinny mouse paradigm presented by Dr. Panda earlier in this chapter? The bloodborne
markers for heart disease—inflammation, high cholesterol—were much higher in the round-the-clock rodents than they were in the 8-hour wonder mice.