 Intermittent fasting is the next hot thing to hit mainstream news. It is an umbrella term for a meal timing schedule. The cycles between voluntary fasting and non-fasting, not eating and eating. It's like putting your digestive system to work at a 9-5 job. You eat when you're at work and then you don't eat the remainder of the time spent outside of work. This recent media blitz correlated to a study that was published towards the end of December. Effects of intermittent fasting on health, aging and disease. The main claim being that, during fasting, cells activate pathways that enhance intrinsic defenses against oxidative and metabolic stress and those that remove or repair damaged molecules. Periodic flipping of the metabolic switch not only provides the key tones that are necessary to fuel cells during the fasting period, but also elicits highly orchestrated systemic and cellular responses that carry over into the fed state to bolster mental and physical performances as well as disease resistance. These two statements hypothesize the main point that fasting and caloric restriction reduce oxidative stress, therefore reducing inflammation, sometimes referred to as autophagy. People believe this is an on and off switch activated by fasting. Fasting is, autophagy is not usually brought up in the context of intermittent fasting, only when fasting for longer periods of time, 2, 3, 4 days, and even then. It becomes questionable if autophagy is maximized and if it's even something relevant when you're following a healthy diet. This brings up another point. We know fasting for longer periods of time, days, even weeks, is far more beneficial than just having an eating window. If we start wondering why they aren't talking about more beneficial health issues, we're wasting our time as this is modern media and the goal is to never get people healthy. We have a for profit medical system. Let's take this a step back. What is causing the damage in the first place that we need to fast? What if it didn't exist to begin with? If you look back at ancestral diets as well as lifestyles, how we lived in harmony with nature, low stress environment, exercise, high quality foods, it's clear how our modern environment is damaging us in more ways than just diet. My personal speculation is that in a natural environment, a human should see no benefit from intermittent fasting since that is not the case however, we do have to speculate on the benefits. One logical assessment that shouldn't be brushed aside is that humans were likely intermittent fasting as well as prolonged fasting for several days, maybe even weeks at a time when food was scarce depending on the season. That being said, we aren't only outside of natural eating windows. The biggest problem is eating unnatural foods. If you follow a healthy, whole foods animal based diet, most of what you put in your body is a net positive. Now think about a standard American diet. You wake up and dash your stomach with coffee, a highly inflammatory cup of seed juice, you choke down a highly processed granola bar on the way to work, have a vegetable oil laden donut on your desk, swing by a fast food restaurant for lunch and who knows what you have for dinner. Every meal on a standard American diet is damaging the systems in your body in some way. There's coffee inhibiting mineral absorption, resulting in metabolic processes not having their precursor nutrients, high omega 6 from that donut causing inflammation in your lipid cells, the granola bar spiking your insulin, raising blood triglycerides causing more metabolic stress. This doesn't even necessarily apply to just a standard American diet. Whether it's a vegan diet, any improper diet, the type of stress and levels of that stress simply change. Not only do you have these negative inputs, you're missing the positive inputs, the healthy foods, which most people assume are fruits, vegetables, whole grains, but the secret to health that my viewers are very familiar with, which most people don't know, is that nutrients are the building blocks of life, vitamins, minerals, fatty acids. So, we remove as many negative inputs as possible and increase the positive inputs. When you start analyzing this with logic and science, you end up with a diet identical to any group of our indigenous ancestors. They had a base of animal foods in the diet for nutrition and consumed both animal and plant foods local to their region. The most notable difference between them and us being food quality, as the ratio of animal to plant calories on a standard American diet can often be identical to these people. But a bowl of cereal with soy milk is nowhere near the nutritional value of wild berries with raw grass-fed cream. Referring back to that study, the main mechanism they go over is that putting your body in a ketogenic metabolism using fatty acids and ketones as a fuel source instead of glucose is what we are trying to achieve. My pet peeve with both fasting and keto is that people view them as on and off switches, when that's technically not how it works. Your body is always healing tissue and recovering. You don't need to fast for that to happen. But if you're on a standard American diet, it's very likely that the level of inflammation from your diet is causing your body to fall into deeper and deeper states of disease and if you just stop poisoning yourself for a few hours a day, you start feeling a lot better. It makes sense. In the case of ketosis on a ketogenic diet, your body was burning fat way before you knew about the keto diet but by changing your meal timing and caloric intake, you're shifting your body's energy processes more towards fat. So maybe in the past you were burning 10, 20, 30, 40% of your calories from fat. Now you're burning 80, 90, 100% when you're in ketosis. It's just a shift in energy metabolism. You're not supposed to be like, oh, if my blood ketones are XYZ, if my blood sugar is XYZ, I'm in ketosis. It's an unfortunate oversimplification of human metabolism and although these views can help some people, it has created confusion and has steered people away of the most important thing. The food quality and presence of animal foods in your diet. They're cross referencing studies using charts to justify all of these benefits of fasting that achieve certain beneficial and result without addressing that those benefits are only seen because everyone is following such a poor diet poisoning themselves every two hours on modern franken foods. It's just another cesspool of academics stroking each other while being intellectually dishonest. You're obviously going to see benefits from intermittent fasting on a standard American diet but that has more to do with just eating less poison as opposed to physical meal timing. You would see the same benefit in someone who exercised a few more minutes every week as exercising increases antioxidants, reducing stress, akin to removing inflammatory foods. Health, nutrition, fitness, all because of these for-profit systems we have in the United States have always been a matter of making the most money. I've said this many times. I could make a lot more money if I wasn't being honest in my videos and with my consultations. I help people so well that they rarely need a follow-up consultation whereas doctors, most other health professionals, want to get you in the system to keep milking your money. Some of you might be wondering what I personally do and before I was doing the bodybuilding and weight training I was eating one meal a day. They call this OMAD, eating once every 24 hours. Sometimes I would eat every two days, every three days. The point is, figure out natural human hunger patterns. When you address the nutrient deficiencies in your diet, when you're consuming mostly quality animal foods, listen to your body. If everything is working and you're following a proper diet, you won't have to worry about intermittent fasting, you know, all of these things that people are using to steer you to sell you supplements, certain products. Who knows? Everything will fall into place once the diet is correct. But what's the reason that things like intermittent fasting are hitting the mainstream? I don't like speculating on this because, you know, calling out corporations and special interest groups is only putting myself in danger and people don't care enough to do something about it. Could it be as simple as selling some new supplements or food products? Are Americans just dying at such severe rates from modern diseases that they need to do a little something? Do they think the for-profit medical industry is going to collapse our society? Are they speculating food shortages and want to trim down the faties? I really don't know. What I can safely say is, increase the amount of quality animal foods in the diet if you aren't doing so already and you'll be on your way to improving your health. So thank you guys for joining me. If you could please like the video, subscribe, hit that bell icon, share the video if you can. If you guys do want to support me further, definitely check out my book, The Ancestral Indigenous Diet, that is available below on Amazon. Thanks again for joining me guys and enjoy the rest of your day.