In 2021, Harvard Medical School published a bulletin with the title, “Intermittent fasting: The positive news continues.” According to the authors, in a mounting number of studies conducted on rats, intermittent fasting — a type of time-restricted diet which involves only eating during a set number of hours each day — seems to improve the rodents’ health. They lose weight, their blood sugar improves, their cholesterol drops.
Humans understandably struggle considerably more with consistent fasting than a subset of the rat population whose diet is entirely overseen by caretakers in lab coats, but the bulletin pointed to research that suggests “the circadian rhythm fasting approach, where meals are restricted to an eight to 10-hour period of the daytime, is effective” for many people, according to metabolic expert Dr. Deborah Wexler, Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Diabetes Center and associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
