Free The 8-Hour Diet by David Zinczenko Page A

but as we’ve seen, it matters less whether you do it every day, every other day, or as little as 3 days a week. You’ll still help protect yourself from all the bad things that can drain your retirement savings and ruin your golden years.
    But what, exactly, is behind this “live longer, live better” effect? Dr. Mattson has one very specific, very powerful idea: Intermittent fasting improves your body’s ability to clean up after itself, on a cellular level.
    Think about it: You’re not just a solid mass; you’re a collection of individual cells carrying out very specific functions—dividing, processing nutrients, creating energy. All of that activity creates waste, in the form of free radicals—the office clutter of the human metabolism. Project that over a lifetime, where the creation of clutter outpaces its cleanup, and suddenly you can’t remember the name of the guy who’s been tuning up your car for three decades. You sprint to catch the bus just like you used to, but now the bus always wins.
    That’s aging in a nutshell: Cells have been working so hard for so long that they lose the ability to purge their waste and broken parts, and their function is compromised.
    But not on the 8-Hour Diet.
    When your cells are subjected to the minor stress of intermittent fasting, they can operate at peak efficiency. They do a better job of clearing out damaged cell structures and spent mitochondria, the equivalent of decommissioning the nuclear power plant before it destroys the groundwater. Less mess on the factory floor, better output from the machinery, longer operating life span for the factory, better product: you.
Live Long and Prosper
    Scientists like Dr. Mattson have become convinced that intermittent fasting is an effective buffer against the major causes of death most of us have to worry about: heart disease, cancer, diabetes. Dodging or delaying those threats is in itself a profound life extender.
    Says Dr. Mattson: “Dietary energy restriction can reduce tumor growth, it can protect neurons in models of neurodegenerative disorders, it can improve cardiovascular health—effects on blood pressure, for example—so being able to better understand how those changes are occurring may help us optimize those anti-aging effects.”
    A definitive summation of Dr. Mattson’s research area appeared in
Ageing Research Reviews,
under the title “Caloric restriction and intermittent fasting: two potential diets for successful brain aging.”
    OK, beach reading it isn’t.
    But it just might be the kind of reading that could land you at the beach resort of your choosing, at age 87, still wheeling and dealing at the top of your game. For buried deep in Mattson’s report is this prime nugget of science speak: “Overall, from many experimental studies … [intermittent fasting] seem[s] to chronically reduce the circulating levels of insulin resulting in an eventual enhanced glucose mobilization and an enhanced insulin sensitivity, both of which serve to maintain a supply of glucose for the vital organs, centralnervous system, and gonads to support these critical organs in time of limited energy intake.”
    I’ll spare you the chore of pasting that into Google Translate.
    Dr. Mattson is saying that intermittent fasting (IF) torches your body’s energy supplies (so bye-bye belly fat) and makes sure that every last bit of insulin is accounted for in your cells, so that your vital organs (heart, brain), central nervous system (everything attached to your brain) and gonads (yes, well…) are being fueled properly. Basically, your body just doesn’t feel like it has the luxury of becoming fat and diabetic.
    So what does that have to do with your mental acuity? And why does it mean holding onto all your faculties—and making them even sharper—as you age?
Build an Ageless Mind
    Do you know what your body’s number-one energy hog is? It’s not your muscles, your hard-pumping heart, or even your ever-rumbling belly.